by Lavie Tidhar
Did we learn anything from that evening? Krupp was sitting with his people in a box. The Queen herself was in attendance, in the Royal Box, of course. Lord Babbage made a rare – one of his last, in fact – public appearances. The cream and crop of London society was there. That rogue Flashman, toadying beside the Queen… I always had a soft spot for him – you know where you stand with a liar and a bully better than you do with a hero, sometimes. There is often only a fine distinction between the two.
But I'm digressing. We spotted nothing that evening, hard as we tried. Could a clandestine meeting be carried out in the open? That is, sometimes, the best way… but who was Krupp there for? It had even crossed my mind it was Mycroft behind it all, Mycroft who, to my surprise, also attended that evening, sitting in the Holmes family's own box, close by the Queen's…
Could Krupp be meeting the Bookman?
Babbage?
And it occurred to me all this was foreground, it was scenery, it was stagecraft – and that I was looking in the wrong place.
I had to look behind the scenes. I had to look backstage.
Where little Abe Stoker moved about, unobtrusively.
"A facilitator," Miss Havisham said, fondly. "An unobtrusive little man, a clerk really. Going about his business – which also means touring on the continent, and corresponding overseas, and in so many ways he could have been the perfect deep-cover spy, undistinguished from his cover story. I fell in love with him a little, then. When I realised this. I told Mycroft, that very night. We had to study Stoker. Learn him, and make our approach. We had to find out who he represented. He was a liaison, I could see that clearly. But between what powers? This insight, together with the German defector's story, added up. I pushed…"
"But?" Lucy said.
Miss Havisham shrugged. "Nothing came of it."
"Nothing?"
"Fogg argued, but Mycroft approved the plan. And nothing happened. Little Stoker was just who he appeared to be – a notparticularly-important theatrical manager of little talent or ambition. We had teams on him round-the-clock for a month, then it got dropped to periodic spot-checks, and finally it got dropped entirely. And there," Miss Havisham said, "the matter rested, until now. Why, has something changed?"
Lucy smiled. She stood up. "Routine inquiry," she said. And, "I had better head back into town before it is dark."
Miss Havisham smiled too, and also stood up. Her look said Lucy wasn't fooling her for a moment.
"You watch out," she told her, leading her back through the comfortable room and out into the ruined front of the mansion beyond, and Lucy thought that Miss Havisham herself had quite a bit of stagecraft in her. "And go safely."
"I will," Lucy said. And, "Thank you."
Miss Havisham nodded. Lucy walked down the steep path of the cliff, back into the grim little village of Satis-by-the-Sea, and to its small, deserted train station. All the while she was aware of Miss Havisham standing where she was, watching as she went.
Mycroft had reactivated the plans concerning Stoker, she now knew. Something had changed, but his attention had been turned not to Germany, and Krupp, but farther, to the remote and inhospitable mountains of Transylvania…
It was when she was approaching London on board the old, patient steam train that the device she had been keeping on her person for days began to blip, faintly at first and then with renewed vigour, and the tension that had been building inside her reached a crescendo and then, all at once, disappeared, leaving her calm and focused.
The moment she had waited for had arrived.
Mycroft's agent, the mysterious Mr Stoker, was finally approaching.
THIRTY-FIVE
Night time, and the sky over Richmond Park was strewn with stars, the clouds clearing, a moon beaming down silver light. A deer moved amongst the dark trees, smelled humans and gunpowder and went another way.
"Everyone present?"
"Present and ready."
Lucy surveyed her team. They have been with her on the raid in Aksum, and they have been with her in the Bangkok Affair, and in the Zululand Engagement… she could trust them with her life.
She was going to have to trust them with Stoker's.
"Listen up." They were gathered around her in a semi-circle. Black-clad, guns ready: not shadow executives but the muscle shadow executives sometimes had to call on, to use, ex-military and ex-underworld and ex-mercenaries, retrained and retained by the Bureau for secretive, semi-military operations.
"Ma'am."
"An airship travelling on a Bureau-approved flight plan is expected to make landing in Richmond Park within the next hour or two. Its cargo is of vital importance. Our mission is simple: retrieve the cargo safely, and get the hell out. Understood?"
"Ma'am, yes, ma'am."
A hand up – Bosie. "Do we expect opposition?"
Smiles on the men's faces, echoed by Lucy's. "We always expect opposition," she said.
Bosie nodded. "Ma'am."
"Spread out. Keep in contact. We may need to signal to the airship when the time comes. Keep a lookout – and remember."
Her men looked at each other, soberly. "Try not to get killed."
"Yes, ma'am!"
