Limit

Xintiandi, Shanghai, China

A perfectly normal life—

Hanging pictures, taking a step back, adjusting the angle. Sorting out books, arranging furniture, stepping back, rearranging. Making small changes, stepping back again, approaching things while remaining detached from them, establishing harmony, the universal Confucian formula against the powers of chaos.

If that was what constituted a normal life, Jericho had fitted himself back into normality without the slightest transition. Xin hadn’t burned down his loft, everything was in its place or waiting to be assigned one. The television was on, a kaleidoscope of soundless world events, because he was less concerned with the content of information than with its decorative properties. He had an urgent need not to have to know anything any more. He didn’t want to understand any more connections, only to roll out the little carpet, which was to lie like that – or was it better like that? Jericho pulled it into a diagonal, took a step back, studied his work and found it lacked balance, because it put a standard lamp in difficulties. Not harmonious, said Confucius, stressing the rights of lamps.

How was Yoyo?

At noon on the day of her rebirth thanks to Xin’s mercy she had woken up, plagued by severe headaches, doubtless partly due to the encounter with Norrington’s skull, also to an unaccustomed excess of Brunello di Montalcino, but finally also to the experience of having been practically shot. The resulting emotional hangover meant that she didn’t talk much on the flight home. At around midday Tu had started the Aerion Supersonic. Four hours later the jet had landed at Pudong Airport, and they had been home again. Of course, in the days that followed there was no escaping the news coverage. Once the Charon had come within range of terrestrial broadcasting, measurements had been confirmed corroborating that there had been a nuclear explosion in the no man’s land of the lunar North Pole, and the outing of the tour group had ended in disaster, with some prominent fatalities. And although the Secret Services tried to spread a cloak of silence over the events, there were rumours of a conspiracy aimed at destroying the American lunar base, with China as a possible source – totally unconsidered assertions that buzzed cheerfully around the net.

Downwinds of suspicion blew anti-Chinese ideas all around the world. In fact there wasn’t the slightest concrete evidence concerning the real masterminds behind it. Orley himself had taken the sting from the suspicions on the way back to OSS, announcing that it was only with the help of the taikonaut Jia Keqiang and the Chinese space authorities that it had been possible to prevent the attack at all. Regardless of this, British, American and Chinese media used the vocabulary of aggression. Not for the first time, China had attacked foreign networks, and it was common knowledge that Beijing administered Kim Jong Un’s military legacy. Voices warning that the space-travelling nations should finally pull together mingled with fears about the armament of space. Zheng Pang-Wang found himself in a public relations crisis when details emerged about the role of the Zheng Group in the construction of the launching pad in Equatorial Guinea. Rushing ahead, the Zhong Chan Er Bu made clear that nothing was known about anyone called Kenny Xin or an organisation called Yü Shen, which supposedly drew its recruits from psychiatric institutions and mental hospitals and trained them up as killers. But if this man Xin did exist, he was operating unambiguously against the interests of the Party. And why were Mr Orley and the Americans really surprised, when they withheld important technologies from the world and snubbed the international community with continued violations of the treaty concerning the Moon and space? This all sounded so familiar in terms of the lunar crisis that serious considerations about what the Chinese actually stood to gain from the destruction of Peary Base (nothing at all, according to seasoned analysts) faded into the background.

Standard lamp and carpet. Harmony refused to establish itself between the two.

Although her shared flat had gained an extra room after Grand Cherokee Wang’s demise, Yoyo had moved in with Tu. Temporarily, she stressed. Perhaps she wanted to stand by Hongbing, who was also staying in the villa until his own apartment had been refurbished, but Jericho suspected she was hoping for something like a confession after the openness of the last few days. She was preparing to resume her studies. Daxiong was working on his bike, disregarding medical advice, as if he didn’t have a freshly stitched wound in his back and an even bigger one in his heart, Tu devoted himself to the steam-train rhythm of his businesses, and pleasantly boring cases of web espionage awaited Jericho. After Operation Mountains of Eternal Light had come to such a bloody end, they had agreed that Hydra no longer posed a threat. They still faced questioning by the Chinese police, but did not feel obliged to reveal the circumstances under which Yoyo had come across the message fragment, particularly since the Secret Services had every reason to be grateful to them: in the end, what was more likely to exonerate Beijing from the accusations that were flying around than that the attack had been scuppered by the feisty actions of two Chinese and an Englishman living in China? The first three days of June had passed uneventfully, and Patrice Ho, Jericho’s high-ranking policeman friend from Shanghai, had called to announce his promotion and his move to Beijing.

‘Of course I know that your investigations gave a great boost to my career,’ he said. ‘So if you have any idea of how I can pay you back—’

‘Let’s just see it as a credit,’ said Jericho.

‘Hmm.’ Ho paused. ‘Perhaps I can come up with a way of increasing that credit.’

‘Aha.’

‘As you know, our investigations in Lanzhou were highly successful. We were able to take out a nest of paedophiles, and came across evidence that suggests—’

‘Hang on a second! You want me to go on poking around in the paedophile scene?’

‘Your experience might be very useful to us. Beijing places a lot of hope in me. After the double success in Shenzhen and Lanzhou, it might provoke irritation if our series of triumphs suddenly came to an end—’

‘I understand,’ sighed Jericho. ‘At the risk of squandering my credit, I’ve decided not to take on any more jobs of that kind. A few days ago I moved into a larger flat, and it’s already too small for all the ghosts I have lodging with me.’

‘You won’t have to go to the front line,’ Ho hurried to reassure him.

‘You know one always ends up on the front line.’

‘Of course. Sorry if I’ve put you under extra pressure.’

‘You haven’t. Can I think about it?’

‘Of course! When are we going to go for a beer?’

‘What about this week?’

‘Wonderful.’

Nothing was wonderful. The carpet and the standard lamp understood one another marvellously well. The point was that neither of them was in harmony with him. There was no harmony anywhere, and certainly no normality. As if by way of confirmation, Julian Orley’s face appeared larger than life-size on the holowall, against the open sky and surrounded by people. He was saying something as he pushed his way through the crowd, followed by the actor Finn O’Keefe and a thrillingly weird-looking woman with snow-white hair. Clearly the tour group had come back to Earth. Jericho turned up the sound and heard the commentator say:

‘—the explosion of the second mini-nuke at nine o’clock Central European time at a distance of 45,000 kilometres from the OSS, which it was clearly designed to destroy. Meanwhile fears are being raised that the series of nuclear attacks might resume. Julian Orley, who plans to leave Quito in the next few minutes, has so far refused—’

Jericho gave a start and turned the sound up again, but he seemed to have missed the most important bit. A news-ticker along the bottom of the screen carried the message of an attempted nuclear attack on the OSS, and said that the number of victims was as yet unknown. Jericho zapped through the channels. Clearly there had been a second atom bomb hidden on the shuttle that had carried the survivors from the Peary Base to the space station, but this had been discovered in time and detonated at a considerable distance from the OSS. Orley himself said that he didn’t plan to comment in any way. Jericho thought he had aged several years.

Yoyo called. ‘Did you hear that? The stuff about the second bomb?’

He switched from CNN to a Chinese news channel, but it was running a story about university reform. Another one was trying to talk down new Uyghur revolts in Xinjiang.

‘Very strange,’ he said. ‘Vogelaar didn’t mention a second bomb in his dossier.’

‘That means he only knew about one.’

‘Probably.’ The BBC was showing a special report on the events. ‘Luckily it’s nothing to do with us any more.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. God, I’m glad we’re out of that! And that they’re leaving us in peace – On the other hand, it’s awesome, isn’t it? It’s really awesome!’

Jericho stared at the red strip of the news-ticker.

‘Mm-hm,’ he said. ‘Everything else okay with you?’

