Puzzling, all very puzzling!
Sensibly, the investigating team didn’t attempt to solve all the puzzles at once, even though there were some obvious conclusions to be drawn. Whoever else he was, the white-haired man was clearly a professional killer; the glass eye held some secret around which the whole business probably revolved; and the Indonesian victim had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. For the moment, however, the Chinese business mogul would be at the centre of the investigation – less because they wanted to understand his motives than because they simply wanted to pick him up as soon as possible. The three rooms that he had taken in the Grand Hyatt didn’t look as though the guests would be returning any time soon. All that was known for sure was that Tu and the woman had driven back from the Institute of Forensic Pathology to the hotel at full tilt, had told the concierge to put the Audi down in the car park, and then had vanished into the lobby, chatting.
What had they been chatting about?
The concierge remembered quite clearly. They had been planning to meet some third person in the Sony Center, because the fat man had said that he wanted ‘something sweet’. Oh, and the woman had been very, very pretty! The police officers pressed the concierge on whether he understood Chinese, and he said he didn’t, that the two of them had been speaking English. This made the head of the enquiry team suspicious – Dr Marika Voss had reported that they had spoken Chinese to one another in the autopsy theatre. Just to be on the safe side, he had sent two men over to the Sony Center, not expecting that they would find anyone there, and set his team to digging up exactly how Tu had arrived.
The longer he thought about it, the more certain he felt that Tu and the blond man were in it together.
* * *
The skycab had needed only a trifling eight minutes to get to the airport, but it seemed like an eternity to Jericho. In his thoughts, he was imagining what the case team would be doing. What would they prioritise? Who would their enquiries focus on? He had been at the scene of the shooting himself, and witnesses had seen him running towards the Tiergarten. They would want to know more about him. It certainly counted against him that he had been carrying a gun in the museum, although ballistics would show that he hadn’t shot Nyela. As for Yoyo and Tu, they had impersonated police officers and then maltreated a corpse, on top of which Tu had driven a hole through the highway code, but the police had several leads to follow. In a way, that was good, since it meant that they would be that much slower making progress. They would have to check identities, draw up timelines, take statements, look for motives. They would get bogged down in speculation.
On the other hand, they had been notably efficient so far. They had turned up at the Grand Hyatt impressively fast, meaning that they already had Tu in their sights. It wasn’t clear yet whether they knew about his jet, or indeed whether they had made the assumption that he would be leaving Berlin at short notice.
The skycab circled above the airport.
They lost height, banking about in a broad curve. They could see Tu’s Aerion Supersonic from here. Its stubby wings, set far back on the fuselage, made it look like a seabird, craning its neck curiously, as eager to be gone as they were. The skycab pilot tilted the jets, let the machine sink down, and landed with a gentle rocking motion not far from the plane. Tu handed him a banknote.
‘Keep the change,’ he said in English.
The size of the tip made the pilot leap to attention and offer his help in loading the jet. Since they didn’t even have luggage to unload from his cab, apart from Tu’s small suitcase, he asked whether there was anything else he could do for them. Tu thought for a moment.
‘Just wait here until we take off,’ he said. ‘And don’t say a word to anyone until we do.’
* * *
The chief case officer was just on his way to the police skyport when his phone rang. Before he could take the call, he saw an officer running across the flight pad towards him.
‘We’ve got Baldy,’ he heard her shout.
He hesitated. The call was from one of the men he had detailed to find out more about what Tu was up to in Berlin. Meanwhile the policewoman had stopped in front of him, breathlessly holding her phone out under his nose. It showed a picture of the man who was, right now, lying on the dissection table with splinters of pencil in his frontal lobe.
‘I’ll call back,’ he said into the telephone. ‘Two minutes.’
‘Mickey Reardon,’ the policewoman told him. ‘An old fossil from the Irish underground, a specialist in alarms systems. He’s been freelancing for every Secret Service you could mention ever since the IRA decommissioned their weapons twenty years ago, and he’s worked for a lot of outfits that are half political, half organised crime.’
‘An Irishman? God help us all.’
