Limit

Callisto, The Moon

Finn O’Keefe closed his eyes. He was no coward. And the absence of other human beings certainly didn’t scare him. He had discovered years ago how calm and agreeable his own company could be, and had experienced many wonderful moments of solitude with nothing above him but the sky and the cries of seagulls riding the salty west winds, scanning the sea for tell-tale signs of glistening backs. The only time he ever experienced loneliness, solitude’s desperate sister, was in crowded places. For this reason, the Moon was completely to his taste, despite having so far failed to have any spiritual effect on him. It was easy to be alone here: all you had to do was go behind a hill, switch yourself off from the radio-wave chatter and pretend the others didn’t even exist.

Now, on the flight to the Peary Base, his self-deception was revealed. It was laughable to think that you could turn your back on the world in the certainty that it was still there, to assume that you could opt back into its incredibly noisy civilisation at any moment. Even in the expanse of the Mojave Desert, in the mountain range of the Himalayas, or in the perpetual ice, you would still be sharing the planet with thinking beings, a thought which gave solitude a comfortable foundation.

But the Moon was lonely.

Banished from Gaia’s protective body, cut off from all communication and from the whole of humanity, it had become clear to him during the two hours they had been en route that Luna placed no value on Homo sapiens. Never before had he felt so ignored and devoid of importance. The hotel, gone to ruin. Peary Base, no longer a certainty. The plateaux and mountain ranges all around them suddenly seemed hostile – no, not even that, because hostility would mean they were acknowledged here. But in the context of what religious people defined as Creation, the human race clearly had less significance than a microbe under a skirting board. If one took Luna to be exemplary of the trillions of galaxies in the visible cosmos, it became clear that all of this had not been made for humans – if it had been made at all.

He suddenly found comfort in the group and was thankful for every word that was spoken. And even though he hadn’t known Miranda Winter that well, her death felt like a personal tragedy, because just a few centimetres would have been enough to prevent it. She might have driven her beloved Louis around the bend, named her breasts, and believed any old nonsense that dried-up old Hollywood divas like Olinda Brannigan deduced from tarot cards and tea leaves; but the way she saw herself, her resolutely cheerful determination not to let anything or anyone destroy her good mood, the sublime in the ridiculous, he had admired all of that about her, and possibly even loved it a little too. He wondered whether he had ever been as honest in his arrogance as Miranda Winter had been in her simplicity.

His gaze wandered over to Lynn Orley.

What had happened to her?

The living dead. It was as though she had been erased. Nina had mentioned some kind of shock to Deputy Commander Wachowski, but she seemed to be working her way through self-destruction programme; she hadn’t spoken a single word since Miranda’s death. There was hardly anything to indicate that she was even aware of her surroundings. Everything—

—had vanished into the event horizon; nothing could make its way out.

She had become a black hole.

And yet, sitting in the depths of the black hole, she found herself capable of following the echoes of her thoughts. This was unusual for a Hawking-like black hole. Something wasn’t right. If she really had fallen into her collapsed core and ended up as a singularity, this would also have meant the end of all cognition. Instead, she had made her way to somewhere. There was certainly no other way to explain the fact that she was still thinking and making speculations, although she had to admit she would probably be doing better if certain green tablets hadn’t been burned when—

—with the destruction of the hotel, any hope of a message from Hanna had been erased. If he was still able to send out messages, that was.

By now, with the chaotic evening on her mind, Dana was having doubts about this. Was a little pessimism advisable? After all, anything could have happened on Aristarchus. Maybe – although of course without writing Hanna off right away – she should confront the possibility of taking things into her own hands. Her cover hadn’t been blown yet, and her avowed opponent didn’t seem aware of anything, not even herself. All the others trusted her. Even Tim, who—

—was in increasing despair about how to fairly distribute his worries. Worries for Amber, for Julian (more than he would like to admit), for Lynn and all the rest in the shuttle, and the others wherever they were at that moment; worries as to the limit of his own capacity for suffering, one endless round of anxiety. After flying for more than two hours they had to be nearing the base by now, but they still hadn’t been able to establish contact. Dana had put it down to the tiresome satellite problem, and said they would have a connection as soon as they came into the transmission area. Tim’s worry-list expanded to include the horror of a deserted and somehow destroyed base. The time crept by, or was it racing? The Moon offered no reference points for human perceptions of the passing of time; his species’ timekeeping had absurd continuance only within the enclave of the Callisto, while all around them there was no time, and they would never arrive anywhere ever again.

And as the horror of the vision, fed by his torturously brooding imagination, threatened to overpower him—

—four words and a yawn provided the solution.

‘Tommy Wachowski. Peary Base.’

‘Peary Base, this is Callisto. We’re coming in for landing. Request permission to land in around ten minutes.’

‘A social visit?’ Wachowski asked sleepily. ‘Heavens. Do you know how late it is? I just hope we’ve cleaned up and cleared away the bottles.’

‘This is no time for jokes,’ said Nina.

‘Just a moment.’ Wachowski’s tone changed in a flash. ‘Landing field 7. Do you need assistance?’

‘We’re okay. One injured, not life-threatening, and one person in shock.’

‘Why aren’t you flying to Gaia?’

‘We’ve come from there. There was a fire. Gaia has been destroyed, but there are other reasons why we can’t go back to Vallis Alpina.’

‘God! What’s happened?’

‘Tommy.’ Dana tuned in. ‘We’ll tell you the details later, okay? We have a lot to report and a great deal more to process. But right now we’re just happy to be able to land.’

Wachowski fell silent for a moment.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll get everything ready here. See you soon.’

American Mining Station, Sinus Iridum

The dust cleared after just a quarter of an hour, restoring the views over to the distant Mare Imbrium, to the mountain range of Montes Jura – and to the mining station.

Hanna allowed himself a moment of rest, stretching out and tilting his head back. Despite veering too far north-west, he had nearly made it. As long as he kept up the pace he would be there very soon. His hunch that the others were either dead or severely limited in their transport capabilities had turned into a certainty. They could have caught him up in no time with a rover, but no one had appeared.

His head felt as though it were stuffed with cotton wool, and he was struggling against light dizziness and nausea. He started to walk again. Within a quarter of an hour, he reached the station. Unlike Peary Base, its design was entirely celestial: a large, regolith-covered igloo, connected to cylindrical, pressurised insectoids, a U-formation of spherical tank depots and hangars framing a landing field, bordered by the railhead with its main and siding tracks. Steps and elevators led up to the tracks, freight trains – basic flatbed wagons coupled together – dozed ahead of their next journey. To the side of the landing field, two dozen spiders, frozen and motionless, waited for the command to deployment. Two more had taken up position right next to the rail track and were loading one of the trains with spherical tanks, while a third, fully laden, was on the approach. The plant seemed to be undergoing some development, and Hanna noticed that the hangars, depots and the igloo-shaped habitat were resting on caterpillar tracks. As soon as the zone had been fully processed, the entire station would move on. The visibility was much better here, even though a thin veil of dust hung over everything. Harsh, bright sunlight was reflected back by the crystalline facets of the suspended particles, creating an oppressive, post-nuclear-disaster mood. A world of machines.

Hanna searched through the hangars and, alongside various maintenance robots, managed to find four robust grasshoppers with larger cargo holds and higher stilts than the ones used in Gaia. There was no trace of anything quicker, like a shuttle. There were no conventionally driven vehicles here at all; in the mining zone everything was on legs, thereby reducing the amount of dust stirred up and providing better protection for the mechanical components. The beetles’ maintenance interfaces were located in the head and the hunchback, which made the design of the grasshoppers logical. They could get above the blanket of dust and, from there, execute precision landings on the vast bodies; the robots took care of the rest. Hanna had no doubt that one of the hoppers would get him to his destination – they hardly used any fuel – but they were terribly slow. He would be en route for almost two days with one of those things, the cargo hold filled up with oxygen reserves – always supposing he found something of the kind in the station. His suit would provide him with drinking water, but he wouldn’t be able to have a bite to eat. He was prepared to put up with that, but not with the time delay.

He had to act within the next two hours.

He paced through the airlock of the habitat and went into a disinfection room, where cleaning fluids were sprayed on him at high pressure to cleanse his suit of moon dust. Then he was finally able to take his helmet off and search the quarters. It was spacious and comfortable enough that you could tolerate several days here, with sanitary facilities, a kitchen, a generous amount of food supplies, working and sleeping quarters, a communal room, even a small fitness centre. Hanna paid a visit to the toilet, ate two wholegrain bars covered in chocolate, drank as much water as he could manage, washed his face and looked for headache tablets. The station pharmacy was excellently equipped. After that, he inspected one of the insectoid transporters connected to the station, but that too proved to be unsuitable for his needs, because it was even slower than the hoppers. He at least managed to find additional oxygen which would assure his survival out there for some days. But on the question of how to finish the job in the near future, he was still at a loss.

He put his helmet back on and hauled all the oxygen reserves he could find out to the landing field.

His gaze wandered over to the spiders. The last one in the row was just heaving its tanks onto the freight train, which was loaded almost to capacity, then securing them in place with the rib-like clamps that extended from the sides. From the looks of things, the train would soon be setting off towards the moon base.

At 700 kilometres an hour!

His thoughts came tumbling thick and fast. There were still around a dozen tanks to be loaded. He had maybe ten minutes. Too little to destroy the hoppers as he had planned, but he could still take the oxygen reserves with him. Running now, he brought them to the elevator and threw them in. The barred cabin set off at an annoyingly slow pace. He could see the spider’s legs through the crossbars, its body, the industrious pincers. Three tanks to go. He rushed out onto the railway platform and squeezed the reserves between the piled-up globes on a freight wagon. The penultimate tank was passed over by the praying-mantis-like extremities and stowed away. Where would be the best place to sit? Nonsense, there was no ideal location; this wasn’t the Lunar Express, it was a cargo train. Certainly one whose acceleration a human could survive without harm. Beyond that, it didn’t matter how quickly the train went. In the moon vacuum it was no different to being in free fall, where you could leave the vessel at 40,000 kilometres an hour and take a casual look around.

The last tank was just being secured.

In front of the tanks! That was the best place.

He pulled himself up onto the wagon bed, then went hand over hand along the metal globes and under the spider’s pincers to the front, until he found a place which seemed good to him, an empty passage between two traction elements. He squeezed himself in, crouched down, wedged in his feet and leaned his back against the tanks.

And waited.

Minutes passed by, and he started to have doubts. Had he been wrong? The fact that the train was fully loaded didn’t necessarily mean it was setting off now. But while he was still brooding over it, there was a slight jolt. Turning his head, he saw the spider disappear from his field of vision. Then the pressure of acceleration followed as the train got faster and faster. The plain flew past him, the dust-saturation around him gradually gave way. For the first time since his cover had been blown, Hanna didn’t feel trapped in a nightmare of someone else’s making.

‘Lousy grasshoppers!’ cursed Julian.

They had made it to the mining station with the very last of their strength. Oleg Rogachev, trained to stay standing for so long that his opponent would fall over from exhaustion, was the only one to show no signs of fatigue. He had rediscovered his gentle, controlled way of speaking and was emitting the freshness of an air-conditioned room. Amber, however, could have sworn that her spacesuit had developed a life of its own, maliciously intent on obstructing her movements and exposing her to the unfamiliar experience of claustrophobia. Soaking wet, she slumped in her gear, bathed in bad odours. Evelyn was faring similarly, traumatised from almost being trampled to death and still a little unsure on her feet. Even Julian seemed to be discovering, with surprise, that he really was sixty years old. Never before had they heard Peter Pan snort so loudly.

It didn’t take them long to discover that there wasn’t a single oxygen reserve in the entire station.

‘We could get some air from the life-support systems,’ Evelyn suggested.

‘We could, but it’s not that easy.’ They were sitting in the living quarters, helmets off, drinking tea. Julian’s face was flushed and his beard unkempt, as if he’d been burrowing around in it for hours on end on the hunt for solutions. ‘We need compressed oxygen. For that we’d need to make various conversions, and to be honest—’

‘Don’t beat around the bush, Julian. Just come out with it.’

‘—at the moment I’m not sure how that works. I mean, I know roughly. But that won’t solve our problem. We would only be able fill up our own tanks. All the reserve tanks have disappeared.’

‘Carl,’ said Rogachev tonelessly.

Amber stared straight ahead. Of course. Hanna had been in the living quarters. They had searched the station in constant expectation of being attacked by him, but he had disappeared without a trace. Which raised the question of how, as it seemed no hoppers were missing – until Julian discovered the transport and operation schedules and found out that a helium-3 transport had set off to Peary Base immediately before they had arrived.

‘So he’s on his way there.’

‘Yes. And from the Pole back to the hotel.’

‘Right, let’s follow him then! When does the next train leave?’

‘Hmm, let me see… oh, the day after tomorrow.’

‘The day after tomorrow?’

‘Guys, the Americans aren’t pumping streams of helium-3 on an hourly basis here! It’s just small quantities. At some stage in the future there’ll be more trains, but right now—’

‘The day after tomorrow. Dammit! That’s two days of sitting around.’

Even the satellites were still refusing to offer them any concessions. Amber crouched in front of her now cold cup of tea, as if by pulling her shoulders up she could stop her head falling down to her feet. Some governing authority seemed to have taken up residence inside her skull. She was afraid of cracking up over her fear for Tim, Lynn and the others. But at the same time she felt as though she were looking at the mountainous skyline of a desk weighed down with the demands of her own survival. No one came to help. Applications for grief and sadness lay around unprocessed, the empathy department had all gone for a coffee break, and the answer phone was on in the Department of Examination for Post-traumatic Syndrome, announcing only the hours of business. Every other service desk had closed due to dismissals. She wanted to cry, or at least whimper a little, but tears required a request form that couldn’t be located, and the Dissociation Department was putting in overtime. Escape plans were checked, considered and discarded as her shocked self sat there in the company of five dead people, waiting for one of the neurotransmitters hurrying by to declare themselves responsible.

‘And how far will we get with the grasshoppers?’ she asked.

‘Theoretically, to the hotel.’ Julian gnawed at his lower lip. ‘But that would take two days. And we don’t have enough oxygen for that.’

‘Could we perhaps reprogram the control system for the trains?’ asked Oleg Rogachev. ‘There are some parked outside after all. If we could manage to start one of them—’

‘I certainly can’t do anything like that. Can you?’

‘Okay, let’s take a different approach,’ said Evelyn. ‘How much longer will our reserves last?’

‘Three to four hours each, I guess.’

‘Right, so that means we can forget all forms of transport that take longer than that.’

‘Well we won’t get to the hotel with that much, that’s for sure. Here, on the other hand, our ability to survive is practically unlimited.’

‘So you want to rot in here while everything else gets destroyed?’ cried Amber angrily. ‘What about the insectoids? Those strange crawling vehicles. They’re equipped with life-support systems, right?’

‘Yes, but they’re even slower than the hoppers. With them it would take three or four days to get even to the foot of the Alps. And climbing after that would take longer than our reserves will last.’

‘The oxygen again,’ said Evelyn bitterly.

‘It’s not just that, Evelyn. Even if we had enough of it, we’re still running out of time.’

Oleg looked at Julian intently. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What?’

‘That we’re running out of time.’

Julian held the Russian’s gaze. He tried to get the words out several times, then turned his head towards Amber in a silent plea for help. She nodded imperceptibly. Julian opened up the dungeons of discretion and finally told Evelyn and Rogachev the whole truth.

Rogachev’s face was expressionless. Evelyn was looking at the tips of her fingers, stupefied. Her lips moved as if she were uttering inaudible prayers.

‘And that’s everything?’ she said finally.

‘Far from it.’ Julian shook his head gloomily. ‘But that’s all I know. Honestly! I would never have brought you all here if I had had the slightest suspicion that—’

‘No one is accusing you of thoughtlessness,’ said Oleg coolly. ‘On the other hand, it is your hotel. So, think. Do you have any idea why someone would blow up Gaia, and with an atomic bomb at that?’

‘I’ve been racking my brains for hours trying to work that one out.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t have a clue.’

‘Exactly.’ Oleg nodded. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Unless there’s something about the hotel that you yourself don’t know.’

Or about its architect, thought Amber. Julian’s suspicion came to her mind. She dismissed the thought as nonsense, but the uneasy feeling remained.

‘Why the Gaia?’ brooded Oleg. ‘Why a nuclear bomb? I mean, that’s completely over the top.’

‘Unless it’s not just about the hotel.’

‘Don’t mini-nukes have less explosive force than normal nuclear bombs?’ asked Amber.

‘Yes, that’s true.’ Oleg nodded. ‘On the scale of the largest possible disaster. Which means you could contaminate half of the Vallis Alpina even with a mini-nuke. So what’s there? What’s the deal with the alpine valley, Julian?’

‘Again: not the faintest idea!’

‘Maybe it’s nothing,’ said Evelyn. ‘I mean, all we have to go on is this detective’s theory.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Julian shook his head. ‘We have five dead people and a killer flushed out of hiding. Everything that Carl’s done in the last hours amounts to an admission of guilt.’

Oleg put his fingertips together.

‘Maybe we should stop wishing for the impossible.’

‘Well, there’s an idea.’

‘Patience.’ Oleg uttered a humourless laugh. ‘If we can’t get to the hotel via the direct route, then we should think about making a detour. Do you know what?’ He looked at them each in turn. ‘I’m going to tell you a joke.’

‘A joke.’ Evelyn stared at him distrustfully. ‘Should I be worried?’

‘The joke of my life. My father often told it. A little story he believed led people towards ideas—’

‘Well, given that Chucky’s not here—’

Julian propped his chin in his hands. ‘Go on then.’

‘So, two Chukchi are walking through the Serengeti when a lion suddenly jumps out at them from behind the bushes. Both of them are scared out of their wits. The lion growls and is clearly very hungry, so one of the Chukchi runs away as quickly as he can. But the other one pulls his rucksack from his shoulder, opens it in a leisurely fashion, takes a pair of running shoes out and puts them on. Are you crazy? shouts the fleeing Chukchi. Do you seriously think those shoes will make you faster than the lion? No, says his friend, they won’t.’ Oleg smiled broadly. ‘But they’ll make me faster than you.’

Julian looked at the Russian. His shoulders shook, then he started to giggle. Evelyn joined in, a little hesitantly. Amber inspected the contents in a bureaucratic manner then decided to laugh too.

‘So we need running shoes,’ she said. ‘Great, Oleg. Let’s just run home.’

Julian’s expression froze. ‘Hang on!’

‘What is it?’

‘We have running shoes!’

‘What?’

‘I’m such an idiot.’ He looked at them, his eyes wide in amazement that he hadn’t thought of it sooner. ‘The Chinese are our running shoes.’

‘The Chinese?’

‘The Chinese mining station. Of course! It’s inhabited. We could get there within an hour with the grasshoppers, without our oxygen reserves running out, there are shuttles there, they have their own satellites—’

‘And they could be behind the attack!’ cried Amber. ‘Isn’t that what that Jericho guy suspected?’

‘Yes, but the people we have to thank for warning us are Chinese too.’ Suddenly, decisiveness was shining in Julian’s gaze again. ‘I mean, what do we have to lose? If there really is a Chinese conspiracy against Orley Enterprises, then bad luck. We can hardly make things any worse. But if not, or if these Chinese people in particular aren’t behind it – then all we can do is win.’

They looked at one another, letting the thought sink in.

‘You should tell jokes more often,’ said Evelyn to Oleg.

The Russian shrugged. ‘Do I look like I know any more?’

‘No.’ Julian laughed. ‘Come on. Let’s pack our stuff.’

London, Great Britain

The China theory.

Ever since they had recognised Kenny Xin in the fat Asian from Calgary, the term had been in frequent use in the Big O and at SIS. The never entirely believed and yet most logical of all explanations, that a Chinese causative agent was causing havoc in Orley’s bloodstream, was experiencing a renaissance. And why? Because of a Chinese assassination attempt.

Jericho was more at a loss than ever.

After the initial moment of triumph at having exposed Kenny Xin, joining the small streams of realisation into a river, he had begun to doubt the paradox of the obvious more and more. At first glance, the China theory made sense. Xin had turned out to be the nucleus of atrocious activity all over the world, and all of his actions served the implementation of the planned attack. Admittedly, he could hardly be held responsible for the massacre in Vancouver: although a jet could have taken him from Berlin to Canada in time to murder ten people there, Jericho doubted he had left Europe. It was more likely that he had followed them to London and was observing the goings-on from somewhere close by, like a fly on the wall. He could have delegated Vancouver, and it was obvious he had helpers, Chinese, for sure. Mayé’s launching pad, the purchase and installation of the mini-nuke, all of it was in Chinese hands. China was said to be the provocateur of the Moon crisis, Beijing resented the USA, Zheng was trying to both fight Orley and get on his side. In short, the China theory conformed perfectly to Secret Service thought processes. In Jericho’s view there was only one thing to say against it: when it came down to it, it just didn’t add up.

‘Crikey, you’re good.’ Norrington sounded appalled. ‘It was Xin who shot at Palstein – that must give you food for thought.’

‘It does,’ said Jericho.

‘The guy isn’t just someone’s weapon, but I don’t need to tell you that! He’s right at the top of the organisation, and he’s a goddamn Chinese Secret Service man. It would be negligent to rule out China being behind all this.’

Yoyo indicated she’d had enough of sitting around in a cellar, however nicely furnished it might be.

‘I asked Jennifer. She said the atomic obliteration of London wouldn’t take place before tomorrow morning, so we might as well go to one of the large offices up in the roof with Diane.’

In its simplicity, it was the best idea for a long while.

The two of them went up. London at two o’ clock in the morning was a sea of lights, and it was London: perhaps not the most modern, but for Jericho the most beautiful and charming city in the world. The O₂ Arena was gleaming on the opposite bank of the Thames, and the Hungerford Bridge lay to the west, held up by glistening spider’s webs and towered over by the wheel of the London Eye. The orange luminescent moon circled mysteriously in the gravitational field of the Big O. Yoyo leaned back on the floor-to-ceiling window, unleashing in Jericho the spontaneous impulse to grab her in his arms and hold her tight.

‘Doesn’t the thing in Vancouver remind you of Quyu?’

The paleness of defeat had retreated from their features. Red wine and fighting spirit were conjuring up fresh sparkle in their eyes.

‘I don’t think that was Xin,’ he said.

‘But the process is similar. The Guardians, Greenwatch, and in both cases information was spread virulently through the net. Containing that spread is practically impossible. So you don’t attempt a surgically precise operation, but instead immediately destroy the entire infrastructure and kill everyone that comes into question as a knowledge carrier. And even that doesn’t give you any guarantees, but you can delay the spread. That’s exactly what Kenny’s doing. I’m telling you, he’d blow up this very building if he could be sure that it would buy him some time.’

‘Because the operation is about to take place.’

‘And we can’t do a damn thing about it.’ Yoyo slammed her fist into the palm of her other hand. ‘Time’s working against us. He’s going to win, Owen, that piece of shit is going to win.’

Jericho walked up next to her and looked out into the London night.

‘We have to find out who’s pulling the strings. Before they can carry out the attack.’

‘But how?’ snorted Yoyo. ‘We only ever find Xin.’

‘And MI6 have homed in on the Chinese. The MI5, Norrington, Shaw—’

‘Well.’ She shrugged. ‘We thought it was them almost the whole time too, right?’

Jericho sighed. She was right, of course. They were the ones who had ignited the China theory smoke bomb.

‘On the other hand, as you’ve already said: the Moon crisis doesn’t fit. Why would China unleash an argument over mining zones at a time when the last thing it needs is international attention?’

‘Norrington thinks it’s a distraction tactic.’

‘Great distraction tactic. It led to Beijing being accused of putting weapons on the Moon! Not exactly trust-inspiring if a bomb does end up going off. And besides, Owen, why didn’t they just send a Chinese assassin up in a Chinese rocket?’

‘Because, according to Norrington, a member of the tour group had better access to the Gaia.’

‘Nonsense, what kind of access? To set off an atomic bomb? You don’t need access for that, you just chuck it down outside the door, make a run for it and blow the thing sky high. Remember what Vogelaar said. It was Zheng he didn’t trust, not Beijing.’

‘And what would Zheng get from killing Orley and destroying his hotel? Would that help him to build better space elevators? Better fusion reactors?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo sucked on her index finger. ‘Unless Orley’s death would turn the balance of power in the company upside down to Zheng’s advantage.’

‘Vogelaar had another theory.’

‘That someone’s trying to turn the Moon powers against one another?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t have to go to extremes right away. They wouldn’t unleash world war that quickly. But a few things would change.’

‘One of them would be weakened—’

‘And the third party strengthened, secretly laughing all the while.’ Jericho hit the palm of his hand against the windowpane. ‘Do you see, that’s what strikes me about the whole thing. It’s all so obvious! It seems so – staged!’

‘Okay, fine, let’s leave China aside for a moment. Who else would benefit from Orley’s downfall?’

