drop them toward the burning gas jet below. Eddie hit a stanchion and swung for a moment before pulling himself up.
Kit had fallen farther 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 among the pipework.
“It’s there, I tell you.” He leaned toward 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-defense 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 offscreen—“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 onto 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 analog 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 among the shadows.
But that shape was instantly recognizable. 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