All Souls’ Day. Part One. Chapter Ten: "Those Down In Hades."

[ghislainem70]

Title: All Souls’ Day. Part One, Chapter Ten: "Those Down In Hades."
author: ghislainem70
rating: NC-17
Word count: 3,600 this chapter; 43,200 so far.
Warnings: graphic violence, explicit sex
Disclaimer: I own nothing.  All honours to Messrs Gatiss, Moffat, BBC et al.



"The Rest I Will Tell To Those Down In Hades."
". . . What we protect here like sleepless watchmen,

Those wounds and secrets locked inside us,

Day after day with overbearing anxiety--

We will tell all, freely and clearly, there."

"Add this," said the sophist half smiling,

"if they speak of such things down there.

And if they care about them, any more."

Cavafy, tr.Seamus Heaney

"They don’t really believe it. But they called the local coppers," Lestrade said of his call to the Spanish police. "I don’t blame them. We get a dozen calls a week, claiming some kind of terrorist threat. Nearly always come to naught."

"And the Yard? You spoke to Yount?" Mycroft asked. Yount was Lestrade’s Superintendent.

"Somebody I didn’t know came on, wouldn’t put me through. Didn’t smell right. I rang off."

"They’ve been thorough, then. God knows what lies they have spread. You’re a black sheep now, too."

Lestrade’s blood began to boil, but he stopped himself. This was bigger than him, bigger than - anything. If they got out of this, well, he would get to the bottom of it: but now, the Yard seemed like a distant dream, trivial even.

"Mycroft - they’ll be arrested - John, Sherlock, all of them - quarantined - God - you don’t think - Mycroft, are they safe? Are Sherlock and John safe?"

* * *

Sherlock backed away, murmuring into his mobile while aiming his pistol at Echavarri. John couldn’t hear anything. At length Sherlock stepped forward, menacing.

"You’re supposed to contact someone, aren’t you, to let them know you delivered the case safely." Echavarri hung his head. "Aren’t you." Sherlock accused, brandishing the gun. Echavarri nodded, terrified.

"Make the call," John said.

"I know the number, but not the code - he -" Echavarri nodded at the dead man, "he has the code."

Sherlock and John stared at each other in dismay.

"What happens if you don’t make the call?"

"They will be here soon."

"How soon?"

"Fifteen minutes. Maybe less, now."

John was already moving. "I’ll search him. I already touched him. What’s done is done. He might have the code hidden on him, written on something." His voice sounded hopeless and distant and this make Sherlock feel very cold and lost.

"Stop, John. Don’t touch him, please, don’t. He won’t have written it down, and anyway . . .we want them to know we have the case. We want them to know that we’re on to them. It’s time for them to come to us." He held out his mobile. "Tell me the number you were to call."

Echavarri told him.

After a moment, Sherlock spoke into the mobile. "Echavarri’s with me. I don’t have the code. But I have your case." He waited, but clearly whoever was there wasn’t willing to speak. Sherlock rang off.

"Sherlock, Jesus, this is not a game. Call the French police, call Interpol, call - whoever you call for something like this. This is bigger than us, Sherlock. Do it, do it now."

"I already have," Sherlock said quietly. "A certain number, a clandestine agency . . . I promise you, they will come. You need treatment. All we have to do is keep the case safe until they get here. Do you feel nauseous, John? Headache? Fever?" His eyes were wide, glassy. John thought he had never seen Sherlock genuinely afraid until this moment.

John shook his head. "No. Not yet. I’ll be all right, Sherlock."

"A high dose will cause vomiting in less than ten minutes. If you don’t feel nauseous for more than an hour, it is a - survivable dose. They’ll be here soon, John."

"Why did you tell them we have the case, Sherlock?"

"Because I’m betting that Aguirre himself might just come for that case."

* * *

Mycroft’s face was like stone. "If they’ve been - contaminated - neither you nor I can help them now. They won’t be free to go even if they weren’t. We have far worse things to consider."

