Sample: Joey the Hacker
This is a sample chapter from my upcoming novel, The Bloody Rock.
6. The Rock
When rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will
William Shakespeare
Gibraltar juts aggressively from the surrounding plain, looking almost proud of its grimy pubs, generally dreadful food, traffic jams, indifferent weather and British military traditions.
The Spanish call it El Peñon. In English, the Rock.
The morning sun bathes its Eastern coast in sunshine and leaves it in dense shadow in the afternoon as it tracks across the peninsula.
On some winter days, with clouds settled over its steep inclines, lashed by rain and wind and with aircraft desperately trying to land on the short single runway, you could imagine it to have been towed out from the Midlands into the Mediterranean by Brits ruggedly determined to export their sad, sorry climate.
Some who grind out their working lives in Gib for gambling or accountancy firms refer to it as Mordor, the dark evil city from the Tolkien books.
Ironically, many Brits who have never visited still think of this small peninsula as an island.
Joey Bagglietto knows better. He is a Llanito, a native of the area and speaks perfect Spanish and slightly less perfect English.
In his line of work, life is an almost daily to and fro across the land border into Spain.
His tiny living room is his workshop, a blinking mass of computers, monitors, network switches and routers. He works there and lives in the tiny kitchen and single bedroom that remain. His neighbours have no idea what he does, but the block’s electrical circuits have blown out at least three times in the past year.
