Snake Bite

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

As Sherlock pulled himself up on to the pier he realized that he was more tired than he had ever been in his life. Every muscle in his body ached, and his chest and legs throbbed with pain from where the alligator had scratched him. What he really wanted was to lie down and rest for a while, but he knew that he couldn’t.

A gangplank led up from the pier to the Monocacy. A group of uniformed sailors were at the top. One of them gestured to him to go up. For a moment he thought about asking them to come down — he wasn’t sure his legs could manage the climb — but he needed their help, so it was best that he went to them.

By the time he was halfway up his legs were trembling. By the time he reached the top he had to pull himself forward with his hands.

A group of sailors with rifles stood on deck. The rifles weren’t pointed at Sherlock, exactly, but they weren’t pointed away either.

As Sherlock caught his breath he noticed Captain Bryan approaching. He was checking his watch and talking with one of his officers. He looked stressed. Glancing around, Sherlock noticed that there were no Chinese people on deck. The Governor’s party obviously hadn’t arrived yet, but the way Captain Bryan was looking at his watch suggested that there wasn’t long to go.

Bryan’s first words seemed to confirm Sherlock’s deduction. ‘Be quick, young man. I am expecting important guests. You have something to say to me?’ He frowned when he saw Sherlock’s face clearly for the first time. ‘I remember you. I saw you at the dinner party at the Mackenzie residence, and again on the quayside yesterday.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you for coming out to see me.’ Sherlock took a deep breath. ‘Malcolm Mackenzie is dead. He was murdered because he was going to warn the Prefect of Shanghai about a plot to blow up your ship.’

‘Why would anyone want to blow up this ship?’ Captain Bryan asked. He scowled. ‘No, forget that question — I can think of several reasons. The United States of America is not best liked in this part of the world.’

‘Someone wants to get the American Government to interfere militarily in this region,’ Sherlock said. ‘It’s all about trade.’

‘Isn’t it always?’ Bryan replied. He glanced down the gangplank to the pier, and checked his watch again. ‘Blast it, the Governor of Jiangsu Province will be here any moment.’

‘That’s when the bomb will go off,’ Sherlock said. ‘A signal will be given from somewhere on shore to light the fuse.’

‘Where is this bomb?’ Bryan barked. One of his officers caught at his arm and muttered something in his ear. Bryan shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter whether I believe the kid or not,’ he snapped. ‘If there’s the slightest chance of a bomb on this ship then it needs to be searched. Besides — look at him. He’s been through hell to get here. He obviously believes the story.’

‘I think it’s near the galley, disguised in barrels of water,’ Sherlock admitted, ‘but I might be wrong. It might have been hidden anywhere.’

‘Who planted it?’

‘Your new Head Cook,’ Sherlock said.

Captain Bryan led the way into the body of the ship and down a ladder. For a man who was in overall charge of everything, Sherlock reflected, he was very involved in details. He seemed to want to do everything himself. Sherlock followed, and behind him came a gaggle of officers. They marched along a corridor, around a corner, down another ladder and along another corridor. Sherlock tried to work out where they were in relation to the deck and the pier, and decided that they were on the other side of the ship, near the hull.

Captain Bryan pushed open a door and entered a large room filled with ovens, sinks, work surfaces and hanging pots. It reminded Sherlock of Wu Chung’s galley on the Gloria Scott, but magnified a hundred times.

The galley was deserted. Captain Bryan clicked his fingers at two of his officers. ‘Search everywhere,’ he snapped.

On the far side of the galley, a door led into a storage area. Bryan crossed to it, with Sherlock and the rest of the officers close behind. He opened the door and went through.

This was obviously a larder. It was shadowy, lit only by two hanging oil lamps. There were shelves everywhere, stacked with boxes of provisions. Fruit and vegetables hung from hooks, along with legs and sides of pork, lamb and beef. Along the far wall, barrels were lined up and stacked three-deep, except for a space at one end.

‘Check those barrels,’ Bryan said to the rest of the officers. ‘See if they weigh too much or too little. Break them open if you have to.’ He glanced around. ‘Where’s that damned cook? Off smoking his opium pipe or something, I’ll be bound.’

Sherlock and Captain Bryan watched for the next five minutes as the officers moved the barrels, shaking them to see if their contents were liquid or solid. The tops had to be prised off some of them with the crowbars hanging from hooks on the wall. Eventually every barrel had been checked. An officer crossed over to where Bryan and Sherlock stood. ‘Nothing,’ he said, glancing sneeringly at Sherlock. ‘The barrels contain water, or rum, or salted meat. That’s all.’

Captain Bryan turned to Sherlock. ‘Looks like you’ve been sold a pig in a poke, son,’ he said, not unsympathetically.

Sherlock felt his heart sink. He knew that his deductions were correct, but he couldn’t see how else the explosives had been hidden. But if he didn’t find them soon, the signal would be given and the ship would be blown up!

