Limit

Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, Southern China

Owen Jericho knew he still had a good chance of entering Paradise today, and he loathed the idea.

Other people loved it. To get there, you needed unbridled lust, the musty sweetness of a misdirected love of children, sadistic tendencies and an ego sufficiently deformed to sentimentalise anything objectionable that you might get up to. Many of those who desired access saw themselves as champions for the sexual liberation of the very ones they were laying their hands on. Control was more important to them than anything else. At the same time most of them considered themselves perfectly normal, and saw the people who got in the way of their self-realisation as the real perverts. Others claimed their legitimate right to be perverted; yet others saw themselves as businessmen. But hardly any of them had endured the shame of being described as sick and weak. It was only once they were up before the courts, when they summoned experts who testified to their inability to resist the call of their own nature, that they turned themselves into pitiably driven individuals in need of sympathy and healing. While still undiscovered, however, and in full possession of their intellectual powers, they were all too happy to withdraw to the playground of their clammy imaginations, the Paradise of the Little Emperors, which was indeed paradise from their vantage point, if not for the little emperors themselves.

For them it was hell.

Owen Jericho hesitated. He knew he shouldn’t have followed Animal Ma this far. He saw him, his eyes widened by archaically fat spectacle lenses into an expression of constant astonishment, crossing the square, elliptically swaying his bottom and hips. He owed this duck-like walk to a hip condition which created the false impression that he was easy prey. But Ma Liping, to give him his real name, hadn’t been given his nickname by accident. He was considered aggressive and dangerous. In fact he pretended to have been given the name Animal at birth, a bizarre act of showingoff, not least because he also pretended it embarrassed him. Ma was cunning too. He must have been, or else he wouldn’t have been able to lull the authorities into the sleepy conviction that he had forsworn paedophilia. As walking proof of the successful reintegration experiment, he worked for the police in the battle against the growing plague of child pornography in China, he provided instructions for the catching of small fry and apparently did everything he could to escape social ostracism.

Five years in jail as a child abuser, he used to say, is like five hundred years in a torture chamber.

This infectiously flourishing suburb of the urban network of Shenzhen in south China, with its boringly functional architecture, had allowed Ma, who was originally from Beijing, the chance to start again. No one knew him here, the local authorities didn’t even have a file on him. In the capital they knew where he was living, but the connection had become attenuated, since the paedophile scene was in a state of constant flux, and Ma could credibly suggest that he had lost contact with its inner circle. No one paid him any attention now; there were other things that needed doing. Fresh depths granted nauseating glimpses of worlds of unbelievable human wretchedness.

Worlds like the Paradise of the Little Emperors.

Lost in a morass of mental overload as they tried to protect, check and defraud 1.4 billion individuals all at the same time, the Chinese authorities increasingly resorted to private investigators to give them support. In hock to digitalisation, they relied on cyber-detectives, specialists in all kinds of criminality and dark online practices, and Owen Jericho had the reputation of being extraordinarily gifted in the field. His portfolio was impeccable when it came to cracking web espionage, phishing, cyber-terrorism and so on. He penetrated illegal communities, infiltrated blogs, chat-rooms and virtual worlds, tracked down missing people using their digital fingerprints and advised companies on how to protect themselves against electronic attacks, Trojans and malicious software. In England, he had dealt with several cases of child pornography so, when the hell of the ‘little emperors’ was revealed to a team of shocked investigators, he had been asked for support by Patrice Ho, a high-ranking officer in the Shanghai Police and a friend of his. As a result of this request he was now standing here, watching Animal Ma on his way into the old, abandoned bicycle factory.

He shivered in spite of the heat. Accepting the commission had meant paying a visit to the Paradise of the Little Emperors. An experience that would leave traces in his cerebral cortex for the rest of time, even though he had had a fundamentally clear idea what he was letting himself in for. ‘Little emperors’ was what the Chinese, with an almost Italian besottedness, called their children. But there had been no way of avoiding the journey to Paradise, he had to log in and put on the hologoggles to understand just whom he was looking for.

Animal Ma stepped through the factory door.

After the city planners had, unusually, revealed no inclination to tear down the collection of mouldy brick buildings, artists and freelancers had moved in, including a gay couple who repaired antiquated electrical devices, an ethno-metal band who vied with one another to see who could make the most noise and shake a deserted fitness studio to its foundations, and Ma Liping, with his shop buying and selling all kinds of goods, from cheap imitations of Ming vases to moulting songbirds in portable bamboo cages. The investigator from Shenzhen who was working with Jericho had started observing Ma on 20 May, and had not let the man out of sight for two days. He had followed him from his home to the old factory and back, he had taken photographs, followed every one of his limping steps and drawn up a list of his customers’ comings and goings. According to this list, during that time a grand total of four people had wandered into the shop, one of them Ma’s wife, an ordinary-looking southern Chinese woman of indeterminable age. What made the small number of customers more surprising was the fact that Ma and his wife lived in a six-storey house, big and nicely presented by local standards, which Ma couldn’t possibly have afforded on the small income that he got from the shop. His wife, as far as anyone knew, didn’t do anything at all except cross the street to the shop several times a day and stay there for some time, perhaps to do office stuff or serve customers who never came.

Apart from two men.

For a whole series of reasons Jericho had reached the conviction that Ma, if he wasn’t alone, was at least the driving force behind the Paradise of Little Emperors. Once he’d managed to narrow the circle of suspects down to a handful of child abusers who were currently rampaging on the net or had attracted attention there some time before, he had homed in on Animal Ma Liping. It was here, however, that his ideas and those of the authorities parted company. While Jericho saw a storm-cloud of clues over Shenzhen, in the opinion of the police it was a man from the smoggy hell of Lanzhou who was attracting the most suspicion, and a raid was being organised there at that very minute. In Jericho’s view there was no doubt that the police would find much of interest in Lanzhou, just not the thing they were looking for. In the Paradise the beast reigned, the snake, Animal Ma, he was sure of it, but he had been instructed to take no further steps for the time being.

