Limit

Quyu, Shanghai, China

At around one o’clock, Jericho had had his fourth phone conversation with Zhao, who was at that instant watching a mass brawl and assured him that he was enjoying himself enormously.

Net-junkies came and went. Some made the move to the honeycomb sleeping modules. Almost the entire population of the Cyber Planet was male – women were a vanishingly small minority and most of them were pretty long in the tooth. For Jericho, the only halfway healthy-looking people were the users of the full-motion suits and the treadmills, who were forced to take a bit of exercise as they explored virtual universes. Many of them spent their time in parallel worlds like Second Life and Future Earth, or in the Evolutionarium, where they could pretend to be animals, from dinosaurs all the way down to bacteria. Some of the reclining figures moved their sensor-covered hands, drew cryptic patterns in the empty air, a clue that they were attempting to play an active part in something or other. The overwhelming majority didn’t lift a finger. They had reached the terminal stage, reduced to being observers of their own extended agonies.

Strangely, the atmosphere had a cathartic effect on Jericho, in which Zhao’s defamations melted away to nothing. The net zombies seemed to stir themselves, letting him know it just took an insignificant effort of will to end the status of his loneliness; they pointed at him with desiccated fingers, accused him of flirting with sadness, of having walled himself up in the past and brought about his own misery; they sent him back to life which, so far, hadn’t been nearly as bad as he thought. He made a thousand resolutions, soap-bubbles on whose surfaces the future iridesced. In a strange way the Cyber Planet brought him comfort. Then, as if on cue, Zhao called, claiming he just wanted to know how Jericho was getting on.

He was getting on just fine, Jericho replied.

And again he waited. Even though he had plenty of experience of staring stoically at a single spot, the comings and goings in the market were starting to bore him. People ate and drank, haggled, hung around, hooked up, laughed or got into arguments. The night belonged to the gangsters, it was here that they brought the day’s bounty back into the cycle of greed, albeit quite peacefully. He started to envy Zhao his punch-up, decided to rely entirely on the scanners for a while, connected the hologoggles up to his phone and logged in to Second Life. The market vanished, making way for a boulevard with bistros, shops and a cinema. Using his phone’s touchscreen, Jericho guided his avatar down the street. In this world he was dark-skinned, he had long, black hair and he was called Juan Narciso Ucañan, a name he’d read years ago in some disaster novel or other. Three good-looking young women were sitting at a table in the sun, all with transparent wings and filigree antennae above their eyes.

‘Hi,’ he said to one of them.

She looked up and beamed at him. Jericho’s avatar was a masterpiece of programming, and even by the high standards of Second Life, unusually attractive.

‘My name’s Juan,’ he said. ‘I’m new here.’

‘Inara,’ she said. ‘Inara Gold.’

‘You’re looking great, Inara. Do you fancy a totally awesome experience?’

The avatar that called itself Inara hesitated. That hesitation was typical of the woman hiding behind it. ‘I’m here with my girlfriends,’ she said evasively.

‘Well, I’d love to,’ said one of them.

‘Me too,’ laughed the other one.

‘Okay, let’s the four of us all do something.’ Jericho Juan put on a wide smile. ‘But first I need to discuss something with the most beautiful one. Inara.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I’ve got a surprise for you.’ He pointed to an empty chair. ‘Can I sit down here?’

She nodded. Her big, golden eyes looked at him steadily. He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

‘Could we be undisturbed for a moment, beautiful Inara? Just the two of us?’

‘It’s not up to me, sweetie.’

‘We’re just going anyway,’ one of the girlfriends said and got to her feet. The other sent a snake-tongue darting from between her teeth, fished an insect out of the air, swallowed it and gave an offended hiss. They both spread their wings and disappeared behind a puff of pink clouds. Inara struck a pose and stretched her ribcage. The fabric of the tight top she was wearing started to become transparent.

‘I love surprises,’ she purred.

‘And this is one – Emma.’

Emma Deng was so surprised that she momentarily lost control of her clothes. Her top disappeared completely, revealing perfectly formed breasts. A moment later her torso turned black.

‘Don’t go, Emma,’ Jericho said quickly. ‘It would be a mistake.’

‘Who are you?’ hissed the woman who called herself Inara.

‘That doesn’t matter.’ His avatar crossed his legs. ‘You’ve embezzled two million yuan and passed on company secrets to Microsoft. You can’t cope with more problems than that all at once.’

‘How – how did you find me?’

‘It wasn’t hard. Your preferences, your semantics—’

‘My what?’

‘Forget it. My speciality is hunting down people on the net, that’s all. You’ve been transmitting for so long now that it was easy to locate you.’

Not true, but Jericho knew that Emma Deng didn’t have the knowledge to see through his lie. A refined little girl, who had used the fact of her intimate relationship with the senior partner in the company she worked for in order to cheat it for years on end.

‘If I want,’ Jericho went on, ‘the cops will be at your door in ten minutes. You can run away, but they’ll find you just like I did. We’ll get you sooner or later, so I advise you to listen.’

The woman froze. Outwardly she had as little in common with the real Emma Deng as Owen Jericho had with Juan Narciso Ucañan. If you examined her psychological profile, it was very likely that Emma would opt for a body like Inara Gold’s, almost one hundred per cent. Jericho was definitely pleased with himself.

‘I’m listening,’ she muttered.

‘Okay, the honourable Li Shiling is willing to forgive you. That’s the information that I’m supposed to pass on to you.’

Emma laughed loudly.

‘You’re taking the piss.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Christ, I might be stupid, but I’m not as stupid as that. Shiling wants me to rot in hell.’

‘That’s not unthinkable.’

‘Great.’

‘On the other hand Mr Li seems to be missing the delights of your company. Particularly in the genital region, he’s been finding life a little dull since you left.’

Inara Gold’s beautiful face reflected unconcealed hatred. Jericho assumed that Emma was sitting in front of a full-body scanner that transferred her gestures and facial expressions to her avatar in real time.

‘What else did the old fucker have to say for himself?’ she hissed.

‘You don’t want to hear.’

‘I do. I want to know what I’m letting myself in for.’

‘A refreshing dip in the Huangpu, with your feet encased in lead? I mean, he’s furious! Your second-best option is that he’ll hand you over to the authorities. But according to his own personal testimony what he’d really like is for you to go on giving him blowjobs.’

‘Shiling’s disgusting.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have been that bad.’

‘He forced me!’

‘To do what? Relieve him of two million? Flog building plans to the competition? Come on to him, to win his trust?’

Emma looked askance. ‘And what does he want?’

‘Nothing special. He wants you to marry him.’

‘Shit.’

‘Could be,’ Jericho said casually. ‘The Huangpu’s shit too. The quality of the water has declined dramatically. Mr Li is waiting for your call at the number you know, and he wants to hear a loud, audibly articulated Yes. What do you think, could you do that? What shall I tell him?’

‘Shit. Shit!’

‘That’s not what he wants to hear.’

By now Diane had passed on Emma’s location via the relevant server. She was in her apartment in Hong Kong. Far away, but not far enough. Nowhere would be far enough, unless she left the solar system.

‘He might buy you an apartment in Hong Kong,’ he added in a conciliatory tone.

Emma gave up.

‘Okay,’ she squeaked.

‘Mr Li is always available to speak to. I’d like to get a cheerful call from him in an hour at the most, otherwise I’ll consider myself forced to blow your cover.’ Jericho paused. ‘Don’t take it personally, Emma. This is how I make my living.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘We’re all whores.’

‘You said it.’

He logged out of Second Life. The viewing window of the specs brightened. At the market, the last punters were on their feet. Most of the stands had closed. Jericho keyed in the time.

Four in the morning.

‘Diane,’ he said into his phone.

‘Hi, Owen. You’re still awake?’

Jericho smiled. Sympathy from a computer had something going for it if it spoke with Diane’s voice. He looked around. Most of the couches were abandoned. Cleaning systems were operating here and there. Even junkies had a vague sense of the time.

‘Wake me at seven, Diane.’

‘Sure, Owen. Oh, Owen?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m just receiving a message for you.’

‘Can you read it out?’

‘Zhao Bide writes: Don’t want to wake you in case you’ve dozed off under the burden of responsibility. Pleasant dreams. When it’s all over, let’s go and raise a glass.’

Jericho smiled.

‘Write back and tell him – no, don’t write anything. I’m going to hit the hay.’

‘Can I do anything else for you?’

‘No thanks, Diane.’

‘See you later, Owen. Sleep well.’

See you later, Owen.

Later, Owen.

Owen—

Later and later and later, and she doesn’t come back. He lies on his bed and waits. On the bed in the dingy room that he hopes so ardently to be able to leave with her.

But Joanna doesn’t come back.

Instead, fat caterpillar-like creatures start creeping up the bed-covers – claws clutching the cotton fibres – the click of segmented legs – alarm-bells – groping feelers brushing the soles of his feet – alarm – alarm—

Wake up, Owen!

Wake up!

‘Owen?’

He started awake, his body one big heartbeat.

‘Owen?’

The early daylight stung his eyes.

‘What time?’ he murmured.

‘It’s only twenty-five past six,’ said Diane. ‘Sorry if I woke you prematurely. I have a Priority A call for you.’

Yoyo. the idea darted through his head.

No, the scanners were working independently of Diane, they could have woken him with an unnerving noise that was impossible to ignore. And he would have seen red. But among the people who were slowly repopulating the market, there wasn’t a single Guardian to be seen.

‘Put them through,’ he said bluntly.

‘What’s up? Are you still asleep?’

Tu’s square head grinned at him. Behind him, the Serengeti was springing to life. Or something like it: at any rate giraffes and elephants were walking around the landscape. A glowing orange sky hung over pastel-coloured mountains. Jericho pulled himself up. Individual snores rang out through Cyber Planet. Only a young woman sat cross-legged on her stool, with a coffee in her right hand. Plainly not a junkie. Jericho assumed she’d just popped in to see the breakfast news.

‘I’m in Quyu,’ he said, suppressing a yawn.

‘I just thought. Because of your receptionist. A pretty voice, but normally you pick up yourself.’

‘Diane is—’

‘You call your computer Diane?’ Tu asked, interested.

‘I’m short-staffed, Tian. You’ve got Naomi. There was a TV series a long time ago where an FBI agent was always conferring with his secretary, although you never got to see her in person—’

‘And her name was Diane?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Nice,’ said Tu. ‘What’s wrong with a real secretary?’

‘And where would she stay?’

‘If she was pretty, your bed. You’ve made it now, son. You live in a loft in Xintiandi. It’s time for you to arrive in your new life.’

‘Thanks. I’m there.’

‘You’re dealing with people who don’t quite get long-term incomers.’

‘Anything else, Reverend?’ Jericho swung himself off his couch, walked to the bar and chose a cappuccino. ‘Don’t you want to know how our search is going?’

‘You haven’t got anything.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘If you had anything, you’d have been rubbing my nose in it for ages.’

‘Your call is Priority A. Why’s that?’

‘So that I can boast about being your best member of staff.’ Tu giggled. ‘You wanted to know who what’s-his-name Wang phoned before he died.’

The coffee gurgled into the cardboard cup.

‘You mean—?’

‘Yes, I do. I’ll send you over his telephone traffic. All the conversations he’s had since 26 May. You can fall at my feet if you like.’

‘How did you manage that?’

‘Certainly not by rummaging through his remains. As luck would have it, I play golf with the CEOs of two service providers. The guy was registered with one of them. My acquaintance was kind enough to pass the data on to me, no questions asked.’

‘Christ, Tian!’ Jericho blew on his coffee. ‘Now you owe him all the favours in the world, right?’

‘Not at all,’ Tu said in a bored voice. ‘He owes me something.’

‘Good. Very good.’

‘Where do we go from here?’

‘Diane is constantly checking the net for suspicious texts, Zhao and I are keeping an eye on the markets. If no one appears in the course of the next few hours, I’ll have to consider extending the circle of investigators and showing photographs around. I’d rather avoid that if we can.’ Jericho paused. ‘How did your conversation with Chen Hongbing go?’

‘So-so. He’s worried.’

‘Isn’t he at least reassured that she’s at liberty?’

‘Hongbing has turned worrying into an art form. But he trusts you.’

Behind Tu, a big bird of prey flapped into the air. A giraffe came quite close.

‘Tell me, where are you?’

‘Where do you think?’ Tu grinned. ‘In my office, of course.’

‘And where are you pretending to be?’

‘In South Africa. Pretty, isn’t it? It’s from the autumn collection. We’re offering twelve environments. The software places your image in the background as soon as you make your call, and adapts you to the environment. Have you noticed that the sun’s shining on my bald head?’

‘And the other environments?’

‘The Moon’s really brilliant!’ Tu beamed. ‘In the background the American moon base and spaceships landing. The program gives you a spacesuit. One can see your face through the visor of the helmet. Your voice is a bit distorted, like in the moon landings last century.’

‘One giant step for mankind,’ Jericho teased.

‘Let me know if anything new comes up.’

‘Will do.’

Jericho took a sip of his coffee. Thin and bitter. He urgently needed fresh air. As he crossed the foyer, Diane told him she had received a data packet from Tu, and passed it on to him. He stepped out into the street, with his eye on the display. Numbers, days and times became visible. Wang’s phone traffic. Diane compared the relevant data with information they had already. Of course Jericho didn’t expect any matches.

But she told him there was one.

He frowned. The evening before his death, Grand Cherokee Wang had dialled a number that also appeared among Jericho’s contacts. Diane had correlated names and numbers, so that there was no doubt about who the student had phoned on the afternoon of 26 May.

Jericho stared at the name.

Suddenly he realised that he’d made a terrible mistake.

Steelworks

He had gone for direct confrontation, which temporarily forced him out of his location. After setting up another scanner near the front door of Cyber Planet, Jericho set off. If the scouts caught one of their target people, he could be back within a few minutes.

The streets were still empty, which meant that he made good headway. He parked the Toyota behind a soot-black building, straightened his hologoggles and approached Wong’s World on foot. The glass façade of this Cyber Planet showed that the market was on the way up. This branch of Wong was decidedly less run down than the other one. As Zhao had described it, it lacked the booths for prostitutes and people running gambling games; everything seemed to be entirely devoted to the preparation of food and the sale of groceries. Vegetables, herbs and spices were displayed in baskets and containers. For one customer, a woman reached into a basket with a grabber and pulled out a snake that went into violent convulsions when the saleswoman routinely cut open its body and pulled off the skin. Jericho turned away and inhaled the smell of fresh wontons and baozis. The stand was busy. Two young men with damply glistening torsos, swathed in the steam that rose from huge pots, swung their ladles, passed bowls of broth and crunchy crab and pork dumplings over the counter. Jericho walked on, ignoring the protests of his stomach. He could eat later. He crossed the street, stepped into Cyber Planet and glanced around. There was no sign of Zhao. There were no sleeping pods, but he might have gone to the toilet. Jericho waited for ten minutes, but Zhao didn’t appear.

He stepped outside again.

And suddenly he saw them.

There were two of them. They were both strolling towards the wonton stall and inadvertently looked in his direction as they did so. Their outlines glowed red on the glass of the hologoggles. The boy was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, the girl a mini-skirt for which she was a stone too heavy and a biker’s jacket with a massive City Demons logo. They were laden down with Wong’s World paper bags. They asked the sweaty wonton cooks to put generous portions of soup in sealable plastic bowls, which they received, chatting and laughing, and put in the bags. Both looked carefree and generally cheerful. They talked to other customers for a while and walked on.

They bought enough breakfast to feed a whole gang.

Jericho followed them while the computer supplied him with details taken from Tu’s database: the girl’s name was Xiao Meiqi, known as Maggie, a computer science student. The boy was called Jin Jia Wei, on an electronic technology course. According to Tu, they were part of Yoyo’s inner circle. With Daxiong, that meant that Jericho now knew by sight four of the six dissidents. And those two certainly weren’t going to be demolishing the contents of those bags all by themselves.

He pushed his way towards them, while at the same time keeping an eye out for Zhao. Maggie Xiao and Jin Jia Wei had their Thermos flasks filled with tea, they bought cigarettes and little cakes with a paste of nuts, honey and red beans that Yoyo loved – so Jericho recalled – then they crossed the street. As soon as he saw their parked e-bikes on the other side, he knew there was no point going on following them on foot. He turned back to his Toyota, started it up and steered it between passers-by and cyclists. The street was too wide for washing-lines, there was nothing to obstruct his view, so he could see the looming silhouette of the blast furnace a few kilometres away. Jin and Maggie dashed towards it on their bikes. Seconds later Jericho too had left the commotion of the market behind him, and now saw a dusty patch of waste ground, with the old steelworks stretching beyond. The bikes raised clouds of dust. He avoided following the two of them in a straight line, instead driving the Toyota into the shadow of a row of low Portakabins.

Yoyo was hiding somewhere in those industrial ruins, he was sure of it.

He watched apprehensively as the bikes headed towards the blast furnace which, standing out against the light of dawn, looked like a launch pad for spaceships, as Jules Verne might have imagined it: a barrel-shaped cylinder, tapering towards the top, a good fifty metres high, encased in a steel girder construction that still gave an idea of the smelter. Levels of scaffolding, bridges and walkable platforms, connected by beams and stairways, overflowing with pumps, generators, floodlights, wiring and other equipment. A conveyor belt ran steeply up from the ground to the filling inlet of the furnace. Above it, a massive pipe stretched into the sky, bent abruptly and ended up in a kind of oversized cooking pot with three huge, upright tanks. Everything in this world seemed to have grown and tangled together. Everything that might have served the exchange of gases and fluids, cables, pipelines and tubes, created the impression of hopelessly tangled intestines, as if the innards of a colossal machine had turned inside out.

Right in front of the furnace a tower of girders grew from the ground, about half as high. As if put there by magic, a little house with a gabled roof and windows stood at the top of it, connected to the furnace construction by a platform. Clearly it had once served as a control room. Unlike the other buildings around it, its windows were intact. Jin and Maggie guided their bikes into an adjoining low-rise building, and a few moments later, swinging their Wong bags, reappeared and began climbing the zigzag stairways of the tower. Jericho slowed his pace, stopped and looked up at the former control room.

Was Yoyo up there?

At that moment he saw something approaching from the market and coming to a standstill on the vacant lot. He turned his head and saw a man sitting on a motorbike. No, not a motorbike. It looked more as though a running machine, a narwhal and a jet engine had been combined into something whose purpose wasn’t immediately apparent. Stocky, with a wide saddle, closed side panels and a flattened windscreen, and a gaping hole where its front wheel should have been. Silvery spokes flashed inside it, plainly a turbine. Pivoting jets emerged along the handlebars and the pillion. Apparently the thing slid along on its smooth belly and two tapering fins that pointed to the rear. It was only on closer inspection that you noticed that a nose-wheel grew from the belly, and the fins ended in enclosed spheres, which gave it a certain roadworthiness in spite of its flat bottom. But the actual purpose of the machine was quite different. Years ago, when the first models were ready for production, Jericho had applied for a permit, before baulking at the extortionate purchase price. Those things were expensive. Too expensive for Owen Jericho.

Far too expensive for someone from Quyu.

So what was Zhao doing sitting on that thing?

Zhao Bide, who was staring over at the blast furnace, watching Jin and Maggie climb the steps, without noticing Jericho in the shade of the building. Who hadn’t called in, in spite of everything they’d agreed, even though he was hot on the heels of two Guardians who would in all likelihood lead him to Yoyo. Whose number Grand Cherokee Wang had dialled the evening before he died, to talk to him for one minute, as Tu’s data revealed.

Wang had called Zhao.

Why?

Uneasy and electrified, Jericho was heading across to confront Zhao, who was leaning over right at that moment and wiping something from the dashboard – just as he had polished the display in Jericho’s car.

It all fitted.

Cherokee Wang’s murderer, just before he fled from the World Financial Center: in an elegant made-to-measure suit, with tinted glasses, a false moustache and wig, which temporarily transformed his even features into the face of Ryuichi Sakamoto, he leaned forward and wiped the controls of the Silver Dragon. But Jericho hadn’t been looking carefully enough, because suddenly he reminds him not of a Japanese pop star or a model, but all the time of—

Zhao Bide.

He’s the one who’s set the hitman on Yoyo’s trail.

Just as he puts his foot down on the accelerator, Zhao starts his airbike. A sound of turbines sweeps across the square. The machine swivels its jets into the upright position, balances for a moment on the tips of its fins and shoots steeply upwards, and Jericho realises that there is now hardly a chance of saving Yoyo.

How ridiculously easy everything had been.

And at the same time how excruciating.

Although he had barely been able to conquer his dread over the past few hours when fate had decreed that he go to Quyu, once more having the proof before his eyes that the superiority of the human race was the fevered hallucination of religiously infected Darwinists, a tragic error that called for correction. Sheer revulsion had driven him to speak to Jericho about the failure of creation, the unsuccessful part of the experiment – rashness! What Zhao had by the skin of his teeth managed to turn into sarcasm, now reflected Kenny Xin’s genuine outrage. The bulk of his species was a seething parasitic mass, a scandal for any creator, if there had ever been one. Only a few people who felt similarly had taken their insight to its conclusion, like that Roman who had burned his city down, even if he was said to have ruined the moment by singing. But Xin wished he could have seen the purifying fire in which the face of poverty blistered and charred; or even more than that:

He wished he could be the fire!

Objectively speaking, an eyesore like Quyu deserved to be reduced to ashes. Worldwide, one and a half billion people lived in slums. One and a half billion upon whom life had been squandered, who breathed in precious air and used up valuable resources, without producing anything but more poverty, still more hunger, still more progeny. One and a half billion who were suffocating the world. Still, Quyu would be a start.

But Xin had learned to rein in his feelings. To declare his independence of the dictates of the emotions. He had furiously set about re-creating, immunising and cleansing himself. So deeply that he would never again be forced to rub his skin off to rid himself of the dirt, the wire-pulling circumstances of his birth, the damp and sticky leavings of daily assaults, the scabs of despair. He had known that he would inevitably perish if he didn’t succeed in cleansing himself, and that his own death, the piss-stench of capitulation, would not bring redemption.

So he had acted.

Sometimes, at night, he experienced the day again, over and over. The tribunal of flames. He felt the heat on his cheeks, witnessed the burial of his own sticky corpse, felt the faint amazement of his wonderful, reborn body, his wild joy at the tremendous power that he would now have at his disposal. He was free. Free to do what he felt like. Free to slip into any skin he wished to, such as Zhao Bide’s.

How ridiculously simple it had been to latch on to Jericho, to take the man into his service. Grand Cherokee Wang might have been an idiot, but Xin owed him mute thanks for his detective card. Jericho had taken him to Quyu, to the Andromeda, where Xin had decided to take the game to its extreme. No wig this time, no false noses and beards, just appropriate clothing, based on the standard outfit that he carried with him at all times. Perhaps he hadn’t looked scruffy enough, he didn’t wear appliqués of any kind, but the roadies hadn’t minded, they’d just been grateful for someone to help them with the bulky Portakabins, and within a few minutes they’d given him all the information he needed in order to trick Jericho: Ass Metal. The Pink Asses. What could the detective have done but take Xin for one of them?

Jericho had been the mouse, he was the cat. He had come up with his own makeshift plan. Assault, ceasefire, two beers, a pact. Provided by Hydra with sufficient knowledge about the girl to impress the detective. There were some answers he hadn’t been able to give. Jericho’s question, for example, about whether he was a City Demon had been a complete curve-ball. He had known nothing about any organisation by that name. There was so much he hadn’t known that the unsuspecting detective had kindly told him, like where Yoyo and her Guardians liked to go shopping. It had taken him a quarter of an hour to find out the location of the Wong markets. Zhao Bide was a loyal partner, he made every effort to help, which also involved alerting Jericho’s attention to his pursuer – Zhao himself.

He had spent the afternoon in the Hyatt, where he had had a long and thorough shower to get rid of the stench of Xaxu at least for a few hours. There had been a message to the effect that the experts had arrived, and that three airbikes were ready, just as he had demanded. He had sent the two men on ahead, and had followed them at a leisurely pace, back into the dirt where he was to meet Jericho.

Owen Jericho and he had been a good team.

Meanwhile, since the scanners had revealed the reappearance of Maggie Xiao Meiqi and Jin Jia Wei, it was time to give up that partnership. Jericho might waste away in Cyber Planet. The airbike rose into the air until Kenny could see the steelworks in all its massive dereliction. Only a few scattered people were in evidence, homeless people and gangs who had found refuge in the factory halls. A little group of bikers crossed the savannahs of the slag-fields, came closer. Meanwhile Xiao Meiqi and Jin Jia Wei had worked their way up the system of steps and climbed the platform on which the former control room of the blast furnace rested. The girl disappeared inside, while Jia Wei turned round and looked out onto the square.

His gaze wandered to the sky.

Kenny spoke into the microphone, issued instructions. Then he swivelled the jets of the airbike to horizontal.

Jin Jia Wei had a reputation for being lazy and truculent, and showed little interest in his studies. On the other hand he was a gifted hacker. No more and no less. He didn’t share Yoyo’s lofty plans but neither did he challenge them, because they actually didn’t interest him. She wanted to improve the world? Fine. More fun, at any rate, than mouldering away in lecture halls, and anyway Jia Wei was head over heels in love with her, as was everybody, in fact. As ideologist in chief, Yoyo found nicely idiotic reasons to break into alien networks, preferably those of the Party, and besides, she supplied the equipment too. For Jia Wei she was a magic toyshop owner, with him as the lucky boy who was allowed to try out all the lovely things she brought along. She had the ideas, and he had the ploys up his sleeve. What did you call that kind of relationship? Symbiosis?

Something like that.

On the positive side, it was worth noting that he would never have betrayed Yoyo. Not least out of self-interest – after all, the group stood and fell with her and her box of tricks filled by Tu Technologies. In return he was even prepared to make her problems his own, particularly because he felt a little responsible for the tense situation. After all, he had advised her on this surefire, super-refined matter, and in that he had been successful, unfortunately too successful. Now Yoyo was troubled by worries that robbed her of sleep, so Jia Wei had spent the past two days trying to find out what had actually gone wrong on the night in question. And found something, an incredible coincidence of events. Now, enveloped in a cloud of wonton fragrances rising from Wong’s bags, as he looked across the square, he decided to talk to Yoyo about it right after breakfast. Maggie’s jabbering emerged from the control centre that they had been using as their headquarters since Andromeda had ceased to be safe; she was chattering cheerfully away into her phone, rounding up the rest of the group.

‘Breakfast,’ she crowed.

Breakfast, exactly. That was what he needed now.

But all of a sudden his feet felt frozen to the spot. From his elevated observation-point he could see all the way to the far-away coke plant, whose quenching tower loomed sadly into the dawn sky. The factory grounds were enormous, and included the old steel complex. He wondered where the new sound was coming from, the one that he hadn’t heard around here for ages, a distant hiss, as if the air over Wong’s World were burning.

He narrowed his eyes.

To the left of the quenching tower, something was hanging in the sky.

It took Jin Jia Wei a second to work out that it was the source of the hiss. A moment later he recognised what it was. And although he had never heard anyone say that intuition was one of his outstanding qualities, he felt the danger emanating from it as if in waves.

No one in Quyu had an airbike.

He recoiled. Between Wong’s World and Cyber Planet, he saw two more of the beefy machines appearing and gliding along not far from the ground. At the same time a car came careening out from behind the surrounding Portakabins and stopped by the blast furnace. The airbike seemed to inflate, a sensory illusion caused by the high speed of its approach.

‘Yoyo!’ he yelled.

The machine came towards him like a flat flying fish. Reflections of sunlight darted across the flattened windscreen and flashed in the turbine flywheel as the pilot shifted his weight and forced the bike into a curve. Jia Wei staggered back inside, clutching the bags, as the hiss swelled and the mouth of the turbine began to widen as if to suck him into its rotating shredder teeth. A moment later the airbike came down, sweeping Maggie and Yoyo’s voices away in a surge of noise, touched the floor of the platform, and he saw something flashing in the pilot’s hand—

Xin fired.

The bullets ploughed through the boy and the bags he was holding. Jia Wei’s face exploded, bottles burst, hot soup, cola and coffee, blood, brain matter, wontons and splinters of bone splatted wildly in all directions. While the ruptured body was still tipping backwards, Xin had leapt from the saddle and stepped inside the building.

His glance took in the interior in a fraction of a second, probed, categorised, separated into worth keeping, superfluous, interesting and negligible. Panels with their monitors turned off, covered with dust, suggested a former control centre, equipped with measuring and regulatory technology designed to monitor the blast furnace plant. The room’s current purpose was equally obvious. In the middle of the room, tables had been shoved together, with highly modern equipment, transparent displays, computers and keyboards. Plank beds pushed up against the back wall showed that the control centre was inhabited, or sometimes used as a place to sleep.

He brandished his gun. The fat girl, Xiao Meiqi, or was her name Maggie? held her hands up. Whatever. Her mouth was wide open, her eyeballs looked as if they were about to leave their sockets, which made her look rather ugly. Xin shot her down as casually as the powerful shake hands with those less important than themselves, swept aside the bags she had set down on the table with the barrel of his gun and aimed it at Yoyo.

Not a sound came from her lips.

He tilted his head curiously to one side and looked at her.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. People showed fear and shock in different ways. For example, in the last second of his life Jin Jia Wei had looked as if you could actually wring the fear out of him. Meiqi’s fear, on the other hand, had reminded him of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a distorted image of herself. There were people who preserved their dignity and attractiveness even when they were in pain. Meiqi hadn’t been one of them. Hardly anyone was.

Yoyo, on the other hand, just stared at him.

She must have leapt up just as Jia Wei called her name, which explained her crouching, cat-like posture. Her eyes were wide, but her face looked strangely unexpressive, regular – almost perfect, had a shadow around the corner of her mouth not made her look slightly ordinary. Even so, she was more beautiful than most of the women that Xin had seen in his life. He wondered how much attention such beauty could put up with. Almost a shame they had no time to find out.

Then he saw Yoyo’s hands beginning to tremble.

Her resistance was crumbling.

He drew up a chair, sat down on it and lowered his gun.

‘I have three questions for you,’ he said.

Yoyo said nothing. Kenny let a few seconds pass, waited to see her give in, but apart from the fact that she was trembling nothing in her posture changed. She went on staring at him as before.

‘I expect a quick and honest answer to all three questions,’ he went on. ‘So no excuses.’ He smiled the way you smile at women whose favours you are trying to win by being open. They might just as well have been sitting in a smart bar or a cosy restaurant. It struck him that he felt decidedly comfortable in Yoyo’s company. Perhaps they did still have a little time left together after all.

‘And afterwards,’ he said benignly, ‘let’s go on looking.’

Jericho saw nothing but dust, whirled up by his own car, as he screeched to a halt below the tower of scaffolding. He drew his Glock from its shoulder-holster, pushed the door open and dashed to the steps. They were made of steel, like the rest of the construction, and amplified the sound of his footsteps.

Bonggg, bonggg!

He cursed under his breath. Taking two steps at a time, he tried to walk on tiptoe, slipped and banged his knee painfully against the stair railings.

Idiot! His only advantage was that Zhao hadn’t seen him.

That moment shots rang out above him. Jericho hurried on. The closer he got to the platform, the more penetratingly the hiss of the airbike reached his ear. Zhao had not thought it necessary to turn off the engine. Fine. The bike would drown him out. He turned his head and saw movement on the square below him. Motorcyclists. Without paying them any heed, he took the last few steps, paused and peered across the stairhead.

The airbike was parked right in front of him. The door to the control centre was open. He jumped onto the platform, darted over to the building and paused beside the doorway, back to the wall, gun at eye-level. Zhao’s voice could be heard, friendly and encouraging:

‘First of all, how much do you know? Secondly, who have you told about it? And the third question’s very easy to answer.’ Pause for effect. ‘It’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Yoyo. It is: Where – is – your – computer?’

She was alive. Good.

Less good was the fact that he couldn’t see the killer and therefore didn’t know what direction he was looking in at that moment. He ran his eye along the façade. Just before the corner of the building he spotted a small window. Ducking down, he crept over to it and peered inside.

Yoyo was standing behind a table full of computers. All he could see of Zhao was legs, a hand and the massive barrel of his gun. He was clearly sitting facing Yoyo, which meant that his back was turned to the door. The window was open a crack, so Jericho could hear Zhao saying, ‘It can’t be that hard, can it?’

Yoyo mutely shook her head.

‘So?’

No reaction. Zhao sighed.

‘Right, perhaps I forgot to explain the rules. It’s like this: I ask, you answer. Or even better, you just hand the thing over to me.’ The gun-barrel came down. ‘That’s all you have to do. Okay? If you fail to reply, I’ll blow your left foot off.’

Jericho had seen enough. A few leaps and he was at the door. He jumped inside and aimed his gun at the back of Zhao’s head.

‘Sit right where you are! Hands up. No heroics.’

A glance took in the scene. At his feet lay the boy’s body, shredded as if bombs had gone off in his head and chest. Maggie crouched a few metres away. She kept her head lowered, mutely contemplating her belly, from which amazing quantities of innards spilled. Floor, chairs and table were sprayed with red. Disheartened, Jericho wondered what Zhao had fired with.

‘Flechettes.’

‘What?’

‘Dart-shaped projectiles,’ Zhao repeated calmly, as if Jericho had asked his question out loud. ‘Metal Storm, fifty tiny tungsten carbide arrows per round, one and a half thousand kilometres per hour. Pierce steel plates. Opinions are divided. On the one hand you create one hell of a mess, on the other—’

‘Shut up! Hands in the air.’

Painfully slowly, Zhao obliged. Jericho caught his breath. He felt helpless and ridiculous. Yoyo’s lower lip trembled, her mask slipped, shock took hold of her. At the same time he became aware of a flicker of hope in her eyes. And something else, as if a plan were brewing in her head—

Her body tensed.

‘Don’t,’ Jericho warned, speaking in her direction. ‘No chaos. First of all we have to bring this bastard under control.’

Zhao yelled with laughter.

‘And how are you going to accomplish that? The way you did in the Andromeda?’

‘Shut up.’

‘I could have killed you.’

‘Set the weapon down on the floor.’

‘You owe me a bit of respect, little Jericho.’

‘I said, put the gun on the floor!’

‘Why don’t you just go home and forget the whole thing? I would—’

There was a sharp bang. A few centimetres away from Zhao, Jericho’s bullet pierced the tabletop. The hitman sighed. He turned his head slowly so that his profile could be seen. He had a tiny transmitter in his ear.

‘Really, Owen, that’s too much.’

‘For the last time!’

‘It’s fine.’ Zhao shrugged. ‘I’ll set it down on the ground, okay?’

‘No.’

‘Meaning not yet?’

‘Drop it.’

‘But—’

‘Just let it slip off your knees. Keep your hands in the air. Then kick it over to me.’

‘You’re making a mistake, Owen.’

‘I have made a mistake. Do it, right now, or I’ll shoot your left foot off.’

Zhao gave a thin smile. The gun clattered to the floor. He pushed it with the tip of his boot, so that it slipped a little way towards Jericho and stopped halfway between them.

‘Shoot him,’ Yoyo said hoarsely.

Jericho looked at her.

‘That wouldn’t be a—’

‘Shoot him!’ Tears poured from Yoyo’s eyes. Her features distorted with revulsion and fury. ‘Shoot him, shoo—’

‘No!’ Jericho violently shook his head. ‘If we want to find out who he’s working for, we’ll have to—’

He went on talking, but his voice was lost amongst the hisses and wails of the airbike.

They had got louder. Why?

Yoyo cried out and recoiled. A dull blow made the floor shake as something landed outside the control centre. It wasn’t Zhao’s bike. It was more bikes.

Zhao grinned.

For a paralysing moment Jericho didn’t know what to do. If he turned round, the killer would get hold of his gun again. But he had to know what was happening outside.

And then he understood.

The transmitter in Zhao’s ear! It had been broadcasting his voice all that time. He’d called for reinforcements. Zhao got up from his chair, his fingers clutching its back. Jericho raised the Glock. His adversary paused, crouching like a beast of prey, ready to spring.

‘Drop it,’ said a deep voice behind him.

‘I’d do what he says, little Owen.’

‘I’ll shoot you first,’ said Jericho.

‘Then shoot.’ Zhao’s dark eyes rested on him, seemed to suck him in. He slowly started to sit up. ‘There are two of them, by the way, and it’s only thanks to me that you’re still alive at all.’

Footsteps rang out behind Jericho. A hand reached over his shoulder and grabbed his gun. Jericho unresistingly allowed it to be pulled from his fingers. His eyes sought Yoyo’s. She was pressing herself against the old control-desk, eyes darting back and forth.

A fist pushed him forwards.

Zhao took hold of him, drew back his arm and struck him full in the face with the palm of his hand. His head flew sideways. The next blow hit his solar plexus and forced the air from his ribs. Choking, he fell to his knees. Now he could see the two men, one a thick-set, bearded Asian who had been aiming his gun at Yoyo, the other gaunt, fair and with a Slavic look. They both carried pistols of the same type as their leader’s. Zhao laughed quietly. He brushed the silky, black hair off his forehead and drew himself up to his full height. He started walking around Jericho at a measured pace.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘what you are experiencing here is the triumph of the cerebellum over the belly. The primacy of planning. That’s the only possible way of explaining how a man who effectively had me in his power is now cowering at our feet. A detective, note. A professional.’ He spat the last word at Jericho. ‘And yet I welcome his visit. We now have the opportunity to learn more than before. We can, for example, ask Mr Jericho what he actually wanted to ask me.’

Zhao’s right hand darted forward, grabbed Jericho’s ponytail, pulled him up and to him, so that he could feel the hitman’s hot breath on his face.

‘The question of the client. Always interesting. Our guest could hardly have hit on the idea of looking for little Yoyo all on his own. So who is your client? I’m right, Owen, am I not? Someone threw the stick. Fetch the stick, Owen! Find Yoyo! Woof! – Isn’t there anyone else I should be taking care of?’

Even though the situation was anything but funny, Jericho laughed. ‘I’d be careful about wasting your time.’

‘You’re so right.’ Zhao snorted, shoved him aside and approached Yoyo, who was no longer trying to hide her fear. Her lower lip trembled, streams of moisture glistened on her cheeks. ‘So let’s devote ourselves to our lovely do-gooder here, and ask her to help us in answering questions that have been asked once already. Where – is – your – computer?’

Yoyo stepped back. Again her features underwent a change, as if she had just made a surprising discovery. Zhao paused, plainly irritated. At that very moment Jericho heard a faint metallic click.

‘You’re not going to do anything at all,’ a voice said.

Zhao spun round. Two young men and a woman in bikers’ leathers had stepped into the room, machine-guns at the ready, aiming at him and his two assistants, who in turn were aiming at the new arrivals. One of them was a giant with a barrel chest, gorilla arms, the top of his head a shaven hemisphere. The point of his chin was extended by a blue prosthesis into an artificial pharaoh’s beard. Jericho’s breath froze. Daxiong had misled him really badly, but there was no one else that he would rather have seen at that very moment.

Six Koreans, who had all taken a beating—

Daxiong’s narrow eyes turned towards Yoyo.

‘Come over here,’ he roared. ‘The rest of you stay where—’

His voice faded away. It was only now that the giant seemed to take in what had happened in the control centre. His gaze wandered from the shredded corpse of Jia Wei to Maggie’s grotesquely bent body. His eyes widened very slightly.

‘They’ve killed them,’ whimpered the girl by his side. All the colour had fled from her face.

‘Shit,’ the other guy said. ‘Oh, shit!’

Jericho’s thoughts went running helter-skelter like a pack of dogs. A thousand possible scenarios flooded his imagination. The hitmen, the City Demons, everyone was aiming at everyone else, while Zhao crouched there, waiting, and Yoyo’s eyes wandered from one group to the other. No one dared move for fear of disturbing the fragile equilibrium, which would inevitably have ended in disaster.

