Chapter 8: The Consulting Model
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — March 29, 2008, 10:00 AM]
The whiteboard had cost forty quid at a Staples in Vauxhall, and it was the best investment James had made since arriving in this life.
He stood in front of it with a marker in each hand—black for structures, red for risks—and covered the surface in diagrams that would have looked at home in a Wharton lecture hall. Priya sat on the sofa behind him, laptop open, translating his verbal architecture into digital documentation.
"The problem with what we've been doing," James said, capping the black marker and uncapping the red, "is that we're the ones taking the risk. We break into buildings. We conduct surveillance. We deliver packages. Every operation puts us directly in the line of fire."
He drew a circle in the centre of the board. Wrote MORIARTY inside it. Drew radiating lines outward. "What if we stopped doing that?"
Priya's typing paused. "Stopped doing what? Crime?"
"Stopped doing it ourselves." He drew smaller circles at the end of each line. Wrote CLIENT in each one. "We design operations. We plan them. We provide the intelligence, the logistics, the strategy. And the client executes with their own people."
"So we're—"
"Consultants." He turned around. Priya's expression was caught somewhere between incredulity and the particular brightness that came from encountering an idea that was either brilliant or insane and possibly both.
"Like McKinsey," she said. "For criminals."
"Exactly like McKinsey. Minus the PowerPoint."
She leaned back. Pushed her glasses up. Processed. "Lower risk because we're never at the scene. Higher margins because we're selling expertise, not labour. And it scales—you can plan ten jobs simultaneously if the intel infrastructure supports it."
"The intel infrastructure is you."
"Flattery noted. But you're not wrong." Her fingers moved across the keyboard. "Client intake. Vetting. What's the criteria?"
James turned back to the board. Red marker. "Three categories of rejection. First: anyone who can't articulate their objective clearly. If they don't know what they want, we can't plan it, and they'll blame us when it goes sideways."
"Second?"
"Desperate amateurs. People acting out of emotion—revenge, panic, jealousy. They crack under pressure. They confess to priests and bartenders and therapists. They're walking liabilities."
"Third?"
"Cops. Undercover, informants, anyone adjacent to law enforcement. Priya, I need you to build a background check protocol. Employment history, financial records, associate mapping. Nobody gets through the door without it."
She typed for three minutes straight. James used the time to outline the pricing model—percentage of take for high-value operations, flat fee for planning-only engagements, premium rates for time-sensitive work. The numbers were familiar. He'd built pricing models before, in another life, for corporate restructuring packages that charged six figures to dismantle companies. The mechanics were identical. Only the product had changed.
His ankle twinged. Nearly healed now—the week of enforced rest had reduced the swelling to a faint puffiness around the joint, barely noticeable unless he moved too fast. He'd spent the recovery period on the sofa with the laptop, sketching the model that now covered the whiteboard. Seven days of thinking. Planning. Letting the idea mature until it was ready to present.
"Communication protocols," Priya said. "If we're never at the scene, how do clients report back? How do we handle complications in real-time?"
"Encrypted radio during execution. Burner phones for planning. All communication through you as the relay node—the client never contacts me directly. Compartmentalisation. If any single link breaks, the chain holds."
"And if the client gets caught?"
"They don't know my name. They don't know your name. They met a man in a pub who offered them a plan and a price. That man was using a cover identity. Dead end."
Priya stopped typing. "You've thought about this a lot."
"I had a week with nothing to do but think." He paused. The marker hovered over the board. "There's one more element. Quality control. Every operation I plan has to work. Not mostly work. Not usually work. Every single time. Because we're selling certainty. That's the product. Not plans—certainty."
"That's a big promise."
"It's the only promise worth making."
---
The afternoon brought the first test case.
Kevin arrived at two with news: David Harwell—the Millbrook client, the man who'd paid fifty thousand for documents worth millions—had referred a contact. A man named Gavin Price wanted a competitor's factory destroyed. Insurance job. The competitor was undercutting Price's construction supply business, and Price wanted the playing field levelled by roughly four thousand degrees Celsius.
James met Price at a pub in Clapham. Nondescript. Loud enough to mask conversation, quiet enough to hear it. Price was fifty, barrel-chested, builder's hands wrapped around a pint of bitter. He'd been expecting the old Moriarty—volatile, unpredictable, possibly dangerous in a way that made him nervous.
He got something different.
"I don't burn factories," James said. "I design plans for burning factories. You hire the crew. You execute. I take twenty percent of the insurance payout."
Price frowned. "Twenty percent of—that's eighty grand."
"For a plan that guarantees no forensic evidence, no witness trail, and an insurance investigation that concludes electrical fault. You keep three hundred and twenty thousand and sleep soundly. The alternative is you hire someone off the street, they use too much accelerant, and the fire investigator flags it within a week. Then you're looking at arson charges and a prison sentence."
Price drank his pint. Thought about it. Drank more. "When can you start?"
"I already have." James produced a single sheet of paper—the factory's public planning documents, which Priya had pulled from the council's records that morning. "Tell me about the security system."
Price told him. James listened, asked questions, took notes. The conversation lasted forty minutes. By the end, Price was leaning forward, elbows on the table, describing his competitor's operation with the specific enthusiasm of a man who'd found someone capable of solving the problem he'd been circling for months.
"I'll have a full operational plan within a week," James said. "Payment terms on completion."
They shook hands. Price left. James sat alone in the pub with an empty glass and a head full of numbers.
The board back at the flat read: CLIENT → CONSULTATION → EXECUTION → PAYMENT.
Four words. A business model. The foundation of everything that would come after.
He ordered another drink. The barman poured without asking what—gin and tonic, apparently the original Moriarty's regular. It was crisp and cold and faintly botanical, and James drank it slowly while watching Clapham High Street through the window.
Priya rang at six. "Pizza?"
"Bring the laptop. We need to plan an arson."
"I'll get pepperoni."
She arrived thirty minutes later. They spread the factory plans across the kitchen table—structural diagrams, electrical layouts, fire exit positions—and ate pizza over a discussion about accelerant placement and burn pattern modelling. Priya identified the structural weak points. James designed the sequence. Grease from the pepperoni smeared the corner of the electrical diagram.
The absurdity hit him somewhere between the second slice and the third—a Wharton MBA and an Imperial computer science graduate, cross-referencing fire safety regulations to circumvent them, debating the volatility of different accelerant compounds over a Domino's meal deal.
He grinned. Couldn't help it.
Priya caught it. "What?"
"Nothing. Pass the garlic bread."
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