‘Yep, fine.’ She hesitated. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I haven’t called, but there’s so much happening at the moment, I’m – I’m just trying to get back in step. It’s not that easy. I’ve got funerals of friends to go to, Daxiong is acting the hero, and my father – okay, we had a long talk, I think you know what about—’

These topics were always awkward. ‘And?’ he asked cautiously.

‘It’s all right, Owen, we can talk openly about it. You can’t tell me anything I haven’t found out already. What can I say? I’m glad he told me.’

She sounded oddly terse. She had suffered from Hongbing’s silence all her life, and now all she could find to say was that she was glad that he was suddenly communicating openly with her.

‘Hey!’ she said suddenly. ‘You do understand that we prevented those attacks? Without us there would be no moon base, and no OSS.’

A German channel. The same wobbly pictures of Orley and his group flickered across the holowall. A journalist with a microphone in his hand and the Pacific in the background claimed to have heard that a bomb had gone off on a spaceship, a moon shuttle, and that contrary to the initial reports there had been fatalities, at least one.

‘Just think about it – that would have set American space travel back by decades,’ Yoyo observed. ‘Wouldn’t it? What do you think? No space lift, no helium-3. Orley could have mothballed his fusion reactors.’

‘It almost looks as if we’re heroes,’ he said sourly.

‘Yeah. So we can cautiously start being proud of ourselves, can we? What are your plans for this evening?’

‘Shifting furniture. Sleeping.’ Jericho glanced at his watch. Half past ten. ‘Hopefully. I’ve been exhausted for three days and can’t get to sleep. Only towards the morning, for two or three hours.’

‘I’m the same. Take a pill.’

‘Don’t want to.’

‘Then it’s your own fault. See you later.’

After the call he no longer felt able to think in categories of Confucian interior design. Everything around him seemed to have lost its meaning, he could imagine any arrangement of furniture and none. A glass wall had appeared between him and the objects, harmony and normality became purely academic categories, as if a blind man were talking about colours. He turned off the television and found his jaws stretching into an endless, leonine yawn. According to Schopenhauer, the hero of his youth: Yawning is one of the reflex movements. I suspect that its more distant cause may be a momentary depotentiation of the brain caused by boredom, mental slackness or somnolence.

Was he bored? Was his brain growing slack? Was he depotentiated? Not at all. He was unsettlingly wide awake. He lay down fully dressed on the couch, turned out the light and tentatively closed his eyes. Perhaps if he avoided official actions like getting undressed or going to bed, he might trick his body and mind, which seemed to think that they had to resist sleep the more clearly he attempted to achieve it.

Half an hour later he knew better.

It wasn’t over. Hydra still held him in its embrace, its poison would rage in him until he had finally understood its nature. He couldn’t pretend that none of it concerned him any longer just because no one was trying to kill him. You couldn’t decide on normality; things didn’t come to an end just because you’d buried them in the past. The nightmare continued.

Who was Hydra?

He turned the lights back on. Yoyo was right. They’d found out a hell of a lot of things, they’d thwarted the plans of the conspirators, they had good reason to be proud. At the same time he felt as if they’d been looking through the wrong end of a telescope all along. The closest things had drifted into the distance, into supposed insignificance, but in fact all you had to do was turn the telescope around and the truth would move into the foreground. He opened a bottle of Shiraz, poured himself a glass and systematically crossed all previous suspects off the list: Beijing, Zheng Pang-Wang, the CIA. On closer inspection all of these trails had turned in a circle, but there might have been one that he hadn’t properly understood, one that carried straight on.

The Greenwatch massacre.

The complete leadership of the environmental broadcaster, all wiped out. Why? No one was able to say what Greenwatch had been working on most recently, even though there were several suggestions that there had been a report on environmental damage by oil companies. Loreena’s ambition to clear up the Calgary attack had finally focused attention on the film that supposedly showed Gerald Palstein’s attacker. But given how quickly these pictures had spread, the massacre could hardly have taken place in order to prevent their further dissemination.

He had Diane play through the film sequence once more. Towards the end, as the camera swung round towards the stage, you could see that the square was full of people with mobile phones, and surrounded by television crews. A miracle, in fact, that Xin hadn’t been captured more often, fat suit and all, at any rate Hydra should have predicted that and factored it in, but equally that might have been the first error of reasoning.

Perhaps they’d been banking on it!

The longer Jericho thought about the sequence, the more Xin’s weird disguise and his stately way of creeping around seemed to be part of an act designed to present investigators with an Asian assassin just in case he was caught on camera – just as Zheng’s visible presence in Equatorial Guinea had left an elephant track in the Middle Kingdom. There was a glimpse of Lars Gudmundsson with his double game; Palstein was still alive by happy chance, leaving the way open for Carl Hanna; Loreena Keowa got to the bottom of that, costing ten people their lives and Greenwatch its memory.

Did that make sense? Not really.

Unless she’d found out things at Greenwatch that really put the pressure on Hydra.

Loreena had travelled in from Calgary. Possibly in possession of explosive information. She had immediately gone to the editorial conference, a meeting that Hydra had been able to prevent at the last minute, although this meant that the conspirators still didn’t know how much of the unwelcome research was already stored on the channel’s hard drives, because Loreena might have sent emails in the run-up!

That was it.

Jericho got to work. While it was approaching midnight in Shanghai, the noonday sun was shining on the other side of the Pacific. He had Diane draw up a list of all the relevant internet service providers and started phoning them, one after the other, always on the same pretext: he was calling on behalf of Loreena, because it was impossible to send or receive emails from her web address, and would they please be so kind as to take a look and see why that wasn’t working. Eleven times he was told that no Loreena Keowa was stored as a customer, three of the people he spoke to knew Loreena from the net, had learned of her death and expressed their dismay, for which Jericho thanked them in his best funeral-director voice. He only struck gold with the twelfth call. He was asked to give a password, which meant that she was registered there. Jericho promised to call back. Then he hacked his way into the provider’s system and put Diane to decoding Loreena’s password. Every data transfer had been recorded, so that within a few minutes he received information about Loreena’s mail provider. He rang back, gave the password, and asked if any emails sent over the last fourteen days were still stored in the system. They were stored for up to six weeks, he was told, and which ones did he wish to see?

All of them, he said.

Half an hour later he had viewed all the documents concerning the environmental scandal, which, under the title Trash of the Titans, had been supposed to form the core of that broadcast. It named a lot of names, but Jericho didn’t believe in a connection for a second. The massacre had occurred as a reaction to the last email sent. It contained the answers to all the questions.

Hydra’s identity.

Gudmundsson—

The name sparked something in Jericho’s mind. Following an intuition, he took out Vogelaar’s dossier again, and there it was: Lars Gudmundsson had belonged to the special unit that had brought Mayé to power – along with Neil Gabriel, aka Carl Hanna. They both seemed to have got on particularly well with Kenny Xin, so well, in fact, that they had worked for him in various ways and finally quit APS. Loreena’s email also included the film from the crime scene, a direct line to Repsol and the private number of the presumably widowed Señora Ruiz. He had Diane assemble further facts about the Spaniard, but didn’t come up with much more than the journalist had already put together. In film sequences and pictures the man looked sympathetic, positive and energetic.

But after the meeting in Beijing he’d been worried.

And then he’d disappeared.

Why had that sudden change occurred? Because he’d experienced or learned something at the meeting that stressed him? Right, but more likely because he could no longer be sure of his life. If Alejandro Ruiz had actually fallen victim to a crime, it was because someone had wanted to keep the contents of that meeting from becoming public.

Had Hydra killed Ruiz because he knew about Operation Mountains of Eternal Light? But in that case how was Palstein involved? Loreena found striking factors in common between the two. Might Palstein have been informed about Hydra’s plans?

Jericho took a sip of Shiraz.

Nonsense. These were ludicrous hypotheses. Ruiz had disappeared immediately after the meeting. Before he could open his mouth. Why would they have given Pal-stein three years to bring his knowledge to the people? Calgary had clearly served the purpose of slipping an agent into Orley’s tour group, and also Palstein was alive, even if it was only by chance. Since then there had been no more attempts on his life, even though opportunities had arisen. Gudmundsson, for example, constantly near him for professional reasons, could have killed him with a close-range bullet at any time.