They spread out, silent as shadows, and she was left alone, amidst the trees.
And deadly worried.
Too many things to go wrong.
Too many things had already gone wrong…
Like that persistent feel that she was being followed, as soon as she got off at Euston Station. She had doubled back and changed hansom cabs but still the feeling persisted.
Then there was Fogg, running her down at the Bureau, angry, hard – "Where have you been?"
"I'm on leave."
"I heard you went down to Satis House."
"Heard where?"
His voice, cold and hard. "Westenra, I am your superior. You were not authorised to go there."
"Excuse me?"
He must have had her followed. Which explained some part of her paranoia… "I am researching an old file."
"Which file would that be, exactly?"
"The Orphan file," she said, looking him in the eyes. "The eighty-eight dossier. That was the last encounter we've had with the Bookman."
Fogg's face was white and very still. Lucy said, softly, "Wasn't it?"
"The Bookman is not your concern!"
Lucy did not reply to that. "I need to see Mycroft," she said, instead.
"He's not here. I'm in charge."
"Where is he?"
"Gone."
There was a strange look in Fogg's eyes. Was it panic? Or victory?
And now she was worried.
"I'd better go, then," she said. She turned her back on him.
"Westenra!"
"Sir?"
"Do not meddle in things you don't understand."
She turned back to him and faced him. "Is that a threat?"
Fogg smiled, his mouth like a thin, honed blade. "Take it as you will," he said, indifferently, at last, and walked away.
Lucy was left glaring after him.
Worry about Mycroft made her indecisive. The device he had given her was monitoring Stoker's approach. Did she have time?
She had a decision to make and she made it. Night swallowing the city, she took a hansom cab to Belgravia–
The feeling stole on her as she rode in the darkened cab, the street lights passing, the cries of sellers and the tolling of bells silenced, the faint beeping of the device increasing with each passing second as the mysterious airship from Transylvania was coming closer–
A sense of doom, a sense that Mycroft had foreseen a thing happening that she had thought impossible. That the trail he was following ended abruptly, the questions he sought answers to in his darkened room or at his quarters at the Diogenes Club remaining unanswered–
A piercing noise outside, rising and falling, rising and falling, setting her teeth on edge and she banged on the roof, shouting, "Stop!" to the driver.
She pushed the door open and was already running towards the flashing lights, the rising and falling sound of the siren growing stronger, two minute police automatons gliding on their little wheels, their blue light cones swirling on top of their heads as they came to stop her, but she pushed them away and went towards the house–
Arc lights and police tape and the neighbours' lights were on, but this was a good neighbourhood and no one wanted to show themselves outside. Mycroft's house, a modest place with ivy growing on the walls, a small garden in the front and there on the front steps–
"You can't come through here, miss. I'm sorry."
"What happened?"
"There has been an incident."
He was young and recently recruited to Scotland Yard and it really wasn't his fault he had run into Lucy.
"Where's your superior?"
He had on a little grin. "Miss?"
She made to walk past him and he grabbed her and she turned and grabbed his hand and twisted it, hard, behind his back until he yelled and dropped to his knees. Heads looked their way, then–
"Lucy?"
"Chief Inspector Adler."
Adler came towards her, not hurrying, her face unreadable. "It's been a while."
"Yes."
"Please let Constable Cuff go, Miss Westenra."
"Sure."
She released the man, who stood up, massaging his arm.
"Excuse me, chief inspector? It's Sergeant Cuff," he said.
Irene Adler smiled at him. "It was," she said. "Lucy, walk with me."
They left Cuff behind them. Lucy followed Adler. She wanted to look away but couldn't.
Just before his front door, resting on the little path that led up to his house, rested the large, lifeless body of Mycroft Holmes.
"How?" Lucy said. She felt numb. She had known this was coming, somehow, something deep inside her crying out, before, that all was wrong, that danger was on the way – but now, confronted with the truth of it, she didn't want to believe it.
Irene Adler said, "He was found under an hour ago, as you see him. There are no signs of violence…"
"This couldn't be natural causes."
"You have a better explanation?"
They glared at each other.
"I do," said a new voice. A man in a white coat came towards them, his face a mask of anxiety.
"You have found something?"
Lucy recognised the doctor, another relation – one of Mycroft's Irregulars, as Miss Havisham had called them. Worked at Guy's Hospital, if she remembered right – he must have been seconded to Scotland Yard.
"His death was not of natural causes. Look."
The doctor knelt by Lucy's former employer. With gentle hands he rolled the body and pulled aside cloth to show them the exposed back of the head. The doctor pointed. What was his name, Lucy wondered, trying to recall. Williams. Walton. Something starting with W.
