London traffic being what it was, the transfer of samples from BasePairing’s offices to their new off-site facility in Watford had been scheduled for late in the evening. The sun still hovered at the horizon, but the plaza was empty of even the most devoted employees, creating an eerie, abandoned atmosphere.
“Sherlock, of course, asked to ride along with one of the trucks,” John narrated into his voice recorder. “He says if anyone wanted to steal from BasePairing, now would be the ideal time to try.”
“Even if the thieves guess randomly,” Sherlock reminded him, “that’s still a one-in-three chance of success.”
“It’s a bit like Find the Lady, isn’t it? ‘Round and round she goes …’”
Something about that seemed to give Sherlock pause, but by then they’d entered the lobby to find Leach’s assistant waiting for them.
Without any preamble, the assistant said, “This way,” and led them down to the loading dock.
The loading dock was along the outer perimeter of the building, its massive steel doors opening directly out into the street. Three cargo vans waited in the delivery bays; a handful of staff clustered around one, loading up equipment and refrigerated sample cases from the lab.
Andy Leach stood nearby, overseeing the effort; the moment he spotted John and Sherlock, he waved them over to join him. “Gentlemen! We’re just about to get underway.”
“You’re coming along?” John asked, surprised.
“Oh, no. I’ll be staying here.” Leach gestured off to the side, where Sebastian Moran stood in a loose circle with the three transport drivers. Moran had a tablet in his hands, upon which he and the drivers were working out the routes to Watford. “Captain Moran will be riding along with the samples and equipment, though.”
“I’d advise against that,” Sherlock said. “If Captain Moran’s identity is known to your attempted thief, his presence might indicate the other two trucks are decoys.”
“Ah,” Leach said. “Yes, I see. Perhaps you could—”
Moran glanced up from the tablet. “What if Mr. Holmes’ identity is known to the thief? Same problem.”
Sherlock had to concede the point. “In that case, neither of us should accompany the cargo.”
“Well, who does that leave?” John wondered.
It took a second to notice everyone was looking at him.
John kept his voice recorder running, tucked into an outside pocket of his equipment bag. He wasn’t technically allowed to record somebody without their permission, but while the odds of a car chase and/or highway robbery weren’t exactly high, he’d rather not risk failing to get either on tape. He’d beg forgiveness later.
The driver wasn’t particularly happy to have a passenger and rebuffed John’s awkward attempts at conversation with one-word answers and half-hearted grunts. John gave up after a few minutes, accepting that the rest of the one-hour ride would have to pass in silence.
The van’s route mostly wound through city streets, which would hopefully make it easier to spot—and evade—any potential pursuers. Traffic was light, but the driver still seemed nervous any time he had to idle at a light or a crossing; his anxiety was contagious, and John found himself suspiciously eyeing the pavements and cross streets around them.
Finally they pulled onto the A404, heading north to Watford, and the driver relaxed a bit. The road ahead was more or less empty, and the driver switched the headlights on as the sun finally began to set. John settled back in his seat and let his eyelids droop, watching the fields and trees whip by outside the window.
Some time later, the driver’s phone buzzed. He retrieved it from his pocket and began tapping one-handed at the screen, eyes darting periodically back to the road.
John stirred and blinked as the phone’s glow filled the cabin. “Are you texting someone?”
“Er … yeah.” The driver gave him a sidelong glance. “My girlfriend.”
Moran’s voice crackled over the van’s radio: “This is Vehicle One, checking in. No sign of trouble so far.”
“Vehicle Three, checking in,” came the response from Sherlock’s van. “All clear here.”
The driver dropped his phone into the cupholder and reached for the handset. “Vehicle Two, checking in. Nothing to report.”
John hadn’t meant to peek at the driver’s texts. It was just that he’d left his phone unlocked, and when another text came in, the motion from the screen drew his eye.
The new text read, simply:
Confirmed
But the text it was responding to—the one the driver had sent—read:
Taking the A404 to Watford
John looked up to see the driver staring at him.
A long, agonising second passed in utter silence before John grabbed for the handset. “The driver leaked our route! They know where we are!”
The driver swore and stomped on the brake pedal. The van gave an unsettling lurch as it jolted to a halt, but the driver didn’t care; he’d already thrown the door open and bolted away down the road.
Sherlock’s worried voice called over the radio: “Watson?”
“I’m fine,” John reported. “The driver just legged it.”
Moran broke in: “You need to get away from that van. It’s not safe.”
That was something of an understatement. John had no doubt someone was on their way to intercept the van—someone who wouldn’t react kindly to finding out John was still inside.
Well. People were always complaining the podcast didn’t have enough action in it.
John clambered into the driver’s seat, stepping hard on the accelerator. The truck lurched into motion, and John reached for the radio again. “I’ve taken the wheel,” he said. “Maybe if I keep moving, I can outrun—”
He passed a joining road, and something loomed in his peripheral vision. The van’s balance wobbled beneath him as he swerved, just barely avoiding a collision.
“Christ!” Heart pounding, John peered into the rear-view mirror. A box truck—one that easily dwarfed his own vehicle—had come barrelling down the joining road, missing him by a hair.
