‘Shall I tell you how I see it?’ asked Finn.
They all looked at him.
‘I see two dozen of the richest people on this much-discussed planet Earth feeling trapped between malaria and champagne and, in line with the disproportion that you mentioned, Eva, escaping to the Moon, where they reach remarkable insights in the most expensive hotel in the solar system. You know what? I’m going for another couple of lengths.’
* * *
Sophie had installed Tim’s program and asked him casually whether it hadn’t occurred to him that she might be the traitor. He had looked baffled for a moment, before exploding with laughter.
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘You bet.’
‘Well—’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Happy now?’
He laughed again. ‘If people got out of jail by saying that, we could convert our prisons into hen houses.’
‘You’re a teacher, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many times do you hear that every day?’
‘What? “It’s not me, it wasn’t me”?’ He shrugged. ‘No idea. I usually lose track at about midday. But okay, it wasn’t you. Do you suspect anybody?’
She lowered her head over the keyboard, so that her blonde curls hid her facial expression.
‘Not directly.’
‘You’re thinking about my sister, aren’t you?’ He sighed. ‘Come on, Sophie, it’s not a problem, I’m not cross with you. You’re not the only person who feels that way. Dana has completely homed in on Lynn.’
‘I know.’ Sophie looked up. ‘But I don’t believe for a second that your sister has anything to do with it. Lynn built this hotel. It would be completely idiotic. And what’s more, it’s only just now occurred to me, but when she refused to let your father see the corridor video – why would she have done that? I mean, why, if she had actually recut it herself? In her place I’d have proudly rubbed his nose in it.’
Tim looked grateful and curiously glum at the same time. It was immediately clear to her that he was more inclined towards Dana’s opinion than her own, and that he was bothered by the fact.
‘Quite honestly,’ she smiled shyly, ‘I was wondering before whether you yourself mightn’t—’
‘Ah!’ he grinned. ‘No, it wasn’t me.’
‘More hen houses.’ She smiled back. ‘Would you like to keep me company while I reconstruct the records?’
‘No, I’d just like to see where Lynn’s got to. But call me if you think of anything.’ He smiled. ‘You’re very brave, Sophie. Will you manage?’
‘Somehow.’
‘Not a bit scared?’
She shrugged. ‘Oddly, the thing I’m least worried about is the idea of being blown up. It’s too unreal. If it does happen, we’ll all go in a flash, but we’re not going to know all that much about it.’
‘I feel the same.’
‘So what are you afraid of?’
‘Right now? I’m worried about Amber. Very worried. About my wife, about my father—’
‘About your sister—’
‘Yes. About Lynn too. See you later, Sophie.’
* * *
‘That wasn’t nice,’ Heidrun mocked, after the others had fled the pool area. Only she and Finn were still drifting in the black water of the crater, somewhere between idyll and apocalypse.
‘But true,’ said Finn, launching into a crawl away from her.
She pushed her wet hair behind her ears. Below the surface of the water her body was compressed into a bony caricature of itself, as if the waves were starting to dissolve her. Finn cut a swathe through the water like a motorboat, sending watery chaos in all directions, great surges that a swimmer could never have produced in terrestrial waters. An amusement factor reserved only for moon travellers. You could catapult yourself out of the water like a dolphin and, when you splashed back in again, set small tsunamis on their way. You were operating in arrogant opposition to the laws of gravity, but Finn’s mood was closer to the grey of the surrounding landscape. Heidrun stretched, dived, slipped after him and past him and burst through the surface. Finn saw that the way to the opposite edge of the crater was blocked, and balanced himself in the water.
‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Bad mood?’
‘No idea.’ He shrugged. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be going up?’
‘And what about you?’
‘I haven’t made any dates with anybody.’
Heidrun thought for a moment. Had she made any dates? With Walo, of course, but could you really describe the day-to-day magnetism of marriage as a date?
‘So you’ve no idea what your mood is.’
‘I don’t know.’
