It was very odd being a ginger again. Sherlock did remember it (though Mycroft insisted he didn't)—his hair didn't start to get darker until he was 3. But to look in a mirror and see dark red hair, straight as a stick, coupled with his now-hazel eyes was like looking at one of his French cousins—slightly familiar, but definitely not "Sherlock". The lifts in his shoes that gave him an extra inch in height also made a noticeable, but subtle, change, as did the gold-rimmed spectacles. In his experience, this was often the most successful form of disguise—just enough difference so that an onlooker would dismiss the similarity to a known individual as being coincidental. A variant of "hide in plain sight", in a way.
"That's very effective," Anthea said smugly. "I told you it would work better than blond. You'd look entirely too albino with blond."
Sherlock nodded absently, poking at his new, un-curly locks. "I bleached my hair as an experiment when I was 14. My mother said I looked like a large white rabbit."
"I love your mother," Anthea chortled. "Doesn't mince words, that woman."
"She prefers to mince people," Sherlock said. "I've tried several times to get Mycroft to send her in instead of a strike team. Be just as effective, and much quicker."
"Oh, stop," Anthea said repressively.
Sherlock was finally released from care as of yesterday evening, and he found himself feeling both apprehensive and energized. His physical state was not 100%-he still had significant pain in his arm, and his dexterity was not on a par with his normal abilities. But he had been fitted with a light cast, his stitches had been removed, and his physical therapy was now his own responsibility.
He watched Anthea flitting about the hospital room, ostensibly helping to gather up his things (most of which were new, delivered in the past few days), but largely simply moving everything from one spot to another. That was suspicious—she only dithered when she was trying to avoid talking.
"What is it that you're reluctant to say?" he said abruptly. "We don't have time to waste on sensibility. Presumably it's something I won't like."
Anthea frowned over her shoulder and twiddled with his carryall handle. "I hate it when you do that," she sighed. "You're supposed to let me work myself up to it before you slap me down."
"Saving time," he snapped. He wasn't really in the mood for teasing at this point.
Anthea looked at him sternly. "Convalescence makes you cranky. I remember. But what's Anthea's Number One Rule?"
The beginnings of a reluctant grin twitched at the corners of Sherlock's mouth. "Rudeness Does Not Work," he said. That reached far back into their shared past, when Sherlock had been a mouthy post-grad student and Anthea a newly-minted intern in Mycroft's offices.
She beamed. "You see, you can learn."
He plopped himself down on the edge of the cot and assumed a visage of restrained patience. "Please, Ms. Holder," he said with exaggerated care, "could you share the information you are concerned about?" He blinked his eyes anxiously for a final touch.
Anthea snorted. "You're entirely too good at that," she laughed. "But, well…it might come in handy, actually." Sherlock raised his eyebrows inquiringly. "You're going to have to work with a partner," she said in a rush, and then theatrically stuck her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes.
'Oh my GOD," Sherlock snarled, suddenly furious. "Not again. Mycroft knows better. You know better. I do not 'play well with others', and I have no intention of chaining myself to some half-witted minion while I'm trying to do the most important job of my life. No." He stood up and started cramming clothing into the carryall, only to stop with a whine when he bumped his tender, casted arm.
"Enough," Anthea said. She came over, lifted the sling that was currently hanging loose and empty around Sherlock's neck, then gently slid his painful arm into it. He gave a little huff, irritated at the continued frailty of the transport. But he recognized that he was being unfair to Anthea—she had been a lifesaver this past week, keeping him nominally sane through his forced inactivity. "Thank you," he said reluctantly. She looked up at his discontented face. "Are you ready to listen now?" she asked softly.
He sat back down on the cot, frowning but silent. She dropped into the chair beside him.
"You need to think of this as if you were not Sherlock Holmes. You are Will Scott, MI6 agent for the past 5 years. And MI6 agents do not work alone when they're involved in investigations of large organizations—there are always support people involved, some behind the scenes and others in closer support." She looked at him steadily. "You can't afford to act differently from every other agent, no matter how brilliant you are. That, in and of itself, would raise eyebrows and potentially attract the attention of the wrong people."
Sherlock was listening, though not happy about it. Much though it galled him, it had the ring of truth. But… "There's more to this than mere appearances," he said, thinking out loud. "You have specific concerns that go above normal internal mechanics." Her sudden silence was its own answer. The corollary was obvious. "You have a mole," he said, as he realized what she really meant. "And you think the mole was attached to Moriarty, or at least his organization. Otherwise you wouldn't be that concerned about me specifically."
Anthea nodded. "We're sure there's at least one, if not more. Your brother ran two test scenarios in the past two weeks. One was designed to flush out a mole in the general administrative ranks—information potentially available to a limited pool of people under normal circumstances, but not a need-to-know-only level. The hidden flags were tripped within 2 hours."
Sherlock thought through the ramifications of that. "So the presence of a mole is definite, and that mole is somewhere in the IT ranks, most likely." That was obvious—someone with considerable expertise in subverting security routines and setting trap doors in the systems.
