Temple of the Gods

25




The Mako’s pilot slowly woke to a throbbing pain across his face.

A mushy splat of blood on the control panel revealed the cause. What had happened? Memories groggily returned. He had been chasing the IHA sub, about to unleash the last torpedo – then it had unexpectedly angled upwards, and . . .

The rest was a blur. Something had hit the Mako, throwing him forward in his seat . . . then nothing. He had been knocked out. But he thought he had heard voices. How was that possible?

He squinted through the windows. No sign of the other sub – or the diver who had been with him. But something wasn’t right.

It took him a few seconds to work out what. There were reflections in the Plexiglas . . . of people behind him.

He spun his chair round in alarm – to find the menacing barrel of an ASM-DT pointing at him. It fired, the single shot earsplitting in the confined space. A nail round stabbed into the seat between his legs, the metal spike less than an inch from his groin.

The man holding the gun gave him a nasty look. ‘If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, the next one turns your bollocks into a shish kebab.’

The Mako powered through the blackness.

Eddie and Nina had debated – more accurately, argued – over their next action while waiting for the pilot to wake. Eddie’s first thought had been to try to help Matt. But the pleasure submarine lacked manipulator arms, so had no way to release the Sharkdozer’s ballast. And by the time the pilot recovered and was coerced at gunpoint into getting under way, the other submersible had disappeared. Whether Matt was making a genuine attempt to return to the surface or had merely moved off to deter them from going after him they had no way of knowing: the Mako had no sonar beyond a very basic depthfinder.

So, extremely reluctantly, they had turned to other options. The most obvious was returning to the surface. But the track on the inertial navigation system ultimately swayed the argument in Nina’s favour. Their attackers had come from a mother vessel, a submarine . . . and it seemed likely that Glas was aboard it. Wanted internationally for multiple crimes, and with the Group’s agents hunting for him, where better for the errant billionaire to hide? It explained the intermittency of his communications with his ‘partner’, Dalton: something as simple as making a phone call was impossible hundreds of feet beneath the sea.

The architect of everything that had happened – the man responsible for all the lives that had been lost – was just over two miles away. As Nina pointed out, it seemed a waste not to pay him a visit while they had a chance . . . and a torpedo.

‘So, is your boss on this sub?’ Eddie demanded, poking the rifle against the pilot’s side to encourage a truthful answer.

‘Yes, yes,’ he replied, dry-mouthed. ‘Herr Glas is there.’

‘How many others?’

‘About ten.’

‘About ten, or exactly ten?’ The gun pushed harder against his ribs.

‘Okay, okay! More than ten. Ah . . . twelve.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, yes, twelve! You killed two others.’

‘I’ll make it three if you piss me about again.’ Eddie gave him one final jab with the barrel, then moved back to join Nina. ‘You sure about this?’ he asked her quietly.

She shook her head, but said, ‘It’s the only chance we’ve got to end this. Otherwise Glas’ll just keep sending people after us. After me. Even if I manage to stay alive, other people will still get killed in the crossfire. People like Matt, and Lewis, and the other people on that sub.’

‘So what are we going to do? Cruise up to his window, wave, then blow the f*cker up?’

‘I was thinking more of giving him the finger first,’ she said, with a faint attempt at a smile. ‘But we should talk to him before that. I didn’t believe that Warden was telling us the whole story any more than you did, so we ought to find out Glas’s side of it.’

‘Then blow the f*cker up.’

‘If we have to.’ She looked back at the pilot. The dot representing the sub on the inertial navigator was approaching its origin point. ‘How much further?’ she asked him.

‘About half a kilometre,’ the pilot replied nervously.

The couple moved forward for a better view as the Mako continued towards its destination. Nothing was visible yet, but a readout on the navigation screen ticked down the distance in metres. Four hundred and fifty, four hundred . . . ‘What if it’s moved?’ Nina wondered, still not seeing anything. ‘Maybe they figured out that something went wrong and took off.’