He couldn’t have liked it any worse if Reardon had turned out to be ex-North Korean People’s Army. Whenever a regular army or a resistance movement lost its raison d’être, it would spit out creatures like Reardon, who would often make deals with international Secret Services if they weren’t working for organised crime outright.
‘Who did he work for?’
‘We only know some names. He was with the US Secret Service a lot, then for Mossad, Zhong Chan Er Bu, our own guys. Quite the multi-talent, very clever at shutting down security systems but also at installing them. He was wanted for a number of instances of grievous bodily harm, and suspected of murder as well.’
‘Reardon was armed,’ said the inspector thoughtfully. ‘Meaning he was on a mission. Donner gets rid of him, then he’s shot. By our white-haired gentleman. Is this a Secret Service operation? Reardon and Mr White on one side, Donner and Mr Blond on the other side, Blondie tries to help Donner—’
He had almost forgotten that he was on his way to the Grand Hyatt.
‘We need to get moving,’ his sergeant said.
So it was only once they were in the air that he remembered he had been going to call someone back.
* * *
The jet taxied onto the runway. Tu choked back his engines and waited for permission to take off. He was far more nervous than he was letting on. Strictly speaking, Jericho was right. What they were doing here flew in the face of reason. They were picking a fight with the German police for no reason at all. Indeed, the police might even have been able to help them.
They might not have, though.
Tu had his own bitter experience of the arbitrariness of state power, which had certainly left him with scars, though he tried hard not to jump at shadows. Admittedly, his paranoia was rooted in events that lay twenty-eight years back. Here he was, though, holding the others hostage to his own mistrust, especially Yoyo, who was most receptive to such paranoid behaviours for reasons of her own. There was no doubt that he was manipulating them. He tried to persuade himself that he was doing the right thing, and perhaps he was even right about that, but it wasn’t about that, hadn’t been for a long time now. As he had walked the streets of Berlin at night with Yoyo, he had realised that the only difference between Hongbing’s paranoia and his own was that he was more cheerful about it. His old friend wandered the vaults of his memory forlornly, while he strode through them, whistling cheerfully. Compared with Hongbing, he was fighting fit, but he couldn’t fight hard enough to cope with all that life had to throw at him, not on his own.
So he had told her something of the past, and all he had achieved was to make her more confused and depressed. None of it was any help. He would have to tell her the rest as well, tell her what he had never told anybody else except Joanna, tell her the whole story. He would assume Hongbing’s tacit approval, and he would cut the whole miserable tangle just as soon as the opportunity presented itself. He would have much preferred it if Hongbing himself had told Yoyo the truth, but this way was good as well. Anything was better than silence.
We have to close the door on our past, he thought. Not run away from it, not escape into success or into depression.
The voice in his ea
rphones gave him permission.
Tu brought the jet engines up to speed and engaged thrust. The acceleration pushed him back into his seat, and they took off.
* * *
Only a few minutes later the chief case officer learned that Tu had arrived by private plane, an Aerion Supersonic. The rooms in the Hyatt were abandoned; the Chinese mogul and his companions had obviously left. Perhaps they were still in Berlin, since they hadn’t checked out, and the Audi that Tu had hired at the airport was still in the Grand Hyatt’s underground parking. This was the car whose registration number had set the case team onto his trail.
On the other hand, there was a corpse in one of the rooms.
The inspector ordered his team to secure the mogul’s jet, just in case. Then a few minutes after that, he learned that he had lost the decisive moment by paying attention instead to Mickey Reardon’s identification. He let rip with a string of curses so ripely inventive that the case officers all around him froze in their tracks, but it was no use.
Tu Tian had left Berlin.
Aerion Supersonic
‘Of course she can read memory crystals,’ Jericho yelled into the cockpit, as if Tu had asked him whether he washed every day.
‘A thousand apologies,’ Tu shouted back. ‘I’d forgotten she was a sort of surrogate wife.’
Jericho lifted Diane’s compact body from his backpack, connected it to the ports of the on-board electronics and set up the monitor on its seat bracket. The Pratt & Whitney turbines wrapped the Aerion in a cocoon of noise. The trapezoid-winged craft was still climbing. Sitting next to him, Yoyo was working on Vogelaar’s glass eye, unscrewing it and taking from it a glittering structure about half the size of a sugar lump. Tu circled the plane. Berlin tilted towards them through the side windows, while at the same time the sky on the other side turned a deep, dark blue.
