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The two men circle each other on a hospital rooftop, one short and one tall, playing at heroes and villains. She can read their lips through the scope of the sniper rifle and bites her lip to keep from laughing at the superbly executed theatre. Both manipulating the other, both scheming to obtain the upper hand.
They are both so naive. Even Moriarty with his criminal empire had been led astray, swayed by the challenge presented by a childhood nemesis. He had forgotten his goals in pursuit of another proper genius.
Mary didn't need to be a proper genius to gain the upper hand in this mess of lost profits and overwhelming obsessions.
She warns herself against celebrating too quickly and focuses on the tall man who has just hopped down from the ledge with an incongruous grin on his face.
"What?" Jim demands furiously, doing his best impression of a psychotic terrier. "What did I miss?"
She can't read Sherlock's lips as he circles Jim once more, but she can see his triumph. Hasty, as he'll soon discover.
"No, you're one of the ordinary people," Jim sneers in response to whatever Sherlock has said. "You're on the side of the angels."
Sherlock leans in close and she can read his lips, sixty yards away, as he hisses "Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don't think for one second that I am one of them."
Sixty yards away, Mary stills.
---
Once upon a time, she had been on the side of the angels.
Maria Petrovna Moran was born February 7, 1974 just outside of Atlantic City. Her mother had left after three months when the realities of raising a child didn't match up with the free spirited life she wanted to lead.
Maria never felt her loss too keenly, because she had the best dad in the entire world. Peter Moran was gregarious, larger than life, and almost universally adored; once Maria's mother was out of the picture he settled down and set roots in the community so that his daughter would have a home. American by birth but raised by Russian émigrés, he was well suited to the small Eastern European emigre enclave in which the two lived. Peter taught his daughter Russian alongside English as she grew, and once she had mastered languages he taught her the sacred art of self-defense, gained from two decades of military service. Maria learned to shoot at a young age. She was good at it, despite being about the same height as her dad's rifle.
Maria thought that the very best thing about her dad was his inherent goodness. It radiated from him, infused his smiles with genuine warmth. She wanted to be just like him but worried that she wasn't good enough.
When she was seven, she decided to broach the subject with him. "Daddy," she said one day, holding his hand as they walked home from school, "Does the darkness stop me from being a good person?"
Peter looked down at her questioningly. "What do you mean?"
She bit her lip and tried to think of how to explain it. "Well, I want to be a good person, like you. But sometimes I feel like I have a darkness. And sometimes it's stronger than the part of me that wants to be good and then I do bad things, like laughing at Tommy when he falls off the slide."
"Hmm," he said, and squeezed her hand as they walk up to their little worn house. Maria expected them to go inside, but her dad sat down on the concrete stoop and patted the ground next to him. She sat next to him and picked at the grass growing between cracks in the concrete.
He let out a deep breath before turning to face her. "You know, you're not the only person who has that darkness," he said slowly, trying to explain human nature to a precocious seven year old. "Everyone has that. Some people have less of it than others, but everyone has a dark side."
Maria looked up at him for the first time since sitting down, her face crinkled in disbelief. "Even you?" she asks incredulously.
He made a quick decision. Maybe she was too young for this, but he couldn't have his beloved daughter think that she was a bad person for simply being human. "Especially me. When I was younger I had a lot of the darkness, and I was angry. I tried for a while to make the anger go away, and then I got angry at being angry. Eventually I realized that I couldn't get rid of the dark part of me that caused that anger. I had to live with it."
He watched her closely. She had a contemplative look; not the look of wonder on her face when she learned that butterflies migrated hundreds of miles, but a look of bone-deep comprehension that looked too old on her young face.
"I figured out that it wasn't easy to keep it bottled up. It needed an outlet of some sort, so I joined the military. It turned out to be the perfect fit for me. It let me channel my darkness, which could have been destructive, into something greater than myself. It was my way of turning something bad into something good.
"So you see, this darkness doesn't make you a bad person. You always have a choice in what kind of a person you're going to be, even though you have both darkness and light. You can use the parts of you that are good for bad purposes, and you can use the parts of you that are bad for good purposes. You don't have to be an angel to be on their side."
He stopped there, wondering if anything he said made any sense at all, but one look at Maria reassures him. Her eyes were triumphant, the tension from her shoulders gone.
