Limit

Night Flight

There was one good thing you could say about Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo: after he’d come to power in August 1979, the human rights situation in Equatorial Guinea had visibly improved. From that point on, there were no more mass crucifixions along the highway to the airport, and the skulls of the opposition were no longer impaled on stakes for all to see.

‘A true philanthropist,’ scoffed Yoyo.

‘But not the first,’ said Jericho. ‘Have you heard of Fernão do Pó?’

Heading towards Berlin at twice the speed of sound, they travelled backwards in time, from the Shanghai dawn to the Berlin night, from the year 2025 to the beginnings of a continent in which it seemed everything that could go wrong, always did. Africa, the unloved cradle of humanity, characterised by dead-straight borders which severed its ancient tendons and nerves, creating countries of bizarre geometry, the smallest of which lay patchwork-like on the western fringes, its history reading like a chronicle of continual rape.

‘Fernão do Pó? Who on earth is he?’

‘Another philanthropist. After a fashion.’

As Tu had insisted on flying his company jet himself, Jericho and Yoyo had the luxurious, twelve-seater passenger cabin to themselves. They were using two monitors, supported by Diane, to familiarise themselves with Equatorial Guinea in the hope of finding answers to the questions of the last two days. The picture only became more and more confusing with each piece of information the computer provided, and the only thing that had become clear was that the events in Equatorial Guinea could only be understood if one looked at their development from the very beginning. And that beginning started with:

Fernão do Pó.

A stagnant lake. Dead calm. Curtains of rain billow out over the coastline.

Sweat and rainwater mix on skin, making it look as though it’s been boiled in steam. Orchestrated by the cries of small seabirds, the boats are lowered into the water. The oarsman pulling, a man upright in the bow. The shore comes closer, vegetation takes shape against the deepening grey. The man walks onto the shore, looks around. Once again, an area’s transformation into a state-like zone starts with a Portuguese man.

In 1469, do Pó’s caravels anchor beneath the elbow of Africa, right where the continent tapers off dramatically. The discoverer, the legitimate successor of Henry the Navigator, lands on a small island and calls it Formosa on account of its beauty. Bantus live here, the Bubi tribe. They welcome the visitors in a friendly manner, unaware that their kingdom has just changed hands. From the very moment when do Pó left his bootprints in the sand, they are now subjects of his majesty Alfonso V of Portugal, to whom Pope Nicholas had handed over the entire African island, along with monopoly on trade and sole maritime law, a few years before. At least, the Pope believed that Africa was an island, sharing that misconception with Western Christianity. Do Pó provided proof to the contrary. It was discovered that Africa was in actual fact a continent, and one with a long and fertile coastline, inhabited by dark-skinned people who seemed to have very little to do and who were in dire need of Christianisation. This, in turn, corresponded perfectly with the crux of the papal bull, which decreed that non-believers were to be steamrollered into slavery – a recommendation with which Alfonso and his seafarers were happy to comply.

The day that do Pó arrived changed everything. And yet, ultimately, nothing. If he hadn’t come, then sooner or later someone else would have. Many followed in his footsteps, and the slave trade thrived for three hundred years. Then the Portuguese crown exchanged its ownership of African territory for colonies in Brazil, and the Bantu changed masters. Spain was the new owner. The British, French and Germans began to get involved, all of them fighting for the areas from Cape Santa Clara right up to the Niger Delta—

‘And then they tried to oppress the natives, a task which was made easier by the discord amongst the Bantu, or to be more precise, the growing rivalry between the Bubi and Fang.’

‘Fang?’ grinned Yoyo. ‘Fang Bubi?’

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ said Jericho. ‘This is Africa’s traumatic past.’

‘Yes, I know. The colonialists thought about everything, just not about ethnic roots. Look at Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi—’

‘Okay.’ Jericho massaged the back of his neck. ‘On the other hand let’s not pretend that it’s a purely African invention.’

‘No, you Europeans of all people should keep quiet on that matter.’

‘Why?’

Yoyo’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, come on! Look at Serbia and Kosovo. There’s still no peace even seventeen years after independence! Then the Basques, the Scottish and the Welsh. Northern Ireland.’

Jericho listened, his arms crossed.

‘Taiwan,’ he said. ‘Tibet.’

‘That’s—’

‘Different? Just because you lot don’t want to discuss it?’

‘Nonsense,’ said Yoyo, irritated. ‘Taiwan belongs to mainland China, that’s why it’s different.’

‘Well, you lot are the only ones who believe that. And no one is overly pleased that you’re threatening the Taiwanese with nuclear missiles.’

‘Fine, smart-arse.’ Yoyo leaned forwards. ‘So what would happen if, all of a sudden, let’s say Texas, the Cowboys… if they suddenly declared their independence?’

‘Now that really is different,’ sighed Jericho.

‘Oh sure. Completely different.’

‘Yes. And as far as Tibet is concerned—’

‘Tibet today, Xinjiang tomorrow, then inner Mongolia, Guanxi, Hong Kong – why can’t you Europeans grasp the fact that a One China policy is best for security? Our huge kingdom will fall into chaos if we allow it to fall apart. We have to keep China together!’

‘With force.’

‘No, force is the wrong way. We didn’t do our homework there.’

‘You can say that again!’ Jericho shook his head. ‘Somehow I just can’t figure you out. After all, you’re the one who’s so passionate about human rights. That’s what I thought, anyway.’

‘And it’s true.’

‘But?’

‘No buts. I’m a nationalist.’

‘Hmm.’

‘That doesn’t compute with you, right? That the two can coexist. Human rights and nationalism.’

Jericho spread his hands out acquiescently. ‘I’m happy to learn.’

‘Then learn. I’m not a fascist, not a racist, nothing of the kind. But I am absolutely convinced that China is a great country with a great culture—’

‘Which you yourselves have trampled all over.’

‘Listen, Owen, let’s get one basic thing straight. Give it a rest with all the you,you lot, your people! When the Red Guards were hanging teachers from trees, I wasn’t even a twinkle in my father’s eye. I’d rather you tell me how the whole thing with Bubi Fang carries on, if that’s even relevant.’

‘Fang,’ Jericho corrected her patiently. ‘The Bubi lived on their island. They didn’t care two figs about the coast until Spain united the mainland and islands into the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. And the Fang dominated on the mainland: another Bantu tribe, who greatly outnumbered the Bubi and were less than pleased at being thrown in a pot with them overnight. In 1964, Spain gave the country full autonomy, which in practice meant that they fenced two groups who couldn’t stand each other inside a state border and left them to their own devices. Something that could only end in disaster.’

Yoyo looked at him with her dark eyes. And suddenly, she smiled. So unexpected and untimely a smile that he could do little else but stare back at her, confused.

‘By the way, I wanted to thank you,’ she said.

‘Thank me?’

‘You saved my life.’

Jericho hesitated. The whole time, while he had swum so bravely through the hot water that Yoyo had got herself into, he had contented himself with his own sense of reward. Now he felt taken by surprise.

‘No need,’ he said feebly. ‘It’s just the way things turned out.’

‘Owen—’

‘I didn’t have any choice. If I had known—’

‘No, Owen, don’t.’ She shook her head. ‘Say something nice.’

‘Something nice? After all the trouble that you’ve—’

‘Hey.’ She reached out. Her slender fingers clasped around his hand and squeezed firmly. ‘Say something nice to me. Right now!’

She moved closer to him, and something changed. So far he had only seen Yoyo’s beauty, and the small flaws in it. Now, waves of unsettling intensity washed over him. Unlike Joanna, who controlled and regulated her erotic potential like the volume dial on a radio, Yoyo could do nothing else but burn seductively, relentless, a bright, hot star. And suddenly he realised that he would do everything in his power to make sure that this star never burned out. He wanted to see her laugh.

‘Well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Any time.’

‘Any time what?’

‘I’d do it again, any time. If you ever need saving, let me know. I’ll be there.’ More throat-clearing. ‘And now—’

‘Thank you, Owen. Thank you.’

‘—let’s carry on with Mayé. When does it get interesting for us?’

She let his hand go and sank back in her seat.

‘Difficult to say. I’d say that in order to understand the relations in the country, we need to go back to independence. With the change to—’

Papa Macías.

In October 1968, the same damp and humid climate reigned in the Gulf of Guinea as on any other day of the year. Sometimes it rained, then the land, islands and sea would brood in sunshine that made the beaches glisten and brought all activity to a standstill. The capital city, located on the island and little more than a collection of mildewed colonial buildings with huts gathered around them, was seeing the advent of the first State President of the independent republic of Equatorial Guinea, chosen by the people in a memorable election campaign. Francisco Macías Nguema of the Fang tribe promises justice and socialism, and forces the remaining Spanish troops to retreat, an action which had already been agreed in any case, although they had imagined a slightly more conciliatory end. But ‘Papa’, as the president named himself out of his love for his people, is accustomed to having a good and hearty breakfast. The defeated colonialists were horrified to discover that he was a cannibal, with a tendency to eat the brains and testicles of his enemies. You couldn’t expect a teary goodbye from someone like that.

And yet that’s exactly what happened.

A sea of tears, a sea of blood.

The young republic was defiled almost as soon as it was born. No one there was prepared for something as exotic as market economy, but at least they had enjoyed a flourishing trade in cocoa and tropical woods. Macías, however, enflamed with glowing admiration for Marxist–Leninist-supported despotism, was interested in other things. The last units of the Guardia Civil had barely cleared their posts before it became clear what was to be expected from testicle-eating Papa and his Partido Unico Nacional. The army reinforced Macías’ claim to god-like absolute dictatorship with clubs, firearms and machetes, prompting the remaining European civilians to flee the country in terror. Numerous posts were taken by members of his Esangui clan, a sub-tribe of the Fang. The fact that the island, the most attractive part of the country, seat of the government and economic centre, was Bubi territory had been a thorn in the side of the numerically superior Fang for a long time. Macías fanned the flames of this hate. At least he had had the decency to annul the constitution before breaking it.

From that point on, the Bubi felt the full force of his paternal care.

More than fifty thousand people were slaughtered, incarcerated, tortured to death, including all members of the opposition. Anyone who was able to fled abroad. And because Papa didn’t trust anyone, not even his own family, even the Fang became a target for the president. Over a third of the population was forced into exile or disappeared in camps, while hundreds of Cuban military advisors were given free rein to prowl around the country; after all, Moscow was a reliable friend. By the mid-seventies, Papa had managed to annihilate the local economy so thoroughly that he needed to bring Nigerian workers into the country. But they too soon take to their heels and flee. Without further ado, the country’s father enforces compulsory work for all, thereby unleashing a further mass exodus. Numerous schools are closed, something that doesn’t stop Papa from calling himself the Grand Master of the People’s Education, Knowledge and Traditional Culture. In his delusion of divinity, he also bolts up and barricades all the churches, proclaims atheism and devotes himself to the reinvigoration of magic rituals. The continent is now experiencing the heyday of dictatorship. Macías is referred to in the same breath as Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who also had himself crowned and was utterly convinced he was Jesus’ thirteenth apostle; he is likened to Idi Amin and the Cambodian Pol Pot.

‘At the end of the day, he was an even bigger criminal than Mayé,’ said Yoyo. ‘But no one cared. Papa didn’t have anything that would have been worth caring about. As a good patriot, he renamed everything that didn’t yet have an African name, and since then the mainland has been called Mbini, the island Bioko and the capital city Malabo. By the way, I also looked into Mayé’s native background. He’s from the Fang tribe.’

‘And what happened to this splendid Papa?’

Yoyo made a snipping motion with her fingers. ‘He was got rid of. A coup.’

‘With support from abroad?’

‘It seems not. Papa’s family values got out of hand; he even started to execute his close relatives. His own wife fled over the border in the dead of night. No one from his clan was safe any more, and in the end it became too much for one of them.’

In 1979, there was singing and dancing in Equatorial Guinea.

A man in a plain uniform stands in the entrance to a vault, where glowing ghosts dart over the walls and ceiling, generated by the crackling fire in the middle of the room. He is inconspicuousness personified. From time to time, he gives instructions under his breath, prompting the guards to give the dancers, who have been hopping around the fire and singing Papa’s praises in grotesque liveliness for hours, a helping hand with red-hot pokers. It smells of decadence and burnt flesh. Mosquitoes buzz around. In the gloomy corners and along the walls, the scene is mirrored in the eyes of rats. Anyone who tips over the brink into exhaustion is dragged up, beaten until they bleed and hauled outside. Almost all of them, apart from the uniformed men, are undernourished and dehydrated, many show signs of mistreatment, and others have yellow fever and malaria written on their gaunt faces.

Black Beach Party: just a normal day in Black Beach Prison, the infamous jail in Malabo that makes America’s Devil Island look like a relaxing spa resort.

The man watches for a while longer, then leaves the dance of death, his face filled with worry. His name is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, nephew of the president, Commander of the National Guard and Director of the Black Beach Institution. He is responsible for scenes like these, so highly valued by Papa – just as the president enjoys spending his birthdays shooting prisoners in the Malabo stadium with ‘Those Were the Days, My Friend’ blasting out at full volume. But Obiang’s concern wasn’t for the prisoners, most of whom would never get out of this shabby, car-park-like fortress alive. It was his own life he feared for, and he had every reason to do so. These days, everyone in Papa’s clan had to confront the possibility of suddenly falling victim to the president’s paranoia and being sent off into the eternal rainforests to a soundtrack of Mary Hopkin.

So even Obiang was afraid.

And yet his own family values weren’t very different from those of his cut-throat uncle. Macías’ fear of clans was part of his blood, a fear of the preferential politics which saw clans give their sons and daughters to other clans in order to stay in power. Papa himself felt the full force of it when Obiang staged a coup and chased the Unique Wonder out of office. Papa, deprived of his power, fled headlong into the jungle, but not before first burning the remaining local currency. More than one hundred million dollars go up in flames in his villa, literally the very last of the State money. By the time Obiang’s henchmen tracked down the weakened Macías amongst the huge ferns and piles of apeshit, Equatorial Guinea was as bare as a bone. They drive the man to Malabo, play him ‘Those Were the Days’ and bullet by bullet deliver him to the ghosts of his forefathers, a task taken care of by Moroccan soldiers – his own people are too afraid of the cannibal’s dark magic.

And so the highest military council takes command of government business. Like all newly enthroned leaders, Obiang makes well-meaning promises to the people, proclaims a parliamentary democracy and, at the end of the eighties, even allows elections. Numerous candidates are suggested: but by him. Obiang wins, primarily because his Partido Democrático de Guinea Ecuatorial runs without competition, the representatives of which celebrate with a big party in Black Beach Prison. The government regrows like a lizard’s tail: the same blood, the same genes. Esangui-Fang even. It’s a family business. Anyone who criticises it will soon be dancing and singing around the fire, the only thing that’s changed is the wording. Obiang’s temper isn’t anywhere near as bad as Papa’s; he’s much more preoccupied with re-establishing trust abroad, making tentative links with the enduringly snubbed Spain and informing the Soviets that they are no longer friends. Equatorial Guinea begins to look more like a state again, and less like a subtropical Dachau. Money flows into the country. Annabon, Bioko’s sister island, is large and beautiful, ideal for the disposal of nuclear waste, something for which the First World is prepared to pay a pretty penny. The only problem is that Annabon is inhabited, but it won’t be for much longer. Illegal fishing, arms smuggling, the drugs trade and child labour: Obiang pulls out all the stops and transforms the green patch in the Gulf of Guinea into a lovely little gangsters’ paradise.

Foreign creditors put the pressure on. Democracy is a necessity. Obiang reluctantly accepts opposition parties, but despite using all his criminal talents, he is still 250 million dollars in the red. Then something inexplicable happens, something which gives the future a completely new shine overnight. First near Bioko, and then off the mainland coast. Something which makes the president round his lips reverently, as round as one needs to shape them in order to articulate a certain word.

‘Oil.’

‘Exactly, said Jericho. ‘The first sites were detected at the beginning of the nineties, and after that the race was on. There’s a constant stream of companies interested in the Gulf. Not one of them makes any more references to human rights. All of a sudden, mining licences are more popular topics of conversation.’

‘And Obiang cashes in.’

‘And cleans up, because of the low prices.’ Jericho pointed at his screen. ‘If you want to see the list of people who were imprisoned or murdered—’

‘Show me.’

‘Spain was the exception, I should add. Madrid clearly does get worked up about human rights infringements.’

‘Respect to them.’

‘No, it was motivated by frustration. Some opposition forces had found shelter in Spain and railed against Obiang’s clan, so he was a little reluctant to grant licences to Spanish companies. The Spanish government reacted bitterly and suspended foreign aid in protest. Heart-warming really, because Mobil opens up another oilfield near Malabo just a little later, and Equatorial Guinea’s economic growth shoots up by forty per cent. Then it’s one after another: there are discoveries near Bioko, near Mbini, a building boom in Malabo; oil towns such as Luba and Bata spring up. Obiang has no more political opponents; he is the oil prince. His re-election in the mid-nineties turns into a farce. The only competitor who can be taken seriously, Severo Moto from the Progressive Party, is sentenced to a hundred years’ imprisonment for high treason and escapes to Spain by the skin of his teeth.’

‘Interesting.’ Yoyo looked at him thoughtfully. ‘And who held the most licences?’

‘America.’

‘What about China?’

‘Not at the time. The US companies took the lead. They were the quickest and forced outrageous treaties on Obiang; he had very little understanding of the trade and signed everything they put in front of him. The ethnic shambles between the Fang and Bubi reached a new peak. There were very few Bubi on the mainland, but they’re the majority on Bioko, where the coastline was suddenly spluttering with oil. They all used to be poor, and in theory this should have made them all rich, but Obiang only lined his own pockets. The protests started in 1998. The Bubi founded a movement, fighting for the independence of Bioko, and there’s no way Obiang was going to allow that.’

‘Soviet troops have hauled the tanks out of the garage for far lesser reasons than that.’

‘Chinese troops—’

‘—too.’ Yoyo rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, I know. So how did Obiang react?’

‘He didn’t. He refused to enter into discussion. Radical Bubi mount attacks on police stations and military bases. They’re in despair, made to feel like second-class citizens every day. Which isn’t to say that the Fang are having a better time of it, but it hits the Bubi the hardest. And yet there’s technically enough money around for each person to build themselves a villa in the jungle. On the other hand—’

‘—there’s a hell in every heaven,’ as the people of Malabo said back at the beginning of the millennium, and by that they meant that heaven stands out against hell like a gold ingot swimming in a sea of shit.

Right before the boom, Equatorial Guinea topped the list of poorest countries. The coffee export industry collapsed in Bioko, and a number of coffee plantations along the coast disappeared under the chummy presence of all manner of weeds. Precious wood species are said to be profitable, so they start to fell obeche and bongossi trees and then just stare at the fallen trunks, because there are no machines to take them away, not to mention no transport routes. Malaria, the mistress of the jungle, conspires with the miserable healthcare to reduce the average life expectancy to forty-nine years, backed up by an up-and-coming epidemic called AIDS. All across the land, the only thing flourishing besides fame, orchids and bromeliads is corruption.

Four years later, the sweaty region in Africa’s armpit registers a yearly GDP growth of twenty-four per cent. The oil and dollars flow, but there is little change to the living conditions. Obiang suspects that he was taken to the cleaners during the negotiations for the licence contracts. Not even the sentencing of popular Bubi leaders to imprisonment and death improves his mood. It’s not that the president is struggling financially; after all, he gets rich while black Africa perishes of AIDS, signs a trade agreement with Nigeria for collaboration in oil mining and launches an attack on the exploitation of natural gas resources. It’s just that other dictators have made more lucrative deals. In 2002, a year before the elections, dozens of alleged rebels were arrested, including numerous opposition leaders, which has a wondrous influence on poll attendance. No one of clear mind had any doubt that Obiang would be re-elected – but the fact that he won 103 per cent of the votes amazed even the most hard-boiled analysts. Strengthened by experience and referendum, Obiang assigns licences under stricter conditions, and the coffers are finally rewarded. Teodorin, his eldest son and Forestry Minister, is able to jet around between Hollywood, Manhattan and Paris, buy Bentleys, Lamborghinis and luxury villas by the dozen and spends his time at champagne parties, dreaming of the day when his father will lose the battle against his prostate and hand the presidency over to him.

In the meantime, his father is given a helping hand by a bank in Washington, which discreetly reallocates thirty-five million dollars from the State account to private ones. When the whole thing gets blown open, the president acts offended, although not particularly bothered. You can have a good life with a ruined reputation in ‘Africa’s Kuwait’, as Equatorial Guinea has become known by then. The country is amongst the most significant oil producers in Africa and records the biggest economic growth in the world. The dictator almost lovingly nurtures his reputation for taking after his uncle in culinary matters, of not being averse to the crisply fried liver of an opponent if the right wine has been selected to accompany it. It’s all play-acting of course, but the impact is considerable. Human rights organisations are outraged, dedicating articles to him, and at home no one dares to pick an argument with Obiang. The idea of being tenderised and then devoured in Black Beach is not appealing.

Elsewhere, people are not so sickened. George W. Bush, usually less than fond of Africa on account of it being full of epidemics, fly-covered, starved faces and poisonous creatures, starts to change his mind. Profoundly upset by the attacks of 9/11, he is striving for independence from the oil of the Middle East, and more than a hundred billion barrels of the best petroleum are alleged to be stored in West Africa alone. Bush plans to cover twenty-five per cent of America’s needs from there by 2015. While Amnesty International gets overwhelmed, drowning in horrendous reports, Bush invites Obiang and other African kleptocrats to breakfast in the White House. Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice gives a press conference and publicly expresses solidarity: Obiang is described as ‘a good friend’, whose engagement for human rights is valued. The good friend smiles modestly, and Ms Rice smiles along with him. The other side of the cameras, the managers of Exxon, Chevron, Amerada Hess, Total and Marathon Oil, are smiling too. By 2004, Equatorial Guinea’s oil mining is entirely in US hands; the companies transfer seven hundred million dollars directly to Obiang’s accounts in Washington each year.

Which is rather odd.

Because no one visiting Malabo will see any sign of this wealth. The four-lane Carretera del Aeropuerto which leads from the airport right into its colonial centre is still the only tarmacked road in the country. The old town, partly renovated, partly disintegrated, is ridden with brothels and drinking holes. Extravagant cross-country vehicles are parked in front of the air-conditioned and ugly government palace. The only hotel exudes all the charm of an emergency accommodation building. There’s no school anywhere worthy of the name. There are no daily papers, no smiles on the faces, no public voice. Here and there, scaffolding leans against scaffolding like drunk men huddling together, but only on constructions carried out for the Obiangs; apart from the villas of the kleptocracy, hardly any building work gets finished. Those are the only new structures: monuments of monstrous tastelessness, just like the warehouses and quarters for foreign oil workers which spring out of the ground overnight. As if embarrassed to be there, the American Embassy cowers between the surrounding houses, while a little further on, the other side of the cordoned-off Exxon grounds, the Chinese Embassy flaunts itself brazenly.

‘So they did start to court Obiang,’ said Yoyo. ‘Even though almost everything was owned by the Americans.’

‘They tried, anyway,’ said Jericho. ‘But they weren’t that successful to begin with. After all, Obiang’s new circle of friends didn’t just include the Bush dynasty. Even the EU Commission was eagerly rolling out the red carpet for him, especially the French. What did a ban on religion or torture matter? The fact that the only human rights organisation in the country was controlled by the government, along with the radio and television; they couldn’t care less. The fact that two-thirds of the population were living on less than two dollars a day; mei you ban fa, there was nothing that could be done. The region was of vital interest, anyone who comes too late loses out, and the Chinese were just too slow.’

‘And how did the locals react to the oil workers being there?’

‘They didn’t. The workers were flown straight into sealed-off company grounds. Marathon built their own town not far from Malabo, around a gas-to-liquid plant, and at times there were more than four thousand people living there: a highly secured Green Zone with its own energy grid, water supply, restaurants, shops and cinemas. Do you know what the workers called it? Pleasantville.’

‘How sweet.’

‘Indeed. When a dictator gives you permission to plunder his mineral resources while his own people are butchering monkeys out of sheer hunger, you don’t exactly want to let those people catch sight of you. And they certainly don’t want to see you. But they aren’t even put in that awkward situation, because the companies are self-sufficient. The local private economy doesn’t benefit in the slightest from the fact that several thousand Americans are squatting just a few kilometres away. Most of the oil workers spent months in ghettos like those or on their rig, fucking AIDS-free girls from Cameroon, gobbling down piles of malaria tablets and making sure they arrived back home without having made any contact with the country. No one wanted contact. The main thing was that Obiang was firmly in the saddle, and, therefore, the American oil industry too.’

‘But something must have gone wrong. For the Yanks, I mean. By Mayé’s time they were practically out of the game.’

‘It did go wrong,’ said Jericho. ‘The decline began in 2004. But that was actually down to an Englishman. I’d hazard a guess that our story and the mess we’ve got mixed up in really started after the Wonga Coup.’

Wonga Coup. A Bantu term. Wonga meaning money, dosh, dough, moolah. A flippant way of describing one of the most ridiculous attempted coups of all time.

In March 2004, a rattling Boeing of prehistoric design lands in Harare Airport in Zimbabwe, packed full of mercenaries from South Africa, Angola and Namibia. The plan is to take weapons and ammunition on board, fly on to Malabo and meet up with a little group of fighters smuggled in ahead of them. Together, they plan to overthrow the government in a surprise attack, shoot down Obiang or throw him into his own prison, the main priority being a change of power. The day before, and as if by magic, the leader of the oppositional progressive party, Severo Moto, arrives in nearby Mali from his Madrid exile, thereby enabling him to get to Malabo within the hour to have his feet kissed by the grateful hordes.

But it didn’t quite turn out like that. The South African Secret Services – on the alert against the now unemployed henchmen of apartheid – got wind of the plan and warned Obiang. Simultaneously, the Zimbabwe government was informed of the arrival of a bunch of dreamers convinced they could rewrite history by letting rip with some decommissioned Kalashnikovs. The trap snaps down on both sides: they were all arrested and given immediate prison sentences, and that was that.

Or that would have been that.

Because unfortunately – for those behind the coup – the people questioned betrayed their confidentially vows in the hope of lighter sentences. And so the full force of the law makes itself felt. One of the ringleaders of the unlucky commandos was a former British officer and long-time leader of a private mercenary firm, which had links with a certain Jan Kees Vogelaar. The officer, imprisoned in Zimbabwe, is able to tell them that a dodgy oil manager with a British passport is behind the whole thing, and above all a relative of a British prime minister, who is alleged to have put up considerable sums of money for the operation. Just this information alone is enough to elicit statements from Obiang, hinting at handing over certain parts of the perpetrator’s anatomy to his cook, if they ever get their hands on him. Pretty soon Simon Mann is threatened with extradition. This, and the prospect of dance lessons in Black Beach – and worse – contribute immensely to the loosening of the mercenary leader’s tongue. Then the truth comes out.

The real financers are British oil companies, the crème of the trade, who were disgruntled at the sputtering wealth being divided up between American companies and the impossibility of getting a foot in the door with Obiang. No offence intended, but they wanted to change a few things. Severo Moto had been chosen to undertake the distribution of the cake. A puppet president who, amongst other things, had promised to favour Spanish oil companies too.

And then the mercenary drops the real bomb:

They all knew about it!

The CIA. British MI6. The Spanish Secret Service. They all knew – and they all helped. It was said even Spanish warships had been en route to Equatorial Guinea, an infinite loop of colonialism. Obiang was outraged. Even his brunch buddy from Washington stabbed him in the back. No longer willing to stabilise him, Bush was prepared to divide up shares amongst the English and the Spanish in the interest of a puppet government, and to negotiate more favourable mining conditions in turn. Obiang rages against the whole sorry lot of them – and decides to help put their plan into action: he really does redistribute the mining rights – just in a completely different way from how the global strategists imagined. American companies get the boot, and in their place the South Africans get the lot. Relations with José Maria Aznar, Severo Moto’s friend and host to forty thousand Equatorial Guinea residents in exile, are suspended. France, on the other hand, is alleged to have helped to prevent the coup, and so Obiang looks favourably on the Grande Nation.