An instruction that he basically intended to ignore.

Because apart from the fact that the case bore Ma’s trademark, the fact that he was married gave Jericho food for thought. He had nothing against reformation and change, but Ma was clearly homosexual; he was a gay paedophile. It was also striking that the men who came to the shop only reappeared several hours later. Thirdly, the shop didn’t seem to have anything remotely like fixed opening times, and last of all no one could have wished for a better place to carry out dark practices than the abandoned bicycle factory. All the other occupants used side-buildings with direct access to the street, leaving Ma as the only one with premises off the internal courtyard and the only one who ever set foot in it, apart from a few children who trickled in and out.

From Shanghai Jericho had instructed the investigator to pay a visit to the shop, take a look around and buy something unimportant, if possible something that Ma stocked in his storeroom. This meant that Jericho was already familiar with the shop by the time he followed Ma across the square that morning. He waited for a few minutes in the shadow of the factory wall, passed through the gate, crossed the dusty area of the courtyard, climbed a short flight of stairs and stepped inside the crammed shop, which was filled with shelves and tables. Behind the counter the shop’s owner was busy with jewellery. A bead curtain separated the sales area from an adjacent room, and a video camera was fixed above the doorway.

‘Good morning.’

Ma looked up. The enlarged eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses studied the visitor with a mixture of suspicion and interest. No one he knew.

‘I heard you had something for every occasion,’ Jericho explained.

Ma hesitated. He set aside the jewellery, cheap, tarnished stuff, and smiled shyly.

‘Who, if I might ask, says that?’

‘An acquaintance. It must have been here, yesterday. He needed a birthday present.’

‘Yesterday—’ Ma mused.

‘He bought a make-up set. Art Deco. Green, gold and black. A mirror, a powder compact.’

‘Oh, yes!’ His suspicion vanished, replaced by eagerness. ‘A lovely piece of work, I remember. Was the lady pleased?’

‘The lady who received the present was my wife,’ said Jericho. ‘And yes, she was very pleased.’

‘How wonderful. What can I do for you?’

‘You remember the design?’

‘Of course.’

‘She would like more from the same series. If there are any more.’

Ma widened his smile, glad to be of service since, as Jericho knew from the investigator, there were still a matching brush and a comb to buy. With his curious rolling gait he came out from behind the counter, pushed a little stepladder against one of the shelved walls and climbed up it. Comb and brush shared a drawer quite high up, so that Ma was occupied for a few seconds while Jericho scanned his surroundings. The sales room was probably just what it looked like. The counter had a kitschy fake Art Nouveau front, behind which ivory-coloured pearl necklaces dangled. Beyond it, barely visible, lay the second room, perhaps an office. In the midst of all the junk a surprisingly expensive-looking computer adorned the counter, its screen turned towards the wall.

Ma Liping reached up and clumsily brought down the goods. Jericho didn’t risk going behind the counter. The danger was too great that the man might turn towards him at that very moment. Instead he walked a little way along the counter until the screen display appeared reflected in a glass case. The glowing surface was divided into three, one part covered with characters, the other half divided into pictures showing two rooms from the perspective of surveillance cameras. Although he couldn’t make out any details, Jericho knew that one of the cameras was directed at the sales room, because he saw himself walking around in the window. The other room looked gloomy and it clearly didn’t contain very much furniture.

Was it the back room?

‘Two very beautiful pieces,’ said Ma, as he came down from the ladder and set the comb and brush down in front of him. Jericho lifted both up, one by one, ran his fingers expertly through the bristles and inspected the teeth. Why did Ma need a camera to monitor his back room? Checking the area towards the courtyard made sense, but did he want to watch himself at work? Unlikely. Was there another means of access from outside leading to that room?

‘One tooth is broken,’ he observed.

‘Antiques,’ Ma lied. ‘The charm of imperfection.’

‘What do you want for it?’

Ma quoted a ridiculously high price. Jericho made a no less ridiculous counteroffer, as the situation demanded. At last they agreed upon a sum that allowed both of them to save face.

‘While I’m here,’ Jericho said, ‘there’s something else that occurs to me.’

Antennae of alertness grew from Ma’s temples.

‘She has a necklace,’ he went on. ‘If only I knew something about jewellery. But I’d like to give her a suitable pair of earrings and, well, I thought—’ He pointed rather helplessly to the displays in the counter case.

Ma relaxed. ‘I have some things I could show you,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I’m afraid it won’t be much use without the chain.’ Jericho pretended he needed to have a think. ‘The thing is, I’ve got some meetings to get to, but this evening would be the ideal time to surprise her with them.’

‘If you brought me the chain—’

‘Impossible, I have no time. That is, wait a moment. Do you get email?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then it’s all fine!’ Jericho acted relieved. ‘I’ll send you a photograph, and you look for something suitable. Then I’d just have to collect it later. You’d be doing me a big favour.’

‘Hmm.’ Ma bit his lower lip. ‘When would you be coming, round about?’

‘Yeah, if only I knew. Late afternoon? Early evening?’

‘I’ve got to go out for a while too. Shall we say from six? I’d be here for another good hour after that.’

Faking gratitude, Jericho left the shop, walked to his hire car two streets away and drove to a better area in search of a jewellery shop. After a short time he found one, had them show him necklaces in the lower price range and asked to be allowed to take a photograph of one with his mobile phone, so that he could send the picture, he said, to his wife for inspection. Back in the car he wrote Ma a brief email and attached the photograph, but not before he had attached a Trojan. As soon as Ma Liping opened the attachment, he would unwittingly load the spy program onto his hard drive, from where it would transmit the drive’s contents. Jericho couldn’t assume that Ma was stupid enough to store incriminating content on a publicly accessible computer, but that wasn’t what he was concerned with in any case.