‘Then we go back to the surface, and Chuckles here takes a swim with the sharks,’ said Eddie.

The pilot gulped. ‘It will be there, it will be!’

Three hundred metres. Their prisoner looked from side to side for any sign of the mother ship. Two hundred, and the pilot’s hands visibly trembled as he reduced speed. ‘I think they’ve buggered off,’ Eddie growled, hefting the ASM-DT.

‘No, no, they will be here!’ the pilot squealed. ‘They will be, they will – there!’

He pointed off to the left. A faint line of lights appeared through the murk.

As they closed, the line grew longer. And longer.

‘Wow,’ said Nina, unable to conceal her amazement. ‘That’s a big-ass submarine.’

The craft bearing the lights gradually took on form. The mother ship was well over two hundred feet long, a sleek white shape resembling an ultra-modern megayacht – but one with the ability to plunge beneath the waves on a whim. Large circular portholes ran along the length of its hull, a long wraparound window marking the bridge atop the elevated, streamlined superstructure. ‘Must have cost a few bob,’ said Eddie.

‘Ninety million dollars,’ the pilot volunteered.

‘Did I ask for a f*cking brochure?’ The man fell silent, cowed.

Nina spotted movement through a porthole. ‘Shit, they’ll see us!’ She hunched down, tugging at Eddie’s sleeve for him to do the same. ‘Where do we dock?’

‘Behind the bridge,’ the pilot hesitantly answered, ‘or on the keel.’

‘Go to the top one,’ Eddie told him, pushing the gun behind his ear. The man obediently guided the Mako upwards.

‘You sure?’ Nina asked.

‘Be a lot easier for us to get out by jumping down than climbing up. We’ll need to move fast.’

The larger submarine slid past the windows as its offspring moved into docking position. The area aft of the superstructure was revealed as a flat deck; on the surface, it could be used by passengers to enjoy the sunlight, but underwater it acted as a landing platform. Bright lights revealed a port set into it.

‘Can you dock on your own?’ Eddie asked the pilot.

‘Yes, it’s – it’s automatic.’

‘Good. Where does the hatch open, and how many people will be there?’

‘The docking port goes into the engine room. I don’t know how many people will be inside – three or four, usually.’

‘But there might be more,’ Nina said. ‘Coming to congratulate you for killing us.’

‘They won’t be celebrating for long,’ said Eddie grimly. ‘All right, dock this thing.’

Sweating, the pilot manoeuvred the Mako into position. A graphic of the docking port appeared on a monitor, crosshairs guiding him into the perfect position. A series of bleeps, and the crosshairs turned green; he pushed a button, and the computers took over to lower the sub into position. A couple of bumps and clanks from below, then the engines shut down as flashing text on the screen announced that the minisub had docked safely.

‘That everything you need to do?’ Eddie asked. The pilot nodded. ‘Cheers, then.’ He smashed the rifle’s butt against the man’s head, knocking him back into unconsciousness. ‘You’re f*cking lucky I didn’t kill you.’

‘What next?’ said Nina as they headed for the hatch. ‘I don’t want to rush down there without knowing who’s waiting.’

‘We don’t have to,’ Eddie replied. ‘We’ll let them come to us.’

At the bottom of the docking connector, two of the submarine’s crew watched as an engineer released the hatch, stepping back from the residual drips of water before looking up into it. The Mako’s own hatch was already open at the top.

But nobody was coming down it.

Seconds passed. ‘Where is he?’ asked one of the men, moving closer to see for himself. The submersible’s cabin lights were off.

‘I don’t know,’ said the engineer. He called up through the hatch. ‘Moritz?’ No answer. Giving his companions a look of concern, he tried again. ‘Moritz! What’s the problem?’

‘Yours,’ said Eddie, stepping out of the gloom and firing the rifle down the shaft.