‘A bullet would be enough for just him. You don’t need a nuclear bomb for that.’ Jericho turned away. ‘You know what, before we drive ourselves crazy going over it all, we should ask Aunt Jennifer.’

‘MI6 loves the China theory,’ said Shaw a few minutes later, ‘and so does MI5. Andrew Norrington even wants to call in the Chinese ambassador.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m torn. The theory doesn’t seem to make sense to me, but then it doesn’t necessarily make much sense to a dog when his master puts the dog food on the top shelf. We have to put China as the focus of our mistrust. And as far as Julian is concerned, there are whole armies who would rather see him dead than alive.’

‘There’s a rumour that he wants to make his patent accessible to the world.’

‘That’s possible,’ Shaw conceded.

‘Could that be in Zheng’s interest?’

‘It definitely wouldn’t be in America’s. A change at the top of our organisation would be very useful to Washington right now. The chemistry is a little off at the moment, as you know.’

Jericho hesitated. The branch of a new thought was appearing in his mind and developing lively side shoots.

‘Are there individuals in the Orley enterprise who don’t agree with Julian?’ he asked. ‘Who represent Washington’s position?’

Shaw smiled grimly.

‘What do you think? That we hold hands? Just the fact that Julian is considering freeing himself from American monogamy is considered by many to be tantamount to sacrilege. Except, as long as the boss has the say, they just grumble over their beers and keep their traps shut. You would like Julian, Owen, he’s the kind of man you can have fun with. Meanwhile you quickly forget that he’ll fight to get what he wants with despotic energy, if that’s what it takes. Creatives and strategists have all the freedom they want with him, as long as they sing from his hymn sheet. Palace revolutionaries should just be happy that the guillotine was done away with.’

‘Isn’t his daughter the second in command in the company? What does she think about the patent thing?’

‘Exactly the same as her father. I know what you’re getting at. You can’t corrode Orley Enterprises from the inside.’

‘Unless—’

‘Over Julian’s dead body.’

‘There you go,’ said Yoyo, unmoved. ‘There may be forces in the company that want him dead, but can’t do anything by themselves. Who would they collaborate with?’

‘The CIA,’ said Shaw, without hesitation.

‘Oh.’

‘I know that for a fact. The CIA are developing scenarios of what form a partnership without Julian might take. They’re thinking about everything. The Americans are worried about their national security.’

‘It’s a known fact that the State can withdraw patents if national security is at risk’ said Jericho.

‘Yes, but Julian is British, not American. And the Brits have no issues with him, quite the opposite in fact. With the taxes he pays, the prime minister himself would personally take a bullet for him. And besides, it’s about economy, not war. Julian isn’t endangering anyone’s national security, just their profits.’

‘The only way of controlling the company from the outside would be to get rid of him.’

‘Correct.’

‘Could Zheng Pang-Wang—?’

‘No. After all, Zheng’s hopes rest entirely on Julian, and the possibility that he may at least talk him into a joint venture one day. As soon as other people are running Orley, Zheng would be completely out of the picture. That reminds me, Edda put together the data you asked for.’

‘Yes, it’s about—’

‘Vic Thorn, I know. Interesting idea. Excuse me, Owen, I’m just getting a call from our control centre in the Isla de las Estrellas. We’ll put the data on your computer.’

‘The CIA,’ ruminated Yoyo. ‘That’s a new one.’

‘Yet another theory.’ Jericho rested his head in his hands. It suddenly felt as heavy as lead. ‘Getting rid of their own business partner and putting the blame on the Chinese.’

‘Plausible?’

‘Of course it is!’

They sat there silently for a while. An icon had appeared on Diane’s monitor, VICTHORN, but Jericho was overcome by the paralysis of mental overload. He needed a jump start to get going. Some insignificant little victory.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We’re going to do something now that we should have done a lot sooner.’

He pulled the icon of the intertwined snake bodies onto the screen and named it UNKNOWN.

‘Diane.’

‘Yes, Owen?’

‘Look in the net for equivalents of UNKNOWN. What is it about? Show me the corresponding data and deliver contextual background.’

‘One moment, Owen.’

Yoyo came and sat next to him, crossed her arms on the table and laid her chin in the crook of an elbow. ‘Her voice is very lovely, I grant you,’ she said. ‘If she looked as—’

The screen filled with images.

‘Would you like to hear a summary, Owen?’

‘Yes, please, Diane.’

‘It’s very likely that the graphics show a Hydra. A nine-headed, snake-like monster from Greek mythology, which lived in the swamps of the Argolid and prowled through the surrounding lands, killing cattle and humans and destroying harvests. Even though the Hydra’s middle head was immortal, she was defeated by Heracles, a son of Zeus. Would you like to hear more about Heracles?’

‘Tell me how Heracles defeated the Hydra.’

‘The snake’s distinguishing characteristic was that it grew two new heads for every one that was chopped off, with the result that it became increasingly dangerous as the fight went on. It was only when Heracles began to burn off the neck stumps with the help of his nephew Ioalaus that the new heads were no longer able to grow. Eventually, Heracles succeeded in striking off Hydra’s immortal head too. He dismembered the body and immersed a stake in its blood, which from then on could create incurable wounds. Would you like to hear more details?’

‘Not right now, Diane, thank you.’

‘A Greek monster,’ said Yoyo, her eyes wide. ‘In the picture it looks more Asian.’

‘An organisation with lots of heads.’

‘That grow back when you knock them off.’

‘But would Chinese conspirators really make a creature from Greek mythology into their symbol?’

Yoyo stared at the monitor. Diane had found around two dozen images of the Hydra, various depictions, in artefacts spread across two millennia, all of which showed a scaly snake body with nine tongued heads.

‘No, not a chance in hell,’ she said.

Peary Base, North Pole, The Moon

They felt a little like the survivors from a wagon-train of white settlers, the ones who had made it to the fort in the nick of time, even though there were no equivalents of Indians to be seen anywhere. But at the moment when the Callisto descended over the base’s space station, O’Keefe couldn’t help but picture US cavalry stationed at the Pole, a troop of riders who came tearing over the plateau to protect them, hats and flashing epaulettes, fanfares, shots fired in the air, the familiar tropes: Are you safe, Sergeant? – Aye, sir! A hell of a journey. I didn’t think we’d make it. I see the Donoghues aren’t here. Dead, sir. Blast! And the staff? – Dead, sir, all dead. My God! And Winter? – Didn’t make it, sir. We lost Hsu too. Terrible! – Yes, sir, horrible.

How strange. Even something as exotic as space travel only seemed to function through the cultivation of earthly myths, by imposing elements of the familiar onto the unfamiliar. Something designed to expand the mind ended up being subjected to musty familiarity and forced into narrow spectrums of association. Perhaps people couldn’t help it. Perhaps making the unusual seem banal prevented them from perishing of their own banality, even if it meant their subconscious calling on the services of the western, a genre whose task had been to put a chaotic world back to order with the assistance of sharp ammunition and sublime landscapes. A lot of bad things have happened, Sergeant. Aye, sir. So many have died. Aye. But look at the land, Sergeant! Is it not worth every man lost? – I wouldn’t miss it, sir! – What a wonderful country! Our hearts beat for it, our blood flows for it. We may die, but the land remains. I love this country. By God, me too! Let’s ride!

My arse!

As soon as Nina landed the Callisto at the Pole, all eyes were directed towards the Charon. To the southern end of the landing field, surrounded by the base’s spaceships, the landing module rested like a small, impregnable castle on stilt legs. O’Keefe recalled their first leaps and steps, filled with that conquistador-like feeling of having conquered something, unsuspecting that they would come back just a few days later, depleted and demoralised. The monochrome landscape and mother-of-pearl sea of stars had lost none of their beauty, even after the disaster in Gaia, but their gazes had now turned inwards. The adventure was over. The desire to escape had extinguished the pioneering spirit.

‘Well, I don’t know.’ Leland Palmer, a small, Irish-looking man and commander of the base, looked around at them sceptically. ‘None of it seems to make sense to me.’

‘Well, then a lot of people had to die for something that makes no sense,’ said O’Keefe.

A robot bus had brought them from the landing field to Igloo 2, one of the two domed living quarters which formed the centre of the base. Igloo 1 contained the headquarters and scientific working area, while its neighbouring counterpart was for leisure activities and medical care. In a lounge which oscillated between comfort and functionality, they had told the residents their story, while Karla, Eva and the Nairs were examined for signs of smoke poisoning and Olympiada Rogacheva, in a state of self-reproach, had her leg put in splints. Lynn had sat amongst them silently for a while, until Tim, his face contorted with worry, had taken her hand and told her she should lie down, sleep and forget, a suggestion that she had followed apathetically.

‘I mean there’s no sense to the expense,’ said Palmer. ‘I mean, just look at what a simple oxygen fire can do! What would someone need a nuclear bomb for?’

‘Unless you factor in the location,’ Dana suggested.

‘You mean you think the bomb isn’t for the Gaia at all?’

‘Not exclusively, I would say.’

‘That’s true,’ said Ögi. ‘A few hand grenades, correctly positioned, would have done the job, no problem. I happen to know a thing or two about mini-nukes—’

‘You do?’ said Heidrun, amazed.

‘From the television, my dear. And one thing I know is that you shouldn’t let yourself be fooled by the cute terminology, you know, Mini Rock, Mini Mouse, Mini Nuke. Every one of the mini-nukes which disappeared from the holdings of the former Soviet Union in the early nineties was capable of obliterating Manhattan.’

‘So what are they trying to destroy, then?’ asked Wachowski.

‘Gaia is at the edge of a basin,’ said Tim, his head resting in his hands. ‘Where the Vallis Alpina rounds out.’

‘What would happen if someone set off a nuclear bomb in a basin like that?’ asked O’Keefe.

‘Well.’ Wachowski shrugged. ‘It would contaminate it.’

‘More than that,’ said Palmer. ‘There’s no air here to spread radioactive material, no atmospheric fallout. But on the other hand nor is there anything to slow down the explosion’s energy. The direct destruction itself would be enormous, a bit like the impact of a meteorite. The pressure would blast away the edges of the basin, the heat would turn its walls to glass, vast quantities of rock would be catapulted into the air, but above all, the detonation would be tunnelled.’

‘Which means?’ asked Heidrun.

‘That there’s only one direction, apart from upwards, that the pressure can be released.’

‘Into the valley.’

‘Yes. The waves of pressure would graze along the entire Vallis Alpina, accelerated by the steep walls. I’d estimate that the whole area would be lost.’

‘But to what purpose? What’s so special about the valley, apart from the fact that it’s beautiful?’

Tim crossed his fingers and shook his head. ‘I’m more concerned with wondering why the bomb hasn’t gone off yet.’

‘Well, up to three and a half hours ago it hadn’t gone off yet,’ O’Keefe corrected him. ‘By now it could have blown sky high.’

‘And we wouldn’t have a clue here!’ growled Wachowski. ‘What a mess! What the hell is wrong with the satellites?’

I could tell you all a thing or two, thought Dana. ‘Either way,’ she said, ‘we won’t solve the problem here and now, and to be honest I’m not interested right at this moment. I want to know what has happened on Aristarchus.’

‘The shuttles should be fuelled up soon,’ promised Wachowski.

‘Hmm, Carl.’ Heidrun wrinkled her forehead. ‘I wonder what he’ll do?’

‘That depends. Is he alive, are the others alive? Was he able to flee? My bet is that he still has something he needs to do in the hotel.’

‘And what would that be?’ asked Tim.

‘Priming the bomb.’ She looked at him. ‘What else?’

‘He needs to prime it?’

‘Possibly.’ Wachowski nodded. ‘How else would you ignite the thing?’

‘Remote control.’

‘In order to ignite it via remote control you’d need a very large antenna, which you would have seen when you were searching the Gaia. Otherwise, he’ll need to do the ignition himself.’

‘Which explains why we’re still alive,’ said Ögi. ‘Carl didn’t have a chance to set up a timed fuse. His plans were turned upside down.’

‘Do we care about that?’ O’Keefe looked around at them all. ‘I wouldn’t waste a minute looking for him. Let’s concentrate on the Ganymede.’

‘I totally agree with you,’ said Dana. ‘But it could come down to the same thing. If we find the Ganymede, we may stumble upon Hanna.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ growled O’Keefe. ‘More than fine.’

Nina came into the lounge.

‘We’re ready!’

‘Good.’ Dana and Palmer had agreed to send two search teams off right away. Nina was to fly the Callisto to the Plato crater, follow the Montes Jura along the mining zones and then head for Aristarchus. The Io, a shuttle belonging to the Peary Base, would set off fifteen minutes later, keep a southerly course by Plato, and then, 500 kilometres on, swing over the plain of the Mare Imbrium towards Callisto. Dana got up. ‘Let’s put the teams together.’

‘You can fly with me.’

‘Thank you, but I think my presence is more needed here. Someone has to look after the others. How many people can you spare, Leland?’

Palmer rubbed his chin. ‘Kyra Gore is our head pilot. She can fly the Io with Annie Jagellovsk, our astronomer—’

‘My apologies,’ Dana cut him off mid-sentence. ‘I didn’t express myself correctly. How many people have to stay in the base in order to ensure everything can function?’

‘One. Well, let’s say two.’

‘I want you to be clear about how dangerous this man is. It’s possible that the search teams will be forced to attack Hanna. They may have to free the group from under his control. Each shuttle should be occupied by four, or preferably five people.’

‘But there’re only eight of us.’

‘I’ll come too,’ said O’Keefe.

‘Me too,’ said Tim.

‘Heidrun and I—’ Ögi started to say.

‘I’m sorry, Walo, but you’re not the ideal person.’ Dana made the effort to smile. ‘You’re certainly courageous enough, but we need younger, fitter people. So, Tim and Finn will fly with Nina, plus two more people from the base. The Io will fly with five men from the base—’

‘Just a minute.’ Palmer was trying to rein in the galloping horse. ‘That would be an extraordinary mission.’

‘Well, we have an extraordinary problem,’ replied Dana ungraciously. ‘In case you haven’t noticed.’

‘Six out of eight people. I’d need to consult—’

‘Consult who?’

‘Well—’

‘You won’t reach anyone.’

‘Okay, but – it’s not that simple, Dana. That’s three-quarters of my team. And the shuttles will have no contact to base for most of the time.’

‘View me as a reinforcement here,’ said Dana. ‘My responsibility is the safety of Julian Orley and his guests. And, to be honest, Leland, I would be less than understanding if the rescue mission were to fail due to lack of—’

‘Fine.’ Palmer exchanged a look with Wachowski. ‘I think it’s doable. Tommy, you stay here and – hmm, Minnie DeLucas.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked Dana.

‘Our specialist for life-support systems.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if Jan stayed?’ wondered Wachowski.

‘And who’s that?’

‘Jan Crippen. Our technical director.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Palmer. ‘Minnie can take on his duties, and besides, we won’t be gone for all that long.’

‘I don’t care how long you’re gone,’ said Dana. ‘As long as you find Julian Orley.’

More importantly, as long as you’re all out of the picture for the next few hours, she thought. Carl and I can handle Wachowski and this woman DeLucas.

If Hanna was still coming, that was.

At around 02.40 that morning, the shuttle bus finally took the search teams over to the landing field.

O’Keefe sat on the bench of the open vehicle and let his gaze wander. On their second evening on the Moon, in an effort not to expose himself to too much conversation, he had retreated to the Gaia’s multimedia centre before the meal was over, and had watched a film about the Peary Base. So he knew that it covered over ten square kilometres and that the landing field alone took up three times the space of a football field. The silo-like towers on the western wall were spaceships left behind by the teams who had first ventured to the North Pole. Originally converted into living quarters, they now served as emergency accommodation, themselves dwarfed by a telescope currently under construction, while the domes in the centre, Igloos 1 and 2, formed the heart of the base. Both had been brought to the Pole as collapsible structures, and had then been blown up to house size and coated with a layer of regolith several metres thick, in order to protect the inhabitants from solar storms and meteorites. Airlocks had been cut into the walls, the ground levelled off all around them, and vehicles and equipment had been stored in hangars, those halved tubes which Momoka had referred to in her usual defeatist manner as junk, and which were actually burnt-out fuel tanks from the Space Shuttle era.

Over the years, the station had grown, expanding to include streets, annexe buildings and a vast open-cast mine. In the distance, against a backdrop of automated factories in which the regolith was processed into building components, the framework of huge, open assembly facilities towered up. Manipulators ran on rails along the bodies of mining machines in the making: welding, riveting and adjusting parts, while humanoid robots carried out precise mechanical work. Cable cars and railway trucks were carrying material from the factories to the building yards. Wherever you looked, machines were hard at work. Lifelessness in its most vivid form.

O’Keefe looked towards the east as the bus made its way towards the landing field, two kilometres away from the main site. Fields of solar collectors, their panels directed at the wandering, never-setting sun, covered low, undulating hills. The craters were interspersed with canals of lava. Thanks to them, the Peary Base had a widely ramified system of natural catacombs, the majority of which hadn’t yet been explored. Just one feature betrayed what the ground was concealing: a crack, or rather a chasm. It gaped at its full width in the high plateau, spread out to the west and opened into a steeply descending valley, the bottom of which wasn’t touched by a single ray of sunlight. Bridges crossed over what seemed like the remains of a severe earthquake, although it was actually a caved-in lava canal, through which liquid stone had flowed billions of years ago. As O’Keefe knew from the documentary, some of the cave branches led into the chasm, which made him wonder whether the underground of the base was accessible from there.

They drove through the gate in the screens surrounding the landing field. There was moderate activity taking place all around them. One of the grasshopper-like forklifts was corresponding soundlessly with a manipulator, whose segmented arm rose in their direction like a final greeting, then froze. So far as could be seen, the tracks on the rail station gallery lay there abandoned. Beneath the harsh, uneven light, the lonely route wound off into the valley. The activity of the machines had a ritualistic quality to it; one could even say post-apocalyptic mindlessness, an image of strange self-contentment.

What would they find at Aristarchus? Suddenly, he was overcome by the desire to go to sleep and wake up in the timelessness of a Dublin pub of somewhat ill repute, where the customers were more concerned with the accurate proportion of foam to black stout than all the wonders of the Milky Way put together, and often sighed in remembrance of allegedly better times as they raised the glasses to their lips.

London, Great Britain

The night crawled by.

Yoyo was off somewhere on the phone to Chen Hongbing, Tu was discussing the possibility of a joint venture with Dao IT, his still-furious, abhorrent competitor, and Jericho was struggling to keep his eyes open. Three hundred metres above London, his brain had turned into a swamp, gurgling and mumbling with decaying theories, all paths either reaching a dead end or getting lost in the unknown. He was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. Vic Thorn on his journey into eternity. Kenny Xin, slinking towards Palstein’s planned assassination. The nine heads of Hydra. Carl Hanna, on whom Norrington hadn’t yet managed to find even the smallest blemish. Diane with her ever increasing messages about Calgary and the massacre in Vancouver. Sinister representatives of the CIA, living up to the cliché. From a great height, he could see himself running around in a circle so big it felt like he was going in a straight line, but he always ended up back in the same place.

He was absolutely shattered.

Yoyo came back from her phone conversation just as he was about to stretch out on the floor and close his eyes for a moment. But then he might have gone to sleep, and his overtaxed brain would have conjured up dreams of hunting and being hunted. He was actually pleased that Yoyo was keeping him awake, even though her mercurial vitality was increasingly getting on his nerves. Since their arrival in the Big O, she had single-handedly polished off a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino, had the ruby-red tones of Sangiovese Grosso in her cheeks and the never-tiring look of youth, and all without showing any sign of drunkenness. For every cigarette she smoked, two new ones seemed to grow out of her fingers. She was even more unpredictable than the Welsh weather: gloomy and glowering one moment, bright the next.

‘How’s your father doing?’ he yawned.

‘As can be expected.’ Yoyo sank down into a swivel chair then jumped right up again. ‘Really well actually. I didn’t tell him everything, of course. Like what happened at the Pergamon Museum, he doesn’t need to know that, right? Just so you know, in case you speak to him.’

‘I can’t see any reason why I should.’

‘Hongbing is your client.’ She went over to the coffee machine. ‘Have you forgotten that already?’

Jericho blinked. He suspected that, if he looked in the mirror, he would find his eyes had been replaced by computer monitors. He forced himself to look up from the screen.

‘I brought you back to him,’ he said. ‘So the honourable Chen is no longer my client.’

‘Oh great.’ Yoyo studied the selection on the machine. ‘There’s a thousand varieties of coffee, but no tea.’

‘Look more closely. The English are tea-drinkers.’

‘Where is it then?’

‘Bottom right. Hot water. The box of teabags is next to it. So what did you tell him?’

‘Hongbing?’ Yoyo rummaged through the box. ‘I told him that we had a heartfelt conversation with Vogelaar and that he filled us in on what was going on, and that Donner turned out to be a cover.’ She put her cup under the nozzle, dropped in a bag of Oolong and ran boiling water over it.

‘So in other words you said we were having a lovely holiday,’ mocked Jericho. ‘And have we been to Madame Tussaud’s and shopping on the King’s Road?’

‘So should I have told him about the experience of pressing the eyeballs out of a dead man?’

‘Fine, enough said. A mocha, please.’

‘A what?’

‘Coffee with chocolate. Left row, third button from the top. So how far did you get with Thorn?’

They had divided up their tasks, which meant that Yoyo was evaluating the data relayed by Edda Hoff and completing it with information she found online.

‘I’ll be finished in a few minutes,’ she said, watching as the machine spat out a mixture of cappuccino and chocolate. ‘Would I be correct in assuming that you’re tired?’

Jericho was just about to answer when he realised that Diane was simultaneously uploading 112 new reports about Calgary and Vancouver. He sank into a depressed silence. Yoyo put the steaming cup in front of him and began to slurp down her tea in front of her monitor. He listlessly decided to have one final look at the message that had set everything off, then to go and sleep.

Just as the text appeared on his screen, Yoyo whistled lightly through her teeth.

‘Do you want to know who was project leader for the Peary Missions from 2020 to the end of 2024?’

‘From the way you say it I take it that I do want to know.’

‘Andrew Norrington.’

‘Norrington?’ Jericho’s slumped shoulders tightened up. ‘Shaw’s deputy?’

‘Wait.’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘There were a number of project leaders, but Norrington was definitely in the team. It doesn’t say to what extent or how direct his contact with Thorn was.’

‘And you’re sure it’s the same Norrington?’

‘Andrew Norrington,’ she read. ‘Responsible for personnel and security, transferred in November 2024 to Orley Enterprises as deputy head of security.’

‘Strange.’ Jericho wrinkled his forehead. ‘So it should have rung a bell with Hoff when I spoke to her about Thorn.’

‘She’s Norrington’s subordinate. Why would she be concerned with the details of his past career?’

‘But Norrington didn’t say anything either.’

‘Did you speak to him about Thorn?’

‘Not directly. Shaw and he were in a meeting. I came over and said that some unexpected event must have stopped the mini-nuke being ignited the year before.’

‘Mind you, Shaw already knew about your Vic Thorn theory.’

‘That’s true, probably from Hoff. Hmm. She must have clocked that Norrington was with NASA at the same time as Thorn. Sure, she had a hell of a lot on her plate – but Norrington—’

‘You mean, he should have thought of Thorn himself?’

‘Maybe that’s asking too much.’ Jericho rested his chin in his hands. ‘But do you know what? I’m going to go and ask him.’

‘Victor Thorn—’

Norrington was sitting in his surprisingly small office, one of the few rooms that weren’t open-plan. Jericho had turned up unannounced, as if he were just passing.

‘Yes, Thorn,’ he nodded. ‘He could be our man, don’t you think?’

Norrington gazed at an imaginary point in the room.

‘Hmm,’ he said distinctly, very distinctly. A clearly audible H, followed by a time-winning mmm. ‘Interesting thought.’

‘He died three months after the launch of the satellite. It would fit time-wise.’

‘You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that myself?’

‘People often overlook the things that are right in front of them.’ Jericho smiled. ‘Did you have close contact with him?’

‘No.’ Norrington shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so slow on the uptake if I had.’

‘No contact at all?’

‘My role was related to the general project security. Sure, we crossed each other’s path now and then, but other people were responsible for personnel issues.’

‘And what was Thorn like?’

‘As I said, we had nothing to do with one another. Rumour was that he was a playboy, which may have been an exaggeration. I think he just enjoyed life, but on the other hand he was enormously disciplined. A good – a very good astronaut. People don’t normally get put forward for a second Peary Mission that quickly.’

‘Think back, Andrew,’ asked Jericho. ‘Any information would be helpful.’

‘Of course. Although I fear that I won’t be able to offer anything that enlightening. Is Jennifer already in the picture on this?’

‘Hoff seems to have mentioned it to her. She knew about my suspicion.’

‘She didn’t tell me.’ Norrington sighed. ‘But you can see what it’s like here: we rush from one meeting to the next; everything’s so chaotic. Hanna is driving me insane. I can’t find anything dodgy in his background, and God knows it’s not the first time I’ve looked.’

