Temple of the Gods

15

‘Nina?’ said Lola as she opened her apartment door. ‘My God, where’ve you been? We heard what happened in Rome — everyone’s been so worried! Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Nina replied. She glanced along the corridor to make sure nobody was around. ‘Listen, there’s a really huge favour I need to ask you, but first, Don isn’t here, is he?’

Lola’s fiancé was a firefighter. ‘No, he’s working night shifts at the moment.’

‘Okay, good. Now, I need you to promise me that you will keep this an absolute secret for now. You can’t tell anyone, not even Don — and definitely not the police. If you think that’s going to be a problem, then don’t worry, I’ll just leave.’

‘Nina, it’s me,’ Lola said firmly. ‘You know you can trust me. You saved my life! We Gianettis, we remember that kind of thing.’

Nina smiled. ‘That’s good to know.’ She checked the corridor again, then waved her increasingly intrigued PA back from the door. ‘Okay,’ she called, ‘come on.’

The stairwell door opened and Eddie poked his head out before hurrying down the hallway into the apartment. ‘Hi, Lola,’ he said casually as he passed her.

Lola stared open-mouthed after him. ‘Oh, my God. Oh my God!’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Nina, following Eddie inside and closing the door. ‘Now you see why you need to keep this quiet?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Lola said, nodding. She went to Eddie, regarding him with amazement. ‘Where’ve you been? What have you been doing? How did you get back here without the police catching you?’ A more quizzical look. ‘Why did you grow a beard? It doesn’t suit you.’

‘There’s nowt wrong with my beard,’ Eddie insisted jokily. ‘Tchah! Anyway, they don’t give you razors in Zimbabwean prisons.’

Lola’s eyes widened. ‘You were in—’

‘Let’s save the travelogue for later, huh?’ Nina cut in. ‘There’s something more important to deal with first — namely, Eddie’s innocence.’ She extracted her MacBook Pro from a bag.

‘I knew you were innocent!’ Lola exclaimed.

‘Well, we’ve still got to actually prove it,’ Eddie admitted. ‘But thanks.’ He looked down at her baby bump. ‘So, either the pregnancy’s going well, or you’ve been eating a lot of pies.’

‘Eddie!’ Nina chided.

Lola giggled. ‘Both, actually.’

‘How far along are you now?’

‘Seven months.’

‘You know if it’s a boy or girl?’

‘No, we want that to be a surprise.’

‘If it’s a boy, Eddie’s a good name,’ he said with a grin before turning to his wife. She had put the laptop on a table and opened it. ‘You all set there?’

‘Nearly,’ she replied. ‘Lola, we need to watch a video. It might help prove Eddie’s innocence, but… you probably won’t want to see what happens in it.’

Lola looked uneasy. ‘Is it the one Interpol sent you?’ Nina nodded. ‘Oh. Okay, yeah, I definitely don’t want to see it.’

‘I’m sorry about this.’

‘It’s okay. I’ll be in the bedroom. Or the bathroom. It’s where I seem to spend half my time anyway.’ She glared at her belly. ‘Bad baby! Very bad baby. Stop squishing Mommy’s bladder, okay?’ She headed for another room. ‘If you need me, just shout.’

‘Will do,’ said Nina as she left. ‘Wow, Lola’s gonna be a mom. That’s such a weird thought. Exciting, though.’

‘We could have tried for one by now if you’d wanted,’ Eddie said.

She snorted sarcastically. ‘Are you kidding? Can you imagine me going through what I have lately if I’d been pregnant?’

‘You’d have survived. And so would the baby. I’ve seen pregnant women in war zones who’ve been through Christ knows what, and still gave birth to healthy kids. People are always panicking about every little thing that might go wrong, but the whole pregnancy process is pretty reliable. If it wasn’t, humans would have died out before we even got out of Africa.’

‘Thank you, Dr Chase, Ob-Gyn. Bet you wouldn’t be so casual if it were your baby,’ Nina said, giving him a sly smile. ‘Anyway, this is the video.’

