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Going to Sherlock Holmes was the last thing I wanted to do. Half of the media showed him as an angel, sarcastic and brilliant. The other half showed him as a demon, snarky and brash. It was a fifty-fifty chance to any normal person. But I wasn't a normal person. As a former SVR - Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia's most secret service organization - agent, I was trained to be as suspicious as possible. So when a man could figure out your deepest secrets from a smudge of ink on your thumb, I knew he could unravel my past in an instant.
But I wasn't going to him of my own accord, I was doing it for something much more important than that. I was doing it for my family, my younger sister who'd been missing for three weeks. The first week, I assumed she was on a mission. I left the SVR after dedicating most of my life to it- determined to pursue a sense of normality. My sister stayed. But she always contacted me. Through code or otherwise. This time she didn't.
Week two I tried to look for her myself. I called some old contacts, and they said her mission was supposed to be in Ireland, some soft cover job that should have been done in a few days. They weren't as concerned as I was. They didn't have as much to lose. I took a train to Ireland and attempted to track her movements. She adjusted her appearances on the cameras I could get into, but I would never forget my sister. I knew what a person under disguise was like. Then the trail stopped, and I returned to London at a dead end. It was like she just disappeared.
The third week was when I finally sucked up my pride and decided I would go to Sherlock Holmes. No matter how much he found out, if he could tell my English accent was just a titch off - even if I'd mastered nearly every accent in the world - and pinned me as an ex-Russian spy, I'd do anything to get my sister back.
"Hello, can I help you?" A kindly old woman greeted me at the front door.
"I'm here to see Sherlock Holmes," I requested, clutching the strap of my purse tightly.
The night before I'd went over every inch of my body, covering up anything that would give a hint of my past. Scars were covered with foundation and a tattoo of a hammer and sickle on my hip with a bandage - a ritual for the top agents of the SVR. On my right ring finger was a star, tiny and able to be covered by a ring. But I left that out in the open. My sister had the crescent, and it was the one thing Sherlock Holmes could see.
I bought a new set of clothes straight off the mannequin of a store I never shopped at, putting them through the washer and dryer twice to wear them out a bit. I used soaps and lotions from the department store across town. I wasn't too fond of the scents either, but I could bear them and that was what mattered. I put temporary dye in my hair, washing it thoroughly twice so it'd fade.