And why hadn’t he done it?

And why hadn’t he done it before? Before Calgary?

Hydra had managed to infiltrate Palstein’s inner circle, his security men. Why go to all that effort? A public event. Agents distracting the police. Kenny Xin, firing from an empty building? Why so laborious?

Because it was supposed to look like something that it wasn’t.

No doubt about it: the connection between Lima and Calgary, between Ruiz and Palstein, existed. Loreena’s research led directly to Hydra, otherwise the butchers of Vancouver wouldn’t have murdered ten people and got rid of their computers. So what had really happened on 21 April in Canada?

The meeting in Beijing provided the key.

He was about to phone Repsol in Madrid when the doorbell rang. Startled, he looked at his watch. Twenty past one. Drunks? The bell rang again. For a moment he toyed with the idea of ignoring it, then he went to the intercom and looked at the screen.

Yoyo.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in a puzzled voice.

‘How about you press the button?’ she snapped at him. ‘Or do I have to announce my visits in writing first?’

‘It’s not exactly the time of day when you expect visitors,’ he said as she stepped into his loft, her motorbike helmet under her arm. Yoyo shrugged. She set the helmet down on the central kitchen counter, ambled into the living area and glanced curiously around in all directions. He followed her.

‘Pretty.’

‘Not quite finished.’

‘Still.’ She pointed at the open bottle of Shiraz. ‘Is there another glass?’

Jericho scratched himself irritably behind the ear as she slipped out of her leather jacket and threw herself on his sofa.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Wait.’

He looked across to her and brought out a second glass. In the gloom of the lounge a reddish glimmer indicated that she had lit a cigarette. After he had filled her glass, they sat there for a few minutes, drinking in silence, and Yoyo sent smoke signals issuing from the corners of her mouth, encoded explanations for her presence. She stared into the void. From time to time the heavy curtains of her eyelashes seemed to want to wipe away what they had seen, but whenever she looked up her gaze was as lost as before. More than ever she reminded him of the girl in the video film that Chen Hongbing had shown him a week and a half before.

A week and a half?

It could just as easily have been a year.

‘And what are you up to at the moment?’ she asked, glancing at Diane.

‘Wondering what’s brought you here.’

‘Didn’t you want to go to bed? Get some sleep at last?’

‘I’ve tried.’

She nodded. ‘Me too. I thought it would be easier.’

‘Sleeping?’

‘Carrying on from where you’ve left off. But it’s like reaching into the void. A lot of things no longer exist. The control centre at the steelworks. The Guardians. And I’ve seen Grand Cherokee’s room with all his stuff in it, as if he were about to come back. Spooky. On the other hand, college is college. The same professors, the same lecture theatres. The same administration that makes sure you don’t start thinking too independently. The same chicken coop, the same battles and trivia. I listen to music, I go out, watch television, remind myself that everyone else is even worse off than me, that I could be dead, and that the banality of everyday life has its good side. I try to convince myself that I should be feeling relieved.’

Jericho crossed his legs. He sat in silence on the floor in front of her, his back resting against a chair.

‘And then the thing I’ve been waiting for all my life happens. Hongbing takes me in his arms, tells me how much he loves me and showers me with tragedies. The whole terrible story. And I know I should be letting off fireworks for this moment, I should die of pity, go mad with joy, throw my arms around his neck, the bastards have no power over us now, it’s all going to be okay, we can talk to each other at last, we’re a family! Instead’ – she blew smoke-snakes in the air – ‘my head feels like a chest of a thousand drawers, everyone stuffs whatever he feels like into it, and now my father’s joining in! I think, Yoyo, you miserable little cripple, why don’t you feel anything? Come on, now, you’ve got to feel something, after all, you wished—’ She reached for her glass, downed the contents and sucked the remaining life from her cigarette. ‘You so wished he would talk to you! Even when Kenny held his bloody gun to my head, I thought, no! I don’t want to die without finding out what threw his life so far off the rails. But now I know, I just feel… full.’

Jericho turned his glass around in his hand.

‘And at the same time hollowed out,’ she went on. ‘That’s crazy, isn’t it? Nothing moves me! As if this isn’t the world as I used to know it, but a mere copy of it. Everything looks as if it’s made of cardboard.’

‘And you think it’ll never be normal again.’

‘It scares me, Owen. Maybe everything’s all right with the world, and I’m the copy. Maybe the real Yoyo was shot by Xin after all.’

Jericho stared at his feet.

‘In a sense she was.’

‘Xin stole something that night.’ She looked at him. ‘Took something. Took me away. I can no longer feel what I should be feeling. I’m no longer able to give my father the respect I should. Not even to burst dramatically into floods of tears.’

‘Because it isn’t over yet.’

‘I want it back. I want to be me again.’

She lit another cigarette. Again they were silent for a while, lost in smoke and thoughts.

‘We haven’t yet woken up, Yoyo.’ He threw his head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘That’s our problem. For three days I’ve been trying to tell myself that I don’t want to have anything more to do with Hydra. Or with Xin and all the freaks that frolic in my head when everyone else is asleep. I furnish my life with knick-knacks, I try and make it look as normal and unspectacular as possible, but it feels wrong. As if I’d ended up on a stage—’

‘Yes, exactly!’

‘And a little while ago, after we spoke on the phone, I understood. We’re still trapped in this nightmare, Yoyo. It pretends we’re awake, but we aren’t. We’re watching an illusion. It’s far from over.’ He sighed. ‘I’m actually obsessed by Hydra! I have to go on working on this case. Clearing out the cellar in which I’ve been burying people alive for years. Hydra is turning into the model of my life and the question of how it’s going to go on from here. I have to face up to these ghosts to get rid of them, even if it costs me my courage or my reason. I can’t, won’t, go on like this. I can’t bear living like this, do you understand? I want to wake up at last.’

Otherwise we will be trapped for ever in an imaginary world, he thought. Then we won’t be proper people, we’ll only ever be the echoes of our unresolved past.

‘And – have you kept on working on the case? On our case?’

‘Yes.’ Jericho nodded. ‘Over the past two hours. When you arrived, I was about to phone Madrid.’

‘Madrid?’

‘An oil company called Repsol.’

He saw her face light up, so he told her about his research, familiarised her with Loreena’s last email and introduced her to his theories. With every word Hydra slithered further into that dark loft, stretched her necks, fixed her pale yellow eyes on them. In their effort to shake the monster off, they had conjured it up, but something had changed. The monster didn’t come to ambush and chase them, but because they had lured it, and for the first time Jericho felt stronger than the snake. Finally he dialled the number of the Spanish company.

‘Of course!’ a man’s voice said in English. ‘Loreena Keowa! I tried to get through to her a number of times. Why does she never answer?’

‘She had an accident,’ said Jericho. ‘A fatal accident.’

‘How terrible.’ The man paused. When he went on speaking, there was an under-tone of suspicion. ‘And you are—’

‘A private detective. I’m trying to continue Miss Keowa’s work and shed some light on the circumstances of her death.’

‘I see.’

‘She’d asked you for information, right?’

‘Erm – that’s right.’

‘About a meeting in Beijing that Alejandro Ruiz took part in before he disappeared?’

‘Yes. Yes, exactly.’

‘I’m pursuing that trail. It might be the same people that have Ruiz and Loreena on their conscience. You would be doing me a great favour if you would let me have the information.’

‘Well—’ The other man hesitated. Then he sighed. ‘Sure, why not. Will you keep us up to date? We’d very much like to know what happened to Ruiz.’

‘Of course.’

‘So, we’ve gone through the documents here. In 2022 Ruiz had just been appointed head of the strategy department. He was moving heaven and earth to open up new areas of business. Some of the oil multinationals were increasingly looking into joint ventures, so there were discussions in Beijing, for a whole week—’

‘Why there?’

