They had vanished, at least from immediate view. He glanced around the ballroom, checking the visible alcoves and exits for his quarry. They were not in sight, though the King’s men were still visible in the throng. He parted from his new companion with no small effort and circled the room. In truth, the singer was doing no more than he had commanded. If it were necessary for her to lure the King into a more private setting, it should matter little to him as long as she was successful. Still, he would have felt greater reassurance that his plan was intact if he had seen them leave together.
He gestured, a small, subtle movement with his left hand, and one of the waiters paused by his side with a polite bow. “Do you require refreshment, sir?”
“Information, if you please. Where is he now? Did he leave alone?”
The man fiddled with the glasses on his tray, as if trying to find the right one. He didn’t ask which “he” the Professor meant, instead indicating a distant staircase with a slight tilt of his head. “We— I don’t believe he was alone, sir.” He handed the Professor a glass and turned away at his nod of dismissal. The Professor made note to ask Colonel Moran where he had found this paragon and how they might call for his services again. They would make good use of him in the future, of that he was sure.
He stationed himself near the foot of the staircase that the waiter had indicated and waited. His instructions to Mrs Norton had been quite clear; once she secured the signet, she was to make a wax impression of it, then slip it back into the King’s possession. Failing that, she must steal it. How she was to do either was not his concern. He cared only that she reappeared with it soon and gave it to the man who signaled her. After that, she could wait upon his pleasure for news of her husband.
A brief stir at the top of the stairs caught his attention and he looked up in time to see Mrs Norton and the King on the landing. He looked angry, while she appeared to be most distraught. He saw her wrench her hand from the King’s grasp and propel herself down the steps as rapidly as was feasible in her emerald gown. Her cheeks were flushed and she dashed an angry tear away as she descended. When she reached the bottom of the steps, she reached into her reticule, clearly searching for something.
A gentleman bowed and handed her his handkerchief. She thanked him and, after a moment of holding it in her hand, pressed it back upon him without seeming to use it. Any words exchanged between them were too swift and low for the Professor to hear, but that didn’t matter. That had been the prearranged signal and Mrs Norton had provided either the signet or its copy. Biting back a smile, Professor Moriarty exited the room without waiting to see her departure or her host’s reaction to it, happily assured of the success of his plans.
It was time to retrieve Godfrey Norton and prepare for his next steps. He thought it best to show Mrs Norton that her husband was still intact. Otherwise, she might be tempted to warn the King before he had the opportunity to use the ring, and that would be most unfortunate.
As he anticipated, Colonel Moran was waiting for him outside and he entered the coach with a brief nod to his lieutenant. They went by a roundabout path down several thoroughfares to a building on the outskirts of Whitechapel. There, the Colonel stopped and handed the reins to the guard before disembarking from the coach. The same man who accompanied the Professor earlier met the Colonel at the door and ushered him inside.
A few moments later, they emerged with another man held between them. He had a hood over his head and he hung limply from their grasp as if he were asleep or drugged. They hauled him toward the coach, only to be intercepted by a gentleman riding down the street on a smart hack. He slid his horse smoothly between them and the carriage. “I say,” he said, “your friend a bit worse for the drink? He might do better without that bag on his head, though.”
The Colonel reached a hand toward his pocket, his expression menacing. But another coach had appeared on the street and stopped next to the Professor’s. Professor Moriarty, had he chosen to appear at the coach window at that moment, might have recognized the gentleman on the hack as his tea-spilling acquaintance from the King’s reception.
Certainly, the two men who emerged from the stopped coach would not have been in attendance at that same gathering. “My friends from Scotland Yard would like a look at this chap’s face,” the gentleman on the hack continued serenely, as if he had not seen the Colonel’s hand move toward his pocket, then fall away. The big man clenched his fist and dropped their burden before lunging at the men from Scotland Yard.