“Watson?” Sherlock barked. “What’s happening?”
The truck turned, heavy tires rolling relentlessly over grass and pavement as it began to pursue John’s van.
“I’m being followed,” John reported. “It’s a big truck—I think it tried to hit me!”
His only answer was a mess of confusing chatter; someone was on the phone to the police.
The box truck was heavy and slow, but so was John’s vehicle—he didn’t have much chance of outrunning it. Up ahead was a turning into the car park of a roadside pub; even this time of night, there would undoubtedly be enough of a crowd that the truck couldn’t risk following him in.
But as John angled toward the car park, a dark sedan charged up the opposite way and blocked John’s exit. John swore and veered back onto the road; the sedan whirled sharply to pull up alongside, keeping pace with the van. A second sedan closed in from the other side.
“There’s more cars,” John said aloud; he wasn’t sure anyone on the radio could hear him over the chatter, but at least his voice recorder was still on. Maybe it would be evidence at his murderer’s trial. “They’re boxing me in!”
The two newcomers were smaller and more manoeuvrable than John’s van, with a lower centre of gravity; they could handle turns that would topple the van, which made evading them nearly impossible. The box truck loomed in his rear-view mirror, pushing John to accelerate or risk getting rear-ended.
A flash of orange caught John’s eye: there was a stretch of road work up ahead, abandoned this time of night. The box truck braked as the two cars abruptly peeled away and pulled over onto the sides of the road.
“Sherlock?” John called, hoping he’d be heard. “Something’s off—they stopped following me.”
There was a commotion between several speakers at once, but Sherlock managed to break through. “They were funnelling you,” he said. “It has to be a trap—what do you see?”
“Nothing, it’s just construction—”
Except there was a recently filled-in hole dead ahead. The sight of it dredged up a cold, familiar fear.
“IED!” John’s panic nearly strangled the words as he wrenched the wheel to one side.
The van’s balance shifted once again, and then a wave of pressure and sound washed over him. Grit peppered the windows, knocking chips from the glass. John’s stomach lurched as the van teetered to one side; he could feel two of its tires leave the ground, spinning wildly in the open air. He frantically whirled the steering wheel back in the other direction, leaning against the door, willing the van not to tip.
After an eternal, sickening moment, the two airborne tires settled back to the ground.
John exhaled loudly as he straightened the van out, speeding as fast as he could down the road.
“Watson?” Sherlock sounded more terrified than John had ever heard before. “Watson, are you all right? Answer me!”
“I’m okay,” John reassured him. “Almost tipped over.” He peered into the rear-view mirror; there was no sign of the box truck, or the two cars. “I think I’ve lost them.”
BasePairing’s new lab facility was a red-brick building at the far end of an unremarkable industrial park. It was, in John’s opinion, hardly appropriate for the end of a car chase.
The decoy vans were parked up ahead. There were also about a half-dozen of what John assumed to be facility staff; they descended on the van as soon as it rolled to a stop, hurrying to catalogue and unload its cargo. John made sure to grab his equipment bag as he climbed down from the driver’s seat, groaning a little. His heart hadn’t stopped pounding yet, and probably wouldn’t for a while.
He blinked, and Sherlock was there. He crowded close, checking John over. “You’re all right,” he said—not a question, but a relieved observation.
“‘M fine,” John assured him nevertheless. “I may be sick later.”
“The police are on their way,” Sherlock said, with no small amount of disdain. “We should hurry.”
John was too tired to ask questions as Sherlock led the way into the facility, slipping inside while everyone else was distracted.
The building’s hallways were relentlessly bland, with beige-painted walls and waxed linoleum floors that put John in mind of a hospital. The lab that would shortly house all of BasePairing’s most valuable assets was on the second floor; it was, naturally, empty at the moment. A row of windows lined the far side of the room.
“Watch the door,” Sherlock said, and ducked into the empty lab.
John hovered in the doorway, gaze flitting up and down the hall. Surely they couldn’t actually get in trouble for snooping through an empty lab—and yet Sherlock had made it sound essential that no one catch them doing it.
Sherlock emerged within a few minutes, looking satisfied.
“Well?” John asked, not sure what he was actually asking.
“As expected,” Sherlock replied. “Come, Watson. There’s nothing more for us to do here.”
As far as jobs went, night shift security at Presbury Labs in Watford was all right. Ronnie Buckley far preferred it to the army; the pay was better, if only slightly, and he’d never once been shot at or blown up.
He soon found it necessary to amend that record.
It was gone two in the morning, and Ronnie had almost finished a patrol of the first floor when a tremendous thump sounded from above. A rain of dust rattled loose from the ceiling, and he later swore—usually after a few pints—that he’d felt the building’s foundations shake. Then the fire alarms went off.
He sprinted up the stairs to the second floor and carefully peered out into the hall. The door to one of the labs lay in the corridor, scorched black and bent slightly outward; it had been blown off its hinges. Ronnie immediately recognised the lab as the one that had just been let to BasePairing. Smoke poured from the open doorway.