And wasn’t there a country on the starting blocks, waiting for America to go it alone?

‘China comes into play.’

‘Yes, although treading delicately. Obiang seems prepared to forgive and forget at first. Aznar has been voted out by then, making Spain approachable again, so he launches into a charm offensive. By the same token, Washington tries its hand with diplomatic reparations. Smiling competitions with Condoleezza Rice, new contracts, all of that. By 2008, the companies are pumping half a million barrels a year from the sea off Obiang’s own country, the country that records the highest income per capita in the whole of Africa. Analysts estimate that there is more oil stored in Equatorial Guinea than in Kuwait. The bulk of it flows into the USA, a little to France, Italy and Spain, but the real winner—’

‘—is China.’

‘Exactly! They caught up with America. Slyly and quietly.’

‘I get it.’ Yoyo looked at him, her eyelids drooping. Jericho felt strangely spaced out too. The lack of sleep and the jet gliding at twice the speed of sound were starting to have a narcotic effect. ‘And Obiang?’

‘Still angry. Furious! He realises, of course, that high-ranking members of his government must have known about the plans to overthrow him. You can only arrange a coup like that with support from the inside. So heads roll, and from then on he doesn’t trust anyone. He gets himself a Moroccan bodyguard out of fear of his own people. At the same time, though, he demands to be courted in a bizarre way. When the Exxon bosses arrive, they have to address his ministers and generals as Excellentissimo. Former slaves encounter former slave traders, everyone detests everyone else. The board members of the oil firms hate having to sit at a table with the jungle chiefs, but they do it regardless because both sides stand to make a huge profit.’

‘And the country is still on its knees.’

‘There are some benefits for the Fang, but generally speaking the economy is corrupt. Sure, there are a few more nice cars parked in the slums, but running water and electricity are still in short supply. The country is paying for the curse of having natural resources. Who would still want to work or educate themselves if money were flowing into their accounts of its own accord? The wealth transforms some into predators and others into zombies. Bush states that he plans to pump the sea floor near Malabo empty by 2030, and promises Obiang he’ll leave him in peace with regard to human rights and coup plans, as well as reward him appropriately.’

‘That sounds like a good deal. For Obiang, I mean.’

‘Yes, he could have contented himself with that. But he didn’t. Because good old Obiang—’

—is an elephant: unforgiving, mistrustful. As elephants tend to be. He just can’t forget that Bush, the Brits and the Spanish wanted to do the dirty on him. The pistons of his lubricated power machine rise and fall cheerfully, everything running like clockwork, including his sparkling re-election in 2009. There’s such immense wealth that lesser quantities finally spill over to the middle and lower classes too, enough to anaesthetise any revolutionary ideas for the time being. But Obiang still plots his revenge.

Ironically, of all things it’s the change of government in Washington that heralds the new era. In a way, it was possible to rely on Bush, who lacked the same amount of morals as he endeavoured to fake in his speeches. Barack Obama, on the other hand, the high priest of Change, dreaded the thought of tucking into hard-boiled eggs in the company of cannibals behind closed doors. Eagerly attempting to reestablish America’s worse for wear image around the world, he hauled terms like democracy and human rights out of the sewers of Bush’s vocabulary, listened courteously to the UN when sanctions against rogue regimes were the topic of debate, and aggravated Obiang with his humanitarian demands.

In the fanfare of changed American rhetoric, Obiang is probably the only one to notice that two heavily armed US military bases have sprung up in São Tomé and Príncipe overnight, right in front of his nose. Oil is suspected around this small island state too. By now, China and the USA are engaged in a real race in the resources market. The treasures of the earth seem solely destined to be divided up between the two economic giants. Officially, the two bases are supposed to secure trouble-free transport of gas and oil in the Gulf of Guinea, but Obiang senses betrayal. His fall would make things a great deal easier for the Americans. And they will force his fall, as long as he continues to go to bed with each and every whore instead of marrying just one of them.

Obiang looks to the East.

In 2010, Beijing ascended to become Africa’s biggest financial backer, ahead of even the World Bank. The president figures out two geostrategic equations. The first is that China is least likely to carry out a coup against him, so long as he favours them in commodities poker. The second is that Beijing is most likely to overthrow him if he doesn’t, so he gives more licences to China. The alarm bells start to ring in Washington. Just like before, they still try to maintain close relations with states that have something they want. US representatives travel to corrupt meetings under the soaking skies of Malabo. An unblemished cosmopolitan on the surface, Obiang assures his American friends of his undiminished appreciation while, behind their backs, he puts an end to contracts, redistributes mining rights at will, commences licence fees and stirs up public opinion against the Western ‘exploiters’. These actions result in infringements on US institutions, imprisonments and the deportation of American workers. Washington considers it necessary to threaten Obiang with sanctions and isolation, and the climate rapidly deteriorates.

Then, drunk on power, Obiang crosses the line. Peeved at the extension of the American military bases, he has Marathon’s oil town ‘Pleasantville’ attacked in the dead of night. This culminates in a real battle at Punta Europa, with casualties on both sides. As always, the president denies any part in it, expresses deep consternation and promises that he, like his uncle before him, plans to nail the guilty parties to stakes along the side of the highway. But in doing so, he makes the mistake of casting the blame onto the Bubi, a spark that triggers an explosion. Distracted by geo-strategy, Obiang failed to notice that the ethnic conflict had long since overstepped the border of controllability. The Bubi defend themselves against the accusations, attack Fangs of the Esangui clan, and are riddled with bullets by Obiang’s paramilitaries, but this time his intimidation tactics don’t have the usual impact. Marathon people identify the corpse of a fallen attacker as an officer of the Equatorial Guinea army, a Fang who was loyal to the party line, and one who was also related by marriage to Obiang. Washington doesn’t rule out taking military action. Obiang pointedly has Americans arrested and accuses Obama of trying to engineer his overthrow, a statement which encourages Bubi politicians to send signals to Washington. Severo Moto, the unlucky almost-president, who has little else to do but chew on the bones of failure in Spanish exile, conveys the details: if Malabo, the capital city, can be successfully brought under control, then – and only then! – can a coup have any chance of success. The hearts of the Bubi beat for America. And so a new equation is made: America plus Bubi equals coup equals China out and America in. Officially, the Americans turn down a coup, of course, but the trenches are dug.

Obiang gets nervous.

He tries to unite the Fang to support him, but their belated rage at his failings puts paid to that. Most Fang had no better a time of it under his regime than the Bubi. By now, they are discontented and disunited. The ruling clan in particular shows itself to be a stronghold of Shakespearean plotting. Barricaded behind his puppet guard, the president fails to notice that America has begun to buy Fang and Bubi leaders off in secret, urging them to shake hands and make peace. China makes a bid too. The Equatorial Guinea parliament is up for auction, a Sotheby’s full of corruption. The scattered Bubi parties at home and abroad find themselves in shaky alliances. Obiang responds with terror; civil-war-like conditions shake the country and draw the attention of the foreign media. The USA finally drops the oil prince. He is ordered to call a re-election or, preferably, to step down immediately. Beside himself with rage, Obiang threatens the Bubi with genocide and expresses his desire to eat a whole lot of fried liver. But by now the resistance can no longer be contained.

To add to the confusion, Fang clans from the less than wealthy hinterlands unexpectedly join the Bubi side. Obiang shouts for military helicopters, Beijing hesitates. The hands-off principle, the most important cornerstone of Chinese foreign policy, won’t tolerate military intervention. At the same time, the UN assembly strives for resolutions against Equatorial Guinea. China exercises its veto, the EU demands Obiang’s resignation. Cameroon wants to mediate, but both sides of the Atlantic are in agreement: Obiang’s time is up. The guy has to go. One way or another.

In 2015, a year before his time in office is up, weakened by both politics and his prostate, the dictator finally buckles. A tired old man is shown on State TV describing his health, citing it as the reason why he is no longer able to serve his beloved people in the reliable way they have become accustomed to. Ergo, for the good of Equatorial Guinea, he is now handing over his power to younger hands, and in particular to – to – to—

According to the script, Obiang’s eldest son Teodorin was supposed to rush out from behind the curtain in full presidential regalia, but he had planned ahead, making himself scarce in the Bermuda triangle of the jet set. In any case, the majority of his uncles and cousins wanted to see Obiang’s second-born in power instead: Gabriel, who managed the oil trade. The USA – a bitter opponent of Teodorin since he had boasted years ago of wanting to renegotiate all the oil treaties to America’s disadvantage – spread rumours that Teodorin was planning Gabriel’s murder. Suddenly, no one seems to want to take the reins any more. Obiang, disgusted by the whiff of cowardice, decides without further ado to nominate an interim candidate, one who will lead government business for the duration of his office and then organise fair elections with the inclusion of all parties and candidates. The chosen one is the commander in chief of the armed forces, a cousin of Obiang’s, whose chest is covered with medals for loyal service, including the prevention of numerous assassination and coup attempts as well as the imprisonment and torture of innumerable Bubi and Fang. He is—

Brigadier General Juan Alfonso Nguema Mayé. Huge and bald-headed, with a broad, captivating smile. Mayé, running a store for oil tankers in Berlin and devouring Yoyo’s eyeballs with relish, while Jan Kees Vogelaar—

‘Owen.’

Mayé transforms into Kenny, comes closer, black against a wall of flames, raises his arm, and Jericho sees that he’s waving Yoyo’s eyeless skull.

Give me your computer, he says.

Give me—

‘Owen, wake up.’

Someone is shaking him by the shoulder. Yoyo’s voice snuggles into his ear. He breathes in her scent and opens his eyes. Tu is standing behind her, grinning down at him.

‘What’s going on?’ Jericho gestures towards the cockpit with his thumb. ‘Shouldn’t you be sitting up front?’

‘Autopilot,xiongdi, ’ said Tu. ‘A wonderful invention. I had to stand in for you temporarily. Do you want to hear how the Mayé story continues?’

‘Erm—’

‘That might have been a yes,’ whispered Yoyo, turned towards Tu. ‘What do you reckon, did he say yes?’

‘It sounds more like he wants coffee. Would you like a coffee, Owen?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘I— No, no coffee.’

‘He’s in another world, our innterrrrimm candidaaaa,’ whispered Yoyo conspiratorially.

Tu chortled. ‘Innterrrrimm candidaaaa’ he repeated, against a backdrop of Yoyo’s melodic giggling. Both seemed to be highly amused, and Owen was clearly the source of their merriment. Disgruntled, he looked out of the window into the night and then back again.

‘How long was I out for?’

‘Oh, a good hour.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

Yoyo stared at him. She tried to keep a straight face, then she and Tu burst out out laughing. They cackled idiotically at the tops of their voices, nervous and breathless.

‘Hey! What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing.’ They were still panting and laughing.

‘There’s clearly something.’

‘No, nothing, Owen, it’s nothing. It’s just that—’

‘What?’

Altitude sickness, he thought. The beginnings of hysteria. You hear of people who start laughing after traumatic events and then just can’t stop. Astonishingly, even though he didn’t have the faintest clue what it was about, he felt a painful longing to laugh along, whatever it was. That’s not good, he thought. We’re all going crazy.

‘So?’

‘Well.’ Yoyo blew her nose and wiped the corners of her eyes. ‘Oh, it’s silly really, Owen. I lost you in the middle of a sentence. Your last word was—’

‘What?’

‘I guess it was meant to be interim candidate. You said, Obiang had an inteeeeriiim—’

Tu was making bleating noises.

‘Candidaaaaaa—’

‘You’ve both lost your minds.’

‘Come on, Owen. It’s funny,’ grunted Tu. ‘It’s really funny!’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘You fell asleep in the middle of the sentence,’ giggled Yoyo. ‘Your head fell forward in a funny way, your lower jaw dropped down, like…’

Jericho waited patiently until her re-enactment of his degradation had reached its drooling conclusion. Tu dabbed the sweat from his bald head. In moments like these, the English and Chinese senses of humour seemed to be galaxies apart, but Jericho suddenly realised he was laughing too. For some reason it felt good. As if someone had put the furniture inside his mind in order and let some fresh air in.

‘Right then.’ Tu patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m going up front again. Yoyo will tell you the rest. Then we can draw our conclusions.’

‘Where did we get to?’ asked Jericho.

‘To interiiiiiim—’ chirruped Yoyo.

‘Enough now.’

‘No, I’m being serious. To General Mayé.’

She was right, that was where they had left off. Obiang had named his highest commander in chief as his successor. Mayé was supposed to use the time the outgoing president had left in office to prepare for democratic elections, and yet—

No one trusted the brigadier general. Mayé was seen as a hard-liner and as Obiang’s puppet. There was no doubt that the elections would result in either Mayé himself or one of the president’s sons seizing power. Definitely not the kind of result anyone would like.

Apart from Beijing, that is.

What happened next was so surprising, both for Obiang and Mayé, that even weeks later they were still convinced it was a bad dream. On the day when office was to be handed over, a boldly soldered-together alliance of Bubi and Fang, including members of the armed forces, simultaneously stormed numerous police stations in Malabo as well as the seat of government, taking the dictator and his designated successor prisoner. They drove them to the Cameroon border and threw them out of the country without any further ado. America’s investment had paid off: practically every key position in government circles had been bought. This even turned out to be to Obiang’s advantage, because America refused to tolerate any cases of lynch justice for the logistic and strategic support of the coup.

For the next few hours, the country seemed to have no leader.

Then Severo Moto’s successor emerged from an aeroplane, a university-educated economist by the name of Juan Aristide Ndongo, from the Bubi clan. He had once been forced to reside in Black Beach for a number of years for his criticism of the regime, and for that reason had gained the trust of a large proportion of the population. Ndongo was known to be clever, friendly and weak, the ideal Manchurian candidate. The Fang and Bubi agreed on him in advance with the USA, Great Britain and Spain, expecting to be able to spoon-feed good old Ndongo to their heart’s desire, but he surprised them by having his own plans. The speedy dissolution of parliament is followed by the equally speedy formation of a new government, in which the Bubi and Fang are equally represented. Ndongo promises to create the long overdue infrastructure, a pulsing educational system, to reinvigorate the economy and to provide healthcare and prosperity for everyone. But, above all, he rails against China’s bloodsucking vampire capitalism, which he sees as having destroyed Equatorial Guinea in collaboration with Obiang’s recklessness. He also puts a stop to Beijing’s licence treaties and puts the American ones back in force, without forgetting – with wise foresight – the Spanish, British, French and Germans.

But reality catches up with Ndongo like a pack of hungry dogs. His attempts to put his plans into action aggravate the Fang elite, who hadn’t reckoned with his political survival instinct. He puts oil income into trust funds instead of transferring it to private accounts, and by doing so keeps the money out of the reach of corruption. He keeps to his promise and builds streets and hospitals, kick-starts the wood trade, and relaxes censorship. In doing so, he provokes the hate of the Obiang clique who, they now realise, let themselves be bought without taking into consideration that the preaching Bubi politician intended to take the lead. Within the first year after the coup, the hard-liners move over to the opposition. Ndongo’s successes just feed their hatred, so they try to sabotage him wherever possible, denouncing his inability to rid the world of ethnic resentment and stirring it up in the process. They claim that Ndongo is just another Obiang, a puppet of the USA, and that he will discriminate against the Fang. Many bravely initiated projects grind to a halt. Aids grows rampant, crime is rife, and Ndongo’s parliament proves itself to be just as corrupt as his predecessor’s, while the president, hobbling around defiantly on the crutches of legality, begins to lose touch.

In the second year under Ndongo’s rule, radical Esangui-Fang launch attacks on American and European oil institutions. Bubi and Fang go for each other’s necks as they have since time immemorial, terrorist cells thwart every attempt at political stabilisation, and Ndongo’s idea of a better world collapses with a crash. He has gone too far for his opponents, but not far enough for his friends. In a painful act of self-denial, Ndongo takes a harsher stance, carries out mass arrests and loses what was once his only capital overnight: integrity.

Meanwhile, Mayé is warming up on the sidelines in Cameroon.

‘From the outside,’ said Yoyo, ‘it looked like this: Obiang, sick and bitter, hangs around in the neighbouring country and pressures Mayé to force Ndongo out of office at the next available opportunity. But the old man doesn’t want Mayé himself to rule, but rather to prepare the ground for Teodorin and Gabriel, who have sunk sobbing into one another’s arms at the mere thought of Ndongo. Rivalry is no longer the issue. The country is destabilised and Ndongo is for it. All Mayé would really need to do is travel in and say Boo! Aside from the fact that he can’t enter the country of course.’

‘But because putschists don’t need a visa—’

‘—he agrees and sets off. It’s common knowledge by then that Mayé has already made contact with a private mercenary firm, African Protection Services, APS for short. And they’ – Yoyo paused for a short, dramatic moment – ‘are of interest to us!’

‘Let me guess. This is where Vogelaar comes back into the picture.’

Yoyo smiled smugly. ‘I’ve found the missing years. Does the name ArmourGroup ring any bells with you?’

‘It does. It’s a London security giant.’

‘In 2008 ArmourGroup took on a mandate in Kenya. Around that time, a smaller company, Armed African Services, went through a de-merger. Vogelaar’s Mamba was operating in the same crisis area. They crossed paths, perhaps one of them approached the other and borrowed some ammunition or something, but to cut a long story short they took a liking to one another and formed APS in 2010, with Vogelaar at management level. Do you see?’

‘I do. So Mayé overthrew Ndongo with the help of APS. But who paid APS?’

‘That’s exactly the point. Mayé was incredibly friendly with China.’

‘You mean—’

‘I mean that we assumed the whole time that the coup attempt discussed in the text fragment was the one from last year. But Beijing would have had far more reason to pull the strings in 2017.’

‘And how did Mayé’s coup go?’

‘Without a hitch. As a precaution, Ndongo was out of the country. But no one seemed particularly surprised by it. No resistance, no fatalities. The only one who was shocked was Obiang. Mayé had numerous opposition members imprisoned, including Obiang’s closest confidants, Teodorin supporters, Gabrielists—’

‘Because he had no intention of stepping down.’

‘Bingo.’

‘And Vogelaar became his security boss.’

‘Yep.’

‘Is there proof that China was tied up in it?’

‘Owen, what’s wrong with you?’ Yoyo reprimanded him. ‘There’s never proof, you know that. But on the other hand you would have to be a zombie to overlook the fact that Exxon, Marathon and Co. got the chop immediately after the putsch, whereas the Chinese company Sinopec was suddenly swimming in oil from Equatorial Guinea. Then there’s Mayé’s speeches: they owed the Chinese their gratitude, China had always been a brother, blah blah blah. When it came down to it, he wholeheartedly agreed to his country being sold out to China.’

Jericho nodded. It was obvious that Yoyo was right: Mayé had taken power with the help of the Chinese and, as agreed, hadn’t forgotten to reward them. But then why did they later want to kill him?’

‘And if it wasn’t the Chinese…’ said Yoyo, as if she had read his thoughts. ‘Last year, I mean.’

‘Then who?’

‘Is it that hard to guess? Mayé doesn’t miss a single opportunity to snub the Americans. He has their representatives imprisoned, breaks all contracts, aids and abets terrorist attacks on American institutions, even though he denies it outright in diplomatic circles. In any case, it was enough that Washington was threatening him with sanctions and invasion.’

‘It sounds like sabre-rattling.’

‘That’s precisely the question.’

‘So what then? The guy ruled for seven years. What happened in that time?’

‘He held his hand out. Finished the economy off. Made opposition members disappear, had them tortured, beheaded, who knows what else. Before long, Obiang looked like a philanthropist compared with Mayé, but now they had him by the neck. Mayé didn’t get involved with cannibalism, witchcraft and the whole black magic scene, but he was certainly developing considerable delusions of grandeur. He built skyscrapers that no one moved into, but he didn’t care, the important thing was how the skyline looked. He planned Equatorial Guinea’s own version of Las Vegas and wanted to set up an opera house in the sea. The final straw was when he announced that Equatorial Guinea was promoting itself to become a Space nation, to which end, and in all seriousness, he had a launching pad built in the middle of the jungle.’

‘Wait a second—’ It slowly dawned on Jericho that he had read something about it at the time. An African dictator who had built a space-rocket launch base and bragged to the rest of the world that his country would be sending astronauts to the Moon. ‘Wasn’t that—?’

‘In 2022,’ said Yoyo. ‘Two years before he was overthrown.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Well, do you see any Africans in space?’

‘No.’

‘Exactly. He did send one thing up though. A news satellite.’

‘And what on earth did Mayé need a news satellite for?’

Yoyo circled her finger over her temple. ‘Because he wasn’t all there, Owen. Why do men get penis extensions? They’re nothing but space-rocket launch bases on a smaller scale. But the whole thing became a mockery because the satellite broke down just a few weeks after the launch.’

‘But it was launched.’

‘Yes, without a hitch.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Nothing really. Two years later, Mayé was liquidated, and Ndongo came back.’ Yoyo leaned back. Her entire posture said she was ready to call it a day and unwind. ‘You probably know more about that than I do. That was the part you researched.’

‘But I don’t know much about Ndongo.’

‘Oh well,’ Yoyo shrugged. ‘If you want to find out who footed the bill this time then you’ll need to take a close look at Ndongo’s oil politics. I’ve got no idea whether he has been as loyally devoted to China as Mayé was.’

‘Definitely not.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You said yourself that he would have attacked China pretty heftily. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Ndongo was put in there by the USA and taken out by China.’

‘So who took Mayé out?’

Jericho gnawed on his lower lip.

statement coup Chinese government

‘Something in this story doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘In the text fragment it’s about a coup that China is tied up in, but they can’t mean the coup of 2017. For one thing, that’s eight years ago. And in any case, everyone suspects Beijing was involved in it anyway, so why would they be hunting us down because of that? And another thing, it was explicitly about Donner and Vogelaar. But Vogelaar only comes up in connection with Mayé.’

‘Or was placed there by Beijing back then. Maybe as a kind of guard for Mayé. A spy.’

‘And Donner?’

‘Think back, it wasn’t just a coup last year. It was an execution. A concerted effort to get rid of witnesses. Mayé must have known something, or rather, he and his staff must have. Something so explosive that someone was prepared to kill him for it.’

‘Something about China.’

‘Why else would China have cleared someone out of the way that they themselves put in power? Perhaps Mayé became a liability. And Donner was one of his staff.’

‘And Vogelaar was the one who had contact with Beijing. As security chief, he was closest to Mayé. So he recommends decapitating Mayé’s regime.’

‘And they do. Apart from Donner.’

‘He gets away.’

‘And now Vogelaar is supposed to find him and give him the same send-off he gave Mayé. That’s why they’re after us. Because we know that Donner’s cover has been blown. Because we could beat Vogelaar to it. Because we could warn Donner.’

‘And Kenny?’

‘He might be Vogelaar’s Chinese contact.’

Jericho’s brain was throbbing. If the yarn they were spinning was actually true, then Donner’s life was hanging by a silk thread.

No, there had to be more to it. It wasn’t just about them preventing Donner from being killed. That was part of it, certainly, but the real reason for the brutal hunt of the last twenty-four hours was something else. Someone was worried that they could find out what Donner knew.

He stared out into the night and hoped they weren’t too late.

Berlin, Germany

A glowing circuit board. A mildewed spider’s web against a black background. Colonies of endlessly interwoven deep-sea organisms, the neuron landscape of an endlessly sprawling brain, a cosmos slipping away. At night, and seen from a great height, the world looks like anything but a globe illuminated only by streetlamps, neon signs, cars and house lights, by exhausted taxi drivers and shift workers, by the perpetual search for diversion and by worries which find their expression in sleeplessness and apartments lit up into the early hours. What – in the eyes of an extraterrestrial observer – might look like a coded message, actually means: Yes, we are alone in the universe, everyone for themselves and all for one, and we’re here in the dark wilderness too, except that we’re underdeveloped, poor and cut off from everything.

Jericho stared indecisively out of the window. Yoyo had dozed off in her seat, the jet was preparing for landing. Tu didn’t like engaging in conversation while he was at the controls. Left to his own devices, Jericho had tried for a while to wring information about Ndongo’s current time in office out of the internet, but the media interest in Equatorial Guinea seemed to have vanished with Mayé’s departure. He suddenly felt his motivation ebbing away. Yoyo’s light, melodic snoring had the air of a soliloquy to it. Her chest rose and sank, then she gave a start and her eyes rolled under her eyelids. Jericho watched her. It was almost as though the confusing moment of intimacy they had shared had never happened.

He turned his head and let his gaze wander out over the ghost of light as it become steadily denser. At a height of ten kilometres, he had felt a gnawing loneliness, too far from the Earth, not close enough to the skies. He was grateful for every metre that the plane sank closer to the ground, allowing the strange pattern to form familiar pictures again. Buildings, streets and squares created the illusion of familiarity. Jericho had been in Berlin a number of times. He spoke German well, not perfectly, because he had never made the effort to learn it, but what he could say was accent-free. As soon as he put his mind to swotting up on a language he mastered it in a matter of weeks, and, in any case, just listening was enough to be able to understand.

He fervently hoped that they would find Andre Donner still alive.

At 04.14, they landed in Berlin Brandenburg airport. Tu set off to arrange a hire car. When he came back he was morosely waving an Audi stick.

‘I would have preferred another make,’ he moaned as they crossed the neon wasteland of the parking lot in search of their vehicle. Jericho trotted behind him with his rucksack slung over his shoulder, accompanied by a shuffling and sedated-looking Yoyo, whom they had barely managed to wake. Apart from Diane and some hardware, he had nothing else with him. Tu had refused to take him to Xintiandi before their departure so he could pack a few essentials. Not even Yoyo had been permitted to go back to her apartment, although she been bold enough to protest, making Tu see red.

‘No discussion!’ he had scolded her. ‘Kenny and his mob could be lying in wait. They’d either finish you off right on the spot or follow you to me.’

‘Then just send one of your people instead.’

‘They’d still follow them.’

‘Or just let me—’

‘Forget it!’

‘For God’s sake! I can’t just run around in the same smelly clothes for days on end! And nor can Owen, right? Or can you, Owen?’

‘Don’t try ganging up on me. I said no! Berlin is a civilised city; I hear they have socks, underwear, running water and even electricity there.’

There was electricity; that much was true. But beyond that a hot shower or the scent of fresh laundry seemed light years away in that deserted, car-packed hangar. Tu hurried past dozens of identical-looking metal and synthetic-fibre bodies, swinging his full to bursting travel bag, chivvied the others along and finally spotted the dark, discreet limousine.

‘The car’s not bad at all,’ Jericho dared to comment.

‘I would have preferred a Chinese make.’

‘What are you talking about? You don’t drive a Chinese car. Not even when you’re in China.’

‘Funny,’ said Tu, as the car read the data from the stick and obediently opened its doors. ‘Such a talented investigator, but in some respects you’re from the Stone Age. I drive a Jaguar, and Jaguar is a Chinese make.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since three years ago. We bought it from the Indians, just like we bought Bentley from the Germans. I would just as happily have taken a Bentley of course.’

‘Why not a Rolls?’

‘Under no circumstances! Rolls-Royce is Indian.’

‘You two are nuts,’ yawned Yoyo, and lay down across the back seat.

‘Listen,’ said Jericho, as he slid onto the passenger seat. ‘They don’t automatically become Chinese models just because you buy them. They’re English. People buy them because they like English cars, and that’s precisely why you buy them too.’

‘But they belong—’

‘—to the Chinese, I know. Sometimes the entire globalisation process just seems like one big misunderstanding.’

‘Oh, come on, Owen! Really!’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Comments like that didn’t have any punch even twenty years ago.’

