Limit

Berlin, Germany

Exobiologists had come up with scenarios for extraterrestrial life where you would least expect it. Weird forms of life thrived in volcanic vents, braved oceans of sulphur and ammonia, sprouted under the icy crust of frozen moons or glided with splendid lethargy through the banded skies of Jupiter, giant creatures with wings like manta rays, buoyed up by hydrogen in their body cavities that kept them from crashing down to the gas giant’s metallic core.

At 6.30, one such creature was approaching Berlin.

Its skin shone in the cold, hard light of dawn as it curved slowly about and lost height. Its wingspan was almost a hundred metres. Its body and wings flowed seamlessly together, ending in a tiny vestige of a head that seemed to point to only rudimentary intelligence, compared with the size of the whole thing. But appearances were deceptive. In fact, this head brought together the whole calculating capacity of four autonomous computer systems which kept the monstrous body aloft, all under the supervision of pilot and co-pilot.

It was an Air China flying wing, coming in to land at Berlin. There was room on board for around one thousand passengers. The engineers who had built it were fed up with screwing their lifting surfaces onto canisters, and instead had created a low, hollow, symmetrical craft packed with seating all the way to its wingtips, an aerodynamic miracle. The giant’s engines were embedded in the stern. Because of the phenomenally large surface area, it generated thrust even at low engine speeds, while at the same time the ray-shaped wings made for increased lift and kept turbulence to a minimum. This reduced fuel consumption and kept engine noise to a socially acceptable sixty-three decibels. The designers had even done without windows for the sake of the aerodynamics. Instead, tiny cameras along the midline filmed the world outside and broadcast their pictures to 3D screens which simulated glass panes. Flying here was a feast for the senses. All the same, airsickness could strike those who had the cheap seats out in the wingtips, which could hop as much as twenty-five metres up and down when the aircraft banked, and bore the brunt of the turbulence.

By contrast, the man walking back to his seat from the on-board massage parlour with a spring in his step was enjoying the luxury of the Platinum Lounge. Here, the simulation showed him nothing less than the view from the cockpit, a fascinating panorama with perfect depth of field. He sank back into the cushions and shut his eyes. His seat was precisely on the aircraft’s axis, which was a stroke of luck considering how late he had booked. For all that, the people who had booked the flight for him knew his preferences. Accordingly, they had made sure they made their own luck. They knew that rather than take a seat just next to the axis, he would prefer to travel in a wingtip – or in the basket of a hot-air balloon, be dangled from a Zeppelin’s bag or clutched in the claws of the roc bird. A middle seat was a middle seat, and not up for negotiation. The closer a thing was to perfection, the less he could bear falling short of that ideal, and something inside him pushed him to set things right straight away.

He looked out at Berlin below him in the sunlight, surrounded by green spaces, rivers, sparkling lakes. Then the city itself, a jewel box containing many different epochs. Long shadows fell in the morning light. The flying wing banked in a 180-degree curve, then fell to earth, speeding over the tower blocks, the public parks and avenues, dropping quickly. For a moment it looked from his exposed vantage point as though they were headed straight into the runway, then the pilot lifted the nose and they landed, almost imperceptibly.

The mood inside the aircraft changed subtly. For the last few hours the future had been in abeyance, a matter of aerodynamics and good will. Now it came rushing back to them with all its demands. Conversation broke out, newspapers and books were hastily put away, the aircraft came to rest. Huge hatched gateways opened to let the passengers flood out to all corners of the airport. The man picked up his hand luggage, and was one of the first to leave the plane. His data were already stored in the airport security system here. Air China had sent his files across to the German authorities not twenty minutes after take-off in Pudong, and right now the footage from the on-board cameras was also being transmitted. As he neared the gates, the German computer already knew what he had eaten and drunk on board, which films he had watched, which stewardess he had flirted with and which he had complained to, and how often he had gone to the toilet. The system had his digital photograph, his voiceprint, his fingerprints, iris scan, and of course it knew his first stop in Berlin, the Hotel Adlon.

He put his phone and then the palm of his right hand onto the scanner plate, said his name, and looked into the camera at the automated gate while the computer read his RFID coordinates. The system compared the data, identified him and let him through. Through the gates, the manned counters were lined up in a row. Two policewomen passed his luggage through the X-ray and asked him about the purpose of his visit. He answered in a cordial but somewhat distracted manner, as though his thoughts were elsewhere, at the next meeting. They wanted to know if this was his first time in Berlin. He said yes – and indeed he had never visited the city before. It was only when they handed back his phone that he let genuine warmth enter his voice, saying goodbye to them both and telling them he hoped they didn’t have to spend their whole day standing behind this counter. As he spoke, he looked the younger policewoman straight in the eyes, wordlessly telling her that for his part, he wouldn’t at all mind spending this lovely sunny Berlin morning with her.

A tiny, conspiratorial smile shot back at him, the most she would allow herself. You’re a good-looking guy and no mistake, it said, and your suit is wonderfully well cut, we both know what we’re after, thank you for the flowers, and now get lost. Meanwhile she said out loud,

‘Welcome to Berlin, Zhao xiansheng. Enjoy your visit.’

He walked on, pleased that in this country they knew the proper forms of address. Ever since Chinese had become compulsory at most schools in Europe, travellers could at least be sure that traditional Chinese first names and family names wouldn’t get mixed up, and that the family name would be followed by the right honorific. At the exit a pale, bald man with eyes like a St Bernard’s and hangdog jowls was waiting for him. He was tall, strongly built, and wore his leather jacket fastened all the way to the neck.

‘Fáilte, Kenny,’ he said softly.

‘Mickey.’ Xin gave him a hearty clap on the shoulder in greeting without breaking stride. ‘How’s the last remnants of the IRA?’

‘Couple of them dead.’ The bald man fell in step beside him. ‘I hardly have contact with them these days. Which name did you fly in with?’

‘Zhao Bide. Is everything organised?’

‘All in place. Had a hell of a delay in Dublin, mind you. Didn’t get in here until after midnight – what a shitty flight. Well, that’s life, I suppose.’

‘And the guns?’

‘Got them ready.’

‘Where?’

‘In the car. Do you want to go to the hotel first? Or should we go straight to Muntu? It’s still dark there, mind. So’s the upstairs flat. Probably still asleep.’

Xin considered. Already, a week ago, once his people had cracked Vogelaar’s new identity, Mickey Reardon had dropped by Muntu to check the place out for possible entrances. Alarm systems had been his speciality back in Northern Ireland. Since the IRA had fallen apart he, like many former members, was at work on the open market, and from time to time did jobs for foreign intelligence agencies as well, such as the Zhong Chan Er Bu. Ordinarily Xin liked to work with younger partners, but Mickey was in good shape even if he was in his late fifties; he knew his way around a gun and could navigate any electronic security system blindfold. Xin had worked with him several times before, and in the end had recommended him to Hydra. Since then he’d been on Kenny’s team. He might not be a towering intellect, but he didn’t ask questions either.

‘Off to the hotel quickly,’ Xin decided. ‘Then we’ll get it over and done with.’ He squinted up into the sunlight and swept the long hair from his brow. ‘They say Berlin’s very nice. Maybe it is. I still want to be out of here this evening at the latest, though.’

But Jan Kees Vogelaar wasn’t asleep.

He hadn’t shut an eye all night, which was only partly to do with the headache left behind by Yoyo clouting him with a joint of meat. It was much more to do with talking to Nyela and agreeing on a plan to flee to France for the time being, where he had contacts with some retired Foreign Legionnaires. While Nyela began to pack, he organised their new identities. That evening Luc and Nadine Bombard, descended from French colonists out in Cameroon, would arrive in Paris.

At half past seven he called Leto, a friend of theirs, half Gabonese, who had come to Berlin a few years ago to help his white father fight his cancer. Nyela had met him the day before on the city’s grand avenue, Unter den Linden. Leto had been in Mamba before the company joined the newly founded African Protection Services, and had helped them open Muntu. He was the only one in Germany they could trust, even if he didn’t know all the details of why Vogelaar had had to get out of Equatorial Guinea. As far as he knew, Mayé had been toppled by Ndongo, financed by who knew which foreign powers. Vogelaar had avoided setting him right on the matter.

‘We’ll have to disappear,’ he said brusquely.

Leto had obviously just got out of bed to answer the call, but was so surprised he forgot to yawn.

‘What do you mean, disappear?’

‘Leave the country. They’re onto us.’

‘Shit!’

‘Yes, shit. Listen, can you do me a favour?’

‘Of course.’

‘When the banks open in two hours’ time I’m going to empty our accounts, and then I’ll have a few things to take care of. Meanwhile Nyela will go downstairs to Muntu and pack whatever we can take from there. It would be good if you could keep her company there. Just to be on the safe side, until I’m back.’

‘Sure.’

‘Best thing is if you meet her up in the flat.’

‘I’ll do that. When do you want to leave?’

‘Right after noon.’

Leto fell silent for a moment.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘Why don’t they just leave you in peace? Ndongo’s been back in power for a year now. You’re hardly any threat to him any longer.’

‘He’s probably still not got over me putsching him out of office back then,’ Vogelaar lied.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Leto snorted. ‘It was Mayé. You simply got paid for it. It wasn’t anything personal.’

‘All I need to know is that the goons have turned up here. Can you be with Nyela by half past eight?’

‘Of course. No problem.’

An hour and a half later Vogelaar flung himself into the stream of rush-hour traffic. The traffic lights took so long to change they seemed to be doing it out of spite. He crossed Französische Strasse, made it as far as Taubenstrasse, squeezed his Nissan into a tiny parking spot and went into the foyer of his bank. The temple of capitalism was full to the brim. There was a huge crush in front of the self-service computers and the staffed windows, as though half of Berlin had decided to flee the city together with himself and Nyela. His personal banker was dealing with a red-faced old woman who kept pounding the flat of her hand against the counter in front of the window to punctuate her harangue; Vogelaar caught his eye, and gave him a signal to let him know he’d wait next door. He hurried over to the lounge, collapsed into one of the elegant leather armchairs and fumed.

He’d wasted his time. Why hadn’t he fetched the money the afternoon before?

Then he realised that by the time Jericho and his Chinese girlfriend had left, the banks were probably closed. Which didn’t make him any less angry. Really, it was archaic that he had to hang around here like this. Banks were computerised businesses, it was only because he wanted to carry the money from his account home as cash that he needed to be physically present. Glowering, he ordered a cappuccino. He had hoped that his banker would call him in the next couple of minutes and ask him to come back to the foyer, but this hope was dashed to pieces under the red-faced woman’s avalanche of words. All the other counters had queues snaking around them as well, mostly old people, very old some of them. The greying of Berlin seemed in full swing now; even in the moneyed boulevards a tide of worry backed up like stagnant water, the worry about old age and its insecurities.

To his surprise his telephone did ring, just as he raised the coffee to his lips. He got up, balancing the cup so that he could take it across with him, glanced at the display and saw that the call wasn’t from the bank foyer at all. It was Nyela’s number. He sat down again, picked up the call and spoke, expecting to see her face.

Instead, Leto was staring at him.

Straight away he realised that something wasn’t right. Leto seemed distraught about something. Not quite that. Rather, he looked as though he had got over whatever had upset him, and had decided to keep that look on his face to the end of his days. Then Vogelaar realised that the end had already come.

Leto was dead.

‘Nyela? What’s up? What’s happened?’

Whoever was holding Nyela’s phone stepped back, so that he could see all of Leto’s upper body. He was leaning, slumped over the bar. A thin trickle of blood ran down his neck, as though embarrassed to be there.

‘Don’t worry, Jan. We killed him quite quietly. Don’t want you getting into trouble with the neighbours.’

The man who had spoken turned the phone towards himself.

‘Kenny,’ Vogelaar whispered.

‘Happy to see me?’ Xin smirked at him. ‘You see, I was missing you. I spent a whole year wondering how the hell you managed to slip through my fingers.’

‘Where’s Nyela?’ Vogelaar heard himself ask, his voice dwindling and dropping.

‘Wait, I’ll hand you over. No, I’ll show you her.’

The picture lurched again and showed the restaurant. Nyela was sitting on a chair, a sculpture of sheer fear, her eyes open wide with terror. A pale, bald man clamped her tight to the chair, his arm stretched across her. He was holding a scalpel in his other hand. The tip of the blade hung motionless in the air, not a centimetre from Nyela’s left eye.

‘That’s how things are,’ Xin’s voice said.

Vogelaar heard himself make a choking noise. He couldn’t remember ever having made a sound like that before.

‘Don’t do anything to her,’ he gasped. ‘Leave her alone.’

‘I wouldn’t read too much into the situation,’ Xin said. ‘Mickey’s very professional, he has a steady hand. He only gets twitchy if I do.’

‘What do I have to do? Tell me what I have to do.’

‘Take me seriously.’

‘I do, I take you seriously.’

‘Of course you do.’ Xin’s voice suddenly changed, dark, hissing. ‘On the other hand, I know what you’re capable of, Jan. You can’t help yourself. Right now there are a thousand plans racing through your head, you’re thinking how you could trick me. But I don’t want you to trick me. I don’t want you even to try.’

‘I won’t try.’

‘Now that would surprise me.’

‘You have my word.’

‘No. You won’t really understand why you shouldn’t even try until you’ve grasped the basic importance of saving your wife’s sight.’

The camera zoomed in closer. Nyela’s face filled the screen, twisted with fear.

‘Jan,’ she whimpered.

‘Kenny, listen to me,’ Vogelaar whispered hoarsely. ‘I told you that you have my word! Stop all that, I—’

‘One eye is quite enough for anyone to see with.’

‘Kenny—’

‘So if you could grasp the importance of saving what remains of her sight, then—’

‘Kenny, no!’

‘Sorry, Jan. I’m getting twitchy.’

Nyela’s scream as the scalpel struck was a mere chirrup from the phone’s speakers. But Vogelaar’s yell split the air.

Grand Hyatt

Jericho blinked.

Something had woken him up. He turned on his side and glanced at the clock display. Almost ten! He hadn’t intended to sleep this long. He leapt out of bed, heard the room’s phone ringing, and picked up.

‘I’ve got your money,’ Tu said. ‘One hundred thousand euros, just as our dog of war demands, not too many small-denomination notes, you’ll be able to get through the museum door.’

‘Good,’ said Jericho.

‘Are you coming down to breakfast?’

‘Yes, I— Think I will.’

‘Come on then. Yoyo’s making a spectacle of herself with the scrambled eggs. I’ll keep some warm for you before she eats it all.’

Yoyo.

Jericho hung up, went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. The blond man with the three-day beard who stared back at him was a fearless crime-fighter who put his life on the line, but didn’t know how to use a razor or even a comb. Who didn’t even, come to that, have the decency to say No loud and clear, not even when he really wanted to say Yes. He had a nagging feeling that last night he had screwed everything up again, whatever ‘everything’ meant here. Yoyo had come along to his room, drunk as a skunk but in a chatty mood, she could hardly have found her way there by accident, and she’d wanted to talk. The pimply kid inside him hated that idea. But what was talking, except a little ritual that might lead who knows where? It was person-to-person, it was open-ended. Anything could have happened, but he had taken umbrage and had let her scurry off, then stubbornly watched the re-make of Kill Bill right to the end. It had been about as abysmally bad as he deserved. This arrested adolescence was like lying on a bed of nails, but at last he had fallen comatose into a restless sleep and dreamed of missing one train after another at shadowy stations, and running through a dreary Berlin no man’s land where huge insects lurked in cavernous houses, chirruping like monstrous crickets. Antennae waved at him from every doorway and corner, chitinous limbs scuttled hastily back into the cracks in the wall in a game of halfhearted hide-and-seek.

Trains. What heavy-handed symbolism. How could he be having such ploddingly obvious dreams? He looked the blond man in the eyes, and imagined him simply turning away and walking off into the mirror, leaving him alone there in the bathroom, sick and tired of his inadequacies, the inadequacies of that pimply kid.

He had to get rid of the kid somehow. Anyhow. Enough was enough!

Vogelaar

His shout burst through the lounge like a nuclear blast, tearing to shreds all conversation, all thought. Sleepy jazz muzak tinkled away in the sudden silence. On the low glass table in front of him, an abstract composition in coffee and foamed milk surrounded a jagged heap of shattered porcelain.

He stared at the display.

‘Do you understand me?’ Xin asked.

His knees gave way. Nyela’s muffled sobs sounded in his ear as he sank back into the leather chair. Nothing had happened. The scalpel had not plunged into her eye, had not sliced through pupil and iris. It had simply twitched, and then stopped dead still once more.

‘Yes,’ Vogelaar whispered. ‘I understand.’

‘Good. If you play by my rules, nothing will happen to her. As for what will happen to you though—’

‘I understand.’ Vogelaar coughed. ‘Why all the extra effort?’

‘Extra?’

‘You could have killed me by now. As I left the building, on my drive across town, even here in the bank—’

The picture vanished, and then he saw Xin again.

‘Quite simple,’ he said, back to his chatty old self. ‘Because you’ve never worked without a safety net and an escape hatch. You believe in life after death, or at least you believe in lawyers opening deposit boxes and releasing their contents to the press. You’ve made arrangements in case you die suddenly.’

‘Do you need help?’

Vogelaar looked up. One of the lounge staff, with a startled look on his face, a hint of disapproval. No screaming and shouting in banks. At most, they were places were you could contemplate a dignified suicide. Vogelaar shook his head.

‘No, I – it’s just that I’ve had some bad news.’

‘If there’s anything that we can do—’

‘It’s a private matter.’

The man smiled with relief. It wasn’t about money. Someone had died, or had an accident.

‘As I say, if—’

‘Thank you.’

The staffer left. Vogelaar watched him go, then got up and left the lounge hurriedly.

‘Go on,’ he said into the phone.

‘Your sort of insurance rather depends on the idea that if anyone’s out to cause you harm, they’ll go after you,’ Xin continued. ‘So you can warn them to keep their hands off. If I don’t turn up to take afternoon tea tomorrow at such and such a time and place, with all my bits and pieces intact, the bomb goes off somewhere. It’s a lone wolf strategy, because for most of your life you were a lone wolf. But you’re not any longer. Perhaps you should have changed your plans.’

‘I have.’

‘You haven’t. That bomb will only be detonated if it’s your life at stake.’

‘My life, and my wife’s.’

‘Not exactly. You’ve changed your mind but you haven’t changed your habits. Earlier you’d have said, get the hell back on the next plane out, Kenny, there’s nothing you can do. Or, kill me and see what happens. But now you’re telling me, leave Nyela alone or I’ll make things hot for you.’

‘You can be sure of that!’

‘Meaning that you could still set off the bomb.’ Xin paused. ‘But then what would we do with your poor innocent wife? Or to put it another way, how long would we do it to her for?’

Vogelaar had crossed the foyer, and went out into the crowds on Friedrichstrasse.

‘That’s enough, Kenny. I see what you mean.’

‘Really? Back when Vogelaar only cared about Vogelaar, life was hard for people like me. Back then you’d have said, go on, kill the woman, torture her to death, see where it gets you. We’d have played a little poker, and in the end you’d have won.’

‘I’m warning you. If you harm even a hair on Nyela’s head—’

‘Would you die for her?’

‘Just come out with it and tell me what you want.’

‘I want an answer.’

Vogelaar felt his mind soar, saw his whole life spread out beneath his wings. What he saw was a bug, biting, pinching, stinging, playing dead or scuttling lightning-fast into a crack. A drone, a programmed thing, but one whose armour had been corroded these past few years by regular doses of empathy. His instincts had been ruined once he realised that there was in fact a purpose to life, that there could even be a purpose to dying so that others might live. Xin was right. His plans were out of date. This bug was sick and tired of creeping into cracks, but right now the future held nothing else.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would die for Nyela.’

‘Why?’

‘To save her.’

‘No, Jan. You’d die because altruism is an egotist’s crowning glory, and you’re a deeply egotistical man. Nothing appeals more to a man’s self-importance than martyrdom, and you’ve always had a very high sense of your own importance.’

‘Don’t speechify, Kenny.’

‘You have to know that you won’t save anyone with your death, not if you try to cheat. You’d be leaving Nyela on her own. There’d be no end to her suffering. You’d have achieved nothing.’

‘I understand.’

‘So what’s your escape hatch this time?’

‘A dossier.’

‘This is what Mayé wanted to blackmail us with?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘In the Crystal Brain. It’s on a memory crystal.’

‘Who knows about it?’

‘Only my lawyer, and my wife.’

‘Nyela knows what’s in the dossier?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your lawyer?’

‘He doesn’t know a thing. He just has instructions to retrieve the crystal if I should die a violent death, and upload the contents to a distributor feed.’

‘Why didn’t you tell him what was in the dossier?’

‘Because it’s nothing to do with him,’ Vogelaar snorted, growing angry. ‘The dossier only exists to protect Nyela’s life, and mine.’

‘That means that as soon as I have this crystal— Good, fetch it. How long do you need?’

‘An hour at most.’

‘Is there anyone coming by here before then we should know about? Cleaner, kitchen porter, postman?’

‘No one.’

‘Off you go then, old friend. Don’t dawdle now.’

Vogelaar was no tree-hugger. He drove a solar-powered Nissan because Nyela was concerned about the environment. He realised of course that more small cars meant less traffic in the city, but something in his genes cried out for a jeep. But now that he was crawling painfully through the government quarter, he cursed aloud every vehicle bigger than his own, and felt a sweeping rage against all the damned ignorant drivers hereabouts.