He drove back to a place near the factory and waited.

Ma had opened the attachment shortly after one o’clock, and the Trojan had started transmitting straight away. Jericho connected his mobile to a roll-out screen and received, sharp and in detail, the impressions from the two surveillance cameras. They captured their surroundings in wide-screen mode, unfortunately without sound. On the other hand, a few moments later he received confirmation that camera two actually was monitoring the back room separated off with beads, when Ma disappeared from one window and appeared again immediately in the other one, shuffled over to a sideboard and fiddled with a tea-maker.

Jericho appraised the furniture. A massive desk with a swivel chair and worn-looking stools in front of it, obliging visitors to assume a petitioner’s crouch, some ramshackle shelves, with stacks of paper on the worn plywood, files, wood-carvings and all kinds of horrors like silk flowers and industrially manufactured statues of the Buddha. Nothing to suggest that Ma placed any value on the personal note. No painting interrupted the whitewashed monotony of the walls; there were no discernible signs of that symbiotic connection produced by spouses looking at each other from little frames at work.

Ma Liping, happily married? Ludicrous idea.

Jericho’s eye fell on a narrow, closed door opposite the desk. Interesting, but when Ma set down his tea and opened it, he merely revealed a view of tiles, a wash-basin and a piece of mirror. Less than half a minute later the man appeared again with his hands on his flies, and Jericho had to acknowledge that the supposed entrance was probably a toilet.

In that case why was Ma monitoring the damned room? Whom did he hope or fear to see there?

Jericho sighed. He waited patiently for an hour. He watched as Ma, with the photograph of the chain in front of his eyes, assembled an assortment of more or less matching earrings and seized the unexpected appearance of a customer as the opportunity to fob off on her a remarkably ugly set of tableware. He watched Ma polishing glass jugs and ate dried chillies from a bag until his tongue burned. At about three o’clock the so-called wife entered the shop. Supposedly unobserved, in a state of married familiarity, as they both were, one might have expected to see them exchange a kiss, a tiny act of intimacy. But they met as strangers, talked to one another for a few minutes, then Ma closed the front door, turned the open/closed sign around, and they went together into the back room.

What followed needed no soundtrack.

Ma opened the toilet, let his wife step inside, glanced alertly in all directions again and pulled the door closed behind him. Jericho waited tensely, but the couple didn’t reappear. Not after two minutes, not after five, not even after ten. Only half an hour later did Ma suddenly come storming out, and into the sales room, where the figure of a man could now be seen outside the glass-panelled entrance. As if frozen, Jericho stared at the half-open toilet door, tried to make out reflections in the mirror, but the bathroom didn’t yield up its secrets. Meanwhile Ma had let in the new arrival, a bull-necked, shaven-headed man in a leather jacket, bolted the door again and walked ahead of the new arrival into the back room where they both made for the lavatory and disappeared inside.

Amazing. Either this deadly trio liked to party in a confined space or the toilet was bigger than he thought.

What were the three of them getting up to?

Over an hour and a half went by. At ten past five the guy in the leather jacket and the woman reappeared in the office and came out to the front. This time it was she who opened the sales room, let the bald guy out and followed him, carefully closing the door behind her. Of Ma himself there was no sign. From six o’clock onwards, Jericho guessed, his efforts would be directed at customers and profit, explicitly on complementing a necklace with earrings, but until then, God alone knew what monstrous activities he was pursuing. Meanwhile Jericho thought he had understood the purpose of the second camera monitoring the office. Taking care that no one saw him when he disappeared into the miraculous world of the lavatory, Ma would be equally keen to avoid anyone waiting for him when he came back. The camera probably also supplied a picture to the toilet.

Jericho had seen enough. He would have to catch the bastard unprepared, but was Ma unprepared? Was he ever?

He quickly slipped his phone into his jacket, got out of the car and walked the few minutes back to the factory building as he came up with a battle plan. Perhaps he would have been better off calling the local authorities for support, but they would want to consult further before doing anything. If they obstructed his investigations, he might as well drive back to Shanghai, and Jericho was firmly resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery of the back room. His gun, an ultra-flat Glock, was safely stowed over his heart. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He had too many years drenched in sweat and blood behind him, too much active work at the front, in the course of which he, his adversaries or both had needed emergency medical treatment. The cheekbone on the cobblestones, the taste of dirt and haemoglobin in the mouth – all in the past. Jericho didn’t want to fight again. He no longer valued the bony grin of his old partner from the hereafter, who up till now had been involved in every shoot-out, who had stormed every house with him, entered every snake-pit with him, without being on anyone’s side; who always just reaped the harvest. One last time, in the Paradise of the Little Emperors, he would bring Death into the equation, in the hope of winning him as an ally in spite of his unreliability.

He stepped into the factory courtyard, resolutely crossed it and climbed the steps. As might have been expected, the shop sign said Closed. Jericho rang the bell, long and insistently, excited to see whether Ma would force himself out of the toilet or play dead. In fact he parted the bead curtain after the third ring. Limping elegantly, Ma circled the hideous counter, opened the door and fastened his vision-corrected eyes on the unwelcome guest.

‘My mistake, I’m sure,’ he said in a pinched voice. ‘I thought I said six o’clock, but probably—’

‘You did,’ Jericho assured him. ‘I’m sorry, but I now need the earrings sooner than we agreed. Please forgive my obstinacy. Women.’ He spread his arms in a gesture of impotence. ‘You understand.’

Ma forced a smile, stepped aside and let him in.

‘I’ll show you what I’ve found,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait so long, but—’

‘I’m the one who should apologise.’

‘No, not at all. My mistake. I was in the toilet. Now, let’s have a look.’

Toilet? Jericho registered with amazement that Ma had just given him the password.

‘This is very awkward,’ he stammered. ‘But—’

Ma stared at him.

‘Could I use it?’

‘Use it?’

‘Your toilet?’ Jericho added.