It was true, she guessed, Finn probably just had no idea why his mood had so suddenly soured. He had been in great form all day, making her laugh with his laconic sarcasm, a gift that Heidrun valued above all others. She liked men whose wit sprang from easy understatement, which gave them the ultimate accolade of cool. In her opinion there was hardly anything more erotic than laughter, sadly an attitude fraught with difficulties, because the majority of the male sex tended to try to produce it intellectually. The result was usually tiresome and discouraging. In their constant bid to score points with hilarious thigh-slappers, these suitors lost what remained of their natural machismo, and there was much worse to come. For her part, Heidrun derived intense and noisy pleasure from sex, and had ended up in paroxysms of laughter during so many orgasms that the gentlemen in question, convinced that they were the object of her laughter, were thrown spontaneously off their stroke. The drop in pleasure pressure was always followed by the same embarrassment, she always felt guilty, but what was she supposed to do? She loved laughing. Ögi was the first to understand. Heidrun’s natural responses neither inhibited his erections nor slowed him down in any way. Walo Ögi with his chiselled Zürich physiognomy, which could break out into ringing laughter at any time, took sex no more seriously than she did, with the result that they both enjoyed it a great deal.
Finn, on the other hand. Viewed objectively, in so far as the objectification of beauty was ever justified, he was far better looking than Walo, in terms of classical proportion at any rate: he was perfectly built and a good sixteen years younger. Apart from that, he had the appearance of an uncommunicative and sometimes sulky melancholic. He concealed his stroppiness behind insecurity, his shyness behind indifference, but he was enough of an actor to flirt professionally with all of these qualities. As a result he was surrounded by the aura of mystery that turned millions of emancipated female individuals into spineless mush. Supposedly shy, he cultivated the pose of the eternal outsider in a world whose cofounder and original inhabitant he was; he acted the part of the lout, as if Marlon Brando, James Dean and Johnny Depp hadn’t already taken the idea to ludicrous extremes, and exuded a sweaty rebellious appeal. He couldn’t, with the best will in the world, ever have been described as the life and soul. And yet behind the forbidding façade Heidrun sensed an inclination to excess, to anarchic fun, to wild parties, as long as the right people were invited. She had no doubt that one could fool about with him, and have laughing sex until libido and diaphragm both gave in, after hours.
‘They’re getting on your nerves, aren’t they?’ she surmised. ‘Our lovely fellow travellers.’
Finn rubbed water out of his eyes.
‘I get on my own nerves,’ he said. ‘Because I think it’s my problem.’
‘What is?’
‘Not rising like a spiritual soufflé up here. It seems almost unavoidable. Everyone is constantly coming out with the loveliest philosophical observations. There isn’t anyone who hasn’t a clever thing to say. Some of them burst into tears at the very sight of the Earth, others wallow in self-mortification at the thought of their earthly striving. Eva sees injustice and Mukesh Nair sees miracles and wonder in every grain of moon dust. A complete social elite seem determined to relativise their previous lives, just because they’re sitting
on a lump of stone so far from the Earth that you can see the whole thing. And what occurs to me? Just a stupid old saying from the Pre-Cambrian era of space travel.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Astronauts are men who don’t have to bring their wives anything back from their travels.’
‘Pretty dumb.’
‘You see? Everyone seems to find himself up here. And I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for.’
‘So? Let them.’
‘I did say it isn’t their problem. It’s mine.’
‘You’re complaining on quite a high level, my dearest Finn.’
‘No, I’m not.’ He glared at her angrily. ‘It hasn’t the slightest thing to do with self-pity. I just feel empty, crippled. I’d love to feel that same powerful emotion, vaporise with reverence and get back to Earth inside out, to preach the word of enlightenment, but I don’t feel any of it. I can’t think of anything to say about this trip except that it’s nice, it’s a bit different. But it is, and remains, the bloody Moon, damn it all! No higher level of existence, no understanding or comprehension of anything at all. It doesn’t spiritualise me, it stirs nothing in me, and that’s got to be my problem! There must be more! I feel as if I’ve withered away.’