The Colonel released the man to fall limply to the cobbles and embarked on a lunge of his own, this one calculated to take him away from the detectives and down the nearest alley. He nearly collided with the hack. The gentleman now held a pistol in his hand, with the barrel most unequivocally pointed at his heart. Colonel Moran froze and held out his hands in a gesture of surrender. His companion was being subdued with truncheons and it was some moments before anyone had the opportunity to check the inside of the Professor’s coach.
In the end, it was a new arrival who flung open the door and swore softly at the sight of the empty cushions. The lady with him turned away and swept over the cobbles to free the fallen man’s head. She applied some salts from her bag and, a moment or two later, Mr Godfrey Norton, barrister, coughed his way back to life, if not immediately back to health.
Mrs Norton looked up at the large gentleman standing next to the coach and murmured in a choked voice, “Thank you, Mr Holmes. I am eternally in your debt.”
The gentleman’s hooded eyes appraised her and her husband for a long moment before Mr Mycroft Holmes favored her with a bow. “I believe that England may be in yours, madam. You have foiled a plot against one of Her Majesty’s allies and kept our government from losing face. Allow me to have you escorted to your lodgings and a doctor fetched for your husband.”
The Professor moved out of earshot after that. He didn’t need to hear more; the details of how the clever Irene Adler and her allies had wrecked his plans could wait. The accompanying painful loss of faith in the mathematical precision of his plans, the precision that should have guaranteed his success, was overwhelming. But it would pass quickly enough. Holmes’s brother was a variable that he had not accounted for in his calculations and he had underestimated Mrs Norton. These were not mistakes that he would make again and, when he returned from this Elba, his empire would once again be his. The Napoleon of crime disappeared into the fog.
Dynamics of an Asteroid
Lavie Tidhar
1.
They’d strung up the boy, Twist, from a gas lamp outside and left him there for us to find. Moran carried him in: a limp, pale bundle of broken bones encased in pinched, scarred skin.
Moran laid him down on the kitchen table, as gentle as a serving maid. He stood there looking down mutely on the boy. His face was a mask of anger and hate.
Remarkably, the dead body still tried to move. Moran jumped back with a cry. Twist’s limbs flopped on the kitchen table. His mouth opened and closed without words. His eyes sprung open and glared at us, and I saw the evil, alien flame of intelligence behind the eyes.
The phenomenon only lasted for a moment. Then the flame went out and the body collapsed back and was still, the last vestiges of animated life gone from it. It had not been one of them, only a sliver, just enough for them to deliver this message, let us know they knew where we were, that they could reach us if they wanted to.
‘They want us alive,’ I said, and Moran turned on me and said, ‘No, they want you alive, Professor. They couldn’t give a f—k about the rest of us.’
The ratter, Fagin, looked up balefully from the corner. His face was as white as a skull.
‘Where do we go now?’ he said. ‘We’re trapped. There’s no way out, not any more. Maybe there never was—’ He was babbling, half crazed by now. He’d lost half his boys to the other side and the rest had run. Twist had been the last boy standing.
I stared at him coldly.‘Remember, Fagin. This is still my city,’
I told him. ‘I ruled it from the shadows and I will rule it yet again.’
‘Jack rules it,’ the ratter said. ‘This is Jack’s town now.’
I was on him in a fraction of a second. My fingers tightened on his throat. The ratter’s face turned even whiter. His eyes bulged.
‘F—k Jackie Boy,’ I said. ‘This is my turf.’ I stared into his eyes. ‘Do you understand me, Fagin? Do you understand?’
‘Yes!’ he choked. ‘Yes, yes!’
I released him and he slumped to the ground, massaging his throat. I looked around me, at our bolt-hole. The wallpaper was ghastly. The windows were covered in makeshift blackout blinds. Twist lay on the table. I turned my eyes from him.
‘If they want us,’ I said, ‘then we shall go to them. We shall go to see Jack.’
‘But that’s suicide!’ Moran said, stirring.
