CHAPTER 7: TRAPPED IN THE WOLF'S LAIR
John immediately points his revolver at the attacker in one fluid movement and states, "If you shoot him, I'll make sure you don't live long enough to watch him hit the ground."
"No need for that, John. This floor is filthy, and I'd very much like to avoid lying on it," Sherlock intervenes in a sarcastic tone. "Why don't we try to reason instead?"
"How did you find me?" The same female voice that pronounced the ultimatum a few seconds before echoes sharper now.
"You asked me for my last words; I imagined you would get the hint. We deciphered the code hidden in your crossword puzzle, Miss Baaral," Holmes says smugly, lingering on her last name.
The woman clears her throat uncomfortably and applies more pressure on the gun pressed against Sherlock's nape, making him wince.
"Very well. You know my name and my hideout. Next questions: why are you here and what do you want from me?"
"We are here to save you," Sherlock calmly answers.
"Do you mind if I don't believe you, sir? Given some recent developments in the intelligence system, I cannot grant myself the luxury of trusting anyone," she spits out.
"But I am not anyone." He slowly turns around to face her with his hands in the air. "I'm Sherlock Holmes, your boss's brother."
"Prove it. I've known Mycroft Holmes for ages, and I've done some research about his past. Tell me some episodes of your childhood that you shared with him." She lowers her weapon ever so little, and the muzzle of her gun is now pointing at the detective's chest, as she waits for some evidence of his alleged identity.
Even in the dim-lit hallway, she must admit that the person in front of her bears a striking resemblance to the photos of the notorious detective of Baker Street all over the papers. And yet, none knows better than her that appearances can be deceiving. She has made her whole career out of it.
Sherlock gazes at her and firmly replies, "Is this supposed to be a bluff? If you've been diligent with your research, you probably know that there aren't any. We never spent time together as kids. Mycroft thought I was too childish and slow and would rather be alone than in my company; in fact, he used to ignore me completely." His voice sounded deeper than usual. Even though he doesn't show any signs of emotion, a muscle in his cheek twitches imperceptibly at those memories.
Cathy listens carefully and grins, finally lowering her gun.
"Correct. Pleased to meet you, Mr Holmes The Younger." She is about to shake his hand when a gunshot echoes down the corridor, and a bullet flies just a few inches away from John's head.
"Get down! Get down!" He shouts, and everyone instinctively takes cover. They hear footsteps and commotion in the building's hall; they can distinguish several voices calling one another.
"They found me," Cathy breathes out, hiding behind a protrusion in the wall.
"Who?" John asks dazed, trying to catch sight of the marksman that failed to kill him.
"The terror cell. How did they—" she stops mid-sentence, spinning around and pointing an accusatory finger at them. "You. You basically led them to me. They must have tailed you lately, watching your every move."
Sherlock widens his eyes. "And we've brought them right into your lair." He curses their carelessness under his breath.
Cathy gives him a glacial, resolute look, letting out a shrewd whisper. "Wolf's Lair."
All of a sudden, a hail of bullets inundates the hallway only a few steps away from their refuge.
"Follow me," Cathy orders peremptorily. She slides along the wall, and they instantly imitate her, keeping their heads down. They peep round the corner to check if the way is clear, then sneak into a wide room. Sherlock turns his eyes everywhere to memorise the floor plan.
When a new series of gunshots resound behind them, Cathy points at what looks like an information booth next to a row of rusted ticket barriers. They duck under the counter panting for breath. John kneels down in a firing position and shoots back. Giulia stares awestruck at him. He seems a completely different man. Not the charming, caring doctor who reads the paper, sipping tea, but the brave soldier prepared to do anything to protect his friends.
"You didn't bring any police officer, did you?" Cathy whiffles, handing Sherlock a semi-automatic gun.
The detective removes the safety, takes aim, and shoots twice before answering, "Unluckily not. They are all busy at the Palestinian Mission, as we speak."
"You decoded the second message, too?" Cathy raises a brow, gaping at him.
"She did." Sherlock nods at Giulia.
