Title: The Devil is in the Detail
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: G
Length: 490
Summary: Anthea is checking the room before a vital conference when she spots a mistake.
A/N: My thanks to my beta scfrankles for ensuring this made sense.

Anthea walked round the conference room, checking everything was as it should be.  The meeting had been called at the last minute; Mycroft had almost run into her office to tell her delegates from various European countries would be arriving at seven the following morning and they had less than twelve hours to ensure everything would run smoothly.

Anthea had instantly recognised the seriousness of the situation.  The lack of time would never cause her boss to run; as far as he was concerned that particular problem was others’ concern.  No, Mycroft was aware of the nature of the meeting and the potentially drastic result if it did not go well.

She checked to ensure nothing had been moved out of place by the security sweep.  Mentally she compared the country names to the table flags, in case something had accidentally been swapped.  Then she stopped in horror in front of the Lithuanian desk.  The horizontal stripes of the flag showed green, yellow, red.  She looked round the room.  There was no other country present which flew a flag with those stripes, and she didn’t think that particular combination belonged to any other country in the world.

She motioned to her assistant to join her.  “We have a problem,” she said quietly.

“What is it?” the young woman asked.

“Look!”  Anthea pointed at the flag.

“Oh!  The yellow and green have been swapped.”

“Precisely.  Go now, print out flags for the countries present, and laminate them.  We’ll change them over.  And hurry, we don’t have much time.”

Anthea waited until the woman returned.  Swiftly they replaced the cloth flags with paper ones, bundling the cloth ones into two carrier bags the assistant had thought to bring with her.  The other woman had hardly left the room when Mycroft arrived leading the delegates.

The delegates milled round the room, finding their seats.  One of them spoke to Anthea.  “Where are the proper flags?”

“We received information there was a possibility some of the flags had been chemically tampered with,” she answered.

“Really?”  The delegate turned to Mycroft, apparently unconvinced.

“Oh yes,” Mycroft replied smoothly.  “Unlikely, I know.  But we thought it wasn’t worth the risk.”

***

Later, when the delegates were engaged in their discussions, Mycroft asked Anthea into his office.

“Since I am not aware of any potential hazard from chemical substances on the flags, would you care to explain?”

Anthea told him about finding the flag with the reversed stripes.  “No doubt a childish attempt to upset the Lithuanian delegate,” she said.

“Which would have worked only too well,” Mycroft replied.  “That delegate is particularly volatile and would almost certainly have walked out of the discussions, with potentially catastrophic consequences.  I assume you have contacted security to find out who had the opportunity to change the flags?”

Anthea nodded.

“Good,” Mycroft continued.  “I shall leave you to discover which power was behind this latest attempt to destabilize the negotiations.”