‘No real reason. They could equally well have met in Texas or Spain. Perhaps because the most important was a project between Repsol, EMCO and the Chinese oil company Sinopec, so they agreed on Beijing. The initiator of the joint venture suggested that it should be turned into a business summit. Almost all the big companies agreed to take part, which meant that discussions went on all week without interruption. Ruiz was happy about that. He thought something might change.’

‘Do you have any idea what he might have meant by that?’

‘Not really, to be quite honest.’

‘And where did the summit meet?’

‘At the Sinopec Congress Centre on the edge of Chaoyang, a district to the northeast of Beijing.’

‘And Ruiz was in good spirits?’

‘Most of the time, yes, although it turned out that the train had already pulled out. On the other hand, it could hardly have got worse. On the last day of the summit he called and said that at least the week hadn’t been wasted, and there was one last session that evening, more of an unofficial meeting. A few of them wanted to get together and discuss a few ideas.’

‘And the meeting was also held in the Congress Centre?’

‘No, further out. In the district of Shunyi, he said, at a private house. The next day he looked depressed and unwell. I asked him how the meeting had gone. He reacted oddly. He said nothing had come out of it, and he’d left early.’

‘Do you know who took part in it?’

‘Not explicitly. Ruiz had hinted that representatives of the big companies had come together – I guess we were the smallest fish in the pond. Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, South Americans, Arabs. A proper summit. Not much seems to have come out of it.’

I wouldn’t be so sure of that, thought Jericho.

‘I’d need a list of official participants at the summit,’ he said, ‘if such a thing still exists.’

‘I’ll send it to you. Give me an email address.’

Jericho passed on his details and thanked the man. He promised to get in touch as soon as anything new came in, signed off and looked at Yoyo.

‘What do you think?’

‘A meeting in which senior oil company representatives take part,’ she mused. ‘An unofficial one. Ruiz doesn’t wait for the end. Why does he leave?’

‘He might have felt unwell. That’s the harmless explanation.’

‘That we don’t believe.’

‘Of course not. He left because he’d come to the conclusion that the whole thing was going nowhere, because there was an argument, or because he didn’t want to go along with whatever they decided.’

‘If he’d just been angry, he’d have told his people or his wife the reasons. Instead he said nothing.’

‘He felt threatened.’

‘He was afraid they might hush him up because he didn’t want to play.’

‘As they did, by the look of it.’

‘And who are they?’

‘Hmm.’ Jericho pursed his lips. ‘We’re thinking along the same lines, aren’t we?’

Yoyo stayed with him that night. Nothing happened except that they emptied another bottle of wine together and he held her in his arms, faintly surprised that he only wanted to console her: a girl overtaxed by adulthood, intelligent, talented and beautiful who, at the age of only twenty-five, had already driven wedges of insecurity into the armour of the Party and at the same time preserved the attitude of a teenager, a punishing, immature stroppiness that was every bit as unerotic as her efforts to defy biology and keep from growing up. It seemed to him that Yoyo wanted to stay in adolescence for ever, or until circumstances calmed down enough to grant her a more peaceful youth than the one she had already had. He, on the other hand, wanted only to wipe out this phase of his life, those said transitional years. Small wonder, then, that neither of them felt what they should have felt, as Yoyo had put it.

He thought about this, and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he felt lighter.

There was someone else with them in the room. He looked up, and that shy boy who had been hurt so often was sitting in the gloom of the loft, watching his fingers glide through Yoyo’s hair. Numbed with red wine and worry, he stared straight ahead, while the boy’s eyes filled with tears of disappointment that girls like Yoyo only ever used boys like him to talk to. His nose, disproportionately swollen by the beginnings of puberty, was still too big for his otherwise childish face. His hair needed washing, and of course he was wearing the stuff he always wore, a human being who loved everyone and everything more than he loved himself. How Jericho had hated the little bastard who couldn’t understand why that adult man with the girl in his arms, the girl he could have had there and then, wasn’t declaring his love – why he suddenly didn’t desire her, when he had desired her, hadn’t he?

Had he?

Jericho saw the boy sitting there, felt his paralysing, nagging fear of being inadequate, failing, being rejected. And suddenly he didn’t hate him any more. Instead he drew him into the embrace, he granted him absolution and assured him that he wasn’t to blame for anything, anything at all. He expressed his sympathy. Explained the necessity of finally disappearing from his life, since he had vanished from it in a purely physical sense long ago, and promised him that they would both find peace sooner or later.

The boy turned pale.

He would come back, that much was certain, but for that night at least they were reconciled. The world became more tangible, more colourful. Towards morning, when Yoyo lay snoring quietly on his belly, he still hadn’t slept a wink, and yet he wasn’t tired in the slightest. He carefully lifted her shoulders, slipped from the sofa and let her drop back. She murmured, turned on her side and rolled into a ball. Jericho looked at her. He wondered excitedly who would appear once she had shed the foolish costume of the eternal teenager. Someone very thrilling, he suspected. And she would be happy and adult. She just didn’t know it yet. She would be able to feel everything, not what she was supposed to feel, not what she wanted to feel, but just what she actually felt.

Just before nine. He picked up his phone, went into the kitchen area and put on a strong pot of coffee. He knew what he had to do, and how they could nail those bastards.

Time to make a call.

‘I’ve been thinking about your offer,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ Patrice Ho seemed surprised. ‘I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.’

‘Some decisions are quick to make.’

‘Owen, before you say something—’ Ho hemmed and hawed. ‘I’m sorry if I behaved badly in any way. I didn’t mean to put any pressure on you – you must think I’m never satisfied.’

‘I hope you aren’t,’ said Jericho. ‘Not in terms of the results, anyway. So I will go on supporting you in this paedophile case.’

‘You will?’ Short pause. ‘You’re a friend! A true friend. I’m more obliged to you than ever.’

‘Good. Then I’d like to call in some of my credit.’

‘And I’ll be happy to help you!’

‘Just wait. It’s possible that you’re not going to like it.’

‘That’s what I’m assuming,’ Ho said drily.

‘Right, listen. In the last week of August 2022, in Beijing, or more precisely in the Sinopec Congress Centre in the district of Chaoyang, there was a meeting of international oil companies. I’ll send you the list of participants. On the last day of the summit, on the evening of 1 September, some of these people met up unofficially in the district of Shunyi. I don’t know who took part in that meeting, but it seems to have been an illustrious circle. And I don’t know where the meeting took place.’

‘And that’s what I’m to find out. I get it.’ Ho paused. ‘This sounds like a routine investigation. What wouldn’t I like about it?’

‘The second part of my request.’

‘Which would be?’

‘I can only tell you once I’ve got the answer to part one.’

‘Fine. I’ll sort it out.’

Jericho felt the life flowing back into his veins. The prey had become the hunter! In tense expectation he viewed his emails and saw that the Repsol man had sent the whole schedule of the summit, and sure enough, everybody had met in Beijing, representatives of almost every company that was involved or ever had been involved in the oil and gas business, strategists almost to a man.

He went through the list and gave a start.

Of course! That was only to be expected. And yet—

He quickly passed on the details to Ho, looked in on Yoyo, who was fast asleep, sat back down at the kitchen counter and started coming up with theories.

And all of a sudden everything fell into place.

Late that afternoon – Yoyo had groggily gone on her way, not without asking to be updated on the latest developments – Patrice Ho called him back.

‘Three years is a long time,’ he said, trying to make it sound exciting, ‘but I may have found something. I can’t tell you exactly who took part in the meeting, but I can tell you with some certainty where it took place and who the host was.’

‘A private house?’

‘Correct. There are no Sinopec facilities in Shunyi, but the strategy manager of the company lives there. Big property. We looked into him just for a laugh, and found out that he lives notoriously beyond his means, but yes, lots of people do that. His name is Joe Song. He represented Sinopec during the summit. Can you do anything with that?’