‘You were responsible for the tour group?’

‘Yes. We didn’t know much about Hanna, but Julian was adamant about taking him along. Believe you me, I X-rayed the guy thoroughly. And nothing: he was clean.’

‘Anything new from Merrick?’

‘No. He’s trying to make contact. His botnet theory is probably correct.’ Norrington hesitated. ‘Owen, I don’t mean to suggest I don’t trust your instincts, but we have to look at other Orley organisations too. We can’t be certain that we’re not dealing with a concerted action. Give me a bit of time with Thorn. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Yoyo, when Jericho came back and filled her in on the conversation. ‘Norrington knew Thorn.’

‘He didn’t say he didn’t know him.’

‘No, I mean he really knew him.’ Yoyo pointed at her monitor. ‘Thorn attracted a lot of interest from the media, because of Peary, but also because he was good-looking and talkative. There are dozens of interviews with him, but I found the best one while you were away. A special report about the Peary crew of 2024, plus a human-interest piece. Vic Thorn, sought-after bachelor, on the Moon for the second time, blah blah blah. They took a film crew to his house and were given access while he threw a birthday party, and guess who was on the guest list?’

She started the video. An open-plan kitchen, a relaxed atmosphere. About two dozen people gathered around platters of finger food. Light jazz breezing over a sea of chatter, classics from the Rat Pack era. People dancing in the background, and a lot of dedicated drinking. Thorn laughs into the camera and says something about how wonderful friendship is, then can be seen in animated discussion with a man who slaps him familiarly on the shoulder a few frames later.

‘Is that what people who don’t have any contact with one another look like?’

Jericho shook his head.

‘Most definitely not.’

‘That some of these men will soon spend six months on another celestial body,’ said the female commentator, ‘seems strangely unreal on an evening like this, where—’

‘It could be coincidence,’ Yoyo conceded. ‘We can’t necessarily assume that Norrington is our mole, or even that Thorn had something to do with it. It’s pure speculation.’

‘Nonetheless, I want to know more about his time with NASA. What exactly he was responsible for, how close the contact really was. We know one thing for sure: he lied when he denied knowing Thorn well.’

‘—already his second mission in the Mountains of Eternal Light,’ the commentator was saying. ‘So called because the sun never sets at the lunar Pole. Originally, this played a decisive role for the energy supply to the Peary Base, but since then the construction of a fusion reactor has—’

‘Mountains of Eternal Light,’ whispered Jericho.

Yoyo looked up at him, confused.

‘Yes, that’s what the Polar regions are called. You know that.’

The cogs were turning in Jericho’s mind. As if in a trance, he went over to his desk and stared at the text of the fragmentary message:

There was very little of the text that still puzzled him. In essence, just one single word, added before the dark network went silent, and only because it occupied the space between Operation and of timing in such an odd way, as if it didn’t belong there.

MoonLight

That’s what he’d assumed it said, at any rate.

‘Diane. Fragment analysis. Attribute the origin data to the text building stones.’

‘Colour recognition?’

‘Yes, please.’

A moment later, words like payload rocket and Enterprises were transformed into colourful chains of alphabet letters. Ent erpr ises was, for example, assembled from three sections of data and other terms like Operation and implemented, came from a single data section.

Four fragments created Mo o n light.

‘Oh, God,’ whispered Jericho.

‘What’s wrong?’ Yoyo jumped up, came over and leaned over his shoulder.

‘I think we’ve made a mistake.’

‘A mistake?’

‘A huge mistake.’ How could he have missed it? It was right in front of him. ‘We may have put them on the wrong track. The bomb isn’t supposed to go off in Gaia—’

‘Not in Gaia? But—’

‘There would be no point if it did, and we knew that the whole time. Idiot! I’m such a stupid, blind idiot!’

Operation Mo o n Light

Operation Mountains of Eternal Light.

Chinese Mining Station, Sinus Iridum, The Moon

Jia Keqiang was no politician. He was a taikonaut, a geologist and a major, in that order, or possibly the other way around depending on his mood, but he was no politician, that was for sure. In his experience, the only difference between Chinese and American spacemen, or indeed Russian, Indian, German and French, was the ideology behind them, and whether they were called astronauts, cosmonauts or taikonauts. What they all had in common though was a way of looking at the big picture which politicians, in his experience, never had, except of course for those few statesmen who had been in space themselves. Hua Liwei, his predecessor up on the Moon, had been an American captive for a while and still took every official appearance as an opportunity to accuse the Americans of hair-raising breaches of the lunar peace, but this couldn’t shake Jia’s opinion that spacemen were easygoing, unpolitical people. It was just that each and every one of them followed their script faithfully. Even Hua Liwei, once he had a drink or two inside him, in private, would happily admit that he liked the Yanks, that they had treated him very well and that, as it happened, they had some excellent Scotch tucked away in the catacombs at Peary Base.

Mind you, Hua also reckoned that the Americans were to blame for the whole farcical episode, and Jia agreed with him there. Nevertheless, he had done his best during the Moon crisis to argue for de-escalation and understanding all round, using what influence he had. The Party held him in high esteem as a bright young hope of the Chinese space programme; he was a highly decorated officer in the Air Force and had trained as a taikonaut under the watchful eye of the legendary Zhai Zhigang. On top of all this, he also had a doctorate in geology, specialising in exo-geology, qualifying him to work on the helium-3 mining operation. Zhai had passed on to Jia his love of ballroom dancing, and he was also inordinately fond of naval history, spending hours on end researching the brief flowering of Chinese seamanship in the fifteenth century and the fabled nine-masted ships of the time; he had painstakingly built a three-metre-long scale model of Admiral Zhang He’s flagship. When he wasn’t up in space, he loved to sail with his wife and sons, to read books on maritime history and to cook, which he did as a sort of meditation. He was proud that his country had become the first after the USA to make it to the Moon, he was irked that Zheng Pang-Wang hadn’t made any progress on the space elevator, he was worried about America’s dominance in space and he was slow to make predictions about the future. He was a perfect public face for China, friendly, media-savvy, patriotic, and always careful to keep to himself his own personal opinion that politicians both sides of the Great Wall were not the brightest bulbs in the shop. ‘Frankly’, as the Americans would say, he thought that politicians were idiots.

But right now he had to think about politics, if he didn’t want to lose control of the story he’d suddenly found himself caught up in.

Julian Orley was sitting across from him.

The very fact that he was here was remarkable enough, but what Orley had to tell him was even more startling. Twenty minutes ago he had appeared from the dustbowl of the mining camp, along with his daughter-in-law, the American talk-show queen Evelyn Chambers and some Russian Jia knew nothing at all about, all riding on grasshoppers like a squad of defeated Jedi fleeing the field, and they had asked for shelter and for help. Everyone in the base had been asleep, of course, since it was half past three in the morning, though Orley seemed surprised when Jia pointed this out to him. They had hurried to take care of their unexpected guests, fussed around them and made hot tea, but even so the commander found himself in a tricky situation, since—

‘—without wishing to offend, Mr Orley, last time the Americans entered our territory, there was some trouble.’

They had tried talking Chinese for a while, but Orley’s laborious, broken Mandarin was no match for Jia’s fluent English. Jia’s crew, Zhou Jinping and Na Mou, were in the next room, looking after the others. Evelyn Chambers in particular was in a bad state, showing signs of an imminent nervous breakdown.

‘Your territory?’ Orley raised an eyebrow. ‘Wasn’t it the other way about?’

‘We are of course aware that America takes, let us say, a different view of the matter,’ Jia said. ‘That is, regarding who intruded into whose territory. Perception is such a subjective thing.’

‘It certainly is.’ The Englishman nodded. ‘But you see, Commander, I couldn’t give two hoots about any of that. I’m not answerable for the local mining operation, or for Washington’s territorial issues. I’ve built an elevator, a space station and a hotel.’

‘If you will permit me an observation, that list is not quite complete. You benefit from the mining, because you’re the one who can build the reactors.’

‘Still, I do it as a private businessman.’

‘NASA’s technologies would be inconceivable without Orley Enterprises, and vice versa. In China’s view, that makes you more than just a private businessman.’

Orley smiled. ‘So why does Zheng Pang-Wang constantly remind me that that’s just what I am?’

‘Perhaps to reassure you that you have a free choice in the matter?’ Jia smiled back. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. I would not presume to question the honourable Zheng’s motives, but he is no more a private businessman than you are. You have more influence over world politics than many a politician. More tea?’

‘Please.’

‘You see, I am concerned that you should understand my situation, Mr Orley—’

‘Julian.’

Jia was silent for a moment, uncomfortable, then poured the tea. He had never understood what made the English and the Americans so keen to get onto first-name terms at every conceivable opportunity.

‘The extended agreements signed in November 2024 commit us to helping one another here on the Moon,’ he said. ‘We are taikonauts, you are astronauts, we are all of us humanity’s ambassadors to the stars. We should stand shoulder to shoulder. Speaking personally, I would allow you to use our shuttle the moment you ask for it, but the very fact that it is you asking gives the whole thing a very political aspect. On top of all which, there might be nuclear bombs involved.’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had Chinese help in the matter. Without that, we’d probably know nothing at all about the bomb, and we’d be hiking happily around the lunar hills with Hanna until the whole place blew up.’

‘Hmm, well—’

‘On the other hand—’ Orley steepled his fingers. ‘I’ll put my cards on the table. The people who warned us can’t rule out that China might actually have a hand in the planned attack—’

‘Preposterous!’ Jia snorted. ‘What interest would my country have in destroying your hotel?’

‘You think it’s ridiculous?’

‘Quite ridiculous!’

Julian looked thoughtfully at the man sitting across from him. Jia was a pleasant enough chap, but he was a Beijing company man through and through. If the plot against Orley Enterprises really had been hatched in China, then Jia might well have some part in it. In which case, he was speaking to his enemy right now, which was one more reason to speak openly; he would have to make the man understand that the puppet-masters were about to be unmasked, and that it might be a good move to spill the beans. If Jericho and his friends were wrong, then every secret and suspicion he aired was just one step closer to winning Jia’s trust. He leaned forward.

‘The bomb was put into orbit in 2024,’ he said.

‘Okay, so?’

‘That was when we had that crisis you mentioned.’

‘We did everything that we could to ensure a peaceful resolution.’

‘There’s no arguing, though, that at the time, Beijing wasn’t very well inclined towards Washington. This being so, you may be interested to learn that the bomb was bought from Korean stockpiles, on the black market, and that the buyers were Chinese.’

Jia looked at him in astonishment. Then he passed his hand over his eyes, as though he had just walked head-on into a cobweb.

‘We’re a nuclear power,’ he said. ‘Why would the Party buy nuclear weapons on the black market?’

‘I never said that it was the Party who bought it.’

‘Hmm. Go on.’

‘It’s also worth noting that although the bomb was launched from African soil, the president of Equatorial Guinea at the time was just a puppet, and one that your government had installed. From what I understand, the technology for the Equatorial Guinea space programme all came from Zheng—’

‘Hold on!’ Jia expostulated. ‘What are you saying? That Zheng wanted to destroy your hotel, with an atom bomb?’

‘Please persuade me otherwise.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I have no idea. Because we’re commercial rivals?’

‘But you’re not! You’re not competing for the same markets. You’re competing for know-how. So you spy on one another, pay bribes, argue your corner, try to form alliances – but you don’t start hurling nuclear bombs about.’

‘The gloves are off now.’

‘But an attack like that would be of absolutely no benefit to Zheng, or to my country! What would destroying your hotel do to change the balance of power, even if you died as well?’

‘Quite so. What?’

For a long moment Jia said nothing at all, but kneaded at the bridge of his nose and kept his lids shut tight. When he opened them again, the question in his eyes was easy to read.

‘No,’ Julian answered.

‘No?’

‘My visit here isn’t part of some double-cross, honourable Jia, it’s not a plan or an operation. I truly have no wish to harm you or your country. There’s a lot I could have left unmentioned if I had wanted to steer your decision-making.’

‘And what do you expect me to do now?’

‘I can tell you what I need.’

‘You want me to take you and your friends back to the hotel with our shuttle?’

‘As fast as you can! My son and daughter are in Gaia, as well as the guests and staff. We have reason to fear that Hanna is making his own way back there. I also need the use of your satellites.’

‘My satellites?’

‘Yes. Have you had any trouble with them in the last few hours?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Ours have failed completely, as I told you at the beginning. Yours seem to be working. I need two connections. One to my headquarters in London, and another to Gaia.’ Julian paused. ‘I have put my trust in you completely, Commander, even at the risk of your refusing my request. I can do no more. The rest is up to you.’

The taikonaut fell silent again, then said slowly, ‘You would of course be in China’s debt if I were to help you.’

‘Of course.’

Julian could see the wheels going round in Jia’s head. Right at this moment, the commander was worrying about whether his visitor might actually be right, and his government had plotted some dirty trick that he knew nothing about. And whether, perhaps, he was in danger of committing high treason if he offered unconditional help to the man who had put America where it was today.

Julian cleared his throat.

‘Perhaps you might bear in mind that somebody is trying to make a cat’s paw of your country,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t take too kindly to that, if I were you.’

Jia glowered at him.

‘Entry-level Psychology.’

‘Ah, well.’ Julian shrugged and smiled. ‘Something of the sort.’

‘Go next door and join your friends,’ Jia said. ‘Wait.’

Chambers couldn’t stop the loop from playing. Over and over again she saw the beetle’s foot coming down to crush her, and suddenly she began to twitch epileptically. She slid down the wall of the hab module like a wet rag. Amber and Oleg were in there with her. It was cramped in the station, horribly cramped, quite unlike the American living quarters. Na Mou, one of the taikonauts, was fussing over them with tea and spicy crab cakes. While Julian was softening up the commander, Chambers had been telling the Chinese woman about the events of the last few hours. Perhaps Na understood more English than she spoke, but Chambers herself was so horrified by her own story that the words stuck in her throat.

‘You lie down,’ Na said, kindly. She was a Mongolian-looking woman with broad cheekbones and strongly slanted eyes, with something of the past about her, a suggestion of marching parades and collective farms.

‘It keeps on coming,’ Chambers whispered. ‘It keeps on and on.’

‘Yes. Legs up.’

‘Whether I shut my eyes or keep them open, it never stops.’ She grabbed Na’s wrist, and felt ice-cold sweat start up on her own upper lip and forehead. ‘I’ll be squashed any moment. By a beetle. Isn’t that crazy? People squash beetles, not the other way around. But I can’t stop seeing it.’

‘You can stop.’ Amber turned away from Zhou Jinping, the third crew member at the base, who had been questioning her eagerly. She sat down next to Chambers. ‘You’ve had a shock, that’s all.’

‘No, I—’

‘It’s okay, Evy. I’m pretty close to collapsing myself.’

‘No, there was something there.’ Chambers rolled her eyes, rather like a voodoo priestess in a trance, a mambo. ‘Death was there.’

‘I know.’

‘No, I was over on the other side, do you understand? I was really there. And Momoka was there, and – I mean, I knew that she was dead, but—’

Two dams broke, grief and shock, and tears spilled down over Chambers’ beautiful Latin features. She gesticulated as though trying to ward off some spell, then let her hands drop, exhausted, and began to cry. Amber put an arm around her shoulder and drew her in close, gently.

‘Too much,’ Na Mou said, nodding wisely.

‘It’ll all be all right, Evy.’

‘I wanted to ask her what happens to us next,’ Chambers sobbed. ‘It was so cold in her world. I think she laid a curse on me, she makes me see this terrible sight over and over, she must have seen something just as awful before she died, and—’

‘Evy,’ Amber said quietly but firmly. ‘You’re not clairvoyant. Your nerves are shot, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t even like her very much.’

‘None of us liked her very much.’ Amber sighed. ‘Apart from Warren, I suppose.’

‘But that’s awful!’ Chambers clung tightly to her, racked by sobs. ‘And now she’s gone, we couldn’t even – couldn’t even say something nice—’

Do we have to? Amber thought. Do you have to say nice things to someone who’s clearly a bitch, just on the off-chance that she’ll kick the bucket in the near future?

‘I don’t think she really saw it like that,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘Really. Momoka had her own ideas about what’s nice or not.’

Chambers buried her face in Amber’s shoulder. The most powerful woman in American media, the voice who made presidents, cried for a few more minutes until she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Na Mou and Zhou Jinping had fallen quiet, respecting her sorrow. Rogachev was lying on one of the narrow beds, his legs crossed, and scribbling away on a piece of paper they had found for him.

‘What are you doing there?’ Amber asked, tired.

The Russian twiddled the pen in his fingers without looking at her.

‘I’m doing my sums.’

Jia Keqiang was wrestling with himself. It was a tough fight.

Plentiful experience told him what a long and stony path lay ahead if he took the matter through official channels, just as he knew that the Chinese space agency was largely staffed by paranoiacs. On the other hand, all he needed to do was make one telephone call, and he’d be free of all responsibility. He’d be out of danger of making any mistake, whereas if he spoke up for Orley on his own initiative he would be doomed to mistakes. All he had to do was pass the buck to one of the Party paper-shufflers, and if Orley’s hotel actually was destroyed, it would be no fault of his. Then Beijing would have to face accusations of failing to live up to their treaty obligations and provide adequate help, while he could make loud noises about how he had wanted to help and hadn’t been allowed. He could sleep easy in his bed, and not worry about his career.

If he could sleep easy.

On the other hand – what if Orley was right, and Beijing really was pulling the strings?

He turned his teacup thoughtfully between his fingers, staring down into the green tea. What then? He would dutifully call his superiors and tell them of Orley’s suspicions, only to find himself up to the neck in state secrets. Real state secrets, which were no concern at all of his, because nobody had brought him into the circle. Obviously, he’d be classed as a national security risk straight away. Flying Julian Orley over to Gaia in the shuttle was the least of his problems. It was hostile territory up here, and in case of doubt, they just didn’t fly. Similarly, it would need permission and approvals in triplicate to let the Englishman use Chinese satellites to communicate. Before the Moon crisis, Jia would have been able to make a decision like that on his own, but that option was off the table now.

He would have to call.

So what would he tell them?

He pushed his teacup from right to left, left to right.

And all of a sudden he knew.

There was still a risk, but it could work. He stood up, went to the control panel, put a call through to Earth and had two short conversations.

‘I’ll sum it up,’ Jia said, after he had asked Julian back into the narrow control room to join him. ‘You invite some friends for a private trip. Quite unexpectedly, one of your guests turns out to be a killer, he mows down five people and leaves you stranded on the Aristarchus Plateau.’

‘That’s right.’

‘All this in response to his overhearing a conversation between yourself, Gaia and company headquarters in London, which was about how terrorists may have smuggled a nuclear bomb onto the Moon to destroy an American or Chinese moon base.’

‘A Chi—’ Julian blinked, bewildered. Then he understood. ‘Yes. That’s right. That’s just how it was.’

‘And you have no idea who might be behind it.’

‘Now that you put it that way, Commander, I haven’t the foggiest idea. All I know is that Chinese or American citizens may be in danger.’

‘Mm-hm.’ Jia nodded earnestly. ‘I understand. That makes it all very clear. By which I mean to say that it is in the interests of our national security to look into the matter together with you. I have explained precisely these facts to my superiors, and I have been given permission to prepare the satellite for your use, and then to fly you on to Vallis Alpina afterwards.’

Julian looked at the taikonaut.

‘Thank you,’ he said softly.

‘I’m pleased to be able to help.’

‘You do know, however, that the conversation I am about to conduct may lead to some unjustifiable accusations against China.’

Jia shrugged.

‘All that matters is that I don’t know right now.’

Shaw stood by the table of the conference room. She looked unkempt, as though she had been running about the whole day. Andrew Norrington and Edda Hoff were with her. Behind them, a rather rumpled-looking blond man leaned in the doorway.

‘Julian!’ she called aloud. ‘My God, are you all right? We’ve been trying to reach you for hours.’

‘Have you been able to make contact with Gaia?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? You should be able to reach Gaia by the normal radio chann—’

‘We’ve tried that. Nobody is responding.’

Julian felt his heart skip a beat.

‘Before you ask, there hasn’t been an explosion at Vallis Alpina,’ Shaw said hurriedly. ‘At least that much is good news.’

‘And the base? Have you been able to talk to the moon base?’

‘No response.’

‘Erm, Julian,’ Norrington broke in. ‘Our theory is that somebody is using the satellites to disrupt communication by unleashing a huge botnet on the Moon. The comms equipment up there is completely clogged up, so to speak. The truth is, we’re half blind and completely deaf, we need information from you.’

‘How could anybody clog up our comms?’ Julian snapped.

‘Quite simple. You need an inside man.’

Inside man. Inside woman. Great God, why couldn’t he shake the idea that Lynn had something to do with it.

‘We’re just going over Hanna’s background,’ Hoff said. ‘There’s not a great deal we can say about him for sure, though his whole life story turns out not to be worth the paper it’s printed on. We are however agreed that he can’t be operating on his own up there.’

‘Once again, where are you?’ Norrington urged him.

Julian sighed. He gave a brief account of what had happened in the hours since communications had collapsed. Shaw’s face turned paler with every death he recounted.

‘Jia Keqiang has been kind enough to agree to fly us to the hotel,’ he finished up. ‘We’ll try to reach Gaia through the Chinese satellite first, to—’

‘Mr Orley.’ The blond man straightened up from the doorway and took a step forward. ‘You shouldn’t fly back to Gaia.’

Julian looked at the man, frowning in confusion. Then all of a sudden he realised.

‘You’re Owen Jericho.’

‘Yes.’

‘I beg your pardon.’ He spread his hands. ‘I should have thanked you long ago, but—’

‘Some other time. Does the name Hydra mean anything to you?’

Julian gawped. ‘Greek mythology,’ he ventured. ‘Monster with nine heads.’

‘Nothing else spring to mind?’

‘No.’

‘It looks as though an organisation called Hydra is responsible for all this. Heads that grow back when you cut them off. A great many heads. Invincible, worldwide. For a while we thought that the people pulling the strings were in Chinese high finance or politics, but whichever way you look at it, that doesn’t make any sense. By the way, a friend of yours was on Hydra’s hit list.’

‘What? Who was that, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Gerald Palstein.’

‘What? Why would they want to get Gerald?’

‘That’s the easiest question to answer,’ Norrington chipped in. ‘When Palstein was shot, that meant that he had to pull out of the moon trip at short notice and make room for Hanna.’

‘But how—’

‘Later.’ Jericho came closer. ‘The most important thing for you to know right now is that the attack isn’t aimed at Gaia.’

‘It’s not?’ Julian asked. ‘But you said—’

‘I know. It looks like we made a mistake. In the meantime we’ve been able to decode more of the message, and it seems that the bomb isn’t there to destroy your hotel.’

‘But what, then?’

There was silence for a moment, as though everyone in the room was waiting for someone else to spill the beans.

‘Peary Base,’ Shaw said.

Julian stared at her, his mouth open. Jia looked as though the ground had opened up under his feet.

‘Beijing would never plan—’ he began.

‘We’re not certain that Beijing’s behind it,’ Shaw interrupted. ‘At least, not Chinese government circles. But that’s irrelevant right now. Hydra want to contaminate Peary Crater, the Mountains of Eternal Light, the whole region! They don’t want anything from us, they just used us to get up to the Moon. Contact the base straight away, however you do it! They’ve got to search the place with a fine-toothed comb, and evacuate if need be.’

‘Good God,’ Julian whispered. ‘Who are Hydra?’

‘No idea. But whoever they are – they want to wipe America off the face of the Moon.’

‘And Carl’s headed there right now.’ In an instant, it all became clear. He leapt to his feet and stared at Jia. ‘He’s going to arm the bomb. He’ll arm it, and then clear out!’

They couldn’t reach Peary Base with the Chinese satellite either, which made Orley even more frantic. They tried to reach Gaia, with no luck. Then the base again. Then Gaia again. Shortly after four o’clock, they gave up.

‘It can’t be anything to do with our satellite,’ Jia argued. ‘We could talk to London no problem.’

Orley looked at him. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘That the bomb has already exploded, and that’s why we can’t reach anybody?’ Jia rubbed his eyes. ‘I’ll admit, I had considered it.’

‘It’s horrific,’ Orley whispered.

‘But we heard that the satellites aren’t the problem. It’s the communications equipment. Peary Base and Gaia have been attacked; we haven’t. Which means that we can communicate, just not with the hotel, and not with the Pole. Besides, a nuclear explosion—’ Jia hesitated. ‘Don’t you think we’d have been told? My country keeps a very close eye on the Moon. I think your hotel must still be in one piece.’

‘But the base is in the libration shadow, which means that your country can watch until they go blue in the face, they won’t see anything!’

‘Please be assured that China has nothing to do with it.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Orley paced around the small control room. ‘I simply don’t understand. What’s all this in aid of?’

