CHAPTER 26: DEAD MAN'S THUMB AND A TOT OF RUM

AUGUST 2015

Serbia

They spent the night in the abandoned hotel with the door locked and ears pricked for creaking wood or approaching footsteps. But the night was quiet as a grave. Not even a mouse scratched in the walls.

It was an unusable room, when it came to it. There was no running water, rendering the toilet useless, and the bed had been left with frame and springs but no mattress. They sat on the floor beneath a grimy window, their backs to the wall, speaking in low tones as the sun went down. John tended to them both, as best he could without instruments, only eyes and hands, and he couldn't even clean away the drying blood. By some miracle, they had escaped largely unscathed. Their abrasions were shallow and their bruises would heal, after a time. John was worried about the possibility of internal bleeding, as Sherlock had taken more than one fist to the gut, but through regular monitoring of the tenderness and stiffness of his abdomen, he determined that such was unlikely. They had suffered no broken bones despite falls and kicks, no concussions despite blows to the head, and no haemorrhaging of any sort. They would live.

But they needed sustenance. They were greatly fatigued, for starters, as well as dehydrated, famished. They had lost the mobile to the tunnels, and John was poorly dressed. So they devised a plan for the morning, one to remedy all these ills, and until then they would take turns keeping vigil. John took first watch, laying the procured gun at his side. Meanwhile, Sherlock tried to settle himself on the floor. When it was clear his angles were too sharp to rest comfortably on the cold, hard tiles, John invited him, for the sake of warmth and a measure of softness, to use him as a pillow, and so he rested his head in John's lap. Beyond weary, Sherlock fell into sleep quickly, and he was kept under that spell by a hand gently, ceaselessly stroking the hairs of his head, until it was time to wake, trade places, and become the watchman.

As a youth, Sherlock had learnt the subtle craft of the pickpocket. He didn't think himself a thief, though he admitted he had filched cigarettes, credit cards, bus tickets, and mobile phones in his day, usually with the ultimate objective of getting high. Once clean, he had limited his pickpocketing victims to Lestrade and Mycroft, though on occasion he found the skill useful for a case. He knew the art of misdirection and how to pick the perfect mark, and it was with these tools in his back pocket that he ventured out at first light, promising John to return within the hour. Just to be safe, John insisted he take one of the guns, hidden under his shirt. He kept the other for himself.

True to his word, Sherlock was back, his treasures weighting his pockets. He began to pull them out one by one.

'Got you a shirt off a kiosk as they were setting up for the day,' he said, unballing a short-sleeved, blue-grey polo shirt with a white collar and buttons halfway down the front. He tossed it to John and turned his head, giving John some measure of privacy to remove the blue suitcoat and change into the shirt.

'Anything to eat?' asked John as he shucked the coat.

'A kind of biscuit,' said Sherlock, extracting a few packets of Plazmas. 'And a water bottle to share. Wish it were a strong cup of coffee, though. We'll get something more substantial later, once we're clear of this hell hole.'

'Any hotspots?'

'No.' John was done dressing, so Sherlock turned to look at him again. The shirt fitted him well enough, not least because he had lost noticeable weight. Nearly a stone, by the looks of him. It was the same wan aura that had plagued him in the days after the convent. 'I dare say you have eliminated the threat.'

Last night, he had listened with undisguised awe as John told him what had happened after they had been separated, from disarming and neutralising his three would-be executioners to hunting down Kovač and his men in pursuit of Sherlock, and taking them out, too. All told, he had killed six of Kovač's men, and then Kovač himself.

To this assessment, John returned only a curt nod. He was the soldier again.

'One last check,' said John, holding out his hand, and Sherlock passed over the gun. John had done this twice already: ejecting the magazine, counting the bullets, examining the empty chamber. But it appeared a third check was needed to satisfy him. He handed Sherlock the gun back, then performed the same check on his own weapon.

'Let's get this over with,' he said.

It took Sherlock less than an hour to find a way back into the sewers. As they had discovered yesterday, the doors locked from the outside, and they had no key. It would be impossible to force their way past those doors without, say, ramming it with a dumper truck. Fortunately—or unfortunately—Sherlock proposed an alternative entrance: a manhole.