‘I don’t suppose you would consider evacuating the ship?’ he asked.

Two of the officers laughed out loud.

‘Just on your say-so?’ Captain Bryan asked. ‘’Fraid not, son. That would be an insult to the Governor, who should be here any moment. Nice try, though.’

Sherlock wished that he could see the far bank, in case Arrhenius was out there, ready to give the signal. Perhaps seeing the man, and recognizing him from the dinner party, would be enough to convince the Captain that something was going on. Then Sherlock realized that there was no porthole in the larder, despite the fact that by his reckoning they were right by the hull.

‘Does it strike you,’ he said, ‘that this larder is smaller than it should be?’

The officers and Captain Bryan looked around critically. They glanced at each other with puzzled expressions. ‘Now that you come to mention it…’ one of them said, and tailed off, confused.

Sherlock indicated the far wall, against which the barrels had been stacked. ‘I think you’ll find that’s a false wall,’ he said. ‘I think the explosives are behind it.’

The officers stared at each other, then set to work with the crowbars.

Sherlock was right. It took less than a minute to pull it down.

Behind the fake wall was a space about six feet deep. It was filled with barrels, and this time Sherlock didn’t think that the contents would be water, rum or salted meat. A cord led out of each barrel. The cords all joined together into a braid which ran to a space on one side. Crouching in the space, below a porthole that let in a blaze of light from outside, was a Chinese man in a chef’s uniform. He had the braid of fuses in his hand and a frightened expression on his face. Next to him, on the floor, was a box of matches.

‘Arrest that man!’ Captain Bryan barked. ‘And for heaven’s sake pull the fuses from those barrels before something disastrous happens!’

The Chinese cook tried to run for the door, but two of the officers grabbed him. They carried him out of the larder. Another officer scooped up the box of matches while the remainder went from barrel to barrel pulling the fuses out.

‘How did he get in there by himself?’ Bryan mused in wonder. ‘And how did he intend escaping once he had lit the fuses? Surely he wasn’t going to sacrifice himself?’

‘I doubt it,’ Sherlock replied. He indicated the corner of the hidden area where the man had been hiding. ‘I think there was a hidden door there. Remember, there was a space there with no barrels in it. I think he was waiting for a signal to light the fuse, then he was going to escape into the larder, close the hidden door, jump into the water and swim away.’

‘And he built all this himself?’ Bryan asked, gazing at the fake wall.

‘It didn’t have to be convincing,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘It was covered with barrels. He probably brought it on in sections.’

‘Son, I owe you a debt of gratitude. If not for you, this ship would be a pile of flaming wreckage and hundreds of men would be dead.’

‘And a war would be about to start,’ Sherlock said quietly. He crossed to the porthole and gazed out. He could see all the way to the far side of the Yangtze River… where a boat with two lanterns on the mast was tied up to the bank, just next to the ruined fort.

‘Captain,’ he said quietly, ‘do you have a small rowing boat I can borrow?’

Ten minutes later Sherlock was climbing down a ladder attached to the side of the Monocacy and stepping into a boat that had been lowered down on ropes. Captain Bryan had wanted to send someone with him, but the Governor of Jiangsu Province had just arrived with his retinue, and all hands were required on deck for an official inspection. So while an important visitor was coming up the gangplank, Sherlock was secretly slipping away on the other side of the ship.

His arms still ached, and he found that rowing across the river pulled at his muscles in a way that sent spikes of pain across his chest and back. He was heading at right angles to the normal flow of boats, and he had to keep on stopping to allow other vessels to go past. Even so, there were a lot of shouts and curses directed his way.

He kept looking out for Cameron and Wu Fung-Yi, but there was no sign of them. If they were still looking for Mr Arrhenius then they were looking in the wrong place.

Eventually Sherlock’s boat hit the bank on the other side of the river. He climbed out and secured it.

Reluctantly he trudged up the muddy riverbank and stood in front of the stone ruins of the fort. He really didn’t want to do this. Every muscle in his body felt like it was on the verge of giving up, and the gashes across his chest, where the blood had coagulated, had pulled apart and started bleeding again while he had been rowing. His head ached where the girl had kicked it, and he was getting a fluttery sensation at the edges of his vision. But he knew that he had to do this. If he didn’t, then Arrhenius would get away, and that wasn’t right. Not after the murders of Sherlock’s friend Wu Chung and Cameron’s father.

Sometimes, he thought, doing the right thing was much harder than doing the wrong thing. Sometimes, doing the right thing was the hardest thing in the world.

Not looking forward to what he was going to find, he trudged around the half-ruined wall of the fort until he came to an archway that led inside.

Grass was growing up between the stones. There was no roof, and the remnants of the walls were barely higher than Sherlock’s head. There were gaps in many places, where time and weather had caused the mortar holding the stones together to crumble.

