Chapter Seven.
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John woke on Thursday morning with a jittery euphoria filling his belly. Today, their tour group was catching a plane for Saint Petersburg. And they were not going to be on it. Today, after almost two weeks of barely-restrained impatience, after sixteen months of waiting, they were going after Sherlock.
He could barely concentrate as he packed, stuffing clothes and toys haphazardly into his suitcase. On four separate occasions over the course of the morning Mary had to remind him of something he'd left behind, and twice she had to prevent him from accidentally stealing small items belonging to the hotel. They weren't taking the luggage with them, of course. No, they were leaving that carefully behind to be turned over by the inevitable investigation, so it was vital, as Mary kept reminding him, that everything was packed normally. John knew that his jitters were due to their weeks of inaction, and he waited with mounting anticipation for the moment when the calm would take over. His left hand was trembling so violently that he could scarcely get Billie into her overalls.
.
The task of excusing themselves from the Petersburg flight with the minimum of suspicion had fallen to Molly. Amongst a number of little-known facts about Molly Hooper was this: she was an excellent liar. It was not a talent that she exercised often – and this, she suspected, made it more effective. The thing was, people just never noticed her. She'd known that for most of her life and, mostly, she didn't mind. When people thought about her at all, they thought 'awkward', 'nervous', 'inept'; sometimes 'shy', if they were feeling kind. And if she happened to stumble a bit when uttering a tiny un-truth, well, that was just Molly, wasn't it?
She dressed carefully on the morning of their departure. A nice sun-dress with a hemline that, back home, she would privately have considered rather brave ('It never hurts to show a bit of knee', as her grandmother had often said). She tied her hair back in a ponytail, then ran a hand over it a couple of times to give it an appropriately dishevelled appearance. As a crowning touch, she sat with Billie on her knee for half an hour until Billie obliged her by smearing mashed pumpkin in her ear and drooling on her shoulder.
Their tour guide was a slim young Parisian named Wadi. He wore mustard-coloured, hipsterish jeans, and put too much gel in his hair. A couple of years ago, Molly would probably have developed a crush on him. Now he just reminded her, rather wincingly, of her 'Jim' phase.
She timed her arrival in the hotel lobby very carefully. Too early and she'd give him too much time to think about it. Too late and when the police came calling (as they undoubtedly would), he'd remember it as suspicious.
"Hey chick," Wadi greeted her. She would have been flattered by the epithet, once upon a time. Now she just found it annoying.
"You lot all packed?" he asked her. He made a half-arsed show of paging through his itinerary, clicking his pen against his thigh. Through the hotel's tinted-glass door, she could see Mrs Mossman struggling to heft a bulging suitcase into the airport shuttle.
"Not exactly," Molly admitted. She made sure to catch Wadi's eye, treating him to her most awkward smile.
"The baby's come down with something," she explained apologetically. "I don't think it's serious, but John thinks she's got an ear infection, and if we get on the flight with her like that she'll just scream."
Wadi frowned. "We can't wait, chick. You know we've got connections to make. We'll just have to bring the kid and chance it. Sure her dad can look after her."
"Um… He wants to take her to a hospital," Molly said, shaking her head rapidly. "I know it's really inconvenient and everything, and we don't want to hold everyone up. We'll just stay here for a few days and then maybe try to see if we can get a later flight. We can meet you in Moscow maybe."
But Wadi was shaking his head. "I can't just let you guys off on your own. Let me call in someone to take you to the hospital."
"We'll be fine," Molly assured him, quite truthfully. "We've been here three days, we know our way around. Please don't worry about us."
"Well, if you're sure…"
"I'm so sorry," Molly reiterated. "We'll pay to change the flights ourselves, obviously. And I'll email you and let you know when we can meet back up again."
"Yeah, ok. Hey, sorry about the kid."
"Oh, um… I'm sure she'll be alright. Just… better to be safe than sorry, you know?"
"Yeah. Yeah, of course. Hey, I've got to help these guys get stuff loaded." He gestured over his shoulder at the luggage-laden tourists struggling with the shuttle. "Let me know when you sort it all out."
"Of course. Thanks. Um… sorry again."
"Hey, shit happens. We'll see you in Moscow, yeah?"
"Yeah," said Molly, smiling shyly. "Yeah, of course."
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Concealed from view of the reception area by an ostentatious array of trellis work and potted palms, Mary watched Molly leave. There was a bounce in her step and a bit of a grin on her face as she hastened back towards the stairs. At the reception counter, a dark, handsome man with a discrete Bluetooth headpiece looked up from the form he was filling in and cocked his head in Molly's direction. His eyes followed her intently. When she was gone, he gave a quick, fierce glance around the lobby, and spoke quietly into his microphone. Mary couldn't hear the words from where she was standing, but she could make a reasonable guess.
Now, Mary thought, came the difficult part.
.