And in fact Germany was the country with the most innovative car technologies that had ever been left to slumber in a drawer. Hardly any market worldwide was fonder of petrol motors and speedsters. While in Asia and the USA the number of hybrid cars on the roads had been steadily dropping in favour of ever more sustainable designs, in Germany the hybrid itself had never even made a dent. Nowhere else were hydrogen, fuel cells and electric cars condemned to such a miserable waking death. And nowhere else in the world did men set such store by having a big, imposing car, and by driving it themselves – despite the availability of sophisticated and totally safe autopilots. It was as though whenever the Germanic national character set out to find itself, it always ended up, with tiresome predictability, behind the steering wheel. The only thing less popular hereabouts than the compact car was the future itself.

All of which explained why the Nissan crept along so slowly. Vogelaar swore, and slapped the wheel. When he finally turned into the car park at the Crystal Brain, he was bathed in sweat. He leapt from the cabin and strode hurriedly across to the main entrance.

Einstein looked him square in the face, briefly.

The building had been put up in 2020, not far from the government quarter, but it still looked as though it had just landed. It was a cubist glass UFO with dozens of perfectly faceted surfaces where the logo ‘Crystal Brain’ came and went, glowing like a passing thought. Worlds showed like ghosts in the façade as you approached, different from every angle: raptors loping across the Jurassic savannah, Stone Age hunters hurling their spears at mammoths, Assyrian kings holding court. He saw Greek hoplites, Roman emperors, Napoleon on horseback and Egyptian princesses, pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, the Kon-Tiki and the Titanic, satellites, space stations, moon bases, the stern face of Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare’s bald head and smiling face, Bismarck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Adenauer, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Helmut Kohl, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Reiter, Julian Orley, geocentric, heliocentric and modern representations of the universe, abstract diagrams of quantum worlds on the Planck scale, molecules, atoms, quarks and superstrings like model building blocks, the invention of the wheel, of printing, of curried sausage. All this and infinitely more was there, holographically embedded in the huge walls; it came to life, breathed, pulsated; the figures turned their heads, winked, smiled, shook hands, walked, flew, swam and vanished again as the viewer moved around them. The exterior alone was a masterpiece, a wonder of the modern world, and yet it represented barely a fraction of what was hidden within.

When Vogelaar stepped inside the Crystal Brain, he was entering the world’s greatest concentration of knowledge in the smallest space.

He walked through the foyer’s shimmering dome. Lifts rose and fell to either side of him, seemingly unsupported, a sophisticated optical illusion. They were a fractal representation of the building itself, just as everything in the Crystal Brain was built using the principle of self-similarity. The smallest component, the memory crystal, resembled the largest, the building itself. A crystal in a crystal in a crystal.

The world’s memory.

The tales that mankind had to tell about the world could fit either in one single book, or into so many that even a whole extra planet full of libraries would not be enough to hold them. The Bible, the Qur’an and the Torah knew nothing of evolution, or of the tangled chains of causality, or of Schrödinger’s cat, nothing of the uncertainty principle or standard deviation, nothing of non-linear equations and black holes, nothing of the multiverse, of extra-dimensional space or of how time’s arrow could be made to point backwards. These books were sturdy, impregnable vehicles of faith driving down a one-way street to the absolute truth; they made vast claims, but they were compact.

Look beyond these, though, and the planet was bursting with information.

History alone was a vast academic discipline: millions and millions of works dedicated to deciphering the past, like a cloud chamber filled with the trails of fleeting elementary particles. It was almost impossible to determine their speed and direction, regardless whether they had to do with the colour of Charlemagne’s hair or with whether he had ever even existed. There was huge variety in the fields of physics, philosophy, futurology. The dizzying number of all articles published to date, all the essays, novellas, novels, poems, song lyrics, the works of Bob Dylan alone and then all the commentary about them! The verbiage of assembly instructions for stainless-steel barbecue grills, the meteorological data that had heaped up since records began, the collected speeches of the Dalai Lama, the totality of every menu from every Chinese restaurant from Cape Horn to the Bosphorus, the avaricious words from every one of Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s speech balloons, the angry, exasperated replies that his hapless nephew quacks in turn, the careful record of every leaflet from every packet sold of haemorrhoid cream or anti-depressives…

There was definitely a storage problem.

The book was definitely not the answer.

But CD-ROMs, DVDs and hard drives had also run up against the limits of their capacity, helpless in the face of the exponential growth of information. They were threatened by digital oblivion. Given how long chiselled stone slabs could last, Christianity could take comfort in the thought that the Ten Commandments still existed somewhere. Books could only last about two hundred years, unless they were printed with iron-free ink on acid-free paper, in which case their life expectancy was triple that. Celluloid film was estimated to last about four hundred years, CDs and DVDs maybe one hundred, while floppy discs lasted maybe a decade. Even so, floppies were still in theory better than USB sticks, which showed signs of amnesia after only three years, but then again there were no floppy disc drives any longer. There were thus three principal obstacles to a permanently accessible and truly compact global memory: limited storage capacity, rapid storage decay, rapid hardware obsolescence.

Holographics had solved all three problems at one blow.

The eight storeys of the Crystal Brain housed racks of crystals and laser reading desks, roomy lounges for historical sightseers; it was an El Dorado for an alien who might happen along one day far in the future, clearing away the rampant vegetation in search of human artefacts. Vogelaar, though, blind to the glories around him, made for one of the lifts and rode it down to the second sub-basement, where storage space could be rented for private data. He authorised himself – eye-scan, hand-print, all the usual – and was let through to an atrium glowing with diffuse light.

‘Number 17-44-27-15,’ he said.

The system asked him if he wanted a place at the lasers. Vogelaar declined, saying that he would take his data away with him.

‘Aisle 17, section B-2,’ the system said. ‘Do you know your way about, or would you like directions?’

‘I know my way.’

‘Please retrieve your crystal within five minutes.’

A glass door slid back at the end of the atrium. Behind it, aisles branched off to either side, their walls apparently smooth and featureless. Lines ran along the floor, marked with aisle and section numbers. Vogelaar went to his aisle, stopped after a few steps and turned his head to the left. Only the closest examination revealed that the mirror-smooth wall was in fact divided up into tiny squares.

‘17-44-27-15 is being prepared for delivery,’ the system said.

A faint mechanical click sounded from the mirror. Then a thin, rectangular rod slid out. The transparent object inside was about the size of half a sugar cube. One of millions of crystals that made up the totality of the Crystal Brain, high-efficiency optical storage media with integrated data processing and encryption. They had no moving parts and were practically indestructible. Memory crystals had a storage capacity of one to five terabytes, and were readable at several gigabytes per second. Access time was well under a millisecond. The storage was written in by lasers, etching electronically readable data patterns into the layers of the crystal. A single layer could hold millions of bits; one crystal could hold thousands of pages. Vogelaar’s dossier took up only a tiny fraction of that.

‘Please remove your crystal.’

Vogelaar looked at the tiny object and felt his mood plunge. Suddenly he was overcome by despair. He sank down against the wall opposite, unable to pick up the little cube.

How could it all have gone so horribly wrong?

It had all been in vain.

No, it hadn’t. There was still a chance.

He considered just how far he could trust Xin. In fact, incredible though it might sound, he could trust the killer, to a certain extent, at least within Xin’s own strictly defined limits of madness and self-control. Vogelaar didn’t doubt for a moment that, in the final analysis, Kenny managed to keep his madness at bay with his manic penchant for numbers and symmetry, his constant search for oases of order and his highly personal code of honour. Xin knew perfectly well that he was mad. On the surface, he seemed eloquent, convivial and cultured. But Vogelaar had some idea of just how hard Xin found it to hold an ordinary conversation, and how hard he tried regardless. There must be some final scrap of humanity left alive inside him, a yearning that he could not admit even to himself, a need to be something other than what he was. Something that prevented him from simply gunning down anybody in his way, from setting the world on fire, from becoming the final all-engulfing flame. If he gave Xin this crystal, he would have to make a deal with him for Nyela’s life and his own, although perhaps it would only be Nyela. One way or another, he’d have to decide whether he was going to give the killer everything, this dossier—

And the copy of the dossier.

‘Please remove your crystal within the next sixty seconds.’

He shrugged himself away from the wall, took the little cube between his finger and thumb and held it up to the light. He could see tiny faultlines inside, history in miniature. He put it in his pocket. He left the basement as quickly as he had arrived, took the lift upstairs, quickened his pace as he came out onto the car park, and started the Nissan. By some miracle the traffic had ebbed away, so that he was able to park in front of the restaurant before his time ran out. This time he didn’t allow himself a moment’s delay but got out and walked to the entrance with his hands raised, palms outward. He saw the bald man through the glass pane of the door, a silenced pistol in his right hand. Slowly, he opened the door and peered into the gloom. Leto’s feet were sticking out from behind the bar.

‘Where’s Nyela?’

‘Went in there with Kenny,’ said the bald man, in a thick Irish accent. He motioned with his gun towards the swing doors. Vogelaar didn’t spare him a glance as he walked through the dining area and into the kitchen. The gunman followed.

‘Jan!’

Nyela wanted to go to him. Xin held her back, a hand on her shoulder.

‘Let her go,’ said Vogelaar.

‘You can say hello later. What happened, Jan? Your kitchen looks like it was hit by a herd of elephants.’

‘I know.’ Vogelaar looked at the chaos left behind by his fight with Jericho, his face expressionless. ‘Do you want to clean up, Kenny? Put everything back? You’ll find all you need under the sink: scourers, cleaning spray – I know that you can’t bear to look at a mess.’

‘That’s in my own world. This is yours. Where’s the crystal?’

Vogelaar reached into his jacket pocket and put the memory crystal on a clear spot on the worktable. Xin picked it up in his fingertips and turned it this way and that.

‘And you’re sure that this is the right one?’

‘Dead sure.’

‘I want to go to my husband,’ Nyela said, softly but emphatically. Her eyes looked sore from weeping, but she seemed to be keeping it together.

‘Of course,’ Xin murmured. ‘Go to him.’

He was gazing at the crystal as though under a spell. Vogelaar knew why. Crystals were one of those forms that Xin loved. Their structure and purity fascinated him.

‘You’ve got what you wanted,’ he said. ‘I kept my promise.’

Xin looked up. ‘And I never even gave one.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I was just talking through the options. It’s really too risky to let the two of you live.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Jan, you disappoint me!’

‘You promised to spare Nyela’s life.’

‘Either he lets us both live or neither.’ She hugged herself close to Vogelaar’s chest. ‘If he kills you, he can shoot me straight away as well.’

‘No, Nyela.’ Vogelaar shook his head. ‘I won’t let that—’

‘Do you really believe that I’d just watch this bastard shoot you?’ she hissed, her voice dripping with hate. ‘He’s a monster. How many years he came and went at our home, accepted our drinks, put his feet up on our terrace. Hey, Kenny, do you want a drink? I’ll mix you a drink that will make the flames shoot out of your eyes.’

‘Nyela—’

‘You leave my husband alone, do you hear me?’ Nyela screamed. ‘Don’t touch him, or I’ll come back from the dead to have my revenge, you miserable wretch, you—’

Xin’s face clouded with resignation. He turned away, shaking his head, tired.

‘Why does nobody listen to me?’

‘What?’

‘As if I had ever minced my words. As if the rules hadn’t been clear from the start.’

‘We aren’t here to follow your shitty rules!’

‘They’re not shitty,’ Xin sighed. ‘They’re just – rules. A game. You played too. You made wrong moves. You lost. You have to know how to leave the game.’

Vogelaar looked at him.

‘You’ll keep your promise,’ he said quietly.

‘One more time, Jan, I never gave you a—’

‘I mean the promise you’re about to give.’

‘That I’m – about to?’

‘Yes. You see, there’s still something you want, Kenny. Something I can give you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about Owen Jericho.’

Xin spun about. ‘You know where Jericho is?’

‘His life for Nyela’s,’ Vogelaar said. ‘And spare me the rest of your threats. If we die, we die without a word. Unless—’

‘Unless what?’

‘You promise to spare Nyela. Then I’ll serve you up Jericho on a silver tray.’

‘No, Jan!’ Nyela looked at him, pleading. ‘Without you I couldn’t—’

‘You wouldn’t have to,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘The second promise concerns myself.’

‘Your life against whose?’ Xin asked threateningly.

‘A girl called Yoyo.’

Xin stared at him. Then he began to laugh. Softly, almost silently. Then louder. Holding his sides, throwing back his head, hammering his fists against the tall fridge, quivering with hilarity as though he was having a fit.

‘Incredible!’ he gasped out. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘Is everything all right, Kenny?’ The bald man furrowed his brow. ‘Are you okay?’

‘All right?’ spluttered Xin. ‘That girl, Mickey, that detective, the two of them should get a medal! What an achievement! They took those few scraps of text and – incredible, it’s just incredible! They tracked you down, Jan, they—’ He stopped. His eyes opened wide, even more astonished. ‘Did they actually come to warn you?’

‘Yes, Kenny,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘They warned me.’

‘And you’re betraying them?’

Vogelaar was silent.

‘You try to find fault with my morals, you reproach me with some promise I’ve supposedly made, and then you rat out the people who came to save your life.’ Xin nodded as though he had just learned a valuable lesson. ‘Look at that, just look at that. Unredeemed man. What did you tell the two of them about our adventure in Africa?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’d like to be,’ Vogelaar snarled. ‘In fact I offered them a deal. The dossier, for money. We were just about to make the exchange.’

‘That’s priceless,’ chuckled Xin.

‘And? What now?’

‘Sorry, old friend.’ Xin wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye. ‘Life doesn’t offer all that many surprises, but this – and do you know what’s the best thing about it? I even considered that they might come and find you! Just as you consider the possibility that perhaps next week you’ll be hit by a meteorite, that perhaps there’s a God. I fly off to Berlin in a tearing hurry to prevent something that I never really – never! – thought would actually happen, but life – Jan, my dear Jan! Life is just too wonderful. Too wonderful!’

‘Get to the point, Kenny.’

Xin threw his hands in the air in a gesture that said, let’s all have a drink. A baron among his minions.

‘Good!’ he guffawed. ‘Why the hell not!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a promise. It means you have my promise! If everything runs on rails, no hiccups, no tricks from you, not even thinking about tricks, not even a wrinkle in the skin – then the two of you can live.’ He came closer and narrowed his eyes. His voice took on that hissing note again. ‘But if, contrary to my expectations, anything from that dossier becomes public, then I promise that Nyela will die by inches, you can’t even begin to imagine how! And you’ll be allowed to watch. You’ll see how I pull her teeth out one by one, see me cut off her fingers and toes, gouge out her eyes, I’ll flay the skin from her back in strips, and all that while Mickey here rapes her over and over again until there’s nothing left for him to fuck but a whimpering lump of bloody meat, and by then she’s still a long way from dead, Jan, a long way, I promise you that, and I’ll keep every one of these promises.’

Vogelaar felt Xin’s breath on his face, looked into those cold eyes, dark as night, felt Nyela tremble in his arms, heard his heartbeat in the sudden silence. He believed every word that Xin said.

With a dry crack, the faulty neon tube gave up the ghost.

‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal.’

Museum Island

In satellite images of Berlin, the Museum Island in the river Spree stuck out like a wedge, a kilometre and a half long, driven slapdash into the neatly laid parquetry of the city’s boulevards. An ensemble of imposing buildings, linked by broad paths and walkways, housing exhibits from over six thousand years of world history. Visitors could pass from huge halls the size of cathedrals, through quiet cloisters, to great courtyards flooded with light, could get lost in the megalomaniac grandeur of ancient architecture or lose track of time in silent galleries full of more human-scale artworks. At the northern end of the island, the Bode Museum towered above the water like some baroque ocean liner, its columned prow crowned with a great dome, while at the southern end of the whole complex a Classicist façade churned out crowds of visitors in its wake. Most imposing of all was the Pergamon Museum, a vast building like something glimpsed in a dream – if a bewhiskered German patriot of the nineteenth century had nodded off dreaming over a book of Greek myth. A huge, glowering central hall was flanked by two identical wings to either side, colossal rows of pillars marching off to end in Doric temple façades. The ground plan had originally been a U-shape, but in 2015 a fourth wing had been added, glassed-in, that made the building into a square. Here, as in no other museum on Earth, visitors could walk through millennia of human history, Egyptian, Islamic, Near Eastern and Roman.

Jericho had often crossed the island during trips to Berlin, taking one of the many bridges that moored it to the city, without ever having set foot in one of the museums. There had never been time. Now, as he hurried along the banks of the Spree, the thought that the time had finally come was not a cheering one. His jackets bulged with all the packets of money which made up Vogelaar’s payment. His Glock was in its holster, invisible to all. He looked like any other tourist, but he felt like the proverbial goose, off to meet the fox for dinner. As long as Vogelaar actually had the dossier, the two of them would make the exchange quite quietly and calmly, cash for information, and be on their way. If he didn’t, there would be trouble in store. The mercenary would want the money by hook or by crook, and he would certainly not rely on a smile and a kind word to get it.

Jericho felt his ear and slowed his pace.

The Pergamon Museum’s temple façade seemed to stare at him, each window a watchful eye. In the fourth wing, crowds of culture vultures jostled along the glass hallway, among the last surviving traces of lost empires. He walked on, glancing at his watch. Quarter past eleven. They had agreed on twelve o’clock, but Jericho wanted to get to know the location first. On his right, a long, modern building abutted the rest, its lower storey modelled after the older architecture while the top was a tall, airy colonnade: the James Simon Gallery, entrance to the museum island’s web of walkways. Visitors bustled across to the island in a chattering, sweating throng. Jericho joined the crowd crossing this arm of the Spree and was carried along up a grandiose stairway to the top floor of the gallery. He bought his ticket in a spacious hall lined with terraces and cafés, and followed the signs for the Pergamon Museum.

His first impression as he entered the southern wing of the museum was that he had walked into nirvana. The only feature in the room which tied it to earthly time and space was the Romanesque arched window towards the river. The exhibits were lifted clean out of any historical context, displayed in a space so huge it could almost be hyperspace, and looked splendid yet lonely at one and the same time, a chilly, hypothetical view of history. Jericho turned right and walked along a kind of street, with walls on either side, its frieze and battlements glowing with rich colour, reading the explanatory captions as he went. The animals in the frieze represented the Babylonian gods, with stately lions for Ishtar, goddess of love and protector of armies, serpentine dragons for Marduk, god of fertility and eternal life, patron of the city of Babylon, and wild bulls for Adad, lord of storms. Nebuchadnezzar II had ordered an inscription for the walls, reading ‘May ye walk in joy upon this Processional Way, oh ye gods.’ He could never have dreamed that the moment would come when groups of Japanese and Korean tourists would mill about in confusion here, losing their bearings amidst the grandeur of the past, hurrying to catch up with the wrong tour guide, confused by identical tabards. There was a model of Babylon in a glass cube, with a truncated pyramid in the middle soaring heavenwards; this was the ziggurat, the temple of Marduk. So that was where the God of the Old Testament had poured out his wrath, onto this surprisingly low tower, where he had confounded their language. Right then. This street had originally led to the ziggurat from the Ishtar Gate, which dominated the next hall, blue and yellow, glorious, shining like the sun, covered like the walls of the Way with the gods’ totem animals. The mass of visitors crowding the Way gave some idea of what it must have been like here at the time of the great processions.

Rush hour in Babylon.

Jericho went through the gate of Babylon and emerged 660 years later from a Roman gate that took up the whole wall of the next hall: the Market Gate of Miletus, two storeys high, a showpiece of transitional architecture, halfway between Hellenistic and Roman. He kept a constant lookout for exit routes. So far, it was easy to keep his bearings in the museum. The only thing that might slow him down was the density of the crowd of visitors, moving only at glacial speeds. Next to him, a Korean man was gesticulating furiously, telling his tour guide that he had lost his wife to the Japanese, only to learn that he had ended up with the Japanese. This was the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel, with languages mixing in confusion: the tourist group huddled into a knot. Jericho edged his way around them and escaped to the next hall.

He knew where he was at once.

This was where Vogelaar had chosen for the meeting. The room was the size of a hangar, but more than half of it was taken up by the front of a colossal Roman temple. Even the stairway leading up to the colonnades had to be a good twenty metres wide. All around the base of the temple ran a comic strip in marble, twice the height of a man, which the museum signs announced as the famous frieze of the Gigantomachy, showing the story of the Greek gods’ battle against the giants. It was the tale of an attempted coup, making it the perfect place to meet Vogelaar: Zeus had slighted Gaia by imprisoning her monstrous children, the Titans, in Tartarus – a sort of primordial Black Beach Prison. Gaia was determined to free them from the underworld and get rid of the hated father of the gods and all his corrupt crew, so she roused up to rebellion her children who were still at liberty. These were the giants, and Gaia knew that they could not be killed at the hands of a god. The giants were well-known ruffians, and just to make them scarier, they had giant snakes for legs. They leapt at the chance to protect their mother’s honour, and this gave Zeus the pretext to indulge in yet another of his many dalliances with human women – This is just a strategic move, Hera, it’s not how it looks! – and to father Hercules, a mortal, who would be able to sort the giants out. The giants put up a fight, chucking around hilltops and tree-trunks, so Athena rose to the challenge – Anything you can do, I can do better! – and flung whole islands at them, burying one of the ringleaders, Enkelados, under nothing less than Sicily; from that moment on, the giant blew his fiery breath up through Etna, while another, Mimas, was trapped beneath Vesuvius, and Poseidon scored a square hit on a third giant with the island of Kos. Most of them, though, succumbed to Hercules’ poisoned arrows, until the whole serpent-legged brood was exterminated. The frieze told the same old story, of a struggle for power, with the same old weapons. Who were the Fang, who were the Bubi, and who were the colonialists? Who bankrolled whom, and why? Had there been a dossier back then as well, containing the whole story, something like ‘The Truth about the Gigantomachy’ or ‘The Olympus Files’? A dossier like the one that the last surviving giant from Equatorial Guinea claimed to have?

Jericho’s gaze turned to the stairway.

