Things would go even better for Greenwatch.
The traffic was moderate, there weren’t many cars about on Marine Drive. On their left the forest opened up, providing a view of a still sea and far-off, pastel-coloured mountain ranges. Hundreds of tree trunks made into rafts rested in the shallow water, evidence that the timber industry was still flourishing in spite of massive deforestation. Loreena closed her eyes and enjoyed the airstream. When she opened her eyes again, she glanced into the wing mirror.
An SUV was driving close behind them, a massive, grey off-road vehicle with darkened windows.
Suddenly she was overcome by a feeling of unease.
She wondered how often she had looked into her wing mirror over the past quarter of an hour. Probably all the time, without being aware of it. Loreena was a super-alert passenger, and her constant shouts of ‘Red!’ and ‘When’s it going to turn green?’ and ‘Watch where you’re driving!’ got on some people’s nerves. Nothing escaped her. Not even who was driving behind them.
Frowning, she turned her head.
The feeling condensed into certainty. Now she was completely sure that the SUV had been tailgating them ever since the airport. The windscreen reflected the sky, so that the two occupants could only be made out very vaguely. She looked thoughtfully ahead again. The road ran evenly through luxuriant green, divided along the middle by a yellowing strip of grass on which bushes and low trees were planted at irregular intervals. Another off-road vehicle was coming towards them, equally dark, a different one.
Was she going mad? Was she developing a peculiar little paranoid fantasy? How many dark SUVs were there in Vancouver? Hundreds, certainly. Thousands. To western Canadians off-road vehicles were something like seashells to hermit crabs.
Stop thinking this stuff, she thought.
On the other hand it couldn’t hurt if she jotted down the number of the car. She took out her mobile phone as the SUV suddenly switched lanes and pulled up level with them so that she couldn’t see the number plate any more. Loreena knitted her brows. Fool, she thought. Couldn’t you wait another few seconds? I was about to give you my—
The SUV came closer.
‘Hey!’ Sid honked his horn and gesticulated towards the other vehicle. ‘Keep your eye on the road, you idiot!’
Still closer.
‘What’s up with him?’ barked Sid. ‘Is he drunk?’
No, thought Loreena, filled with sudden unease, no one’s drunk around here. Someone knows exactly what he’s doing.
Sid accelerated. So did the SUV.
‘What a stupid idiot!’ he raged. ‘That guy ought to—’
‘Careful!’ yelled the intern.
Loreena saw the huge car coming, settled into her seatbelt, tried to put some distance between herself and the door, then the SUV collided with the side of the Thunderbird and forced it into the central reservation. Sid cursed and pulled the wheel round, frantically trying not to end up in the opposite lane. Veering wildly they ploughed through soil, brushed past low bushes, just missed a tree. The engine of the sports car wailed. Sid put his foot down. The SUV drew up and rammed them again, harder this time. Loreena lurched about in her seat. The metal screech of punished metal echoed in her aural passages, and suddenly they were on the opposite lane, they heard furious honking, swerved at the last moment.
‘My car!’ wailed Sid. ‘My lovely car!’
Grim-faced, he steered the Thunderbird back onto the strip of green, but in that section someone had placed greater emphasis on bushes. They plunged noisily into a hedge. Branches flew off in all directions as the sports car crashed through several different varieties of shrub. On the right-hand side the SUV dashed along and blocked their way back onto the carriageway. Sid braked abruptly and tried to get behind the SUV, which thwarted his intention by also decelerating.
At that very moment he hurtled forward again.
This time Sid was quicker. Neatly avoiding a collision, he crossed the two opposite lanes and only just managed to dodge a motorcycle and turn into Old Marine Drive, a narrow, potholed street that led a few kilometres along the woods to the university grounds, where it opened back into the main road. There was no one to be seen for miles around; dense, dark green proliferated on both sides. Loreena registered that her seatbelt had been torn from its moorings, and clutched the edge of the windscreen.
My God, she thought. What do they want from us?
