Andy Mcdermott - Temple of the Gods

‘Well, not quite the reunion I’d hoped for,’ she mumbled into his butt—

Eddie pushed the second button.

Rockets set around the capsule’s door fired. More pyrotechnics on the window behind it shattered the safety glass a fraction of a second before the pod blasted through and sailed out into open air. The G-force squashed Eddie hard against the door, Nina screaming as she was jammed against him.

A moment later, the skyscraper crumbled.

A wedge-shaped chunk eight storeys high sheared away from the top of the tower, sliding diagonally down the fault line created by the exploding helicopter before plunging towards the ground in a trail of smoke and dust. Evacuees ran screaming across the lawns as it fell. The mass of steel and concrete and glass smashed down, the shock of the impact destroying every window on the bottom twenty floors and sending a choking cloud of pulverised debris across the grass after the fleeing workers. More office detritus rained down on the mangled girders and rubble.

The escape pod was also falling — but far more slowly. The rockets had burned out in seconds, their job of propelling the capsule away from the building completed. After a brief but terrifying period of freefall, a trio of parachutes deployed. Twirling gracefully like a sycamore seed, the orange sphere descended and thumped down on one of the lawns well clear of the scene of destruction.

The door opened. Eddie fell out backwards, a dizzied Nina crawling after him and flopping on to the grass. She regarded the smoking wreckage with horrified amazement as people staggered out of the billowing cloud like walking ghosts. ‘I think… I want my office moved to the first floor,’ she gasped.

Eddie sat against the pod, recovering his breath. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah. Somehow.’ She looked up at him, taking in his bruised face and torn, bloodied clothes. ‘My God! You look…’

‘Like I got beat up by ninjas?’

‘I was going to say “weird with a beard”.’

‘Tchah!’

‘But yeah, you need to get to a hospital.’

‘They might be a bit busy tonight.’ He nodded towards the fleeing workers. ‘And anyway, that could cause me a few problems if the police want to ask me any questions.’

Nina sat up. ‘ I’ve got some questions. Where have you been for the past three months? What have you been doing? And why are you here — I mean, this exact place, right now, at the same time as me?’

‘In order? All over the place, tracking down Stikes—’ He stopped mid-sentence, instantly angry.

‘Stikes?’ Nina looked round nervously, as if the mercenary might suddenly appear and try to finish the job, but there was no sign of him.

Eddie shook his head. ‘He’ll be gone. He’ll be fucking gone! Bastard, that — fuck !’ He banged a rage-clenched fist against the pod. ‘I had him, I had my chance to fucking kill him, and I missed it!’

‘ That’s why you were here?’ said Nina in disbelief. ‘To kill Stikes? Not — not what you told me in Peru, that you were going to prove you didn’t murder Kit?’

Her disappointment, almost disgust, immediately poured cold water on his burning fury. Several moments passed before he spoke again, more calmly. ‘It doesn’t matter, ’cause I think I’ve been set up. We both have.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Someone told me Stikes would be here — in return for me doing something for them.’

‘Destroying the statues.’ Nina pulled the case from the pod and opened it. The three stone figures inside were all intact.

‘Yeah. Only I don’t think it’s a coincidence, that chopper showing up as well. Somebody wanted all of us dead — Takashi, Stikes, you… and me. I need to find out who.’ Flashing lights caught his attention, emergency vehicles racing along the nearby roads. Ambulances, fire trucks — and police cars. ‘Can’t talk about it now, though. I’ve got to go.’

‘No, Eddie, you can’t! Look, Interpol know that Kit was up to something — if you come in, we can try to clear you—’

‘Sorry, love, but I can’t. Not yet.’ He stood, searching for an escape route. The wind turbine’s rotor had stabbed into the grass like an enormous lawn dart; beyond it, streets led into Tokyo’s urban maze. ‘I need to have words with somebody.’ He turned, about to run — then, before Nina could react, snatched the case from her hand.

She jumped up, but he was already sprinting. ‘Eddie!’

He looked back. ‘Remember something else I said to you in Peru? The last thing? I still mean it!’

Nina was too shaken to pursue him. All she could do was slump against the pod and watch as he disappeared into the night.

She did indeed remember his parting words as he fled the gas plant. They were ‘I love you’.

‘Oh, God, Eddie,’ she sighed. ‘What have you gotten involved in?’

It was a question she could also ask of herself.

The shinkansen — better known in the West as the bullet train — was as much a symbol of Japan as Mount Fuji, the streamlined expresses hurtling between cities with incredible speed and clockwork precision. This particular one was heading southwest out of Tokyo, the last train of the night from the capital to its final destination of Hakata on the country’s west coast, five hours and seven hundred miles away.

Eddie wasn’t going that far. His stop was Nagoya, a third of the way along the route, from where he would leave Japan via the international airport; security would be on a lower alert there than at Narita. His exit had been arranged by Scarber. Considering what had happened at the Takashi building, he was not the least bit surprised to learn when he called her that she was in the country. She had almost certainly been within sight of the skyscraper to observe events personally.

And report the outcome to her bosses.

A scrolling LED display overhead told him that the time was almost midnight. Scarber’s instructions had been that they not meet until then, after the train departed Shin-Yokohama station. Nagoya, the next stop, was an hour and fifteen minutes away. Plenty of time, she had said, for an undisturbed discussion.

He had his own suspicions about why she didn’t want to be interrupted. And had taken precautions.

In the meantime, his thoughts returned to what Nina had said to him after their landing. His relief and delight at seeing her again had been followed by dismay at her reaction on learning why he was there. She had been appalled to learn that his goal had been to kill Stikes… and, he now accepted, rightfully so. He had set out from Peru with the intention of proving his innocence, but somehow over time that had fallen away, replaced by a simpler, cruder, easier motivation. Vengeance, nothing more, taking his revenge on Stikes for everything he had done. He had always thought of such payback as unprofessional, but over the last three months he had fallen into the emotional trap. Uncovering whatever plot connected Kit, Stikes and Sophia had proved harder and so far fruitless, and he had allowed another goal chosen by some reptilian, bloodthirsty part of his psyche to drive him instead.

Now, though, his objective was investigation once more. He was going to find out who had set him up, and why.

But when he did, he might well indulge the reptile within.

There was something else to kill first, however: the last few minutes before his meeting. He flipped through the English-language edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper he had bought before boarding. ‘Interpol widens search for fugitive billionaire’ was a minor headline that caught his eye; the name Harald Glas stirred his memory as being connected to the IHA in some role. The Dane had apparently fled his native country when faced with charges of fraud, money laundering and drug-smuggling. Eddie imagined that Glas’s life on the lam was considerably more luxurious than his own.