There were three entrances to the pillared central hall, where the altar had once stood. Vogelaar had said he’d be waiting there. He climbed the gleaming marble steps, went through the columns and found himself in a large, rectangular space, brightly lit, with another, smaller frieze running around its walls. From up here there was a good view of everything happening down at the bottom of the stairs, as long as you didn’t mind being seen in turn. Further back in the room, and you were safely out of sight.

Jericho looked at his watch.

Half past eleven. Time to explore the rest of the museum.

He left the temple hall the other way and went into the north wing, where he found other examples of Hellenistic architecture. And what if Vogelaar didn’t have a dossier? He paced along the façade of the Mshatta palace, a desert castle from the eighth century. He was increasingly worried that the whole thing might be a trap. Romanesque windows marked the end of the north wing, but he couldn’t have said what he had seen in this part of the museum. As a scouting trip to learn the lie of the land, this was a wash-out. Stone faces stared down at him. He turned left. The way through to the fourth wing of the museum, the glass wing, led between rams and sphinxes, past pharaohs, through the temple gate from Kalabsha and beneath artefacts from the pyramid temple of Sahuré. Suddenly Jericho felt reminded of another glass corridor, the one where the ill-fated Grand Cherokee Wang had met Kenny Xin. An omen? With a grating sound, arms lifted, spear-tips were raised, granite fingers closed on the hilts of swords carved from stone. He went on, the daylight flooding in on him. To his right he could look through the windows that covered the whole wall, down to one of the bridges over this arm of the Spree, while to his left the inner courtyard of the museum stretched away. In front of him was an obelisk showing priest-kings gesturing strangely from the backs of glaring beasts, and in the corner was a statue of the weather god Hadad. Here the glass corridor joined the museum’s south wing and completed the circuit, leading back to the Babylonian Processional Way.

Twenty to twelve.

He went into the Pergamon hall for the second time, and found it besieged by art students who had parked themselves on the landing with sketch pads and were beginning to turn the glories of antiquity into rough sketches for their own future careers. He started up the steps with a feeling of foreboding. In the inner courtyard with the Telephos frieze, visitors were shuffling from one marble fragment to the next, seeking history’s secrets in the missing arms and noses. Jericho’s head pounded as he paced among the crippled heroes, eavesdropping on a father who was lecturing his offspring in muffled tones, stifling whatever faint glimmer of interest they might ever have had in ancient sculpture. With every date he mentioned, the kids’ frowns grew deeper. The look in their eyes spoke of honest bafflement – why were grownups so keen on broken statuary? How could anyone get through life without arms? Why not just fix the things? Their voices were older than their years as they feigned enthusiasm for smashed thighs, stone stumps and the fragmentary face of a king, without hope of escape.

Without hope of escape—

That was it. Up here, he was trapped.

Pessimist, he scolded himself. They had saved Vogelaar’s life, and furthermore the Telephos hall wasn’t the kitchen at Muntu. The exchange would take place, swift and silent. The worst that could happen would be that the documents didn’t contain what the seller claimed. He tried to relax, but his shoulders had frozen solid with tension. The father was doing his best to enthuse his children for the beauty of a right breast, floating free, which must, he explained, have been part of the lovely goddess Isis. Their eyes darted about, wondering what was lovely or beautiful here. Jericho turned away, glad all over again that he was no longer young.

Vogelaar

His thoughts were a whirl. He was caught up on a merry-go-round of ifs and buts as his feet carried him mechanically along the Processional Way. If Jericho and the girl got there at the time agreed, if Xin kept to the arrangement, if he could actually trust the Chinese assassin – but what if he couldn’t? Here and now, he was in danger of letting the last chance to free Nyela slip through his fingers, but she was in the clutches of a madman who quite possibly never even intended to let her, or him, live. He had decades of experience in finding his way out of tight spots, but it was no use. He was unarmed, without even a phone, in the middle of a crowded museum, and his chances of putting one over on Xin were slim – but it wasn’t impossible. Could he really afford not to use any tricks? Just how dangerous was this Mickey who was currently watching over Nyela? The Irishman gave the impression of being just another hapless career criminal, but if he worked for Xin, he had to be a threat. Nevertheless Vogelaar reckoned he could get rid of the guy, but first of all he had to deal with Xin.

An attack, then. Or not? In the next couple of minutes, before he reached the Pergamon hall. Unarmed and with no plan.

Not a glimmer!

No, he couldn’t attack. The only way to get one over that madman was blind luck, but what if Xin actually intended to keep his promise? What if Vogelaar failed in his attempt to put one past him, and in failing, actually caused Nyela’s death, not to mention his own?

Trick him? Trust him? Trick him?

Five minutes earlier, in the James Simon Gallery.

‘I understand you,’ Xin says gently. ‘I wouldn’t trust me either.’ He’s close behind Vogelaar, the flechette pistol hidden under his jacket.

‘And?’ Vogelaar asks. ‘Would you be right?’

Xin considers for a moment.

‘Have you ever got to grips with astrophysics?’

‘There were other things in my life,’ Vogelaar snarls. ‘Coups, armed conflict—’

‘A pity. You would understand me better. Physicists are concerned, among other things, with the parameters of a stable universe. Or indeed of any universe which could come into existence at all, as such. There’s a long list of facts to deal with, but it all comes down to two different points of view. One of them says that the universe is infinitely stable, that it never even had any choice but to develop in the form in which we know it. If things had been different, perhaps no life would have been able to arise. Pondering such matters though is as pointless as wondering what your life might have been like if you’d been born a woman.’

‘Sounds fatalistic, boring.’

‘Philosophically speaking, I quite agree. Which is why the other camp likes to speak of the infinite fragility of the universe, of the fact that even the smallest variation in initial parameters could lead to fundamental changes. A tiny little bit more mass. Just a very few less of this or that elementary particle. The first camp says that all sounds too contingent, and they’re right. But the second viewpoint does come closer to the way we imagine existence to be. What if… ? For myself, I prefer a vision of order and predictability, grounded in binding, non-negotiable parameters. And that’s the spirit in which we made our agreement, you and I.’

‘Meaning that you can always come up with some reason you needn’t keep your promise.’

‘You have a petty mind, if I may be so bold as to say so.’

Vogelaar turns around and stares at him.

‘Oh, I already see what you mean! I understand how you see yourself. Might the problem perhaps be that your’ – he waved his hand in the air in a circle – ‘idea of universal order doesn’t hold true for your fellow mortals?’

‘What’s up all of a sudden, Jan? You were calmer just a moment ago.’

‘I couldn’t give a damn what you think about that! I want to hear you say that Nyela will be safe if I keep my side of the bargain.’

‘She’s my guarantee that you’ll keep it.’

‘And then?’

‘As I have said before—’

‘Say it again!’

‘My goodness me, Jan! Truth doesn’t become any more true just from being repeated.’ Xin sighs and looks up at the ceiling. ‘If you like, though. As long as Mickey’s with her, Nyela’s fine, she’s safe. If everything else goes according to our agreement, nothing will happen to either of you. That’s the deal. Are you content?’

‘Partly. The devil never does anything without his reasons.’

‘I appreciate the flattery. Now do me a favour and move your arse.’

The Market Gate of Miletus.

Xin’s words in his ear. What if he turned round, right now, this moment? Ran through the museum full tilt, tried to reach the restaurant before him? That would definitely change the parameters! But to do that he would have to know exactly where Xin was. He had stayed behind as they went into the south wing. Vogelaar had turned round once to try to spot him, but hadn’t been able to see him among the hordes of tour groups. He didn’t doubt that the killer was watching his every step, but he also knew that from now on in, Xin would stay invisible until the time was ripe. Jericho and the girl were sitting in a trap in the Telephos hall. He would show up as though out of thin air, shoot twice—

Or would it be three times?

Trust him? Trick him?

Xin wasn’t sane. He didn’t live in the real world, he lived in some abstraction of reality. Which was actually a reason to trust him. His madness forced him to cling to order. Perhaps Xin wasn’t even able to break a promise, as long as all the parameters were observed.

He shrugged his way through the crowds and approached the entrance to the Pergamon hall, a smaller gate in the Hellenistic façade, which was just now being cleaned and restored. To leave a clear view of the architecture, the museum had clad it with glass walls rather than shrouds. The glass reflected the spotlights from the ceiling, and the statues and the columns all around, the visitors, himself—

And someone else.

Vogelaar stared.

For the length of a heartbeat he was helpless against rising panic. Iron bands clamped his ribcage, and an electric field paralysed his legs. Rage, hate, grief and fear pooled like a thrombosis in his feet, which became numb, refused to take one more step. Instead of horror at all the things that could happen to Nyela, he felt the searing certainty of what had most probably already happened.

As long as Mickey’s with her, Nyela’s fine—

Then why was Mickey in the museum?

Because Nyela was no longer alive.

It could only be that. Would Xin have allowed her to stay in the restaurant unguarded? Vogelaar walked on as though drunk. He had failed. He had surrendered to the childish hope that the madman might keep his promises. Instead, Xin had ordered the Irishman to come along to the museum to share the work of killing. That was all. Just as Nyela had never had a chance, right from the start, he too would die along with Yoyo and Jericho, in the little room at the top of the temple, if not before.

The thought acted like an acid, dissolving his fears in a trice. Ice-cold rage flooded in instead. One by one, his survival mechanisms clicked into place, and he felt the metamorphosis, felt himself become once more the bug he had been for most of his life. He marched onwards, chitin-clad, through the gate and into the Pergamon hall next door. Watchful, he waved his antennae, saw the entire hall through faceted eyes: over there, at the opposite end of the great hall, another gate that was the partner of the one he had come through, tiny, almost ashamed to be so small but nevertheless bravely doing its work, one narrow little bypass in the flow of bodies through the museum, pumping tirelessly. To his left, isolated parts of the frieze standing alone on pillars and pedestals; to his right the temple with the stairway, up above the colonnade, leading through to the Telephos hall where Jericho and the girl would be, waiting for a dossier that they would never see now, that they would never need. It would have all been so simple, so quickly over and done with. He would have been a hundred thousand euros richer, and he would have handed them the second dossier. The duplicate that apart from him only Nyela had known about—

Had known?

How could he be sure that she was dead?

Because she was.

Wishful thinking. No part of a bug’s existence.

Vogelaar’s jaw worked back and forth. Platoons of tourists thronged the stairway to the colonnade, many sitting on the steps as though planning to have lunch there. Vogelaar spotted a younger group all armed with sketch pads and pencils, their faces fixed in concentration, rapt in their struggle with immortal art. A few curious passers-by were peering over their shoulders. He swept his eyes across the students, one by one, and stopped at a pale girl with a sharp nose who had gathered no admirers around her. He walked up to her, unhurried. On the white sheet of paper, Zeus fought the giant Porphyrion, and the two of them together fought the girl’s artistic ineptitude, her inability to breathe life into the scene. She must have had a good twenty pencils in the case next to her, and the number was obviously inversely proportional to her talent. Clearly every euro of tip money from the evening job waiting tables went on her art supplies. She was throwing money away in the deluded belief that in art, having the right kit is half the struggle.

He leaned down to her and said in his friendliest voice, ‘Could you perhaps – excuse me! – lend me one of your pencils?’

She blinked up at him, startled.

‘Just for a moment,’ he added quickly. ‘I want to jot something down. Forgot my pen, as always.’

‘Hmm, ye-e-es,’ she said, slowly, obviously upset at the thought that pencils might be used for writing as well. In the next moment she seemed to have come to terms with the idea. ‘Yes, of course! Pick any one.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

He chose a long, neatly sharpened pencil which looked sturdier than the rest, and straightened up. Xin was watching him at this moment, he had no doubt. Xin saw everything and would draw his own conclusions from whatever Vogelaar did, meaning that he only had seconds.

He turned round, lightning-fast.

Mickey was only a few steps behind him, and stared at him like a surprised mastiff, then half-heartedly tried to hide behind a group of Spanish-speaking pensioners. Vogelaar was at his side with just a few brisk paces. The Irishman fumbled at his hip with his right hand. Obviously Xin had never given him instructions in the event anything like this should happen, since he seemed absolutely flummoxed. His jowls wobbled with fury, his eyes darted hectically to and fro, sweat broke out on his pate.

Vogelaar put a hand to the back of his head, pulled him in close, and rammed the pencil into his right eye.

The Irishman gave a blood-curdling scream. He twitched, and blood spouted from the entry wound. Vogelaar pushed the flat of his hand more firmly against the end of the pencil, drove it deeper into the eye socket, felt the tip break through bone and enter the brain. Mickey slumped, his bowels and bladder emptying. Vogelaar felt for the killer’s gun and tore it from the holster.

‘Jericho!’ he yelled.

Stampede

Jericho had chosen to wait for the South African on the other side of the temple, hidden behind a phalanx of free-standing sculpture exhibits, uncomfortably aware that Vogelaar could get the drop on him. He was even more frightened by what he saw now. It was worse than any of the scenarios his overheated imagination had dreamed up over the past couple of hours, since it meant that the handover had failed. No doubt about it.

Everything was going horribly wrong. With his Glock in his right hand, he broke cover. Shock-waves of horror and revulsion were spreading out from the scene of the attack; he could hear screams, shrieks, groans, noises that defied description. The immediate eyewitnesses had reeled back to form a kind of small arena, with Vogelaar and the bald man in the middle, like a pair of modern-day gladiators. Others had frozen with terror as though struck by a Gorgon’s gaze, as motionless as the gods and giants all around. Pencils dropped from the art students’ nerveless fingers. The girl with the sharp nose leapt up, bouncing on the balls of her feet like a rubber ball, and held her hands in front of her mouth as though trying to stop herself squeaking. Little yelps of fear slipped through her half-open lips, as regular as an alarm. Everywhere heads turned, eyes went wide with shock, people walked faster, groups broke apart. The fight-or-flight response was beginning to set in.

All structures were breaking down. And in the midst of it all, Jericho saw the angel of death.

He was running towards Vogelaar, who was buckling under his victim’s weight. The dying man fell to the ground, dragging the South African with him. The angel was closing in from the northern wing, white-haired, ferociously moustached, his eyes hidden by tinted glasses, but the way he moved left no doubt as to his identity. Nor did the pistol that seemed to leap into his hand as he ran.

Vogelaar saw him coming as well.

Yelling, he managed to heave the bald man back up. The next moment the leather jacket covering his torso exploded, as the shots that had been meant for Vogelaar smacked into him. Jericho threw himself to the ground. Vogelaar struggled to shove the dead man aside and opened fire in turn on Xin, who took cover among the screaming, running crowd. A woman was hit in the shoulder and dropped to the ground.

‘No point!’ Jericho yelled. ‘Get out of here.’

The South African kicked at the corpse, trying to get free. Jericho dragged him to his feet. With a sound like meat slapping down onto a butcher’s block, Vogel-aar’s upper thigh burst open. He collapsed against Jericho and clutched him tight.

‘Get to the restaurant,’ he gasped. ‘Nyela—’

Jericho grabbed him under the arms without letting go of the Glock. He was heavy, much too heavy. All hell was breaking loose around them.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he grunted. ‘You’ve got to—’

Vogelaar stared at him. He sank slowly to the ground, and Jericho realised that Xin had shot him again. Panic swept over him. He scanned the crowd for the killer, spotted his shock of white hair. He only had moments before Xin would have another clear line of sight.

‘Get up,’ he screamed. ‘Get going!’

Vogelaar slipped from his grasp. His face was going waxen, mask-like, horribly fast. He fell on his back, and a gout of bright red blood gushed from his mouth.

‘Nyela – don’t know if – probably dead, but – perhaps—’

‘No,’ Jericho whispered. ‘You can’t die on me…’

A few metres away, a man was lifted up and flung forward as though by a giant fist. He flew through the air and then crashed to the ground, spread-eagled.

Xin was clearing his way through.

Vogelaar, Jericho thought desperately, you can’t just croak on me now, where’s the dossier, you’re our last hope, get up, for goodness’ sake. Get up. Get up!

Then he turned and ran as fast as he could.

Vogelaar stared into the light.

He had never been a religious man, and even now he found that the promise of heaven sounded tawdry and hollow. Why should every fool who’d ever drawn breath find their way to the Other Side? Religion was just one of those cracks this bug had never scuttled into. He couldn’t understand a character like Cyrano de Bergerac, who had spent a lifetime scoffing at religion and then felt a pang of fear at the last moment, humbly seeking forgiveness on his deathbed in case there was a God after all. Life ended. Why waste what time was left to him believing in some paradise? This was only the neon white light streaming down onto him from the ceiling, the artificial daylight of the museum hall. The white light that people spoke of after near-death experiences. The Hereafter, supposedly. In truth it was nothing but hallucinogenic tryptamine alkaloids flooding the brain.

How stupid of him not to have given Jericho the dossier! Done with now. Dead and gone. He felt a faint flicker of hope that he had been wrong about Nyela. Hope that she was still alive, that the detective could do something for her – if he got out alive. Otherwise the situation was beyond his control, beyond his concern – but it wasn’t the worst way to die, his last thoughts with the only person he had loved more than himself.

Now he was freed from his armour, his bug’s shell. Free at last?

Xin came into view.

Gasping and grunting, Vogelaar lifted his gun, or rather strained every muscle to do so. He might just as well have been trying to fling a dumbbell at Xin. The pistol lay in his hand, heavy as lead. He only just had strength enough left to shoot daggers from his eyes.

The killer curled his lips contemptuously.

‘Parameters, you idiot!’ he said.

Xin shot Vogelaar in the chest and stalked on past without giving the dead man a second glance. Did he have any cause to reproach himself? Had it been a mistake to order Mickey along to the museum at the last moment, so that nothing went wrong this time? Vogelaar had spotted the Irishman, had drawn the wrong conclusion – and all this time Nyela was hanging from two pairs of handcuffs in the cellar at Muntu. Unharmed, as Xin had promised.

Hadn’t he said that he’d let her live?

He’d done that, damn it!

Yes, he would have let them both live! He’d have been happy to let them live! Vogelaar hadn’t understood anything, the stupid ape. Now it was all past help, the laws cried out for vengeance. Now he had to kill the woman. He’d promised that too.

Xin began to run, driving the crowd before him like lowing cattle, dumb animals all trying to crush through the narrow gate at the same time. A girl in front of him stumbled and fell to the ground. He trampled her underfoot, flung another to the side, cracked the pistol grip against the side of an old man’s head, fought his way through, charged like a battering ram at the ruck of fleeing tourists and plunged out the other side, his gaze fixed on the Market Gate of Miletus, where Jericho had just vanished through into the next wing. He squeezed off a burst of fire, sending splinters flying from two-thousand-year-old carvings. People screamed, ran, flung themselves to the ground, the same old tiresome spectacle. Swinging his pistol like a club, he followed Jericho, saw him melt into the crowd of visitors thronging the Processional Way, and then in his place two uniformed figures ran out from a corridor off to the side, their weapons at the ready but without the first idea of who their enemy really was. He mowed them down without breaking stride. A bow wave of panic washed before him, all the way to Babylon.

Where was that blasted detective?

Jericho ran along the Processional Way.

How absurd it was to be running away with a loaded gun in his hand, instead of using it. But if he stopped, Xin would shoot him before he could even turn round and aim. The killer was trained to hit small targets and to use any window that presented itself. He swung his Glock like Moses swinging his staff, shouting, ‘Get out of the way!’ parting the sea of people, and ran to the black statue of Hadad, past grinning sculptures of crouching lions. The beasts looked as though they had poodles or mastiffs somewhere in their bloodline. Had the cultures of the ancient world ever even seen lions, or had they only existed in the limited imaginations of sculptors working to order? Perhaps they’d just been bad sculptors. Not everything that found its way into museums necessarily had to be any good. And what the hell was he thinking about, at a moment like this!

A family scattered to all sides in front of him.

Beyond Hadad, a row of tall, slender columns marched away meaninglessly, no longer supporting whatever it was they had once held up. Following an inner impulse, he flung himself to the right, heard the dull crack of a pistol being fired and the shot thud into the storm god, ran towards the glassed fourth wing—

And stopped.

Stepping into that glass corridor meant that he would be trapped in the museum, running round the square all over again. He could get to the James Simon Gallery by going left here, and right now, just for a moment, he was out of Xin’s sight—

He dropped to all fours like a dog, scuttled behind the pillars, seeking cover, then crept back the other way, and from the corner of his eye he saw Xin running into the glass hall. Jericho stuffed the Glock back into his pocket. From now on he was just one of many, trying like all the rest of them to avoid becoming a statistic on the evening news report. A tsunami of rumour and consternation swept through the museum entrance hall, so that nobody paid him any attention as he hurried outside, running rather than walking down the steps to the river. He crossed the bridge back where he had come this morning.

Nyela. The dossier.

He had to get to Muntu.

Things were calmer in the glass hall. Xin scanned the crowd for Jericho’s blond hair. His pistol cast a spell of fearful silence all around, but something was wrong. If Jericho had come through here before him, armed, shouting, running, people would be a lot less relaxed. Obviously they thought that Xin was a policeman of some kind, on patrol. He glanced along the corridor, its western wall glowing with noon sunlight. In front of him an obelisk from Sahuré’s temple, the pharaohs on their plinths, the glowering temple gate of Kalabsha – he couldn’t rule out that Jericho might have the nerve to be hiding behind any of these. He’d had ten seconds’ head start, maximum, but enough to get behind one of the pharaohs.

And if he’d gone north—

No. Xin had seen him run in here.

Cautiously, he pushed on, taking shelter among the museum visitors – who were growing visibly more nervous. He aimed his gun behind plinths, pillars, façades, statues. Jericho had to be somewhere in this hall, but there were no shots, nobody broke cover to dash away, there was no headlong frontal assault. Meanwhile the tension was building up to open terror, worry tipped over into the fear that perhaps this man was a terrorist after all. Armed men would be turning up shortly, he was sure of that. If he didn’t find the detective in a hurry, he’d have to disappear himself, leaving the job unfinished.