Jia turned his head. ‘When do you want to set off?’

‘Now. I’ll tell the others.’ Orley paused. ‘I am really very grateful, Commander. Very.’

‘Keqiang,’ Jia heard himself say.

Really? For a moment, he felt an urge to withdraw the offer, but he liked this easygoing, long-haired Englishman. Had he been too harsh in judging the relaxed Western ways? Maybe being on first-name terms was a step towards harmony among the nations.

‘One thing’s for sure, Keqiang,’ Orley said with a sour grimace. ‘There’d have been no Moon crisis if it had been down to us two.’

At that moment, they heard his name.

It droned from the loudspeakers, part of a looped message, an automatic broadcast signal.

‘Callisto to Ganymede. Callisto to Julian Orley. Please come in. Julian Orley, Ganymede, please come in. Callisto to—’

Jia leapt up and raced to the console.

‘Callisto? This is Jia Keqiang, commander of the Chinese mining operations. Where are you?’

For a second there was only crackling from the loudspeakers, then Nina Hedegaard’s face appeared on the screen.

‘We’re flying over the Montes Jura,’ she said. ‘How come—’

‘We’re keeping our ears open. Are you looking for Julian Orley?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded emphatically. ‘Yes!’

Julian shoved into view. ‘Nina! Where are you?’

‘Julian!’ Suddenly Tim’s face appeared next to hers. ‘At last! Is everybody all right?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘But—’ Tim was visibly distraught.

‘That’s to say, Amber’s fine,’ Julian reassured him hurriedly. ‘What happened to Lynn? And Gaia? Tim, what’s going on here?’

‘We don’t know. Lynn’s – we’re alive.’

‘You’re alive?’

‘Gaia was destroyed.’

Julian stared at the screen, lost for words.

‘There was a fire, several people died. We had to evacuate anyway, because of the bomb.’

The bomb—

‘No, Tim.’ He shook his head, and clenched his fists.

‘Don’t worry, we’re safe. At the moon base. That’s where we just flew from. There are two search parties out to—’

‘Are you in touch with the base?’

‘No, they’re cut off from the outside world.’

‘Tim—’

‘Julian, I’m coming in to land,’ Nina said. ‘We’ll be back at the Pole in an hour. Then we can—’

‘Too late, that’s too late!’ he yelled. ‘The bomb’s not in Gaia. Do you hear? Gaia has nothing to do with all that. The bomb’s stored at the Pole, it’s meant for the moon base. Where’s Lynn, Tim? Where’s Lynn?’

Tim froze. His lips formed three silent words:

At the Pole.

‘Don’t tell me that!’ Julian wrung his hands and looked about frantically. ‘You have to get her out some—’

‘Julian,’ Nina said, ‘the second search party set out after us, they’re circling over the Mare Imbrium. As soon as we’ve picked you up, we’ll climb until we can make contact and we’ll send them straight back to the base. They’re closer than we are.’

‘Hurry! Carl’s on his way to Peary. He’s going to arm it!’

‘We’re on our way.’

Peary Base, North Pole

Dana Lawrence sat in the half-dark of the command centre in Igloo 1, breathing in pure oxygen through a mask, staring dead ahead. She’d had enough oxygen back in Gaia to see to the smoke inhalation, but a couple more breaths couldn’t hurt.

‘Don’t you want to go get some sleep?’ Wachowski asked sympathetically. The lights from the control panels and screens bathed his face in an anaemic blue-white glow. ‘I’ll wake you if anything happens.’

‘Thanks, I’m fine.’

In fact she didn’t feel tired at all. For as long as she could remember, all her strength had been focused on not falling asleep. In the sickbay, Kramp, Eva and the Nairs were lying comatose, exhausted. They were all under sedation, and tended by DeLucas, the station medic and life-support specialist. Even DeLucas, though, had no idea what Lynn needed. A young geologist called Jean-Jacques Laurie had suggested leaving her in the care of ISLAND-I, an older model than ISLAND-II. The programmed psychologist had diagnosed shock, to nobody’s astonishment, along with a possible case of late-onset psychosomatic mutism. Since then, Julian’s daughter had been either lying wide-eyed in the dark, or wandering about like a zombie, a prisoner in her own body. The Ögis were the only ones who were healthy and in full possession of their wits, and they had taken a room in one of the western towers. The base was short-staffed, all the survivors were out of action, the search parties had set off on their fool’s errand, and Hanna would be trying to get back to the hotel. God knows she had done everything she could to make things easy for him, but Hanna wasn’t coming. By now it was past four o’clock, and any confidence she had had that he would turn up was gone. The plan had been that they would carry out the operation together, but in this trade, you fought side by side with your comrade until circumstances demanded you sacrifice him. In two to three hours, the search parties would be back. By then, one of them had to have done the deed.

She got up.

‘I’m going to stretch my legs. It’ll help me stay awake.’

‘We brew a pretty good coffee up here as well,’ Wachowski said.

‘I know. I’ve had four cups already.’

‘I’ll put on some more.’

‘I’ve had enough smoke inside me to poison my system, thanks, I won’t risk a caffeine overdose. I’ll be next door in the fitness room if anything happens.’

‘Dana?’ Wachowski smiled, embarrassed.

‘Yes?’

‘I can call you Dana, can’t I?’

Dana raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course – Tommy.’

‘Respect.’

‘Oh.’ She smiled again. ‘Thank you.’

‘I really mean it. You’re keeping it all together! After everything that happened, Orley can be glad he has you. You’re keeping a cool head.’

‘Well, I try to.’

‘His daughter’s pretty much in a world of her own.’

‘Hmm. ISLAND-I says she’s suffering from shock.’

‘Pretty severe shock. What’s up with her? You know her better, Dana, what’s her problem?’

Dana was silent for a moment.

‘The same problem we all have,’ she said as she left the room. ‘She has her demons.’

Hanna

The freight train with the helium-3 tanks shot up the valley bed to Peary launch field at more than 700 kilometres per hour, but Hanna’s thoughts were moving faster.

He had to arm the bomb, but before he did that, it would be best to make contact with Dana. He hadn’t the first idea what might have happened at the hotel. All he knew for sure was that with his cover blown, they had a lot less room for manoeuvre. If he waited for her at the Pole, they could escape together, but he’d find himself an officially wanted man, by the time they boarded the OSS at the latest, and he could forget taking the elevator back down to Earth. The whole screw-up called for quick action. Set the fuse timer, then get out of there on the Charon. Xin’s finely crafted plan could still work. Not exactly in all details, perhaps, but with the same results. It would be best if Dana were still safely tucked away in the Vallis Alpina, putting on a show of concern, and hoping that the Chinese could put her through to Earth under their treaty obligations for mutual assistance.

The high plain drew closer. He could see the blast walls around the spaceport, the hangars, antennae, the neat lines of human presence. He was pressed against the tank in front of him as the maglev slowed, much more sharply than the Lunar Express. For a moment he was afraid that he had misjudged things, that he would be crushed in the murderous deceleration, then the train slid round the last curve as gently as a Sunday excursion and drew to a halt at the station. Hanna jumped onto the platform before a manipulator arm could mistake him for a helium-3 tank, taking care to stay out of sight of the surveillance cameras. All around him the machinery awoke to life, forklifts rolled up, the arms began to unload. He scurried to the further edge of the platform and leapt the fifteen metres to the ground in a single bound. Two kilometres of rough ground stretched away ahead of him, broken only by the road from the spaceport to the igloos. They showed starkly against the hills beyond and the factory buildings around, flanked on either side by the towers of the residential quarters and, in amongst them, a seemingly random assortment of warehouses and huts. Some distance away, a vast structure reared out of the stony surge of a hillside, the shell of the helium-3 power station, under construction.

Hanna loped away at an even, unhurried pace, keeping off the road and in the shelter of the slopes for as long as he could see the base to his right. Soon enough there’d be another sun shining here, only briefly but so blazing bright, and it would change everything. The landscape around. The course of history.

Lawrence

She went up to the top level of Igloo 1 in the lift, then took the connecting walkway between the two domes. Beneath her the road ran off to the factories behind. There were a few small windows here, with views out to the edge of the crater, the industrial plant and the spaceport. The sun cast a panorama of shadow like a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, but Dana had no eyes for the surreal beauty of the landscape under the billions of stars. Intent on her task, she crossed to Igloo 2 and took the lift down to the lounge, where she put on the armoured plates and backpack of her spacesuit. She picked up her helmet and then took the lift on down, past the fitness studios and the sickbay, through a layer of rock into the winding labyrinthine caves and pathways of the underground level. She had memorised every detail of Peary Base from Thorn’s maps and descriptions, so that without ever having been here before, she knew what lay ahead of her, knew which way to turn once the lift doors glided apart.

She stepped out onto a seabed.

At least that was how it looked. The glass walls of fishtanks stretched up, metres high, all around her. Flickering pools of light chased one another like will-o-the-wisps across the floor, reflected from the water when the ruffled surface was stirred up by salmon and trout and perch as they darted about, by the schools of fish flitting back and forth. A little while later the cave divided, most branches leading off into the darkness, only a few passages shimmering with blue-green or white light, and beyond them the greenhouses, the genetic laboratories and production facilities which kept the moon base stocked with fruit and vegetables. She crossed a passageway, walked along a short corridor and emerged into a vast, almost round stone hall. She could have taken a lift down here directly from Igloo 1, but Wachowski had to believe that she was in the fitness studio. Her eyes swept around the place, looking for cameras. There hadn’t been any here back in Thorn’s day, nor could she see any now. Even if there was any such thing down here, Wachowski would have enough on his hands – short-staffed as the moon base was – watching the external cameras. The fishtanks and kitchen gardens were the last thing that he would be looking at.

Several passageways led off from the hall, leading to the laboratories, storehouses and residential blocks. Only one passage had an airlock, that gave onto hundreds of kilometres of unexplored caves, unused, branching endlessly in the vacuum. Most of the lava tubes petered out in the cliff-like rim of Peary Crater, while others burrowed downward, some of them opening out into the canyon fault that ran through the whole site. She put on her helmet, stepped into the airlock and pumped out the air. After a minute, the outer door opened. She switched on her helmet lamp and went into an unhewn rocky passageway which led her onward into the darkness, black as night. The torchbeam skittered nervously over vitrified basalt. After about a hundred metres, she saw a gap open up in the wall to her left, just as Hanna had said. It was narrow, unnervingly so. She squirmed through, pulled her shoulders in, got down on all fours when the roof suddenly dipped down towards her, and crawled through the last part of the cleft on her belly. It had almost become too narrow to bear when the walls suddenly swept apart and she could see a pile of rubble that had obviously been heaped up by the hand of man; she stretched out both hands and moved the rocks aside.

She could see something low, flat and shimmering. Something with a blinking display, and an arming panel.

Hanna had positioned it neatly, she had to admit.

All of a sudden she realised that her cloud had a silver lining here. If all had gone according to plan, the package would have reached the base of the canyon under its own power, and lain there undisturbed until the last day of the trip. Only then, during the official visit to the base just before they all returned to the OSS, would Hanna have left the group, retrieved the contents and taken the bomb up into the caves. Charon would have left the Moon that same evening, and then the payload would have blown twenty-four hours later. But the package’s mechanisms had failed, so Hanna had had to take the contents up to the base ahead of schedule, to hide the mini-nuke here in the bowels of the caves. In hindsight, since his cover had been blown and everything thrown into disarray, it was a blessing that he had been forced to do that.

She opened the catch, lifted the cover to the keypad, and hesitated.

When should she set the detonator for? By now everybody knew that there was an attack planned. They still believed that it was aimed at Gaia, and she had done all she could to encourage that. But perhaps the search parties up on Aristarchus might realise what was going on. What if they came back, knowing that the base itself was in danger, and then started to search here at the Pole?

She mustn’t give them enough time to find the bomb.

A short fuse, then.

Dana shivered. Better if she wasn’t vaporised by the nuclear blast herself. Right now, her fingers were hovering over the control panel of a miracle of destructive technology which could turn Peary Crater into one of the circles of hell, sweeping away every trace of human presence as though it had never been. A good idea then to be as far away as possible, but when would the search parties return, when would the Charon set off? The safe option to make sure that she survived would be to set the detonator at twenty-four hours. But what if the communications jam failed prematurely, and they learned that the mini-nuke really was here at the Pole?

There was no way they could find that out.

But they could. The very fact that they knew that the bomb existed at all proved that they could find out anything. Callisto must have reached the Aristarchus Plateau by now. If they had found any survivors, then she could expect them back soon. If not, then they would keep searching for who knew how long. She couldn’t decide based on what she thought the shuttles might do. She had to arm this bomb, hijack the Charon and then fly to OSS. She’d have a lot of explaining to do once she got there; why she had flown off without the others, why she had flown off at all, how she could have known about the bomb. Especially if there were any survivors, who could bring all her carefully placed lies tumbling down.

But she would have to deal with that when it happened. She had been trained to deal with that sort of thing.

Her fingers twitched, indecisive.

Then she punched in a timecode, piled the rocks up in front of the bomb again and squirmed hastily backwards. The inferno was set. Time to get out of here.

Igloo 1

Wachowski was visibly startled.

‘What are you doing here?’

Lynn looked down at him, mildly surprised to see herself in his eyes as he so clearly saw her, a pale phantom with wild hair, looming up silently as though driven into the room by a gust of wind, an apparition: Lady Madeline Usher, Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein, the very image of a B-movie. Quite astonishing, how clearly she could see all these pictures shining out in the darkness of her thoughts, now that her sanity had fled the scene – although it had obviously left a breadcrumb trail to guide the little girl lost back into the waking world.

Follow your thoughts, astral voices whispered to her. Go into the light, into the light, star-child, they muttered, higher intelligences without need of physical bodies but with a twisted sense of humour, who lured unsuspecting astronauts into monoliths, dumping them into bad copies of Louis XIV bedrooms, just as had happened to poor Bowman, who—

Bowman? Lady Madeline?

This is my mind, she screamed. My mind, Julian!

And her scream, that brave little scream, set out, bold little fellow, dragged itself the whole long way out to the event horizon, then lost its strength, lost its courage, tottered over backwards and died.

‘Are you all right?’

Wachowski cocked his head. Interesting. The way the snaking arteries at his temples busily pumped blood showed he was on edge, alert. Lynn could see the tiny submarines sailing through the flow.

‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

Submarines in the blood. Dennis Quaid in Innerspace. No. Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence, Fantastic Voyage. The o-o-o-o-riginal!

Oh, yes. Sorry, Daddy.

She was contaminated ground. Poisoned by Julian. No mistake, there he was, teasing her, making a fool of her with his movie mania. Whenever she thought she had reached her real self, there she was in one of his worlds, Alice in Orley-Land, eternal heroine in his invention, his original creation.

You’re mad, Lynn, she thought. You’ve ended up like Crystal. First depressive, then mad.

Or had Julian written this role for her as well?

His flashing eyes, his floating hands, whenever he took her and Tim into his private cinema, where they had to watch every metre of celluloid or digital drama that ever a science-fiction author or director had dreamed up: Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la lune, Fritz Lang’s Girl in the Moon, Nathan Juran’s First Men in the Moon, This Island Earth with Jeff Morrow and Faith Domergue and the mutant – oh my word, that mutant! – Star Trek, The Man Who Fell to Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Alien, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Perry Rhodan with Finn O’Keefe, hey, Finn O’Keefe, wasn’t he somewhere hereabouts, and always – fanfare! – Lynn Orley, the lead role in—

‘You really gave me a shock.’

Wachowski. All alone in the twilit control room, surrounded by screens and consoles. Shouldn’t make such a fuss, the bastard. He looked a fright himself.

‘That’s good,’ Lynn whispered.

She leaned down to him, put her hand to the back of his neck and pressed her lips to his. Mm-hm, warm, that was good. She was Grace Kelly. Wasn’t she? And he—

‘Miss Orley, Lynn—’ Cary Grant stiffened.

Sorry, is this the right set for To Catch a Thief?

Funny. That wasn’t even a science-fiction film. Julian liked it, though.

Click, hssss, verify.

You lost the hotel.

Another of those lit-up signposts. What was she doing here? What the hell was she doing in the control room, with her nose full of Wachowski’s greasy smell? She pushed him away, started back and wiped her lips in disgust.

‘Are you okay?’ he whispered, in fascinated horror.

‘Never better!’ she snarled at him. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

He jumped to his feet, nodding.

Glug, glug, and her thoughts were draining away once more, whirled down the plug. When he put the glass of water in her hand, she couldn’t even remember having asked for it.

Hanna

He had given the residential towers a wide berth, trudging past them in an arc along the edge of the chasm. The canyon was a collapsed lava channel, and not all of its walls were sheer drops; rather they formed staircases and steps, so that Hanna could make his way down easily. To the west, the canyon opened out into a steep valley that cut through Peary Crater’s flank, while to his right, towards the base, the chasm grew narrower. Standing on its floor, Hanna could just about see the tops of two residential towers, shining in the sunlight, and two bridges, not far apart, that spanned the canyon above. It was dark down here, and the canyon floor was strewn with rubble. He picked his way through under the first bridge, following a groove in the rock that led him like a path over the gently sloping ground, as far as the second bridge. Then he twisted to look upwards.

About ten metres above him, a hole yawned in the cliff-face.

Several such holes dotted the rock where lava tubes opened up into the canyon, but this one in particular interested him. He clambered up, reached the opening, then switched on his helmet lamp and made his way into the twisting cave. The cave mouth was steep for a moment, and then levelled off. His headlamp caught the ragged gap through to where the bomb lay slumbering. For a moment he considered skipping the visit to the control room and programming the thing straight away, but he had to speak to Dana first. A lot could have happened in the past few hours that would force them to make a whole new plan, and on top of that he urgently needed information to help him see where he stood personally. If all was going according to plan, the laser link between the base and Gaia would be functioning, but Dana would have fixed it so that all signals went straight through to her mobile phone.

He ignored the crack and went to the airlock instead, stepped into it. There was light coming through the tiny viewport. On the other side of the airlock was the room they called the Great Hall, a large natural cave leading off to the laboratories, greenhouses and fishtanks. A lift from the Hall up to Igloo 1 led straight to the control room. Hanna glanced at his watch. Almost half past four. Could be that the control room wasn’t even occupied. Nevertheless he drew his gun as he went into the Hall, scanned all around for threats and then tapped the sensor that would bring the lift down.

Lawrence

She was determined not to spend a second longer in the base than she had to. She’d glanced through the sickbay door in Igloo 2, heard the roomful of snoring sleepers like an orchestra playing softly, with Mukesh Nair taking the solo lead as far as she could tell. Minnie DeLucas, an African-American woman with dreadlocks, was working at a computer.

‘How are they?’ Dana asked, concern in her voice.

‘They’re as well as they can be.’ The medic put a finger to her lips and glanced over to the beds. ‘The smoke inhalation isn’t so bad, but the tall German lady seems pretty traumatised, I’d say. She was telling me what happened in the lift-shafts at the hotel. How she couldn’t save that woman.’

‘Yes,’ Dana whispered. ‘We saw some dreadful things. How is Miss Orley, though?’

‘I would have had to strap her down to keep her here.’

‘She’s gone then?’

‘Wandering around somewhere. She can’t sleep, or doesn’t want to. I think she went over to Tommy in the control room. And you? Are you coping?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve breathed in so much oxygen these past few hours that I don’t think the smoke inhalation can touch me.’

‘I mean mentally.’

‘I cope.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I try my best to do without mental traumas, I find they’re something of a luxury.’

‘You should see a psychologist, in any case,’ DeLucas advised.

‘Of course.’

‘I’m serious, Dana. Don’t try burying it. There’s no shame in asking for help.’

‘What makes you think I might be ashamed?’

‘You just give the impression that you—’ DeLucas hesitated. ‘That you’re very hard on yourself. Yourself, and others.’

‘Oh.’ Dana raised her eyebrows, interested. ‘Do I?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with putting yourself on the couch,’ DeLucas smiled.

‘Oh, there are some people who reckon I belong on the couch.’ She winked confidingly. ‘See you later. I’m going to run for a bit.’

Igloo 1

In a lucid interval, Lynn had sought out the control room’s coffee nook to put down her empty glass. It was a small space, half screened off from the rest of the room by a sheet of sand-blasted glass. Something inside her said that it was important to put things back where they belonged, after she’d spent weeks and months torturing herself with wild terrors, visions of destruction. Gaia was in ruins. She had wrecked it so often in her dreams that she felt a gnawing suspicion that she truly had destroyed it herself, but she wasn’t really sure.

At the very moment that she put the glass down, suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and she remembered.

The rescue mission up on the crown of Gaia’s head. Miranda’s death.

She tried to cry. Turned down the corners of her mouth. Made a tearful face. But her tear ducts wouldn’t do their job, and until she could cry she would wander onward through the maze of her own soul, without hope of redemption. Undecided, she was staring dumbly at the glass when she heard the lift humming.

Somebody was coming up here.

Her face twisted into a mask of rage. She didn’t want anybody up here. She didn’t want Tommy Wachowski anywhere near her. He’d kissed her, the pig! Hadn’t he? How could he do a thing like that? As though she were some cheap tart! A slut in a spacesuit. There for anyone to fuck, a toy, an avatar, a plaything for other people’s fantasies!

You can all go fuck yourselves, she thought.

Fuck you, Julian!

She leaned back a little, so that she could see past the edge of the frosted glass – and into the control room. The lift-shaft passed through the middle of the igloo like an axis. Somebody in a spacesuit came out of the lift, helmet in one hand, gun in the other. It was quite obviously a gun, since he was pointing it at Wachowski, who jumped up and scurried backwards in surprise.

‘Who else is here?’ the new arrival asked in a low voice.

‘Nobody.’

‘Are you sure?’

Wachowski somehow managed not to glance towards the coffee nook.

‘Just me,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Anybody who might turn up anytime soon?’

Wachowski hesitated. He had been left as base commander. He hunched a little. He seemed to be considering whether to attack the other man, who was much bigger than him. Lynn was staring, paralysed, at the shaven back of the big man’s head, unable to move even a finger or turn away her gaze.

Carl Hanna!

‘You never know who may just turn up,’ Wachowski said, playing for time. ‘It wouldn’t be too smart to—’

There was a soft pop. The base commander dropped to the ground and didn’t move.

Hanna turned round.

Nothing. Just the big, softly lit space of the control room. Deserted, save for the dead man at his feet.

Hanna put his helmet down on the console, kept his gun at the ready and walked once around the lift-shaft. None of the other workstations was occupied. Faint light glowed from behind a frosted-glass screen, where he could see part of a shelf, full of packs of coffee, filters and mugs.

He stopped dead, moved closer.

He heard a faint shuffling sound from where he had shot the other man. He spun around in an instant, trained the gun on the motionless body and then dropped the muzzle at the same moment when he realised that the man was dead as dead could be. It had just been his arm, slipping down to the side. He holstered his weapon and leaned over the console, studying its controls. His fingers scurried over the touch-screen, called up a connection with Gaia – or what ought to have been a connection, but there was no answer.

He tried again. The channel was dead.

What was happening over there?

‘Dana, dammit,’ he hissed. ‘Pick up.’

After he had tried one more time, it slowly dawned on him that it couldn’t be Dana’s fault. The computer was telling him that no connection could be made. In other words, there was no connection through to the hotel, even by laser link.

Gaia wasn’t answering.

Lynn huddled against the sink, clenched like a fist, making herself smaller and smaller, pressing her face between her knees. She had overcome her paralysis at the last moment and pulled her head back in a flash – oh, the things you can do, thought little girl lost jubilantly, following the glowing trail of crumbs, amazed at her own miraculous reflexes, while the grown-up woman, the body she lived in, cramped up with tension and her lungs began to ache from holding her breath.

Another chasm yawned in her thoughts. That was Carl Hanna, the guy who would rather have been a pop star. Hanna, maybe a little stand-offish, but pleasant enough for all that, popular with all, the man she’d chatted to one late evening in Gaia, the man whose muscular body she’d imagined – just for a moment – on hers, his strong hands passing skilfully across her, if only she could work up the nerve to drag him off to her suite. That hideous suite, oh hell, where the mirror held a hysteric, a notorious madwoman who gulped down green tablets, that was why she didn’t like to spend time in that suite. Hanna had been cool and collected, and she had reined herself in, and after that there were a few chapters missing in the chronology, things were mixed up. Somebody had said that Hanna was a bad guy, that he wanted to blow up her hotel. Just a few words had turned her world topsy-turvy, and now the same nice guy she’d been flirting with in the Mama Quilla Club had shot poor Tommy Wachowski, and all of a sudden she felt a horror of his muscular body and his skilled hands. Fear bathed her brain in ice-water, so that for a moment she could think clearly again, at least enough to know that she mustn’t move a muscle, mustn’t surrender to the urge to whimper helplessly and whistle the songs of a little girl lost, because if she did, the man who’d been calling himself Carl Hanna would kill her too.

