By the time he left Fleet Street it was already close to midnight.
Russell turned up the collar of his coat, buried the lower half of his face in a dark-grey cashmere scarf, and slipped away from the night-shift workers and newspaper-selling boys into the cold, fog-shrouded streets of London.
Charing Cross was not far from Fleet Street, yet the deeper one went into the alleys the quieter and cleaner the heart of the Empire became.
Still, he kept feeling that something was wrong.
This Iliad Finch was clearly an independent small studio—possibly even a sole proprietor. Given his physique, being able to contribute to a few London papers would already be enough; expanding the range of activity to other cities was impossible.
Unless the Milverton company owned its own transmitters in every city.
That would be an exaggeration.
Yet when one thought about it carefully, if the purpose was to guard a vault that held nearly half of Britain's scandals, doing so was understandable.
In other words, the possibility of using Iliad Finch to seize Milverton directly was low.
First, take a look.
Russell sighed and then walked on at a brisk pace.
Fifteen minutes later he stopped in front of a second-hand bookshop whose faded signboard was dim and peeling.
The shop windows were covered with years of uncleaned dust and damp; yellowed old books and cheap parchment crowded the display. The second-floor windows were dark, without a single light; the proprietor was clearly fast asleep.
Russell stood in the shadow of the porch and looked around.
In this quiet alley that even stray dogs avoided, nothing could be heard except the sound of wind and snow striking the brick walls.
He took a probe from his pocket and skilfully inserted it into the keyhole of the old brass padlock.
In less than two seconds the copper lock opened.
Russell pushed the door open, slipped into the dim interior, and locked it from the inside.
The first thing he smelled was a mixture of the mouldy, rotting odour of old paper and the scent of cheap tobacco.
He did not light a gas lamp in the darkness. Eyes long accustomed to the dark relied on the faint reflection of the gas street-lamps outside the windows to sweep quickly across the narrow shop.
Behind a teetering pile of books stood a cluttered wooden workbench.
Scattered across the workbench were large quantities of blank sixteen-cell grids, various pencils, and several nearly empty bottles of ink.
He stepped forward and, relying on his excellent night vision, began searching the workbench.
If Milverton had to update the Appled security code every day, then the bookseller named Finch was nothing more than an outsourced typesetter. Therefore there must have been frequent daily means of contact between them.
Russell stirred the pile of discarded letters with his fingers until his gaze was drawn to a small iron box held down by a brass paperweight at the edge of the heavy wooden table. He unfastened the latch of the box.
Inside there were neither coins nor promissory notes, only neatly stacked letters and receipts.
Russell picked up the topmost stamp and glanced at the postmark.
[Tomorrow morning's submission. Fill in the order 2-0-8-5.]
He turned a few more pages.
Each receipt contained only a very short sentence and a string of four-digit numbers.
These were all letter paper. The envelopes appeared to have been disposed of, but that did not matter.
This alone was enough to corroborate it.
"2085…"
Russell immediately performed the subtraction in his head.
Subtracting tomorrow's date and year from this sequence produced the exact result of 1895.
Russell returned the copied notes to the tin box.
He could picture that arrogant King of Blackmail sitting every day in the luxurious suite of the Savoy Hotel, leisurely drinking cognac. Then he would casually write a string of numbers, put it into an envelope, stick on a stamp, and drop it into a red pillar-box by the roadside.
They themselves need not even have written the words.
The next morning an unknowing postman would toss this letter—bearing the fate of the British Empire—together with debt-collection notices and junk mail under the door of the dilapidated bookshop. The impoverished bookseller Iliad Finch, in order to earn a meagre side income, would obediently arrange the numbers into Sudoku puzzles and deliver them to the editorial departments of various newspapers. The entire process involved neither direct contact nor suspicious flows of funds—provided one had not already deciphered the cipher.
Even if Scotland Yard turned Fleet Street upside down, they would never notice this inconspicuous arrangement that existed among hundreds of thousands of newspapers.
"It is impossible to prevent."
Russell murmured.
He did not linger long in the mouldy second-hand bookshop.
Now that he had found the physical terminal through which Milverton transmitted the security codes, there was no need to wake the unfortunate contractor still sleeping soundly upstairs. The man might know nothing; making noise here, let alone kidnapping Finch, would only alert the enemy.
Russell closed the tin box again and returned the brass paperweight to its original place.
He vanished into the darkness and casually locked the padlock once more.
When he returned to Baker Street, Charlotte was not asleep, but Russell was used to that.
The moment Charlotte saw Russell return she looked up at him with expectant eyes.
