The car skipped over the middle divider and merged onto the lanes going in the opposite direction.
Sydney shifted gears and forced the motorcycle to do a rapid turnseveral hundred yards down. The bike’s wheels slammed against the divider, threatening to flip her, but she hung gamely on to the handles and guided it over. She merged with the opposing lane and revved the engine again.
The car had succeeded in widening the gap between them. But it didn’t matter, because when Sydney synced her watch with her phone, the red tracker still showed up on her map. Now it was exiting the bridge and heading south, out of the city center and westward along the Thames.
She kept up her pace. As the end of the bridge appeared, she saw that the street parallel to the bridge was newly jammed with cars, all honking loudly. A second later, she realized that Eli’s car had zipped around a street right before it could get stuck behind a garbage truck that had paused to collect the piles of bags at a street corner. Sydney swore under her breath, remembering the neighborhood’s late night bin collection schedule.
As the cars ahead of her stalled, she veered sharply off the road and skipped up onto the sidewalk. The bike hurtled straight for a set of stone stairs leading to the top of the short wall running along the riverside.
She gritted her teeth, sped up, and tilted the bike’s front wheel off the ground.
She roared up the stairs and launched briefly into the air.
The wheels landed with a thud and a screech on top of the wall. She sped down the riverside.
Moonlight reflected off the rippling black surface of the Thames. The world blurred by her in darkness. Up ahead, she saw the first hints of the car’s taillights turning in the evening fog. Then the mist was upon her, and the river disappeared into the gray shroud. All she could see ahead of her were the faint shadows of building silhouettes and the faint scarlet blur of taillights far ahead.
“Display my maps,” she called out to her phone.
The screen went bright, and suddenly there appeared a virtual grid of the city before her—the streets and the Thames and the flatslining the other side of the road—all passing her rapidly as she hurtled through the fog.
Up ahead, the car disappeared down another street.
Sydney skipped the motorcycle back down onto the road, then turned with it. They’d gone far outside central London and, according to her maps, had reached a lock on the river in the borough of Richmond. She frowned. If Eli Morrison had business out here, it couldn’t be good.
A small pair of footbridges emerged and faded repeatedly in the thickening fog. It was between these footbridges that Sydney saw the red dot on her grid come to a sudden stop.
She stepped on the motorcycle’s brakes. The bike sputtered to a halt in the thick of the fog. Sydney opened the hood again and twisted the wiring out of the ignition lock.
The bike’s rumbling engine cut off abruptly. Its lights faded, and Sydney found herself shrouded in the night.
The fog muffled the sounds of the water and the distant scream of sirens. Up ahead, she could make out the faint sounds of three voices—none of whom sounded like Eli Morrison—along with their boots tapping on the sidewalk. The roar of a plane overhead covered up any chance of her hearing what they were saying.
As they went, she could hear the footsteps shift from cobblestone to the hollow thud of a pier’s gangway. Then one of them changed from walking to being dragged. The boots scraped long lines of noise against the wooden flooring.
Her skin prickled. They either had a prisoner with them, or someone unable or unwilling to walk. Who had Eli brought with them in the car? Who had been held captive in there before they’d climbed in?
She edged silently through the fog toward the sound, and as she drew near, a yacht materialized in the darkness, bobbing easily against the river’s gentle current, its lights turned suspiciously down. Against the few lights on inside the boat, she could make out four silhouettes.
Her eyes darted to the name of the boat.Invictus. One of the yachts that Eli owned.
Sydney crept closer until she reached the beginning of the pier, then swung her legs over the side of the wall to the grass and dirt along the riverbank. The shadows under the pier stretched long here, and she melted into them, her figure lost in the fog. As the ground sloped into the water, she hopped up into the wooden scaffolding underneath the pier, balancing along the beams until she had reached the end of the pier where the yacht was docked. There, in the safety of the shadows, she stopped at a vantage point where she could glimpse some of the commotion on the deck.
She hit the Record button on her phone and her earring studs activated.
“Wake him up.”
A stranger’s voice drifted to her through the fog. Sydney picked up the slightest hint of a Corcasian accent, and saw one of the men nodding at the other.
There was a slight shuffle, followed by the sound of a hand slapping a face. Sydney shifted to the other side underneath the pier for a better view. There, she finally caught sight of the prisoner.
It was Eli Morrison.
Every hair stood up on the back of Sydney’s neck. Hewasthe prisoner.
Eli’s head lolled listlessly to one side.
“Can he talk at all?” the first stranger said.