The trick here was finding one in an unpopulated street, and one that could be pried open with their fingers alone. That was where the hour's search came in. John was on the cusp of proposing that they wait until nightfall when Sherlock spotted one. The street wasn't entirely untrafficked, but sparsely, and the pedestrians were at some distance.

'Last chance to back out,' said Sherlock, hooking his fingers into holes of the lid.

John said nothing, just crouched down and joined him.

The manhole cover was predictably heavy, and certainly not intended to be prised up by two men's gripping fingers. They braced and grunted and strained to lift it from the lip of the hole, then scrape it aside to peer down. Still bearing the torch, John clicked a button and angled the beam inside the aperture to ascertain its depth. Then, without further hesitation, he set the torch between his teeth, gripped the sides of the manhole, and lowered himself until he was forced to drop. Sherlock heard his feet hit the bottom with a splash, and followed after.

There was nothing for it: they left the manhole uncovered and proceeded forward into the dark tunnel, with only a torch to light their way.

They were relying on Sherlock's brain and the map he had created there based on his study of the city's streets and yesterday's time spent in the underground labyrinth. They were trusting that the tunnels all connected. They were trusting, too, that the only other people to be found here were dead.

'Left,' whispered Sherlock, when they came to their first juncture. John didn't question him, and went left.

The passageway narrowed, and the ceiling began to slope as their path twisted beneath the city. The more it turned, the harder Sherlock struggled to keep orientated to the map in his head. The tunnels they traversed were quite different from the ones they had been dragged through the day before, more modern and built of cement, and too narrow to walk two abreast. Sherlock followed after John, who bore the torch and an empty pack on his back, which they had nicked from a corner vendor on their way here. But even so, they often found themselves side-stepping just to squeeze through particularly tight passes, or crouching low to keep their heads from scraping the ceiling and series of pipes.

'I'll tell you right now,' said John, 'I'm not leopard-crawling through anything. It gets worse than this, we're going back.'

'Agreed.'

All Sherlock's senses were highly attuned to the subterranean environment. The air was dank and cool and smelt of damp, though nothing putrid. Above their heads were the distant sounds of passing cars and water running through pipes, and in the walls the hum of generators. He could see little but what the torch illuminated, and he kept close behind John for that very purpose. Then, at one point, while passing through another tight squeeze, his hands sought for guidance along the black walls and found John's doing the same. John said nothing, but slowed his pace and took Sherlock's hand, the better to guide him, he supposed.

His stomach warmed a little at the familiar touch, the memory of the night before returning. Not that it had gone very far. He wished to pause and examine it, like a scientist encountering a new species of bird or a detective unveiling a startling new clue. But perhaps there was nothing that had happened that was new, so to speak. They had arrived at a point of clarity, not alteration, understanding, not discovery. It was his own illiteracy in matters of the heart that led to the fascination, a child's first time peering through a telescope and discovering the beauty of the moon. He had not been kissed before in his life; that is, he had not been kissed by someone whom he loved, nor who loved him, and it left his thoughts a little less ordered than usual. How unusual, how novel. How worthy of further examination.

Never mind, put it aside, focus on the matter at hand.

'Shit,' John said in a whisper.

Sherlock looked ahead and saw they had reached a sudden end. Well, perhaps not an end. The tunnel they trod stopped abruptly at an iron door. It looked heavy, and if past experience was anything to go by, it was sure to be locked.

'Try it,' said Sherlock, and held his breath as John grasped the unturning knob. He pushed, then again, then a third time even as Sherlock's eyes roved through what little light was available. He spotted the hinge. Then he smirked. 'Pull.'

John froze in mid action. Then he reversed course, and pulled.

With a loud screech, the door swung inward. They passed through and found themselves in a much wider tunnel, this one made of stone. They were back in the ancient sewer.

On Sherlock's gut-led recommendation, they went right, and carried on for a short while before John slowed, shone his light backward and forward, and said, 'I know this stretch,' like he wasn't sure, or was afraid to be wrong. His head kept swivelling one way then the other. 'Yeah, over there. I think . . . I think that's where I turned . . .'