Eddie regarded the screen. It showed a grainy still frame from the Peruvian gas pumping station, a catwalk with a multitude of pipes and valves beneath it cutting diagonally across the camera’s view. Near the left of the screen, a ladder ran from ground level to the gridwork walkway.

He remembered the scene well. ‘That’s where I climbed up,’ he said, pointing at the ladder. ‘Kit and Stikes were further along here —’ he indicated a point out of frame — ‘talking to Sophia.’ There was a timecode at the bottom right. ‘How long before I turn up does it start?’

‘Not long.’ She tapped the trackpad, and the video started to play. It was immediately clear that the pipeline monitoring system was not employing the latest technology: the image occasionally flickered with lines of static, looking as though it had originally been recorded on a well-used VHS tape rather than digitally.

The only things that moved for several long seconds were video glitches — until a figure, bent low and creeping stealthily through the shadows, appeared at the left of the frame. ‘There, that’s me,’ said Eddie.

‘Yeah, I kinda guessed that,’ Nina replied. He made a rude sound.

The Eddie on the screen, carrying a SCAR assault rifle, reached the base of the ladder and began to climb. ‘There isn’t any sound, is there?’ his present-day counterpart asked. Nina shook her head. Past-Eddie cautiously peered over the top of the ladder, watching something off-screen, then made a quick ascent to the walkway and brought up the rifle as he disappeared from view.

‘It’s a few minutes before anything else happens,’ said Nina. She was about to fast-forward through the recording, but Eddie stopped her. ‘What?’

‘If there’s anything in this that can help me, it has to be in the boring bits everyone skips through. Otherwise someone would have seen it by now.’

‘Interpol will have watched the entire thing.’

‘I’ve done surveillance work. It’s the most bloody mind-numbing thing imaginable, and it’s easy to miss something, even with other people looking as well. You can go over a tape again and again, and not catch something until the third or fourth time. So let’s keep watching.’

They did so. Apart from video flickers, nothing seemed to happen for over two minutes, and then a wash of light swept over the scene. ‘That’s me and Macy arriving,’ said Nina. ‘And—’

‘And now everything kicks off,’ Eddie said as two figures came back into view: himself and Kit, wrestling for control of the SCAR. Staccato flames burst from its barrel as it fired down into the pumping machinery. The pair continued their desperate brawl — then the image was momentarily wiped out by an explosive flash from below, video afterimages fading to reveal a jet of bright flame blasting out horizontally from a damaged pump.

Both Eddie and Kit had been knocked over by the blast, the Indian landing on top. He landed a couple of blows on Eddie’s head, then finally managed to prise the gun away from him, turning it round to fire — but Eddie kicked it upwards as he pulled the trigger, the last bullets searing just over his head.

Even though she had seen it before, Nina still winced. ‘Jesus, that was close.’

‘Feels even closer when you have a gun fired in your fucking face,’ said Eddie.

Another explosion flared as a second pump blew apart, starting the chain reaction that would soon consume the entire gas plant. The men on the screen were still fighting, Eddie slamming Kit’s head against a railing — then the section of catwalk on which they were battling suddenly collapsed, tipping like a trapdoor to drop them towards the burning gas jet below. Eddie hit a stanchion and swung for a moment before pulling himself up.

Kit had fallen further before catching the edge of the catwalk, dangling above the flames near a cluster of pipes. He tried to haul himself higher, but couldn’t get a firm enough grip. Eddie hesitated, then used the stanchions like stepping stones to get closer.

‘I was going to pull him up,’ said Eddie. ‘Honest to God. I needed him alive to find out what the hell was going on.’

‘I believe you,’ Nina reassured him. On the screen, her husband reached Kit, who had at last managed to find a more secure hold.

Eddie started to bend down, extending his hand—

Then abruptly drove a boot into Kit’s face, sending the Interpol officer plunging into the inferno below.

The sight shocked Nina as much as when she had witnessed it in person. And despite what Eddie had told her, she still couldn’t see a gun in Kit’s hand. She looked at him questioningly.

