Chapter 11- The Ice Does Not Forgive
Text from: John
K unit showed up. We're interrogating Mycroft :-)
Mycroft Holmes had a meeting with Mrs Jones. He could not pretend to like the woman but he could tolerate her when required and today it was certainly required. They were meeting to discuss Rosie and Alex Rider and Sherlock's involvement in the case. Mrs Jones was very clearly not happy. She sucked anxiously at a peppermint with the wrappers of several others scattered across the desk. Her house plant, a gift from Rider, was wilted. Mycroft wasn't used to sitting on this side of the desk, a government man like himself was supposed to be leading the meeting. Mrs Jones placed a paper file on the desk in front of him and he flipped it open to reveal pages of close spaced, size 11 font. He didn't want to read it now but her eyebrow was raised so he began to skim the information. All of it was highly classified and he knew it would never be allowed to leave the room. She stood and began to pace. "You have heard nothing from your brother?" Mycroft shook his head and went back to perusing the data in front of him. "Sherlock is a host unto himself. He does as he pleases, not as he's told." She looked disappointed but said nothing. Mycroft supposed it wasn't in her disposition to display her emotions. "Agent Bravo has yet to report on this morning's activities. We must hope that Dr Watson sends you a message before too long."
Dr Watson was, at that moment, contemplating his imminent death by suicide. He had forgotten just how annoying certain members of K-unit could be, especially after an hour in close quarters with nothing to stave off the boredom. It was Eagle, of course, who was currently acting like a five year old with too much sugar. He chattered; he fidgeted; he pestered John constantly for stories from his old army days. It was enough to drive anyone batty. John tried to be patient, to channel his inner GP and treat him like any other bothersome patient, but it was difficult when he wouldn't leave John alone. By the time they landed, he was about ready to jump out of the plane and save the pilot the trouble. But they were in France now and the mood among the motley crew had turned sombre: they had gone too far to turn back now. John had yet to hear anything else from Sherlock and that would make their search more difficult but John was clever enough to get through medical school, he had spent the past ten years living with the master himself, and both him and K-unit were tenacious enough to survive years of danger, fighting for their lives in far-flung countries. They could do it.
The guest house Sherlock stayed in was cramped and close to derelict. He didn't mind the poor conditions (they were better than the drug dens he had frequented in his youth) but he did turn his nose up at the food. He was on a case! Why were they trying to force food on him? He had, however, procured a map. Now, in the quietness of his darkening room, he searched it for a suitable place to keep a prisoner, tried to put himself in the mind of the criminals he so often hunted, so that he could find probable locations. The problem with being in rural areas was that there were so many places to hide (cities weren't much better but Sherlock chose to ignore that for the time being). He had spoken briefly to some of the villagers who said they hadn't seen the van. It couldn't have gone any further south-east than Steene, where he was staying. In between the fields of wheat and corn were several farms with outhouses perfect for hiding illicit activities but it would take weeks to investigate all of them. He didn't have that kind of time. He would have to narrow it down more. He could discount anything close to the village or anything too exposed. There would need to be space to stow the van and a thick shield of trees or bushes. He circled a few potential candidates and then stopped, his breath catching in his throat. There was a rental cottage. Not too far from the village but not close either, difficult to access and closely guarded by a copse of trees, it was a perfect base for those who didn't want to be found. He circled it in red pen, almost disappointed by how easy it was to find them in the end.
Waterboarding was something Alex was trained to endure but nothing could make it pleasant. After so long being imprisoned, he was weak enough that he couldn't fight off Blunt's men when his face was forced under and he couldn't hold his breath for nearly as long as he would have liked to, or even expected to. He choked and spluttered. The dripping water and Blunt's harsh chuckles mingled and rose to a crashing crescendo that stopped his breath and he couldn't even gasp in a lungful of air before he was forced under again. On and on, over and over, and Alex went from haughty silence to begging, inwardly, for it to stop. But Blunt was asking for information, access codes that would be useless and names of agents that Alex, as a loner, didn't know, so he kept quiet and furious. The fear would not overtake him. By the time they realised he wasn't going to talk and stopped, he was trembling, his chest aching with the force of his coughing. They left him lying on the ground in a widening pool of water, trembling with shivers he couldn't suppress.