It was Yoyo who broke the spell. She walked slowly past Zhao and over to Daxiong. Zhao didn’t move. Only his eyes followed her.

‘Stop.’

He said it quietly, no more than a sibilant murmur, but it still drowned out the hiss of the airbikes, the dog-like wheezing of the others, the hammering in Jericho’s head, and Yoyo stopped.

‘No, come here,’ Daxiong yelled. ‘Don’t listen to—’

‘You won’t survive this,’ Zhao interrupted. ‘You can’t kill us all, so don’t even try. Give us what we want to have, tell us what we want to hear and we’ll be off. Nothing will happen to anyone.’

‘Like nothing happened to Jia Wei?’ wept the girl with the gun. ‘Or Maggie?’

‘That was inev— No, not like that!’

She had swung the gun round slightly; the fat Asian had also swung the barrel of his gun and was aiming it at her head. Daxiong and the other City Demon reacted in similar fashion. The blond guy’s jaws worked away. Zhao raised a pleading hand.

‘Enough blood has been spilled! – Yoyo, listen, you’ve seen something you shouldn’t have seen. An accident, a stupid accident, but we can wipe this problem out. I want your computer, I have to know who you’ve entrusted it to. No more people must die, I promise. Survival in exchange for silence.’

You’re lying, Jericho thought. Each of your words is pure deceit.

Yoyo turned doubtfully towards Zhao, looked into the beautiful face of the devil.

‘Yes, it’s fine, Yoyo, all fine!’ He nodded. ‘I give you my word that nothing will happen to anyone as long as you cooperate.’

‘Shit!’ yelled the young man next to Daxiong. ‘It’s all a great big pile of shit! They’re going to shoot us all as soon as—’

‘You watch yourself!’ roared the blond guy.

‘Kenny, that won’t do any good.’ The fat man was quaking with nerves. ‘We should kill them.’

‘You fat fuck! First we’ll take you and—’

‘Shut it!’

‘One more word! One word and I’ll—’

‘Stop it! Stop it, all of you!’

Eyes darted back and forth, fingers tightened on triggers. As if the room had filled with an inflammable gas, Jericho thought, and now they were all desperate to click their lighters. But Zhao’s authority held them all in check. The explosion hadn’t happened. Yet.

‘Please – give – me – the computer.’

Yoyo wiped her hand over her face, smearing it with tears and snot. ‘Then will you let us go?’

‘Answer my questions and give me your computer.’

‘I have your word?’

‘Yes. Then we’ll let you go.’

‘You promise that nothing will happen to Daxiong and Ziyi – and Tony? And that guy there?’

How thoughtful, thought Jericho.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ he said. ‘Zhao will—’

‘I’ve never broken my word,’ Zhao cut in, paying him no attention. It sounded friendly and honest. ‘Look, I’m trained to kill people. Like any cop, any soldier, any agent. National security is a higher good than individual human lives, I’m sure you understand that. But I’ll keep my promise.’

‘If you give him the computer, he’ll kill us all,’ Jericho announced. He said it as soberly as possible. ‘I’m your friend. Your father sent me.’

‘He’s lying.’ Zhao’s voice sounded wheedling. ‘You know what? You should be far more afraid of him than you are of me. He’s playing a game with you, every word he comes out with is a lie.’

‘He’s going to kill you,’ said Jericho.

‘Just let him try,’ snorted the boy. So his name was Tony. He jutted his chin belligerently, but his voice and his outstretched weapon trembled slightly. Ziyi, the girl, started to sob uncontrollably.

‘Just give him that fucking computer!’

‘Don’t do it,’ Jericho insisted. ‘As long as he doesn’t know where your computer is, he has to let you live.’

‘Shut up!’ Daxiong yelled at him.

‘Just give him the damned computer!’ Ziyi shouted.

Yoyo walked to the table. Her fingers floated over a device hardly bigger than a bar of chocolate, connected to the keyboard and the screen.

‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Jericho dejectedly. All the strength was oozing from his limbs. ‘He’ll kill you.’

Zhao looked at him.

‘The way you killed Grand Cherokee Wang, Jericho?’

‘The way I— What?’

Yoyo paused.

‘Bullshit!’ Jericho shook his head. ‘He’s lying. He’s—’

‘Just shut your mouth,’ yelled the fat guy, pulled his gun around and aimed it at Jericho, who saw with startling clarity every individual drop of sweat on the killer’s forehead, glittering like bubble wrap.

Daxiong aimed at Zhao, whose eyes widened.

‘No!’ he yelled.

The lighter clicked.

Jericho saw Tony lifting his gun, then there were two shots in quick succession, and the fat guy collapsed. Everything happened at the same time. With a deafening bang the fair-haired man’s pistol went off and shot away half of Tony’s face. He tipped over and obstructed Daxiong’s view, while Ziyi squealed and Yoyo stormed towards the door. Zhao tried to grab her, missed her and fell headlong. Jericho reached for the gun on the floor. He grabbed the barrel, but Zhao was faster, while Ziyi was shooting wildly in all directions, forcing the blond guy to take cover behind the table.

He ducked.

Daxiong dashed forward, slipped in Jia Wei’s blood and cracked the back of his head on the floor-tiles, dragging Jericho with him. A burst of fire ploughed up the floor next to him. Jericho rolled away from the unconscious giant and saw Ziyi stride like a vengeful goddess over Tony’s corpse, shouting and firing indiscriminately. A moment later a bright red fountain sprouted where her right arm had been. The reports from Zhao’s pistol rang out as he ran outside. Ziyi hesitated. Glassy-eyed, she turned round, an expression of mild surprise in her eyes, and sprayed her pumping blood at the blond guy, spurting it into his eyes. The man raised a hand to protect himself, tried to avoid her dying body, lost his balance.

Jericho leapt up. Ziyi’s severed arm twitched at his feet, and suddenly he was caught up in the vision of a theatrical performance. He was gratefully aware of something within him stepping aside and something else taking control of his thoughts and his motor abilities. He bent down, fumbled the gun from Ziyi’s slack fingers, aimed the muzzle at the stumbling hitman and pulled the trigger.

Empty.

With a yell, the blond guy slung the dead girl away from him, reached for his gun and, still blinded by Ziyi’s blood, fired his magazine off into the air. Jericho whirled out of the line of fire and without so much as another glance, he leapt over the prostrate bodies and hurried outside.

Xin briefly imagined how simple things might have been. Tracking down the girl and her computer. Knowing which one it was. Charming information out of her as to who he still had to worry about, which would have taken only a few minutes. Xin was sure that Yoyo was extremely susceptible to pain. She would quickly have told him what he needed to know.

Fast work.

Instead, Owen Jericho had turned up as if pulled out of a hat. Xin hadn’t the slightest idea what had sent the detective here. Hadn’t his disguise been perfect? Irrelevant for the time being. Dark and massive, the blast furnace loomed above him. Two airbikes were parked down below, between Yoyo and the stairs. In her confusion, she had probably spent a moment too long wondering which way was shorter, and meanwhile Kenny had managed to get outside and block her exit route. The tower of girderwork provided no opportunity for escape. So she had fled across the bridge connecting the control centre and the blast furnace, to the other side, into the middle of the jungle of walkways, equipment and pipes that ran riot around the crucible.

He came after her, in no particular hurry. Each level of the furnace’s scaffolding was connected to the next by a flight of steps, but the way down was blocked by broken props. By now Yoyo too was aware of her mistake. She looked alternately upwards and at Kenny, as she pushed her way slowly backwards. Once again he was sure that he was going to win. He stopped.

‘This isn’t what I wanted,’ he called out.

Yoyo’s features blurred. For a moment he thought he was about to see her bursting into tears again.

‘I never planned to give you the thing,’ she cried.

‘Yoyo, I’m sorry!’

‘Then fuck off!’

‘Have I broken my word?’ He put all the hurt he could muster into his words. ‘Did I?’

‘Kiss my butt!’

‘Why don’t you trust me?’

‘Anyone who trusts you dies!’

‘Your people started it, Yoyo. Be sensible, I just want to talk to you.’

Yoyo looked behind her, looked up, and turned her gaze back to Kenny. She had almost reached the steps leading to the next level. He set his pistol down in front of him and showed her the palms of both hands.

‘No more violence, Yoyo. No bloodshed. I swear.’

She hesitated.

Come on, he thought. You can’t get down. You’re in a trap, little mouse. Stupid little mouse.

But suddenly the mouse seemed anything but helpless. He uneasily wondered who was actually playing games with whom here. The girl was in shock, sure, but as she approached the stairs she no longer resembled the tear-drenched Yoyo who had been ready to hand him her computer just a minute before. In her catlike agility he recognised his own alertness, practised over the years and based on stubbornness, suspicion, deviousness and a will to survive. Yoyo was stronger than he’d imagined.

As soon as she leapt onto the steps he knew that any further diplomacy was a waste of time. If there had ever been a chance of coaxing the girl down, it was gone.

He picked up his gun.

The wail of a turbine rose up behind him. Kenny turned round and saw Jericho sitting on the saddle of one of the airbikes, trying to get the vehicle started. He weighed up his options in a flash, but Yoyo took priority. He ignored the detective and hurried after the escaping girl whose footsteps made the passageway above him tremble, and watched through the bars as her silhouette dashed away. A few leaps and he was up there. He found himself in a ravine of struts and pipes, and caught a glimpse of flying hair as Yoyo disappeared behind a rusty pillar; then her footsteps hammered towards the next floor up.

She was slowly turning into a nuisance. High time to bring this matter to a close.

He chased after her, floor after floor, until she had nowhere left to go. A few metres above her the furnace tapered, ending in an inlet through which coke and ore had been funnelled in earlier times. Above it rose an angular, winding structure that culminated in a massive exhaust outlet, making the construction visible even from a distance. Vertical scaffolding-rods led to the highest point, about seventy metres up. Nothing beyond that but open sky. No escape was possible, unless you dared to pick your way about twenty metres along a pipe leading sharply downwards, and jump another ten metres down onto the enormous pot-like tank in which it ended.

He listened. It was surprisingly quiet up here, as if the vague and distant sounds of the city and the background noise of Xaxu were a sea that surged below him. The turbines of large aircraft sang somewhere in the stratosphere.

Xin threw his head back. Yoyo had disappeared.

Then he saw her climbing. She clung to the stanchions like a monkey, pulled herself higher up, and he understood that there probably was a possible escape route. A conveyor belt abutted the inlet. It ran down from the top of the furnace to the ground, steep, but walkable.

The bitch.

Did he actually need her alive? She had reached her hand out to the computer, there was no doubt which one it was. It was still in the control room… except he didn’t know who she’d talked to about the matter.

Cursing, he began his ascent.

A loud hissing sound came towards him. With one hand clamped to the scaffolding and the other gripping his gun, he turned his head.

The airbike was coming straight at him.

Jericho had stalled the first bike he tried. It was a new model, very different from the ones he was used to. The controls gleamed from a flat user interface, there was nothing mechanical on this one. He slipped from the saddle, jumped onto the second airbike, whose engine was running, and ran his hand over the touchscreen. He was luckier this time. The machine reacted like a goaded bull, bucked and reared and tried to throw him off. His hands gripped the handles. Before, they’d been vertical, now they curved upwards and could be twisted in all directions. The bike circled wildly. The display blinked like the lights on a fruit machine. Just by chance Jericho touched two of them, and the carousel-ride came to an end, but he was carried instead towards the front of the control room; he shifted his body weight, narrowly avoiding collision, and flew in an extended 180-degree turn. His eyes scoured the surroundings.

No trace of Yoyo or Zhao.

He gradually got the knack of turning. He brought the bike up, but neglected to pivot the jets at the same time, which immediately got him into trouble again, because the bike now soared into the sky like a rocket. He felt himself sliding helplessly out of the saddle, and struggled with darting fingers to correct the mistake, regained control, and took another turn with his eyes on the blast furnace.

There they were!

Yoyo had made it to the inlet, where the conveyor belt began, followed by Zhao, who hung two metres below her in the scaffolding. Jericho forced the machine upwards, in the hope that it would react as he wished. He saw the hitman give a start and hunch his shoulders. Less than half a metre away from him, Jericho swung the airbike round, turned a circle and bore down on the furnace once more. On the edge of the conveyor belt, Yoyo was looking charmingly helpless. He understood exactly why as he flew over the belt. Where there should have been rollers and struts, part of the construction had simply broken away. For a long stretch only the side braces remained. Getting down from there would have required the skills of a professional tightrope-walker.

Yoyo was trapped.

He cursed himself under his breath. Why hadn’t he taken the blond guy’s pistol off him? There had been weapons lying around all over the control centre. He watched furiously as Zhao’s head and shoulders appeared over the rim. With one bound the hitman was on the inlet. Yoyo recoiled, went down on all fours and gripped the brace of the conveyor belt. She nimbly let herself down on it until her feet touched a rod further below, tried to find a halfway solid footing, began lowering herself down, hand after hand, inch after inch—

Slipped.

Horrified, Jericho saw her fall. A jolt ran through her body. At the last second her fingers had closed on the rod she had just been standing on, but now she was dangling over an abyss a good seventy metres deep.

Zhao stared down at her.

Then he left the cover of the girderwork.

‘Bad mistake,’ Jericho snarled. ‘Very bad mistake!’

By now his glands were firing considerable salvos of adrenalin, whipping his heartbeat and blood pressure up to heroic levels. With each passing second, he was more in control of the machine. Carried on a wave of rage and euphoria, he sent the airbike shooting forward and took aim at Zhao, who was at that moment crouching, about to climb down to Yoyo.

The hitman saw him coming.

Baffled, he came to a halt. The bike shot over the conveyor belt. Anyone else would have been swept into the depths, but Zhao managed to pirouette himself back onto the edge of the inlet. His gun clattered far below. Jericho turned the bike and saw the blond guy staggering out of the control centre and getting onto one of the remaining airbikes. No time to worry about him too. His fingers twitched in all directions. Where on the display – no, wrong, you did it with the handlebars, right? He just had to bring the right handlebar down a touch—

Too much.

The bike plummeted like a stone. Cursing, he caught it, climbed, put his foot down and then immediately decelerated until he hung, jets hissing, right under the wildly flailing Yoyo.

‘Jump!’ he shouted.

She looked down at him, her face distorted, as her fingers slipped millimetre by millimetre. Gusts of wind grabbed the bike and carried it away. The girders trembled as Zhao jumped gracefully from the edge of the inlet and landed on the lower part of the scaffolding. The hitman plainly didn’t suffer from any kind of vertigo. His right hand came down to clutch her wrist. Jericho corrected his position, and the bike spun back under Yoyo.

‘Jump, for God’s sake! Jump!’

Her right foot struck his temple, and he couldn’t see or hear a thing. Now he was underneath her again, looking up. He saw Zhao’s fingers stretching out, touching her ankle.

Yoyo let go.

It was a bit like having a sack of cement dropped on him. If he had imagined she would land elegantly on the pillion, he could think again. Yoyo clutched his jacket, slipped off the bike and dangled from him like a gorilla from a rubber tyre. With both hands he pulled her back up, as the bike hurtled towards the ground.

She shouted something. It sounded like maybe.

Maybe?

The turbine noise rose to a scream. Yoyo’s fingers were everywhere, in his clothes, his hair, his face. The dusty plain rushed up at them, they would be smashed to pieces.

But they weren’t smashed, they didn’t die. He had clearly done something right, because at the same moment as her hands closed around his shoulders and she pressed her torso against his back, the bike shot straight upwards again.

‘Maybe—’

The words were shredded by the squall. The blond guy was approaching on the left, his face a mask of dried blood, from which hate-filled eyes stared across at them.

‘What?’ he shouted.

‘Maybe,’ she yelled back, ‘next time you’ll learn to fly the thing first, you fucking idiot!’

Daxiong floated to the surface.

His first impulse was to ask Maggie for a cappuccino, with plenty of sugar and foam, of course. That was why they were here, after all. To have breakfast together, since Yoyo had appointed Andromeda as her summer residence again, as Daxiong jokingly put it, except that right now it seemed to make more sense to go into hiding in the steelworks for a while.

Maggie only ever brought coffee for him. The others, Tony, Yoyo, Maggie herself, Ziyi and Jia Wei preferred tea, like good Chinese. And like good Chinese they had wontons and baozis for breakfast, they ate pork belly and noodles in broth, swallowed down half-raw shrimps, the whole deal, while for unfathomable reasons his heart still beat for the Grande Nation and was devoted to the buttery, warm smell of freshly baked croissants. By now he was even toying with the possibility that he might have French genes, which anyone who saw his face would strenuously have denied. Daxiong was as Mongolian as a Mongolian could be, and Yoyo was forever rattling off all the wonders of the fun, authentic China that had no need of imported Western culture. Daxiong let her talk. For him, the day began with a proper milk foam moustache. Maggie had called and croaked ‘Breakfast!’ into the receiver, and Ziyi had yelled and screamed.

Why had she done that?

Oh yes, he’d been dreaming. Something terrible! Why would anyone dream something like that? He, Ziyi and Tony had driven over to the blast furnace, following Maggie’s call, when two of those flying motorbikes, which were too expensive for him ever to have afforded one, had landed on the control centre platform, where a third one already stood. Amazing. As he approached, he had tried to get through to Maggie, to ask her what kind of guys these were, but she hadn’t replied. So they had decided to take the guns out of their saddle-bags, just in case.

A funny dream. They were having a party.

They were all enjoying themselves, but Jia Wei couldn’t really join in, because there wasn’t much left of him, and Maggie had a sore stomach. Tony was missing half of his face, oh dear, that seemed to be why Ziyi had started screaming, now everything fitted into place, and what on earth kind of people were these?

Daxiong opened his eyes.

Xin exploded with fury.

With simian agility, he leapt back down over the scaffolding, struts and steps. His airbike was still on the platform, engine running. Far below, the detective was wrestling with the hijacked machine, busy driving himself and Yoyo to their deaths.

Jericho, that thorn in his side!

He’s on his way out, Xin thought. I’ve got the computer, Yoyo. Who can you have spoken to apart from your few friends here, and they’re dead. I don’t need you any more.

Then he saw Jericho wresting control of the machine, gaining height, moving away from the blast furnace—

And being forced back down again.

The blond guy!

Kenny started waving both arms.

‘Kill them all!’ he yelled. ‘Finish them off!’

He didn’t know if the blond guy had heard him. He leapt energetically over the edge of the walkway, landed with a thump on the steel of the platform, and ran to his bike. The turbine was running. Had Jericho been fiddling around with it? Before his eyes, the two bikes set off at great speed, and disappeared into the intricate labyrinth of the steelworks. He pivoted the jets to vertical. The machine hissed and vibrated.

‘Come on!’ he shouted.

The airbike was slowly lifting off, when something whistled past his head so close that he felt the draught. He turned the machine in the air and saw the bald-headed giant from the control centre, a gun in each hand, firing from both muzzles. Nosediving, Xin attacked him. The giant threw himself to the ground. With a snort of contempt he pulled the airbike back up and flew after the others.

Daxiong sat bolt upright. His heart was thumping, the sun was beating down on him. Across the shimmering fields of slag the vanishing airbikes quickly gained distance, but one of the bikes was unmistakably hounding the other and trying to force it to land.

One of the hitmen was dead in the control room. So who was that on the fleeing bike?

Yoyo?

While he was still thinking about it, he clattered down the zigzag stairs. Apart from him and possibly Yoyo none of the Guardians had survived the massacre. The remaining City Demons knew nothing about the double life of the six of them, even though they might have guessed at various things. Yoyo and he had originally brought the Demons to life as a disguise. A motorbike association aroused no suspicion, it wasn’t considered intellectual or subversive. They could meet easily, particularly in Quyu. Three more members had joined the previous year. Perhaps, Daxiong thought, as he lowered his full three hundredweight onto his motorbike, the time had come to initiate them. Strictly speaking, he no longer had that option. Whoever their opponent might have been, it was clear that the Guardians had been busted.

As he drove off he selected a number.

There was a ringing noise. It went on too long, far too long. Then he heard the boy’s voice.

‘Where were you, damn it?’ snorted Daxiong.

Lau Ye yawned and talked at the same time.

Then he asked a question.

‘Don’t ask, Ye,’ Daxiong snorted into the mobile. ‘Get Xiao-Tong and Mak over here. Right now! Go to the blast furnace and clear the control room, everything you find there, computer, displays, the lot.’

The boy stammered something which Daxiong took to mean that he didn’t know where the others were.

‘Then find them!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll explain it later. What? No, don’t take the stuff to Andromeda, and not to the workshop. Then think of something. Somewhere they won’t connect with us. Oh, and Ye—’ He swallowed. ‘You will find corpses. Brace yourselves, you hear?’

He rang off before Ye could ask any questions.

Jericho’s machine took a blow when the blond guy’s airbike collided with its chassis. Time and again he had tried to steer towards the airspace above the steelworkers’ housing estate. Every time the blond guy forced him back, stared wildly over at them and tried to take aim. The lunar landscape of the slag-fields sped along beneath them. Once again Jericho tried to turn off to the left. The blond guy speeded up and forced him in the other direction.

‘Where are you actually trying to get to?’ Yoyo’s voice rang in his ears.

‘We’re outdistancing him!’

‘You haven’t a hope out in the open! Tempt him into the plant.’

The blond guy’s airbike shot upwards and immediately plummeted back down again. Jericho saw the machine’s fish belly right above him and then dived. They wobbled along just above ground level.

‘Be careful!’ Yoyo snapped.

‘I know what I’m doing!’ Rage welled up in him, but he was actually by no means sure about what he should do. Right in front of him a huge chimney rose out of the ground.

‘To the right!’ screeched Yoyo. ‘The right!’

The blond guy drove them further down. The bike scratched along dried-up slag, started skipping, went into a violent roll, then they were around the chimney, only to find themselves in front of a hangar-sized warehouse. They were too close, far too close. No chance of avoiding it, of turning away, of avoiding a collision.

No! The warehouse door was open a crack.

Just before the threatened impact Jericho pulled the machine to the side and shot through it.

Lau Ye dashed through the gloomy concert hall of the Andromeda. He ran as fast as his lanky legs would carry him.

Don’t ask any questions. Just don’t ask.

He was used to this from Daxiong, and he had never complained. Lau Ye was a novice in the order of the City Demons: he had been the last to join and he was by far the youngest. He respected Daxiong and Yoyo, Ziyi and Maggie, Tony and Jia Wei. He also respected Ma Mak and Hui Xiao-Tong, even though they had only been admitted to the club subsequently. Subsequently in that the others had set up the association together, with Daxiong as founder and Yoyo in the role of Vice President.

But Ye wasn’t blind.

Born on the estate just after the steelworks was closed down, with no school education, but more intimately familiar with Xaxu’s peculiar qualities and those of its inhabitants, from the very start he had refused to believe that the Demons were just a bike club. Daxiong was from Quyu, too, but he was seen as operating somewhere between the worlds of the connected and the outsiders. No one doubted that he would wake up on the other side one morning, rub his eyes, drive a smart car to an air-conditioned high-rise skyscraper and pursue some well-paid job there. Yoyo, on the other hand, Maggie, Ziyi, Tony and Jia Wei belonged to Quyu about as much as a string quartet belonged in Andromeda. In the control room they’d set up a kind of Cyber Planet for the privileged, and Yoyo had packed all the super-expensive computers full of brilliant games, but she was from a different world. She went to uni. They all went to uni to study something that parents considered sensible.

Yeah. Not his.

Lau Ye’s parents didn’t pay him much attention. At the age of sixteen he might as well have been living on the Moon. His job in Daxiong’s workshop and the City Demons were all he had, and he loved being part of it. And so he didn’t ask questions, either. He didn’t ask whether the only purpose his humble self, Xiao-Tong and Mak served was to disguise a conspiratorial little student club as something fit for the slums. He didn’t ask what the other six organised at their many meetings in the control centre when he, Xiao-Tong and Mak weren’t around. Until a few days before, when Yoyo had turned up at the workshop in a complete state. That time he had asked Daxiong.

The answer had been a familiar one.

‘Don’t ask.’

‘I just want to know if there’s anything I can do.’

‘Yoyo’s got problems. Best you stay in the workshop for the time being and avoid the control centre.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘Don’t ask.’

Don’t ask. Except that three days later that guy with the fair hair and the blue eyes had turned up, the one Daxiong had later said looked like a – what was it? Scanavian? Scandinavian! Ye had talked to the man and learned that he wanted to get into Andromeda.

‘Cool,’ he had said to Daxiong later. ‘You may have sent him on a wild goose chase. Why would you do that?’

‘Don’t—’

‘No. I’m asking.’

Daxiong had rubbed his bald head and his chin, had poked around in his ears, tugged on his fake beard and finally snarled:

‘It could be that we’re about to get an unwanted visit. Nasty people.’

‘Like the other guys that time?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And what do they want from us? I mean, what do they want from us? What have you done, you – six?’

Daxiong had looked at him for a long time.

‘If I confide something in you, little Ye, you’ll keep your trap shut and not tell anyone?’

‘Okay.’

‘Not even Mak or Xiao-Tong?’

‘O-okay.’

‘Do I have your word?’

‘Of course. Erm – what’s going on?’

‘Don’t ask.’

But even on that odd day the standard rebuff hadn’t sounded as desperate and furious as it had just now. It seemed as if the suspicions that Ye had held for a long time were being borne out. The six of them had conspiratorial rituals. His limbs quivered as he crossed the inner room, which was still in a state of complete chaos from the previous night, and barely negotiable for leftover food, bottles, cigarette ends and drug paraphernalia. Alcohol, stale smoke and piss launched a general attack on his chemoreceptors. Mak and Xiao-Tong had been together for four weeks, and had been at the same concert as him. After that they’d had one hell of a party. It was only towards morning that Ye had crept, royally zonked, to Yoyo’s ‘summer residence’. Even now his head felt like an aquarium that the water sloshed around in every time he moved, but Daxiong trusted him.

You’ll find corpses—

Something terrible must have happened. Ye guessed where the other two might be found. Ma Mak slept, with his parents and his brothers and sisters, in the ruin of a half-demolished house on the edge of the estate. The family shared a single room, while Hui Xiao-Tong lived alone in a cave-like shed nearby. That was where he would find them.

He staggered out into the harsh light, narrowed his eyes and ran across the vacant lot to his motorbike.

Inside the warehouse it was gloomy, a vast space, the ceiling somewhere between twenty and thirty metres high, riveted walls, steel joists. Huge racks suggested that cast steel had been stored here in the past.

Shots rang out behind them. Their echo was thrown back by walls and ceilings, acoustic ricochets.

‘Oi, watch where you’re flying,’ shouted Yoyo.

Jericho turned his head and saw the blond-haired guy catching up with him.

‘Dive!’

Their pursuer approached. Shots whipped through the hall again. Turbine wailing, they raced between the racks towards the rear wall of the warehouse, another door there, ceiling height, which was fortunately open. On the other side yawned a space even darker than this one.

Something that looked like a crane emerged from the darkness.

‘Careful!’

‘If you don’t keep your trap shut—’

‘Higher! Higher!’

Jericho obeyed. The airbike skipped away over the crane in a breakneck parabola. Suddenly it was too near the ceiling. At the last minute he swivelled the jets in the opposite direction. The machine turned at an angle, darted downwards and started spinning on its axis at fantastic speed. Circling madly they wheeled into the next hall. Jericho caught a glimpse of their pursuer, saw him just passing under the lintel and going into a controlled nosedive, then the blond guy steered his bike into theirs and rammed them from the side, but what was intended to throw them off course had the opposite effect. As if by a miracle the bike stabilised itself. Suddenly they were flying straight ahead once more, worryingly close to the wall. Jericho narrowed his eyes. This factory space seemed even bigger and higher than the one before. A line of rollers, in their hundreds, ran along the floor, clearly a kind of conveyor belt leading to a tall, looming structure. Massive and gloomy, it looked like a printing press, except that this one would have been producing books for giants.

A rolling mill, it occurred to Jericho. It was the frame for a roller, to crush iron ingots into sheets. The things you know!

Again the blond guy came down, trying to squash them against the wall. Jericho looked across at him. A triumphant grin flashed in the man’s blood-spattered face.

At that he saw red.

‘Yoyo?’

‘What?’

‘Hold on tight!’

As soon as she pressed against him, he threw the handlebars around and gave the attacking bike a mighty thump with the back of his own. Yoyo screamed. Splinters of exploding windscreen sprayed in all directions. The hitman’s bike was slung aside, his gun disappeared into the darkness. Jericho didn’t give him time to breathe, he rammed his bike again, as they hurtled side by side towards the rolling-mill.

‘And with my very warmest wishes,’ he yelled, ‘have a bit of this!’

The third blow rammed the blond guy’s rear. His bike somersaulted in the air, whirled towards the rolling mill. Jericho drew past him, saw the hitman struggling for control and balance, arms flailing, and settled into the curve. They flew just past the colossus, but instead of the ugly noise of a bike’s fatal impact they heard a sequence of loud gunshots. Somehow the guy had managed to avoid a collision and lower his bike to the floor. Like a stone on the surface of the water, it skipped over the rollers of the conveyor belt, tipped over and threw its rider off.

The next gaping portal opened up in front of them.

‘Yoyo,’ he called back. ‘How the hell do we get back out of here?’

‘We don’t.’ Her outstretched arm pointed past him into the darkness. ‘Once you’re through there, you go straight to hell.’

Xin didn’t bother about the individual biker who was helplessly trying to follow them. The guy was ridiculous. Huge, clumsy, a joke. Let him empty his magazine into the air. In time he’d wish he’d never been born.

He kept a lookout for the airbikes.

They’d disappeared.

Perplexed, he wheeled above the plant, but it was as if the sky had swallowed up the two machines. The last he had seen of them was when they flew around a complex of factory buildings behind which a single big chimney loomed.

It was there that he had lost track of them.

The grouchy whine of the bike reached him from below. He toyed with the idea of raining a few grenades down on the giant’s bald head. His index finger tapped against a spot to the side of the instrument panel, and a cover immediately slid aside just above his right knee. Behind it lay a considerable arsenal of weapons. Xin inspected the contents of the compartment on the other side. All there, hand grenades, sub-machine-gun. Gingerly, almost tenderly, his fingers slipped over the butt of the M-79 launcher with the incendiary rounds. All three airbikes were equipped with the same weapons.

Including Jericho’s.

He shoved the thought aside and glanced at the altitude gauge: 188 metres above sea level. He continued his search with reduced thrust. The sky couldn’t swallow anyone as quickly as that.

If part of the roof hadn’t been open, it would have been pitch-dark. But as it was, spears of white daylight jabbed in at an angle, carving weird details from the walls, casting lattices over walkways, steps, balconies, terraces, pipes, cables, segmented and riveted armour, massive, open bulkheads.

Jericho slowed his bike in the beam of light. Hissing softly, it hovered in the air, which was impregnated with iron, rust and the smell of rancid grease.

He threw back his head.

‘Forget it,’ called Yoyo. Her voice bounced across walls and ceilings, and was caught between the constructions. ‘It’s barred up there. We won’t get through.’

Jericho cursed and looked round. He couldn’t really tell whether this room was any bigger than the one they had flown through before, but at any rate it looked monumental, almost Wagnerian in its dimensions, a Nibelheim of the industrial age. Steel joists a metre thick ran along the ceiling; open baskets hung from them, anchored to massive hinges, so big that he could have fitted his Toyota inside any one of them. A pipe about three metres in diameter grew from the darkness of the vaulted ceiling, led downwards at an angle and finished halfway up the hall. More of the basket-like formations were distributed across the floor, and containers were stacked along the walls.

Yoyo was right. There was something hellish about the whole thing. A chilly hell. Still startled by his unexpected knowledge of the rolling mill, Jericho tried to remember the purpose of this place. Steel was heated here, in colossal containers called converters. Right in front of them gaped their skewed, round mouths, hatches leading to the heart of the volcano, great maws that would normally have glowed red and yellow with molten ore. Now they lay there, black and mysterious, three in all.

A world extinguished.

The hiss of the other airbike came across from beyond the passageway, changed, grew more distinct. It was getting closer.

‘Hey, what’s with these things?’ Yoyo leaned forward and pointed at one of the gaping entrances to the converter. ‘He won’t be able to find us in there.’

Jericho didn’t reply. The bike would fit quite easily in one of the converters, with both of them on it. The maw was big enough, the container was bulbous and several metres deep. And yet he didn’t like the idea that they might be trapped down there. He brought the machine up, towards the ceiling.

‘If only you hadn’t brought us in here,’ Yoyo complained.

‘If only you’d brought your computer with you,’ Jericho snarled back. ‘Then we wouldn’t be making targets of ourselves.’

Between two joists, right below the ceiling, there was a platform from which you had a vantage point over most of the hall. The converters yawned far below them, separated from one another by large armoured bulkheads. Sunbeams stroked their bike, explored its shape, let it go. With extreme concentration Jericho fiddled with the controls, and the jets produced a small amount of reverse thrust, just enough for the machine to move slowly backwards over the edge of the platform.

‘He’s coming,’ hissed Yoyo.

A beam of light crept into the hall from the neighbouring space. The blond guy had turned on the headlight. Jericho silently settled the airbike on the platform and turned off the engine. The hiss faded to a faint hum. He almost felt something like pride at his navigational abilities. The blond guy wouldn’t hear them above the noise of his own machine, and the gloom up here would swallow them up. They clung to the ceiling like a fat, lurking insect.

‘And by the way I did bring my computer,’ Yoyo whispered.

Puzzled, Jericho turned round to look at her.

‘I thought—’

‘That wasn’t my computer. I just wanted him to think it was. I wear mine on my belt.’

He raised his hand and hushed her. Far below their pursuer appeared and hovered slowly along underneath them. His bike hissed quietly, and a powerful finger of cold, white light crept around the building. Jericho leaned forwards. The blond guy was craning his head in all directions, looking at the ceiling without seeing them, peering between the containers. His gun lay heavy in his right hand.

Had he lost them?

Jericho hesitated. Highly unlikely that the man had gone looking for his pistol after the crash. The force of the collision had slung it far out into the darkness of the hall where the rolling mills were. There was only one explanation. His bike was fitted with more weapons, and if that was true of all of them, then—

On either side of the tank, he thought. That was the only place where there was room, right in front of his legs.

His fingers ran over the body of the bike.

Yep, no doubt about it, there were chambers there, cavities under the casings. But how did you get them open?

Below them, the hitman curved through the hall. The luminous eye darted between constructions and containers, slid along walkways and balconies. Only now did Jericho notice that their pursuer was creeping towards a tunnel-shaped hatch that opened up to the rear of the arched ceiling. Rails led from it to the inside of the hall. The blond guy stopped his bike and glanced in. He seemed uncertain whether to go inside before scouring the entire hall, then he turned back and climbed higher.

He was coming right towards them.

Jericho thought frantically. In a few seconds the killer would find them in their hiding-place. Like a man possessed, he searched the casings and the instrument panel for a way of opening the weapon compartments. The hissing got closer. He felt Yoyo’s breath on the back of his neck, craned his head and ventured to look. The blond guy was two-thirds of the way up the hall.

Less than a metre, and he would see them.

But he got no higher.

Instead, his gaze wandered downwards and fixed on the mouths of the converters, that were turned towards him, lips rounded as if to suck him in, and Jericho realised what he was thinking. The bike stood motionless above one of the gaping maws. There was inky blackness within the steel cooking pot, no way of telling if anyone was hiding inside. The blond guy reached into a compartment on his bike, pulled something long from it and threw it down, then accelerated and got out of the danger zone.

A second went by.

Another, and another.

Then came the inferno.

The grenade went off with a deafening boom. A column of fire shot several metres out of the converter as the pressure of the explosion burst from the opening, bathed the hall in glowing red light, whirled smoke in all directions. Jericho grimaced, so painful was the echo in his ears.

The rumble of the explosion spread, escaped through the light-slit in the roof of the converter hall, its panes of glass shattered long since, vibrated the air molecules above and spread through the sky.

Xin heard the explosion two hundred metres higher up.

Something had gone up. Where exactly he couldn’t have said, but he was sure that there had been a bang in one of the halls lined up to the west of the blast furnace.

Daxiong, on the other hand, had no doubt that the explosion originated in the converter hall.

He pulled the motorbike round, spraying up gravel, and at the same moment Xin plunged down from the sky like a hawk.

‘Get a move on, damn you!’

Lau Ye was really furious. He was hopping from one leg to the other in Xiao-Tong’s shed, watching his friends slowly putting on their shirts and trousers, as if the process of getting dressed contained incalculable risks. Ma Mak revealed the stoicism of a zombie, not embarrassed in the slightest that little Ye had found her and Xiao-Tong naked, in a position that left no doubt about the activity they had been engaged in when they fell asleep. Xiao-Tong blinked hard, trying to banish tiny living creatures from the corners of his eyes.

‘Come on, now!’ Ye clenched his fists, headed nowhere. ‘I promised Daxiong that we’d hurry.’

A duet of grunting was heard, but at least the two of them managed to come shuffling after him. Outside, in the early sunlight, they contorted like vampires.

‘I need a cup of tea,’ murmured Mak.

‘I need a fuck,’ grinned Xiao-Tong and grabbed her backside. She shook him off and struggled onto her motorbike.

‘You’ve lost it.’

‘You’ve both lost it,’ said Ye, and gave Xiao-Tong a shove that managed to get the guy to swing one leg over the saddle. They didn’t have far to go. A few blocks up the street was Wong’s World, and behind it, in the early morning mist, stood the silhouette of the blast furnace. Xiao-Tong pointed feebly at the market.

‘First couldn’t we at least go an’—’

‘No,’ said Ye. ‘Pull yourselves together. Party over.’

That sounded good and very grown up, he thought. Could have come from Daxiong, and it seemed at least to make a big impression on Xiao-Tong and Mak. Abandoning all resistance, they left their bikes where they were, and followed him up the street. The closer they drew to the blast furnace, the tighter the feeling in Ye’s guts became, and a terrible fear took hold of him.

Daxiong had said something about corpses.

He avoided mentioning that to Xiao-Tong and Mak. Not now. For the time being he was just glad to have managed to wake them up at all.

Jericho held his breath.

The blond guy had steered the airbike over the second converter, bringing himself a good bit closer to them. Again he drew out a hand grenade, pulled the pin, slung it into the container and got out of range. There was a bang; the converter spat fire and smoke.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Yoyo whispered in his ear.

‘Then he’ll get us,’ Jericho whispered back. ‘We won’t get away from him another time.’

They couldn’t escape for ever. Eventually they would have to finish off the blond guy, particularly since Jericho had no doubt that they would have to deal with Zhao sooner or later. If that was the man’s name. One of the hitmen had called him Kenny.

Kenny Zhao Bide?

His gaze darted around. Right below them gaped the maw of the third converter, wide open as if the steel pot were waiting to be fed. A baby dinosaur, Jericho thought. That was what the pot looked like to him. Little birds crouched in the nest with their beaks wide open, greedily demanding worms and beetles, and what were birds if not miniaturised, feathered dinosaurs? This one was massive. With an appetite for something bigger. For human beings.

A moment later the blond guy’s bike approached and obstructed his view of the converter. The machine was hovering right above the smelting pot, so close that Jericho could have touched the killer’s head with his outstretched arm. A glance at the ceiling would have been enough for the blond guy to see them, but he seemed to have eyes only for the abyss where he assumed the fugitives were hiding.

He bent forward, reached into his arsenal of weapons and pulled out another hand grenade.

‘Hold on tight,’ Jericho said as quietly as possible. Yoyo pressed his upper arm to indicate that she had understood.

The blond guy pulled the pin from the grenade.

Jericho turned on the engine.

The airbike jumped forward and plunged down at the hitman. For a heartbeat Jericho saw him as if in a flash from a camera, his arm raised to throw the primed grenade, head thrown back, eyes wide with amazement, frozen.

