Before I kill you, Mr. Blond, I want you to know that I am truly pained to be doing this.
No, I don’t mean that metaphorically. I am not trying to say that, as a master artisan of that most worthy of metals, the steel of the human soul, I hate destroying such a painstakingly developed tool as yourself, although, admittedly, that part of it doesn’t feel great either.
My challenge is that I think this is going to get me killed, and that’s the harbinger to a world-destroying migraine. (I do mean that metaphorically. The world is going to be fine; I, personally, feel like I’ve just awakened from a poor night of sleeping on top of now-empty bottles of cheap tequila.)
Alive, you are a danger to me, Mr. Blond. You are ingenious and talented and well-trained and cruelly good-looking, and, I admit, you have already survived an army of my defensive measures, any one of which ought to have resulted in the casual onlooker having difficulty differentiating between your remains and a particularly poorly-arranged platter of sashimi.
You know much of my organization, my plans, and myself. Were I to permit you to live and then simply go about my business, everything I’ve worked for would be in jeopardy. Whereas, with you dead…
…I’m screwed.
I’m not sure where my confederates got their outdated sense of criminology. One does not nullify a tax bill by throwing it into the fireplace; one does not defeat a battalion of tanks by challenging the lead tanker to unarmed single combat; and one scarcely outwits the Secret Service by making a prominent agent disappear.
Don’t get me wrong; if we’d found you a few weeks ago, you’d be so pumped full of lead that we could use your for ballast. But that’s because we’d have had a lot of time to plan how the hell we might get away with this, and before you’d seen so much of our operation. I mean, unless you’re an imbecile, you’ve made at least one major report about some of our most secret activities. We kill you now, and the police forces of half a dozen nations will be after us; and while, like most criminal masterminds, I consider myself significantly more intelligent than 99.9% of those fools, I’m also capable of doing math. Even if the aforementioned calculation is correct (and self-understanding of cognitive abilities is highly subject to confirmation bias) – really, that still leaves a lot of very smart people who know way too much about me and are quite upset with me. Some would be particularly motivated because you’ve helped them in the past; some because they don’t like me any more than you do; and some because they rightfully surmise that my organization has significant resources in precious gemstones, and a few of the latter shinies might find their way into the pockets of certain slightly less-than-entirely-selfless agents.
I’m very attached to my plans, Mr. Blond. But when my options are the likely destruction of said plans, followed by my death, or the destruction of those plans, followed by my escape to a life of all the luxury available when one is a fugitive with great underworld contacts and a sack full of diamonds, I’ll take the latter.
Oh, I’m sure you and yours will still have a reasonable chance of catching up to me eventually. But achieving my primary goal of world dominion is now unlikely, achieving my secondary target—living a life of glorious dissipation and seeing if I can have an unspeakably good time on secret yachts, private jets, and fabulous uncharted islands—feels quite reasonably within my reach. I am a genius, a tactician, and a planner, and it is my specific goal to die of extreme pleasure long before you have a chance to take me down. There are such a lot of truly horrible people in this world, and I’ve conveniently left you a little list of names and some extremely educated guesses about various deviltries and their likely perpetrators. I imagine it’s galling to think that I’ll get away, but really, you need to go do something about that jerk with the glacier-melting device before you worry too much about me. You’ve already smashed my operation; you going to let the earth get flooded just because of a personal grudge? That’s kind of a dick move, no offense.
Now, I’m guessing you’ve worked out most of the combination for escaping from my inescapable bank vault, but just in case, the last three digits are “007”. If that helps.
Goodbye, Mr. Blond. From this day on, while you may hate me, you are no longer my archnemesis. That role, going forward, is reserved for strawberry cheesecake.
Here’s my novel, “There and NEVER, EVER BACK AGAIN“.
And Evil Expo, the Villain Convention, is coming! Learn more!