The man’s hands developed a crawling life of their own, pushed earrings around on the threadbare velvet of the pad. A cough crept up his throat, followed by another. Small, slimy, startled animals. Suddenly Jericho had the horrific vision of a bag in the shape of a humanoid, filled with swarming, chitinous, glittering vermin, stirring Ma Liping’s husk from within and imitating humanoid gestures.

Animal Ma.

‘Of course. Come with me.‘

He held the bead curtain open, and Jericho stepped into the back room. The second camera fastened its dark eye on him.

‘But I must—’ Ma paused. ‘I’m not equipped for this, you know. If you wait a second, I just want to sort out a fresh towel.’ He directed Jericho to the desk, and opened the toilet door behind him.

Jericho grabbed the handle and pulled it open.

As if in a flash he took in the scene. A bathroom, sure enough, tall and narrow. The outlines of dead insects in the frosted glass of the ceiling light. The tiles cracked in certain places, mildewed grouting, the mirror stained and tarnished, a rust-yellow back to the wash-basin, the toilet itself little more than a hole in the floor. A wardrobe on the back wall, if you could call it a wall, because it was half open, a disguised door that Ma had neglected to close in his haste to serve Jericho.

And in all this Animal Ma Liping, who seemed at that moment to consist only of his magnified eyes and the sole of a shoe darting out and colliding painfully with Jericho’s sternum.

Something cracked. All the air was driven out of his lungs. The kick sent him to the floor. He saw the Chinese man, teeth bared, appear in the doorframe, drew the Glock from its holster and took aim. Ma darted back and turned round. Jericho leapt to his feet, but not quickly enough to prevent his opponent from escaping into the darkness beyond the secret opening. The back wall swung back and forth. Without pausing, he charged through it, stopped at the top of a flight of stairs and hesitated. A curious smell struck him, a mixture of mould and sweetness. Ma’s footsteps rang out down below, then everything fell silent.

He mustn’t go down there. Whatever lay hidden in that cellar, the secret of the toilet was solved. Ma was in a trap. It was better to call the police, let them take care of whatever horrors lay down there and allow himself a drink.

And what if Ma wasn’t in a trap?

How many entrances and exits did the cellar have?

Jericho thought of the Paradise. Scattered across the organism of the World Wide Web, the paedophiles’ pages were suppurating wounds that sickened society irremediably. The perfidiousness with which the ‘goods’ were offered was unparallelled, he thought, and just then something from the vaults rose up towards him, ghostly and thin. A whimpering that stopped abruptly. Then nothing more.

He made his mind up.

Gun at the ready, he stepped slowly down. Strangely, with every step, the silence seemed to coagulate; he was moving through a medium enriched with rot and decay, a sound-swallowing ether. The stench grew more intense. The stairs wound round in a curve, led further downwards and opened out into a gloomy vault supported by brick pillars, some connected by wooden slats, crates that had been cobbled together. What they contained was impossible to make out from the foot of the stairs, but at the end of the chamber he glimpsed something that captured his attention.

A film set.

Yes, that was exactly what it was. The more his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the clearer it became to him that films were being made there. Phalanxes of unlit floodlights, perched on stands and hanging from the ceiling, peeled from the darkness; folding chairs, a camera on a tripod. The set seemed to be divided into parts, some furnished with equipment, others bare, possibly something like a green-screen so that virtual backgrounds could be added later. Checking in all directions as he walked on, he made out little beds, furniture, toys, an artificial landscape with a children’s house, meadows and trees, a dissecting table from a pathology lab. Something on the floor looked unsettlingly like a chainsaw. Cages hung from the ceiling, surrounded by various utensils and something that might have been a small electric chair; tools were mounted on the wall – no, not tools: knives, pincers and hooks – a torture chamber.

Somewhere in all that madness Ma was hiding.

Jericho walked on, heart thumping, putting one foot in front of the other as if crossing ice that might crack at any moment. He reached the crates. Turned his head.

A boy looked at him.

He was naked and dirty, perhaps five years old. His fingers clutched the wire mesh between the slats, but his eyes looked apathetic, almost lifeless, the sort of eyes familiar in people who had withdrawn deep inside themselves. Jericho turned his head in the other direction and saw two girls in the cage opposite, barely clothed. One of them, very small, lay on the ground, clearly sleeping, the other, older, leaned with her back against the wall, hugging a cuddly toy. She lethargically turned a swollen face, and fastened sad eyes upon him. Then she seemed to understand that he was not one of the people who normally came here.

She opened her mouth.

Jericho shook his head and put his finger to his lips. The girl nodded. Holding the gun rigidly out ahead of him, he peered in all directions, checked again and again and ventured further into the hell of the little emperors. Still more children. Only a few who saw him. He gestured to them, the ones who raised their heads, to be silent. From cage to cage it got worse and worse: dirt and degradation, apathy, fear. A baby lay on a grimy blanket. Something dark rattled against a bar and yapped at him, so that he instinctively flinched, turned round and held his breath. The sickly stench seemed to have its source right in front of him. He heard the buzzing of flies, saw something darting across the floor—

His eyes widened and he felt nauseous.

That brief moment of inattention cost him his control. Dragging footsteps echoed, a draught brushed the back of his neck, then someone jumped at him, pulled him back, laid into him, screamed incomprehensible words.

A woman!

Jericho tensed his muscles and jabbed his elbows back again and again. His attacker wailed. As they whirled around he recognised her – Ma’s wife or whatever role she might have played in that nightmare – grabbed her, pressed her against one of the columns and held the barrel of the Glock to her temple. How did she get here? He had seen her leave, but he hadn’t seen her come back. Was there another entrance to the cellar? Could Ma finally have escaped him?

No, it was his fault! He had been sloppy on the way from the car to the factory. He had neglected to keep an eye on his computer. At some point during that time she must have come back here, to—

The pain!