Then they crashed straight into him.

Both turbines screamed to life. Jericho boosted thrust. He relentlessly smashed his opponent’s bike against the converter, wrenched the handlebars around and escaped back into the air. The blond guy’s machine plunged still further, somersaulted, crashed against the rim of the opening, was slung up in the air and clattered, dragging its rider with it, into the stygian abyss of the pot. A hollow clank and rattle followed them as they climbed. Desperately trying to get away from the hell that was about to break out, Jericho put his bike at top speed, sending prayers up to the hall ceiling.

Then came the explosion.

A demon rose from the depths of the cauldron, stretched roaring above it and fired out incandescent thermal waves. Its hot breath gripped Jericho and Yoyo and slung the bike through the air. They were dragged upwards, they turned and plunged. A quick sequence of explosions like booming cannons drowned out their cries as the blond guy’s whole arsenal went up, one piece after another. The volcano spat fire in all directions, set half the plant ablaze in an instant, while they hurtled spinning towards the ground and Jericho tugged wildly on the handlebars. The bike looped, scraped along a column and crash-landed onto a platform. Jericho was breathless. Yoyo screamed and almost broke his ribs for fear of being thrown off. Raising sparks, they dashed along the platform, straight towards a wall. He braked, went into reverse thrust. The machine careened violently, altered course and clanged against a balustrade, where it hung vertical for a moment as if he had suspended it neatly from a hook, then it gave a groan and tipped over.

Jericho fell on his back. Yoyo rolled over next to him and hauled herself up. Her left thigh didn’t look great, her trousers in shreds, the skin beneath it torn and bloody. Jericho crept on all fours to the balustrade, grasped the railings and got unsteadily to his feet. All around him everything was on fire. A smell of tar billowed to the ceiling and began to fog the hall.

They had to get out of there.

Yoyo bent double beside him and moaned with pain. He helped her up, as he stared into the thickening wall of smoke. What was that? Something was vaguely taking shape in the roiling clouds, they were brightening. At first he thought it might be another source of fire, but the light was white, spreading evenly, growing in intensity.

The fishlike rump of an airbike pushed its way out of the smoke.

It was Zhao.

As he set his foot on the bottom step of the zigzag stairs, Ye tried to control the trembling of his knee. His glance wandered along the tower of scaffolding to the platform on which the control room rested. All of a sudden he was afraid of what he might see there, so frightened that his legs threatened to give way.

He looked around.

A battered old car, a Toyota, was parked crookedly just below the girderwork, and two motorbikes a little further along. That surprised him. Normally they rode the machines into the adjacent empty building before going up.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the bikes.

One of them was Tony’s. And the other? He wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be Ziyi’s.

Tony – Ziyi—

What were they to expect up there?

Mak was trotting upstairs like a shadow in Xiao-Tong’s wake. Ye cleared his throat.

‘Wait, I’ve got to—’

‘Let’s not hang around,’ she growled. ‘You’ve got us out of bed now—’

‘Terrible time of day,’ Xiao-Tong complained.

‘—so you can bloody well come too.’

Ye wrung his hands. He didn’t know what to do. It was time to tell them Daxiong had mentioned corpses. That something terrible had happened in the control centre. But his tongue clung to his palate, his throat hurt as he swallowed. He opened his lips, and a croak issued from them.

‘I’m coming.’

Daxiong hadn’t come via the old rolling mill. There was a shortcut, at least he hoped it was still possible to get through it. Trains had once criss-crossed the grounds of the plant, shunting-engines with torpedo-shaped wagons that were filled with liquid pig iron after the blast furnace was tapped. From there they had driven their 1400-degree cargo to the converter hall, where the iron was poured into huge pans and from there into the steel smelting pots.

Daxiong followed the tracks. They led at least two kilometres across the open field and disappeared into a tunnel, more of a covered passageway, really, that opened right into the converter hall. Shots were ringing out from there now. He put his foot right down, caught his front wheel in one of the tracks, slipped. The motorbike threw him off. He skidded along on the seat of his trousers, dumbfounded by his own stupidity, jumped to his feet, cursed. He had got off lightly, but the accident had cost him time.

His eyes scoured the sky.

No trace of an airbike. He righted his toppled motorbike and tried to start it. After several attempts and encouraging words, the most frequent of which was Merde!, the machine finally sprang to life, and Daxiong plunged into the darkness of the passageway. What he saw was less than encouraging. A shunting-engine rested, broad and sedate, on one of the two parallel tracks; another was coupled to two torpedo cars. He wouldn’t be able to get by on either side, only the space between the trains was wide enough – but there was something blocking it.

He should have gone through the rolling mill!

Forced to stop, he got off his bike and walked over to the obstruction, which turned out to be a twisted metal frame. Bracing his three-hundredweight bulk against it, he tried to shift it from its position. Further ahead he could see the dim opening beyond which the hall lay. It couldn’t have been more than twenty metres away.

He had to get there.

At that moment there was a third explosion, a salvo this time, much louder than the others. The passageway lit up, something burning flew into it and crashed to the ground. Further explosions followed. As if possessed, Daxiong rattled at the metal frame until at last, with a great creak, it started to give. The thing wasn’t heavy, just hopelessly stuck. He tensed his muscles. All hell must have broken loose through there, flames were blazing. Daxiong panted, pulled and tugged, pushed and shoved, and all of a sudden the metal frame yielded and twisted a little to the side.

Still. Just enough of a gap for him to squeeze through.

Xin held a hand in front of his mouth and nose as he rode his airbike through the billows. Acrid smoke brought tears to his eyes. What in hell’s name had the blond guy been up to? Hopefully it had been worth it at least. Beyond the deep blackness he saw flames flickering. His right hand reached for the butt of the sub-machine-gun in its holster and let go of it again.

First he had to find a way out.

The smoke cleared, giving him a view of the hall. The whole place was in flames. Not a soul in sight, just a toppled airbike hanging from the balustrade of a gallery, dented and blackened. The windscreen was missing. Xin steered towards it, as a great roll of thunder set the hall trembling. Immediately behind him a column of fire shot into the air, the wave of pressure sending heavy vibrations through his bike. He climbed, then glimpsed a movement at the far end of the hall.

Something came roaring out of the wall. The motorbike rider. The bald giant.

Xin drew the gun from the holster.

A greasy black cloud billowed over and enveloped him, hot and suffocating. He held his breath, brought the bike further up, but the cloud wouldn’t let go of him. Of course it wouldn’t! Smoke drifted upwards. What sort of an idiot was he? Blinded and disorientated, he brought the bike back down again. He couldn’t even see the lights on the instrument panel now. He steered haphazardly to the right and collided with something, then dragged the handlebars around.

Further down. He had to get down there.

Small fires crackled around him, immersing his airbike in a flickering red glow. He thought he could hear voices coming from somewhere, headed straight ahead to avoid any further collisions, and managed to get out of the cloud. Between flickering flames and plumes of smoke he saw the motorbike.

Yoyo was sitting on its pillion.

Xin bellowed with fury. The motorbike disappeared into the wide, low passageway from which it had emerged. With hissing jets he shot after the two of them and followed them into the tunnel. The motorbike dashed between two trains. He tried to estimate the amount of room he had: airbikes were a bit broader than motorbikes, but if he was careful he would fit through.

When he was just about to shoot the girl in the back, he saw something blocking the way.

Iron bars. Bent, wedged.

Beside himself with fury, he was forced to look as Yoyo and the giant ducked their heads and managed by a hair to get under the twisted metal. He himself would have been skewered. Not a chance. His bike was too wide, too high. He pivoted the jets and braked, but his momentum carried him on towards the metal poles. For a moment Xin was filled with a paralysing sense of complete helplessness; he pulled the bike round sideways-on, scraping along against the trains, and metal crunched against metal as he managed to reduce his speed.

He held his breath.

The airbike stopped, just centimetres away from the metal frame.

Seething with rage, he stared through it. Daylight entered at the end of the passageway. The motorbike engine seemed to give him an insolent growl as it disappeared from view. Close to losing his self-control, Xin wrenched the airbike round, flew back into the hall, plunged into the smoke, sped through the rolling mill and the warehouse and back outside. Above the slagheap, he turned in a great circle, grateful for the fresh air, opened the cover of the second weapon chamber and reached inside. When his hand came back out, it was holding something long and heavy. Then, at great speed, he bore down on the blast furnace.

Jericho spat and coughed. The smoke billowed into every corner. He wouldn’t survive another fight in this inferno. If he didn’t get out of here right away, it would all be too late. Another few minutes, and he might as well just settle down and fill his lungs with tar until they were the colour of liquorice.

He hoped devoutly that Yoyo had made it. Everything had happened at impossible speed. Their escape over the platform, Zhao’s bike. Then, all of a sudden, Daxiong. The hitman must have seen him, but something had kept him from reacting straight away, fire, perhaps, welling smoke. They had had time to get to Daxiong, who stopped his bike all of a sudden and paused with the engine running. There had been a flicker of puzzlement in the giant’s narrow eyes, as he wondered how he would get them both on his narrow pillion.

‘Go, Yoyo,’ Jericho had said.

‘I can’t—’

‘Go, damn it! No speeches, just fuck off! I’ll be fine.’

She had looked at him, soot-blackened, unkempt and plainly shocked, with a mixture of fury and defiance in her eyes. And all of a sudden he had seen that strange sadness in her, which he knew from Chen’s photographs. Then Yoyo had jumped on Daxiong’s pillion. At that moment Zhao had spotted them both.

Jericho clung to the hope that they’d got away from the hitman. Visibility was getting worse and worse. With his sleeve pressed to his mouth and nose, he edged his way up to the gallery and inspected the airbike. In poor shape, but the damage seemed to be mainly cosmetic in nature. Hoping the handlebars weren’t damaged, he bent down and hoisted the machine upright.

His eye fell on something small.

It lay on the ground next to the airbike, something flat, silvery, gleaming. He picked it up, surprised, looked at it, turned it around in his hand—

Yoyo’s computer!

She must have lost it here. When she fell off the bike.

He’d found Yoyo’s computer!

He quickly slipped the device into his jacket, swung onto his saddle and started the bike. The familiar hiss.

He had to get out of there.

It had been worse than he had feared. Ma Mak had suddenly thrown up, Xiao-Tong alternately yelled curses and the names of their dead friends, and looked as if he would never recover.

Ye was crying.

He knew he would never be able to get these images out of his head. Never in his life.

Don’t ask any questions.

‘We’ve got to pack all the stuff up,’ he sniffed.

‘I can’t,’ wailed Mak.

‘We promised Daxiong. Something to do with all this stuff. It’s all got to go.’ He started unplugging computers and disconnecting displays. Xiao-Tong stared at him numbly.

‘What on earth’s happened here?’ he whispered.

‘Dunno.’

‘Where’s Yoyo?’

‘No idea. Are you going to help me now?’

Mak wiped her mouth, picked up a keyboard and pulled it from the computer. Eventually Xiao-Tong joined in as well. They stuffed the equipment into cardboard boxes and dragged them outside. They didn’t touch the corpses, they tried not to look at them or, even worse, to walk through the still damp pools of blood. Everything was covered with blood, the room, the table, the screens, everything. Mak put her arms around a cardboard box, lifted it and set it down again. Ye saw her shoulders twitching. Her head swung back and forth like a clockwork toy, unable to accept what she saw. He stroked her back, took the box from her hands and pulled it through Tony’s blood – or was it Jia Wei’s, or Ziyi’s – and outside.

He paused for a moment, snorted and looked up at the sky.

What was that?

Something was approaching from out of the air beyond the halls. It was quick, and coming closer. A high-pitched hiss heralded its arrival. A flying device. Like a motorbike, but without wheels. Someone was sitting in the saddle steering the thing, steering it straight at the control room—

Ye blinked, screened his eyes against the sun with his hand.

Daxiong?

He was gradually able to make out details. Not who was driving the machine, but that the driver or pilot or whatever you called him was holding something long that flashed for a second in the sun—

‘Hey,’ he called out. ‘Come and take a look at th—’

Something detached itself from the flying motorbike and came hurtling at him with the speed of a rocket.

It was a rocket.

‘—is,’ he whispered.

His last thought was that he must be dreaming. That it wasn’t happening, because it couldn’t possibly happen.

Don’t ask any questions.

Xin sped away.

The little house resting on the scaffolding seemed to inflate for a second, as if taking a deep breath. Then the front part blew apart in a fiery cloud, slinging rubble in all directions, crashing against the main structure of the blast furnace, the façades of the adjacent buildings, the forecourt. Xin curved round and fired further rockets at the rear façade. What remained of the side walls exploded, and the roof collapsed. The struts of the girderwork tower supporting the blazing ruin snapped. The control room began to topple, raining down flaming fragments, broke apart in the middle and sent a flurry of sparks through the tower.

Xin felt a sudden twinge of satisfaction as he spotted Jericho’s Toyota in the midst of the avalanche of rubble. A moment later there was nothing more to be seen of the car. The detritus of the old control centre spilled over the ground until all that remained upright was what was left of the scaffolding, a pyre, testimony to the cathartic power of heavy explosives.

Jericho’s heart felt cold and clammy as he left the darkness of the warehouse. He saw people running shouting across the slagheaps, drawn by the roar of the fire,

whose black column of smoke, scattered with flying sparks, rose far above the furnace and reached towards the pale, early sun.

Had Yoyo been in the building? Had she and Daxiong gone back there? Had Zhao caught them there in the end?

No, Zhao, Kenny or whatever his name was must have destroyed the building for some other reason. Because Yoyo had left him thinking that the computer was still there. He had wiped out most of the Guardians and now he’d destroyed their meeting point, too, with all the electronics it contained, decapitated the organisation, killed anyone Yoyo might have confided in.

He devoutly hoped that her head start had been enough to let her get away from Zhao.

He flew closer. The airbike was harder to steer now than it had been before the crash in the converter hall. It was possible one of the jets had been twisted and could no longer be precisely adjusted any more. Trying to tilt the bike out of its crooked angle, he didn’t immediately understand what it was that he actually saw. The memory of his car came sketchily to mind, parked below the tower of scaffolding. It was only when he was so close to the fire that the heat forced him to turn away that he knew for sure that his Toyota was burning at the bottom of the column of flames.

Fear, exhaustion, everything was swept away by a wave of ungovernable fury. He searched feverishly for the mechanism that would open the side compartments, to shoot Zhao from the sky with his own weapons. But nothing opened, and Zhao was nowhere to be seen.

The forecourt filled with people. They came from all directions, on foot, on bicycles and on motorcycles. The whole of Wong’s World was pouring towards the blast furnace. Even Cyber Planet opened its doors, releasing pale and baffled figures, unable to believe what they saw.

Nothing helped. Under such circumstances even the police might have been expected to remember that forgotten world. Jericho climbed. He saw various people pointing at him, thrust his engine and passed over the industrial estate.

Xin saw the airbike getting smaller.

A good way away from the scene, he perched on the top of a chimney like a buzzard. For a moment he had considered finishing Jericho off with a well-aimed bullet as well, but the detective might still prove useful. Xin let him go. Yoyo was more important. She couldn’t have got far, and yet he would have to get used to the idea of having lost the girl for the time being. He decided to stay here and keep watch for her at least until the forces of law and order arrived.

In spite of his defeat, he had a clear image of the universe at that moment. Existences that came into being and then exploded, a surging froth of birth and death, while Xin remained immortal, the centre, the point where all lines crossed. The idea reassured him. He had sown chaos and destruction, but he had done it for a higher good. The remains of the girderwork joined the burning ruins on the ground; in the west the flames rose high from the converter hall. Lesser men than he would have called it destruction, but Xin saw nothing but harmony. The cleansing fire spread, healing the world of the infectious afflictions of poverty, cauterising the pus from the organism of the megalopolis.

At the same time, with conscientious precision, he recapitulated his commission, translated into the language of money. Because Xin had learned to navigate safely on the ocean of his thoughts. Without the slightest doubt, he was insane, as his family had always maintained, except that he understood his insanity. Of all the things he liked about himself, this one filled him with special pride, being a self-analyst, able to establish quite objectively: he was a perfect example of a psychopath. What terrible power that realisation contained! Knowing who he was. At one and the same second, being able to be everything all at the same time – artist, sadist, empath, higher being, ordinary Joe. Right now it was the careerist who had assumed control of his various personalities, the conventional one who liked to attend to business and then relax in a villa by the sea, surrounded by helpful staff, feeling like the centre of the universe. It was that down-to-earth, predictable Xin who restrained his crazed, pyromaniac alter ego in his place and taught him efficiency.

He was so many people. So many things.

High up on his chimney Xin, the planner, started wondering what he had to do to make Yoyo come to him of her own accord.

Jericho

For a while, Owen Jericho rode his bike under the elevated highway that separated Quyu from the real world. Below him, the traffic headed noisily westwards, counterpointed by the boom and roar of the CODs on the freeway above him. He was trapped in a sandwich of noise. When two police skymobiles came chasing over with their sirens wailing he took refuge between the sand-coloured skyscrapers that typified the urban desert around the central district of Shanghai, and followed the course of the main road to Hongkou. As he did so, he tried to stay as low as possible in the canyon of buildings. He assumed that he was flying below the permitted altitude, but he didn’t feel at ease on the battered airbike. And he didn’t want to experience a sudden engine failure high above the rooftops. Trying to compensate for the leftward tilt of the vehicle, he wound his way between façades, pillars, traffic-light poles, electric wires and elevated road signs, looking alternately straight ahead, into the rear-view mirror and towards the sky as he waited for Zhao. It was only when he had crossed Hongkou and flown the bike out towards the river that he started to think he might have shaken him off. If Zhao had even wanted to follow him. He plunged into the busy shopping streets behind the colonial façade of the Bund, landed to the west of Huaihai Park and dragged the airbike to the Xintiandi underground car park. The left rear wheel got stuck and scraped noisily over the asphalt. For a moment he wondered where to park it, until he remembered what had happened to his car.

At least he had a parking space for this thing now.

The scraping of the damaged wheel echoed angrily against the ramp walls as he steered the airbike towards the space reserved for him. He tried to forget his fury over the loss of his car, and grant priority to Yoyo’s wellbeing. In a mood of selflessness he extended his concern to Daxiong, as he hurried through the car park, hoping no one would see him with his soot-blackened face, but there wasn’t even anyone in the lift. There was a uniform light on the walls, the unit hummed gently. By the time he finally slammed the door of his loft behind him, he was certain no one had caught sight of him.

He sighed with relief and ran his hands over his face and through his hair.

He closed his eyes.

Immediately he saw the corpses, the boy with his face shot away, the dying, spinning girl with bright red fountains shooting from her shredded shoulder artery, her severed arm, saw himself freeing the gun from her clawed fingers – what was up, what had gone wrong? Hadn’t he wanted to lead a peaceful life? And now this. Within a few days. Abused children, mutilated young people, he himself more dead than alive. Reality? A dream, a film?

A film, exactly. And popcorn and something nice and cold. Lean back. What was on next? Quyu II, the Return?

Impressions came chasing after him like rabid dogs. He mustn’t let it all get to him. He would never be able to get rid of it again; from now on the images would visit him on sleepless nights, but at the moment he had to think. Stack up his thoughts like building-blocks. Make a plan.

Scattering T-shirt and trousers carelessly around the sitting room, he went to the bathroom, turned on the shower, washed soot and blood from his skin, took stock. Yoyo and Daxiong had got away. A hypothesis, admittedly, temporarily elevated to the status of fact, but then he had to have something to go on. Secondly, Yoyo had been able to save her computer, which was now in his possession. Of course Zhao wouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that all the data were on the hard drive of a single, small device. The control room hadn’t been destroyed on a whim, it had served the purpose of annihilating the group’s infrastructure and possibly all the other devices that Yoyo had transferred the data onto. On the other hand Yoyo’s bluff might have achieved the desired effect when she suggested to Zhao that she’d left her computer at the control centre. Zhao must have believed he’d solved that problem at least.

What would he do next?

The answer was obvious. He would of course ask himself the question that had been troubling him ceaselessly for days: Who had Yoyo told about her discovery, and who out of them was still alive?

I know about it, he thought, as the hot streams of water massaged the back of neck. No, wrong! I know that she’s found something out, but I don’t know what. Zhao, on the other hand, knows that I know precisely nothing. Nice and Socratic. I’m not really an accessory, I’m only a witness to a few regrettable incidents.

Only? Quite enough to get him second place on Zhao’s hit list.

On the other hand, what were the chances that Zhao planned to kill him as well? Very high, looking at it realistically, but first he might hope that Jericho, the dewy-eyed twit, would lead him to Yoyo a second time.

Jericho paused, his hair a foam sculpture.

Then why hadn’t Zhao followed him here?

Very simple. Because Yoyo had actually been able to get away! Zhao assumed she was still in Quyu. He had preferred to continue with the chase. And in any case he didn’t need to follow Jericho, since he knew exactly where he would find him.

Still. He’d gained some time.

How much?

He rinsed his hair. Black trickles ran down his chest and arms, as if new dirt were constantly emerging from his pores. A stinging pain testified to some of the grazes he’d got when he crashed in the converter hall. He wondered how Yoyo was at that moment. Probably traumatised, although her big mouth hadn’t seemed to be in a state of shock. She’d still been capable of producing a reliable torrent of insults, suggesting a certain mental balance and, at the very least, a degree of resilience. The girl, he guessed, was as tough as sharkskin.

He turned off the tap.

Zhao would show up sooner or later. It was quite possible that he was already on his way. He reached for a towel, ran, still drying himself, through the sunlit expanse of his loft, which he would have to leave again almost as soon as he’d moved in, slipped into fresh clothes, tidied his hair very slightly. Next on the agenda was the flight of Owen Jericho, Inc., which consisted of Jericho himself, Diane, and all his technical equipment. He disconnected the hard drive, a portable unit the size of a shoe-box, and stuffed it in a rucksack along with the keyboard, a foldable touchscreen surface and a transparent 20-inch display. Along with that he packed his ID card, money, his spare mobile phone, a small hard drive for backups, Yoyo’s computer, headphones and Tu’s hologoggles. He stuffed underwear and T-shirts in with it, a spare pair of trousers, slippers, shaving materials, some pens and paper. The only things left in the loft were his control console and large screen, a few bits of hardware and various built-in drives, all of which were, without Diane, as useless as prosthetic limbs without anyone to wear them. No one who managed to get in here would find a bit or a byte; they wouldn’t be able to reconstruct Jericho’s work. The flat was more or less data-free.

Without turning round again, he went outside.

In the underground car park he strapped the rucksack onto the pillion seat of the airbike and examined the bent jet. With both hands he forced it back into its position. The result didn’t look very convincing, but at least it could be adjusted now. Then he fiddled around with the tailfin, drove the bike up the ramp and, with a certain satisfaction, noticed that the sound of scraping had gone. The ball wheel was turning again. He had swapped the car for an airbike, not voluntarily, but it was still a swap.

Outside the sun poured its light down like phosphorescent milk. Jericho narrowed his eyes, but Zhao was nowhere to be seen.

Where to now?

He wouldn’t have to go far. In a city like Shanghai the best hiding-place was always right around the corner. Instead of heading for the notoriously jammed Huaihai Donglu, he took less frequented alleyways that connected Xintiandi with the Yu Gardens, to the Liuhekou Lu, known for a long time as an authentic residue of the Shanghai that had stirred the imaginations of incorrigible colonial romantics. But what, over the passing centuries, did authenticity consist of? Only what existed, the Party taught. There had been a covered market here, scattered with flower stalls, echoing with the scolding of all kinds of animals, chickens jerking their heads back and forth to demonstrate their edible freshness, crickets tapping away against the walls of jam jars and bringing consolation to their owners, whose lives were not all that different in the end. Then, three years ago, the market had made way for a handsome shikumen complex, full of bistros, internet cafés, boutiques and galleries. Diagonally opposite, a few last market stalls were asserting themselves with the defiance of old gentlemen stopping in the middle of the carriageway and threatening approaching cars with sticks until friendly fellow citizens walked them to the other side and assured them of the utter pointlessness of their actions. They too were still a piece of ‘authentic’ Shanghai. Tomorrow they would have disappeared, to make way for a new ‘authenticity’.

Jericho parked the bike two floors down in the underground car park of the complex and withdrew into the back corner of a bistro, where he ordered coffee. Although he wasn’t even slightly hungry, he also asked for a cheese baguette, bit into it, scattered crumbs on his T-shirt and trousers and noted with some satisfaction that it didn’t all come right back up again.

How far would Zhao go?

This temporary equilibrium was much more bitter than the coffee that he was gulping down. No car. No loft, because it was uninhabitable for the time being. In the sights of a hitman, with his back to the wall. No option but to run away. Forced to act, except that he didn’t think he was capable of action. There was no way back into normality, except by getting to the bottom of things. Understanding how the whole drama played out. Find out who had commissioned Zhao.

Jericho stared straight ahead.

Hang on, though! He wasn’t entirely incapable of action. Zhao might have forced him onto the defensive, but he had something the hitman didn’t know about. His secret weapon, the key to everything.

Yoyo’s computer.

He had to find out what she had discovered.

Then he would track her down again, to take her back to her father. Chen Hong-bing. Was it a good idea to call him? Tu Tian had established the contact, but in point of fact Chen was his client. The man had a right to be informed, but what would he say to him? All fine, Yoyo’s in great shape… No, honourable Chen, it isn’t the police who are after her, just a hardened hitman with a weakness for explosive devices, but hey, don’t worry, she’s still got both arms and legs and her whole face, haha! Where is she? Well, she’s on the run! Me too, see you soon.

What could he say, if he didn’t want the man to die of a heart attack?

And what if he did get the police involved? Of course he would have to give them a bit of background, not least concerning Yoyo. Which risked drawing attention to the girl. They would ask what part she’d played in the massacre, look at her data, establish that she was on file, even that she had a criminal record. Impossible. The police were out of the question, even though Zhao wasn’t a cop, regardless of what he might have told Yoyo in the control centre:

I’m trained to kill people. Like all policemen, like all soldiers, all agents.

All agents?

National security is a higher good than individual human lives.

The Secret Service, on the other hand, had already blown plenty of other things sky high, particularly when they got involved in matters of national security. Zhao could have been bluffing, but what if he actually had the blessing of the authorities?

But what about calling Tu?

That looked pretty pointless too. Jericho forced himself to think clearly. First switch on Diane. He looked around. The bistro was two-thirds full, but the tables around him were free. Here and there young people were writing on their laptops or making phone calls. He set keyboard and screen in front of him and connected both to the hard drive in the rucksack. Then he jammed in the headset earbud and linked the system to Yoyo’s computer. A symbol appeared, a crouching wolf threateningly showing its fangs. Below it appeared some text:

I’m inviting you to dinner.

Okay, then, thought Jericho.

‘Hi Diane,’ he said quietly.

‘Hi, Owen.’ Diane’s velvety timbre. The consolation of the machine. ‘How did you get on?’

‘Fucking awful.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’ How honest that sounded. Okay, then, it wasn’t dishonest. ‘Can I help?’

You could be made of flesh and blood, thought Jericho.

‘Please open the file “I’m inviting you to dinner”. You’ll find access data in Yoyofiles.’

Silence fell for two seconds. Then Diane said:

‘The file is locked four times. I’ve been able to use three of the tools successfully. I haven’t got the fourth access authorisation.’

‘Which tools worked?’

‘Iris, voice and fingerprint. All assigned to Chen Yuyun.’

‘Which one’s missing?’

‘A password, by the look of it. Shall I decipher?’

‘Do that. Have you any idea how long the decoding’s going to take you?’

‘Afraid not. At the moment I can only speculate that the coding includes several words. Or one unusually long one. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘Go online,’ said Jericho. ‘That’s it. See you later, Diane.’

‘See you later, Owen.’

He logged on to Brilliant Shit. If his assumption was correct, the Guardians’ blog was being used as a dead letter drop, and regularly checked.

Jericho to Demon, he wrote. I’ve got your computer. He added a phone number and an email address, stayed logged in and stored the blog as an icon. As soon as someone saved a message in it, Diane would let him know straight away. By now he felt a little better. He bit into his baguette, topped up his coffee and decided to contact Tu.

A call came in for him.

Jericho stared at the display. No picture, no number.

Yoyo? So quickly?

‘Hi, Owen,’ said a very familiar voice.

‘Zhao.’ Everything inside Jericho shrank to a tiny lump. He paused for a moment and tried to sound relaxed. ‘Or should I say Kenny?’

‘Kenny?’

‘Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you are! Didn’t that fat asshole call you that before he kicked the bucket?’

‘Oh, right.’ The other man laughed quietly. ‘As you wish, then – Kenny.’

‘Kenny who? Kenny Zhao Bide?’

‘Kenny’s just fine.’

‘Okay, Kenny.’ Jericho took a deep breath. ‘Then wash your ears out. Yoyo’s slipped through your fingers. I got away from you. You won’t get any further as long as one of us has a reason to feel threatened by you.’

A sigh of resignation came through the receiver.

‘I’m not threatening anybody.’

‘Yes, you are. You’re shooting people and blowing up buildings.’

‘You’ve got to look the facts in the face, Owen. You put up a decent fight, you and the girl. Admirable, but not especially clever, I’m afraid to say. If Yoyo had cooperated, everyone might still be alive.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘It was your people who started all the shooting.’

‘Not at all. They only started shooting because you’d killed Xiao Meiqi and Jin Jia Wei.’

‘That was unavoidable.’

‘Really?’

‘Yoyo would hardly have talked to me otherwise. Later I did everything in my power to avert any further bloodshed.’

‘What do you want, Kenny?’

‘What do you think I want? Yoyo, of course.’

‘To do what?’

‘To ask her what she knows and who she’s told.’

‘You—’

‘Don’t worry!’ Kenny cut in. ‘I’m not planning on killing even more people. But I’m under a certain amount of pressure, you know? Pressure to succeed. These are the times we’re living in, everyone constantly wants to see results, so what would you do in my place? Come away empty-handed?’

‘You’ve got your hands pretty full. You’ve destroyed Yoyo’s computer, and the complete infrastructure of the Guardians. Do you really think any of them wants to mess with you again?’

‘Owen,’ said Kenny in the voice of a teacher who needs to explain everything three times, ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know whether I destroyed Yoyo’s infrastructure, how many computers she transferred the data to, whether everyone she confided in died in the control centre. What about that huge bike-riding baby? What about you? Didn’t she tell you anything?’

‘We won’t get any further like this. Where are you anyway?’

Kenny paused for a moment.

‘Nice flat. Looks like you’ve done some house-clearing.’

Jericho gave a sour smile. He felt a kind of satisfaction in being proved right and having got out in good time.

‘You’ll find a cold beer in the fridge,’ he said. ‘Take it and go.’

‘I can’t do that, Owen.’

‘Why not?’

‘Haven’t you had jobs to do, like I do? Aren’t you used to taking things to their conclusion?’

‘I’ll tell you once more—’

‘Imagine the inferno if the flames should take hold of other parts of the building.’

Jericho’s mouth dried up all of a sudden.

‘What flames?’

‘The ones from your flat.’ Kenny’s voice had dropped to a whisper and he suddenly reminded Jericho of a snake: a huge talking snake stuffed into the body of a human being. ‘I’m thinking of the people, and also of you. I mean, everything here looks new and expensive. You’ve probably put all your savings into it. Wouldn’t it be terrible to lose all that at one go, just for a matter of principle, out of solidarity with some pig-headed girl?’

Jericho said nothing.

‘Can you imagine my situation any better now?’

A host of insults collected on the tip of Jericho’s tongue. Instead he said as quietly as possible, ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘That’s a weight off my mind. Really! I mean, we weren’t a bad team, Owen. Our interests are marginally different, but basically we want the same thing in the end.’

‘And now?’

‘Just tell me where Yoyo is.’

‘I don’t know.’

Kenny seemed to think about it.

‘Good. I believe you. So you’ll have to track her down for me.’

Track her down—

Good God! What sort of bloody idiot was he? He didn’t know what tricks the hitman had up his sleeve, but doubtless everything he said was designed to drag the conversation out. Kenny was trying to track him down. To locate him.

Without hesitation, Jericho hung up.

Less than a minute later his phone lit up again.

‘I give you two hours,’ hissed Kenny. ‘Not a minute longer. Then I want to hear something that will put my mind at rest, otherwise I’ll consider myself forced to undertake a radical restructuring of the building.’

Two hours.

What was Jericho supposed to do in two hours?

He hastily bundled the display and the keyboard back into his backpack, put a banknote on the table and left the bistro without a backwards glance. He strode towards the lift, took it down to the underground garage, climbed onto his bike and brought it out onto Liuhekou Lu, where he started the engine and flew towards the river. During the short flight a bulky ambulance hovered below him, big enough for him to land on. In the distance he saw an armada of unmanned fire-engines making for the hinterland of Pudong. Private skymobiles crossed his path, pleasure-blimps bobbed above the Huangpu. For a moment he considered flying to the WFC and looking up Tu, but it was too early for that. He would need peace to carry out his plan, and he had to have somewhere to stay, for as long as Kenny robbed him of the warmth and security of Xintiadi.

And he knew where.

Looming over the grand buildings of the Bund was one of the most peculiar hotels in Shanghai. Like a huge lotus blossom, China’s symbol of growth and affluence, the roof of the Westin Shanghai Bund Center opened itself up to the sky. It made some people think of an agave, others of an outsize octopus extending its tentacles to filter birds and skymobiles out of the air. Jericho saw it only as a refuge whose manager played in the same golf club as himself and Tu Tian. A casual acquaintance without the bonus of familiarity, but Tu liked the man, and tended to use the hotel as accommodation for business partners too lowly for the WFC and the Jin Mao Tower. Jericho was also granted the indulgence of special conditions, a favour that he had so far never called on. Now, since he felt little desire to wander nomadically from bistro to bistro, he decided to make use of it. After he had landed his bike by the front entrance, he stepped into the lobby and asked for a single room. The cameras set into the wall scanned him and passed the relevant information on to the receptionist. She smilingly greeted him by name, a sign that he was already on their files, and asked him to set his phone down on the touchscreen. The hotel computer compared Jericho’s ID with the database, authorised the reservation and uploaded the access code to Jericho’s hard drive.

‘Would you like us to take your car to the underground car park?’ the woman asked, and performed the trick of speaking with a smile even though her lips never met.

‘I’ve come on an airbike,’ said Jericho.

‘We’ve got a landing bay, as I’m sure you know,’ said the smile fixed to the corners of the receptionist’s mouth. ‘Do you want us to park your bike there for you?’

‘No, I’ll do that myself.’ He grinned. ‘Quite honestly, I need every hour of flying time I can get.’

‘Oh, I understand.’ The smile switched from routine politeness to routine cordiality. ‘Safe journey up there. Don’t forget, the hotel façade can take more knocks than you can.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

He left the lobby and flew his bike up along the glazed outside wall, constantly accompanied by his reflection. For the first time he became aware that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, as the regulations for airbikes demanded. Another reason to keep away from the police. If they found out that the bike wasn’t registered to him, it was going to be a tough thing to explain.

The landing pad was open and almost empty, aside from the hotel’s own shuttles. Nearly all twentieth-century visions of the future had assumed some form of private urban air traffic powered by lightbeams, taking it for granted that aerial traffic would shape the face of cities. In fact, the number of such skymobiles was tiny, and they were restricted to State and city institutions, a few exclusive taxi companies and millionaires like Tu Tian. In purely infrastructural terms, of course, there were good reasons for lightening ground traffic by exploiting the airborne variety, except that all these considerations faced a great Godzilla of a counter-argument: fuel consumption. To counteract the force of gravity you needed powerful turbines and a whole load of energy. The economical alternative, the gyrocopter, spiralled its way into the air by rotor power like a helicopter, but had the disadvantage of excessively massive rotor blades. Financially, the expense of making cars fly was entirely disproportionate to the effect, and airbikes, even though they were more economical and affordable, weren’t really an exception to that. They were still expensive enough to make Jericho wonder who could afford to supply a hitman with three – especially customised models. The police, chronically underfunded? Hardly. Secret services? More likely. The army?

Was Kenny a soldier? Was the army behind all this?

With his backpack over his shoulder, Jericho took the lift to his floor and held his phone up to the infrared port beside the door to his room. It swung open, revealing a view of the room behind it. Fussy and staid, was his first impression. All in great condition, but stylistically nowhere. Jericho didn’t care. Within a few minutes he had freed Diane from her backpack and connected her up. That made this room his new investigation agency.

Would Kenny set the loft on fire?

Jericho rubbed his temples. He wouldn’t be surprised, but on the other hand he doubted that the hitman would wait in Xintiandi until he called. Kenny would try to arrest Yoyo on his own initiative, probably aware that Jericho wasn’t automatically prepared for collaboration just because he was waving a box of matches around.

‘Diane?’

‘I’m here, Owen.’

‘How’s the search for the password going?’

It was a stupid question. As long as Diane registered no success, he didn’t need to worry about where things went from here. But talking to the computer made him feel as if he was in charge of a little team that was doing everything in its power.

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ said Diane.

Jericho gave a start. Was that humour? Not bad. He lay down on the huge bed with its gaudy yellow cover and felt terribly tired and useless. Owen Jericho, cyber-detective. Hilarious. He had been supposed to find Yoyo, and instead he’d put a psychopath on her trail. How in God’s name would he explain that to Tu, let alone to Chen Hongbing?

‘Owen?’

‘Diane?’

‘Someone’s uploading a post to Brilliant Shit.’

Jericho jolted upright.

‘Read it to me.’

At first he was disappointed. It was a list of coordinates, with no sender or any kind of accompanying text. Time, input code, nothing else.

An address in Second Life.

Did it come from Yoyo?

With leaden head and arms, he pulled himself upright, walked over to the little desk where he’d put his screen and keyboard, and took a look at the short text. At length he found a single letter that he’d probably overlooked: a D.

Demon.

Jericho took a look at his watch. Just after eleven. At twelve o’clock Yoyo was waiting for him in the virtual world. As long as the message really did come from her and wasn’t another attempt by Kenny to locate him. Had he given away the address of the blog to the hitman? Not as far as he remembered. Kenny surely couldn’t be so cunning as to turn up all of a sudden in Brilliant Shit as well, but caution was plainly advised. Jericho decided not to take a risk. From now on he would put any online communication through the anonymiser.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

There was nothing he could do.

After a few minutes the turbulent sea of his nerves was calm once more. He dozed off, but he didn’t sink into a relaxing sleep. Just below the surface of his consciousness, he was haunted by images of creeping torsos that weren’t human beings, but failed designs of human beings, grotesquely distorted and incomplete, covered with blood and mucus like newborn babies. He saw legless creatures, their faces nothing but smooth, gleaming surfaces, split down the middle by obscenely twitching pink openings. Half-charred lumps teetered towards him like spiders on a thousand legs or more. Eyes and mouths suddenly opened up in a scab of shapeless tissue. Something blind stretched towards him, darting a gnarled tongue between fanged jaws, and yet Jericho felt no fear, just a weary sadness, since he knew that in another life all these monstrosities had been as human as he was himself.

Then he fell, and found himself back on a bed, but it was a different bed from the one on which he had lain down. Dark and damp, lit by feeble moonlight that fell through a dirty window and outlined the bleak, bare room where he had ended up, it seemed to exert a curious power over him. Lucidly dreaming, he realised that he must be in his comfortable, boringly furnished room, but he couldn’t sit up and open his eyes. He was bound to this rotting mattress as if by magnetic force, swathed in weird, dry silence.

And in the midst of that silence he suddenly heard the click of chitin-armoured legs.

Jagged feet scratched at the edges of the bedcover, snagged in the fabric and drew fat, segmented bodies up to him. A wave of anxiety washed over him. His horror was due less to the question of what the armoured creatures wanted to do to him, than to the most terrible of all realisations: that a perfidious dream had slung him back into the past, to a phase of his life that he thought he had long since overcome. His rise through society in Shanghai, the peace that he had made with Joanna, his arrival in Xintiandi, it was all revealed as a fantasy, the real dream, from which the invisible insects were now waking him with their rustles and clicks.

