He broke the surface and took a deep breath. Water splashed off him as he climbed out of the pool. His assistant had left his bathrobe and a glass of orange juice next to the door. He drained the glass and put on the robe.
The sun had risen just above the horizon and was colouring the sky in all shades of red and orange. He took a moment to take in the view through the large, wall-to-ceiling panorama windows. Waves of soft green hills sprinkled with the white dots of grazing sheep gave way to stone cliffs and the dark vastness of the ocean.
He left the pool and went into the lounge. On the table, a cup of steaming coffee and a slim cigarillo were waiting for him. Breakfast. Before he sat down, he went to the sound system hidden in the wall. Instead of the usual classical music in the morning he decided that Ska fit his mood better today.
He lit the cigarillo and took a sip of coffee. It didn't pretend to be Italian or French; there was no milk, no foam, no flavouring, no sugar and certainly no soy products. It was just plain black coffee. Perfect.
A stack of international newspapers was sitting on the table awaiting his attention. It was a small luxury he allowed himself to get the first impression of the events of the day in ink and paper. He would later use his tablet to do more precise and up-to-date research, but to get a daily snapshot of the state of the world, nothing beat browsing through old-fashioned newspapers.
He went through them quickly, mentally taking note of items to follow up on later: a successful hostile takeover for which he had to check on his commission, a business opportunity opening up in Indonesia, a straw man that had shown commendable initiative, taxation changes in Argentina. On the whole, he concluded, the world was in an amusingly miserable and delightfully ignorant state. People were basically holding up large bags of money and begging him to rob them.
He dealt with the financial sections last. As usual, the stock markets were a prime example of how humans liked to run around like a herd of headless chickens, always following the latest trends, unpredictable and unreasonable. He thought of the invention of the stock exchange as one of the greater criminal accomplishments of history.
Foreign exchange on the other hand was a sad necessity. His liaisons from less dominant countries happily dealt in Euro and US Dollar, but try to pay a British business partner in Euros and he would act as if you just ripped the dress of the Queen and spit on a portrait of Diana. It was the downside of globalisation that you had to deal with bankers. He despised bankers.
He put away the newspapers and picked up his tablet from the counter to check on his agenda for the day. He looked at the items on his list for a minute and sighed. There was no excitement, no giddiness about any of them. For half of the operations he had been involved with lately, he didn't even have to break the law.
He fondly remembered the excitement he had felt when he had taken his first steps into the global world of crime. How thrilled he had been to find huge gaps between local authorities that allowed inventive criminals to actually operate within legal parameters. He had amused himself by finding bureaucratic loopholes and had thrown a party to celebrate the first million that he had earned honestly.
Back then he had felt as if he was part of one of those rare times when new territory was discovered and there were no regulations other than your own boundaries, like the exploration of the American west or the internet in the 1990s.
But that was ten years ago and nothing had changed. Occasionally, governments threatened to cooperate better and create a more tightly knit net, but they never could agree on anything and then everyone got back to dealing with their own little problems and nothing of consequence ever happened.
Things had become too easy, too comfortable, too boring. He yearned for a challenge, for a competent member of law enforcement to try to get to him. He needed an opponent.
He stared at his tablet for a moment longer and picked up the phone to talk to his assistant.
"I'm bored. Cancel my appointments for today. Tell Sebastian to get on a plane to Osaka and deal with the Tashimi situation on his own. And get me whatever we have on the latest movements of Pinky and the Brain."
It took only a couple of moments before the files popped up on his tablet. He lay down on the sofa and browsed through them, getting increasingly frustrated. A dead pilot, a painting vanished from a closed safe, a con-artist couple, a serial killer that stole his victims left socks. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.
Really Sherlock? This is how you choose to spend your time? Murder and petty theft? Getting Granny's cat out of a tree? This is how far your horizon stretches?
Why wouldn't he see? Why did the man that noticed everything and anything fail to see the big picture? After everything he did. All the trouble he went through to make Sherlock come out and play.
He shuddered as he remembered those incompetent fools the Black Lotus had sent to deal with the missing pin. Normally he would have plainly refused to work with amateurs like that, but he had seen an opportunity to give Sherlock a glimpse of the big world outside of London. And things had gone, let's say, reasonably well. For a moment he had thought he would have to interfere to save Watson - an accidental early demise of Sherlock's morality pet would have all sorts of unforeseeable consequences - but thankfully they had sorted themselves out. And he was certain that once he had opened that door to international organized crime, Sherlock couldn't help but step through, rush through, and revel in the new dimension, marvel at the new opportunities. And eventually, of course, he would cross paths with him, come up against him. But he hadn't. He had taken a look, said 'meh' and turned back to being a glorified private eye.
So he had stepped things up a little. Staged a set of puzzles that slowly increased in scale and global relevance. Made himself known. The last one had been a bit problematic. He had failed to find a forger whose work matched his ambitious criteria, so he had to cheat. He had picked a Vermeer from his personal collection and had the forger add only the one star in a paint that matched the rest of the painting. It was completely worthless now, of course but it had worked wonderfully.
So why wasn't Sherlock out here chasing him? He had shown himself to be an entertaining opponent. Had even resorted to the cheap trick of threatening Sherlock's life, threatening the life of the one closest to him. Why wouldn't Sherlock come after him? Come out to play. To get revenge. He'd just shrugged and gone back to his daily routine. So fucking frustrating.
Maybe he had overdone the crazy super villain act? He had been in a silly mood that day and gone a bit overboard in his excitement. Maybe he'd come across as too unpredictable.
He sighed. Well, no use sitting here wallowing in self-pity. He'd have to give it another try. He picked up the tablet again and opened a list of all on-going operations. Which one of those could he sacrifice to get Sherlock to play? The Tashimi situation was already out-of hand. And since you apparently had to throw a dead body at him to get his attention, why not? Japanese twin sisters - he could arrange a nice puzzle with that. The Tashimis it was.
He picked up the phone again. "Tell Sebastian to forget about Osaka. I'll deal with it. He needs to go to São Paulo and renegotiate with Alessandro. Tell him anything over 10% comes out of his salary."
He smiled. Time to get dressed.