‘Jericho!’ he yelled.

His voice fell unheeded on the glass walls.

‘Come on out. We’ll talk.’

No answer.

‘I promise that we’ll talk, do you hear me?’

Talk, then shoot, he thought, but all was silent. Obviously he hadn’t expected Jericho to step out from the shadows with a look of cheery relief on his face, but what really enraged him was the total lack of any reaction – except, that is, that everyone around him was suddenly in a hurry to leave the wing. Seething, he stalked onward, saw a movement in among the pillars of the Kalabsha Gate and fired. A Japanese tourist staggered out of the shadows, hands clutching her camera and a look of mild astonishment on her face. She took one last picture as if by reflex and then fell headlong. Panic spread, unleashing a stampede. Xin took advantage of the confusion, ran to the end of the hall and looked wildly around to all sides.

‘Jericho!’ he shouted.

He ran back, stared down through the glass at the inner courtyard, turned his head. He could hear heavy boots approaching from the passage to the James Simon Gallery. His eye fell on the bridge leading away from the Pergamon Museum, swept along the pavement by the riverside—

There! Blond hair, Scandinavian almost, a good way off by now. Jericho was running as though there were devils after him, and Xin realised that the detective had tricked him. There was a crowd forming now between the statues of the pharaohs. Security personnel were trying to get through the rush of visitors coming the other way – and these guards had sub-machine-guns. He had wasted too much time, shed too much blood to expect these new arrivals not to shoot first and ask questions later. He needed a hostage.

A girl slipped on the gallery’s smooth polished floor.

With one leap, he was behind her, catching hold, hauling her up, and he pressed the muzzle of his pistol to her temple. The child froze and then began to cry. A young woman gave a piercing scream, stretched out her hands but was knocked aside by others running to escape, and her husband grabbed hold of her, held her back from rushing to certain death. The next moment, uniformed figures took up position either side of the parents, calling out something in German. Xin didn’t understand but he had a pretty shrewd idea of what they wanted. Without taking his eyes off them, he dragged the girl over to the tall windows and looked down to the bridge over the Spree, where by now a few gawkers had gathered.

He leaned down to the little girl.

‘It’ll all be all right,’ he said softly into her ear. ‘I promise.’ She didn’t understand a word of Mandarin of course, but the sibilant syllables had their effect. Her little body relaxed as though hypnotised. She became calmer, breathing in short, shallow gasps like a rabbit.

‘That’s good,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

‘Marian!’ Her mother screamed, raw misery in her voice. ‘Marian!’

‘Marian,’ Xin repeated amiably. ‘That’s a very pretty name.’

He pulled the trigger.

Cries and shouts went up as the windowpane burst apart under the impact of dozens of flechette rounds. He had swung the pistol away at the last moment. Splinters of glass flew around their ears. He shielded the girl from the shrapnel with his torso, then shoved her away, crossed his arms in front of his head and chest and leapt out. While the officers were still trying to work out what had happened, he had landed cat-like among the onlookers three metres below, and he began to run.

Jericho

Muntu was closed. Hardly pausing, Jericho fired two shots into the lock and then kicked in the door. It slammed back against the wall inside. He rushed headlong into the dining area, looked behind the bar and then jumped back: but the man staring at him with puzzlement in his eyes, a light-skinned African, was clearly dead. Yesterday’s chaos reigned unchallenged in the kitchen. Nobody had cleaned up since his fight with Vogelaar.

There was no sign of Nyela.

Frantically, he charged through the beaded curtain, flung open both toilet doors, then tugged uselessly at the handle of a third door – Private, it said, and it was locked. He shot out this lock as well. Worn stairs led down into the darkness. A smell of mould, and disinfectants. The chalky scent of damp plaster. Memories of Shenzhen, the steps leading down to Hell. He hesitated. His hand fumbled for the light-switch, found it. At the bottom of the stairs a light bulb glowed in its cage. Whitewashed plaster, a stained concrete floor, a spider scuttling away. He went down a step at a time, his Glock at the ready, his skin crawling, overcome by nausea. Kenny Xin. Animal Ma Liping. Who or what was awaiting him down below? What kind of creatures would leap out at him now, what images would burn their way into his brain?

He stepped off the last stair. He looked round. A short corridor, piled high with crates and barrels. A steel door, half open.

He went through, his gaze darting, gun ready.

Nyela!

She was squatting down on the floor with her arms behind her back, her mouth covered with tape. Her eyes glowed in the half-light. He hurried across to her, holstered his Glock, tore the tape away and put his fingers to his lips. Not yet. First he had to get her out of the cuffs. Her jailers had locked her to the pipework, and he didn’t imagine that the key would be lying about somewhere as a reward for keen-eyed detectives.

‘I’ll be right back,’ he whispered.

Back in the kitchen, he pulled open drawers, rummaged through the tools, steel, copper, chrome, looked around all the worktops and finally found what he was looking for: a cleaver. He hurried back down to the cellar.

‘Lean forward,’ he ordered. ‘I need some room.’

Nyela nodded and turned away from him so that he had a good view of her hands. The pipe was worryingly short. Just a few centimetres from her wrists, it turned into the wall and vanished into the crumbling mortar. He took a deep breath, concentrated, and brought the blade down. The whole radiator sang like a struck bell. He frowned. There was a dent in the pipe, but otherwise nothing had changed. He struck again, and a third time, a fourth, until the pipe burst open, so that he could prise it apart with the handle of the cleaver. The chain of the cuffs scraped through the gap.

‘Where—’ Nyela began to ask.

‘Over there.’ Jericho motioned with his chin, ordering her over to a metal work-table. ‘Back to the tabletop, palms down, as flat as you can. Pull the chain tight.’

Nyela’s features clouded over with a premonition of the dreadful news she knew she was about to receive. She did as he said, turning her hands about.

‘Don’t move,’ Jericho said. ‘Stay still, quite still.’

She looked down at the floor. He fixed his eyes on the middle of the chain, and struck. One blow broke the chain.

‘Now let’s get out of here.’

‘No.’ She stood in his way. ‘Where’s Jan? What happened?’

Jericho felt his tongue go numb.

‘He’s dead,’ he said.

Nyela looked at him. Whatever he had expected, bewilderment, shock, tears, didn’t happen. Just a quiet grief, her love for the man who now lay dead in the museum, and at the same time a curious nonchalance, as though to say, there it is then, so it goes, it had to happen sometime. He hesitated, then hugged Nyela tight for a moment. She responded, a gentle embrace.

‘I’ll get you out of here,’ he promised.

‘Yes,’ she said, tired, nodding. ‘I hear that a lot.’

There was nobody upstairs, just the dead man staring out from behind the bar as though waiting for an explanation of what had happened to him. Jericho hurried to the closed door of the restaurant and peered outside.

‘We’ll have to run for it.’

‘Why?’

‘My car’s a few streets away.’

‘Mine isn’t.’ Nyela leaned across the bar, opened a drawer and took out a data-stick. ‘Jan was using it earlier today. He must have parked it in front of Muntu.’

Yoyo had spoken of a Nissan OneOne. There was just such a car parked a few steps away, its legs drawn up. The cabin was egg-shaped, its design rather like a friendly little whale. The legs on either side were thick at the base, tapering towards the wheels. When the legs were stretched out flat, the cabin hung low to the ground, but if the driver drew in his wheels, the legs drew inward and upward, lifting the cabin. The low, aerodynamic profile, like a sports car, changed to become a compact, taller car. Jericho stepped out of the door and scanned the street. Shapes and colours seemed over-exposed in the noonday sun. There was a smell of pollen, and of baking tarmac. There were hardly any pedestrians to be seen, but the traffic had picked up. He put his head back and looked up at a cigar-shaped tourist zeppelin that bumbled cheerfully into view, its engines droning.

‘All clear,’ he called back inside. ‘Come on out.’

The car roof reflected the sky, the clouds and the buildings around, curving them into an Einsteinian space. Nyela unlocked the car, and the roof lifted like a hatch. The interior was surprisingly roomy, with a long bench right across it and extra folding seats.

‘Where to?’ she asked.

‘The Grand Hyatt.’

‘Got you.’ She swung herself inside, and Jericho slid in next to her. He saw that the Nissan’s steering column was adjustable. The whole thing could be swung across from the driver’s side to the passenger’s. The tinted glass filtered the harsher wavelengths out of the noonday light and created a cocoon-like atmosphere. The electric motor sprang to life, humming gently.

‘Nyela, I—’ Jericho massaged the bridge of his nose. ‘I have to ask you something.’

She looked at him, the life draining from her eyes.

‘What?’

‘Your husband was going to give me a dossier.’

‘A— My God!’ She pressed her hand to her mouth. ‘You don’t have it? He couldn’t even get the dossier to you?’

Jericho shook his head, silent.

‘We could have blown the bastards’ game for good and all!’

‘He had it with him?’

‘Not the one from the Crystal Brain, Kenny has that one, but—’

Of course he does, Jericho thought, tired.

‘But the duplicate—’

‘One moment!’ Jericho grabbed her arm. ‘There’s a duplicate?’

‘He wanted to give it to you.’ She looked at him, pleading. ‘Believe me, Jan had no choice, he had to sacrifice you and the girl! That wasn’t in his nature, he wouldn’t have double-crossed you. He always—’

‘Where is it, Nyela?’

‘I thought he’d have told you.’

‘Told me what?’ Jericho felt he was going mad. ‘Nyela, damn it all, where did he have—’

‘Have, have!’ She shook her head furiously, spread out her fingers. ‘You’re asking the wrong questions. He is the duplicate!’

Jericho stared at her.

‘What do you m—’

Her throat opened out in a red fan. Something warm sprayed out at him. He flung himself down onto Nyela’s lap. Above him, the Nissan’s cabin exploded, the foam seat stuffing splattered about his ears. Still bending down, he grabbed hold of the steering wheel, tugged it towards himself, revved up and sped away. A salvo stitched through the car’s carbon-fibre hull with a dry staccato. Jericho raised his head just far enough to see over the dashboard, then felt Nyela slump heavily against his shoulder, and he lost control. The car careened down the street, lurched into the opposite lane and climbed the pavement, leaving the squeal of brakes and blare of horns in its wake. Pedestrians scattered. At the last moment, he wrenched the wheel to the left to come back across to his side of the street, almost colliding with a van. As the van swerved aside and rammed several parked cars, he bumped up onto the kerb on his own side and steered for the Spree.

There, tall, white-haired, he saw the angel of death.

Xin fired as he ran, coming directly towards him. Jericho nudged the wheel again. The Nissan threatened to tip over, the cabin was too high up on its legs, the wheels too close together for manoeuvres like this. He scanned the dashboard desperately. Xin had stopped to take aim. With a loud crack, part of the wrecked roof broke away. The Nissan raced towards Xin, and Jericho braced himself for an impact.

Xin leapt aside.

The car sped past him like a giant runaway pram. Xin fired after it, heard brakes squealing, dodged out of the path of a limousine by a hair’s breadth and stumbled across to the other lane, forcing a motorcyclist to veer crazily. The bike skidded and slanted. Xin dodged away again, felt something brush against him, and he flew through the air; he slammed full length against the pavement, on his front. A compact car had struck him, and now the driver was roaring away. Other cars stopped, people climbed out. He rolled onto his back, moved his arms and legs, saw the motorcyclist running towards him and fumbled for his pistol.

‘Good God!’ The man leaned over him. ‘What happened?’ he asked in English. ‘Are you all right?’

Xin grabbed his gun and shoved it under the man’s nose.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said.

The motorcyclist turned pale and scuttled backwards. Xin leapt to his feet. A few steps took him to the bike, and he swung himself into the saddle and thrashed off towards the Spree, where he drew up, tyres squealing, and looked about in all directions.

There! The Nissan. It ran a red light, vanished southwards.

Jericho looked about and saw him coming.

He had gone the wrong way. The Audi was somewhere else entirely. He could have changed cars by now, got out of this wrecked Nissan and away from the dead woman. The corpse was flung about this way and that, and kept thumping against him. He looked all over the dashboard for the control that would let the legs down. Pretty nearly everything was controlled via the touchscreen, there must be some symbol somewhere there, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept having to dodge, swerve, brake, accelerate.

Xin was catching up.

Jericho rumbled along the promenade by the river, across the cobblestones, cut up a lorry and emerged onto a majestic boulevard fringed with grand Prussian buildings. He tried to remember how to get to the hotel from here. Up on its stilts, the Nissan lurched from side to side, always threatening to tip over. All of a sudden he realised that he had no plan. Not a glimmer! He was racing through central Berlin in a wrecked compact car with a dead woman at his side, and Xin was after him, growing inexorably closer.

The traffic ground to a halt ahead. Jericho changed lanes. Another jam. Change again. A gap, a jam, a gap. Bumping from lane to lane like a pinball, he drove towards a huge equestrian statue which marked the beginning of a central island, planted with trees right down its length, a broad green lane dividing the traffic flows. He wrenched the wheel to the right, smashed into the kerb and climbed it. All of a sudden he was surrounded by pedestrians. He jammed the flat of his hand against the horn, veered about, frantically trying not to run anyone over, then the jam was past and he slalomed back down onto the road. He was going too fast, and the wheels had no grip on the road surface. The car skidded across the lanes towards the central reservation, lost contact with the tarmac. On two wheels, he was racing towards the line of trees, and he threw his weight to the side. Something slammed. The car shuddered, leapt violently, bark scraped, huge clouds of dust billowed up. The central island stretching away in front of him was almost empty of people, flanked by lime trees and by benches. To either side the traffic blurred behind the thick green foliage, an impressionist smear of cars, buses, bicycle rickshaws, colour, light, movement.

He glanced backwards.

Xin’s motorcycle was thrashing on under the low-hanging branches, hunting him like a beast of prey.

Jericho accelerated. More people suddenly. A café, shady, romantic, jutting out into the tree-lined walk. Yelled curses, shaken fists, scurrying backwards. A kiosk with tall tables standing around, people playing pétanque. He was racing towards a crossroads, saw the traffic lights changing through a gap in the leaves, yellow, red, and then he was cutting under the noses of dozens of cars ready to move, and was on the next stretch of the central strip. The chorus of blaring horns died away behind him. Glance back, no sign of Xin. Jericho yelled hoarsely. Lost him! He’d shaken Xin off, at least for the moment. He’d won some time, valuable seconds, every second worth an eternity.

Suddenly he also got his bearings back.

A snack bar blocked his way, but the traffic was lighter on both sides. Jericho steered the Nissan out of the shadow of the trees, back down onto the road, and saw it on the skyline ahead of him, the Brandenburg Gate, still some way off. Not for the first time, he felt surprised at how grand it looked in photographs and how small it really was. The Prussian-era courtyards and palaces were giving way now to modern architecture, the bistros and shops were ending, there were fewer pedestrians about. Soon enough the boulevard would end at Pariser Platz, with the Academy of Arts, the French Embassy, the American, and he hoped he could turn off there. North or south, and then—

Jericho squinted.

Something was going on up ahead. To his left, the trees had ended, so that he could see the whole width of the boulevard. Horrified, he saw that he was coming to a roadblock. Whole sections of the road were barricaded off. A monstrous robot was stretching out its cantilevered arm, lowering some huge, long object down to the road surface, and he could see Xin’s motorcycle tearing towards him in his only remaining rear-view mirror.

Jericho cursed. Whatever was being built up ahead had turned it into a blind alley for him. The construction robot was swinging an enormous steel girder slant-wise across the pavement and the road, while building workers waved away whatever cars had ended up here despite the road signs. There must have been announcements for the diversion, but of course he hadn’t seen them because he’d been tearing down the central reservation, and now there was nowhere to turn aside to, the girder was sinking lower, Xin was coming closer, he was readying his gun—

Where was the control for the legs?

The first of the workers had turned round and spotted him, jumped aside. Shots slammed into the rear of the Nissan. If he braked now, Xin would blow his head off, and if he didn’t, the girder would knock it clean off, nor could he turn around, he was going too fast, much too fast, and he couldn’t find the icon on the touchscreen—

There! Not an icon at all, but a switch! A plain and simple, old-fashioned switch.

In a trice the Nissan had stretched out its wheels, becoming a low-slung, wide vehicle. The girder grew larger in front of Jericho’s eyes, much too fast, dark, threatening, less than a metre and a half off the ground, a thick grey line, an end point. In a ridiculous reflex he lifted his arm up in front of his face as the cabin of his car sank further downwards, then there was a splintering, crunching sound as the edge of the steel swept away what was left of the roof. He pressed himself down into his seat. As flat as a flounder, the car shot through beneath the girder; it was briefly night, then clear blue day again. The crossroads, a bus, an inevitable collision. As though a film had jumped frames, all of a sudden the Nissan was two metres further to the right, began to turn, skated across Pariser Platz, cyclists, pedestrians, the whole world running from him. Scrabbling to get the car back under control, he screeched towards the Brandenburg Gate. A police gyrocopter came into view above the bronze statue atop the Gate, an ultralight helicopter, half open, a loudspeaker voice booming down at him. His plan to speed through the Doric columns of the Gate and get away the other side was thwarted by a row of low bollards that blocked any such attempt. He braked. The Nissan fishtailed, slid, crashed against the bollards and came to a stop. Next to him, Nyela seemed to want to say something. She straightened up, then her body was flung forward and back again into her seat, as though she had had second thoughts.

Jericho leapt clear of the wreckage.

The gyrocopter sank towards him. He ran for his life, under the Gate and through to the other side, where the boulevard continued, becoming a main road several lanes wide. Far off he could see a tall, slim column, and the road forked here just in front of the Gate. Without even looking at the traffic lights or signs, he hurried through a zebra crossing. Brakes screamed, and there was a crash as somebody shunted the car in front. Weird. Were there really cars still on the road without proximity pilots? A superannuated convertible zipped under his nose, missing running over his feet by a hair’s breadth, and he heard furious yelling. He started back, then sprinted, reaching the other side by dashing past a lorry’s radiator grille, and ran into a cool green passageway. This was the Tiergarten, the green park at the heart of Berlin. Sand, gravel, quiet pathways. In front of him was the statue of a lion. More trees, opening out into lawns, paths branching out in all directions. He raced down one, running, running, running until he could be sure that there was nobody following him, no Xin and no gyrocopter. He only stopped when he got to a small lake, and bent down with his hands on his knees, his sides aching, a sour taste on his tongue. He fought for breath. Gasped, spat, coughed. His heart was pounding like a battering ram. As though it wanted to break out of his ribcage.

An elderly lady looked across at him briefly, then turned her attention back to her little grandson, who was doing his best not to fall off his bike.

Xin

At last he had cleared the girder, but he had lost valuable time. He saw the Nissan racing away from him ahead, and he rode around the bus, leaning into the curve, taking aim. It looked as though the detective had lost control of the car. Good. Xin squeezed off a salvo just as a gyrocopter appeared above the Gate. To his astonishment, the police seemed to be paying more attention to his motorcycle than to Jericho, who at that moment jumped out of his car and ran away. The police dropped lower, faced the copter directly towards him; he heard shouted commands. He assessed the situation, thinking lightning-fast. The gyrocopter was still perhaps a metre above the ground. It was impossible to get past, and if he shot at the copter,the police would have no qualms about opening fire in return. He yanked his bike around and roared off along the street that crossed the boulevard.

The gyrocopter gave chase straight away. As he sped over the next crossroads, something splattered onto the tarmac in front of him, swelled up and set solid. They were firing foam cannon at him! One round of that in his spokes, and his ride would come to a sudden end. The stuff set instantly and hard as rock. Xin swerved, saw how the road in front of him led up over a bridge, turned right instead and found that he was back on the riverbank, on the Spree. If he hadn’t lost his bearings, this should lead back to the Museum Island. Not a good idea to pop up there again – it must be crawling with police by now. He heard the dry clattering of the copter behind him, then above him, then ahead. The gyrocopter set down, forcing him to brake to a stop. He wheeled about, a breakneck turn, and raced off the other way, only to spot another police flyer hanging, apparently motionless, over the dome of the parliament building, the Reichstag. It raced towards him.

They had him trapped.

Xin thrashed his bike onward, headed for the Reichstag, the river to his right. Tourists were thronging up the grand stairway outside, and the promenade opened out. There was government architecture all along the river here, steel and glass dotted here and there with petite little trees, elegant topiary. Sightseeing boats chugged along the Spree, took a curve further along the river and went under a filigree bridge.

And above everything, the two copters.

Xin aimed for the bridge. A group of young people scattered in front of his eyes. He revved hard, sat up on his back wheel, gunned the engine for all it was worth and shot over the edge. For a moment the motorcycle hung above the water; the river below him was a sculpture of glass, the gyrocopters hung in the sky as though nailed there. Xin felt a pleasant breeze on his skin, an intimation of what it would be like to live a completely different life, but there was no other that he could live.

He took his hands from the handlebars.

The surface splintered into kaleidoscopes, water thumped in his ears. He tried to get away from the sinking bike as fast as he could. The front wheel caught him a blow across the hip. He ignored the pain, surfaced, pumped his lungs full of air and dived again, deep enough not to be seen from the air. With powerful strokes, he made for midstream, one of the tourist boats thrumming above him. He had been trained to stay underwater for a long while, but he would have to surface sooner or later, and he had two copters to deal with. They would split up, one of them looking for him upstream, one downstream. His reflexes racing, he saw the dark bulk of the sightseeing boat moving away above him, and kicked his way up. He surfaced with his head just by the stern of the boat, which sat low enough in the water that he could grab one of the stanchions down by the windows. He slipped, grabbed hold again, clung tight and peered up into the sky, partly obscured by the boat’s deck and viewing platforms.