Close beside him, someone had begun to whimper, in high, singing tones. Everything sank back into darkness, because the fact that his eyes were closed was starting to defeat the vision of that terrifying room. His mind found its way back to reality, except that nobody seemed to have told his body. It didn’t respond, it wouldn’t move. He was starting to fight against that weird rigidity by emitting those whimpers, real sounds that anyone who had been in the room could have heard as clearly as he did himself, and finally, by summoning all his powers, he managed to move the little finger of his left hand. He was wide awake by now. He remembered stories about people who – having apparently passed away – had been carried to the grave, while they actually saw every moment with crystal clarity, and without the slightest chance of being able to attract anyone’s attention, and he whimpered still louder in his panic and despair.

It was Diane who rescued him.

‘Owen, I’ve cracked Yoyo’s password.’

A twitch ran through his paralysed body. Jericho sat up. The computer’s voice had broken the spell, dream images gurgled away down the drain of oblivion. He took a few deep breaths before asking:

‘What was it?’

‘Eat me and I’ll eat you alive.’

My God, Yoyo, he thought. How overdramatic. At the same time he was grateful that she had clearly chosen the access code in a fit of rebellious romanticism, rather than opting for the more secure variation of a random sequence of letters and digits, which would have been much harder to decode.

‘Download the content,’ he said.

‘I’ve done it.’

‘Save it in Yoyofiles.’

‘With pleasure.’

Jericho sighed. How was he going to wean Diane off her habit of saying With pleasure? Much as he liked her voice, her tone, the words bothered him more each time. There was something servile about it that he found repulsive. He rubbed his eyes and squatted on the edge of the desk chair, his eyes fixed on the monitor.

‘Diane?’

‘Yes, Owen?’

‘Can you— I mean, would it be possible for you to delete the phrase With pleasure from your vocabulary?’

‘What do you mean exactly? With pleasure? Or the phrase with pleasure?’

‘With pleasure.’

‘I can offer to suppress the phrase for you.’

‘Great idea. Do that!’

He almost expected the computer to grant his wish with another With pleasure, but Diane just said silkily, ‘Done.’

And how amazingly simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it years ago? ‘Show me all the downloads in Yoyofiles from May of this year, sorted by time of day.’

A short list appeared on the screen, totalling about two dozen entries. Jericho skimmed them and concentrated his attention on the time leading up to Yoyo’s escape.

There was something.

His weariness fled instantly. About half an hour before Yoyo left her flatshare, data had been transferred to her computer, two files in different formats. He asked Diane to open one of them. It was a shimmering symbol of intertwined lines. It pulsed as if it were breathing. Jericho took a closer look.

Snakes?

It actually did look like a nest of snakes. Snakes twining into a kind of reptilian eye. It seemed to rest in the centre of a body, from which the snake bodies emerged: a single, surreal-looking creature that somehow reminded Jericho of school visits.

Where did snakes go creeping around all over the place in mythology?

He looked at the second file.

Jericho rubbed his chin.

You didn’t have to be particularly intelligent to understand what it meant. Three websites were to be exchanged. He wondered how Yoyo had got hold of the data. He asked Diane to open the three pages at the top, one by one, all of which were innocuous and generally accessible pages. friends-of-iceland was a blog. In it, Scots emigrants to Iceland swapped experiences, provided useful tips to new arrivals and those who were thinking of emigrating, and put photographs on the net. en-mediode-la-suiza was also devoted to the charms of living abroad. Produced in Spain, the page provided a great deal of visual material about Switzerland, in the form of 3D films. Jericho looked at some of them. They had been filmed from a plane or helicopter. At a low altitude he flew over Zürich, landscapes of the canton of Uri and picturesque collections of houses and barns that lay scattered along a winding river.

Brainlab.de/Quantengravitationstheorie/Planck/uni-kassel/32241/html, finally, came from Germany and consisted of closely typed lines of text, examining over twelve pages a phenomenon that physics described as ‘quantum foam’. It described what happened if you applied quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity to the so-called Planck length, which gave you foaming space–time bubbles and at the same time a scientific dilemma, because those bubbles overrode the calculations of General Relativity. The text was remarkable for its lack of paragraphs, and was plainly written for people whose notion of ecstasy involved a blackboard scribbled all over with formulas.

Scotland, Spain, Germany. The joys of Iceland. The beauty of Switzerland. Quantum physics.

Hardly designed to provoke fear and horror.

Curious, he called up the websites that were supposed to be swapped. Vanessa Craig was revealed as a student of agricultural science from Dallas, Texas, who was spending a few months on an exchange programme in Russia. In her online diary she wrote quite unexcitingly about her little university town near Moscow. She was homesick and lovesick and complained of the low temperatures responsible for the innate melancholy of the Russian soul. Behind Hoteconomics, an American website offering up-to-the-minute economy news, was Littlewonder, an Austrian portal for handmade toys, specialising in the needs of pre-school children.

What was all this? What did travel reports, toys, quantum physics, the global economy and the notes of a shivering American have in common?

Nothing.

And that was precisely the quality required by dead letter drops. You walked by, looked at them without suspecting for a moment that they might contain something other than what they actually contained. Yoyo must have found their common properties. Something you couldn’t see, but was still there. Again Jericho opened the Spanish address with the film clips from Switzerland, clicked on the snake symbol and moved it aside.

Nothing happened. As if pulled by elastic bands, it darted back into the empty space of the display.

‘Weird,’ Jericho murmured. ‘I could have sworn—’

That it’s a mask.

A mask to reveal hidden content in the apparently harmless context of the pages. A decoding program. Again he dragged it onto the Spanish website, and again it slipped away.

‘Okay then, friends of Iceland. Let’s see what you have to offer.’

And this time it happened.

The moment he dragged the snake symbol to the blog, an extra window opened. It contained a few apparently unconnected words, but his instinct hadn’t failed him.

‘I knew it! I knew it!’

Jericho clenched his fists. Excited now, he went to work. The snake icon was a key. Anyone who had concealed messages in the pages was using a special algorithm, and the parameters for that algorithm lay in the mask. He opened the page with the essay about quantum foam and repeated the procedure. Further words were added to the fragment:

There are? Whatever there were, this stuff here was far more likely to alarm somebody who was the focus of State surveillance! What looked at first glance like sheer Dadaism was really part of a larger message, the text of which had been sent to an unknown number of mailboxes.

Dead letter drops existed wherever states and institutions spied on one another and agents had to avoid being seen together, Jericho thought. During the Cold War they had been the most common form of message transmission. Almost anything at all could be used: rubbish bins, holes in trees, cracks in masonry, public phone books, magazines in waiting rooms, vases and sugar bowls in restaurants, the cisterns in public lavatories. The drop was a place accessible to anyone, where you left something that anybody might see, but which only the initiated recognised as a message. Transmitter and receiver agreed on a period of time, the transmitter deposited what he wanted to pass on – documents, microfilms, demands for cash, journalistically controversial material – left a sign at an agreed place that something was waiting in the drop, and disappeared. A little later the receiver came along, picked up the transmission, left a sign of his own that it had been collected, and also went on his way. The system worked as long as the physical exchange of hardware was involved. Since encrypted messages were now passed on via the internet, they had fallen out of fashion, and were reserved for cases where the information to be passed on could not, with the best will in the world, be transmitted down a fibre-optic cable.

At least that was what people said.

In fact the drop was celebrating an unparallelled renaissance, particularly where electronic encryption was forbidden or if there was a risk that the net police had been given a spare key. The new drops were harmless files and websites that anyone could access. What they contained was unremarkable as long as the content was suited to the transmission of the message. A sentence consisting of twelve words could be broken down into twelve parts and distributed across twelve websites. Word one, The, could appear in the second line of a travel piece, word two in the sixth line of the third paragraph of a specialist scientific article, and where it was absolutely imperative that a word should not appear, it was broken down into individual letters that could be found anywhere.

However, no one could do anything with the files while they weren’t in possession of a key that separated the words or letters from their contexts and combined them to form a new, secret meaning, a mask, like the kind used in former times, when the Bible or the works of Tolstoy were made to reveal the most incredible content simply by placing a sheet of variously perforated cardboard over a particular page. The matter that appeared in the holes produced the message. In the world of the World Wide Web that mask was a program. Parts of such a program had clearly made their way onto Yoyo’s computer, along with an indication that three drops had been replaced by three different ones. Jericho had no idea how many drops were involved overall. It could be dozens, hundreds. Clearly, other addresses were needed for the meaning of the message to be revealed, but Jericho was beginning to understand why Yoyo must have become convinced that she had kicked a hornets’ nest.

Jan in Andre runs business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, 10117 Berlin.

Who could that be? Someone called Jan or Andre, perhaps even a woman – Jan in: Janine? Could you run a business address? Unfortunate choice of words. Something was missing, although the address seemed to be complete.

continues a grave that he knows all about One way or another

Something was continuing, and someone knew about it.

that he knows all about

He? Not a woman, then? Jan in Andre. Was that one continuous name? Now the controversial bit:

statement coup Chinese government

Here Yoyo’s eyes must have popped out of her head. The Chinese government, mentioned in the same breath as the idea of a coup. A person who had knowledge of it, possibly to the cost of the people undertaking the coup. Who or what was to be overthrown? The government in Beijing? Were there plans for a coup in parliament, amongst the military, abroad? Hard to imagine? It was more likely that the statement referred to a coup in another country, and that the Chinese government was involved in it. A coup that had succeeded or failed, or else was still to come.

Was there anyone who could have blown the cover on Beijing’s role?

implemented of timing and Donner be liquidated

Gobbledygook apart from one word: liquidated. Liquidate Donner? Donner and Blitzen? Donner kebab? Hardly. As everywhere throughout the fragment, crucial passages were missing here too. The text might have been completed with a few words, but it might equally have been hundreds of pages long, and everything that Jericho thought he was reading into it might prove to be erroneous. But if that wasn’t the case, a murder was being reported, announced or at least recommended here.

He studied the text once more.

timing. This was about a sequence of events. A sequence of events that was under threat? Yoyo must have assembled the puzzle just as he had, reached similar conclusions and immediately gone into hiding as if the devil were on her tail. And it was perfectly possible to see the Chinese State security service in that light. And yet her escape didn’t really make sense. She had been working with controversial material for years. The fragment should surely have aroused her curiosity, stirred her enthusiasm, and instead it had thrown her into a panic.

Had it? Or had she hurried enthusiastically to Quyu, to round up the Guardians and start doing background research in the shelter of the control centre?

No, that would have been absurd. She wouldn’t have left her father without a word. There could have been only one reason, that she was worried about putting him and herself in danger by making too close contact. Because she assumed that she was under surveillance. More than that! That night she must have had cause to worry that her enemies would be outside the door in a few minutes, because she had broken into their secret information channels and been noticed.

They had detected Yoyo.

Jericho called to mind her piece on Brilliant Shit, had Diane load the text and read it again:

No one victorious would write like that. It was a cry for help from someone losing control. When she was uploading the web addresses and the mask, she must have realised that she’d been located. That was why she had left so quickly.

He studied the fragment again.

‘Diane, find 50 Oranienburger Strasse, 10117 Berlin.’

The reply came in an instant. Jericho looked at his watch. Two minutes to twelve. He connected the hologoggles to the computer, logged on and chose the coordinates entered by Yoyo.

The Second World

Since the middle of the last decade, when Second Life had been restructured after its predictable collapse, there was no longer a central hub, any more than the space–time continuum had a real centre, just an infinite number of observation points, each of which created the illusion of being the centre, the way an earth-dweller felt that his location was fixed and the whole cosmos was something spinning around him, moving away from him or towards him. An astronaut on the Moon and every creature in the universe felt exactly the same, wherever they happened to be. In the real universe, the totality of all particles was interlinked, which meant that every particle was able to occupy its relative centre.

Similarly, Second Life had turned into a peer-to-peer network, an almost infinite, decentralised and self-organising system in which every server – like a planet – formed a hub, which was connected by a random number of interfaces with every other hub. Each participant was automatically a host and a user of the worlds of others. How many planets Second Life comprised, who inhabited or controlled them, was unknown. Of course there were lists, cybernetic maps, well-known travel routes and records that made it possible to realise oneself in the virtual world in the first place, just as the outside universe was subject to physical boundary conditions. Within these standards, avatars travelled to all the places on the web that were known to them, and to which they were granted access. But there was no longer anyone who was familiar with everything.

Jericho would have expected to land at such an unknown place, but Yoyo’s coordinates led to a public hub. Almost every metropolis in the real world had been virtually copied by now, so he travelled from Shanghai to Shanghai, to find himself back in the People’s Square, or at any rate in a nearly identical copy of it. Unlike the real Shanghai, there were no traffic jams and beyond the city boundaries no districts like Quyu. On the other hand new edifices were constantly going up, staying for a while, changing or disappearing with the speed of a mouse-click.

The builder and owner of Cyber-Shanghai was the Chinese government, and it was financed by both Chinese and foreign companies. The Party also maintained a second Beijing, a second Hong Kong and a virtual Chongqing. Like all net cities based on real models, the charm of the depiction lay in the relationship between authenticity and idealism. It could hardly come as a surprise that more Americans lived in Cyber-Shanghai than Chinese, and that most Chinese-looking avatars were bots, machines disguised as living creatures. In turn, some Chinese had second homes in Cyber-New York, in virtual Paris or Berlin. French and Spanish people tended to live in Marrakech, Istanbul and Baghdad, Germans and the Irish liked Rome, the British were drawn to New Delhi and Cape Town and Indians to London. Anyone who dreamed of living in New York and couldn’t afford it found an affordable and entirely authentic Big Apple on the net, only wilder, more progressive and even a bit more interesting than the original. People doing business in virtual Paris didn’t seek seclusion, but were interested in as many interfaces with the real world as possible. BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other car manufacturers didn’t sell fantasy constructs in the cyber-cities, but prototypes of what they actually planned to build.

Basically net cities were nothing but colossal experimental labs in which no one thought twice of travelling by spaceship rather than by ship, as long as the Statue of Liberty stood where it belonged. The owners, meaning the countries in question, were opening another chapter in globalisation here, but above all they were remodelling the world of human beings in a peculiar way. Crime and terrorism did exist in the virtual New York, buildings were destroyed by data attack, avatars were sexually molested, there were muggings, break-ins, grievous bodily harm and rape, you could be imprisoned or exiled. There was only one thing that didn’t exist:

Poverty.

What was produced on the net was by no means an illustration of society. You could fall ill here. Hackers planted cyber-plagues and scattered viruses. You could have an accident or simply not feel so great, or become addicted to something. In times of ultra-thin sensor skins that you slipped into in order to feel the illusion of perfect graphics on your body as well, cyber-sex was a great source of income and expenditure. Compulsive gaming flourished, avatars suffered from morbid fears like claustrophobia, agoraphobia and arachnophobia. But far and wide there was no hint of overpopulation. The poor as a source of all evil had been identified and removed from human perception. Networked people could afford a Mumbai or a Rio de Janeiro that was constantly growing, with no impoverishment involved, because bits and bytes were an abundant resource. Even natural disasters had haunted the cybercities – anyone who lived in Tokyo expected an authentic little earthquake from time to time.

But there were no slums.

The representation of the world as it could be became the world itself, with all the light and shade of real existence – and demonstrated who was responsible for global abuse. Not capitalism, not the industrial societies that supposedly didn’t want to share. With empirical ruthlessness the virtual experiment identified the guilty as those who had the least. The army of the poor in Quyu, in the Brazilian favelas, the Turkish gecekondular, the megaslums of Mumbai and Nairobi, billions of people who lived on less than a dollar a day – in cyberspace they weren’t isolated and locked away, not exploited in the class-war, not the object of Third World summits, development aid, pangs of conscience and denial, they weren’t even hate objects.

They simply didn’t exist.

And suddenly everything worked smoothly. So where did the problem lie? Who was responsible for the lack of space, overexploitation, environmental pollution, since the virtual universe worked so wonderfully well without poverty? It was the poor. No point stressing the impossibility of comparing the two systems, the carbon-based and the hard-drive-based. With the naïve cynicism of the philosopher who sees overpopulation as the root of all human evil, and stops listening as soon as consequences are discussed, representatives of the net community pointed out that there were no poor here. Not because someone had cut funds, knocked down slums or even killed millions. They had simply never appeared. Second Life showed what the world looked like without them, and it certainly looked considerably better, honi soit qui mal y pense.

Of course there were other things that didn’t exist in virtual Shanghai. There was no smog, for example, which always unsettled Jericho. Precisely because simulation took human visual habits into account, the lack of the permanent haze completely altered the overall impression.

He looked around and waited.

Avatars and bots of all kinds were on the move, many flying or floating along above the ground. Hardly anyone was walking. Walking in Second Life enjoyed a certain popularity, but more on short journeys. It was only in rurally programmed worlds that you encountered hikers, who could walk for hours. There was swiftly flowing traffic even above the highest buildings. Here too, the programmed Shanghai differed from the real one. On the net the vision of an air-propelled infrastructure had become reality.

Noisy and gesticulating, a group of extraterrestrial immigrants was heading towards Shanghai Art Museum. Recently reptiloids from Canis Major had been turning up in increasing numbers. No one really had much idea who was in charge of them. They were considered mysterious and uncouth, but they did successful business with new technologies for heightening sensitivity. Cyber-Shanghai was entirely controlled by State security which, with a great deal of trouble and the use of a number of bots, kept the huge cybercities under control. Possibly the reptiloids were just a few tolerated hackers, but they might equally have been disguised officers from Cypol. By now extraterrestrials were staggering around all the net metropolises, which hugely extended the possibilities of trade. As a general rule, software companies lay behind these, taking into account the fact that virtual universes had to offer constantly new attractions. The astral light-forms from Aldebaran, for example, with which you could temporarily merge in order to enjoy unimagined sound experiences, had by now been unmasked as representatives of IBM.

Jericho wondered what form Yoyo would appear in.

After a minute or so he glimpsed an elegant, French-looking woman with big dark eyes and a black pageboy cut crossing the square towards him. She was wearing an emerald-green trouser suit and stilettos. To Jericho she looked like a character out of a Hollywood film from the sixties in which Frenchwomen looked the way American directors imagined them. Jericho, who had several identities in Second Life, had appeared as himself, so that the woman recognised him straight away. She stopped right in front of him, looked at him seriously and held out her open right hand.

‘Yoyo?’ he asked.

She put her finger to her lips, took his hand and pulled him after her. She stopped by one of the flower stalls near the entrance to the metro, let go of his hand and opened a tiny handkerchief. The head of a lizard, the same emerald green as her outfit, peeped out from it. The creature’s golden eyes fastened on Jericho. Then the slender body darted upwards, landed on the ground at their feet and wriggled along the floral carpet, where it paused and looked round at them, as if to check that they were following it.

A moment later a transparent sphere about three metres in diameter was floating closely above her. The lizard turned around and darted a forked tongue.

‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘Before we—’

The woman drew him to her and gave him a shove. The impetus propelled him straight into the inside of the sphere. He sank into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, as far as he remembered, or at least the sphere had looked completely empty from outside. She jumped after him, sat down beside him and crossed her legs. Jericho saw the lizard looking up at them through the transparent floor.

Then it had disappeared. In its place an illuminated and apparently bottomless shaft had opened up.

‘’ave you a strong estomac?’ The woman smiled. She sounded so French that a real French person would have been horrified.

Jericho shrugged. ‘Depends what—’

‘Good.’

The sphere plunged down the shaft like a stone.

The illusion was so real that all of Jericho’s skin, muscle and brain vessels suddenly contracted and adrenalin pumped violently into his bloodstream. His pulse and heartbeat quickened. For a moment he was actually glad not to have burdened his stomach with a generous breakfast.

‘Just shut you’ eyes if you don’t bear it,’ twittered his companion, as if he had complained about something. Jericho looked at her. She was still smiling, a mischievous smile, he thought.

‘Thanks, I like it.’

The surprise effect had fled. From now on he could choose which standpoint to emphasise. That of sitting in a hotel room watching a well-made film, or actually experiencing all this. Had he been wearing a sensor skin the choice would have been difficult, almost impossible. The skins erased all distance from the artificial world, while he was wearing only glasses and gloves. The rest of his equipment had stayed in Xintiandi.

‘Some people ’ave an injection,’ the Frenchwoman said calmly. ‘’ave you been once in a tank?’

Jericho nodded. In the bigger branches of Cyber Planet, which were visited by the more affluent customers, there were tanks filled with cooking salt solution, in which you floated weightlessly, dressed in a sensor skin. Your eyes were protected by 3D glasses, you breathed through tiny tubes that you were barely aware of. Conditions in which you experienced virtuality in such a way that reality afterwards seemed shabby, artificial and irritating.

‘A tiny little injection,’ the woman continued, ‘into the corners of your eyes. It paralyse the lids. The eyes are moistened, but you cannot any more close them. You have to watch everything. C’est pour les masochistes.’

It’s far worse having to listen to everything, Jericho thought. For instance, your ridiculous accent. He wondered how he knew the woman. She must have come from some film or other.

‘Where are we actually going, Yoyo?’ he asked, even though he had guessed. This connection was a wormhole: it led out of the monitored world of cybernetic Shanghai into a region that was probably unknown to the Internet Police. Lights darted past, a crazy flickering. The sphere started to turn. Jericho looked between his feet through the transparent floor and saw an end to the shaft, except that it seemed to be widening.

‘Yo Yo?’ She laughed a tinkling laugh. ‘I am not Yo Yo. Le violà!’

A moment later they were floating under a pulsating starry sky. Rotating slowly before their eyes was a shimmering structure that looked like a spiral galaxy and yet could have been something completely different. It seemed to Jericho like something alive. He leaned forward, but they spent only a few seconds in this majestic continuum before shooting into the middle of a conduit of light.

And floated again.

This time he knew they had reached their goal.

‘Impressed?’ asked the woman.

Jericho said nothing. Miles below them stretched a boundless blue-green ocean. Tiny clouds drifted close above the surface, their backs sprinkled with pink and orange. The sphere sank towards something big that drifted high above the clouds, something with a mountain and wooded slopes, waterfalls, meadows and beaches. Jericho glimpsed swarms of flying creatures. Colossal beasts grazed on the banks of a glittering river, which snaked around the volcanic peak and flowed into the sea—

No, not flowed.

Fell!

In a great banner of foam the water plunged over the edge of the flying island and scattered into the bluish green of the ocean. The closer they came, the more it looked to Jericho like a gigantic UFO. He threw his head back and saw two suns shining in the sky, one emitting a white light, the other bathed in a strange, turquoise aura. Their vehicle fell faster, braked and followed the course of the river. Jericho caught a swift glimpse of the enormous animals – they weren’t like anything he had ever seen before. Then they darted off over gently undulating fields, beyond which the terrain fell to a snow-white beach.

‘You will be picked up once more,’ said the Frenchwoman, with a little wave. The sphere disappeared, as did she, and Jericho found himself squatting in the sand.

‘I’m here,’ said Yoyo.

He raised his head and saw her coming towards him, barefoot, her slender body swathed in a short, shiny tunic. Her avatar was the perfect depiction of her, which somehow relieved him. After that fanciful copy of Irma la Douce he’d worried—

That was it! The Frenchwoman had reminded him of a character in a film, and now he knew at last who it was. She was the perfect re-creation of Shirley MacLaine in her role as Irma la Douce. An ancient flick, sixty or seventy years old. That Jericho knew it at all was down to his passion for twentieth-century cinema.

Yoyo looked at him in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘Is it true about Grand Cherokee?’

‘What?’

‘That you killed him.’

Jericho shook his head.

‘It’s only true that he’s dead. Kenny killed him.’

‘Kenny?’

‘The man who murdered your friends too.’

‘I don’t know if I can trust you.’

She came up to him and fixed him with her dark eyes. ‘You saved me in the steelworks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, or does it?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not necessarily.’

She nodded. ‘Let’s walk for a while.’

Jericho looked around. He didn’t know what to make of it all. Filigree creatures were landing a little way off, neither birds nor insects. They reminded him of flying plants, if anything. He tore his eyes away and together they strolled along the beach.

‘We came across the ocean when we were looking around the net for safe hiding-places,’ Yoyo explained. ‘Pure chance. Perhaps we should have moved here with the control centre straight away, but I wasn’t entirely sure if we’d really be undisturbed here.’

‘So you didn’t program this world?’ asked Jericho.

‘The island, yes. Everything else was here. Ocean, sky and clouds, weird animals in the water, which sometimes come right close to the surface. The two suns go up and down, slightly out of sync. There’s also land. So far we’ve only seen some in the distance.’

‘Someone must have made all this.’

‘You think so?’

‘There’s a server with the data stored on it.’

‘We haven’t been able to identify it so far. I’m inclined to think there’s a whole network involved.’

‘Possibly a government network,’ Jericho speculated.

‘Hardly.’

‘How can you be sure of that? I mean, what’s going on here? In whose interest is it to create a world like this? For what purpose?’

‘An end in itself, perhaps.’ She shrugged. ‘Nobody today is capable of grasping Second Life as a whole. Over the past few years tools have been produced in vast numbers, and they’re constantly being modified. Everyone builds his own world. Most of it’s rubbish, some of it’s incredibly brilliant. You can get in here, not there. In general they adhere to the rule that everyone can see what other people see, but I’m not sure even that’s true. In some regions they have completely alien algorithms.’

Jericho had stepped close to the edge. Where water should have played on the beach, the strand fell vertiginously away. Far below them the light of the suns scattered on the rippled surface of the ocean.

‘You mean, this world was made by bots?’

‘I’m not the sort of idiot who makes a new religion out of disk space.’ Yoyo stepped up next to him. ‘But what I think is that artificial intelligence is starting to penetrate the web in a way that its creators couldn’t have imagined. Computers are creating computers. Second Life has reached a stage whereby it’s developing out of its own impulses. Adaptation and selection, you understand? No one can say when that started, and no one has any idea where it’s going to end. What’s happening is the consistent continuation of evolution with other means. Cybernetic Darwinism.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘What I said. Chance. We were looking for a bugproof corner. I thought it was hopelessly old-fashioned, squatting like migrant workers in the Andromeda or the steelworks, where Cypol could walk through the door at any time. Okay, they can kick in your door on the net as well. If you encrypt, you’re finished, you might as well just invite them to arrest you. We communicated via blogs, with data distortion and anonymisation. But even that didn’t do it. So I thought, let’s move to Second Life. There they can go searching for you like mad, but they don’t know what they’re looking for. All their ontologies and taxonomies don’t work here.’

Jericho nodded. Second Life was an ideal hiding-place, if you wanted to escape State surveillance. Virtual worlds were far more complicated in their construction and more difficult to control than simple blogs or chat-rooms. There was a difference between putting textual building blocks in a suspicious context and drawing conclusions about conspiracies and dodgy attitudes from the gestures, facial expressions, appearance and environments of virtual people. In Second Life everything and everyone can be code, whether friend or foe.

It was only logical that no single organisation in China had as many staff as the State internet surveillance authority. Cypol tried to penetrate every area of the virtual cosmos, and it was no more able to do that than the regular police were able to infiltrate the population in the real world. In spite of their massive apparatus they lacked the human staff required to keep countless millions of users under observation. Cypol relied on destabilisation. Not everyone in Second Life was a government agent by any means, but they could be: the sharp businesswoman, the friendly banker, the stripper, the willing sex partner, the alien and the winged dragon, the robot and the DJ, even a tree, a guitar or a whole building. As an additional consequence of chronic staff shortage, the government worked with great armies of bots, avatars that were guided not by human beings, but by machines pretending to be human beings.

By now there were highly refined bot programs. Every now and again, in the course of his Second Life missions, Jericho allowed Diane to take virtual form, and she appeared as a tiny, fluttering elf, white, androgynous, with insect-like, black eyes and transparent dragonfly wings. She might equally well have appeared as a seductive woman and turned the heads of real guys who didn’t notice that they were flirting with a computer. At moments like that Diane became a bot that you could only track down using the Turing test, a procedure that no machine was capable of performing, even in 2025. Anyone could carry out the test. It involved engaging a machine in dialogue long enough for it to reveal its cognitive limitations and out itself as a refined but ultimately stupid program.

And herein lay the problem of bot agents. Without genuine intelligence and capacity for abstraction, they were hardly capable of unmasking the behaviour and appearance of virtual people as codes. Small wonder, then, that Yoyo and her Guardians had focused their attention on Second Life: since the decentralised structure of the peer-to-peer network was ideally suited to the creation of hidden spaces, it was extremely hard to identify senders and receivers of data, and the number of worlds tended towards infinity. In fact, only the itineraries of the data between the servers could be reconstructed.

Servers themselves worked with many electronic doorkeepers. Anyone who visited a server and was allowed in was subject to the control of the webmaster in question, while visitors to the server couldn’t check one another if they didn’t have the requisite authorisation.

The webmaster of Cyber-Shanghai was Beijing. If Jericho had had an investigation centre in the virtual metropolis, he would have been a tenant of the Chinese government, which meant that the authorities would be able to knock at his door and turn his electronic office on its head with a search warrant (although to do that they would have needed judicial permission, which the Chinese were reluctant to grant). That was the only reason Jericho had never considered moving his office there.

He looked out at the bluish-green expanse.

Was it possible that this world had actually been created by a bot network? If computers developed something like aesthetic aspirations, they were copied from those of human beings, while at the same time being unsettlingly alien.

‘And is the island safe?’

Yoyo nodded. ‘We’ve drilled into cyberspace at every available point to build our own planets, in such a way that not everyone can get there. Jia Wei’ – she hesitated – ‘has calculated millions of simultaneous possibilities. That included modifying the protocol. Not significantly, just in such a way that the uninitiated end up in a jumble of data if they don’t have the right key. No idea how many variations we tried out, we generated them at random because we thought it was a new idea. Instead we ended up here.’

‘And the protocol is—’

‘A little green lizard.’

Yoyo smiled. It was the same sad smile that he knew from Chen Hongbing’s photograph.

‘Of course Cyber-Shanghai’s server records the intervention, but it doesn’t raise the alarm. It doesn’t register the momentary opening of an electronic wormhole, through which you escape into a kind of parallel universe. As far as it’s concerned, all that happens is that someone opens a door and closes it again.’

‘I figured it was something like that.’ Jericho nodded. ‘So who’s Irma la Douce?’

‘Hey!’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows. ‘You know Irma la Douce?’

‘Of course.’

‘Heavens! I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was when Daxiong turned up with her.’

‘A film. A lovely film.’

‘A film about a French poule.’

‘Perhaps it doesn’t necessarily represent the glorious Chinese culture,’ said Jericho mildly. ‘But there’s something else, think about it. The avatar is, incidentally, a perfect copy of Shirley MacLaine.’

‘She – erm – was an actress, right? A French one.’

‘American.’

Yoyo seemed to think for a second. Then she suddenly laughed out loud.

‘Oh, that’s going to nettle Daxiong. He thinks he knows everything there is to know.’

‘About films?’

‘Not at all. Daxiong has this thing about France. As if we didn’t have enough culture of our own. He could bang on at you all day about— Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

She turned away and ran her hand over her eyes. Jericho left her in peace. When she turned back to face him he saw the smeared remains of a tear on her cheek.

‘You’ve got my computer,’ she said. ‘So, what do you want? What do you want from me?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jericho.

‘But?’

‘Your father sent me. He’s terribly worried about you.’

‘Don’t think I don’t care,’ she said belligerently.

‘I don’t.’ He shook his head. ‘I know you don’t want to worry him. You thought your communications were being monitored, and that if you sent him an email they’d pounce on him and give him a going-over. Am I right?’

She stared gloomily ahead.

‘Hongbing doesn’t know about blogs and virtual worlds,’ Jericho went on. ‘He’s happy to be able to use an antediluvian mobile phone. And he’s consoling himself with the idea that his daughter has learned her lesson. He doesn’t know what you’re doing. Or let’s say, he guesses what you’re up to and doesn’t know. I’m sure he hasn’t the faintest idea that Tu Tian is protecting you.’

‘Tian!’ cried Yoyo. ‘He commissioned you, right?’

‘He referred your father to me.’

‘Sure, because Hongbing never— But why didn’t he—?’

‘Why didn’t he send a message for you to the Andromeda? Even though he knew where you’d fetched up? I mean, you never told him anything about the blast furnace, so in the end he got nervous—’

‘How do you know Tian?’

‘He’s a friend of mine. And, I should think, a kind of unofficial member of the Guardians. At least he supported you as best he could. The stuff in the control centre came from him, didn’t it? Tian was just as much of a dissident as you are now.’

‘As we were.’

Oh, right, thought Jericho. What a miserable subject. Whatever they were talking about, that was where they would always end up.

‘Tian didn’t need to send me a message,’ said Yoyo. ‘He knew it wouldn’t change a thing.’

‘Exactly. But it changed something when Hongbing hit on the idea of having a search made for you. A risky enterprise. Your father might prefer to act ignorant, but he knew he couldn’t get the police involved. I guess he secretly knew that you were going through the Party’s rubbish bins out the back. So he asked Tu Tian, the way you ask somebody with connections like that, and also because he accepted through gritted teeth that Tian might have been closer to you than your own—’

‘That’s not true,’ Yoyo rounded on him. ‘You’re talking nonsense!’

‘But that’s how it looks to—’

‘That has nothing to do with you! Nothing at all, okay? Keep out of my private life.’

Jericho tilted his head.

‘Okay, princess. As far as I can. So what was Tian supposed to do? Slap Hongbing on the shoulder and say, no need to worry? I know something you don’t know. But all right, your private life is sacred to me, even if it’s cost me my car and possibly my flat, which could go up in flames at any moment. You’re causing a lot of stress, Yoyo.’

A wrinkle of fury appeared between her eyebrows. She opened her mouth, but Jericho interrupted: ‘Save it for later.’

‘But—’

‘We can’t go on wasting time on your island for ever. Let’s see how we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess.’

‘We?’

‘You’re not listening, are you?’ Jericho showed his teeth. ‘I’m in this too, so take a good hard look, young lady! You’ve lost your friends. Why do you think all this happened? Because you stirred up a bit of dust? The Party is used to stepping in dissident shit. They might send you to jail for it, but they’re never going to send someone like Kenny.’

Her eyes filled with tears.

‘I couldn’t—’

Jericho bit his lip. He was making a mistake. Blaming Yoyo for the deaths of the others was as unfair as it was stupid.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said hastily.

She sniffed, took a step in one direction, then another, and then sliced the air with her trembling hands.

‘Maybe I should have – I should have—’

‘No, it’s okay. There’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘If only I hadn’t come up with that stupid idea!’

‘Tell me about it. What did you do?’

‘Nothing would have happened. It’s my fault, I—’

‘It isn’t.’

‘It is!’

‘No, Yoyo, there’s nothing you can do about it. Tell me what you’ve done. What happened during the night?’

‘I didn’t want any of that.’ Her lips trembled. ‘It’s my fault they’re dead. They’re all dead.’

‘Yoyo—’

She threw her hands to her face. Jericho walked over, gently took her wrists and tried to draw them down. She pulled back and staggered away from him.

He heard a deep, throaty growl behind him.

What was it this time? He slowly turned round and looked into the golden eyes of an enormous bear.

Very impressive, he thought.

‘Daxiong.’

The bear showed its teeth. Jericho didn’t move. The beast was pretty much as big as a middle-sized pony. Of course the simulation didn’t put him in any danger, but he didn’t know what impulses were emitted by the gloves. They produced haptic sensations, meaning that they stimulated the nerves. Would they also emit pain if the monster decided to start chewing his fingers?

‘It’s okay.’ Yoyo had joined him. She stroked the huge animal’s fur, then looked at Jericho. Her voice was calm again, almost expressionless.

‘We tried something out that night,’ she said. ‘A way of sending messages.’

‘Via email?’

‘Yes. The whole thing was my idea. Jia Wei supplied the method.’

She tapped the bear on the nose. It lowered its head and a moment later it was gone.

‘We’re in touch with a lot of activists,’ she went on. ‘We wouldn’t be able to get hold of the relevant information without them. Of course we can’t openly ask Washington what dirty tricks China’s up to, and I’m registered as a dissident, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘So, Second Life is one way of tricking Cypol. It always involves a lot of effort. Good for a meeting like ours, but I wanted something quick and uncomplicated, just to send through a photograph or a few lines.’ Yoyo stared at the spot where the bear had stood. ‘And there’s a constant traffic of mails. Boring, unsuspicious mails containing nothing that would scare the Politburo. So we’ve tried to hop other people’s freight-trains.’

‘Parasite mails?’

‘Piggybacks, parasites, stowaways – whatever you want to call it. Jia Wei and I wrote a protocol that lets you encode messages in white noise and decode them again; we used it between Daxiong and me and decided to do a test.’

Jericho was gradually working out what had happened that night. The basic idea was designed to trick even the cleverest surveillance experts. It was based on the fundamental principle of email traffic, which was that mails were primarily a collection of data, little travellers that wanted to be helped on their way. So they were crammed into packets of data like passengers into railway carriages, and like those carriages the packets had a standard length. If one carriage was full, the next one turned up, until there was room for the whole message and it could be sent, with the receiver’s web address up at the front as the locomotive.

But the difference in the quantities of data usually meant that the last compartment was only partly occupied. The phrase end of message defined where the message ended, but because a packet could only be sent as a whole, there was usually some data-free space left over, what was known as white noise. As it arrived, the receiving computer selected the official data of the message, cut the rest off and threw it away. It didn’t occur to anyone to look through the white noise for further content, because there was nothing to be found there.

That was where the idea began. Whoever had it first, it was and remained brilliant. A secret message was coded in such a way that it looked like white noise, was immediately switched for the real white noise and sent on its way like a stowaway. There was only one problem that needed to be solved. You had to send the message yourself, or have access to the sender’s computer. There was no reason not to let stowaways travel on their own trains. But once you’d attracted attention, your email traffic would be under constant surveillance. Organisations like Cypol might be overstretched, but they weren’t stupid, so it was to be feared that they would also check up on white noise.

But there was a solution, which was to use other people’s email traffic. Two dissidents who wanted to pass a conspiratorial message one to the other each needed a router or illegal railway station for passing data-trains, and of course they had to agree on the same train. It might be birthday greetings from Mr Huang in Shenzen to his nephew Yi living in Beijing, both reputable citizens with nothing bad to be said about them as far as the State was concerned. So Mr Huang sent off his birthday greetings without guessing for a moment that his train was about to make an unscheduled stop with Dissident One, who took charge of the white noise, swapped it for the disguised message and sent the train on its way again. But before it reached Yi, it was stopped again, this time by Dissident Two, who received the message, decoded it, replaced it with real white noise, and now at last it went on to the nephew in Beijing, who was assured of Mr Huang’s esteem, while neither of them knew what purpose they had served. The whole thing suggested innocent tourists who had drugs secretly smuggled into their luggage at the airport and then taken out again at the other end, with the significant difference that the drugs didn’t assume the appearance and consistency of their underwear.

‘Of course we weren’t so naïve as to assume that we’d invented the trick,’ said Yoyo. ‘But it’s really not that likely that you’re going to come across an email that already has a stowaway.’

‘And whose official mail did you intercept?’

‘It came from some government authority or other.’ Yoyo shrugged. ‘The Ministry of Energy or something.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘Wait, it was – it was—’ She frowned and looked defiant. ‘Okay, don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Jericho looked at her in disbelief. ‘You don’t know who—?’

‘For the love of heaven! It was only a test! Just to see if I could get into it!’

‘And what did you write?’

‘Just something.’

‘Come on! What was it?’

‘I—’ She seemed to chew the sentence a number of times before spitting it out at Jericho’s feet: ‘Catch me if you can.’