They pursued this new lead for less than a minute before John, with greater confidence, picked up the pace. He was like a hound following a scent, and when they came to the next decision point—a fork in the tunnel—he didn't hesitate before taking the path on the left. Sherlock's ears remained pricked for noises made by a scraped shoe that wasn't one of their own, or voices or even breathing, but they were alone in the hollows of the earth.

Suddenly, John halted and put out and arm to arrest Sherlock in his path. He lifted the beam of the torch, and ahead some twenty paces, Sherlock saw them: three dark mounds, fallen bodies, not yet twenty-four hours cold.

They approached silently until they came upon the three men who had escorted John away. John trailed the beam of the torch over each of them until it settled on the face of Kovač's second-in-command. He held it there while Sherlock put his hands inside the dead man's pockets. He found a wallet with cash and cards, and a mobile phone. They moved to the other two men and looked for the same, coming up back with, again, only cash and cards, useless mobile phones and fully loaded guns.

They took it all, loading it into the pack on John's back, but they left disheartened, having not found their quarry.

Again, John led the way, retracing his path until they came at last to the end of a tunnel and the foot of a wide, stone staircase, four more corpses laid out upon the ground.

'Found you,' John said under his breath. He tucked his pistol into the back of his jeans, and Sherlock realised—to his own shame, as the most observant man in the world—that he had not noticed when John had pulled it out to begin with.

There was no more hesitation in John. He did not hedge in his advance toward the bodies, or skirt them like they might spring to life and grab him. He knew they were dead, and he was not sorry for it. Furthermore, they had come to do a job, and like the soldier he was deep down in his bones, he would do it.

'This one,' he said, neither loudly nor softly as he pointed down at one of corpses, distinct from the others in that he alone wore no suit coat or jacket, for John had relieved him of it.

Sherlock stepped to his side and peered down the beam of John's torch to where the dead man lay. Across his striped white shirt was an almost perfect circle of dark blood from his chest, just left of centre. A direct shot to the heart. Just like the others. Just like the first three. All seven men had been felled in the exact same manner, precise and deadly, almost machine-like.

'Kovač,' he said.

John dropped to a crouch and, handing the torch off to Sherlock, fished inside his trouser pockets. When he didn't find what he was after, he shifted to the next body, but it was the third that held their wallets—passports and all—in an inner coat pocket of a jacket. These he shoved into he pack before finally checking the fourth corpse.

'Still not here,' he said with a sigh.

'Then it's with the two who got away,' Sherlock surmised. 'I'm sorry, I should have . . . Like you did, I should have—'

'It's a loss,' said John, business-like. 'We just accept the fact that the mobile is gone.'

'Then we contact Mycroft by some other means.'

'Yes. Right then. Let's got on with it.'

Sherlock didn't reply, only extracted Kovač's mobile, which John had found in the suit coat and which lay at the heart of their new plans. He pressed a button on the side of the phone, which lit up dimly, showing the time (09.12) and the battery life (39%). The screen invited him to input a passcode, but he hadn't touched it. There was no point in trying to crack it, especially if failed attempts would lock him out altogether. Fortunately, he had no need for guesswork. John was lifting the corpse's hand and extending a thumb.

'Lefty, like me,' he commented, and Sherlock wondered at what point he had made the observation. For him, of course, it had been apparent at the start, but most people did not observe what their two eyes saw right in front of them. He felt a peculiar swelling of pride in his friend.

Sherlock crouched beside him, angled the mobile just so, and let John press the dead man's thumb to the built-in fingerprint reader. Only a second later, the phone gave a cheery ding. They were in.

The first thing he did was change Kovač's password, making it accessible to them from thence forward, and added his own thumbprint for quick access. Then, for the next ten minutes, they sat side by side on the bottommost step of the stone stair, in darkness but for the light of the phone illuminating Sherlock's face. Rapidly, he scrolled through the contents of Kovač's smartphone, from apps to emails to browsing history, and like a computer himself, he translated, catalogued, and analysed the data that swam before his face. John ignored the screen, only waited patiently beside him for the final summary.