She held her breath and listened, heard him curse, heard every word he spoke, heard his secrets.

Hanna

Change of plan. Dana was no longer a factor. Whatever had happened to her, he had to go on without her.

Those were the rules.

Hanna swung the dead man over his shoulders like a sack of Christmas toys and went back down to the Great Hall, dragged him out into the airlock and watched his face distend in the vacuum. Then he pulled Wachowski into the cave beyond and didn’t spare him another thought. He ran to the cleft, squirmed in, got down on his hands and knees and slithered along like a snake until the passage opened out again and the familiar pile of rubble appeared in the torchlight. He shovelled the stones aside with both hands, opened up the control panel on the mini-nuke, lifted the cover—

And froze.

The detonator had been programmed.

For a moment, there was a vacuum in his mind. He refused to believe what he saw, but there was no doubt, somebody had activated the bomb. And that somebody could only be—

Dana Lawrence.

She was here! No, she was gone. As good as gone. If Dana Lawrence didn’t want to risk being vaporised on the slopes of Peary Crater, she had to be leaving the base on board the Charon, probably at this very moment. Which meant—

He scrambled hastily backwards out of the tunnel, stood up too soon, bashed his helmet on the roof, found his way out, and then ran along to the rift, following the bobbing light from his headlamp. He leapt down to the canyon floor, stumbled along the grooved path, climbed the cliff wall by the first bridge and heaved himself over the edge. He loped along the road in long strides, past the residential towers, hurrying over the dusty regolith.

Igloo 2

Minnie DeLucas glided her fingers over the touchscreen and completed a set of four bases.

She had always argued that it would be possible to raise moon calves in the catacombs of Peary Base. Chickens could barely survive in the extremes of zero-g, but they did well enough in one-sixth of Earth gravity, laying eggs that dropped neatly to the floor of their hutches. They also made a pretty good lunar chicken burger. So why shouldn’t calves and lambs thrive at the Pole? Maybe even pigs, although the whole problem with the smell meant opening up some of the more distant caves. As a scientist, DeLucas was used to tackling problems from the practical and the theoretical side, and since there was no livestock to be had, she was busy experimenting with the genomes. Watching other people sleep wasn’t exactly a challenge. As long as none of them fell out of bed, she could work undisturbed. Right now she had loaded data from some experiments with Galloway cattle embryos to the sickbay computer, and was so busy with the results that at first she didn’t realise someone was talking to her.

‘Peary, please come in. Io to Peary. This is Kyra Gore. Wachowski, why aren’t you picking up?’

DeLucas looked at the clock: ten to five. Io was back within radio range. They’d got back surprisingly quickly, but why were they calling her?

‘Minnie here,’ she said.

‘Hey, what’s up?’ Gore asked urgently. ‘Where’s Tommy kicking his heels?’

‘No idea. Perhaps he’s gone to the little boys’ room.’

‘Tommy wouldn’t go pee without taking his radio with him.’

‘He’s not been by to talk to me. Where are—’

‘We’ll be with you in five minutes! Listen, Minnie, you’ve got to get the people out of there! Get out of the base! Bring them all to the landing field.’

‘What? Why?’

‘The bomb’s in the base.’

‘In the base?’

‘It’s been hidden somewhere under our noses! The guy who’s going to prime it is on his way to you. Get everybody into their spacesuits and bring them outside. And go look for Tommy.’

The Landing Field

Dana had switched her transceiver to pick up all frequencies, so that she heard Io’s call as she went through the gate to the spaceport.

She stopped dead. What the hell were they doing back here already? At the very most, she’d have expected Tommy Wachowski to radio her to ask what she was up to, since she’d made no effort to stay out of sight as she dashed to the landing field, but now Io was coming in to land. And to make it even worse:

They knew about the bomb!

Now she really did have just a matter of minutes.

Dana began to run.

DeLucas

Fighting to remain calm, Minnie ran next door and shook the German women awake, then the Indian couple. Which wasn’t so easy, as she found out. Certainly Mukesh Nair started up from his sleep with one last trumpeting blast of snores, and Karla Kramp sat up straight, blinking curiously, but Eva Borelius and Sushma Nair both lay there as though in an enchanted slumber.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Kramp.

‘You’ll have to get dressed,’ DeLucas said, her eyes skittering about. ‘Everyone into their spacesuits. We’re leaving the base.’

‘Aha,’ said Kramp. ‘And why are we doing that?’

‘It’s a – precaution.’

‘Against?’

‘Sushma?’ Mukesh Nair was struggling visibly against the sedatives, and it looked as if he was losing. ‘Sushma, my love! Get up.’

‘I just want to know what’s going on,’ Kramp said, but she was obediently gathering her belongings as she spoke.

‘So do I,’ DeLucas said as she hurried out. ‘You just make sure that everyone here is ready to leave in five minutes.’

Instead of taking the lift, she ran up the stairs to the top floor, looked in the lounge, then sprang back down the steps and checked the fitness studio. Hadn’t Dana said that she would be running? And where was Tommy lurking? Where was Lynn Orley? Her uneventful vigil had suddenly turned into herding cats. DeLucas dashed back up to the top floor, hurried along the passageway to Igloo 1, and went into the control room. It was lit only by the dim glow of computer screens, and seemed deserted.

‘Tommy?’ she called.

There was nobody here. The only noise in the room was the machines chattering away to one another, a faint humming of transistors and ventilation, whirring, clicking, beeping. She walked quickly around the room, looking at every screen in the hope that she might spot Wachowski, but he was nowhere to be seen. As she left she heard a new sound, a noise she couldn’t quite recognise, a soft, high squeak. She paused on the threshold, hesitant, filled with dread, then turned around.

What was that?

Now she couldn’t hear it.

Just as she was about to turn away again, she heard it once more. Not a squeak, more like a whimper. It was coming from somewhere towards the far end of the room, and it was creepy. Her heart beat faster as she went back into the control room and circled the lift-shaft. Halfway round, it was closer, much closer, a thin, unhappy sound coming from the small recessed space of the coffee nook.

DeLucas drew a deep breath and looked inside.

Lynn Orley was squatting in front of the sink, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, making those forlorn sounds.

DeLucas squatted level with her.

‘Miss Orley.’

No reaction. The woman simply looked straight through her as though she wasn’t there. DeLucas hesitated, put out her hand and touched her shoulder gently.

She might just as well have pulled the ring on a hand grenade.

The Landing Field

Dana cursed. Why did the landing module have to be right at the other end of the spaceport? Every second that passed lessened her chances of being able to clear out of here.

She had to think of some alternatives.

What if she—

‘Wait.’

Someone grabbed her upper arm.

Dana leapt to one side, turning. She saw a tall, well-built astronaut, barely recognisable behind his mirrored faceplate, but his height and voice left her in no doubt. She immediately switched to a secure channel.

‘Where were you?’ she hissed.

‘You set the timer,’ Hanna stated, without answering her question. ‘Did you want to leave without me?’

‘You weren’t there.’

‘Now I’m here. Come along.’

He started moving. Dana followed, just as the bulky shape of the Io came into sight on the other side of the blast walls. The next moment the shuttle was hanging over the landing field, dropping, its engines pumping, blocking their way.

Hanna stopped dead, reached for his thigh, drew his gun.

‘Forget it,’ Dana whispered.

Io settled down, bouncing slightly, and the lift-shaft extended from its belly. There were two of them, facing Leland Palmer’s troupe of five astronauts in peak physical condition and with excellent reflexes, admittedly unarmed but fast and with close-combat training. It might just be possible to take them down in a skirmish, but whatever happened, Dana’s cover would be blown, and she couldn’t allow that at any cost.

That made up her mind.

She switched back to the general-broadcast channel, and unclipped the little pickaxe from its place on her suit. Everyone had one for emergencies. Hanna had spread his legs, taking up position, aiming. The airlock cabin travelled down the shaft to the landing pad. The doors opened. Astronauts emerged. She saw the pistol muzzle track upwards, and she lifted the pick-axe over her head—

And brought it smashing down.

The point of the pick stabbed through the tough material of the suit and into the back of Hanna’s hand, deep in between the bones and sinews. The Canadian groaned in pain. He spun about and struck out at Dana, knocking her off her feet.

‘Help!’ she yelled. ‘Help!’

There was a hubbub of voices. Incomprehensibly, Hanna was still holding his gun, the fingers of his left hand clenched over the hole in his spacesuit, and was aiming at Dana. She rolled, kicked out at his knee and made him stagger. The next moment, she had sprung to her feet and swung the pick again. This time the needle-sharp end hit Hanna’s faceplate and made a tiny hole in the armoured glass. He leapt backwards and kicked her in the belly. The pick-axe was torn from her grasp and stayed where it was, lodged in his visor. She flew away and landed a few metres off, scrambling to her feet. Part of her chestplate splintered off, and she knew he had shot at her. The crew of Io were running towards them across the landing field in huge lunar leaps.

She had to finish this. Whatever happened, the astronauts mustn’t take Hanna alive. She hurled herself at him with a great jump, knocked him to the ground and grabbed hold of the pick-handle that jutted from his faceplate.

For a ghastly moment she thought that she could see his eyes, despite the mirrored glass.

‘Dana,’ he whispered.

She wrenched at the pick and tore it free. Shards broke loose from the visor. Hanna dropped his gun and lifted both hands, but the air left his suit far faster than he could put his hands to his helmet. He lay there with his arms raised as though embracing a woman she could not see. Dana felt for his gun and slipped it into a pocket on her thigh – nobody could have seen her do it – then toppled ostentatiously to one side and called for help.

People hurried towards her. They helped her up. Gabbled at her.

‘Hanna,’ she gasped. ‘It’s Hanna. He – I think he was planning to escape with the Charon.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Palmer asked urgently. ‘Did he say anything about the bomb?’

‘He—’ Whatever you do, don’t seem too unruffled, Dana! Best to make a drama of the situation, so she staggered exaggeratedly, letting the others catch her. ‘I was outside. I saw him running from the base towards the spaceport. First I thought it was Wachowski, but from his size it could – it could only be Hanna—’ She shook off the hands supporting her, took several deep breaths. ‘Then I ran after him, called him on the radio. He ran out onto the landing field—’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Yes, when – when I caught up with him. I was trying to stop him, and he shouted that this whole place was about to blow up, and – that’s when he attacked me. He just jumped at me, he was going to kill me, what could I have done?’

‘Shit!’ Palmer cursed.

‘I had to defend myself,’ Dana wailed, putting a note of hysteria into her voice. Kyra Gore took her by the shoulders.

‘You did good, Miss Lawrence, what you did was incredibly brave.’

‘Yes, it was,’ Palmer said, pacing back and forth for a moment, then he stopped dead and clenched his fists. ‘Crap! Damn the guy! He’s dead now, the bastard. What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’

Igloo 1

DeLucas felt carefully at her face. Glistening crimson liquid slicked her fingertips. Blood. Her blood.

The woman was mad!

Lynn Orley had unfolded like a flick-knife and launched herself at her, swiping her fingernails across DeLucas’ face and slicing her cheek open, then tried to run out of the control room. She had chased after the fleeing woman, grabbed hold of her and shoved her up against the lift-shaft.

‘Miss Orley, stop it! It’s me. Minnie!’

Then all of a sudden shouts for help were coming over the loudspeakers, snatches of words, Dana Lawrence, Palmer’s voice.

Lynn tore free, swung an arm and hit DeLucas on the nose so hard that for a moment all she saw was a red haze. When she could see clearly again, Lynn was just leaving the control room. Her head pounding, DeLucas ran after her, caught hold again and clutched her tight, doing what she could to dodge the rain of blows from her fists. Lynn stumbled against Wachowski’s empty chair, looked at the lift-shaft and started backwards, her eyes wide.

‘Everything’s okay,’ DeLucas said, coughing. ‘Everything’s okay.’

Lynn’s lips opened. Her eyes darted from her to the lift-shaft, and back again.

‘Can you understand me? Miss Orley? We have to get out of here.’

Cautiously, she stretched out her right hand.

Lynn scurried backwards.

‘You have to come with me,’ DeLucas said firmly, even as she felt a thick trickle of something warm running down her upper lip. She put her tongue out, automatically, and licked at it. ‘Come next door. Put on your spacesuit.’

All at once, there was sanity and comprehension in Lynn’s eyes. She moved her lips again and put out a trembling finger.

‘That’s where he came from,’ she rasped.

DeLucas followed her gesture. The woman was obviously acutely frightened of the lift-shaft, or more exactly of someone who had come out of it.

‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Wachowski?’

Lynn shook her head. DeLucas felt a cold fear grip her.

‘Who, Lynn? Who came out?’

‘He just shot him,’ Lynn whispered. ‘Just like that. He could have shot me too.’ She began to hum a tune.

‘Who, Lynn? Who shot who?’

‘Minnie? Tommy!’ Palmer’s voice from the loudspeakers. ‘Please come in, we have a problem.’

Lynn stopped humming and stared at DeLucas.

‘What do you want from me anyway, you silly cow?’ she snapped.

The Landing Field

‘Leland, I’m having trouble with Lynn Orley.’

‘Oh great, that too! What about the rest of them?’

‘They must be ready by now.’

‘Then get them out of there, Minnie!’ Palmer paced up and down impatiently, with Hanna’s corpse at his feet. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Something seems to have happened to Tommy,’ DeLucas said. ‘Lynn claims that somebody appeared in the control room and shot some other person, she’s scared out of her wits and—’

‘Hanna,’ Palmer snarled.

‘I think she’s been trying to tell me that Tommy’s been shot. But he’s not here, nor is anybody else.’

‘Crap,’ murmured Gore.

‘We have to make a decision,’ Palmer said. ‘Dana’s managed to stop Hanna from escaping. She had to kill him to do it, but before that he said—’

‘I caught what he said,’ DeLucas interrupted. ‘That this place is about to blow.’

‘So stop jabbering,’ Dana spat at her. ‘Will you kindly ensure that my guests are evacuated!’

‘I can’t be everywhere at once,’ DeLucas snapped back. ‘Tell her—’

‘Listen, Minnie, I’m not going to give up the base as easily as that, but she’s right, you have to get those people out of there.’

Palmer stopped dead and gazed upwards at the shimmering oceans of stars, fading out over to the east where the sun glowed low on the horizon. He simply couldn’t imagine that all this might end.

‘Could be we still have time,’ he said. ‘Hanna must have given himself long enough to get away.’

‘He was in a hell of a hurry,’ Dana remarked.

‘Whatever. We’ll search the area while Kyra flies the guests to a safe distance on the Io.’

‘And where should I fly them to?’ Gore asked.

‘Take them to meet Callisto. Tell her to turn round right away. You should be in radio contact as soon as you’re up there. Then go back to the Chinese base.’

‘That’s madness,’ Dana said. ‘Forget it. How do you expect to find a bomb on a huge installation like this?’

‘We’ll look for it.’

‘Sheer idiocy! All you’re doing is putting your people in danger.’

‘You’ll be flying with the Io anyway.’ Palmer paid her no further attention, and turned to his crew. ‘Does anybody else want to fly with them? You have a free choice – we’re not the army here. I’m going to look for the thing. The bastard must have given himself at least half an hour!’

Dana spread her arms to concede defeat.

‘Leland?’ Minnie DeLucas. ‘If what Lynn was telling me is true, maybe Hanna came up from underground. From the Great Hall.’

‘Good.’ Palmer nodded grimly. ‘Let’s start there.’

London, Great Britain

Had his suspicion been right, or did MoonLight really just mean ‘MoonLight’? There was uproar and disagreement in the Big O. The Moon was still besieged by the bot army, with no end in sight. No contact with Peary Base or Gaia. Merrick was hurrying, burrowing, scurrying from satellites to ground stations, but getting nowhere.

Meanwhile the MI6 delegation were in a feeding frenzy over the theory that China might be behind the attack. It was a beautiful theory, it fit everything so neatly, temptingly. Gaia, well indeed, why would China have Gaia in their sights, but Peary Base – if that were destroyed, a substantial part of America’s lunar infrastructure would be knocked out. Not an attack on Orley, but on Washington’s supremacy. Knock the enemy off his feet. Weaken the American helium-3 industry. It had to be China! Beijing, or Zheng, or both of them.

The CIA had barely joined the list of potential suspects than it was off again.

‘Whatever the truth of it,’ Shaw said, ‘we’ve reached a whole new level of helplessness.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Yoyo.

Security departments at Orley subsidiaries worldwide were reporting back to the London situation room, but there were no concrete leads on further attacks. Norrington insisted that the corporation had to take every conceivable precaution. He hadn’t come up with any more information on Thorn. A photograph of Kenny Xin had been distributed which his own mother wouldn’t have recognised. A shuttle had set out from the OSS to the Moon, but it would take more than two days to reach Peary Base.

‘Norrington looks nervous to me,’ Jericho said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes, he’s fighting on too many fronts, opening up one campaign after another.’ Yoyo got to her feet. ‘If he carries on like this, he’ll bring the whole operation to a grinding halt.’

Just a few minutes ago, another crisis meeting with MI5 had broken up, since the agencies now reckoned that domestic security was threatened. There wasn’t even a pause to draw breath. One discussion led straight into the next. The air twanged with the buzz of ideas, urgent purpose and determination. But there was an undertone too, a feeling that all this to-do was deluded, based on the belief that being there and acting busy would lead to answers.

‘So why’s he doing that?’ Jericho mused, following Yoyo outside. ‘Is he so worried?’

‘You don’t even believe that yourself. Norrington’s not an idiot.’

‘Of course I don’t believe it. He wants to put a spanner in the works.’ Jericho looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to them. Norrington was making phone calls in his room, and Shaw was doing the same in hers. ‘I just haven’t the first idea who we should trust to talk to about him.’

‘You mean that they could all be in it together?’

‘How would we know?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo looked across at Shaw’s open office door, dubious. ‘She doesn’t exactly look like a mole.’

‘Nobody looks like a mole, apart from moles.’

‘Also true.’ She fell silent for a while. ‘Good. Let’s break in.’

‘Break in? Where?’

‘The central computer. The drives we aren’t authorised for. Norrington’s patch.’

Jericho stared at her. Somebody scurried past them, talking urgently into a phone. Yoyo waited until he was out of earshot, and dropped her voice in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it? If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you know yourself but do not know your enemy, then for every victory you gain you will suffer a defeat.’

‘Is that yours?’

‘Sun Tzu, Art of War. Written two and a half thousand years ago, and every word is as true as the day it was written. You want to know who’s pulling the strings? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, then. Your charming friend Diane will fish for Norrington’s password, and we’ll have a look around his parlour.’

‘You’re pulling my leg! How is she going to do that?’

‘Why are you asking me?’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows, all innocence. ‘I thought you were the cyber-detective.’

‘And you’re the cyber-dissident.’

‘True,’ she said, unruffled. ‘I’m better than you.’

‘How’s that?’ he asked, stung.

‘Aren’t I? Stop moaning, then, and give me some ideas.’

Jericho glanced around. There was still no one paying them any attention. He might just as well have gone off to sleep somewhere, popping up every couple of hours with more ominous news to set them all scurrying.

‘Right then,’ he hissed. ‘We only have one chance, if that.’

‘We’ll do it, whatever it is.’

Twelve minutes later Norrington left his glassed-in cubicle and joined one of the working groups, which was busy making telescopic observations of the Moon. He talked to them about this and that, and then went to fetch a coffee. Then he went to see Shaw in her office, briefly, and went back to work at his own desk.

Access denied, said the computer.

Baffled, he clicked on the file again, with the same result. It was only then that he realised he wasn’t logged on.

But he hadn’t logged out when he left the room.

Or had he?

He glanced around the control room. Everybody was looking busy, except for the Chinese girl, who was standing not far from one of the workstations as though she didn’t know where to go.

Norrington felt a gnawing doubt. Uneasy, he restarted the system to log himself in.

Yoyo watched him out of the corner of her eye. Nobody had noticed her slip into his office and log him out – it had only taken a few seconds. She pretended to be absorbed by one of the wall monitors, and pressed a button on her phone to send a signal up to the roof.

Jericho gave Diane the command to start recording.

Data coursed through the processors in the Big O. Nobody in the whole building had their own computer in the sense of an autonomous unit. All employees had a standardised hardware kit, a portable version of the boxy lavobots that Tu Technologies used. Everybody could access the Big O central computer from any jack or port, simply by logging in with name, eight-character password and a thumbprint. But not everybody had access to all the drives. Even the powerful sysadmins who managed the superbrain and issued passwords couldn’t access the whole machine. The ebb and flow of data in the Big O was like the roar and hum of traffic in a big city, and of course, the roar was loudest during normal working hours.

If you knew how, you could listen to the roar. Not by listening to every part of it at once. The information that coursed through the network was encoded of course, in bits and bytes. But if you knew the precise moment when a piece of information would be sent from A to B, you could record that transmission and then set to work painstakingly filtering out individual data packets, then you could apply powerful decoder programs to unlock the words and images inside. At the moment the system was fairly quiet, so that it was easy enough to isolate Norrington’s data packet right at the moment when he logged on. And Diane began her calculations.

Six minutes later, she had the eight-character password. It took her another three minutes to crack the software that had carried Norrington’s thumbscan to the central processors, and now she had his print as well.

Jericho stared at the prize. Now there was only one more hurdle to clear. Once logged on, nobody could log in again using the same personal data without raising a flag – no more than you could ring your own front doorbell while you were already inside in the living room.

They had to lock Norrington out again.

The chance came a little while later. Norrington was called to a pow-wow, but he spent a long time lingering near the workstations which gave him a view of his office. Edda Hoff chivvied him along. He hemmed and hawed, but finally gave up his watchpost and went into the room, not without casting one last, mistrustful look behind himself.

Jericho smiled at him.

He and Yoyo had switched places. One of the basic rules of surveillance was not to let the target see the same face the whole time. Now she was upstairs, waiting for his signal. The door to the conference room clicked shut. Unhurriedly, Jericho was on his way across to Norrington’s office when the conference-room door opened again, and Shaw emerged.

‘Owen,’ she called.

He stopped. He was ten, perhaps twelve steps from Norrington’s office. He could be going anywhere.

‘I think perhaps you should join the discussion. We’ve sifted some more data from Vogelaar’s dossier, material which has to do with your friend Xin, and the Zheng Group.’ She glanced about. ‘By the way, where are your colleagues?’

Jericho went over to join her.

‘Yoyo’s on Vic Thorn’s trail.’

Her habitual scowl softened to a smile. ‘Could be that you’ll be quicker about it than MI6 with your enquiries. And Tu Tian?’

‘We’ve given him the day off. He has a business to run.’

‘Splendid. God forbid that the Chinese economy should falter. The American crash was quite enough. Are you coming?’

‘Right away. Give me a minute.’

Shaw went back inside without quite closing the door. Jericho strolled casually back to Norrington’s office. Somebody at one of the workstations looked up at him, then back at the screen. Without stopping, Jericho stepped into the little room, logged Norrington out and then walked purposefully across to the other side, and to the conference rooms. Just before he joined the others, he sent Yoyo the agreed signal.

Straight away, she typed Norrington’s name. The system asked for authorisations. She entered the eight-character password, squirted Norrington’s thumbprint and waited.

The screen filled with icons.

‘There you go,’ Yoyo whispered, and told Diane to download Norrington’s personal data.

‘As you wish, Yoyo.’

Yoyo? How nice. Owen must have stored her voiceprint. She watched eagerly as Diane’s hard drive gulped down one data packet after another, holding her breath for the Download complete message.

Jericho was just as impatient, waiting for the signal that would tell him that the transfer had worked and that the false Norrington was now logged out. Once that happened, there was one more thing for him to do: leave the conference, go across to the office and log the deputy head of security back in, so that Norrington would not notice the theft later.

At that moment, Norrington stood up.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, smiled at the assembled talking heads, and left.

Jericho stared at his empty chair. Yoyo, he thought, what’s going on? Why’s it taking so long?

Should he leave too, and catch up with Norrington? Stop him from going into his office? What would that look like? Norrington was already on edge at the idea that the central computer had simply shut him out, and if Jericho took any action, he would certainly suspect trickery. Ill at ease, he resisted the urge. He sat there hoping for the all-important signal, and tried to look interested.

Ever since he could remember, Norrington had suffered gut-ache and stomach cramps whenever he was scared. He made for the toilet, sank down, grunting, and then left with a lighter step. He was at the door of the conference room, holding the handle in his hand, when all of a sudden he had the feeling that someone was staring at the back of his head. Not someone, something, some grinning, goggle-eyed bogeyman. He stopped dead, and whipped round towards his office.

Nobody there.

For a second he hesitated, but the whatever-it-was was still staring at him. Slowly he crossed the space, walked into his office and around his desk. Everything seemed to be in order. He tapped the touchscreen and tried to open one of his files.

Access denied.