‘Catch me if you can?’

‘Am I talking Mongolian? Yesss!’

‘Why that?’

‘Why that?’ she said, copying him. ‘Doesn’t matter. Because I thought it was cool, that’s why.’

‘Very cool. In a test—’

‘Oh, son-of-a-turtle!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘No – one – was – supposed – to – read – it!’

Jericho sighed and shook his head.

‘All right. Go on?’

‘The protocol was set to real time. Stop mail, take out noise, put in own message, encode, pass on, all at the same time. So, I write, and at the same time I notice there’s something in it already! That I haven’t taken out any white noise at all, but some kind of mysterious stuff.’

‘Because someone else was trying to do the same thing as you were.’

‘Yes.’

Jericho nodded. In fairness, he had to admit that Yoyo couldn’t have anticipated this development.

‘But by then the email was already on its way again,’ he said. ‘To the person that the mysterious stuff was meant for. Except that it never got there, because you’d taken it out and swapped it.’

‘Unwittingly.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Imagine this. They’re waiting for some complex, secret information. Instead they read: Catch me if you can.’ Jericho couldn’t help it. He raised his hands in the air and applauded. ‘Bravo, Yoyo. Lovely little provocation. My congratulations.’

‘Oh, fuck you! Of course they immediately worked out that someone had broken in.’

‘And they were prepared.’

‘Yes, unlike me.’ She pulled a sour face. ‘I mean, I don’t know if they’d expected something like that exactly, but their defences work, you have to give them that. Some kind of watchdog program immediately started barking: woof! An extra hub has appeared in the predetermined route, it shouldn’t be there. Grrr, where are our data?’

‘And traced you back?’

‘Traced me back?’ Yoyo gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘They attacked me! They attacked my computer, I don’t know how, it was absolutely terrifying! While I’m still gawping at what I’ve pulled out of the water, I see them starting to download my data. I couldn’t get online quickly enough as they went through my stuff. They knew exactly who I was – and where I was!’

‘Does that mean you don’t have an anonymiser—’

‘I’m not stupid,’ she hissed. ‘Of course I use an anonymiser. But if you’re implementing something completely new and playing around with it, you’re forced to open up your system for a moment. Otherwise the protection tools downstairs would get in your way, that’s what they’re there for.’

‘So you turned various things off.’

‘I had to take that risk.’ Her eyes flashed with fury. ‘I had to be sure we could work like that.’

‘Well, now you know.’

‘Lovely, Mister Brain Box.’ She folded her arms. ‘What would you have done?’

‘One bit at a time,’ said Jericho. ‘First take out the attachment and check it for land mines. Then put my own thing in there. Leave myself the option of cancelling everything before I send it off. And most importantly, don’t put any smug little phrases in there, even if you’ve encoded it as noise a thousand times over.’

‘What’s the point of data transfer that doesn’t make sense?’

‘We’re talking about a test. As long as you don’t know for sure whether your data transfer is safe or not, you’ve got to sound like a communication error. They might have wondered where their message ended up, but it wouldn’t immediately have occurred to them that someone was tapping off their communication.’

She looked at him as if she was thinking of tearing his throat out. Then she spread her arms and let them fall back helplessly by her side.

‘Okay, it was a mistake!’

‘A big mistake.’

‘Could I have guessed, out of all the billions and billions of mails, I would hit on one that had already been infiltrated?’

Jericho looked at her. His rage had flared up for a moment, less about the mistake than about the fact that someone with Yoyo’s experience could have made it. With her complacency, she hadn’t just put her own life on the line. Almost the whole of her group had been killed, and Jericho didn’t feel exactly safe. Then his fury evaporated. He saw the mixture of fear and dismay on her face and shook his head.

‘No. You couldn’t.’

‘So who’s on my case?’

‘Our case, Yoyo, if you’ll forgive me. If I might just remind you about me and my problems.’

She averted her head, looked out at the sea and back at him.

‘Okay. Ours.’

‘Doubtless someone with power. People with money and influence, technically advanced. To be quite honest I doubt that their communication is still at the experimental stage. You’ve tried something out. They’ve been doing it for ages. Just by chance you’re using the same protocol, which allowed each of you to read the other’s data. From that point it gets speculative, but I also believe that they’re influential enough not to be dependent on other people’s emails.’

‘You mean—’

‘Let’s assume they’re sending mails from their own servers. Quite officially. They’re based in public institutions, they can check incoming and outgoing traffic, and pack anything in there as they see fit.’

‘They sound like senior officials.’

‘You think it’s the Party?’

‘Who else? All the Guardians’ operations are – were – directed against the Party. And we have no illusions about it, the Guardians are – were—’

‘—another word for Yoyo.’

‘I was the head. Along with Daxiong.’

‘I know. You mouthed off, which got State security on your back. Since then you’ve tried to find ways of protecting yourself. Second Life, parasite emails. And in the process, without meaning to, you break into a secret data transfer, and your worst fears become reality. There’s something about “coup” and “liquidating” in connection with the Chinese government, and a minute later they’ve tracked you down.’

‘What would you have done in my place?’

‘What indeed?’ Jericho laughed mirthlessly. ‘I’d have got the hell out, just like you did.’

‘That’s comforting.’ She hesitated. ‘So did you – were you on my computer?’

‘Yes.’

Jericho expected another blaze of fury, but she just sighed and looked out at the ocean.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been snooping. I’ve just tried to introduce some clarity into the whole business.’

‘Did you get anywhere with the third website?’

‘The Swiss films?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Not so far. But there must be something on there. Either you need a separate mask or there’s something we’ve overlooked. At the moment I think it’s about a coup in which the Chinese government was – or will be – involved, and that someone knows too much and that his liquidation is being considered.’

‘Someone called Jan or Andre.’

‘More likely Andre. Did you research the address in Berlin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Interesting, isn’t it? Donner be liquidated. Somebody called Andre Donner runs a restaurant specialising in African delicacies at that address.’

‘The Muntu. I’d got that far.’

‘But what does that tell us?’ Jericho reflected. ‘Is Andre Donner in danger of being liquidated? I mean, what does a Berlin chef know about Beijing’s involvement in some sort of planned coup? And what about the second man?’

‘Jan?’

‘Yes. Is he the killer?’

Or, is Jan the same as Kenny? Jericho thought, but kept the thought to himself. His imagination was fizzing. Basically the fragment of text was too mutilated to provide any useful conclusions.

‘It’s an African restaurant,’ Yoyo said thoughtfully. ‘And it hasn’t been around for very long.’

Jericho looked at her in amazement.

‘Okay, I’ve had more time to look into it,’ she added. ‘There are reviews on the net. Donner opened Muntu in December 2024—’

‘Only six months ago?’

‘Exactly. You can hardly find any information about the man himself. A Dutchman who lived in Cape Town for a while, perhaps was even born there. That’s it. But the African connection is interesting in that—’

‘—in that Africa’s familiar with coups.’ Jericho nodded. ‘That means we need to take a closer look at the more recent chronology of any dubious or violent government takeovers. An interesting approach. Except that South Africa is ruled out. They’ve been stable for a long time.’

They fell silent for a while.

‘You wanted to know who we were dealing with,’ he said at last. ‘To engineer coups you need money and influence, both political and economic. But above all you need to have a capable executive, and one that’s willing to engage in violence. So these people have managed to set an expert with reinforcements on your trail. Equipped like an army. So let’s assume that certain government circles are behind this. Then I think I can put your mind at rest in one respect.’

Yoyo raised her eyebrows.

‘They’re not interested in dissidents,’ Jericho said finally. ‘They don’t give a damn about what you’re up to. They would have hunted down anyone who got in their way…’

‘Very reassuring,’ Yoyo sneered. ‘And instead they have hordes of cops who will, when time’s up, give me the pleasant feeling that it’s not because of my dissident activities that they’re going to kill me. Thanks Jericho. I can sleep again at last.’

He gazed along the beach. Shimmering in the double sunlight, it looked oddly vivid. Patterns formed spontaneously in the sand and immediately blurred again. Some of the flower-like creatures spread their wings, transparent and veined as leaves. Clouds of golden dust puffed up among them, and were carried over the edge of the island, where they scattered in the wind. Yoyo and Daxiong had programmed a world of unsettling beauty.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I have a few suggestions. First of all I need your permission to upload your data onto my computer. As far as I can tell, all your backup systems have been destroyed.’

‘Apart from one.’

‘I know. Can I ask what computer you’re connected to at the moment?’

She chewed her lip and looked round, as if there were someone there to advise her.

‘It’s at Daxiong’s,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Where? In the workshop?’

‘Yes. He lives there.’

‘And you’ll get away straight after the meeting.’

‘Daxiong’s cellar is safe, we—’

‘Kenny fires rockets,’ Jericho interrupted her gruffly, ‘which means that nothing is safe. The workshop is registered as Demon Point, under the name City Demons. It’s only a matter of time until Kenny turns up there or sends someone. Does Daxiong have a complete copy of your data?’

‘No.’

‘Then let me download it.’

‘Okay.’

Jericho thought for a moment and counted the points up on his fingers. ‘Secondly, we’ll follow the African trail. Thirdly, we’ll try to crack the Spanish website with the films of Switzerland. Both down to me. Diane has the relevant programs, she—’

‘Diane?’

‘My – my—’ Suddenly he felt embarrassed. ‘Doesn’t matter. Fourthly, what do all six pages, valid and invalid, have in common?’

‘That’s obvious.’ Yoyo looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘They contain, or contained—’

‘And following on from that?’

‘Hey! Can you stop sounding like a bloody headmaster?’

‘Someone will have to check them,’ Jericho continued, unfazed, ‘to make sure that the mask – the decoder program – always fits. In terms of content there doesn’t seem to be a connection, all the pages are publicly accessible and registered in various countries. But who initiated them? If we can find a common initiator, we might be able to find out which other pages he controls. The more pages we find that fit our mask, the more we will decode.’

‘I don’t know how to do that. And neither does Tian.’

‘But I do.’ Jericho took a deep breath. For a moment he imagined it was the clear air of the ocean planet flowing through his capillaries, but he was only breathing whatever the air-conditioning was blowing into his room. With every word he uttered he felt strength and resolution returning. The certainty that he hadn’t been handed over defenceless to Kenny and the people behind him flooded his consciousness like a physical glow. ‘Fifth, we assume that Andre Donner is on the hit list same as we are. And that immediately gives us two reasons to get in contact with him. To find out more about our own case, and to warn him.’

‘If he needs a warning.’

‘So we have nothing to lose. Do we?’

‘No.’

‘Okay then.’ He hesitated. ‘Yoyo, I don’t want to keep coming back to it, but who else have you told about your discovery? I mean, which of them—’

‘Which of them is still alive?’ she asked bitterly.

Jericho said nothing.

‘Only Daxiong,’ she said. ‘And you.’

She crouched down and let nacreous sand slip through her fingers. The thin streams formed mysterious patterns on the ground before vanishing in a shimmer of light. Then she raised her head.

‘I want to call my father.’

Jericho nodded. ‘That would have been my next suggestion.’

He wondered if it mightn’t have been more sensible to make contact with Tu first. But that decision was entirely up to the girl at his feet, who was now slowly standing up and looking at him with beautiful, sad eyes.

‘Shall I leave you alone?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She gave an unladylike sniff, and turned her back on him. ‘Maybe it’s better if you’re here.’

The fingers of her right hand moved through the void, etching something into it. A moment later a dark field appeared in the clear air. An old-fashioned dial tone was heard, absurdly mundane and out of place in this strange world.

‘He hasn’t activated picture mode,’ she said, as if apologising for Hongbing’s backwardness.

‘I know, his old phone. You gave it to him.’

‘I’m amazed he’s still using it,’ she snorted. It went on ringing. ‘He should really be at the car dealership. If he doesn’t pick up, I’ll call th—’

The dial tone stopped. There was a quiet rustling sound, along with other background noises. No one spoke.

Yoyo looked uncertainly at Jericho.

‘Father?’ she whispered.

The answer came quietly. It crept up ominously, a fat, weary snake rearing up to take a closer look at its next victim.

‘I’m not your father, Yoyo.’

Jericho didn’t know what was going to happen. Yoyo was stricken, her friends were dead. She had to deal with the sort of images that are only bearable in nightmares, whose horror subsides in the morning light. But there was no awaking from this nightmare – Kenny’s voice seeped like poison into the island idyll. But when Yoyo spoke, there was nothing but suppressed rage in her words.

‘Where is my father?’

Kenny took his time, a long time, before answering. Yoyo in turn said nothing, waiting frostily, so both of them remained silent, a mute test of strength.

‘I’ve given him the day off,’ he said at last. He crowned the remark with a smug, quiet chuckle.

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘No one told you to ask questions.’

‘Is he well?’

‘Very well. He’s taking a rest.’

The way Kenny said ‘very well’ was designed to suggest the precise opposite. Yoyo clenched her fists.

‘Listen, you sick fuck. I want to talk to my father right away, you hear? After that you can make your demands, but first give me a sign of life, or else you can go on talking to yourself. Did you get any of that?’

Kenny let the rustling noise continue down the line for a while.

‘Yoyo, my jade girl,’ he sighed. ‘Clearly your world-view is based on a series of misunderstandings. In stories like this the roles are assigned in a different way. Every one of your words that doesn’t meet with my absolute approval will cause pain to Hongbing. I’ll let you off with the “sick fuck”.’ He giggled. ‘You could even be right.’

Vain as a peacock, thought Jericho. Kenny might be a pretty exotic specimen of a contract killer, but he seemed much closer to the profile of a psychopathic serial killer. Narcissistic, in love with his own words, flirting affectionately with his own obnoxiousness.

‘A sign of life,’ Yoyo insisted.

All of a sudden the black rectangle changed. Kenny’s face filled it almost completely. He hovered above the pearly beach like a spirit in a bottle. Then he vanished from the camera’s perspective, and a room became visible, with a wall of windows at the back, bright daylight falling through them. The outlines of some items of furniture could be seen, a chair with someone sitting on it. In front of it, something black, massive and three-legged.

‘Father,’ whispered Yoyo.

‘Please say something, honourable Chen,’ said Kenny’s voice.

Chen Hongbing sat as motionless on his chair as if he had become a part of it. With the light behind him, it was almost impossible to make out his face. When he spoke he sounded as if someone was walking on dry leaves.

‘Yoyo. Are you okay?’

‘Father,’ she cried. ‘It’s all fine, everything’s going to be fine!’

‘It— I’m so sorry.’

‘No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I really am!’ A moment later her eyes filled with tears. With a visible effort of will she forced herself to calm down. Kenny appeared in the picture again.

‘Terrible quality, this phone,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid your father could hardly hear you. Perhaps you could come and see him, what do you think?’

‘If you do anything—’ Yoyo began unsteadily.

‘What I do is entirely up to you,’ Kenny replied coolly. ‘He’s quite comfortable at the moment, except that his mobility is a little restricted. He is sitting in the sights of an automatic rifle. He can speak and blink. If he suddenly feels like jumping in the air or just raising his arm, the gun will go off. Unfortunately it will also do that if he tries to scratch himself. Not quite so cosy, perhaps.’

‘Please don’t hurt him,’ sobbed Yoyo.

‘I’m not interested in hurting anyone, believe it or not. So come here, and come quickly.’ Kenny paused. When he went on talking, the snakelike tone had left his voice. Suddenly he sounded friendly again, almost matey, the way Zhao Bide had spoken. ‘Your father has my word that nothing will happen as long as you cooperate. That involves telling me the names of everyone who knows about the intercepted message, or even what was in it. And you are to give me every, really every drive with a download of the message on it.’

‘You destroyed my computer,’ said Yoyo.

‘I destroyed something, yes. But did I destroy everything?’

‘Don’t contradict him,’ Jericho whispered to Yoyo.

She said nothing.

‘You see.’ Kenny smiled as if his assumption had been confirmed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep my word. And bring that shaven-headed giant with you, you remember the one. You will both come in through the front door, it’s open.’ He paused. Something seemed to go through his head, then he asked, ‘By the way, has this guy Owen Jericho been in touch with you?’

‘Jericho?’ Yoyo echoed.

‘The detective?’

Jericho had been keeping out of view of the phone, so that he saw the scene in Chen’s flat, but couldn’t be seen by Kenny. He gave Yoyo a sign and shook his head violently.

‘I have no idea where that idiot is,’ she said contemptuously.

‘Why so harsh?’ Kenny raised his eyebrows in amazement. ‘He saved you.’

‘He wants to jerk me around the same as you do, doesn’t he? You said he killed Grand Cherokee.’

A flicker of amusement played around Kenny’s lips.

‘Yes. Of course. So, when can you get here?’

‘As quick as I can,’ sniffed Yoyo. ‘Depends on the traffic. Quarter of an hour? Is that okay?’

‘Completely okay. You and Daxiong. Unarmed. I see a gun, Chen dies. Anyone else comes through the door, he dies. Anyone tries to disarm the automatic rifle, off it goes. As soon as everything’s sorted out, we’ll leave the house together. Oh, yes – if reinforcements are waiting outside or anyone tries to play the hero, Chen dies too. He can only leave his chair when I’ve deactivated the mechanism.’

The line went dead.

The weird calls of big animals reached them from the distance. A breeze rustled the bushes that lined the beach to the meadow, and set clusters of blossom bobbing up and down.

‘That bastard,’ groaned Yoyo. ‘That damned—’

‘Whatever he is, he’s not omnipotent.’

‘He isn’t?’ she yelled at him. ‘You saw what’s going on! Do you really think he’ll let him live? Or me?’

‘Yoyo—’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’ She shrank back. Her lower lip was trembling. She shook her head, as tears ran down her cheeks. ‘What on earth am I supposed to do? What should I do?’

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘We’ll get him out of there. I promise you. No one’s going to die, you hear?’

‘And how are you going to achieve that?’

Jericho started walking up and down. He didn’t really know either, yet. Bit by bit, a plan was starting to form in his head. A crazy undertaking that depended on a whole series of very different factors. The glass façade behind Chen Hongbing played a part in it, as did the captured airbike. He needed to talk to Tu Tian as well.

‘Forget it,’ said Yoyo breathlessly. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Wait.’

‘But I can’t wait! I have to get to my father. Let’s get out of here.’ She held her right hand out to him.

‘Hang on, Yoyo—’

‘Now!’

‘Just one minute. I—’ He chewed on his bottom lip. ‘I know how we’re going to do this. I know!’

Hongkou

The house on Siping Lu, number 1276, had retained the monotonous pastel of some of the blocks of flats built in the Shanghai district of Hongkou at the turn of the millennium. When the weather was gloomy it seemed to disappear into the sky. As if to counteract this, emphatically green-tinted panes of glass broke up the façade, another stylistic device of an era that made even skyscrapers look like cheap toys.

Unlike the high-rises a street further on, number 1276 contented itself with six floors, had generously sized balconies and also flaunted what looked a bit like a pagoda roof. On either side of the balconies, the dirty white boxes of the air-conditioning system clung to the plaster. Listlessly flapping in the wind was a tattered banner, on which the inhabitants of the building demanded the immediate suspension of building work on the maglev, another elevated highway that would lead right past their front door, and whose pillars already loomed high above the street. Aside from this pitiful gesture towards revolt, the building was no different from number 1274 or 1278.

The flat, covering an area of thirty-eight square metres, comprised a living room with a wall unit, dining area and sofa-bed, a separate bedroom, a tiny bathroom and a kitchen, only slightly bigger, that opened onto the dining table. There was no hall, and instead a screen at the side masked off the front door, creating a small amount of intimacy.

Until recently at any rate.

Now it leaned folded against the wall, so that the whole of the area around the front door was visible. Xin had made himself comfortable on the sofa-bed, a little way away from the chair on whose edge Chen Hongbing sat as if lost in contemplation, tall, angular, bolt upright. His temples glistened in the light that fell through the glass façade to the rear and dissolved into tiny droplets of sweat that covered his taut skin. Xin weighed the remote control for the automatic rifle in his hand, a flat, feather-light screen. He had told the old man that any sudden movement would lead to his death. But the mechanism had not been activated. Xin didn’t want to risk the old man bringing about his own demise through sheer nervousness.

‘Maybe you should take me hostage,’ Chen said into the silence.

Xin yawned. ‘Haven’t I done that already?’

‘I mean, I – I could put myself at your mercy for longer, until you no longer saw Yoyo as a threat.’

‘And where would that get you?’

‘My daughter would live,’ Chen replied hoarsely. It looked odd, the way he uttered words without any gestures, struggling to keep even the movements of his lips to the barest minimum.

Xin pretended to think for a moment.

‘No, she will survive as long as she convinces me.’

‘I’m asking you only for my daughter’s life.’ Chen’s breathing was shallow. ‘I don’t care about anything else.’

‘That honours you,’ said Xin. ‘It brings you close to the martyrs.’

Suddenly he thought he saw the old man smiling. It was barely noticeable, but Xin had an eye for such small things.

‘What’s cheered you up?’

‘The fact that you’ve misunderstood the situation. You think you can kill me, but there isn’t much left to kill. You’re too late. I’ve died already.’

Xin began to answer, then looked at the man with fresh interest. As a rule he didn’t set much store by other people’s private affairs, particularly when they were eking out their final minutes. But suddenly he craved to know what Chen had meant. He got up and stood behind the tripod on which the rifle stood, so that it looked as if it were actually growing from his belly. ‘You’ll have to explain that to me.’

‘I don’t think it will interest you,’ said Chen. He looked up and his eyes were like two wounds. All of a sudden Xin had the feeling of being able to see inside that thin body, and glimpse the black mirror of a sea below a moonless sky. In its depths he sensed old suffering, self-hatred and repulsion, he heard screams and pleas, doors rattling and slamming shut. Groans of resignation, echoing faintly down endless, windowless corridors. They had tried to break Chen, for four whole years. Xin knew that, without knowing it. He effortlessly identified the focus point, he could touch the spots where people were most vulnerable, just as a single glance into the detective’s eyes had been enough to spot his loneliness.

‘You were in jail,’ he said.

‘Not directly.’

Xin hesitated. Might he have been mistaken?

‘At any rate you were robbed of your freedom.’

‘Freedom?’ Chen made a noise between a croak and a sigh. ‘What’s that? Are you freer than me right now, when I’m sitting on this chair and you’re standing in front of me? Does that thing you’re pointing at me give you freedom? Do you lose your freedom if you’re locked up?’

Xin pursed his lips. ‘You explain it to me.’

‘No one needs to explain it to you,’ Chen croaked. ‘You know better than anyone.’

‘What?’

‘That anyone who threatens anyone else is frightened. Anyone who points a gun at anyone is frightened.’

‘So I’m frightened?’ Xin laughed.

‘Yes,’ Chen replied succinctly. ‘Repression is always based on fear. Fear of dissident opinions. Fear of being unmasked. Fear of losing power, of rejection, of insignificance. The more weapons you deploy, the higher the walls you build, the more ingenious your forms of torture, the more you are only demonstrating your own impotence. You remember Tiananmen? What happened in the Square of Heavenly Peace?’

‘The student unrest?’

‘I don’t know how old you are. You were probably still a child when that happened. Young people demonstrating for something that had already been fought for by many others: freedom. And lined up against them a State almost paralysed, shaken to its foundations, so much so that it finally sent in the tanks and everything sank into chaos. Who do you think was more frightened then? The students? Or the Party?’

‘I was five years old,’ said Xin, amazed to find himself talking to a hostage as though they were sitting together in a tea house. ‘How the hell should I know?’

‘You know. You’re pointing a gun at me right now.’

‘True. So I would guess that you’re the one who should be shit scared right now, old man!’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Again a ghostly smile distorted Chen’s features. ‘And yet I fear only for the life of my daughter. And the other thing that frightens me is that I might have got everything wrong. Stayed silent when I should have talked. That’s all. Your gun there can’t scare me. My inner demons are more than a match for your ridiculous gun. But you’re frightened. You’re frightened about what might be left if you were robbed of your weapons and other attributes of power. You’re afraid of backsliding.’

Xin stared at the old man.

‘There’s no backsliding – haven’t you worked that out? There’s only striding ahead in time. Just a permanent Now. The past is cold ashes.’

‘I agree with you there. Apart from one thing. The cold ashes are what destroys people. The consequences of destruction, on the other hand, remain.’

‘You can even cleanse yourself of those.’

‘Cleanse?’ Bafflement flickered in Chen’s eyes. ‘Of what?’

‘Of what was. When you consign it to the flames. When you burn it! The fire purifies your soul, do you understand? So that you are born a second time.’

Chen’s wounded gaze drilled into his own. ‘Are you talking about revenge?’

‘Revenge?’ Xin bared his teeth. ‘Revenge only makes an adversary bigger, it gives him meaning. I’m talking about complete extinction! About overcoming your own history. What tormented you, your… demons!’

‘You mean you can burn those demons?’

‘Of course you can!’ How stupid did you have to be to deny that fundamental certainty? The whole universe, all being, all becoming, was based on transience.

‘But what,’ Chen said after thinking for a while, ‘if you discover that there are no spirits? No demons. That the past has only shaped you like an image and the spirits are part of yourself. Don’t you then try to extinguish yourself? In that case, is your cleansing not self-mutilation?’

Xin lowered his eyelids. The conversation was taking a turn that fascinated him.

‘What have you burned?’ asked Chen.

He wondered how to explain it to Chen, so that he would understand Xin’s greatness. But suddenly he heard something. Footsteps in the corridor. ‘Another time, honourable Chen,’ he whispered.

He walked quickly back to the sofa and turned on the automatic trigger. Now it was happening. One false move from Chen, and his body would be shredded. The footsteps came closer.

Then the door swung open and—

Yoyo saw her father sitting on the chair, facing the muzzle of the rifle. He didn’t move, only his eyeballs turned slowly towards her. She sensed the tension in Daxiong’s massive body beside her and stepped inside, clutching the little computer in her right hand. In the background the hitman rose from the edge of the sofa. He too held something in his hand, gleaming and flat.

‘Hello, Yoyo,’ he hissed. ‘How lovely to see you again.’

‘Father,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘Are you okay?’

Chen Hongbing attempted a crooked smile. ‘In the circumstances, I would say so.’

‘He’s fine as long as you stick to our agreement,’ Kenny said. ‘The automatic trigger has been activated. Any movement by Chen will kill him.’ He held the remote control in the air. ‘Of course I can operate the trigger too. So whatever you were planning, forget it.’

‘And where do we go from here?’ growled Daxiong.

‘First shut the door behind you.’

Daxiong gave the door a shove. It fell silently shut.

‘And now?’

Kenny turned his back on them and glanced out of the glass façade at the back. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. Yoyo shivered and held up the computer.

‘You wanted this,’ she said.

The hitman looked outside again for a moment. Then he turned towards them.

‘Let’s say yes for the time being.’

‘Yes or no?’

Yoyo was gradually getting nervous, but she tried not to show it. Something must have gone wrong. Why was it taking so long? Where was Jericho?

‘Well?’ Kenny nodded encouragingly at her. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I’ve got a few things to clear up first.’

‘I think I remember that we discussed everything clearly.’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing’s clear yet. What guarantee do we have that you’ll let us live?’

Kenny smiled like someone experiencing an anticipated disappointment ‘Spare us this, Yoyo. We’re not here to negotiate.’

‘True,’ snorted Daxiong. ‘Do you know what I think? As soon as you have what you want, you’ll waste us.’

‘Exactly,’ nodded Yoyo. ‘So why should we tell you anything if you’re going to kill us anyway? Maybe we’ll take a few secrets with us to the grave.’

‘I gave you my word,’ Kenny said very quietly. ‘That should be enough for you.’

‘Your word wasn’t worth much this morning.’

‘But we can play the game another way too,’ he went on, ignoring her remark. ‘No one has to die straight away. Look at your father, Yoyo. He’s a brave man, who isn’t afraid of death. I can’t help admiring him. I wonder how much pain he can bear.’

Hongbing uttered a croaking laugh. ‘You’d be amazed,’ he said.

The hitman grinned.

‘Boot up your computer. Get the encrypted file up on the screen and throw it over to me. You have no options left, Yoyo. Just your faith.’

Damn Jericho, she thought. What’s going on? We can’t keep this bastard hanging on much longer. Where are you?

Jericho cursed. Until a moment ago it had gone smoothly – almost too smoothly. While Yoyo and Daxiong were on their way to Chen, he had spoken to Tu and managed to break open the weapon chambers of the airbike. He had chosen a high-velocity rapid-fire automatic laser rifle that lay heavy and secure in the hand, started the engine and flown the machine unimpeded to the agreed meeting point.

They had met not far from number 1276 for a quick briefing.

‘It’s the eighth building along.’ Yoyo had pointed down the street. ‘The back yards are all the same, with lawns and trees and a path connecting them. It’s the left window side, fourth floor.’

‘Good,’ Jericho nodded.

‘Have you brought my computer?’

‘Yes. Daxiong too?’

‘Here.’ The giant had handed him a rather ancient-looking computer. Jericho transferred the fragment of encrypted text to it.

‘Can I have mine back now?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Of course.’ Jericho had put her computer back in his pocket. ‘When all this is over. It’ll be safer with me until then. Kenny mustn’t get the chance to take it from you.’

She said nothing, which he took as a sign of assent. He had looked from her to Daxiong and back again.

‘All okay?’

‘So far, yes.’

‘You go into the flat in five minutes exactly.’

‘Okay.’

‘And I’ll be there straight after, and get his back to the wall. Any more questions?’

They both mutely shook their heads.

‘Good.’

In five minutes.

That was now! And he was still standing on the corner of the street, because the airbike had suddenly started behaving like a diva who refused to go on stage, however much you cajoled her.

‘Come on,’ he snapped.

This part of Hongkou was entirely residential, and Siping Lu was a feeder road, several lanes wide. There were hardly any shops, or restaurants either. The pavements were correspondingly empty, since the Chinese, even forty years after Deng Xiaoping’s legendary opening up to the West, showed no real liking for strolling as the French, Germans and Italians did. The traffic flowed quickly along, spanned by pedestrian bridges at regular intervals. Because most commuters had been at their desks since the early hours of the morning, the volume of vehicles remained relatively small. From the central strip separating the lanes the massive pillars of the future maglev elevated highway rose and threw long, menacing shadows. A small park with a lawn, a pond and a little wood occupied the opposite side of the road, where old people, divorced from time, practised qigong. It was like watching two films running at different speeds. Against the backdrop of the slow-motion ballet, the cars looked as though they were travelling faster than they really were.

No one paid Jericho any attention in his audible dispute with the airbike, in which he spoke and the machine remained stubbornly silent.

The seconds flew by.

At last he interrupted his monologue and dealt the vehicle a kick in the side, which the plastic casing absorbed so silently that it amounted to an insult. He feverishly ran through the alternatives. As he did so, he went on mechanically trying to start the airbike, so that he was still brooding when the rotors of the turbine suddenly began to turn and the familiar hiss climbed the scale of frequencies, higher and higher, until it finally invited him to fly as if there had never been a problem.

‘Fine,’ said Yoyo. ‘You’ve won.’

She crouched down and slid the little computer along the floor towards Kenny. When she stood up again, her eyes met Hongbing’s. He seemed to be asking her forgiveness for the fact that he could contribute nothing more towards solving her problems than to sit there frozen. In fact, Kenny’s perfidious arrangement even kept him from throwing himself at the man who was threatening his daughter. He wouldn’t make the first metre. Nothing would have been gained.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ she said. And then, trusting that Jericho was still on his way, she added, ‘Whatever happens, Father, don’t move from the spot, you hear? Not an inch.’

‘Touching.’ Kenny smiled. ‘I could puke.’

He lifted the computer and glanced at the screen for a moment. Then he gave Yoyo a contemptuous look.

‘Pretty ancient model, isn’t it?’

She shrugged.

‘Are you sure you’ve given me the right one?’

‘It’s the one for backups.’

‘Okay, part two. Who else knows about your little outing to forbidden climes?’

‘Daxiong,’ said Yoyo, pointing at him. ‘And Shi Wanxing.’

Daxiong gave her a quick look of surprise. It wasn’t just Kenny who would be wondering who Shi Wanxing was. In fact she’d spontaneously invented the name in the hope that Daxiong might understand her bluff and play along. Now that the hitman had taken her computer, or what he thought was her computer, they were effectively dead. She had to try to keep him at arm’s length.

‘Wanxing?’ Kenny’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who is that?’

‘He—’ began Yoyo.

‘Shut up.’ Kenny nodded to Daxiong. ‘I asked him.’

Daxiong let a moment’s silence pass, a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. Then, jutting his pharaoh beard, he said, ‘Shi Wanxing is, apart from us, the last person you haven’t killed. The last surviving Guardian. I didn’t know Yoyo had confided in him.’

Kenny frowned suspiciously. ‘Even she doesn’t seem to have known that until a minute ago.’

‘We don’t agree on the subject of Wanxing,’ growled Daxiong. ‘Yoyo thinks a lot of him, for some reason. I didn’t want to have him in the group at all. He talks too much.’

‘Wanxing is an outstanding crypto-analyst,’ Yoyo replied scornfully.

‘That’s why you shouldn’t have transferred all your data to him straight away,’ Daxiong complained.

‘Why not? He was supposed to decode the page with the Switzerland films on it.’

‘And? Did he?’

‘No idea.’

‘He did absolutely bugger all, is what he did!’

‘Hey, Daxiong!’ Yoyo railed at him. ‘What’s really at issue here? Just the fact that you can’t stand him.’

‘He’s a loudmouth.’

‘I trust him.’

‘But you can’t trust him.’

‘Wanxing is no loudmouth.’

‘Frogshit!’ said Daxiong, getting angry. ‘It’s all he bloody is!’

Kenny tilted his head. He didn’t really seem to know what to make of the argument.

‘If Wanxing talked to anyone at all about it, it was because he needed extra tools,’ Yoyo roared. ‘After you completely failed!’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

‘What?’

‘That Sara and Zheiying are in possession of this bloody message.’

‘What? Why them?’

‘Why? Are you blind? Because he fancies Sara.’

‘So do you!’

‘Hey,’ said Kenny.

‘You’re off your head,’ Daxiong snapped. ‘Shall we talk about your relationship with Zheiying? The way you make him look like an idiot just because he—’

‘Hey!’ Kenny yelled, throwing his computer at Daxiong’s feet. ‘What the hell’s going on? Are you taking the piss? Who’s Wanxing? Who are these other people? Who else knows about this? Say something, somebody, or I’ll blow the old guy to pieces!’

Yoyo opened her mouth and closed it again. She couldn’t take her eyes off the hitman, who seemed to have worked something out. That they were bluffing, keeping him at arm’s length. That they were actually staring past him, at the source of the hissing noise that Kenny hadn’t noticed because he had allowed himself to be distracted by the staged argument. Kenny, the bomb that had to be defused, like in the old films. Just another few seconds. The countdown approaching zero, half a dozen wires, all the same colour, but only one that you could cut through.

‘You’re in the crosshairs,’ she said quietly.

Xin looked at his display. It showed him what the scanner of the automatic rifle saw: Chen Hongbing, pressed into his seat. Part of the rear glass façade. A dark outline at the edge of the picture.

Something had appeared behind Chen.

‘If my father dies, you’re dead,’ said Yoyo. ‘Same if you attack us or try to escape. So listen. One of your airbikes is hovering outside the window right now. Owen Jericho is sitting on it, and he’s pointing something at you. I’m not familiar with these things, but judging by the size of it, I’d say that he could blow you to pieces with it, so try to keep your temper under control.’

Xin put his thoughts and feelings in order like an accountant. He’d get annoyed later. He had no doubt that Yoyo was telling the truth. If Chen died that second, he would die too. The girl and her enormous friend were unarmed, while he had a gun tucked into the top of his trousers – not much of an advantage really, because before he had drawn the gun he would be dead too.

‘What should I do?’ he asked calmly.

‘Turn off the trigger. That gun. I want my father to get up and come over to us.’

‘Right. To do that I’ll have to turn off automatic activation. I’ll have to touch it, okay?’

‘If this is one of your tricks—’ roared Daxiong.

‘I’m not about to commit suicide. It’s just a remote control.’

‘Go on,’ nodded Yoyo.

Xin tapped on the touchscreen and switched off the automatic trigger. The gun was no longer programmed to respond to Chen Hongbing’s movements. It was entirely under his control again.

‘Just a moment.’ He quickly keyed in swivel angle, rotation speed and fire frequency. ‘All done. Stand up, honourable Chen. Go to your daughter.’

Chen Hongbing seemed to hesitate.

Then he hurried from his chair and to the side.

Xin fell to the ground and pressed Start.

Cave-dwellers, savannah-runners: they’d experienced everything by the twenty-first century. They saw the rustling of the grass, heard what the wind carried to them, were astonishingly able simultaneously to respond to and intuitively assess a variety of stimuli. Some people drew more from their ancient inheritance than others, and some had preserved their instincts, developed over six million years of human history, to an extraordinary degree.

Owen Jericho was one of those.

He had driven the bike right up to the glass façade, clutching his rapid-fire rifle, held so that the red laser dot was resting on Kenny’s back. He hung there like a dragonfly, well aware that the hitman must have heard the hissing of the jets long before, but Kenny had shown no sign of turning round. He wasn’t prepared for an attack from that direction. They had him over a barrel.

Yoyo said something and pointed at her father.

The laser dot quivered between Kenny’s shoulder blades.

Chen’s thin, lanky body tensed, the hitman bent his arms. It was possible that he was holding something in his left hand, which he was using with his right.

Then it happened – and Jericho’s ancient legacy took hold. His perception sped up so quickly that the world seemed to be heading for a standstill and all sounds dropped to sub-audible levels. There was nothing but a dull background hum. As if he had become weightless, Chen slowly rose from the chair, moved away from the seat, centimetre by centimetre, left leg braced against the floor, right leg bent as he tipped to the side. It was a preparation for a leap, and even before it had really begun, Kenny showed that he was about to throw himself to the floor. Jericho registered all of this, Chen’s escape and Kenny’s dive, intuitively made connections between them and centred his attention on the remote-controlled gun. Even before it began to turn on its tripod, he knew exactly what was about to happen. Chen was able to escape because the gun was no longer aimed at him. The hitman wasn’t running away from Jericho’s gun, he was fleeing his own, which he was at that very moment directing to fire at the windows.

The same evolutionary calculation that had saved hunters millions of years before taught Jericho to climb a second before the barrel spat its first bullets. He had changed position by the time they left the muzzle.

Then things speeded up.

The gun on the tripod swung around and rattled off its rounds, then turned further on its axis. All the windows exploded. The burst took in Jericho’s bike, but he had managed to climb high enough to avoid being hit himself. Two of the bullets struck the rotating wheels of the engine. There was a sound like a cracking bell. The airbike took a terrible blow.

It dropped.

‘Down!’ yelled Daxiong and threw himself sideways. Three hundredweight had to get moving, but almost all of Daxiong’s colossal body was muscle, so he managed to shove Yoyo and reach Chen Hongbing with a few long strides, the gun following after him. Bullets drilled into the wall and ceiling. Wood, glass and plaster sprayed from gaping holes. Daxiong saw Yoyo fall. At a frequency of eight rounds per second, the gun shredded the door they had been standing outside just a moment before, kept on turning, pursuing him as he breathlessly tried to flee. He collided with Hongbing and pulled him to the floor.

The wall exploded above their heads.

Jericho fell.

Apparently unconnected factors combined unexpectedly, including the principles of construction of flying machines, the effects of heavy ballistics and the ambitions of the city parks commission. Tokyo, for example, symbolised a people that had always lived in a state of extreme self-confinement, which was why you hardly ever saw a tree there. Shanghai, on the other hand, was bursting with parks and tree-lined streets, which enormously enhanced the quality of life, and was also ideal when it came to considerably softening the fall of an airbike plummeting from about twelve metres in the air. Encouraged by the humid climate, the birch trees in the hinterland of Siping Lu had grown luxuriously rampant. The bike crashed into the dense foliage of a tree-top and threw Jericho off. He toppled into the branches, which grew denser as he fell; he flailed around, fell further, whipped by twigs and thrashed by thickening boughs until at last he managed to cling on to one and dangled from it, legs flailing, four to five metres above the courtyard.