Tu steered the car in slalom through the aisles, whose uniformity was only outdone by the fact that they seemed so infinite in number. ‘I’d rather you told me whether you’ve found out anything else that might be of interest to us.’

Jericho gave him a brief overview of Ndongo’s unsuccessful attempt to reform the country and do business with the United States again, and of Mayé’s subsequent coup, Beijing’s obvious implication in it and Mayé’s China politics. He also mentioned the dictator’s growing delusions of grandeur, his failed space programme and his violent removal from power.

‘The official story is that Mayé and his clique fell victim to a Bubi revolt which was supported by influential Fang groups,’ he said. ‘Which would be plausible. But Obiang certainly wasn’t behind it. Since his expulsion to Cameroon he’s become quite a hermit and, according to rumour, is fighting his final battle against cancer.’

‘And it wouldn’t have been the sons either?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ Tu clicked his tongue. ‘There’s surprisingly little information about what’s been happening there over the last year, don’t you think?’

Jericho gave him an appraising look. ‘Is it just my imagination, or do you know something that I should know?’

‘Oída ouk eidós,’ said Tu innocently.

‘That’s not Confucius.’

‘I know, are you impressed? It’s Plato, Socrates’ apologia: I know that I know not.’

‘Show-off.’

‘Not at all. It’s perfectly fitting for what I’m trying to say. I do know that there’s an explanation for the diminished interest in Equatorial Guinea, but I just can’t work out what it is. I know it’s something obvious though. Something that’s right in front of our noses.’

‘Does it also explain why there was hardly any public speculation about involvement from abroad?’

‘Ask me after I’ve figured out what it is.’

Jericho listened to the navigation system for a while.

‘Look, the problem is that the coup wouldn’t have been possible without outside help,’ he said. ‘It’s clear that Mayé was installed there by the Chinese, so one would assume that America did it. But our text fragment says something different, that China had its finger in the pie too. If that’s correct, then the submissive servant wasn’t submissive enough when it really came down to it.’

‘You mean he was no longer willing to comply with Beijing’s wishes?’

‘Yoyo and I are leaning towards the view that he and his inner circle could even have become dangerous for China.’

‘Which would explain why the Chinese build him up first and then kill him,’ concluded Tu.

‘And accept the considerable disadvantages too.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oil. Gas. Ndongo had never been Beijing’s friend.’

Tu opened his mouth. For a moment he looked as though he had grasped something which had far-reaching implications. The he clapped his lower jaw back up. Jericho raised an eyebrow.

‘You wanted to say something?’

‘Later.’

They fell silent. Yoyo had fallen asleep on the back seat again. Once they were finally on the autobahn, dawn began to break and the traffic became busier. The navigation system issued muted directions. They approached Berlin Mitte, were directed towards Potsdamer Platz and, by 5.30 a.m., had secured spacious rooms on the seventh floor of the newly renovated Hyatt. An hour later, they sat down to breakfast. The choice was more than ample. Yoyo had overcome her tiredness and was shovelling immense quantities of scrambled eggs and bacon into her mouth. Tu, much less picky, instead made his way diagonally through what was on offer, managing to combine smoked fish and chocolate spread in such a repulsive way that Jericho had to avert his gaze. As usual, Tu didn’t even seem to register what he was eating. He noisily watered down the melange with green tea and started to talk:

‘You can’t still be tired, you slept enough in Shanghai, so—’

‘I didn’t even get a wink of sleep,’ groaned Yoyo. ‘Only just then on the plane.’

‘The same with me,’ admitted Jericho. ‘Every time I thought I was dropping off it felt as if I was falling into an electrical field.’

‘God, that’s it!’ Yoyo opened her eyes wide and touched his hand, as though in reflex. ‘That’s exactly what it feels like. As if someone’s running a bolt of electricity through you.’

‘Yes, you jump—’

‘And then you’re awake again! The whole night through.’

‘Interesting.’ Tu looked at them each in turn and shook his head. ‘I mean, I went through the little Depression of 2010, the Yuan Crisis of 2018, the recession two years ago – and I didn’t let any of it rob me of my sleep.’

‘Oh no?’ drawled Yoyo. ‘Did someone slaughter your friends in front of your eyes too, and then almost hound you to death afterwards?’

Tu cocked his head to one side.

‘So you think you’re the only person who’s seen others die?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I mean, I have no idea what you’ve seen.’

‘If you don’t have any idea—’

‘No, I don’t!’ hissed Yoyo. ‘And do you know why not? Because you and my father brood about your miserable pasts by yourselves! I don’t care what you’ve both been through. Maggie, Tony, Jia Wei and Ziyi were shot into shreds in front of my eyes. Xiao-Tong, Mak and Ye are dead too. I don’t even want to start on Grand Cherokee; and the fact that my father, Daxiong and Owen are still alive is bordering on a miracle. So I’ve allowed myself to lose a little sleep over it. Do you have any other clever comments?’

‘You should keep your outbreaks of emotion—’

‘No, you should!’ Yoyo waved her hands around wildly in the air. ‘Hongbing, tell your child the truth, you have to trust her, you can’t keep up this silence any longer, blah blah blah. God, you’re the master of blah blah blah, Tian, you’re sooo understanding and constructive! But when it comes to you, you keep things under wraps, right?’

‘If I could just—’ interjected Jericho.

‘You’re no better than Hongbing, do you know that?’

‘Hey!’ Jericho leaned over. ‘I’ve no idea why you guys came to Berlin, but I want to find Andre Donner, is that clear? So sort your issues out somewhere else.’

‘Tell him that.’

Tu kneaded his hands morosely. He slurped tea, took a bite of a sausage, shoved the rest in after it, scrunched up his serviette and threw it carelessly onto the plate. Clearly he wasn’t anywhere near as untouchable as he liked to imply. For a while, hurt silence reigned.

‘Fine. As far as I’m concerned you can have a nap. But at some point in the course of the morning it would be advisable for you to stock up on the essentials, underwear, T-shirts, cosmetics, whatever. Perhaps we’ll be back home again by this time tomorrow, but perhaps we won’t. There’s a shopping mall just opposite. Go and get what you need. After that we’ll pay Muntu a visit. Is the place open at midday?’

‘From twelve until two. According to the website.’

‘Good.’

‘I’m not sure.’ Jericho tore a croissant to pieces indecisively. ‘We shouldn’t just all rock up there at once.’

‘Why not?’

‘We want to warn Donner, not make him take flight. A European-looking guy, a Chinese girl, fine. In the city we’d just look like a normal couple. But add another Chinese guy and Donner could get suspicious.’

‘You think? Berlin is full of Chinese people.’

‘Do they go to African restaurants?’

‘Please! We’re the most culturally open people in the world.’

‘You’re as open as a vacuum cleaner,’ said Jericho. ‘You suck up everything that isn’t screwed on and riveted, but gastronomically you’re all ignorant.’

‘You’re confusing us with the Japanese.’

‘Not at all. The Japanese are culinary fascists. You lot, on the other hand, are just ignorant.’

‘I’m sure things would look different at McDonald’s.’

‘Oh, come on!’ Jericho couldn’t help but laugh. Discussing food with Tu was almost as absurd as explaining the benefits of vegetarianism to a shark. ‘When you guys are abroad you always go to Chinese restaurants, right? All I’m saying is that the man who now goes by the name of Donner has had bad experiences with Chinese people, if our theories are correct. He’s being hunted. The organisation that Vogelaar and Kenny belong to want to kill him.’

‘Hmm.’ Tu pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

‘Of course he’s right,’ said Yoyo to her plate.

‘Fine then, you two go to Muntu. I’ll hold the fort here.’

‘You could amuse yourself with Diane in the meantime,’ suggested Jericho. ‘Try to find out more about how Mayé was overthrown. And more about Ndongo. What drives him, what are his interests, who’s supporting him? And why has there not been any more news from Equatorial Guinea?’

‘I think I already know.’

Jericho stopped. Even Yoyo seemed to have overcome her hurt pride and was looking at him expectantly. Tu stretched out his fingers and massaged the globe of his belly.

‘And?’

‘Later.’ Tu got up. ‘You have things to do, I have things to do. Have a good sleep. After that you can go and exhaust my credit cards.’

Jericho would have preferred to track down Donner as soon as they landed and, if needs be, turn up on his doorstep and get him out of bed, but there was no private address on record for him anywhere. He instructed the hotel computer to wake him at 10 a.m. He feared he’d relive the nightmare of the previous night, interspersed with phases of just staring at his eyelids from the inside, but instead he slept a deep and dreamless sleep for two hours and awoke in a much better mood and full of purpose. Yoyo seemed more cheerful too. They made their way through the mall, purchased underwear, shirts and toothbrushes and commented on the everyday life going on around them. Yoyo bought several bottles of spray-on clothing. It was hot and sunny in Berlin, so they didn’t need more than just a few things. Jericho avoided asking her about her private life. He didn’t really know how to act around the girl in this relatively normal setting; for a change there wasn’t anything to research, nor was there anything to run from. Yoyo displayed an almost dismissive lack of concern by skipping around in front of him in the tiniest of tops, touching him every few minutes, pulling him here and there and getting so close to him that the only possible explanation for her actions seemed to be her complete lack of sexual interest in him.

That’s exactly what it is, concurred the pimply boy hiding in the shade at the corner of the playground, seeking comfort from Radiohead, Keane and Oasis. That’s what women are like; you’re just a thing to them, not someone who can express desire or intentions. A conglomerate of cells only spat into life to be a friend to them. They would rather be seduced by their teddy bears than acknowledge the possibility that you could fall in love with them.

Bite me, Jericho told him. Pussy.

After that, the pus-filled, pubescent-stubble-covered ghost retreated, and Yoyo’s company really began to grow on him. Nonetheless, he was still relieved when it got closer to twelve and it was time to drive to Oranienburger Strasse. Muntu was on the ground floor of a beautifully renovated old building just a few hundred metres from the banks of the Spree, where Museum Island divided the water like a stranded whale. They almost walked right past it – the tiny restaurant was crammed furtively between an evangelical bookshop and a branch of the Bank of Beijing, as if it wanted to make a surprise attack on passersby. Over the door and windows was a cracked wooden panel with MUNTU in archaic-looking lettering, and underneath, The Charm of African Cuisine.

‘It’s cute,’ said Yoyo as they stepped inside.

Jericho looked around. Ochre and banana-yellow coloured walls, offset with blue on the skirting boards. Batik-patterned tablecloths, above which paper lamps hung down like huge, glimmering turnips. Wooden pillars and ceiling beams were painted and decorated with carvings. The end wall of the square room was dominated by a bar of rustic design, and to the left of that swing doors covered with mythical images led through into the kitchen. There was no trace here of the battle sculptures, spears, shields and masks commonly found in similar establishments, an agreeable omission which suggested authenticity.

Only a few of the tables were occupied. Yoyo headed towards a table near the bar. A figure broke away from the half-shadow behind it and came over to them. The woman might have been in her early forties, possibly older. Wrinkles came late to African women, which made guessing their age a challenge. Her slim-fitting dress was hued with powerful, earthy colours, and a matching headdress unfurled from an explosion of Rasta locks. She was very dark and quite attractive, and had a laugh that didn’t seem acquainted with the compromise of a smile.

‘My name is Nyela,’ she said in guttural German. ‘Would you like a drink?’

Yoyo looked at Jericho, confused. He mimed bringing a glass to his lips.

‘Ah, okay,’ said Yoyo. ‘Cola.’

‘How boring.’ Nyela switched to English instantly. ‘Have you ever tried palm wine? It’s fermented palm juice made from flower bulbs.’

Without waiting for an answer, she disappeared behind the bar, came back with two beakers of a milky-looking drink and laid out English menus in front of them.

‘We’re out of ostrich steak. I’ll be back in a moment.’

Jericho took a sip. The wine tasted good, cool and a little sharp. Yoyo’s gaze followed Nyela to the neighbouring table.

‘What now?’

‘We order something.’

‘Why aren’t you asking to see Donner? I thought it was urgent.’

‘It is.’ Jericho leaned over. ‘I just don’t think it’s a good idea if we blurt it out just like that. In his position I would be a bit mistrustful if someone asked for me for no reason.’

‘But we’re not asking for no reason.’

‘And what do you want her to tell him? That he’s going to be killed? Then he’ll slip through our fingers.’

‘We’ll have to ask for him at some point.’

‘And we will.’

‘Okay, fine, you’re the boss.’ Yoyo opened her menu. ‘So what do you fancy today, boss? Ragout of kudu-antelope perhaps? Monkey penis with skinned-alive frogs?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Jericho let his gaze wander over the starters and main courses. ‘It all sounds really good. Jolof rice, for example, I had that back in London.’

‘Never had it.’

‘All it takes is a little courage,’ Jericho teased her. ‘Think of how we Europeans have to suffer in Sichuan.’

‘No, I’m not so sure. Adalu, akara, dodo.’ Her eyes flitted back and forth. ‘Look at the crazy names these things have. How about some nunu, Owen? Some nice nunu.’

Jericho paused. ‘You’re on the menu too.’

‘Eh?’

‘Efo-Yoyo Stew!’ He laughed loudly. ‘Well, we know what you’re having then.’

‘Are you insane? What on earth is it?’ She wrinkled her brow and read: ‘Spinach sauce with crabs and chicken and – ishu? What the devil is ishu?’

‘Yam dumplings.’ The black woman had come back over to their table. ‘No party without yams.’

‘What are yams?’

‘It’s a root. The queen of all roots! The women cook them and then pound them with a pestle and mortar. It really builds the muscles.’ Nyela gave a deep and melodic laugh and showed them a well-sculpted bicep. ‘Men are too lazy for it. Probably too dumb too, no offence, my friend.’ Her hand clasped Jericho’s shoulder in a familiar way. A spicy scent came off her, a raw seduction.

‘You know what?’ said Jericho cheerfully. ‘Just put something together for us.’

‘He’s no fool,’ said Nyela, winking at Yoyo. ‘Letting the women decide.’

She disappeared into the kitchen. Not even ten minutes later, she came back bearing two trays groaning with dishes.

‘Paradise is here,’ she sang.

Yoyo, her face full of mistrust, watched as Nyela put down little plates and bowls in front of them.

‘Ceesbaar, pancakes made from plantain. Akara, deep-fried dumplings with shrimps. Samosas, pastry parcels with minced beef. Those are moyinmoyin, bean cakes with crabs and turkey meat. Next to that is efo-egusi, spinach with melon seeds, beef and dried cod. Here, nunu, made from millet and yoghurt. Then adalu, bean and banana stew with fish. Brochettes, little fish skewers. Dodo, roasted in peanut oil, and – tapioca pudding!’

‘Ah,’ said Yoyo.

Jericho stretched out his finger and sampled the akara, samosas and moyinmoyin in quick succession.

‘Delicious,’ he cried, before Nyela could get away again. ‘How is it possible that I’d never heard of this place before?’

Nyela hesitated. Catching sight of a raised hand at the neighbouring table, she excused herself, took their order, delivered it to the kitchen and then came back.

‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘We only opened six months ago.’

Jericho was stuffing his mouth full of nunu while Yoyo nibbled timidly at one of the fish skewers. ‘And where were you before that?’

‘Africa. Cameroon.’

‘You speak excellent English.’

‘I can get by. German is much harder. It’s a strange language.’

‘Isn’t Cameroon French-speaking?’ asked Yoyo.

‘African,’ said Nyela, with a facial expression that implied Yoyo had just cracked a good joke. ‘Cameroon was once French. A large part of it at any rate. Many languages are spoken there: Bantu, Kotoko and Shuwa, French, English, Camfranglais.’

‘And you’re the one who cooked all these wonderful things?’ asked Jericho.

‘Most of them.’

‘Nyela, you’re a goddess.’

Nyela laughed, so loudly that the paper lamps shook.

‘Is he always this charming?’ she wanted to know. ‘Such a charming liar?’

Yoyo didn’t answer, coughing instead. She seemed to have just realised that the spiciness of the pancakes struck with a malicious delay. Jericho took a slug of palm wine.

‘Nyela, we’ve been play-acting a little. Muntu was actually recommended to us. So we’re not here completely by chance. We would like to include you in a food guide. Would you be interested?’

‘What kind of guide?’

‘A virtual city guide,’ said Yoyo, who had got a grip of herself again and, her eyes sparkling, picked up on Jericho’s idea. ‘People could get a three-dimensional experience of your restaurant in it by putting on hologlasses. Are you familiar with holographics?’

Nyela shook her head, visibly amused. ‘My speciality is the law, my child. I studied law in Jaunde.’

‘Picture it like this. We produce a walk-in image of the restaurant as a computer program. With the necessary equipment, people can even take a peek into the cooking pots. But there is also a simpler version, just an entry online.’

‘I can’t say I fully understand, but it sounds good.’

‘Are you in?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then we just need to take care of the formalities,’ said Jericho. ‘If I’ve been correctly informed, you’re not the owner?’

‘Muntu belongs to my husband.’

‘Andre Donner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, you’re Mrs Donner?’ He raised his eyebrows, feigning sudden realisation. ‘May I ask – your husband – I mean, Donner isn’t an African name—’

‘Boer. Andre is from South Africa.’

‘No, what a love story!’ cried Yoyo in delight. ‘South Africa and Cameroon.’

‘And you two?’ grinned Nyela. ‘What’s your story?’

Jericho was just about to reply when Yoyo’s fingers flew nimbly across like a squirrel and covered his.

‘Shanghai and London,’ she whispered happily.

‘Not bad either,’ said Nyela cheerfully. ‘I’ll tell you what, my girl. Love is a language that everyone can understand. It’s the only one you’ll ever need.’

‘We—’ said Jericho.

‘—are in love, and we work together,’ smiled Yoyo. ‘Just like you and your husband. It’s so wonderful!’

Jericho could almost hear the string section warming up. He didn’t know how to pull his hand back without making it look suspicious. Nyela looked at them both, visibly moved.

‘And where did you meet?’

‘In Shanghai.’ Yoyo giggled. ‘I was his tour guide. To be more specific, he had the glasses on, the holo things. Owen fell in love with my hologram, isn’t that sweet? After that he did everything he could to get to know me. I didn’t want to at first, but—’

‘Amazing.’

‘Yes, and you? Where did you meet your husband? South Africa? Or was it in Equatoria—’

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ interjected Jericho. ‘But we still have a lot of things to do. So, Nyela, in order to prepare the entry we need to speak to your husband. We need his signature. Perhaps he’s here now?’

Nyela looked at him thoughtfully with her shining white eyes. Then she pointed at the tapioca pudding.

‘Have you tried it yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then you’re not going anywhere, not for the time being at least.’ Her grin lit up the room. ‘Not until you’ve eaten everything up.’

‘No problem,’ purred Yoyo. ‘Owen loves African food. Don’t you, poppet?’

Jericho thought he must be hearing things.

‘I sometimes call him poppet,’ Yoyo confided in Nyela, who seemed interested and not at all embarrassed. ‘When we’re by ourselves.’

‘Like now?’

‘Yes, like now. What do you think, poppet, shall we stay a little longer?’

Jericho stared at her. ‘Of course, you old bag. Whatever you say.’

Yoyo’s smile frosted over. Her fingers made their retreat. Jericho felt a mixture of regret and relief.

‘Andre isn’t here right now, by the way,’ said Nyela. ‘How long will you be in Berlin?’

‘Not long. We’ve got an early flight.’ Jericho scratched the back of his head. ‘There isn’t any chance that we could meet him at short notice, is there? This evening perhaps?’

‘We’re actually shut this evening. Although—’ Nyela put a finger to her lips. ‘Okay, wait a moment. I’ll be back shortly.’

She disappeared through the swing doors.

‘Did you really call me an old bag?’ asked Yoyo under her breath.

‘I did. And I meant it.’

‘Oh. Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome, poppet.’

‘But why?’ she protested. ‘What I said was nice! I said something nice, and you—’

‘Consider yourself lucky I didn’t say something worse.’

‘Owen, what’s all this about?’ A steep fold was building up between Yoyo’s brows. ‘I thought you knew how to joke around.’

‘You nearly let the cat out of the bag, you twit! You were about to say Equatorial Guinea.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘I heard it!’

‘But she didn’t.’ Yoyo rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, I’m sorry, calm down. At the very most she would have thought I said the equator. And that makes sense, right? Cameroon is on the equator.’

‘Gabon is on the equator.’

‘Daft know-all.’

‘Toad.’

‘Jerk!’

‘Are we having a relationship crisis?’ mocked Jericho. ‘We shouldn’t push it, darling, or we might as well leave right now.’

‘So I’m the one that’s pushed it too far? Because I was nice to you?’

‘No, not because of that. Because you weren’t being careful.’ He knew he was reacting too harshly, but he was boiling over with rage.

Yoyo looked away morosely. They were still silent when Nyela came back to the table.

‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘Andre is obviously on the move. And can’t be reached. But he should be giving me a call sometime in the next few hours. Can you give me your mobile number? I’ll call you.’

‘Of course.’ Jericho wrote his number on a paper serviette. ‘I’ll make sure my phone’s turned on.’

‘We’d like to be in this guide of yours.’ Nyela laughed her throaty, African laugh. ‘Even though I don’t have a clue what hologoggles are.’

‘We’ll put you in,’ smiled Jericho. ‘With or without the goggles.’

‘Wow, a restaurant guide. What a great idea!’

Yoyo fidgeted along behind him resentfully as they left Muntu. The midday light was crystal clear, a hot early summer Berlin day, the sky an upside-down, sparkling blue swimming-pool. But Jericho didn’t stop to take it all in. He crossed the street, marched into the shade of the row of buildings opposite and halted so suddenly that Yoyo almost ran into him. He turned round and stared at the restaurant.

‘She didn’t notice anything,’ Yoyo assured him. ‘I’m sure she didn’t.’

Jericho didn’t answer. He gazed thoughtfully over at Muntu. Yoyo paced on the spot, planted herself in front of him and then waved her hand around in front of his eyes.

‘Everything okay, Owen? Is there anyone at home?’

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he looked at his watch.

‘Fine, you don’t have to speak to me,’ she warbled. ‘We can write to each other. Yes, that’s a good idea! You can write everything down on a little piece of paper and give it to someone to give to me. And I—’

‘You can make yourself useful.’

‘Oh, you do have a voice!’ Yoyo bowed in front of an imaginary audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The man has spoken. It is with great pride that we present to you—’

‘You can shadow Nyela.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’ve no idea whether she noticed your slip or not, but there’s one thing I don’t buy: her claim that Donner couldn’t be reached.’

‘Why?’

‘She was in the kitchen too long.’

‘You mean that Donner would be suspicious if someone wanted to include his restaurant in a guide?’

‘You said it yourself – a great idea,’ Jericho flashed back at her. ‘Your irony was clear enough.’

‘Could you stop being mad at me for just a minute?’

‘There are two possibilities. Either she bought it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that he did. But it doesn’t really matter what story we dished up. Donner will be suspicious by nature, towards everyone and everything. The second possibility is that she didn’t believe a word we said. Either way, he needs to find out who we are, what we want from him and what we have to tell him. He needs to make quite certain. I’d hazard a guess that they’ve already spoken on the phone. If Nyela leaves the restaurant it could be that she’s going to meet him. Either that or he’ll turn up here.’

‘What for?’

‘To get here before someone can surprise him on his own premises. Or maybe just because he has garlic to chop. Things to do, whatever.’

‘Which means you’ll watch the restaurant?’

Jericho nodded. ‘Did you notice the camera?’ he asked, trying to make the tone of his voice more gentle now.

‘What camera?’

‘There was one installed above the bar. It didn’t look like one, but I’m familiar with them. Muntu is under surveillance. Perhaps Donner will want to look at the recording before he agrees to a meeting.’

‘And what if none of that’s right? What if you’re wrong?’

‘Then we wait until Nyela calls us. Or until she leads you to Donner’s private residence.’

‘I mean, if he’s not suspicious at all. If he really does want to meet us about the food guide, just not until this evening. Aren’t we frittering away the chance to warn him in time? Shouldn’t we tell Nyela the truth?’

‘And have him take off? We didn’t come here to save his life, but to find something out from him. And to do that we need to meet him!’

‘I know that,’ retorted Yoyo irritably. ‘But if he’s already dead he can’t tell us anything anyway.’

‘Yoyo, for God’s sake, I know that! But what are we supposed to do? We have to take a risk. And, believe me, he is mistrustful! He may even mistrust Nyela.’

‘His own wife?’

‘Yes, his wife. Do you trust her?’

‘Okay, fine,’ murmured Yoyo. ‘So I’ll shadow Nyela then.’

‘Do that. Call me if you notice anything.’

‘I might need the car.’

Jericho looked around and spotted a Starbucks. They had parked the Audi a few metres further down, in full sight of Muntu.

‘No problem. We’ll sit over there, have a coffee and keep our eyes on the restaurant. If she goes anywhere, you follow her. On foot, by car, whatever’s necessary. I’ll hold the fort here.’

‘We don’t even know what Donner looks like.’

‘White, I guess. It’s a Boer name, South African—’

‘Great,’ said Yoyo. ‘That narrows it down considerably.’

‘I could easily widen it again. Donner might be from a mixed marriage. He wouldn’t be the first black person on the Cape to have a white surname.’

‘You sure know how to look on the bright side, don’t you?’

‘I’m renowned for it.’

Jericho had committed the faces of the other guests in the restaurant to memory. After he and Yoyo left, three more couples had gone in, as well as a lone old man accompanied by his incessantly yapping alter ego. In the time that followed, they watched as Muntu emptied person by person. The man and dog were the last to leave, and after that Jericho was convinced there were no guests left inside. More time passed. Yoyo drank tea by the bucketful. Shortly after three, a dark-skinned man came out onto the street, unchained a bicycle and pedalled off. Clearly one of the kitchen staff, perhaps Nyela’s sous-chef.

‘So this is what you do?’ Yoyo asked, somehow managing not to sound scornful. ‘Spy on people for hours on end?’

‘Most of the time I’m online.’

‘Uh-huh. And what do you do there?’

‘Spy on people.’

‘It’s so dull.’ She pulled a dripping teabag from her cup. ‘One big, long, boring wait.’

‘I don’t entirely agree with you. There are a lot of fun aspects and it’s certainly lively. From time to time someone sets a steelworks on fire. There are lovely little chases, you get to save people and fly halfway across the world at the drop of a hat. Is your life so much more exciting?’

Expecting her to protest, he stared back out of the window, but Yoyo seemed to be giving it serious thought.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not. But it is more social.’

‘But society can do your head in,’ said Jericho, then brought up his hand to silence her. Nyela was just leaving Muntu. She had swapped the colourful folklore of her dress for jeans and a T-shirt.

‘Time for your mission,’ he said.

Yoyo dropped her teabag, gathered up the car keys and her mobile and ran outside. Jericho watched as she started the car. Nyela paced away in lengthy strides and disappeared around the corner of a house. The car followed her slowly. Jericho hoped Yoyo wouldn’t be too obvious. He had tried to give her a brief overview of the basic rules of a subtle observation, which included not ramming your bumper right into the behind of the person you were observing.

She phoned just ten minutes later.

‘There’s a parking lot two streets down. Nyela just left it.’

‘What’s she driving?’

‘A Nissan OneOne. SolarHybrid.’

A small, nimble town car, designed for heavy traffic, which could reduce its floor space by shortening the wheel base. Against that, the Audi was a cumbersome monstrosity, only superior on highways.

‘Stay close to her,’ he said. ‘Let me know if anything happens.’

After that he rang Tu and brought him up to date.

‘And how’s it going there?’

‘I’m having fun with Diane,’ said Tu. ‘A lovely program. Not top of the range any more, mind, but we’re having a good time nonetheless.’

‘The program is completely new,’ protested Jericho.

‘New is something that hasn’t been built yet,’ Tu advised him.

‘Get to the point.’

