Chapter 24: The Charity Gala
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — October 15, 2008, 5:30 PM]
The tuxedo was rented, which bothered James more than it should have.
He stood in front of the bathroom mirror, adjusting the bow tie with fingers that knew the knot despite the mind behind them having learned it from YouTube in a previous life. The rental fit well enough—Priya had provided his measurements from the Westwood suit purchase, and the Savile Row hire shop had done competent work. But the fabric lacked the weight of ownership. It was a costume, and James was increasingly uncomfortable with costumes that announced themselves as such.
"You look like a penguin," Kevin said from the kitchen, where he was eating a Greggs sausage roll over the sink to avoid crumbs on the floor.
"Thank you, Kevin."
"A posh penguin. Like the ones at Edinburgh Zoo."
"That's enough."
"I'm just saying. Very distinguished."
James checked the burner phone—the Richter phone, Mayfair prefix. Two texts from Ashford's assistant confirming the table assignment. One from Priya: Catering team in place. Three staff. Devices positioned during setup. Feed is live. Good hunting.
The operation had been planned for two weeks. Priya had placed three assets within the catering company contracted for the event—a bartender, a server, and a kitchen porter. Each carried a micro-recorder concealed in their uniform. The server would work the main hall; the bartender would cover the smoking terrace, where real conversations happened after the third drink; the kitchen porter would handle the cloakroom, where phones were left in jacket pockets and jackets were left unattended.
Additionally, Priya had arranged for listening devices in two floral centrepieces—the kind of miniaturised equipment that Holt sourced through contacts James preferred not to ask about. Battery life: six hours. Range: twelve metres. More than enough to capture the table conversations of London's powerful at their most unguarded.
"Remember," James told himself, straightening the pocket square, "you're not here to steal anything. You're here to listen."
---
[Mansion House, City of London — October 15, 2008, 7:15 PM]
Crystal chandeliers threw fractured light across two hundred guests in evening dress. The Egyptian Hall—barrel-vaulted, columned, the kind of architecture that existed to make human beings feel smaller than the institutions they served—hummed with the particular frequency of wealth performing charity. Champagne circulated on silver trays. A string quartet played Vivaldi in a corner nobody was listening to.
James entered as Alex Richter, Ashford's guest, and began to work.
The skill wasn't socialising. The skill was cataloguing. Every handshake was an assessment. Every introduction was a file opened. Every conversation was a thread that might, eventually, be pulled.
Ashford made introductions with the casual authority of a man distributing favours. "Alex, this is Margaret Pemberton—she sits on the board of three FTSE companies and runs the most effective children's charity in London." "Alex, meet Sir Douglas Keane—retired diplomat, now advises the Foreign Office on matters they'd rather not discuss publicly." "Alex, you must meet David Collins—Junior Minister for Business, very bright, very underappreciated."
Collins was forty-three, sandy-haired, wearing a dinner jacket that fit slightly too tightly across the shoulders—the jacket of a man whose salary couldn't keep pace with the events his position required him to attend. His handshake was firm but brief. His smile reached his eyes exactly long enough to register before retreating behind the professional mask that all politicians wore like a second skin.
"Ashford tells me you're in security consulting," Collins said, accepting a champagne flute from a passing waiter—one of Priya's people, James noted.
"Risk assessment, primarily. Helping organisations understand threats they'd prefer not to think about."
"God, I wish the civil service would hire people like you. Half the security briefings I receive could have been written by a particularly nervous schoolteacher."
James laughed—measured, warm, the laugh of a man who appreciated wit without competing with it. "Government work must be frustrating. All the responsibility, none of the resources."
Collins's expression shifted. The mask slipped, just a fraction—enough to reveal the exhaustion and resentment beneath. "You have no idea. I've been pushing an infrastructure initiative for eighteen months. Good policy, strong evidence base, broad support in principle. Blocked because the Chancellor's office won't release funding and my senior minister is too focused on his leadership campaign to fight for it."
"That sounds like a structural problem, not a political one."
"It's both. The structure rewards visibility, not effectiveness. I could solve real problems, but solving real problems doesn't get you on the evening news."
James filed the information. Collins was ambitious, frustrated, principled—a dangerous combination in politics, because principled ambition without institutional support eventually curdled into either cynicism or vulnerability. He was exactly the kind of person who might, with careful cultivation, accept help from someone who operated outside the usual channels.
Not tonight. Tonight was observation. But the file was open.
"I'd enjoy hearing more about it sometime," James said. "Infrastructure is one of my firm's areas of interest."
Collins produced a business card. "Call my office. We'll have lunch."
---
James circulated for three hours. The canapés were exceptional—truffle vol-au-vents, seared scallops on bone china spoons, miniature beef Wellingtons that dissolved on the tongue. He ate more than he should have. There was something absurd about cataloguing potential blackmail targets while savouring a canapé that probably cost more than Kevin's sausage roll. The absurdity was becoming familiar, which was its own kind of warning.
By ten o'clock, his mental catalogue held seven entries.
Entry one: Sir Douglas Keane, retired diplomat, engaged in extended conversation with a woman thirty years his junior who was emphatically not Lady Keane. Physical proximity suggested established familiarity, not new acquaintance.
Entry two: Margaret Pemberton, charity chair, discussing with a hedge fund manager the precise mechanism by which charitable donations could offset capital gains liability in ways that Her Majesty's Revenue wouldn't notice. The bartender—Priya's asset—was mixing drinks three feet away.