Too high to jump.

Where was the airbike?

A crunching and splintering announced that he had overtaken the machine on his way down. It was raging high above him. He threw his head back and saw something flying at him, tried to get out of its way, too late. A branch crashed against his forehead.

When his eyesight had cleared, the airbike was coming straight at him.

Xin rolled over.

Dense clouds of plaster dust formed before his eyes. Near the shattered door he saw Yoyo creeping over to her father on her elbows. By now the spinning rifle had completed its first circuit, and was moving on, still spitting fire, to its second.

‘Yoyo, get out!’ he heard Daxiong shouting. ‘Get out of here!’

‘Father!’

Xin waited till the bullets had passed by him, then jumped up and slipped his index finger over the touchscreen of the remote control, stopped the weapon, pulled his finger down and to the right, and the gun followed his movements, and spat a burst of fire at the very spot where Chen and the giant were just getting back to their feet. The bullets missed them by millimetres. Still crouching, they staggered into the next room. Xin fired into the wall, but the masonry had already survived the first shots.

Whatever. In there they were trapped.

He calmly swung the gun round to the left. In a fierce staccato the gun hammered its rounds into the concrete, ploughed through a half-shattered shelf and brought it crashing down completely. A line of craters appeared in quick succession, tracing a line that continued all the way to the girl on the floor.

Yoyo stared at it. Panicking, she tried to get to her feet, but she was ridiculously slow. Her eyes widened when she realised that she was about to die.

‘Bye bye, Yoyo,’ he hissed.

Turbine mouth downwards, the airbike crashed through the branches as if to kill Jericho and swallow him up at the same time.

He had to jump!

The splintering and crashing came to a stop. The machine’s rump had jammed less than half a metre above him and come to a juddering standstill.

Bark, leaves and twigs rattled down on him. He looked into the shattered rotors of the turbine, swung towards the trunk and spotted a branch below him that might support his weight.

Worryingly thin, on closer inspection.

Too thin.

The rain of twigs resumed.

He had no choice. He dropped, climbed back up, felt the wood yielding under his weight and wrapped his arms around the trunk.

Xin heard the scream, which had come not from Yoyo but from the giant, who stormed in from the next room, hurled himself like a demolition ball against the tripod and brought it crashing down. The rifle pointed at the ceiling now, bringing down lumps of brick the size of fists. Xin pressed Stop and drew his handgun. He saw Hongbing running over to Yoyo, who leapt to her feet and pulled open what was left of the splintered door to the flat.

As Xin took aim at her, Daxiong pulled his legs away.

Xin collapsed onto his back and nimbly rolled sideways. Daxiong crashed to the floor. Xin raised his pistol, but the giant pushed himself up with amazing dexterity and knocked it from his hand. Xin gave him a kick at the spot where his wardrobe-sized chest met his chin, which must therefore have been something like an Adam’s apple. Daxiong’s pharaoh beard splintered. The giant staggered backwards and uttered a choking croak. With a racing dive Xin was on the pistol, grabbed hold of its butt, felt himself being grabbed and held aloft like a child. Kicking out in all directions, he struggled in vain to free himself from the man’s grasp. Daxiong’s great paws gripped him like vices as he carried him to the glass façade.

His plan was obvious.

Xin reached back and fired haphazardly. A muffled groan led him to assume that he had hit his target, although it didn’t keep Daxiong from hoisting him higher and violently hurling him through one of the windows. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame. Under other circumstances the impact would have meant certain death, but the injury had cost the giant some of his strength. Xin spread his arms and legs like a cat, tried to find something to hold on to and caught hold of a strut that hadn’t been shattered in the hail of gunfire. His body swung outside. For a moment he looked down at the green sea of leaves below him, tensed his muscles to get back inside, saw Daxiong’s fist flying at him and slipped away.

He fell – a little way.

In an instant he spotted and grabbed the bulky box of the air-conditioning system. A jolt ran through his body, his hands clawed around the box, which scraped sideways. Far below him there was crashing, splintering and rattling as if a huge animal were raging in the tree-tops.

Jericho? That was exactly the spot where the detective had fallen.

No matter. He had to get back into the flat. Using all his strength he pulled himself up, braced his feet against the masonry and started climbing.

Jericho clung desperately to the tree trunk. His feet slipped. No bark to claw on to. Just three metres above the ground he decided to let go, pushed himself away, landed on both feet, lost his balance, fell on his back and saw the airbike plunging down on top of him.

Motorbike falls from tree and kills detective.

There were headlines that you didn’t want to imagine in print.

With all his strength he catapulted himself sideways. The airbike struck the ground beside him with such force that he was afraid the arsenal of weapons would go up, but he was spared that disaster at least. The bike lay on its side; two jets and part of the casing had come off. As a result it had ceased to function as a flying machine. He looked up, but the tree-tops obscured the view of Chen’s flat. When he staggered to the house wall he thought he saw a foot disappearing over the window ledge and narrowed his eyes.

The foot was gone.

He looked around, discovered a back door, pressed the handle and found it was open. Behind it, the corridor lay in darkness. Cool air drifted towards him. He slipped inside and took a moment to find his bearings, saw a turn in the corridor and followed its course. After a short flight of steps he found himself beside the lift-shaft. Ahead of him, the hall stretched to the front door. A series of loud thumps came from the stairwell. Someone was charging down the stairs like an elephant. Jericho jerked backwards, hid behind the lift-shaft and waited to see who would appear in the hall.

It was Daxiong. The giant staggered and rested his arm against the wall. His jacket was torn and bloodstained over his right shoulder. A few quick steps and Jericho was beside him.

‘What’s going on? Where are Yoyo and Chen?’

Daxiong spun around, fist ready to strike. Then he recognised Jericho, turned and stumbled towards the front door.

‘Outside,’ he snorted.

‘And Kenny?’

‘Outside too.’

His knees gave. Jericho grabbed him under the arms.

‘Stand up,’ he panted.

‘I’m too heavy.’

‘Nonsense. I’ve rocked bigger babies than you before. What do you mean outside?’

Daxiong clawed one of his great hands into Jericho’s shoulder and shifted his weight to him. Of course he was too heavy. Far too heavy. Almost like dragging a medium-sized dinosaur around with you. Jericho pulled the door open, and they staggered together into the sunlight.

‘I threw him out,’ wheezed Daxiong. ‘Out of the window. The bastard.’

‘I think the bastard’s crept back in again.’ Jericho quickly scanned the surroundings. A car and a bike were on the move, some way apart.

‘They must be here somewhere – there!’

Between the vehicles Yoyo waved at them from the other side of the road. She was on the saddle of one of the two motorbikes on which she and Daxiong had arrived. Beside her, Chen Hongbing shifted nervously from one foot to the other. Yoyo pointed to the second motorbike and shouted something.

‘Exactly,’ growled Daxiong. He took his hand off Jericho’s shoulder and stomped unsteadily off. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

The pagoda-like roof of the building flattened in the middle section, by the shaft of the stairwell. Xin had parked his airbike next to it when he’d gone down to the fourth floor and now he charged back into the open, gun at the ready, safety-catch released in haste, bleeding from a thousand cuts. He ran to the edge of the roof. The pagoda sloped gently below him and hid most of the street, but he could still make out the struts for the new elevated highway and the park on the other side.

He saw Yoyo and her father standing next to a footbridge.

He took aim and realised that his magazine was empty. With a howl of rage he threw the gun away, ran to his airbike, sat on it, started the engine and climbed until he had a wider view of the whole road. Jericho and Daxiong were running along it. They had crossed the central reservation and were now halfway over the bridge. The traffic surged along below them. From the air they looked like mice in a lab run. One of them was limping.

The giant. He had hit him.

Xin reached down into the weapon chamber and brought out a sub-machine-gun. Jets wailing, he plunged.

Jericho saw him coming. He grabbed Daxiong – running in front of him, bent almost double – by the sleeve of his jacket and pointed into the air.

‘Shit,’ gasped Daxiong. He raised both arms to alert the others to the bike, and groaned. His face was contorted with pain. But Yoyo had also realised the danger she was in. She jumped from her motorbike and started running as fast as she could towards the park, with Hongbing hot on her heels.

‘Daxiong,’ yelled Jericho. ‘We’ve got to get back.’

‘No!’

‘We’ll never make it.’

He gave the giant a shove and pushed him to the point where the walkway crossed the central reservation, next to one of the massive pillar constructions on which the rails of the maglev were going to run. Prongs jutted out from it at regular intervals. Jericho swung himself over the parapet and started climbing down. He hoped Daxiong would be able to summon the strength to follow him. There was no way he could carry the guy down there.

The airbike shot across the footbridge. Shots rang out loudly. Daxiong lost his grip and landed heavily in the grass of the central reservation. Jericho ran to the fallen man, who sat up and uttered a roar that easily drowned out the sound of the cars. To Jericho’s relief Daxiong wasn’t shouting with pain, but bawled a cascade of curses all of which concerned Kenny’s slow and painful demise.

‘Up with you,’ Jericho shouted at him.

‘I can’t!’

‘Yes, you can. I’m not particularly responsive to stranded whales.’

Daxiong turned his narrow gaze on him.

‘I’ll tear his stomach out,’ he shouted. ‘And his guts! First his large intestine, then the small one—’

‘As you wish. On your feet now!’

Xin came around in a circle and took aim at Yoyo.

A moment later they had disappeared under the lush foliage of the trees that surrounded the park. He brought the bike down and swept over the field towards the qigong group. Heads high, shoulders lowered, upper and lower body in harmony, the old people stretched their arms out, turned their palms and brought them slowly upwards, stretched their limbs, craned their arms until it looked as if they were keeping the sky from plummeting down on Siping Lu. He saw the fugitives appear between plane trees and weeping willows and fired, tearing gaping holes in the wood. The front members of the group fell out of sync with the rest. They forgot to clasp their fingers, missed the slow exhalation, turned their heads.

A moment later they scattered, as the airbike swept through them.

Xin slowed the bike and headed towards the little wood into which Yoyo and her father had disappeared. No sign of them. He pulled up the nose of the airbike and quickly gained height. Maybe they wanted to seize the right moment and run out on the other side, to get to their motorbikes. Jets hissing, he aimed for the two machines. Being powered by electricity, they wouldn’t explode, but after an intensive bombardment they would no longer be usable.

He saw a movement in the central reservation. Ah! Jericho and the colossus who’d tried to throw him out of the window.

So much the better.

‘Here he comes!’

Daxiong nodded feebly. They waited until the last moment, then fled between the pillars as the first shots ploughed through the grass and struck the concrete. The airbike dashed past them and then performed a quick turn.

‘To the other side.’

They took cover again, hoping to keep Kenny at bay. They could always take shelter behind one of the columns. At least that was what Jericho hoped.

Daxiong leaned next to him, drenched in sweat, breath rattling. His face was now worryingly pale.

‘I’m not going to be able to keep this up for much longer,’ he panted.

‘You won’t need to,’ said Jericho, but he was starting to worry that for some reason the last part of his plan mightn’t work quite as well as he had hoped. His eyes swept the sky. Vehicles roared past on either side at irregular intervals. The hiss of the turbine moved away. For a moment he allowed himself to believe that the hitman had given up. If he was high enough, the pillar wouldn’t be much use to them. They could circle the thing like rabbits, but sooner or later they would be hit.

‘—and his appendix, if he’s still got one,’ croaked Daxiong. ‘I’ll drag that out of him too. Or first the appendix and then—’

Grass and soil sprayed up at their feet. Jericho circled the pillar. Daxiong came staggering after him, barely capable of keeping on his feet.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Jericho.

‘That son of a bitch hit me somewhere in the back,’ Daxiong murmured. He coughed and collapsed. ‘I think I’m going to—’

‘Daxiong! For God’s sake! You can’t give in now. Do you hear me? Don’t faint!’

‘I’m – I’m trying – I—’

‘There! Look!’

Something had appeared in the sky in the distance, flat and silvery. It dived and came very quickly towards them.

‘Daxiong,’ yelled Jericho. ‘We’re saved!’

The giant smiled. ‘That’s nice,’ he said dreamily and tipped sideways.

Xin had briefly shifted his attention to the little wood, so he didn’t see the shimmering flatfish until it was almost too late. Within a few seconds it grew menacingly large, but the pilot showed no sign of veering away from him. He gave a start, then realised that the new arrival planned to ram him into the ground. Startled, he raised his arm and fired off a few rounds that the vehicle dodged elegantly before immediately heading straight back towards him again.

Whoever was steering the skymobile was a master of navigation.

He let the airbike drop like a stone and caught it again right above the traffic. The silver discus went into a nosedive. Xin turned, passed over the woods and the artificial lake, twisted and dodged, and still couldn’t shake off his pursuer. The silver discus chased him across the park and back to the road, then suddenly turned off and rose steeply into the sky. Xin watched after him in confusion, slowed his bike down and held it hovering above the flow of traffic.

The strange machine disappeared.

Cursing, he remembered what he had to do. It was humiliating! Yoyo and old Chen were hiding somewhere in the bushes watching everything, an idea that made him boil with fury. He would use the grenade launcher and set the woods ablaze – but first Jericho and Daxiong had to go. No police had turned up yet. Gun at the ready, he was heading towards the pillar with the two idiots hiding behind it, when he saw the silver discus coming back and heading straight for him.

He hid his gun. Below him, antediluvian cars impregnated the air with exhaust and street dust. He was seething with rage. He wouldn’t allow himself to be hunted again. He would bring that guy down from the sky. His fingers closed around the butt of the rocket-launcher, but it was stuck. He rattled at it frantically, looked down and lost his concentration for a moment.

There was a loud honking noise.

Louder, closer.

Irritated, Xin raised his head.

The front of a roaring heavy goods vehicle, growing, vast. The airbike had dropped while he was battling with the launcher. With horror, he saw the driver shouting and gesticulating behind the windscreen, pulled the bike back up and missed the roof of the driver’s cab by inches, only to see the discus shooting away above him, so close that its shock-wave gripped the airbike and whirled it around like a leaf. He flew from the saddle in a high arc and landed on his back. The impact left him breathless. He instinctively reached his arms up, but nothing drove over him. He was lying on something that was solid yet yielding. Battling for breath, he pulled himself upright and saw rusty planks supporting the pile of whatever he was rolling in.

No. Not planks. Bodywork. Xin reached into the mass and let it trickle through his fingers.

Sand.

He had fallen into a heap of sand.

With a cry of rage he got to his feet, saw houses, masts and traffic-lights drifting past him, lost his balance and landed back in the sand as the huge truck he was lying on turned off, accelerated and drove him out of Hongkou, away from Daxiong, Jericho, Yoyo, Chen and Siping Lu.

On the inside of the four westbound lanes, the traffic started to back up. The airbike had fallen on the central reservation, scattering parts of its shell over the carriageway and forcing some drivers into bold braking manoeuvres. If there were no collisions, this was due only to the compulsory introduction of pre-safe sensors, which even old models had had to adopt. Radar systems with CMOS cameras constantly analysed distance and automatically braked the car if the driver in front came to an abrupt standstill. Only flying objects obviously created problems for the sensors.

Meanwhile the Silver Surfer had landed in the park. Jericho peered between the cars and saw the vehicle’s side doors lifting and a familiar, fleshy figure climbing out. Then he saw someone else, and his heart thumped with joy.

Yoyo and Chen came running out of the wood.

‘Daxiong!’ He bent down to the giant and patted his cheek. ‘Get up. Come on.’ Daxiong murmured something unfriendly. Jericho brought his hand back and gave him two loud slaps, and jumped backwards just in case he had underestimated the giant’s reflexes. But Daxiong just sat up, sighed and looked as if he were about to sink back again. Jericho took his arm and gripped it tightly for a few seconds, before the massive body slipped away from him.

‘Damn it, Daxiong!’

He couldn’t let the wounded man fall into a coma. Not here. Further slaps were needed. This time he was more successful.

‘Have you lost your mind?’ Daxiong yelled.

Jericho pointed at the prongs in the pillar that led up to the footbridge. ‘You can go to sleep in a minute. First we’ve got to get up there.’

Daxiong tried to support himself on his left arm, collapsed, tried again and got to his feet. Jericho felt terribly sorry for him. In the movies people with bullet wounds went on charging around the place doing heroic things, but the reality was very different. The wound on Daxiong’s back might just have been a graze, but the very shock of it, caused by the velocity of the dart bullets, was enough to send a person out of his mind. Daxiong had lost a lot of blood, and the wound must be very painful.

The big man’s gaze wandered up the ladder. By now his face was ashen.

‘I won’t get up there, Owen,’ he whispered.

Jericho breathed out. Daxiong was right. He didn’t even feel all that steady on his feet himself. He estimated the width of the central reservation – just wide enough, he thought, and took out his mobile. Two beeps later he had Tu on the line. Jericho could see him over in the park, while Yoyo and Chen were climbing into the skymobile.

‘Tian?’

His voice was suddenly trembling. All of him, and everything around him, had suddenly started trembling.

‘My God, Owen!’ trumpeted Tu. ‘What’s up? We’re waiting for you.’

‘Sorry.’ He gulped. ‘You were great, but I’m afraid the big challenge still lies ahead of you.’

‘What? Which one do you mean?’

‘Precision landing. Central reservation. See you soon, old friend.’

Tu’s Silver Surfer had been designed as a two-seater with an ejector seat. Under the combined weight of five people, two of them massively obese, it shed some of its agility. It also became horribly cramped. They shifted Daxiong to the passenger seat and squashed in together behind him. Hopelessly overladen, the Silver Surfer took off with all the elegance of an arthritic duck. Jericho was surprised it could fly at all. Tu guided the machine over the uniform red-brown roofs of the residential complexes of Hongkou, crossed the Huangpu and headed for the northern shore of the financial district. Within view of the Yangpu Bridge lay the park-like gardens of the Pudong International Medical Center, a collection of weightless-looking glass cocoons, nestling in spruce gardens with artificial lakes, bamboo glades and secret pavilions. The renowned private clinic had been built only a few years previously. It represented the new, ‘natural’ Shanghai, based on plans which demonstrated that if you built something shaped like the neck of a brachiosaurus it might provide lovely views, but otherwise it created nothing but problems. (The ultimate example of architectural phallic delusion, the Nakheel Tower, also loomed half-finished above the now bankrupt city of Dubai, as if to confirm the platitude that the biggest guy isn’t the one with the longest. The monster had been planned to reach a height of 1400 metres. After just over a kilometre the work had been suspended; the architects, in their bid to climb to heaven, had been defeated by the banality of their concept; the casa erecta was ripe for inclusion in the book of heroic failures.) Structures like the interlocking cells of the Pudong International Medical Center came much closer to the demands of a metropolis that saw itself as a gigantic urban protozoon; its metabolism was based on neuronal interconnections rather than unfeasibly vast dimensions.

‘I know someone here.’

As ever when anything new happened in Shanghai, Tu was on intimate terms with people at the top, in this instance the head of surgery. After they had handed over Daxiong, the men had had a quiet chat. It ended with the assurance that Daxiong’s injury would be treated, with no questions asked. The giant had to be stitched up, and would have to get used to the idea of a nice smart scar. And he would be in pain for a while.

‘But there are things we can do about that,’ the surgeon said as he left, smiling reassuringly at everyone. ‘There are things we can do about everything these days.’

In private clinics, his expression added.

Jericho would have liked to ask what he planned to do about Yoyo’s pain over the loss of her friends, about Chen Hongbing’s emotional torment, and his own inner movies, but instead he just shook Daxiong’s hand and wished him all the best. The giant looked at him expressionlessly. Then he let go of his hand, stretched out his right arm and drew him to him. Jericho groaned. If Daxiong could hug you with a gaping wound in his back, he preferred not to know what declarations of love he was capable of in a state of perfect physical health.

‘You’re not so bad!’ said Daxiong.

‘My pleasure,’ Jericho grinned. ‘Be nice to the nurses.’

‘And you look after Yoyo till I’m out.’

‘Will do.’

‘So, see you tonight.’

Jericho thought he had misheard. Daxiong turned his head to one side as if any further discussion about his release were a simple waste of time.

‘Leave it,’ said Yoyo as she left. ‘I’m just glad he didn’t want to come with us straight away.’

‘And now?’ asked Chen Hongbing as they trotted back to the Silver Surfer. It was the first time he had said anything at all since they had left the park. His blank face, whatever hell had caused it, made him seem strangely uninvolved, almost uninterested.

‘I think there are some things I should explain to you.’ Yoyo lowered her head. ‘Except – perhaps not right now.’

Chen raised his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I don’t understand all this.’ His gaze wandered to Jericho. ‘But you’d—’

‘I found her,’ Jericho nodded. ‘Just like you wanted.’

‘Yes,’ Chen said slowly. He seemed to be wondering whether this was really what he had wanted.

‘I’m sorry about what happened.’

‘No, no. I’m the one who should be thanking you!’

That sounded exactly like the man who, two days ago – had it really only been two days ago? – had come into his office, conspicuous for his excessive formality. But lurking in the background there was also the question of how someone might seriously expect thanks for having set off on a simple missing-person job and come back with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in hot pursuit.

Jericho said nothing. Chen said nothing back. Yoyo had discovered something fascinating in the sky. Tu paced about for a while among ferns, bamboo and black pines, and issued a stream of instructions into his phone.

‘So,’ he announced when he came back.

‘So what?’ asked Jericho.

‘So someone’s going to the Westin to collect your computer and the rest of your stuff and bring them to my place, where you’ll be living for the next little while.’

‘Oh. Fine.’

‘And I’ve organised two people to keep an eye on your loft in Xintiandi. Two more are on their way to Siping Lu. To clean up and stand watch.’ He cleared his throat and put his arm around Chen’s shoulders. ‘Of course we’ll have to ask ourselves, my dear Hongbing, what we will tell the police when they come to examine the state of your sitting room.’

‘That means we’re flying to your place?’ Yoyo concluded.

Tu looked at them all. ‘Does anyone have a better idea.’

Silence.

‘Anyone rather spend the night at home? No? Then excuse me.’

With a quiet hum, the Silver Surfer lifted its wing doors.

‘The highest are the wise,’ Jericho whispered as he climbed into the back seat.

Tu glared at him.

‘Those who are born wise,’ he said. ‘Get Confucius out of your head. I can do it better than you. Longnose!’

Without Daxiong, who counted as two, the flying machine swiftly gained altitude. Tu lived in a villa in a gated area, a fortress-like guarded compound in the hinterland of Pudong, surrounded by park-like areas of green. They landed right in front of the main building, peeled themselves from their upholstered seats and climbed a flight of steps leading to a porch with double doors.

One of the doors opened. An attractive Chinese woman with red-dyed hair appeared in the doorway. She was the complete opposite of Yoyo. Less beautiful, but more elegant in her appearance and, strangely, more sensual. A person with no gaps in her CV, who was used to having the world rotate around her. Tu greeted her with a hug and marched inside. Jericho followed him. The woman smiled and kissed him fleetingly on both cheeks.

‘Hi, Owen,’ she said in a sonorous voice.

Jericho returned her smile. ‘Hi, Joanna.’

Pudong

Tu had instructed Joanna to focus all her care and attention on Chen as soon as they got back. What he really wanted was for her to distract him for a while, a task which Joanna dedicated herself to fully. Steering the confused Chen into her palatial kitchen with the same uncompromising attitude as someone pushing a shopping trolley in front of them, she demanded to know what tea he preferred, asked whether he would like a sauna, a bath or a hot shower, where it hurt, what had happened, whether he would like some cold chicken from the fridge. He didn’t know how it had all ended up like that, the guy just suddenly appeared in the room with the gun, and oh God, how did he even get in, and oh, you’ve got scratches all over you, they could get inflamed, hold still, don’t argue, and so on and so forth. She didn’t have a clue what was going on, of course. But Joanna wouldn’t have been Joanna if that had been a problem. She exuded the bountiful aromas of her optimism, bathing Chen in confidence until he was ready to believe that everything would be okay, purely because she said so. Jericho had never met any other person with such powers of conviction that things would turn out fine, without having the faintest idea how. Joanna bluffed for all she was worth. In her world, the tail wagged the dog. Presumably Chen was convinced that he was having a conversation, or even that he had started it. Joanna had a way of driving a man in front of her in such a manner that he would swear it was her following him.

‘So what should we do?’ hissed Tu.

‘Notify the police,’ said Jericho tersely. ‘Before they turn up of their own accord.’

‘You want to go on the offensive?’

‘What other option do we have? That maniac set half the steelworks on fire. It won’t take them long to find the bodies and then some witnesses in Quyu. It looks as if a bomb just went off on Siping Lu – doesn’t it, Yoyo—?’

‘Yes.’

‘—and there’s a crashed airbike decomposing in the courtyard, chock-a-block with heavy-duty weapons. And one that brought the traffic to a standstill. They’ll be able to piece together some of the puzzle from all that.’

‘But how much of it?’

‘I’m telling you, it will only be a few hours before they start asking what your friend Hongbing had to do with the massacre in Quyu. They’ll think of Yoyo in no time at all. I mean, the thing in the steel factory looks like some campaign of destruction against the City Demons, don’t you think? And Yoyo’s part of the group.’

‘And what about you?’ asked Yoyo. ‘Do you reckon they’ll think of you too?’

‘How would they? My car was incinerated in Quyu.’

‘But they’ll be able to identify it.’ Tu pursed his lips. ‘And besides, Siping Lu has security cameras. Which means they’ll have recordings of all of you meeting up, of Yoyo and Daxiong going into the building, of how that – that—’

‘Kenny.’

‘—Kenny guy herded the two of you in front of him—’

‘Not just us,’ said Jericho. ‘Think about it. You were just as easily visible, in your state of heavenly wrath. And who is it who works in your company to finance her studies?’

‘Yoyo, the girl who just can’t keep her mouth shut,’ snorted Yoyo.

‘Yes, my dear, you really do have a sparkling reputation,’ commented Tu, scratching his bald head. With his new glasses on, he looked almost civilised. ‘So what are we going to tell them? That Yoyo happened to overhear Kenny, completely by chance, while—’

‘Forget it,’ Yoyo interrupted him. ‘You want me to tell the police that I’m in possession of secret information? With my record? If that arsehole is from the government I might as well lock myself up and throw away the key. Or better still, just shoot myself!’

‘I don’t think the police are in on this,’ said Jericho.

‘Yes, but you don’t know what might happen if they get their hands on me.’

‘Hold on a second.’ Tu was shaking his head energetically. ‘Let’s be realistic. We’re assuming the Shanghai police force has the same powers of deduction as a quantum computer. They’re not going to put all the pieces together that quickly.’

‘Well, either way, we still need to notify them,’ said Jericho.

‘But perhaps not straight away.’

‘Yes, straight away. If someone trashes your apartment and you don’t report it, that looks odd. Not to mention that Yoyo, Daxiong and I turned up just beforehand, and that I have a flying machine just like Kenny’s.’

‘Okay fine, then how about this: someone holds up a motorcycle club in Quyu and causes a bloodbath. He has accomplices, all of them on flying machines. What they don’t realise is that Yoyo had a family friend visiting, Owen, and he ends up creating a hell of a problem for them, right? Both Yoyo and Owen get hold of one of the airbikes and are able to flee. Not long after, Yoyo receives a call from Hong-bing, telling her that someone’s trying to break into his apartment.’

‘No way!’ Yoyo shook her head. ‘You don’t call your daughter if someone’s trying to break into your place.’

‘Fine, then—’

‘I know. Kenny threatened to kill all the members of your family,’ Jericho suggested. ‘So you call your father. He doesn’t answer, so you go to see him, enlisting the help of Hongbing’s best friend, Tian.’

‘And we have no idea what the guys want?’ asked Yoyo sceptically. ‘You expect them to believe that?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘God, what a cock and bull story.’

‘The most important thing is to keep you out of it,’ said Tu. ‘No dissident background, no Guardians.’ He gave Yoyo a reproachful look. ‘On that note, you could have told me you were all hanging out in a blast furnace. I only knew about the Andromeda.’

‘I’m sorry. You weren’t supposed to get dragged that far into it.’

‘How do you figure that out? I provided the infrastructure for you and your troop of pests. You can’t get much deeper involved than that.’ Tu sighed. ‘But fine. Point two on the agenda. What do we tell Hongbing?’

Yoyo hesitated. ‘The same story?’

‘What?’ barked Jericho.

‘Well, I just thought—’

‘You want to have your father believing this was all the act of some nut job?’ Suddenly he was furious with her. He pictured Hongbing, filled with all that sorrow. And now they wanted to pull the wool over his eyes yet again?

‘Owen.’ Yoyo raised her hand. ‘It’s great, everything you’ve done for us, but this really has nothing to do with you.’

‘Your father deserves an explanation!’

‘I’m not sure if he really wants one.’

‘Exactly. You’re not sure. My God, he was taken hostage, held at gunpoint, his daughter was threatened, his apartment destroyed. You have to tell him the truth! Anything else is pure cowardice.’

‘Stay out of it!’

‘Yoyo,’ said Tu softly but firmly, as if commanding a dog to come to heel.

‘What?’ she snapped. ‘What is it? It has nothing to do with him! You said yourself that it would be a mistake to burden my father with it.’

‘The circumstances have changed. Owen’s right.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot.’ Yoyo contorted her face mockingly. ‘He’s a family friend now.’

‘No. He’s just right – pure and simple.’

‘But why? What does Owen know about my father?’

‘Well, what do you know about him?’ asked Jericho, antagonised.

Yoyo glared at him. Clearly he’d hit a sore spot.

‘Hongbing is embittered, set in his ways, introverted,’ said Tu. ‘But I know him! I’m waiting for the day when he’ll break out of that bitter shell, and I don’t know whether I should long for it or dread it. He’s had to spend years of his life feeling utterly, terribly helpless. Up until now there was no reason to rub his nose in the fact that you’re China’s most-wanted dissident, but that just changed. After this morning he knows full bloody well that you have some explaining to do.’

Yoyo shook her head unhappily.

‘He’ll hate me.’

‘He’s more likely to hate me for having helped you, but I don’t genuinely believe that either. You can’t carry on lying to him, Yoyo. For him, the worst possible thing would be you not confiding in him. You’d be taking away his—’ Tu seemed to be struggling to find the words, ‘his purpose as a father.’

‘His purpose as a father?’ echoed Yoyo, as if she’d misheard.

‘Yes. Everybody needs to feel significant in some way or another. Hongbing tried to do something too, a long time ago, and he was punished for it. His purpose was taken away from him.’

‘And now he’s punishing me.’

‘Punishing you is the last thing he wants to do.’

Yoyo stared at him.

‘But he’s never spoken to me about his life, Tian! Never! He’s never confided in me! And you don’t think that’s a punishment? In what way have I been significant to him? Okay, he worries about me from morning to night, and I’m sure he’d rather lock me in out of sheer worry, but what’s the point? What does he want from me if he won’t even talk to me?’

‘He’s ashamed,’ said Tu softly.

‘Of what? I’m the one suffering. I have a – a zombie for a father!’

‘You can’t talk like that.’

‘Can’t I? What about him explaining something to me for a change?’

‘He’ll probably have to,’ nodded Tu.

‘Oh, great! When?’

‘It’s your turn first.’

‘Why me again?’ exploded Yoyo. ‘Why not him?’

‘Because you’re the one in a position to reach out to him.’

‘Don’t come to me with your emotional guilt trip,’ she shouted. ‘My friends are dead, and my father was nearly killed too. I’m the one who’s had the most to deal with here.’

‘We’ve all had a lot to deal with,’ Jericho interrupted. He had heard enough. ‘So solve your problems, but solve them somewhere else. Tian, when do you think my computer will be here?’

‘In a few minutes,’ said Tian, grateful for the change of subject.

‘Good. I’ll get to work on the Swiss films again. Can I use your office?’

‘Of course.’ Tu hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders submissively. ‘So I’ll notify the police then. Agreed?’

‘Yes, do it.’

‘Are we all available for questioning?’

‘There’s no point hiding, otherwise they’ll just pay us personal visits.’ Jericho furrowed his brow. ‘They may have already started. The first victim in Kenny’s dirty game was Grand Cherokee Wang.’ He looked at Yoyo. ‘Your flatmate. They’re going to be all over you like a pack of hungry wolves.’

‘They can go ahead,’ said Yoyo grimly. ‘Let’s see them try to eat me.’

‘Eat me, and I’ll eat you alive.’

‘Well remembered,’ snorted Yoyo, turning round and walking off to the kitchen.

Jericho was ecstatic to have Diane back again. Without holding out any great hopes, he checked the three websites which were supposed to be interchanged according to the report, and was disappointed. The mask hadn’t unearthed anything. It seemed they really had been taken out of circulation.

So that just left him with the Swiss films and a hunch.

He gave Diane a series of directions. With programmed courtesy, she informed him that the analysis would take some time, which meant it could just as easily take five years as five minutes. The computer had no plan on this front. He might as well have asked Alexander Fleming how long he would need to discover penicillin. As the films were three-dimensional, Diane had to go through data cubes rather than data surfaces, which threatened to drag the process out for a long time.

Joanna came in, bringing him some tea and English biscuits.

It was four years now since they had broken up, but Jericho still didn’t know how to act around the woman who had lured him to Shanghai and then left him out of the blue. At least, that’s how it had seemed to him: that Joanna had ditched him in order to marry someone who was hitting the big time in the Chinese boom, someone who didn’t conform in the slightest to what one might assume to be her ideal partner. But it was this very man who had become Jericho’s closest friend: a friendship, initiated by Joanna, which had started out within the cocoon of a business relationship, and developed in such a way that neither Tu nor Jericho had really realised it was even happening. It had come down to Joanna to alert them to the fact they had become more deeply attached, at the same time hoping to make Jericho realise it was about time he stopped seeing himself as indebted to everyone.

‘I don’t,’ he had retorted with a baffled expression, as if she had just suggested he shouldn’t walk to work on all fours any more.

But Jericho knew exactly what she meant. She had exaggerated a bit of course, which was in her nature, because Joanna went to the other extreme: she hardly ever felt guilt. This might lead to accusations of self-righteousness, but her behaviour was far from amoral. She just lacked the guilt that all children were born into. From the day you first come into the world, you find yourself being constantly admonished, lectured, caught in the act, always in the wrong, subjected to judgement and constant corrections, all of which are intended to make an imperfect human being into a better one. The extent of the improvement is measured by how much you live up to others’ expectations, an experiment doomed to failure. It normally leads to failure for all involved. Accompanied by good wishes and silent reproaches, you ultimately end up taking your own path and forget to grant the child within you absolution, a child accustomed to being scolded for running off alone. Rushing through the crossroads of ‘I can’t, I shouldn’t, I’m not allowed’, you always find yourself back in the same place you set out from a long time ago, regardless of how old you may have become in the process. Your whole life long, you see yourself through the eyes of others, measure yourself by their standards, judge yourself by their canon of values, condemn yourself with their indignation, and you are never enough.

You are never enough for yourself.

That was what Joanna had meant. She had developed a remarkable talent for freeing herself from the entanglements of her childhood. Her way of looking at things was genuine, as sharp as a knife, her behaviour consistent. She had considered herself fully within her rights to break up with Jericho. She knew that the breakdown of their relationship would cause him pain, but in Joanna’s world, this kind of pain was no more the result of culpable behaviour than toothache. She hadn’t robbed him, hadn’t publicly humiliated him, hadn’t continually deceived him. She paid no attention to what others felt she should have done or not done. The only person whose gaze she wanted to be able to meet was the one right opposite her in the mirror.

‘How are you?’ asked Jericho.

‘Well, how do you think?’ Joanna sank down into one of the cantilever chairs scattered around Tu’s office. ‘Very agitated.’

She didn’t look particularly agitated. She looked intrigued, and a little concerned. Jericho drank his tea.

‘Did Tian tell you what happened?’

‘He gave me an overview in passing, so now I know his version.’ Joanna took a biscuit and nibbled at it thoughtfully. ‘And I’ve heard Hongbing’s too of course. It sounds dreadful. I wanted to speak to Yoyo, but she’s in the middle of battling out her tiresome father–daughter conflict.’

Jericho hesitated. ‘Do you actually know what that’s about?’

‘I’m not stupid.’ She jerked her thumb in the direction of the door. ‘I also know that Tian is involved.’

‘And that’s not a problem for you?’

‘It’s his business. He must know what’s he’s doing. I’m too shamefully lacking in ambition myself, as you know. I wouldn’t make a very convincing dissident. But I understand. His motivations seem clear to me, so he has my unconditional support.’

Jericho was silent. It was obvious that Chen Hongbing wasn’t the only one who had eaten bitterness at some point in his past. Tu’s professional status implied all manner of things, but not collaboration with a group of dissidents. There must be something from way back that was influencing his behaviour.

‘Maybe he’ll tell you about it someday,’ Joanna added, eating another biscuit. ‘In any case, you’ve all been hunting, and now I’m coming to gather. And as Yoyo is otherwise engaged, I’m starting with you.’

Jericho briefly explained what had taken place since Chen’s visit to Xintiandi. Joanna didn’t interrupt him; that is if you didn’t count the occasional ahhs, mm-hms and ohhs which were ritually expressed in China as a form of courtesy to assure the other person of your attentiveness. During his report, she also devoured all of the biscuits and drank most of the tea. That was fine by Jericho. He still didn’t have even the slightest appetite. After he finished talking, they both fell silent for a while.

‘It sounds like you’ve all got a long-term problem,’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’

‘Tian too?’ It sounded like Me too? Jericho was just about to tell her that her own wellbeing should be the least of her worries, but stopped himself; perhaps he was reading too much into her question.

‘You can work that out for yourself,’ he said. ‘In any case, even Kenny will have to acknowledge the fact that he’s cocked things up. By now we could have confided in anyone under the sun. He missed his opportunity to eliminate everyone who knew about it.’

‘You mean he won’t keep trying to get Yoyo?’

Jericho pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. He could feel a headache coming on. ‘It’s hard to tell,’ he said.

‘In what way?’

‘Believe me, I’ve met psychopaths who are bad to the core, ones who tortured their victims, filleted them, canned them, let them die of thirst, cut off this or that, things you wouldn’t believe. Their type are motivated purely by obsession. And then there are the professional killers.’

‘Who combine business with pleasure.’

‘The main thing is that they see it as a job. It brings them money. They don’t develop any emotional connection to their victims, they just do their job. Kenny botched his up. Aggravating for him, but usually you’d expect him to leave us in peace from now on and turn his attention to other jobs.’

‘But you don’t think that’s the case?’

‘He’s a professional and a psycho.’ Jericho circled his index finger over his temple. ‘And those guys are a little harder to classify.’

‘Which means?’

‘Someone like Kenny could feel offended that we’ve not all been eliminated as planned. He might think we shouldn’t have put up a fight. It’s possible that he’ll do nothing. But it’s just as possible that he’ll set my loft on fire, or your house, or lie in wait for us and shoot us down, and all just because he’s angry.’

‘I see you’re full of optimism as usual.’

Jericho glowered at her. ‘I thought that was your job.’

He knew his retort was unfair, but she had provoked him. It was a shabby, mean little comment with sharp teeth and threadbare fur, which had scurried up in a surprise attack, sank its teeth in and then died with a cackle.

‘Jerk.’

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t be.’ She stood up and ruffled his hair. Strangely, Jericho felt both comforted and humiliated by her gesture. A display lit up on Tu’s computer console. The guard reported that the police had arrived and wished to question Tu as well as the others present on the incidents in Quyu and Hongkou.