"On the side of the angels," she said, a startling amount of determination in her voice. "That's what I'm going to be."
She smiled at her father and he smiled back.
---
They continued in this way, a contented family of two. Maria made friends, started high school, dated a few boys. She never distanced herself from her dad as most teenagers did, and dad and daughter went shooting every weekend. Maria was a crack shot, a fact that never failed to delight her father. He loved to watch newcomers at their regular shooting range. They would make jokes about the petite blonde girl just out of earshot, and Maria encouraged them with a sweet smile and a flip of her hair. Then it would become clear that she knew how to handle a rifle and their faces would go a bit slack-jawed, and her father would smile proudly.
Everything was wonderful in a way that later made her think that their contentedness had been begging the universe for retribution. She never forgot that conversation with her father about darkness and light, and came to think of the world as a balancing act in which good and evil eventually cancelled out. It was as simple as physics, really: every action had an equal and opposite reaction. But she had only thought of it in the context of good counterbalancing evil, never the other way around.
And then two weeks after Maria's eighteenth birthday a drunk driver crashed into her father's car on his way home from work.
For the first month she only felt numb. This allowed her to arrange the funeral and attend it without wishing that the church would go up in flames around her. This allowed her to be hugged by acquaintances and distant cousins and read the will and acknowledge that Peter had left his beloved daughter everything he owned. This allowed her to pay the bills and go back to school and eat regular meals and wake up in the morning.
Then the grief kicked in, and self-loathing snuck in alongside it. This was her fault. If she had called him to ask how his day had gone, he would still be alive. If she hadn't said she would make beef stroganoff, his favorite meal, for dinner, he might not have been in such a hurry to get home. If only, if only.
(But these were the visible factors, and they were the symptoms rather than the cause. She had known the nature of the world since she was seven, had known that the world never takes without giving, and somehow had never inverted the logic into its truer form: the world never gives without taking. The world took, because they had been too happy, she and her father, and this was the price they paid.)
Maria slipped from grief to depression, skipping the second stage of the cycle entirely.
She waited for the anger to come.
It didn't come.
---
And then one day a catalyst showed up on her doorstep in the form of a forty-seven year old woman with Maria's eyes. Her mother.
Maria didn't offer a hug or a cup of tea, or even invite her inside. She stood out on the front stoop and looked down at the woman who had abandoned her. "Why are you here?"
"I just heard about Peter." Her voice was slightly lower than Maria's. "I'm so sorry."
"That was over seven months ago." Seven months, one week, and two days.
"I'm not really in touch with anyone around here anymore..." she babbled, and Maria stopped listening as she talked about her life in Brooklyn and how wonderful it was. Instead she looked at her mother, satisfied when she concluded their resemblance seems to be limited to their eyes.
"...but I'm here now, and we'll be as thick as thieves!"
Mary tilted her head in a manner that her father would recognize as a forewarning of trouble and narrowed her eyes for good measure. Her foot was still propping the door open slightly in case she needed to make a hasty escape inside. "What?"
"I'm moving in with you, of course! You need a parent in your life."
She was tempted to make a sarcastic reply about her mother's nonexistent parenting skills, but stopped when she saw the suitcase by her mother's feet. "You can't be serious."
"You're just a child. You can't take care of yourself, I'm amazed you haven't starved yet. Speaking of which, do you have anything to eat?" Her mother picked up the suitcase, ready to be graciously welcomed to her new home. Instead, Maria shut the door with finality and stood in front of it.
"No."
"You don't have anything to eat? Well, you'll have to go to the store later, I don't know where anything is around here anymore!"
"No, you aren't staying here."
Her mother adopted a pitying look on her face, as if Maria can't possibly understand what she's saying. "You're only sixteen!"
"Eighteen. Nearly nineteen."
"Ah, well, age is no marker for adulthood. Look at me, after all!" She winked at her daughter.
Maria looked at her. She saw the wrinkles etched prematurely on her face and the slight tremor in her hands that could only have come from some kind of addiction. She saw that the childishness was a manipulative facade, underneath which was selfishness and greed.
Her mother finally sensed that her guileless charms weren't working, and pulled out her trump card. "But I'm your mother!" she exclaimed. "I love you."