‘So, with regard to Ndongo: he seems to be striving for more balance than during his first time in office, and is resisting influence from the Chinese, but this time without snubbing Beijing. His sympathies clearly lie with Washington and the EU. On the other hand, he made it known at the beginning of the year that he wants to consider the interests of all countries equally, as long as they don’t show tendencies towards economic annexation. He also pushed a few scraps over to Sinopec. Other than that, he’s trying to clean up the pigsty that Mayé left behind.’

‘He sounds like less of a puppet than before.’

‘That’s right. And do you know why? We all know! They’ve got oil and gas down there. And by the tonne. The answer to questions that no one’s asking any more. That’s where the problem lies, and it seems it became Mayé’s problem too. Do you see?’

‘Helium-3?’

‘What else?’

Of course! Everyone knew it. It was just that they also quickly forgot who was affected by the shift in circumstances brought about by the Moon business.

‘At the start of 2020 it was clear that helium-3 would supersede fossil fuels,’ said Tu. ‘The United States put all their eggs in one basket. Into the development of the space elevator, the extension of the infrastructure on the Moon, the commercial backing of helium-3, Julian Orley. He, in turn, worked feverishly on his fusion reactors. Orley and the USA created an immense bubble back then. It could have all gone horribly wrong if it had burst. The biggest company of all time would have exploded like a cluster bomb, the USA would have suffered painful losses in fossil poker with their unilateral arrangement on the Moon, millions and millions of people would have lost their money. Africa would have been able to continue swimming in wealth, financing the never-ending civil wars from oil income and dictating conditions to the rich nations. Think back to the barrel price in 2019.’

‘It was still up then.’

‘For the last time. Because we know it worked! Orley and the USA built their elevator, and the first one ever at that! I’ve researched it in detail, Owen. On 1 August 2022 the moon base was put into operation, and a few days later, so was the American mining station. Two weeks later the mining of helium-3 officially began. A month and a half later, on 5 October, the first Orley reactor went onto the network and fulfilled all expectations. The fusion age had begun; helium-3 became the energy source of the future. In December, the barrel price of oil was a hundred and twenty dollars, the following February it sank to seventy-six dollars, and in March China followed suit and sent its first helium-3 deliveries to Earth, albeit with conventional rocket technology and in minute quantities. Nonetheless, the two most commodity-hungry nations were on the Moon. Others panted along behind them: India, Japan, the Europeans, all obsessed with staking their claim. It’s not that oil didn’t play a part any more, but the dependence on it was dwindling. The summer of 2023, fifty-five dollars a barrel. Autumn, forty-two dollars. Even that was fairly high, but it kept going down. People expected brisk trade, that it would never be that cheap again, but they were wrong. The important consumer nations had stocked up their supplies in good time. No one sees the need for more depots, and in the car sector electricity becomes a serious option. The countries that export fossil fuels, which have relied exclusively on their income from the oil and gas trade and therefore neglected their native economy, feel the full impact of the resource curse, particularly in Africa. Potentates like Obiang or Mayé see the end dawning. Now they have to pay the price for milking their countries to death. They don’t make the rules any more. Their pals from overseas, who they played off so wonderfully against each other for decades on end, have had enough of being messed around and having very little to show for it, and now, to top it all off, they aren’t interested in oil any more either! That, my friend, is the reason why Washington’s indignation over Mayé sounded more and more scripted as time went on. For China it’s a done deal, catching up with America and freeing itself from the fossil fetters. So what does the crazed man go and do?’

‘You’re not seriously suggesting that Mayé started his idiotic space programme in order to land on the Moon and develop helium-3?’

‘Yes. Precisely that.’

‘Tian, please. He was a madman. The torturer of a country where the greatest technological achievement was the painstaking maintenance of a functioning power network.’

‘Of course. But he said it.’

‘That he wanted to go to the Moon? Mayé?’

‘That’s what he said. Diane found quotations. He was clearly an idiot. On the other hand, experts attested to the launch pad being in good working order. He sent a news satellite into orbit with it, at any rate.’

‘Which broke down.’

‘Regardless. The launch was successful.’

‘How did he finance even the launch pad?’

‘I guess he used the national budget. Shut down hospitals, I don’t know. The interesting thing is that Mayé’s overthrow definitely wasn’t the result of other countries’

interest in his oil. So what worried Beijing so much that they felt it necessary to get rid of the ruling clique of a tiny little country which had become entirely uninteresting, both economically and politically – and right down to the very last man? With this question in mind, I kept looking – and I found something.’

‘Tell me.’

‘On 28 June 2024, a month before his death, Mayé publicly chastised the exploitative nature of the First World on national television and directed explicit accusations at Beijing. He claimed that China had dropped Africa like a hot potato, the money promised to them had never materialised, and above all, that they were responsible for the entire continent withering away.’

‘Who did he think he was, Africa’s lawyer?’

‘Yes, it’s laughable, isn’t it? But then, while he was saying all this, he let something slip that he shouldn’t have. He said that if Beijing didn’t fulfil its obligations, he would be forced to hawk information about that would incriminate China all over the world. He publicly threatened the Party.’ Tu paused. ‘And a month later he was no longer able to talk.’

‘And he made no indication of what that information was?’

‘Indirectly, yes. He said that his country wouldn’t let anyone bring it down. And, in particular, that the space programme would be extended and another satellite launched, and that certain contemporaries would be well advised to offer their full support unless they wanted a rude awakening.’

Jericho paused. ‘What did China have to do with Mayé’s space programme?’

‘Officially, nothing. But even the dumbest person can figure out that no one in Equatorial Guinea was in a position to build something like that. I mean, physically speaking maybe, but not to make the whole thing a reality. The only thing Mayé came up with was the idea. He waved his millions, and they came from all around: engineers, constructors, physicists. French, German, Russian, American, Indian, from all over the world. But if you look a little closer, one name in particular stands out – Zheng Pang-Wang.’

‘The Zheng Group?’ Jericho blurted out, amazed.

‘That’s the one. Large parts of the construction were in Zheng’s hands.’

‘As far as I know, Zheng is closely connected with the Chinese space travel programme.’

‘Space travel and reactor technologies. Zheng Pang-Wang isn’t just one of the ten richest men in the world, and one with an enormous influence on Chinese politics at that – he also seems to have decided to become Julian Orley’s Chinese counterpart. The cadre are resting their biggest hopes on him. They expect that, sooner or later, he’ll build them their own space elevator and a functioning fusion reactor. So far, though, he hasn’t delivered either of them. There’s a rumour that he’s putting much more energy into infiltrating and spying on Orley Enterprises. In official circles he’s trying to get Orley to collaborate. There’s even talk that Orley and Zheng like each other, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

Jericho thought for a moment. ‘Mayé’s assassins acted fast, don’t you think?’

‘Suspiciously so, if you ask me.’

‘Conjuring Ndongo up out of nowhere, and then the logistics of the attack. You can’t plan something like that in four weeks.’

‘I agree with you. The coup was prepared just in case Mayé said the wrong thing.’

‘Which he did—’

‘Excuse me, Owen,’ said Diane’s voice. ‘May I interrupt you?’

‘What’s up, Diane?’

‘I have a Priority A call for you. Yoyo Chen Yuyun.’

‘No problem,’ said Tu. ‘I’ve told you everything I needed to anyway. Keep me posted, okay?’

‘I will. Put her through, Diane.’

‘Owen?’ Yoyo’s voice came through, embedded in street sounds. ‘Nyela got out of the car in the city centre. I followed her for a bit; she was looking in the shop windows and speaking on the phone. She didn’t look particularly worked up or concerned. Two minutes ago she met a man, and now they’re both sitting in the sun in front of a café.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Chatting, having a drink. The guy is dark, but not black, perhaps mixed race. Around fifty years old. You saw the photos of Mayé and his staff. Did any of them look like that?’

‘There aren’t that many photos. And none of them show all of his staff. There’s always someone or other next to him, but you could try searching for the list of his ministers that died during the attack.’ Jericho tried to remember the pictures. ‘None of them had that skin-colour, I think.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Keep at it. How are they acting around each other?’

‘Friendly. A little kiss when they met, a hug. Nothing extreme.’

‘Do you have a rough idea where you are?’

‘We drove over that river twice – the Sprii, Spraa, Spree – one crossing right after the other. The café is in an old railway station, one built in brick with round arches, but nicely renovated. Wait a moment.’

Yoyo marched along the brick façade and looked out for any markings, street signs or the name of the station. Hordes of people were streaming down from the steps of the subway station. Owing to the beautiful weather, the forecourt looked as if it were under siege: young people and tourists were pushing the turnover in the numerous pubs, bars, bistros and restaurants sky-high. Clearly Nyela had led her into one of the hip quarters of the city. Yoyo liked it here. It reminded her a little of Xintiandi.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jericho. ‘I think I know where you are. You must have driven over Museum Island.’

‘I’ll be able to tell you in a second.’

‘Okay.’

Yoyo spotted a white S on a green background. Next to it, something was written in light green lettering. She opened her lips and hesitated. How did one pronounce s,c and h one behind the other?

‘Hacke – s – cher – Mar—’

‘Hackescher Markt?’

‘Yes. It could be that.’

‘Okay. Keep your eye on both of them. If nothing happens here I’ll come and join you.’

‘Okay.’

She ended the call and turned round. The station was excreting an even bigger contingent of travellers, most of whom seemed to be trying to catch up on the time they had lost. The rest, chattering away, spread out amongst the folding chairs and tables of the outdoor eateries, on the hunt for free seats. Suddenly, Yoyo found herself staring at a battery of backs. She stuck her elbows out and pushed her way forward. A waiter circled over like a fighter jet and made a move to run her down. With a dart, she managed to escape behind a little green and yellow tree. Scribble-covered boards were obstructing her view. She ran out past the tables into the square, and approached the café with the blue and white striped awning, under which Nyela and the light-skinned black man were sitting.

Were supposed to be sitting.

Yoyo’s heart skipped a beat. She ran inside. No one. Back out again. No Nyela, no companion.

‘Shit,’ she mumbled. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

But cursing wouldn’t bring them back again, so she rushed back out onto the main street, to where Nyela had succeeded in securing a parking place in rush hour and where she herself had parked the car beneath a strict ‘No Parking’ sign.

The Nissan was gone. Breaking down both physically and mentally, she ran on, issuing pleading looks in all directions, up and down the street, begging fate for mercy, just to curse it the very next moment, and then finally gave up, out of breath and with sharp pains in her sides. None of it helped. She had cocked it up. All because of a lousy sign. Just because she had insisted on being able to tell Jericho where she was.

How was she supposed to tell him this?

A lighter-skinned black man around fifty years old. Jericho tried to imagine him. He could fit in with Nyela in terms of age.

Andre Donner?

Indecisive, he looked over at Muntu. It was all quiet. The lights were out, as far as he could tell through the mirrored glass anyway. After a few minutes he pulled out his mobile, logged into Diane’s database and loaded the photos of Mayé they had found on the internet.

Almost all of them came from online articles about the coup. The whole thing had made waves only in the West African media, where sumptuously illustrated biographies of the dead dictator had appeared as a result of the putsch: Mayé on a visit to a waterworks, Mayé inspecting a military parade, Mayé orating, patting children’s heads, flanked by oil workers on a platform. A man who, even in the pictures, oozed physical presence and narcissism. Anyone who managed to make it into a picture with him seemed strangely out of focus, insignificant, overshadowed, irrelevant. Aided by the captions, Jericho identified ministers and generals who had died in the coup. The others pictured remained nameless. What united them was their dark or very dark skin colour, typical of the equatorial regions.

Jericho loaded the film which showed Mayé with Vogelaar, various ministers, representatives from the army and the two Chinese managers at the conference table. He zoomed in on the faces and studied the background. A uniformed man sat two seats behind Vogelaar, following the Chinese presentation with an arrogantly bored expression; he might have passed for lighter-skinned, but then again it could just have been down to the effect of the overhead lighting.

Was one of them Donner?

He looked up and stopped short.

The entrance door to Muntu was open.

No, it had just swung shut! Behind the glass, a tall shadow became visible and disappeared into the reflections of the building opposite. Jericho suppressed a curse. While he had turned his attention to the idiotic task of trying to recognise a man he had never seen amongst a group of complete strangers, someone had gone in over there. If he really had gone in, that is, and not opened the door from the inside. Hastily, he pushed his chair back, tucked away his mobile and walked outside.

Was it Donner he’d seen?

He crossed the street, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered in through the small window. The restaurant lay in darkness. No one to be seen. The only thing of note was a blue flicker from a defective emergency light, behind the small windows in the swing doors that led to the kitchen.

Had his senses been playing tricks on him?

No, there was no chance of that.

He pushed against the door. Cool, stagnant restaurant air wafted towards him. He glanced quickly around at the tautly pulled tablecloths, the motionless ferns and the bar. From the other side of the swing doors he heard a machine start up, possibly an air-conditioner. He froze and listened. No more sounds. Nothing to suggest that anyone was here apart from him.

But where could the man have disappeared to?

Automatically, his right hand grazed the hilt of his Glock. It was resting in its usual place, narrow and discreet. Even though he had come to warn Donner, there was no way of predicting how the man would respond to his visit. He paced lightly over to the bar and looked behind the ornate counter. No one. Behind the swing doors, the gleam of light flickered icily. He went back into the middle of the room and turned his head towards the bead curtain in front of the toilets. Thinking that he saw some of the cords swinging softly, he looked more closely. Like naughty children caught in the act, they froze into motionlessness.

He blinked.

Nothing was moving. Nothing at all. Nonetheless, he went closer and peeped through the bead lattice into a short, gloomy corridor.

‘Andre Donner?’

He didn’t expect any answer, nor did he get one. The door on the left led, as far as he could tell, to the men’s toilets, and opposite them was their female counterpart. At the end of the corridor was another door, marked ‘Private’. He pushed his hand between the cords, awakening them to a lively murmur, then pulled them further apart. He hesitated. Maybe he should put off the inspection of the toilets and the private room until later. His gaze wandered back to the swing doors, and at that moment the hum of the generator stopped. He could now clearly hear—

Nothing.

He had preferred the sounds of the machine.

‘Andre Donner?’

He was answered by dry stillness. Even the noises from the street seemed to be cut off here. Slowly, he walked over to the swing doors and peered through one of the tiny windows. There wasn’t much to see. A little world of its own, made up of chrome and white tiles, chopped up in a strobe effect by the defective fluorescent lamp. The archaic body of a gas cooker with dark attachments, covered by a tarnished cooker hood. The corner of a workbench. Roasting pans and pots were piled up in a cupboard.

He walked in.

The kitchen wasn’t that small after all. It was surprisingly spacious for a restaurant like Muntu. Three walls were taken up with shelves, cupboards, fridges, a sink unit, oven and microwave. Along the fourth wall were storage surfaces and struts, draped with casserole dishes, pans, soup ladles and splatter screens. A longish work table took up the centre of the room, occupied at the stove end by two huge pans, bowls of finely chopped vegetables under cling film and closed polystyrene boxes. As if to balance it out, a huge slicing machine was enthroned at the opposite end. The kitchen smelled of stock, congealed frying fat, disinfectant and the cold sweetness of thawing meat. The latter was resting half-covered on a baking tray, pale brown in the pulsing light and coated with iridescent skin, its bones protruding. It looked like the hind leg of some huge animal. Kudu-antelope, thought Jericho. He couldn’t picture the breed, but he was sure he was staring at the leg of an antelope. He suddenly pictured the whitish tendons and ligaments under the fur of a living creature, a masterpiece of evolution which enabled the animal to take such stupendous leaps. A highly developed flight mechanism, but ultimately useless against the smallest and quickest of all predators, the rifle barrel. Cautiously, he went closer to the stove. The bluish flicker was increasingly reminiscent of an insecticide device, every flicker a record of death. Smeared wings and little legs, compound eyes, staring unfazed before they boiled in the electronic heat and exploded. In the crystal silence, he could now hear the humming of the lights too, their stumbling clicking when they sprang on and then died again, like some strange code. His gaze fell on a casserole dish on the stove. The contents gripped his attention. He looked in. Something was wriggling in it, something that seemed to be alive and squirming in the pulse of the lights, a headless, rolled-up snake.

Jericho stared at it.

He suddenly felt the temperature fall by several degrees. Pressure exerted itself on his chest as fingers encircled his heart, trying to bring it to a standstill. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He felt someone breathing behind him and knew that he was no longer alone in the kitchen. The other person had stalked in without a sound, appeared from nowhere, a professional, a master of disguise.

Jericho turned round.

The man was considerably taller than him, dark-haired, with a strong jawline and light, penetrating eyes. In an earlier life he had had a beard and been ash-blond, something which was only detectable from his light eyelashes and brows, but Jericho recognised him at once. He was familiar with the faces of this man; he had seen them again just a few minutes ago, on the display of his mobile.

Jan Kees Vogelaar.

Alarmed thoughts came in a rush: Vogelaar was waiting for Donner in order to kill him. Had already killed him. A body in the freezer cabinet. And he was in the worst possible position, much too close to his opponent. Unbelievable stupidity on his part, to have gone into the kitchen. The ghostly effect of the flickering neon light. The weapon in Vogelaar’s hand, pointing at his abdomen. Talk or fight? The failure of rational thinking.

Reflexes.

He ducked and aimed a blow at Vogelaar’s wrist. A shot freed itself from the weapon, echoing into the base of the cooker. Springing back up, he rammed his skull against the man’s chin, saw him stagger, grabbed the saucepan and hurled it towards him. A twitching alien whipped out, the skinned body of the snake. It smacked Vogelaar in the face, the casserole dish scraped his forehead. With all his strength, Jericho kicked out at the hand holding the gun, which clattered to the floor and slid under the workbench. He reached for his Glock, grasped the hilt and tumbled backwards as if he’d just been hit by a ram. Vogelaar had got a grip of himself, turned on his own axis as quick as lightning, flung up his right leg and given him a kick in the chest.

All the air drained from his lungs. Helpless, he crashed into the cooker. Vogelaar whirled up to him like a dervish. The next kick got him in the shoulder, another, his knee. He fell to the floor with a cry. The huge man leaned over, grabbed his lower arm and rammed it hard against the edge of the cooker, again and again. Jericho’s fingers twitched, opened out. Somehow he managed to maintain his grip on the Glock and sink his left hand into Vogelaar’s solar plexus, but it had zero impact. His opponent hit his lower arm again. A sharp pain flooded through him. This time, the pistol flew out of his hand in a wide arc. He punched Vogelaar’s ribs repeatedly with his free hand, around his kidneys, then felt the grip around his arm loosen. Released, he crawled sideways.

Where was the Glock?

There! Not even half a metre away.

He threw himself forwards. Vogelaar was quicker, pulling Jericho up and hurling him towards one of the huge pans. Instinctively, he tried to get a grip on it, buckled over as Vogelaar kicked him in the back of his knees, and ripped the pan down with him as he fell. A torrent of greasy broth gushed down over him, hailing bones, vegetables and meat. Filthy and wet, he writhed around on the kitchen floor, then saw the other man leaning over him, saw his fist coming down towards him, grabbed the empty pan with both hands and rammed it as hard as he could against Vogelaar’s shins.

The South African tried to suppress a cry of pain and stumbled. Like an amphibian, Jericho glided through the pool of liquid, grabbed a bowl of finely chopped tomato and threw it at Vogelaar, then another, fruit salad relieved of gravity: mango, pineapple and kiwi in free fall. For a few seconds his adversary was busy with dodging manoeuvres, giving him enough time to gain a metre of distance before the giant attacked again. Jericho fled around the workbench, grabbed the struts of a high cabinet, bringing pots, tins, bowls and sifters, pans, casserole dishes and cutlery drawers crashing down to the floor. Vogelaar sprang back, away from the avalanche. In no time, half of the kitchen was blocked. There was only one route left, along the opposite side of the workbench.

But Vogelaar was closer to the swing doors.

You idiot, Jericho cursed to himself. You’ve backed yourself right into the trap.

The South African bared his teeth sneeringly. He seemed to be thinking exactly the same thing, except that Jericho’s predicament was visibly cheering him. Eyeing each other, they paused, each clasping their end of the workbench. In the flicker of the neon light Jericho had the opportunity to get a good look at the man for the first time. His short-term memory simultaneously unearthed the birth date of the former mercenary, and he suddenly realised that his opponent was long past sixty. A fighting machine of pensionable age, against which the privilege of youth withered away, a farce. Vogelaar didn’t seem in the slightest bit tired, while he was puffing like a steam engine. He saw the man’s eyes light up, reflecting the flicker of the neon light. Then, without any warning, it went dark.

The light had given up the ghost. Vogelaar faded into a silhouette, a black mass emitting a low, triumphant laugh. Jericho narrowed his eyes. The only light still coming in was through the gaps in the swing doors, just enough to see the only remaining escape route. Like a crab, he shuffled out from the protection of his cover. As if mirroring his movements, the silhouette of the South African set itself in motion too. An illusion. He wouldn’t get to the doors fast enough. Perhaps a little conversation was advisable.

‘Hey, let’s cut the crap, shall we?’

Silence.

‘We won’t achieve anything like this. We should talk.’

The disheartened tremolo in his voice wasn’t good at all. Jericho took a deep breath and tried again.

‘This is a misunderstanding.’ That was better. ‘I’m not your enemy.’

‘How stupid do you think I am?’

An answer, at least, albeit croaky and threatening and not exactly emanating a desire for understanding. The silhouette came closer. Jericho backed off, grappled behind him, got hold of something jagged and heavy and closed his fingers around it in the hope that it was suitable as a weapon.

With a dry bang, the lights sprang back on.

Vogelaar stormed over, swinging a worryingly long kitchen knife, and Jericho was paralysed by a déjà vu. Shenzhen. Ma Liping, the paradise of the little emperors. At the very last second, he pulled up what he was holding in his hand. The knife sliced the radish in two, whizzed through the air and missed him by a hair. Jericho stumbled backwards. The giant chased him around the table towards the upturned cabinet. On a wing and a prayer, he reached into the pile of kitchen utensils that had poured out from it, grabbed hold of a baking sheet and held it in front of him like a shield. Clanging steel screeched over aluminium. He wouldn’t be able to fend off Vogelaar’s enraged attacks for long, so he grabbed the tray with both hands and went on the attack, swinging it around wildly and landing an audible hit. Vogelaar swayed. Jericho threw the tray at his head, fell to the floor, rolled under the table through to the other side, sprang to his feet and started to run. Vogelaar would have to go around the table—

Vogelaar went over the table.

Just centimetres before the door he felt himself get grabbed and pulled back with such force that he lost his footing. Effortlessly, Vogelaar spun him around and knocked him down. He crashed against something hard, making him lose his hearing and sight, then realised that the South African was holding his head against the meat slicing machine. The next moment, the blade began to rotate. Jericho wriggled, trying to break free. Vogelaar turned his arm behind his back until it made a cracking sound. The blade sped up.

‘Who are you?’

‘Owen Jericho,’ he wheezed, his heart in his throat. ‘Restaurant critic.’

‘And what do you want here?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. Donner, to speak to Donner—’

‘Andre Donner?’

‘Yes. Yes!’

‘About a restaurant review?’

‘Yes, damn it!’

‘With a gun?’

‘I—’

‘Wrong answer.’ The South African pressed his head against the metal and pushed it towards the racing blade. ‘And a wrong answer costs an ear.’

‘No!’

Jericho gave a howl. Burning pain shot through his outer ear. In fear and panic, he kicked his feet out and heard a muffled blow. The pressure on his shoulder suddenly gave way. Vogelaar slumped over him. He pulled himself to his feet, saw his torturer stagger and rammed his elbow into his face. The other man sank his fingers into his belt, then toppled over. Jericho held onto the edge of the table to avoid being dragged down with him. Something big and dark landed on the back of Vogelaar’s head. The man collapsed and didn’t move again.

Yoyo was staring at him, both hands clasped around the bones of the frozen antelope leg.

‘My God, Owen! Who is this arsehole?’

Dazed, Jericho felt behind his ear and touched raw, ripped-open flesh. When he looked at his finger, it was red with blood.

‘Jan Kees Vogelaar,’ he mumbled.

‘Damn it! And Donner?’

‘No idea.’ He drew air into his lungs. Then he crouched down next to the motionless body. ‘Quick, we have to turn him over.’

Without asking any more questions, Yoyo threw the antelope leg aside and helped him. With combined effort, they managed to roll Vogelaar onto his back.

‘You’re bleeding,’ she said, casually.

‘I know.’ He opened Vogelaar’s belt buckle and pulled it out of the loops. ‘Is there any of my ear left?’

‘Hard to say. It doesn’t really look like an ear any more.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of. Back on his stomach.’

The same sweat-inducing process. He bent Vogelaar’s lower arms behind him and tied them tightly together. The unconscious man breathed heavily and groaned. His fingers twitched.

‘Clobber him again if necessary,’ said Jericho, looking around. ‘We’ll manoeuvre him over to the fridge over there. The one next to the microwave.’

Together, they gripped the heavy body under the arms, dragged it across the tiles and lifted it up. Vogelaar weighed around a hundred kilos, but his groaning and blinking suggested that he wasn’t far from regaining consciousness. Hastily, Jericho whipped his own belt off and tied him to the fridge door handle with it. Sitting upright and with his head dangling down, the South African now had a martyred look about him. The flickering of the neon light became a constant, sterile brightness. Yoyo had found the light switch. Jericho crept over the kitchen floor, spotted his Glock and his opponent’s pistol and seized both.

‘Bastard,’ spluttered Vogelaar, as if he were spitting snot into the gutter.

Jericho handed Yoyo the pistol and fixed his gaze on the restrained man.

‘You should choose your words more carefully. I might be offended. I could, for example, think about the fact that my ear hurts, and who I have to thank for that.’

The South African stared at him, with a look full of hate. Suddenly, he began to tear at his shackles like mad. The fridge moved forward a centimetre. Jericho released the safety-catch on the Glock and pressed it against Vogelaar’s nose.

‘Wrong reaction,’ he said.

‘Kiss my ass!’

‘And a wrong reaction will cost you the tip of your nose. Do you want to go through life without a nose, Vogelaar? Do you want to look like an idiot?’

Vogelaar ground his jaw, but stopped his attempts to free himself. Clearly the idea of a noseless existence bothered him more than the threat of losing his life.

‘Why all the fuss?’ he asked sullenly. ‘I mean, you’re going to shoot me anyway.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Why?’ Vogelaar laughed with disbelief. ‘Man, don’t bother messing around.’

His healthy eye wandered over to Yoyo. The glass eye stared straight ahead. ‘What’s with you guys anyway? I thought Kenny would insist on finishing off the job himself.’

Inside Jericho’s brain, cogs interlocked, circuits loaded up, and the Department for Astonishing Developments and Incomprehensible Activities started its working day.

‘You know Kenny?’

Vogelaar blinked, confused. ‘Of course I know him.’

‘Now listen here,’ said Jericho, crouching down. ‘We have a document, only fragmentary admittedly, but I’d have to be a real idiot not to realise that you’re here to kill Andre Donner. So, first things first. Let’s start with Donner, okay? Where is he?’

Something in Vogelaar’s gaze changed. His rage gave way to pure, complete confusion.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘You’d have to be a complete idiot to believe that I’m here to do that.’

‘Where in God’s name is Andre Donner?’

‘Are you completely stupid, or what? I’m—’

‘For the last time!’ screamed Jericho. ‘Where is he?’

‘Look!’ the man tied to the fridge screamed back at him. ‘Open your eyes.’

Well, said the manager of the Department for Astonishing Developments and Incomprehensible Activities, it looks like we’ll miss out on the award for lateral thinking again.

‘I don’t understand—’

‘He’s sitting in front of you! I – am – Andre – Donner!’