Cathy cocks an impressed brow at the woman, then glances at that odd trio. What an interesting team: the mind on fire, the defensive weapon, and the human reason. She looks directly into Giulia's eyes, trying to find out her boundary line between fear and fortitude. She would swear that she was looking at her sister again. This thought strikes her, and her expression becomes unreadable as she turns to confront the three of them.
"Here's the plan: I'm going to lay down some suppression fire to let you escape. Run as fast as possible and get as far away from here as you can. I'll hold them off."
Sherlock protests, "No, we're your rescue mission."
"That's very gallant of you, Mr Holmes, but I am afraid we have very different ideas about rescuing someone," the agent lampoons him.
The terrorists are now crowding in the room, so Cathy quickly leads the group through a service door and along another succession of corridors. When clamour and blasts arise from the far end of the passageway in front of them, she comes to a halt at an intersection and looks sternly at them.
"You should go now. Run and try to stay alive."
John tilts his head. "Try?"
"What about you?" Giulia asks in a concerned tone. She doesn't like leaving anyone behind, not even a complete stranger with quite some experience with firearms, apparently.
Cathy averts her gaze, lost in thought, and murmurs, "I need to accomplish one last mission."
"Then we're coming with you. We didn't come to interfere. We are allies." Sherlock puts his foot down.
Cathy snaps out of her meditation and smiles slyly. "I couldn't have said it better myself. But you need to save yourself while there's still time. You have to trust me, Mr Holmes, and I promise you we'll win the war."
He stares into her determined eyes and nods reluctantly. "Where do we go now?"
Cathy points ahead. "First corridor to the right; then I'm sure you'll find your way out." She winks at them and swiftly disappears beyond the corner.
They don't waste a second, but the moment they step in the aisle, two armed men run towards them, firing away. Sherlock notices an open door and pushes John and Giulia inside the room, locking a solid reinforced door behind him. He places his hands on his knees, gasping for air and attempting to focus on the room. There isn't much to see, though, just a small table with city maps disseminated all over it.
No windows, no connecting doors, no weapons, his brain rapidly registers.
When their chasers kick and punch the door, Sherlock seems to wake from a trance. He lifts his eyes to John, who groans and clenches his fists, murmuring, "Wrong turn. We hit a dead end."
An air of defeat hangs thick in the dust-filled room.
"No way out of here? Have you checked?" Giulia asks as a shiver runs through her body. She isn't claustrophobic, but the hopelessness of their situation is putting a strain on her frightened mind.
John shakes his head despairingly. "Nothing doing. This place is a bunker. As long as we stay here, we are safe; but the moment they pick the lock... We're as good as dead."
Sherlock's head whips up at his sentence. "What have you just said?"
"You mean the unceremonious announcement of our imminent death?" Giulia snivels.
"No, his exact words." He closes his eyes, recalling John's phrase. "He said: This place is a bunker."
Bunker. The word hovers before his shut eyelids while shreds of a previous conversation rush and gather inside his mind.
"We are allies," he had said to Cathy, to which she had responded with, "I couldn't have said it better myself."
She didn't mean it as 'partners', though, Sherlock reflects. In his mind palace, the word slightly changes as a capital letter appears at the beginning of it. We are the Allies, he finally understands. Then, his brain reproduces another sentence pronounced by Cathy: "... we'll win the war."
His eyes snap open while he whispers, "This is, in fact, the bunker."
"Yeah, that's what I said. But this is the problem, not the solution," John talks back, frowning at Sherlock's entranced face.
The detective bends over the table at the centre of the room and he studies the city maps on display.
"Cathy must have designed this room to reproduce one very specific place: Adolf's Hitler Führerbunker in Berlin," he affirms confidently.
Giulia and John exchange bewildered looks. Is his brain running low on oxygen?
"Look at the maps: that's not London. You can check roads, squares, monuments, everything, and you'll realise it's always the same city: Berlin."
They lean forward to observe them, and John remarks, "Fine, but I still don't see how this could help us right now."
Sherlock straightens up and goes back to his mind palace to check the plan of the construction site that he strained to memorise while running around. He recalls the movements they have made so far, all the forks and turns they have encountered until that dead end. He knows exactly on what side of the building they are standing at the moment. His eyes scan the room and his gaze lands on the floor; he squats down next to a wall and brushes his finger on the ground.