The nail round hit the engineer in the face and went straight through his head, bursting out behind one ear in a bloody spray. The man standing beside him only had time to flinch in shock before a second sharpened spike plunged into the top of his chest and ripped open his heart. Both corpses crashed down on the deck.

The third man turned to flee. Behind him, Eddie dropped from the docking port with a bang. Another shot, and six inches of steel punched through the running man’s upper back to clang off the bulkhead beyond.

There was only one exit from the chamber. Eddie stepped over the bodies and opened a hatch to find a flight of steep metal stairs leading down into the submarine’s engine room. Two more crewmen were in the compartment, one staring up at him in stunned surprise, the other already sprinting towards a door. The Englishman tracked him and fired. The recoil from a nail round was different from that of a bullet, but when the first smacked noisily into a bank of batteries just behind his target he immediately adjusted – and the next shot hit home, tearing into the man’s neck.

He snapped the gun back at the other engineer – who was diving for a control panel. Eddie fired, but the man had already slapped his hand down on an alarm button – his last act on earth before the nail pierced his skull. A siren sounded, red lights flashing.

Nina emerged from the docking chamber. ‘So much for the stealthy approach!’

‘It’s not really my thing anyway.’ Eddie switched the ASM-DT to conventional ammunition and ran down the stairs. ‘Okay, what’s a good thing to break?’

As well as the batteries, the two-deck-high room housed a pair of diesel engines for use when the submarine was on the surface, plus electrical generators and hydraulic pumps. But what caught his eye were two identical sets of machinery, complex networks of pipes and valves connected to large metal cylinders. Both systems were hooked to overhead ducts that led through the forward bulkhead into other parts of the sub. Eddie was no engineer, but it seemed a safe bet that the machines were part of the submarine’s air supply. ‘Nina!’ he shouted as he hurried across the room. ‘Find an intercom and tell Glas we want to talk to him.’

She descended the stairs, spotting a panel with a telephone-like handset near the door. ‘What if he refuses?’

‘Then he’ll have trouble breathing!’ He reached the nearer of the two machines. A prominent warning sticker told him that the device was an oxygen generator, using chemical reactions both to create and to recycle the life-sustaining gas, and that the greatest potential danger from it was potassium chlorate burns. That was, in an odd way, reassuring: since it didn’t store compressed oxygen in pressurised tanks, there was far less risk of an explosion.

He still retreated to what he hoped was a safe distance before taking aim. ‘Okay, Nina, get down!’ He waited for her to duck behind the batteries – then fired.

The bullets tore into the generator’s pipework. A pump shattered, gas escaping with a shrill hiss. The rest of the machinery rattled furiously for several seconds before rasping to a stop. Warning lights flicked on.

Nina hesitantly raised her head. ‘What did you do?’

‘Took out one of their oxygen generators. There’s a backup, but I’ve got enough bullets left to f*ck that up too. Get on the phone and let them know. Oh, and say that if they try to force their way in here, we’ve wired the place to blow.’

‘We have?’

‘No, but they don’t know that!’

He found a toolbox and took out a crowbar as Nina went to the intercom and picked up the handset. ‘Hello, hi,’ she said into it. ‘This is Nina Wilde calling for Harald Glas – I guess you know me, since you’ve been trying to kill me for the past week. I just wanted to tell you that we’ve destroyed one of your oxygen generators, and we’ll take out the other one if we don’t hear from you in, oh . . . thirty seconds?’

Eddie used the crowbar to jam the hatch’s handle. ‘Bit casual, and I would’ve told him to surrender straight off, but not bad. You’re getting the hang of this whole being threatening lark.’

‘Everyone at the IHA thinks I’ve already got it.’ Eddie moved back to cover the hatch as Nina waited for a reply. The seconds ticked by. ‘Is he going to answer?’

Eddie grinned crookedly. ‘Maybe we caught him while he was taking a dump. Even billionaires have to crap.’

‘There’s a delightful thought,’ she said with a disgusted sigh.

