Chapter Sixteen
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"I told you you looked nothing like Sherlock, you berk!"
Mycroft sniffed. "It worked for long enough, didn't it?"
John swore thickly. The bridge of his nose was already swelling, and their rapid flight had done nothing to stem the flow of blood. His shirt front and the crotch of his jeans were soaked with it and it felt, from the stickiness, as though it had made its way into his pants as well. Mulishly, he peeled a particularly viscous strand of blood-stained mucous off his neck and flicked it into the gutter.
Mycroft, in all fairness, wasn't doing a hell of a lot better. He was limping heavily and hugging his ribs. His right ear was a pulpy, purple mass, and a rivulet of drying blood ran down the side of his neck and into his collar.
"Are you even going to explain that?"
Mycroft gave a put-upon sigh. His sneer only emphasised the bloody residue left around his teeth.
"It answers something that has been puzzling me: who revealed that Knight was in Guantanamo in the first place? According to Tomas Coulter – the man Irene and I interrogated in Bern – Sherlock learned about it from a German named Jorg Olbrich. But how did Olbrich know? He was present at Knight's ersatz execution and knew he had been sold to the Americans, but that was ten years ago. Why reveal it now? The fact that he sought Sherlock specifically argues that his knowledge of Knight's whereabouts was recent information: so where did he get it? I suspected Madame Palazuelos, who has a history of selling small scraps of information alongside the cocaine, heroin, and American contraband."
"Bloody hell. And here I thought she was a sweet old dear."
"Your landlady once engaged in similar activities, I believe."
"It was her husband's…"
Mycroft smiled. "Of course, John. In any case, my suspicion paid off. Madame Palazuelos did sell the information, which was given to her by her son or daughter-in-law, both of whom worked at Guantanamo and both of whom, according to her, are now under threat from the Agency. It is even possible that they were acting under Knight's instructions. It is a rare Cuban who supports the Agency's activities here, and Knight – at least, the Knight I knew – had the ability to be very persuasive."
"Given that he worked for you, I'm not exactly surprised."
Mycroft didn't respond, though he looked rather smug.
"Right. So our next step is what, exactly?"
Mycroft frowned slightly, considering. "Returning to the hotel and replacing our clothing would be the most sensible option. We're drawing a certain amount of attention."
"Yeah, a bloke with a face like minced beef will do that."
"Don't exaggerate John. You lost a little blood, nothing more."
"I wasn't talking about me."
Mycroft ignored him. "Returning to the hotel might may well be sensible, but I'm wary of losing time. Madame Palazuelos will no doubt be sending a messenger to warn her son as we speak. If we want to find him, this is our best chance."
John pulled out his wallet and found the bloodied scrap of paper on which the old lady had scribbled the address. Mycroft took it from him with an expression of distaste.
"Less than an hour's walk away," he declared. "What do you think, shall we?"
John eyed him suspiciously. "You're enjoying this," he accused. "Being Sherlock. It's like a holiday for you."
Mycroft raised a supercilious eyebrow. "Don't be preposterous John."
"You are."
"I am not."
"Are too."
Mycroft sniffed. "Can't you do something about that blood?" he asked, waving a hand in John's general direction. "Tie your shirt around your waist or something."
"Trying to get my clothes off now?"
"Well, you did accuse me of being insufficiently like Sherlock."
"Har-de-har."
Mycroft heaved a put-upon sigh. "Here," he said, shrugging himself out of his long coat. "Put this on."
"Are you insane? It's about 35 degrees out here!"
"Yes, it is a touch warm, isn't it? A shame you made such a mess of yourself."
John growled.
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The afternoon was beginning to wane before they turned onto the rutted track that led to their quarry. They had washed at the first fountain they came across, which had done very little to restore their appearance, but had at least removed the more obvious signs of their recent spat. With Mycroft's long coat buttoned over John's stained shirt, they'd escaped the worst of the attention, though John was sweltering beneath the thick wool. How Mycroft had worn it around all morning without collapsing, he didn't know. Perhaps the Holmes family was part vampire.
Their apparent destination was a small dwelling, part-brick, part-timber, that stood alone off a narrow, un-sealed road. The land around had once been cultivated but had now run half-wild. Straggling stalks of self-sown maize grew in the fields beside the road, some towering over John's head, others leaning drunkenly. The house, when they reached it, was dark and silent, the shutters latched and doors locked tight. A line of washing stretched from a nail at the corner of the house to a cracked fence post; the clothes were sun-bleached, with the stiffness that came from many days of being soaked and dried again. If Carlo Palazuelos had ever been there, it looked as if he had long fled.
Mycroft walked slowly around the house, examining scuffed earth and faded curtains, dust and dirt and door frames, while John went to work on the lock. He'd carried a set of lock picks attached to his key-ring since he'd first moved in with Sherlock, along with a leatherman, a small LED torch, and a flint. They made his key-ring bulky as all hell, and it was a pain finding trousers with large enough pockets, but it was worth it. He was still carrying the whole bundle of them now, despite the fact that the keys in question fitted doors a hundred miles away.