"Ash," he mumbles. "I should have expected this. Oh, it's so clever," he exclaims, springing to his feet. "I knew she was smart: the trick of the crossword puzzle was quite good. But this, oh, this is brilliant."
At that moment, the terrorists shoot the lock in an attempt to open it.
"Sherlock, come on," Giulia begs, scared to death.
"The Führerbunker was a subterranean bunker in Berlin where Hitler spent his last days and eventually committed suicide," he begins to explain.
"Straight to the point, please," John urges him, listening to the cracking sounds coming from the doorjambs.
"There was an emergency exit in that bunker," Sherlock says, staring at the base of the wall. "As per the Führer's instructions, after their suicides, the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit..." As he speaks, he leans both hands against a portion of the wall in front of him. "And their bodies were burnt in the..." he presses on the movable partition that had been painted to look like a real wall; it slowly shifts, opening outwards.
"... garden," he finishes as a gust of wind sweeps over them.
They are now contemplating the park on the east side of the construction site. A hint of a smile appears on Sherlock's lips. He was right about their position: he successfully found his bearings in that labyrinth.
Giulia and John hold their breath at the sight of the trees and the night sky.
"We're out," she murmurs almost inaudibly.
"Run," John exhorts them, rushing towards the street.
Sherlock follows them at a short distance. His legs slowed down by the frantic rhythm of his thoughts. He feels as if he is missing something, and he is never wrong. At the sound of the word 'bunker', some sort of intuition clicked in his brain; although he cannot catch up with it yet.
They stop near a bench, out of breath.
"What was that trick you pulled down there? You knew there was a secret passage leading to the park?" John breathlessly asks him.
"I didn't know it; I observed and deduced it," he corrects him. "As I said, Cathy organised that room like the Führerbunker. And since Hitler's dead body was cremated in the Reich Chancellery Garden outside his bunker, I presumed that a pile of ash beside a partition wall couldn't just result from poor cleaning. If you remember, she said that we would find our way out, and that's why she led us to that corridor. She knew we would choose the only door that she had intentionally left open."
His face clouds over, leading him to one obvious conclusion. "That room was meant for someone else, though. I can only guess that she had been preparing this emergency shelter for her twin sister, counting that her sibling would be able to decipher all the history-related clues that signalled the exit."
Giulia lets out a relieved sigh. "Who would've thought history would save my life one day?"
"Boy, that young lady is really fond of World War II," John says, shaking his head in disbelief.
"True. She's so keen on warfare that she turned her lair into a bunker just like—" Sherlock stops dead, listening to his own words. The gears relentlessly turning inside his head come to a sudden halt as the final piece falls into place.
"Wolf's Lair," he murmurs. He shuts his eyes while Cathy's voice echoes in his head: "I need to accomplish one last mission," she had said.
"What did you mumble?" John furrows his brow, getting annoyed at Sherlock's frequent visits to his mind palace.
Sherlock cracks his eyes open and stares at him.
"Did you hear what Cathy said when the terrorists showed up?"
"No. I was momentarily busy preventing my skull from turning into a colander," John shoots back.
"She called her hideout Wolf's Lair. Does this name ring a bell?" Holmes's gaze is so intense that John is compelled to look away, ill-at-ease with his friend's inquisition of his general knowledge.
He shrugs. "Not sure, maybe. It does sound familiar: I probably studied it in school, a lifetime ago."
"Let me refresh your memory, then. Wolf's Lair, in German Wolfsschanze, was Adolf Hitler's military headquarters on the Eastern Front during the war."
"Hold on, I thought she tried to re-create Hitler's bunker in Berlin," Giulia objects. She hates it when her genius flatmate makes it impossible for her to follow his train of thought.
"Yes and no. That was the clue left in the room with the emergency exit. But she is very fond of history, so she made another reference that I didn't immediately catch. Wolf's Lair was also the scene of a failed assassination attempt against Hitler: the so-called '20 July plot'. And that is Cathy's last mission: killing the führer," Sherlock concludes in a grim tone.