Entry three: An MP named Gareth Howe, backbencher, who'd consumed five glasses of champagne and was loudly explaining to a small group how he'd voted against a housing bill despite privately supporting it, because his constituency chairman had threatened to deselect him.
Entries four through seven: variations on the theme. Affairs hinted at. Deals discussed. Principles traded for pragmatism in the particular way that London's powerful had been trading them for centuries. The raw material of leverage, scattered across a room like diamonds on a ballroom floor—invisible until you knew what to look for.
The listening devices would capture what James couldn't overhear directly. Priya would process the recordings overnight—transcribing, cross-referencing, building files. By tomorrow morning, the Moriarty network would possess documented evidence of behaviour that each of these people would pay considerably to keep private.
Not blackmail. Not yet. Inventory. The archive was a warehouse, not a weapon. Weapons were deployed; warehouses accumulated value.
James stepped onto the smoking terrace at eleven. The City's skyline spread before him—the Gherkin, the Lloyds building, the Tower of London lit like a stage set, the Thames beyond it all, moving black and constant. The air was cool and carried the particular October smell of London: wet stone, exhaust, the faint sweetness of fallen leaves composting in gutters.
Collins appeared beside him, lighting a cigarette with the furtive efficiency of a man who'd been told to quit.
"Enjoying the evening?" Collins asked.
"Very much. Your speech was good."
"My speech was five minutes of approved talking points delivered to an audience that was thinking about dessert. But thank you."
"The infrastructure points were solid."
Collins looked at him—properly, for the first time, with the assessment gaze of a man who'd learned to distinguish genuine interest from social lubrication. "You actually listened."
"Occupational habit."
"Most people in that room were listening for opportunities to talk. You were listening to understand. That's rare." Collins drew on his cigarette. The ember glowed against the dark. "Ashford says you're trustworthy. Coming from a man who trusts approximately four people on Earth, that means something."
"I appreciate his confidence."
"I may take you up on that lunch. There are things I'd like to discuss that don't fit neatly into parliamentary committees."
"I'd welcome the conversation."
Collins nodded. Finished his cigarette. Ground it carefully into the standing ashtray—the gesture of a man who cleaned up after himself, even at someone else's party. He went back inside. James stayed on the terrace.
Seven potential leverage points from one evening. At this rate, within a year, the archive would contain enough material to influence anyone in London who mattered. Politicians, judges, business leaders, aristocrats—each one a file, each file a thread, each thread a potential pull on the fabric of power.
The string quartet had switched to Debussy. The music drifted through the open doors—liquid, chromatic, the sound of elegance dissolving into something more complicated. James listened. Drank the last of his champagne. Set the glass on the terrace railing.
The vault begins filling.
He thought of the Millbrook job—a break-in that had earned fifty thousand pounds and bruised knuckles and the first proof that this body could fight. Seven months ago. A different operation, a different scale, a different understanding of what power looked like. Back then, power was a fence in a pub with stolen documents and a client who undercharged. Now, power was a room full of people who ran the country and didn't know they were being recorded.
The progression should have been terrifying. It was exhilarating. And the exhilaration was, perhaps, the most terrifying thing of all.
James left the terrace. Found Ashford. Thanked him with the precise warmth that the situation required—grateful but not effusive, appreciative but not obsequious. Ashford clasped his hand and said, "There's a weekend at my country house in November. Shooting. You should come. Bring that quiet attentiveness of yours. People talk more freely when they're holding shotguns."
"I'd be delighted."
James retrieved his coat from the cloakroom—passing the kitchen porter, one of Priya's people, who didn't acknowledge him. Stepped out onto Walbrook Street. The night was cold. His breath made small clouds that dissolved into the city's permanent haze.
He pulled out the Richter phone. Texted Priya: Seven principals. Three confirmed, four probable. Full harvest. Process overnight. I want files by morning.
Her reply came in seconds: Already started. Audio quality is excellent. You should see what Pemberton said about the tax scheme. It's practically a confession.
James pocketed the phone. Hailed a taxi. The driver was listening to a phone-in about Arsenal's midfield problems. Normal. Ordinary. A Tuesday night in London.
In the back seat, James loosened the bow tie. The rented tuxedo rustled against the leather upholstery. He'd buy one. A proper one—bespoke, fitted, the kind of investment that announced permanence. Alex Richter was no longer a temporary cover. He was a permanent second identity, a face that moved through rooms where Moriarty could never go and collected the kind of intelligence that money alone couldn't buy.
Two worlds. One man. And a vault that grew fuller with every champagne glass raised and every secret spoken in the comfortable belief that wealth was the same thing as privacy.
The taxi crossed Blackfriars Bridge. South of the river, the lights were different—yellower, sparser, the illumination of function rather than display. Home ground. James paid the driver, climbed the three flights, unlocked the three locks. The flat was dark. The kettle sat cold on the counter.
He hung the tuxedo on the back of the door. Changed into jeans and a shirt. Made tea. Sat at the kitchen table with the new notebook—the WHSmith replacement, barely started—and began writing.
Names. Connections. Vulnerabilities. The architecture of London's power structure, mapped from the inside by a man who existed in both its halves.
The phone buzzed. Moran: Second contract complete. Asset's family has confirmed departure. Clean.
The domestic abuser. The one James had approved while declining the whistleblower. Principles, even in killing.
Two engines. Running parallel. Neither visible to the other, neither aware of the other's fuel or destination. But both driving the same machine forward, into a future that the canon version of James Moriarty had always been meant to inhabit.
The tea was good. The flat was quiet. The notebook filled, line by careful line, with the names of people who didn't know they'd been collected.
Note:
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.