It took him twenty-seven minutes of juggling before the lock clicked open. John was irritated; it was a simple lock, and Sherlock, he was pretty sure, could have done it in less than ten. He rose from the awkward kneeling position he'd been forced to adopt, rubbing the back of his neck. He was out of practice.
They didn't have to go far to find the reason for the house's air of abandonment. The bodies lay where they had fallen, the woman on the tiled floor of the kitchen and the man sprawled on an upright wooden chair at the table.
"Carlo and Maria?" John asked, not really needing the confirmation. Mycroft nodded.
"So it would seem."
John crouched to examine the woman. He could tell already that there was no need for caution – the murderers had been and gone.
"Four, maybe five days," he murmured, prodding gently at the dead abdomen.
"Five, I think."
The woman was young, perhaps no more than late twenties. Her hair was long and braided, and there were old calluses on her hands. The man was older, his stubble rather greying. His head was thrown backwards, neck exposed, and his hands hung limply at his sides. There was a grey sock on his left foot; the other lay crumpled at the base of the chair.
"Any theories?" John asked.
Mycroft raised an eyebrow. "You tell me. I thought you were the expert here."
John huffed.
"Both killed with a single shot to the head," he said, to gain time, though it hardly needed stating. "Pistol probably. Smallish calibre, can't tell what. No attempt to hide the bodies or cover it up, so whoever did it isn't concerned with being caught." He paused, considering. "So… CIA tracked them down then?"
"And made sure that Carlo here would no longer be in a position to reveal sensitive information, yes. Anything else?"
John frowned, scanning the room, trying to pick up on anything that might be significant. Then he blinked, the deduction fizzing suddenly and surprisingly in the forefront of his brain.
"Sherlock's been here!" he blurted.
Mycroft looked faintly impressed. "Very good, John." He tilted his head to one side, considering. "How did you know?"
John grinned.
"His socks," he said, indicating the man's body with a thumb. "One off, one on. All well and good. But the one on the floor is inside out, and his shoes are miles away, so he wasn't getting ready to go out. There's blood on the sock, quite a bit, but his foot's barely pink. Inference: someone removed the sock after he died." He grinned again. "Who else but Sherlock would remove a corpse's socks?"
Mycroft very nearly laughed. "Well done," he said. "Perhaps you are not quite so dim after all."
John frowned, but it wasn't in response to the faint praise.
"It doesn't really help us that much though, does it? Sherlock was here, but we don't know when or why, and we still don't know where he is now."
"He was last here two days ago," Mycroft said. "He came, as we did, looking for information, but found our friends here dead on arrival. He lay low here for three nights, planning his next move."
John wrinkled his nose at the thought of spending three nights in the same house as two increasingly malodourous corpses, but he didn't say anything. He knew Sherlock well enough to realise that such a detail would have scarcely crossed his mind.
"And," Mycroft continued, with a ferocious scowl, "Lacking as my idiot brother apparently is in both practical intel and common sense, I think we can both deduce where he has now gone."
John winced. He'd known it was coming, but that didn't make hearing it any easier.
"Guantanamo?"
"Guantanamo."
Mycroft looked positively murderous. Letting Sherlock break into a top-security prison on his own had not, it seemed, been part of the plan.
"So what, head back to the hotel and go after him then?" John asked, but Mycroft wasn't listening. He had taken two long strides towards a shelf by the door and pulled a folded piece of paper from beneath a mug with a broken handle. His expression, if possible, grew even grimmer.
"What's that?"
"Sherlock's idea of a joke, it would seem." His voice was soft and very, very cold. "We have an agreement, my brother and I. Whenever he takes something, whatever he takes, he writes a list."
He dropped the slip of paper into John's palm, and John, dry-mouthed, saw the intricate diagrams of a dozen chemicals annotated in Sherlock's most precise, most flourishing hand.
.
Sherlock, not uncharacteristically, had grown bored of waiting. He should have delayed until it was full dark, but his impatience had got the better of him. Now, he was half a mile off-shore in a small fishing boat whose erstwhile owner, he suspected, would be very, very unhappy come tomorrow morning. Sherlock had never rowed while at Cambridge, eschewing as he did anything even vaguely resembling a team sport, and Mycroft, of course, would sooner kiss Mrs Hudson than partake in any unnecessary physical activity, but Sherrinford had once rowed for Oxford and it was he who had taught Sherlock. It had been over the course of a summer holiday in Cornwall, during Sherlock's admittedly rather extended pirate phase. Sherlock had been nine, Sherrinford nearly twenty. Myc had been sixteen, still at school, and so horribly spotty that Sherlock had declared any ship containing him to be a plague vessel. Mycroft, to be fair, had taken it in reasonably good humour.
Sherlock pulled lazily at the oars, not in a hurry now that he had started at last. The evening was clear and warm, the first stars already starting to appear above him. The sky and sea were both inky black, and he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. With each pull of the oars the blades were briefly limned in green-gold. A trail of phosphorescent bubbles spun out away from the boat with every slow stroke.
