I am not lonely [Mystrade]

CHAPTER 197 : Freedom of Speech

London's Heathrow airport was looking rather bleak, emptied of all  passenger. It was three in the morning and the busiest airport in Europe  was usually closed at that time of the day but tonight it had to be  reopened for the urgent take off of a jet to Washington. Mycroft was  walking quickly, nearly running, through the dim lighted corridors until  he reached gate 3F where the small air force plane was waiting for him.

Anthea  by his side he entered the plane and the pilot closed the door right  behind them. Four people were already seated in the rather uncomfortable  looking seats at the back of the plane. The elder Holmes was used to  travel on governmental duty but always in private jets or in first class  and from as far as he could recall, he never had embarked on a military  flight excluded once as a chaperone for a young Prince William on his  first visit to a military base in Afghanistan.

The politician had  just sat down and strapped his seatbelt when the plane started moving.  The order being of arriving as quickly as possible in America, the pilot  had received the authorization to fly at low altitude and on full speed  during the entire flight and had gain priority over commercial flight,  something that would have usually pleased the official greatly as it  meant losing less time but which in this uncomfortable plane meant a  painful and long flight.

Already in a bad mood of having been  awoken in the middle of the night on a weekend his mood has even lowered  when he had been made aware f the reason of such a call. As always when  he suffered from insomnia Sherlock had been wandering around social  media doing whatever he usually did. Although his deduction could  sometime be useful, his eldest had always been in favour of suppressing  all of his social media but had been prevented by those around him. What  had happened that night was another proof that the politician probably  had been right.

Sleepless and bored, the young sleuth had decided  to sneak around the American governmental twitter account and all of a  sudden twenty-seven rather insulting tweets addressed to the American  president had appeared on his account. If it had been any commoner who  had addressed such nonsense to one of the most powerful man in the  world, it would probably have stayed unnoticed but Sherlock wasn't just a  man amongst other. Not only was he followed by nearly five hundred  thousands people on twitter, but he also had been depicted by the  international press as one of the British crown's jewel for a reason  quite obscure to his brother. In less than ten minutes, the twenty-seven  tweets where all over the press and the television channels had switch  to special edition mode forcing the British foreign office to react.  Mycroft was that reaction.

"ETA is seven hours and six minutes.  You will find some tea and snacks in the cupboard at the back of the  plane. Have a good flight." the pilot announce through the crackling  speakers.

"Who are you ?" the elder Holmes wondered, looking at the young man sat beside him.

"Jamie White, sub delegate to the Foreign Secretary, specialist in American politics." the man introduced himself.

If  it was for the Secretary of State himself, the top of the Foreign  Office had been summoned on this high risk diplomatic mission and it was  a good indication of how tedious the situation was. Alongside the sub  delegate was the Permanent Under-Secretary and Head of the Diplomatic  Service Sir Alistair Duncan, the civil servant who was the real man in  charge of supervising the minister on a day to day basis, the Minister  of State for Europe and the Americas Sir Simon Johns and the  Parliamentary under-secretary of state for Foreign Affairs the MP Sarah  Janet. All of them, despite sometime serving for just a few months, had  already work on multiple occasion alongside the elder Holmes and were  quite aware of the issue his brother could be and none of them seemed to  be willing to talk first.