Chapter Seven:

After Lestrade uttered his ultimatum in the mortuary, John couldn't get a word out of Sherlock - he was just speechless with anger at being shut out of the case. After watching his flatmate pacing in tight parabolas on the pavement in front of Barts, John went across the little grassy park to snag a taxi coming down West Smithfield. He directed the driver back to where Sherlock was now standing still, with his eyes half closed, and his hands making odd gestures. John had seen this kind of behaviour before, but never in public. He steered Sherlock into the back seat, almost pushing him in. The odd gestures stopped, but Sherlock wouldn't make eye contact with John, just worked furiously on his phone the whole way home, his face set in a permanent scowl. The doctor could feel a full-throttled strop coming on. It was rare that Lestrade pulled rank on the consulting detective, and it worried John.

As soon as he got back in the flat, Sherlock commandeered the whole wall behind the sofa as a make-shift evidence board. The sofa got pushed into the centre of the room, and turned around so it faced the wall. The smiley face gazed down benignly. When he wasn't pacing in front of the wall, Sherlock was sitting or lying on the sofa staring at it. Three days later the face was buried under a mass of bits of paper, photos, print outs of maps, and yellow sticky notes with his spidery scrawl on them. The far right-hand side had a piece of flip chart paper with an organisation chart drawn in black magic marker pen, with green twine connecting sections of it with materials across the wall. The left-hand side had a similar, but different chart, with blue string to another set. There were a whole series of neon pink post-it notes with big question marks- the gaps in the consulting detective's knowledge. He had not spoken once over the three days. John's questions had been totally ignored.

The doctor was getting royally fed up with it. "Want a cup of tea, then?"

No reply. Instead came a frenzied attack by Sherlock on his laptop, in search of something.

John got hungry and cooked himself an evening meal of scrambled eggs and bacon. The smell of bacon cooking- surely he can't ignore that?

The plate of food went cold, along with the cup of tea that John set beside Sherlock. A glance over his shoulder showed John that Sherlock was deep in some obscure site, written in Cyrillic.

"You read Russian?" John tried to sound less than amazed, but surprise crept into his tone.

A grunt, which John took as agreement. Then, "unfortunately, this is Bulgarian and, although there are some similarities in the Slavic roots, the common alphabet obscures the huge differences between the languages. Google translations are…amazingly stupid at times." He sounded fed up.

Still, it was the first time he'd spoken in days, so John tried to keep him going. He pointed to the left hand side of the wall- the one with the blue strings. "You've made more progress up the chart with this one; tell me what it all means."

Sherlock just sighed.

"Come on. Sometimes just hearing yourself talk out loud can help. And, who knows, I might be better than the skull. I can ask a stupid question that makes you realise something."

Sherlock got up from the sofa and went to the wall. "This is the Romanian side. This whole crime spree is far, far bigger than a dispute over working girls, John. The evidence trail…" and he gestured to the strings "… is going up the food chain- through a series of companies that are inter-related, some private, some state owned. I think the source of the problem lies in the privatised section, Fabrica de Arme Cugir, which was spun off the national ROMCARM company. It's almost impossible to discover who the owners are, but it is clear that there are some people in the system there who are siphoning off arms illegally. They transit the EU legally as part of a NATO contract, but some shipments just conveniently disappear and end up in the UK, before being shipped to the US, where they are modified and then sold to the Mexican drug cartels. It's a huge business- we are talking billions of dollars."

John was stunned. "Arms sales? I thought this was a human trafficking problem?"

Sherlock shook his head. "It's all linked. If you are successful at one form of logistics and transport, then the same supply chains can be used for other purposes. The Romanian WASR 10s are, apparently, the weapon of choice for the Mexican drug cartels, which are paying for the arms with drugs. I think the place where the payments are being made, the exchange of weapons for drugs, is here in the UK. And I think the Bulgarian crime syndicate is trying to muscle in on it."

John looked askance. "Um, isn't this sort of ….you know…out of your league?"

That earned him a filthy look from his flatmate. Undeterred, John carried on. "Well, it's got to be something that Mycroft would be aware of."

"Would it? You overestimate the aptitude of the security services, John. They are so busy looking at the problem from the other side that they might not connect what looks like a small local matter on the surface with what they know about the international problem."

John sat down on the sofa so he could really scrutinise the evidence wall. "But, Sherlock, why would criminals on that level be even remotely interested in something so mundane as a group of prostitutes and their punters on the backstreets of a north London suburb?"

Sherlock flopped down into his chair, with a frown on his face. "The problem is, no one out there fighting crime gets it from the perspective of the criminal organisations."

"And you do?"