The questioning went as questioning tended to go with citizens of a higher social standing. An investigating civil servant with assistants in tow showed great courtesy, assuring all of those present of her sympathy and describing the incidents in quick succession as ‘horrifying’ and ‘abhorrent’, Mr Tu as an ‘outstanding member of society’, Chen and Yoyo as ‘heroic’ and Jericho as a ‘valued friend of the authorities’. In between all that, she flung questions around like circus knives. It was clear she didn’t believe the story in the very parts where it wasn’t true, for example when it came to Kenny’s motive. Her gaze resembled that of a butcher, talking encouragingly to a pig as he carved it in his mind’s eye.

Chen looked even more hollow-cheeked than normal. Tu’s face had a purple tinge to it, while Yoyo’s was filled with bitter pride. Clearly the arrival of the police had torn them from a heated discussion. Jericho realised that the inspector had gauged the emotional climate down to the exact degree, but she wasn’t commenting on it for the time being. It was only in the course of the individual interrogations that she became more explicit. She was a middle-aged woman with smoothly brushed hair and intelligent eyes, behind what looked like old-fashioned glasses with small lenses and thick frames. But Jericho knew better. It was actually a MindReader, a portable computer which filmed the person opposite, ran their expression through an amplifier and projected the result in real time onto the lenses of the glasses. In this way, the merest hint of a smug smile could become perfectly clear to the wearer. A nervous blink would mimic an earthquake. Tell-tale signals in facial expressions that wouldn’t normally be noticed became readable. Jericho guessed that she had also linked an Interpreter to it, which dramatised the tone, accentuation and flow of his voice. The effect was uncanny. If you combined the forces of MindReader and Interpreter, the people being questioned suddenly sounded like bad actors, turning into grimacing, crude robots, despite fully believing they had their reactions under control.

Jericho himself had already worked with both programs. Only very experienced investigators used them. It took years of practice to correctly read the discrepancies between the expression, intonation and content of a statement. He showed no sign of having recognised the device, told his version of the incident stoically and fended off question after question.

‘And you’re really just a friend of the family?’

‘And there was no particular reason why you happened to be in the steel factory today of all days?’

‘Those guys arrived at the factory at exactly the same time as you, and you expect me to believe that that’s pure coincidence?’

‘Did you perhaps have a commission in Quyu?’

‘Don’t you find it strange that Grand Cherokee Wang was murdered one day after you went looking for him?’

‘Did you know that Chen Yuyun was once imprisoned for political agitation and passing on State secrets?’

‘Did you also know that Tu Tian has not always behaved in the best interests of the Chinese State and our justified concerns for its internal stability?’

‘What do you know about Chen Hongbing’s past?’

‘Am I really supposed to believe that not one of you – although the actions indicate an act which was planned long in advance! – had the faintest clue who this Kenny is and what he wants?’

‘I’ll ask you once more: What commission did you have that led you to Quyu?’

And so on and so forth.

Eventually she gave up, leaned back and took the glasses off. She smiled, but her gaze continued to saw away at him, hacking off tiny pieces.

‘You’ve been in Shanghai for four and a half years,’ she stated. ‘According to what I hear, you have an excellent reputation as an investigator.’

‘Thank you, it’s an honour to hear that.’

‘So how is business going?’

‘I can’t complain.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it.’ She put the tips of her fingers together. ‘Rest assured that you are highly valued in my field. You have successfully collaborated with us a number of times and each time you have displayed a high level of willingness to cooperate. This is one of the reasons why we would like to extend your work permit’ – here, her right hand made a waving motion, illustrating some vague future – ‘and then to extend it again and again. Precisely because our relationship is based on reciprocity. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘You’ve expressed it very clearly.’

‘Good. Now that’s clear, I’d like to ask you an informal question.’

‘If I’m able to answer it, I will.’

‘I’m sure you can.’ She leaned over and sank her voice conspiratorially. ‘I would like to know what you would make of all this if you were in my seat. You have experience, intuition, you have a good nose. What would you be thinking?’

Jericho resolved not to get taken in by her.

‘I would exert more pressure.’

‘Oh?’ She looked surprised, as if he had just invited her to torture him with burning cigarettes.

‘Pressure on my team,’ he added. ‘To make sure they put all their energy into getting their hands on the man who is responsible for the attacks, and into investigating his background, instead of getting taken in by the crude idea of making victims into perpetrators and threatening them with deportation. Does my answer suffice?’

‘I’ll make a note of it.’

As far as Jericho could tell, she didn’t seem in the slightest bit taken aback. It was clear that she doubted the substance of his statement, but she knew equally well that she had nothing on him. He was more worried about the others. Practically everyone besides him seemed to have come into conflict with the law in one way or another, which put them at the mercy of the police.

‘I would like to express my sympathy once again,’ she said, in a different tone now. ‘You went through a great deal. We will do everything we can to bring those responsible to justice.’

Jericho nodded. ‘Let me know if I can be of any assistance.’

She stood up and held out her hand. ‘Rest assured I will.’

‘So?’

Tu had come into the room. It was late afternoon by now; the skies were overcast and light drizzle was falling on Pudong. The investigators had retreated.

‘Nothing new.’ Jericho stretched. ‘Diane is keeping herself busy with the Swiss films. We’re also trying to trace the six websites back to a common source. So far there’s nothing to indicate that there is one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ Tu pulled a chair over and sank down into it, panting. Jericho noticed that his shirt sleeves were pushed up to different heights. ‘How did the questioning go?’

‘How do you think it went? She didn’t believe a word I said.’

‘She didn’t believe me either.’ For some unknown reason this seemed to fill Tu with satisfaction. ‘Nor Yoyo. Hongbing was the only one she seemed to handle with kid gloves.’

‘Of course,’ murmured Jericho.

From the very moment Chen had first come into his office in Xintiandi, he had noticed something about him that was hard to define, something in his eyes, in his tautly stretched face, something which gave the impression that his soul had been peeled away. Now he realised what he had seen, and the investigator must have seen it too. The idea that this man could lie was inconceivable. Nothing in Chen’s features was capable of even hosting a lie. This left him completely at the mercy of his surroundings. He couldn’t bear dishonesty, neither from himself nor from others.

‘Tian…’ Jericho said hesitantly.

‘Mm-hm?’

‘There may be a problem with regard to how we proceed from here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not—’ He searched for the words.

‘What is it? Out with it.’

‘I know too little about you.’

Tu was silent.

‘Too little about you and Chen Hongbing. I know it has nothing to do with me. It’s just – in order to judge what danger you’re in regarding the authorities, I would need to – well – I would need an idea, but—’

Tu pursed his lips. ‘I understand.’

‘No, I don’t think you do,’ said Jericho. ‘You think I’m being nosy. You’re wrong. I couldn’t care less. Well, no, that’s not it. I mean that I respect your silence. Whatever has happened in your or Chen’s past has nothing to do with me. But in that case you have to be the one to say where we go from here. You’re better placed to judge—’

‘It’s fine,’ mumbled Tu.

‘It’s your business. I respect—’

‘No, you’re right.’

‘Under no circumstances do I want to be inconsiderate of—’

‘Enough, xiongdi.’ Tu clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Consideration is the very foundation of your being; you don’t need to explain yourself. In any case, I’ve often thought about strengthening our friendship by confessing a little of my past to you.’ His gaze wandered over to the door. Somewhere in the great expanse of the house, Yoyo and her father were wrestling with the past and future. ‘It’s just that I fear I have to get back in the ring.’

‘To mediate?’

‘To take some of the heat. Yoyo and I have decided to clear the air. By the end of the day Hongbing will know the whole truth.’

‘And how is he taking it so far?’

‘I’m sure he’s not exactly over the moon.’ Tu belched. ‘But I’m not seriously concerned. The more pressing question is how long he proposes to brood in his anger. Sooner or later he has to see that you can’t earn trust by denying your child long-overdue answers. He’ll have to tell Yoyo his truth too.’ Tu sighed. ‘What happens then, I really don’t know. It’s not that Hongbing seriously believes a part of his life didn’t happen. He just can’t bring himself to tell someone he loves about it. Because he’s ashamed. He’s just an old crab really. And try telling a crab it should cast off its shell.’

‘Well, if he did he would be the first crab to be able to do without it.’

‘Oh, they shed them a lot when they’re young in order to grow. It’s a dangerous undertaking though, because the new shell is very soft for the first few hours. They’re very vulnerable for that time, easy targets, without any protection. But if they didn’t shed them, there wouldn’t be enough space for them to live.’ Tu stood up. ‘And as I said, Hongbing is a pretty old crab, but his shell has definitely got too small for him. I think he needs to shed it again so he doesn’t end up shattering into a thousand pieces from the pressure.’

Tu laid his right hand on Jericho’s shoulder for a moment. Then he left the room.

Dusk stole in, stuffy and damp.

Diane was still processing.

Jericho wandered through the house and went to see Joanna in her studio, a glass pagoda temple backing onto the artificial lake which formed the centre of the property. He wasn’t surprised to find her working on one of her large-format portraits. Joanna wasn’t the type to wander through the house wringing her hands if they could be put to better use. She had turned on bright lamps and was giving depth and contour to two beautiful socialites who were pictured arm in arm in front of a mirror, looking as if they had danced through three days and nights straight.

After Chen had emerged, flushed with anger, and disappeared into the guest rooms on the first floor, Tu had intensified the security around his villa and fled to his office. Yoyo had crossed Jericho’s path as he walked through the entrance hall. She looked as though she had been crying, and had waved her hands around as if trying to signal that he shouldn’t ask any questions. Just when she was about to climb the stairs, her father had appeared on the landing, heading stormily for the bathroom, which was enough for Yoyo to hastily change direction and wander off into the garden, where Jericho had just been coming in from.

All at once, he had felt terribly out of place.

Tu’s butler saw him standing around and rushed to attend to his needs. Jericho turned down hot lavender baths and Thai massages, ordered some tea and unexpectedly felt a craving for the kind of biscuits Joanna had brought him just hours before, only to scoff them all under his nose. The butler offered to make up the salon for him. For want of a better idea, Jericho nodded, paced around in a circle twice and noticed that the feeling of being out of place was accompanied by the quicksand-like sensation of helplessness.

Something had to happen.

And it did.

‘Owen? This is Diane.’

He felt a frisson of excitement, pulled out his phone and spoke into it breathlessly. ‘Yes, Diane? What is it?’

‘I’ve found something in the films that will interest you. A watermark. There’s a film within a film.’

Oh, Diane! thought Jericho. I could kiss you. If you looked only half as good as you sound I would even marry you, but you’re just a damn computer. But never mind. Make me happy!

‘Wait there,’ he called, as if there were some risk she might decide otherwise and leave the house. ‘I’m coming.’

Yoyo would have liked to convince herself she was past the worst, but she felt the worst still lay before her, and three times as intense. Hongbing had screamed and shouted. They had argued for over an hour. As a result, her eyes were sore and filled with salty tears, as if she had seen nothing but misery and hardship her whole life. She felt guilty about everything. About the massacre in the steelworks, the destruction of the apartment, her father’s despair, and finally about the fact that Hongbing didn’t love her. Almost as soon as it had appeared, this last thought entered into sinister alliances with all possible forms of self-loathing and gave birth to a new guilt, namely, having done Hongbing an injustice. Of course he had loved her, how could he not have? How low did you have to sink to assume anything else but love from your own father? But now just that thought alone made her undeserving of love, and Hongbing had taken the only logical step and stopped loving her. So what was she complaining about? She was to blame for the fact that his mask of a face had not melted, but shattered.

She had disappointed everyone.

For a while she hung around silently in Joanna’s studio, watching as Tian’s beautiful wife conjured up a feverish sparkle in the eyes of the exhausted teenagers, that last glimmer of energy moments before all systems shut down. On the monstrous two and a half by four metre canvas, she portrayed carefree natures through pigments: two ornamental fish in the shallow waters of their sensitivities, whose only worry in life was how not to die from boredom before the next party kicked off. Realising that the worst massacres in the lives of the two beauties were probably the ones they had caused in the hearts of pubescent boys, Yoyo cried a little more.

She was probably doing these girls an injustice too. Was she really any better? She had certainly been no stranger to excess in the last few years. She was more than familiar with the moment when one faded out like a dwindling, bright red dot in the blackness of a charred wick. She had sung incessantly against Hongbing’s sadness, danced against it, smoked and fucked against it, without once flagging with a soothing emptiness in her gaze like the princesses of the night on Joanna’s canvas. Each time, her last thought had been that the excesses weren’t worth dying for, that she would have much rather been sitting at home listening to what her father had to tell her about the time before she was born. But Hongbing hadn’t told her one single thing.

Joanna created eyelashes with a flourish, pressed in smatterings of mascara and distributed make-up in the corner of the eyes and onto cheekbones. Yoyo watched, overcome with melancholy. She liked Joanna’s flirtation with society, the way she wore its colourful plumage. There was no canvas big enough to depict the way China entertained itself, Joanna always said. After all, China was a big country, and so she explained to her feathered friends, whenever they came to sharpen their beaks and sip at champagne, that lack of content couldn’t be portrayed on a small scale. It was a witty and catchy comment, but really incomprehensible in an artistic sense. She pompously celebrated the beauty of emptiness and the emptiness of beauty, sold her fans something they could look at, and neglected to tell them it was actually a mirror.

‘Don’t forget,’ she always said with her most charming Joanna smile, ‘I’m in the picture too. In every single one. Including yours.’

Yoyo envied Joanna. She envied the egoism with which she sailed through life, and without picking up any bruises along the way. She envied her ability to be uninterested, and her lack of concern in showing it. Yoyo, on the other hand, was interested in everything, and compulsively so. Could that ever end well? Sure, the Guardians had accomplished quite a lot of things. Under their pressure, imprisoned journalists had been released, corrupt civil servants stripped of office and environmental scandals solved. While Joanna’s hands were being manicured, Yoyo had been busy dirtying hers by delving them into painful subjects, never tiring in demanding China’s right to its own culture of fun. This had given her the reputation of being a nationalist from time to time. Just as well. She was a hedonistic preacher, a liberal nationalist who got fired up by the injustice in the world. Wonderful! And yet there were so many other things she could do. She was sure she could find something, as long as it meant not having to be Chen Yuyun.

Joanna painted, and was simply Joanna. Self-involved, care-free and rich. Everything that repulsed Yoyo from the bottom of her heart, and yet she yearned for it too. Someone who offered security. Someone who wouldn’t step aside, because it was something they never did.

She was crying again.

After a while, Yoyo’s supply of tears was exhausted. Joanna cleaned her brushes in turpentine. Over the glass surfaces of the pagoda roof, the sky was working its way through every shade of grey in preparation for the evening.

‘So how did it go? Well?’

Yoyo sniffed and shook her head.

‘It must have gone well,’ Joanna decided. ‘You screamed at each other, and you cried. That’s good.’

‘You think?’

Joanna turned to her and smiled. ‘Well, it’s certainly better than him swallowing his own tongue and talking to the walls at night.’

‘I shouldn’t have lied to him like that,’ said Yoyo and coughed, her airways blocked from all the crying. ‘I hurt him. You should have seen him.’

‘Nonsense, sweetheart. You didn’t hurt him. You told him the truth.’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

‘No, you’re getting confused. You’re acting as though speaking frankly were some huge moral issue. If you tell the truth, you’re one of the good guys. How it’s received is a different matter, but that’s what psychiatrists are for. There’s nothing more you can do to help your father bite the bullet.’

‘To be honest, I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do now.’

‘I do.’ Joanna stretched out her slim fingers, one after another. ‘Run yourself a bath, go a few rounds with the punch bag, go shopping. Spend money. Lots of money.’

Yoyo rubbed her elbows. ‘I’m not you, Joanna.’

‘No one suggested you take off and buy a Rolls-Royce. I want you to understand the principles of cause and effect. The truth is a good thing, even if it can be unpleasant at times. And if it is unpleasant, it strengthens the body’s defences.’

‘And did it strengthen Owen’s defences?’

Joanna held a thick paintbrush up to the light and fanned the bristles out with her fingernail.

‘Tian told me that you were together,’ Yoyo added quickly. ‘Before you got married.’

‘Yes, we were together.’

‘Okay. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

‘It’s fine.’ She put the paintbrush down and gave her a beaming smile. ‘We had a great time.’

‘So why did you break up? I mean, he’s a really nice guy.’

Yoyo was surprised by her own words. Did she think Owen Jericho was nice? So far he had only come up in connection with firearms, death and severe bodily harm. On the other hand, he had saved her life. Do you automatically think someone is nice because they save your life?

‘Relationships are contracts that can be terminated at any time, my dear,’ said Joanna, picking up the second brush. ‘Without notice. You don’t quit sexual relations six weeks before the end of the quarter. If it’s not working any more, you have to go.’

‘And what wasn’t working?’

‘Everything. The Owen who came with me to Shanghai bore no resemblance to the one I had met in London.’

‘You were in London?’

‘Is this an interview?’ Joanna raised her eyebrows. ‘If it is I’d like to see the article for authorisation later.’

‘No, I’m genuinely interested. I mean, we haven’t known each other for that long, right? You and Tian, you’ve been together now for – how many years?’

‘Four.’

‘Exactly. And we haven’t had much of a chance to talk.’

‘Woman to woman, you mean?’

‘No, not all that rubbish, it’s just, I’ve known Tian for ever, my whole life, but you—’

‘You don’t know anything about me.’ Joanna smirked mockingly. ‘And now you’re worried about good old Tian, because you can’t imagine what a beautiful and spoilt woman would want from a bald-headed, sloppy, overweight old sack who, despite having money coming out of his ears, still fixes his glasses with sticky-tape and wears the seat of his trousers around the backs of his knees.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ replied Yoyo angrily.

‘But you thought it. And so did Owen. Fine, I’ll tell you a story. It’s a lesson about the economics of love. It begins in London, where I moved in 2017 to study English Literature, Western Art and Painting; something for which you need to be either crazy, an idealist or from a rich background. My father was Pan Zemin—’

‘The Environment Minister?’

‘Deputy Environment Minister.’

‘Hey!’ cried Yoyo. ‘We always admired your father.’

‘He’d have liked that.’

‘He publicly addressed a number of problems.’ Warming enthusiasm flooded through Yoyo. ‘He was really brave. And the way he pushed to put more money into solar research, to increase the energy yield—’

‘Yes, generally speaking he was pretty salubrious,’ said Joanna drily, ‘but it didn’t hurt that one of the companies which made the breakthrough belonged to him. As I said, crazy, idealistic or from a rich background. In London, the Chinese community had long since outgrown Gerrard Street by then. There were a lot of good clubs in Soho that were popular with Chinese and Europeans. I met Owen in one of them. That was 2019, and I liked him. Oh, I liked him a lot!’

‘Yes, well, he’s very good-looking.’

‘He’s easy on the eye, let’s say. But the great thing about him wasn’t the way he looked, but the fact that he wasn’t afraid of me. It was awful, how all the men were instantly afraid of me: such losers; I used to eat them for breakfast.’ She smiled maliciously and twirled another brush through the turpentine. ‘But Owen seemed determined not to let himself be influenced by my undeniably dazzling looks or my financial independence, and for two whole hours he managed not to look at my tits. That spoke volumes. He also respected my intelligence; I could tell by the way he contradicted me. He was a cyber-cop at Scotland Yard, where they don’t exactly shower you in gold, but then I wasn’t interested in money. Owen could have slept under London Bridge and I would have lain down next to him.’ She paused. ‘Well, let’s say I would have bought it and then lain down. We were very much in love.’

‘So how could that go wrong?’

‘Yes, how?’ Joanna gave a melodious little sigh. ‘In 2020, my father suffered a stroke and was considerate enough not to wake up again. He left behind a respectable fortune, a wife whose patience had been tested and who endured his passing as unquestioningly as she had endured him, and also three children, of whom I am the eldest. Mum was often lonely, and with the unhoped-for inheritance I’d just received, I felt there was no need for me to keep clogging up the lecture theatres in London. So I decided to go back. I asked Owen what he thought of us moving to Shanghai, and he said, without giving it much thought: Sure, let’s move to Shanghai. And you know, that was strange in itself.’

‘Why? That was exactly what you wanted.’

‘Of course, but he didn’t have even the slightest objection. And we’d only been together for half a year. But that’s the problem. If men do what you tell them to, they’re suspect, and if they oppose us we think they’re ridiculous. Back then I thought, well, it’s because he loves me so much, which was a good thing in itself, because as long as he loved me, he would only betray himself and not me. But back then I was already beginning to ask myself which one of us loved the other more.’

‘And he loved you too much.’

‘No, he loved himself too little. But I only realised that after we arrived in Shanghai. To start with, everything was great. He knew his way around, liked the city, and had been there numerous times during bilateral investigations. At New Scotland Yard he was a kind of in-house Sinologist, and I should mention that Owen doesn’t learn languages laboriously like other people do; he simply swallows them down and then brings them back up in well-worded formulations. I suggested he take a job with the Shanghai Department for Cybercrime, because they already knew and valued him there—’

‘Cypol,’ snorted Yoyo.

‘Yes, your good friends. We moved into an apartment in Pudong and planned a lifetime of happiness. And that’s when it started. Little things. His gaze started to waver when he spoke to me. He started to suck up to me. Sure, we were living in my country, meeting my people, including politicians, intellectuals and all kinds of representatives of society, every one of whom sucked up to me. In my circle, greatness is the result of the degradation of others, but Owen’s knees became weaker and weaker. His wonderful self-confidence melted like butter in the sun, he seemed to degenerate, get pimples again, and after a while he asked me, full of timidity, if I loved him. I was totally gobsmacked! It was like he’d just asked me, right in front of a bright blue sky, if the sun was shining.’

‘Perhaps he sensed you didn’t love him as much as you had before.’

‘It’s the other way around, sweetheart. The doubts came with the doubter. Owen didn’t have the slightest reason to mistrust me, even though he probably thought he did. He had stopped trusting himself; that was the problem! You can only fall in love when you’re on an equal standing, but if your partner is bowed over in front of you, you have no choice but to look down on him.’

‘Did he get jealous?’

‘Jealousy’s such an ugly addiction. Nothing makes you smaller or less attractive.’ Joanna walked over to an open store cupboard, in which dozens of tubes lay next to one another. ‘Yes, he did. He was possessed by some old insecurity. Our relationship lost its equilibrium. I’m a positive person, sweetie, and I don’t know how to be any other way, which meant that next to me Owen looked increasingly like a pot plant someone had forgotten to water. My optimism left him to wither. The worse he felt, the more I enjoyed my life, or that’s what he thought anyway. That was complete nonsense of course! I had always enjoyed life, but before that we used to enjoy it together.’ She took out a tube of vermilion and squeezed a small splodge of it onto a palette. ‘I left him so that he could finally find himself.’

‘How considerate of you,’ scoffed Yoyo.

‘I know how you see it.’ Joanna paused for a second. ‘But you’re wrong. I could have grown old with him. But Owen had lost his faith. The world is an illusion; everything is an illusion, love intrinsically so. If you stop believing in it, it disappears. If you stop feeling, the sun becomes just a blob and flowers become brambles. That’s the whole story.’

Yoyo padded over to a footstool and sank down onto it.

‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for him.’

‘Who?’

‘Owen, of course!’

‘Tsk, tsk.’ Joanna shook her head disapprovingly. ‘How rude, I thought you would grant him a little more respect. Owen is talented, intelligent, charming, attractive. He could be anything he wants to be; everyone knows that. Everyone except him.’

‘He probably believed it for a while. Back in London.’

‘Yes, because of the sheer surprise that things were working out with us he temporarily forgot to be a pathetic little jerk.’

Yoyo stared at her. ‘Tell me, are you really this heartless, or are you just pretending to be?’

‘I’m honest and I try not to be corny. What do you want? Sentimentality? Then go to the movies.’

‘Fine. So what happened next?’

‘He moved out right away of course. I offered to support him, but he turned it down. After a few months he chucked his job in, purely because I had got it for him.’

‘Why didn’t he go back to England?’

‘You’d have to ask him that yourself.’

‘You never spoke about it?’

‘We kept in touch, sure. There were just a few weeks when we didn’t talk, a time during which I fell in love with Tian, whom I had already met at a number of parties. When Owen found out we were seeing each other his entire world-view collapsed.’ Joanna looked at Yoyo. ‘And yet I don’t care how old, fat or bald a man is. None of that matters. Tian is genuine, honest and straightforward, and I sure as hell value that! A fighter, a rock. Quick-witted, educated, liberal—’

‘—rich,’ completed Yoyo.

‘I was rich already. Of course I liked the fact that Tian was looking for a challenge, that he was achieving success after success. But when it comes down to it there’s nothing he can do that Owen wouldn’t be able to do too. Except that Tian’s existence is shaped by an almost unshakable belief in himself. He thinks he’s beautiful and that makes him beautiful. That’s why I love him.’

Joanna’s story had begun to have a pleasantly numbing effect on Yoyo. She suddenly realised that she could breathe more easily when other people’s problems were the topic of conversation. At the very least it was good to know that other people had problems. Even if they could have done with being just a little bit bigger to fully distract her from the morning’s events.

‘And what happened with Owen after that?’ she asked.

Joanna turned her attentions to the oily strand on her palette and stirred it into a crème with a pointed paintbrush.

‘Ask him,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I’ve told my story. I’m not responsible for his.’

Yoyo slid indecisively back and forth in her seat. She didn’t like Joanna’s unexpected uncommunicativeness. She decided to press her, but just at that moment Tu came into the studio.

‘There you are!’ he said to Yoyo, as if she were obliged to let him know where she was at all times.

‘Has something happened?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Owen’s been working hard. Come with me to the office – it looks like he’s found out a whole load of stuff.’

Yoyo got up and looked over to Joanna. ‘Are you coming?’

Joanna smiled. Vermilion dripped down from the tip of her paintbrush like old, noble blood. ‘No, sweetheart, you go ahead. I’d only ask stupid questions.’

At 19.20 hours, Tu, Jericho and Yoyo immersed themselves in the beauty of the Swiss Alps. A 3D film was playing in large format on Tu’s multimedia wall. It showed a cable car rising up from a picturesque little town and heading towards a neat alpine pasture, over ravines and forests of fir trees. A low, classic-looking building came into view. The Spanish commentator lauded it as one of the first designer hotels in the Alps, praising the rooms for their comfort and the kitchen for its dumplings, before heading off to accompany a group of hikers across a meadow. Cows plodded over curiously. A pretty city girl watched them approach with scepticism, started walking quickly then broke into a run towards the valley, where two donkeys came shuffling out of their shed, grey and tired, and herded her back towards the cows. Some of the hikers laughed. The next scene showed a farmer kicking one of the cows up the backside.

‘Up here, traditions are still quite coarse and primordial,’ explained the Spanish commentator in the tone of some behavioural scientist who has just discovered that chimpanzees aren’t that intelligent after all.

‘Well, this is great,’ said Yoyo.

Neither she nor Tu spoke Spanish, but that didn’t matter. Jericho stubbornly let the film play on, champing at the bit for his big moment.

‘I don’t need to explain to either of you how a film like this is developed,’ he said. ‘And you both know about watermarks too. So—’

‘Excuse me,’ said someone from the door.

They turned round. Chen Hongbing had come in. He paused, hesitantly took a step towards them and straightened himself up.

‘I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to—’

‘Hongbing,’ Tu hurried over to his friend and put his arm around his shoulder. ‘How lovely that you’re here.’

‘Well.’ Hongbing cleared his throat. ‘I thought, we should make them smart, shouldn’t we? Not for my sake, but—’ He went over to Yoyo, looked at her and then away again, looked around at the others, massaged the tip of his chin and waved his hands around indecisively. Yoyo stared up at him, confused. ‘So, the thing is, I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know what, may I ask?’ Jericho asked cautiously. Chen gestured vaguely towards the film playing on the screen.

‘How something like that is developed. A, erm – watermark.’ He cleared his throat again. ‘But I don’t want to hold you up, don’t worry. I just wanted to be here too.’

‘You’re not holding us up, Father,’ said Yoyo softly.

Chen snuffled, let out a whole cascade of throat-clearing noises, and mumbled something incomprehensible. Then he took Yoyo’s hand, gave it a brief, firm squeeze and let it go again.

Yoyo’s eyes started to shine.

‘No problem, honourable Chen,’ said Jericho. ‘Have the others brought you up to date with what we know?’

‘Chen, just call me Chen. Yes, I know about the – the garbled report.’

‘Good. We didn’t have much more than that until just now. Just a hunch that there must be something else in the films.’ He wondered how he could make all of this comprehensible to Chen. When it came to technology, the man was endearingly clueless. ‘You see, it’s like this: every data stream is made up of data packages. Try imagining a swarm of bees, several million bees of different colours, who keep rearranging themselves in new ways so that your eyes see moving pictures. And now imagine that some of these bees are encoded. In a way that isn’t visible to the viewer. But if you have a special algorithm—’

‘Algorithm?’

‘A mask, a decoding process. It lets you block out all of the non-encoded bees. Only the encoded ones stay. And suddenly you realise that they represent something too. You see a film within a film. That’s called an electronic watermark. It’s not a new process: at the beginning of the millennium it was used to encode films and songs when the entertainment industry was fighting against pirate copiers. It was enough to make just a small adjustment in the frequency spectrum of a song. The human ear can’t tell the difference, but it enabled the computer to investigate the origin of the CD.’ He paused. ‘Today, the difference is this: the old internet mapped the data streams two-dimensionally, whereas nowadays the internet is construed for three-dimensional content. These kinds, of data streams have to be pictured cubically, which offers much better opportunities for hosting complex watermarks. Although, admittedly, decoding has become equally complex.’

‘And you’ve decoded one of these watermarks?’ asked Chen, awestruck.

‘Yes. That is, Diane – erm, my computer – found a way to make it visible.’

By now, the group of hikers had valiantly climbed to a high plateau. The pretty city girl was approaching a sheep. The sheep didn’t budge, and stared at the woman, who took this as encouragement to circle round, giving it a wide berth.

‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ said Yoyo.

‘Okay.’ Jericho looked back at the wall. ‘Diane, start the film again. Decoded and compressed, high resolution.’

The alpine world disappeared. In its place appeared a recording of a car journey, filmed from inside the vehicle. It made its way along a bumpy street. Hilly farmland stretched out on both sides, broken up now and then by bushes and the occasional tree. There were a few huts here and there, most of them very run down. The sky was swollen with rainclouds. As the landscape steepened and became more densely populated with trees, the grey cross-hatchings of downpours stopped.

A truck was being driven a fair way ahead of the car, whirling up dust. There were a number of black men sitting in the back, most clad only in shorts. They looked lethargic, at least as far as you could tell from this distance and through the dirt from the road. Then the camera swung round to the driver, a man with ash-blond hair, a moustache and a strong jawline, wearing sunglasses.

The person holding the camera said something incomprehensible. The blond man glanced over and grinned.

‘Of course,’ he said in Spanish. ‘Praise the President.’

They both laughed.

The picture changed. The same man was shown sitting at a long table in the company of men in uniform, this time dressed in a khaki shirt and light jacket, and without sunglasses. The camera zoomed in on him. His eyebrows and lashes were as pale as the hair on his head, his eyes watery blue, one of them with a fixed gaze, possibly a glass eye. Then the camera panned out and captured the table in its entirety. Two Chinese men in suits and ties were presenting some charts. The target audience of their report seemed to be a brawny figure at the head of the table, bald, bull-necked and as black as polished ebony. He was wearing plain overalls. The uniforms of the other participants, who were also black, seemed more formal, dark with red-gold epaulettes and all kinds of decorations, but the bullish one was clearly the nucleus of the whole meeting, while the blond seemed to be taking on the role of spectator.

This conversation was taking place in Spanish too. The Chinese spokesman was fluent, but had an appalling accent. The topic of discussion was clearly the building of a gas to liquid plant, which was eliciting approving nods from the bullish man. The Chinese man asked his colleague for some files, with a light Beijing accent.

The camera zoomed in on the blond man again. He was making notes and following the presentation attentively.

Lines and whirling shapes suddenly flashed across the multimedia wall. Someone was trying to focus the picture. A street came into view, an inner-city landscape, full of cars. Someone was coming out of a glass building on the other side of the street, where holographic advertisement films were hovering over the façade like ghosts. The camera zoomed in on the person, going hazy many times in the process, then captured the head and upper body. Tall, clean-shaven and with his hair dyed dark, at first glance the blond was hardly recognisable. He looked around then walked off down the street. The camera flickered again, then came back into focus to show him sitting in the sun, flicking through a magazine. Now and then he sipped at a cup, then he looked up and the film ended abruptly.

‘That’s all there is,’ said Jericho.

For a while, they were all silent. Then Yoyo said:

‘It’s to do with Chinese interests in Africa, right? I mean, that conference, it was obvious.’

‘Could be. Did any of them look familiar to you?’

Yoyo hesitated. ‘I’ve seen the bull-necked guy before.’

‘And the Chinese men?’

‘They look like corporate types. What was it about again? Gas to liquid plants? Oil managers, I’d say. Sinopec or Petrochina.’

‘But you don’t know them?’

‘No.’

‘Any other thoughts, anyone?’

He looked around. Tu seemed to want to say something, but shook his head.

‘Okay. I haven’t had a chance to analyse the film yet, but I can tell you a few things. In my opinion the recordings are purely and simply about the blond guy. Twice we see him in an African country, where he seems to hold a public position, then later, with his appearance changed, in a city somewhere in the world. He’s dyed his hair darker and shaved off the moustache. Conclusions?’

‘Two,’ said Yoyo. ‘Either he’s on a secret mission, or he had to go underground.’

‘Very good. So let’s ask ourselves—’

‘Owen.’ Tu gave him a lenient smile. ‘Could you not come straight to the point?’

‘Sorry.’ Jericho shrugged apologetically. ‘So, I instructed Diane to scour the internet in search of the man, and she found him.’ He added a dramatic pause, not caring whether Tu liked it or not. ‘Our friend’s name is Jan Kees Vogelaar.’

Yoyo stared at him. ‘There’s a Jan in the text fragment!’

‘Exactly. So we’ve got two men who are connected with the incidents of the last few days. One of them being Andre Donner, about whom all we know is that he’s running an African restaurant in Berlin, but nonetheless. And Jan Kees Vogelaar, top mercenary and personal security advisor to a certain Juan Alfonso Nguema Mayé, if that rings any bells with any of you.’

‘Mayé,’ echoed Tu. ‘Wait, where have I—’

‘In the news. From 2017 to 2024 Juan Mayé was the president and sole dictator of Equatorial Guinea.’ Jericho paused. ‘Until he was violently removed from office.’

‘That’s right,’ murmured Tu. ‘Look! We may have our coup.’

‘Possibly. So let’s assume it’s not about plans to overthrow the Communist Party after all, nor some other crazy conspiracy story. That means the coup being discussed in the text fragment would have taken place a long time ago. Last July, to be precise. And with the involvement of the Chinese government no less!’

Chen raised his hand. ‘Where is Equatorial Guinea anyway?’

‘In West Africa,’ Yoyo explained. ‘A horrid little coastal state with a hell of a lot of oil. And the guy with the bull-neck—’

‘—is Mayé,’ confirmed Jericho. ‘Or rather, was. His ambitions to stay in power didn’t do him any good. They blew him and his whole clique up. No one survived. It was all over the news in 2024.’

‘I remember. We were planning to do some research about Equatorial Guinea back then. When we were still interested in foreign politics.’

‘Why aren’t you now?’

Yoyo shrugged. ‘What else can you do when the rubbish is piling up in front of your own door? You walk through the streets and see the migrant workers sleeping on the building sites the way they always have, the same place where they fuck, breed and kick the bucket. You see the illegal immigrants without papers, without work permits, without health insurance. The filth in Quyu. The queues in front of the appeal offices, the government-hired thugs who turn up at night and beat them black and blue until they’ve forgotten what they wanted to complain about. And all the while Reporters Without Borders announces that freedom of opinion has demonstrably improved in China. I know it sounds cynical, but after a while the problems of exploited Africans don’t even register on your radar.’

Chen lowered his gaze, painfully moved.

‘Let’s stick with Vogelaar for now,’ decided Tu. ‘What else can you tell us about him?’

Jericho projected a chart onto the wall. ‘I’ve investigated him as much as I could. Born in South Africa in 1962 as the son of a Dutch immigrant, he did military service, studied at the military academy, and then in 1983, aged twenty-one, he signed up as an NCO with the notorious Koevoet.’

‘I’ve never heard of them,’ said Yoyo.

‘Koevoet was a paramilitary unit of the South African police formed to combat SWAPO, a guerrilla troop fighting for the independence of South-West Africa, now Namibia. Back then, the South African Union refused to retreat from the area despite a UN resolution, and instead built up Koevoet, which, by the way, is the Dutch word for crowbar. Quite a rough bunch. Predominantly native tribal warriors and trackers. Exclusively white officers. They hunted down the SWAPO rebels in armoured cars and killed many thousands of people. They were said to have tortured and raped too. Vogelaar even became an officer, but by the end of the eighties the group had come to an end and was disbanded.’

‘How do you know all that?’ asked Tu in amazement.

‘I looked it up. I just wanted to know who we’re dealing with here. And it’s very interesting by the way. Koevoet is one of the causes of the South African mercenary problem: at any rate, the troop included three thousand men who found themselves unemployed after the end of apartheid. Most of them, including Vogelaar, found jobs with private mercenary firms. After the suppression of Koevoet at the end of the eighties, he got into the arms trade, working as a military advisor in conflict areas. Then, in 1995, he went to Executive Outcomes, a privately run security company and meeting place for a large proportion of the former military elite. By the time Vogelaar joined, the outfit was already playing a leading role in the worldwide mercenary trade, after initially being content with infiltrating the ANC. By the mid-nineties, Executive Outcomes had built up perfect connections. A network of military service companies, oil and mining firms: one which headed lucrative contract wars and was very happy to profit from the petroleum industry. They ended the civil war in Somalia in the interest of American oil companies, and in Sierra Leone they recaptured diamond mines which had fallen into the hands of the rebels. Vogelaar built up excellent contacts there. Four years later he transferred to Outcomes’ offshoot Sandline International, but it drew unwanted attention through bodged operations and ended up abandoning all activities in 2004. He eventually founded Mamba, his own security company, which operated predominantly in Nigeria and Kenya. And Kenya is where we lose all trace of him, sometime during the unrest after the 2007 elections.’ Jericho looked at them apologetically. ‘Or, let’s say that’s where I lose trace of him. In any case, he appears again in 2017, at Mayé’s side, whose security apparatus he led from then on.’

‘A gap of ten years,’ commented Tu.

‘Didn’t Mayé take power by military coup himself?’ asked Yoyo. ‘Vogelaar may have helped him with that.’

‘It’s possible.’ Tu grimaced. ‘Africa and its regicides. Stabbing everyone in the back. After a while you lose perspective. It just surprises me that they still have a clue what’s going on.’

Chen cleared his throat. ‘May I, erm, contribute something?’

‘Hongbing, of course! We’re all ears. Go ahead.’

‘Well.’ Chen looked at Jericho. ‘You said that the whole clique of this Mayé guy got killed in the coup, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘And I’m translating clique in the broadest sense of the word as government.’

‘Also correct.’

‘Well, a coup without any fatalities at all would be unusual, to say the least.’ Suddenly, Chen seemed jovial and analytical. ‘Or, let’s say, when weapons come into play, collateral damage is par for the course. But if the entire government clique was killed – then it can hardly be described as collateral damage, can it?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘That the coup wasn’t so much about forcing Mayé and his people out of office, but more about exterminating them. Every single one of them. It was planned that way from the start, or that’s how it looks to me at any rate. It wasn’t just a coup. It was planned mass murder.’

‘Oh, Father,’ sighed Yoyo softly. ‘What a Guardian you would have made.’