"Worse than John and Sherlock possibly - God, I can’t bear it!"

A thousand recollections of Sherlock, John, his deep respect and friendship for both, even his doomed love for John, all overwhelmed him, a loss unbearable. Unthinkable. "We can’t just leave them alone down there, I tell you - we can go down now, bring them out, Mycroft -"

"Greg, no, you can’t. We must bear it. We must. And we can’t help them, not with this. They would agree: Now, our most urgent concern is whoever will be sent to recover that case. Whoever is coming will be more than a match for the French police, I assure you."

"Well, you're forgetting something. There's us."

Mycroft's smile was bitter. "I hadn't forgotten. There's us."

* * *

They waited silently, watching the windows below for signs of movement, struggle, straining for sounds of gunfire. There was nothing but the deep silence of the French countryside.

"How long do we wait?"

"Hmm. . .Gallic efficiency. They’ll come very soon now."

Mycroft realized that the horrific deadliness of the nuclear threat meant that it was more vital than ever before that he discover the identity of the MI6 traitor.

A traitor striving to seal the success of the Day of Wrath, at this very moment - while they strove blindly against it.

As he ceaselessly processed the known facts, one in particular demanded his attention. Lestrade had said that he was certain - the man who tried to kill him in the alley in St. Jean-de-Luz was one of the men Mycroft himself had set for Lestrade’s protection at his own house in St. John’s Wood.

Protection Mycroft had personally ordered when, unexpectedly, he was ordered to leave London in immediate pursuit of the terrorist, Aguirre.

Protection that Mycroft had ordered for one reason: He wanted Lestrade to stay in his own highly secure home, safe from reprisals by Russian gangsters seeking revenge for Lestrade’s interference in Liverpool.

Mycroft had shown Lestrade photographs of the agents he had assigned to the protection detail. But Lestrade recognized none of them but Agent 009, Robert Roussel, who had died in his arms, delivering the Dies Irae coin to Lestrade as his last act.

And yet, Lestrade was certain that he had seen his assailant outside of Mycroft’s house.

Mycroft realized his mistake. Someone had replaced one of his agents without his knowledge.

It was this man who Lestrade had shot in that alley, a man who had somehow tracked them to France.

"Describe again the man in the alley, in St. Jean-de-Luz. The man you shot," Mycroft said urgently.

Lestrade shook his head. "It was dark, Mycroft- "

"Right or left handed?"

"Left," Lestrade said instantly.

"Hair?"

"Dark, probably. . . or a cap; and not tall, smallish frame, I'd say."

"Eyes?"

Lestrade concentrated. They had fought; he had kept his eyes on the knife; but in the final moment, their eyes had met. As though he knew the bullet was coming. And in that instant, Lestrade had seen them. Killer’s eyes.

"Very blue. Startling color . . .could have been contact lenses, a disguise."

Mycroft was closing his eyes now, sifting through his orderly photographic memory. The eyes, the startling blue eyes, left-handed . . .surely it couldn’t be true?

* * *

"Look at this, Greg, carefully." Mycroft showed Lestrade a photograph on his mobile. A slightly-built, dark-haired man with piercing electric-blue eyes.

Greg looked, and remembered the sudden transformation in those eyes to wide, almost innocent astonishment as he fell to the ground.

"Mycroft. This is the man. Who is he?"

Mycroft bowed his head to conceal the fact that he was utterly astounded.

* * *

Since finding Lestrade’s photograph, stained with blood, under Ayala’s body, Mycroft had ceaselessly been processing, sifting, considering, rejecting amongst possible candidates: Who in MI6 was a mole, a traitor; in league with the Day of Wrath terrorists, or worse, their mastermind?

The man in the photograph, the man Lestrade had shot, was a sometime agent going by the name "Hawke." Pretentious.

"Hawke" was a hired gun. He had been used, to Mycroft’s knowledge, just once by MI6: very briefly, and that more than five years ago. Under the auspices of Mycroft’s closest colleague.