Maria stood absolutely still for a moment, listening to those words. She'd heard them so many times from her father, in all sorts of contexts and in tones ranging from loving to exasperated. She had heard the echo of those words in his presence at her school plays and in the ballet recital he had grudgingly agreed to perform in, and in the dollhouse he had made by hand for her birthday. She looked around the minuscule front yard and remembers playing catch and learning how to ride her bike. She saved the stoop, with its two small stairs, for last, and remembered that somehow all of their important conversations had happened on that front stoop, so that whenever one of them needed to discuss anything important they would automatically move out to the front yard.
Each memory holds the echo of "I love you", and never had he said it as a form of coercion.
And suddenly she was angry, the kind of rage that seemed to well from somewhere deep inside, and she vaguely recognized the darkness that she had worried about all those years ago. But the concern was wiped out by the sweetness of fury, of feeling after all those months of nothingness.
Maria stalked down the stoop until she stood inches away from her mother. She could feel herself trembling with rage, but her voice came out just above a whisper. "You are not my mother. You do not love me. And if you don't leave within the next two minutes you'll have more to worry about than just getting your next fix."
Her mother flinched. Ah, so it was a drug addiction. She opened her mouth to speak but caught Maria's eyes first. Maria hoped that every bit of fury was pouring out of her eyes at that moment.
Apparently it was because she shut her mouth, picked up her suitcase, and walked away.
Maria watched her go. Then she walked back inside the house and locked all of the doors and windows, illogically. She stood in the kitchen when she was done and felt the rage itching, trying to escape her skin.
She grabbed the nearest object - a water glass - and threw it against the wall as hard as she could. The cacophony of shattered glass satisfied a deep-seated need to destroy. She wanted more of it.
She broke every dish in the kitchen, one at a time.
When she was done, left breathing heavily and feeling as though she had inhaled gasoline and then lit a match, she stood alone for a quiet moment. She looked around at the wreckage, and walked over the shards with bare feet. It didn't matter, anyway.
She went outside and sat on the left side of the stoop, her side, for the first time since her father died. She thought about the darkness and the marrow-deep rage that simmered quietly up her spine. She remembered her father telling her that the darkness could be put to good use, and her vow to be on the side of the angels.
She stood up unsteadily sometime after midnight and went inside. Her feet left smeared bloodstains on the concrete.
The next day she joined the army.
---
It helped and it didn't, all at the same time.
She hadn't expected the anger to go away. That was too much to hope for. But, just as her father had said, the army provided an outlet, gave her something to focus on. The relentless training and discipline simultaneously focused and relaxed her, an odd paradox. She sank into the unthinking machine of the army.
She wanted to be in a combat zone. Her marksmanship and a few casual asides about the trouble that could result from a qualified woman being turned down got her a placement in Afghanistan. Her first day on the base outside of Kabul she stared up at the sky, such a pale blue it was almost white, and traced the outlines of the jagged peaks far in the distance. The heat was overwhelming. She could already feel sand and grit collecting in every crevice of her uniform as the harsh wind scraped across her face. She grinned, for the first time in ages. She felt an odd kinship with the desolate landscape around her.
The best part about Afghanistan was that it was easy to forget. Easy to forget that there was a world outside of Nangarhar Province, that most people didn't become accustomed to sound of gunfire and distant explosives. Even easier to forget that she wasn't always this person. She wasn't Maria now, she was Moran.
---
A lot changes in five years.
Later she thinks of this period as her first transformation, the first time she becomes someone else. It was nothing unique: everyone changes, especially when faced with grueling PT and iron discipline and the pervasive edginess stemming from near-constant danger. Everyone acclimatized, but she sank into it willingly and built it into her bones. The darkness grew lighter that way.
She realized early into training that she wouldn't be content anywhere but the field. Active conflicts were few and far between, though, so she trained for special forces.
If only her father could see her now.
"Moran," Pete hissed through her comms, "Target is preparing to leave the building."
She checked the scope of the rifle and tested the wind (light gusts, coming from the north-east). Not exactly optimal. Neither is the timing: Kabul is humming with noise and activity at this time of day, the raucous noise audible from her position on the roof of a four story building. "Copy," she said under her breath, scanning the entrance of the mosque a quarter of a mile away.
She could see two of her teammates, one lingering casually by the entrance, the other chatting with a street vendor. Moran knew that two others were guarding her. She trusted them to do their jobs, and they trusted her to make the shot, no matter how difficult.
