All Souls Day. Part 2. Chapter Four: Scorched Earth
Title: All Souls Day, Part 2. Chapter Four: Scorched Earth
author: ghislainem70
rating: NC-17
word count: 3,500 this chapter (61,000 Parts One and Two together so far)
Warnings: graphic violence, explicit sex (entire work)
Disclaimer: I own nothing. All honours to Messrs Gatiss, Moffat, BBC et al.
Summary: Mycroft, Lestrade, Sherlock and John race to foil a terrorist conspiracy called the Day of Wrath.
All Souls' Day. Part Two, Chapter Four: Scorched Earth
You can tell
When you feel love.
And I can tell
That there is something
in your eye.
It’s a tear,
falling down.
I can tell
That you are in love.
And I know
What that little drop is
in your eye.
It’s a tear of happiness
No more fear or loneliness.
Lyrics to Feel Alive, all rights reserved Benassi Brothers
In an abandoned brewery on the outskirts of London, a portable lantern cast a lonely pool of yellow light in a vast, dank underground barrel room.
A single figure sat slumped in the light. He hiccuped a little; the worst of the retching seemed to be over. A black-gloved hand tossed him a bottle of water.
"Drink more. Anti-nausea agent. It will help for a little while. Then- it won’t matter," said a voice from the darkness. Singh drank.
Singh knew that voice. This was not the rough voice of the Aguirre’s henchman, the man who spoke Euskara. The man who had done the unthinkable and opened the plutonium case. No, it was impossible.
Utterly impossible.
But then the tall figure was stepping into the light. He pulled off his silicone mask, the black moustache, removed the dark contact lenses. In his black-gloved hands was a gun with a long silencer.
Singh gave a hopeless groan. He wasn’t in the hands of his Day of Wrath confederates, after all. These men did not belong to Aguirre.
This was, if such a thing were possible, worse.
"Holmes," he said dully.
His mind was sluggish but even so, he perfectly comprehended that Mycroft Holmes’ possession of the plutonium core, intercepting him at Ascot, could only mean that their plans were foiled.
* * *
Moments before, Singh was possessed of the satisfaction that even in the face of death - Aguirre, like the viper that he was, betraying even him: his most important, his most highly placed confederate - the Day of Wrath would be fulfilled; and with it, his vengeance would be complete. Thus rendering death sweet.
"I have a message for you," Mycroft said. He stepped forward and handed Singh a small object. His hands were not bound. He reached out to take it. It was a Roman coin. He did not have to read the inscription, but his finger ran over it just the same.
DIES IRAE. The Day of Wrath.
"From a Certain Person," Mycroft continued, "whom, I’m sure you can appreciate, can never overlook your - what is the word - some might say, betrayal - I would say, folly."
Singh flushed with humiliation. Mycroft, of course, was striking were it would cause the most pain.
"What message?"
"'Et tu, Brute?'"
"Ha. Always the ironist, Holmes. Apparently you have our ‘knife.’ Caesar won’t be struck down after all. They say justice is blind. She must be."
"Justice! Thank you for coming to the point so quickly. I wish you to explain to me -- and please be brief, you don’t really have a great deal of time - how you feel that this - plot - serves justice. Oh, we understand, now, the means: the canisters, the plutonium core, the MOX shipment - yes, even that, we’ve just learned! Don’t look so surprised. For the last I cannot claim credit. But you know how clever my little brother is."
Singh shook his head. "Why should I give you the satisfaction."
"Satisfaction! This is a very deep betrayal of your country, Singh. I suppose you know you are the greatest traitor since Philby. If you had succeeded, you would have caused far more deaths than the Cambridge Five ever did. You have a few hours left before the radiation damage to your organs causes your death. A very painful one, I’m sure you know. This is an opportunity for you to make your manifesto. I’m listening. And of course, the cameras are running."
Singh shook his head in the negative. Mycroft sighed. He pulled out his mobile and showed Singh a photograph.
It was a serious-looking blonde woman, speaking at a conference.
"She goes first," Mycroft said.
Singh’s head sank.
Mycroft showed him the second photograph.
Two young children, a boy and a girl, aged perhaps five and seven; the boy fair like his mother, the girl darker, like her father, but with her mother’s blue eyes.
"They go next. After they watch what happens to their mother," Mycroft said calmly.
Singh made an effort to be stoic. "I do not believe you. You wouldn’t do it, Holmes."
"Really, Singh, I thought you knew me better. Of course I wouldn’t. Do you know who those men are? The ones that brought us from Ascot?"
Singh hadn’t really thought about it. But he remembered the names, now: Nikolai. Pashi.