Norrington stumbled backwards, looked around in a panic. What was happening here? A system error? Not on your life! He felt a trickle of ice creep up his spine as he remembered how Jericho had niggled at the matter of Vic Thorn, and what a stupid mistake he’d made in replying. Why hadn’t he just admitted that they’d been friends, good friends at that? What the hell would that prove, that he’d known Thorn, even if the guy turned out to be a terrorist a thousand times over?

He opened a login window and typed in his name.

The system told him that he was already logged in.

Download complete.

‘At last,’ Yoyo said, logged Norrington out and sent the message to Jericho’s phone.

Norrington stared at his screen.

Somebody was helping themselves to his data.

His fingers trembling, he tried again. This time the system accepted his codes and let him in, but he knew all the same that they had been through his files. They had got hold of his access data and they’d been spying on him.

They were onto him.

Norrington steepled his index fingers, and put them to his lips. He was fairly sure that he knew who ‘they’ were, but what could he do to stop them? Demand that Jericho’s computer be searched? Then the detective would cast his loyalty in doubt. Norrington would have to agree to a search of his own data if he didn’t want to arouse suspicion, and that would be the beginning of the end. Once they started to piece together his deleted emails—

One moment though. Jericho was sitting in the conference room. It might have been Jericho who had logged him out, but he could hardly have anything to do with what had just happened. One of the others, either Tu Tian or Chen Yuyun, was sitting in front of Jericho’s computer right now – what kind of stupid name had he given it? Diane? It was probably the girl. Hadn’t she been roaming through the control room just a while back, looking as though she had nothing better to do?

Yoyo. He had to get rid of her.

‘Andrew?’

He jumped. Edda Hoff. Pale and expressionless under her lacquered black pageboy cut. Expressionless? Really? Or wasn’t there rather a gleam in her eye, the sly look of someone watching a trap to see who will walk into it?

‘Jennifer rather urgently needs you to come back for the rest of the meeting.’ She drew her eyebrows together, infinitesimally. ‘Is everything all right? Are you not feeling well?’

‘The tummy.’ Norrington got to his feet. ‘I’m fine.’

The way he came back to the conference table set alarm bells ringing for Jericho. The man’s face was a jaundiced yellow colour, and his forehead was creased and lined with worry. There was no mistaking that Norrington knew exactly what was going on, but instead of pointing the finger at him and demanding an explanation, he sat down to suffer in silence. If any further proof of his perfidy were needed, Norrington had just supplied it.

‘Possibly I should recap on the—’ he began, when all of a sudden more faces appeared on the video wall, and the Xin working group broke in to have their say.

‘Miss Shaw, Andrew, Tom—’ One of the new arrivals held up a thin file. ‘You’ll want to hear this.’

‘What have you got?’ Shaw asked.

‘It’s about Julian Orley’s good friend Carl Hanna. He’s a Canadian investor, and he’s worth fifteen billion, isn’t that right?’

‘That was his story,’ Norrington said, nodding.

‘And you checked him out.’

‘You know that I did.’

‘Well, everybody makes mistakes. We asked around a little. In the end the CIA dug up his family tree.’

Expectant silence.

‘Hey.’ The man smiled at each of them in turn. ‘Anybody want to get to know the guy a little better? After all, this is somebody you people decided you could trust to go on a trip with Julian Orley.’

‘This is quite a build-up.’ Shaw gave them a razor-thin smile. ‘Is there going to be another advertisement break, or will you get to the point?’

The agent put the file down in front of him.

‘From now on, you can call him Neil Gabriel. He’s American, born in 1981 in Baltimore, Maryland. High school and US Navy, then after that he was with the police as an undercover detective. The CIA noticed him, recruited him and sent him off to New Delhi for an operation. He did such good work there that they let him stay several years. He became something of an expert on the region, but also a bit of a lone wolf. So he was telling the truth about India, although that’s about the only truth he did tell. In 2016 he left the good guys and signed up with African Protection Services.’

‘Hanna was with APS?’ Jericho blurted out.

The man leafed through his pages. ‘Vogelaar mentions pretty nearly everybody in his dossier who was connected with the Mayé coup in 2017. There’s a Neil Gabriel in that list, although he was only with the outfit for a little while and then went independent. It looks as though he did jobs for the Zhong Chan Er Bu as well, at least Vogelaar says that Xin liked his work. So now that we’ve talked to our American friends, we know who Neil Gabriel is. Clearly APS must have split at the time. One part stuck with Vogelaar, while the others became Kenny Xin’s creatures.’

Jericho listened, fascinated, and kept an eye on Norrington at the same time. The security number two was visibly distressed by the barrage of facts.

‘Right now we’re busy trying to unravel Hanna’s fake CV, pardon me, I mean Gabriel’s. We hope to find out who set him up with shares in Lightyears and Quan-time. People with serious money. This won’t be anywhere near as easy as it was to crack who he really is.’

‘You know one of them already,’ Jericho said. ‘Xin.’

The agent turned towards him. ‘We don’t hold out much hope of getting a glimpse of him. He seems to just melt away into thin air whenever you think you have him in your sights.’

‘Was it easy to crack Hanna’s identity?’ Shaw asked.

‘Well, easy would be overstating the case. We have good contacts with our friends across the pond, and we couldn’t have done it without them. But the bottom line is’ – he paused, and looked at Norrington – ‘a quiet chat with the Central Intelligence Agency would have done the trick back at the start.’

Norrington leaned forward.

‘Do you really think we didn’t talk to them?’

‘I have absolutely no wish to question your competence,’ the agent said, cheerily. ‘I leave that to others.’

Jericho’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen, excused himself and went outside, shutting the door behind him.

‘Norrington knows,’ he said quietly.

‘Crap.’ Yoyo was silent for a moment. ‘I thought—’

‘Didn’t work out as we expected. Were you able to download everything, at least?’

‘I’ve been hard at work already! The search program can’t find anything about Thorn in Norrington’s data, but there’s some stuff about Hanna. He was a long way from being the only one who could have taken Palstein’s place. There was a regular queue of candidates: Orley’s business partners, it looks like, or people he wanted to do business with. Multi-billionaires, the lot of them, but Norrington always managed to find something to cavil at. Heart condition, high blood pressure, this one’s been in therapy, that one might be flirting with the competition, the other’s got close links with the Chinese government and he doesn’t like the look of it, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t help but think that he was being paid money to find reasons to rule them all out of going along.’

‘Maybe he was paid.’

‘And after all that, Hanna’s just smiles and sunshine. The perfect travelling companion for Julian Orley.’

‘And nobody double-checked?’

‘Norrington’s not just a line manager, Owen. He’s deputy head of security. If somebody like him recommends Hanna, then Hanna flies. Orley must have trusted him – after all he pays him a lot of money for his expertise.’

‘All right, I’ll talk to Shaw. Enough hide-and-seek.’

She hesitated. ‘Are you sure that you can trust her?’

‘Sure enough to take the risk. If the whole thing turns out to be flim-flam, she’ll throw us out on our ear, but we’ll chance it.’

‘Good. I’ll spend some more time going through Norrington’s sock drawers.’

The door to the conference room opened. Norrington hurried over to his office. Shaw, Merrick and the others got ready to go their separate ways.

‘Jennifer.’ Jericho moved to intercept her. ‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’

She looked at him, her face expressionless.

Peary Base, North Pole, The Moon

In the end DeLucas had given up caring and had marched Lynn up to the top floor by main force, then along to Igloo 2, where she threw her a spacesuit, backpack and helmet, and threatened to beat her up if she didn’t pull herself together. She’d run out of patience, whether or not this was Julian Orley’s beloved daughter. The woman was clearly two sandwiches short of a picnic. Sometimes she seemed to be perfectly lucid, then at the next moment DeLucas wouldn’t have been surprised to see her crawling around on all fours, or stepping gaily into the airlock without putting her helmet on. She turfed the Ögis out of bed, who were mercifully cooperative and quick to understand the situation, but by the time she had got the whole crowd of them into one of the robot buses and over to the landing field, Palmer and his crew had already arrived and begun to search the caves. They turned the laboratories upside down as though carrying out a drugs raid, tore the mattresses from the bunks in all the bedrooms, looked into all the lockers and behind the wall panels, in the aquaria and the vegetable patches. Finally DeLucas, already in her spacesuit, her helmet under her arm, went into the Great Hall to join them. She hadn’t the first idea what a mini-nuke looked like. All she knew was that it was small, and could be anywhere.

Where would she hide something like that? In the jungle of the greenhouses? In among the trout and the salmon?

In the ceiling?

She looked up at the Great Hall’s basalt dome. She felt a feverish desire to get out of there, to go with the guests. What they were doing here was crazy! The fact that Hanna had showed up in the control room didn’t remotely mean that the bomb had to be here in the underground. It could be anywhere in the whole vast complex.

She peered indecisively into the corridors.

What would make sense?

What did people do when nuclear attack threatened? They built bunkers, underground bases for protection. That was because an atom bomb exploding up on the surface would destroy everything for miles around, but there was some chance of survival if you were in a reinforced bunker. Did that mean that the underground would survive at Peary Base?

Hardly.

She looked at her watch. Twenty to five.

Think, Minnie! An atom bomb was an inferno, devouring everything in its path, but even a doomsday device could be deployed more or less optimally. Towns and cities were built on the surface, never mind all the tunnels, cellars and sewers below ground. If you wanted to destroy New York with an atom bomb, your best bet was to drop it from above, but life on the Moon demanded a mole’s-eye perspective once you’d lived there for a few months. If you wanted to destroy the base, really destroy it, it had to be done from inside. The bomb would have to tear apart the bowels of the plateau, and only then blaze up over the crater.

It had to be down in the catacombs. Between the aquaria, the greenhouses, the residential quarters and the laboratories.

She glanced across at the airlock.

Hmm. She didn’t need to search beyond the airlock. There was nothing there.

Wrong! That was where the unused part of the labyrinth began, and some of the passages led into the canyon.

How had Hanna even managed to get into the igloo? Through the surface-level airlocks? It was possible. But if he had, wouldn’t Wachowski have seen him on the screens? Well, maybe he had. Maybe Hanna had just strolled in, all above board and official, but if so, why hadn’t he gone from the ground floor to the control room on foot? It was only a couple of metres. Why had he taken the lift?

Because he had come from underground.

‘Nothing here,’ said a tense voice over her helmet link.

‘Here neither,’ Palmer answered.

And how had he got into the catacombs unnoticed?

She walked towards the airlock. Hardly anybody ever went into the caves beyond. From here, the labyrinth burrowed endlessly into the massif and the crater wall beyond. It would have taken a whole army of astronauts weeks or months to search the labyrinth’s full extent, but DeLucas knew that the only logical place to look for the bomb was nearby, somewhere central, below the habs, and that meant the Great Hall and its immediate surroundings.

She went into the airlock, put on her helmet and pushed the button that would pump the air out. When the airlock door on the further side opened, she switched on her helmet lamp and stepped out into the forgotten corridor beyond.

Almost immediately, she stumbled across Tommy Wachowski’s corpse.

‘Tommy,’ she gasped. ‘Oh my God!’

Her knees trembling, she squatted down and played the cone of light over the body. His limbs were twisted as he lay there, his face deformed.

‘Leland!’ she called out. ‘Leland, Tommy’s here, and—’

Then she realised that the interior radio network didn’t work this side of the bulkheads. She was in no man’s land, cut off from the world.

She felt sick.

Gasping, she fell to all fours. Cold sweat broke out all over her body. It was only by a mighty effort of will that she succeeded in not throwing up inside her helmet. She crawled away from the dead man on all fours like an animal, into the corridor, where she closed her eyes and quickly took in a few deep breaths. Once she dared open her eyes again, she saw a shadow in the light from her helmet. It was just a few paces away.

For a second, her heart skipped a beat.

Then she realised that there was nobody standing there, that this was just a narrow gap in the cave wall. She squinted, her eyes still watering from retching, then pulled herself together and stamped on her fear. She climbed to her feet like a puppet, walked across to the gap and looked inside. She saw that it was more like a crack than a corridor. Not very inviting. Nowhere you would choose to go of your own accord.

And that, she thought, is exactly why you’ll go in.

She drew in her shoulders and pushed her way in until the roof dipped sharply down and she had to crawl. Her breath caught and choked in her throat as the fear fought back. Then there wasn’t even room to crawl. She had to lie flat on her belly, feeling her heart hammering against the rock below her like a jackhammer. She considered turning back. This was going nowhere. Dead end. She would go one more metre. Gasping, she pushed herself on, following the scurrying disc of light, imagining what it would be like to be buried alive here, and then all of a sudden the passage opened wide and her fingers were scrabbling in a heap of rubble.

That was it. End of the line.

Or was it? She hesitated. The rubble looked odd. Not a natural pile. DeLucas stooped, and the light scurried over the stones and reflected off something buried in among them. She began to clear the rocks away with one hand, and then saw the surface of something bulky and metallic, smooth, machine-tooled, sleek.

It couldn’t be anything else but—

She shovelled the rubble aside madly, uncovering the thing. It was the size of a briefcase. She tugged it towards herself. There could be no doubt, now she saw the blinking display and the timecode running backwards from—

‘Oh no,’ she whispered.

So little time. So little time.

Frantic, clinging on to the bomb with both hands, she began to wriggle out. She had to get out of here, but the next moment her backpack was wedged against the low roof and she couldn’t move another inch. She was stuck fast.

Waves of panic came crashing together over her head.

London, Great Britain

‘You are crazy,’ said Shaw.

Her workspace was an identical copy of Norrington’s office, modest and functional, the only difference being a few hints that she had a life beyond the Big O. Photographs showed that Shaw had a husband and grown-up children, that little kids somewhere called her granny. Jericho thought of the exile of his own existence, and had a hard time imagining this flinty-featured security chief as someone with wants and needs, hormones, a woman who had whispered and moaned and cried out with pleasure, limbs entangled. Jennifer Shaw was in charge of the safety of the world’s largest technology corporation. He wondered what her pet name was. At home, within her own four walls, between the TV set and the dental floss, was she Bunnikins or Mummy Bear? He glanced outside quickly, but Norrington’s office was out of sight from here.

‘Doesn’t all that give you pause for thought?’ he asked.

‘What makes me pause is the thought that you’ve been abusing my trust,’ said Bunnikins, or Mother Bear, sternly.

‘No, you’re not looking at it right. We’re trying to stop someone from abusing your trust.’ He drew up a chair and sat down. ‘Jennifer, I know we’re on very thin ice here, but Norrington lied about his relationship to Vic Thorn. He obviously knew him better than he’s letting on. Why would he do that if he had nothing to hide? He may have had perfectly understandable reasons to take Hanna under his wing, but given all the resources he has at his disposal, how come he couldn’t identify an ex-CIA man? Before the moon trip! And once he noticed that we’d cracked his pass-codes, well – what would you have done, in his place?’

She looked levelly at him with her grey-blue eyes.

‘I would have nailed you to the wall.’

‘Quite!’ Jericho slapped his hand down on the desk. ‘And what does he do? Comes slinking in, lets the MI6 fellows haul him over the coals and then rushes off again. Now, you told me that it was Edda Hoff who passed on my theory that Thorn had been supposed to arrange the attack, and that she told the security services too. Shouldn’t we suppose that she told Norrington as well?’

‘She’s certain to have done so. Edda is extremely conscientious.’

‘But when I went into his office to talk to him about it, he acted as though it were a complete surprise! Even though, by that point, he must have known we were thinking along those lines. And don’t you get the feeling that all his activity is actually slowing down the Big O’s attempts to find anything out, rather than helping?’

‘I have told him that we’re fighting on too many fronts at once.’ Shaw gave him a level look. ‘And what should I do about that, in your opinion? Relieve him of his duties because of one or two odd bits of behaviour? Have his data searched?’

‘I think you know quite well what you should do.’

Shaw was silent.

Two doors down, Norrington was dialling a number on his phone, his fingers trembling.

He had made mistakes. He’d reacted without stopping to think. The noose was tightening, since they would find proof, and once they decided to put him through the wringer he would lose his nerve, he’d break down, he’d spill the beans. He was an idiot to have got involved in the whole thing to begin with, from the moment they offered him money to suggest Thorn for a second mission. But it had been so much money, so incredibly much, and there was the promise of much more once Operation Mountains of Eternal Light was done with, once the course of history had been changed. He had been a quick learner in the school of corruption, and had risen to be one of Hydra’s chief planners, had fed the many-headed monster with information about the OSS, about Gaia and Peary Base. He had even come up with the shadow network which the conspirators used to communicate their murderous plans. A white-hot inferno, disguised as mere white noise. He had met Hydra’s immortal head, the brains behind the whole scheme, the criminal mastermind whose identity only six other people knew. It had been seven, but one of them had got cold feet. That was when Norrington had learned that if need be Hydra would sooner cut off one of its own heads than let it turn blabbermouth.

He mustn’t end up in Secret Service hands.

Xin picked up.

‘We’ve been found out, Kenny! Just like I told you we would be.’

‘And I told you to keep your nerve.’

‘You go to hell with your know-it-all remarks! MI6 blew Gabriel’s identity. Jericho and the girl hacked into my data. I don’t know when Shaw’s going to shut the trap on me – it could be that I already wouldn’t be allowed out of the building. Get me out of here.’

Xin was silent for a moment.

‘What about Ebola?’ he asked. ‘Do they know about her, too?’

Norrington hesitated. For some reason, he just couldn’t get used to Dana’s code-name.

‘They don’t know anything about her, nor about the rest of it. They just know that the bomb’s at Peary. But of course the next thing they’ll do is make use of all my data, and then they’ll take another look at everybody whose appointment I approved.’

‘Are you sure that Jericho’s been talking to Shaw about you?’

‘No idea,’ he groaned. ‘I hope he hasn’t yet. Under the circumstances, nothing’s certain.’

Xin thought.

‘Good. I’ll be on the flight deck in five minutes. Maybe you should try getting Jericho’s computer out of the building.’

‘Maybe we should try painting the Moon yellow and putting a smiley face on it,’ Norrington snapped. ‘They mustn’t get their hands on me, Kenny, don’t you understand? I have to get out of here! ’

‘Everything’s all right.’ Suddenly Xin’s voice took on that soft, sibilant note. ‘Nobody’s going to get their hands on you, Andrew. I promised to be there, and I keep my promises.’

‘You hurry up, damn you!’

While the street lights of London faded away under a magnificent dawn sky, Yoyo decided to call Jericho again. During the night, she and Diane had become fast friends. She’d never worked with such excellent search programs or selection parameters.

‘I have some news,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

‘In Jennifer’s office. We can speak openly. Wait a moment.’ He listened to a soft voice in the background, then said, ‘Look, the best thing to do is call again, direct to her number, okay?’

‘You can tell her straight away that—’

‘Tell her yourself.’

He hung up. Yoyo squirmed around impatiently on her chair. She was burning to tell him about the dossiers Norrington had put together on the guests and staff at Gaia. Diane had done a lightning search, comparing Norrington’s supposed findings with publicly available biographies on the net and found no significant discrepancies, except perhaps for the fact that Evelyn Chambers was telling some whopping lies about her age. As for the staff at Gaia, two Germans, an Indian and a Japanese, they had been chosen by the director of the hotel, Dana Lawrence, who in turn had got the job on the strength of a report from Norrington, knocking four other highly qualified candidates out of the running. Norrington hadn’t actually turned any of these other four down flat, quite the opposite, it was rather that Lawrence’s track record put all the others in the shade. Lynn Orley had made the final appointment, and she would have had to have been insane to refuse Lawrence the job, given such excellent references. It was only when you looked closer that you realised that Lawrence’s official CV on the net was strangely different. Certain jobs that she had supposedly held made her just the right woman for the job in Gaia, but online they were missing, or didn’t quite match up. It was certainly the career of a dedicated professional, but if you wanted to assume the worst, you could easily say that Norrington had massaged the facts to help Lynn make her decision. Yoyo saw nothing at all wrong in assuming the worst.

Eager to know what the others would make of her findings, she typed in Shaw’s name and was just about to let the computer make the call when she heard a noise.

A lift had stopped outside on the gallery. She heard the doors slide apart.

Yoyo froze. Nobody was supposed to be in the Big O right now except for the security patrols and the tireless crew down in the situation room. She strained her ears, becoming aware of her surroundings for the first time. She was sitting at somebody’s workplace, an entirely interchangeable, uniform cell; employees kept their personal possessions in the mobile units that let them log in anywhere needed, throughout the building. Diane lay to her left, beneath the holographic display, a slim, shimmering machine, while on her right was a wheeled set of drawers, probably containing all the clutter that a computer still couldn’t replace, even in 2025.

She opened the top drawer, peered into it, opened the next one down.

She glanced at the panoramic windows. London’s night was slowly giving way to early morning light, but over in the west it was stubbornly dark. She could see the office interior reflected in outline in the windowpane, the workstations, the door in the wall behind her that led through to the hallway and the gallery.

She could see a silhouette in the hallway.

Yoyo ducked. Whoever it was hesitated. A man, judging by the height. He was just standing there, staring.

He had to take her by surprise. It could be that Shaw still didn’t know about the hacking. It would be one thing to overpower Yoyo and get hold of the computer, but then there would be Jericho to deal with. Perhaps there would be a way to lure him upstairs. Assuming that the two of them hadn’t told Tu Tian what they were up to, it might be enough to get rid of them and then the computer as well, then it would be as if none of this had ever happened, nobody would ever suspect that—

Rubbish! This was wishful thinking from start to finish. How would he explain it once they were both dead? The surveillance system would show everything. Why grab Jericho’s computer, when it didn’t hold anything that wasn’t also stored in the Big O mainframes? Shaw could get at his data any time she liked, which is what she would do if he killed two people up here – not to mention the fact that he’d never manage that, since in stark contrast to people like Xin, Hanna, Lawrence and Gudmundsson, he wasn’t a killer. It wasn’t game over for Hydra yet, but for him it certainly was. Even making a break for it was as good as a confession of guilt, but if he stayed, he might just as well put the cuffs on himself. There wasn’t any point cleaning up his trail now. He had to get out of here, drop out of sight!

He had enough money for a new life, quite a comfortable one at that.

The open-plan office lay in twilight.

How much had she learned? Had Jericho’s computer been able to retrieve his deleted emails and reconstruct them?

Where was the girl?

He was torn between the urge to find out more and the need to get away. He looked across the room, then his feet carried him forward as though of their own accord. He stepped into the office. It looked empty. The overhead lights were dimmed. Two workstations away, monitor screens glowed, and he saw the modest little box that Yoyo had left there, the one they called Diane. He should search the office. The workstations offered various hiding-places. Indecisive, he walked a little way into the room, paced this way and that, looked at the clock. Xin must be here by now, he should get out, but the monitors glowed like the lights of some safe refuge.

He hurried across to the workstation, bent down and had his hands on the little computer when the room burst into life behind him.

Petite though she might have been, Yoyo was also muscular and in good shape, so she had no trouble in picking up a fairly heavy office chair and taking a swing. As Norrington spun round to face her, the back of the chair caught him full-on, slamming into his head and his chest and knocking him backwards onto the desk. He grunted, and scrabbled for a handhold. Yoyo swung at him again, from the side this time, and he fell to the floor. Even as he landed there on his back next to Diane, she flung the chair aside and drew from her belt the scissors she had found in the drawer. She landed hard on his chest with both knees.

There was an audible crack. Norrington made a choking, hacking sound. His eyes bulged. Yoyo clamped the fingers of her left hand around his throat, leaned down low and shoved the point of the scissors so hard against his balls that he could feel it poised there.

‘One false move,’ she hissed, ‘and the Westminster Abbey Boys’ Choir will be glad to make your acquaintance.’

Norrington stared at her. Suddenly, he swung at her. She saw his clenched fist flying at her, ducked aside and drove the scissors deeper into his crotch. He flinched with his whole body and then froze completely, simply staring at her again.

‘What do you want from me, you madwoman?’ he gasped.

‘I want a little talk.’

‘You’re crazy. I came up here to see whether everything’s okay, whether you need anything, and you—’

‘Andrew, hey, Andrew!’ she interrupted. ‘That’s crap. I don’t want to hear any crap.’

‘I just wanted—’

‘You wanted to swipe the computer. I saw that, thanks. I don’t need any more proof, so get talking. Who are you working with, and what do they want? Were we right about Peary? Who’s pulling the strings?’

‘With the best will in the world, I don’t know what you’re—’

‘Andrew, you’re being foolish.’

‘—talking about.’

Dark red swamped her vision, glowing and all-consuming. Utterly forgotten was any chance that the man beneath her might have had nothing to do with the deaths of her friends, with the agonies that Chen Hongbing had gone through while Xin had him trapped in front of the automatic rifle. Forgotten any idea that she might be wrong about him, that Norrington might have had nothing to do with any of this. Every cell of her body burned with hatred. She wanted, she needed a culprit, here, now, at last, anyone to blame before she lost her mind, a bad guy to stand in for the monsters who had tortured the people she loved, the people whose love she needed. Her loved ones, who had seen things that they couldn’t talk about, things that clamped a mask over their faces. She jerked back her arm and rammed the scissors into Norrington’s thigh, stabbing so hard that skin and flesh parted like butter before the blades, and the point scraped hard against the bone. Norrington screamed like a stuck pig. He raised both hands and tried to shove her away. Still wrapped in her red rage, she yanked the improvised weapon from the wound and set the point against Norrington’s genitals again.