The kind of bond the team formed was difficult to explain to a civilian. (Not that she had tried, who did she have to explain it to?) It wasn't friendship. It didn't matter if they liked each other particularly. But they trusted their lives to each other, relied on their combined strength. They were brothers in arms. Their bond was permanent, immutable.
But they did not--could not--care for each other. The operation was what mattered, even if it outlived all of them. It did no good to weep for a friend who had stepped on a landmine or been shot down violently at the market. Instead it reinforced the fact that they lived a breath away from the edge of the void, set up a strange dichotomy in which survival instincts and selfless teamwork lived peacefully side by side.
In this business, it was easiest to pretend that you were already dead, and the bullet just hadn't found you yet.
Moran's focus never wavered from the door that the target would exit from. The sun beat down on her hijab and she felt as though she would sweat through her leather gloves, but she drowned out the sensations. A thrill of anticipation curled through her. Intuitively, she knew the target was coming out.
And there he was. One of the more influential members of the Taliban. She looked at his face, double checked it against the photos of him in her mind, and confirmed his identity internally. A secondary confirmation came from Pete half a second later. She measured his pace through her scope, followed it with her rifle, and pulled the trigger on the seventh step.
Almost instantaneously he collapsed, a quarter of a mile away. Moran ducked down and pulled the rifle to where the sun couldn't glisten off it and give away her position. She left it there as she pulled off her gloves and made sure her disguise was intact. She had no concerns about the rifle being found: she had purposely been given a Kalashnikov as a false lead. Everyone would be quick to blame the Russians.
"Target down," Pete said in her ear, "Clean kill. Perfectly centered head shot, I might add." He sounded too amused for a man who had just confirmed a kill. She hoped to God that he wasn't in earshot of anyone who spoke English as she slipped easily through the narrow streets, the job complete.
---
Moran flew into Chicago for her two weeks off. The flight was abominable, turbulence the entire way across the Atlantic, and the drink she ordered an hour in never did get served. She got off the plane jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, and with a monstrous headache.
She wasn't tired enough to miss the fact that a man in a dark suit followed her from baggage claim into downtown Chicago.
She took off her coat, put on a scarf, and switched trains, but she saw him again in front of the cheap Holiday Inn. He didn't so much as flinch when she turned around and looked in his direction. A professional, then.
Enough was enough. She shouldered her duffel bag more securely and walked leisurely to a seedier part of town before turning into an alley. It was approaching evening and the alley was in shadow. Perfect.
The man stepped into the alley and Moran grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back and pinned him up against the wall.
"Who are you?" she asked in a quiet, deadly tone that she knew to be even more threatening than a shout.
To her surprise, the man grinned even as half of his face pressed against rough brick. "Ma'am," he said, his voice slightly strained but utterly unconcerned about being pinned up against the side of an alley by a strange woman, "I think I might have a job offer for you."
Ten days later, Maria Petrovna Moran perished in an ambush outside of Kandahar.
Amy Grace Rowley-Arlington was born that day, at the age of twenty seven.
---
Intelligence work, Amy assured herself when she bothered to think of it, was still on the side of the angels. It wasn't even that different from her work in special ops, when it came down to it. She still traveled frequently, still had to deal with mind-numbing government bureaucracy even when she technically didn't exist. Even the rifle was the same.
But now she had the training to work under deep cover, and it was exhilarating in a way that she hadn't expected. Putting on a new identity like a coat, adopting just the right personality to inspire trust-
-all for good cause, of course.
She wasn't a bad person, and if her work involved killing, well. Sometimes people should be killed, that's why people like her existed.
She held on to that belief like a talisman, clung to it, until experience bred cynicism and the morality stopped mattering quite so much.
Quick hits in Thailand, Yemen, Belarus, Algeria. Brush-passes in Germany, Australia, Libya, Estonia. Deep cover in Russia, Serbia, England, Turkey, the Czech Republic.
They started to blend together, after a while.
Just a job, after all.
---
Amy was in the middle of infiltrating the Albanian mafia to look for the identity of a black market plutonium seller and was deeply bored to the point that she considers allowing herself to be caught for the fun of breaking out when the bouquet of flowers arrived in her hotel room.