Her heel had driven itself into his foot. Jericho reached out and slapped her in the face with the back of his hand. The woman struggled like a mad thing in his clutches. He gripped her throat and pushed her harder against the pillar. She kicked out at him and then, surprisingly, she abandoned all resistance and stared at him with hatred.

In her eyes he saw what she saw.

Alarmed, he let go of her and spun round to see Ma sailing through the air in a grotesque posture, coming straight at him, his arm outstretched, swinging a huge knife. He wouldn’t have time to shoot him, to run away, he would just have time to—

Jericho ducked.

The knife came down, sliced whistling through the air and through Mrs Ma’s throat, from which a cascade of blood sprayed. Ma staggered, thrown off balance by his own momentum, stared through blood-sprinkled glasses at his collapsing wife and flailed his arms. Jericho hammered the Glock against his wrist and the knife clattered to the floor. He kicked it away, kicked Ma in the belly and again in the shoulder, at which the child-abuser toppled forwards. The man groaned, collapsed on all fours. His glasses slipped from his nose. He felt around, half blind, struggled to his feet, both hands raised, palms outwards.

‘I’m unarmed,’ he gurgled. ‘I’m defenceless.’

‘I see a few defenceless people here,’ Jericho panted, the Glock aimed at Ma. ‘So? Did that help them at all?’

‘I have my rights.’

‘So do the children.’

‘That’s different. It’s something you can’t understand.’

‘I don’t want to understand!’

‘You can’t do anything to me.’ Ma shook his head. ‘I’m sick, a sick man. You can’t shoot a sick man.’

For a moment Jericho was too flabbergasted to reply. He kept Ma in check with the gun and saw the man’s lips curling.

‘You won’t shoot,’ said Ma, with a flash of confidence.

Jericho said nothing.

‘And you know why not?’ His lips pulled into a grin. ‘Because you feel it. You feel it too. The fascination. The beauty. If you could feel what I feel, you wouldn’t point a gun at me.’

‘You kill children,’ Jericho said hoarsely.

‘The society you represent is so dishonest. You are dishonest. Pitifully so. You poor little policeman in your wretched little world. Do you actually realise that you envy people like me? We’ve attained a degree of freedom of which you can only dream.’

‘You swine.’

‘We’re so far ahead!’

Jericho raised the gun. Ma reacted immediately. Shocked, he threw both hands in the air and shook his head again.

‘No, you can’t do that. I’m sick. Very sick.’

‘Yes, but you shouldn’t have made that attempt to escape.’

‘What attempt?’

‘This one.’

Ma blinked. ‘But I’m not escaping.’

‘Yes, you’re escaping, Ma. You’re trying to get away. This very second. So I find myself forced—’

Jericho fired at his left kneecap. Ma screamed, doubled up, rolled on the floor and screeched blue murder. Jericho lowered the Glock and crouched down exhaustedly. He felt miserable. He wanted to throw up. He was dog-tired, and at the same time he had a sense that he would never be able to sleep again.

‘You can’t do that!’ Ma wailed.

‘You shouldn’t have tried to get away,’ Jericho murmured. ‘Asshole.’

It took the police a full twenty minutes to find their way to the factory, and when they did they treated him as if he were in cahoots with the child-abuser. He was far too exhausted to get worked up about it, and just told the officers that it would be in the interest of their professional advancement to call a particular number. The duty inspector pulled a sulky face, came back as a different man and handed him the phone with almost childlike timidity.

‘Someone would like to speak to you, Mr Jericho.’

It was Patrice Ho, his high-ranking policeman friend from Shanghai. In return for the information that the raid in Lanzhou had thrown up a paedophile ring, although it hadn’t been possible to prove a connection with the Paradise of the Little Emperors, Jericho improved his evening with the news that Paradise had been found and the snake defeated.

‘What snake?’ his friend asked, puzzled.

‘Forget it,’ Jericho said. ‘Christian stuff. Could you make sure that I don’t have to put down roots here?’

‘We owe you a favour.’

‘Fuck the favour. Just get me out of here.’

There was nothing he yearned for so much as the chance to leave the factory and Shenzhen as quickly as possible. He was suddenly enjoying the deference normally reserved for folk heroes and very popular criminals, but he wasn’t allowed to leave until eight. He dropped the hire car off at the airport, took the next plane for Shanghai, a Mach 1 flying wing, and checked his messages in the air.

Tu Tian had been trying to contact him.

He called back.

‘Oh, nothing in particular,’ said Tu. ‘I just wanted to tell you your surveillance was successful. The hostile competitors admitted to data theft. We had a talk.’

‘Brilliant,’ said Jericho without any particular enthusiasm. ‘And what came out of the talk?’

‘They promised to stop it.’

‘That’s all?’

‘That’s a lot. I had to promise to stop it too.’

‘Excuse me?’ Jericho thought he had misheard. Tu Tian, whose company had proved to have fallen victim to Trojans, had been absolutely furious. He had spared no expense to get his hands on the, as he put it, pack of miserable blowflies and cockroaches so presumptuous as to spy on his company secrets. ‘You yourself wanted to—’

‘I didn’t know who they were.’

‘And excuse me, but what difference does that make?’

‘You’re right, absolutely none at all.’ Tu laughed, in great humour now. ‘Are you coming to the golf course the day after tomorrow? You can be my guest.’

‘Very kind of you, Tian, but—’ Jericho rubbed his eyes. ‘Could I decide later?’

‘What’s up? Bad mood?’

Shanghai Chinese were different. More direct, more open. Practically Italian, and Tu Tian was possibly the most Italian of all them. He could have performed a convincing version of ‘Nessun dorma’.

‘Quite honestly,’ Jericho said, ‘I’m wiped out.’

‘You sound it,’ Tu agreed. ‘Like a wet rag. A rag-man. We’ll have to hang you out to dry. What’s up?’

And because fat Tu, for all his egocentricity, was one of the few people who granted Jericho an insight into his own inner state, he told him everything.