Eventually, Sherlock shipped his oars and sat quiet. There was no sound but for the lap of water and the steady drip from the paddle blades. Unhurriedly, he removed his coat, shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers and stuffed them, not without difficulty, inside a heavy-duty plastic dry-bag. Punching the last of the air from it, he sealed the top of the bag and trussed it over his shoulders. He tossed the dinghy's small anchor stone over the side and felt the scrunch as it hit sand (a boat moored in the wrong place was less noticeable than a boat drifting with the tide – at least to everyone other than the vessel's owner).
With one last cursory glance to make sure he'd packed everything, Sherlock tightened the straps of the dry-bag, and dived.
His limbs were gilded instantly in a layer of phosphorescence. His hands, thrust out in front of him, were outlined suddenly in flame, and tiny, copper-coloured bubbles lay meshed in the hair on his arms. The water was warm as blood. He swam with long, steady strokes, lifting his head every fifty to sight the distant shoreline.
He had reasoned – accurately enough, as it seemed – that the mines, or whatever other security devices they employed, could not have been intended to guard against waterborne bodies. If they had been, the foreshore would have been littered with a smorgasbord of diced shark.
He crawled ashore with his belly dragging on the sand. There couldn't be motion sensors out here, not unless they wanted to set off an alarm with every stray dog. Even so, it took him twenty-three minutes to locate a surveillance camera fit for his purposes. To his immense irritation, he missed both his first and second shots. 'John wouldn't have missed', his mind grumbled, and Sherlock fiercely quelled it.
The third rock hit its target, smashing the camera off its axis so it pointed harmlessly at the ground. He waited, lying in the shallows on his belly, but no one came to investigate. Strike one against the U.S. army.
Sherlock wasn't fool enough to tangle with the razor wire, nor with the thin, high-voltage lines suspended a foot beyond the fence. Instead, he unrolled the top of his dry-bag and removed a folded titanium snow shovel. Approaching the fence warily, he stepped into the space left by the now-absent beam of the security camera. He couldn't suppress a small sigh. Digging holes was John's forte, not his.
Fortunately for Sherlock, the elaborate security fence was built mostly on sand. There was a moral somewhere in that, but Sherlock didn't consider it worth the brain-space. All the same, digging was tedious. He fell into a routine, striking downwards, applying pressure, levering, tossing the sand away behind him, mindful not to let any of it escape the narrow space between the cameras. Even pretending to be digging for buried treasure didn't help all that much.
After a long, tedious hour, he had a hole deep enough to reach beneath the fence and wide enough for a thin man to wriggle through. He spread the excess sand about as well as he could, reluctant to draw undue attention to his burrowing. He considered for a moment filling the tunnel in after him, but decided on balance that he couldn't be bothered. Besides, it was always useful to have an emergency escape route. 'A sensible man would have planned a way out beforehand,' the John in his mind offered conversationally.
.
Sherlock had barely squirmed his way beneath the fence when a patrol came past, two soldiers with torches and unpleasant-looking rifles. Sherlock scrambled towards the camp, barely managing to throw himself behind an out-building as the torch beams swept past. 'Idiots', he thought, with satisfaction.
It took him longer than he would have liked to find an unlocked building. The one he ended up in appeared to be a scullery of some kind, attached to a large and cavernous kitchen; the adjoining door was securely bolted, so Sherlock had to make do. There was an old stone sink whose taps, when twisted, yielded a thin trickle of ferrous water. Hurriedly, he splashed his belly and thighs, scrubbing fiercely to remove the worst of the sand. He grimaced. The curls of hair beneath his navel were thick with the ghastly stuff.
As rapidly as he could, Sherlock flipped open the top of his bag and pulled on his coat. It stuck horribly to his wet skin, but a man wearing a long coat over bare legs was still less likely to be noticed than a man wearing his underpants and eight pounds of sand.
It was at this point that Sherlock discovered a flaw in his planning. In all the items he had considered essential to an infiltration of one of the most heavily-guarded military bases of all time, neither a towel nor a pair of dry pants were among them. He plucked mournfully at his damp pants and wasted another twenty seconds fruitlessly wishing for John. John remembered things like pants.
The sound of voices and the scuffle of feet outside snapped Sherlock out of his self-pity. He dug through the bag until he located his socks and pulled them hastily on. He laid his shoes out next to him, ready to step into if he got the slightest indication that he was about to be interrupted. It was a curious facet of human condescension that people always noticed bare feet before anything else, even on a man who was dripping seawater and practically naked beneath his coat.
He vacillated a moment more over his pants. 'Which'll it be, genius? Wet crotch or commando?' John sounded amused.
In the end, the sound of approaching footsteps made his mind up for him. He grabbed his trousers from the bag, pulled them on, and stuffed his feet hastily into his shoes while fastening his fly. Just as the latch of the door rattled, he shoved his bag out of sight behind a rubbish bin and wrapped his coat about his chest. The door opened.
The bulky lieutenant who stood there had clearly not expected to find a man hiding out in a scullery. He blinked in surprise, torch beam playing over Sherlock's face, mouth open in astonishment.
"Who the bloody hell are you?" he asked.
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A/N: I've been wanting to write that scene for aaaages. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you! Next up: John has to face Mary, and Molly discovers something interesting.