"How was it?"
"To be honest, something feels wrong."
Russell shook his head.
"You couldn't find the outsourcing company?"
Charlotte frowned.
"I found it in a deserted second-hand bookshop in a back alley off Charing Cross Road."
Russell removed his thinly snow-dusted coat and hung it on the coat-rack by the entrance. Then he went to the warm fireplace, stretched out both hands and warmed them over the fire.
"The shopkeeper's name is Iliad Finch—an unlucky businessman who earns a meagre income by supplying Sudoku puzzles to various newspapers. I found a brass box on his desk. It was packed with old receipts, each bearing a four-digit number that followed the 1895 pattern."
Hearing this, Charlotte raised one eyebrow slightly.
"This sounds like a perfect closed loop. What is his password for tomorrow morning?"
"2085."
Russell turned his face toward Charlotte.
"Even after subtracting tomorrow it is still 1895. The letter must have been sent today, either during the day or in the evening, through the ordinary local postal system, or else a messenger boy slipped it under the door."
"Then everything falls into place."
Charlotte nodded and set down her coffee cup.
"Milverton only needed to prepare a four-digit addition-and-subtraction problem every day and put it into an envelope. After that, the unknowing contractor distributed it onto breakfast tables all over London."
But at that moment a sudden crease appeared between her brows.
"Wait—this Finch? Who is he?"
"An unlucky businessman who earns a meagre income by supplying Sudoku puzzles to various newspapers."
Russell repeated his own answer.
Hearing this, Charlotte immediately stood up.
"Wrong."
She said, "There's a problem."
"I think so too."
Russell avoided a direct statement.
"The scale doesn't match."
Charlotte said.
"Even if an unlucky businessman managed to monopolise the business of the major Fleet Street newspapers, he would absolutely lack the ability to publish these ciphers simultaneously on the same morning in the local papers of Birmingham, Manchester, or Scotland."
"What if Milverton had found a Finch in every city?"
Russell proposed a hypothesis.
"He has the financial resources to support hundreds of independent distribution points."
"That is my second point, and at the same time the most fatal one."
Charlotte shook her head; her tone gradually grew serious.
"Fault tolerance."
A Dead Hand system is, in essence, a fragile time-bomb that, once triggered, cannot be repaired. If Milverton had set up ten, or even fifty, Finch stations across Britain simply to receive the codes… then if one day a postman in a certain city got drunk and lost the mail, or a heavy rain delayed it, or a man named Finch fell ill and failed to deliver the Sudoku puzzle to the newspaper on time, the lurking keepers would open Pandora's box automatically after three days without seeing the password.
Charlotte looked at Russell and spoke word by word.
"Even the British Royal Mail occasionally sends monthly bills to the wrong address. You regard him as a meticulous King of Blackmail who holds the lifelines of the nation's highest elite. Would he entrust the fragile fuse of the Sword of Damocles to unreliable postmen, bad weather, and dozens of unlucky sole proprietors?"
When she finished speaking, the living room was wrapped in a deathly silence.
"Calculating with probability theory, the chance of sending a password every day for an entire year through the postal system to fifty domestic stations without a single error is less than one percent. Even the slightest mistake could trigger an avalanche. Milverton would never do such a thing."
Charlotte slammed her fist against the wall.
"It's a fake."
From the Sudoku, through the 1895 transposition cipher steeped in his own classical tragedy, down to that flawed old bookshop on Charing Cross Road… it was all nothing more than a façade he had deliberately made public!
"A smokescreen to lure out the intelligent people who try to challenge him."
Russell added quietly.
"What's the next step?"
Charlotte fell silent for a while; her ash-blue eyes swirled with various thoughts.
"I have a good idea."
She suddenly spoke.
"Hm?"
"Intercept it."
Charlotte said.
"Tomorrow, use Mary's influence on Fleet Street to force The Guardian not to print the Sudoku layout for tomorrow. Don't log in 2085. Or use any other string of numbers. If this is truly a Dead Hand method, once the newspaper is published some piece of illicit information will inevitably leak within three days. If there is no sound at all…"
"That would completely prove it was a total lie."
Russell said.
"But what exactly can it achieve?"
"He may detest it."
Charlotte said angrily.
"Can we make him sick of it?"
Hearing the reason, Russell could not help chuckling and shaking his head.
"If it's only to irritate him a little, the price is too high. What if our speculation is wrong and this really is part of Appled? Three days later photographs of the entire British Cabinet would start circulating online, and the first to raise a fuss would undoubtedly be your brother who works at Whitehall."