‘I think so, yeah.’ A name, another name! Now it would all depend on whether he was right. ‘Thanks! That’s all fine.’

‘I get it. Now comes the bit I’m not going to like.’

‘Yes. You have to hack into Song’s computer.’

‘Hmm.’

‘It could be that I’m mistaken and the guy has nothing to hide. But if—’

‘Owen, listen. A promise is a promise, okay? But before I do that, I need more information. I’ve got to know where your investigations are leading.’

Jericho hesitated. ‘Possibly to the retrieval of the Chinese government’s honour.’

‘Aha.’

‘You promise to help me anyway?’

‘As I said—’

‘Okay, listen up. I’ll give you the background. Then I’ll tell you what you need to look for.’

Twenty minutes later, when he could be certain that the Repsol man had drunk his first café con leche, he called Madrid again.

‘Can I bother you again?’

‘Of course.’

‘You mentioned that the joint venture planned between Sinopec, Repsol and EMCO was based on an initiative. Can you remember who the initiator was?’

‘Sure.’ The man told him the name. ‘By the way, he was the one who blew the whole thing up into a summit and suggested holding it in Beijing. Sinopec liked that. The Chinese like the world being negotiated on their territory.’

‘Thanks. You’ve been a great help.’

The initiator—

Jericho smiled grimly. He saw the Hydra stretching its necks, darting its heads forwards, baring its fangs. It hissed at him, but its mighty serpentine body bent and started slowly retreating.

That night he slept a deep and dreamless sleep.

The next day, radio silence till lunchtime. Then Ho rang, and he sounded just as excited as he had two and a half weeks previously, when Jericho had passed on the news of the capture of Animal Ma Liping.

‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘You were right.’

Jericho’s heartbeat did a drumroll.

‘What exactly did you find?’

‘The icon. That snaky thing, what’s the creature called again?’

‘Hydra.’

‘On Song’s company computer! Hidden among other programs. To make his deleted emails visible again. However, we’ll have to get at his hard disk.’

‘No problem. You have sufficient grounds to arrest him officially.’

‘Owen, that could—’ Ho caught his breath. ‘That could make my promotion to Beijing—’

‘I know.’ Jericho smiled. ‘Bust the guy. You’ll find data that look like white noise, but using that icon you’ll be able to get a message out of it without too much difficulty.’

‘I’ll call you. I’ll call you!’

‘Wait!’ Jericho started to pace back and forth, kept in motion by adrenalin. ‘We need the other participants in the meeting. It only looks like a plot by a business sector, it’s really a conspiracy by a small number of people. We’ve got to get to them. Focused and fast, so that none of them has a chance to get away. Perhaps you’ll manage to wring a confession from our friend by pointing out the mitigating circumstances.’

‘Like him being able to keep his head attached to his neck,’ sniffed Ho.

‘Oh, come on. I thought the death penalty was abolished in 2021.’

‘So it was. But I can always threaten to bring it back specially for him. Soon we’ll know who the other participants were, you can be sure of that!’

‘Fine. If he doesn’t talk, we’ll have to check out every single alibi. I know that’s going to be a big job.’

‘Not really. I’d say the companies will be very interested in getting the truth into the open. In times like these, they don’t want to cock up their reputations.’

‘Whatever. It will have to be a concerted action. That means you’ll have to bring in MI6 and the American Secret Service, as well as the Secret Services of all the countries affected. Then I’m going to phone Orley Enterprises, so promise me that the Chinese police won’t stonewall. You’re going to be bathed in glory.’

‘The glory will be yours, Owen!’

Jericho said nothing.

Did he want that? Did he want to be bathed in glory? A little bit proud, perhaps, as Yoyo had suggested. They’d earned that, Yoyo, Tian and he. And apart from that, he just needed one more good night’s sleep.

Early in the afternoon, Joe Song, the oil strategist, was arrested in his office, looked completely dumbfounded, and the investigators went to work. Just as restorers work their way through layers of paint to reveal much older art, they brought to light Song’s deleted emails, supposed white noise which, with the expert use of the decoding program, was shaped into a document whose contents were enough to put Song in jail for the rest of his life.

And yet he denied everything. For an evening and a night he denied having anything to do with the attacks, and nor did he know anything about an organisation called Hydra, or how the icon and the message had found their way onto the Sinopec computer. Meanwhile a police unit was raging around his house before the eyes of his terrified wife, and found another gleaming, pulsing Hydra on Song’s private computer, and the manager still claimed not to know anything. It took a night in jail and two consultations with his lawyers, before Patrice Ho, on the afternoon of 6 June – in a soundproofed room – vividly presented him with the bleakness of the rest of his life, but not without suggesting a possible way out in the event that he admitted everything.

After that Joe Song couldn’t stop talking.

Jericho listened ecstatically to what Ho went on to tell him. Immediately afterwards he dialled Jennifer Shaw’s number. It was nine in the morning in London, and he was almost pleased to be seeing her again.

‘Owen! You keeping okay?’

‘Pretty good now, thanks. You?’

‘The Big O makes an ants’ nest look like a Zen monastery. All the investigations get concentrated here so that you can’t take so much as a step without getting hopelessly entangled.’

‘Doesn’t necessarily sound as if you’ve achieved clarity.’

‘Still, by now we know that Gaia’s hotel manager was a former Mossad agent. Good that you called, though. Julian seems to have triplicated himself. He’s working round the clock, but I know he wanted to call you at the next possible opportunity.’

‘So is he there?’

‘He’s buzzing around the place. Shall I try to put you through?’

‘I’ve got a much better suggestion, Jennifer. Bring him here.’

Shaw raised a Mr Spock eyebrow.

‘I assume you have more on your mind than just saying hello.’

He smiled. ‘You’re going to like it.’

A short time later they were all gathered in Jericho’s loft, projected vivid and life-sized on Tu’s holowall, and Jericho played his cards. Orley didn’t interrupt him once, while his eyebrows drew together until they stood like craggy mountain ranges above his clear blue eyes, but when he finally turned his head towards Shaw, his voice sounded calm and relaxed.

‘Prepare a helicopter to the airport,’ he said. ‘From there we’ll take the jet. We’ll pay him a visit.’

‘Now?’ asked Shaw.

‘When else do you suggest?’

‘To be quite honest I haven’t the faintest idea where he is right now. But okay, of course we can—’

‘You don’t need to.’ Orley smiled fiercely. ‘I know where he is. He told me, right after we got back. When he called to express his dismay.’

‘Of course,’ said Shaw devotedly. ‘When do you want to fly?’

‘Give me an hour for hand luggage. Inform Interpol, MI6, but they’re not to steal the show. Owen?’ Orley stood up. ‘Do you want to come?’

Jericho hesitated. ‘Where to?’

Orley told him the name of the city. It really wasn’t terribly far – for a well-motorised Englishman.

Suddenly he burst out laughing.

‘I’m in Shanghai, Julian.’

‘So?’ Orley looked around, as if to prove that there were no problems in view. ‘This is your moment, Owen! Who cares about distances? I don’t. Take the next highspeed jet, I’ll book you a ticket.’

‘Very kind of you, but—’

‘Kind?’ Orley tilted his head. ‘Do you have any idea what I owe you? I’ll carry you on my shoulders if I have to! No, here’s what we’ll do, have we got one of our Mach 4 jets anywhere in his vicinity? Find that out for me, Jennifer, I think there’s one in Tokyo, isn’t there? We’ll collect you, Owen. And bring Tu Tian with you, and that wonderful girl—’

‘Julian, wait.’

‘It’s not a problem, it really isn’t.’

Jericho shook his head. I’ve got more important things to do, he was about to say. I have to marry a standard lamp and a carpet in a Confucian ceremony, that’s my life, but he didn’t want to insult Orley, particularly since, as Shaw had predicted, he actually liked him. The Englishman radiated something that made you unreservedly willing to plunge into the next adventure with him.