‘Young man, young man,’ Tu said, amazed, after a few seconds of respectful silence. ‘How did you do it?’

‘I just told you.’

‘No, I mean, how did you get wise to him? How did you know it was him?’

‘I didn’t. It was just that everything pointed in that direction. Ma is vain, you know. The website was more than a catalogue of ready-produced horrors, with men forcing themselves on babies and women forcing little boys to have sex with them before laying into them with a hatchet. There were the usual films and photographs, but you could also put on your hologoggles and be there in 3D, and at various things happening live as well, which gives these guys a special kick.’

‘Revolting.’

‘But most importantly there was a chat-room, a fan forum where these people swapped information and boasted to each other. Even a second-life sector where you could assume a virtual identity. Ma appeared there as a water spirit. I suspect most paedos aren’t familiar with that kind of thing. They tend to be made of more conventional stuff, and they don’t much like talking into microphones, even with voice-changer software. They’d rather type out all their bullshit on the keyboard in the old-fashioned way, and of course Ma joined in and there he was. So I got the idea of adding my own contributions.’

‘You must have felt like chucking!’

‘I’ve got a switch in the back of my head and another in my belly. I usually manage to turn off at least one of them.’

‘And back in the cellar?’

‘Tian.’ Jericho sighed. ‘If I’d managed that, I wouldn’t have told you all this crap.’

‘I understand. Go on.’

‘So, every imaginable visitor to the page is online, and of course Ma, the vain swine, is on there too. He disguises himself as a visitor, but you notice that he knows too much, and he has this huge need to communicate, so that I start suspecting that this guy is at least one of the originators, and after a while I’m convinced that it’s him. A little while ago, I subjected his contributions to a semantic analysis – peculiarities of expression, preferred idioms, grammar – and the computer narrows the field, but there are still about a hundred known internet paedophiles who are possible suspects in this one. So I have the guy analysed while he’s online and writing, and his typing rhythms give him away. Just about every time. That leaves four.’

‘One of them Ma.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re convinced it’s him.’

‘Unlike the police. They, of course, are convinced that Ma is the only one of the four that it isn’t.’

‘Which is why you went out on your own. Hmm.’ Tu paused. ‘All due respect to your approach, but didn’t you recently tell me the nice thing about i-profiling was that the only fighting you have to do is against computer viruses?’

‘I’ve had it with brawling,’ Jericho said wearily. ‘I don’t want to see any more dead, mutilated, abused people, I don’t want to shoot anyone, and I don’t want anyone shooting at me. I’ve had enough, Tian.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Completely. That was the last time.’

Back at home – although it wasn’t really a home any more, filled as it was with removal boxes that he had spent several weeks packing, making his life look as if it came from a props store and had to be returned in its original packaging – Jericho suddenly had a creeping fear that he’d gone too far.

It was just after ten when the taxi set him down outside the high-rise building in Pudong that he would leave in a few days to move into his dream flat, but every time he closed his eyes he saw the half-decaying baby lying in the shack, the army of organisms that had pounced upon it to consume its flesh; he saw Ma’s knife flashing down at him, again he felt the moment of deadly fear, a film that would now be on constant rerun, so that his new home threatened to become a place of nightmare. Experience alone told him that thoughts were by their nature drifting clouds, and that all images eventually faded, but until that happened it could be a long and painful period of suffering.

He shouldn’t have taken on that damned mission!

Wrong, he scolded himself. True despair lurked in the subjunctive, in the spinning-out of alternative plot strands that weren’t alternatives because each one had only one path that it could travel down. And you couldn’t even tell whether you were travelling voluntarily, or whether someone or something was impelling you – and Christ, what that something might be, there was no way of knowing! Are we just a medium for predetermined processes? Had he had a choice about whether or not to take on the mission? Of course, he could have turned it down, but he hadn’t. Didn’t that invalidate any idea of choice? Had he had a choice about whether or not to follow Joanna to Shanghai? Whichever path you took, you took it, so there was no choice at all.

A trite acknowledgement of the bitter truth. Perhaps he should write a self-help manual. The airport bookshops were full of self-help manuals. He himself had even seen some warning against self-help manuals.

How could you be so wide awake and at the same time so tired?

Was there anything else he needed to pack?

He turned on the monitor wall and found a BBC documentary – unlike the bulk of the population, he was able to receive most foreign channels without any difficulty, legal or illegal – and went in search of a box to sit on. At first he could hardly work out what was going on, then the subject started to interest him. Exactly right. Pleasantly far away from everything he had had to deal with over the past few days.

‘A year ago today,’ the commentator was saying, ‘a dramatic worsening in Chinese–American relations preoccupied the plenary meeting of the United Nations, one that would become known as:’

The Moon Crisis

Jericho fetched a beer from the fridge and sat cross-legged on the box. The documentary was about the ghost of the previous summer, but began two years earlier, in 2022, a few weeks after the American base on the North Pole of the Moon went into operation. Back then the USA had started quarrying the noble-gas isotope helium-3 in the Mare Imbrium, setting in motion a development that had hitherto occupied the minds only of economic romantics and authors of science-fiction novels. Without a doubt, the Moon had a special part to play in the opening-up of the solar system: as a springboard for Mars, as a place of research, as a telescopic eye reaching the edges of the universe. From a purely economic point of view, compared with Mars Luna was a cheap date. You needed less fuel to get there, you got there quickly and came back quickly too. Philosophers justified moon travel with references to the spiritual sustenance of the enterprise, hoping for proofs or counter-proofs of God’s existence and, quite generally, an insight into the status of Homo sapiens, as if it took a stone ball 360,000 kilometres away to do it.