'Kovač's last communication with Moran was forty-two hours ago,' he said at last, 'telling him that you and I were abroad in Europe and to activate all eyes in search of us. If spotted, he was to detain us by force and alert Moran immediately. He told us as much, so no surprises there.'

'He never contacted Moran, then.'

'You never gave him the chance.'

John surveyed the carnage at his feet, laid out by his own hand.

'Doubtless Kovač was not the only one to receive these orders,' Sherlock continued, 'but I see no evidence that he was in contact with the other linchpins, let alone the fourth. If Moran is playing the same game Moriarty did, the spiders on the web can't see each other. Or pretend not to. I'll need to spend more time with this phone, but the battery is running low.'

'Any indication of where he is now?'

'No. Though we would be wise to assume he's within a day of Belgrade. Two at most, depending on his means of travel.'

'Fine. Let's do this.'

'Ready when you are.'

They placed hands on knees and pushed to their feet. 'Shall I go first?' asked Sherlock, offering John the mobile. To his surprise, though, John shook his head.

'How do you want me?'

'Knees should be fine.'

They moved to the side of the tunnel, away from the stone steps and the corpses. John exhaled deeply before lowering himself to his knees on the hard, uneven ground, wincing as he did so. If John's knees were anything like Sherlock's, they were still bruised and aching from the day before.

'Hands behind your back,' said Sherlock, 'like they're bound. Creates visible tension in the neck.'

John placed his hands behind himself.

'Hang your head a little to the side. Grit your teeth. Eyes downcast. Try to appear distressed, but don't overdo it.'

When he was positioned just right, with the bearing of a prisoner, Sherlock opened the camera on the mobile phone, stepped close, and snapped a photo. Then he stepped back to examine it, looking for signs of deceit that Moran might pick up on. But no. John's face was bruised and scratched, his skin and beard dirty, hair dishevelled. He looked very much the prisoner who had been forcibly subdued. For a passing moment, Sherlock fell back in time, remembering the photos Moran had once sent to Lestrade's phone, and his stomach flooded with the horror of the memory. But it passed. He handed John the phone, and they traded places.

They agreed to place Sherlock on the ground, head turned to the side to capture his blood shot eye, which looked angrily, defiantly into the camera lens. The expression was intended to be provocative, one to excite the fervour in Moran's blood.

John pulled Sherlock back to his feet. 'Is it enough?'

Sherlock brushed the dust from his trousers and straightened his jacket. 'It will be.'

'Then I would very much like to leave.'

Croatia

The summer was deepening, a heat wave spreading across Europe bad enough to make the road shiver in the distance and the sheep keel over from exhaustion. Inside the coach, Sherlock's shirt stuck to his back and his feet felt prickly with heat inside his shoes, like the blood in his veins was on a low simmer. A line of perspiration ran from his forehead and down, disappearing inside his collar. Beside him, a large man in regrettable all-black garments panted and fanned his face with a print-out bus ticket.

The air con on the fully booked coach had been working fine at the start, when the sun was still creeping upward. But now it hung well past noon, and as the temperature passed forty degrees outside, the air con gave up the ghost, leaving the passengers quite literally steaming. The smell had grown rank.

Behind a pair of sunglasses, Sherlock watched as the woman who was sat beside John—five rows up and on the other side of the aisle—removed yet another layer of clothing. First it had been a jacket, then a light cardigan, and now a t-shirt, leaving her in a top that could only be described as something between a tank and a bra. She laughed as she settled back into her seat, and Sherlock felt another flicker of annoyance. She had been trying to chat John up the entire drive, which was now coming on three hours since departing Belgrade, and she was persistent. She was a transient who spoke English with a French accent, and she clearly thought she could sweet-talk something out of John, maybe money, maybe more.

Sherlock didn't like it. At the first, John had shown little interest beyond a tight smile and short answers—damn his impulsive politeness—but those smiles were more frequent now, his answers longer, and as they neared their first destination, where Sherlock had designed to switch to a new bus line, John and the woman were engaged in a drawn-out conversation, one that the woman was evidently enjoying, given how often she threw her head back with laughter or tossed her hair.

Sherlock bit his tongue, wondering at what game John was playing. He couldn't help the thought, unbidden: Mary would not approve.