Moving carefully down the corridor, worried that the explosion had damaged the stability of the floor, Ronnie approached the lab. Inside was a blackened wasteland of plastic, glass, and metal.
Every last thing that BasePairing had entrusted to Presbury Labs was destroyed.
By morning, the heatwave had broken.
John slept late—by his standards, anyway. Considering the previous night’s events, he allowed himself a lazy morning, lying in bed as he checked his phone.
No sooner had John spotted the news from Watford than Andrew Leach was knocking at the door, wearing a hunted expression.
“It would appear,” Sherlock said, going through the photos Leach had sent him, “that an incendiary device was placed in the lab before BasePairing’s assets were moved in.”
“I don’t understand.” Leach was bent nearly double on the sofa, head in his hands; he’d barely acknowledged the microphone on the coffee table in front of him. “How does anyone benefit from destroying it all? Stealing I could understand, but—”
“We misunderstood the thieves’ goals,” Sherlock said. “They never needed to lay hands on your property—merely to deny anyone else access to it. In which case, it wasn’t necessary to take anything out of the lab. They just needed to get something in.”
“Then why attack the van?” John wondered aloud.
“Redundancy,” Sherlock surmised. “Plan A was to intercept the cargo in transit. Incinerating the lab was Plan B. Or perhaps Plan M.” After a moment’s consideration, he went on: “It’s also possible the van chase was a misdirection.”
“So while everybody was focused on the trucks,” John said, “nobody was paying attention to where they were going. Because who bothers to guard an empty lab?”
“‘Find the Lady,’” Sherlock murmured, but didn’t elaborate.
Leach sighed and leaned back into the sofa. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now,” he said. “I assume you’ve seen the news.”
John nodded. The story had come in overnight from BasePairing’s headquarters in the United States: the company was filing for bankruptcy, just as Sherlock had predicted.
“Operations are suspended until things have been sorted out,” Leach said. “So I suppose we couldn’t process anything even if our lab weren’t destroyed.” With a wan smile, he added, “I do have to say, Mr. Holmes, it was a pleasure watching you work.”
He stood; Sherlock and John both rose to shake his hand, and then he was out the door.
“Well.” Sherlock flopped back into his chair. “I suppose Ms. Kruger will be interested to know the outcome of her little mystery.”
Something had been bothering John since he saw the story about the explosion. “Thing is,” he said, “you checked out that lab before any of the samples went in.”
“I did,” Sherlock confirmed, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
John knew by now what that tone of voice meant. “You saw the bomb. You spotted it, and you didn’t say anything.”
“I saw enough to confirm my suspicions,” Sherlock replied. “Once it became clear BasePairing’s samples were to be destroyed, not stolen, I determined no further measures were needed.” He glanced at John from the corner of his eye. “As you pointed out—if the samples had survived, they would shortly be in the hands of the highest bidder. A rather unsatisfactory end to the narrative.”
John laughed and settled into his own chair. “All right, but how did they get the bomb in? I thought security in that place was supposed to be immaculate.”
“There was one flaw,” Sherlock pointed out. “The windows.”
“Yeah, three floors up a sheer brick wall,” John retorted. “Nobody could’ve climbed that.”
“On the contrary—I could list at least six criminals within London alone capable of achieving the feat.” Sherlock wriggled a little in the chair. “One, in particular, comes to mind.”
Clay yawned and stretched out on the sofa in the study; they’d reconvened, once more, in his lady friend’s townhouse. “Fucking Watford,” he groaned. “Moran couldn’t have moved the samples somewhere a little closer?”
Jay rolled his eyes. “Yeah, all right. You set off a bomb in central London and see what happens.”
Turnbull was leaning against the desk. “You’re sure all the samples were destroyed?”
“Completely,” Jay assured him.
“And the suspect pool for who did it starts with every single person who sent in a sample within the past few weeks,” Clay pointed out, “so your boss should be in the clear.”
Jay couldn’t resist needling Turnbull. “Too bad your driver didn’t work out.”
Intercepting the shipment in transit had been Turnbull’s idea. It was a crude solution, but a possible solution nonetheless—although Jay had taken care to put a few contingencies in place.
Turnbull shrugged. “We’ll find him. If he thinks he can take our money and run, he’s mistaken.” With a look in Jay’s direction, he continued, “Speaking of which, I suppose it’s time to settle up.”
“I’ll send you the account details,” Jay replied. “I know your lot prefer to deal in big briefcases full of cash, but—”
Clay coughed, loudly.
“Right,” Turnbull said. “Be seeing you.”
Jay could’ve sworn Turnbull was smiling a little as he walked out of the study.
Clay, meanwhile, had preoccupied himself with a loose thread along the seam of the sofa cushion. “I suppose I should thank you.”
“I suppose you should,” Jay replied. “How do you keep finding the worst clients in this whole fucking city?”
“At least this one wasn’t a double-crossing Russian mercenary.” That seemed to remind him of something. “Where’d the boytoy get to, anyway? I figured you’d bring him.”
“He’s wrapping things up with Leach.” Jay had plans once that was done, but Clay didn’t need to know about those.
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