“You destroyed your own trap,” she hissed over the dying comm.
“Sherlock Sub. Always looking down. Never up.”
“Look there, Thorne,” Sub murmured, tapping the sonar. A ghost bloomed on the screen: a wreck, not on any chart.
On the surface, as the river police hauled up diamonds and a furious Irene, Thorne asked, “How did you know the frequency?” sherlock sub
The answer surfaced in the form of a woman’s laugh, echoing through the sub’s hydrophone.
“Elementary,” Sub replied, adjusting his waterproof deerstalker. “The thief isn’t a man. It’s a current. Or rather, a manufactured one.”
Sherlock Sub lit his pipe—waterproof, naturally—and puffed a ring of smoke that dissolved into the fog. “You destroyed your own trap,” she hissed over
Thorne panicked. Sub smiled. “You forget, Irene. I’m a student of pressure.”
Adler-Nemo’s sub was sucked backward into the collapsing warehouse, pinned by a falling barge.
The feed flickered to a live sonar image: a sleek, stingray-shaped submersible, bristling with claws. Its pilot? Irene Adler-Nemo, the maritime mastermind who’d once stolen the Cutty Sark ’s rudder just to prove she could. Never up
They descended. The black water pressed in. Through the viewport, the wreck resolved—not a ship, but a drowned warehouse, its brick teeth grinning in the silt. And inside, stacked like silver ingots: the missing barges.
The Thames had coughed up a mystery. Three barges had vanished from the Surrey Commercial Docks in as many weeks, leaving only a slick of iridescent oil and a single, sodden velvet glove. Scotland Yard’s river police called it current theft. Sherlock Sub called it a lie.
“Brilliant. But now you’re in my tide pool.” Her sub’s claws scraped the St. Mary’s Log ’s hull. “Flood your ballast tanks, or I’ll crack you like a crab.”