The Reluctant Knight Read Free Page B

accidentally prodding herself in the
tender flesh of her own neck several times. Centimetre by
painstaking centimetre, she pulled the bag around.
    By the time she
reached the knot, her throat hurt from the abuse her fingers kept
accidentally inflicting upon it and she was growing dizzy for a
third time. She paused once more, unable to continue until she'd
cleared her head.
    Several more
minutes passed while she rested and thought. There was still no way
for her to tell for sure if this was a test from Myron or a real
situation. However, it was evident that, if it was a test, she was
meant to believe it was real. Either way, what she should do was
the same. She could almost hear Myron's voice in her head telling
her to assume it was real and act accordingly.
    She nodded her
acknowledgement of the thought and felt around the side of her neck
for the knot. It was complicated and the string used to form the
not had frayed, leaving strands of the soft fibre to trip her
fingers up while they worked blind.
    It took her
several minutes of feeling along the knot for her to find anything
that might be considered an end to start work with. When they'd
pulled the bag over her head and bundled her along the hotel
corridor she hadn't thought the knot was this complicated, but it
was possible elements of it had already been in place and they'd
only needed to yank it tight to seal her in darkness.
    Amelia pulled on
the different parts of the knot, but after ten minutes her finger
tips were rubbed raw, she'd torn a finger nail somewhere low enough
it now gave off a dull ache, and she had made incredibly little
progress.
    With a sigh, she
gave up. The loose strands were tangled up in the rest of the knot,
and trying to undo it without being able to see was only making
more of a mess. No matter how hard she tried she didn't think she
would manage to undo it.
    If she was going
to use the bug to communicate with Myron she needed to do so
without using her voice. Reaching her fingers around until she
could feel the bug, she placed the digit of one finger over the top
of it. She paused, making sure she remembered SOS in Morse code,
and then tapped it out several times.
    After that she
realised she knew little else. E was the most common letter so she
knew it was represented by a single dot and she was fairly sure T
was a single dash. That didn't give her the ability to say much. No
matter how much she tried to think of other letters she just
couldn't remember what they were. Not even numbers came back to
her.
    Morse code was
something she'd looked at once in a maths lesson when she was a
young child and then forgotten about. Twenty years later, there was
nothing she could do to recall it. Unlike that of the Holmes
brothers, her memory wasn't perfect.
    Just in case
someone hadn't heard her first message, she tapped out SOS again
every now and then to signal to whoever was listening that she was
in trouble. With that plan in motion, she tried to feel around the
inside of the boot but her arms were tucked against her body in
such a way that she could only feel a limited area. She poked,
pulled and otherwise tried to get to something like the outside of
the car, but nothing gave way to her probing fingers.
    Until she reached
somewhere else, she had no hope of escape. All she could do in the
meantime was try to feed information to whoever might be listening
in. She tried not to think about how little she had to communicate.
With the bag on her head she had no idea where she was going.
    While she fought
to keep herself calm, keep track of the time, and keep up her
message-tapping, hours slipped by, and she found her hope slipping
away with it.
     

Chapter 3
    It took Mycroft
several minutes to scan over the area around the white van, but he
saw nothing, not even a cigarette butt that might give him a clue.
After glancing at the quiet car park to see if he was being
watched, Mycroft tried to open the back of the van. Surprisingly,
it was unlocked.
    Not