Mercenary

The wars of the modern age, explicitly the First and Second World Wars, are regarded as international conflicts, established on the basis of the laws of war and executed by state-owned forces. In many parts of the world, this has led to the mistaken notion that soldiers have in actual fact always been armed civil servants, who earn money even when there is no one to attack and nothing to defend. It’s unimaginable that divisions of the US Army, the Royal Air Force, the forces armées or the Bundeswehr would rampage through their own country plundering and raping. The introduction of compulsory military service actually seemed to herald the end of the forces which had decisively shaped warfare until then. King David’s Kerethites and Pelethites, the Greek hoplites in Persia’s army, the marauding hordes of late mediaeval Brabants and Armagnacs, mercenaries in the Thirty Years War and private armies in colonialist Africa: they all served whoever happened to be the most generous master at the time. They were paid for fighting, not for sitting around in barracks.

In the twentieth century, the retreat of the colonial powers lured many mercenaries into the turmoil of post-independence Africa, where persecution and expulsion, coups and genocide were the order of the day under the new, ethnically disunited rulers. Ordered not to intervene, the West began to secure its interests with the help of private troops rather than on an official level – for example their efforts to oppose the establishment of communism on African soil. The communists’ approach was no different. States like South Africa also got themselves paramilitary task forces like Koevoet, and procured lucrative long-term positions for the contract soldiers. The old-style mercenary seemed to have found his niche in amongst the dictators and rebels.

Then everything changed.

With a sigh from history, the Soviet empire collapsed; without a whimper, banal and irretrievable. East Germany ceased to exist. London’s U-turn called the IRA into question, apartheid came to an end on the Cape, the Cold War was declared over, Great Britain and the USA reduced their troops, and political change in South America discredited thousands in the armed forces. All over the world, soldiers, policemen, Secret Service workers, resistance fighters and terrorists lost their jobs and their raison d’être. That was nothing new. Years before, unemployed Vietnam War veterans had founded private military and security services in the USA, ones that ventured where Washington didn’t dare get caught. Serving the CIA, these firms hunted unpleasant rulers out of power, trafficked weapons and drugs and, incidentally, also relieved the strain on the defence budget. Now, though, the market was collapsing under a surplus of trained fighters fighting each other for the last crisis zones in the era of Nelson Mandela and Russian–American chumminess. The remaining despots could only do so much to encroach on human rights; there simply wasn’t enough for everyone.

And then the curtain rose on a new act.

The new players were Saddam Hussein, arrogant and voracious, and Slobodan Milošević, delirious with nationalism. Perfect antagonists of an otherwise peace-loving humanity, one which yet again speedily agrees to permit war as a continuation of politics, but this time with other means. Foolishly, a few soldiers too many had been laid off in the frenzy of reconciliation. The mercenaries were on the march again. Authorised by the United Nations, they polish up their tarnished image by helping to conquer the lunatic in the Gulf and the monster of the Balkans, and secure peace. Then, one day, two passenger jets fly into the Twin Towers and send the final remains of the pacifist mindset up in flames. Determined to bring the axis of evil to its knees, George W. Bush, otherwise known as the biggest political bankruptcy in American history, bestows on the USA thousands of dead GIs and a fiscal hole the size of a lunar crater. Practically all its allies are forced to learn how terribly expensive war is and how much more expensive it is to win peace, especially with the employment of regular armies. But on the other hand, given that the way war is led is no longer up for debate, commission after commission goes to the efficient and discreet private security firms.

Fittingly, Africa uses its raw materials to enter the playing field of globalisation. Wounds that were long believed healed burst open, petrodollars split whole nations, and the gravitational forces of East and West pull at everything. Somalia becomes synonymous with blood and tears. Millions of people die during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Barely recovered from the wrangling between the government and liberation armies, the Sudan staggers into the Darfur conflict, the pull of which grips the whole of central Africa. With France as a silent partner, Chad’s dictator invests trillions of oil money in arms purchases and destabilises the region in his own special way. The parties of the north and south are smashing each other’s head in on the Ivory Coast, while violence is rampant in oil-rich South Nigeria. Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi and Uganda top the scale of inhumane acts. Even supposedly stable nations like Kenya sink into chaos in just a short time. Almost everything that was supposed to improve just gets worse.

The only people things improve for are the likes of Jan Kees Vogelaar.

At the beginning of the millennium, his Mamba supports the peace troop of the African Union in Darfur, reduces the popularity of the Arabic Sudanese in the guerrilla camps and takes on lucrative mandates in Kenya and Nigeria. After the foundation of African Protection Services, Vogelaar is able to expand his activities to more crisis areas. APS develops for Africa in a similar manner to how Blackwater developed for Iraq. By 2016, the group of companies makes a name for itself in the safeguarding of oil plants and transport routes for raw materials, the conduct of negotiations with hostage-takers and the exploration of exotic locations for Western, Asian and multinational companies, which are increasingly acquiring a taste for hiring private armies.

But it remains a painstaking business, and Vogelaar gets tired of changing sides again and again. After years of instability on all fronts he begins to long for something more lasting and solid, for that one, ultimate commission.

And then it comes.

‘In the form of Kenny Xin,’ said Vogelaar. ‘Or rather Kenny’s company, which practically handed me the future on a silver platter.’

‘Xin,’ echoed Yoyo. ‘The name doesn’t exactly suit him.’ Jericho knew what she meant. Xin was the Chinese word for heart.

‘And who’s behind the company?’ he asked.

‘Back then, it was the Chinese Secret Service.’ The South African rubbed his wrists, which were marked by the welts of the belt. ‘But as time went on I started to have my doubts about that.’

The revelation of Donner’s identity had thrown everything off-kilter. Adjusting to the new situation, Jericho had first seized the opportunity to take a quick look at his ear in the toilet mirror. It looked awful, drenched in scarlet; the blood had run down his neck in streaks and into the neckline of his T-shirt, where it had congealed and was now encrusted. Bleeding, drenched with fish stock and covered in the remains of squashed root vegetables, he was a wretched sight. After he’d washed the blood away, though, things looked a little better. Instead of finding himself faced with a problem of van Gogh proportions, he discovered he had actually only lost a carpaccio-thin slice of ear muscle. Yoyo, directed by Vogelaar to the kitchen’s first aid box, had bandaged him up. It had felt as if her touch was much more tender than the task required; if he were a dog, one might have referred to it as petting, but he wasn’t a dog, and Yoyo was probably just doing her job. Vogelaar had watched them, suddenly looking very tired, as if he had years of sleep to catch up on.

‘If you’re not here to kill me, then what in God’s name are you here for?’

‘To warn you, you stupid bastard,’ explained Yoyo in a friendly tone.

‘About who?’

‘About the people who are planning to kill you!’

Jericho pulled his mobile out and silently projected the text fragment and then the film onto the wall, the clip which showed Vogelaar in Africa.

‘Where did you get that from?’

‘We don’t know. We stumbled across it on the internet, but ever since then your friend Kenny has been trying to kill us.’

‘My friend Kenny.’ A sound somewhere between a laugh and a grunt came from Vogelaar. ‘Let’s be frank now, there’s no way you came here because you were seriously concerned about my survival.’

‘Of course not. Especially not after the meat-slicer incident.’

‘Well, how was I supposed to know who you were?’

‘You could have asked.’

‘Asked? Are you right in the head? You forced your way into my kitchen and attacked me!’

‘Well, after you—’

‘Good God, what was I supposed to do? What would you have done in my position? Nyela phoned and told me that two clowns were sitting in my restaurant pretending to be restaurant critics.’

‘See!’ said Yoyo, triumphantly. ‘I told you—’

‘That wasn’t the problem, little one! You were the problem. Your little slip of the tongue. No one here knows anything about our time in Equatorial Guinea. Nyela is from Cameroon and I’m a South African Boer. The Donners were never in Equatorial Guinea.’

Yoyo looked embarrassed.

‘Did you watch the films from the security camera?’ Jericho wanted to know.

‘Aha, so you noticed the camera?’

‘I’m a detective.’

‘Of course I looked at them. I’m prepared for everything, boy. I had actually hoped to live out the rest of my life in peace here. New identity, new home. But Kenny doesn’t give up. The bastard has never given up yet.’

‘Do you think the text came from him?’

‘What I think is that you should untie me right away, or you can figure the rest of it out by yourself.’

And so, with an uneasy feeling, he had untied Vogelaar while Yoyo covered him with the gun. But the only thing the South African did was go next door and put palm wine, rum and coke on the table. He then proceeded to listen to their story as he led one cigarillo after another to its cremation.

‘What kind of deal did Kenny offer you?’ asked Jericho as he gulped down a glass of rum he felt was more than well-earned.

‘A kind of second Wonga coup.’

‘Not exactly a good omen.’

‘Yes, but the circumstances had changed. Ndongo wasn’t Obiang, and he certainly wasn’t as closely guarded. Practically all the key positions in his government had been bought by the USA and Great Britain. It’s just that money doesn’t make a good building block, not in the long term, anyway. You have to constantly replaster it, otherwise the place will collapse above your head. And besides, Ndongo was a Bubi. The Fang only got involved with him because they’d been having just as bad a time of it, and things threatened to be even worse under Mayé. Back then, APS operated along the entire west coast of Africa. In Cameroon, we were protecting oil plants against the resistance. It was in Jaunde that I met Nyela, by the way, the first woman who inspired me to bring some kind of order into my life.’

‘Is she really called Nyela?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Are you crazy?’ snorted Vogelaar. ‘No one uses their real name if their life is at stake. In any case, one beautiful day I arrive in my office, and there sits Kenny, waiting to explain the Chinese interests to me.’ Vogelaar puffed away, veiling himself in smoke. ‘He had this strange way of switching terminology when it came to his clients. Sometimes he spoke about the Communist Party, sometimes about the Secret Service, and at others it sounded like he was there in the service of the State oil trade. When I demanded a little more clarity, he wanted to hear my thoughts on the difference between governments and companies. I thought about it and realised there wasn’t one. Strictly speaking, I haven’t found one in over forty years.’

‘And Kenny suggested a coup.’

‘The Chinese were quite bitter about the American presence in the Gulf of Guinea. Remember that we’re talking about the time before helium-3; the area was like pure gold back then. Besides that, they felt they were entitled to something that Washington had helped itself to since time immemorial. I tried to make Kenny realise that there was a difference between protecting governments from guerrillas and actually overthrowing them. I told him about the Wonga Coup, about Simon Mann, how he was rotting in Black Beach because of it, and how the Briton had made himself look like a complete fool. He responded by sharing information about the overthrow of the Saudi Arabian royal family the year before, and I almost passed out. It had been obvious to all of us, of course, that China had supported the Saudi Islamists, but if what Kenny told me is true, then Beijing did more than just provide a little assistance. Believe me, I can smell bullshit from ten miles away upwind. Kenny wasn’t bullshitting. He was telling the truth, and so I decided to carry on listening to him.’

‘I guess he was on excellent terms with Mayé.’

‘They were certainly in contact. In 2016, Kenny was still in second rank, but I knew right away that the guy would soon pop up in a more exposed position.’ Vogelaar laughed softly. ‘If you meet him, he actually seems like a nice guy. But he’s not. He’s at his most dangerous when he’s pretending to be nice.’

‘Can anyone be nice in this business?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Of course. Why not?’

‘Well, take mercenaries for example.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, aren’t they all more or less – erm – racists?’

Good God, Yoyo, thought Jericho, what are you playing at? Vogelaar slowly turned his head to face her and let smoke billow out of the corner of his mouth. He looked like a huge, steaming animal.

‘Don’t be shy, speak your mind.’

‘Koevoet. Apartheid. Do I need to go on?’

‘I was a professional racist, my girl, if you’re directing that at me. Give me money, and I hate the blacks. Give me money, and I hate the whites. It’s real racists who screw up the fun. By the way, there are racists in the army too.’

‘But you’re for sale. As opposed to regular—’

‘We’re for sale, sure, but we don’t betray anyone. And do you know why? Because we’re not on anyone’s side. Our only loyalty is to the contract.’

‘But if you—’

‘We’re unable to commit any kind of betrayal.’

‘Well, I see it differently.’

Jericho was fidgeting uneasily on his chair. What was Yoyo thinking, impaling Vogelaar on the stake of her indignation, and now of all moments? He was just opening his mouth to interrupt when a trace of realisation flitted across her face. With sudden humility, she slurped on her cola and asked:

‘So who made contact with whom? Mayé with the Chinese? Or the other way around?’

Vogelaar looked at her, debating his answer. Then he shrugged his shoulders and poured an almost overflowing glass of rum down his throat.

‘Your people approached Mayé, as far as I know.’

‘You mean the Chinese,’ Yoyo corrected him.

‘Your people,’ Vogelaar repeated mercilessly. ‘They came and knocked the doors down, doors that were already wide open. After all, the point was that Obiang had dramatically misjudged things with Mayé. He wanted someone he could direct from behind the scenes, but he picked the wrong guy. Without helium-3, Mayé would probably still be in Malabo.’

‘But he did end up being a puppet just recently.’

‘Sure, but for the Chinese, the buffoon of a ranking world power. That’s different from letting yourself be spoon-fed by a terminally ill ex-dictator. When Kenny turned up at my place, he had already done his research and decided that we were the best match. So I listened to him calmly – and then refused.’

‘Why?’ wondered Jericho.

‘So he would come down from his high horse. He was disappointed of course. And uneasy too, because he had opened up and made himself vulnerable. Then I told him that perhaps there was a chance after all. But for that he would have to throw more on the scales than the commission for a coup. I made it clear to him that I was tired of the trench warfare, this constant haggling for jobs, but that, on the other hand, I would bore myself to death if I went off to live in some villa somewhere. I was nearing some sort of retirement, but I didn’t want it to be of a retiring nature.’

‘So you asked for a position in Mayé’s government. That’s quite an unusual request for a mercenary.’

‘Kenny understood. A few days later we met with Mayé, who banged on at me for two long hours about his lousy family, and Kenny had to make all kinds of promises to him. There was no way there was a position in it for me too! He kept me in suspense for hours on end, then he switched sides, to cuddly old Uncle Mayé, and pulled the rabbit out of the hat.’

‘And offered you the position of security manager.’

‘The funny thing is that it was Kenny’s idea. But he buttered the old guy up so much he thought it was his own. So the deal was done. The rest was child’s play. I took care of the logistics, put commandos together, organised the weapons and helicopter, the usual rigmarole. You know the rest. The Chinese were adamant that the whole thing had to go off without any bloodshed and that Ndongo had to leave the country unscathed, and we managed all of that.’

‘Beijing didn’t seem to have that many concerns last year.’

‘There was much more to play for last year. In 2017 it was just about an adjustment to the power relationships.’

‘Just, sure.’

‘Oh, come on! Everyone knew that clever journalists would write clever articles sooner or later. Beijing’s role was clear just from the redistribution of the mining licences. And so what? People are used to “arranged” changes in government. But they’re less used to killings. Especially when you’re trying to clean up your image. The Party hadn’t forgotten the Olympic gauntlet-running of 2008. That’s also why the House of Saud got off so lightly in 2015 when the Islamists captured Riyadh. It was Beijing’s condition for financing the fun. Anyway, we advanced into Malabo, Mayé squeezed his fat ass into the seat of government, I built up EcuaSec, the Equatorial Guinea Secret Service, had the entire opposition imprisoned, and that was that.’

‘And that didn’t make you sick?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Sick?’ Vogelaar put the glass to his lips. ‘I only got sick once in my life. From rotten tuna.’

Jericho shot Yoyo a look like daggers. ‘And then what?’

‘As expected, Kenny landed on his feet shortly after we heaved Mayé into power and ended up with more authority. Equatorial Guinea became a playground to him. Every few weeks he would relax in the lobby of the Paraíso, a hotel for oil workers, where he treated himself to hookers and waited for my reports. We had agreed in Cameroon that I would keep an eye on Mayé—’

‘So that was the deal.’

‘Of course. As I said, it was Kenny’s idea. No one got as close to Mayé as I did. He accepted me as a close confidant.’

‘A confidant who also happened to be spying on him.’

‘Just in case the fatty escaped our leash. I was being watched too of course. That’s Kenny’s principle, how he builds up his clique: everyone keeps an eye on everyone else. But I always had one more pair of eyes than the others.’

‘Yes, made of glass,’ scoffed Yoyo.

‘I see more with one healthy one than you do with two,’ retorted Vogelaar. ‘I quickly found out who the moles were that Kenny had set on me. Half of EcuaSec was infiltrated. I didn’t let on that I knew of course. Instead, I began to watch Kenny myself; I wanted to find out more about him and his men.’

‘All I know is that he’s completely insane.’

‘Let’s just say he loves extremes. I found out that he lived in London for three years, assigned to the Chinese military attaché, and spent two years in Washington, specialising in conspiracy. Officially, he belonged to Zhong Chan Er Bu, the military news service, the second department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army. Unfortunately my contacts there turned out to be scarce, but I did know a few people who had worked with Kenny in the past in the fifth office of the Guojia Anquan Bu, the ministry for state security. According to them he had outstanding analytical abilities and an instinct for how people’s minds work. They also commented that when it came to sabotage and contract killing, he handled things with quite a – well, uncompromising attitude.’

‘In other words, our friend was a killer.’

‘Which in itself isn’t any cause for alarm. But there was something else too.’

Vogelaar paused to light another cigar. He did it slowly and elaborately, switching from the spoken word to smoke signals and immersing himself in his own thoughts for a while.

‘They thought there was something monstrous about him,’ he continued. ‘Which my gut instinct had told me too, although I couldn’t really say why. So I tried to delve deeper into Kenny’s past. I found the usual military service, his studies, pilot training, arms certificate, all the normal stuff. I was just about to give up when I stumbled on a special unit with the beautiful name of Yü Shen—’

‘Lovely,’ said Yoyo sarcastically.

‘Yü Shen?’ Jericho wrinkled his forehead. ‘That rings a bell. It has something to do with eternal damnation, doesn’t it?’

‘Yü Shen is the Hell God,’ Yoyo explained to him. ‘A Taoist figure based on the old Chinese belief that hell is divided up into ten empires, deep inside the earth, each of which is ruled by a Hell King. The Hell God is the highest power. The dead have to answer to him and the judges of hell.’

‘So that means everyone goes to hell?’

‘To start with, yes. And everyone appears before a special court, according to his or her actions. The good ones are sent back to the surface and are reborn in a higher incarnation. The bad ones are reborn too, after they’ve served their time in hell, but as animals.’

Jericho looked at Vogelaar.

‘So what was Kenny Xin reborn as?’

‘Good question. A beast in human form?’

‘And what was he before?’

Vogelaar sucked at his cigar.

‘I tried to collect information about Yü Shen. It was a difficult task. Officially, the department doesn’t exist, and it’s actually very similar to the hell court. It recruits its members from prisons, psychiatric institutions and clinics for brain research. You might say they search for evil. For highly gifted people whose psychic defect is so far over the inhibition threshold that they would normally be locked away. But, with Yü Shen, they get a second chance. Not that they want to make them into better people there, mind, it’s more about how to use their evil. They carry out tests. All kinds of tests, the type you wouldn’t even want to hear about. After a year, they decide whether you’ll be reborn in freedom, for example in the military or Secret Service, or whether you’ll live out your life in the hell of the institution.’

‘It sounds like an army of butchers,’ said Yoyo, disgusted.

‘Not necessarily. Some Yü Shen graduates have gone on to have incredible careers.’

‘And Kenny?’

‘When Yü Shen tracked him down, he had just turned fifteen and was in an institution for mentally disturbed young offenders. Most of what happened before that remains in darkness. It seems he grew up in bitter poverty, in the corner of a settlement where not even tramps dare to go. A father, mother, and two siblings. I don’t know much more detail than that. Just that one night, when he was ten years old, he poured two canisters of petrol onto his family’s corrugated iron shack while they were all sleeping. Then he blocked up all the escape routes with barricades he had spent weeks making out of rubbish, hooked them all up so that no one could get out, and set the whole thing on fire.’

Yoyo stared at him.

‘And his—?’

‘Burnt to death.’

‘The whole family?’

‘Every one of them. It was pure chance that some shrink got wind of it and took the boy away with him. He declared that Kenny possessed outstanding intelligence and well-developed clarity of thought. The boy didn’t deny anything, didn’t utter a single word in attempt to explain why he had done it. For four years he was passed around circles of experts, each of them trying to get to the bottom of his behaviour, until ultimately Yü Shen became aware of his existence.’

‘And they let him loose on humanity!’

‘He was declared to be healthy.’

‘Healthy?’

‘In the sense that he was in control of himself. They didn’t find anything. No mental illness that features in the textbooks at any rate. Just a bizarre compulsion for order, a fascination with symmetry. Classical symptoms of compulsive behaviour, but overall nothing that could brand him as being insane. He was just – evil.’

For a while, there was an uneasy silence. Jericho thought back over what he knew about Xin. His love of directing the action, the eerie ability he had of reading people’s minds. Vogelaar was right. Kenny was evil. And yet he had the feeling that wasn’t all there was to it. It was as if some dark code underlay his behaviour, one that he followed and felt bound to.

‘Now, in the meantime I had no reason to mistrust Kenny. Everything was running like a well-oiled machine. Beijing kept to its promise not to get involved, Mayé was enjoying the status of an autonomous ruler. Oil flowed in return for money. Then the decline came. The whole world was talking about helium-3, everyone wanted to go to the Moon. Interest in fossil resources kept falling, and Mayé couldn’t do a thing about it. Nothing at all. Neither executions nor fits of madness could help.’ Vogelaar flicked ashes from his cigar. ‘So, on 30 April 2022 he called me to his office. As I walked in, he was sitting there with a number of men and women, who he introduced to us as representatives of the Chinese Air and Space Travel Ministry.’

‘I know what they wanted!’ Yoyo waved her hand eagerly as if she were in a classroom. ‘They suggested building a launching pad.’

Jericho was jerked from his thoughts. ‘So it wasn’t Mayé’s idea at all.’

‘No, it wasn’t. He wanted to know what it was for of course. They said it was to shoot a satellite into space. He asked what kind of satellite. They said: “Just a satellite, it doesn’t matter what kind. Do you want a satellite? Your own, Equatorial Guinea news satellite? You can have it. The only important thing to us is the launch, and that no one finds out who’s behind it.”’

‘But why?’ asked Jericho, dumbfounded. ‘What did they have to gain from shooting Chinese satellites up from African soil?’

‘That’s what we wanted to know too, naturally. They told us there was a space treaty agreed in the sixties at the initiative of the United Nations, then signed and ratified by the majority of member states. It’s about who outer space belongs to, what they can or can’t do, and who can permit or forbid things. Part of the treaty is a liability clause, later put in concrete terms in a special agreement, which regulates all the claims regarding accidents with artificial celestial bodies. For example: if a meteorite falls into your garden and kills your chickens, you can’t do a thing. But if it’s not a meteorite but a satellite with a nuclear reactor, and it doesn’t fall on your chickens but right smack bang in central Berlin, then that would cause damage of astronomic proportions, not to mention the dead and wounded and the soaring cancer rate. So who would be liable for that?’

‘Whoever caused it?’

‘Correct. The state that sent it up, and the treaty dictates that the liability has no limits. If Germany can prove it was a Chinese satellite, then China has to cough up. The decisive factor is always whose territory something was launched from. So the more a nation launches, the higher the risk they run of having to pay up at some point. That’s why, according to the delegates, they were now negotiating with states who were willing to allow China to build launch pads on their territory and pass them off to the world as being their own.’

‘But that would make those states liable!’

‘Guys like Mayé don’t have any issues with driving their own people into ruin. He had long since piled the millions from the oil trade into private bunkers, just like Obiang did before him. The only thing he cared about was what was in it for him. So Kenny named a figure. It was exorbitantly high. Mayé tried to stay calm, while all the while he was pissing himself with joy under his tropical wood desk.’

‘Didn’t the whole thing seem completely absurd to him?’

‘The delegation claimed that Beijing was concluding deals like these for minimisation of risk. That the danger of a satellite falling was becoming less and less, and that it wasn’t to do with military operations, it was merely about the testing of a new, experimental initiative. The only thing Mayé had to do was strut about as the father of Equatorial Guinea space travel and pledge his lifelong silence about who was really behind it. And for that, they were prepared to pay for his satellite.’

‘What an idiot,’ commented Yoyo.

‘Well, think about it. Equatorial Guinea, the first African country with its own space programme.’

‘But didn’t anyone notice that loads of Chinese people were running around when they were building the launching pad?’ asked Jericho.

‘It wasn’t like that. There was an official announcement. Mayé informed the world that he wanted to get in on the space travel scene, invited specialists over to Equatorial Guinea, and of course the Chinese came too. The whole thing was organised perfectly. In the end, Russians, Koreans, French and Germans all ended up working on the launch pad too, without noticing whose tune they were dancing to.’

‘And the Zheng Group?’

‘Ah!’ Vogelaar raised his eyebrows admiringly. ‘You’ve done your research. That’s right, a large part of the construction was developed by Zheng. They had a team on site the whole time. They started in December and a year later the thing was up. On 15 April 2024, Mayé’s first and only news satellite was shot into space in a festive ceremony.’

‘He must have practically burst with pride.’

‘Mayé was obsessed with the thing. There was a model of it hanging in his office, it rode along the ceiling on a rail and then circled around him at his desk, the sun of Equatorial Guinea.’

‘But not for very long.’

‘Not even three weeks. First a temporary failure, then radio silence. The news spread of course. Mayé became the subject of ridicule and malice. It wasn’t that he really needed a satellite; after all, he had coped perfectly well without one before. But he had taken his place in international circles, he wanted to be part of it all and now he had to contend with this major fall. He made a proper fool of himself, and even the Bubi in Black Beach were rolling around in their cells with laughter. Mayé was frothing with rage, screaming for Kenny, who informed him that there were more pressing concerns. And there were. The Chinese and Americans were threatening each other with military action, each of them accusing the other of having stationed weapons on the Moon. I advised Mayé to hold back, but he kept on and on. Eventually, at the beginning of June, when the Moon crisis was just starting to defuse, Kenny travelled to Malabo for talks. Mayé refused to restrain himself, demanding a new satellite immediately. But then he made a mistake. He mentioned his suspicion that there was more behind the launch than the testing of some experimental initiative.’

Jericho leaned forward. ‘What did he mean by that?’

Vogelaar blew smoke, in memory of bygone times.

‘It was something he’d heard from me. Something I had found out. About the whole project.’

‘So you had the whole thing investigated?’

‘Of course. I kept a closer eye on the building of the ramp and the launch than Kenny would have liked, but in such a way that he didn’t notice. In the process, I stumbled upon inconsistencies. I told Mayé about it and impressed upon him the need to keep it to himself, but the idiot had nothing better to do than threaten Kenny.’

‘How did Kenny react to it?’

‘In a nice manner. And that was what concerned me. He said that Mayé didn’t need to worry, that there would be some way of agreeing on things.’

‘That sounds like a pre-announced execution.’

‘That’s exactly what I thought. A lot of fuss had been caused by that point. So the only option was to find out the whole truth, to increase the pressure on Kenny so much that he couldn’t simply get rid of us. And I did find out. When Kenny next turned up, Mayé received him in the company of his most important ministers and military staff. We confronted him with the facts. He was silent. For a long time. A very long time. Then he asked us if we realised we were playing with our lives.’

‘The beginning of the end.’

‘Not necessarily. It showed that he was taking us seriously. That he wanted to negotiate.’ Vogelaar laughed joylessly. ‘But Mayé messed the whole thing up again by demanding horrendous sums, practically a genuflection. Kenny couldn’t give him what he wanted. He seemed to be making things easy for Mayé though, and I genuinely got the impression that he didn’t want things to escalate, but Mayé, in his arrogance, was unstoppable. By the end he was screaming that the whole world would find out about it all. Kenny stood up, hesitated. Then he gave a broad grin and said, Okay, I give in. You’ll have what you desire, Mr Dictator, give me two weeks. He said that and then left.’

Vogelaar watched the smoke from his cigar float away.