‘It hurts, wherever I aim,’ she whispered. ‘But next time the consequences may be rather more permanent. Were we right about Peary?’

‘Yes,’ he screamed.

‘When? When’s the bomb due to go off?’

‘I don’t know.’ He twisted and turned, his eyes stark with pain. ‘Sometime. Now. Soon. We’re out of contact.’

‘You started the botnet.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you stop it?’

‘Yes, let me go, you’re insane!’

‘Is your organisation called Hydra? Who’s behind it all?’

Without warning Norrington’s head jerked up, and Yoyo realised that it had been a mistake to crouch so low above him. There was a noise like two blocks of wood being slammed together as his forehead met hers. She was flung back. By reflex, she stabbed and heard him howl, then felt him grab hold of her and fling her aside. There were spots dancing in front of her eyes. Her head roared and her nose seemed to have swollen to several times its original size. She rolled swiftly out of Norrington’s reach, holding the scissors out in front of her, but instead of launching himself at her, he hobbled away.

‘You stay here,’ she gasped.

Norrington began to run, as much as his wounded leg would allow. Yoyo clambered to her feet, then fell down again straight away and felt at her face. Blood was pouring from her nose. She felt sickeningly dizzy, but finally managed to stand up, staggered from the office out to the gallery and saw Norrington climbing some stairs on the other side of the glass bridge between the Big O’s western and eastern wings.

The shithead was making for the flight deck.

A quiet voice inside her warned her not to give way to her hatred, to consider that it might be dangerous up there. She didn’t listen. Just as she could not doubt Norrington’s guilt, right at this moment she couldn’t think of anything but stopping him from getting away. She ran after him, glanced down at the dark glass canyon that yawned below the bridge and felt a wave of nausea climb her throat. She fought it down.

Norrington was fighting his way up the last steps.

He was lost to sight.

She shook herself. She resumed the chase, crossed the bridge at last, hurried up the steps two at a time, in constant danger of losing her balance. She made it to the top and saw one of the glass doors out to the roof gliding shut.

Norrington was outside.

Holding the scissors tightly, she went after him, and the glass doors slid open again. The flight deck stretched away before her eyes, with its helicopters and sky-cars. Norrington hobbled towards something without looking round, waving.

‘Over here!’ he called.

She quickened her pace. She was puzzled to note that there were airbikes up here as well, more exactly, one airbike. She hadn’t noticed it the previous morning, and all of a sudden she knew why.

Because it hadn’t been there.

She stopped. Her eyes skittered around the flight deck, and she saw two guards lying on the floor, their limbs outflung. A figure dismounted. Norrington staggered, recovered and then dragged himself on towards the bike. The figure pointed a gun at him and he stopped, his hand pressed to his thigh.

‘Kenny, what is this?’ he asked, his voice wavering.

‘We’ve classed you as a risk,’ Xin said. ‘You’re stupid enough to get caught, and then you’ll tell them what you mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘No!’ Norrington screamed. ‘No, I promise—’

He was flung upward a little into the air, and his body hung there for a moment like a puppet before he flew backwards, his arms spread, and thudded at Yoyo’s feet.

There was a only a mass of red where his face had been.

She froze. Sank to her knees, and dropped the scissors. Xin walked towards her and pressed the muzzle of the gun against her forehead.

‘How nice,’ he whispered. ‘I had already given up all hope.’

Yoyo stared dead ahead. She thought that if she ignored him perhaps he might just vanish, but he didn’t, and her eyes filled slowly with tears, because it was over. Finally over. This time nobody would ride to her rescue. There was nobody who could turn up and take Xin by surprise.

Very softly, her voice hoarse, so that she could barely understand the word she spoke, she said, ‘Please.’

Xin squatted down in front of her. Yoyo raised her eyes to the handsome, symmetrical mask of his face.

‘You’re pleading with me?’

She nodded. The gun’s mouth pressed harder against her brow, as though boring a hole.

‘For what? For your life?’

‘For everyone’s lives.’

‘How very exorbitant of you.’

‘I know.’ Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, and her lower lip began to tremble. And suddenly, curiously, she felt fear washed away with her tears, the fear that had been her constant companion for so long, leaving only a deep, painful sorrow behind. Sorrow that she would never learn now what had happened to Hongbing, why her life had been the way it was, why their lives hadn’t been different. Xin couldn’t scare her now, nor any of his kind. It wouldn’t have taken much for her to fling her arms around his neck to sob on his shoulders. Why not?

‘Yoyo?’

Someone was calling her name in the distance.

‘Yoyo! Where are you?’

Jericho! Was that Owen?

Xin smiled. ‘Brave little Yoyo. Admirable. It’s a shame, I would have liked the chance for a longer chat with you, but as you see, there’s no rest for the wicked. They’re looking for you, I’m afraid, so now I shall have to leave you.’

He stood up, the gun still pointing straight at her forehead. Yoyo turned her face towards him. The dawn breeze was pleasant as it dried the tears on her cheeks. Caressing. Forgiving.

She heard Jericho shout, ‘Yoyo!’

Xin shook his head.

‘I’m sorry about this, Yoyo.’

Peary Base, North Pole, The Moon

The evacuated guests took their seats in the Io and buckled themselves in. Kyra Gore was on her way to the cockpit when a call came through from Callisto. Nina Hedegaard’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Where are you?’ Gore asked as she warmed up her engines.

‘On our way to land soon.’

‘Turn around, right now! Orders from Palmer.’

‘What about our group?’

‘They’re all on board here with me.’ She modified thrust, aimed her jets and lifted the shuttle slowly. ‘Here on Io.’

‘All of them?’

‘The only ones left in the base are Palmer and some of our crew. We had a visit from Carl Hanna. The whole place might blow up any moment now, so turn round and cover some ground away out of here!’

‘What about Carl?’ Julian Orley broke in. ‘Where is he?’

‘Dead.’

She cast her eyes over the control panel, from sheer force of habit. The landing field was dwindling away below the Io, and the whole scattered assembly, factories, pipelines, igloos and corridors, were only toys, a bucket-and-spade set for scientists to muck about in the lunar sand. The roads ran across the regolith like grooves on a toybox lid. In the tiny hangars, little machines assembled other machines, not quite so little. The sunlight gleamed blindingly from the solar panels. Gore curved her flight-path, climbed again and steered Io across the crater wall to the west.

‘Dead?’ Orley snapped.

‘Miss Lawrence killed him. She’s with me, along with your daughter and your guests. They’re all right.’

‘And the bomb? What are Palmer and his crew doing?’

‘They’re looking for it.’

‘We can’t just leave them to—’

‘Yes, we can. Turn around. We’re flying back to the Chinese.’

DeLucas

Had only seconds passed? Or hours? DeLucas couldn’t have said, but when she saw the timecode ticking backwards on the bomb, she knew that the worst experience of her life had not even taken a minute. Kicking and screaming, she had finally managed to break free. After a few metres, the bomb wedged against the rock. She had had enough of being afraid, so this time she simply yelled at the mini-nuke as though it were a snot-nosed kid who only heeded harsh words. Wonder of wonders, it actually listened to her, and the low box came free of the wall. A surge of adrenalin carried her along the corridor and past Tommy Wachowski’s body into the airlock, where she hopped from one leg to the other as though the floor were electrified. As the air pumped slowly in, she saw through the viewport Palmer and Jagellovsk coming into the Great Hall, and she slammed her fists against the pane. Palmer spotted her and stopped dead in his tracks. The door glided open. DeLucas stumbled over the threshold and fell full-length on the floor, and the bomb skittered across to stop at the commander’s feet.

‘Six o’clock,’ she panted. ‘We have thirty-five minutes.’

Palmer grabbed the box with both hands and stared at it.

‘Let’s get it out of here,’ he said.

They went up with the lift, left the igloo and ran outside onto the bulldozed plain, out amongst the hangars. The Io was just disappearing off past the crater wall.

‘What do we do with it now?’

‘Disarm it!’

‘Thanks, wise guy! Do you know how to do that?’

‘Oh, man, I must have seen it a thousand times in the movies. We just have to—’

‘Red wire or green wire? Movies are movies. Are you out of your mind?’

‘Twenty-nine minutes!’

The mini-nuke lay there between them on the asphalt, a squat, malevolent box. The timecode ticked down mercilessly, a countdown to the end of creation, bringing a new Big Bang.

‘Stop!’ Palmer shouted, holding up both hands. ‘Everybody just shut up! Nobody’s disarming a damn thing round here. Get it over to the landing field. We have to get rid of it.’

‘We’ll never manage it,’ DeLucas said. ‘How do you intend to—’

Palmer switched over to the shuttle frequency.

‘Io? Callisto? Leland Palmer here, can you hear me?’

‘Kyra here. What’s up, Leland?’

‘We found the darn thing! It’s going to blow in twenty-eight minutes, excuse me, twenty-seven. I need one of you back here, right now!’

‘All right,’ Gore said. ‘We’re turning round.’

‘We’re nearer,’ Nina said.

‘What? But you have to—’

‘There!’ called Jagellovsk.

DeLucas held her breath. Callisto broke free against the backdrop of the stars, curved about and dropped down towards the base.

‘I’m coming in to land,’ said Nina.

‘Over to Igloo 1!’ Palmer shouted. He leapt and danced like a dervish, waving his arms. ‘Igloo 1, you hear me? We’re outside! Get the bomb on board and then dump it as far away as you can, in some goddam crater!’

Callisto

‘I see them,’ Nina said.

Julian bent down. ‘Once we’ve got the thing on board—’

‘Once I’ve got the thing on board.’ She turned her head and looked at him. ‘You’re getting out.’

‘What? Out of the question!’

‘You are.’

‘We’re flying together—’

‘You’re all getting out,’ she said, with an air of quiet command. ‘You too, Julian.’

And then there it was.

For one deeply satisfying moment she saw fear in Julian’s eyes. For just an instant, but an instant that would be with her for ever, she saw at last what she knew she had earned, knew that she deserved from him, that she’d never asked for, in all the time by his side. He wasn’t afraid for his guests, or his precious daughter, or for his hotel. He was afraid only for her, afraid that she might be hurt. Fearful of the hole she would leave in his life if she died, the hole in his heart.

She slowed, and let the shuttle sink down.

Down below, the astronauts were scurrying about and waving to her. She choked back on the thrust. The bulldozed patch down here was relatively small, full of vehicles and machinery. Carefully, she guided Callisto over to a spot near the igloo that offered just enough room for her to land, then settled with a bump, extended the airlock and turned around to her passengers.

‘Everybody out!’ she shouted, clapping her hands. ‘Then bring the damn bomb in here. Quick!’

She looked at Julian. He hesitated. The storm-clouds cleared on his face and she saw a beam of honest-to-goodness affection break through like the sun, and all of a sudden he was hugging her to himself, and gave her a scratchy kiss.

‘Take care of yourself,’ he whispered.

‘You won’t get rid of me that easily.’ She smiled. ‘Watch out for the engines when you get out. Don’t let them wander about under the thrusters.’

He nodded, slid from his chair and hurried to catch up with the others. Nina turned back to the controls. The lift control showed her that the group was going down to the ground. She watched through the cockpit window as an astronaut hurried across carrying something about the size of a suitcase in both hands. The figure disappeared under Callisto’s belly, and then she heard Palmer’s voice.

‘It’s in!’

‘Got you.’

‘Get going then! Twenty minutes to go! Get the thing away from us!’

‘You can say that again,’ she murmured, revving. She brought the shuttle up a few metres even as the airlock was retracting, and turned. A shudder ran through Callisto.

‘What happened?’ she called.

‘You struck the lock against one of the hangars here,’ Julian said. ‘Just brushed the roof.’

Nina cursed, and lifted higher. She glanced around for any error message.

‘Is it still retracting?’

‘Yes! Seems fine.’

The controls showed that the lock was fully inside Callisto. Nina climbed to three hundred metres, then accelerated faster than she would ever have dared with passengers on board. The thrust pushed her back into her seat as Callisto shot off at more than twelve hundred kilometres per hour. The base dropped away out of sight. Cliffs, chasms and plateaux flew past below like a time-lapse landscape. She would have to make for lower ground as soon as she could, but the stark mountains below seemed to climb and climb for ever where the edges of Peary Crater fused into Hermite to the west. Range reared up after range, ridges and plateaux marched on endlessly, but then at last she saw a ragged abyss yawn wide.

The bowl of Hermite Crater.

Still too close.

Even if the mountain ranges protected the base from the blast itself, there was no telling where the debris would rain down. Nina called up a polar map on her holographic display and looked for a suitable spot. The question was how far she could make the time left to her stretch out. If she waited too long to chuck the mini-nuke overboard, she was in danger of being caught in the nuclear furnace herself, but she didn’t want to dump it out of the airlock too soon. The shadows of a sunlit plain rushed past below her, sown with impact craters from smaller meteorites. Flying as low as she was, she had lost radio contact with everyone. According to the dashboard clock she had been flying for eight minutes, and she still wasn’t past the whole of Hermite. She could see the crater’s western wall looming in the distance, a vast, curving cliff, growing fast, growing closer.

Twelve minutes left.

She looked back at her map. Further to the south-west was a smaller crater, in deep shadow, which suggested that it must be fairly deep. She asked the computer for more information, and a text field unrolled on top of the hologram.

Sylvester Crater, she read. 58 kilometres in diameter.

Depth: unknown.

She liked the look of it. It looked almost tailor-made to swallow the energy of a nuclear bomb, and all of a sudden she had to smile. Sylvester, how appropriate. A crater named for the father of industrial explosives, and it would see the biggest damn explosion the Moon had known for thousands of years. Grinning, she changed course a few degrees south-west, and Callisto tore over Hermit’s western rim.

Eleven minutes.

The crater wall fell away beneath her, rugged, pocked by lesser impacts, and gave way to a broad, flat valley. The other side of the valley had to be Sylvester’s outer wall. Nina leapt from the pilot’s seat and ran to the airlock, suddenly scared that Palmer might have misread the timecode, but when she peered through the pane she saw the mini-nuke sitting on the cabin floor, its counter just ticking down from the ten-minute mark.

The sight of the bomb made her suddenly queasy.

09.57

09.56

09.55

Time to throw in her hand; she’d pushed her luck as far as she could. There was enough distance now between the bomb and the base. She ran back to the cockpit and gave the command to extend the airlock.

The computer gave her an error report.

Incredulous, she stared at the console. Suddenly the lift symbol was blinking, fiery red. She tried again to extend the shaft, but without success.

Impossible. Just impossible!

She demanded a report.

Airlock not fully drawn up, it said. Please draw up lock before attempting to extend.

Her legs trembled wildly. Hastily she ordered the shaft to draw up, even though it was already drawn up – at least, it had seemed that way, but perhaps there was a centimetre or so still to go. But the display didn’t stop blinking.

Airlock cannot be drawn up.

Cannot be drawn up?

Nine minutes.

Less than nine.

‘Are you crazy?’ she shouted at the control system. ‘Draw up, extend! How the hell am I supposed to—’

She stopped. You had to be completely crazy yourself to try arguing with a computer. The airlock wouldn’t open, and that was that. Which meant that she couldn’t just spit the bomb out that way, and she couldn’t fetch it from the lock to throw it out of the rear hatch.

The rear hatch!

Her heart pounding, she raced to the stern, opened the bulkhead to the cargo hold, charged inside and looked around. There were a few grasshoppers here, hanging in their brackets and ready to roam. It had hardly been eighteen hours since they had been using them to tour the legendary Apollo landing site. She loosened the clips on one of them, stood it up on its telescopic legs and checked the fuel tank. Enough. All right then, back to the bridge, but as she drew level with the airlock she couldn’t resist glancing inside. She hesitated, then looked in at the infernal device, saw the timecode running down—

06.44

06.43

– she tore herself away. Dashed into the cockpit.

Looked out.

Sylvester’s crater wall, still a good way off but growing larger every moment. She had to make sure that the bomb would explode on the crater floor, deep inside. Otherwise she would be dead for sure. Her fingers leapt across the instrument panel like a virtuoso at the keyboard as she calculated the angle of approach she would need for a controlled crash, and the shuttle’s nose dipped – no, that was too much, less! – there, that was it. A steady descent.

And now, out of here. Helmet on.

Her hands were trembling. Why were her hands trembling, now of all times?

05.59

The helmet wouldn’t fit.

05.58

She had left it too late.

05.57

05.56

Now!

Cargo hold. Manual controls.

The loading hatch sank down, infuriatingly slowly, to reveal the stars and, far off, the Peary–Hermite range. Nina climbed up onto the grasshopper platform and kicked the thing up into the air, just a little. The hatch yawned wider. A hair’s breadth was all she needed. Without waiting for it to open entirely, she steered the hopper along the cargo hold and through the shuttle’s rear hatch as it tore down towards the ground.

It would be an illusion to think that she was safe now. The shuttle seemed to be standing still relative to her speed, which meant that she was still hurtling towards Sylvester at 1200 kilometres per hour on her tiny craft, just as fast as Callisto itself. Realistically, her chances were just about as bad as could be, though she still had five minutes to achieve the impossible, maybe four. Somewhere between 250 and 300 seconds, at any rate. All her hopes hung on having calculated the proper angle of impact for the shuttle. She swung her nozzles to the horizontal and opened the throttle for as much thrust as the little machine could muster.

The hopper bucked and tried to throw her off.

Then it rushed for all its engines were worth away from Callisto, bravely doing its best against the murderous acceleration, and losing height all the while. The shuttle dwindled away rapidly in front of Nina’s eyes. She swung the nozzles around a little further and went down to the ground, too close to the ground, as she established the next moment, since she was still going much too fast. She was in danger of being smashed to pieces, and she steered the hopper up again, wringing the last drop of thrust out of its jets, and saw Callisto speeding towards Sylvester’s sunlit slopes. The dusty lunar surface was not racing past quite so fast beneath her now, the hopper was battling against its own momentum and winning. It was slowing down, but would there be time to slow it to a safe landing speed?

And if she could? How much time did she still have?

Two minutes?

One?

A small crater rushed towards her, zipped by below and then was lost to sight. An ideal spot to take shelter. Somehow she had to make her way back to the crater, but she was still travelling at considerable speed. Over on the horizon, Callisto hung above the sweeping wall of mountains, a gleaming point, so close to the rim that for a moment she was afraid that she had miscalculated and the shuttle would smash into the crater wall, that the bomb would explode there on the slopes, and that nothing would protect her from the fury of the blast.

Then the shining dot disappeared inside Sylvester, and she gave a victory whoop, since she’d won this point at least in the deadly game. Still whooping, she steered the hopper down, fought against her own headlong hurtle, and gradually, little by little, the contraption seemed to be bleeding off the speed that the shuttle had given it, even if it was still going too fast to land. She could forget about that little crater by now, it was already much too far behind her, but something about the same size sped towards her, maybe a little smaller. The ring wall was two, perhaps three kilometres across but it was astonishingly high, so that all of a sudden she was afraid that the hopper wouldn’t make it over the peaks, would crash. Just before impact, she yanked the machine upwards, scraping over the rim, and then looked down. The crater wall cast a threatening shadow into the cauldron, a curve of blackness like a scythe. She slowed further, flew over the opposite wall, then she could see the plain again and Sylvester, its peaks terrifyingly near, unsoftened by atmospheric haze.

There was something happening there.

Hildegaard narrowed her eyes.

The sky above Sylvester blazed.

She held her breath.

From one moment to the next, the stars were swallowed up by a smear of blazing light as though a second sun were being born inside the crater. Instantly, she turned her eyes away, flew a 180-degree curve and realised that she now had full control of speed and direction. Her second little crater was some distance off by now, but the ground below was no longer hurtling past. She had won the battle against her acceleration and now she had to find shelter. All around, the slopes and cliffs, even the distant polar massif, were glowing in the light of the nuclear explosion, but that died away so suddenly that she couldn’t resist her curiosity. She turned the hopper.

The light had vanished.

For a moment she thought that Sylvester had absorbed the energy of an entire nuclear explosion, but something was different now. At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing, but then the shock of recognition hit.

The ridge of the crater wall had vanished.

No, not vanished. It was hidden by a screen of dust that shrouded the upper slopes and fountained skywards, swallowing the stars, a plume many kilometres high, growing higher and higher, unreal, bizarre, a nightmare image—

Crawling down the slopes.

Crawling?

‘Oh shit,’ whispered Nina.

All of a sudden, the wall of dust had become a huge wave, spilling over the crater wall in all directions and racing down towards the plain. Nina had no idea just how fast it was travelling, but it was certainly coming ten times faster than her little hopper could fly, twenty times, thirty. For a moment she was paralysed, not able even to tear her eyes away, then she yanked the machine around and thrashed it back towards the nameless little crater. After the breakneck ride out of Callisto, it was as though the hopper was just creeping along. She risked another look. Sylvester had vanished completely. There was only the dust racing towards her, swallowing the sky and devouring all before it.

Faster. Faster!

The crater wall, her only hope of shelter!

Desperately, she yanked the grasshopper upwards, and it hauled itself up the slope as though worn out by the excitement of the past few minutes. Its telescopic legs scrabbled across the rocks and it tottered from side to side, then with one leap it was over the ridge. Nina spread her arms and leapt from the platform. Her body slammed into the steep regolith and then she was rolling down, over a sudden edge. She fell in a long arc and landed quite a way further off, in the shadow of a sheer cliff-face. From the corner of her eyes she could see the grasshopper tumbling end over end. She braced her feet in the scree slope and managed to stop her downward slide. She crawled into the shelter of an overhang and curled up into a ball.

Above her, the sky grew dark.

In the next moment, everything was grey. A hail of pebbles, tiny stones, pattered down into the crater’s bowl. Nina cowered as small as she could, protected against the pressure wave and the rubble by her overhang, but the rocks falling in front of her sent up a spray of regolith in turn. She crossed her arms in front of her helmet for protection and hoped that the suit would hold up to the onslaught. She could see nothing at all, merely a thick grey cloud on a grey ground, and she shut her eyes.

The wall raced past her.

She had no idea how long she had been lying there. When she finally dared take her arms from her faceplate, the impacts had stopped and a hazy, shifting cloud of dust hung everywhere.

She clambered to her feet and stretched her limbs. She could hardly believe that she was still alive. That nothing had broken. Apparently, she was totally unharmed.

She had survived an atom bomb.

On the other hand, she was now stuck in a nameless crater miles from Peary with no means of getting away. Her own little crater, that had saved her life. She had an intact spacesuit, her radio and enough oxygen for the next few hours until Io found her. At least, she hoped that they’d be looking for her and hadn’t simply assumed that her death was inevitable.

First of all, she decided, she had to get out of this crater. Better for the radio reception once Io turned up.

Resigned, she set out on the long climb.

London, Great Britain

I’m sorry about this, Yoyo—

Whatever else Xin said after that reached her as mere wordsound, a voiceprint only, since at that moment her overloaded nerves gave way. The nervus vagus, that had survived so many lesser crises before now, simply stopped all regulatory function and left the organs under its command to their own devices, plunging them into chaos. Without higher functions to command them, arteries let the blood rush unhindered to her legs, her heart found nothing to pump, her brain waited in vain for the oxygen to arrive and Xin’s next words were nothing more than a half-heard electrochemical impulse. ‘You lose.’ Maybe he said them, maybe he didn’t. At that moment, all systems shut down. Her eyes turned up, and she slumped. Shot down by a bullet that never hit her.

That was how Jericho found her. As part of a collection of bodies scattered over the flight deck: two dead guards, the dead traitor, and Yoyo lying there as though dead, without a pulse, unbreathing, drenched in cold sweat. She hadn’t picked up when Shaw called from her extension, nor when he tried his own phone. One look into Norrington’s office told them that he wasn’t there. This was enough to send him up to the sixty-eighth floor, worried, where he found Diane lying pitifully, her cables wrenched out, and clear signs of a fight. No sign at all of Yoyo but a trail of blood on the floor, on the gallery, the bridge, the steps up to the deck.

The rest was intuition.

He had burst out onto the roof just in time to see the airbike vanishing into the sky, and for a dreadful moment he thought that Yoyo was dead. He sank to his knees beside her, broken by his failure, seeing clearly the grief that would seize Tu and Hongbing when he brought them the news. But then he heard a barely perceptible heartbeat, his ear pressed to her ribcage. Another followed. A slow, faltering rhythm that picked up speed and grew stronger, and then the blood flowed back to her brain and consciousness returned. When he propped her legs up she came to, groggy, confused, just about able to see and speak. Who am I? Headache, tired, sleep.

Xin had let her live.

Why?