Oddly, it didn’t occur to her that the attack might have anything to do with Palstein, Ruiz and the whole story. She thought instead of juvenile delinquents, carjackers or someone who did that kind of thing just for fun, who must be completely insane. She looked behind her. Potholes, woods, nothing else. For a moment she was surviving on the tender shoot of hope that Sid might have shaken off his pursuer with his manoeuvre, when he appeared behind them and came relentlessly closer.
A scraping noise emerged from the Thunderbird’s engine compartment. The car stuttered.
‘Faster!’ she screamed.
‘I’m driving as fast as I can,’ Sid yelled back. Instead they were losing speed, growing steadily slower.
‘You must be able to go faster!’
‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ Sid let go of the wheel and waved his hands around in the air. ‘Something’s fucked, no idea what.’
‘Hands on the wheel!’
‘Oh God almighty,’ groaned the intern and ducked his head. The massive, dark front of the SUV roared up and crashed into them from behind. The Thunderbird gave a leap. Loreena was slung forward and bumped her head.
‘Come on!’ Sid pleaded with the car. ‘Come on!’
Once again the SUV hammered into their rear. The Thunderbird made unhealthy noises, then their attacker was suddenly beside them, pushing them easily aside. Sid cursed, steered like crazy in the opposite direction, put his foot down, braked—
Lost control.
The moment of lift-off had the entirely curious effect that at the same moment every sound – not only that of the tyres on the gravel of the carriageway, but also the sounds of the engine, of the SUV – seemed to die away, apart from the single, bubbling call of a bird. They turned over and over in peaceful silence, the trees grew momentarily down from the sky towards them, bushy clouds sprinkled an endless blue sea of unfathomable depth, then there was a change of perspective, the wood was at an angle, a roaring and scraping, and everything was back, the whole terrifying cacophony of the crash. Loreena was hurled from her seat. Arms flailing, she sailed through the air, while below her the Thunderbird skidded down the embankment, undercarriage towards her, tyres spinning, an animal devouring bushes and foliage. Still flying, she became aware of the wreck abruptly reaching a standstill and coming to rest, then a piece of meadow came rushing towards her at breakneck speed.
She had no idea what exactly she broke as she landed, but judging by the pain the damage must have been considerable. Her body was slung around several times, onto her back, onto her belly, onto her side. What wasn’t broken broke now. At last, after what seemed like an eternity, she lay there, limbs outstretched, blood in her eyes, blood in her mouth.
Her first thought was that she was still alive.
Her second, that her phone was flashing in the sun not very far away. It sparkled on a flat stone like an exhibition piece, right in the middle, as if lovingly placed there. Further down lay the shattered Thunderbird in the trellis of broken trees, scattered with twigs, bark and leaves, and in the car, in fact more out than in, Sid dangled, his head half torn from his shoulders, staring at her.
Tyres approached across gravel and grass.
‘Loreena?’
The cry reached her, thin and plaintive. She raised her eyes and saw the intern lying in the shadow of a fir tree. He tried to prop himself up, collapsed, tried again. The SUV stopped. Someone came down the embankment with long, not particularly hurried steps. A man, tall, dark trousers, white shirt, sunglasses. He casually held a long-barrelled pistol in his right hand.
‘I’ll be right with you,’ he said. ‘Just a moment.’
Silencer, the thought ran through her head.
He smiled in a rather businesslike manner as he walked past her, stepped up to the intern and fired three shots at him, until the boy stopped moving. It went pop, pop, pop. Loreena opened her mouth because she wanted to scream, to wail, to call for help, but only an ebbing sigh escaped her chest. Every breath was torture. She struggled forwards, propped her elbows in the grass and crawled towards the stone with the phone on it.
The man came back, picked it up and put it in his pocket.
She gave up. Rolled onto her back, blinked into the sun and thought how right Palstein had been. How close they had been, how bloody close! Lars Gudmundsson’s head and torso entered her field of vision, the muzzle of his pistol.
‘You’re very clever,’ he said. ‘A very clever woman.’
‘I know,’ groaned Loreena.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all – it’s all on the net,’ she murmured. ‘It’s all—’
‘We’ll check that,’ he said in a friendly voice, and pulled the trigger.
Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon
Nina Hedegaard tried to catch a thousand birds as she sweated away in the Finnish sauna, in a state of mounting frustration. Everywhere she saw the peacock plumage of affluence, heard a twittering exchange about nests and young, and imagined that carefree daydreaming that was only possible in Julian’s world. A thousand wonderful, wildly fluttering thoughts. But Julian wasn’t there, and the birds refused to be lured into the pen of her life-plans. Whenever she thought she was holding at least a sparrow, after Julian had murmured something that sounded halfway authoritative in her ear, even that little hope escaped and joined all the other ideas, enticingly close and at the same time unattainably far off, of her inflamed imagination. By now she had serious doubts about Julian’s honesty. As if he didn’t know full well that she had hopes. Why couldn’t he confess openly to her? Did he have an act of adultery to conceal, social ostracism to fight against? Not a bit of it; he was single, just as she was single, good-looking and lovable single, not rich, perhaps, but then he was rich himself, so what was the problem?
* * *
Her frustration seeped like dew from every pore, collected on her forearms, breasts and belly. She furiously distributed layer after layer of warm sweat, let her hands circle around her inner thighs, her fingers working their way slowly to the middle, settling in her crotch, twitching, untameable, abject, pleasure-seeking digits. Shocking! Along with her fury, she was seized with a furious desire to make the absent figure present in her mind, and— but that was impossible, absolutely out of the question.
To cut a long story short, Julian just wanted to fuck her. That was it. He felt nothing, he didn’t love. He just wanted to fuck a nice little Danish astronaut if he felt like it. Just as he fucked the whole world when he felt like it.
Stupid idiot!
She violently pulled her hands away, pressed them to the edge of the wooden bench beside her hips and looked out at the wonder of the gorge with its pastel-coloured surfaces and uncompromising shadows. Thousands upon thousands of bright, frozen stars suddenly seemed more attainable than the life that she would have liked to live by his side. She wasn’t concerned with his money, or rather it wasn’t really about the money, even though she didn’t necessarily scorn it. No, she wanted a place in that vision-filled brain, capable of dreaming up space lifts, she wanted to be Julian’s personal stroke of genius, his most brilliant idea, and to be seen as such by the world, as the woman he desired. She hadn’t just fucked her way to that, she’d earned it!
Telling him things like that was the reason she was sitting here. Without wanting to put any pressure on him, of course. Just a bit of homeopathically prescribed planning for the future, allied to what she saw as the dazzlingly attractive option of an act of love in the sauna, as soon as the Ganymede landed. That was what they had agreed, and Julian had promised to join her straight away, but now it was a quarter to eight, and on demand she would have to listen to an unconvincing-sounding Lynn as she served up the fairy tale that the group, enchanted by the Schröter Valley, had forgotten time and would be an hour or two late.
How could Lynn have known that without a satellite connection?
Okay, she didn’t know. Even in the morning, Julian had talked about an extended excursion into the hinterland of Snake Hill and predicted a late return. No cause for concern. Everything was bound to be fine.
Fine. Ha ha.
Nina stared dully ahead. Perhaps it was fine to fuck the guests around, but not her, thank you very much. She should never have got involved with the richest old codger in the world. It was as simple as that. High time to take an ice-cold shower and do a few lengths in the pool.
* * *
‘No, there’s something solemn about it,’ Ögi said. ‘Only if you transcend it, of course.’
‘If you what?’ Winter smiled.
‘If you reduce the immediately perceptible to its significance, my dear,’ Ögi explained. ‘The most difficult exercise these days. Some people call it religion.’
‘A tilted flag? An old landing module?’
‘An old landing module and the essentially rather unexciting leftovers of two men in a boring-looking area of the Moon – but they were the first men who ever set foot on it! Do you understand? It gives the whole of the Mare Tranquillitatis a – a—’
Ögi struggled for words.
‘Sacred dignity?’ Aileen Donoghue suggested, with gleaming eyes and a church-going tone.
‘Exactly!’
