Seven floors it was, then. He carefully clambered over the guardrail and edged across a girder until he reached one of the vertical struts, then started his ascent. It took less than half a minute to reach the next floor. Six to go. The next stage took the same amount of time, the third a little longer as his body began to feel the strain. It wasn’t the climb itself that was wearing, but the effort of maintaining a grip on the featureless steel. Only the pressure of his hands and feet kept him from a very long plunge.
Three floors to go, and he paused to let the aching in his muscles fade. He took out the torch and shone it upwards. There were the doors to the penthouse… which had extra wiring around them. Alarms. Going the extra floor to the machine level was the right decision.
He set off again. Grip the strut, push his feet against it for support, bring up his hands one at a time, hold tight, raise his feet, repeat. The cramp in his hands returned—
An echoing metallic clack from below, the grumble of machinery building up speed… and the cables started to move.
The elevator was rising.
Shit! He looked down, seeing the tiny pinprick lights going out one by one as the car blotted them out. It was maybe twenty floors below him — and picking up speed.
He was halfway between levels. There was no way he could climb up to the next before it reached him, but if he dropped back down, the slightest mistake would pitch him down the shaft.
No choice. He swung sideways, let go, fell—
The drop was about eight feet, on to unyielding, narrow steel. Even bending his legs to absorb the impact, Eddie still felt pain slam up through his feet into his knees and hips. He wobbled, grabbing at the strut as he pivoted to push himself back against the wall…
One foot slipped.
Fear shot through him. He clawed at the metal frame, fingertips desperately searching for purchase on the bare steel—
And finding a dent where it had been banged against a neighbour during construction. He rasped his nails against the imperfection, finding just enough grip to steady himself.
Both feet back on the girder, but now the car was only a couple of floors below, and still racing upwards…
Eddie straightened and flattened himself against the wall just as the elevator reached him. He sucked in his stomach and held his breath, head turned sideways as it passed. There was so little clearance that his shirt buttons rasped against its side. Then it was past, decelerating sharply to stop at the forty-ninth floor. The clattering cables fell still.
He let out a gasp of relief, tempered with frustration. The car now blocked his path. All he could do was wait and hope that whoever was using it wasn’t settling in for a long night shift.
Fortunately, it took only half a minute before another clack of brakes being released warned him that the elevator was about to move again. He squashed himself against the wall once more, wincing as the car scythed back past him — this time actually tearing off a button. It could have been worse, he decided: it might have lopped off a nipple, or an even more important protuberance lower down his body. Suppressing a shudder, he waited until the elevator was safely distant before gathering himself and resuming his ascent.
Fiftieth floor, a brief rest… then on to the top.
He climbed to the doors, shining his torch over them. No alarms that he could see. A closer look revealed a locking bar; he pulled it downwards. A clank, and the door shifted slightly. He worked his fingers into the gap between the two sliding sections and forced them apart.
Like the maintenance hub, the skyscraper’s uppermost storey was sparsely lit, but Eddie could see well enough. In common with many tall buildings, the topmost level was dedicated to mundane but vital functions such as supplying air conditioning and water to the floors below. He moved deeper into the maze of humming machinery, sweeping the torch beam from side to side. What he needed was an access panel, some way into the crawlspace between this and the penthouse…
A hatch was set into the floor beside an air conditioning unit. He opened it and shone his torch inside.
The space below was cramped and dusty, about two feet high and a nest for numerous snaking ventilation hoses serving the penthouse. A squeeze, but he had been in much tighter confines. He climbed down and crawled towards the nearest air vent.
He found on reaching it that it was too small for him to fit through, but a quick survey with his light revealed fatter hoses nearby — presumably serving larger vents. He followed one of the larger lines until it curved down to attach to a slatted grille set into the floor. That was more like it! Once he disconnected the hose, he could either unscrew or simply kick out the grille and drop down into the penthouse.
Voices reached him as he arrived at the vent. Someone was in the room below. This particular entrance wasn’t a good choice, then, but there would be others. He was about to move on when he realised the speakers were talking in English. Curiosity got the better of him, and he peered through the slats. He was above a rather spartan lounge, a young Japanese man in an expensive suit addressing someone out of sight. ‘That should not be an issue,’ said the man. ‘We are all working for the same goal, so there’s no need to be concerned about details of overall responsibility.’
‘Being concerned about details is how I stay alive,’ said another voice.
Eddie froze, a sudden surge of anger and adrenalin rushing through his body. Stikes! There was no mistaking the measured, arrogant tones of the former SAS officer.
Scarber had told him the truth: his enemy was here, right now. He felt the weight of the gun inside his jacket, and almost without conscious thought reached for it. One shot through the grille would see his enemy dead…
He forced himself to stay his hand. Yes, he could kill Stikes, but he didn’t yet have an escape route short of grovelling back through the crawlspace and climbing down fifty floors. Besides, he now had an obligation to Scarber. The ex-CIA agent had lived up to her side of the bargain by giving him Stikes’s location; he should do the same by trying to destroy the statues.
He shifted position to get a look at his target. Stikes sat nonchalantly in a leather armchair, a glass of whisky on a small table beside it. His haughty, smug expression as he spoke was just as Eddie remembered — though the Yorkshireman took a small amount of satisfaction from seeing that his aristocratic features were disfigured, the vivid scar of a grazing bullet wound running from his forehead up through his blond hairline.
Stikes had made himself comfortable, so Eddie guessed he would be here for a while. Good; that gave him time to locate the statues before settling old scores. He started to move away to find another vent—
‘Dr Wilde is with Takashi-san at this moment,’ said the Japanese man.
Eddie was so shocked that he almost yelped ‘What?’ out loud, managing to clamp his mouth shut before he gave himself away. Nina was here? The thought sent a thrill of longing through him — tempered by caution. Why would she be here with Stikes? He leaned closer to the grille, straining to hear every word.
‘She will soon put the statues together for us,’ the man continued. ‘Then we’ll finally see their power — and the plan can begin.’
‘It took you long enough,’ Stikes replied. ‘I gave them to the Group three months ago.’
‘We were exploring other options.’
‘But you already knew she could make them work, so you wasted time looking for someone else with the same ability. I told you she was the best choice, and that she wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to find out more about the statues. She’s an obsessive — it’s what drives her. Her work always comes first.’