Having said this, the distant view of Man’s shared, fragile home did seem to encourage the formation of peaceful states of mind. The only questionable aspect was the satellite’s economic productivity. There was no gold up there, no diamond mines, no oil. But even if there had been, the cost would have made commercial exploitation absurd. ‘We may discover resources on the Moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream,’ George W. Bush had announced in 2004, wearing the face of a founding father, and it had sounded exciting, naïve and adventurous, but then who took Bush seriously? At the time America had been bogged down in wars, and had been about to ruin its economy and its international standing. Hardly anything could have seemed more inappropriate than the idea of the reawakening of a new Eldorado, and besides, NASA had no money.

And yet—

Startled by the announcement by the US that they planned to send astronauts to the Moon again by 2020, the whole world had suddenly been galvanised into frantic activity. Whatever there was to be fetched back from the Moon, the field wasn’t to be left open for America again, particularly since this time it seemed to have less to do with the symbolism of flags and footprints than with a tangible policy of economic supremacy. The European Space Agency offered technological support. Germany’s DLR fell in love with the idea of having its own moon base. France’s ESA carthorse EADS preferred a French solution. China hinted that in a few decades moon-mining would be crucially important to the national economy, explicitly the mining of helium-3. Roskosmos was also flirting with this quarrying idea, and so were the Russian companies Energia Rocket and Space Corporation, which had announced the construction of a moon base by 2015, whereupon India had immediately sent a probe with the beautiful name of Chandrayaan-1 into the polar orbit of the satellite to see how exploitable it was. Given the clear undertone of the Bush doctrine of going it alone, representatives of Russian and Chinese space travel authorities met for discussions about joint ventures, Japan’s JAXA entered the game: everyone was in a terrific hurry to court La Luna and make sure they got hold of some of her legendary treasures, as if it were enough simply to go there, dig the stuff up and scatter it over the home territory. Each prognosis outdid the last in terms of boldness until Julian Orley set out his clear conditions.

The richest man in the world had become involved with the Americans.

The result was, to put it mildly, radical. No sooner had international competition for extraterrestrial raw materials begun than it had fizzled out again, as the victor was, thanks to Orley’s decision, quite clear: a decision made less for reasons of sympathy than because the notoriously cash-strapped NASA turned out to have more money and a better infrastructure than all the other space-travelling nations put together. Apart from China, perhaps. There, during the nineties, ambitions to soar to cosmic greatness had become apparent, admittedly with a modest self-evaluation and an overall budget that came to a tenth of the USA’s, but which were driven by patriotism and claims to world-power status. Then, after one Zheng Pang-Wang had begun financing Chinese space travel in 2014, their budgets and aspirations had become almost equal; there was just a lack of know-how – a shortcoming that Beijing thought it would be able to make up.

Zheng, high priest of a globally active technology company whose greatest ambition lay in putting China on the Moon even before the USA, and making the exploitation of helium-3 a possibility, was often described in the media as the Orley of the East. In fact, like the Englishman he had not only immense wealth but also an army of high-class builders and scientists at his disposal. The Zheng Group went to work feverishly on the realisation of a space elevator, probably in the knowledge that Orley was doing the same thing. But while Orley attained his goal, Zheng didn’t solve the problem. Instead, the group managed to build a fusion reactor, but again they fell behind because Orley’s model worked more safely and efficiently. China’s ruling Communist Party grew nervous. Zheng was urged finally to demonstrate some success, if necessary by making long-nose an offer he couldn’t refuse, so old Zheng went for dinner with Orley and told him that Beijing wanted to cooperate in the near future.

Orley said Beijing could kiss his butt. But would Zheng share another bottle of that wonderful Tignanello with him?

Why not share everything? asked Zheng.

Like what?

Well, money, a lot of money. Power, respect and influence.

He had money of his own.

Yes, but China was hungry and extremely highly motivated, far more than slack, overweight America, which was still reeling from the financial crisis of 2009, so that there was something doddery about everything it did. If you asked an American about the future, in seventy per cent of cases he would see something profoundly terrifying about it, while in China everyone faced the coming day with a cheerful heart.

That was all well and good, said Orley, but shouldn’t they move on to an Ornellaia?

It was pointless, and certainly all mining plans with traditional rocket technology were economically unproductive, and condemned to throw Chinese space travel into the red. But with the defiance of a foot-stamping child, the Party decided to do just that, trusting in the hope that Zheng and the great minds of the Chinese National Space Administration would soon be back in the running. And because America had shown no scruples about letting its mining machines loose on the very part of the Moon where, according to the general geological view, there was a higher-than-average deposit of helium-3, a border area of the Mare Imbrium, the components for a mobile Chinese base and solar furnaces on caterpillar tracks were transported to that very spot, right next to their unloved competitor, and the Chinese began their own mining operation on 2 March 2023. America acted first amazed, then delighted. China was cordially welcomed to the Moon, there was talk of a global legacy and an international community, and no one worried about the newcomer’s touching efforts to squeeze its pathetic portion of helium-3 out of moon dust.

Until 9 May 2024.

Over the past few months both nations had successively stepped up their mining operations. On that day a rather heated discussion took place between the American moon base and Houston. Following immediately on from this, the alarming message reached the White House that Chinese astronauts had deliberately and with unambiguous intentions crossed the mining boundaries and annexed American territory, and that the Americans felt provoked and threatened. The Chinese ambassador was summoned and accused of border violations, and ordered to re-establish the status quo forthwith. The Party asked for an enquiry into what had happened, and on 11 May declared itself unaware of any guilt. Without officially negotiated borders there could be no border violation. Broadly speaking, Washington must know what the world thought of the way that America, in defiance of all clauses in the space treaty in general and the lunar treaty in particular, had invented facts; and how had anyone ever come up with the abstruse idea of crossing that heavenly body – which, according to those treaties, belonged to no one – with borders? And did they really want to have that tiresome discussion all over again, instead of contenting themselves with their own superiority, which was, after all, plainly visible to anyone with eyes to see?

