Team of Seven III Chapter 3 and 4

3.

The beast like figure landed in a crouch position on the unit flooring. It was still in its human form although his clothes from Saville looked as if it needed mending. It looked up and looked back to the broken window. It stood up and then it heard the voice.

“I disliked it when you boys go out to play without me.” The voice belonged to an older lady in the tight dark dress and short coat that reached just below the waist. That was the dressing part but the lady packed a waist belt with the double holster guns and in her hands, she held the huge double barrel gun with the shortened barrel.

“Bad boy.” The lady pulled the trigger which fired the bullets in the barrel towards the beast like figure. The beast like figure was propelled to the broken window and went down hard onto the street. The figure laid there unmoving but it was still breathing. The soldiers surrounded it but no ne fired any shot. What they saw then was a man like them lying there.

“Don’t shoot him.” Another figure ran to the man on the street. “I command you to lower your guns.”

It was Nayland Smith then who pushed his way through to clear a path to the man. The British Executive for Foreign Affairs specialising in countering threats. Ever the gentleman, he was dressed in the three pieces designed tweed suit with the walking cane. He knelt down to check the man’s vital signs while the lady shooter left the scene.

“Dr Jekyll is still alive. Get me a doctor here.” Nayland called out.

“Make way for doctor.” Doctor Watson pushed himself in and then checked the man they were hunting. He heard the medical carriage making its way there and stepped aside to let the Medical aides take over.

“By George, he fell harder than I would have expected.” Mycroft looked from the body to the broken window.

“By Mary, when did you become an expert in the medical field?” Sherlock asked and then looked at Watson. “Sorry for the reference to Mary but George was taken up too many times.”

“Move it boys. He might wake up soon.” Nayland took command of the situation. He then turned to the soldiers and constables. “Good show, chaps. The country will be safe with you in the streets and …. At our borders.”

Soon there was only four of them standing there watching the man they knew as Doctor Jekyll or Mr Hyde was taken into special custody. The prisoner was bounded with chains and strapped to the moving stretcher.  

“Chaps, I got word that M is looking for the pair of you, SOE’s office.” Nayland told the others. “I have to escort Dr Jekyll back to his new home.”

“I am condemned to butler duty nowadays.” Nayland sighed.

The other three English men sighed and then they filed in a single line to the office of the Office of Inter-Services Research Bureau or for them in the inner circle it’s called Special Operations Executives.

Soon they were in the comfortable chamber of the SOE’s Head, Sir Robert Fleming seated in the lined up of seats as if they were in an Inquiry instead of a meeting. The Head of SOE was reading the notes in the folder when the doorway to his office opened to admit one more person pushing the tea cart.

“Mrs Hudson, please do sit down. Here we have aides to serve us tea.” Sir Fleming placed down the folder. The other three men turned to look at the lady who they knew in a different capacity.

“Gentlemen, may I present to you, Martha Louise Hudson, Mrs Hudson to you. She is our recruit of ours in the Prefix 100 officers. Her prefix is 101. She was the one who stop the earlier beast.”

The most surprised one was Sherlock Holmes. He thought he had all of it deducted into specific compartment in his mind and his landlady held one there but he missed some details.  Unfortunately, he did not now that his findings were incomplete like the Gloria Scott case which he never really get to solve it completely.

“Hello boys. This is not Baker Street and here I am your …. equal. Well, I wore knickers which you may not. So, the tea is for me. And mine alone. Ta da.”

“Martha has been working with us for ….” Sir Fleming was interrupted by Sherlock.

“You….” Sherlock looked from the Head of SOE to Mycroft. “Never did anyone mention that she was a recruit of this …”

“Yes, Mycroft does not know either. Mr Holmes.” Sir Fleming looked towards Sherlock. “You were not a recruit here. 

Not on a permanent role. Unlike Mycroft, he was one of ours but even then, we held secret from each other. After all, we are all spies, and secrets are our trade.”

“Gentlemen, please allow me to formally introduce Martha Louise Hudson, our sleeper agent under Prefix 101. She was only activated for duty in the most extreme situations. If helped when she is a landlady of man who was hardly around at times. Her serving of the household kept us alert of who’s who at the address.”

