The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

A Scandal in Arabia Claude Lalumière

To the Professor he is always the Detective. In dreams, in thought, or in conversation, he seldom refers to him under any other name. In the Professor’s mind, he eclipses and predominates the whole of his profession. It is not that he feels any emotion akin to affection for the Detective. All emotions, and that one particularly, are abhorrent to his cold, precise and mathematical mind. The Professor knows himself to be the most perfect calculating machine in the history of the world; no one would ever mistake him for a caring human being. He never speaks of the softer passions, save with a jibe and a sneer. Such emotions are quantifiable variables to be measured by the objective observer – elements in the equations that predict and manipulate the movements and actions of individuals and populations. For the trained mathematician to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely tuned psyche would be to introduce distracting factors that might throw a doubt upon all his calculations. Yet there has ever been but one significant opponent to him, and that opponent was the Detective, of dubious and questionable motives.

This morning, as the orange light of the Middle Eastern sun hits the glass windows of the Professor’s Dubai penthouse, his thoughts are again of the Detective. For the past decade, now that his centuries of calculations have elevated him beyond any stature he had imagined when he first stepped on to the path of crime and corruption, every night he has dreamed of his illustrious opponent. In these dreams, the two of them spar like they used to, the Detective meticulously untangling every strand of the Professor’s web of conspiracy. In these dreams, the Detective is relentlessly victorious and the Professor is inevitably undone and humiliated.

The Professor believes that the Detective is dead, has been dead for nearly a century, and yet a doubt lingers. The Professor does not like chaotic variables to mar the precise beauty of his equations, is dissatisfied at having to rely on ambiguous opinion, even his own, rather than proven and quantifiable data.

The Detective retired on 7 July 1902. By that time, the Professor and the Detective had been duelling, at times publicly but most often secretly, for two decades. The Professor’s agents kept watch over the Detective during his retirement, but he never showed any signs of interfering with the Professor’s designs. Indeed, the Detective, in those elder years, seemed to lose any interest in meddling with the criminal world. Emboldened, the Professor embarked on what was, at that time, his most ambitious plot yet. Even the British government, who had pulled the Detective out of retirement to aid in the War Effort, did not know what only the Detective had correctly deduced: that the Great War was set into motion by the Professor to further his long-term plans.

The Detective’s belated interference prevented the First World War from achieving its full potential – the Professor’s equations had not accounted for the Detective’s involvement – but the Professor nevertheless profited from its outcome, albeit not as richly as he had initially calculated.

After the Great War, the Professor lost track of the Detective. Indeed, the historical record was altered in such a deliberate and methodical way by the Detective’s older brother – a shadowy puppet-master operating behind the scenes of the British government – that the world now regards the Detective as a fictional character created by a failed physician with a credulous penchant for spiritualists and fairies.

All in all, the Professor and the Detective matched wits for a mere three decades! That brief period, now more than a century in the past, outshines any other in the Professor’s long life.

Enough! The Professor chides himself for indulging in such nostalgia.

Teenage twins from India – brother and sister – stand naked at their station in his private spa, to minister to his morning needs. Afterwards, there is a full day awaiting him: following breakfast, a teleconference is scheduled with his worldwide network of operatives; after lunch, he has a full slate of brief meetings with financiers and politicians from all over the globe; after dinner, he will read the day’s reports; for the rest of the evening, he will pore through the near-infinite datastreams now available to him thanks to the surveillance society he has manipulated into being; finally, at midnight, synthesizing everything he has learned in the last twenty-four hours, he will revise all his equations and send off fresh instructions to his agents.

But now: the twins. For the body must not be neglected.

The Professor, contrary to what the Detective’s biographer has reported, is not British, although he pretended to be for many years, adopting an Irish name and fabricating an entire life story, calculated to maximize the efficiency and impact of his persona. The Detective eventually saw through the deception, but, as far as the Professor knows (with a probability of 97.86 per cent), never shared the truth with his biographer, or with anybody else; the Detective must have feared (with a probability of 98.34 per cent) being taken for a madman should he try to convince anyone of the truth behind the Professor.

The Professor was born in Shiraz, one of the greatest cities in Persia, in what would now be called the thirteenth century. As a young boy, the Professor already displayed an uncanny aptitude for mathematics. His father, an Arab who had travelled north in his youth and settled in Persia, was a religious scholar employed at the court of Abu Bakr ibn Saad. The ruler took a liking to the young boy and delighted in his mathematical acuity. By grace of Abu Bakr’s patronage, the boy received the best education Persia could provide – and at the time Persia was the most learned of all the world’s nations.

The boy excelled in academics, easily impressing his teachers when mathematics was the subject or deceiving them when philosophy, especially ethics, was the theme at hand.

From an early age, the boy perceived the world differently than those around him. Every moment, every interaction, every thought, every action – everything – expressed itself in his mind as a mathematical equation. Any outcome could be reached if the correct equation could be articulated, solved and applied.

In his mind, the equations grew in complexity and scope, but the reality they described could not be achieved in a single lifetime. According to his calculations, he would not witness the results of his equations in the mere decades of life he could reasonably expect his body to endure.