"See here?" the doctor was pointing. Lucy peered closer. Was that a tiny discoloration in Mycroft's skin?
"It's a puncture hole," Irene Adler said.
"Exactly," the doctor – Wilberforce? Wharton? – said. "A very fine one – yet, I think, deadly. He was attacked. Poor Mycroft…" The doctor took a deep breath and resumed. "He had been coming up to his door when the attacker caught him. He must have been in hiding, waiting for him. He inserted a long, thin needle into Mycroft's head, going all the way in, killing him almost instantly."
Lucy pushed up. She felt ill, helpless. What should she do now?
Unbidden, Mycroft's face came into her mind, his lips moving. Speaking to her, on their way to the palace.
What had he told her?
"If something were to happen to me," Mycroft had said – she had wanted to protest, but he silenced her. "If something were to happen to me, I have put certain precautions in place. Certain agents have been… put in reserve, shall we say. The old and the new…" and he smiled, looking at her. "You must get hold of the Stoker information," he told her. "At all costs. Off the books, non-Bureau sanctioned. Were I to die, there is still Smith… if he is not too old." Here he smiled again. "For you, however, I have made a different precaution."
Smith? That old hack?
Wasn't he dead?
Well, her objective was clear. It hadn't changed. Dead or alive, Mycroft's instructions stood. And he had made an arrangement for her… and one she intended to follow.
She felt relief at that, a sense of order returning. She looked down at his large corpse. "The end of an era," the doctor murmured, echoing her thoughts.
"What is the meaning of this!"
The voice was loud like a fog-horn and edged like steel and most recently it had been shouting at her.
Fogg, arriving at the scene of the crime. Lucy couldn't bear it, suddenly. She had to get away.
"Where are you–?" from Adler.
Lucy didn't have time to answer. She went around the side of the house, Fogg's footsteps echoing up the path–
"Was that Westenra? Oh dear, oh dear–"
He had seen the body.
"Why was I not immediately informed? This is a matter of national security! Bureau takes precedence!"
His voice faded behind her. She made her way to the adjoining road and hailed down a hansom cab.
It was time to finish the job, she thought.
It was time to find out what Stoker was carrying.
What had Mycroft said? "Six months ago I played a pawn," Mycroft had told her. "Not sure whether I was sacrificing a piece or making a play on the king."
Well, she would find out. She would not let the fat man down.
"Where to, miss?" the hansom cab driver asked.
"Richmond Park," she said.
Her team had been notified. They would wait for her there.
She stared out of the window as the hansom cab headed for the river and the bridge, to cross over to the south bank. The rattle of the carriage sounded like piano keys and, as they drove closer to the water, the singing of the whales rose, majestic and slow, all about her, but what they sang she didn't know.
THIRTY-SIX
"Ma'am."
"Report."
"Unknowns approaching from Richmond Hill gate."
"Number?"
"About two dozen. Spreading out – did we invite anyone else to the party, ma'am?"
"No."
"Hostiles then?"
"Yes."
Silence on the Tesla set. Then, "They're armed."
"I wouldn't expect anything less."
"Take them out?"
She made a quick calculation. Too early, a fire fight would draw unwanted attention. Someone else wanted Stoker. Someone else knew he was coming–
"Keep an eye on them."
"Ma'am–"
"Yes?"
"Hostiles approaching from Kingston gate direction."
Lucy swore.
"Ma'am?"
"Keep an eye on them."
She had expected some opposition. She had not expected an army.
And the airship, with its precious cargo, was approaching rapidly…
She put her spyglasses to her eyes. The airship was visible now, gaining momentum, a black shape crossing against the face of the moon. She tensed, knowing it was about to happen, it was too soon, she had not been prepared enough, and that, in the next few minutes, people would die.
"Mark it!"
"Ma'am!"
A silent flame rose up into the air, and then another, and another – her men shooting flares into the sky, marking the landing spot for the airship.
And giving away their position…
But no one was going to act until the airship had landed, safely.
Weren't they?
The airship was lit up now by the flares, a dark and unfamiliar dragon-shape, a strange design she had not seen before. It was a long, graceful design that, in the silver light of the moon and the yellow of the flares, looked almost like a dragon, descending. Or a bat, come to think of it…
&nbs
p; And the airship was beginning its descent, and Stoker must be alive up there, must have managed his escape, and was bringing back the precious information Mycroft had gambled so heavily for. Her men were spread out, the flares would only give away the landing site but the rest of them were keeping watch on the intruders–
