The Anti-Corruption Squad

"I knew Victor couldn't have killed himself so easily. Emily let him go, on your instructions."

Sherlock pulled out a silver brooch the size of a fingernail. He had taken it from Victor's mouth while examining his teeth.

"Th-that design looks familiar." Sitangna struggled to remember. She really did seem to have seen it somewhere.

"On Emily's ear." Sherlock wrapped up the silver pin. Its design meant it could be worn as either a brooch or a stud earring.

"After he was released, you recruited him to dig up more evidence for your anti-corruption squad, evidence powerful enough to shake the foundations of London itself. If I'm not mistaken, Miss Emily is a member of your team too."

Sherlock's voice rang with the sharp edge of someone who had seen through everything.

Mycroft leaned back slightly, his fingertips tapping the desk out of habit. It was a thinking gesture he rarely showed.

"Your imagination is as fanciful as ever, my dear brother. But I must remind you, some gardens are shrouded in mist, and an overly curious gardener invites unnecessary trouble."

"And Victor Trevor... well, a tragic figure with a rare gift for biopharmaceuticals. His value lies in the untapped potential of his mind, not in his spent fury."

"He did indeed disappear for a time under the protection of a distinguished academic who valued talent. As for Emily Cavendish..." Mycroft paused, his gaze deep. "She has a mission she must complete."

"Your defeat at the hands of Miss Irene Adler last time disrupted the plans several politicians had laid out on their chessboards. They're already wary of you."

One of Mycroft's major plans had also been put on hold, but he didn't consider it Sherlock's fault. Irene was not as simple as she appeared, having single-handedly held a country's ruler and the top officials of several nations in check.

His foolish younger brother still thought she had only been teasing him.

Sherlock sneered, as though his dear brother had struck a sore spot. His voice was icy.

"Plans or silencing witnesses? Cavendish should already have realized Emily's true identity. If I remember correctly, this Andrew was his second-in-command, his most trusted subordinate apart from Emily."

"The reason this subordinate died was simple too. He took over from Emily, temporarily gaining access to a list of higher-level 'protectors,' and followed orders to destroy it."

"Seeing that everything he'd worked for in pursuit of revenge was about to be lost, Victor acted on his own in desperation, didn't he?"

"Tell me, Cavendish pretended to dote on his only daughter, yet all these years, he never even told her the password to the matrix disk."

"Otherwise, you wouldn't have planned such a meticulous kidnapping to pry that brick loose, would you?"

"This is thrilling!" Sherlock's face lit up. He had cracked two connected cases within half an hour of arriving, and their deeply buried complications and the answers yet to be uncovered sent his brain into orgasm.

Deep inside St Bartholomew's Hospital, a laboratory marked "Special Pathology Research" was crowded with people. The air was cold, filled with the smell of disinfectant and chemical reagents.

Molly was still willing to come back and help them after what had happened yesterday. Watson and Sitangna were so moved they nearly cried, and they planned to go back and give Sherlock a thrashing on her behalf.

Molly Amber wore a crisp white lab coat, her gaze as sharp as the scalpel in her hand. A large screen in front of her displayed a three-dimensional scan of the deep regions of Victor's brain, with intricate nerve bundles and networks of blood vessels clearly visible.

"Sherlock's observation was extremely precise." Molly pointed to a highlighted area on the image, so minute that a standard autopsy would almost certainly have overlooked it.

"The abnormal constriction of the pupils was caused by a neurotoxin. We isolated traces of an extremely rare synthetic alkaloid in the cerebrospinal fluid near his medulla oblongata and cerebellum."

"Only a trace amount, with an astonishing metabolic rate and an extremely short window of action." Molly spoke fluently on her area of expertise, and everyone listened intently.

"It doesn't kill directly, but it can instantly paralyze specific cerebellar and vestibular nerve receptors, causing irresistible vertigo and a loss of balance."

"Is it the same as the chemical reagent Victor developed before?" Sherlock asked, taking the blood test report from the printer as he stared at the medical screen.

"An eighty percent match. Presumably an improved version." Molly brought out the test data she had sealed away last time. It wasn't part of her duties, but Sherlock had asked for it, so she had done it.

"A neurotoxin?" Watson pressed. As an army doctor, he was no stranger to biochemical weapons of this kind.

"More precisely, a... precision weapon of bioengineering." A deep, weary voice came from a shadowed corner of the laboratory.

Everyone turned. An elderly man with silver-white hair and a stern face approached, his hands behind his back. His wary gaze rested on Sherlock for a moment.

"That was a molecular carrier I designed, code-named 'Angel Dust.'"

"It has an extremely specific target, and its duration of action is precisely controlled to last only a few minutes. It then breaks down in the body into undetectable inert metabolites. For now, though, it exists only in theory." The old man's voice held a hint of bitter self-mockery.

"Victor was my most valued student, and the brilliant researcher at the Royal Institution most likely to succeed in developing it. What a pity, my dear pupil."

He walked over to Victor and reached out to feel the icy cold remains of his former pupil.

"Professor Ashton, former president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, highly respected in your field but also the subject of much attention because of certain controversial studies. I've long admired you. I'm Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective on Baker Street."

Sherlock, who never missed a newspaper, naturally knew who the white-haired old man before him was. He was somewhat surprised; he hadn't expected Victor to be his direct student.

That information hadn't been in the file.

"But why do you say this weapon exists only in theory?" Sherlock stepped forward, his gray-green eyes fixed on Ashton. "Didn't Victor already make it?"

At that, a flash of pain and anger at the desecration crossed Ashton's face.

"The complete molecular formula and synthesis pathway exist only in Victor's encrypted research notes and the highest-security section of my independent server."

"But Oliver Cavendish controls a vast and evil network service cluster. His reach has spread into every corner of Britain's political and business circles."

He took a deep breath, drew a tiny chip gleaming with cold metallic light from his pocket, and handed it to Sherlock.

"Victor took enormous risks to go undercover here and intercepted fragments of his encrypted communications from the weeks before his death."