There's a word that floats on the filthy air of London. It's everywhere, if you listen hard enough, not so much spoken but hinted at. The word itself is a name, but they speak of the concept, the idea of the man who bears the name. The next question everybody asks is 'what's the word' and I describing their expression when I finally tell them, all the links clicking together in their slow little heads.
The word? Moriarty.
But a few people understand who he is, everybody else understands the subtext. He's danger, life and death, the puppet master of the great city and if he decides something will happen, it will.
It always takes a moment, while they let it sink in that they've caught his attention but finally they come back to earth and look at me. That's always a killer, the moment they figure it all out. Some stumble off their chairs, others draw their guns and just every now or then under their breath one will mutter my name 'Moran'.
I don't so much as have the myth he did but, our tales come as one. If he is the puppet master I am the strings, the closest he ever comes to a confidant and the top of a web spanning well beyond the city itself. I live a life that has me dancing the line of death daily, and pushing people over it with every other phone call. I'm an assassin, a commander and a right hand man to death himself. The story twists me into a brute, an animal with only the intelligence to do what I'm told. They're wrong, and just because I'll beguile you with what really happened, end to end. Clear his name as well as mine from the tarnish of incompetency.