"Yes," Anthea confirmed. "As you always say, 'so far, so obvious'. But the second scenario was more elaborate. In that case an actual operation underway in Spain was compromised while the field agent was out of contact with everyone except his direct handler, who is both unequivocally loyal and aggressively adept at security measures. Luckily, since this was Mycroft's test, there was actually a back-up on site who was able to rescue the agent and secure the target."
Sherlock thought about that for a bit. "So the implication is that there is also someone who has access to mission planning detail-not an IT drone, since that kind of information isn't usually committed to system storage until after the mission is complete." And that, thought Sherlock, would alarm his brother, since it meant that Moriarty's people had been capable of successfully subverting a senior-level MI6 executive. Which also meant that it was entirely possible that at some point, MI6 people and resources had actually been undertaking missions to serve Moriarty's purposes, rather than the Crown's.
And that, thought Sherlock, was a very bad thing indeed, since the one thing he and Mycroft had both counted on, in envisioning this crusade of his, was the ability to piggyback on MI5 and MI6 resources. If that wasn't possible, things suddenly got substantially more difficult, and the timeline expanded dramatically. "So, what—I'm to help you root out the moles first, before going after Moran? I have to tell you I am unlikely to be convinced of the necessity of that." And he meant it—keeping John and the others safe had been his primary concern in all of this, and he wouldn't be derailed from that because of his brother's security issues.
"Well, as it happens, our aims run together on this. Because we're pretty sure that the MI6 high-level mole takes his orders directly from Sebastian Moran. So if we can craft a trap that will take out one, we can take out both if we do it properly," Anthea said cheerfully. "It's grand when things work out, isn't it?"
The plan, such as it was, had been hastily assembled, and to Sherlock's jaundiced eye, rested on far too much speculation and far too little concrete data. He had spent the last twelve hours running obsessively through everything contained on the memory stick Anthea had presented him with, before depositing him and his things in the nondescript flat now assigned to "Will Scott".
The only truly verifiable piece of information in this morass was the knowledge that Sebastian Moran was currently listed as the senior executive of a large shipping operation that regularly transported exotic automobiles across Europe for delivery to their new owners. He wasn't operating under his real name, of course, but it was him—facial recognition technology had picked up his photo under the senior management team tab of the firm's website.
Sherlock had put considerable thought into why Moriarty's second in command would have involved himself in an import-export business for hideously overpriced vehicles. He had done some surreptitious digging in a variety of police databases and discovered that at least some of the vehicles had probably been stolen and then shipped from Britain to continental buyers. But that couldn't possibly be the whole story. Certainly it was a means of generating large amounts of cash quickly, and Moriarty's operations always needed that, but that didn't explain Moran's involvement. That kind of work would normally have been undertaken by a run-of-the-mill criminal who cut his teeth in moving stolen cars from point A to point B.
His speculation was abruptly interrupted by a knock on the door. Sherlock came out of his meditative state to look somewhat dazedly at the clock, and was surprised to see that it was just past 1 am. This couldn't be Anthea—she had been quite emphatic that Sherlock would not see her for another 48 hours when she left, since she had to go attend to her "real job" (and, as Sherlock pointed out snarkily, soothe his brother's feathers, which were no doubt severely ruffled at her extended absence).
The knock came again, quiet but persistent. Sherlock set his laptop aside, removing the memory stick and sliding it inside his cast against his palm. After a second's consideration he also picked up the pistol Anthea had reluctantly left with him ("you're a terrible shot, Sherlock!") and placed it carefully in his sling, out of sight but within easy reach. At the last second he also snatched the spectacles off of the coffee table and put them on before cautiously opening the door a crack.
The man at the door was carrying a large pizza box, though he was clearly not a delivery boy. Quite tall, medium-brown curly hair, a pleasant but forgettable face—until one took a close look at the sharp blue eyes. Sherlock was suddenly aware that he was receiving the same kind of scrutiny as he was giving the new arrival, and the other penny dropped. "Let me guess," he drawled. "Delivery for Anthea?"
The man's face creased in an appreciative grin. "Well I hope not, since she's the one who sent me to get it and bring it here." He paused expectantly, then huffed. "Going to let me in, mate? Pizza's getting cold, and I suspect you and I have a thing or three to discuss." He looked over Sherlock's shoulder into the bland flat. "Got some beer?" he asked hopefully. But he made no move to enter until Sherlock reluctantly moved aside. Reluctantly, because he realized, with a sour note to the thought, that this was his new "partner".
The tall man walked in confidently, dropped the pizza on the coffee table and stuck out a large hand. "Gabriel Austin. Better known as Gabe." Sherlock took the hand and shook it firmly. "William Scott. Better known as Will." He gave his new partner his best Normal People Grin and was taken aback when the man frowned in return. "You really need to work on that, my man. You'll scare the children." Sherlock drew back. "Personal interaction is not my strong point," he sniffed.
"No shit," Gabe said, with no particular animosity. "Anthea said you didn't go into the field all that much, right? So you're a maybe little out of practice with the whole 'reassuring smile' thing. We'll work on that." He wandered into the kitchen and found plates, then slid pieces of pizza onto each and held one out to Sherlock, who took it in a slightly-bemused way. The tall man then plopped himself down on the ugly brown chair across from Sherlock.