One of the gyrocopters was circling over the spot where he had gone under. He could hear the other one, but not see it. In the next moment it appeared, directly over the ship, and Xin slipped underwater again without letting go of the stanchion. He held his breath for as long as he could. When he risked another look, they were just passing under a bridge.

The copter was moving away.

He let the boat carry him along for a little while longer, then pushed away, swam to the bank and hauled himself up. There was a concrete embankment in front of him, with a busy road running beyond it. As far as he could see, the police were still searching on the other side of the bridge. He felt for his wig, but it was on the bottom of the Spree by now. He quickly tore off the false beard, peeled off his jacket, left everything there in the water and crept ashore, dripping wet. He had lost his gun as well, but had been able to keep hold of his phone, which was waterproof, thank God. He felt the reassuring grip of the money belt around his waist that held credit cards and the memory crystal. Xin made a point of carrying credit cards around with him, even if they were reckoned to be old-fashioned and everybody made purchases using the ID codes in their phones. He didn’t like to show up on records when he went clothes shopping though.

Not far away was an express railway, up on its viaduct. He glanced up and down the street. It curved away to a building with a glass dome and gleaming blocks clustered about it, which had to be Berlin’s main railway station. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, swept back his smooth, dark hair and walked along the street, quickly but without haste. Traffic streamed past him. He saw another gyrocopter a little way off, but since by now he hardly matched the description of the man the police were looking for, he felt fairly safe. He resisted the impulse to quicken his pace. In ten minutes he had reached the station concourse, and took cash from an ATM with one of his cards. He found a leisurewear store and bought jeans, trainers and a T-shirt. The salesgirl, studded with appliqués, looked at him in astonishment. He dressed in the clothes that he had bought and asked the salesgirl for a plastic bag. He paid cash, stuffed his wet clothes into the bag and then dropped it into a pavement rubbish bin outside, and went back to the Hotel Adlon by taxi.

Jericho

As far as he remembered, the Hyatt was south of the Tiergarten park, but then he lost his bearings among all the forked paths and duck-ponds, and wandered from one idyllic glade to the next. He could hear traffic sounds some indefinable way off. The sun shone down on him, unnaturally bright. He was overcome by nausea, a stitch yanked at his ribs, there was a pain spreading down from his shoulder to his left arm. The sky, the trees, the people around were all sucked into a red tunnel. Was this what a heart attack felt like? He stumbled across to a bush, his knees weak as wax, and threw up. After that he felt better, and he made it as far as the main road. At a crossroads he recognised several of the buildings, saw a Keith Haring sculpture and realised that the Grand Hyatt was just around the corner. He could have sworn that he’d been in the park for hours, but when he looked at his watch, he saw that not even fifteen minutes had passed since he had crashed at the Brandenburg Gate. It was just before half past twelve.

He called Tu.

‘We’re upstairs in your room. Yoyo and I—’

‘Stay there. I’m coming up.’

Since Diane was in Jericho’s room they had made it their command centre, so as to be able to research further and keep trying to decrypt more messages. In the lift, his thoughts shifted gear, becoming inordinately clear, self-aware. He hadn’t often been so completely at a loss. So incapable of acting. Nyela had been as good as safe, and he had still lost her.

‘What happened?’ Tu jumped to his feet and came towards him. ‘Is everything—’

‘No.’ Jericho reached into his jacket, fished out the packages of money and threw them onto the bed. ‘Here’s your money back. That’s all the good news there is.’

Tu picked up one of the packages and shook his head.

‘That’s not good news.’

‘It’s not.’ In curt sentences, he described how events had unfolded. Striving to remain objective, he only managed to make the whole story sound more dreadful. Yoyo grew paler with every word.

‘Nyela,’ she whispered. ‘Whatever have we done?’

‘Nothing.’ He rubbed his hands over his face, tired, dispirited. ‘It would have happened one way or another all the same. All we did was keep her alive a couple of minutes longer.’

‘No dossier.’ Her face clouded over. ‘All for nothing.’

‘According to Nyela, he must have been carrying it around with him!’ Jericho walked over to the window and stared out, seeing nothing. ‘Vogelaar had sold us out to Xin, but he was trying to turn the tables one more time. At the last moment, whatever it was that moved him to do so. He wanted me to have that dossier.’

‘Curses and maledictions.’ Tu punched a fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘And Nyela’s quite sure—’

‘Was sure, Tian. She was sure.’

‘—that he had it with him? She specifically said—’

‘She said that Kenny had got hold of the original.’

‘The memory crystal.’

‘Yes. But apparently there was a duplicate.’

‘Which Vogelaar was going to bring into the museum.’

‘Wait a moment.’ Yoyo frowned. ‘That means that he still has it on him?’

‘Irrelevant.’ Jericho pressed two fingers against his brow. Now they really were at a dead end. ‘The police will have taken it as evidence. But good, that means we have nothing more to decide. From now on, we aren’t working on our own any more. I imagine we can trust the local authorities here, so that means—’

He stopped.

He heard Tu speaking as though through cotton wool, heard him saying something about surveillance cameras that would have got his picture in the museum, that they would have put his picture out on the wanted list by now, that you couldn’t trust the authorities anywhere in this world. But more clearly, more meaningfully now, he heard again the last words that Nyela had ever spoken:

You’re asking the wrong questions. He is the duplicate!

He is the duplicate?

‘My God, how simple,’ he whispered.

‘What’s simple?’ Tu asked, baffled.

He turned around. Both of them stared at him. There it was again, his assurance, that he thought he had lost.

‘I think I know where Vogelaar hid his dossier.’

Hotel Adlon

Xin took out the memory crystal, turned it between his fingers and smiled. Useless knowledge. All in all, he could rest content. Paying no attention to the grand interior, he strode across the hotel lobby, went up to his suite and tried his phone before anything else. The manufacturer’s guarantee said that it was waterproof up to twenty metres, and indeed it was working as well as ever. Looking at the display, he saw that his contact had been trying to reach him, just before he had got his sights on Vogelaar.

‘Hydra,’ he said.

His voice was recorded, checked, ID’d.

‘Orley have received a warning,’ his contact announced.

‘What?’ Xin exploded. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday, late afternoon.’

‘Details?’

‘Someone named Tu sent across a document. It was obviously a fragment of your message.’ The other man drew a deep breath. ‘Kenny, they must have been able to decipher more as well! How could that happen, I thought—’

‘What do you mean?’ Xin began to pace up and down the room. ‘What sort of fragment?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Then I’m telling you this: you’ll take all of our pages down from the web.’

‘If we do that, our whole email communication breaks down.’

‘You’ve tried that argument on me before.’

‘And I was right.’

‘Yes, and look where it got you.’ Xin tried to calm down. He opened the minibar and mechanically began to shift the bottles until they were exactly the same distance apart. ‘The email idea was good for exchanging complex information and for using the global server; phones are enough for everything else. The die is cast. We can’t change anything now anyway. The only thing that could still go wrong would be if my message were cracked completely, so take the pages down from the web!’ He paused. ‘Have you already told him?’

‘He knows.’

‘And?’

The other man sighed. ‘He agrees with you. He thinks we should block the pages too, so I’ll do what’s needed. Your turn now. What’s happening with Vogelaar?’

‘He’s been dealt with.’

‘No more danger?’

‘He had created a dossier. Memory crystal. I’ve got the thing now. His wife was the only one who knew all about it; she’s dead too.’

‘Good news there for a change, Kenny.’

‘I wish I could say the same about yours,’ Xin snapped. ‘Why am I just hearing about this warning now?’

‘Because I only learned about it myself this morning.’

‘How did the company react?’

‘They called Gaia.’

‘What?’ Xin practically dropped the telephone. ‘They’ve told Gaia?’

‘Calm down. Probably because it’s in the news just now. As far as I know everything’s running to plan, they haven’t cancelled any of the trips, nobody wants to leave early.’

‘And who took the call at Gaia?’

‘I’m expecting more details any moment.’

Xin stared into the fridge.

‘Well, fine,’ he said. ‘Find out something for me in the meantime, and fast. Find Yoyo and Jericho in Berlin.’

‘What? They’re in Berlin?’

‘They must be staying somewhere. Hack into the hotel booking systems, the immigration databases. I don’t care how you do it, but find them.’

‘Dear God,’ the other man groaned.

‘What’s up?’ Xin asked threateningly. ‘Are you losing your nerve?’

‘No, that’s no problem. Okay then. I’ll do what I can.’

‘No,’ Xin snarled. ‘You’ll do more than that.’

Grand Hyatt

Just before Xin shot her, Nyela had spread her fingers as though to emphasise what she was saying. He had thought that it was only a gesture of exasperation, but in fact she’d been doing something different. She had been pointing to her face, and at that moment, it was supposed to be Vogelaar’s face. She had been pointing to her eyes.

He is the duplicate!

Vogelaar’s glass eye was a memory crystal. He carried the duplicate around with him, in his eye socket.

‘What a sly fox,’ Yoyo said, half admiring, half disgusted.

Tu snorted with laughter. ‘He could hardly have found a better place for it. An eye for the facts.’

‘So that they come to light once he dies.’ Yoyo had more colour in her face now. Jericho remembered last night. Not ten hours had passed since she had left his room with sunken, hollow eyes, looking dissolute, flushed, blotchy, stinking of cigarette smoke and red wine. She had gone pale again now – after all, life was playing them one dirty trick after another – but other than that, the night’s excesses hadn’t left a mark on her. She looked fresh, smooth-skinned and perky, practically rejuvenated. Jericho was depressed by what this said about youth and intoxicants. For himself, when he’d been drinking the night away, the enzymes only ever worked fitfully, at best, at patching him up again.

‘You know this sort of thing, Owen,’ Tu said. ‘What happens during a forensic autopsy? Will they look at the glass eye as well?’

‘They’ll certainly remove it while they work.’

‘And a memory crystal would stand out?’

‘Anybody with medical training would certainly notice,’ Yoyo said. ‘Assuming that Owen’s right, then the police will have our dossier in their hands in the next few hours.’

Jericho rubbed his chin. He didn’t much like the idea of tangling with the German police. They’d be interrogated for hours, treated with suspicion, quite likely they’d never get a look at Vogelaar’s data. Their own investigation would slow down to a crawl.

Tu handed him a printout.

‘Perhaps you should have a look at what we found out while you were away. We’ve bolded everything that’s new.’

‘Payload rockets.’ Jericho looked up. ‘That’s another thing that supports what Vogelaar said. That satellite launch was about more than just an experimental rocket.’

‘A payload rocket has to be delivering something,’ Tu said. ‘How did Mayé’s satellite get up into orbit?’

‘Payload rocket,’ Jericho suggested. ‘They’re called carrier rockets as well, I think.’

‘But there’s nothing here about a satellite.’

‘No. Looks like it has nothing to do with the satellite. It’s about some other pay-load.’

Tu nodded. ‘I took the opportunity to talk to some people who my people have helped out in the past. I couldn’t get any definite information, but they gave me some well-founded supposition. Apparently, the Chinese government has never launched its own space projects from foreign soil. That story about wanting to avoid the insurance treaties is as threadbare as Chairman Mao’s shroud. The whole thing must have been dreamed up for Mayé’s benefit; at any rate it doesn’t accord with current practice to shuffle the risk onto other states like that.’

‘So it could have been something that Zheng was doing on his own account?’

‘There’s no record of the Zheng Group having been active in Africa anywhere but in Equatorial Guinea that one time. It looks doubtful that they were acting for Beijing. My informants don’t think so. So did the Chinese government have anything to do with the Equatorial Guinea space programme, or with the coup against Mayé? Yes, if you are working on the premise that people like Zheng Pang-Wang are the government. Not if we’re talking about the government as such.’

‘Which proves again that the Party is just a pretext, a phantom,’ Yoyo said contemptuously. ‘There’s no dividing line between politics and business any longer, the State can’t be trusted to act in State interests. China’s oilmen putsched Mayé into power, the Zhong Chan Er Bu helped them, and the whole Party knows it. Could be that Zheng putsched him out again afterwards. He’s our biggest industrialist, a power in his own right.’

‘And the Party wouldn’t have known about that.’

‘Quite so.’ Yoyo tapped the page. ‘And then further down: Nobody there suspects– what? Something or other. The everything turns out to go with the next bit of the sentence. Everything is under way. They sit there and debate whether it’s even worthwhile getting rid of Vogelaar at this stage. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds as though the balloon’s about to go up.’

‘Any ideas about the bit before that?’

‘Vogelaar didn’t know about the timing any more than the nature of the operation.’ Tu shrugged. ‘I don’t think any of it gets us anywhere.’

‘Well, that’s great,’ Jericho said. ‘We’re stuck.’

Yoyo toppled backwards onto the bed, her arms spread wide. Then she sat up suddenly.

‘How does that work with Vogelaar, exactly?’

‘What do you mean?’ Jericho blinked, confused. ‘How does what work?’

‘Well, right now.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Or let’s go back an hour. Twelve o’clock. Blam. Blam! Vogelaar’s shot, he’s lying dead in the museum. What happens next?’

‘A specialist police team arrives. The scene of the crime is secured, then forensics get to work.’

‘What happens to the corpse?’

‘Right now, it’ll still be there. Forensics work takes time. Then it’ll be on the autopsy table at, say, two o’clock at the latest, then they’ll cut him open, snip snap.’

‘And the eye?’

‘Depends. The forensic surgeon isn’t an investigating officer himself – it’s a bit different from how you might have seen it at the movies. He just makes a note of everything worth handing over to the investigating team. Assuming that he notices anything odd about the eye, he’ll put it in his report. Maybe he’ll put it back into the socket; maybe he’ll put it aside as evidence.’

‘How long does an autopsy take?’

‘Depends on the case. There’ll be no doubt here about the cause of death. Vogelaar was shot, so it’ll be quick. They’ll be done in two or three hours.’

‘And then?’

‘The forensic surgeon will sign the corpse over.’ Jericho gave a wry grin. ‘You can pick it up, if you bring a hearse.’

‘Good. We’ll fetch it.’

‘Great plan.’ Tu stared at her. ‘Where are you going to get a hearse?’

‘No idea. Since when have we been scared of a challenge?’

‘We’re not, but—’

‘Why do we even need a hearse?’ Yoyo sat up straight now, all vim and vigour. ‘Why not go and fetch him in an ordinary car? What if we were next of kin?’

‘Well, sure,’ Tu said mockingly. ‘You could easily be his sister. The hair, the eyes—’

‘Hold on!’ Jericho raised a hand. ‘First off, we wouldn’t get anywhere without a hearse. Secondly, if they’ve taken the eye, Vogelaar’s corpse will be no use to you at all.’

Yoyo’s burst of energy melted away. She folded her arms and frowned despondently.

‘Thirdly,’ Jericho said, ‘that’s still a good idea you had there.’

Tu narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you thinking of doing?’

‘Me?’ Jericho shrugged. ‘Nothing. Probably I daren’t even show my face any more in Berlin, they’ll pick me up on the spot. My hands are tied.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Yours aren’t though.’

Charité Hospital, Institute of Forensic Pathology

Around three o’clock, Jan Kees Vogelaar was looking fairly good. Granted, his face was waxy and he was dead as a doornail, but he wore a proud sneer that seemed to say, kiss my arse. A few hours ago he had been lying in a pool of his own blood, his eyes wide open, his limbs twisted, looking more like the Ides of March. Fallen like Caesar beneath a Roman temple. A death that may sound romantic in the textbooks, but in fact it was a bloody mess. The bald man lying next to him, likewise dead, did little to make the picture any prettier.

Once he had been photographed from all angles, and the dead man next to him with the pencil jutting from his eye, they zipped him up into a plastic bag and drove him across to the Institute of Forensic Pathology at the Charité Hospital. Here he was weighed and measured, his identifying features noted down, and he was put into cold-storage. He didn’t stay there for long, however, but was taken out and X-rayed several times. This showed where the flechettes had lodged or broken apart in his body, as well as revealing old bone breakages, mended now, and a titanium knee. It also showed that his left eye was artificial. He was wheeled into the autopsy theatre, along with the bald man, where they were just about to slice him open when Nyela was brought in as well. This meant that three of the five dissection tables were occupied by as yet unidentified corpses. The surgeons removed Vogelaar’s organs, examined them, weighed them, drained off bodily fluids and measured the volumes, noted down all their procedures and findings. Meanwhile a case team was hastily assembled, and the investigating officers compared photographs of the corpses with pictures from the city police files. It was soon established that the female corpse had been found in a car registered in the name of Andre Donner, resident in Berlin since a year ago. He was a restaurant owner, married to Nyela Donner, and photographs from the records left no doubt as to the dead woman’s identity, or that the man with the glass eye was her husband.

The bald man’s name, though, was not so easily established.

Just as Donner (alias Vogelaar) was being sewn back up, the pathology lab got a phone call from the German Foreign Office, saying that Donner’s murder had caught the attention of the Chinese authorities. Chinese and German police working together, so the civil servant on the phone said, had been investigating a gang of technology smugglers for some time. Perhaps the restaurant owner’s death had something to do with a failed handover, and Donner might well not be Donner at all, but somebody else entirely, an alias. The Berlin government was very keen to do what they could to help the Chinese investigators, two of whom would be arriving in a few minutes to take a quick look at the body. Could the autopsy team please treat them as guests of the government?

The trainee doctor who took the call said that she would have to make enquiries. The civil servant gave his name and a telephone number, asked her to move as quickly as she could, and hung up. Next, the trainee spoke to the head of the Institute, who told her to check with the Foreign Office that it was all above board, and to bring the Chinese investigators through to theatre as soon as they arrived.

4 – 9 – 3 – 0 – she dialled—

—and was put through. It really was the Foreign Office number, but the extension number was a little special. It didn’t actually exist. Thus she wasn’t actually put through where she thought she would be when she heard a recorded voice saying:

‘This is the Foreign Office. Currently all our lines are busy. You will be put through to the next free line. This is the Foreign Office. Currently—’ Then a woman’s voice, gentle, melodious: ‘Foreign Office, good afternoon, my name is Regina Schilling.’

‘Institute of Forensic Pathology, Charité. Could you put me through please to – erm—’ The woman on the line paused, probably looking at her notes. ‘Mr Helge Malchow.’

‘One moment,’ said Diane.

Jericho grinned. He had picked a first name and family name quite at random out of the Berlin telephone book, and had programmed a few sentences into Diane. The whole little show would certainly dispel any doubts the caller might have that she was speaking to the Foreign Office – and not, for instance, to a computer in a hotel room. Diane’s German was perfect, of course.

‘Mr Malchow’s line is busy at the moment,’ Diane told the trainee. ‘Would you like to hold?’

‘Will it take long?’

Jericho pointed to the right answer.

‘Just a moment,’ Diane said, and then cheerfully, ‘Ah, I see that he’s just hung up. I’ll put you through. Have a pleasant day.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Helge Malchow,’ Jericho said.

‘Charité Hospital. You called about the Chinese police delegation.’

‘That’s right.’ His own German wasn’t bad at all. Maybe a bit rusty. ‘Have they arrived yet?’

‘No, but they’re quite welcome. They should drive to Building O.’

‘Splendid.’

‘Perhaps you could tell me their names?’

‘Superintendent Tu Tian is leading the investigation, Inspector Chen Yuyun will be with him. The two of them are working undercover, so perhaps you could be so good as to let them see what they need as quickly as you can, not too much red tape.’ It was a ludicrous claim, but it sounded halfway plausible. ‘By the way, you’ll find that they only speak English.’

‘That’s fine. We’ll keep the red tape to a mini—’

‘Thank you very much indeed.’ Jericho hung up, and dialled Tu’s number.

‘All systems go,’ he said.

Tu put his phone down and looked at Yoyo. She could see it in his eyes that he absolutely loathed what they were about to do.

‘I never wanted to see another corpse in my life,’ he said. ‘Corpses in tiled rooms. Never again.’

‘Sometime or other we’ll all be corpses in tiled rooms.’

‘At least I won’t have to see that for myself, when it’s me.’

‘You don’t know that. They say that you see yourself when you die. See yourself lying there, and you couldn’t care less.’

‘I could care.’

Yoyo hesitated, then reached out and squeezed Tu’s hand. Her slim white fingers against his soft, liver-spotted flesh. A child seeking to reassure a giant. She thought of the evening before and the story Tu had told her during the course of the night, of people locked away in prison for so long that in the end the prison was in them. For years now she had been carrying around her own burden of self-reproach, certain that in some obscure way she was responsible for the grown-ups’ pain; and now that burden was taken from her shoulders and replaced instead with the truth, which was so much worse, so much more depressing. She had smoked, boozed, cried, and felt helpless, useless, the way children feel when they see their parents’ moods, so complex, so painful, moods that they can’t understand and think must be something to do with them. Every argument Tu used to make her feel better about it just deepened the pain. His story freed her from the accumulated years of self-pity, but now she felt a vast pity for Hongbing instead, and wondered if she wanted a father she had to pity. Now she was ashamed of even having had the thought, and again she felt guilty.

‘Nobody wants to pity his parents,’ Tu had said. ‘We want them to protect us for a while, and then at some point we want to leave them alone. The most we can achieve is to understand what they do, and forgive the child we used to be.’

For all that, Tu deserved pity as well, but he seemed not to need it, unlike her father. She suspected that it had been far worse for him than it had been for Tu. But unlike the bitterness that Hongbing had eaten, Tu’s fate seemed to her—

‘Not so bad?’ Tu had laughed. ‘Of course. I’m not even your uncle. I’m an old fart with a young wife. When you look at me, you see who I am, not who I was. There’s no history to chain us together.’

‘But we’re – friends?’

