Welcome to Baker Street

102. Save the last dance

"John!" Giulia screams and rushes to his side. Without a second thought, she quickly tears off an edge of her dress and hands it to him to wrap it around the gash on his calf.

Sherlock runs to them, trying to determine the severity of the injury. The wound will make it difficult for John to walk, but he is stopping the blood loss, so he shouldn't be in any grave danger.

"What the hell just happened?" Watson moans through his teeth, tending to his self-medication.

Sherlock stares ahead, an entranced expression on his face. "The floor is some sort of pressure table. You've just walked on one of the wrong tiles, apparently," he says, earning bewildered looks from both of them.

"Pressure table? How does that work?" Giulia inquires.

"If you look closely, you'll be able to see that most of the floor ahead of us appears to be slightly elevated as compared to where we are currently standing. Jim must have built it as a huge platform sensitive to pressure, meaning that we can only touch some specific parts of it without having arrows shot at us, or whatever unpleasantries he has prepared. There is only one right path that leads to the end of the room," he methodically explains.

She gapes. "Are you really saying we can't just rush to the other side of the room and push the button?"

"That would be too easy, wouldn't it?" He sighs. "And this is also the reason Moriarty painted the floor with these ridiculous drawings. We can only step on some specific tiles, and we must figure out which ones, somehow."

"And if we get it wrong..." Giulia trails off, casting a horrified glance at John's bleeding leg.

At that moment, a sudden epiphany hits Sherlock as Jim's words resound in his head. "He tried to warn us. He said, and I quote: There's no place for missteps. Once again, he hid a clue in his words."

"Very kind of him to always be so forthcoming," she sarcastically says. "But how are we supposed to find out the right path? Should we jump from India to Delta, then maybe step on Hotel and proceed to Alpha or maybe the Oscar award?" she groans exasperated, randomly naming some designs.

John, who wasn't following her gaze but was busy patching up his wound, jerks his head up, dumbfounded.

"How do you know that code?" he blurts out.

She furrows a brow at him. "I don't know any code. I was just describing the drawings on the squares." She points at the painted floor.

John squints his eyes at the sequence of colourful designs until pure realisation lights up his face. "Those aren't simple drawings: each of them represents individual letters according to the NATO phonetic alphabet." He gestures at the images on the ground. "The Indian flag obviously means India, which is the codeword assigned to the letter I in the NATO phonetic alphabet."

He hadn't realised he still remembered that piece of information from his days in the army. It feels like all the memories from that bygone era that he had locked away into the recess of his mind are flooding back in.

Giulia scans the surface and comments, "Then I guess that the Greek letters α and δ stand for A and D."

John nods, and Sherlock intervenes, "I'm no expert, but I suppose the hotel sign symbolises the letter H, and I'd bet the word Uniform, as represented by the sketch of an army uniform, is the codeword for U, isn't it?"

He is pleasantly impressed by John's witty connection and the undeniable benefits of his military experience.

Giulia squints her eyes and says, "I'm not American, but I'm well versed in sports, and I recognise the drawing of a New York Yankees baseball cap. Wild guess: Yankee stands for Y."