“I’m not exactly keen on it either,” he replied. But despite his attempt at forced levity, he too felt his eyes welling. “Oh Christ, look at me. Getting all emotional.”
“You do that a lot more than you like to pretend,” Nina told him, wiping her face.
“I’ve had a lot to get all emotional about lately,” he admitted. “Losing Mac, losing Nan …” Now it was his turn to rub his eyes. “Losing you.”
She shuffled around the booth to sit beside him. “You didn’t lose me, Eddie. I lost you. For a while. But I got you back.”
“Thanks,” he managed to say, almost overcome. He put his arm around her. “Thank you.”
“I’m still completely furious with you, obviously,” she said after a pause.
He half-laughed. “So what else is new? You’re always furious about something. Bloody redheads.”
“Yeah, we’re the best.” They sat in silence for a while, simply enjoying being together again.
“So what changed?” Eddie eventually asked. “When I left you in Peru, you … well, you flat-out accused me of murder. Why do you believe me now?”
Nina straightened. “A few things. First, Kit lied to me about Interpol authorizing him to negotiate with Stikes to get the statues back. So that made me start wondering if he’d lied about anything else. And the second thing is … well, you.”
“Me?”
“I know you, Eddie. I think pretty well by now. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed … wrong. I know how angry you were that night—but kicking a helpless man to his death? I know the things you can do when you feel you have to, but that’s not one of them.”
“I was actually trying to get Kit out of there,” he said, thinking back to the chaos of the impending conflagration. “He was the only way I could prove what was going on. But he would have shot me if I hadn’t … well, you were there. Even if you didn’t see the gun.”
“It wasn’t on the video either,” she told him glumly. “The angle was wrong, and it was too dark. I watched it over and over, but I couldn’t see anything. Interpol didn’t either.”
“There’s a video?”
“Yeah, from a surveillance camera. Renée Beauchamp sent me a copy to see if I could tell her anything new.”
Eddie became thoughtful. “How long is it?”
“Ten or twelve minutes, maybe. Nothing happens for a lot of it, though; you climb up onto the catwalk, then you’re out of shot until you and Kit are fighting.”
“I’ll need a look at it. But there wasn’t anything showing Stikes or Sophia?”
“Afraid not. Oh, oh!” she added excitedly. The shock of the attack at the airport had pushed events in Italy to one side. “Sophia was in Rome!”
“What?”
“I don’t know what she was doing—I don’t even know how she’s still alive. But she was there, and she …” Nina trailed off, still not quite able to accept what had happened.
“What did she do?” he demanded.
“She, ah … You’re not going to believe this, but she saved my life.”
He stared at her. “You’re right, I don’t believe it. How?”
She explained what had happened outside the Vatican. “So,” said Eddie when she was done, “she shot her own man in the back to save you, then got all cutesy and ‘don’t tell anyone’ about it? Why would she do that? She hates you even more than she hates me!”
“Thanks for that, Eddie. I always like being reminded that a murdering psychopath has a grudge against me. But no, I don’t know why she did it. I’d guess she was there to make sure Agnelli didn’t blab to me about whoever paid him to raid the Brotherhood’s archives. And so was the other guy—only she double-crossed him.”
“Sophia stabbing someone in the back? No!” said Eddie sarcastically.
“But whose side is she really on? Apart from her own, obviously. She didn’t save me because she wants a bridge partner—she needs me alive for something.”
“Something to do with those bloody statues, probably. Even Dalton mentioned them.”
“Dalton?” said Nina in surprise. “As in, out-on-his-ass president?”
“Yeah. Turns out he set me up to be killed in Japan. Sophia’s not the only person who holds grudges. I popped around to his house to have words.”
She put her head in her hands again. “I need the Cliffs-Notes to follow all this. What the hell is going on?”
He patted her shoulder. “Well, you tell me what you know, I’ll tell you what I know, and maybe between the