West was about thirty yards away – and twenty yards from the oily water behind the ship’s stern.
Eddie pounded after him. The gap closed with every step, but West had seen him, fear driving him faster. Nine yards, eight, seven, but the obese man was nearly there, about to throw the memory card into the sea. Yards shrank to feet, the tweed almost in reach—
West whipped his arm forward just as Eddie dived at him and clamped a hand over his, the tackle sending them both over the quayside.
They entered the water with a huge splash. Eddie’s eyes and nose immediately started to sting, the sea polluted with oil and anti-fouling biocides and effluent from the hundreds of ships that passed through each week. West thrashed; Eddie kept his grip on his hand, feeling the card’s sharp edge digging into his palm.
But it was slipping away, the fat man still desperate to lose the incriminating data even in his panic. If he opened his fingers, it would be gone . . .
Eddie pulled West’s hand to his face – and bit it.
A muffled gurgle of shock and pain, the card popping free – and Eddie sucked it into his mouth along with some of the foul water. The vile taste almost made him throw up, but he choked back the reflexive response and swallowed. He let go of West’s hand and shoved him away, then kicked upwards until his head broke the surface. Gasping, he shook water from his eyes and swam to the dock, taking hold of a concrete piling.
West surfaced, spluttering and screeching. ‘Help! Help me! I can’t swim!’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Eddie growled. He reluctantly pushed himself back out and grabbed West by his collar to haul him to the quay.
Running footsteps above. ‘Eddie!’ Kit shouted. ‘Eddie, where are you?’
‘Three bloody guesses!’ he called back.
A head peered over the edge. ‘Over here!’ said Kit, pointing. Other faces appeared, including Ayu’s. ‘We’ll get you out.’
A lifebelt was tossed down, which West eagerly grabbed, followed by a rope ladder. Before long, both men were on the dock, dripping. ‘I see I’m going to have to buy a new suit,’ Kit said unhappily at the sight of his oil-stained jacket.
‘You got promoted; you can afford it,’ Eddie replied, spitting to clear the revolting taste from his mouth. ‘Christ, that’s rank.’
West was already on the defensive. ‘I had no idea this was a police operation,’ he protested to the uniformed officers. ‘I thought I was being robbed – I was running for my life!’
Ayu struggled to bring his bloated arms together behind his back so she could handcuff him. ‘You’re involved in smuggling, Mr West. You’re under arrest.’
‘Smuggling?’ West hooted. ‘I’m sure you were recording the meeting, so check your tapes – I told them that under no circumstances would I get involved in anything illegal. Where’s your evidence?’
Kit turned to Eddie. ‘Where is our evidence, Eddie? What happened to the memory card?’
He patted his stomach, then indicated the polluted water. ‘With the amount of crap I swallowed, it’ll come out pretty quickly.’ A queasy grin. ‘From one end or the other.’
The port’s customs officials had all the facilities necessary to catch foreign objects as they left the human body, by whatever route. To Eddie’s relief, if it could be called that, a cup of clean but very salty water was enough to make him puke out his stomach contents into a bowl, rather than having to speed nature’s course along with a laxative. The memory card was recovered and cleaned; it had not been damaged by its brief immersion in either seawater or digestive acids.
Now, the data contained on it had been extracted. ‘This bloke West did ship stuff for the Khoils,’ Eddie told Nina via phone from Interpol’s Singapore office. ‘The statue the Khoils had in their vault, he smuggled it out of Japan.’
‘Japan? Do we know who it belonged to originally?’ Nina asked.
‘No, just which ports he moved it through. He’ll be questioned about it, though. Kit said there might be a plea bargain on offer. Oh, and Kit was right about the Venezuelan connection. West moved all those Inca treasures out of the country.’
‘Did they originate from Venezuela, though? Or was it just a transit point from Peru?’
‘Kit was checking a— Oh, hang on, here he is. You can ask him yourself.’ Kit entered, holding a sheaf of papers and looking pleased with himself. Eddie put the phone on speaker. ‘It’s Nina.’