They disembarked in Croatia, in a city called Đakovo. They had already presented their papers at the border to little interest from the border guards (who fortunately did not search bags, or they might have found a veritable weapons hoard, wads of cash, and other men's credit cards) and so had no worries about further justifying their presence in this country. Not that they planned to stay. The next stop was Zagreb, but only as a place to push onward through Slovenia and into northern Italy. But along the way, there were things to do, the first being to secure a charger for Kovač's now essentially dead mobile, and a burner phone. Shouldn't be too hard. The street outside the bus station was teeming with electronic shops, and surely he'd be able to barter with the salesman, using Serbian dinars rather than Croatian kunas and avoid using plastic . . .

'Got it,' said John, sidling up beside him as they casually left the station.

'Hm?' Sherlock looked in the opposite direction, pretending he hadn't noticed John.

'Phone and charger. I got it. Let's go.'

Sherlock came up short. 'What?'

With a jerk of his head, John pressed forward through the crowd. 'Girl on the bus. Turns out, her charger was the right kind for the mobile. We're fully charged. She also gave me a burner phone. Keeps at least four of them on her at all times for different countries. Said if I called her later, I could have one.'

'. . . Oh.'

John laughed shortly, incredulously. 'You know I'm not going to call her.'

Sherlock blushed. 'Right then. Well done.' They could save their dinar on bottles of water.

So John had been playing a part, a ruse to get someone to do what he wanted. Obvious. It was not the first time Sherlock had observed some of his own traits rubbing off on him. What was more startling was his reaction to it. Now he understood what John felt, all those times he himself had affected a role to manipulate a mark, and how irksome it had been to John. For the first time in their acquaintance, Sherlock became cognizant to the fact that, as much as John had become more like him, he had become a little something like John. Interesting.

At last, John looked at him long enough to quirk an eyebrow. 'What were you doing for the last five hours?'

'Trying not to suffocate.'

John chuckled softly, a sound not unlike music to Sherlock. He handed him the burner phone. 'First things first.'

They walked a short distance down the street and found a small park with benches. This was as good a place as any—quiet, untroubled, shaded.

'Next bus leaves in thirty minutes,' John reminded him as they sat together.

He nodded, then began to punch in the number of a memorised phone number, one that had been in his head for years, and the only one he had once believed was worth guarding. As a protective measure, that was. For just in case. He placed the phone to his ear.

It rang three times, as he expected. The number was foreign, so unlikely to be answered right away. But answer she did.

'Hello?'

Molly's voice was level, but guarded, a sweet feminine note ending in a warble. Its familiarity washed over Sherlock like a warm ocean wave, and he could not help but smile, though his chest ached like he'd just been kicked in the solar plexus.

'Hey sis,' he answered. He felt a warm hand on his sticky back.

A world away, Molly gasped, recognising him. He heard the background murmuring of dozens of voices, then a shuffling of feet as she sped herself away from the locus of activity for somewhere more private. 'Sher—?' she began, before catching herself. 'Sure has been a while since we had a natter, ha ha,' she said, her voice pitching a little on the forced laugh.

'Are you free to talk?' he asked. 'I can call back later tonight—'

'No! No no, ha ha, just one of those silly office parties. Donna's birthday, you know. Lots of drinking, not much cake. No one much minds me, I can talk. Just tell me . . .' Her voice dropped precipitously. 'Tell me you're okay.'

He laughed warmly. 'Super.'

'You're both okay?'

'I promise you, yes, we're doing fine. Both of us. It's beaches and margaritas, every day.'

But clearly she understood he was lying. 'We see things on the news, and we never know where you are or if you're . . . Are you . . . coming home soon?'

He paused, casting a glance at John, who frowned. 'I don't know.'

'I mean, on your end, there's things to do, but once you've done them . . . We're getting close, things are happening here, and Greg—'

Sherlock cut her off at the spoken name. 'Look, I wish . . . I wish we could say more, but we don't have long to chat—'

'Tell me what you need.'

