Sherlock - The Game Is On!

The Six Thatchers- Ten

Chapter Ten

Third POV

Tbilisi, Georgia - Six Years ago

A room is a puzzle, in all fairness it's a mess...

Two large pedestals reside either side of the middle of the large room have large bronze lions on them. Several people sit at the foot of each pedestal, wrapped in blankets. The windows were varnished with the Georgian flag.

A few armed men in military uniform prowl around the room watching the innocent lives held in captivity.

A chess set reflects the light within the room. A woman looks up towards the approaching solider...

"What do you think? Mate in two?"

The solider aims his rifle to the couple. "I will shoot you." He threatens in his original language and accent. "Don't antagonise them, darling." The husband spoke lowly to his wife. 

"Oh, what else is there to do?"

She makes a move on the chess board. The soldiers talk amongst themselves nearby.

"Everything palls."

"They'll send someone soon."

"'They?' Who are 'they?' Seem to me we've put an awful lot of faith in 'they'. Well, I've got something 'they' would dearly love if only we could get out of here." She looks to her husband smugly. "I've got Ammo." The Ambassador states. "Ammo?"

At that moment glass shatters above them. The Georgian soldiers shout out and everyone dives for cover as two black-clad operatives with balaclavas over their faces rappel down into the room on ropes, firing as they go. At the same time two more operatives kick their way through a door which had been held closed with an axe through the handles and begin to pick off the soldiers with accurate single shots from their rifles. With all the soldiers apparently terminated, the operatives move through the room checking in all directions.

Visualising the four people, each section containing one of the operatives. Above each of their heads appears a letter. Left to right, the letters read:

G.A.R.A.

The two operatives on the left change places, their letters following them. Now the order of letters reads:

A.G.R.A.

The ambassador kneels up from where she had taken cover under the table. The operative labelled 'R.' holds out a hand towards her and speaks in a very recognisable female voice. "Madam Ambassador." Mary addresses. She takes the woman's hand and pulls her to her feet. "What took you so long?"

"Can't get the staff." With a firm push at the ambassador towards the door, one of the other operatives yells at the other hostages: "Everyone out! Now!" The hostages begin to get to their feet and head for the door.

Shortly afterwards, the AGRA team are leading the hostages through the building. They reach a junction and the team checks in all directions. One of them shouts, "To your left!" and the hostages turn that way. The team moves on but Georgian soldiers suddenly come into view in front of them and the one in the lead fires upwards, blowing out all the lights in the dark corridor. The hostages scream and duck. AGRA turn and realise that there are armed civilians behind them.

AGRA pause, weighing their options as they calculate how many people they are up against, and then another Georgian soldier steps into view with his hand on the neck of a female hostage and his pistol pointed at her head. As he grins and chuckles, revealing a set of gold teeth, one of the AGRA team, wearing a silver A.G.R.A memory stick round his neck on a chain, pulls up his balaclava to reveal his face. "What now? What do we do?" Mary pulls up her own balaclava and takes one more look at the armed men surrounding them. "We die."

She pulls the pin from a device and hurls the object to the floor in front of her and turns her face away as a massive white light explodes in front of them. The hostages scream as gunfire begins.

Sherlock stands in front of his chair pacing whilst Michelle gazes to the memory stick clasped within her hands. She has a bruise under her eye and Sherlock has a bruise on his nose. The door opens and Greg comes in. The pair turn to look at him. "Well?"

"He can't have got far. We'll have him in a bit."

"I very much doubt it." Sherlock corrects the use of Scotland Yard. Michelle stamps her foot agitatedly. "Why?" Lestrade questions. "Because he worked with Mary." Michelle determines.

In his crummy little room, the intruder is sitting on the floor holding an open bottle in one hand and to the right of him on the floor is an open laptop. He has googled 'Sherlock Holmes & Michelle Phillips' and is looking at the various images that have come up. He clicks on some of them and then finds one of John, Mary, Sherlock and Michelle outside the church on the Watsons's wedding day. He zooms in on Sherlock, then pans across to Michelle before looking to Mary's smiling face.

Putting down the bottle, he picks up the laptop and puts it into his lap, staring at the photo and breathing heavily. He closes his eyes, grimaces, and now he's in flashback...

Wearing his black camo gear but without the balaclava, he runs across the floor of a pottery workshop and braces himself momentarily against one of the racks in the middle of the floor. Soldiers shout in Russian somewhere nearby, one of them yelling, "I tell you, bitch, I will shoot!" A man, maybe a potter, maybe a guard, is sitting at a side bench and the operative runs across towards him. The man gets up and the operative fights with him.

A gunshot explodes some nearby pottery on one of the central racks, and the operative takes down his opponent as a soldier comes in and starts firing. By now the operative has a pistol but he has no chance to use it because there are now at least two soldiers firing at him and pottery and coloured glaze powder are exploding into the air all around him.

Using the cover of the flying dust, the operative turns and runs to the far end of the workshop and sees six identical white plaster busts of Margaret Thatcher on the table.

Pulling his memory stick's chain over his head, he stuffs the chain and stick into the open base of one of the busts. As the soldiers make their way cautiously forward, he stands the bust up. He turns to run but the gold-toothed man is behind him and smashes him to the floor.

Some time later the operative is tied to a chair. The gold-toothed soldier shoves his head up to reveal his bleeding mouth and then punches him hard in the stomach twice. As the operative slumps and wheezes, the man walks around behind him. "Ammo. Ammo. Ammo." He chants.

The operative looks around at the bare walls. He seems to be in a small warehouse or maybe a storage lock-up. There's another man standing at a table behind him but he's not aware of him yet. A doorway some feet away in front of him leads to another room and there's some movement in there. The gold-toothed man wraps his arm around the operative's neck from behind and starts to strangle him. "Ammo. Ammo. Ammo-o-o-o-o."

The operative's vision goes black and he slumps in his chair almost unconscious as the man releases him. The other man walks across and pulls his head up to look at his face. "He passed out again." He releases the operative's head and steps back. "It's no fun when they pass out. We'll come back later." He starts to walk away and his colleague follows but then turns back. "What would he do if he knew, huh? About the English woman?"

"What would you do to a traitor? Maybe we'll tell him one day. If he lives that long." They chuckle. Blood dribbles from the operative's mouth.

A few moments later he lifts his head. The torturers have gone into the next room and in a shadow on the wall, the operative can see that someone has been hung from the ceiling by their wrists and is being repeatedly punched or flogged. The victim has long straggly hair. The operative's head goes down briefly but then he raises it and looks up to the ceiling.

It's as if his chair is falling backwards but instead of landing on hard concrete, he falls back onto the carpet in his bedsit. Staring blankly upwards, he raises his bottle to his lips and drinks. The perspective changes and he's still lying on his back on the floor, although his face isn't as badly beaten as it was in the past.