False Flag

Chapter Ten

As the battery died and the screen went black, Sherlock's mind was already whipping through the possibilities of what Emile Bashir's panicked message implied.

Cocaine.

Cocaine smuggling was the most likely deduction given the current facts and had been perched on the tip of his tongue for days now. Bolivia, Peru and Colombia alone were responsible for three-quarters of the world's cocaine production, no small feat. Emile, a gregarious, squeaky-clean Briton physician would have been a sight for sore eyes for a local cartel wishing to expand or augment their operations abroad. No wife, no children, thus, his sister would have become the target of their threats, however hollow. Though, they did manage to stab him to death in the middle of London, mere hours after he left Bolivian soil. Not quiet so hollow after all.

MI6 wasn't covering up a murder. They were covering up a mistake, an underestimation. They expected Emile to be safe on British soil, perhaps promised him a new life, a new name in exchange for his cooperation. But Emile was no spy. The video more than explained that. As soon as his handler didn't show at Heathrow, he panicked and rather than getting the hell out of London and laying low, he hopped the tube to his sister's flat, to warn her and protect her. It was the one and only place the drug cartel knew he'd show up eventually.

"Elia!" Sherlock shouted into the small mobile shop, adopting the nickname her brother had used upon seeing how quickly she responded to it in the video.

Eliane darted out of the shop and skid to an unsteady halt in front of him. "What?"

"Have you been receiving threats lately? Physical, verbal, written? Has someone been following you, at home, at work? It would have only occurred in the last... three months."

"Oh, no more threats than usual," she joked weakly, though Sherlock's dark and serious demeanor quickly sobered her. "No, I... I haven't. I would have noticed something like that."

"Would you?" Sherlock clucked derisively. "The wealth of periphery information the human mind dismisses on a daily basis is extraordinary. That man on the corner, black cap, track suit, talking on his mobile for the last five minutes. Don't you think he's dressed a bit warm for the weather?"

Eliane's attention quickly snapped to the corner in question and Sherlock took a perverse kind of pleasure in watching her eyes widen in surprise.

"He's nobody. However, the young blonde woman at the cafe across the street. Don't look," Sherlock warned as excitement and amusement quickened his breath. "She's been reading the same magazine article for the last three and half minutes and yet, doesn't seem in the slightest engrossed or amused by it. Her fingers slide up to the earpiece in her right ear every now and then, because she doesn't realise I can see her reflection in the shop window. Designer suit, designer handbag, garish gold jewelry, cheap ballet flats she instinctively tries to hide behind her chair. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong."

"The shoes," Eliane breathed in surprise.

"You can always spot a field operative by their shoes. Sensible, flat and comfortable. A bullet will stop them but a blister will slow them down just long enough for a suspect to get away."

"MI6?" She asked, her brows furrowing in confusion. "But... I thought-"

"CIA," Sherlock neatly corrected her. "Probably just curious about us. Why we're poking around so close to their home turf. Grosvenor Square is only a few minutes walk from here."

"Why the hell would the Americans care?" Eliane hissed, deliberately turning her back to the agent.

"They're entitled to a bit of curiosity, I should think. They are the ones who flew your brother's body back to Bolivia and staged it, after all. Ah, John!" Sherlock cheered as the man emerged victorious with an overpriced phone charger in hand. Unfortunately, the woman across the street's legs were tensed, her magazine abandoned and. Sherlock knew they had but only seconds to make a snap decision. "How are you at running?"

Surprisingly efficient, Sherlock found out as he grabbed fierce hold of Eliane's wrist and yanked her down the street. After a few initial hesitant stumbles, instinct kicked in and she kept up nicely as they barreled towards Oxford Circus, hoping to lose their tails in the mass of shoppers that mulled aimlessly about Regent Street.

"Are... we seriously... running from the CIA?" Eliane wheezed as they slammed into an immovable wall of bodies stuffed in a construction-narrowed walkway. "Are you mental?"

"Undoubtedly," Sherlock nodded firmly as he spun to examine his companion's wardrobe. They were too easily identifiable and the fenced in bottleneck gave them a rare opportunity that made Sherlock dizzy with excitement. Sherlock's hand shot out like a rocket and snatched a bottle of water out of a passing woman's hands without so much as a grimace of apology, and then dumped it over John's head. At least, he had the decency to keep his voice down when he snarled. "Sherlock, what the hell are you doing?"

"Your hair, it's too light," Sherlock informed him as he pitched the bottle over his shoulder and shrugged his jacket off. "Slick your hair back and put this on. Elia, glasses off, hair up and stand up straight for once. We've got one shot to pull this off. Moscow Rules. King's Cross, Platform 5, half an hour."