‘Yes, we’re friends, and if you were a bit more interested in my bank balance and had fewer scruples, we could be lovers. But you can only see Hongbing in one particular way, that’s genetics for you. No place for pity there. It just doesn’t feature. We each have our own genetic destiny, and when we’ve played that role to the full, then perhaps we can see our parents for what they really are, understand them, accept them, respect them, maybe even love them. For what they always were: just people.’

Oh God, and then dropping in on Jericho late at night. What an embarrassment! She’d been carried away by the intoxicating notion of storming his room, and then she’d crept out without achieving anything, like a silly drunk. It had been a whim, of course, and like all such whims it only made her feel stupidly ashamed. In retrospect, she didn’t even know what she had wanted there.

Or did she?

‘Let’s get this over with,’ said Tu.

They’d fetched the Audi a quarter of an hour ago from the street by the Spree, and now they were parked across from the Institute of Forensic Pathology, Charité Hospital. Tu started the engine and drove up to the barrier at the front gate. He waved his ID out of the window at the guard, told him that the Foreign Office had approved their visit and asked the way to Building O. They drove along past grand red-brick façades. Splendid green lawns beneath spreading leafy boughs called out to them to stop and linger with a loaf of bread, some cheese, a bottle of Chianti, to make the most of every minute before the die was cast and they had to enter Building O. They felt that same yearning for peace and quiet that even the liveliest extrovert feels in a graveyard.

After driving straight ahead for a long while, then turning twice, they stopped in front of a light, airy, somewhat sterile building with all the charm of a provincial clinic. There were only three police cars parked in the forecourt, with the green Berlin livery and marked Forensics. All this understated modesty unsettled Yoyo, gave her the odd feeling that they weren’t where they needed to be, that the corpses must be somewhere else. She had imagined that in a megalopolis like Berlin, where people died every minute of every day, the Institute of Forensic Pathology had to be a vast hangar-like edifice, but this little low building hardly suggested doctors arguing, inspectors, profilers, all the scenes she knew from the movies. They went up three steps, rang the bell by a glass door and were let through by two women in white coats, one tall, young and rather pretty, the other short and wiry, in her late forties, apple-cheeked and with a no-nonsense haircut. The older woman introduced herself as Dr Marika Voss, and her young companion as Svenja Maas. Tu and Yoyo held out their IDs. Dr Voss glanced at the characters and nodded as though she dealt with Chinese documentation every working day.

‘Yes, you have been announced to us,’ she said, in stiffly formal English. ‘Miss Chen Yuyun?’

Yoyo shook her hand. The doctor looked thoughtful for a moment. Clearly she was doing her best to reconcile Yoyo’s appearance with what she imagined an undercover homicide squad must look like. She glanced across to Svenja Maas and then back again, as though remembering with an effort that there were good-looking people in all walks of life.

‘And you are Mister—’

‘Superintendent Tu Tian. This is very good of you,’ Tu said amiably. ‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time. Have you already completed the autopsy?’

‘You are interested in Andre Donner?’

‘Yes.’

‘We just finished with him a few minutes ago, but not yet with Nyela Donner. She is being examined two tables further on. Do you need to look at her as well?’

‘No.’

‘Or at the second dead man from the museum? We don’t have his identity yet.’

Tu frowned.

‘Perhaps. Yes, I think so.’

‘Good. Please come.’

Dr Voss looked into a scanner. Another door opened. They entered a corridor, and here for the first time Yoyo smelled that sharp, sweet smell that the people on television always ward off with a bit of balm rubbed under their noses. It was bacterial decay; the smell thickened, from a mere hint to a miasma, as they went downstairs to the autopsy section, and from a miasma to a brackish pool as they entered the lobby to the theatre. A young man with an Arabic look about him was uploading children’s portrait photos to a monitor screen. Yoyo didn’t even want to think about children, here. Nor did she need to, since Dr Voss had just pressed something into her hand. She looked at the little tube, utterly at a loss, and felt her ignorance open up beneath her like a trapdoor.

‘For our visitors,’ the doctor said. ‘You know, of course.’

No, she didn’t know.

‘For rubbing under your nose.’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘I thought that you would—’

‘This is Miss Chen’s first case involving forensic pathology,’ Tu said, taking the tube from Yoyo’s fingers. As though he had done it all his life, he squeezed out two pea-sized blobs of the paste it contained and smeared them under his nostrils. ‘She’s here to get some experience.’

Dr Voss nodded understandingly.

‘You’ve not been paying attention in theory class, Inspector,’ Tu teased her in Chinese, passing Yoyo the tube. She rolled her eyes at him and rubbed a squeeze of the stuff on her upper lip, only to find out the next moment that it was, quite definitely, too much. A minty bomb exploded into her nasal passages, swept through her brain and blasted the smell of decay aside. Svenja Maas watched her with conspiratorial interest, the fellow-feeling of two beautiful people who meet in the company of the less well favoured.

‘You get used to it at some point,’ she declared, the voice of experience.

Yoyo smiled faintly.

They followed the doctor into the theatre, tiled red and white with frosted glass windows and boxy ceiling lights. Five autopsy tables were lined up next to one another. The first two were empty, but two surgeons were bent over the table in the middle, one of them just lifting the lungs from a yawning gap in the ribcage of the black woman they were working on, while other said something into a microphone. The lungs went onto a scale. Dr Voss led the group past the fourth table, where a large corpse lay under a white sheet, and she stopped at the last. Here too the corpse was covered, but she turned the sheet back and they saw Jan Kees Vogel-aar, alias Andre Donner.

Yoyo looked at him.

She hadn’t particularly liked the man, but now that she saw him lying there, a Y-shaped incision freshly sewn up on his torso, she felt sorry. Just as she had felt sorry for Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for Robert de Niro in Heat, Kevin Costner in A Perfect World, Chris Pine in Neighborhood, Emma Watson in Pale Days. All those who had so very nearly made it, but who always failed at the last moment no matter how often you watched the film.

‘If you don’t need me,’ Dr Voss said, ‘I’ll leave you with Frau Maas. She assisted in the Donner autopsy and should be able to answer any questions you have.’

‘Well, then,’ said Tu, switching to Chinese. ‘Let’s get started, Comrade.’

They leaned down to look at his face, waxy, already tinged with blue. Yoyo tried to remember which side Vogelaar had his glass eye on. Jericho had insisted it was the right side. She wasn’t so sure herself. She could readily have sworn that it was the left. It was a magnificently well-made eye, and under Vogelaar’s closed lids there was no telling which it might be.

‘Not sure?’ Tu frowned.

‘No, and that’s Owen’s fault.’ Yoyo looked askance at Svenja Maas, who had stepped back. ‘Let our friend there show you the fellow on the next table.’

‘Fine, I’ll keep her off your back.’

‘It’ll be all right.’ Yoyo gave a sour smile. ‘There are only two possibilities.’

She wasn’t getting used to the sight of corpses, or to the idea that people she had barely got to know dropped like flies. But even as she veered between fascination and disgust, an unexpected sense of calm took hold of her, deep and clear, like a mountain lake. Tu turned to Svenja Maas and pointed to the body on table four, still under its sheet.

‘Could you please uncover this man for us?’

Stupid. The trainee doctor stepped round the wrong side of the table. From where she was, she still had a good view of Yoyo. Tu shifted position to block her view.

‘Great heavens above,’ he cried out. ‘What happened to his eye?’

‘He was attacked with a pencil,’ the trainee doctor said, not without some admiration in her voice. ‘Straight through the bone and into the brain.’

‘And how exactly did that happen?’

Yoyo put two fingers onto Vogelaar’s right eyelid and lifted it. It seemed to have no particular temperature, neither cold nor warm. While Svenja Maas was explaining about angle of entry and pressure, she pressed her middle finger and thumb into the corner of the eye. The eyeball seemed to sit much too firmly in the eye socket, more like a glass marble than soft and slippery, so that for a moment she wasn’t sure that Jericho hadn’t been right after all, and she shoved her fingers deeper into the socket.

Resistance. Were those muscles? The eye wasn’t coming out, rather it tugged backwards, leaking some kind of fluid, like a cornered animal.

That wasn’t a glass eye, not on her life.

‘The shaft splintered,’ Maas said, walking over to the organ table between the corpse and the wash-basin, where something lay in a transparent plastic bag on a tray. Quickly, Yoyo pulled her fingers out of the socket, just before Maas happened to glance over at her. She thought she heard a squelching sound as she did so, reproachful, tell-tale. Tu hurried to block the sightlines again. Yoyo shuddered. Could the woman have heard something? Had there been anything to hear, or had she just imagined it, expecting an eye socket to squelch as you take your fingers out?

The surface of the calm lake inside her began to ruffle. There was something sticky on her fingers. Jericho had been wrong! While Tu twinkled at Svenja Maas, asking interested questions about her work, she plunged her fingers into Vogelaar’s left eye socket. Straight away she could feel that this was different. The surface was harder, definitely artificial. She pushed further, flexed her middle finger and thumb. All the while, Tu was asking learned questions about the improvised use of drawing equipment as weapons. Maas pronounced that everything could be a weapon, and stepped to the left. Tu declared that she was absolutely right, and stepped to the right. The pathologists at the middle table were busy with Nyela.

Yoyo took a deep breath, high on mint rub.

Now!

The glass eye popped out, almost trustingly, and nestled into the palm of her hand. She slipped it into her jacket, closed Vogelaar’s sunken eyelid as best she could and saw that she had caused lasting disfigurement. Too late. She quickly pulled the sheet back up over his face and took two steps to Tu’s side.

‘There is no doubt any longer about Andre Donner,’ she said in English.

Tu stopped in the middle of a question.

‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Very good. I think we can go.’

‘When will you want my report, Superintendent?’

‘What kind of question is that, Inspector! As soon as possible. The director of prosecutions is breathing down our neck.’

Curtain, applause, Yoyo thought.

‘Are you done?’ Svenja Maas looked from one to the other, disgruntled to be so abruptly ignored.

‘Yes, we don’t want to discommode you any further.’

‘You are not – erm – discommoding me.’

‘No, you are right of course, it was a pleasure. Goodbye, and best wishes to Dr Voss.’

Svenja Maas shrugged and led them out to the lobby, where they said goodbye. Tu marched ahead, sped up on the stairs, and practically raced along the corridor. Yoyo scurried after him. The last of her calm was gone. They didn’t need any authorisation to leave. They went out into the car park and headed for the Audi, when suddenly a commanding voice rang out from the building.

‘Mr Tu, Miss Chen!’

Yoyo froze. Slowly she turned, and saw Dr Marika Voss standing on the steps, her chin raised.

They’ve noticed, Yoyo thought. We were too slow.

‘Please forgive our hasty departure.’ Tu raised his arms apologetically. ‘We wanted to say goodbye, but we couldn’t find you.’

‘Was everything as you had hoped?’

‘You were extremely helpful!’

‘I’m glad of that.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘Well, then, I hope that you make progress with your investigations.’

‘Thanks to your help, we shall make great strides.’

‘Good day to you.’

Dr Voss marched back inside, and Yoyo felt as though she had turned to butter in the sunshine. She slid into the Audi, and melted onto the seat.

‘Do you have it?’ Tu asked.

‘I have it,’ she replied, with the last of her strength.

Svenja Maas wasn’t exactly offended, but she was rather peeved. As she went back into the autopsy theatre she felt a nagging suspicion that the Chinese policeman hadn’t really been interested in her, just in keeping up some Asiatic notion of etiquette. She went to the furthest tables and noticed that his young inspector had put the sheet back up over Donner’s corpse, though not very neatly. She tugged at it irritably, and found that the whole thing was crooked. She turned the sheet down.

She saw straight away that something was wrong. Vogelaar’s right eye wasn’t looking good, but the left eye was horrible.

With a dark presentiment, she lifted the lid.

The glass eye was missing.

For a moment she flushed hot and cold at the thought that she would be blamed. She had left the eye in its socket, but only because she wanted to take it out later and show it to a prosthetics expert. They had noticed something odd about it. It looked as though it had something inside, maybe some sort of mechanism with which Vogelaar could see, perhaps something else. They hadn’t really considered it significant.

Obviously they had been wrong.

Electrified, she ran from the theatre and up the stairs. She found Dr Marika Voss in the corridor.

‘Are the Chinese police still here?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘The Chinese?’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows. ‘No, they just left. Why?’

‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

‘What’s up?’ the older woman demanded.

‘They took something with them,’ Maas stammered. Bastards, landing her in it like this!

‘With them?’ Voss echoed.

‘The eye. The glass eye.’

The doctor hadn’t been in the team who had examined Donner. She knew nothing about the eye, but she understood all the same that they would be in trouble.

‘I’ll call the guards at the gate,’ she said.

The car glided along the main road on the hospital campus, past the stern red-brick buildings, the peaceful lawns and paths, the shady trees.

‘Hey,’ Yoyo said, frowning. ‘What’s going on up ahead?’

Somebody came running out of the guards’ cabin, a man in uniform. He raised his hands as though directing an aeroplane on the runway. At the same time, the barrier began to drop. Obviously the fuss was about them.

‘I should imagine we’ve been found out.’

‘Great. Now what?’

‘All down to you.’ Tu looked across at her. ‘How do you like Berlin? Do you want to stay?’

‘Not at any cost.’

‘Thought not,’ he said, accelerated and shot under the barrier, so close that Yoyo was surprised not to hear it scrape across the roof. Behind them, the guard’s yells drifted like pollen on the summer air.

Hotel Adlon

The symbol shimmering on the display showed many twisting reptilian necks, all springing from a single body. Nine heads. The symbol of Hydra.

Xin clapped the phone to his ear.

‘We’ve sent you data from several major Berlin hotels,’ said the caller. ‘No luck with the smaller ones. There’s a hell of a lot of them – all Berlin seems to be nothing but hotels. The problem was that working so fast, we couldn’t get into every single computer—’

‘Understood. And?’

‘No hits.’

‘They must be staying somewhere,’ Xin insisted.

‘They’re not in any of the international chains. No Chen Yuyun and no Owen Jericho. However, I can give you more details of the warning that reached London yesterday. I’ll send you the text. Do you want to hear it first?’

‘Spit it out.’

Xin listened to the fragmentary sentences that he already knew so well. He considered just how dangerous this fire might be that Yoyo and Jericho had started. It was hardly a fragment by now. They had decrypted almost ninety per cent of the message. All the same, the really important parts, the decisive information, was still missing. And it hadn’t been Jericho, or the girl, who had called Edda Hoff, but a man called Tu. Hoff was number three in the Orley security chain of command, and Xin knew very little about her, other than that she was quite unimaginative and accordingly would never exaggerate, or downplay, a threat.

‘Hoff made the decision on her own account, and she told the whole corporation that there may perhaps be an attack, without pretending that she had any real information,’ the caller said. ‘Gaia was informed as well, just like every other link in the corporate network, but they saw no reason to change the programme up on the Moon. Hoff seems to have let all the right people know.’ The caller didn’t dare name names over the telephone, even though it was practically impossible that anyone might be listening in on this connection. On the other hand, they had never expected that the encrypted messages piggy-backing on harmless email attachments could be cracked.

‘Tu,’ said Xin thoughtfully.

‘That’s the name he gave. I’ll send you over his mobile number. We don’t know where he was calling from.’

Unlike the astonishing diversity of given names, the number of Chinese family names was limited indeed. The vast majority of Chinese people shared just a few dozen clan names, mostly monosyllables – the so-called Old Hundred Names. It was not uncommon for an entire village to be called Zheng, Wang, Han, Ma, Hu or Tu. Nevertheless Xin couldn’t shake off the feeling that he had heard the name Tu quite recently, and in connection with Yoyo.

‘Have you taken those pages down from the web?’ he asked, since inspiration failed to strike.

‘That channel of communication has been closed.’

Xin knew what the decision entailed, so he understood why his caller was so sullen. The man at the other end of the line had himself suggested the piggy-back encryption, and had written the code. It had served them well for three years. Hydra’s heads had been able to exchange messages in real time, functioning as one great brain.

‘We’ll get over it,’ he said, trying to sound friendly. ‘The net served its purpose for us, and more, and it’s all down to you! Everybody respects your contribution. Just as everybody will understand why we decided to break off simultaneous communication so close to our goal. The time has come when there’s nothing more to say. All we can do is await developments.’

Xin hung up, stared down at his feet and shifted them to a parallel position, ankles and instep exactly the same distance apart, not touching. Slowly, he drew his knees inwards. How he hated the tangled web of accident and circumstance! As soon as he felt the hairs on his calves begin to brush against one another, he adjusted his feet, shifted his thighs, his arms, his hands, his shoulders, positioning them symmetrically along the line of an imaginary axis, until he sat there as an exact mirror image, one side of his body the perfect reflection of the other. This usually helped him to get his thoughts in order, but this time the technique failed. He felt dizzy with self-doubt, blindsided by the thought that perhaps he’d done everything wrong, that hunting Yoyo down had only made things worse.

Thoughts and afterthoughts.

Losing control.

His heart hammered like a piston. Only one last nudge, he felt, and he would burst apart into a thousand pieces. No, not him. His shell. The human cloak called Kenny Xin. He felt like a host body for his own larval self, like a cocoon, a pupa, the mid-stage of some metamorphosis, and he was horribly afraid of whatever it was that was eating him from the inside. Sometimes it grew, flexed itself and choked the breath in his throat, and he couldn’t tame it, couldn’t take the strain any longer; at these moments he had to give the beast something to calm it, just as he had allowed it to burn the hut where his torturers had kept him. Unredeemed, sick and poverty-stricken as they were, he had given them to the flames, and in that moment had felt himself made free, cleansed of all suffering, his mind clear and unclouded. Since then he had often wondered whether he had gone mad that day, or been cured of madness. He could hardly remember the time before. At most, he remembered his disgust at living in this world. His hatred towards his parents for having given birth to him, even if at such a tender age he knew little of just how he had been thrust into this world. He only felt certain that his family was responsible for his life, which was already enough to make him hate them, and that they were making it a living hell.

That there was no sense to his existence.

It was only after the fire that the sense of it all became clear. Could he be mad when suddenly everything made sense? How many so-called sane people spent their days in the most senseless activities? How much of accepted morality was based on ritual and dogma, with not the least shred of sense to it? The fire had broadened his horizons, so that all at once he recognised the plan, creation’s twisting labyrinthine paths, its abstract beauty. There was no way back from here. He had moved up to a higher level which some might call madness, but which was simply an insight of such all-illuming power that he had to struggle to contain it. Any attempt to share it with others was mere vanity. How could he explain to others that everything he did flowed from a higher insight? It was the price that he paid, by making other people pay.

No. He hadn’t made things worse.

He had had to make sure!

Xin imagined his own brain. A Rorschach universe. The purity of symmetry, predictability, control. Slowly, he felt his calm return. He stood up, plugged the phone into the room’s computer console and uploaded the hotel reservation lists. He went through them one by one. Naturally he didn’t expect to see Chen Yuyun or Owen Jericho turn up in the lists. Hydra’s hackers had gone through the lists several times over once they had broken into the hotel systems. He didn’t exactly know what he expected to find, he only knew that he felt he would find something.

And what a find.

It fell into place like the last piece of a puzzle, neatly explaining everything that had happened in the museum and answering half a dozen other questions besides. Three rooms in the Grand Hyatt on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz had been booked to a company called Tu Technologies, registered in Shanghai. They had been booked by the director of the company, who had signed for them in person. Tu Tian.

The outfit that Yoyo worked for.

That was where he knew the name from!

He loaded the company homepage and found a portrait of the owner. A plump man, almost bald, with a pate like a billiard ball. All in all, so ugly that he came out the other side as rather appealing. His thick lips could make a frog turn green with envy, but they were somehow sensual at the same time. His eyes, peering out from behind a tiny pair of glasses, glowed with humour and pitiless intelligence. He radiated a Buddha-like calm and iron determination, all at once. Xin could tell at first sight that Tu Tian was a streetfighter, a jackal in jester’s clothing. Somebody he could ill afford to underestimate. If he was helping Yoyo and Jericho, that meant that they were mobile, that they could leave Berlin as quickly as they had shown up.

The Vogelaars were dead. Which meant that they would be leaving Berlin.

Very soon. Now.

Xin strapped on his gun. He chose a long red wig and a face-mask with a matching beard, then stuck appliqués to his forehead and cheekbones. He pulled on an emerald-green duster coat, put on a slim pair of mirrored holospecs and stopped in front of the mirror for a few seconds to check the effect. He looked like a pop star. Like a typical mando-progger, who had made more money than he’d ever had good taste.

He hurried from the hotel, flagged down a taxi and ordered it to the Grand Hyatt.

Grand Hyatt

Tu’s face showed up on the screen. Jericho was hardly surprised to hear him say:

‘Get Diane packed. We’re leaving.’

‘What about the glass eye?’

Yoyo’s fingers appeared onscreen. Vogelaar’s false eye stared at him. Denuded of its eyelids, it looked somehow surprised, even a little indignant.

‘There’s no doubt that it’s a memory crystal,’ he heard her say. ‘I had a look at it, it’s the usual pattern. Hurry up. The cops will be with you shortly.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘On our way to you,’ Tu said. ‘They’ve got the car numberplate. In other words, they know that it’s a hire car, they know who rented it, they know his address, and so on and so forth. I should guess that they’ll make the connection with this morning’s unhappy events.’

‘And with your jet,’ said Jericho.

‘With my—’

‘Fuck!’ said Yoyo’s voice. ‘He’s right!’

‘As soon as they find out that you rented the car at the airport, they’ll twig,’ said Jericho. ‘They’ll arrest us even before we check the car back.’

‘How much time do we have?’

‘Hard to say. The first thing they’ll do is go through the passenger lists of all the flights that landed before you went to the rental desk. That will take a while. They won’t find anything, but since you must have got here somehow or other, they’ll check the private flights.’

‘It’ll take us at least half an hour to get to the airport in the Audi.’

‘That could be too late.’