Still nothing but silence from the intercom. Eddie eyed the remaining oxygen generator. Now that the threat had been made, they might have to go through with it . . .

A click from the handset. ‘Dr Wilde. This is Harald Glas.’

Nina switched the intercom to speaker mode so Eddie could hear. ‘First things first. If you try to break in here, we’ll destroy the other oxygen generator, and the engines and batteries too. You’ll be trapped down here. You got that?’

‘I hear you.’ The Dane’s voice was sonorous, measured, calm even under threat. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want you to stop trying to kill my wife, for starters,’ said Eddie. ‘Then if we’re still making deals, maybe also an Aston Martin. And a pony.’

‘You’re as irreverent as I’ve heard, Mr Chase.’

‘You seem very well informed about us,’ Nina said.

Glas didn’t offer a response to that, instead saying, ‘I assume you wish to see me in person.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Eddie replied. ‘You get your arse down here – alone.’

A brief hesitation. ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. But . . . I will send a representative to bring you to me. A hostage, if you prefer.’ The background hiss from the speaker briefly cut out as Glas closed the mic; Nina guessed that the newly appointed ‘hostage’ was unhappy about the arrangement. ‘They will be with you shortly. Alone, as you wished.’

‘And unarmed,’ said Nina.

Another muted pause. ‘Agreed.’

‘If we see anyone else on the way to you, I’ll shoot your friend and blow up the engines,’ Eddie told him. ‘So get everyone to lock themselves in the galley or wherever.’

‘It will be done,’ said Glas. The intercom fell silent.

‘You trust him?’ Nina asked Eddie, before answering her own question. ‘Of course not.’

‘Go upstairs and wait in the airlock. If anything happens, get back into the sub and take off.’

‘I don’t know how to drive the thing,’ she told him as she ascended. ‘I don’t even know how to detach it from this sub.’

‘Bash every button until something happens, that’s my usual trick.’

‘Yeah, that’s why I don’t let you use my laptop.’ She pushed the hatch until it was slightly ajar and she could see out through the narrow gap.

Before long, someone knocked on the door. Eddie looked up at Nina. ‘Well, here we go,’ he said, freeing the crowbar from the handle before returning to cover. ‘Okay, open it. Slowly!’

He held his finger tightly on the trigger as the door eased open; if he saw a weapon, he was ready to fire instantly. But instead a pair of slender black-gloved hands came into view, fingers spread wide to show they were not carrying anything. ‘Well?’ said a familiar aristocratic voice, filled with irritation. ‘May I come in?’

Eddie could hardly believe it. ‘Oh, for f*ck’s sake!’

‘Charming as ever, Eddie.’ Sophia Blackwood leaned through the opening, taking in the rifle pointed at her. ‘You can put that down; I’m not armed.’

‘I’ll check that for myself. Shut the door, then put your hands against it.’

Sophia impatiently complied. Eddie pushed the ASM-DT’s muzzle against her back and performed a one-handed pat-down. He knew his ex-wife well enough to be unsurprised to find she had lied. ‘Not armed, eh?’ he said as he pulled a compact Glock 36 pistol from the waistband of her black leather trousers beneath her blouse. ‘I should just shoot you on f*cking principle. Glas thought he could use you to kill us, did he?’

‘Actually, Harald doesn’t even know I have that gun,’ she said as he finished his search. She looked up at Nina, who had cautiously emerged from the docking chamber. ‘It’s got quite an interesting story, actually.’

‘Really,’ said Eddie, not caring. ‘You should send it to a publisher – maybe it’ll outsell Dan Brown.’

‘I’m sure Nina will want to hear it. Part of it takes place in Rome.’

Eddie stepped back, keeping the rifle fixed on Sophia. ‘Nina, take this,’ he said, holding out the Glock.

His wife quickly descended the stairs. ‘What about Rome?’ she demanded. ‘What the hell was going on there? Your buddy killed Agnelli, and was about to kill me when—’

‘When I shot him. Yes, I do remember – I was there,’ Sophia snarked.