"No," he said.
"Chechens. That’s right! They owe me a favor. The sort of favor that I don’t mind admitting to you I prefer - how shall I put it - to leave to the professionals."
"It’s a trick."
"You don’t really have much time left to find out, do you?"
* * *
Singh realized he was feeling very dizzy, and the room was starting to spin. He might faint. The radiation must be hitting him harder now. The core had been within eight feet of him when Mycroft opened the case. He knew what that meant.
Mycroft sighed. "Very well. You want proof. I understand that. Pay attention, please."
Mycroft held up his mobile. Singh heard his wife’s voice, and then his children’s. He held up his hand.
"Turn it off. Stop. Tell them to stop. You’ll find out most of it anyway now whether I tell you or not. If they stop, I’ll talk. Give me your word, Holmes."
"I give you my word that if you tell me the truth, your family will not be harmed. My word, unlike yours, means something."
"I know it," Singh said bitterly. "I’m counting on you, Holmes."
Mycroft spoke into the mobile in Chechen.
"Let me speak to her, Holmes. Just a word or two. And then I’ll tell you."
Mycroft held up the mobile to Singh’s lips. "Darling, Helen, are you all right now? Are the children?"
"Yes, Sammy."
"You’ll find out, later, what’s happened. You’ll understand, I hope. I love you and the children. Take good care of them. Goodbye, Helen."
"Goodbye, Sammy."
Mycroft took the mobile away and put it in his pocket.
"You mentioned justice, I believe. Start there. Realize of course that all traitors, all terrorists, think their cause is just. And so I already knew you would bring justice into the story: ‘Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.’ Samuel Johnson. What, precisely, are the crimes you believe you are avenging?"
"It all starts," Singh said, "With your grandfather."
Of any words he had ever expected to fall from Singh’s lips at this very moment, these were, possibly, the very last.
* * *
"My grandfather?"
"You know my file," Singh said.
"You emigrated from Borneo when you were twelve. With your mother. You became a British subject, naturally. Your innate abilities permitted you to make up for your early upbringing, which I understand to have been - forgive me - backward in the extreme. Scholarship to Oxford, where you took firsts in South Asian languages and history. Tapped by MI6 quite early. Merely average in field work, but a brilliant administrator. Your name was brought forward as a coordinator for the Royal Protection Command. And so I completely comprehend how it was that you were in a position to plan to subject the young Royals to radioactive contamination at Ascot. But why?"
"That is the end of the story. I want to start at the beginning. And the beginning starts with your grandfather. Captain Reginald St. John Holmes. He was a junior officer attached to Churchill’s Chiefs of Staff - specifically under General William Slim."
"I am well acquainted with my family history," Mycroft said sternly.
"Perhaps you know, then, that is was your grandfather’s memorandum suggesting that Borneo be destroyed as a scorched earth tactic that swayed Churchill’s chiefs of staff and ultimately, Churchill himself. And so, Borneo was allowed to fall."
Mycroft swallowed. He had been aware of it. He had read his grandfather’s diaries. Scorched earth tactics were banned by the Geneva Convention, but possessed a history of successful employment in battles as varied as the destruction of Carthage by Rome; William the Conqueror’s subjugation of the North of England; Russians against Napoleon’s Grand Army; Stalin against the Germans.
A bitter but effective tactic of last resort.
* * *
"This is not, I would think, the time to debate England’s tactics in the Pacific Theatre," Mycroft said drily.
"But it is! My grandfather was the Assistant Chief of Police for North Borneo. He was a Sikh; you know the British liked to import Sikhs from India as enforcers in their little colonial backwaters. My grandfather made a home in Borneo, he had status, position. He had a beautiful house, a wife, a household. A man of respect. Do you know there were just seventy British altogether in Sandakan at the start of the war? Everything else was run by "the natives." Of which, evidently, my grandfather was considered one. The British abandoned Sandakan, they burned everything, and let the people starve, or be slaughtered by the Japanese."
"In war, people die. British troops died in Borneo; Australians, too."
"Too little, too late. Do you want to know how my grandfather died?"
Mycroft cursed his lack of thoroughness. He was acquainted with Singh’s own story, and a little of that of his parents’ stories. Mycroft had only worked with Singh for the past four years, and while they were sometime rivals, their respective spheres of influence were very different. They had little in common personally; Singh was a staid family man, while Mycroft’s personal life, secretive and conducted on occasion in foreign cities, was very private indeed. It had never been of any importance, Mycroft had thought, for him to know more about Singh. What a mistake.