A colleague considered, in some circles, as Mycroft’s equal (which Mycroft himself found extraordinarily insulting):

Sammy Singh.

Although Hawke was a hired gun, and therefore could be working for anyone at any time, Mycroft could not believe that this was coincidence. No, this had to be Singh’s hand at work.

Singh was the traitor.

* * *

Sammy Singh was, of course, a British citizen. Mycroft summoned forth his recall of the man’s file.

Singh’s family had immigrated to England after the British protectorates of Malaysia had been decimated in World War II.

Sammy Singh, among his other multitudinous duties, was a sometime liaison between MI5, MI6 and SO14.

SO14 is the Metropolitan Police’s Royalty Protection command, established to provide personal security to the Royal Family.

* * *

Singh’s family, refugees from . . . Borneo, specifically, Mycroft now recalled.

Borneo. Where the Day of Wrath terrorists had flaunted a gruesome beheading as a foretaste of actions still to come.

Borneo. Where Abu Sayyaf, the "Sword of God" Islamic separatist movement, plied their trade: kidnaping of tourists, beheadings, ransom demands.

Among Abu Sayyaf’s numerous other ambitious plots had been a foiled assassination attempt on the Pope.

* * *

Mycroft considered the bare facts:

Abu Sayyaf’s stated goal: the establishment of an independent Muslim state within the Philippines.

The various paramilitary splinter groups - disaffected by the recent cease-fires in Northern Ireland.

ETA - seeking a separate state for the Basque people.

He considered other prominent separatist terrorist groups: the Chechen Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade, with known Al Qaeda ties; the defeated Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, known to be attempting to reform in exile.

Sammy Singh. Who had ties leading back to Malaysia, to Borneo; and who had very intimate knowledge of, and access to, the entire security scheme for the protection of the Royal Family.

A series of coins, depicting an image very like that of Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar.

Instead of "EID MAR," or The Ides of March, the date of Caesar’s assassination in the Senate, someone had taken the trouble to replicate this ancient coin with the new inscription, DIES IRAE. The Day of Wrath.

Sammy Singh’s hired gun, Hawke, had been sent to kill Lestrade, after Lestrade was presumably discovered as the last person to speak to Agent Robert Roussel, holding the DIES IRAE coin in his hand when he died.

Sherlock had revealed that three men who received DIES IRAE coins from Ayala were here, tonight.

The Day of Wrath was to be All Souls’ Day.

The day of prayer for the souls of the dead.

And on that day, deadly action would be taken, action undoubtedly calculated to bring its intended targets to their knees. All this Mycroft had pieced together, fact upon fact, until the only missing pieces were the only ones that mattered: who - or what - were the targets? And what means of destruction?

He considered Sherlock’s warning. "Radioactive."

Mycroft considered, then, the 2006 assassination of Russian dissident and former KGB/FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, by polonium-210 radiation poisoning. Just last month, in October 2011, the Coroner of St. Pancras had announced a new public inquest into this officially unsolved murder.

It had taken Litvinenko three agonizing weeks to die. Presciently, Litvinenko had once said, "It was considered in our service that poison is an easier weapon than a pistol." His death by radiation poisoning was said to be "sadistically designed to trigger a slow, torturous and spectacular demise."

Marcus Brutus and the conspirators dispatched Julius Caesar with knives.

The Day of Wrath terrorists intended to dispatch the modern Caesars with a weapon more painful by far than the knife.

* * *

"You know him, who was he?" Lestrade asked of the blue-eyed man in the photograph.

"An independent contractor of sorts, once under my colleague Sammy Singh. Singh has to be our traitor. He’s a coordinator for SO14, Greg. You understand what that means."

Lestrade processed this. "That man down there came in hot - radioactive. It’s got to be big, then. If Singh’s our man, and he has access to the royals - it has to be an assassination plot. But how would they bloody get that stuff close to any of them? Impossible."