‘At that moment I knew that Mayé had just condemned us all to death. He may have been basking in the belief of being the victor, but he was already dead. I didn’t waste any time convincing him otherwise, and just went home. My wife and I packed our bags. I always have a few identities up my sleeve, an escape plan or something. The following morning we disappeared from Equatorial Guinea. We left all of our possessions behind, everything apart from a suitcase full of money and a pile of false papers. Kenny’s henchmen were on our heels right away, but my plan was perfect. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to go underground. We dodged them again and again until we had thrown them off. Once we got to Berlin, we became Andre and Nyela Donner, a South African agricultural engineer and a qualified lawyer from Cameroon with a gastronomic background, and looked for some premises. The day we opened, Ndongo was filling his pants in Malabo, and Mayé was dead. Everyone who knew about it was dead.’

‘Apart from one person.’

‘Yes.’

‘So what was the space programme really about?’

Vogelaar stretched out a finger and pushed a half-full glass over the tablecloth. The rum sparkled in the light of the paper lamp, a frenzy of movement and reflection.

‘Come on, don’t make me keep asking. Why did it all happen?’

The mercenary propped his chin in his hands meditatively.

‘It should be me asking who’s coming after the two of you.’

‘Oh, sure!’ Yoyo glared at him angrily. ‘What do you think we’ve been doing the whole day?’

‘Obviously I’m asking myself the same thing.’

‘Probably Zhong Chan Er Bu,’ conjectured Jericho. ‘The Chinese Secret Service. After everything you’ve told us.’

‘I’m not so sure any more. I’ve since started to believe that Kenny’s strange delegation represented neither the Chinese government nor the Chinese space travel authorities. Both of them are probably still none the wiser that they were used as a pretext.’

Jericho stared at him in amazement.

‘They were very convincing, Jericho.’

‘But the Party must have realised what was happening in their name. Mayé must have mentioned it on official state visits.’

‘Nonsense, think about it! There were no Chinese government visits to Equatorial Guinea, just as Mayé was never invited to the Forbidden City. No one wanted to be seen with him. A little minister of the energy authorities might pop up coyly here and there, but otherwise Chinese oil people kept their heads down. Beijing had always emphasised the fact that its only relationship with Equatorial Guinea was strictly trade-related.’

‘But they didn’t have any problems with being photographed with dictators in Mugabe’s era.’

‘They didn’t overthrow Mugabe. After a coup, it’s not the done thing for the initiators to draw attention to themselves. The Chinese are more careful nowadays.’

‘But what about Zheng?’

‘What about him?’

‘The Zheng Group works for the Chinese space travel authority. Scrub that, they are the space travel authority, and they did construction work for Mayé too. It must have come out then that official positions had been used as a pretext.’

‘Who says Zheng was consulted? Inside an authority, there are those that know and those that don’t. His company accepted a commission on the free market. And so what?’

‘The Party allowed their most important construction company to build a foreign launch pad.’

‘You can’t control companies like Zheng or Orley; not even the Party can do that, nor do they want to. The Chinese prime minister has shares in Zheng, so that would have meant keeping an eye on himself too. On the contrary, Beijing welcomed the fact that Zheng responded to the invitation to tender, because it made espionage there easier.’

‘So why did you become suspicious?’

Vogelaar smiled thinly.

‘Because I’m always suspicious. That’s how I found out that Kenny left Zhong Chan Er Bu in 2022. He now works purely on a freelance basis for the military Secret Service.’

‘Just a second,’ said Yoyo. ‘The coup that brought Mayé to power—’

‘Was financed by Chinese oil companies, ratified by Beijing and executed by the Chinese Secret Service, with our help.’

‘And the launching pad?’

‘That had nothing to do with it. The launching pad just brought new protagonists onto the scene. Beijing was only ever concerned with commodities. The people that talked us into the launching pad had other interests.’

‘So Kenny changed camps?’

‘I’m not sure whether he did or not. Perhaps he just broadened his circle of activity. I don’t think he explicitly contravened Beijing’s interests, rather that he saw someone else’s interests as being more important.’

‘And the Mayé coup?’

‘The launching pad people were to blame for that. It’s possible that the Party approved of it. But they were certainly never asked.’

‘Is that what you believe or what you know?’

‘What I believe.’

‘Vogelaar,’ said Yoyo insistently. ‘You have to tell us what you found out about the launching pad, do you hear?’

Vogelaar put his fingertips together. He fixed his gaze on his thumbs, brought them towards the tip of his nose and then looked at the ceiling. Then, slowly, he nodded.

‘Okay. Agreed.’

‘Tell us.’

‘For a quarter of a million euros.’

‘What?’ Jericho fought for air. ‘Have you gone insane?’

‘For that you’ll get a dossier, everything’s in it.’

‘You’re crazy!’

‘Not in the slightest. Nyela and I have to go underground, and right away. A large part of my fortune is frozen in Equatorial Guinea. What I was able to take with me is tied up in Muntu and the apartment upstairs. By tomorrow I’ll have flogged whatever I can, but Nyela and I will have to start again from scratch.’

‘Damn it, Vogelaar!’ exploded Yoyo. ‘You truly are the most filthy, ungrateful—’

‘One hundred thousand,’ said Jericho. ‘Not a cent more.’

Vogelaar shook his head. ‘I’m not negotiating.’

‘Because you’re not in a position to. Think properly now. It’s a hundred thousand or nothing.’

‘You need the dossier.’

‘And you need the money.’

Yoyo looked as though she wanted to drag Vogelaar straight off to the slicing machine. Jericho kept an eye on her. If it came to it he was prepared to give the South African a good going over with the Glock, but he doubted that Vogelaar would let it go that far again. They had to reach an agreement with him somehow.

He waited.

After what felt like an eternity, Vogelaar breathed out, long and slow, and for the first time Jericho sensed the big man’s fear.

‘One hundred thousand. In cash, to be clear! Money in exchange for the dossier.’

‘Here?’

‘Not here. Somewhere busy.’ With a nod of his head, he gestured outside. ‘Tomorrow at midday in the Pergamon Museum. That’s right around the corner. Take Monbijou Strasse down to the Spree, then go over the river to Museum Island and to the James Simon Gallery. That’s where the stream of tourists divides between the museums. We’ll meet at the Ishtar Gate opposite the Processional Way. Nyela and I will leave immediately afterwards, so make sure you’re on time.’

‘And where do you plan to go?’

Vogelaar stared at him for a long time.

‘You really don’t need to know that,’ he said.

‘Fantastic! So where are you going to get a hundred thousand euros from?’ Yoyo asked as they crossed the street to where the Audi was parked.

‘How should I know?’ Jericho shrugged. ‘It’s still better than a quarter of a million.’

‘Oh, much better.’

‘Okay.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘So what do you think I ought to have done? Tortured the truth out of him?’

‘Exactly that. We should have beaten it out of him!’

‘Great idea.’ Jericho felt his ear where it had been bandaged up. It was thick and puffy. He felt like a plush toy rabbit. ‘I can just imagine the scene. I hold him down while you beat him to a pulp with an antelope haunch.’

‘Good of you to mention it. I—’

‘And Vogelaar would have just let us do that to him.’

‘But I did beat him to a pulp with the antelope haunch!’

‘So you did.’ Jericho walked on, and opened the car door. ‘How did you get here anyway? Weren’t you supposed to be keeping an eye on Nyela?’

‘That just about beats everything.’ Yoyo flung open the passenger door, flopped down in her seat and twisted her arms into a knot. ‘You’d have ended up as cold cuts if I hadn’t come along, you arsehole.’

Jericho kept quiet.

Had he just made a mistake?

‘I don’t know where we’re going to get the money either,’ he conceded. ‘And I don’t want to count on Tu’s help, not automatically.’

Yoyo grumbled something he didn’t catch.

‘Well then,’ Jericho said. ‘Let’s go to the hotel, shall we?’

No answer.

He sighed, and started the car.

‘I’ll ask Tu, in any case,’ he said. ‘He can lend it to me. Or give it as an advance.’

‘Whver.’

‘Maybe he’s got some news for us. He’s been playing about with Diane since this morning.’

Silence.

‘I called him before I went into Muntu. Very interesting stuff he’s found out. Confirms everything that Vogelaar said. Should I tell you what Tu told me?’

‘’f y’wnt.’

He couldn’t get anything else out of her. All the way to the Hyatt, all she would do was spit out knotty strings of consonants. Jericho reported his conversation with Tu, in the cheery tones of a man pushing water uphill, until in the end he couldn’t keep up the pretence that nothing was wrong. In the Hyatt’s underground garage, he finally gave up.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

Arms folded, she stared dead ahead.

‘I behaved very badly. I should have thanked you.’

‘N’wrries.’ On the other hand, at least she wasn’t jumping out of the car.

‘Without you, Vogelaar would have killed me. You saved my life.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So, umm – thank you, okay? I mean that, really. I’ll never forget it. It was extremely brave of you.’

She turned her head and looked at him, her brows drawn down like thunder.

‘Why exactly are you such a halfwit?’

‘No idea.’ Jericho stared at the steering wheel. ‘Maybe I just never learned.’

‘Learned what?’

‘How to be considerate.’

‘I think that you can be, though. Very considerate.’ Her arms, folded tight, relaxed a little. They even slipped apart a bit. ‘Do you know what else I think?’

Jericho raised his eyebrows.

‘I think that you’re least considerate towards people you actually care about.’

He caught his breath. Not stupid, this one.

‘And who helped you with that little insight?’ he asked, nursing a suspicion.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was just thinking it’s the kind of thing that Joanna might have said.’

‘I don’t need Joanna for that.’

‘You didn’t happen to talk to her about me, then?’

‘Of course I did,’ she admitted straight away. ‘She told me that the two of you were an item.’

‘And what else?’

‘That you cocked it up.’

‘Ah.’

‘She said it was because you didn’t like yourself – you’re never nice to yourself – not at all nice to yourself.’

Jericho pursed his lips. He lined up some counter-arguments, and each looked more threadbare than the next. He held them back. God knows they had better things to do here than rummage through their emotional baggage, but somehow he suddenly felt as if he’d been caught with his trousers down. As if Joanna had stripped him bare and was marching him about by the ring in his nose. Yoyo shook her head.

‘No, Owen, she didn’t say anything bad about you.’

‘Hmm. I’ll think about it.’

‘Do that.’ She grinned. The way he surrendered seemed to have smoothed her ruffled feathers. ‘We mustn’t rule out the possibility that we’ll have to save one another’s lives a few more times.’

‘As I believe I’ve already said – any time!’ He hesitated. ‘About Nyela—’

‘My fault. After I screwed it up, I thought the best thing to do would be to come back quickly.’

Jericho felt his ear.

‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you did screw it up.’

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Pounding the streets of Calgary and showing people the photograph of a possible gunman was more or less like knocking down an anthill and looking for one particular ant. Just a moment ago one and a half million people had been hard at work here, busy making more goods for the shelves and building more blocks on the streets of Canada’s fastest-growing city, industrious citizens flooding the streets, but now they seemed to have lost all sense of direction in an instant. Loreena welcomed the switch to helium-3 in the energy industry, but for all that she couldn’t bear the grim spectacle of mass unemployment, the decline of whole cities and provinces, the impending bankruptcy of countries which had made their money almost entirely from oil and gas. Ecologists had always had an idealistic vision of a smooth and manageable transition, with Mr Fossilosaurus given a gold watch and sent packing to a nice quiet retirement home, where he would then draw his last breath after a dignified decline, while ten billion people cheerily got their electricity from helium-3 generators. But transition had never gone smoothly, never in history. Not in the Cambrian epoch, not in the Ordovician, the Devonian, not at the end of the Permian, Triassic or Cretaceous, and not in the Upper Pleistocene either. That was when a new species called mankind appeared, a self-aware creature who added war and economic crisis to the catalogue of boundary events that already included volcanic eruption, meteorites, ice ages and epidemics. So the brave new world of clean fusion came hand in hand with a full-blown global economic crisis, whether the heralds of the new dawn liked it or not.

She put fruit, yoghurt and bread rolls onto her tray and took it over to the table, where the intern was already piling into his second stack of pancakes.

‘Yesterday was a damp squib then,’ he said.

Loreena shrugged. The Westin Calgary had the advantage of being near the Imperial Oil building on 4th Avenue Southwest, so after she had telephoned Palstein she had decided to take rooms for the night there for herself and the kid. After that they retraced the mysterious fat man’s steps. It was a dispiriting business. On Bruford’s video, he came in from the north. Most hotels were to the south, west or east though. He could have been staying in any one of them, if he had been staying in a hotel at all. Perhaps he even lived in the city. There was a clear Asian presence here. Just a walk away from the Bow River, the third largest Chinatown in Canada after Vancouver and Toronto stretched down Calgary’s lively Centre Street. In the Sheraton, not far from Prince’s Park Island, the staff thought that they remembered a tall, shabby-looking Asian man with a paunch on him, but he hadn’t been a guest. They had showed his picture around shops and restaurants, and had even paid a visit to Calgary International Airport, all to no avail. The only good news this morning for Keowa was her breakfast, a filling but not fattening tray of pineapple, sunflower seed rolls and low fat yoghurt.

Just as she was pouring a cup of herbal tea, Sina called, from the Vancouver desk for high society and other gossip.

‘Alejandro Ruiz, fifty-two years old. Last heard of as a member of the strategic board for Repsol, or more exactly Repsol YPF to give it its full name, incorporated in Madrid—’

‘I know all that already.’

‘Wait though! They’re market leaders in Spain and Argentina, for a long while they were the biggest energy corporation in private hands, they’re focused on exploration, production and refineries, they’re also world number three in LNG. They’ve never held any stake in alternative energies. Just to make up for it, the Mapuche Indians in Argentina have been bringing lawsuits against them like clockwork for the past twenty years, accusing them of polluting the groundwater.’

It was news to Loreena that this tribe was so litigious.

‘Are there even any Mapuche left?’

‘Oh yes! They’re in Argentina and Chile. Even if the Chilean government stubbornly denies that there’s ever been any such thing as the Mapuche. Makes you laugh, eh? Anyway, Repsol’s one of those companies where the lights are going out floor by floor. And Ruiz wasn’t just vice-president for strategy, which is what I thought yesterday, he was also directly responsible for petrochemical activities in twenty-nine countries, as of July 2022.’

‘That’s odd,’ said Loreena.

‘Why?’

‘I mean, given the way the company’s set up. Why would they make somebody strategic director who demands they diversify into solar power, and uses funny words like ethics?’

‘Most of the time they just put him on the payroll as their ecological conscience so they wouldn’t look dumb in public. He was a second-ranker in the corporate hierarchy, so he could bark but he couldn’t bite. But by 2022 the tanker was well and truly headed for the rocks. In a situation like that, you could have appointed an Andalusian donkey to the top job. Once it was obvious that Repsol was going to be one of the big losers, they needed a scapegoat at the helm, that’s all.’

‘By 2022 Ruiz had no chance of preventing catastrophe.’

‘I know. Still, he tried pretty much everything he could. He even tried striking a deal with Orley Enterprises.’

‘Say what?’ said Loreena, taken aback.

‘I watched a couple of videos. He gives a good impression, this guy. His wife and daughter in Madrid are distraught over whether he’ll ever turn up again. I’ll send you contact details for them, and for some of his colleagues at Repsol. Best of luck.’

‘You’re gonna call Ruiz’s old lady?’ the intern asked once she had finished speaking to Vancouver.

Loreena got up. ‘Any reason why not?’

‘The time. Also, you can’t speak Spanish.’

‘It’s half past five in the afternoon in Madrid.’

‘Hey, really?’ He licked grease off his fingers. ‘I thought it was always night in Europe when it’s day here.’

Loreena opened her mouth to answer, stopped, shook her head and went up to her room. She was pleased to get through on her first attempt. Señora Ruiz looked distracted, and tried to rebuff her at first but in the end was very helpful; above all, she spoke excellent English, as Loreena had secretly been hoping, since indeed she didn’t speak Spanish. They talked for about ten minutes, then she called one of the strategic team at Repsol, who had also been a friend of Ruiz out of the office. Sina had hunted down numbers for some more of his colleagues, but they were all newly unemployed.

She was interested by what she found out.

She looked out of the window. A grey sky brooded over the city, warning that all things must pass. Drizzling curtains of rain blurred the lines of the Calgary Tower, one hundred and ninety metres tall, built by the oil companies Marathon and Husky Oil back in the day. There was something skeletal about the high-rises. A once-prosperous city was shedding weight fast, devouring its own reserves of stored fat. After thinking things over for a while, she called Vancouver again.

‘Can you reconstruct the last few days before Ruiz disappeared?’

‘Depends what you want to know.’

‘I’ve just been speaking with his wife, and one of his colleagues. Ruiz’s last stop before he flew on to Lima was in Beijing.’

‘Beijing?’ asked Sina, surprised. ‘What was Ruiz doing in Beijing?’

‘Yes, indeed. What?’

‘Repsol has no stake in China.’

‘Not quite true. There was definitely a joint venture with Sinopec – it had been planned for a while. Some kind of exploration deal. They spent a week bashing it into shape. I’m more interested in what he did on the last day, right before he left China. On 1 September 2022, to be exact. Apparently he was taking part in some conference that his colleague I spoke to knew next to nothing about. All he knew was that it took place outside Beijing. He reckoned there had to be some papers about it lying around somewhere, and he’ll have a look.’

‘Nobody knows what the conference was about?’

‘Ruiz was strategic director. Autonomous. He didn’t have to sit up and beg for every little thing. Señora Ruiz tells me that her Alejandro was a very warm-hearted, easygoing person—’

‘Sobs.’

‘I’m getting somewhere. He wasn’t the type to get upset over nothing. They had spoken on the phone just before the conference, and he was all smiles and sunshine. He had helped get the joint venture on its feet, he was in a good mood, he was cracking jokes and looking forward to Peru. But when he called from the plane to Lima, he seemed fairly downcast.’

‘This was the day after the mysterious conference?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And did she ask him why?’

‘She supposed that something must have gone wrong in Beijing, something that really got to him, but he didn’t want to talk about it, she tells me. All in all he seemed like a different person, he was in a very uncharacteristic mood, upset and nervous. Then he called her one last time from Lima. He sounded desperate. Almost scared.’

‘This was just before he disappeared?’

‘The same night, yes. It was the last she heard from him.’

‘And what am I to do now?’

‘Dig around, as usual. I want to know what kind of meeting he was attending in China. Where it happened, what it was all about, who was there.’

‘Hmm. I’ll do what I can, okay?’

‘But?’

Sina hesitated. ‘Susan wants another word with you.’

Loreena frowned. Susan Hudsucker was the Greenwatch number one. She had an idea what was coming, and come indeed it did, just as she expected: when, Susan asked, did Loreena expect to be done with her documentary about the oil companies’ environmental sins? If at all possible, they wanted to broadcast Trash of the Titans while there were still titans around, and didn’t she think she might be barking up the wrong tree with Palstein?

Loreena said she was trying to solve an attempted murder.

Susan said that Greenwatch wasn’t the FBI.

But it could be that the shooting had a lot to do with the subject of her documentary.

Susan was sceptical, although on the other hand Loreena wasn’t someone that even she could push around.

‘Maybe you should bear in mind that what you’re doing could be dangerous,’ she said.

‘When has our work ever not been dangerous?’ snorted Loreena. ‘Investigative work is always dangerous.’

‘Loreena, this is about an attempted murder!’

‘Listen, Susan’ – she paced up and down the hotel room like a tiger in a cage – ‘I can’t give you all the details right now. We’ll take the first plane to Vancouver tomorrow morning and call an editorial conference. Then you’ll all see that this is an extremely hot story, and that we’ve already got a whole lot further than the darn police. I mean, we’d be fools not to stick with this one!’

‘I don’t want to stand in your way. It’s just that we have an awful lot else to do as well. Trash of the Titans needs to be finished, I can’t take you off that task.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘But I do worry.’

‘Apart from all that, I did a deal with Palstein. If we solve this case, he’ll give us the deep dirt on EMCO.’

Susan sighed. ‘Tomorrow we’ll decide what happens next, okay?’

‘But by then Sina has to—’

‘Tomorrow, Loreena.’

‘Susan—’

‘Please! We’ll do everything you want, but first we have to talk about it.’

‘Oh, shit, Susan!’

‘Sid will come fetch you. Let him know in good time when you’re landing.’

Gritting her teeth, Loreena paced the room, thumped her clenched fist on the wall several times and then went back down to the restaurant, where the intern was digging into a huge portion of chocolate mousse.

‘Why do you stuff your face like that all the time?’ she snarled at him.

‘I’m having a growth spurt.’ He raised his eyes sluggishly. ‘That doesn’t seem to have been a particularly good call to Señora Ruiz.’

‘No, that was fine.’ She slumped down sulkily into her chair, looked into the empty cup and rattled the empty teapot. ‘The not particularly good call was with Susan. She thinks we should be concentrating on Trash of the Titans.’

‘Oops,’ said the intern. ‘That’s not good.’

‘All the same, we fly to Vancouver first thing tomorrow and we’ll sort it out. I’m not going to let it slip through my fingers now!’

‘So we’re still working on Trash of the—’

‘No, no!’ She leaned down. ‘I will be working on Trash of the Titans. You take a good look at Lars Gudmundsson.’

‘Palstein’s bodyguard?’

‘That’s the guy. Him, and his team. I found out that he worked for an outfit in Dallas called Eagle Eye – cute name, huh? Personal protections, mercenaries. Check Gudmundsson out, tell me his shoe size and his favourite food. I want to know everything there is to know about the guy.’

The intern looked uncertain. ‘What if he notices something? Catches us sniffing around after him?’

Loreena gave him a thin smile. ‘If he notices anything, we’ve made a mistake. And do we make mistakes?’

‘I do, sure.’

‘I don’t. So eat up before I get sick from watching you. We’ve work to do.’

Grand Hyatt, Berlin, Germany

They were sitting in the lobby by the fireplace. Tu listened to their report as he guzzled down nuts by the handful. He was scooping them from the little bowl by his vodka martini faster than he could gulp them down, so that his cheeks filled out like a squirrel’s in the autumn.

‘One hundred thousand,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘And that’s his final price.’ Jericho fished around in the bowl. A single remaining peanut sought to escape his clutches. ‘Vogelaar won’t be beaten down.’

‘Then we’ll pay him.’

‘Just so we’re all on the same page here,’ said Yoyo, smiling sweetly, ‘I don’t have a hundred thousand.’

‘So what? Do you really think that I flew the whole way here just to give up because of a measly hundred thousand? You’ll have the money tomorrow morning.’

‘Tian, I—’ Jericho managed to catch the nut between finger and thumb, and popped it into his mouth, where it rattled around on his tongue, lonely. ‘I wouldn’t like to see you shell out the money.’

‘Why not? I’m the client.’

‘Well, as to that.’

‘Am I somehow not your client?’

‘Actually that’s Chen, and he doesn’t have a—’

‘No, actually it’s me, and I’ll pick up the tab!’ Tu said emphatically. ‘The main thing is that your friend hands over the dossier.’

‘Well that’s very – noble of you.’

‘Don’t fall on my neck weeping. This is what we call expenses.’ Tu dismissed the topic. ‘As for myself, I can report that after some hours spent in the pleasant but somewhat sexless company of your Diane, we’ve identified the provider who hosted those dead letter boxes.’

‘You decoded the message?’ Yoyo yelped.

‘Shhh.’ Tu twinkled merrily at the waiter, who had come to exchange the empty bowl for another, brimming with nuts. He chomped away and waited until the man was out of earshot. ‘First of all I tracked down the central router. Very sophisticated system, that. The web pages were bounced from server to server until they appeared to be hosted in several different countries. If you track them all back though, you end up at one single, common server. And that – marvellous to report! – is in Beijing.’

‘Blimey!’ Yoyo exclaimed. ‘Who’s the host?’

‘Hard to say. Mind you, I’m afraid that this server might turn out not to be the last link in the chain either.’

‘If we had some way of tracking each and every page routed out from there—’

‘There’s no list, if that’s what you mean. Anyway, Diane is working with the latest miraculous software from Tu Technologies, so she found some more dead letter boxes in the web which respond to the same mask.’ A reverential look passed over Tu’s features. He looked at each of them in turn. ‘The text is now a little longer.’

‘Orley Enterprises.’ Yoyo frowned quizzically.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Tu grinned slyly. ‘The world’s biggest technology corporation. We were just talking about them! If you ask me, that throws a whole new light on the matter. It seems to have less to do with some violent handover of power in Equatorial Guinea and much more to do with who’s top dog—’

‘—out in space.’ Jericho felt his ear. Right now he felt as though he’d been slogging and stumbling along a rutted country road for hours, and had just found out that the main road was running alongside. According to Vogelaar, their problems had begun in 2022 when a delegation paid a visit, supposedly from the Chinese aerospace ministry; Mayé had seen all his hopes dashed and was ready to take any deal. He signed a contract which could hardly have been more absurd, but Kenny stood for Beijing, and so Mayé had believed that he was dealing with an official delegation.

‘Good.’ He steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s forget Mayé for a moment. Yoyo, do you remember what Vogelaar said about the launching pad? Who built it?’

‘The Zheng Group.’

‘Exactly, Zheng. And who is Zheng’s biggest competitor?’

‘America.’ Yoyo frowned again. ‘No. Orley Enterprises.’

‘Which more or less amounts to the same thing, if I’m not mistaken. Orley helped the Americans towards lunar supremacy, and he’s always just ahead of Zheng, any way you look at it. So Zheng turns to espionage—’

‘Or to sabotage.’

‘I see that you’ve got it.’ Tu scrabbled around in the Brazil nuts and pistachios. ‘They’re talking about an operation, and the fact that Vogelaar continues to represent a grave risk because he knows all about something. But what kind of operation could this be where people have to die in droves to keep it secret?’

Yoyo’s face clouded over.

‘An operation that’s not been carried out yet,’ she said slowly.

‘I think so too,’ Jericho said, nodding. ‘Vogelaar doesn’t seem to know anything about the nature or its timing, but he could send the whole thing sky-high if he made a public comment about the facts behind the coup. The whole world still believes that Ndongo got the presidency back under his own steam, or with Beijing’s help—’

‘Quite, and just for once we’re not going to fall into the usual trap,’ said Tu. ‘Then there’s more. Furthermore, Orley Enterprises – blah blah – have no reason to suspect disruption. And—’

‘Nobody there suspects everything.’

‘So they suspect something.’ Yoyo looked from one to the other. ‘Isn’t that right? I mean, that’s what you’d say if they know something.’

‘We can’t assume that the second phrase is actually complete, just because it looks it,’ Jericho said. ‘What’s quite clear is that Orley Enterprises is part of the picture somehow. Then Zheng stands on the other side. The disaster in Equatorial Guinea is all down to some faked-up space programme that he got onto its feet. Zheng represents Beijing, although he could be acting on his own account. Julian Orley stands for Washington, he’s the saviour of the American space programme and Zheng’s natural enemy—’

‘That’s only true to a limited extent,’ Tu butted in. ‘Julian Orley is English himself, if I’m not mistaken, and he only plays that game with the Americans because they’re useful to him. Even he’s just acting on his own account.’

‘So what’s going on here? A proxy war?’

‘Possibly. We’ve known since last year if not before that the Moon’s got the potential to cause a crisis.’

‘Vogelaar sees things differently,’ Yoyo threw in. ‘He reckons that Beijing was just a bluff on the part of whoever was actually behind the Equatorial Guinea satellite programme.’

‘Call it Beijing or call it Zheng.’ Tu shrugged. ‘Do we really want to rule out the possibility that if a global corporation planned an attack on a rival, its government would give tacit approval?’

‘Do dogs get in dogfights?’

‘Wait a moment.’ Jericho put his fingers to his lips. ‘Orley Enterprises – haven’t they just been in the news? There was a report about the Moon crisis a few days ago, and—’

‘Orley is always in the news.’

‘Yes, but this time there really was something new.’

