Public Enemy Number Two by Anthony Horowitz

to ribbons. I saw the mirrors and door handles spin away into the night. The car veered into us, out of control, then swung away. I watched it spiral into the curb. Then it was as if somebody had picked it up and thrown it. It took off, bounced, then cartwheeled into a telephone booth. A few seconds later it exploded.
    They were dead. Snape and Boyle were dead. There was no way they could have survived. And they were the only people in the world who knew that I’d been framed. They were my only way out of this mess. And they were dead.
    I could have cried. But I didn’t have time.
    There was a sharp bend in the road. I heard Tim cry out. I looked up. He was spinning the wheel desperately. But we were going too fast. He’d lost control. Ma Powers dropped the machine gun. Johnny swore. The people mover, at ground level, left the road, sliced through a hedge, and hurtled toward a building. Tim didn’t even have time to slam on the brakes. Traveling at seventy miles an hour, we smashed into the wall.
    At least, the wheels did. But by the time the impact came, the hydraulic arms had lifted us up again. The wheels, the engine, and the undercarriage flattened themselves against solid brick. But the bus itself was twelve feet up, the same height as the first floor. And on the first floor there was a plate-glass window.
    The force of the impact tore the bus off the hydraulic arms. As the gas tank ignited and the undercarriage erupted in flames, the bus itself came free, rammed itself through the window, and slid along the floor of the building. The place was an empty office building. There was nothing inside to stop our progress. Carried by our own velocity, we slid the full length of the floor, and then, with another explosion of breaking glass—exited through a second window on the other side.
    This is it, I muttered to myself as we rocketed out. Now we’ve got to die.
    But the office building looked out over the River Thames. We landed, not with a crash but a splash. And when I finally found the courage to open my eyes, we were floating gently on the water. We were bruised, shaken, and exhausted. But we were still alive.
    We floated the rest of the way. There were roadblocks all over London, but we sailed right past them. Nobody had thought to contact the river police. I was free. Over the wall. But Snape and Boyle were dead.
    So what did I do next?

WAPPINGLIES
    It’s funny how often the River Thames seems to feature in my life. Once, I was locked up beside it and almost drowned in it. The next time you take a pleasure boat down from Charing Cross pier, look out for a kid dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater floating facedown in the dirty water. It’ll probably be me.
    The river took us all the way to Wapping. It’s just as well the tide was going in our direction or we’d have been out of London via Windsor and on our way to Wales. Even so it was quite a journey. Under Vauxhall Bridge and down past the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the National Theatre. Then around the corner and on past Traitor’s Gate and the Tower of London, the redeveloped St. Katharine’s Dock, and almost as far as the Isle of Dogs.
    This was East London, the heart of Johnny’s criminal empire. And looking at it in the cold half-light of the early morning, he was welcome to it.
    Everything was gray: the sky, the water, the broken hulks of the old barges moored along the banks. The south side of the river was long and flat, punctuated by a tangle of cranes here, a gas pile there, in the distance a forlorn church steeple.
    We moored on the north side at a jetty between two warehouses. There was nobody around. There had probably been nobody in those warehouses for fifty years. A derelict houseboat stood firm a few yards away, tied to the bank and somehow resisting the chop and swell of the Thames water. Shivering, we pulled ourselves out of the broken people mover and stood on damp—if not quite dry—land.
    “Where do we go now?” I