What did he need? She had asked him that before, once. What he needed was an update on Mycroft. Was his recovery progressing, did he still struggle to find the right words, how well was he walking these days? He needed to ask after Lestrade and know how he was coping in the aftermath of the explosion at New Scotland Yard and the loss of so many colleagues. He needed to know about Donovan, too, and whether she had been badly hurt, and what progress she had made with that key. He needed to know that Mrs Hudson was being well looked after, and to tell her that he and John were well and thought often of her. Hell, he even needed to know that Dryers was being useful. Desperately, he needed to spend an hour, two hours, just talking to Molly, asking questions and listening to her tell stories of London. But this phone call was risk enough. The shorter they talked, the better.

'A message,' he said, 'for George Orwell.'

'I'm ready.'

'Tell him my telescreen is busted. No repair needed, just take it out of commission.'

'Oh. Okay.'

'That's . . . that's all.'

'What about—'

'Wish I could talk longer, but—.'

Molly cut him off, evidently afraid the call was ending too fast. It was. 'I miss you,' she said. 'We all do.'

Sherlock closed his eyes and fought to push away the sorrow. He wished she hadn't said that. 'We have to go. Sorry, sis. We . . . we have to go.'

Before she could utter another syllable and make his resolve waver, he pulled the phone away from his ear and ended the call.

John's hand fell to his shoulder and squeezed. He didn't need to say anything. They both understood.

Spain

Somewhere on the coastline between Barcelona and Valencia in northern Spain, well after sundown, two men checked into a hotel room with a balcony overlooking the Balearic Sea. Though peak tourist season, the night was quiet. The wind sweeping down the empty beach rustled the palm leaves and pushed waves to shore. In a different life, John might have thought himself on holiday. He rested his elbows on the balcony railing, watching the blackness of the water break white against the shoreline, again, again, a pulse as steady and soothing as a heartbeat. He imagined himself on that beach, bare feet sinking into warm sand above his ankles with each step toward a cool, inviting sea, then just . . . onward. As far as he could go. He'd never been much of a swimmer, but he fancied he'd give it a try. One arm over, then the other, and stroke, stroke, toward the horizon and a rising sun.

He had already shucked his Serbian sweat-through garb. He had already showered, an achingly hot shower. As he scrubbed his blood- and mud-splattered skin down with soap, he saw before his swimming eyes the faces of the men he had shot. Scrub, scrub, scrub, down went three in the darkened tunnel. Scrub scrub scrub, three more by the stone stairs. Scrubscrubscrub and down went Kovač. He scrubbed until he could no longer see their faces, and his skin shone bright red with scalding water and scouring soap.

Now Sherlock took his turn in this shower. As John waited for him, staring out into the night, he wondered what sins Sherlock felt he had to wash away. He knew that the man, for all his cool logic, was not above guilt, or contrition.

He thought of Mary, as he often did at quiet times. Sometimes, he thought of what their life together would have been like, had things carried on the way they had planned. They would be wedded by now, he was almost certain. She would have said yes to the ring, to him. Their child that today would have been three months old. Now that life seemed, not only a fantasy, but one belonging to another man entirely. It frightened him that not even a year had passed since he lost her, and already she was slipping away. So, to keep her close, he spoke to her, sometimes, the way he wished he still could.

'We never made it to Spain,' he spoke softly into the breeze. 'I think you would have liked it.'

The shower turned off. He heard Sherlock moving around in the bathroom and knew what they had to do next. But he was quite content to delay, and so remained where he was, leaning into the balcony rail and watching a lone, white gull circling in a black sky.

'Hey.'

Sherlock came up softly behind him, then to his side. He mimicked John's position, resting his forearms on the railing.

'Feel better?' John asked.

'Like shedding a layer of desiccated skin. I'm a new man.'

An unexpected and unexplainable feeling of fondness settled over him. He smiled crookedly at Sherlock, whose sense of humour, he believed, he alone ever fully appreciated.

'It's nice, this,' John commented. 'To think, we could have been enjoying our exile in a place like this all along.'

'And miss out on sewers and hovels? Please, John. Where's your sense of adventure?' He let out a long, contented sigh, evidently refreshed from his shower. 'But, I'll grant you, having a flushing toilet is a special treat.'