That, too, he knew could be solved with the application of the proper equation.

All those gullible fools who thought the Fountain of Youth was a place waiting for any idiot to stumble on to! Eternal life was, like everything else, a mathematical equation. Once the Professor decided to apply his formidable mind to the problem, it was only a matter of three years, two months, four days, two hours, fifty-six minutes and thirteen seconds to resolve the mathematical formula that gave him complete control over his body and its processes.

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.

The coming financial and political upheaval will restore common people’s belief that they wield some control over their collective destiny. In truth, the equations of world domination are unfurling according to the Professor’s designs. Time now to dive into the datastreams.

In the last two decades, the Professor’s equations have grown exponentially in both complexity and accuracy. The information society that he calculated into existence has yielded, as per the model based on his equations, a surveillance society that collects so much data that only the Professor’s exquisitely trained mind can synthesize it.

The Professor wields every string of the surveillance society like a master puppeteer. It is a world of his own making, a world in his own image. He rules it. He dominates it. And no one – not even the Detective, even if he were, improbably, still alive – will ever wrest it from him.

That night, for the first time in a decade, following his unprecedented nap-time victory, the Professor does not dream of the Detective. Does not dream of the Detective defeating him. The Detective is again absent the next night … And the next …

A pyramid, reflects the Professor during a trip to Egypt, is the perfect mathematical expression of the perfect human society. A construct of concentric rungs, each superior tier smaller than the inferior yet dominating the lower and larger tier, until the top rung is reached, and that rung has only one component. The ruler. The pharaoh. The alpha. The Professor.

The Professor is in Cairo to oversee a crucial play in his game of world domination. His personal attention is not strictly required, but without his presence there is a 17.3 per cent probability that the move will fail. Factoring his on-hand intervention, that probability falls to 0.002 per cent.

The three arms dealers, the four bankers, the seven foreign diplomats, the one representative of the Egyptian government, the two environmental activists, the six revolutionary militia commanders, the three insurance brokers, the five industrialists, the two civil rights advocates, and the three religious figures do not meet each other. The Professor handles every discrete aspect of the negotiations, and it all goes smoothly, exactly according to the Professor’s calculations. Having now met all the actors in this particular action, the Professor recalculates that, even without his presence in Cairo, the likelihood of this venture’s success would really have been 99.12 per cent.

World domination is so ridiculously effortless. All that is needed is to apply meticulously the proper equations and act on them without mercy or hesitation.

It has now been one year since the Detective has been banished from his dreams. The Professor is as all-powerful in dream as he is in reality. The world responds to his every whim as if it were a limb directly attached to his perfectly calibrated brain. The world is his, and there is no one, not a single person on the entire planet, with even the slightest potential to pose any serious, or even minor, challenge to his hegemony.

On the night of the anniversary of his conquest of the Detective of his dreams, the Professor falls into slumber with perfect serenity and confidence.

… Only to be once again visited by the Detective, who all this time has been secretly plotting against the Professor. The Professor’s worldwide empire collapses. His operatives and vassals turn against him. All of his schemes are revealed. His web of influence is ripped apart. The Detective is ruthlessly victorious, the Professor utterly ruined and destroyed.

The Professor wakes before dawn, his entire body covered in sweat. It takes him a moment to realize that his body feels different, uncomfortable.

He rushes to a mirror and gazes upon the naked body of an ashen old man. He once more resembles the persona he adopted against the Detective in the late 1800s. But older – more decrepit, more defeated.

The Professor cancels all of his appointments for the day. He spends the next few hours recalibrating the formula that keeps him alive, the legendary Fountain of Youth. He lets himself appear a few years older than he has recently done – late thirties rather than late twenties. Neither young, nor old. Eternal.

That settled, he dives into the datastreams to lose himself in the ceaseless flow of information at his disposal, but after thirty minutes he disengages in disgust.

There is no real information in the datastreams. Everything is as he has calculated and put into motion. There are no surprises. There is no chaos. There is no opponent. The grip of his will upon the world is as precise as it is unshakeable.

That night, he again dreams of absolute destruction at the hands of the Detective.

For the first time since his childhood eight hundred years ago, the Professor’s mind is in disarray. His own equations are subtly beyond his grasp. The datastreams are incomprehensible gibberish. When faced with the prospect of issuing instructions to the network of subordinates who sustain his empire, he is dumbfounded.

How long can he afford to ignore his life’s work? How long before entropy sets in, unhinging the precision of the equations at the foundation of his world order?

His mind refuses to supply the mathematical solution to these questions.

The Detective continues to haunt the Professor’s sleep. Every night, in dreams, the Detective relentlessly pursues, outwits and conquers the Professor.

Every minute of every day, the Professor feels his body ageing and decaying. He can no longer recall the mathematical formula that gives him control over the ageing process.

The Professor goes through the motions of his daily routine. The teleconferences with his operatives. The meetings with politicians and financiers. Reading the reports. He must maintain appearances. He must appear in control.