Nina took the gun from Eddie. Checking, she found that it was fully loaded with a round already chambered. ‘And why were you there?’

Sophia gave her a patronising look. ‘It’s all rather complicated.’

‘Well gee, if only I were a PhD so I could understand. Wait, whaddya know!’ She put the magazine back into the weapon, making sure Sophia heard the click as it seated. ‘You can explain on the way to Glas.’

‘Oh, very well. If Eddie will let me take my hands off this door.’

‘Go ahead,’ he told her. ‘By the way, what’s with the gloves? The air in a submarine bad for your cuticles?’

Her expression became considerably more hostile. ‘Actually, I have you to thank for that. And this.’ She brought up her left hand to point with her index finger at the scar running down her face; her ring and little fingers remained strangely rigid beneath the expensive black leather. ‘When you threw me off that cliff in Switzerland—’

‘When he tackled you over it to stop you from shooting me,’ Nina reminded her.

‘Whatever. The point remains that my dear ex-husband used me to cushion himself on the way down.’ Acid on her tongue, Sophia opened the door. Eddie glanced through. The corridor was clear. ‘I came out of the experience rather worse off than he did.’

‘I broke a rib and punctured a lung!’ Eddie objected.

‘And I lost half my f*cking hand!’ With a genuine flare of anger, she tugged off her left glove – revealing that a chunk the size of a large bite was missing from the edge of her palm, replaced, along with the two fingers above it, by a waxy prosthesis attached with an elastic strap. ‘It got torn off on a rock, and before I even had time to realise what had happened I hit another one – face-first.’ She turned the injured side of her face to them. Even after surgery to repair it, the scar was still ragged and deep. Despite her loathing for Sophia, Nina couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy.

But only a pang. The Englishwoman was a ruthless multiple murderer, killing without a qualm anyone who threatened to obstruct her goals. Both Nina and Eddie had been in her sights on more than one occasion. ‘Well, sorry to hear that,’ she said lamely. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

Eddie was tempted to make some tasteless hand-themed joke, but restrained himself. Like Nina he had found the sight shocking, though for different reasons. Sophia had been his wife, after all, and to see the face he had known so well ravaged by injury was unsettling.

Scar aside, though, it was not quite as he remembered. ‘Who arranged for the plastic surgery?’ he asked as Sophia put the glove back on and went through the door. He followed, keeping the gun fixed on her back; Nina cautiously took up the rear with the Glock at the ready. ‘Glas, I’m assuming.’

‘Yes,’ said Sophia, hands raised as she led them down the passage. ‘I knew him before I met you again in New York.’

‘When you say you “knew” him . . .’ said Nina suspiciously.

Sophia blew out an exasperated breath. ‘I seem to have acquired a reputation as a woman who sleeps with every wealthy and powerful man she meets.’

‘Oh, I wonder why?’ Eddie muttered.

‘But yes, I did.’

‘I might have bloody known!’

‘It was after my father died, and the jackals in the City stripped every last morsel of flesh from his company’s bones to leave me with nothing. I still had my title, so – to be bluntly mercenary about it – I was looking for a man with resources I could use to get my revenge. Harald was one potential suitor, as it were.’

Eddie made a disgusted sound. ‘Along with René Corvus, Richard Yuen, Victor Dalton . . .’

‘He wasn’t the best choice at the time, I’ll be frank. But he was still infatuated with me.’

‘What man wouldn’t be?’ Nina said sarcastically. ‘I mean, on average there’s only a fifty per cent chance that you’ll kill them.’

‘It’s not even close to fifty per cent,’ Sophia replied, irked at the accusation. ‘I didn’t kill Gabriel Ribbsley. Or Joe Komosa, or—’

‘Enough, Jesus!’ Eddie cut in. ‘I don’t need to hear the f*cking list. The literal f*cking list.’

