Welcome to Baker Street

19. Bunker

An air of defeat hangs thick in the dust-filled room.

"No way out of here? Have you checked?" Giulia asks as a shiver runs through her body. She isn't claustrophobic, but the hopelessness of their situation is putting a strain on her frightened mind.

John shakes his head despairingly. "Nothing doing. This place is a bunker. As long as we stay here, we are safe; but the moment they pick the lock... We're as good as dead."

Sherlock's head whips up at his sentence. "What have you just said?"

"You mean the unceremonious announcement of our imminent death?" Giulia snivels.

"No, his exact words." He closes his eyes, recalling John's phrase. "He said: This place is a bunker."

Bunker. The word hovers before his shut eyelids while shreds of a previous conversation rush and gather inside his mind.

"We are allies," he had said to Cathy, to which she had responded with, "I couldn't have said it better myself."

She didn't mean it as 'partners', though, Sherlock reflects. In his mind palace, the word slightly changes as a capital letter appears at the beginning of it. We are the Allies, he finally understands. Then, his brain reproduces another sentence pronounced by Cathy: "... we'll win the war."

His eyes snap open while he whispers, "This is, in fact, the bunker."

"Yeah, that's what I said. But this is the problem, not the solution," John talks back, frowning at Sherlock's entranced face.

The detective bends over the table at the centre of the room and he studies the city maps on display.

"Cathy must have designed this room to reproduce one very specific place: Adolf's Hitler Führerbunker in Berlin," he affirms confidently.

Giulia and John exchange bewildered looks. Is his brain running low on oxygen?

"Look at the maps: that's not London. You can check roads, squares, monuments, everything, and you'll realise it's always the same city: Berlin."

They lean forward to observe them, and John remarks, "Fine, but I still don't see how this could help us right now."

Sherlock straightens up and goes back to his mind palace to check the plan of the construction site that he strained to memorise while running around. He recalls the movements they have made so far, all the forks and turns they have encountered until that dead end. He knows exactly on what side of the building they are standing at the moment. His eyes scan the room and his gaze lands on the floor; he squats down next to a wall and brushes his finger on the ground.

"Ash," he mumbles. "I should have expected this. Oh, it's so clever," he exclaims, springing to his feet. "I knew she was smart: the trick of the crossword puzzle was quite good. But this, oh, this is brilliant."

At that moment, the terrorists shoot the lock in an attempt to open it.

"Sherlock, come on," Giulia begs, scared to death.

"The Führerbunker was a subterranean bunker in Berlin where Hitler spent his last days and eventually committed suicide," he begins to explain.

"Straight to the point, please," John urges him, listening to the cracking sounds coming from the doorjambs.

"There was an emergency exit in that bunker," Sherlock says, staring at the base of the wall. "As per the Führer's instructions, after their suicides, the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit..." As he speaks, he leans both hands against a portion of the wall in front of him. "And their bodies were burnt in the..." he presses on the movable partition that had been painted to look like a real wall; it slowly shifts, opening outwards.

"... garden," he finishes as a gust of wind sweeps over them.

They are now contemplating the park on the east side of the construction site. A hint of a smile appears on Sherlock's lips. He was right about their position: he successfully found his bearings in that labyrinth.

Giulia and John hold their breath at the sight of the trees and the night sky.

"We're out," she murmurs almost inaudibly.

"Run," John exhorts them, rushing towards the street.

Sherlock follows them at a short distance. His legs slowed down by the frantic rhythm of his thoughts. He feels as if he is missing something, and he is never wrong. At the sound of the word 'bunker', some sort of intuition clicked in his brain; although he cannot catch up with it yet.

They stop near a bench, out of breath.

"What was that trick you pulled down there? You knew there was a secret passage leading to the park?" John breathlessly asks him.

"I didn't know it; I observed and deduced it," he corrects him. "As I said, Cathy organised that room like the Führerbunker. And since Hitler's dead body was cremated in the Reich Chancellery Garden outside his bunker, I presumed that a pile of ash beside a partition wall couldn't just result from poor cleaning. If you remember, she said that we would find our way out, and that's why she led us to that corridor. She knew we would choose the only door that she had intentionally left open."

His face clouds over, leading him to one obvious conclusion. "That room was meant for someone else, though. I can only guess that she had been preparing this emergency shelter for her twin sister, counting that her sibling would be able to decipher all the history-related clues that signalled the exit."

Giulia lets out a relieved sigh. "Who would've thought history would save my life one day?"

"Boy, that young lady is really fond of World War II," John says, shaking his head in disbelief.

"True. She's so keen on warfare that she turned her lair into a bunker just like—" Sherlock stops dead, listening to his own words. The gears relentlessly turning inside his head come to a sudden halt as the final piece falls into place.

"Wolf's Lair," he murmurs. 

* * * Author's Note: In this chapter, I tried to put into words Sherlock's reasoning process inside his mind palace.

I found out it isn't really a piece of cake (that was to be expected), but I hope it is quite clear, anyway.

Hopefully, you are able to imagine what I see through my imagination.

Votes or comments would be highly appreciated.
Thank you so much for reading this story.