"We seem to be getting rather far afield from your plot to murder most of the Royal Family. Let alone attacking hundreds of civilians with the canisters, and whatever destruction you could have accomplished with that MOX cargo."
"What happened to it? The MOX ship. You may as well tell me."
"My dear fellow, what do you suppose we have nuclear submarines for? And nuclear salvage teams. The ship is beneath the waves by now."
"You sacrificed the entire crew, then? They weren’t all ours, you know."
"They are not your concern. Please continue. You were on the point of telling me how your grandfather died."
"Yes. You will have heard of the Sandakan Death Marches."
Mycroft nodded to indicate that he had.
"My grandfather - Ranjit Singh - died the mud. In the jungle. North Borneo. The stock of a Japanese rifle cracked open his skull and they slit his throat with a bayonet. They didn’t consider it worth the ammunition to just shoot him, you see. He never got to even hold my father in his arms. My grandmother was pregnant when she left Sandakan, the day the Japanese landed: my father was born in a mountain village. I was born there, too. I cannot possibly make you understand how - primitive, I suppose you would say - the conditions were there. Still are. You, Holmes, grew up on a rather grand estate in Kent."
"Yes. The Japanese officers responsible for the death marches were held responsible, there were war crimes trials, I recall."
"Trials! A temporary humiliation, and then a merciful death by hanging. If my grandfather had not been murdered on the death march trail, he would shortly have died of starvation. They said his body may have weighed as little as ninety pounds, at his death. Ranjit Singh was a large, imposing man before the war. He was skin and bone when he died."
"Most regrettable. And yet, that would again seem to be the fault of the Japanese."
"No, of the British. For abandoning Borneo when it should have been defended. Or the should have given the "natives" the means of defending themselves. There were only twenty guns left to the civilians in Sandakan when the Japanese landed. They were expendable."
"I find it difficult to believe, tragic though your grandfather’s story is, that you conceived a desire to snuff out the entire Royal Family as a consequence."
"Do you? The arrogance. The arrogance of Empire. It is that arrogance must be punished. I was not born in England, Holmes. Borneo is my homeland. My entire life would have had a very different outcome if Borneo had been defended, if my grandfather had not died. I would have been born to wealth, to privilege. Like you. I hate you; I hate all of your kind. Sandakan had a post-war boom that would have brought our family from prosperity to wealth and power. If such a thing can be certain, it would have been certain, then. I don’t believe a person such as yourself, raised under such privileged circumstances, a real son of the Empire, could ever know what it is like to be raised as I was. I am not ashamed of my village. But the term Third World does not really give a picture of how . . . poverty-stricken it is."
"I should think that England has done very well by you - Oxford, MI6, you have been promoted over and over, given positions of trust. A grave mistake, obviously. But you have more to say, I see."
* * *
"You are right. I haven’t finished my story. You know that MI6 thinks you are the traitor, Holmes. You and Detective Inspector Lestrade."
"Yes. That was your doing, obviously. That will be remedied very shortly. I suppose this . . .grudge against my grandfather prompted you to target me. I was not just a target of convenience. But -" Here Mycroft displayed the first visible anger - "you should not have involved Lestrade."
"Oh, but it was most important. I tried to have him killed. You know that. But did you know it was also me that had him abducted? In St-Jean-de-Luz? I had word passed to Elorza’s men that ‘Guy Lamont’ was spying for the French police. I didn’t expect him to walk away from that one!"
Mycroft recalled lifting Lestrade, battered and bleeding, from the filthy floor of the warehouse in St.-Jean-de-Luz, bone fragments piercing his torn skin. It would be very, very easy to put an end to this; he had his gun, he had his bare hands. It would be the work of a moment. But that would be too easy.
If nothing else, Singh would be made to suffer.
"Don’t speak of him. Don’t speak his name. Tell me why this is so personal. I can see you were trying to hurt me. Lestrade was . . . your instrument. You knew it would hurt me. I can’t believe this is down to my grandfather."
"It isn’t. No, it is more personal, much more personal than that. Your grandfather was what I believe used to be called an ‘Orientalist.’ A peculiarly imperialist and colonialist outlook upon Asia and the Middle East. And your father, Lord Anthony Holmes, learned at his knee, I imagine."
"Yes." Mycroft was starting to anticipate what was coming. "And so. You met my father."
"I met your father. In Borneo."
"Do you know what happened to him?" Mycroft and Sherlock’s father, the preeminent enthnobotanist, had disappeared on an expedition to Borneo when Sherlock was just nine years old.
"I do. Nothing could induce me to tell you. Not now."