‘Forget the bloody Audi,’ Yoyo called out. ‘If we’re to have any chance at all, we need a skycab.’

‘I could order one,’ Jericho suggested.

‘Do that,’ Tu agreed. ‘We’ll be at the hotel in ten minutes.’

‘Your wish is my command.’

Jericho hung up and ran out to the corridor. As he dashed towards the lifts, he could see with his mind’s eye how the efficient German police would be unravelling the puzzle of their arrival, dauntless, dutiful and assuming the worst. He went up to the roof and found the skyport empty. A liveried hotel employee beamed at him from over the edge of his terminal. Jericho’s arrival seemed to give him a new purpose in life, stranded up here as he was on the lonely expanse of the roof.

‘Would you like to order an aircab?’ he asked.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘One moment, please.’ He slid his fingers busily across the console. ‘I could have one here for you in ten to fifteen minutes.’

‘As quick as you can!’

‘While you’re waiting, would you like any help with your lugg—’

The sentence probably ended with –age, but Jericho was back in the lift. He hurried to his room and shoved Diane into his rucksack with all the hardware. He packed whatever clothing lay around on top, checked and holstered his Glock, ran along the corridor and left a note for Tu:

I’m on the flight deck.

Charité Hospital, Institute of Forensic Pathology

‘No, he’s not,’ said the voice on the telephone.

Dr Marika Voss hopped from one foot to another, while Svenja Maas stood next to her, pale and wringing her hands.

‘Malchow,’ she repeated stubbornly. ‘Hel – ge Mal – chow.’

‘As I’ve already said—’

‘My colleague called him.’

‘That may well be, but—’

‘First she was held in a queue, then one of your switchboard staff put her through. To Malchow. To Hel—’

‘There’s no such person.’

‘But—’

‘Listen,’ said the voice, growing audibly less patient as the conversation went round and round in circles. ‘I would very much like to help you, but we have nobody of that name in the whole Foreign Office! And the extension number that you gave me doesn’t exist either!’

Dr Voss pressed her lips together indignantly. She’d known as much, ever since the automated dialling system had told her that there was no such number. Despite all this, she saw no reason to back down.

‘But the woman on the switchboard—’

‘Ah yes, the switchboard.’ A short pause, a sigh. ‘And what was the woman called?’

‘What was she called?’ Dr Voss hissed.

‘Something like Schill or Schall,’ Maas whispered, hunched over, miserable.

‘Schill or Schall, my colleague says.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘We do have a Scholl. Miss Scholl.’

‘Scholl?’ asked Dr Voss.

Maas shook her head. ‘It was Schill.’

‘It was Schill.’

‘I’m sorry. No Schill, no Schall, no Malchow. I really do advise you to call the police. Clearly you’ve been the butt of a very nasty joke.’

Dr Voss gave in. She thanked the civil servant in an icy tone, then called the number for the police. At her side, Svenja Maas wilted.

Within five minutes the case officers had tracked down the numberplate. Within seconds, they knew the name of the hire firm’s client. They compared that information with the records from immigration, and learned that Tu Tian had touched down in Berlin early the day before, giving the Grand Hyatt on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz as his address.

Two minutes after that, a team was dispatched to the hotel.

Grand Hyatt

Thanks to Tu’s dauntless driving, they reached the hotel sooner than they had expected, and with even more reason to get away again as quickly as they could – he must have chalked up dozens of traffic offences between the hospital at Turmstrasse and the hotel on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz. He got out, threw the keys to the concierge and asked him to take the car down to the underground parking.

‘Shall we go to the bar?’ Yoyo asked, loudly enough that the man couldn’t help but overhear it. Tu winked, understanding her plan, and picked up the charade.

‘To tell you the truth, I feel like something sweet.’

‘There’s a Starbucks in the Sony Center. Up the street.’

‘Great. See you there. I’ll just go tell Owen.’

It was vaudeville stuff of course, but it might buy them some time. They crossed the lobby as fast as they could without arousing suspicion, went up to the seventh floor and headed for their rooms.

‘Leave everything there that you don’t need,’ Tu called to her. ‘Bring only the bare essentials.’

‘Easy enough,’ Yoyo snorted. ‘I don’t have anything! You look after yourself, don’t waste time fussing with your suitcase.’

‘I don’t care about fashion, me.’

‘True enough, we’ll have to work on that. See you on the flight deck in two minutes.’

Seven floors below, Xin jumped out of the taxi. By now he knew what floor they were on, what room numbers, the only thing he didn’t know was who had which room. All the rooms were booked to Tu Technologies, and neither Yoyo nor Jericho were mentioned by name. He walked into the lobby in his full battledress. Hyatt staff and guests would certainly remember who had walked in at 15.30: a tall man, a striking figure with a flowing mane of red hair and a Genghis Khan moustache, probably some sort of artsy type. Holospecs hid the Asiatic cast of his eyes. He could easily be taken for European. The best disguise was to make yourself noticed.

He walked into a lift and pressed for the seventh floor.

Nothing happened.

Xin frowned, then spotted the thumbscan plate. Of course. The lift worked on authorisation only, as in most international hotels. He trotted obediently back into the lobby, where a contingent of his fellow-countrymen was just making their way to the reception desk. There was a sudden throng. The staff at the desk steeled themselves for the task of making sense of the new arrivals’ broken English, riddling out what they meant from what they said, and adding to the rich confusion with their own small store of Chinese words. Xin headed purposefully to the only receptionist who was busy with other tasks, in this case the telephone. He drew himself up to his full height and then wondered what on earth he could ask her.

How do I get up to the seventh floor?

Would you like to check in? – No, I have some friends staying here and I wanted to drop in on them. I can authorise you and then call them for you, to let them know you’re coming. Ahh, you know how it is, actually I wanted to surprise them. I understand! If you wait just a moment, I’ll ride up with you. It’s all a bit busy at the moment, as you see, but in a few minutes’ time… Can’t we be a bit quicker? – Well, you see, I’m not really supposed to – it’s really just guests who can—

Xin turned away. The whole thing was too complicated. He didn’t want to leave his thumbprint in the Hyatt’s system, any more than he wanted to risk Tu, Jericho or Yoyo being warned. He mingled in with the other Chinese.

Jericho saw the skycab lift over the Tiergarten park and make for the Hyatt, a muscular-looking VTOL with four turbines. It came in fast, dipped its jets with a hissing snarl and sank slowly down onto the landing pad.

‘Your taxi’s here,’ the hotel employee said, smiling, the joy in his voice announcing how wonderful it was that air transport was so widely available these days, and what a pleasure it was to see people use it.

In the next moment Yoyo hurried from the terminal, a crumpled shopping bag under her arm and Tu trotting in her wake. He was pulling his suitcase along behind him as though it were a recalcitrant child.

The taxi settled.

‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ Tu beamed.

‘Just what the detective ordered,’ Jericho reminded him amiably.

‘Enough strutting and preening, you two.’ Yoyo headed for the boarding hatch. ‘Is your jet cleared for take-off?’

It was as though her question had slammed on the brakes in Tu’s stride. He stopped, fumbled at the bare expanse of his scalp and tried to twist his fingers into the tiny short hairs there.

‘What is it?’

‘I forgot something,’ he said.

‘Say it’s not so.’ Yoyo stared at him.

‘It is. My phone. I just now thought, all I need to do is call the airport from the taxi, and then I realised—’

‘You have to go back to your room?’

‘Erm – yes.’ Tu left his suitcase where it was, turned around and hurried back to the lift. ‘I’ll be right back. Right back.’

When Xin heard that the elderly Chinese couple in front of him intended to book one of the Grand Hyatt’s finest and most expensive suites, he felt a warm glow of pleasure. Not because of any sudden spasm of altruism, but because the suite was on the seventh floor. Right where he wanted to be.

The husband put his thumb on the scanplate. A young receptionist offered to show the couple up to their room, and they strolled across to the lift together. Xin fell in behind them. As they stood there waiting for the lift, the wife turned to look at him, her curiosity as strong as an elastic band tugging her head around. She looked in bemusement at the tumble of hair over his shoulders, and in bafflement at his holospecs. She eyed the toes of his snakeskin boots dubiously, visibly nervous at the thought of having to share a hotel with the likes of him. Her husband stuck to her side, short and stocky, and stared at the gap where the lift doors met until they opened. They went into the lift together. Nobody asked whether he was with the group. The young receptionist smiled warmly at him, and he smiled back, just as warmly.

‘Seventh floor as well?’ she asked, in English just to be on the safe side.

‘Yes, please,’ he said.

Next to him, the Chinese woman stiffened, horribly sure now that he was living on the same floor.

Tu tore back the bedclothes but his phone wasn’t there, any more than it had been on the desk or on either of the night-stands. He rummaged through sheets, flung pillows aside, grabbed fistfuls of linen and damask, slid his fingers in between the mattress and the frame.

Nothing.

Who had he called last? Who had he been meaning to call?

The airport. At least, he had wanted to, but then he had decided to call later. He had even had the thing in his hand.

And he’d put it down.

He swept his eyes over the desk again, the chairs, armchair, carpeting. Incredible, he was getting old! What had he been doing just before? He saw himself standing there, his phone in his right hand, while there was something in his left hand too, something just below waist height—

Aha, of course!

Seventh floor.

The Chinese wife pushed herself brusquely past the young receptionist to get out of the lift, as though she feared that Xin might bite her at the last moment. Her husband, though, had a sudden access of Western etiquette, and took a step back to let the young woman go first, smiling broadly at her. Xin waited until the group was out of sight. The hotel corridors stretched around a sunny atrium space, four sides of a square, with the guest rooms along the front edges. He looked at the wall map. He was glad to see the receptionist and the Chinese couple had set off in the opposite direction from the rooms which Tu had taken.

He was alone.

The carpet muffled his steps. He passed a club lounge, turned into the next corridor, stopped, recalled Tu’s room numbers.

712, 717, 727.

712 was to his left. He walked on quickly, counting up. 717, also locked. His coat swung out around him as he stopped still, dead in the middle of the corridor. 727 was ajar.

Tu? Jericho? Yoyo?

One of the three of them would soon regret not having locked up.

Yoyo saw the gyrocopter first.

‘Where?’ Jericho yelped.

‘I think it’s headed this way.’ She ran to the edge of the skyport and stood there, hopping from one leg to the other. ‘Oh, shit! The cops. It’s the cops!’

Jericho had been chatting with the skycab pilot, but now he shaded his eyes with his hand. Yoyo was right. It was a police gyrocopter, coming closer, like the one he had seen above the Brandenburg Gate a few hours ago.

‘They could be here for any one of a thousand reasons.’

Yoyo hared across to him. ‘Tian will screw it all up.’

‘Nothing’s screwed up yet.’ Jericho nodded towards the skycab. ‘We’ll get in. That way at least they won’t see you leaping about up here.’

‘Ha!’ Tu called out.

He’d gone to have a pee, of course! And while he’d been peeing, guiding the stream with his left hand and holding the phone in his right, he’d had a momentary brainfart and had almost shaken the last drop off his phone and talked to his dick. Mankind at the mercy of communication technology. He felt outraged. A fellow should at least to be able to go to the toilet without having to communicate. There were limits. Nothing should make a man mix up his wedding tackle and his telephone.

So he had put the thing to one side – the phone that is – and had attended to the call of nature. The bathroom was inside the main suite, like a room within a room, with two doors, opposite one another. You could go into it from the bedroom and from the front lobby. Tu slid back the glass door by the bed and looked first at the toilet. The phone was lying there on top of the cistern.

Little bastard, he thought. Now to get out of here.

Xin went into the open room and looked about. A short front lobby led into a brightly lit larger room, obviously the suite. Directly to his right was a frosted glass door, closed. He could hear steps from behind it, and tuneless whistling. There was someone in the bathroom.

His hand slid under his emerald-green coat.

The gyrocopter settled down.

Yoyo squirmed back into her seat as though she wanted to melt into the upholstery. Jericho risked a glance outside. Two uniformed officers got out of the ultralight craft, went to the hotel clerk at the terminal and talked to him.

‘What are they after this time?’ grumbled the pilot, in German-accented English, and craned his neck inquisitively. ‘Even up in the air they don’t leave you alone.’

‘It’s good that they keep an eye on things though,’ Yoyo trilled cheerfully.

Jericho looked askance at her. He expected the hotel clerk to point across at them at any moment. If the patrol had brought photos with them, then they were sunk. The man gesticulated, pointed inside the terminal to the lifts.

Jericho held his breath.

He saw the policemen exchange a few words, then one of them looked across at the skycab. For a moment it seemed that he was looking straight at Jericho. Then he glanced away, and the two officers vanished beneath the terminal roof.

‘Let’s just hope that Tu doesn’t walk right into them,’ Yoyo hissed.

The steps came closer. He heard something clatter. A silhouette appeared behind the frosted glass and stopped there, right in front of the bathroom door.

Xin readied his weapon.

He yanked the door open and grabbed the man behind it, shoving him against the wall at the back, then pulled the door closed behind him and pressed the muzzle of the gun against the man’s temple.

‘Don’t make a sound,’ he said.

‘What did you say?’ one of the policemen asked.

The other pointed forward. ‘I think 727 is open.’

‘So it is.’

‘I reckon we needn’t think much more about which room to start with, wouldn’t you say?’

They had taken the lift down from the flight deck to the seventh floor and set out in search of the rooms which the Chinese mogul had taken. His picture had been stored in the airport databases, and was on their phones now, so they had a pretty good idea of what he looked like. On the other hand, they had no idea which of the three rooms he might be in.

‘We should have shown that guy on the roof Tu’s picture.’

‘What makes you think so?’ his colleague whispered back.

‘Just because.’

The other officer gnawed at his lip. They had only asked where the rooms were.

‘I don’t know. What can the guy on rooftop duty tell us?’

They could see a little way through the open door of 727 and into the hallway.

‘Whatever,’ the other man whispered. ‘It’s too late anyway.’

Xin listened.

His left hand was over the fat man’s mouth – he could feel sweat pearling under his fingers – and his gun was still pressed against his forehead. He would have liked the chance to ask a few questions, but now the situation had changed. Men just in front of the door to the room, at least two of them, trying to keep their voices down. They were doomed to failure there – Xin had ears like a beast of prey. As far as he was concerned, the two of them were not whispering but bellowing like drunks at a summer barbecue.

Right at this moment, they were very interested in room 727.

A muffled sound broke free from the man in front of him, a grunt from somewhere deep in the ribcage. Xin shook his head, a warning, and—

Tu held his breath. He stood there frozen like a statue, his eyes wide. The slightest mistake and things would be over for him, that much was clear.

Over and done with.

The police officers looked at one another. They readied their weapons, then one of them pointed to the door of the room and nodded.

In we go, he said wordlessly.

Xin ran through his options.

He could warn his victim: say one word, and you’re dead! Then he’d hide in the small toilet cabin next to the shower, and hope that the man was scared enough not to betray his presence. This was risky. It would be even riskier to take him hostage. How would he get a hostage out of the Grand Hyatt? He didn’t know who those men out there were. Since they were trying not to make any noise, they were probably security, maybe police.

Or maybe Jericho?

There were two doors to this bathroom. Both were drawn shut. All he could do was hope that the men would look first at the bedroom behind, and then come into the bathroom through that door. This would give him the chance to slip away unnoticed through the door to the hallway. But in order to do that—

Lightning-fast, without letting go of his gun, he placed his hands on either side of the fat man’s head, and with a practised movement broke his neck. The man’s body slumped. Xin caught him as he dropped, and slid him silently down to the floor.

The policemen crept along the short corridor. A mirror to their left cast their reflections back at them for company. On the right they saw a frosted glass door, which must lead to the bathroom. One of the two stopped, and looked at his colleague questioningly.

The other man hesitated, shook his head and pointed forward.

Slowly, they paced on.

Tu could breathe again.

When he had left his room and seen two uniformed officers in the corridor, his heart had sunk in his chest, right down to the threadbare seat of his trousers. Without even daring to shut the door behind himself, he had watched the policemen slow their stride at room 727, where they stopped and talked, too quiet for him to hear. They had their backs to him the whole time – although it was certainly him they were after, and there he stood, not ten metres from them, rooted to the spot as though paralysed, so that all they would have needed to do was turn round and scoop him up in their net.

But they hadn’t turned round.

For some reason, all their attention was on Yoyo’s room. And suddenly Tu knew why. The door was ajar. He understood it at the moment when the two policemen went inside, and he realised how outrageously lucky he had been.

Why had Yoyo left her door open? Hurry? Bad habits?

Who cared.

Quietly, he shut 717, tiptoed down the corridor past the lounge on the left and found the lifts. He pressed his thumb to the scanplate and looked up at the display.

All the lifts were downstairs.

Xin strained his senses, following the men. There were two of them, just as he had conjectured, and right now they were going into the bedroom, where their footsteps parted ways.

He glanced down at the dead body in hotel livery, its head at an unnatural angle on the broken neck. The man’s right hand still held the little bottle of shampoo that he had been about to put under the mirror. At the same moment, Xin remembered that he had seen a room-service trolley in the corridor. Not making a sound, he slid open the bathroom door to the front hall, slipped out and pulled it closed behind him. He spotted a uniformed arm and shoulder in the room, hoped that they had not left another officer in front of the door, and slipped out of the room, quiet as a cat.

Tu hopped from toe to toe, snorting, peering about. He spread his fingers out, then clenched his fists.

Come along, come along, he thought. Blasted lift! Just bring me up to the damn roof.

The levels were ticking by painfully slowly on the display. Two cabins were headed up. One was stopped on five, the other on six, right below him. For a moment Tu felt murderous rage at the people getting in and out of the lifts down there. They were taking up his time. He hated them with all his heart.

Come on there, he thought. Come on!

Room 727.

The policemen approached the glass door that led straight from the double bed to the bathroom. For a moment they paused there, listening for noises from inside, but all was quiet.

At last one of them plucked up his nerve.

They must be finding the body about now.

Pacing with care, Xin approached the turn in the corridor that led on to the lifts. He stayed calm. The police had not seen him going out. He had shut the glass door behind himself, ever attentive to detail. There was nothing to show that whoever had murdered the hotel employee had been in the bathroom just a few seconds before.

No need to hurry.

Seven!

Tu could have sworn that the lift had crept up those last few metres. Finally the gleaming steel doors swept apart, letting out a horde of young folk, expensively dressed. He shoved his way brusquely through them, put his thumb to the scanplate and pressed Skyport. The doors slid shut.

Xin rounded the corner. Hotel guests came towards him the other way. He saw one of the lifts just closing, headed for the next one, pressed the sensor and waited.

Seconds later he was on his way down to the lobby.

‘There you are at last!’ Yoyo called.

Tu rushed from the terminal, leaning forward as he ran as though trying to outrun his own legs. He tumbled into the cabin, slumped down into the seat across from them and signalled to the pilot.

‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ Jericho observed, while the cab swung its jets downward.

‘Two.’ Tu held up his index and middle finger to make the point, then realised he had just made a V for victory and grinned. ‘They didn’t see me though.’

‘Idiot,’ Yoyo spat at him, softly.

‘Well, do please excuse me.’

‘Don’t do anything like that again! Owen and I were sweating bullets.’

They lifted off. The police gyrocopter dwindled away behind them on the landing platform, then the pilot accelerated and left Potsdamer Platz behind. Tu looked out of the window, indignant.

‘Feel free to keep sweating,’ he said. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet.’

‘What were the cops doing down there?’

‘They went into your room. Speaking of which, you left it open.’

‘I did not.’

‘That’s odd.’ Tu shrugged. ‘Well, maybe it was room service.’

‘Whatever. They won’t find anything there. I didn’t leave anything behind.’

‘Didn’t forget anything?’

‘Forget?’ Yoyo stared at him. ‘Is this really you, asking me, whether I forgot anything?’

Tu cleared his throat several times in a row, took out his phone and called the airport. Of course you forgot something, Jericho thought to himself. Same as we all forgot something. Fingerprints, hair, DNA. While his friend was on the phone, he wondered whether it might not have been smarter after all to let the local authorities know what was gong on. Tu seemed to share Yoyo’s antipathy to the police, but Germany was not China. So far Germany had no obvious interests at stake in this drama that they were all living through. In the meantime, they had begun to act more and more like the outlaws. Although they weren’t the ones who had committed the crimes, it must seem that they were up to their necks in guilt.

Tu snapped his phone shut and looked at Jericho for an age, while the skycab raced towards the airport.

‘Forget it,’ he said.

‘Forget what?’

‘You’re wondering whether we shouldn’t just give ourselves up.’

‘I don’t know,’ Jericho sighed.

‘I do, though. Until we know what’s in this dossier, and we’ve spoken to the delightful Edda Hoff one more time, we won’t trust any intelligence agency in the world.’ Tu pointed to his own temple, twirling his finger meaningfully. ‘Except this one.’

The massacre in the Pergamon Museum had thrown police headquarters into an uproar that made a hornets’ nest look quiet. And now this as well – a dead Indonesian room-service worker, a man with no record of misbehaviour, who spoke hardly any German, whose whole job was to dole out soap, toilet paper and bedtime sweets. The risks of such a job were grumbling guests or messy rooms, not a broken neck when the body lotion began to run out.

Setting aside the two dead police from the museum for a moment, several people had some obscure connection with this new death. A murdered restaurateur from South Africa, who had taken another man with him as he died, killing the mystery man with a pencil – suggesting that he had skills mostly lacking in the restaurant business. Then his black wife, who had been shot in her car and then driven halfway across town. There was the driver to consider as well, a white man, blond, who had clearly been trying to help Donner in the museum but who had become a target in turn, drawing fire from Donner’s killer, another mystery man, tall with white hair, a bristling moustache, wearing a suit and spectacles. Then there was a Chinese industrialist, head of a Shanghai technology enterprise, who had himself claimed to be a policeman and had stolen Donner’s glass eye, helped by a young Chinese woman. Then last of all the Indonesian man, whose role in life had been to make sure that guests were never left lacking in the bathroom and that they always found a little treat on their pillow at bedtime.

