“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.” —Sherlock Holmes describing Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem”
Powerful minds are not always drawn to the pursuit of good; there are those whose genius is tainted with criminality and who, as Holmes believed of his archnemesis Professor Moriarty, possess “hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.” Like Holmes, you may discover that the crimes committed in your city are not the random work of unrelated thieves and killers but are connected—though subtly—in a giant web, at the center of which is a mastermind like Moriarty, controlling all from a seemingly untouchable remove. Until you can find proof admissible in a court of law that such is the case, however, your day-to-day casework will remain an unending, Sisyphean task; unless you can outwit the mastermind, your crime-solving efforts will address only the branches of evil, not the root. By undertaking the following methods, you may be able to take the fight to him.
1. Gather evidence of the mastermind’s crimes. This first step is the most difficult, for as Holmes said of Moriarty, “so aloof is he from general suspicion . . . so admirable in his management and self-effacement” that finding proof of his criminal ties may seem impossible. Holmes’s method was comprehensive: He surreptitiously searched Moriarty’s house on three occasions (and found “absolutely nothing”), peeked into the mastermind’s finances (“I made it my business to hunt down some of Moriarty’s checks”), and tracked the doings of Moriarty’s criminal associates. Most importantly, he took every precaution to conduct his investigations without the mastermind’s knowledge; unfortunately, Holmes reports in “The Final Problem,” Moriarty was “too wily for that.” If you too are found out, proceed to the next step.
2. Thwart his attempts to assassinate you. “The only conceivable escape for him,” said Holmes of his archenemy, “lay in silencing my tongue.” Yet it’s not from the mastermind himself that the blow likely will fall, but from one of his many agents, and it’s in their interest to kill you quickly and quietly. That can only mean one thing: snipers. Holmes’s prodigious paranoia of assassins wielding silent-but-deadly air guns in “The Final Problem” likely saves his life, as does his insistence on keeping clear of windows and closing all shutters. Do likewise, and in addition make yourself as difficult as possible to track, keeping to alleys and by-ways rather than main thoroughfares and using rear windows and garden walls to access buildings. Keep a revolver close at hand, but use it only if absolutely necessary, else you might end up in the dock for murder, rather than your enemy.
3. Make yourself scarce. Once your damning evidence has been assembled and the machinations of the mastermind’s ruin are in motion, he will be at his most dangerous. Desperate, the mastermind will do anything to destroy you before the net of justice closes around him completely; it’s prudent, therefore, to get as far away as possible until the game is won. Don a disguise, as Holmes did when Moriarty came after him in “The Final Problem,” and hop the next train out of town. Tell no one save your most trusted confidant of your plans, for your enemy has spies everywhere. Travel light but leave nothing behind that you cannot live without—a lesson that Holmes and Watson learned the hard way when Moriarty’s henchmen set fire to their famed Baker Street rooms as they fled.