The two men, two women and a baby who slipped unobtrusively from a rear balcony of the hotel and into a pair of idling taxis looked rather different from the Greg, Molly, John, Mary and Billie who had arrived there with a tour group three days earlier. Mary was dark-haired and dressed in flat heels and an ugly pinstriped power-suit at least fifteen years out of date. Greg was in faded jeans and a football jersey, and seemed to have gained a decade and twenty kilos overnight. Molly, in thick eyeliner, oversized hoodie and skin-tight jeans, could have been a nineteen year old. The baby in her lap was chewing contentedly on a scruffy Barbie doll and wearing a nauseatingly pink Disney princess t-shirt (none too clean), about which her father would, in normal circumstances, have thrown a self-righteous feminist fit. The father in question had no room to talk, however, as he was currently seated alongside them sporting a black leather jacket, a tattooed neck, and a frankly alarming buzz-cut that he prayed to God Sherlock would never find out about.
At an anonymous mall in Downtown Athens, a small, tattooed man in a leather jacket visited a safety deposit box and retrieved an unremarkable FedEx parcel. From the parcel, he retrieved a battered leather wallet and a simple door key on a blue plastic tag. Unhurriedly, he made his way over to an idling taxi where a teenage girl and a grubby-looking child were waiting for him. He gave the blue key-ring a brief once-over, and grunted an address to the driver.
Half an hour later, in a dozy suburban street, a taxi pulled over outside number 10. The glum, fat man in the football jersey clambered laboriously from the backseat and waited dumbly on the pavement while the woman paid. She was a pinched, ugly-looking sort of woman herself, the driver thought, noting the unfashionable pumps and the ill-fitting blazer. Even as he pulled away, he could hear her berating the man, whose shoulders hunched defensively. Strangely, he thought he heard the man laugh.
If any neighbour had chanced to be looking out of their windows around one o'clock in the afternoon, they might have noticed the middle-aged couple making their way laboriously up the hill. A particularly observant observer might have paused to wonder why their taxi hadn't dropped them at the gate; but, as it was a small mystery, in the grand scheme of things, it would have been easily forgotten. At number 43 the couple paused and the woman rang the bell. A few moments later, the door was opened by a skinny girl with a baby on her hip. The older couple stepped inside and the door was quietly shut behind them.
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Secure inside the safe-house that Mycroft had arranged, they re-convened. The luggage and supplies that John had ordered while still in England were waiting for them, stacked tidily against one wall of the near-empty kitchen. Greg made toast and spaghetti for lunch and they ate sprawled about on the living-room floor as though at a picnic. Painstakingly, they packed and re-packed, removed their earlier disguises and adopted new ones. Molly, armed with a set of electric clippers, cropped John's hair into a slightly less alarming form. Then, all there was to do was wait.
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They reached the airport without mishap – Mary as a harassed solo mother, and the other three as be-suited engineers on the way to a conference. They'd spotted no signs of surveillance since they'd left the hotel and Mary was hopeful that their unexpected evasive manoeuvres had thrown their pursuers off the scent, but she still hadn't breathed easily until they were safely ensconced on the flight from Athens to Istanbul.
From Istanbul, they flew to Chicago (a lawyer, a music teacher, and a pair of Mormon missionaries), and from Chicago to New York (a builder, a P.A., a truckie, and a virulently Scots banker – John was rather proud of that one). From there, they dodged up into Quebec, just to keep life interesting (a travel writer, a student, and a gay couple with their adopted daughter ('Is this weird? This feels weird.'). By the time they reached Miami in the small hours of Sunday morning, Billie was howling.
Through it all, Mary managed them with a brutal efficiency. She knew precisely which of an airport's many toilets or prayer rooms or maintenance cupboards could be guaranteed to be unoccupied for long enough to change a skirt or don a fake tattoo. She knew how to apply small pieces of facial prosthetic in just such a way as to fool the scanners into accepting a fake passport, and which items from duty free could be added to enhance a disguise. She instructed them on how to talk and what to say, how to follow conversations so that they didn't contradict each other, where to stash their many passports so they didn't get confused. The competence with which she marshalled them left John with a slightly queasy feeling in his gut; the knowledge that this life, for Mary, had never really gone away.
Dazed, jet-lagged, and encumbered by an infant who was screaming with all the might and main at the disposal of her fifteen-month-old lungs, it seemed to John that their arrival in Florida could hardly have been more obvious. This state of events was not improved by his decision to have a very voluble row with the kitchenette facilities in the hotel room over their inability to provide him with a decent cup of tea. It took a great deal of conciliating on Mary's part before she was able to convince him to "please put down the completely innocent and blameless kettle and please John, for the love of god, don't throw it at the w–"
He decided right then and there that he hated America.
Tomas Coulter, despite appearances, was not a stupid man. From the moment the woman had approached him, he had suspected a honey-trap. Coulter was aware enough of his own personal charms to realise that women of her calibre did not, typically, fall into his orbit. He was aware enough of her charms to find her out of place in the shabby bar where she had picked him up, despite the unpractised make-up and the deliberately down-at-heel clothes. But Coulter was by nature a gambler. In a career that spanned thirty years in various secret services, this was hardly the first time that sex had been used as a little extra incentive. Coulter reckoned that it was worth the gamble. The woman would string him a long a little, give him a taste first, before she tried to reel him in.
He was confident in this assessment right up until the moment when the whip appeared.
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A/N: Thanks as always to everyone who's reviewed. :-)