She gave him a small cat-like smile, pleased to have needled him once more. ‘But anyway, I managed to drag myself out of the lake not far from the waterfall and broke into a nearby house. I didn’t know whom to call at first, but then I remembered that Harald had a residence in Switzerland for tax reasons. I had no idea whether or not he would actually be there, but as it turned out, he was.’

‘So he came and rescued you,’ said Nina. ‘Even knowing what you’d done – that you tried to nuke New York?’

‘The human heart is a very forgiving thing.’

‘Like you’d know,’ Eddie scoffed.

‘Cynicism is so unattractive in a man, Eddie. Up here.’ They reached a flight of stairs to the next deck. Eddie checked the passage and nearby doorways, but so far it appeared that Glas had been true to his word and ordered the crew to stay out of their way. They ascended. ‘But he got me medical treatment, without telling the authorities that I was still alive, and then for a while I was his . . .’ She hesitated, as if her mouth had suddenly gone dry. ‘His guest. But,’ she continued, brushing the odd pause aside, ‘you know me, I do dislike being out of the loop. So I persuaded Harald to let me get more involved in his work. Which is when I learned that he was a member of the Group.’

‘I gather they weren’t happy when they found out Glas had been protecting you,’ said Nina, remembering their conversation with Travis Warden.

‘They were not,’ Sophia replied, sounding amused by the fact. ‘At first, they wanted me dead. Fortunately, Harald has always been something of an iconoclast, so he stood up to the rest of the Group. Then, and now. He split from them over a matter of conscience.’

‘Some conscience,’ Eddie said scathingly. ‘Seeing as he wants Nina dead.’

She gave them a saccharine smile. ‘Every cloud, as they say. But I’ll let him explain his reasons himself.’

They continued down another hallway along the upper deck, heading for the submarine’s bow. ‘Glas rescued you and talked the rest of the Group out of killing you,’ mused Nina. ‘So after all that he did for you . . . why did you shoot his guy in the back in Rome?’

The smile returned, this time knowingly conspiratorial. ‘Let’s just say that it would be best for everyone, myself included, if you kept that to yourself for now.’

‘Glas doesn’t know?’

‘Maybe we should turn you in,’ Eddie suggested.

‘Maybe I should remind you that I saved Nina’s life in Rome.

I could have let Harald’s man kill her – I could even have killed her myself. But I chose not to.’

‘Without wanting to sound ungrateful,’ said Nina, ‘why?’

‘There’s a lot more going on than you think. But here we are, so remember what I just said.’ A set of polished wooden double doors marked the end of the hallway. She raised a hand to open them.

‘Careful now,’ warned Eddie, pushing the gun into her back once more.

‘For God’s sake, Eddie,’ she complained. ‘He agreed to talk to you, and believe it or not, that’s what he’ll do. He’s very much a man of his word.’

‘You’ll forgive us if we don’t entirely trust him,’ said Nina. ‘Or you.’

Sophia knocked. ‘Harald? Your hostage has brought your guests.’

‘Come in,’ came Glas’s voice from the room beyond. Sophia opened the doors.

Eddie used her as a shield, quickly checking for potential threats in what was revealed as an observation lounge, large circular windows looking out into the ocean’s depths. But visitors to the room were more likely to be wowed by the wonders within than outside.

Rarity was the theme of the small but incredibly valuable collection, Nina immediately saw. One stand contained coins arranged on red velvet, among them a gold 1933 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle – one of the most sought-after and expensive pieces in the world, worth many millions more than its original twenty-dollar face value. Another stand held stamps, the Swedish Treskilling Yellow at its centre also priced in the millions. Further treasures were arranged around the room: bottles of vintage wine, a first folio of Shakespeare’s plays, a leaf of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with annotations by the composer himself, and more.

Another, less obvious theme, she realised, was that everything was relatively small and easily transportable. Their owner was on the run; he had brought with him probably only a fraction of the rare items he possessed.

The man in question was waiting for them at the room’s centre. Their enemy. Harald Glas.