“Take a left!” I yell.

Felix swerves through traffic. The SUV beneath us is barreling along at twice the legal speed limit. I’ve still got the laptop the cartel gangsters gave me balanced on my lap, but the SUV is swinging from side to side so viciously it’s hard to see the screen.

I’m sandwiched in between Felix’s two associates – they are the only thing keeping me from sliding far enough to slam my head against a window.

“Wait!” I shout, just as Felix prepares to turn. The whole SUV jolts. Felix turns his head, and stares at me with black, beady eyes that dig into my soul. “I mean: right.”

“Which is it, girl?” He grunts, still holding eye contact. Cars flash by left and right, their warning lights glowing in the darkness.

I can see the license plate of a truck dead ahead. It’s growing in size, getting clearer every second. I can almost make out each individual letter. Felix isn’t slowing down. He’s not even looking at the road.

“Right!” I scream, my heart thudding at ten times its usual rate. “Definitely, go right!”

Felix keeps staring at me just another second longer. It’s like he’s putting on a show of dominance – saying, “I’m so manly I don’t even have to look at the road.”

I just think he’s an idiot. No one cares how hard you are if you end up dead…

His eyes flicker back to the road, and he yanks the steering wheel right. The back of the SUV swings out, and my knuckles go white holding onto the laptop. The engine explodes beneath us, and Felix jacks the speed up even further. The power is throbbing through the SUV’s chassis: driving up through the seat; making the laptop screen wobble in front of my eyes.

We thunder down a side street. Shops are shuttered left and right. Restaurants are still doing a roaring trade. Neither of Felix’s associates seems to care that their boss is acting like a suicidal maniac. I guess they are just used to it.

“Where to next?” Felix growls up front. His voice sounds alive with excitement. I guess he lives for this kind of thing.

I struggle to bring the laptop screen into focus and – more than that – to concentrate. Between the fear of my imminent death, the wild gyrations of the SUV, and the fear gripping my stomach – you can guess why.

There’s a glowing icon on the map on the left-hand side of the computer. That’s us.

Think, Kim.

I need to figure out a way of getting Nate’s attention. How I do that, I’ve got no idea. It’s not like I can ask to borrow a cell phone. If Nate got my message – and more importantly figured it out – then he’ll be in the area. But that’s just the start. London is a huge city. Nate could be two hundred yards away, and it would be way too far to help.

Dozens of ATMs are all marked out on the map. A small string of them are shaded red – already drained by Boris and his crew. The rest are still marked green – possible targets for Boris and his cronies.

“Where are they going, Sawyers?” Felix grunts. The end of the alleyway is closing fast.

Okay, think. You know where they might be going. How does that help?

“I’m working on it,” I mutter to buy myself time, tapping at the keyboard. Carlos – Felix’s huge, silver-toothed henchman glances down at the screen, but grimaces in confused disgust. Good – I can’t have him seeing what I’m doing.

“Dis beach jus’ plane’u, homes,” he groans. “She ain’ got no idea. I tell’u, gi‘me ten minutes, she yell’it”

“That right, chica?” Felix calls back at me. His mouth is stretched open wide in the rearview mirror in an evil grin. “You playin’ me fo’ a foo’? Dis a dangerous game for a little girl…”

I have a flash of inspiration. Don’t follow the football. Go where it’s going.

“Wait,” I hiss back, the urgency in my voice coming out with a hint of desperation. “I’ve got an idea.”

I scan the map. “Okay, they are in a place called Hoxton right now. Take the next left, and then it’s straight down.”

Felix guns the engine. “Hoxton,” he snarls. I think he’s happy, but it’s hard to tell. “Hox–ton,” he repeats, breaking the word into bits and rolling them across his tongue. “You gringos say the strangest shit.”

His associates snigger, but I block them out. I bring up a command window. White text on a black screen – it looks like computing back in the eighties, a decade before I was born. It’s not the best way of doing what I have planned, but I’m pretty sure it will be more than enough to confuse Carlos. The brute sitting next to me doesn’t seem like the brightest tool in the shed.

I’m just glad that these guys don’t know much about computers. Once you get down into the weeds, you can do a whole lot more with them than you think. You just have to know how. I do.

I scan through the list of ATMs in Hoxton. They’ve already drained two. They are all in a long stretch, down the main street of the East London suburb. I cross my fingers, hoping that Boris is greedy enough to want to hit all of them in turn.

“Okay,” I mutter, narrating what I’m doing – well, not all of it. “I’m going to knock a few of these ATMs off-line –.”

Felix cuts me off, glancing over his shoulder. “You can do dat, chica? Hell girl, you in de wrong job. How ‘bout you come work fo’ me when we done wit dis?”

I multitask, eyes glancing up and down as I start attacking the ATMs.

“It’s easy enough,” I reply. “It’s a security feature to stop people hacking them – it doesn’t mean you can steal from them. They just go out of order for a bit.” Like heck will I ever “come work for” you, I don’t add. I’m not stupid.

Felix looks nonplussed in the mirror. He pulls his face into a frown, scrunching his nose into his eyes. “Stop playing games, girl: what the hell are you doing?”

I don’t reply … not immediately. I tap a set of coordinates into the command window instead, right in front of Carlos’s eyes. He doesn’t have any idea what I’m doing, I can tell. I glance up at him just to be sure, the stress twisting my neck and back into knots. His eyes are glassy. He looks half asleep.

I type in Nate’s email address, press send, and clear the window before Carlos has a chance to clock what I’m doing. I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s up to fate, now – and more importantly, Nate. I’ve done as much as I can.

“I’m making the rules,” I reply, now giving Felix my undivided attention. His features tighten with anger, but he doesn’t shoot me down – not yet.

“I’ve taken three ATMs in a row and put them out of order. If Boris wants cash, he’s going to have to head to the far end of the strip. It looks like a convenience store: it’s quiet, isolated. It’s a good spot for –.”

Felix finishes my sentence for me. His morbid excitement fills me with a cold sense of dread.

“– Ambush.”