“She was spying on me?” Sherlock raised his objection.

“No, she was protecting you. The demure lady you see here is an expert in the arts of physical fighting; savate being one of them from her early days in Paris, her gun skills from her first marriage to a Secret Service from the colonist, her survival skills she picked up from the lads in the Highlands Regiments, and last not least, her uncanny ability to handle the most unique opponents in the art of sleuth from her tenant.”

“Viola! She was spying on my methods.” Sherlock grind the tone on his words.

“No, Mr. Holmes. I did not learn it all from you. There was Charlie Chan, Senior who once taught me in Honolulu, Hawaii when I was there with my husband for a year. He is a great detective but on a low profile. He actually started coaching his son then Charlie Chan to be one. With you, I picked up more on those disguises works.”

“So Mrs. Hud… Agent 101 told you of our visitors. How convenient of you?”

“Yes, I will come to that point. Princess Fa Lo Suee and the lady were in our scrutiny ever since all of you returned to India. We had the pair trailed to Hong Kong and then to Australia before she embarked back here. She is every elusive and we lost her several times before we managed to trail her until the last leg she was in London. She went missing and it was for a week before we saw her at Baker Street.”

“221B to be exact.” Sir Fleming looked at Sherlock. “We saw her visit your unit.”

“So, it was your thugs I saw out there? I am surprised that you are working with the Tongs on this.” Sherlock replied. “I had a narrow escape from them when I intruded into their opium den at the docks.” (The case of the Twisted Lips.).

“Yes, the one where you exposed the man of his begging antics. I read that case form the personal notes of Doctor…”

“You read my notes? What else did you not do? Watched me with Mary perhaps?”

“No, Doctor. We are careful but not intrusive into another’s privacy.” Sir Fleming explained. “Pardon me on these works but since the last M saga, we were forced to take some strong measures to ensure all is well.”

“Well, I hope so for I am leaving.” Sherlock stood up to leave but Mrs. Hudson stopped him.

“Mr. Holmes, for all I ever done to you I think you need to hear this tale out.” Mrs Watson then motioned to the doorway where another lady stood there.

It was Princess Fa Lo Suee.

4.

The colonisation of the new world began way back as far as the early days of the Vikings and the Normans when the Isle then was invaded. It was very much in the European continent that the act of invasion was ever recorded but it took many more centuries until the fourteenth century before we took it outside of the continent. Christopher Columbus was one of the pioneers then with the Italian explorer with his Spanish expedition found the New World. It opened up too many more from there and more popular explorer like Vasco Da Gama, Magellan and even Marco Polo who travelled inland to the Far East.

They founded the New World as we know then.

But who found the Old World?

Was it the Neanderthals or we knew them as the caveman the earliest one? Their world will be the Primitive World. Soon after them and before the new colonists there were others. King Solomon was one, and so was Alexander the Great, and later the Roman Empire, or before that the Persian or the Greeks, or even the Macedonians.

Historical findings have surfaced that civilisation may had occurred not from those empires stated above but dated far back to five thousand years before them in the settlement next to the Yellow River in the Far East. That settlement soon became known as the Xia Dynasty ruled by the first Emperor named Yu the Great. He was on the one who tackle the flooding of the corps when the Yellow River overflowed from the annual torrential rain. For over a decade the Emperor struggled to build the foundation and later the wall to form the raised river bank to curb the flood. Finally, after thirteen years of effort, he managed to hold the river water from flooding his land. With his land safe from the flood, Emperor Yu then began to invade the neighbouring lands to claim as his. The Emperor then decreed that his lineage will succeed him as the ruler and it was on-going until the dynasty was taken over by the Shang Dynasty. It was decided at the battle of Mingtiao when the two empires clashed and the last Xia Emperor was defeated.

However, it did not end the lines of descendants of the Xia rulers. The surviving siblings went into hiding and kept their identities hidden for many generations. They were only known by their real names to the inner circle of descendants. Soon the inner circle became the few and the Xia descendants looked to be getting extinct until a young son was born then. His name was Fu Xia, the son of Xia and a Manchurian lady who came from a family that was once related to the Great Khan, Genghis Khan.