Sherlock glared. "Yes, I do. Consider it this way, John. If these two Eastern European crime syndicates really went after each other all out, it would be worse than a real war. They certainly have the weapons to do it, and are not bound by any treaties. There are no rules of engagement- no Geneva Convention, no concern at all about civilians caught in the crossfire. They have the manpower, too- they could launch punitive strikes against one another that would rack up casualties in the thousands. And they could take the fight to anyone or more of the dozens of countries in which they operate. But once they got started, how would it end? Bloodshed on that scale becomes very difficult to stop. They don't have the political mechanisms that national governments have; there's no 'UN for the Criminal Underworld' to settle disputes without wholesale war."

He sighed and drew his hands through his hair, as if he needed the feel of it to ground him. "If the cartels lose control, the conflict spirals into all-out warfare. Just look at Mexico- from 2007 to 2012 there were nearly 50,000 civilian casualties there due to fighting between drug cartels - more than there were in Afghanistan during the same period. Nation states have armies to keep the bloodshed down to a minimum. Organised crime isn't allowed the same luxury; they know how much it costs them when these fights get out of hand. So, wherever they can, they prefer to fight little skirmishes, proxy wars- one little bit against another bit- to try to show their muscle off without risking everything. It's what happens when opposing forces have the ability to cause mutually assured destruction."

"Sherlock, surely someone has figured this out?"

That earned his second 'death stare' from Sherlock. "Yes, John, I have. Unfortunately, Lestrade doesn't see this as anything other than what it appears on the surface- a local gang issue. And the world's intelligence and security services don't realise that it's anything other than a local matter, under the jurisdiction of the police. That's why the syndicates do it this way." The consulting detective made this last point through gritted teeth.

John was reminded of Mycroft's haunting words on the very first night he took John into that abandoned warehouse. When you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield. But, the battlefields he'd been on over the past nine months had been London ones; now he realised that this recent conflict was just one part of a global war.

"All the more reason to tell Mycroft."

Sherlock waved his hand in dismissal. "It's beneath his radar. 'Leave it to the police, brother' would be his reply. He's a lazy git. From his perspective, he'd just want to push this little war off the coast- 'go find somewhere else to play, please'. Oh, MI5 does its bit on organised crime, but they are pushed by politicians to do the counter-terrorism thing, which may be scarier to the public, but is actually far less damaging to society than what the crime syndicates are doing. MI6 is only interested in what's going on overseas; a little 'local difficulty' here at home is beneath their concern. Most so-called intelligence services are…rather short on intelligence about these things. Too big picture to get involved in the nitty gritty detail-that's what makes them vulnerable. This just falls between the cracks of our system."

John thought about what Sherlock was saying, and instinctively knew that the man was right. It made sense. Act out their ambitions against one another in a theatre of war that was actually disguised as a local crime problem- and the criminals would get away with it.

"Do you think the latest murders- and the bodies being dumped on Holmes Road- are because they know you know, so it's meant as a message to you- a sort of 'get your tanks off my lawn' kind of warning?"

Sherlock was up now and had walked over to the window overlooking Baker Street. "That's what is puzzling me. If they'd acted the way I expected them to, then our questions would have been dealt with the way a local crime group would- send a few heavies after us on the street and try to give us a thumping. I was counting on that as a way of getting the local management out of the shadows- that was the best tactic to bring them into the Yard and try to finesse the next level of information out of them. But this? This suggests someone with a brain is actually working it through."

John thought about the wisdom of Sherlock's setting himself- and John as well- up for a beating in the hope of a case breakthrough. "I'm not following you there- aren't the bodies on a road named after you a pretty good way to get the message across?"

Again, that provoked a disdainful gesture of dismissal. "That's just it. Anyone who knows me knows it would be pointless. But this wasn't aimed at me; it was designed to spook Lestrade into making me step back- which is exactly what happened. That's clever. But, it's the second step that is really clever- setting up someone to take the murder rap to shut the police up. They will be satisfied that they've got their man, and will close the case. It just stops anyone from thinking through the deeper significance. So, they've planted a shell casing with a fingerprint. I expect Lestrade to ring at any minute to tell me that they've found the suspect. Of course, he will be dead, or be shot dead when they try to arrest him- convenient for the crime networks. The police get to tick a box, a murderer is dealt with without the expense of a public trial. It's a real 'win-win'."

The tall brunet's shoulders slumped. "Done deal, they'll move onto the next homicide, without realising that they've just blown the only chance we had to get to the upper echelons of the crime syndicates." He turned from the window, and John saw a strange look come into Sherlock's eyes- surprise, mixed in with…what?...admiration? John couldn't read it.

Then, Sherlock nodded to himself. "It's clever, really clever. If I had tried to devise a way to stop me in my tracks, to ensure the syndicates are protected- well, this is what I would have done. I wonder who thought of it?"

He sat back down on the sofa, steepled his hands beneath his chin, and disappeared into his Mind Palace again, leaving John to try to puzzle through everything that his flatmate had just said.