"Nothing is impossible, I’m afraid. You’ve heard of the incident of the visitor to the Queen’s bedchamber, of course? Just last week, a man was arrested for shooting at a window at the White House. Trying to kill the President. When I started after Aguirre, he had been seen at Ascot. Ascot is very close to Windsor. The Royal Family attend events at Ascot frequently. There is a National Hunt race, the Coral Ascot - in a week. Mycroft consulted his mobile.

"The Queen is in residence at Windsor until she and the family leave for Sandringham in three weeks’ time. In the meantime, the young Princes, the Duchess of Cambridge, and other of the younger royals, are scheduled to attend the Coral Ascot."

* * *

Sherlock and John froze as a small sound came from the rear of the farm house. In the instant of hesitation, the bound man hurled his chair to the floor, shouting out. And several things happened at once.

John could see in the shadows of the dark hall that figures were, inexplicably, rushing towards them, coming literally out of nowhere.

Sherlock was shooting. One of the figures went down.

Two more jumped into the room over his body, shooting.

Echavarri’s head exploded in pink mist.

Sherlock hit the floor, blood gushing, pumping from his shoulder, and rolled behind a long sofa.

John dove and rolled toward the deadly case. He cradled it with his body and put his shaking hands around it.

He held his gun to the lock.

"Stop, or I’ll shoot it open!" He screamed over the gunfire.

* * *

Everything became very still in the room. Everyone stared at John’s hands, shaking, holding the case.

"You don’t want a dose of your own, then." John deadpanned.

"You’ll die too, and so will your friend Sherlock Holmes, if you open that," said one of the men. His English was heavily accented. He was not young; strongly built, with strong dark features that John now could recognize as typically Basque. Sherlock had shown him a photograph from Mycroft’s files.

Aguirre.

"Yes. I’m already poisoned. So odds are - I’m dead already. We’re in the countryside. I didn’t see another farm or house for miles around.

"So you see, whatever happens when I open this case, I’d rather it happened here than wherever you fucking bastards were planning on taking it."

* * *

"You’re wrong, Doctor Watson. If you open that case, the explosion will destroy everything within twenty-five kilometers. More than a hundred thousand people. Are you willing to do that much, Doctor Watson?"

"I’d have thought that would please you," John said. "If that’s true, why would you want to stop me? The case - It’s not a bomb. You’re bluffing."

Aguirre turned his gun on the sofa where Sherlock was hidden. "Put your gun down, Doctor Watson, or I’ll kill Holmes there. I can see his shadow." John saw that it was true.

He couldn’t risk looking at Sherlock; couldn’t risk moving his gun. He thought he could sense Sherlock about to try to move, when all the lights went out.

* * *

John could see nothing, but heard breaking glass; the thunk of a bullet fired through a silencer; grunting, scuffling and sharp cries from blows. Finally, a crunching thump.

And the lights came back on.

The first thing John saw was Mycroft gently bending over him, prying the case from his trembling grip and setting it gingerly on the ground.

Sherlock was lying in an expanding pool of blood. His blood mingled with the blood from Echavarri’s corpse, virtually decapitated by a large caliber gunshot to the head.

The two intruders were bound on the floor, bruised and bleeding, but alive.

"He’s Aguirre," John said. "Mycroft - they . . came out of nowhere."

"Yes," Mycroft said. "Keep your gun on them, John. I must help Sherlock."

John watched, agonized, as Mycroft examined Sherlock’s wound and bound it up with a strip from his own shirt, tying it off with his belt. John didn’t think he could have done much better under the circumstances and resisted going to him. Until he knew he was clean and clear, he shouldn’t touch Sherlock, or anyone.

Sherlock’s face was very white. John’s entire world narrowed to the mesmerizing sight of his chest rising and falling, very faintly.

* * *

Through the shattered window John saw flashing lights, a siren. It seemed an hallucination. Something in him had truly believed they would never leave this farmhouse alive.

Then there was a great confusion as the door burst open, and officers wearing black Demron full body suits and masks stormed in. A figure in a full bomb suit crept towards the case.

By the time John looked up again, Mycroft and Aguirre were gone.

