Return to Atlantis: A Novel (17 page)

The anguished operative was still clutching the injector. Eddie clamped a fist around his hand and twisted it to jam the nozzle up against the goon’s jaw. There was a sharp hiss. The man’s shrieks turned to pure horror as he realized his death was just seconds away.

But the same would be true for Eddie if he couldn’t get clear …

He bodily shoved the dying man across the table, then snatched at a lever on his chair. The first-class seat slammed into its reclined position as Eddie threw himself back against it. The other man stood to bring his gun above his spasming partner—only to have the Smith & Wesson kicked from his hand as his target rolled backward.

Eddie crashed down in the next set of seats and scrambled to his feet. He had to get out of the carriage—the presence of witnesses would drastically limit Scarber and her men’s actions. He leapt into the aisle, about to sprint for the door at the end of the coach—

It opened. Another suited Asian man came through, gun raised.

Eddie dived across the aisle as he fired. A dull thump of lead against flesh and a choked scream came from behind him. The man beside Scarber had moved to retrieve his gun, only to take the bullet in his chest.

Another shot smacked into the seat back above Eddie. The new arrival was charging down the carriage for a clear shot. He needed a weapon. The dead goon’s gun had landed on the seats across from Scarber’s table. Eddie flung himself over the row of chairs. Another shot hissed overhead as he landed heavily.

The gun! Where was it?

He looked frantically about, hearing footsteps rapidly closing.

If it had fallen under the seats, he was doomed—

There
, against an armrest. He snapped it up, firing blind over the seats. The running man ducked for cover.

Eddie jumped back into the aisle. Scarber was still in her seat, but had hooked her gun with one outstretched foot and was reaching under the table for it.

He pointed the SD9 at her and pulled the trigger—

It clicked. Empty.

Scarber nevertheless flinched as if she had received an electric shock. A brief exchange of hostile glares, then
Eddie vaulted the dead man and ran for the rear of the carriage. “Get Jun and kill that bastard!” Scarber shouted.

The door automatically slid open as he approached. He darted into the boarding compartment. Two sets of doors ahead marked the connecting passage between this coach and the next—and through the glass he saw another man hurrying toward him.

Nowhere to go. The outer doors were sealed, controlled by the
shinkansen
’s crew and opening only when the train was stationary.

But there was another door, a
NO ENTRY
sign on it. He shoulder-barged it, but the lock held firm. The man was almost at the connecting passage.

Another slam—

The door burst open. Eddie fell into a cramped guard’s compartment, hip barking against a shelf-like desk on the back wall. A telephone was fitted above it, but there was no time to call anyone for help. He shut the door, jamming the handle with the empty gun.

Not that it mattered, as the compartment was too small to provide any cover. All the gunman had to do was fire through the door. He looked about in desperation. Nothing he could use for protection, no panels in the walls or floor—

A small hatch in the ceiling.

Eddie didn’t know where it led, or care. He scrambled onto the little desk and tugged at the hatch’s inset handle. If it was locked, he was dead. The handle rattled, but didn’t move.

Noises outside. The door juddered, clanking against the wedged gun. A kick, then another, harder. The panel around the catch buckled.

He gripped the handle with both hands, his entire weight on it. Metal creaked. A third strike from outside—

Something inside the hatch snapped—and it dropped open, wind screaming into the cubicle. Eddie grabbed the frame above and pulled himself up.

Onto the bullet train’s roof.

The slipstream mashed him against the opening’s rear edge with hurricane force. In the darkness the
shinkansen
’s white-painted carriages were little more than dim blocks shrinking into the distance ahead and behind, the only illumination the glow of the train’s internal lights on the concrete trackside—and the dazzling blue flashes of electrical sparks where a pantograph arm touched the overhead high-tension cables.

The roof was smooth except for a pair of parallel ribs running its length, about two feet apart. Eddie lay flat between them, palms and toes pushing against the low aluminum ridges, and crawled forward. Moving toward the train’s rear would be far easier, but it would leave him completely exposed, whereas the pantograph’s raised base was just a few yards ahead. Getting over it would give him some protection against bullets.

However small.

The exposed top of his head stung and prickled as dust and grit snatched up by the train’s wake hit him at the takeoff speed of a 747. He kept moving. Even though the pantograph’s base was streamlined, it still disrupted the airflow, blasting a swirling tornado into Eddie’s face as he got closer. He had to turn his head and bury his chin into his shoulder just to draw a breath.

Movement behind—a man emerging from the lit rectangle of the hatch.

The sight of the agent galvanized him. He scrambled along the roof like a gecko, the airflow trying to tear him off with every movement. Another sharp stab as something hit him above one eye, then he reached the pantograph and pulled himself over its base, careful to avoid the arm itself—

A gunshot!

He flattened himself against the roof, not sure how the gunman had missed from such close range. Another shot—but still he didn’t feel the agonizing slam and burn of a bullet impact. He grabbed the rooftop ribs again and pulled himself onward, risking a look back. A
flash from the power line revealed the agent halfway out of the hatch, anger clear even through the force of the wind on his face.