Two Chinese soldiers were lying on the ground in the first room he came to — a large, hall-like area. Sherlock crouched by them. They were both unconscious; both had bleeding gashes in their scalps. He suspected that they were guards who were assigned to the ruins, or perhaps they were part of a team stationed along the riverbank in preparation for the arrival of the Governor. Whatever the reason for their presence, it was bad luck for them. Neither of them was armed, and that worried Sherlock. Presumably Arrhenius had taken their weapons after overpowering them.

Having made sure that the two unconscious soldiers were at least comfortable, he moved on through a doorway into another room.

This room was as large as the first one. Mr Arrhenius was there, standing by a glassless window that overlooked the river. He was holding a lamp, and he was patiently opening and closing its shutter in a regular sequence, sending flashes of light across the river to the USS Monocacy.

Where nothing was happening.

‘I presume you have managed to alert the ship’s crew to the presence of the explosives,’ Arrhenius said in his high-pitched voice. He didn’t turn his head. ‘I presume also that the crew have discovered the location of the explosives, despite the meticulous way they were hidden, and apprehended the agent who was waiting to light the fuse. I presume all of this because of the obvious lack of any explosion, despite the fact that I can see the Governor’s entourage on deck and I have been signalling the agent for the past five minutes.’ He set the lantern on the stone sill of the window and turned to face Sherlock. ‘The agent was told that the fuse burned for five minutes, giving him time to make his escape,’ he continued. ‘In fact, it only burns for thirty seconds. In five minutes, someone might have discovered it and put it out.’

‘Not,’ Sherlock said, ‘a problem now, I am afraid.’

‘Apparently not.’ Arrhenius sighed. ‘You really are an impressive young man. You would not believe the amount of time, effort and cold, hard cash that has been expended on this plan. Then you come along and sabotage it just by —’ he shrugged — ‘just by observation and deduction. Really very impressive.’ He reached behind him, to where Sherlock saw something propped up against the wall. ‘Impressive, and troublesome. I think I will save the world the bother of dealing with you in the future by eliminating you now. That way, I will at least have accomplished something today.’

He brought his hands out from behind his back. He was holding a long wooden staff, Sherlock saw, but it ended in a strangely shaped metal blade. It looked very sharp. He must have taken it from one of the unconscious soldiers.

‘Please,’ Arrhenius said, ‘try to resist. Try to escape. That will make this process much more entertaining for me.’

‘What happened to the girl?’ Sherlock asked, stepping to one side. Distracting Arrhenius, delaying him from attacking, was, he decided, his best option.

His best option among a small group of very unsatisfactory options, his mind couldn’t help adding.

Arrhenius turned slowly to follow him, holding the bladed weapon in front of him like an executioner at rest. ‘My daughter? Oh, I presume she is still out there, somewhere back along the river.’

‘And you don’t care?’

‘The older she grew, the more wilful she became. I was beginning to lose control of her. It was only a matter of time before she left me. The only question in my mind was whether she would try to kill me first, or merely disappear. By abandoning her — at your instigation, of course — I merely anticipated and controlled an unavoidable outcome.’

Sherlock shook his head. ‘But… your own daughter?’

Arrhenius shrugged. ‘Oh, I have no fatherly feelings for the girl. Her mother died in childbirth. Her own development was affected by the large amounts of colloidal silver that I had consumed, and that I fed to her as she was growing up. She was never normal, never like other children. She would never have grown up happy, I am afraid.’ He stepped forward, swinging the blade at Sherlock’s legs. ‘Just as you will never grow up at all!’

Sherlock flung himself backwards on to the flagstones. The blade whistled through the air, missing him by an inch. He tried to struggle to his feet, pushing his body forward and upward on his elbows, but Arrhenius rushed at him again, bringing the blade swishing down towards Sherlock’s head.

He rolled sideways. The blade slammed into the flagstone. Sparks and fragments of stone exploded upwards. Sherlock felt them pepper his face, drawing blood, as he rolled.

Arrhenius seemed momentarily shocked by the vibrations from the impact of the blade on the stone. His face twisted in pain. Sherlock took the chance to climb to his feet and stagger away.

Holding the staff like a spear, Arrhenius turned and lunged at Sherlock, with the blade aimed directly at the boy’s heart. With only a moment to work out what to do, Sherlock decided that his best option was to dive at Arrhenius’s feet, tucking himself into a ball as he did so. Arrhenius tried to jump over Sherlock, but tripped and fell over the boy’s rolling body. Sherlock sprang to his feet before Arrhenius could react and scrambled away on hands and knees.

He was by the wall now, the wall with the hole in it looking out on to the river. On the floor near where Arrhenius had been standing Sherlock could see a sword. Arrhenius must have taken it from the second unconscious soldier. Sherlock scooped it up, hefting it experimentally in his hand. The blade was strangely shaped compared to the European swords that he was used to, but things were desperate and he didn’t have much choice.