I laughed. ‘Do you think me a fool?’ I said. ‘I have studied them, from the very start. I know them better than anyone alive. You are a hunter, Colonel Moran. And it is time for us to hunt.’
He looked at me wanly. The fight wasn’t in him. Six months since it’d all begun. Six scant months since the world changed for ever. And we have fought them, in the streets and alleys, in the shadows, every day and night. And still, we were losing.
I checked my gun. Before, I had no use for guns. I believed in the mind, in pure mathematics. It was that which led to my infam ous lecture, before the Royal Society, about the dynamics of that d—ed Marsian asteroid.
2.
I knew, even as I was speaking, that they did not believe me. They heard the words but the meaning did not register.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own, because, of course, this is complete and utter poppycock.
I would not have called them intelligent, not exactly. They had a species’ predatory hunger, a need to survive. Intelligence was secondary. As for being mortal – they could be killed, yes, but with difficulty. But they were coming, even though, back then, I did not yet know the extent of it.
The Royal Society was packed that night but no one was listening any more. A man in the second row from the front was the only one paying attention. He was dressed in a seersucker suit, with mutton chops down his narrow face and a sun hat, which tried to disguise his bright fevered eyes, and failed. He had always taken ridiculous pride in his disguises, which I never understood – he was never very difficult to spot in a crowd.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘your outrage does you no credit. This is science, simple and inevitable mathematics. There is a Marsian asteroid heading directly to Earth. If my calculations are correct – and my calculations are never wrong – it will hit somewhere to the south-west of London in approximately six months from today.’
The man in the seersucker suit raised his hand. ‘Professor Moriarty?’ he said.
‘Yes, Holmes?’
He flushed red under the fake sideburns, mortified his disguise did not fool me.
‘What do you mean, alien life forms?’ he said.
‘I mean exactly that. It is my determination that the course of this asteroid is not random. It has been aimed.’
‘You consider it a hostile act?’
‘I don’t know what else we can call it, Detective.’
‘But that means …’
‘That the British Empire is under attack.’
‘Your empire, you mean. The secret criminal empire of which you are master!’
‘Like a spider in the centre of a web,’ I said, tiredly. ‘What was it you called me when we last met? The Napoleon of crime? I am a mathematics professor, Mr Holmes. A good one.’
The truth was I rather liked the old boy. Of course he liked to claim he was the top of his field, but then he was the only one in his field. Mostly, he did divorce work, much as he tried to deny it. All around us the distinguished members were booing and shouting. Only Holmes understood, and yet he misunderstood profoundly.
‘They could be emissaries,’ he said. ‘Ambassadors from the red planet. If you are right—’
‘I am never wrong—’
‘If you are right, then this is marvellous,’ he said. ‘A first meeting with an extraterrestrial race!’
He thought he understood people, you see. He had that trick where he guessed where you came from or what you did by the type of cigarette you smoked. He was an idiot.
‘I am quite sure that a man of your intelligence will see that there can be but one outcome to this affair,’ I said.
‘You speak of danger,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Danger is part of my trade.’
‘That is not danger, you fool!’ I said. ‘It is inevitable destruction.’
He smiled, thinly and without charm. ‘Then I propose a wager.’
‘Oh? I did not have you pegged as a gambling man, Mr Holmes.’
‘Only when I can be sure of the outcome,’ he said, smugly.
I wondered if I should not let Moran shoot him. The Colonel was eager to play with his latest toy, some sort of air rifle used to hunt big game. It would have been wasted on Holmes. A knife in the ribs would have been quicker and quieter, and cost less to boot.
‘Speak your mind,’ I said. No one else was listening. They were still ranting and raving, calling me delusional, a madman and a flake. It had become a sort of sport. To them I was a nobody, a provincial mathematician, and they were, or so they thought, the grand men of their day. Unbeknown to them, most were in hock to me already. The others would be blackmailed or robbed, perhaps murdered. I do not suffer fools.