‘I can’t get away from here right now,’ he said. ‘I have clients, and you know how it is – you shouldn’t leave anyone in the lurch.’

‘No, you’re right.’ Orley stroked his beard, clearly displeased by the situation. Then he turned his sea-blue eyes back towards Jericho. ‘But perhaps there’s a possibility of staying in Shanghai and still being in on it – but honestly, Owen, can you sleep peacefully without having brought all this to its conclusion?’

‘No,’ said Jericho wearily. ‘But it’s no longer my—’ He paused, searching for the right word.

‘Campaign?’ Orley nodded. ‘Okay, my friend. I know. You have to finish off your own story, not mine. Still, listen to my suggestion. It involves putting in a brief appearance, but you shouldn’t miss out on that, Owen. You really shouldn’t!’

Venice, Italy

The record for the biggest man-made mirror in the world was disputed by the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Arizona on the top of Mount Graham – two individual mirrors, to be precise, each one eight and a half metres in diameter and sixteen tonnes in weight – and the Hobby Eberle Telescope in Texas, consisting of reflecting cells over a surface of eleven metres by ten. On the other hand, there was no disputing the most beautiful mirror in the world. In times of global flooding, the Piazza San Marco in Venice surpassed anything that had ever been seen before.

Gerald Palstein sat outside the Caffè Florian, buffeted by the unceasing stream of tourists that repelled him just as much as the flooded Piazza San Marco magically attracted him. For some years now the square had been continuously underwater. For the sake of it, he accepted the invasive spectacle, particularly since something was slowly changing in the behaviour of the visitors. Even in Japanese tour groups, you could now detect a certain reluctance to cross the square on sunny days like this and disturb the peace of the ankle-high standing water that perfectly reflected the Basilica di San Marco, the Campanile in front of it and the surrounding Procuratie, a world based on water and at the same time commemorated in it, a symbolic glimpse of the future. As inexorably as the lagoon rose, the city was sinking into the sea, like lovers seeking to unite even if it means that they merge together.

Apart from that, nothing in the city had changed. As ever, the clock tower diagonally opposite, with its passageway to the Mercerie, showed the phases of the sun and moon and the star signs on a background of lapis lazuli, and sent out bronze guardians to segment the earth and the universe into hours with its booming chimes, while faint breezes drifted across the one-and-a-half-square-kilometre mirror and rippled the architecture without dissolving it, as if the ghosts of Dalí and Hundertwasser were frolicking in the square.

Palstein scraped the sticky and delicious crust of sugar from the bottom of his espresso cup. His wife hadn’t wanted to come and was preparing to leave for an Indian ashram, which she had been visiting at increasingly close intervals ever since an exhibition opening where she had met a guru who had a knack of luring what he wanted from people’s souls and bank balances. In point of fact Palstein preferred it that way. Alone, he didn’t have to talk, or pretend to be interested, or see things that he would rather block out. He could live in the pleasant stillness of Venice reflected in the water, just as Alice had passed through her mirror to visit the world that lay on the other side.

Noise. Shouts. Laughter.

A moment later the illusion passed, as a group of teenagers splashed their way through the surface of the water and everything turned into a wild, splashing daub.

Idiots, destroying a masterpiece!

The illusion of a masterpiece.

Palstein watched after them, too tired to get angry. Wasn’t that always the way? You took such trouble building something, brought it to a state of perfection, and then a few hooligans came along and destroyed it all. He paid the exorbitant cost of the espresso and chamber music, strolled through the arcades of the piazzetta to the Bacino di San Marco, where the Doge’s Palace lay along the deeper water, and followed the footbridges to the Biennale gardens. Near there, by a quiet canal in the tranquil sestiere of Castello, he had an early dinner at the Hostaria da Franz, which experts held to be the best fish restaurant in Venice, had a chat with Gianfranco, the old proprietor, a man whose life was a Humboldt-style exploration of the world along paths both straight and winding, who would stir himself for nothing except perhaps the sight of a few empty glasses, hugged both him and Maurizio, his son, as he left, and boarded a water taxi that brought him to the Grand Canal and the Palazzo Loredan. EMCO had bought the magnificent early Renaissance building in better days, and had forgotten, during the insanity of its systematic decline, to get rid of it. The building still stood open to the company executives, though it had not been used for ages. But because Palstein loved Venice, and thought nothing was more appropriate to his position than the symbol of everything transient, he had come here for a week.

By now the sun was low over the canal. The rattle and chug of the vaporetti and the barges mingled with the hum of elegant motorboats, the sound of accordions and the tenor voices of the gondolieri, to form an aural backdrop unlike anything anywhere else in the world. Now that the ground floor was underwater, he entered the palazzo via a higher entrance, and climbed the wooden staircase to the piano nobile, the first floor. Where the late sunlight came in through the windows, sofas and armchairs were gathered around a low glass table.

In one of the chairs sat Julian Orley.

Palstein gave a start. Then he quickened his pace, hurried the cathedral-like width of the room and spread out his arms.

‘Julian,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a surprise!’

‘Gerald.’ Orley got to his feet. ‘You weren’t expecting me, were you?’

‘No, absolutely not.’ Palstein hugged the Englishman, who returned the embrace, a bit firmly, it seemed to him.

‘How long have you been in Venice?’

‘Got here an hour ago. Your concierge was kind enough to let me in, once I’d persuaded him I wasn’t about to steal the Murano chandeliers.’

‘Why didn’t you call? We could have gone for dinner. As it was I had to make do with the best turbot I’ve ever eaten, all by myself.’ Palstein walked over to a little bar, took out two glasses and a bottle and turned round. ‘Grappa? Prime uve, soft in the mouth, and drinkable in large quantities.’

‘Bring it over.’ Julian sat back down. ‘We must clink glasses, my old friend. We have something to celebrate.’

‘Yes, your return.’ Palstein thoughtfully considered the label, half filled the glasses and sat down opposite Julian. ‘Let’s drink to survival,’ he smiled. ‘To your survival.’

‘Good idea.’ The Englishman raised his glass, took a good swig and set the drink back down. Then he opened a bag, took out a laptop, flipped it open and turned it on. ‘Because drinking to yours would be like drinking to the future of a hanged man. If you catch my meaning.’

Palstein blinked, still smiling.

‘Quite honestly, no.’

The screen lit up. A camera showed the picture of a man who looked familiar to Palstein. A moment later he remembered. Jericho! Of course! That damned detective.

‘Good evening, Gerald,’ Jericho said in a friendly voice.

Palstein hesitated.

‘Hello, Owen. What can I do for you?’

‘The same thing you once did in the Big O. Help us. You helped us a lot back then, you remember?’

‘Of course. I’d have been happy to do even more.’

‘Fine. Now’s your chance. Julian would like to know a lot of things, but first there’s something I’d like to tell you. You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve solved the mystery of the Calgary shooting.’

Palstein said nothing.

‘Even though I was worried I would have a tough time of it.’ Jericho smiled, as if remembering a hurdle overcome. ‘Because you see, Gerald, if someone had wanted you out of the way – someone who had managed to infiltrate Lars Gudmundsson into your security men – why would he have needed a spectacle like Calgary? Why didn’t Gudmundsson just quietly get on with it and shoot you? Even in the Big O it seemed to me that the whole assassination attempt was a staged event, but who was it for? Eventually it occurred to me that Hydra – an organisation I don’t need to tell you anything more about – had decided to present the world with a Chinese assassin, if Xin was captured on camera in Calgary. And that was certainly one of the reasons, just as Hydra went on leaving trails back to China – on the one hand because the Chinese were the ideal scapegoat, but probably also because open conflict would have further held up the lunar projects of the space powers after the success of Operation Mountains of Eternal Light. But even seen in this perspective, the attack made no sense. Anyone as intimately acquainted with Kenny Xin as we are knows, for example, that he is infatuated with flechettes. In Quyu, in Berlin, on the roof of the Big O, it’s the ammunition he’s always used. But in Calgary he settled for decidedly smaller projectiles. Your injury will have been painful, but entirely harmless, as a conversation with your doctors should confirm.’