Singh grinned, horribly, the face of a man about to face an executioner. "I am feeling very unwell, Holmes. I don’t have much time left. You’ve beaten us. We failed. But I can still do this. I am going to my grave now. And I know what happened to your father. And you will never, ever learn what I know."
Mycroft was speechless. The mention of his father, as always, brought back such painful memories that he was sorely pressed to maintain any sort of composure. But he could not give Singh the satisfaction of seeing him suffer, even for this. His father, and his grandfather, deserved his utmost. And so his face remained a frozen and haughty mask.
"Very well," Mycroft said. "Turn off the cameras," he called out.
* * *
Singh looked afraid now.
"I have something to show you, Singh," Mycroft said. He reached behind him and brought out the plutonium case. Singh looked at it with fascination and repulsion.
"You’re mad, put it down," Singh said.
"Why? Surely you’re not concerned for me. And you’ve already received a fatal dose."
Singh laughed, then. "It’s instinct, I suppose."
Mycroft opened the case. Singh gasped. Mycroft pulled out the dull lead-colored sphere. And flung it at Singh, who screamed.
The ball bounced harmlessly off of Singh’s chest and rolled off into a corner.
Mycroft reached into the case and switched off the little blue light hidden in the bottom.
"What is this?" Singh gasped, hyperventilating now, faced with an alteration in reality that his mind could not grasp.
"What this is, Singh, is that this is not your plutonium core. You haven’t been subjected to radiation poisoning. You aren’t dying. I gave you a very mild poison and a hallucinogenic, to make you think you were ill. Nothing that will cause you more than a headache by tomorrow.
"And I’ve done nothing to your wife and children. You let your imagination run away with you, Singh. That was from a recording of an ordinary conversation between you and your wife. Think, what did she actually say? And the photos, just part of your file. Nothing sinister.
"And so, Singh, you had better come to grips with the fact that you’re going to see tomorrow. You’re going to live a very, very long time. And with the video we just made, you’re going to be jailed for treason for the rest of your life. After a very long and tedious trial.
"And at some point, you’re going to want to talk to me about my father, after all. I can wait."
* * *
Mycroft thought that as many men as he had ever killed (and he knew the precise number, and it was rather large), he had never seen a man’s face show such devastation, such shock.
Mycroft would far preferred to have shot the Singh here and now; even better, to have broken his neck for the satisfaction of feeling it snap under his hands as recompense for his having dared to harm Greg.
But as he left France for Dover, he had realised that he had no alternative but to bring Singh to justice. Real justice. The kind of justice that Greg knew, that Greg served, and respected, and helped to make happen in the performance of his ordinary duties with the Yard, every day. And that sort of justice demanded evidence, a trial; a right to defense by the accused, the vote of a jury, and a legal sentence handed down by a judge in an open court of law.
If he didn’t do this, he would not be able to face Lestrade, ever.
And while he had no idea if he ever really would have that chance, he knew he had to stay innocent of at least this, if nothing else. Singh’s story had made it much more difficult for Mycroft to hold to this. But he had made his resolution, and was determined to keep it.
The past was past, the dead, even his own father, were gone. Greg was, thank God, alive. Mycroft allowed himself a moment to hope that perhaps, Lestrade would be proud of what he had done today. He astonished himself by finding that his vision was blurring and a single burning tear dropped from his eye. He dashed it away and forced himself to return to his iron composure.
The Day of Wrath was over.
* * *
Mycroft called out: "Now, if you please," and a dozen officers burst into the room, headed by a Crown Prosecutor and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Osborne of the Counter-Terrorism Command of the Metropolitan Police Service. Singh was cuffed, and Osborne read from prepared charges:
"Sanjay Singh: I arrest you on the suspicion of high treason, and for conspiring to commit acts of terrorism, for conspiracy to commit murder against Mycroft Holmes, and for conspiracy to commit kidnapping and murder against Gregory Lestrade. You do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but I must warn you that if you fail to mention any fact which you rely on in your defence in court, your failure to take this opportunity to mention it may be treated in court as supporting any relevant evidence against you. If you do wish to say anything, what you say may be given in evidence."
To be continued . . .
Listen to Feel Alive:Feel Alive
Note: The Holmes brothers' father, Lord Anthony Holmes', disappearance in Borneo when Sherlock was a child was mentioned in Chapter Three of my fic The Irresistibility of Orbits, Part Two: The Forgetting of Things Past, Number 6 of the Indestrutcible series and also in Chapter Eleven, "Life Clock," of In The Footsteps of the Master: A Hitchcockian Thriller, Number 7 of the Indestructible Series.
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