‘Wind it back,’ he said. She did so. ‘Okay, watch his right hand… now!’

Nina paused the recording. ‘Eddie, there’s… I can’t see anything.’ Shadows and the camera angle, coupled with the low quality of the video, made it impossible to discern anything clearly amongst the pipework.

‘It’s there, I tell you.’ He leaned towards the laptop until his nose was almost touching the screen.

‘I told you, not even Interpol found anything, and they gave it the full CSI treatment.’

Eddie sat back. ‘Buggeration. I’m fucked, then. The only way I can prove it was self-defence is showing people that gun.’

‘I’m sorry.’ They sat in glum silence — until a question occurred to Nina. ‘Where did the gun come from? You and Kit were fighting over that rifle, so presumably he didn’t have one of his own.’

‘No, it was Stikes’s gun. I made him and Sophia chuck theirs over the edge. It must have landed in the…’ He jerked upright. ‘It landed in the pipes! Wind it back to when I went up the ladder.’

His sudden hope was infectious. ‘What are we looking for?’ Nina asked as she scrolled back through the recording.

‘I climbed up the ladder — Sophia and Stikes were talking, and they didn’t see me coming.’ On the laptop, past-Eddie acted out his current self’s narration. ‘Sophia had a bodyguard who pulled a gun, so I took him down —’ muzzle flash from off-screen — ‘and then, and then…’ He tried to remember the precise sequence of events. ‘Stikes dissed Mac, so I shot him—’

‘You shot him?’ exclaimed Nina, pausing the playback. ‘He seemed pretty spry in Tokyo for a dead man!’

‘I only clipped him. Gave him a nice scar to remember me by.’ Eddie tapped his forehead in the same spot as Stikes’s wound. ‘Kind of wishing I’d just blown his fucking head off now. Anyway, after that I told him and Sophia to get rid of their guns. Stikes lobbed his over the side, past me…’ He pointed at the shadowed pipes on the screen. ‘It had to end up where Kit could reach it. Play it.’

Nina tapped the trackpad. ‘How long was this after you climbed on to the catwalk?’

‘Not long — a minute, maybe less.’

She glanced at the timecode. Twenty seconds passed, thirty. Her attention went back to the pipes. Any moment now…

A video glitch rippled across that part of the screen for a fraction of a second. Nina’s heart sank — anything the video might have revealed was lost in the distortion — but Eddie’s shout was one of triumph. ‘There! You see it?’

‘No, I only saw the—’

‘It’s there, it’s there,’ he said excitedly. ‘Take it back and play it frame by frame.’ He indicated a specific spot. ‘Right there, keep watching.’

Nina replayed the video in extreme slow motion, eyes fixed on the pipes. Each frame chugged past, the only movement the shimmer and crawl of analogue video. Then—

Eddie stabbed at the trackpad to pause the recording. ‘That’s it!’

Nina stared at the screen. It was at the very edge of the picture, blurred by its motion and just barely catching one of the pumping station’s lights, a silvery shape amongst the shadows.

But that shape was instantly recognisable. A gun.

‘My God,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s there, I can see it.’

‘Told you, didn’t I?’ He advanced to the next frame — and the falling gun was consumed by the bolt of static. It only lasted for another three frames, less than an eighth of a second, but by the time the image cleared the gun had vanished into the darkness between the pipes. ‘That’s why nobody saw it. One frame’s not long enough for your brain to pick it up consciously, so the only thing anyone registered was that glitch.’

‘You saw it, though.’

‘I knew it was there.’

Nina looked at him, a smile spreading across her face. ‘Eddie, this proves your story. We’ve got to tell Beauchamp, let Interpol know what we’ve found. This’ll get you off the hook!’

‘You mean you let Interpol know. Until this is all sorted out, I’d better keep a low profile.’

‘The main thing is, we’ve got proof.’ She took the recording back to the frame showing the gun. ‘All we have to do is give Beauchamp that timecode, and you’re in the clear!’

Lola came back into the room. ‘What happened? Did you find something?’

‘We found something,’ Nina told her happily. ‘We definitely found something.’