If any of his agents and vassals wonder at his prolonged silence, at the absence of fresh directives, they do not voice their apprehension. But the Professor feels that the balance of power is shifting. At least some of them are intuiting his current weakness, perhaps even planning a coup.

Despite the Professor’s neglect, his empire runs along smoothly, wealth and power trickling inexorably upward, poverty and oppression spreading in concentric circles of dominance. The world is still the world of his creation. His vassals are still getting wealthier and more powerful every passing day. Nevertheless, the Professor expects that unless he soon regains his mathematical acuity someone or some faction will attempt to usurp his position. If the potential traitors hesitate, it is because they fear that upsetting the status quo might disrupt the system that grants them the riches and privileges they crave with such greed and desperation.

But the lust for power cannot be underestimated. The most predatory among his entourage must be able to smell his weakness. The instinct to pounce can only be ignored for so long. Someone will act. And soon.

The Professor wakes from yet another dream defeat at the hands of the Detective knowing that the time has come. The air in the tower is supercharged. As the day progresses, everyone is oh so careful to appear subservient. The tension mounts with each passing second, and it can only be relieved with a bloodletting.

But who will die? Who shall be the sacrifice? The Professor or the usurpers?

The sun sets, and still no overt move has been made against him.

In his office, he pretends to log in to the datastreams. He has been unable to sift through the information for weeks, but still, should he be surveyed, he makes a show of interfacing with the flow of information. He must maintain the illusion of control, of power.

But he ignores the digital babble and focuses on his immediate environment. His caution is rewarded: they are here, in this room. There are three of them. They no doubt believe they are being stealthy.

It is not by chance, or even by mathematics alone, that the Professor has survived eight centuries.

It takes him two and half seconds to disarm and kill the two most dangerous ones, the ones who moved with a modicum of skill and confidence – the latter assailant managed to nick the Professor’s cheek, drawing blood – and another half-second to disarm the weakling among the trio, the leader.

The two he killed were not conspirators, but merely hired assassins. He has never seen them before; their trim, taut bodies betray their obvious training. The one left alive is a plump but merciless bank executive from Belgium. The professional assassins had wielded knives; the cowardly banker had held a gun that he did not even know how to grip properly.

The Professor spends the rest of the night torturing his would-be usurper. He finds out the names of all those who supported his move against the Professor. Even though every piece of information has been squeezed out of the banker, the Professor ministers his cruel attentions on his prisoner until sunrise. The Professor has not slept, but he feels refreshed, more rested than he has in a long while.

He convenes an emergency meeting in the reception hall. Attendance is mandatory for all those currently in the tower: financiers, politicians, operatives, staff, slaves – everyone. Within twenty minutes, there are 764 people gathered in the hall. The Professor keys in the code that locks all doors in the building.

Emerging from behind the stage curtain, the Professor drags the bloodied and bruised banker, so as to let the repugnant creature be seen by the gathered congregation. Holding up the semi-conscious man in front of him, the Professor crushes his neck with his bare hands and then flings the corpse aside.

He waits one full minute. There is scarcely a breath to be heard in the entire room. They all wait on his word.

The Professor’s head oscillates from side to side in a menacingly reptilian fashion. He starts naming names, his cold, merciless gaze falling one by one on those he lists. After having pronounced thirty-seven names, he falls silent. For a full minute, the only movement in the room is the oscillation of his head. Then he utters two words: “Kill them.”

The assemblage sets upon the designated victims. Upon the conspirators.

The blood is lovely. The atavistic savagery is sublime. The unquestioning obeisance is perfect.

As the congregation sacrifices the unworthy to the altar of the Professor’s dominance, his mind is unshackled; it once more teems with the equations that are his lifeblood.

There were seventy-one other conspirators who were not present on site. The Professor had them dispatched with the application of one efficient formula – a slight shift in the markets that targeted them and them alone. Within four days, they were all destitute and under investigation by whichever force polices financial crimes in their respective countries. Within fifteen days, they had all either taken their own lives or been assassinated in such a way as to mimic suicide.

The Professor has not dreamed of the Detective since his victory over the conspiracy that sought to topple him. But he knows that the spectre of his opponent is waiting to pounce the moment his mind once more grows idle. The Professor cannot risk being so enfeebled again.

The random chance that gave birth to the Detective is no longer possible. The Professor’s control over the world is now too absolute to allow for the nurturing of such a mind as his one true opponent’s.

That must change, and yet it must also not change.

Working on the problem for two hours every evening, it takes the Professor seventeen days to calculate the exact variables to feed into a new equation. It will take three generations from this moment, but a new opponent shall rise. And from then on twice every century a new adversary will be born, each time from a random location, from random circumstances, driven by different motivations, with a different set of skills with which to spar with the Professor.

That will do, yes; that will do. Life is long, and the Professor must face fresh challenges – even if he must manufacture them himself – lest his mind and psyche stagnate and wither.

The Professor steps out on to his private rooftop terrace, facing inland, and, with a cold sneer, breathes in the brisk night air of Dubai, of the world. Of his world. His head oscillates in that distinctly inhuman manner that distinguishes him as the ultimate predator. Below him, the sands of Arabia stretch far away in time and distance.