"I cannot be wrong."
Charlotte said with conviction.
"But if this bomb explodes, its power would be enough to destroy nearly half of Britain. At the same time, Milverton would absolutely ensure that his fuse explodes only when necessary."
The girl slammed her coffee cup onto the coffee table with a crisp sound.
Looking at Charlotte's murderous gaze, Russell could only shrug helplessly.
"Since the great detective has spoken, it seems I must play the errand-boy villain to the very end."
He glanced at the wall clock. The hands had already quietly passed two in the morning.
"There are only a few hours left until the final printing of tomorrow's morning edition. I'm going to Kensington now to borrow Mary's voice in this country."
"Go ahead."
Charlotte waved her hand languidly and curled up again on the large sofa.
At last she remembered something, raised her face, and looked at Russell with a faintly warning gaze.
"Be sure to come back at night."
….
"Just changing four numbers in the Sudoku puzzle on the entertainment page is enough?"
Edgar, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, looked at Russell with a puzzled expression.
"Is it not necessary to include positive media coverage of the Morstans as well?"
"There's no need, Mr Edgar."
Russell shook his head lightly, a polite smile still on his face.
"Miss Mary has recently developed a peculiar attachment to numbers and believes these four digits will bring a touch of humour to tomorrow's London."
"Yes, I understand."
Edgar nodded. "Which numbers should I use instead?"
"Hmm… four zeros, I suppose."
Russell thought for a moment, then spoke.
…
Eight o'clock in the morning.
Savoy Grand Hotel, penthouse suite.
The winter sun pierced London's rare thin fog and, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, cast light onto a dining table covered with a velvet tablecloth.
Charles Milverton, wearing a bathrobe, was elegantly enjoying breakfast.
On the silver tray beside him the major newspapers that had just been delivered that day were neatly arranged.
He set down the bone-china cup of Darjeeling tea and picked up the topmost issue of The Guardian—his unbroken daily routine every morning.
As a media king who controlled a newspaper empire, he enjoyed sniffing out the anxieties and desires of the city's people from between the lines of the papers.
He skilfully turned past the political news on page one, skipped the economic section on page two, and directed his gaze straight to the corner of page three.
When Milverton's eyes fell on the sixteen-cell grid that should have been filled with 2085—representing the 1895 burned into his memory…
The hand holding the teacup paused slightly.
The sixteen-cell grid contained neither complex logical arrangements nor the familiar cipher.
As far as the printed layout was concerned, there were only four numbers so simple they could almost be called crude.
0, 0, 0, 0.
Like four wide-open mouths, they quietly yet maliciously mocked his self-righteous cleverness.
In the quiet, luxurious suite the symphony from the gramophone continued to play softly.
Milverton remained in that posture, staring fixedly at the four zeros for thirty seconds.
Then he slowly set the newspaper down.
He neither smashed the cup in fury nor hurled curses in anger.
Not the slightest expression of surprise appeared on that refined, scholarly face.
"Haha…"
From the depths of the King of Blackmail's throat a low, suppressed yet thrillingly pleasurable laugh escaped.
The laughter grew louder and louder until finally Milverton removed his gold-rimmed glasses, sat deeply in the chair, and let out a bold, unrestrained laugh.
Zero points…?
Through the newspaper lying on the table he could almost see the mocking eyes of the great detective and the phantom thief in that living room on Baker Street.
This was a merciless answer.
"Clever—truly clever."
Milverton breathed a sigh of relief, folded his handkerchief and returned it to his breast pocket, then put the gold-rimmed glasses back on.
The smile gradually faded from his face, replaced by a serious, concentrated expression as though he had finally met an opponent worthy of himself.
That fake postal system had indeed been a fake.
As Charlotte had guessed, a man who held the lifelines of countless aristocrats of the British Empire would never entrust the fuse of his trump card to bad weather and the unreliable British post.
The second-hand bookshop set up in the back alley of Charing Cross was merely an entrance he had used to eliminate competitors.
If Mary or Moriarty had believed it and sent someone to eliminate the contractor, it would prove that these young people rising in London knew only how to act bravely—nothing more than reckless barbarians.
"It seems that particular scheme will not work on them."
Milverton picked up the slightly cooled tea and slowly took a sip.
The probing attempt carried out behind the scenes had been easily blocked—and even outmanoeuvred—by the other side, making the situation far more complicated.
Continuing this game of hide-and-seek would only make him look cheap.
He stretched out his hand and pressed the silver call-bell on the table.