Palstein stared into his glass.

‘Take this from someone who’s managed to escape Xin several times. He was ahead of us in London and Berlin, and he cost us a lot of lives. He’s a phenomenal marksman! Definitely not somebody who’s going to miss a target just because he trips, especially when he’s got an unobstructed view. But even if we were willing to accept that stumbling drew the first shot to your shoulder rather than your head, the second would have got you before you reached the ground.’ Jericho paused. ‘You were hit, nevertheless, Gerald. But certainly, however much you’ve risked and invested, it can’t have been in your interest to come away with a serious injury. And I know very few marksmen who could pull off such a precision shot as the one in Calgary: hitting a man while he pretends to slip, without giving him anything more than a completely harmless flesh wound that will heal very quickly. A masterpiece, after which with the best will in the world, no one could suspect that you’d cleared the way for Gabriel – or shall we call him Hanna? – to join Julian’s group. Even in the unlikely event that someone discovered details about the operation, you’d covered your tracks. Against this background, Loreena’s discovery of the video can hardly have troubled you that much, can it? It too was factored in.’

‘I admired Loreena for her sharpness of mind,’ said Palstein. He was listening with great interest to the lecture.

‘Of course you did,’ said the detective. ‘Except that you wouldn’t have predicted in a million years that she would dig out Ruiz and establish a connection with a very particular meeting in Beijing three years ago. At that point things got tight, very tight.’

‘I warned Loreena,’ sighed Palstein. ‘Several times. You may not believe it, but I was very keen to spare her that death. I liked her.’

‘And Lynn?’ Julian said, quietly severe. ‘What about Lynn? Didn’t you like her?’

‘I was prepared to make sacrifices.’

‘My daughter.’

Palstein thoughtfully slipped his finger along the edge of his glass.

‘Seven people in Quyu,’ Jericho went on. ‘Ten in Vancouver, Vogelaar, Nyela. Even Norrington couldn’t have imagined that working with you would be quite like that. And purely out of interest, who took care of Greenwatch?’

‘Gudmundsson.’ Palstein stiffened. ‘We had to make sure that there was no editorial conference. I told him to disappear immediately after the operation.’

‘Which wonderfully confirmed your victim status once again. Gerald Palstein, betrayed by everybody. Might I also take the opportunity to ask you what happened to Alejandro Ruiz?’

‘We had to disassociate ourselves from him.’

Should he tell them how Xin and Gudmundsson had put the Spaniard on a boat while the city of Lima slept, and introduced him to the world of marine life? What sharks, crabs and bacteria had left of him rested in the silent darkness of the Peruvian ocean trench. No, too many details. They’d never get out of here.

‘He was a weakling,’ he said. ‘He was more than happy to do something about helium-3, convinced as he was that we were merely going to blow up a few digging machines. When Hydra met at Song’s house on the evening of 1 September, it turned out that I’d misjudged him. Unlike everyone else, by the way. I selected the heads of Hydra very carefully over a period of months. They had to have influence, and the power to divert large sums into fake projects without anyone asking any questions. But above all they had to be willing to do anything. As expected, when Xin and I presented Operation Mountains of Eternal Light, it only came as a surprise to Ruiz. He was completely horrified. Turned white as a sheet. Stormed out.’

‘He threatened to blow Hydra’s cover?’

‘His next step was predictable.’

‘Which meant that his fate was too.’

Palstein ran his hands over his eyes. He was tired. Shockingly tired.

‘And how are you going to prove all this?’ he asked.

‘It’s been proved already, Gerald. Joe Song’s confessed. We know the heads of Hydra, and right at this very minute they’re all getting visits from representatives of their national authorities. They will find snake icons and white noise on the computers of some of the world’s biggest oil companies. Really titanic stuff, Gerald. Regardless of borders and ideologies. You were the initiator of the joint venture between Sinopec, Repsol and EMCO, you turned the meeting in Beijing into a summit, but it’s Hydra that’ll make you go down in history.’ Jericho paused. ‘Except that your name will not be mentioned in very flattering contexts. By the way, how did you get hold of guys like Xin?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, Owen.’ Julian, who had until then been sitting with legs crossed, sat forward. ‘It should be: how did Xin get hold of people like Gerald.’

‘In Africa,’ Palstein said calmly. ‘In Equatorial Guinea, 2020, when Mayé was still of interest to EMCO.’

‘Why all this, Gerald?’ Julian shook his head. ‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why did you go so far?’

‘You’re seriously asking me that?’ Palstein stared at him listlessly. ‘To defend my interests. Just as you defend yours. The interests of my sector.’

‘With atom bombs?’

‘Do you seriously imagine I wouldn’t have done absolutely anything to solve the problems in a peaceful manner? Everybody knows how much I fought to steer the dinosaur in a different direction to the one it was cheerfully heading in, towards the hurtling meteorite that would seal its extinction. In most alternative sectors we could have held our own. But we missed all opportunities, we neglected to buy Lightyears, to get Locatelli on our side, even though it was already clear that helium-3 would mean the end for us. And I even tried to get a foothold in the helium-3 business, as you know, except that I wasn’t given permission to draw up an agreement with you.’

‘Which you were on the point of doing.’

‘In the event of failure, yes. Not if two atom bombs had just destroyed the helium-3 mining infrastructure and set things back by decades.’

And suddenly, enraged by the wasted potential of his plan, he jumped to his feet, fists clenched.

‘I’d calculated everything, Julian! The consequences if we’d destroyed either the space lift or Peary Base, but it was only the double whammy that produced the best results. Like China, the Americans would have had to deploy conventional rockets to carry helium-3 to Earth, which would never have happened! Everyone knows that China’s extraction is running at a loss. But even if they’d taken such a step, the extracted quantities would have remained pitiful. You would have had to build a new space lift, a new space station, and that would have taken at least twenty years. You wouldn’t have had it financed as quickly as you did the first time. And only if shuttle transports had been possible from the orbit to the Moon would you have been able to rebuild the infrastructure up there, and even that would have taken years, maybe decades.’

‘But in forty or fifty years it’ll all be over anyway. Then you’ll be finished, because there’ll be nothing left!’

‘Forty years, yes!’ snorted Palstein. ‘Forty years of business left to us. Four decades of survival, in the course of which we could have made up for the mess made by all those idiots, my predecessors included. We could have reorganised. As long ago as 2020 I commissioned an analysis of all the possible scenarios of what would happen if helium-3 extraction were carried out successfully within a precise time frame. It meant our annihilation. We had to stand up to you!’

‘We?’ whispered Julian. ‘You and your gang of lunatics dare to speak for the whole sector? For thousands of decent people?’

‘Thousands of people who would have lost their jobs,’ yelled Palstein. ‘A damaged global economy! Look around you! Wake up! How many countries, how many people who depend on oil will be damaged by your helium-3? Have you thought about that?’

‘And you were once called the green conscience of the energy sector.’

‘Because I am!’ Palstein cried. ‘But sometimes you have to go against your convictions. Do you think four more decades of oil economy would do more damage to the planet than it’s done already? We might be a gang of lunatics, but—’

‘No,’ said Jericho’s voice from the laptop. ‘You’re not insane, Gerald. You are calculating, and that’s the worst thing about you. Like any other halfwit, you find a reason to blame your crimes on circumstances. You’re not special.’

Palstein said nothing. He slowly dropped back into his chair and stared at his feet.

‘Why the flight to the Moon?’ Julian asked quietly.

