Sir Edwin stood at parade rest, his eyes on the stark figure of Mycroft Holmes silhouetted against the pale winter sky. The man was gazing out the window at a scrubby patch of garden below, his voice and countenance pensive.
"As my colleague is fond of remarking," Holmes mused, "This country sometimes needs a blunt instrument. Equally, it sometimes needs a dagger — a scalpel wielded with precision and without remorse."
Holmes twisted, gazing through the glass wall at the conference in progress. "There will always come a time when we need Sherlock Holmes."
"If this is some expression of familial sentiment," Sir Edwin began, his voice raising in question on that last word, so foreign to everything he thought he knew about this man.
Mycroft sighed audibly. "Don't be absurd." He pivoted sharply, his cold gaze locked on Sir Edwin. "I am not given to outbursts of brotherly compassion."
That forbidding gaze dropped for just a moment before Mycroft raised his eyebrows in mocking inquiry. "You know what happened to the other one."
Sir Edwin fought to keep the grimace off his face, turning back to the window. He had thought it a rumor, carefully cultivated by the enigmatic elder Holmes to strike fear in the hearts of those who might betray him, but if it were actually true…
Another brother, young and brilliant, separated from his siblings by both age and inclination. A mind capable of perceiving patterns in the chaos — mathematical genius exceeding even that of his mother — isolation pulling that genius inexorably toward the intricacies of computer code and networks. And then underneath it all, the hubris of a Holmes — small violations turning to blatant transgressions until no power, foreign or domestic, was safe from the meddling of a single insolent child.
There one day, gone the next. Killed, exiled, imprisoned — no one knew for certain except the man who stood in front of Sir Edwin now.
Sir Edwin had heard one particularly compelling story, that the child had been subsumed into the great system of British government, his talent turned to defending the security of the nation rather than eroding it, his name replaced with a single letter. "Some horses run better in a harness," the gossip had said with a significant lift of his eyebrow, and Sir Edwin had snorted at the implication. Sir Edwin's clearance was the highest in the land. If another Holmes were within the British government, he of all people would know about it.
Wouldn't he?