Mercifully, his companions did as asked and they emerged on the other end of the bottleneck in complete disguise. Sherlock, dressed in his vest with his trousers slung so low he feared they might fall off, walked with limp in his best approximation of a gangster lean to disguise his height. His arm was lazily slung over Elia's shoulder who wore his favourite blue Herringbone Turnbull & Asser shirt tucked into her jeans, her hair tamed into a hurried makeshift bun. John popped out seconds later with his hair dark and slicked back with Elia's glasses on, practically drowning in Sherlock's jacket as he tried desperately not to think about how much of a cock he looked.

"Moscow rules?" Elia couldn't help but stifle a laugh as soon as they broke away from the pack and took the separate routes to their destination. "Seriously?"

"John's something of a Le Carré aficionado," Sherlock shrugged, extracting his arm from around her shoulder to practice his lean a bit more. It seemed to be working. All manner of people were shying away, avoiding eye contact thanks to his challenging gaze. It helped him feel significantly less ridiculous. "We only need to keep them off our backs long enough to watch the rest of the video."

"God, what the hell did he get himself into?" Elia sighed, fidgeting with the sleeve of Sherlock's shirt.

Sherlock knew quite well what Emile got himself into, but detailing it to his sister didn't exactly seem the best course of action. The less she knew, the less likely she was to burst into tears and dive into that indignant, impassioned, ignorant speech everyone gave when they realised they didn't know everything about their loved one's life. "They'll be watching your flat now, if they weren't already. I'd recommend you stay with a friend until this issue is resolved."

"Absolutely not," Elia protested, shaking her head with a wry laugh. "No way I'm dragging anyone else into this mess. I'll stay at a hotel."

"Good," Sherlock grunted as determined they hadn't been followed and permitted his body to snap back to its original state, striding with with sharp determined steps. "Interior room, ground or first floor. You're going to need... at least three escape routes not including the window. Use a false name, no credit card. I've a passport you could borrow, if you want, if you don't mind dyeing your hair grey and being a fifty-six year old woman from Sheffield named Edith Parker-Pratt. You'd have to work on the accen-"

Eliane stopped suddenly and shot him an incredulous stare. "Are you... for real? I mean, I looked you up and, Christ, the things people say about you."

Sherlock very much doubted that, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. "What?"

"Oh, well... you're a military experiment gone wrong, an android, a time traveller from the future. There's a man in West Ham who's convinced you're a Draconian, and I guess this is why," she laughed, a free, crisp sound that carried over the din of the streets. "You are, for lack of a better word, a bit alien."

Sherlock pouted. "Draconian?"

"Umm, a shape-shifting reptile from Alpha Draconis that lives in the center of the earth that generally plots the demise of all mankind," Elia explained in a low breath, her eyes twinkling with mirth. "Not the kindest compliment, I must say."

"Ah, that would be Pete Gibbons, then. Former client. He tried to hired me to investigate the disappearance of his cat. Thought the New World Order was behind it."

"Were they?"

Sherlock couldn't help but grin as he hiked his trousers back up around his waist. "No. It was a Ford Fiesta."

Three hours later, Sherlock was on the verge of exploding. Despite being crouched in his favourite thinking chair, with his favourite thinking mug filled to the brim with his favourite thinking scotch, Sherlock couldn't bloody think. The rest of Emile Bashir's message had been nothing more than a dramatic tearful goodbye that didn't do Sherlock a damn bit of good. Every time he played the message, his mind would wander and in a last ditch effort to purge his thoughts of Elia, Sherlock allowed his mind a moment's indulgence.

She wasn't particularly repulsive. No more so than the rest of London's uninteresting, uninspired masses. In turn, nor was she particularly attractive. Her brother was, but that was largely because he was dead and the linchpin of the mystery that had livened his summer something fierce. She wasn't beautiful or witty, or quick, or wise, or brilliant. She was just a funny little thing, all hard angles and long clumsy limbs, as if she had never truly grown out of her awkward gangly adolescence. Elia wouldn't have so much as turned his head if they had crossed paths on the street and here, Sherlock was unable to get the sound of her laughter - that warm, uninhibited noise - out of his damn head.

It was hardly the first time a client -or, well, near client- caught his interest. Bright young things, male and female alike always did have a way of captivating him, reducing him to little more than a magpie until the mystery of their allure was solved. The closest thing to an explanation Sherlock could deduce at the point was that Elia looked very much like her brother and that the sight of his features on her face, alive and animated fascinated some part of his brain that worked on an unconscious level.

Surely, that must be it. His powers of deduction were simply working overtime, as they were wont to do. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, Sherlock tried to convince himself as he swallowed a burning mouthful of scotch and sank back into his chair, praying that this time, it would have the decency to swallow him whole.

The weekend's here and it'll be a few days until I upload the next chapter, so sit tight. Thanks for reading! Please leave a review or comment if you can spare the time.