Meanwhile Shaw was growing apoplectic. Norrington’s guilt still had to be proved, even if she no longer doubted it. She was prey to a whole swarm of suspicions about what the deputy head of security could have done to damage Orley, and she ordered his data combed, his body searched. They found a datastick disguised as a house key, containing only a single program which uploaded as the image of a nine-headed snake, a shimmering, pulsing sign of his treachery.

That was the point when Jericho decided to give up.

They could fix their own problems. He couldn’t do any more, didn’t want to. It was as though he and Xin had some tacit agreement now that the killer had spared Yoyo’s life and vanished, leaving a curt but unambiguous message: Mind your own business. Maybe Xin had simply recognised that by now Yoyo’s death was unnecessary, since so many other people knew her secret. It would have been pointless to kill her now, and somehow or other pointless actions simply didn’t fit into Xin’s… philosophy, if that was what it was.

Never mind.

He was a detective, and he had kept his promise. He had brought Yoyo back to his two clients, to Tu and Chen. Everything else was for Shaw and the British Secret Services to bother about, none of his business, and he was also horribly tired. At the same time, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink, no matter how hard he was yawning now.

Tu on the other hand hardly appeared to sleep at all, and the shock seemed to have jolted him into a state of unceasing wakefulness, driven by the guilt of not having been there at Yoyo’s side. She had been asleep in her bed for two hours now – all the guest suites in the Big O had several rooms, and spectacular views – while he sat with Jericho in the living room, drinking tea and gobbling down the nuts and nibbles like a maniac.

‘I have to eat,’ he said half apologetically, belching loudly. ‘Food and sex are man’s essential desires.’

‘Says who?’ muttered Jericho.

‘Confucius, since you ask, and he meant by it that we should be sure to eat well so that we can protect our women. Which means I have some catching up to do.’ A handful of Brazil nuts and jelly babies together. ‘And if I ever get my hands on that swine—’

‘You won’t.’

Tu slapped the table. ‘We’ve got this far, xiongdi. Do you really think that I’ll knuckle under and let the bastard get clean away? Think of what he did to Yoyo’s friends, to Hongbing. The tortures he put him through!’

‘Not so loud.’ Jericho glanced at the half-closed bedroom door. ‘No question that you’re right to be angry, but perhaps you should just be grateful that you’re not dead.’

‘All right, I’m grateful. What next?’

‘Nothing next.’ Jericho spread his hands and rolled his eyes. ‘Live. Life goes on.’

‘It’s not like you to take this attitude,’ Tu chided him. ‘The woodworm doesn’t just sit about making comments on the carpentry.’

‘Thanks for the comparison.’

‘So why did we get involved in the first place?’ Tu asked between gritted teeth. ‘So that the bastards could get away with it?’

‘You listen to me.’ Jericho put down his teacup and leaned forward. ‘Maybe you’re right, and maybe next week I’ll see it all differently, but where has all this got us? Following leads in ever-widening circles, all these killers, mercenary armies, Secret Services, coups in West Africa, government ploys and corporation plots, yesterday Equatorial Guinea, today the Moon, the day after tomorrow who knows, maybe Venus? Where has it got us? Corrupt oil cartels, Korean atom bombs, hotels on the Moon, rogue astronauts, oil managers getting shot at, Greenwatch wiped out, theories about China and the CIA, nine-headed monsters? Where? To a baking hot day and a man scared for his daughter. The furniture still in its packing and he’s worried that she’s disappeared, but first of all he has to help me get two chairs out of the bubble-wrap so that we have something to sit on. To be blunt, I couldn’t give a shit about Xin and his Hydra. With the best will in the world, I have no idea what we have to do with Orley Enterprises. There’s a girl in the next room, still breathing, we didn’t have to lay her out in a shroud, and to me that’s worth all the global conspiracies you could pile up together, since it looks as though we’re well out of this game, however the whole thing plays out. We’ve got those sods on the run, Tian, so much so that they can’t see any point in killing us. The story will fizzle out of its own accord. It begins and ends on the Shanghai Pudong golf course when you asked me to bring your friend his daughter back, alive and in one piece. That’s what I did. Thank you, next please.’

Tian looked at him appraisingly, a handful of nuts raised halfway to his mouth.

‘I’m very grate—’

‘No, you’re not following me.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘We’re all grateful, all of us, to one another, but now we’re going to fly off home, you can take care of your joint venture with Dao IT, Yoyo will carry on her studies, Hongbing will sell that silver Rolls that he was telling me about and enjoy his commission, and I’ll wipe Xin’s fingerprints from my furniture and try to fall in love with some woman who’s not called Diane or Joanna. And won’t it just be wonderful to be able to do all that? To lead a perfectly ordinary, boring life. We’ll wake up from this hideous dream, we’ll rub our eyes and that will be that, because this isn’t our life, Tian! These are other people’s problems.’

Tu scratched his belly. Jericho sank back into the depths of the sofa and wished he could believe what he’d just said.

‘A perfectly ordinary, boring life,’ Tu echoed.

‘Yes, Tian,’ he said. ‘Ordinary, boring. And if I can give you some advice, as a friend: talk to Yoyo. Both of you. Talking helps.’

It was rude to talk this way in Chinese culture, even with a friend. But perhaps after all the last two days had brought – how much closer did you need to be before you allowed such trust? He looked out at London as the day began, and wondered whether he should leave Shanghai and come back here. Actually, he didn’t much care either way.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed. ‘I know it’s nothing to do with me.’

Tu let the nuts he was holding rattle back down into the bowl, and stirred them with his finger. For a while, neither of them said anything.

‘Do you know what an ankang is?’ he asked at last.

Jericho turned his head. ‘Yes.’

‘Would you like to hear a story about an ankang?’ Tu smiled. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. Nobody wants to hear a story about an ankang, but you’ve brought it upon yourself. This is a story which begins on 12 January 1968 in Zhejiang province, when a child is born, an only child. Nothing to do with the one-child policy, by the way, that was only proclaimed years later, though of course you know that, since you’re practically Chinese yourself.’

12 January—

‘Not your own birthday,’ Jericho said.

‘No, besides which I was born in Shanghai, and this happened in a small town. The child’s father was a teacher, meaning that he was under serious suspicion of harbouring such heinous aims as wanting to educate people, or using his brain to develop an intellectual position. In other words, suspected of thought. Back in those days even knowing the rudiments of your own country’s history was enough to have you beaten in the streets, but when Beijing’s creatures began to destroy our culture in the name of revolutionising it, this teacher of ours adapted to the new circumstances. At first. After all, the capital was a vipers’ nest of Red Guards, but out in the provinces the local Party leaders were fighting the Guards. The peasants and workers out there were doing quite well from the policies of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. So our teacher worked in a tractor factory to avoid the suspicion of intellectualism, and he did what little he could to stop Deng and Liu from being toppled by the Maoists. There was a Red Guard faction established in his town that was openly sympathetic to Deng, the Coordinated Work Committee, and this teacher thought it would be a good idea to join them. Which it was. Until ’68, when the committee broke up under pressure from the hard-liners, who didn’t need to know more than that he had once been a teacher. The day that he began to fear for his life was the day his son was born.’

Jericho sipped at his tea, and a suspicion stole over him.

‘What was this teacher called, Tian?’

‘Chen De.’ Tu tapped at a peanut with his finger, sending it skittering over the table. ‘You can probably guess his son’s name for yourself.’

‘A name meant to show how faithful the father was. Red Soldier.’

‘Hongbing. A clever enough tactic, but it didn’t help much. At the end of ’68 they came to arrest Hongbing’s mother for reactionary statements supposedly, though it was actually because quite a few Guards had been practising Cultural Revolution between her legs, and she wouldn’t accept that it helped the poor peasants one jot if people like them dragged her into bed. They took her off to a re-education camp, where they, well, re-educated her. She came back home very ill, and broken, not the same person as she had been. Chen De started teaching again, sporadically, taking enormous risks to do so, but mostly he worked in the factory and did his best to teach his boy as much as he could, in secret, for instance telling him how to live an ethical life and why – highly dangerous propaganda, I can tell you! Then in the mid-seventies they noticed his links to the old committee. By now Mao liked to spend most of his time with the daughters of the Revolution, making sure that none of them were virgins. Chen De was accused of counter-revolutionary tendencies, seven years late, very quick trial, then prison. Hongbing was left behind, a child alone, looking after his sick mother, so he took over the job in the tractor factory.’

Tu paused, pouring himself more tea.

‘Well, various things changed, some for the better, some for the worse. His mother died, and then Mao soon after, Deng was rehabilitated from having been in disgrace, and Hongbing’s father could teach again – as long as he stuck to the Party line, of course. The boy grows up caught between ideology and despair. Since he has no role-models around him, he falls in love with cars, which were very rare indeed at the time. You can’t make a living from something like that out in the country, so when he’s seventeen he moves to Shanghai, which is as fun-loving as Beijing is sclerotic. He takes a string of odd jobs and falls in with a group of students who are tending the delicate shoots of democratic thought in post-revolutionary China, and they introduce him to books by Wei Jingsheng and Fang Lizhi – the Fifth Modernisation, opening of society, all those enticing, forbidden thoughts.’

‘Hongbing was a democracy activist?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Tu nodded enthusiastically. ‘He was up there in the front line, Owen my friend. A fighter! 20 December 1986, seventy thousand people took to the streets in Shanghai to protest against the way the Party had manipulated appointments to the People’s Congress, and Hongbing was at their head. It’s a miracle that they didn’t fling him behind bars right then. Meanwhile he’d also got a job at a repairs garage, fixing up cadre cars, making influential friends. This was where he lost the last of his illusions, since the new brand of Chinese managers could have invented corruption. Well, never mind that. Tell me, does 15 April 1989 mean anything to you?’

‘4 June does.’

‘Yes, but it all began earlier. Hu Yaobang died, a politician the students had always seen as their friend, especially after the Party made him their own internal scapegoat for the disturbances of ’86. Thousands of people march in Beijing to remember him and pay their respects on Tiananmen Square, and the old demands come up again: democracy, freedom, all the stuff that enrages the old men in power. Then criticism of the regime spreads to other cities, Shanghai as well, of course, and Hongbing raises a clenched fist once more and organises protests. Deng refuses dialogue with the students, the demonstrators go on hunger strike, Tiananmen becomes the centre of something like a huge carnival, there’s something in the air, a mood of change, a happening, and Hongbing wants to see it for himself. By now there are a million people on the square. Journalists from all over the world, and the last straw comes when Mikhail Gorbachev arrives with his ideas of perestroika and glasnost. The Party is in a tight corner indeed.’

‘And Hongbing’s in the thick of it.’

‘For all that, it could have ended peacefully. By the end of May most of the Beijing students want to wind the movement up, happy to have humiliated Deng, but the new arrivals like Hongbing insist that all demands must be met, and that escalates things. The rest is well known – I don’t have to tell you about the Tiananmen Massacre. And once again, Hongbing has the most incredible luck. Nothing happens to him because his name’s not on any of the blacklists. He went back to Shanghai, with the last of his illusions in shreds, decided to concentrate on his job instead and made it to deputy foreman. It’s grown up to be a lovely big garage over all these years, the nouveaux riches have turned their backs on bicycles and nobody knows cars like Hongbing does. Every now and again he gets a trip to the brothel as a gift from a customer, the upper cadre invite him for meals, he’s a good-looking lad, some fat cat functionaries wouldn’t much mind if he got their daughters pregnant.’

‘So he’s adapted to the times.’

‘Up until winter of ’92, which is when Chen De hangs himself. He’s spent all those years keeping his head down, and then he strings himself up. Depression. His wife had died, you see, and the Revolution had destroyed his family. Hongbing explodes with self-loathing. He hates his own name, he hates it when his drinking buddies boast and blather and yell ganbei, profiteers who used to be interested in the democracy movement but have sold out. He wants to make his voice heard. The year before, the dissident Wang Wanxing had been arrested for unfurling a banner on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, right in the middle of the square. It called for the rehabilitation of the demonstrators who had been killed. So the Tiananmen anniversary comes round again, 4 June 1993, and Hongbing demonstrates for Wang’s release along with a couple of like-minded souls. He reckons that this is a small thing to ask, modest enough, that it might have better chances of success than always pissing up the same tree and shouting that the whole system should change. And lo and behold, someone takes notice of him. The wrong kind, unfortunately.’

‘He’s arrested.’

‘On the spot. And this is where things get really despicable, although you might say that it’s all been quite despicable enough. You’d be wrong. So far, it’s just been brutal.’

Tu paused, while the sun climbed higher and flooded the Thames with light.

‘For many years there was a pretty little Buddhist temple a few kilometres outside Hangzhou, in an idyllic spot between rice fields and tea plantations. Until they tore it down to build something in its place that was deemed more useful to Chinese society.’

‘An ankang.’

Jericho felt his tiredness vanish. He had heard about the ankangs, though he had never seen one. The literal meaning of ankang was safety, peace and health, but in fact these were the police psychiatric prisons.

‘The ankang at Hangzhou was the first psychiatric clinic of its kind in China,’ Tu said. ‘Based on the belief that there is one perfect ideology, and that anybody who questions it must be suffering from some sort of mental illness, either acute or chronic. Just like you’d have to be mentally ill to believe that the Earth is a cube, or that your spouse is really a dog in disguise. Taking the Soviet Union as their example, China had always made a habit of declaring that its dissidents were crazy, but the Party only gave the psychiatric clinics that cute little name – ankang – at the end of the eighties. Up till then, they had operated in secret.’

‘Tell me, that dissident whom Hongbing was trying to get freed from prison, Wang Wanxing – wasn’t he in an ankang as well?’

‘For thirteen years, and then in the end he was deported in 2005. Up until then, there had only ever been rumours about the ankangs, dark mutterings that they had less to do with caring for the mentally ill than humiliating people who were of sound mind. That was when a debate began, very tentative at first, and it didn’t stop the Party from opening more of these so-called clinics. There’s a constant supply of people with paranoid delusions of human rights or schizophrenic beliefs about free elections. The world is full of lunatics, Owen, you just have to pay close attention: trade unionists, democrats, religious believers, people presenting petitions and lodging complaints about the demolitions and urban planning policy in Shanghai, for instance, and demanding outlandish things like citizen consultation. Not to mention the real crazies, the ones who think that our perfect society could harbour corruption.’

Jericho kept quiet. Tu slurped at his tea, as though to wash the taste of the word ankang from his mouth.

‘Well, anyway, since Wanxing was deported in 2005 the victims have begun to speak up for themselves. Early 2005 the People’s Congress even passed a law forbidding police torture, though this was a farce of course. It’s still standard operating practice to work suspects over until they sign some kind of confession as proof of mental illness, then you can torture merrily away and call it medical treatment. There are about a hundred ankangs in China, and these days there’s a lot of public debate and international pressure because of them, but back when Hongbing was admitted to the Hangzhou clinic it was still 1993 and there was no such thing as a right of appeal. There was a red banner hanging in the plane trees in the grounds, a very pretty thing to look at, saying A healthy mind in a healthy body means lifelong happiness, the usual cynical vocabulary of the gulag. Hongbing gets a diagnosis: he’s suffering from paranoid psychosis and political monomania. You won’t find a doctor outside China who’s heard of either of these conditions, they’re not on any international list, but that’s just more proof of how stupid foreigners are. The clinical assessment is all couched in the most harmless terms, it says that Hongbing makes a good impression, his mental condition is stable, he does as he’s told, he listens to the radio, he likes reading, he’s keen to help, it’s just that – and I’m quoting word for word here – he displays massive impairment in logical thought as soon as talk turns to politics. He’s quite obviously mentally disturbed and his thought processes display clear signs of megalomania, affective aggression and a pathologically overdeveloped will. The doctors prescribe a course of pharmaceutical treatment and close supervision to bring poor Hongbing back to his wits, and with a stroke of their pen, he has no more rights.’

‘Couldn’t he talk to a lawyer, at least?’ Jericho asked, nonplussed. ‘There must have been some way to get his case heard.’

‘But, Owen.’ – Tu had started eating the nibbles again, scooping up another handful just as soon as he’d swallowed the first – ‘that would have been a nonsense. I mean, how can a madman contest the fact that he’s mad? After all, everybody knows that loonies always think they’re the only sane ones. There’s no way to appeal against a police finding that you’re mad; the only people who decide how long you’re detained are the police psychiatrists and functionaries. That’s what makes it so unbearable for the victims. In a prison or a work camp, at least you know how long they’ve sent you down for, but when you’re in an ankang it’s entirely up to your tormentors. But do you know what’s truly despicable here?’

Jericho shook his head.

‘That most of the inmates really are mentally ill. That’s cruel, eh? Just imagine how a healthy person suffers when he’s surrounded by others who are seriously disturbed, criminals, threatening him the whole time. Not even half a year after admission, Hongbing sees two inmates murdered, and the staff stand by and watch. Night after night he forces himself to stay awake, for fear he could be next. Then there are other prisoners, pardon me, patients, who are perfectly sane, just like he is. Doesn’t matter. They all have to go through the same hell. They’re given regular therapy, the chemical cosh, insulin shock, electroshock therapy. You’d never believe all the cures they have for a sick mind! They stub their cigarettes out on your skin, genitals preferably, they torture you with hot wires. Extreme heat, sleep deprivation, dunking in ice-cold water, and beatings, always the beatings. Troublemakers get chained to the bed and tortured till they pass out, for instance by sticking a needle into their upper lip and then passing a current through – they vary the voltage, switching from high to low so that you can’t get used to the pain. Sometimes, if the doctors and nurses feel in the mood, all the inmates in a section have to submit to punishment, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. Given this level of expert care, many patients die of heart attacks. One that Hongbing had befriended was so desperate that he went on hunger strike. So they chained him to the bed as well, and then the mentally ill inmates were told to force-feed him, under staff supervision. But how do you go about that? Since nobody actually taught them what to do, they just force the poor guy’s jaws open and tip the liquid food into him until he suffocates, but at least he’s eaten. The death certificate called it a heart attack. Nobody was charged. Hongbing was lucky, if you want to call it that: they didn’t use the worst tortures on him. There are some car-crazy cadre members in Shanghai who put in a word on his behalf, discreetly, so that they wouldn’t draw reprisals onto themselves, but it was enough to make sure he got relatively privileged treatment. He gets a cell to himself, he’s allowed to read and watch television. Three times a day he gets a dose of narcoleptics, with very pronounced side-effects, and all the while many of the doctors are quietly letting him know that they think he’s entirely healthy. Hongbing hides the pills under his upper lip and then gets rid of them down the loo, then he gets insulin shock therapy as punishment and lies in a coma for days. Another time he’s strapped down, the doctor puts on a pair of gloves with metal plates on them and puts his hand on his forehead, boom, there’s an almighty bang and he can’t see or hear. Electroshock therapy, this time as a punishment for being Hongbing. It’s always booming and banging in the ankang – you can’t get a wink of sleep for all the screams of pain. The patients hide under the beds, in the toilet, under the wash-basin, no use any of it. If you’ve been chosen, they’ll find you. Oh, we’re out of nibbles.’

It took Jericho a moment to react. In a trance, he stood up, went to the bar and came back with a couple of bags of crisps.

‘Cheese and onion,’ he read out. ‘Or would you like bacon?’

‘All the same to me. In the second year, Hongbing tries to escape. He’s almost out and then they catch him. He still dreams about that today, more than about all the rest of it. As a reward for showing so much initiative they dose him with scopolamine, which makes you listless, so that you don’t spend your time thinking about silly things like escape. I hardly need mention that the stuff causes serious physical and psychological injury. In the third year of his stay, summer of ’96, a young worker is admitted to the clinic who had reported her factory manager’s son for taking bribes. The son beat her senseless, and she reported that as well, so the factory manager decided that anyone who could act with such a lack of decorum must be insane. The chief of police and the director of the ankang agreed. She’s whisked away to the clinic without any medical diagnosis, without standing trial or being sentenced, while the ankang director’s son-in-law is named a section manager in the factory. Coincidences do happen. Oh, and Hongbing? Falls in love with the lady, and looks after her until six months after her admission, when she dies under insulin shock therapy. Which breaks the last of his resistance. On the day he lost that woman, Hongbing lost the last of his strength.’

‘That’s dreadful, Tian,’ Jericho said softly.

Tu shrugged. ‘It’s the story of a wrong turn, as so many of us have taken in life. A story of might-have-been and had-I-only. Then, spring ’97, our merry band of madmen get a new member in their ranks, a well-to-do sort, pragmatic, self-assured. As you might expect, the first thing the doctors do is take care of that self-assurance. He’s not exactly an unknown quantity in dissident circles, this chap, he’s something of a local hero for fighting against corruption. He was section head in an electronic components factory and led thousands of employees in a protest against the management getting rich on the backs of the workers. Went to Beijing with proof, and was arrested and sectioned for his pains. In the ankang they give him all kinds of muck, he gets ill, his hair falls out, he has fits, can’t sleep, his nerves are shot and his memory’s full of holes but they can’t break his will to live. His only goal is to get out of there as quick as he can, and he has powerful friends in Shanghai, for instance his brother-in-law plays golf with the chief of police. This man likes Hongbing. He spends a lot of time with him, listens to what he has to say, slowly puts him back together again. Six months later he’s back outside, gets a senior job at a software company and makes plans to get rich and powerful. The year after that, when Hongbing’s finally free, he’s thirty years old and he’s spent five of those years in the clinic; his friend from the ankang fixes him a job with a car dealer and takes it upon himself to take care of him whenever and however he can.’

The sun had climbed higher. Soft, rosy dawn light touched all the rooftops.

‘You’re the friend from the ankang,’ Jericho said softly.

‘Yes.’ Tu took his glasses off and began to clean them on a corner of his shirt. ‘I’m the friend. That’s the link between Hongbing and me.’

Jericho was silent for a while.

‘And Hongbing has never talked to Yoyo about this time?’

‘Never.’ Tu held the glasses up to the light and looked thoughtfully at the lenses. ‘Have a look at your own life, Owen. You know it yourself, there are some experiences that just lock your vocal cords tight. You’re tongue-tied by the shame, and also, you think that if you don’t talk about it, it will fade with the years, but its power over you simply grows. After he was freed, Hongbing considered going to court. I told him, build your own life up first before you take any more steps. He had such a knack with cars! Whenever a new model came onto the market, he would know all there was to know about it within days. He listened to me, and worked up to being a salesman. In 1999 he got to know a girl from Ningbo and married her, in a great rush. They didn’t suit one another, not one tiny bit, but he wanted to catch up on his five lost years, fast-forward and start a family as soon as possible. Yoyo was born, the marriage broke up just as predicted, since Hongbing suddenly decided he wasn’t able to love any more. Truth was it was only himself he couldn’t love, and he still can’t today. The girl went back to Ningbo, Hongbing was given custody and tried to give Yoyo what he didn’t have.’

‘Kindness.’

‘Hongbing’s problem is that he thinks he doesn’t deserve kindness. But Yoyo has got the wrong idea. She thinks that she’s done something wrong. By saying nothing he’s given her an enormous guilt complex, which is exactly the opposite of what he intended, but you’ve met him, you know what he’s like by now. He’s walled himself up in his own silence.’ Tu sighed. ‘The night before last, in Berlin, when I was out on the tiles with Yoyo and you were sulking in the hotel, I finally got round to telling her my story. She’s clever, Yoyo, and straight away she asked whether something like that had happened to Hongbing.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘He’ll have to talk to her.’

‘Yes.’ Tu nodded. ‘Once he can break out of his shell. I have to tell you that in secret, without her having the least idea, he’s still fighting to be rehabilitated.’

‘And you? Were you ever rehabilitated?’

‘In 2002, when I became manager at the software company, I decided to lodge an appeal. It was rejected nine times. Then, totally out of the blue, I heard that it was all a dreadful mistake and that I had been the victim of misdiagnosis, even of a criminal conspiracy! My reputation was restored and that smoothed the path for my career. I put in a word for Hongbing and got him made technical director of a Mercedes dealership, which gave him enough of a livelihood that he could go to court at last, and he’s been making his case ever since. He’s gathered whole crates full of evidence, medical affidavits showing that he was never mentally ill, but so far his sentence has only ever been partially revised. I picked my fight with corrupt managers, but they’d broken the law after all. He took on the Party. And the Party’s an elephant, Owen. He’s a marked man, he’s scarred for life. I think that if he were fully rehabilitated, he might even be able to confide in Yoyo, but as it is—’

Jericho turned his teacup around between his fingers.

‘Yoyo has to learn the truth, Tian,’ he said. ‘If Hongbing won’t talk to her, you’ll have to.’

‘Ah well.’ Tu perched his glasses back on his nose and gave a wry grin. ‘After this morning, at least I have some practice.’

‘Thank you for telling me.’

Tu gazed at the empty crisp packets, lost in thought. Then he looked Jericho in the eyes.

‘You’re my friend, Owen. Our friend. You’re one of us. You’re part of it.’