‘You say it will hit in six months,’ he said. ‘Let us meet then, and go to welcome these life forms of yours. These Marsians. And we shall see who is right.’
I smiled at him pleasantly enough.
‘Gladly,’ I said. I had my own plans for the landing. By having Holmes along, I thought, I could kill two birds with one stone.
Though, as it turned out, I had underestimated our strange visitors from another world. And it had cost me: it had cost me dearly.
3.
The trajectory of the asteroid’s fall led me to conclude that it would make landing somewhere near Woking, Surrey. It seemed unlikely to be a coincidence. It was far enough from urban habitation to be discreet, yet close enough to London to make any kind of attack a swift one. It was visible now in the night sky, a red, baleful eye, which had drawn a crowd and some members of the constabulary, trying to keep the peace, including that buffoon, Lestrade, of Scotland Yard.
When we arrived it was night. Holmes was already waiting, smoking a pipe, leaning against a fence with a nonchalance that didn’t fool me for a minute. He was a hopeless addict, and I could see by the shaking of his hands and the feverish look in his eyes that he had taken enough cocaine to give an elephant a heart attack. What he was seeing in the night sky was anyone’s guess, at that point. It must have seemed a magical fireworks display to him, some ethereal wonderland in the night.
To me, that red glare meant nothing less than a declaration of war.
‘Stand back, stand back!’ Lestrade shouted.
The observers gaped at the sky in a bovine fashion. Holmes gave me a nod and I nodded back, guardedly. I had my own plans for this extraterrestrial invasion.
My men had surrounded Horsell Common. They were hidden in the trees, drawn from the mean streets of London: heavy men, with heavy guns. My plan was simple. As soon as the asteroid – meteoroid, now, and soon to be a meteorite – landed, my men would open fire. Anyone who got in their way – a certain detective, say, or a dim-witted Scotland Yard inspector – would be blasted to kingdom come. I quite relished that thought.
‘I wonder what type of cigarette tobacco they smoke,’ Holmes said, dreamily. I saw his man, Watson, emerge from the trees then, fumbling with his belt.
‘This is no time to go to the loo,’ Holme
s murmured. Watson shrugged. He was a small, stocky man who moved with a slight limp in bad weather.
We watched the sky, and that hateful red glow coming nearer and nearer.
4.
Now there were only the three of us left, Moran and Fagin and I. The boy, Twist, we left behind. He was no use to anyone any more. We crept through the city’s dark curfew.
We had taken shelter in a maze of alleyways in one of the East End’s most notorious slums. It had been Fagin’s hinterland in the days of my empire, his base of operations, where the children were trained as fine-wirers and cutpurses. We had been retreating by degrees as the enemy, quietly and insidiously, grew in power. Now the streets were dark, deserted. The only shapes that moved did so jerkily, with a stiffness of limbs and a vacuity of eyes, and we avoided their patrols, hiding until they passed. Jack. Jack was somewhere out there, a spider in its web – what had Holmes called me? I missed Holmes. I missed all of it. The great game we used to play.
‘Where are we going?’ Fagin whispered. I exchanged a glance with Moran, who grinned in savage amusement.
‘Do you know how to catch a tiger, Fagin?’ I said.
‘Professor?’
‘The way to catch a tiger is to offer it something it wants,’ I said. ‘Hunters, like our friend Colonel Moran here, would tie a living goat to a tree and lie in wait nearby. The goat would cry in fear, until the tiger came. Do you understand?’
I could see the confusion in the poor man’s eyes. ‘But where will we find a goat at this time of night? In the East End?’
I sighed. I liked Fagin, he was a good worker, and he had no morals of which to speak.
‘Not a goat, you fool,’ I said. ‘A man.’
Something must have finally registered. His eyes flashed. He began to turn towards me and there was a knife in his hand. Then Moran knocked him on the back of the head with the butt of his air rifle, and Fagin slumped unconscious to the ground. Moran picked him up, grunting at the weight.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 8