"So what else did Anthea tell you?" Sherlock asked stiffly. He was all too aware of being the less-informed person in the room, and while he could certainly deduce a fair amount about this man (though not as much as he usually could, of someone he'd just met—Austin was apparently a better-than-average agent, going by that fact alone), he had no way of knowing what information Anthea had shared.
Gabe chewed a bit before he responded. "I can give you the thumbnail sketch if you'd like, or the full tour. Whichever you'd prefer." He gave another one of those "I'm-basically-harmless" grins, which in Sherlock's experience usually meant exactly the opposite was true.
Sherlock's chin went up. "The full tour, by all means. If she's been indulging in character assassination, I'd prefer to know it now."
The grin faded a bit, to be replaced by a disconnect between eyes and face as Gabe assumed a distracted stare. "William Algernon Scott. Born in Durham but moved to Somerset at age 4. No siblings, parents alive and well but estranged. Age 28—29 next month. 6 feet and 1¼ inch. Agent for a little better than 5 years, mostly in Eastern Europe. Winchester, then Oxford. Expertise in languages, cryptography, chemistry and electronics, though not a hacker. Highly proficient in two separate martial arts forms—you'll have to spar with me, I'm dying for a good match—but a truly awful shot." He pulled out of his stare and the grin was back. "Which means you can pull that gun out of your sling—by all accounts you'd be more likely to hit yourself than me." Sherlock, to his annoyance, found himself flushing. He wasn't that bad a shot, after all. Ricochets could happen to anyone. And it only happened the one time.
He curled his lip slightly at Gabe as he fished out the pistol and dropped it on the coffee table, only to have the man gasp and lunge for it. "Safety, man, safety. Put the fuckin' safety on before you go dropping it. Jesus." He shoved the pistol into his own pocket while Sherlock glowered. He ignored Sherlock's ill temper and slid back into the chair again. "Let's see, what else. Would you like me to list your school results? GSCEs? Medical history for the past 5 years?" He grinned at Sherlock's stony expression and subsided a bit. "Probably the most relevant thing is, I know what happened to your arm, and to your previous partner." He looked Sherlock right in the eye. "And I'm really fucking sorry."
Sherlock debated trying on a few tears—he knew the harrowing story Anthea had made up about his injuries, and his partner's tragic demise. But he didn't want to overplay things, and he felt oddly uncomfortable in playing his new partner, who, though arrogant, seemed sincere enough. He settled on a crackle in his voice and downcast eyes. "Thank you," he near-whispered.
Gabe gave himself a little shake and ran his hands through his hair. "So, what now? What would you like to know about me?"
And Sherlock knew it was unwise, knew he shouldn't do it. But—"You don't need to tell me a thing. I'll tell you, shall I? And before you ask, no, Anthea hasn't given me any information about you to speak of." He stood up and started pacing the small living room.
"You've been in intelligence services for the past 12—no, 13 years. You are 40 years of age, though you look much younger. You are 6 foot 4 inches tall, and played rugby at university; perhaps considered a professional career before doing permanent damage to your left knee. You still play occasionally but are finding the physical demands harder than they used to be." Sherlock caught Gabe's wince out of the corner of his eye. "You have worked with a variety of partners and in a variety of locations, but prefer to stay in Britain as you do not learn foreign languages easily. You did not go to a public school, but attended Cambridge, on a scholarship, most likely." He paused, as if thinking things through. "And you would like very much to have sex with Anthea."
He expected a gasp, or a denial. What he got was a lazy smile. "Shit, man. Who wouldn't?" Gabe said easily. "But where did you get the rest of that? Not saying you're wrong, mind you. Just don't think most of that is in my file."
"I told you, I haven't seen your file. It's what I do," Sherlock said smugly. "I notice things."
"I'd say so," his new partner said mildly. "But next time you might want to notice that carrying a loaded pistol in a sling with the safety off is a good way to lose an arm."
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "That's what I have you for, don't I? Since clearly I'll be the brains and you'll be the brawn in this operation." He thought about that, though, while Gabe gave him a mildly-offended look. "Though you and I do have more in common than it would initially appear. Eidetic memory, yes?"
The tall man nodded. "Mostly. Though for whatever reason, it doesn't work worth a damn on foreign languages, at least trying to speak them. I can read anything, just can't get it out of my mouth."
"We're even," Sherlock said absently. "Mine rarely tells me when something is intended as a joke, and when someone is serious." He dropped abruptly back onto the sofa—he wasn't yet 100%, and it had been a very long day. "I'm assuming you already have a proposal for our entrée into Moran's operation. Give me just the high points—I need to sleep, soon." He found himself rubbing at his arm—he was overdue for pain medication again.
Gabe sprawled back in his chair, spreading his arms expansively as he yawned. "Well, we could just go in, guns blazing, and kill everyone."
Sherlock blinked. "You remember what I said about me and jokes?" he offered cautiously.
Gabe chuckled. "I said we could do that—I didn't say we would. But what I think we will do is, let's go and steal some cars. How's that sound?"