‘Hongbing is right,’ said Tu quickly, before Chen could splutter at Yoyo’s observation. ‘And as we’re clearly not afraid to poke around in the dark, we may as well jump straight to assuming the worst. The dragon has already feasted. Our country brought about this atrocity, or at least helped with it.’ He sank his double chin down onto his right palm, where it rested plumply. ‘On the other hand, what reason would Beijing have for annihilating an entire West African kleptocracy?’

Yoyo opened her eyes wide in disbelief. ‘You don’t think they’re capable of it? Hey, what’s wrong with you?’

‘Calm down, child, I think they’re capable of anything. I’d just like to know why.’

‘This’ – Chen’s right hand made vague grasping motions – ‘what was he called again, the mercenary?’

‘Vogelaar. Jan Kees Vogelaar.’

‘Well, he would know.’

‘That’s true, he—’

They all looked at one another.

And suddenly it dawned on Jericho: of course! If Chen was right and the Mayé government really had been the victim of an assassination, then there could only be two reasons. One, public anger had boiled over. It wouldn’t be the first time an enraged mob had lynched its former tormentors, but something like that usually happened spontaneously, and moreover used different methods of execution: dismembering by machete, a burning car tyre around the neck, clubbing to death. In the short time available, Jericho hadn’t been able to find out much about relationships in the crisis-torn West African state, but Mayé’s fall still seemed like the result of a perfectly planned, simultaneously realised operation. Within just a few hours, all the members of the close circle around the dictator were dead. As if the plan had been to silence the entire set-up. Mayé and six of his ministers had died in an explosion caused by a long-range missile, while a further ten ministers and generals had been shot.

But one of them had got away. Jan Kees Vogelaar.

Why? Had Vogelaar been playing both sides? A coup of this calibre was only possible with connections on the inside. Was Mayé’s security boss a traitor? Assuming that this was true, then—

‘—Andre Donner is a witness,’ murmured Jericho.

‘Sorry?’ asked Tu.

Jericho was staring into space.

—Donner be liquidated—

‘Could you perhaps let us in on your thoughts?’ Yoyo suggested.

‘Donner be liquidated,’ said Jericho. He looked at them each in turn. ‘I know it’s bold to try to read so much into a few scraps of text. But this part seems clear to me. I’ve no idea who Donner is, but let’s assume he knows the true background to the coup. That he knows who’s pulling the strings. Then—’

—continues a grave—

A grave what? Risk? A risk that Donner, after having gone underground, might divulge what he knew?

—that he knows all about—

—statement coup Chinese government—

‘Then what?’ repeated Yoyo.

‘Pay attention!’ shouted Jericho, worked up. ‘Let’s assume Donner knows the Chinese government were involved in the coup. And that he also knows why. He could flee. He’s probably not even called Donner yet in Equatorial Guinea, he’s somewhere in the – in the government? Yes, in the government! Or he’s high up in the military, a general or something. But whatever he is, he needs a new identity. So he becomes Donner, Andre Donner. If we had photos of those formerly in power and one of him, we’d be able to recognise him! He goes to Berlin, far away, and builds up a new existence, a new life. New papers, new background.’

‘Opens a restaurant,’ says Tu. ‘And then he gets tracked down.’

‘Yes. Vogelaar is given the commission of coordinating the simultaneous liquidation of the Mayé clan. One of them slips through his fingers, someone who could ruin everything. Think of the fuss they made trying to eliminate Yoyo just because she intercepted some cryptic material. Vogelaar’s backers are worried. As long as Donner is still alive he could decide to bust the whole thing open.’

‘The fact that a foreign regime brought the coup about, for example.’

‘Which wouldn’t be anything new,’ said Jericho. ‘Just look at all the places where the CIA has played a part: 1962, attempted coup in Cuba. Early seventies, Chile. 2018, the collapse in North Korea. No one had any doubt that they were involved in the assassination of Kim Jong Un. There are also some who claim China helped in Saudi Arabia in 2015, so why not in West Africa too?’

‘I see. And now Vogelaar has arrived in Berlin to eliminate the miraculously rediscovered Donner.’ Tu gave his neck a thorough scratch. ‘That really is bold.’

‘But conceivable.’ Chen gave a slight cough. ‘It’s perfectly clear to me anyway.’

‘So there you go,’ whispered Yoyo.

‘What?’ asked Jericho.

‘Well what do you think?’ she snapped. ‘Like I said! It’s the government. I have the Party at my throat!’

‘Yes,’ said Jericho wearily. ‘It looks that way.’

She put her face in her hands. ‘We need to know more about this country. More about Vogelaar, more about Donner. The more we know, the better equipped we’ll be to defend ourselves. Failing that I’ll just have to pack my bags. And so will all of you. I’m sorry.’

Tu studied his fingernails.

‘Good idea,’ he said.

Yoyo lifted her face from the grave-like shape formed by her hands. ‘What?’

‘To pack your things, leave the country. It’s a good idea. That’s exactly what we’ll do.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What is there to understand? We’ll look for this Donner guy. He’s in grave danger. We’ll warn him, and in return he’ll tell us what we need to know.’

‘You want to—’ Jericho thought he’d misheard. ‘Tian, the man lives in Berlin. That’s in Germany!’

‘If they even let us out at all,’ said Yoyo.

‘One at a time.’ Tu raised his hands. ‘You lot have more reservations than a porcupine about to engage in sexual activity. As if I were suggesting fleeing headlong over the border. Think about it for a second, the police were just here in this very house. Do you seriously believe we would still be sitting here if they had wanted to grab us? No, we’ll just go on a little trip, all official and above board. In my private jet, if you’ll allow me to extend the invitation.’

‘And when do you want to set off?’

‘Sometime after midnight.’

Jericho stared at him, then Yoyo, then Chen.

‘Shouldn’t we perhaps—’

‘That’s the soonest we can do it,’ said Tu apologetically. ‘I’ve still got a dinner that I can’t put off, not for love nor money. It’s in an hour’s time.’

‘Shouldn’t we try calling Donner first? How do you even know for sure that he’s still in Berlin? Perhaps he’s gone away somewhere. Gone underground.’

‘You want to warn him we’re coming?’

‘I just think—’

‘That’s a lousy idea, Owen. Let’s say he answers the phone and believes you. Then we’ve lost him. You won’t have time to catch your breath and ask questions in the time it would take him to disappear. And besides, what else are you going to do? If you sit around here in Pudong you’re just going to be making a dent in all my sofa cushions.’

‘So you expect us to go to Berlin,’ croaked Hongbing. ‘In the middle of the night?’

‘I have beds on board.’

‘But—’

‘You’re not coming anyway. Just the rapid response team: Owen, Yoyo and me.’

‘Why not me?’ asked Chen, suddenly outraged.

‘It would be too tiring for you. No, no arguments! A small, agile troop is just right for this kind of thing. Nimble and agile. In the meantime, I’m sure Joanna can drown you in tea and give you foot massages.’

Jericho tried to picture Tu as agile and nimble.

‘And if we don’t find Donner?’ he asked.

‘Then we’ll wait for him.’

‘What if he doesn’t come?’

‘Then we’ll just fly back.’

‘And who,’ he asked, fuelled by a dark suspicion, ‘might the pilot be?’

Tu raised his eyebrows. ‘Who do you think? Me.’

A few kilometres away and several metres higher up, Xin looked down on the city at night.

After a traffic jam had finally slowed the blasted dump truck down to a walking pace, he had jumped off, caught the metro to Pudong – given that there was no free COD in sight – put the last few hundred metres to the Jin Mao Tower behind him at a running pace, and then crossed the lobby as if he had taken leave of his senses. He was on a mission to satiate his hunger for something sweet, and there was a chocolate boutique in the foyer boasting pralines for the price of haute couture. Xin had purchased a pack of them, half of which he plundered just during the journey upwards. Chocolate, he had realised, helped him to think. After arriving in his suite he had thrown off his clothes, rushed into the huge marble bathroom, turned the shower on and almost rubbed his skin away in his attempt to cleanse himself of the filth of Xaxu and the stain of his defeat.

Yoyo had got away from him yet again, and this time he didn’t have the faintest idea where she might be. The answer machine was on at Jericho’s place. Fuelled by a surge of hate, Xin contemplated blowing up the detective agency. Then he discarded the thought. He couldn’t afford to be vindictive in his current situation, and besides, after the disaster in Hongkou he didn’t have the appropriate weapons. What’s more, it was clear to him that there was no real reason to punish someone purely because they had exercised their God-given right to defend themselves.

Cleansed, enveloped in a cocoon of terry towelling and at an agreeable distance from the city, Xin tried to impose some order on the hornet swarm of his thoughts. First, he picked up the clothes lying all around him and dumped them in the washing basket. Then he glanced over at the ravaged box of pralines. Accustomed to subjecting his consumption of any kind of food to a master plan, and one which was intended to maintain the symmetry of what was on offer for as long as possible, Xin shuddered at what he had done. He normally ate from the outside, working his way in. There should be no excessive decimation, and the relationship of the components to one another had to remain constant. Just devouring everything on one side of the packaging was an unthinkable act! But that was exactly what he had done. He’d pounced on it like an animal, like one of those degenerate creatures in Quyu.

He sank down into the sprawling armchair in front of the floor-to-ceiling window and watched as dusk enveloped Shanghai. The city was sprinkled with multicoloured lights, an impressive spectacle despite the lousy weather, but all Xin could see was the betrayal of his aesthetic principles. Jericho, Yoyo, Yoyo, Jericho. The transgressions in the box needed to be corrected. Where was Yoyo? Where was the detective? Who had been driving the silver flying machine? The box, the box! Unless he created order there he would drift right into insanity. He began to rearrange the remaining pralines according to the Rorschach style, starting from scratch again and again until an axis ran through the box, a stable, regulatory element, on either side of which the remaining pralines mirrored each other. After that he felt better, and he began to take stock of things. There was no longer any point in following Yoyo and the detective. In just a few days everything would be over anyway, and then they could talk all they wanted. They were no longer important. The operation was the priority now, and there was only one person who could still endanger the plan. Xin wondered what conclusions Jericho had drawn from the fragments of the message that he, Kenny Xin, had sent to the heads of Hydra after tracking down the Berlin restaurant of a certain Andre Donner, recommending his immediate liquidation. Unfortunately he had attached a modified decoding program to the mail, an improved, quicker version. Every few months, the codes were exchanged for new ones. The fact that Yoyo had intercepted this very email had been the worst possible luck.

And there was nothing that could be done about it.

Andre Donner. Nice name, nice try.

He dialled a number on his mobile.

‘Hydra,’ he said.

‘Have you eliminated the problem?’

As always, their conversation was transmitted in code. In just a few words, Xin reported on what had happened. His conversation partner fell silent for a while. Then he said:

‘That’s a mess, Kenny. You’ve done nothing you can be proud of.’

‘Those that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,’ responded Xin illtemperedly. ‘If you’d implemented a safe algorithm, we wouldn’t even be in this situation.’

‘It is safe. And that’s not the issue here.’

‘The issue is whatever I consider worthy of being the issue.’

‘You’ve got a nerve.’

‘Oh really?’ Xin roared with laughter. ‘You’re my contact man, or had you already forgotten that? Just a glorified Dictaphone. If I want to hear a lecture, I’ll call him.’

The other man cleared his throat indignantly. ‘So what are you suggesting?’

‘The same thing I’ve already suggested. Our friend in Berlin has to be got rid of. Anything less would be irresponsible. And besides, the address of the restaurant is in the goddamn email. If Jericho comes up with the idea of getting in touch with him, then we really have a problem!’

‘You want to go to Berlin?’

‘As soon as possible. I’m not leaving that to anyone else.’

‘Wait.’ The line went dead for a moment. Then the voice came back. ‘We’ll book a night flight for you.’

‘What about backup?’

‘Already on its way. The specialist is setting off in advance as requested. Try to be more careful with the personnel and equipment this time.’

Xin curled his lip contemptuously. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘No, after all, I’m just the Dictaphone,’ said the voice icily. ‘But he’s worried. So make sure you finish the job this time.’

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

On 21 April, Sid Bruford and two of his friends made a pilgrimage to an event in Calgary, where EMCO had proposed to outline a future that no longer existed. No one harboured any illusions that Gerald Palstein would announce anything other than the end of oil-sand mining in Alberta, which meant that all hopes were now focused on strategies for redevelopment, consolidation, or at the very least a social security plan. It was in hope of this that they were standing there, aside from the fact that it was only right and proper to be present at your own burial.

The plaza, a square park in front of the company headquarters, was filling slowly but steadily with people. As if mocking their misery, a bright yellow sun shone down on the crowd from a steel blue sky, creating a climate of new beginnings and confidence. Bruford, unwilling to abandon himself to the general bitterness, had decided to make the best of the situation. It was part of the dance of death to make fatalism look like self-confidence, to stock up on the required quota of beer and to avoid violence wherever possible. They talked about baseball for a while and stayed towards the back of the crowd, where the air was less saturated with sweat. Bruford held up his mobile and circled, trying to capture the atmosphere around them. Two pleasingly scantily clad girls came into sight, noticed him, and then started to pose, giggling. A complex of empty buildings stretched out behind them, the headquarters of a now-bankrupt firm for drilling technology, if he remembered rightly. The girls liked him – that was as sure a bet as the closure of Imperial Oil. He had handsome, almost Italian-looking features, and the sculpture of his body was his incentive for wearing little more than shorts and a muscle shirt, even in frosty temperatures. He lingered on them with the phone’s camera and laughed. The girls teased. After a few minutes he turned back to his friends for a second, then when he looked round at the girls again, he realised that they were now filming him. Flattered, he began to play the fool, pulling faces, swaggering around, and even his friends felt encouraged to join in. None of them was behaving particularly maturely, or like people who had just had their sole source of income taken from them. The girls began, amidst fits of laughter, to enact scenes from Hollywood films, prompting the boys to respond to their pantomime repertoire, calling out the solutions to one another boisterously. The day was shaping up to be more fun than expected. Besides, whenever Bruford examined his reflection in the mirror he always thought he would be better placed in the film industry than the Cold Lake open-cast mine. Perhaps he would even be grateful to EMCO one day. His mood soared up to the April sun on the wings of Icarus, with the result that he almost missed the small, bald-headed oil manager climbing up onto the platform.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was time. Bruford turned his head just in time to see Palstein stumble. The man steadied himself, wobbled and then collapsed. Security personnel rushed past, forming a wall against the chanting crowd. Bruford craned his neck. Was it a heart attack, a circulatory collapse, a stroke? He pushed forwards, holding his mobile up above the heads of the agitated crowd. It was an assassination attempt, it was obvious! Hadn’t people seen enough of that kind of thing in films! The stumble, a mishap. But something had jerked the manager around before he had fallen to the floor. A shot, what else? Someone must have shot at Palstein – that had to be it!

What Bruford didn’t know was that twenty minutes before the incident, while he was filming the girls, one of the security cameras had captured him for just a few seconds, albeit blurred and out of focus. When the police came to analyse the transmitted material, they simply overlooked him.

But the people from Greenwatch didn’t.

He could still hardly believe they had managed to track him down from just that snippet of film, on the snowball principle, as Loreena Keowa, the high-cheekboned, not particularly pretty and yet somehow sweat-inducingly arousing native Indian girl had explained to him. Greenwatch had quickly come to the conclusion that the men next to him, who were easier to make out on the film, must be his friends, and then one of them had said something to an old man in the row in front of them. It was Jack ‘pain-in-the-ass’ Becker of course, he could still remember that, because Becker had wound him up no end with his sentimentality. Unlike the others, Becker, who had worn his Imperial Oil overalls that day, had been captured sharply on the film, and Keowa clearly had contacts in the human resources department of the company. She had identified him, called him and showed him the recording, upon which ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ Becker had named both Bruford’s friends and Bruford himself.

And now he was sitting here. It was a scary world! Anyone could be tracked down. On the other hand, there were worse things than sitting next to Loreena in her rented Dodge, fifty Canadian dollars richer, watching her as she loaded his blurry videos onto her computer. Loreena in her chic clothes, which didn’t seem quite right for an eco-girl. A number of things were going through his head. Whether he should have asked for more money. What Greenwatch intended to do with the films. Why native Indian hair was always so shiny, and what he would need to do to make his that shiny for his career in Hollywood.

‘Shouldn’t we go to the police?’ he heard himself suggest. A sensible question, he thought. Loreena stared at the display, concentrating on the transfer process.

‘Rest assured, we will,’ she murmured.

‘Yes, but when?’

‘It doesn’t matter when,’ grumbled Loreena’s companion from the back seat.

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head and made an expression of genuine concern, proof of his acting talents; he’d always known it, it was what he’d been born to do. ‘I don’t want to get dragged into anything. We’re obligated to tell them really, aren’t we?’

‘So why didn’t you do it?’

‘I didn’t think of it. But now that we’re talking about it—’

‘Yes, you’re right of course, we should reconsider the deal.’ Loreena turned her head towards him. ‘Do we know whether the material is worth fifty dollars? Perhaps there’s not even anything on there.’

Bruford hesitated. ‘But that would be your problem.’

‘But then perhaps it’s worth a hundred dollars, you see?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you think, Sid? On the condition that a certain someone stops asking questions and worrying about the police?’

Bruford suppressed a grin. That was exactly what he had wanted her to say.

‘Sure,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I think that could be the case.’

She reached into her jacket and brought out another fifty, as if she had reckoned on this development. Bruford took it and put it with the other one.

‘There seems to be quite a nest in your jacket,’ he said.

‘No, Sid, there were only two. And perhaps they’ll have to go back in if I come to the conclusion that you can’t be trusted.’

‘Then I’ll just take something else.’ Now he couldn’t help but grin. ‘You have other good things inside your jacket that come in twos.’

Loreena glanced at her companion, who looked willing to resort to violence.

‘Okay,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No problem. It was a pleasure meeting you.’

He understood. With a shrug of his shoulders he opened the passenger door.

‘Oh, and one more thing, Sid, just in case you do decide to call the police in a sudden passion of loyalty to the law: the money in your pocket constitutes withholding evidence for the purpose of your own personal gain. That’s an offence, do you understand?’

Bruford stopped short. He suddenly felt deeply offended. With one leg already on the pavement, he leaned back in towards her.

‘Are you trying to threaten me?’

‘Now, you listen up, Sid—’

‘No, you listen up! My job has gone down the crapper. I’m trying to get what I can, but a deal is a deal! Is that clear? I may have a loose tongue, but that doesn’t mean I shit all over people. So kiss my ass and look after your own business.’

‘What a snitch,’ said the intern contemptuously as Bruford set off down the street without looking back at them. ‘For another hundred dollars he’d have flogged his own grandmother.’

Loreena watched him go.

‘No, he was right. We insulted him. If anyone behaved dubiously then it’s us.’

‘While we’re on the subject – shouldn’t we hand this footage over to the cops?’

Loreena hesitated. She hated the idea of doing something illegal, but she was a journalist, and journalists thrived on having a head start. Without giving an answer, she connected her computer to the in-car system. The Dodge she had rented at the airport had a large display.

‘Come up front,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look at what good old Sid has to offer first.’

‘It’s a bit of a blind bargain.’

‘Sometimes you have to take risks.’

They saw a blurred panning shot, a crowd of people, food stalls, the headquarters of Imperial Oil, a podium. Then Bruford’s friends, grinning broadly into the camera. Bruford had been filming straight ahead initially, then he started to swivel round. Two young women came into shot, noticed that they were being filmed and started fooling around.

‘They’re having fun,’ laughed the intern. ‘Pretty hot, too. Especially the blonde.’

‘Hey, you’re supposed to be paying attention to the background.’

‘I can do both.’

‘Oh, sure. Men and multi-tasking.’

They fell silent. Bruford had used up a lot of memory space on the two backwater beauties’ performance, in the course of which several people walked into shot, three policemen appeared, two of them took off again, and one took up his post in the shadow of the building. The girls contorted themselves into a clumsy performance, the significance of which Loreena couldn’t decipher at first, until the intern whistled through his teeth.

‘Not bad at all! Do you recognise it?’

‘No.’

‘That’s from Alien Speedmaster 7!’

‘From what?’

‘You don’t know Alien Speedmaster 7?’ His amazement seemed to know no bounds. ‘Don’t you ever go to the cinema?’

‘Yes, but it sounds like I see different films to you.’

‘Well, there’s a gap in your education there. Look what they’re doing now! I think they’re re-enacting the scene from Death Chat, you know the one, where those small, intelligent creatures go for the woman with the artificial arm and—’

‘No, I don’t know.’

The girls doubled up with laughter. This was disheartening. They had already looked at half of the material without seeing anything more than pubescent nonsense.

‘What are they doing now?’ puzzled the intern.

‘Would you just keep your eyes on the building?’

‘It looks like—’

‘Please!’

‘No, wait! I think that’s from the slushy love film that was hyped up so much last year. A bit cheesy if you ask me. That guy’s in it, that horny old man – you know the one. God, what’s his name? Tell me!’

‘Absolutely no idea.’

‘Yeah, the old bastard who recently got an honorary Oscar for his life’s work!’

‘Richard Gere?’

‘Yes, exactly! Gere! He plays the grandfather of—’

‘Shh!’ Loreena silenced him with a hand motion. ‘Look.’

From the side exit of the central building, two athletic-looking men in casual clothes came out, strolled over to the patrolling policeman and started speaking to him. Both were wearing sunglasses.

‘They don’t look like oil workers.’

‘No.’ Loreena leaned forward, wondering why she had a feeling of déjà vu. She played the section back again and again, zooming in on their faces. A moment later, a slim woman dressed in a trouser suit walked out of the building and positioned herself next to the entrance. The policeman pointed to something, the men looked in the direction of his outstretched hand, one of them holding something under his nose, which might have been a map of the city, and the conversation continued. In the background, a pot-bellied man with long black hair approached, wound his way towards the unguarded side entrance and shuffled inside.

‘Look at that,’ whispered Loreena.

A few moments later, the athletic-looking men shook the policeman’s hand and headed off. The woman in the trouser suit leaned against a tree, her arms folded, and then Bruford’s recording jumped. Sequences followed in which the girls continued to get up to mischief, without anything happening in the immediate vicinity of the building, then the crowd of people and the podium came into view. Both uniformed officials and civilians were pushing their way forward, everything was hectic. Images that had clearly been filmed right after the assassination attempt.

‘The guy that disappeared into the house—’ said the intern.

‘Could be anyone. The janitor, the engineer, some tramp.’ Loreena paused for breath. ‘But if not—’

‘Then we just saw the killer.’

‘Yes, the man who shot Gerald Palstein.’

They exchanged glances like two scientists who had just discovered an unknown, probably fatal virus and could see a Nobel Prize glimmering against the abyss of horror. Loreena isolated a freeze-frame of the fat man, enlarged it, connected her computer with the base station in Juneau and loaded the Magnifier, a program that could do wonders with even the grainiest of material. Within seconds, the blurred features became more contoured, strands of greasy hair separated from white skin, a straggly moustache corresponded with sparse chin stubble.

‘He looks Asian,’ said the intern.

Chinese, Loreena thought suddenly. China was involved in the Canadian oil-sand trade. Hadn’t they even acquired licences? On the other hand, what would the death of an EMCO manager change about the fact that Alberta was lost? Or was Imperial Oil in Chinese hands? But then EMCO would have belonged to them too. No, it didn’t make sense. And killing Palstein certainly didn’t. As he himself had said: Every unpopular decision I make reduces my popularity, but I’m really only the strategic leader.

She stroked her chin.

The sequence with the fat man alone was enough to justify a report, even if the guy turned out to be harmless. Yet it would make the police look a laughing stock. Greenwatch would have used up all its ammunition at once. A brief triumph that would cost them their decisive head-start in the investigations. The chance of solving the case by themselves would be blown.

Perhaps, thought Loreena, you should be content with what you have.

Indecisive, she rewound the film to the moment when the men with the sunglasses engaged the policeman in conversation. She zoomed in on them and let the Magnifier do its work, extracting details from the blurred image which, with all likelihood, came very close to their actual appearance. But even after that the policeman still looked unidentifiable, just an average policeman. The taller of the two men, however, looked familiar to her. Very familiar, in fact.

The computer informed her that the editorial office in Vancouver wanted to speak to her. The face of Sina, editor for Society and Miscellaneous, appeared on the display. ‘You wanted to know whether any other managerial figures from the oil trade have been injured since the beginning of the year.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Bingo. Three, one of them being Umar a-Hamid.’

‘The OPEC Foreign Minister?’

‘Correct. He fell off his horse in January and broke his leg. He’s recovered now. The nag was suspected of having connections in the Islamist camp. No, I’m just kidding. The next, Prokofi Pavlovich Kiselyev—’

‘Who in God’s name is that?’

‘The former Project Manager of Gazprom in West Siberia. He died in March, a car accident, reported to be his own fault. The man was ninety-four years old and half blind. That’s it for this year.’

‘You said there were three.’

‘I took the liberty of going further back. Which brings it to three. There’s always someone of course, one gets sick, another dies, a suicide here and there, nothing unusual. Until you look at the case of Alejandro Ruiz, the strategic second in command of Repsol.’

‘Repsol? Weren’t they taken over by ENI in 2022?’

‘It was discussed, but it never actually happened. In any case, Ruiz was, or is, quite an important figure in strategic management.’

‘And now? Which is it: was or is?’

‘That’s the problem. We’re not sure if he can still be counted as being alive. He disappeared three years ago on an inspection trip to Peru.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Overnight. He vanished. Lost without a trace in Lima.’

‘What else do you know about him?’

‘Not much, but if you like I can change that.’

‘Please do. And thank you.’

Alejandro Ruiz—

Repsol was a Spanish–Argentine company, trailing at the bottom of the field’s top ten. There weren’t all that many points of contact between the Spanish and EMCO. Was she risking wasting her time? Did the disappearance of a Spanish oil strategist in Lima in 2022 have anything to do with this?

Palstein was a strategist too.

Her thoughts oscillated between this new information and Bruford’s film recordings, trying to make some kind of sense out of them, knotting the ropes of logic together.

And suddenly she knew who one of the men in the sunglasses was.

‘Really! I swear to you!’

They were sitting in a small café on the Fifth Avenue Southwest, just a few blocks away from the Imperial Oil Limited headquarters. Loreena was drinking her third cappuccino, and the intern was sucking at a Diet Coke and devouring an awe-inspiring breakfast, composed of porridge, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes and much, much more. Loreena’s analytical mind couldn’t help wondering why someone would drink Diet Coke in the face of neutron-star-like calorie compression. Fascinated, she watched as he led a spoon of warm gruel, saturated in maple syrup, towards his mouth for processing.

‘The Magnifier can’t perform miracles,’ said the intern. ‘The picture isn’t that sharp.’

‘But I saw the guy just two days ago, and he was this close to me.’ She held her hand in front of her face. Through the gaps between her fingers, she saw a sausage disappear. ‘This close!’

‘Which makes me a little concerned that you may have kissed him.’

‘Don’t be silly. He wanted to see my ID card. As if Palstein’s house were the Pentagon or something.’

The intern put his spoon down and wrinkled his forehead.

‘There’s nothing unusual about his security people keeping a check on things.’

‘And did they? Did they check up on things? What had they lost in the house anyway?’

‘As I said.’ He picked his spoon back up. ‘They were keeping a check that—’

‘All that cholesterol has blocked up your synapses!’ she said angrily. ‘It’s obvious that he would have security personnel around him, and police too – I mean, he didn’t exactly come bearing Christmas presents. But would you send your private bodyguard into an empty house opposite? After all, Palstein isn’t Kennedy. How likely is it that someone would shoot at him from there?’

His answer got lost amidst a struggle with an oversized piece of pancake.

‘Let’s assume the Asian guy was harmless,’ she continued. ‘He may have just been looking for a bathroom. That would either mean that Palstein’s people overlooked him, or that they weren’t interested in the fact that he went in. Both are unlikely.’

‘The two guys were talking to the policeman. They couldn’t even see him.’

‘And the woman?’

‘Are you sure she was one of them?’

‘She came out immediately after them. And besides, those security types all look the same. So, suppose that the Chinese guy is our killer.’

‘What makes you think he’s Chinese?’

‘Asian. It doesn’t matter.’ She leaned over. ‘Just think, will you, three security people! One standing close to the entrance. Two others chatting with a policeman, just a few metres away. And none of them notices the grotesquely overweight apparition entering a building they were supposed to be guarding?’

‘Perhaps the Chinese— the Asian guy was security too. Didn’t Palstein tell you that he only started using a security team after Calgary? I find that much more surprising.’

‘No, he didn’t.’ She rolled her cup around, mixing the espresso with foam. ‘Just that they’ve been guarding his house since Calgary.’

‘Well, it would have been better to take on someone else.’

Loreena stared at the foam and espresso mixture.

Would have been better—

‘Damn, you’re right.’

‘Of course I am,’ said the intern, scraping together the remains of the porridge. ‘About what?’

‘He can’t trust them.’

‘Because they’re a dead loss. Too dumb to—’

‘No, they’re not.’ Unbelievable! Why had she only thought of it now? The security people let the killer pass! In full knowledge of who he was! More than that, they distracted the policeman and kept their eyes on the surroundings to make sure no one stopped him from entering the house.

‘Good God,’ she whispered.

Dallas, Texas, USA

‘It’s not long ago that the ability to secure the necessary fossil fuel resources was crucial to the geopolitical role of a nation state. It was under this premise that we foresaw China leading the economic nations in the medium term, knocking the USA down to a distant second, followed by India.’

Gerald Palstein’s guest lectureship at UT Dallas, a state university in the suburb of Richardson, had brought around six hundred students into the lecture theatre, most of them budding managers, economists and information scientists. It was very popular, which was as much down to Palstein’s media savvy as to the fact that he was depicting a wide-screen panorama of failure, in which a Titanic of an energy industry rammed right into an iceberg called helium-3.

‘Russia’s role at this time was one of a major power as far as oil and gas were concerned. Gazprom was also referred to as a weapon. And no one used this weapon in the battle for Russia’s geostrategic role as ably as the country’s former president Vladimir Putin. Does anyone here still remember his nickname?’

‘Gasputin,’ called a young woman from the front row. There was laughter. Palstein raised his eyebrows approvingly.

‘Very good. At the time, the Americans looked on with concern as China openly flirted with Russia regarding its energy requirements, and also strengthened its contacts to OPEC. The latter was pleased of course. They hadn’t been courted like that in a long time and were hoping for a renaissance of their former status. And so the oil nations in the Gulf started to invest their money in the accounts of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, in Turkey and India instead of in American institutions, and China began to settle the bill for its oil supplies from Iran in euros instead of dollars. The balance of power shifted, along with the motivation for America’s efforts to free itself from dependence on Eastern oil supplies. In 2006, representatives from Saudi Arabia travelled to Beijing to sign a number of treaties. Even Kuwait was wooing China, because it was afraid of losing ground to Russia. China knew how to exploit all of that. Although I wouldn’t want to encourage any hate-filled stereotypes, one might picture the energy-hungry China of the first decade of our millennium as an octopus whose arms were silently unfurling, largely unnoticed, in the traditional mining regions of the Western oil multinationals. In the White House, they developed scenarios in which radical forces toppled the Saudi ruling dynasties, all based on the expectation that China would be involved and would ultimately station Chinese nuclear missiles in the Saudi desert. This fear was, as we now know, not completely unfounded. The fall of the house of Saud most definitely took place with concealed Chinese participation. And it’s certain that if the recent conflict between Islamist and monarchist forces had grown to epic proportions and caused a public clash between China and America, then the dawning potential of helium-3 would not have led Washington’s interest in another direction.’

Palstein dabbed sweat from his brow. It was hot in the lecture theatre. He wished he were on board a ship on a lake somewhere or, even better, out on the open sea with invigorating winds all around him.

‘We can assume the following: if gas and oil had continued to play the dominant role, the world would look a little different today. China might have overtaken the USA instead of just catching up with them. The Chinese, Russian and Gulf states would have made an energy pact. Iran, relatively recently in possession of nuclear devices, would have more power internally than is the case today, despite its nuclear armament, and would probably have exerted more pressure on New Delhi, who, back in 2006, already had its sights on a pipeline project in partnership with Tehran, through which Caspian oil would flow to India. This pipeline was supposed to end at the Red Sea, but then the oil wouldn’t have been able to flow to Israel, so for that reason the US was against it. Not an easy situation for India. A collaboration with Iran ran the risk of angering America, while concessions to Washington would have aggravated Iran. In order to escape this Catch-22, the Indians looked to a third power, to help integrate the existing two, having good contacts with both China and Iran. And so the Russians came back into play in the form of Gazprom, taking every opportunity they had to strengthen their nation, for example by turning off the gas taps to their neighbouring states and blackmailing them. Do you recognise the formation of blocs that this heralded? Russia, China, India, OPEC – that couldn’t have been in Washington’s interest. Faced with this situation, George W. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, turned to diplomacy. He tried to improve relations with Russia and to take the wind out of Iran’s sails, a clever strategy that worked in part. But of course even Obama would have secured the USA’s energy requirements by force if he had to, if the technological advancement which Washington achieved through its collaboration with Orley Enterprises hadn’t opened up completely new possibilities to the Americans—’

A staff member of the UTD office came into the lecture hall, paced briskly towards him and pressed a note into his hand. Palstein smiled out into the auditorium.

‘Please excuse me for a moment. What is it?’ he asked softly.

‘Someone wants to speak to you on the telephone, a Miss—’

‘Can’t it wait twenty minutes? I’m in the middle of a lecture.’

‘She said it was urgent. Very urgent!’

‘What was her name again?’

‘Keowa. Loreena Keowa, a journalist. I wanted to put her off until later, but…’ Palstein thought for a moment. ‘No, it’s fine. Thank you.’

He excused himself once again, left the auditorium, walked out into the hallway and dialled Loreena’s number.

‘Shax’ saani Keek,’ he said, as her face appeared on the display of his mobile. ‘How are you?’

‘I know I’m interrupting—’

‘To be honest, yes. I’ve got one minute, then I’ve got to get back to educating the future elite. What can I do for you?’

‘I’m hoping it’s me that can do something for you, Gerald. But for that I need a few more minutes of your time.’

‘It’s a bit awkward right now.’

‘It’s in your interest.’

‘Hmm.’ He looked out through the window across the sunlit campus. ‘Okay, fine. Give me a quarter of an hour to finish my talk. I’ll call you immediately afterwards.’

‘Make sure no one’s listening in.’

Twenty minutes later, he called her from an isolated bench in the shadow of a chestnut tree, with a view out over the university grounds. Two of his security people were patrolling within sight. All around, students were hurrying towards unknown futures.

‘You sure know how to worry a man,’ he said.

‘Do we have an agreement on reciprocity?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We help one another,’ said Loreena. ‘I get information, you get protection.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Are we in agreement?’

‘Hmm.’ Now he was really curious. ‘Fine, yes, we are.’

‘Good. I’m sending you a few photos on your mobile. Open them while we talk.’

His mobile confirmed the arrival of a multimedia message. One after another, he loaded the pictures. They showed two men in sunglasses, and a woman.

‘Which of them do you know?’

‘All of them,’ he said. ‘They work for me. Security staff. You must have met one of them, out on Lavon Lake. Lars Gudmundsson. He has the internal power of command.’

‘That’s right, I met him. Did you order the three of them to guard the building that you were presumably shot at from on 21 April?’

‘Well, that would be a bit of an exaggeration.’ Palstein hesitated. ‘They were just supposed to keep an eye on the surrounding area. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if I should bring them. Having private security makes you seem like you’re putting on airs, like you think you’re so incredibly important. But there had been a few threats against EMCO, and against me too—’

‘Threats?’

‘Oh, stupid things. Nothing that we needed to take seriously. Just resentful people with existential angst.’

‘Gerald, are the Chinese involved in any way with EMCO?’

‘The Chinese?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not really. I mean, there were many attempts to take over our subsidiaries. EMCO itself is – was – too tough a nut for them to crack. And of course they had a good old poach in our coalmines.’

‘Canadian oil sand?’

‘That too.’

‘Okay. I’m sending you another photo.’

This time an Asian face appeared on the display. Long, unkempt hair, a straggly beard.

‘No’ he said.

‘You haven’t seen him before?’

‘Not that I know of. If you could let me in on—’

‘Of course. Listen, Gerald, this man entered the empty building just before you took to the podium. Your security team was in the building too. In our view there’s very little doubt that Gudmundsson’s people not only let the Asian man pass, but also made sure that he could.’

Palstein stared at the photo in silence.

‘Are you completely sure that you’ve never seen him before?’ pressed Loreena.

‘Not consciously, at any rate. I would remember someone like him.’

‘Could he be one of your people?’

‘My people?’

‘I mean, do you know all your bodyguards personally, or does Gudmundsson—’

‘Of course I know every single one of them, what do you expect? And besides, there aren’t that many. Five in total.’

‘Whom you trust.’

‘Of course. They are paid by us, and besides, a respected agency for personal security provided them, EMCO has been working with them for years.’

‘Then you may have a problem. If this Asian guy really is the man who shot at you, then there’s good reason to believe that your own people are in on it. I need to ask you one more question, please excuse my abruptness.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Does the name Alejandro Ruiz mean anything to you?’

‘Ruiz?’ Palstein was silent for a few seconds. ‘Wait a moment. That rings a bell.’

‘I’ll help you. Repsol. Strategic management.’

‘Repsol – yes, I think – yes, for sure, Ruiz. We were on the same flight once. It was a while ago.’

‘What do you know about him?’

‘Practically nothing. My God, Loreena, we’re not talking about some close-knit family here, the oil trade is huge, there are a zillion people working in it. Even now, by the way.’

‘It seems Ruiz was an important man.’

‘Was?’

‘He disappeared. Three years ago in Lima.’

‘Under what circumstances?’

‘During a business trip. You see, I’m interested to find out whether the attack in Calgary has any precedents. Whether it was perhaps less about you personally and more about what you represent. So I put Ruiz’s files together. Happily married, two healthy children, no debts. But he does have opponents in his own field for whom he was too liberal, too environmentally aware; he was a moralist – nicknamed Ruiz El Verde. For example, he spoke out against oil-sand exploitation and pushed for more exploration of the deep sea. Now, I don’t need to tell you that the companies always shied away from cost-intensive exploration proposals when oil prices were low, and three years ago the demise was already well under way. Ruiz urged Repsol to strengthen their involvement with alternative energies. Does that remind you of anyone? Yourself perhaps?’

Incredible, thought Palstein.

‘It could all be a coincidence,’ Loreena continued. ‘Ruiz’s disappearance. China’s engagement in the oil-sand trade. Even the Asian man your people allowed into the house. Perhaps he’s just harmless and I’m seeing ghosts, but my gut instinct and common sense are telling me that we’re on the right track.’

‘And what do you think I should do now?’

‘Don’t trust Gudmundsson and his people. If it should all turn out to be a mistake, I’ll be the first one to eat humble pie. Until then: rack your brains! About Ruiz. About critical overlaps with China. About pitfalls in your own business; and another thing too – have a think about who might have had a vested interest in your not going along on the moon flight. You can call me, or we can meet up, at any time. Try to find out who the Asian in the photo is, perhaps he might be on EMCO’s internal database. Invest in personal security, throw Gudmundsson and his team out on their ear as far as I’m concerned, but don’t go to the police. That’s the only thing I’m asking of you.’

‘Then you’re asking a lot!’

‘Just not for the moment.’

‘This could all be evidence.’

‘Gerald,’ said Loreena insistently, ‘I promise you, I won’t do anything that puts you in danger, nor keep things from the police. It’s just for the moment. I need a head start to be able to get an exclusive on the story.’

‘Do you realise what you’re telling me here? What you’re asking of me?’

‘We have a deal, Gerald. I may have found your would-be assassin, and that’s more than the police managed in four weeks. Give me time. We’re working on it under extreme pressure. I’ll serve those pigs up to you on a silver platter.’

Palstein fell silent. Then he sighed.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Do whatever you think is right.’