"Isn't she a bit late?" John sarcastically replies, earning a stern look from Sherlock.
"Maybe neither of you can speak German, but I'm pretty sure you both know that the English translation of führer is—"
"Leader," they pronounce simultaneously.
"She wants to kill the leader of the terror cell," Giulia realises, shocked.
"Bingo." Sherlock beams at her and turns around, heading back to the construction site they have just fled. "I have to go back." It's the only explanation he provides them.
"Are you kidding? Those terrorists are probably still tracking us. You can't walk back in there. That's too reckless, even for you." John struggles to keep his voice down, even though he is boiling with rage. Does his friend have any idea what surviving means?
Sherlock half-turns to him. "She's going to kill him, John."
"Yeah, and the victim is a terrorist leader. Who cares?" Watson rolls his eyes.
"John, you don't understand—" Sherlock protests but is immediately interrupted by him.
"No, I don't. In fact, I can barely recognise you. You undervalue your own life all the time and now you're concerned about the survival of a criminal?"
"No, I'm not. He could be tortured and executed for all that I care. But if she kills him now, I will never be able to interrogate him. And I must do it: I need answers. I want to bring this cell down," Holmes affirms stubbornly.
John shakes his head, showing his signature disappointed, tight-lipped smile.
"Here's the Sherlock Holmes I know, the man who always puts his life at risk just because he needs to know," he spits out every word tartly. He knows that there is nothing left to say, and he is all too aware of his friend's stubbornness; he can see a glint of determination shimmering in his eyes right now.
Sherlock finally finds the strength to look straight into John's pale blue eyes.
"Keep Giulia safe and stay away from the building. Are we clear?"
Watson stares back at him for a long instant before nodding quickly, speechless.
"Behave, you two. I'll be back in ten minutes." He winks at them and runs away.
John watches his silhouette disappear into the night, then turns to Giulia.
"I'm sorry. This insane situation took an unexpected turn, and I still haven't checked on you. Are you alright?"
She touches her arms and legs as if to ensure that all limbs are accounted for, then flashes him a faint smile.
"A bit upside down, but I'm fine."
The moans of sirens wail in the distance: the police are close.
"Good. We should alert Lestrade, now. I suppose someone in the neighbourhood must have heard the gunshots and called the police, but it's better to let them know exactly what we're dealing with. Half of the terrorist squad is here, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask for adequate backup."
After a few minutes of calls with Scotland Yard, he eventually pockets his phone and tilts his head with a pensive expression.
"Wolf's lair. How could he recall that? How can his brain work so fast? As I said, I remember I studied it at school, and now it just came back to my mind. I did a research project on that German headquarters," he speaks freely, as childhood recollections come and go.
"That one specifically? Why?" Giulia asks. She hasn't spent a lot of time with her new flatmates yet, and she hopes to have more occasions for a chat, especially with John, who seems the most human of the two. It would be nice to sit down in the living room and let him talk, just talk, about whatever he feels like sharing. He seems reserved; it's clear that he is still readjusting to civilian life. In the end, that's all she knows about him: he is a retired Army doctor who got shot in the field—which makes more logical sense than Sherlock's made-up occupation as 'consulting detective' anyway. She wouldn't mind knowing a bit more about their life, possibly without being chased and shot at.
"I liked the name," he replies automatically, lost in thought. "I remember it surprised me that the whole complex comprised eighty bunkers." Some details resurface distinctly from the mists of his memory. "They were so colossal that, at the end of the war, aerial bombardment didn't provoke severe damage. They managed to blow them up only through massive explosives..." he trails off.
And it's like a brick has hit him in the head; the blood turns cold in his veins.
"Oh, God." The words die away in his mouth. He instinctively leaps forward, crying out, "SHERLOCK!"
At that exact moment, a tremendous explosion knocks the two of them down while the building collapses upon itself. The crash of the detonation reverberates through their chests for seconds on end. John coughs spasmodically and props up on his knees and palms with difficulty. He squints ahead, trying to ignore all the dust that has lifted from the ground. He stares at what remains of the construction site: a pile of rubble and flames rising towards the night sky.
While facing the very hell, one single thought possesses his mind: my best friend was in there.