Rosie stared in confusion at the papers scattered across the floor of 221B. Mrs Hudson had let her in and told her both Dad and uncle Sherlock had gone out. When she thought Rosie wasn't listening she had complained about the lack of warning and "honestly, those boys should not be left in charge of children. They can't even look after themselves." Rosie thought they were more than capable of surviving without Mrs Hudson's input but she didn't dare say anything to draw attention to herself. Bravo had left her at the end of Baker Street again but she didn't mind that she hadn't taken her all the way to the door: she wasn't a baby after all. But for now, she needed to solve this clue. Her uncle Alex was relying on her. What was it that linked the Rider men? The Royal and General Bank. That was where she was taken yesterday. That was where Mrs Jones and Bravo worked. She recalled the end of Bravo's conversation on the phone: "Bravo out." A radio sign off. And that debriefing that she hadn't listened to, when they addressed employees as 'Agent,' hadn't been normal protocol at all. She had stumbled into something far too large for her limited skills. Trilingual and a master of deduction she may be, but agents and shadowy organisations and missing relatives and strings of deaths? That was her uncle Sherlock's area of expertise. She decided in the meantime to study the contents of the corkboard.
The photos were laid over the articles and letters bundled into two piles for bills and personal letters. The bills were dull and she had no use for them so she set them aside but the letters were another matter entirely. The first one she read was from 'Jack' and was little more than a printed email about her trip to America to visit family. She lingered on the soft tone of address, the familiarity with which she wrote, and couldn't figure out her relation to the man she knew. Next she read the letter from 'Edward, Rosa and Sabina.' This one, too, was tender and yet something was different about their letters (and there was more than one; Rosie recognised the handwriting), something fatherly in the way that 'Edward' addressed him. He said that he did 'understand why you left us, after everything you've been through it makes more sense than any decision you've made while in our care, but I do wish you'd come home' and that 'if, when you think it will be safe to, you decide you want to return, you will always have a place at our table and in our hearts.' But she couldn't find a last name anywhere, in any of the letters. Then she read the letters from Sabina. There were less of them but those that were kept were long and full of random pieces of information: the name of an auntie's pet budgie, the captain of the school football team, and then, hidden in a convoluted tale of college drama, 'Sabina Pleasure is not meant for a career in medicine.' She had found them. There were news articles about them because Edward Pleasure was a high profile journalist and his near death had made national news. Of Alex Rider, there was no mention until a year or so later when a sole newspaper published an article about his adoption. Several years after that came the news that their house had been blown up, and a scorpion scorched into the front lawn.
The call came from Mycroft when they were on the road to Dunkirk. "We need to go to Grand Millebrugge," John told Wolf from the back seat and the grizzled man acknowledged him with a curt nod. He heard Mycroft talking still and listened to the rest of the information. "We're meeting another one of his agents when we get there." They groaned. It was an apparent hatred of the SAS to work with spies. John took a quick glance at the GPS and settled down for the remainder of the drive.
He didn't think any of them were expecting Mycroft's 'agent' to be Ben Daniels, otherwise known as Fox, the ex-SAS soldier who had worked with both K-unit and Alex in the past but in retrospect it made sense. Keeping details of the mission with people who knew about the mission was the logical thing to do and Mycroft was nothing if not logical. They parked the car and walked into the town, taking in the rural setting and relaxed atmosphere. There was one guest house on the outskirts of the town where Sherlock must have stopped for the night. It was easy to walk in through the door and ask the receptionist for the room number of Sherlock Holmes. It was easy to get complacent, until she refused to answer. "Je suis désolé, cette information est confidentielle." They exchanged looks of confusion. Despite the requirement to learn a language, none of them had studied French since A Levels and now they were stuck. It was Ben who saved them. Apparently being a spy in France for the past few days had payed off and he knew a little of what she was saying. Or maybe it was because he had spent some time with Alex. So started a rapid-fire conversation, full of flying hands and scornful tongue-lashings. Ben was a bit frazzled by the end of it but told them she would tell them anything they wanted to know when her shift began the next evening but that they would get nothing out of anyone else. He told them he had booked three rooms for the night and with the afternoon drawing to a close, they trooped up the stairs to their rooms.
Author's Note:
I'm back again! I promised you guys another chapter this week and here we are, up to chapter 11. Chapter 12 is also in the editing stage and should go up later next week (probably Tuesday or Wednesday) with an aim for 15 chapters total. I'm going to try to post two chapters next week and the week after so that I finish the whole thing before my trip. My exams are now over (yay!) so I have infinitely more time to write than before. I decided to up the rating to T because of the description of Alex's treatment in this chapter. I'd actually been considering it for a while and couldn't put it off any longer.
No one guessed last week's reference which I totally get because it had a very niche group. It was from Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' which are a series of British books technically for children but I'm not sure how many people who read them are children. The film of the first book is called 'The Golden Compass' (and it's terrible) which might be the name the book is published under in the US. This time it's another book, this time a YA fantasy novel which I adore. The characters are really diverse and it deals with loads of different social issues. It helps that the covers are beautiful. I'll give you a clue: the same author wrote the Grisha trilogy and this book is set in the same universe.
Thanks so much for your support. Let me know what you think!