‘Hi, Diane.’
‘Hi, Owen,’ said the soft, familiar voice. ‘How are you?’
‘Could be better.’
‘What can I do to make you well?’
‘Plenty,’ Yoyo said in a quietly mocking voice. ‘One day you’ll have to tell me if she’s a good kisser.’
Jericho grimaced. ‘Open the Crystal Reader, Diane.’
A little rod slid from the front of the computer, sheathed in a transparent frame. The jet swung back to the horizontal and went on gaining height. Below them the massive scab of urban development made way for green-brown-yellow arable land, patchworked with small wooded areas, roads and villages. As if daubed on, rivers and lakes shimmered in the afternoon sunlight.
‘I’ll be really pissed off if that great mess in the Charité wasn’t worth it,’ growled Yoyo. She leaned across to Jericho and set the cube in the surround, and the tiny drawer slid shut again.
‘Everyone made sacrifices,’ he said wearily, while Diane uploaded the data. ‘After all, Tian was prepared to chuck a hundred thousand euros to the four winds.’
‘Not to mention your ear.’ Yoyo looked at him. ‘Or at least the snippet of your ear. The atomic layer of your—’
‘The serious injury to my ear. There.’
The screen filled with symbols. Jericho held his breath. The dossier was much bigger than he had thought. He immediately felt that ambivalent dread that you feel just before you enter the monster’s lair to see it in all its terrifying hideousness and ascertain its true nature once and for all. In a few minutes they would know the reason for the hunt that had claimed so many victims, almost including themselves, and he knew they weren’t going to like what they saw. Even Yoyo seemed hesitant. She put a finger to her lips and paused.
‘If I’d been him,’ she said, ‘I’d have provided a short version. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Jericho nodded. ‘But where?’
‘Here.’ Her finger wandered across to a symbol marked JKV Intro.
‘JKV?’ He narrowed his eyes.
‘Jan Kees Vogelaar.’
‘Sounds good. Let’s try it. Diane?’
‘Yes, Owen.’
‘Open JKV Intro.’
There sat Vogelaar, in shirt and shorts, on a veranda, under a roughly hewn wooden roof, and with a drink beside him. In the background, hilly scrubland fell away to the coast. Here and there palms were sticking up from low mixed vegetation. It was plainly drizzling. A sky of indeterminate colour hung over the scene and softened the horizon of a far-off sea.
‘The likelihood that I am no longer alive at this second,’ Vogelaar said without preamble, ‘is relatively high, so listen very carefully now, whoever you are. You won’t be having any more information from me in person.’
Jericho leaned forward. It was spooky, looking Vogelaar in the eyes. More precisely, they were looking at him through one of his eyes. Unlike in Berlin, he was ash-blond again, with a bushy moustache, light-coloured eyebrows and eyelashes.
‘There are no bugs here. You wouldn’t think intimacy was a problem in a country that consists almost entirely of swamp and rainforest, but Mayé is infected with the same paranoia as almost all potentates of his stamp. I think even Ndongo would have been interested in going on listening to the parrots. But as they’ve appointed me head of security, the task of snooping on the good people of Equatorial Guinea, particularly the ruling family and our valued foreign guests, has fallen to me. My task is to protect Mayé. He trusts me, and I don’t plan to abuse that trust.’
Vogelaar spread his arms in a gesture that took in the hinterland. ‘As you see, we live in paradise. The apples drop into your mouth, and as you would expect of any decent paradise, a snake is creeping around the place, and it wants to know that everything is under control. Kenny Xin doesn’t trust anyone. Not even me, although he describes himself as my friend and he was the one who got me this extremely remunerative job in the first place. Hi there, Kenny, by the way. You see, your suspicion was justified.’ He laughed. ‘I doubt very much that you know the guy, but he’s the reason why I’m presenting this file. Some of the attached documents deal with him, so let’s just say that in 2017, on the instructions of the Chinese oil companies and with the approval of Beijing, he organised the coup against Juan Aristide Ndongo and, with my help, or more precisely with the help of African Protection Services, carried it out and enthroned Mayé. The dossier records a chronicle of coups, internal information about Beijing’s role in Africa and much else besides, but at its heart there lies a quite different subject.’