‘Aha,’ said Winter.
‘Do you have to believe in God to feel that?’ Rebecca Hsu fished a glacé cherry out of her drink, pursed her lips and sucked it into her mouth. A quiet slurp and it was gone. ‘I just found it significant, but sacred—’
‘Because you have no sacred tradition,’ Chucky said to her. ‘Your people, I mean. Your nation. The Chinese don’t hold with the sacred.’
‘Thanks for reminding me. At least now I know why I liked the Rupes Recta better.’
They had assembled for communicative relaxation exercises in the Mama Quilla Club, and were trying to quell their anxiety about the continued absence of the Ganymede by vociferously going through the day’s events. In the western Mare Tranquillitatis they had admired the landing console of the very first lunar module, in which Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the satellite in 1969. The area was considered a culturally protected area, along with three little craters, named after the pioneers and the third man, Collins, who had had to stay in the spaceship. Even during their approach, from a great height, the museum, as the region was generally known, had revealed the full banality of man’s arrival. Small and parasitic, like a fly on the hide of an elephant, the console stuck to the regolith, and Armstrong’s famous bootprint lay in splendour under a glass case. A place for pilgrims. Doubtless there were more magnificent cathedrals, and yet Ögi was right when he felt there was something in it that bestowed significance and greatness on the human race. It was the certainty that they wouldn’t have been able to stand there if those men hadn’t taken the journey through the airless wastes and performed the miracle of the first moon landing. So what they felt was respect, in the end. Later that afternoon, in the view of the infinite-looking wall of Rupes Recta, which looked as if the whole Moon continued on a level 200 metres higher up, they had succumbed to the sublimity of the cosmic architecture, deeply impressed, admittedly, but without feeling the curiously touching power emanated by the pitiful memorabilia of human presence in the Mare Tranquillitatis. At that moment most of them had understood that they were not pioneers. No one said hello to a pioneer. He was greeted not by shabby metal frames, not by bootprints, but only by loneliness, the unknown.
Lynn Orley and Dana Lawrence made a great effort to keep the cheerful chitchat going until Olympiada Rogacheva set down her glass and said, ‘I’d like to talk to my husband now.?
??
The others fell silent. Clammy consternation settled on the gathering. She had just broken an unspoken covenant that they should not worry, but somehow everyone seemed happy about it, particularly Chuck, who had already had to tell three miserable jokes just to drown out the sound of his menacingly grumbling belly.
‘Come on, Dana,’ he blustered. ‘What’s going on? What are you not telling us?’
‘A satellite breakdown is nothing serious, Mr Donoghue.’
‘Chuck.’
‘Chuck. For example a mini-meteorite the size of a grain of sand can temporarily paralyse a satellite, and the LPCS—’
‘But you don’t need the LPCS. Armstrong’s gang didn’t have an LPCS.’
‘I can assure you that the technical defect will soon be repaired. That will take a while, but soon we’ll be in contact with the Earth exactly as we were before.’
‘It’s odd, though, having no sign of them,’ said Aileen.
‘Not at all.’ Lynn gave a strained smile. ‘You know Julian. He’s organised a huge schedule. He said even this morning that they’d probably be late. And by the way, have you seen the system of grooves between the Mare Tranquillitatis and the Sinus Medii? You must have done, when you flew to Rupes Recta.’
‘Yes, they look like streets,’ said Hsu, and the whistling in the forest resumed.
Olympiada stared straight ahead. Winter noticed her catatonia, stopped licking at the sugar rim of her strawberry daiquiri, edged closer and put a tanned arm around her narrow, drooping shoulders.
‘Don’t worry, sweetie. You’ll have him back soon enough.’
‘I feel so shabby,’ Olympiada replied quietly.
‘Why shabby?’
‘So miserable. So useless. When you really want to talk to somebody you despise, just because there’s no one else there, it’s pitiful.’
‘But you’ve got us!’ Winter murmured, and kissed her on the temple, a seal of sisterhood. Only then did she seem to understand what Olympiada had just said. ‘So what do you mean, despise? Not Oleg, surely?’