All is Fair in Love and War

Prologue

JIM MORIARTY

It shouldn’t have surprised anybody.

It did, of course. That was half the fun of it.

But it shouldn’t have.

Who would believe that I, of all people, would throw my life away for the sake of a childish rivalry? Apparently all of London had. Even he did, and he wasn’t even ordinary. Pitiful.

Why would it shock anyone to learn that I had faked my own death when he had done the same? Apparently, it makes more sense to fake your death by leaping from the top of a hospital than it does to blow your brains out. Obvious, really. Obvious and boring.

I don’t do boring. Hence the roof. Hence the gun. Hence not being dead. Psych! No-one saw that coming.

Not London.

Not Mycroft.

Not Mary.

Not Johnny-boy.

Not him.

Not The Virgin.

Not Sherlock Holmes.

I rubbed the bandages behind my ears. They bloody itched. The surgeon would make them not itch, if he knew what was good for him. Still, all things considered, it was a small price to pay for a continued mortal existence. Sherlock was stupid. If he’d been paying more attention to me and less to how to beat me, then he might’ve seen the telltale scars behind the lobule, even in spite of the makeup. He might’ve guessed the ruse - that it wasn’t me at all.

It wasn’t hard, finding someone to blow their head off for me. All you have to do is threaten their entire family, and suddenly you can have a whole line of people waiting to commit suicide for you. So much for sentiment.

A scalpel, a hairline cut, a cautious shifting of skin, of hair, of follicles. If you have the money, plastic surgery can make you a twin in two hours. One, if the surgeon is good. And he had to be good. I couldn’t let just any street corner doctor wannabe swap my beautiful face out for an afternoon. I had to be good, too. It was hard, finding someone in England who was my stature, weight, and hair color with a loving wife and children that could be bumped off if compliance even looked like it might be an issue.

Harder still was finding someone who sounded like me. Oh, that was dull. Hours and hours of CCTV feed, audio enabled, waiting for that special someone. I found him, of course. In a world of nine billion people, statistics demands that there be someone genetically similar to you somewhere.

The rehearsal was boring. It was fun at first to watch him shake and cry, but it got so dull so quickly. It was important, though. I couldn’t let Sherlock doubt the authenticity of the Moriarty in front of him for even a millisecond. So we practiced, he and I. I invented the most probable dialogue. I gave him a flesh-colored ear mike, invisible to the naked eye. I sat in one room, he in another, and relayed instructions. How to sit. What to say. Sometimes even when to blink.

I knew it was unimaginative, that I was repeating myself. But this time, there were no bombs. No semtex. Just two men on a roof, one of whom had a little voice buzzing in his ear.

The test run was the visit to Baker Street after the trial. It hadn’t been hard to swap our places in prison the night before. It hadn’t even been vaguely challenging. How Scotland Yard kept anybody at all under lock and key was a mystery. He didn’t have to speak at the trial - that was the point. The jury gave the verdict - not guilty. Surprise, surprise.

I walked him out of the courthouse. I had him hail a cab. He entered 221B, paused on the stair when I told him to. The conversation with Sherlock went flawlessly. I’d predicted most of it ahead of time, of course. The bit with the apple was improvised, the minute my camera angle showed them sitting on the table, but he handled it perfectly. Funny how having one’s entire life on the line can do that to a man.