The Glass Alibi: Vows of the Vulture

Chapter 7: The Third Eye

The black sedan sliced through the rain like a shark through dark water. The heater hummed with its internal warmth but I couldn’t keep the shivers away from my skin. My clothes were plastered to my body with the wet, heavy smell of cliff-side mud and the smoke-scented air of the manor.

Beside me, Silas sat like a wall of vibrating, silent intensity. Laptop in his lap, fingers flew over the keyboard while he scrubbed our digital footprints from every satellite and server within fifty miles.

"Where are we going?" My voice sounded like broken glass in my own ears.

"To a place that doesn’t exist on any map," Silas didn’t look up. "The 'Glass Alibi' is only effective if the world thinks we’re tucked away in a honeymoon suite in the city. If they find us out here, the story cracks."

Suddenly, Silas’s phone vibrated against the leather console. It was not a ring-tone but a rough, rhythmic pulse. He stopped what he was doing, a grimace on his face as he picked it up.

He froze. He became dead still.

"What is it?" I leaned toward him, my heart doing a nervous flip-flop.

Silas held out the phone, screen facing me. My breath caught in my throat. It was a photo-crisp, high definition and taken at an impossible angle.

It was a picture of this very car. It showed Silas’s forehead pressed against mine back on the cliff, rain streaking the window and framing us in a picture. Underneath, was a sentence in German:

"Ein schner Anfang. Aber Glas bricht immer." (A beautiful beginning. But glass always breaks.)

"Someone was watching us," I whispered, the cold settling back into me ten-fold. "Back on the cliff. While we were alone."

"Not watching," Silas grunted, eyes narrowed as he tapped a few commands into the laptop. "A long-range thermal lens. Whoever sent that isn't a street punk. Not working for your father."

"How do you know that?"

"Your father doesn't speak German. He certainly doesn't have access to the Petrov private satellite network." Silas brought up a map of Moscow on the screen, a bright red dot blinking over a fortress-like estate on the outskirts of the city.

"The Petrovs?" I questioned. "The Russian syndicate? Why do they care about a New York Senator and a photographer?"

"They don't care about the Senator," Silas stated, shutting the laptop with a snap. "They care about the ledger in Sterling's library that I couldn’t find."

He turned his head, eyes meeting mine. His hand reached out, his fingers gripping my chin and forcing me to meet his hard, flinty gaze. "Elara, think. When you were taking those pictures through the curtain… did you see Sterling hide anything before he collapsed? A drive? A key? Anything at all?"

I closed my eyes, trying to recall, my brain sifting through images like a film reel on rewind. I saw the blood, Sterling gasping, Silas on his knees…. And then I saw it again, a fleeting, frantic motion.

"His cufflink," I breathed, opening my eyes. "Sterling wasn't clutching his throat because he couldn't breathe. He was pulling his cufflink off his shirt and it fell into the vents under the leather chair."

Silas’s grip tightened for a fraction of a second, a dark, predatory pleasure flitting across his face. "The air vents. Of course. A dead drop."

Before I could say anything, the car’s emergency alarms began blaring. The red light on the dashboard lit up.

RADAR LOCK DETECTED.

"Marcus, evasive!" Silas roared.

A sudden, blinding flash of light lit the cabin from above. I looked up through the sunroof just in time to see a drone-sleek, black and silent-hover directly overhead. A small hatch opened on its belly.

"Jump!" Silas grabbed the door handle and shoved me against him to knock me out into the wet grass on the side of the highway, just as the car was enveloped in a silent, blue-white flash of electromagnetic energy.

The Maybach didn’t explode. It died. The engine choked off, the lights flickered out and the massive sedan skidded uncontrollably toward the guardrail at eighty miles an hour.

We landed rolling in a blur of wet grass and mud and I came to a halt at the edge of a drainage ditch, my head spinning. I pushed myself up to see the Maybach smash into the steel rail, a crumpled black hulk.

Silas was on his feet immediately, yanking my arm and pulling me up. He wasn’t checking for the drone, he was looking down the road ahead.

Three sets of headlights approached, piercing the darkness in a perfect, synchronized V. They weren’t SUVs; they were armored tactical vehicles-the kind private military contractors use.

"The Petrovs," Silas breathed, his sidearm drawn. "They didn't come for an alibi. They came for the witness."

He turned to me, the harsh lights illuminating his face, a flicker of what might have been genuine concern-or perhaps just dangerous obsession-in his eyes. "Elara, if we don’t make it to the city by morning, the 'Glass Alibi' is shot. And so are we."