There was no room service at the beaten-down hostel, no way for the flowers to have gotten in legitimately.
Amy smiled, a bit of adrenaline humming through her veins. She searches the room but nothing is missing and there are no explosives to be found, so she opens the formal envelope attached to the flowers with a piece of garish ribbon. High quality paper, she noted.
Gloves on, she slid out the note.
At first glance it is a rather boring missive extolling the virtues of Tirana, but at second glance it is a skip code.
She's always loved those.
"The rooftop, tomorrow, eight" is the encoded message. She doesn't waste time pretending that she won't be there, gun in hand and bells on.
---
Heart thrumming pleasantly in her throat, Amy shut the door behind her quietly. The roof lay in front of her: flat, no hidden space, nowhere to hide. So she saw the man in the expensive suit immediately, even though she had shown up an hour early to the meet.
Off guard already. This would be a good meeting, at least.
"Hello, doll," the man drawled with a slight Irish accent. English. She had expected a language with a Cyrillic root.
"Not my name," Amy answered back readily, hand clenching her gun, finger resting loosely on the trigger.
"Well, it certainly isn't Galina now is it." It wasn't a question so she doesn't bother to answer.
The man leans forward, his pale face slightly manic. "So, you're AGRA. I've wanted to meet you for such a long time."
She kept her face pleasant and her right arm tensed. "Have you really."
He nodded earnestly, widening his dark eyes too much to be completely sincere. "Of course. You did such beautiful work in Kosovo last month. And Ankara, a few months ago - perfection! Really, your work was brilliant even back in Kabul all those years ago."
He isn't government, so how does he know about those missions?
Seeing the question on her face, he laughed. "How do I know you? Let's just say that we've worked at cross purposes before."
"For so many years? You must have an empire." Amy infused the last word with a touch of scorn, and the man's grin only widened as he held his hands above his head.
"Guilty as charged! And as you can see, I'm unarmed, so would you mind putting that little toy away now?"
She choose to level the gun at his head instead. "And why would I do that?"
"Feisty!" he exclaimed, only marginally concerned that a woman with no reason to not pull the trigger has threatened him. "I actually have a proposition for you."
"The answer is no."
"So sure?" He pouted exaggeratedly, and she only raised an eyebrow.
"Fi-ine, then, if you're so certain." He pretended to think for a moment before adding, "I had planned on killing you if you didn't agree to work with me, but you're just too interesting. Plus, you'll say yes. Eventually."
He walked closer, and Amy rotated slowly, keeping the gun pointed at him. The man opened the door and tossed back casually, "The name is Moriarty. Jim Moriarty. We'll be seeing each other again soon." Moriarty winked and shut the door.
---
She thought about the offer, of course. Amy Grace Rowley-Arlington and her many aliases didn't really exist and so had nothing to lose, and she was long past the illusion that her work was for good. It was for power, pure and simple, and her side was losing every day.
It wasn't much of a surprise when she turned from her post surveying a building her mark had failed to appear from and saw Jim Moriarty standing behind her, arms crossed.
"One of yours, is he?" Amy started disassembling the rifle.
"No, actually," Moriarty said casually. "The man you were sent to target? He doesn't exist. I thought you might appreciate a little display of my reach. An attempt to woo you, if you will."
She lifted a brow, refusing to show that she was impressed. "Why should I work for you?"
"Well now, that's a good question," he replied, only faintly mocking. "Despite your past, you're not all about Queen and country, are you? Oops, stars and stripes, my mistake. You're in it for the power, for the way the darkness in the marrow of your bones yearns for the danger and violence."
The words resonated with Amy in a way that patriotic platitudes never had, and she inclines her head, a subtle encouragement.
"This is entire game isn't about good and evil - you know that already, of course - but about power. And honey, I have more of that than you have ever dreamed of."
She looked down at her hands to realize that she had stopped putting the rifle away at some point, and Moriarty smirked at her.
She kept her voice neutral."So, then. What are your terms? No guarantee that I'll accept, of course."
"Of course, darling," he replied, the play acting back in full force.
She had once thought that for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That had to apply here as well. For every bad thing she does, something good happens elsewhere. The worse her action, the greater the good.
It balance out. In a way, she is faciliating greatness.
That's what she told herself, anyway.