The USA felt snubbed. The Moon was a long way away, no one on Earth could say exactly who was strolling about on whose territory, but on 13 May the moon base announced the arrest of the Chinese astronaut Hua Liwei. The man had been sniffing around on the territory of the American mining station, an automatised facility, which was why he could hardly have shown up there to talk about the moon weather over tea and cakes. That Hua was also commander of the Chinese base, a highly decorated officer who was given no opportunity to provide his version of events, did nothing to defuse the situation. Beijing raged and protested vehemently. At the Ministry for State Security, they outdid themselves in describing the martyrdom that Hua would have to endure in the remote polar base, and made demands for his immediate release which Washington studiously ignored, whereupon Chinese associations, officially this time, invaded American territory with vehicles and mining robots, or at least that was how it was reported. In fact, only one unfortunate small robot was involved, which accidentally rammed an American machine and completely wrote itself off. There could have been no question of manned vehicles, given the isolated Chinese Rover roaming around on its own, and on closer inspection the feared associations proved to be the clueless, disorganised remnants of the base staff, two women who had had to simulate an invasion because of political arm-twisting, while the American astronauts at the Pole didn’t understand why they had had to take poor Hua prisoner, and put all their efforts into at least giving him a good time.

But no one on Earth was interested in any of that.

Instead, ghosts long thought exorcised tried to scare each other to death. Imperialism versus the Red Peril. In a sense the excitement was even justified. It wasn’t at all about the few astronauts or a few square miles of terrain, but who was and would be in charge if more nations tried to take possession of the Moon. Then Washington promptly threatened sanctions, froze Chinese bank accounts, prevented Chinese ships from leaving American ports and expelled the Chinese ambassador, prompting Beijing to threaten massive measures against American mining, if bank accounts, ships and Hua were not released forthwith. America insisted on an apology. No one at all would be released before that. Beijing announced a plan to storm the American station. Bafflingly, no one asked the question of how the completely overtaxed taikonauts could take a huge, partly subterranean base at the inaccessible, mountainous North Pole, and once Washington had threatened military strikes against the Chinese mining station and Chinese facilities on Earth, no one really felt like asking it either.

The world was beginning to get frightened.

Unimpressed, if not actually motivated by this, the aggrieved superpowers continued to tear into each other. Each accused the other of perpetrating a military build-up in space, and of having stationed weapons on the Moon, with the result that the news was full of simulations of lunar nuclear engagements, with dark hints that the conflict might be continued on Earth. While the BBC showed pictures of exploding space stations and, in happy ignorance of physics, gave them an audible bang, the moon-base crews were forbidden to talk to each other. In the end neither party knew what the other was doing and what the whole thing was really about, apart from saving face, until the UN ruled that enough was enough.

That old carthorse, diplomacy, was yoked up to the cart, to drag it out of the dirt. The UN plenary session met on 22 May 2024. China pointed out that because they didn’t have their own space elevator they were unable to transport weapons to the Moon, while this was an easy matter for the Americans. Therefore the Americans must be seen as the aggressors, because they had very clearly stationed weapons on the Moon and broken the space treaty yet again, but then what was new? They themselves, incidentally, were not planning to arm, but found themselves forced by continued provocations to consider a modest contingent for self-defence. The Americans expressed similar intentions. China had been the source of the aggression, and if America were ever to arm itself on the Moon, it would be the consequence of a completely unnecessary border violation.

No border had been violated.

Okay, fine. And we didn’t have weapons on the Moon.

Did.

Didn’t.

Did.

Didn’t.

Did.

The UN General Secretary, with weary rage, condemned both the actions of the Chinese and the imprisonment of the Chinese astronaut by the USA. The world wanted peace. That much was true. Basically, Beijing and Washington wanted nothing more than peace, but face must be saved! It was not until 4 June 2024 that China, teeth gritted, backed down, without reference to the UN resolution, the power of which, once again, seemed to be largely symbolic in character. The truth was that neither of the two nations was either willing or able to engage in open conflict. China withdrew from American territory, which involved the taikonauts carting away the shattered mining machine. Hua was released, along with the Chinese bank accounts and ships, and the ambassadors moved back into their offices. At first the situation was characterised by threats and suspicion. There was a political chill, which meant that the economy froze temporarily as well. Julian Orley, who had wanted to open his Moon hotel as early as 2024, had to suspend its construction for an indefinite period, and helium-3 mining suffered on both sides.

‘It took until 10 November 2024,’ the commentator said with a serious demeanour, ‘for dialogue between the USA and China to resume at the World Economy Summit in Bangkok, for the first time since the outbreak of the dispute, and since then it has been marked by conciliatory tones.’ Her voice became more menacing and dramatic. ‘The world has escaped an escalation – how narrowly, no one can say.’ And again, in a milder tone: ‘The USA assured the Chinese of a stronger connection to the infrastructure of the moon base, new agreements for mutual aid in space were signed and existing ones extended, Americans and Chinese reached an understanding on trade agreements that had until then been contentious.’ Positive, optimistic, with a sleep-well-little-children smile: ‘The waves have been stilled. As ambitiously as they went at each other’s throats, gestures of goodwill were now exchanged. For a very simple reason: the economies couldn’t do without each other. The integration between the two trading giants, the USA and China, could not withstand a war; each party would only be destroying its own property on hostile territory. There is halfhearted talk about cooperating more strongly in future, while only now is each of the two major world powers able to strive for dominance on the Moon. Meanwhile the space-travelling world is vying for the patents of Julian Orley, who has over the last few days broken into space with an illustrious and suspiciously multinational troop of selected guests, perhaps in order to reconsider his US-exclusive attitude – but perhaps also to show them our small, fragile planet from a distance, and remind them that belligerent disputes would not be won by anyone. On that note: good night.’

Jericho sucked the last bit of foam from the bottle.

Curious race, humanity. Flew to the Moon and abused little children.

He turned off the television, gave the box a kick and went to bed in the hope of being able to sleep.