The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [54]
Had he not looked at flotsam and seen a shark, he might even have approached them openly.
As it was, his train was one of dozens the two men had watched pull in that day, and he was both alert and unremarkable, one of a thousand men in dark suits and city hats.
He spotted the first watcher while the train was slowing to a halt, a big man tucked into a niche near the exit, giving close scrutiny to every passing male, and to those females of a greater than average height. Holmes went still, his grey eyes boring into the nondescript figure on the far side of the crowded platform, instantaneously considering and discarding a hundred minute details of dress, stance, hair, attitude. There came a brief gap in the stream of passengers, and two things happened: The man shifted, as if his feet were sore, then he glanced across the station. The watcher had a partner.
Police? Not that the nearer man had trained as a constable, or even as a soldier—no man who’d pounded the pavements would fail to wear comfortable shoes for day-long surveillance. Plain-clothes detectives? But they were not local: No Continental tailor had cut those suits, and Holmes could place the source of both men’s hats to a specific London district.
Mycroft’s men? He was conscious of a sudden taste of optimism in the air; nonetheless, he kept his seat in the emptying car. Certainly the two had the look of the men his brother employed, quiet, capable, and potentially deadly. And the cut of the first man’s coat suggested a gun, which Mycroft’s agents had been known to carry.
However, these two were actively looking for him, searching for his face among the crowd. If Mycroft had wished to throw his brother a link, wouldn’t he have instructed his men simply to take a stand in some prominent location and wait for Holmes to approach them?
This pair was not offering themselves to Holmes: They were hunting him.
Ten seconds had gone by since he’d seen the first man, and although he wanted nothing better than to sit and explore the meaning of it, he had to move. He discarded the day’s paper and made a number of small adjustments to hat, collar, and tie that changed their personality, then moved smoothly to the door, where an ancient hunched dowager hesitated to commit her ivory-handled cane to the descent. “Kan ik u helpen?” he asked politely. The old woman peered up at him with suspicion, adjusting her fur collar with a diamond-studded hand. In the end, she either decided that she knew him, or that he was better than nothing, and tucked one gnarled hand through his arm. He helped her down from the car, bending his ear (and thus his spine) to her querulous and incomprehensible monologue, punctuating his nods with the occasional Ja! or Het is niet waar? as they went. They tottered down the platform, adding a finishing touch to the picture of an elderly couple, shrunk by age and forced by reduced circumstances to make their own way into an inhospitable city. Not at all what the two English agents had been told to watch for.
At the taxi rank, Holmes handed the woman into a cab and let it pull away.
He was sorely tempted to double back and turn the tables on the man with the gun. All it needed was a moment’s distraction for him to slip a hand inside the coat and make the weapon his. A short walk to a quiet place, and he could ask who had sent the two men.
But there were two. And Holmes did not know the city intimately, nor did he speak the language with anything approaching fluency. If it weren’t for Damian … but no, getting himself arrested would leave the lad dangerously exposed. Discretion never felt less a part of valour; on the other hand, walking away permitted the formulation of a plan.
What he required was a place to ruminate. Were he at home, he would settle into a nest of cushions with some shag tobacco and stare into nothingness, letting his mind chew its way through the facts and inferences. Here he had neither cushions nor shag, nor even a violin. He could, however, achieve