He kept his mouth shut.

* * *

John and Sherlock were swiftly removed to a temporary enclosure on the farm property. The two (known) captives were nowhere to be seen; nor were the corpses. John wondered if they would ever be seen again. He wondered if he and Sherlock would ever be seen again. He understood the score.

John started answering questions posed first in French, then English, and submitted to the removal of all of his clothing and a strong blast in a portable shower enclosure outside. He was scanned repeatedly.

He heard the telltale chatter of the meter. They didn’t have to tell him what that meant.

As Sherlock was borne away, he flashed back to the first day he met Sherlock Holmes:

"If you were dying, if you were murdered, in the very last seconds, what would you say?" Sherlock demanded: arrogant, hectic, in a frenzy to solve the puzzle.

"Please God, let me live." John replied. Simply. Calmly.

"Use your imagination," Sherlock spat back derisively.

"I don't have to."

Sherlock blinked, perhaps; for less than an instant did Sherlock stop to absorb this, before his brain ricocheted back to the alluring mystery of the pink phone.

Months later, when everything was different, Sherlock asked him about that day, and John told him.

"Please God, let him live," John whispered now.

They began his treatment.

* * *

Mycroft dragged Aguirre down the tunnel. While he dragged, he told Aguirre a story.

"The worst mining accident in Europe happened, right here. The Courrieres mine disaster. Over a thousand men died in these very coal mines. There were innumerable pitheads, you see, connecting to galleries on many different levels. No one could interpret the maps of the mine, they were so complex. There were at least a hundred kilometers of tunnels in that mine alone. These old mines are everywhere in the Pas de Calais. When you and your - confederate appeared, I knew you could only have gotten in by means of a tunnel. It had to be a disused mine shaft."

Aguirre grimaced as well as he was able through his gag.

They were indeed in an abandoned mine shaft, leading down. Mycroft dragged Aguirre along, a flashlight tucked under his arm.

Eventually Mycroft deemed that they were well out of earshot of anyone above.

"I will leave you down here, Aguirre. Tie you up and gag you, and bury you under the rubble, down here in the dark. No one will know where you are. No one will ever find you. An ignominius end. I could even make you help me do it. You are familiar, perhaps, with Poe? I have always admired "A Cask of Amontillado." No sherry here, sadly."

Mycroft propped Aguirre against a rocky wall and stood against the opposite wall.

"Of course, if you told me what I want to know, I could be. . . merciful. I am not without connections. Your connection is with Sammy Singh, I believe. I assure you that my reach is higher. And while you are considering that, my dear fellow, I believe I shall search you."

* * *

Mycroft was rewarded with a mobile, a folded map, and a DIES IRAE coin through which a small hole had been drilled, and which Aguirre wore on a chain about his neck.

"Charming souvenir of a failed escapade," Mycroft sneered.

"Not failed," Aguirre gasped through his gag. Mycroft pulled it down.

"Don’t scream."

"We didn’t fail," Aguirre repeated. His grin was reptilian in the gloom.

"I’ll leave you now, then. To contemplate your success," Mycroft said. He began piling stones over Aguirre’s feet.

"I won’t tell you anything," Aguirre spat.

"I find that men such as yourself usually wish to ensure that the world knows of their brilliance. How will the world know, if I leave you here?"

"They’ll know what I want them to know. The rest - I’ll tell it in hell. I’ll see you there, soon enough. Maybe I’ll tell you then."

Mycroft contemplated Aguirre. He saw that he was not intending to talk. He had a plan for that.

Mycroft began piling the stones higher. There were a great many of them. He was in a hurry, but he went as slowly as he dared.

He left a very small opening for Aguirre’s face.

"Down in hell! How quaint," Mycroft said, standing over the freshly made barrow. "Have you ever stopped to consider - what if nobody down there cares?"

He made his way back, quietly, up the passage.

And switched off the flashlight.

* * *

To be continued . . .

listen to Maximal Crazy:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNHEW2V9oqY

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