The door was quickly pushed open; a manservant in tails entered respectfully and bowed lightly.
"Sir, is there anything you require?"
"Prepare invitations using the finest gold-foil-stamped parchment."
Milverton gazed at the morning fog of London spreading beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows; a faint smile appeared in his ash-green eyes.
"In my name, invite Miss Mary Morstan, Miss Charlotte Holmes, and Mr Russell Watson. Dinner tomorrow night at eight o'clock at the rooftop restaurant of the Savoy Hotel. I shall bear all expenses."
"Yes, understood."
The manservant acknowledged the order and withdrew.
Milverton clasped his hands and rested them on the flat tablecloth.
Now that the barrier that had been lurking in the shadows had been removed, the time had come to sit at the negotiation table and talk face to face.
….
"An invitation?"
Russell looked at the letter in his hand and could not help raising an eyebrow.
"They have invited the three of us to dinner at the highest-class restaurant of the Savoy Hotel."
He waved the document in his hand toward Charlotte.
"Is this a reward for solving the riddle?"
Charlotte snatched the gold-foil-stamped parchment from his fingers, glanced at it, then gave the expected cold sneer.
"It's sarcasm."
She tossed the invitation onto the coffee table and picked up the half-cold cup of black tea.
"As a reward for seeing through his smokescreen, he has gone to great trouble, spent hours flipping through newspapers, and even paid for the dinner out of his own pocket. The rooftop restaurant of the Savoy Hotel is the most expensive and most glamorous place in London. He chose that location to show us that he knows no fear."
"In other words, this King of Blackmail intends to carve filet mignon in front of everyone's eyes while forcing us to hand over control of the Morstan family?"
Russell sat deeply on the sofa and let his gaze linger for a while on the finely crafted invitation.
"The fact that he had the courage to distribute this calling card means he must already have planned an escape route. The rooftop restaurant of the Savoy Hotel is not only a favourite haunt of London's political and financial elite; it is also a perfect stage for gossip reporters and society people. He reserved a table there for us; if any quarrel or shooting incident were to occur during the meal, the next morning it would become a major scandal that would shake the entire Empire. That place was the absolute safety zone he himself had chosen."
"No wonder he is a media king who built his fortune by manipulating people's hearts. Even when being beaten he chooses the place with the most people."
Russell casually placed the invitation under the teacup.
"But since he is treating us to first-class French cuisine for free, it would be rude to not to go."
Just then a series of light footsteps could be heard from the stairwell.
With the sound of the door hinge turning, Mary pushed open the living-room door and entered.
Today she was wearing a deep-red, body-fitting coat. Although the snow outside had stopped, the damp cold of London had left the tip of her nose faintly red.
"You received one as well, I see."
The girl immediately noticed the parchment under the teacup, walked over to Russell, sat down, and tossed an identical invitation onto the table.
"They even went so far as to send someone to the mansion, calling my name to invite me to dinner."
"Shall we go?"
Russell turned his face toward her and casually brushed the snow from the collar of her coat.
"Of course we will go."
A proud smile appeared on Mary's lips.
"I have almost never eaten at the rooftop restaurant of the Savoy."
"Then let's go."
Charlotte stood up and straightened her clothes.
"And let him know that in this city even blackmail must be carried out according to the master's wishes."
…
The following night at eight o'clock.
As dusk settled over the Strand, the main entrance of the Savoy Hotel was filled with every kind of luxurious carriage decorated with aristocratic crests.
Uniformed doormen courteously opened the golden doors and ushered guests into the warm, magnificent hall.
The rooftop restaurant was enclosed by enormous floor-to-ceiling windows, offering a panoramic view of the winding Thames and the gas lamps glittering along its banks.
The air was filled with the scents of fine perfume, freshly roasted rosemary, and high-quality red wine.
On a circular stage a short distance away a string quartet was playing a Strauss waltz; the music was light and elegant.
Charles Milverton had secured the best seat early—the one closest to the floor-to-ceiling windows and with the finest view.
He wore a perfectly tailored haute-couture tuxedo; cold light from the crystal chandeliers reflected off his gold-rimmed glasses.
When Russell, Mary and Charlotte were shown in by a waiter and entered the restaurant side by side, they naturally attracted the attention of many of the celebrities present.
After all, the simultaneous appearance of the new head of the Morstan family and the rising young female detective was perfect fodder for gossip. Seeing the three approach, Milverton rose, smiling and gesturing in invitation, displaying impeccable gentlemanly manners.
"Good evening, my dear cousin, and the two distinguished guests who have come from afar."