'And a hot meal.'

'And a bottle of rum.'

John laughed soundlessly. It was the one thing he had doubled back for, just before they reached the hotel, having spotted it in a shop window: a bottle of Canarian rum. Sherlock had given him an inquisitive, almost leery look, but said nothing, only pulled out his wallet.

'Come on, then,' said John, leaving the balcony. Sherlock followed.

Though small, the room did manage to fit some furniture in addition to the bed: two chairs and a round table, in the centre of which rested the bottle and two paper cups they had found in the room. They each took a chair, and John reached for the rum.

'In the nineteenth century, British soldiers were rationed one eighth of an imperial pint of rum per day,' he said, twisting off the cap. 'Called it a tot. During World War One, the men in the trenches got their daily ration. But'—he dragged the two paper cups closer—'if they were ordered over the top, to charge enemy lines, commanders issued them a double tot. Liquid courage, yeah? That, and a little send off just in case, you know, they didn't come back.'

John poured the rum into one cup, then the other, just about a quarter of an imperial pint, he reckoned.

'When I was in Afghanistan,' he continued, 'we had this ritual. Night before a battle—when we knew there'd be one—the officers would gather their men in a circle in the desert, each with a small glass of something. Beer, scotch, wine, whatever was available. And we'd lift a glass to each other. A pledge. These were the men we were choosing to enter the battlefield with, whom we trusted our very lives to, and with our lives we would defend them.' He shook his head, laughing wryly. 'I guess we didn't all mean it. But I did.'

He slid one paper cup across the table. Sherlock met his eyes, then touched the cup.

'Raise a glass with me,' said John.

They lifted their paper cups, and drank. The rum slid down John's throat, warm like honey, burning like a bee sting. He swallowed once, twice, thrice, and drained the cup.

Sherlock set his cup back to the table, empty. 'Once more, into battle?'

John let the burn linger in the back of his throat, breathing in slowly to activate the flame. Only once it had faded did he reach for Kovač's mobile, now fully charged. He placed it face-up in front of Sherlock.

'For all the marbles,' he said.

Sherlock picked up the phone and pressed his thumb to the fingerprint reader to gain access. John watched as he opened up text messaging, located Moran's ongoing thread, quiet now for four days. 'Here we go,' he murmured, then typed in the following text.

I believe I have found
what you are looking for

He used no contractions, no punctuation, because Kovač never did, even though his English grammar was sound. Then he looked to John for approval.

'Send it,' said John.

He hit send.

They waited. John poured another round, just a splash each. He was already longing for the bed and the reprieve of wakefulness, even if that meant he had to return to the landscape of his nightmares. With Sherlock lying beside him, they weren't so bad. And with the sound of the sea and the sweep of winds passing by their window, maybe they wouldn't come at all.

It was almost five minutes before the phone lit up with a reply.

Show me.

They let two more minutes go by to give the impression that a command was being obeyed. Then, stone-faced, Sherlock attached two photos to his answer: Sherlock Holmes, bruised and bloody on a stony floor, and John Watson on his knees, arms bound behind him. Two prisoners captured by a professional criminal.

Send.

This time, they did not have to wait long. The reply oozed with excitement.

Keep them bound. Two guard
on each man AT ALL TIMES.
Do NOT talk to them, especially
Holmes. Gag them. Water only.
Beat Watson regularly and make
Holmes watch. Don't kill them.
I'm on my way. Send coordinates.

John threw back another finger of rum, willing the alcohol to keep him from shaking.

'Sick son of a bitch took the bait,' said Sherlock icily. 'Let's show him where the bodies are.'

He typed a reply, giving their location, which he had saved the moment they exited the tunnels. Using a 2 dinara coin, they had left the door to the tunnels propped open, not enough to be discernible by an uninterested party, but enough to leave it unlocked. Whether Moran or the Serbian Police found it first was not their problem. He finished the text with a question:

How long?

Moran must have been traveling as they were. No aeroplanes, just wheels and tracks.

Two days.

A pause.

Don't tell the others.

Another pause.

Get this right, Kovac, and
your reward will be immense.
Screw me, and you'll wish
you were never born.