---
Three months later she was sent to Minsk to gather intelligence from a Belarusian arms dealer as Karen Mikhailova. The man was a butcher by day and arms dealer by night, with a son in his late twenties, and she saw her opportunity.
She teased him, told him he wasn't a real man, then insulted him after too many drinks.
His story - that a knife had just appeared in his hand and suddenly his girlfriend was lying on the ground dead, stabbed to death - would never carry any weight.
The intelligence agencies were quietly saddened by the death of a great operative but never investigated. Such was the life of an intelligence agent, particularly one who never existed.
---
She met up with Moriarty in Lithuania. In a bar crowded by overenthusiastic sports fans, he slipped a thick packet under the table and whispered "Congratulations" in a vaguely menacing manner in her ear before leaving. She didn't stare after him, that would be too obvious, but she wanted to.
She didn't trust him, but that was never a prerequisite in her line of work.
Back at the shithole she was staying at she opened the package.
It contained documents under the name of Mary Elizabeth Morstan (a grand coincidence, that) and ten thousand dollars, cash.
---
It worked gorgeously for a while. Moriarty gave her real jobs, interesting jobs, and there were never cash flow issues. More than once Mary had paid informants out of her own pocket when the agency wouldn't cough up the cash, but that was never an issue with Jim.
Moriarty had a worldwide network. He was like a spider with connections to every criminal activity spanning the globe.
Mary did not trust him, but she had to admire his competence.
But then Jim, tired of playing at the outskirts of the big governments, began to crave the power that would come from having a powerful government official under his thumb. Not a Cabinet official or some two-bit parliamentarian, but someone with real power, power to rival his own.
After a great deal of consideration, he selected Mycroft Holmes.
---
"You're obsessed," Mary said to Jim when she heard his plans for the hostages.
Jim gave her a pitying look, like she was a dog who had peed on the floor. "Do I need to explain how leverage works again? Mycroft Holmes has only one weak spot: his brother. If I have Sherlock Holmes, I have Mycroft Holmes."
She glared. "I'm not questioning your choice of leverage. I'm questioning the method."
"Oh, but my darling," he had sung happily, "why not mix business and pleasure? I so rarely get to meet a proper genius, I do so want to enjoy myself."
Mary turned away then. His game had cost them contracts and allies, none of which were as easy to replace as Jim claimed. The web was disintegrating as Jim's focus became laser-focused on his old nemesis.
Mycroft Holmes was a valuable man, but she wondered if Jim enjoying toying with the detective too much.
Three days later, she found herself on the balcony of a swimming pool pointing a sniper rifle at a Semtex vest that would kill everyone in the building, including her, if it exploded.
Mary was horrified.
A phone call was the only thing that stopped them all - Mary, Moriarty, Sherlock, his doctor, and the seven other snipers - from being blown up.
She got back to her studio apartment in East London early the next morning and slammed the door, furious.
Jim's obsession had gone too far.
She began to construct a plan.
---
Six months later she is on watching the rooftop of St Bart's Hospital through a sniper scope.
On the side of the angels.
She hasn't been for quite some time.
And on the rooftop, Jim sticks a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, expecting the gun to be filled with blanks, expecting Mary to carefully shoot at the packet of blood on the back of his neck and give Sherlock the impression that Jim has killed himself.
Bit of a nasty shock for him when he pulls the trigger and actually dies, instead.
Mary can't celebrate yet, even though her plan has gone perfectly so far. She keeps her eyes on Sherlock, watches his face as he talks to his doctor. The tears even look to be genuine.
And then he falls off the roof onto an inflatable mat, and a body that she presumes bears a strong resemblance to him is dropped on the pavement to produce a thud. Sherlock leaps off the mat - still alive, then - and lies on the ground and is covered with blood while the doctor struggles to stand up from the pavement. The cricket ball is the final touch.
Superlative theatre, that. Mary can't help but smile, now.
Did he really think that no one would notice?
Mary is free now. Free to assume Moriarty's name and his position as the spider at the center of a hundred webs, free to become the foremost criminal mastermind in the world.
She wants to keep Mycroft Holmes under her thumb, too. But she has a different idea of how to do it. Sherlock is still key, of course, but she has a different way of getting to him.
"I think," Mary muses to herself, as the doctor fellow clutches at a not-dead Sherlock's wrist and moans his grief, "that I'll target John Watson."