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 farther 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 offscreen, 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 pry the gun away from him, turning it around to fire—but Eddie kicked it upward 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