‘Of course!’A spark of recognition lit up in Yoyo’s eyes. ‘Gaia!’

‘What?’

‘The hotel! The hotel on the Moon! Gaia!’

‘That’s right,’ Jericho said pensively. ‘They’re planning a hotel up there.’

‘I think they’ve even built it by now,’ Tu said, frowning in thought. ‘It was supposed to be ready last year, and then there were delays thanks to the helium-3 flare-up. Nobody knows what it looks like. Orley’s big secret.’

‘You can find all kinds of speculation on the net,’ said Yoyo. ‘And you’re right, it is ready. Sometime round about now there’s even supposed to be— Hmm.’

‘What?’

‘I think there’s supposed to be an inaugural trip. Some gang of filthy rich guests are flying up there. Maybe even Orley himself. Utterly exclusive.’

Jericho stared at her. ‘Are you saying that the operation might have to do with this hotel?’

‘Interesting.’ Tu ran his fingers through the sparse growth at the sides of his head. ‘We should get to work straight away. We’ll have to learn all the latest about Orley Enterprises. What’s up right now? What’s planned in the near future? Then we’ll have a look at the Zheng Group. Once we have Vogelaar’s dossier on top of all that, we’ll probably be one giant leap further. When were you going to meet this guy, anyway?’

‘Tomorrow noon,’ said Jericho. ‘At the Pergamon Museum.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Of course you haven’t. Three thousand years of Chinese civilisation puts everything else just that little bit out of focus.’ Jericho rubbed his jaw and looked at Yoyo. ‘By the way, I don’t think it’s a good idea if we both turn up there.’

‘Now wait a moment!’ she protested. ‘So far we’ve been through everything together.’

‘I know. Nevertheless.’

‘I see!’ She tightened her lips into a hostile line. ‘You’re still pissed off because of Nyela.’

‘No, not in the least. Really, I’m not.’

‘Do you think that Vogelaar will try to shove you into the meat-slicer again?’

‘He’s unpredictable.’

‘He wants money, Owen! He chose to meet in a public place. What’s going to happen there?’

‘Owen’s right,’ Tu put in. ‘Do we know whether Vogelaar even has this dossier?’

Yoyo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I say. He told you about a dossier. Did he actually show you one?’

‘Of course not, he wants us to give him the—’

‘So he could have been bluffing,’ Tu interrupted her. ‘Precisely because he wants the money. He could try to get the drop on Owen in the museum and make off with the hundred thousand.’

‘Get the drop on him how?’

‘Like this.’ Jericho stretched out an index finger and put it to his temple. ‘It works, even in crowds.’

‘Well great!’ Yoyo squirmed in her seat from rage and frustration. ‘So that’s why you want to go into the museum on your own?’

‘Believe me, it’s safer.’

‘It would be safer with me and my haunch of antelope.’

‘I’m faster and more adaptable on my own. I don’t have to watch out for anyone but myself.’

‘Like you can look after yourself, bunnikins.’

‘I can look out well enough to save your skin twice.’

‘Oh, so that’s what it’s about,’ Yoyo huffed, turning red. ‘You’re worried you’d have to save my skin a third time. You think I’m a nitwit.’

‘You’re anything but a nitwit.’

‘So what am I?’

‘Could it perhaps be that you’re trouble?’

‘I should hope so!’

‘Yoyo,’ Tu said gently but firmly, ‘I think the decision’s been made.’

Yoyo had got herself worked up into a storm of indignation, and now came the cloudburst. Fat tears like raindrops gathered in the corners of her eyes, brimmed over her eyelids.

‘I don’t want to just sit about!’ she said in a ragged voice. ‘I got all of us into this mess. Don’t you understand that I want to do something?’

‘Of course we do. You’ll be doing something if you help me with the research.’

The waiter appeared and checked their table. Tu plunged his hand into the bowl, as though afraid that he hadn’t been giving due attention to the nuts.

‘We’ll haff to fime oup emryfing abou’ Orley,’ he muttered indistinctly. ‘On fop of all vat’ – he swallowed – ‘I want to know more about Zheng’s solo projects. After all, he’s the only Chinese entrepreneur who could go building a satellite launch pad anywhere on Earth without prior state approval. You see, my dear Yoyo, even if Owen were to beg me on bended knee to let him take you with him, I’d still refuse.’

Yoyo glowered at him. ‘You eat like a pig, just so you know.’

‘Are you going to help me or are you not?’

‘Have you two alpha males even considered letting Orley Enterprises know?’

‘I have,’ Tu said. ‘All the same, I don’t know exactly what we could tell them.’

‘That something is going to happen, at some point in time, though we don’t know what it is or what’s the target, but that they are possibly the victim.’

‘All admirably specific. Shall we also tell them that Zheng is behind the whole thing?’

‘Or Beijing. Or the Chinese Secret Service.’ Yoyo was visibly calming down. For the time being, it seemed that the dams would not burst. ‘We don’t know when the attack is going to take place – if indeed it is an attack. Mayé was deposed right around the time of the Moon crisis, it could even be that the crisis was the operation, but our text tells us something quite different. It’s still to come. But when? How much time do we have? We zoomed over to Berlin at Mach 2 to warn Vogelaar. We should send word to Orley Enterprises at the speed of light, even if our message is very vague.’

‘Excellent strategic argumentation,’ Jericho put in.

Yoyo leaned back. She looked only halfway mollified. Jericho knew what she was going through, the rage, the shame and the helplessness of a child who isn’t even allowed to clear up the mess she’s made; he knew that her father’s reproachful silence loomed up somewhere inside her. Like so many children, she had learned early enough that she wasn’t up to some unspoken standards.

There was a pimply boy who knew all about such things.

Like the goddess Kali, the Orley conglomerate had many arms growing from its torso, so many that at some point Tu got fed up with following links and flowcharts. The company presented some excellent targets for attack. The hotel project was nominally part of Orley Space, which was responsible for the space programme and ancillary technologies, but then again it wasn’t, because private travel to the Space Station and the Moon came under Orley Travel. For helium-3 mining and freight, NASA and the US Treasury were the people to talk to, but then again so were Orley Space and Orley Energy, whose main business was building fusion reactors. The further they delved into the labyrinthine structures of the company, the less they felt they knew about where the ‘operation’ might be aimed. Orley Entertainment produced films such as Perry Rhodan, which had made the Irish actor Finn O’Keefe one of the top earners in the movie world; it was also experimenting with the next generation of 3D cinema, and had built an Orley Sphere in several cities around the globe, each a huge spherical arena for grandiose concerts and events, seating thirty thousand visitors. Currently a concert on the OSS was in the planning stages, to be given by David Bowie – almost eighty years old – and this of course was Orley Entertainment’s brief, but Orley Space and Orley Travel were also part of the project. There was a division for marketing and communication, Orley Media, as well as an innovation incubator where young researchers tweaked tomorrow’s world into shape – this was Orley Origin. Once you got to the internet, the conglomerate grew and ramified like a spiral galaxy. When Diane tried the simple keyword news, it came up with a complete agenda for the twenty-first century. Everything was new, and everything really did mean everything, since there was hardly a field of human endeavour where Orley Enterprises wasn’t trying to plant their flag, all of course with fervent belief and noble intent. There seemed no end to their search by the time they found OneWorld, an initiative which Julian Orley had founded to prevent global collapse; it poured forth projects for prevention and adaptation as reliably as the gushing geysers of Iceland, constantly testing new fuels and reagents, new kinds of engine, new this that and the other, all the way up to the meteorite shields which were being developed aboard the OSS in collaboration with Orley Space and Orley Origin.

And all of this under the aegis of Julian Orley, icon, philanthropist and eccentric, more like a rock star than a business mogul, smiling youthfully, the promise of endless adventure on his lips; he was America’s ally and at the same time nobody’s partner, a concerned citizen, generous patron, unpredictable genius, a master of time and space, the high priest of what-if, a man who seemed to hold the patent on planet Earth and interplanetary space, even on the future itself.

Diane also informed them that Gaia, the hotel on the Moon, was now open for a select group of guests led by Julian and Lynn Orley. The trip was organised by—

‘That’s enough for me,’ Tu declared, and called company headquarters in London, asking to be put through to Central Security. Jennifer Shaw, the chief of security, was in a meeting, and her deputy, Andrew Norrington, was travelling. In the end Tu spoke to a woman called Edda Hoff, number three in the hierarchy, who wore her hair in a pageboy cut like a crash helmet. She had all the personality and approachability of an electronic voice menu: if you want to report a terrorist attack, please say ‘one’. For bribery, corruption and espionage, say ‘two’. If you wish to attack us yourself, please say ‘three’. She spoke as though Orley Enterprises spent the whole day fielding calls from people warning of dark deeds or announcing their own.

Tu sent her the text fragment. She read it carefully, without a flicker of expression passing across her mask-like face. She listened calmly to his explanations. It was only when Tu started talking about the hotel that her features came to life, and she raised her eyebrows so that they almost met her black fringe.

‘And what makes you so sure that the attack is going to target Gaia?’

‘I heard that it was open for business,’ Tu explained.

‘Not officially. The first group of visitors arrived there a few days ago, Julian Orley’s personal guests. He himself—’ She stopped speaking.

‘Is up there?’ Tu completed the sentence for her. ‘That would make me nervous!’

‘There’s nothing in the document about the timing of the operation,’ she said somewhat pedantically. ‘It’s all rather vague.’

‘What’s not so vague is that innocent people have lost their lives because of this document,’ Tu said, almost cheerfully. ‘They’re dead, dead as doornails, definitely dead, nothing vague about it, if you see what I mean. As for ourselves, we’ve also risked our lives so that you can read it.’

Hoff seemed to consider. ‘How can I reach you?’

Tu gave her his phone number, and Jericho’s.

‘Do you plan to do anything about it?’ he asked. ‘And if so, when?’

‘We’ll let Gaia know. Within the next couple of hours.’ The corners of her mouth lifted slightly, giving the illusion of a smile. ‘Thank you for letting us know. We’ll call you.’

The screen went dark.

‘Was that a woman?’ Yoyo wondered out loud. ‘Or a robot?’

Tu snorted with laughter. ‘Diane?’

‘Good evening, Mister Tu.’

‘Just call me Tian.’

‘I shall do so.’

‘How are you, Diane?’

‘Thank you, Tian, I’m very well,’ Diane said in her warm alto voice. ‘What can I do for you?’

Tu turned back to the others. ‘I’ve no idea who or what Edda Hoff is,’ he whispered. ‘But compared with her, Diane is definitely a woman. Owen, I owe you an apology. I’m beginning to understand you.’

Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

‘Is there someone close to you whom you can trust unreservedly?’

Lynn thought about this. Her first instinct was to say Julian’s name, but suddenly she felt uncertain about this. She loved her father and admired him, and of course he trusted her. But whenever she saw herself through his eyes she was terrified by the image of the woman with sea-blue eyes, the woman Julian called his daughter, and the worst of it was that she could only ever see herself through his eyes, that even as a child she had yearned for his approval as a plant turns towards the sun. But she wasn’t that woman. So how could she trust him, since clearly he knew nothing at all of how she felt, didn’t know that she was just a puppet on strings, a shape-shifting monster, a mimic, a tumour, a thing?

‘Who are you thinking of at the moment?’ asked ISLAND-II.

‘Of my father. Julian Orley.’

‘Julian Orley is your father?’ the program asked, just to be sure.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s not the person you trust, though.’

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact. The man sitting across from her leaned forward. Lynn breathed heavily, and the sensors in her T-shirt dutifully registered her breathing and stored it in the database. The polygraph measured her body temperature, pulse, heartbeat and even her neuronal activity; the program scanned her voice frequencies as she spoke, measured her gestures, the way her pupils expanded or contracted, every movement of her eye muscles, each drop of sweat that formed. With every passing second of measurement, Lynn supplied more information for ISLAND-II, giving the program more to work with when it made statements about her.

The man seemed to stop and think for a moment. Then he smiled encouragingly. He was strongly built, completely bald, with friendly, thoughtful eyes. He seemed to be able to look through every veil that Lynn had wrapped around herself, her diorama of concealment, to pierce every layer with his glance but without that cool invasive gaze that psychologists so often used to put their patients under the microscope.

‘Good, Lynn. Let’s stick with the people around you right now. Tell me the names of the people you feel close to right now. And please leave a couple of seconds between every name.’

She looked at her fingernails. Talking to ISLAND-II was like walking a tightrope in the darkness to an unknown goal – along a torch-beam. The trick of it was to think of yourself as just as unreal as the program. The best thing was that there was no way of making a fool of yourself. For instance, Lynn had no idea at all whether there had ever been a real person who had served as the model for the bald man; the only thing she knew for sure was that it was impossible for him to feel contempt for her concerns. ISLAND-II – the Integrated System for Listening and Analysis of Neurological Data – was only as human as the therapists had programmed it to be.

‘Julian Orley,’ Lynn repeated – although the program had already struck him from the list of people she trusted – and she obediently included a brief pause. ‘Tim Orley – Amber Orley – Evelyn Chambers – that’s all of them, I think.’

Evelyn? Did she really trust America’s most powerful talk-show queen? On the other hand, why not? Evelyn was a friend, even if they hadn’t spoken much since the trip began. But the question had been about people she felt close to. What did ‘close’ have to do with trusting a person?

The man looked at her.

‘I’ve learned a great deal about you in the past quarter of an hour,’ he said. ‘You’re afraid. Less because of any actual concrete threats than because you have thoughts which make you horribly afraid. For as long as you do that, you can’t feel anything else. And then because you’ve lost that ability to feel, you lurch into a depression, this makes you more afraid, and most of all you’re afraid of fear itself. Unfortunately, when you’re in this frame of mind, every one of your thoughts grows to monstrous size, so you make the mistake of imagining that there’s some substance to what you’re thinking and that’s to blame for your condition. So you try to get rid of them at the level of substance, and you end up doing entirely the opposite. They only look like monsters, but the more seriously you take them, the bigger and stronger they grow.’

He paused to let his words sink in.

‘But in point of fact the substance is practically interchangeable. It’s not the substance of your thoughts that makes them frightening. Fear is a physical phenomenon. It’s the fear that creates the substance. Your heartbeat speeds up, your chest tightens, you tense up, stiffen, you become rigid. Your inward horizons shrink down and now you feel helpless and no longer free. You rage against it, like an animal in a cage. All these physical symptoms taken together make you give your thoughts such weight, Lynn, that’s why they have such horrible power over you. It’s important that you learn to see through the mechanism. It’s nothing more than that, you see. As soon as you manage to relax you’ll be able to break the spiral. The more intensely you feel yourself, the less power your thoughts have to torture you. That’s why any sort of therapy will have to begin with physical exercise. Sport, lots of sport. Exercise, feel the burn, make your muscles ache. Sharpen up your senses. Hearing, sight, taste, smell, touch. Leave all these projections behind and get out into the real world. Breathe deeply, feel your body. Do you have any questions?’

‘No. Actually, yes.’ Lynn wrung her hands. ‘I understand what you mean, but – but – it’s just that these really are very specific fears. I mean, I’m not just making this up! What I’ve done here, what I’ve let myself in for. My thoughts only ever have to do with – destruction, disaster – death. Other people, dying. Killing, torturing them, destroying them! – I am so horribly afraid of turning into something, suddenly slipping my leash, that I’ll leap on the others, tear them to shreds, people I love! Something eating away at me from inside, until there’s nothing left of me but a shell, and inside that shell something awful, something strange, and – I don’t know who I am any longer. I don’t know how much longer I can take all the pressure—’

Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, drops of sheer despair. Her chin trembled. There seemed to be fluids spouting from everywhere, from her nose, the corners of her mouth, spilling over her lower lip. The man leaned backwards and looked at her from under lowered eyelids, maybe expecting that she would add something, but she couldn’t say any more, she could only gasp for air. She wished she could vanish from this world, back to the womb, not to Crystal’s though – the woman had never been able to offer her safety or warmth, all she had done was pass on her melancholy poison, the bad code written in her genes. She wished she had a father who would tell her that it had just been a bad dream, but not Julian – he would take her in his arms and comfort her, yes, but he wouldn’t have the least idea of what her problem was, any more than he had been able to understand Crystal’s depression and her later mental illness. That didn’t mean though that Julian despised weakness, he just couldn’t understand it! Lynn wanted to be back in the loving arms of parents who had never existed.

‘I have very high expectations of myself,’ she said, straining to sound businesslike. ‘And then – I feel sure that they’re too high, and I hate myself for falling short – for failing.’

She felt herself become transparent, and clutched her arms tightly around herself though it did nothing to make the feeling go away. She was talking to a computer, but she had rarely felt so exposed.

‘I’ll just suggest another way you could look at it,’ ISLAND-II said after a while. ‘These aren’t your expectations. They are other people’s expectations, but you’ve bought into them so completely that you think that they are yours. So you try to bring your actions into line with these expectations. You don’t place any value on who you truly are, but rather on how other people would like you to be. But you can’t deny your real self for ever, you can’t spend for ever running yourself down. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I think I do.’

The man looked at her for a while, friendly, analytical.

‘How do you feel right now?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘The person you really are knows. Try to feel that feeling.’

‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘I can’t do something like that. I can’t get – close to myself.’

‘You don’t have to conceal anything here, Lynn.’ The man smiled. ‘Not from me. Don’t forget, I’m just a program. Albeit a very intelligent one.’

Conceal? Oh yes, she was the queen of concealment, had been since her childhood, when she had spent hours in front of the mirror, herself and her reflection practising concealment together, until she was able to project any possible expression onto her pretty face: confidence, when she was about to fall to pieces, easygoing calm when the winds of stress were screaming all around her, bluffing with an empty hand. And how quickly she had learned what such tactics could achieve, when the man she most wanted to please disapproved of the very idea of such concealment. But he couldn’t see through her mimicry, and in the end even she couldn’t see through it. In the hectic attempt to keep up with the pace he set, she developed a deep-seated aversion to finer feelings, her own included. She began to despise her fellow man’s maudlin moods and public passions. Souls stripped bare, suffering on display, the clingy confidentialities of unearned intimacy. Letting the whole world know what side of bed you’d got out that morning, letting them all peer in at the bubbling chemistry of your mind – all this was repulsive. How much she preferred her own clean, hygienic concealment. Until that day five years ago when everything changed—

‘What you’re feeling is rage,’ ISLAND-II said calmly.

‘Rage?’

‘Yes. Unfettered rage. There’s a Lynn Orley trapped inside who wants to break out at last, and be loved, wants herself to love her. This Lynn has to tear down a great many walls, she has to free herself of a great many expectations. Are you surprised that she wants to maim and kill?’

‘But I don’t want to maim and kill,’ she sobbed. ‘But I can’t – can’t do anything to stop—’

‘Of course you don’t want to. Not physically. You don’t want to do anything to anyone, Lynn, have no fear on that front. You’re only torturing one person, yourself. There’s no monster inside you.’

‘But these thoughts just won’t leave me alone!’

‘It’s the other way around, Lynn. You won’t leave them alone.’

‘But I’m trying. I’m trying everything I can!’

‘They’ll become weaker the stronger the real Lynn grows. What you think is some monstrous transformation is really just a new birth, a beginning. We also call it liberation. You kick and bite, you want to get out. And of course as you do that, something else dies, your old self, the identity that was forced upon you. Do you know what the three childhood neuroses are?’

Lynn shook her head.

‘They’re as follows: I have to. I mustn’t. I ought to. Please repeat.’

‘I – have to, mustn’t – ought to—’

‘How does it sound?’

‘All fucked up.’

‘From today, they don’t count for you any longer. You aren’t that child any longer. From now on, all that counts is: I am.’

‘I am what I am—’ Lynn sang in a wavering voice. ‘And who am I?’

‘You’re the one who knows what you think and what you’re doing. You are what’s left when you have shucked away all those people you think are you, until all that’s left is pure awareness. Have you ever had the feeling of watching yourself think? That you can see the thoughts rising up and then vanishing again?’

Lynn nodded weakly.

‘And that’s a very important truth as well, Lynn. You are not your thoughts. Do you understand? You are not your thoughts. You are not the same as what you imagine the world to be.’

‘No, I don’t understand.’

‘An example. Are you aware right now that you can see the holographic image of a man?’

‘Yes.’

‘What else can you see?’

‘Furniture. The chair I’m sitting on. A few gadgets, technology. Walls, floor, ceiling.’

‘Where are you, exactly?’

‘I’m sitting on a chair.’

‘And what are you doing?’

‘Nothing. Listening. Talking.’

‘When?’

‘What do you mean, when?’

‘Tell me when this is happening.’

‘Well, now.’

‘And that’s all we need. You are well aware of the world that’s really there, around you, you can cut through to the world as it is. To the here and now. Then after that there’s another now, and another now, and now, now, now, and so on and so forth. Lynn, everything else is just projections, fantasy, speculation. Do you find the here and now threatening?’

‘We’re on the Moon. Anything could go wrong, and then—’

‘Stop. You’re slipping away into hypotheticals again. Stay with what really is.’

‘Well then,’ said Lynn, unwillingly. ‘No. Nothing threatening.’

‘You see? Reality is not threatening. When you leave this room, you’ll meet other people, you’ll do other things, you’ll experience a new now, then another now, and then another. You can look at each moment as it comes, and ask if it’s threatening, but there’s only one thought not allowed here – What if? The question is – What is? And then you’ll find, nearly all the time, that the only threat is in your imaginings.’

‘I’m dangerous,’ Lynn whispered.

‘No. You think that you’re dangerous, so much so that it frightens you. But that’s just a thought. It pops up and goes boo, and then you fall for it. Eighty-five per cent of everything that goes through our heads is rubbish. Most of it we don’t even register. Sometimes, though, a thought comes along and goes boo, and we jump with fright. But we are not these thoughts. You needn’t be afraid.’

‘O-okay.’

The man was quiet for a while.

‘Do you want to tell me any more about yourself?’

‘Yes. No, another time. I’ll have to end the session – for now.’

‘Good. One more thing. Earlier I asked you whom you trust.’

‘Yes.’

‘I assessed your physiological responses as you named each name. I recommend that you confide in one of these people. Talk to Tim Orley.’

Confide in a person.

‘Thank you,’ Lynn said mechanically, without even thinking whether ISLAND-II cared for the common courtesies. The bald man smiled.

‘Come again whenever you like.’

She switched him off, removed the sensors from her forehead, took off the T-shirt and put on one of her own. She stared at the empty glass plate for a while, unable to stand up, even though standing up was easier here on the fucking Moon than anywhere else.

Had it been wise to come here? To sweat and strain in front of a mirror that she really didn’t want to look into? Famously, ISLAND-II could deliver some astonishing results. Since it had come along, manned space-flight without regular psychotherapy was unimaginable. During the 1970s, of course, the age of hero-worship, people would have been more likely to believe that Uncle Scrooge McDuck was real than they’d have believed that astronauts could suffer from depression, but now, in the era of the long-haul mission, everything depended on the mysteries of the human mind. Nobody wanted to screw up grotesquely expensive undertakings such as the planned missions to Mars just because of neurotic compulsions. The greatest danger didn’t come from meteorites or technical failure, but rather from panic, phobias, rivalry displays and the good old sex drive, all of which urgently demanded a psychologist on board ship. Simulations had been tried, which yielded much food for thought. In two cases out of five, the psychologist lost his mind before anyone else, and began to drive the other crew members mad with his analytical skills. But even when he managed to keep it together, his presence didn’t have the desired effect. It became clear that the other astronauts would rather swallow their own tongues than confide their troubles to a living, breathing fellow crew member, who could pass judgement on them. There were tragically obvious reasons for such self-censorship: men were worried for their careers, and women were scared of judgement and scorn.

Which was how virtual therapists had joined the game. At first, simple programs ran through questionnaires and gave advice straight out of the self-help shelves, then later came scripted exchanges, then finally software capable of complex dialogues. There was nothing here that could replace a video-link and a chat with friends and family, but what could be done on Mars, where it was virtually impossible to get a connection? In the end, prize-winning cybertherapists had developed a program which combined advanced dialogue capacity with simultaneous evaluation of the most extensive corpus of knowledge that any artificial intelligence had ever had access to. Sceptics proclaimed that every individual human being had their own specific needs, that only another human being could ever understand, but results seemed to show quite the opposite. There might be many doors to the labyrinth of the human soul, but once you’d wandered around in there for a while you always reached familiar ground. There weren’t millions of different psychological profiles, just a few basic patterns repeated a millionfold. In the end, you always hit the same old neuroses, complexes and traumas, and most of them were acute in nature, such as squabbles over who had eaten whose last pot of chocolate pudding. Since then, ISLAND-I had been used in space stations, remote research installations and corporate headquarters all around the globe, while the incomparably more advanced ISLAND-II was so far only installed in Gaia’s meditation centres and therapy rooms. Even its programmers didn’t quite understand this pseudo-personality, a creature with no Promethean spark but able to learn astonishingly fast and reach remarkable conclusions.

After a while Lynn summoned up the energy to leave the therapy centre. As she walked to the lobby, her body language shifted to exude good cheer and brisk confidence. Guests walked past, euphoric, fidgeting restlessly, eyes as wide as children’s, back from their excursions to the lava caves in Moltke Crater, the peak of Mons Blanc or the depths of the Vallis Alpina. They chattered away about mankind’s civilising mission in the universe (specifically through tennis and golf), about the thrill of water sports in the pool here, about shuttle flights, grasshopper trips, moon-buggy rides, and of course, over and over again, about the view they had of Earth. Quarrels and disagreements seemed buried in the regolith by now. They were all talking to one another. Momoka Omura actually used words like creation, humility; Chuck Donoghue said that Evelyn Chambers was a real lady; Mimi Parker giggled as she agreed to take a sauna with Karla Kramp. Good cheer hung like a miasma over any honest, straightforward resentments they might have harboured. They were all hugs and smiles, even Oleg Rogachev, who forced each and every one of his fellow guests into a round of judo and sent them flying through the air for metres at a time with a nage-waza, grinning like a fox, and of course nobody got hurt! It was enough to make her throw up, but Lynn the chameleon listened to all the stories as though she were learning the secret of life, accepted compliments as a whore accepts payment, smiled as she suffered, suffered as she smiled. Quarter to eight, time to look forward to dinner. In her mind’s eye she saw the first course served and devoured, saw a fishbone stick in Aileen’s throat, saw Rogachev spitting blood, Heidrun choking, saw Gaia’s faceplate burst open and the whole merry gang of bastards sucked outside, defenceless in the vacuum, popping open, boiling, freezing.

Well, you didn’t go pop straight away.

But their own mothers wouldn’t have recognised the corpses.

Dana Lawrence looked up as Lynn came into the control room. She glanced at the clock. There were a few minutes yet before feeding time, and she had to go down to the basement for a routine check. Normally Ashwini Anand would take over in the control room while she was away, but she was just now looking into why the robot had failed to change the sheets in the Nairs’ suite.

‘Everything all right?’ Lynn asked.

‘So far, yes. There’s been a tech failure up on level twenty-seven, nothing important.’

Lynn’s eyes flickered. It was enough to trigger Dana’s analytical turn of mind. She wondered what was wrong with Julian’s daughter. More and more, she was showing signs of uncertainty, irritability. Why had she so vehemently refused to show Julian the footage two days ago? She looked at Lynn searchingly, but the woman had pulled herself together by now.

‘Can you manage, Dana?’

‘No problem. Look, since you happen to be here, could I ask you for a favour? I have to go downstairs for ten minutes. There’ll be nobody in the control room during that time, and—’

‘Just route it all through your phone.’

‘I do, usually. It’s just I’d like to keep an eye on everything when it all gets going in the restaurant. Could you take over for a while?’

‘Of course.’ Lynn smiled. ‘Go on then, never fear.’

You’re acting, Dana thought. What are you hiding? What’s your problem?

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘See you soon.’

The control room. Little Olympus.