Sword in hand, heart thumping, Sherlock stepped forward.

Arrhenius suddenly reversed the staff and jabbed several times at Sherlock’s chest with the blunt end. Startled, Sherlock parried with his sword, carving chunks out of the wood, but one of the jabs hit him right on his breastbone. He thought his heart had stopped, the impact was so hard. He staggered backwards, desperately trying to catch his breath.

Abruptly Arrhenius swung the staff around, bringing the sharp blade down at Sherlock’s forehead. Sherlock could hear the air hiss as the blade carved through it.

He brought the sword up, holding it two-handed, so that it intercepted the blade. The impact drove him to his knees.

Using every last ounce of his strength, he forced his way back to his feet, pushing Arrhenius’s blade up. For a long moment they both stood there, frozen like statues. Sherlock’s muscles screamed at the exertion.

Gradually Arrhenius pushed his blade closer and closer to Sherlock’s face. Sherlock could see the liquid gleam of light on the sharp edge. Arrhenius’s face was contorted into a snarl: blackened lips pulled back over teeth that glittered like metal. His irises were so dark they were almost black.

‘I think you’ve been driven mad by the silver you’ve drunk,’ Sherlock grunted. ‘I think it’s clogged your mind, like some kind of metallic sludge. You don’t think like a human being any more. You don’t care about people, just like your daughter doesn’t care.’

‘I have news for you,’ Arrhenius hissed. ‘I never did. Emotion doesn’t pay the bills. Only silver does that.’

He stepped back abruptly, pulling his staff away and then swinging it around low, chopping at Sherlock’s knees. Sherlock parried. The clang as the blades met echoed back and forth between the stone walls of the fort.

Arrhenius took two steps backwards. He didn’t seem to be breathing heavily — in fact his grey-black lips were twisted in something approximating a smile — but Sherlock’s lungs were burning with the effort of taking in air.

‘Give it up, child,’ Arrhenius said calmly. ‘You can struggle, and then I will kill you, or you can lay down the sword now, and I will kill you. Either way you will be dead, but you can save yourself a lot of pain and stress on the journey.’

‘You killed my friend,’ Sherlock said through clenched teeth. ‘And you killed my friend’s father.’

‘I didn’t kill either of them, not directly, although I will grant you that I did organize their deaths.’ He paused, considering. ‘I do not think that I have ever killed anybody directly.’ He smiled. ‘Until now, that is. This will be my first. I must say that I am looking forward to it. It will be interesting to find out what it actually feels like — taking another life. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Sherlock said. ‘But don’t expect it to be easy.’

‘Nothing worthwhile ever is.’ Arrhenius made a small motion with his bladed staff. ‘Now, shall we finish this? With the failure of the plan to blow up the USS Monocacy I am short several hundred thousand dollars in payments. I will need to start building diplomatic bridges with my employers if I want to keep on working.’

Sherlock opened his mouth to say something meaningless to delay the inevitable, but Arrhenius abruptly swung his staff around, aiming the blade at Sherlock’s face. Sherlock jerked his sword up, blocking the blow, but the impact knocked him sideways, twisting him around. His shoulder slammed into the wall. His sword dropped from numbed fingers, clattering on the floor.

‘Goodbye, Master Holmes,’ Arrhenius said. He kicked the sword away. It skittered across the flagstones. Arrhenius hefted his bladed staff like a spear. The point was aimed at Sherlock’s heart. Sherlock felt stone, cold and hard against his back. It seemed to be sucking the warmth, even the life, from him.

Sherlock let his hands drop to his sides. This was it. The game was over.

His fingers brushed against something in his right-hand pocket: a hard-edged, metal object. He slipped his hand inside the pocket and closed his fingers over it, feeling the rough edges. Feeling a sudden flush of hope.

‘Goodbye, Mr Arrhenius,’ he said.

He pulled the object out and raised it up to his face. With a flick of his thumb, Sherlock operated the spring mechanism. The jaws snapped wide open. His thumb found the rubber bulb inside and jabbed it, hard.

A spray of snake venom arced across the few inches between Sherlock and Arrhenius. Droplets splattered into Arrhenius’s eyes. He screamed, dropping his bladed staff and clutching his hands over his face. He staggered backwards, still screaming.

‘For God’s sake!’ Arrhenius cried. ‘The pain! The pain! Kill me! Kill me now! I’m begging you — kill me now!’

‘Not in cold blood,’ Sherlock said quietly. ‘That’s not the kind of person I am.’

Arrhenius collapsed to his knees and he writhed, and screamed, and cried, and fell forward, so that he was lying on his face on the stone slabs that made up the floor of the ruined fort. Eventually Arrhenius stopped moving. Only then did Sherlock turn and walk away.