Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

In different times and eras, it is more advantageous to look a specific age – young, middle-aged, elderly; the mathematical formula that grants him immortality allows for such variables. In England, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it suited his purposes best to exude the gravitas of a man of late middle age with paling skin and greying hair, and so that was the age and appearance he selected when, first, he adopted the persona of the Napoleon of Crime, in those glorious years when the Detective’s keen intellect posed the most serious challenge to his superiority he had yet encountered, and second during the Cold War, when he (using as a codename the same initial that had brought him such notoriety as the Detective’s greatest enemy) headed the Secret Intelligence Service, deploying it and its posse of spies and assassins not to the advantage of the United Kingdom and its allies, as everyone was so easily duped into believing he was doing, but to serve his own agenda.

Now, with the nation of his birth so close – a few kilometres away across the Persian Gulf – he once more resembles a healthy young man in his late twenties, his tan skin and dark hair restored to their natural luxuriance.

No! Why is his mind turning so easily to nostalgia and sentimentality? In anger at himself, he rips his white shirt while attempting to pull it on. In such rare moments, when the Professor’s emotions – how he loathes succumbing to these trivial distractions – make him lose control, the speed with which his head oscillates from side to side in a menacingly reptilian fashion increases, as if he were about to strike his prey and spew deadly venom.

The Professor regains control of himself as he pulls a fresh shirt from his wardrobe and finishes dressing. The oscillation of his head abates somewhat, so that the inattentive observer might not be able to pinpoint exactly what it is about the Professor’s demeanour that is so disquieting.

No, the reason he has once again adopted the appearance of a young man of Middle Eastern origins has nothing to do with nostalgia for his long-ago youth. What rubbish! No, it is a practical and calculated move: in this era, youth is valued over maturity, and in this time and place an Arabic mien smooths his path to dominance and influence.

Fully dressed, he inspects himself in the mirror and notices a splotch of dried blood on his cheek. He returns to the spa adjoining his bedroom, careful to avoid the corpses of the Indian twins, and walks to the sink to carefully wash the stain off his face.

Before exiting his private rooms, he leaves a note for the maid service: tomorrow, he would enjoy the ministrations of three young she-males from Thailand.

The Professor makes his way to his office for this morning’s work. There is a world to dominate. His mind teems with merciless equations.

The Professor is distracted, scarcely able to pay attention or to retain any of the information presented to him. His operatives, beholden to him as they may be, are idiots, unable to parse what is important from what is trivial. The morning teleconference ends, and the Professor cannot bring to mind any fresh data to feed into his equations.

While eating his lunch, he decides to eschew the usual format for the afternoon meetings with financiers and politicians. There will be no string of confidential tête-à-têtes; instead, he issues an order that all of the day’s supplicants convene together in the conference room.

Half an hour later, 156 of the cowardly and opportunistic toadies he has positioned as figureheads in the spheres of finance and politics are crammed nervously in a room that is designed to hold no more than sixty comfortably. None of them dare crowd the Professor, and so he is naturally bestowed the wide berth that allows prey to feel a modicum of false security around an alpha-predator.

For three hours, he allows them to chirp at him, but again his mind retains nothing.

In the entire world he can count on the fingers of his two hands those few financiers and politicians who are not his vassals. Those who serve him, each and every one of them, have profited greatly from his patronage, and yet there is not an ounce of loyalty in any of them. All they understand is fear and profit. Today, they annoy him more than usual.

He lets their sycophantic blather fade into background noise, and he abandons himself to the equations of world domination that cascade through his mind. He pauses on one equation – one with no discernible profit but rather imbued with petty vindictiveness. Before being aware of having made a conscious decision, he articulates the practical application of that equation.

The assemblage falls immediately silent at the sound of his voice – everyone here is justifiably afraid of offending the Professor in any way.

Not a single one of these men and women can understand the implications of the instructions they have received. If they obey his will – and they shall; they always do; they always must – it will mean the ruin of 58 to 63 per cent of those present, and that of 27 to 31 per cent of their colleagues around the world.

No matter; they are all of them interchangeable puppets: those currently in positions of power; their supposed opponents ostensibly championing other political, economic, or moral paradigms; those waiting in the wings; the defenders of the status quo; the terrorist militias; the progressives; the conservatives; the socialists; the capitalists; the industrialists; the civic crusaders; the revolutionaries; the charities; the religious institutions … Worldwide, 93.72 per cent of those who toil in the halls of economic, political, and social power obey the unyielding influence of the Professor’s equations.

A wave of self-loathing washes over the Professor. He has acted with impulsive emotion, not from the cold and objective perspective of the perfect mathematician he knows himself to be.

Unable to stand their presence a second longer, he dismisses his loathsome congregation.

He sits alone for another hour, realigning the precision of his intellect by focusing on the equations most in need of his attention.

The Professor skips dinner. He shuts himself in his study to parse through the current state and equilibrium of his equations before reading the reports that have accrued throughout the day.

But, within minutes, comfortably nestled in his armchair, he drifts off to sleep, to once more do battle with the Detective.

Emerging from his accidental nap, the Professor’s heart beats wildly with excitement. In his latest dream, the Detective was especially cunning and relentless; his adversary had only one string left to pull and the whole of the Professor’s empire would have come crashing down, dismantled beyond repair. At the last minute, the Professor applied an unexpected equation into the fray, and the Detective’s carefully constructed body of evidence and counter-measures untangled, humiliating the Detective, leaving him disgraced, his reputation and authority forever tarnished.

Never before has the Detective been defeated in the Professor’s dreams. What has changed? The Professor delves into the mental universe of his equations, scrutinizing every element, variable, algorithm and solution.

Re-examining his earlier equation, the one with which he seemed to succumb to his annoyance with his sycophantic puppets, he understands now that it was the correct and timely move in his complex game of domination. It reassures him that, even on those rare occasions when emotion seizes him, his mind will nevertheless act on the correct equations, ignoring these irksome distractions that sometimes flutter on the surface of his consciousness.

Every once in a while – the equations reveal that the intervals must appear chaotic although they follow a complex algorithm – the masses need to be placated with a scapegoat, a sacrifice, a deception. The larger the bloodletting, the more the public is appeased and fooled into thinking the world has turned in their favour, that justice has been served.