Puzzling, all very puzzling!

Sensibly, the investigating team didn’t attempt to solve all the puzzles at once, even though there were some obvious conclusions to be drawn. Whoever else he was, the white-haired man was clearly a professional killer; the glass eye held some secret around which the whole business probably revolved; and the Indonesian victim had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. For the moment, however, the Chinese business mogul would be at the centre of the investigation – less because they wanted to understand his motives than because they simply wanted to pick him up as soon as possible. The three rooms that he had taken in the Grand Hyatt didn’t look as though the guests would be returning any time soon. All that was known for sure was that Tu and the woman had driven back from the Institute of Forensic Pathology to the hotel at full tilt, had told the concierge to put the Audi down in the car park, and then had vanished into the lobby, chatting.

What had they been chatting about?

The concierge remembered quite clearly. They had been planning to meet some third person in the Sony Center, because the fat man had said that he wanted ‘something sweet’. Oh, and the woman had been very, very pretty! The police officers pressed the concierge on whether he understood Chinese, and he said he didn’t, that the two of them had been speaking English. This made the head of the enquiry team suspicious – Dr Marika Voss had reported that they had spoken Chinese to one another in the autopsy theatre. Just to be on the safe side, he had sent two men over to the Sony Center, not expecting that they would find anyone there, and set his team to digging up exactly how Tu had arrived.

The longer he thought about it, the more certain he felt that Tu and the blond man were in it together.

The skycab had needed only a trifling eight minutes to get to the airport, but it seemed like an eternity to Jericho. In his thoughts, he was imagining what the case team would be doing. What would they prioritise? Who would their enquiries focus on? He had been at the scene of the shooting himself, and witnesses had seen him running towards the Tiergarten. They would want to know more about him. It certainly counted against him that he had been carrying a gun in the museum, although ballistics would show that he hadn’t shot Nyela. As for Yoyo and Tu, they had impersonated police officers and then maltreated a corpse, on top of which Tu had driven a hole through the highway code, but the police had several leads to follow. In a way, that was good, since it meant that they would be that much slower making progress. They would have to check identities, draw up timelines, take statements, look for motives. They would get bogged down in speculation.

On the other hand, they had been notably efficient so far. They had turned up at the Grand Hyatt impressively fast, meaning that they already had Tu in their sights. It wasn’t clear yet whether they knew about his jet, or indeed whether they had made the assumption that he would be leaving Berlin at short notice.

The skycab circled above the airport.

They lost height, banking about in a broad curve. They could see Tu’s Aerion Supersonic from here. Its stubby wings, set far back on the fuselage, made it look like a seabird, craning its neck curiously, as eager to be gone as they were. The skycab pilot tilted the jets, let the machine sink down, and landed with a gentle rocking motion not far from the plane. Tu handed him a banknote.

‘Keep the change,’ he said in English.

The size of the tip made the pilot leap to attention and offer his help in loading the jet. Since they didn’t even have luggage to unload from his cab, apart from Tu’s small suitcase, he asked whether there was anything else he could do for them. Tu thought for a moment.

‘Just wait here until we take off,’ he said. ‘And don’t say a word to anyone until we do.’

The chief case officer was just on his way to the police skyport when his phone rang. Before he could take the call, he saw an officer running across the flight pad towards him.

‘We’ve got Baldy,’ he heard her shout.

He hesitated. The call was from one of the men he had detailed to find out more about what Tu was up to in Berlin. Meanwhile the policewoman had stopped in front of him, breathlessly holding her phone out under his nose. It showed a picture of the man who was, right now, lying on the dissection table with splinters of pencil in his frontal lobe.

‘I’ll call back,’ he said into the telephone. ‘Two minutes.’

‘Mickey Reardon,’ the policewoman told him. ‘An old fossil from the Irish underground, a specialist in alarms systems. He’s been freelancing for every Secret Service you could mention ever since the IRA decommissioned their weapons twenty years ago, and he’s worked for a lot of outfits that are half political, half organised crime.’

‘An Irishman? God help us all.’

He couldn’t have liked it any worse if Reardon had turned out to be ex-North Korean People’s Army. Whenever a regular army or a resistance movement lost its raison d’être, it would spit out creatures like Reardon, who would often make deals with international Secret Services if they weren’t working for organised crime outright.

‘Who did he work for?’

‘We only know some names. He was with the US Secret Service a lot, then for Mossad, Zhong Chan Er Bu, our own guys. Quite the multi-talent, very clever at shutting down security systems but also at installing them. He was wanted for a number of instances of grievous bodily harm, and suspected of murder as well.’

‘Reardon was armed,’ said the inspector thoughtfully. ‘Meaning he was on a mission. Donner gets rid of him, then he’s shot. By our white-haired gentleman. Is this a Secret Service operation? Reardon and Mr White on one side, Donner and Mr Blond on the other side, Blondie tries to help Donner—’

He had almost forgotten that he was on his way to the Grand Hyatt.

‘We need to get moving,’ his sergeant said.

So it was only once they were in the air that he remembered he had been going to call someone back.

The jet taxied onto the runway. Tu choked back his engines and waited for permission to take off. He was far more nervous than he was letting on. Strictly speaking, Jericho was right. What they were doing here flew in the face of reason. They were picking a fight with the German police for no reason at all. Indeed, the police might even have been able to help them.

They might not have, though.

Tu had his own bitter experience of the arbitrariness of state power, which had certainly left him with scars, though he tried hard not to jump at shadows. Admittedly, his paranoia was rooted in events that lay twenty-eight years back. Here he was, though, holding the others hostage to his own mistrust, especially Yoyo, who was most receptive to such paranoid behaviours for reasons of her own. There was no doubt that he was manipulating them. He tried to persuade himself that he was doing the right thing, and perhaps he was even right about that, but it wasn’t about that, hadn’t been for a long time now. As he had walked the streets of Berlin at night with Yoyo, he had realised that the only difference between Hongbing’s paranoia and his own was that he was more cheerful about it. His old friend wandered the vaults of his memory forlornly, while he strode through them, whistling cheerfully. Compared with Hongbing, he was fighting fit, but he couldn’t fight hard enough to cope with all that life had to throw at him, not on his own.

So he had told her something of the past, and all he had achieved was to make her more confused and depressed. None of it was any help. He would have to tell her the rest as well, tell her what he had never told anybody else except Joanna, tell her the whole story. He would assume Hongbing’s tacit approval, and he would cut the whole miserable tangle just as soon as the opportunity presented itself. He would have much preferred it if Hongbing himself had told Yoyo the truth, but this way was good as well. Anything was better than silence.

We have to close the door on our past, he thought. Not run away from it, not escape into success or into depression.

The voice in his earphones gave him permission.

Tu brought the jet engines up to speed and engaged thrust. The acceleration pushed him back into his seat, and they took off.

Only a few minutes later the chief case officer learned that Tu had arrived by private plane, an Aerion Supersonic. The rooms in the Hyatt were abandoned; the Chinese mogul and his companions had obviously left. Perhaps they were still in Berlin, since they hadn’t checked out, and the Audi that Tu had hired at the airport was still in the Grand Hyatt’s underground parking. This was the car whose registration number had set the case team onto his trail.

On the other hand, there was a corpse in one of the rooms.

The inspector ordered his team to secure the mogul’s jet, just in case. Then a few minutes after that, he learned that he had lost the decisive moment by paying attention instead to Mickey Reardon’s identification. He let rip with a string of curses so ripely inventive that the case officers all around him froze in their tracks, but it was no use.

Tu Tian had left Berlin.

Aerion Supersonic

‘Of course she can read memory crystals,’ Jericho yelled into the cockpit, as if Tu had asked him whether he washed every day.

‘A thousand apologies,’ Tu shouted back. ‘I’d forgotten she was a sort of surrogate wife.’

Jericho lifted Diane’s compact body from his backpack, connected it to the ports of the on-board electronics and set up the monitor on its seat bracket. The Pratt & Whitney turbines wrapped the Aerion in a cocoon of noise. The trapezoid-winged craft was still climbing. Sitting next to him, Yoyo was working on Vogelaar’s glass eye, unscrewing it and taking from it a glittering structure about half the size of a sugar lump. Tu circled the plane. Berlin tilted towards them through the side windows, while at the same time the sky on the other side turned a deep, dark blue.

‘Hi, Diane.’

‘Hi, Owen,’ said the soft, familiar voice. ‘How are you?’

‘Could be better.’

‘What can I do to make you well?’

‘Plenty,’ Yoyo said in a quietly mocking voice. ‘One day you’ll have to tell me if she’s a good kisser.’

Jericho grimaced. ‘Open the Crystal Reader, Diane.’

A little rod slid from the front of the computer, sheathed in a transparent frame. The jet swung back to the horizontal and went on gaining height. Below them the massive scab of urban development made way for green-brown-yellow arable land, patchworked with small wooded areas, roads and villages. As if daubed on, rivers and lakes shimmered in the afternoon sunlight.

‘I’ll be really pissed off if that great mess in the Charité wasn’t worth it,’ growled Yoyo. She leaned across to Jericho and set the cube in the surround, and the tiny drawer slid shut again.

‘Everyone made sacrifices,’ he said wearily, while Diane uploaded the data. ‘After all, Tian was prepared to chuck a hundred thousand euros to the four winds.’

‘Not to mention your ear.’ Yoyo looked at him. ‘Or at least the snippet of your ear. The atomic layer of your—’

‘The serious injury to my ear. There.’

The screen filled with symbols. Jericho held his breath. The dossier was much bigger than he had thought. He immediately felt that ambivalent dread that you feel just before you enter the monster’s lair to see it in all its terrifying hideousness and ascertain its true nature once and for all. In a few minutes they would know the reason for the hunt that had claimed so many victims, almost including themselves, and he knew they weren’t going to like what they saw. Even Yoyo seemed hesitant. She put a finger to her lips and paused.

‘If I’d been him,’ she said, ‘I’d have provided a short version. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Jericho nodded. ‘But where?’

‘Here.’ Her finger wandered across to a symbol marked JKV Intro.

‘JKV?’ He narrowed his eyes.

‘Jan Kees Vogelaar.’

‘Sounds good. Let’s try it. Diane?’

‘Yes, Owen.’

‘Open JKV Intro.’

There sat Vogelaar, in shirt and shorts, on a veranda, under a roughly hewn wooden roof, and with a drink beside him. In the background, hilly scrubland fell away to the coast. Here and there palms were sticking up from low mixed vegetation. It was plainly drizzling. A sky of indeterminate colour hung over the scene and softened the horizon of a far-off sea.

‘The likelihood that I am no longer alive at this second,’ Vogelaar said without preamble, ‘is relatively high, so listen very carefully now, whoever you are. You won’t be having any more information from me in person.’

Jericho leaned forward. It was spooky, looking Vogelaar in the eyes. More precisely, they were looking at him through one of his eyes. Unlike in Berlin, he was ash-blond again, with a bushy moustache, light-coloured eyebrows and eyelashes.

‘There are no bugs here. You wouldn’t think intimacy was a problem in a country that consists almost entirely of swamp and rainforest, but Mayé is infected with the same paranoia as almost all potentates of his stamp. I think even Ndongo would have been interested in going on listening to the parrots. But as they’ve appointed me head of security, the task of snooping on the good people of Equatorial Guinea, particularly the ruling family and our valued foreign guests, has fallen to me. My task is to protect Mayé. He trusts me, and I don’t plan to abuse that trust.’

Vogelaar spread his arms in a gesture that took in the hinterland. ‘As you see, we live in paradise. The apples drop into your mouth, and as you would expect of any decent paradise, a snake is creeping around the place, and it wants to know that everything is under control. Kenny Xin doesn’t trust anyone. Not even me, although he describes himself as my friend and he was the one who got me this extremely remunerative job in the first place. Hi there, Kenny, by the way. You see, your suspicion was justified.’ He laughed. ‘I doubt very much that you know the guy, but he’s the reason why I’m presenting this file. Some of the attached documents deal with him, so let’s just say that in 2017, on the instructions of the Chinese oil companies and with the approval of Beijing, he organised the coup against Juan Aristide Ndongo and, with my help, or more precisely with the help of African Protection Services, carried it out and enthroned Mayé. The dossier records a chronicle of coups, internal information about Beijing’s role in Africa and much else besides, but at its heart there lies a quite different subject.’

He crossed his legs and wearily waved away a flying insect the size of a human fist.

‘Perhaps someone remembers the launch pad that Mayé had built on Bioko. International companies were involved, under the aegis of the Zheng Group, which allows us to assume that China had a hand in this as well. Personally I don’t believe that. Nor is it true, even though we’ve repeatedly sold the idea in public, that our space programme was an initiative one hundred per cent down to Mayé. In fact it was initiated by a group of possibly Chinese investors which, in my opinion – and contrary to their own account – is not identical with Beijing and was represented by Kenny Xin at the time. The fact is that this organisation wanted to fire an information satellite from our soil into space, supposedly as an investigation into new kinds of rocket propulsion. Mayé was supposed to be able to use the satellite for civilian purposes, with the proviso that the whole space project was presented as his own idea. I’ve attached the blueprints for the launch pad, along with a list of all the companies which helped to build it.’

‘He’s still taking the piss out of us,’ Yoyo hissed.

‘Hardly.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘He can’t take the piss out of us any more.’

‘But that’s exactly what he did in Muntu—’

‘Wait.’ Jericho raised his hand. ‘Listen!’

‘—the launch was scheduled for two days later. This meant that the preparations should actually have been completed, and only the satellite had still to be put on the tip of the rocket. That same night a convoy of armoured cars arrived in the grounds of the launch pad. Something was brought into the construction hangar and coupled with the satellite: a container the size of a very big suitcase or a small cupboard, fitted with landing equipment, jets and spherical tanks. The whole thing could be collapsed so that it didn’t take up much room. Only close contacts of Xin dealt with the delivery and assembly of the craft, no foreign constructors were present, not even anyone from the Zheng Group. Neither Mayé nor his people knew at this point that anything but the said satellite was to be fired into space. I’m not a specialist in space travel, by the way, but I assume that the container held a small, automatic spaceship, a kind of landing unit. My people photographed the arrival of the convoy and the container; you will find the pictures in the files KON_PICS and SAT_PICS.’ Vogelaar grinned. ‘Are you still watching, Kenny? While you deludedly thought you were observing me, did it never occur to you that we were observing you?’

‘So.’ Tu came out of the cockpit and joined them in the corridor. ‘We’re flying on autopilot. We’re on course for London via Amsterdam, so let’s have a dr—’

‘Shhh!’ hissed Yoyo.

‘—was of course interested in what was in that container,’ Vogelaar went on. ‘So I had to reconstruct the route it had taken – I should perhaps mention that the people who delivered it at dead of night were almost all Chinese. Anyway, we managed to trace the route of the plane that had brought it to Africa back through a series of intermediate landings. For obvious reasons I had expected that the plane had originally started off in China, but to my surprise it came from Korea, or more precisely from a remote airport in North Korea, near the border.’

In the background it had started raining heavily. A rising rustle mingled with Vogelaar’s words, a changing grey blurred the sky, scrubland and sea.

‘I’ve built up extensive contacts over the years. Not least with south-east Asia. Someone who still owed me something set about working out what had been loaded on at the airport. You must know, the whole area is extremely unsafe. There’s a lot of piracy in the surrounding waters, a high level of criminality, unemployment and frustration. The South has been paying for the North’s reconstruction since 2015, but the money is disappearing in a vast bubble of speculation. Both sides feel they’ve been tricked, and they aren’t happy about it. Corruption and black market dealings are flourishing as a result, and one of the most lucrative markets is the trade in Kim Jong Un’s former arsenal of weapons, particularly the warheads. Especially popular are the mini-nukes, small atom bombs with considerable destructive power. The Soviets certainly experimented with them, in fact all the nuclear powers did. Kim had a few too, hundreds even. Except nobody knows where they ended up. After the collapse of the North Korean regime, the death of Kim and reunification they had suddenly disappeared, and since they aren’t particularly big—’

The soldier measured out a length of about a metre with his hands.

‘—and not much thicker than a shoe box, they won’t be all that easy to find. A mini-nuke has the advantage of fitting into the smallest hiding-place, whatever infernal power it’s capable of unleashing.’ He smiled. ‘For example a small, automatic spaceship fired into space piggy-backing on a satellite.’

Jericho stared at the monitor. Behind Vogelaar the skies had opened.

‘I wanted to know if anyone had been doing any sort of shopping on the black market not long ago. My contact confirmed this. Just two years before, in the no man’s land between North and South, Korean nuclear material had switched owners in a private transaction. I’m always suspicious these days, and as everybody knows you should treat hearsay with caution – but there are lots of signs that I knew the buyer very well.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Tu said. ‘They fired an atom bomb into space?’

Vogelaar leaned forward.

‘Our old friend Kenny Xin had bought the thing. And I knew already why he had hit on the idea of building the launching pad in our quiet little jungle paradise. The whole thing was illegal in the extreme! It wouldn’t have been possible to plant an atom bomb unnoticed on a state space agency. Kenny’s employers had to find a neutral country, ideally a banana republic, whose ruling clique wasn’t above any kind of deal. Some unloved patch of soil where no one was watching your every move. And the ideal launching pads for rockets are distributed in the area around the equator. Which was proof for me that China’s Communist Party, at least at the highest levels of government, wasn’t involved in this one, or else they could simply have launched the phoney satellite from their official launch pads in Xichang, Taiyuan, Hainan or Mongolia, and not a soul would ever have guessed what it was carrying. So in my opinion we’re dealing with a non-state, criminal or terrorist association. Which doesn’t mean that individual state organisations aren’t involved. Let’s not forget, China’s Secret Services have been developing a grotesque life of their own in the meantime, and Washington doesn’t always know what the CIA’s getting up to. But it could also be that there’s a big company behind it. Or else good old Dr Mabuse, if anyone still remembers him.’

‘And the bomb’s target—’ whispered Yoyo.

Vogelaar leaned back, took a swig from his drink and stroked his moustache.

‘This file was actually conceived as life insurance,’ he said. ‘For me and for my wife, whom you may have met as Nyela. Clearly it hasn’t been able to save us, so now it will serve to bring down the men behind the organisation. Kenny would definitely be of crucial importance, because he has contact with the head of the gang and might know his identity. I’ve attached his eye-scans, fingerprints and voice samples, under KXIN_PERS, but he definitely isn’t the instigator. So who is? Certainly not Korea, they’re just flogging off their Great Leader’s belongings. The Communist Party, secretly arming space? As I’ve said, they wouldn’t have needed a launch pad in Equatorial Guinea to do that. Zheng-style forces close to the government? Possibly. Perhaps the answer lies in the race to the Moon. China has made it clear more than once that it condemns America’s rush into space, and Beijing is also projecting its dissatisfaction onto Orley Enterprises, Zheng’s successful competitor. Or else somebody’s trying to use China, because it’s doing so well against the backdrop of the scramble for helium-3 and so on. With a strategically deployed atom bomb you could set the superpowers against one another, but what would be the point? They would both emerge weakened from an armed conflict. But perhaps that’s exactly what they want to achieve, so who could profit from their weakness?’

The jet sped along in a straight line. UFOs could have been flying ahead of them and they wouldn’t even have noticed. Their attention was focused on the monitor.

‘Now we get to the question of where the bomb is at the moment. Still in the satellite? Or was it dropped as the launch vehicle was carrying it into space? There was no nuclear explosion on Earth, but okay, it needn’t have exploded. On the other hand it would be idiotic to send a bomb first into orbit and from there back to Earth. Now, I think I can give a partial answer. Because even in the control room we were able to look over Kenny’s people’s shoulders. Under DISCONNECT_SAT you’ll find film material that not only shows the satellite maintaining its position in orbit, but also something breaking away and flying off on an independent course. There’s no doubt about what it is, but where did the mini-nuke go after decoupling? That’s easy to answer too. Somewhere that an atom bomb couldn’t have been sent by official channels. And what for? To destroy something that can’t be easily destroyed from Earth. The target lies in space.’

Vogelaar put his fingers together.

‘I’ll give you one last mystery for the road. It concerns the fact that I am speaking to you in the year 2024. I don’t want to bore you with personal stories, but our cute little state is bankrupt, no one is fighting over our oil any more, Mayé is starting to go round the bend, and to be honest I’d somehow imagined my government job would be more one of supporting the interests of the state. But no matter. Just bear in mind that construction of the launch pad began two years ago, and I’m sure the planning of the enterprise goes back even further than that. So the deployment of the bomb was planned a long time ago. Now it’s up there. When’s it going to go off? What is certain is that the target must have existed years ago, or else people knew that it would exist at the time of the launch of the satellite. As I said, I’m not a space expert, there are a few potential targets around the Earth and on the Moon, but to my knowledge only one has been completed and opened, probably this year. A hotel, planned for ages, location the Moon, building contractor Orley Enterprises. Does that tell us anything? Of course it does! Julian Orley, Zheng’s great adversary, responsible for the permanent disadvantage of the Chinese.’

Vogelaar raised his glass in a toast to them. Behind him, Equatorial Guinea drowned in tropical torrents.

‘So have fun with your investigation. I haven’t been able to assemble anything more than this, you’ll have to find out the rest for yourselves. And come and see me, if you know where my grave is. Nyela and I would be delighted.’

The recording ended. The only sound was the even humming of the turbines. Slowly, as if in a trance, Yoyo turned her head and looked first at Jericho and then at Tu. Her lips formed two words.

‘Edda Hoff.’

‘Yes.’ Tu nodded grimly. ‘And fast!’