He crossed his legs and wearily waved away a flying insect the size of a human fist.
‘Perhaps someone remembers the launch pad that Mayé had built on Bioko. International companies were involved, under the aegis of the Zheng Group, which allows us to assume that China had a hand in this as well. Personally I don’t believe that. Nor is it true, even though we’ve repeatedly sold the idea in public, that our space programme was an initiative one hundred per cent down to Mayé. In fact it was initiated by a group of possibly Chinese investors which, in my opinion – and contrary to their own account – is not identical with Beijing and was represented by Kenny Xin at the time. The fact is that this organisation wanted to fire an information satellite from our soil into space, supposedly as an investigation into new kinds of rocket propulsion. Mayé was supposed to be able to use the satellite for civilian purposes, with the proviso that the whole space project was presented as his own idea. I’ve attached the blueprints for the launch pad, along with a list of all the companies which helped to build it.’
‘He’s still taking the piss out of us,’ Yoyo hissed.
‘Hardly.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘He can’t take the piss out of us any more.’
‘But that’s exactly what he did in Muntu—’
‘Wait.’ Jericho raised his hand. ‘Listen!’
‘—the launch was scheduled for two days later. This meant that the preparations should actually have been completed, and only the satellite had still to be put on the tip of the rocket. That same night a convoy of armoured cars arrived in the grounds of the launch
pad. Something was brought into the construction hangar and coupled with the satellite: a container the size of a very big suitcase or a small cupboard, fitted with landing equipment, jets and spherical tanks. The whole thing could be collapsed so that it didn’t take up much room. Only close contacts of Xin dealt with the delivery and assembly of the craft, no foreign constructors were present, not even anyone from the Zheng Group. Neither Mayé nor his people knew at this point that anything but the said satellite was to be fired into space. I’m not a specialist in space travel, by the way, but I assume that the container held a small, automatic spaceship, a kind of landing unit. My people photographed the arrival of the convoy and the container; you will find the pictures in the files KON_PICS and SAT_PICS.’ Vogelaar grinned. ‘Are you still watching, Kenny? While you deludedly thought you were observing me, did it never occur to you that we were observing you?’
‘So.’ Tu came out of the cockpit and joined them in the corridor. ‘We’re flying on autopilot. We’re on course for London via Amsterdam, so let’s have a dr—’
‘Shhh!’ hissed Yoyo.
‘—was of course interested in what was in that container,’ Vogelaar went on. ‘So I had to reconstruct the route it had taken – I should perhaps mention that the people who delivered it at dead of night were almost all Chinese. Anyway, we managed to trace the route of the plane that had brought it to Africa back through a series of intermediate landings. For obvious reasons I had expected that the plane had originally started off in China, but to my surprise it came from Korea, or more precisely from a remote airport in North Korea, near the border.’
In the background it had started raining heavily. A rising rustle mingled with Vogelaar’s words, a changing grey blurred the sky, scrubland and sea.
‘I’ve built up extensive contacts over the years. Not least with south-east Asia. Someone who still owed me something set about working out what had been loaded on at the airport. You must know, the whole area is extremely unsafe. There’s a lot of piracy in the surrounding waters, a high level of criminality, unemployment and frustration. The South has been paying for the North’s reconstruction since 2015, but the money is disappearing in a vast bubble of speculation. Both sides feel they’ve been tricked, and they aren’t happy about it. Corruption and black market dealings are flourishing as a result, and one of the most lucrative markets is the trade in Kim Jong Un’s former arsenal of weapons, particularly the warheads. Especially popular are the mini-nukes, small atom bombs with considerable destructive power. The Soviets certainly experimented with them, in fact all the nuclear powers did. Kim had a few too, hundreds even. Except nobody knows where they ended up. After the collapse of the North Korean regime, the death of Kim and reunification they had suddenly disappeared, and since they aren’t particularly big—’