Fu Xia had a better life with his father then a rich trader in the silk and other products. His trading house held many visitors from the faraway lands. They came bearing gifts and soon many were his friends. As the only son, Fu Xia sat on his father’s lap at the tender age of four to learn how to communicate with the other traders. His father had the best tutors in the city to teach him the words of wisdom and knowledge while his mother born and bred on the plains taught him the art of fighting and hunting. “A man without the means to defend himself will be dead soon.” The mother told her son when she first started coaching him. She deplored the use of the new weapons and stuck to the older ones like the dagger and the bow with the arrow, or the long spear.

When he was about to reach adulthood, the father of Fu Xia sent the boy to the Western continent to learn more of their ways. The young boy then embarked on an education of trail of the academic books in the higher learning places and also on the experiences to see for himself how his people were used by the colonists. He rebelled then against the repression and associated himself with the secret societies there. He soon joined the Si Fan, a sect that trained assassins to kill the imperialists. He was identified by the authorities but he fled before they could arrest him. He left back for his own home and then took over the business when his father died later. He hid his real identity and called himself Fu Manchu adopting his mother’s lineage. Soon after his return, he saw the influence of the West have arrived into his land, and he vowed to fight them there. He formed the new Si Fan sect there and secretly recruited new members to be trained as assassins. He found his own wealth was limited to finance the assassin sect and it was then he took to robbing besides killing. When that failed to fully support the cause, he went into the trade of opium to send back to the Western World. He trafficked in white slavery to serve his clients in the Far East. He held no qualms on the moral of the trade as long it made the imperialists suffered like his own.

Fu Manchu’ empire grew and soon he was considered like an Emperor. He soon realized that even Emperor’s die of age and he felt that it was too soon for he was to die. His works was only partly done, and he began to think of how to extend his life. He recalled that once great Emperor Qin Shi Huang had sought the Elixir of Life. He then pursued his life desired from within his lands to the far reaches like Admiral Zheng He who sailed as far as the Dark Continent to the Southern Islands. “My Emperor, beware the curse of Hsu Fu.” The advisers with him cautioned him on the foolish journey to find the elixir from the immortals on Penglai Mountain. “To avoid the folly of Hsu Fu, you must have a listening post there. Send no one without the means to know of the outcome.”

For the few occasions in his life he listened to his advisers. Fu Manchu build his empire to cover the vast lands and from there he struck his influence to exert his control. From there he will sought the final desire of his; the elixir of life. He had searched for most of the Far East to the Western World but he was intrigued by the high mountains that split the world apart. Fu Manchu took to himself to visit the Mountains in search of the Elixir for many years but each time he had yielded no results. He had his spies here for this was not one land that he could just conquer or influence. He then learned of the Spiritual Guardians that stood guard over the so named untamed ones for no man’s prison could hold them. The prison held them in a stasis state for death was denied to them but a long-lasting hell of living among the damned. Fu Manchu thought that the untamed may be his answer to his immortality. He came there but he could not find it until the last trip he made there, he never returned to his home,

Fu Manchu was feared missing but months later, he turned up at his palace but he was the not the same person before.

“Thank you, Princes Fa Lo Suee for your history on your father. Now shall we come to the part when he realized he was not who he was.” Sir Robert asked. “You were his daughter but yet you did not please him.”

“Yes, I am not his favourite maybe I am a daughter. He favours a son but he had none. His Empire may crumble if there is none.”

“Okay, enough parables. Can we get to the task on hand here if there is one? For the records, Princess Fa Lo Suee is my client. She had secured my service.”

“Yes, Mr. Holmes. Your service is still secured however as just now I am under the protection of the SOE. Hence my protector or body guard is one named Mrs. Hudson.”

“Convenient but I think it’s not necessary.” Watson growing agitated then replied. “Or you could terminate our services. Both of us. In fact, all of us will be preferable.”

Watson was still upset at the SOE invading his privacy.

“Yes, I need both of you.” The Princess spoke out. “You will investigate my father’s whereabouts from the world you knew. I will need the SOE to help me in China. It’s the one place I am now considered as enemy No.1. I need to check if that is my really my father or not. And I can’t do it alone. Not anymore.”