There were so many buttons you could press here, systems you could reprogram, settings and parameters you could shift. Increase the oxygen level until everything burst into flame. Mix in a lethal level of carbon dioxide. Shut all the bulkheads and lock away the restaurant party until they all went mad, one after another. Pump the sludge into the drinking water so that everyone fell ill. Stop the lifts. Unplug the reactor. Increase the internal air pressure and then shunt it all out in one. All kinds of fun you could have. There were no limits to creativity here.

I am dangerous.

Lynn’s eyes drifted across the wall of monitors, all the areas under surveillance.

No. You are not your thoughts!‘

I am what I am,’ she sang softly.

Another tune joined in. A call from London, Orley headquarters, Central Security. Lynn frowned. Her hand hovered indecisively over the touchscreen, then she took the call, feeling queasy. Edda Hoff’s face appeared on the screen, with her pageboy cut. Her mask-like features gave no clue as to whether she had good news or bad to report.

‘Hello, Lynn,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘How are you?’

‘Couldn’t be better! The trip’s a complete success. And down there? Body count? Armageddon?’

Hoff took worryingly long to reply.

‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘A few hours ago someone got in touch with us. A certain Tu Tian, a Chinese businessman, currently in Berlin. He had a rather convoluted story to tell us. Apparently he and some friends of his have ended up in possession of restricted information, and since then they’ve been on somebody’s hit list.’

‘And what does that have to do with us?’

‘The text that caused all this kerfuffle is very broken up. There are only fragments, but from the little that they’ve been able to send us it doesn’t read much like a bedtime story.’

‘What is it, exactly?’

‘I’ll send it over to you.’

A few lines of text appeared on a separate screen. Lynn read the text, read it again, then once more, hoping that the name Orley might perhaps vanish, but it just seemed to grow bigger every time she read it. She stared at the document, paralysed, and felt a black wave of panic roll towards her as though the conversation with ISLAND-II had never taken place.

Nobody there suspects everything.

And?’ Hoff urged her. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s a fragment, as you say.’ Just don’t show any uncertainty! ‘A puzzle. As long as we don’t have the full text, we may perhaps be reading more into it than is really there.’

‘Tu is worried that there will be an attack on Gaia.’

‘That’s going a bit far, don’t you think?’

‘Depends how you look at it.’

‘There’s nothing here to tell us when this operation is even going to take place.’

‘That’s what I told him. On the other hand, we can’t simply ignore what’s going on.’

‘What is going on though, Edda? To decide whether or not you’re going to ignore something, you need to know what it is, don’t you? But we just don’t know. Orley has interests worldwide: if there really is something planned against us, it doesn’t necessarily have to be aimed at Gaia. How did this Chinese gentleman get that idea?’

‘Because the reports are in all the newspapers.’

‘I see.’ Her thoughts raced. The edges of the room seemed to be blurring and fading. ‘Well, that’s true, the hotel is certainly most in the news, but that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s most at risk. At any rate, we really can’t afford any upset up here at the moment – you do understand that, don’t you, Edda? Not with these guests! There’s no way we can risk scaring away potential investors with this sort of thing.’

‘I don’t want to scare anyone away,’ Hoff said, somewhat indignantly. ‘I’m doing my job.’

‘Of course.’

‘Apart from which, I didn’t want to bother you about it, I thought I would speak to Dana Lawrence, but you just happened to pick up. And I’m not daft, Lynn. I know that you’ve got a crowd of investors up there, all very important people, ultra-rich, famous faces. But isn’t that exactly what might suggest that the hotel is in some sort of danger?’

Lynn kept quiet.

‘Be all that as it may,’ she said in the end, ‘you did the right thing telling us so quickly. We’ll keep our eyes open up here, and you should do the same. Stay alert. Have you already talked to Norrington and Jennifer Shaw?’

‘No. First of all I checked out this character Tu.’

‘And?’

‘A self-made millionaire from the first wave. Extremely successful. He runs a high-tech holography and virtual environments outfit in Shanghai. I found a few interviews and articles about him. Definitely not a nutcase.’

‘Good. Stick with it. Tell me if there are any developments, and – Edda?’

‘Yes?’

‘Speak to me first if anything happens.’

‘I’ll have to tell Norrington and Jennifer as well of course—’

‘Certainly you shall. Until then, Edda.’

Lynn ended the call and stared dead ahead. A few minutes later Dana came up from the basement levels. She got up, smiled and wished the director good evening, without breathing a word about the call. She left the control room at a steady pace, took the lift up to Gaia’s curved bosom, squirmed into her suite as soon as the door slid open and dashed into the bathroom. She tore open the packet of green tablets and gulped down three of them, and even as she choked them down she was wrestling with a dark glass jar full of little capsules the size and shape of maggots.

It slipped through her fingers. Fell.

She snatched and caught it. Two little maggots crept out into the palm of her violently quivering hand. She shoved them hurriedly between her lips and washed them down with water. When she raised her head there was a Gorgon staring at her, a fearsome face with serpent hair; she wouldn’t have felt surprised if she’d turned to stone on the spot. She was gripped tight by the feeling that she was falling, and that the fall would never end. The stuff wasn’t working, not fast enough, she was rushing onward, headlong into madness, she would go mad if it didn’t work, mad, mad—

Sobbing, she ran into the living room, forgot the lesser gravity for a moment, slammed straight into the wall and fell on her back. Helpfully, she ended up where she had wanted to be anyway, even if not quite like this, but what the hell. There it was, the minibar, right in front of her nose. Cola, water, juice, everything out, there had to be a bottle of red wine here somewhere, or even better the whisky, the little emergency ration that she had smuggled in, even though you weren’t supposed to drink alcohol up on the Moon, blah blah blah, get it down, neck it—

The bourbon burned her throat as it went down. She crept back to the bathroom on all fours as her ribcage quivered from the coming eruption. She just made it to the toilet, clutched the sides of the bowl and spewed out a jet of whisky, tablets and whatever else was in her stomach. The vomit splattered against the ceramic in front of her, and some of it splashed back onto her face. Where were the tablets? A sour stench assailed her nose, brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t see anything. She retched again, although there was nothing left to bring up, until at last she could wrench herself away from the toilet bowl and collapse beside it. Whimpering, motionless, she lay there bathed in sweat and vomit, staring at the ceiling – and all at once she could breathe again.

Tim. ISLAND-II had said that she should talk to Tim. Where was he? At dinner? Had they already started? It’s twenty past eight, you silly cow, of course they’ve started, a quick hello from the kitchen staff, fripperies of foam and essence and whatever damn thing those fools served up; anything she ate would come straight up again, but she had to go there, she couldn’t stay lying here for ever could she, somebody would come and break the door down.

Fear is a physical phenomenon.

Oh how true, you clever-clogs machine, you Socrates!

All these physical symptoms together make you give your thoughts such weight, Lynn, that’s why they have such horrible power over you.

She sat up carefully. Something buzzed and boomed inside her skull. She felt as though she had lain in the baking Sahara sun for a year, but she could still think straight, and her nerves slowly settled back down from the hideous shock that had set them thrumming. She climbed to her feet like an old woman, and looked at herself in the mirror.

‘God, you look like shit,’ she murmured.

As soon as you manage to relax you’ll be able to break the spiral. The more intensely you feel yourself, the less power your thoughts have to torture you.

Well then. They’d just have to eat the first course without her. What she saw in the mirror there couldn’t be fixed with just a bit of blusher. She would have to retouch, for sure, but she’d be able to do that too. Then she would turn up in the Selene just in time for the main course, glowing and beautiful, the queen of concealment.

A succubus dressed as an angel.

Berlin, Germany

Tu insisted on an evening’s entertainment once he had shot off messages to all and sundry, hoping to get some inside information about the Zheng Group. Some of the people he wrote to were already lying in their beds in Shanghai or Beijing at this time of day, while others were in America – these he either spoke with, or he left a message asking them to call him back. He quipped that at the end of the day, any information he could get about Zheng from America was going to be better than anything from China.

‘Why’s that?’ Jericho asked, as they were served their Wiener schnitzel in the legendary Restaurant Borchardt.

‘Why?’ Tu raised his eyebrows. ‘America is our best friend!’

‘That’s right,’ Yoyo said. ‘Whenever we Chinese want to know anything about China, we ask America.’

‘Fine friends you have,’ Jericho remarked. ‘That friendship of yours makes the rest of the world quake in their boots.’

‘Oh, Owen, come on now. Really.’

‘Seriously! Didn’t you say yourself that the Moon crisis was as bad as the Cuban crisis?’

Tu lifted up his schnitzel with his knife where it spilled over the edge of the plate, and peered doubtfully underneath, as though perhaps he might find something there to explain why Europeans didn’t cut their meat into bite-sized morsels like civilised folk. He would rather have gone to a Chinese restaurant, but he had given way in the face of a dual chorus of ‘You cannot be serious!’

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘And I was as worried sick about it as you were. But you just have to remember that China and America simply can’t go to war. They are the twin giants of the global economy, and they might be at odds but they’re joined at the hip. Traditionally, arch-enemies have always done the best deals, there are advantages to not actually liking the guy you’re doing business with. If you like your trading partner, deals are guaranteed to go wobbly, but antipathy puts you on your guard. That’s why China does so extraordinarily well when it trades with the nations it likes least of all, meaning the USA and Japan. Of course, if I wanted to know something about America, naturally I would get in touch with the Zhong Chan Er Bu.’

‘That’s all a heap of platitudes.’ Jericho began to eat. ‘The idea that the citizens of totalitarian regimes can find out most about themselves if they ask the people whose job it is to spy on them. We’re talking about something else. Even the Americans can’t peer into Zheng Pang-Wang’s mind.’

‘True. It’s still worth asking the CIA and the NSA though, if you want to know something about him. Or for my money you could ask the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the SIS, or the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Mossad or the Indian Secret Service. You’re a detective, Owen, you believe in infiltration. So do they. Anyway, experience has shown by now that it’s easier to infiltrate a government than a company.’ Tu squeezed some lemon onto his schnitzel, though from the look on his face he seemed worried it might jump from the plate and run out of the door. ‘You said earlier that Orley Enterprises and the USA are the same thing in the end. They are. But only to the extent that Orley can set the conditions for American space flight. Of course, they don’t like that. They hate the idea, but the truth is that the USA is totally dependent on Orley. Their space programme and their whole energy plan is drip-fed from the world’s biggest tech company; it’s plugged in to Julian Orley’s money and his boffins’ know-how. To that extent, Orley might be the same thing as American space-flight, but Washington’s a long way from being the same as Orley. Even if you knew everything about what the American government was planning, you still wouldn’t have much idea about Orley Enterprises. That corporation’s a fortress. It’s a parallel universe. It’s a state in its own right. Extraterritorial.’

‘And Zheng?’

‘Well, that’s different. American presidents may have been in hock to the oil lobby, or the steel barons or the military-industrial complex, but they were never totally identical. Even if that’s just because the big corporations are by definition private in democratic countries. It’s different in China – historically, they’re rooted in the State, but they do what they like.’

‘Are you telling me that the Party has lost power to the corporations?’ Jericho asked. ‘I’d be surprised to hear that.’

‘Rubbish.’ Yoyo shook her head. ‘Losing power implies that somebody has shoved you aside and now rules in your place. But you’re still there, for all that maybe you’re sitting in opposition. But nobody shoved anybody aside in China, it was more like a one-hundred-per-cent transformation, a metamorphosis. Every old communist who kicked the bucket made room for some bright young thing with a Party membership book in his pocket and a chair on the board of a profit-making company.’

‘It’s not much different in America.’

‘But it is. Washington has lost power to Orley Enterprises, and that probably makes the government stare out of the window cursing on rainy days, but at least there’s somebody to stare and curse. There are no State institutions left in China where that could happen. The whole shooting match might still call itself communism, but it’s really just a self-appointed government by corporate consortium.’

‘You can look at it the other way round though,’ said Tu, as though the two of them were moderating a political talk-show. ‘China is governed by managers who have a second job in politics. The Western world still has a few heads of state who’ll say No when private enterprise is saying Yes. Maybe the great big No dwindles away to a hopeless little bleating No, but at least there’s still something or someone defending a position. In China you just have to imagine what No looks like when it’s made up of a whole load of Yeses. When Deng Xiaoping decided to allow some experiments in privatisation, lots of people wondered how much privatisation would be allowed in future. Well, the question’s obsolete by now, since in the end communism itself was privatised.’ He put down his knife and fork, picked the schnitzel up in his fingers and bit into it. ‘And that, Owen, is why it’s simpler to get information about a Chinese company from abroad than it is in China. If you want internal details about Zheng, all you have to do is tap into the flow of intelligence in all the nations spying on Beijing. And as it happens, I know some people in the intelligence services.’

Jericho fell silent. He had no idea whom Tu knew, or when he had crossed paths with the Secret Services in his busy lifetime, but he knew that he had rarely been given such a clear picture of a world where either the governments had been taken over by the corporations, or the corporations had lifted themselves clear of all governmental control.

Who was their enemy?

Around ten o’clock he felt tired, drained, while Yoyo was suggesting that they check out the local night life and see what trouble they could get into. She was in frantic high spirits. Tu demanded a look at the Kurfürstendamm. Jericho logged into Diane and teased out a list of the hot clubs and karaoke bars. Then he said he’d go back to the hotel, using the excuse that he had to work, which even happened to be true. He had been neglecting some of his clients dreadfully these past two days.

Yoyo protested. He had to come along!

Jericho hesitated. He had basically made up his mind to go back to the hotel, but all of a sudden he felt like giving in. When she protested, some previously undiscovered reserve battery had flooded his system with energy. It felt like extra oil in his tank, a warm feeling around the ribcage.

‘Well, to be honest I really ought to—’ he said, for form’s sake.

‘Okay. See you later then.’

The battery spluttered and died. The world snapped back into the unending winter of his teenage years, when he had only ever been invited to parties so that people could say afterwards that they hadn’t forgotten him. It flashed through his mind that Yoyo would have plenty of fun without him, just as everybody else had been able to have plenty of fun without him back then.

How he had hated his youth.

‘Well?’ she asked, her eyes cold.

‘Have fun,’ he said. ‘See you later.’

Later turned out to mean after he had done absolutely none of the things that he had gone back to the hotel to do. He lay there wondering where he had taken that wrong turn in life, why he always ended up where he least wanted to be, as one did in a nightmare. He was like a traveller standing at the luggage carousel waiting for a lost suitcase, while it was probably being auctioned off somewhere at the other end of the world; he waited and waited, and the certainty crept over him that maybe all he would ever do in life would be to wait.

About two o’clock he was half watching a botched 3D remake of Tarantino’s classic Kill Bill when there was a shy knock at his door. He climbed to his feet, opened the door and saw Yoyo standing in the hallway.

‘Can I come in?’ she asked.

Automatically, he looked at the digital clock on his video wall.

‘Thanks.’ She shoved past him and came into his room, not quite steady on her feet. ‘I know how late it is.’

Her eyes were as sad as a dog’s. A cigarette between her fingers sent up its curls of smoke, and she’d evidently had a good deal to drink. By the look of her, they’d even run into a minor tornado somewhere on their adventures, which had left her rumpled. Jericho rather doubted that she’d had fun that evening after all.

‘What are you doing right now?’ she asked inquisitively. ‘Got a lot of work done?’

‘Not bad.’

There would have been no point telling her that he had spent the last few hours wrestling with his inner eighteen-year-old. ‘And you? Had a good time?’

‘Oh, fantastic!’ She spread out her arms and spun about, so that Jericho suddenly he felt he should hurry to catch her. ‘We ended up in some karaoke bar that was playing pure shit, but Tu and I managed to liven up the joint all the same.’

He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You sang?’

‘And how.’ Yoyo giggled. ‘Tian doesn’t know even one line of lyrics, and I know them all backwards. A couple of guys hanging around there told us we should come along to a gig in a club. Some band called Tokyo Hotel. I thought they’d be Japanese! But they were German, old guys, dinosaurs of rock.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘Yes, but I had to go and pee after half an hour, and I couldn’t find the loo anywhere. So we had to go in the bushes, and then on to the next pub that was still open. No idea where that was.’

She fell quiet all of a sudden, and slumped down onto the edge of the bed next to him.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘Hmm. Tian told me something. Do you want to know what?’

Suddenly he was seized by the idiotic notion of kissing her and finding out what Tu had said that way, simply sucking the knowledge out of her. Drunk and dishevelled as she was, pasty and drawn, she seemed lovelier than ever. He felt it briefly in his loins and then straight away felt the pain of knowing that Yoyo had come here to talk.

He stared at Diane, sitting there cool and sexless. Yoyo looked down and sucked the last life from her cigarette.

‘I’d like to tell you, you know.’

‘Okaaay,’ Jericho said, drawing out the word. He was turning her down flat and there was no way she couldn’t know it.

‘Well only if you’re not—’ She hesitated.

‘What?’

‘Maybe it is a bit late though. Is it?’

No, it’s just the right moment, the adult man in his head shouted, but he was on autopilot now, frustration and misery had taken charge and were consummately giving Yoyo the cold shoulder. They looked at one another across an emotional Grand Canyon.

‘Well then – I probably ought to go.’

‘Sleep tight,’ he heard himself say.

She got to her feet. Jericho was baffled by his own behaviour, but did nothing to stop her going. She paused for a moment, drifted indecisively over to the computer and then back again.

‘We might hate it now but some day we’ll look back on this time of life and we’ll love it,’ she said, suddenly speaking clearly. ‘Some day we’ll have to make peace, or we’ll go mad.’

‘You’re twenty-five years old,’ Jericho said, tired. ‘You can make peace with whoever you please.’

‘What the hell do you know?’ she muttered and ran from the room.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

She felt like a Dobermann chained up in front of a butcher’s shop. Loreena Keowa couldn’t think of any other way to describe it; her instinct had taken her straight to Beijing, to the conference which had led to Alejandro Ruiz vanishing so completely. She had caught the scent, she was just about to bite, she could sink her teeth into it, and now Susan wanted to talk. Why? What about? Sina couldn’t give her any more help for now, because Susan Hudsucker had reservations. What a pointless waste of time and of opportunity! Loreena didn’t doubt for a second that the reason for Ruiz’s disappearance would become clear as day if only she knew what the conference had been about, and that the mystery of the attempt on Palstein’s life would be solved at the same time. She was so close!

And now Susan wanted to talk.

Listlessly, she typed a couple of sentences into the Trash of the Titans script on her laptop. Strictly speaking, she didn’t even need Sina’s help. Sitting here in Calgary, she could access the databases at Vancouver headquarters just as easily as she could reach her own computer back home in Juneau. If she wanted, she could be headquarters. She could have searched the network off her own bat. All that was keeping her playing by the rules was respect, and the fact that so far Susan Hudsucker had always covered her back when it came to it. So she was planning to bring the chief a good, well-researched treatment – for Trash of the Titans, part 1: The Beginnings – to sweeten her up before she wooed her over to her cause, setting out the facts that would force her to make Palstein a priority.

Loreena shut her laptop. She caught the eye of the Chinese waiter killing time behind the bar polishing glasses, and held up her empty glass to let him know that she wanted another Labatt Blue. It was oppressively empty here in the Keg Steak-house and Bar at the Calgary Westin hotel. She was looking forward to a grilled salmon and a Caesar salad, and impatient for the intern to arrive. She was more and more cautious about eating with him, mind you, since she was afraid he could well explode, showering her with the vast quantities of sausage, steak and scrambled eggs she had seen him shovel down in the past few days. On the other hand, the kid was good at what he did. He’d certainly have some information for her, when he did turn up.

The waiter brought her beer. Loreena was just about to take a sip when her phone rang.

‘Good evening, Shax’ saani Keek,’ said Gerald Palstein.

‘Oh, Gerald,’ she replied, pleased. ‘How are you? Quite a coincidence you should call, we’re just busy right now with your friend Gudmundsson. Have you slung him out yet?’

‘Loreena—’

‘Maybe we should keep an eye on him for a while first.’

‘Loreena, he’s disappeared.’

It took Loreena a moment to realise what Palstein had just said. She stood up, took her beer, left the bar and found a private spot in the lobby.

‘Gudmundsson has disappeared?’ she asked, keeping her voice down.

‘Him, and all his team,’ said Palstein, looking worried. ‘Since today noon. Nobody knows where. Eagle Eye can’t reach him at any of his numbers, but I learned that one of your people had called them and had been asking about him.’

Loreena hesitated. ‘If I’m going to find out who shot you, there’s no getting past Gudmundsson.’

‘I’m not sure we still have a deal.’

‘One moment!’ she yelped. ‘Just because—’

‘No, you listen to me a moment, will you? You’re not a professional investigator, Loreena. Don’t get me wrong, I’m deeply indebted to you. I’d never have known otherwise that Gudmundsson was working against me! Believe me, I’ll do everything I can to support your ecological reporting, that’s one promise I will keep, but from now on in you should leave all this detective work to the police.’

‘Gerald—’

‘No.’ Palstein shook his head. ‘They’ve got you in their sights. Get out of their cross-hairs, Loreena – these are people who kill to get what they want.’

‘Gerald, have you ever wondered why you’re still alive?’

‘I was stupidly lucky, that’s all.’

‘No, I mean why you’re still alive. Perhaps it was never even about killing you. Perhaps you’d be alive now even if you hadn’t stumbled on the podium like that.’

‘Do you mean—’

‘Or perhaps they couldn’t care either way. Think about it! Gudmundsson could have taken pot-shots at you a thousand times over by now, but instead you’re running around without a care. I’m sure that the attack was simply intended to get you out of the way for a while.’

‘Hmm.’

‘All right, one small correction,’ she added. ‘If you hadn’t stumbled, that bullet would have hit you in the head. But everything else is right, it has to be. Somebody wanted to stop you from doing something. My guess is stop you from flying to the Moon with Orley. And that worked, so why should they kill you now? Could be that Alejandro Ruiz wasn’t so lucky—’

‘Ruiz?’

‘Strategic director at Repsol.’

‘Slow down, my head’s spinning. I really can’t see any connection between myself and Ruiz.’

‘I can though,’ she breathed, looking around to see whether anyone was within earshot. ‘My God, Gerald! You’re the strategic director of a company that has spent pretty nearly its whole existence doing exactly what you didn’t want it to do. It was only when everything was far too late and it was all going downhill that they gave you the power to do anything, and there’s hardly anything you can do. This is exactly how it was with Ruiz! He was a voice of conscience, he fouled their nest and got on their nerves. He kept up the pressure on Repsol to get into solar power, he wanted a partnership with Orley Enterprises just like you did! He was talking to a brick wall there. And all of a sudden, when the ship’s already sinking, they make him strategic director. You and Ruiz both spent years arguing for a stake in alternative energy, you’re ignored and then put on the throne, one of you gets shot, the other one disappears in Lima, and you don’t see a connection?’

Palstein didn’t answer.

‘On 1 September 2022,’ Loreena went on, ‘the day before he flew to Lima, Ruiz took part in a mysterious conference somewhere near Beijing. Something must have happened there. Something that shook him so badly that his own wife barely recognised his voice. Does that ring any bells?’

‘Yes. Warning bells.’

‘And what does that tell you?’

‘That you’re in danger. When you tell me all this, I actually think your suspicions are right. We can’t ignore parallels like this.’

‘There you have it.’

‘And that’s exactly why I’m worried.’ Palstein shook his head. ‘Please, Loreena. I don’t want you to come to any harm because of me—’

‘I’ll be careful.’

‘You’ll be careful?’ He laughed harshly. ‘I was duped by my own bodyguard, and believe me, I was careful! Are you going to leave the detective work to the—’

‘No, Gerald,’ she pleaded. ‘Twenty-four hours, give me twenty-four hours – every good thriller gives the detective twenty-four hours! I’m flying to Vancouver first thing tomorrow morning, then the whole thing goes up to boardroom level. All of Greenwatch will be working on the story. Tomorrow night I’ll know what the conference was about, who Gudmundsson is really working for, and if I don’t, I swear to you we’ll bring the police on board. That’s my promise to you, but give me that much time.’

Palstein looked at her with his sad eyes, and sighed.

‘All right then. How many people have you shown those photographs to, of Gudmundsson and the Asian guy?’

‘A few. Nobody recognises Fatty.’

‘And this business with Ruiz?’

‘Three, maybe four people know about it. I’m the only one who knows everything.’

‘Then do at least this much for me. Keep it that way until you land in Vancouver. In the meantime, don’t go lifting up any more rocks.’

‘Hmm. Okay.’

‘Promise?’ he asked, doubtful.

‘Honest Injun. You know what that means, for me.’

‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘Shax’ saani Keek.’

‘Take care of yourself, Gerald.’

‘And call me when you get to Vancouver.’

‘I will do. First thing.’

She hung up. The picture of Palstein faded out. Somewhat surprised, Loreena discovered that she found him oddly attractive, even if he was melancholic, in love with mathematics in that abstract way of his, a man who listened to weird music by dead avant-garde composers. On top of all which, he was shorter than her, a trim little man, almost skinny, losing his hair, the exact opposite of the broad-shouldered masculine type she usually went for. He had regular features, but they weren’t especially striking; there was just something reassuring in his dark velvet eyes. She was back in the bar, still looking thoughtfully at the blank screen, when the chair across from her scraped noisily back.

‘I’m dying of hunger here,’ said the intern. ‘Where’s the menu?’

She put her phone away. ‘I hope you’ve been busy. Steaks for information. One to one.’

‘Should be enough here for a kilo of T-bone.’ He spread out a dozen sheets of paper in front of himself. ‘All right, watch this. I called Eagle Eye, the security company that provided Palstein’s bodyguard. Dished them up a story about a journalist in peril, working on a sensitive story, needs protection, told them you’d just recently met Gudmundsson, Palstein had told you a lot of good things about him, yadda yadda yadda. They told me that Gudmundsson’s a freelance and fairly busy keeping an eye on the oilman, so they’d have to see whether he still had any spare capacity, if not, they could put together a tailor-made team for you. By the way, they knew about you.’

Loreena raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh yes?’

‘From the web. Your reportage. They were pretty taken with the idea of protecting Loreena Keowa.’

‘Flattering. Do they use a lot of freelancers?’

‘Almost exclusively. Half of them are ex-police, the others are a mix of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and Green Berets, some of them were mercenaries, active right round the world. Then they use ex-Secret Service agents for logistics and information operations, they prefer CIA, Mossad or the Germans. They tell me that the Bundesnachrichtendienst have excellent contacts, and the Israelis of course, but sometimes they even get guys from the KGB wandering into Eagle Eye, even Chinese or Koreans. If you ask, they’ll give you the CV of any of their agents. They don’t keep these things secret, quite the opposite! The career histories are part of their reputation.’

‘And Gudmundsson?’

‘He’s half Icelandic, hence the name. Grew up in Washington. Ex-Navy SEAL, trained as a sniper, he’s got his hands dirty, you could say. When he was twenty-five he joined a mercenary army, Mamba.’

‘Never heard of them.’

‘They were operating in Kenya and Nigeria at the beginning of the century. Then he went on to a similar operation in West Africa called African Protection Services, APS for short.’

‘Hmm. Africa.’

‘Yes, but he’s been back in the States for five years now. He offers his expertise to private security companies, Eagle Eye and others, usually as project manager.’

Loreena thought it over. Africa? Was it important where Gudmundsson had worked before? What was certain was that he had betrayed one of his employer’s clients. She couldn’t rule out that Eagle Eye was involved there, but nor could she assume that that was the case. It was a well-respected company and their services were used by a lot of well-known figures. Interesting that Eagle Eye was already employing Gudmundsson at the time Ruiz disappeared. So what had Gudmundsson been doing on the night of the second to the third of September 2022? Where had he been the night Ruiz went missing? In Peru, perhaps?

‘Was that all?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else?’

‘Hey, come on there, that’s not bad.’

‘Might be enough for a roast potato.’ She grinned. ‘Okay, okay! And a couple of spare ribs.’