That same wind had saved Eddie. The gunman’s aim was thrown wildly off as the 180-mile-per-hour gale lashed his arm.

But now the agent was climbing out after him. No matter how strong the blast, he couldn’t miss from a distance of two feet. Eddie set off again, muscles already aching. He squinted ahead. Machinery was set into the smooth aluminum expanse of the roof, but at the very far end of the carriage. He had a long way to go before knowing if it would help or hinder him.

And his opponent was younger, faster, not sore from multiple injuries. He was already slipping past the pantograph, smoothly avoiding the electrified arm like liquid metal. All Eddie could do was keep going, knowing that the other man would be close enough for an unmissable shot in seconds—

A sudden bolt of pain—but in his face, not from behind. The shock almost made him lose his grip.

An insect
, he realized. He had just hit a bug, the unfortunate creature splattering against his forehead.

If something so small could hurt so much … what about something larger?

Even as the idea blazed through his mind, he was already shifting position, bringing one hand to his jacket pocket. It found hard, cold metal—his lighter.

He drew it out, looking back. The agent was mere feet behind him. The man brought up his gun, took aim—

Eddie tossed the lighter over his shoulder.

Instantly caught by the slipstream, it shot backward and hit the gunman’s face with the force of a punch. He screamed as blood streamed from his nose—then Eddie’s boots cracked against his head as the Englishman deliberately raised his hands and let the wind whip him back along the smooth metal surface. The agent lost his hold and tumbled along the roof—

Into the overhead cable.

Tens of thousands of volts surged through him, his hair instantly bursting into flames. A fiery halo surrounded his head as the cable sliced vertically down through his skull like a cheese wire. Friction dragged him backward—into the arm, which collapsed under his weight.

Registering a dangerous loss of power from one of its pantographs, the train’s computers immediately applied the emergency brakes.

Eddie had just regained his grip on the rooftop, but even had he been equipped with suckers on his hands and feet he wouldn’t have been able to hold on against the abrupt deceleration. Momentum hurled him forward. The low ridges weren’t enough to channel him—he bumped over them, sliding toward the edge and a lethal plunge to the tracks below—

One hand caught a protruding section of the air-conditioning machinery set into the end of the roof. He jerked to a halt, crying out as his shoulder joint crackled.

Brakes squealing, the
shinkansen
dropped below a hundred miles per hour, sixty, thirty. A final shrill, and it lurched to a standstill on a concrete flyover above the surrounding countryside. Eddie painfully dragged himself back onto the roof and started a staggering run toward the head of the train, looking for another access hatch. He had to get back inside before Scarber and her remaining goon found the statues …

Scarber didn’t need the update from her man Jun to know that something had gone seriously wrong; the sudden braking that threw her to the floor of the first-class car had been clue enough. Any stoppage of a bullet train was considered an emergency by the authorities, and with at least two corpses aboard and clear evidence of a gunfight there would be a massive police presence very shortly. It was time to bug out.

But there was something she had to do first. “Never
mind that,” she told Jun as he started explaining where the Englishman had gone. “We’ve got to find the statues. You saw the bag Chase had when he boarded—it must be somewhere forward of here. Find it, then evac the train.”

Jun nodded. “Where do we meet?”

Scarber looked through a window. There was nothing visible in the darkness outside; the train had stopped somewhere between the towns along Japan’s south coast. “Hell if I know. Just get the statues, then once you’re off the train call me—we’ll rendezvous when I’ve got a GPS fix.”

“Okay. What about you?”

“Never mind about me, just get the bag. Go on!”

Jun turned and jogged from the carriage. Scarber raised her recovered and reloaded gun and fired three shots at the nearest window, splintering the toughened glass.

The other carriages were scenes of confusion and rising concern. The
shinkansen
were renowned for their efficiency and safety; an emergency stop far from a station was almost unheard of. The train’s staff were making their way through each coach in turn, trying to reassure the passengers that the delay was only temporary, the problem would soon be solved, and they would be moving again as quickly as possible.

Jun pushed through the worried commuters, eyes sweeping from side to side as he searched the luggage racks. Chase had boarded the train carrying a nondescript black holdall, and a couple of passengers had already protested when he examined what turned out to be false positives. But he was running out of time to worry about raising suspicion; the operation had already gone to hell, and he wanted to get out of the confines of the train as quickly as possible.

He spied another black bag on the luggage rack. The fact that nobody was sitting in the seats immediately
beneath it made it a likely prospect. None of the passengers nearby paid him any attention as he took it from the rack, more concerned with questioning the guard about the delay. He unzipped the holdall. Inside was a polycarbonate case. He opened it—and smiled.

Three crude statuettes of purple stone gazed dumbly back at him. Why they were important, he didn’t know, or care. His superiors wanted them, and that was all that mattered. He closed the case, refastened the bag, then squeezed back down the aisle.

The door to the boarding compartment slid open, and he went through. Those to the connecting passage were push-button-operated rather than fully automatic, so he tapped the control and waited for them to hiss apart—

An arm locked around his throat from behind, pinning him in a brutal choke hold as a clenched fist pounded paralyzingly into his kidneys. A voice growled in his ear: “I think that’s
my
bag.”