The Sacred Vault_ A Novel - Andy McDermott [104]
Kit spun the steering wheel and yanked on the handbrake. The car fishtailed, its rear end swinging round and swatting away one of the guards with a thump of flesh against steel.
The remaining man dived aside in the nick of time, rolling and bringing up his gun—
Mac kicked open the passenger door. It hit the crouching guard just as he fired, knocking the gun downwards. A semicircle of red sprayed over the tarmac as the bullet hit the luckless man’s kneecap. He fell on his back, dropping the gun as he screamed and clutched the wound.
Mac tossed the fallen weapon out of his reach, then waved to the occupants of the crippled Veyron. ‘Well, come on! We haven’t got all day!’
20
Kit lowered his cell phone, his normally sunny face somewhat clouded. ‘That . . . did not go well. But it could have been worse.’
‘What did your bosses say?’ Nina asked. ‘Are they going to arrest the Khoils? Or at least investigate them?’
‘Unfortunately, no. Not without more proof.’
‘But we’ve got proof,’ said Eddie, indicating the Talonor Codex. The golden book sat on a desk in Kit’s small but modern Delhi apartment, the Interpol officer having arranged a flight from Bangalore back to the capital on a government transport aircraft. ‘They had that thing in their bloody house. That’s got to be enough for Interpol to take action, surely?’
‘It’s your word against theirs. I know you recovered it from them, but that isn’t firm evidence. If Khoil had left a single fingerprint on it, that would be enough, but you said yourself that he never actually touched it. And,’ Kit sighed, ‘the Khoils have already been busy. They have lots of friends in high places - and they seem to have spoken to all of them in the last few hours. Politicians, lawyers, judges . . . We need absolutely irrefutable evidence before we can take any action.’
‘So there’s nothing they can be charged with?’ Nina said in disbelief. ‘What about the simple fact that I’m sitting right here in India? I was goddamn kidnapped!’
‘I looked into that. But unfortunately, the immigration agency has a record of you arriving - alone - at Bangalore airport three days ago.’
‘That’s impossible! They brought me straight to their own airfield.’
‘That’s not what the computer says, I’m afraid.’
‘And guess whose company wrote the software on that computer?’ said Eddie rhetorically.
Mac made a grumbling sound. ‘It seems we have a stalemate. There’s not a great deal they can do to us without arousing suspicion against themselves, but we’ve got nothing on them either.’
‘I have one piece of good news, though,’ Kit told Eddie. ‘The Interpol red notice issued on you has been rescinded. I’ve told my superiors that the Talonor Codex has been recovered - and that you helped. I strongly implied the whole thing was some sort of sting operation. You’ll still have to be questioned back in New York, but for now you’re off the arrest list.’
Eddie wasn’t especially overjoyed. ‘Fucking marvellous. We’ve got the Codex back, but it doesn’t matter, ’cause they’ve got what they needed from it.’ He tapped the plastic replica of the key beside the golden book. ‘They’ve probably made another copy already.’
‘I told you we should have deleted the pattern,’ Nina said.
‘So the Khoils will be able to find the Vault of Shiva?’ Kit asked.
‘Unless we find it first,’ said Nina.
Eddie frowned. ‘Not much chance of that, is there? We don’t know where it is.’
‘Nor does Khoil. He had a translation of the Codex, and made some deductions from it, but hadn’t pinned down an actual location.’
‘What deductions?’ asked Mac.
Nina thought back to Khoil’s boastful claims at the palace. ‘He said it was somewhere near Mount Kailash - Shiva’s home.’
‘The Sacred Mountain,’ said Kit, nodding. ‘The logical place.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘No, unfortunately.’ He smiled. ‘My work doesn’t give me a lot of time for pilgrimages. Perhaps some day.’
‘Do you have an atlas?’
Kit found a book and opened it to