‘Because something got in the way in 2024.’ Palstein shrugged. ‘An astronaut called Thorn was supposed to have—’

‘I don’t mean that. Why that one and not the next one? Why the one my children and I were on, people like Warren Locatelli, the Donoghues, Miranda Winter—’

‘I didn’t care about your guests, Julian,’ sighed Palstein. ‘It was the first opportunity that offered itself since Thorn’s failure. When would the next trip have taken place? Only after the official opening. This year? Next year? How long would we have had to wait?’

‘Perhaps you also factored in the possibility of Julian’s death,’ said Jericho.

‘Nonsense.’

‘His death would have strengthened the conservative forces at Orley. The people opposed to the idea of selling off technologies. The smaller the number of countries that can build a space lift, the smaller the chance that a second—’

‘You’re fantasising, Jericho. If you hadn’t spoiled everything, Julian would have been back on Earth ages before the explosions took place. And his son and daughter too.’

The muffled chugging and thudding of the boats reached them from outside. Right below their window someone was singing ‘O Sole Mio’ with businesslike ardour.

‘But we weren’t on Earth,’ said Julian.

‘That wasn’t the plan.’

‘Fuck your plan. You went beyond the limit, Gerald. In every respect.’

Palstein looked up.

‘And you? You and your American friends? How is what you’re doing any different from what we’ve been doing for decades? You extract something from the ground until it’s all gone and you find you’ve destroyed a planet in the process. What limit do you lot go beyond? What limit do you in particular go beyond when you run your company like a state that dictates the rules of play to real states? Do you think you’re being public-spirited? At least the oil companies served their countries. Who are you serving, apart from your own vanity? There are no social states without state organisations, but you’re behaving like a modern Captain Nemo and spitting on the world as it happens to work. We merely played the game that the circumstances required. Only look at mankind, their clean, just wars, the cyclical collapse of their financial systems, the cynicism of their profiteers, the unscrupulousness and stupidity of their politicians, the perversion of their religious leaders, and don’t talk to me about limits.’

Julian stroked his beard.

‘You could be right, Gerald.’ He nodded and got to his feet. ‘But it doesn’t change anything. Owen, thanks for giving up your time. We’re going.’

‘Take care, Gerald,’ said Jericho. ‘Or not.’

The picture on the screen went out. Julian snapped the laptop shut and put it back in its bag.

‘A little while ago,’ he said, ‘when I was stepping inside your lovely residence, I noticed a little plaque: in the mezzanine of a building across the courtyard from this palazzo, Richard Wagner died. You know what? I liked that. I like the idea of great men dying in great houses.’ He reached into his jacket, took out a pistol and set it down on the table in front of Palstein. His clear blue eyes had a penetrating expression, almost friendly and encouraging. ‘It’s loaded. One shot is generally enough, but you’re a big man, Gerald. A very big man. You might take two.’

He turned round and crossed the room at a leisurely pace. Palstein watched after him, until Julian’s grey-blond ponytail had disappeared beyond the landing. As if of their own accord, his fingers found their way to his phone and keyed in a number.

‘Hydra,’ he said mechanically.

‘What can I do?’

‘Get me out of here. I’ve been unmasked.’

‘Unma—’ Xin fell silent for a moment. ‘You know, Gerald, I think my contract’s just run out.’

‘You’re walking out on me?’

‘I wouldn’t put it like that. You know me, I’m loyal and I’m not afraid to take risks, but in hopeless cases – and your case is unfortunately completely hopeless…’

‘What—’ Palstein gulped. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Hmm.’ Xin seemed to think for a moment. ‘Quite honestly, it’s been rather tiring lately. I think I need a bit of a holiday. You take care.’

Take care. The second person who’d said that to him.

Palstein froze. He slowly lowered his phone. Voices rose to him from below.

His eyes wandered to the gun.

The people from Interpol and MI6 were waiting for him in the stairwell. Shaw looked at him quizzically.

‘Give him a minute,’ said Julian.

‘Well, I’m not sure.’ One of the agents frowned. ‘He could do something to himself.’

‘Yes, exactly.’ Julian pushed past him. ‘Jennifer, let’s go. I have to look after my daughter.

London, Great Britain

Stars like dust.

She had been lost in sleep, and the dream had put her back into the stillness of the spaceship dashing through the sparkling night, carrying her and the bomb. She had lived through everything all over again. Again she had come up with the plan to stow the mini-nuke in the living module, uncouple it and come back to the OSS with the landing unit. Back to Tim and Amber and Julian, who had cried so hard when he called her name. In her mind she had promised him never to leave him alone again, but her thoughts had been all that she was able to mobilise, and that wasn’t much.

Then the moment when the spinning bomb, lit by the flickering of her dying consciousness, had revealed the truth, that there were still hours to go until detonation, not minutes or seconds as she had thought. That she would have had a chance.

She had gone to sleep in the pearly rain of her blood.

I’m coming. I’m coming, Daddy.

I’m there.

Clunk!

One of those noises that feel like a nuisance, even if they mean the salvation of really having made your peace. In the absence of choice, of course. But she had made her peace before the shuttle on which Julian, Nina, Tim and Amber had followed her docked to the Charon – her lonely spaceship that had not had the chance of filling its tanks on the OSS, which was why it had finally run out of fuel. Even before it reached its top speed.

But she hadn’t known anything about any of that.

Voices around her. People in spacesuits.

‘Lynn? Lynn!’

Impotence. Scraps of words. As if through cotton wool.

‘How long now?’

‘Just over five hours. Enough time to bring both shuttles back.’

‘I think Lynn’s stable.’ Nina. ‘She’s lost a lot of blood, but it seems to me—’

Silence again. Then a voice on an endless loop:

‘And now get the thing out of here!’

Thing out of here, thing out of here, thing out of here, thingoutof here, thingoutof herethingout—

‘Lynn.’

She blinked. The hospital room. Back in the present. Hang on, wasn’t there a film called—

Doesn’t matter, what a film!

‘How are you?’ said Julian.

‘Been dreaming.’ She sat up. Her left side hurt, but she was feeling better every day. Lawrence, the bitch, had missed taking her life by inches. ‘We were back in the spaceship.’ Christ, she was hungry. Incredibly hungry! She could have eaten the bed. ‘A nightmare, to be honest. Always the same nightmare.’

‘It’s over.’

‘Hey, no big deal. It wasn’t all that bad, either.’ She yawned. ‘Hopefully I’ll dream something else eventually.’

‘No. It’s over, Lynn.’ Julian took her hand and smiled, very much the magician of her childhood. ‘The nightmare is over.’

Xintiandi, Shanghai, China

‘Yoyo could really give us a call,’ Jericho complained.

Tu pulled a sticky strand of noodle from the cardboard box that stood in for his lunch plate.

‘And you could drop by again,’ he said, chewing. ‘Instead of only ever phoning. Burying yourself away in your stupid loft.’

‘I’m busy. Honestly.’

Tu gave him a disapproving look over the rim of his glasses. The bridge looked as if it was about to snap in two over his nose.

‘You have friends to cultivate,’ he chided him. ‘What about this evening? A bunch of us are going out to eat. And drink, more importantly.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Everyone you can think of. Yoyo too, once she’s stopped crying. She’s been sobbing away constantly, I’m thinking of installing a dam in the guest room. Terrible. Nothing but tears. A great big crybaby.’

‘And Hongbing?’

‘He’s crying too. They’re closer than they’ve ever been.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘Yeah, great,’ growled Tu. ‘You just don’t have to put up with it. What about tonight?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good. I wouldn’t have let you get away with anything else, xiongdi!’

Jericho sat there for a while.

Then he went across to the kitchen area to magic a cappuccino from the coffee machine. His journey took him past the ensemble that he had now got used to calling ‘the odd couple’, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau embodied by a standard lamp and a carpet, which failed, failed, failed to accomplish the ideal of Confucian harmony, in any imaginable arrangement.

He studied them for a moment.

Then he moved them aside, put them in the cellar and looked at the corner. And finally, flooded only by light, clear and tidy, he liked it.

That had been important!