Your biggest security leak. The schemer on the plain

 (Sherlock Meta by abidos)

The second part of my piece about A Scandal in Belgravia, centred around Mycroft’s masters and what Irene was actually threatening Mycroft with.



 “(…) unless you want to tell your masters that your biggest security leak is your own little brother”

I’d like to begin by looking at a very interesting theory forwarded by Wellingtongoose.  According to it, Mycroft has no “shadowy masters” who might pose a direct threat to Sherlock, rather, the threat is against Mycroft’s position.  In this theory Mycroft is not part of the structure of the British Government or Secret Service, instead he functions as a consultant.  His “masters” are people like the Prime Minister and similar.  Sherlock is not guilty of breaching the Official Secrets Act of 1989, but Mycroft is, by letting Sherlock get involved in the Bond Air operation.  This would make Mycroft liable to prosecution and would greatly damage his relation with the Secret Service, who might decide to no longer use him.

Let’s start by looking at Mycroft’s responsibility in Sherlock’s involvement.  As I argued in part 1, Mycroft did not come up with the idea to give Sherlock the case of the photos.  Even if he had, at this point he had no reason to believe Irene had anything to do with Bond Air, so blaming him for introducing Irene and Sherlock makes no sense.  Furthermore, he did not know about the MOD e-mail until Moriarty texted him, so he can’t even be accused of letting Sherlock be involved in the Bond Air operation, since he didn’t know both events were related until it was too late.



Mycroft is a very capable man.  If this were the situation, he would easily be able to flip it, blaming the CIA for ruining his operation and threatening his brother.  The British Secret Service and the Government would already be pissed at them for running covert operations in their territory, so this wouldn’t be a hard pitch to make.  In this case, revelling Sherlock’s involvement in the case would have no real negative consequences for Mycroft, or for Sherlock.

I have already pointed out several problems with the idea of Mycroft working from outside the official organization, so we can set this scenario aside.



As a consequence, we cannot discard the possibility of Mycroft having to answer to more sinister figures than the public figures at the head of the Government.  So, what danger do they pose, for either Sherlock or Mycroft, were they to find out that Sherlock decoded the e-mail.

I don’t understand enough about British law to know if Sherlock might be brought up on charges for anything else, but even if he was, would these people really want to do so?.  Regardless of them being career politicians or shadow entities, I doubt they’d want the public opinion to get wind of a failed operation that involved appropriating a few hundred cadavers of British citizens.

Another option might be revenge.  To make Sherlock disappear, either dead or into one of those handy unofficial detention centres.  But would it really be worth it to antagonise Mycroft over this?  The failure of Bond Air is a huge hit to his career, but I’m sure he also has a large number of successes to his name, he also knows all the secret handshakes and where the skeletons are buried.  Would a mild sense of personal satisfaction really be worth it to gain such an enemy?



So what else is there?  What could make the revelation of Sherlock’s involvement make a terrible situation so much worse, instead of simply adding insult to injury?  I think the answer is to be found in Irene’s words.  She calls him the “biggest security leak”.  But, strictly speaking, Sherlock doesn’t leak anything.  All he does is deduce from a rather obscure partial e-mail.

So what if that is what Irene threatens to expose?  There are always minor leaks in major operations, even without anyone with malicious intent spying, there are always small slips.  Spouses who see parts of reports, papers who get mislaid, the wrong words mumbled while being drunk at a sister’s wedding.  And, most of the participants of the operation would only know small parts of the plan.  Secrecy relies on almost no one having all the pieces, and to keep a very good eye on the few that do.  But what about someone who can deduce the entire plan from just a few of the small pieces?  Someone like that would be a considerable liability.

Before Bond Air became unravelled, Mycroft could have argued that his brother would never endanger the country willingly, and that he is too smart to be fooled into doing it without realising it.  He could also point out that he himself is keeping an eye on his brother and wouldn’t allow it.  But it has become painfully clear that this is no longer the case.  Whomever Irene refers to as Mycroft’s masters, they have plenty of justification to get interested in Sherlock, to try to get him under their control.  And, with the exception of the more severe measures, there is little Mycroft could say to stop them, since his brother did just cause the failure of a mayor operation. Someone with the same, or more power as Mycroft could make life really difficult for Sherlock.  But they wouldn’t need to.  Either as a precaution or as a form of coercion they could impede his collaboration with Scotland Yard, from where most of Sherlock’s cases come.  In Scandal in Belgravia we see how, even now, with regular cases and John’s influence, the people who care for Sherlock still fear that he might have danger nights.  What would happen if he were denied his cases?  I think this is Mycroft’s greatest fear.  Not what others might do to Sherlock, but what he might do to himself.



And done!  The last part will be about what Mycroft decides to do with Irene, how she ended up on her knees before a sword, how it is basically impossible for Mycroft not to have known about Sherlock’s rescue and how John just can’t get the upper hand, being sandwiched between the two Holmes’s.