Doggy-paddling, they drifted towards one another. And while Heidrun was still wondering what she could reply to this outburst without sounding like a maiden aunt, she was suddenly close to him. His lines and wrinkles revealed a life of clueless carousal. She recognised Finn’s inability to make his brilliant talent chime with the banal realisation that in spite of his special gift he was not a special person, simply alive and, like everyone else, damned, on the highway that they were all hurtling along, one day to crash into the wall without ever having come close to the meaning of everything. Not a trace of apotheosis. Just someone who had had too much of everything without ever feeling sated by it, and who now, in his total cluelessness, reacted more honestly to the impressions of the journey than the rest of the group put together.
A moment later she sensed him.
She felt his hands on her hips, her backside. She felt them exploring her waist and back, his lips strangely cool on hers, wrapped both legs around him and pulled him so tightly to her that his sex pressed against hers, ambushed by the brazenness of his approach and even more by her own simmering readiness for a fling. She knew she was about to do something incredibly stupid that she would bitterly regret afterwards, but the whole catechism of marital fidelity was consumed in the heat of that moment, and if men thought with their dicks, as was so often rightly said, then her will and intelligence had just irrevocably faded away in her cunt, and that too was something so terrifyingly banal that all she could do was erupt with laughter.
Finn joined in.
It was the worst thing he could have done. Even an irritated twitch of his eyebrows would have saved her, a hint of incomprehension, but he just laughed and started rubbing her between the legs until she was terrified, even as her fingers clawed at the hem of his trunks and pulled them down, to liberate the engorged beast within.
Water monkeys, she thought. We’re water monkeys!
Uh! Uh!
‘I’d leave it if I were you,’ she heard Nina Hedegaard saying, just before the water started splashing. ‘He’ll bring you nothing but frustration and a whole host of problems.’
As if struck by lightning they parted. Finn reached irritably for his trunks. Heidrun dipped her head beneath the surface, breathed in crater water, came back up and coughed her lungs up. Scooping water like a paddle-steamer, Nina passed them on her back.
‘Sorry, I didn’t want to spoil your fun. But you should really think about it.’
And that was that.
Heidrun lacked the genetic prerequisites for blushing, but at that moment she could have sworn she turned beetroot, a beacon of embarrassment. She stared at Finn. To her infinite relief nothing in his expression suggested that the past few minutes had been embarrassing to him, only regret and a vague understanding that it was over. He plainly still wanted her, and she wanted him a bit less, but at the same time she felt an urgent longing for Walo, and the desire to kiss Nina for her intervention.
‘Yeah, we’ – Finn grinned crookedly – ‘were just about to go upstairs.’
‘So I saw,’ Nina said sullenly. She swam powerfully over to them and stood up in the water. ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. The rest is your business. They’re starting to get worried up there. Julian’s group still isn’t back, and neither are the satellites.’
‘Didn’t Julian say anything?’ Heidrun asked, her whole body still one big heartbeat. ‘This morning, I mean.’
‘No, he said they’d be showing up later. Too busy a schedule, says Lynn.’
‘Then that’s how it is.’
‘Seems odd to me.’
‘Julian would definitely have tried to get through, to you first of all,’ said O’Keefe.
‘Yeah, great, and what would you do, Finn, if you didn’t get through? You’d be on time! So as not to worry the others. And I’m not stupid, there’s more to it than that. There’s something they aren’t telling me.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Dana Lawrence, the cold fish. Lynn. Who knows? Dinner’s now been arranged for nine, by the way.’
Heidrun could tell by the tip of Finn’s nose that he was thinking exactly the same as she was, whether they shouldn’t make use of that time in his suite. But it was a pale, threadbare thought, less than a thought, in fact, since it came not from the head, not from the heart, but from the abdomen, whose coup had just been permanently thwarted. Finn slipped over and gave her a quick kiss. There was something conciliatory, something final about it.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up and join the others.’
London, Great Britain
After the conversation with Palstein, Jericho had taken a trip around the highly armed information centre and introduced Jennifer to the contents of his rucksack.
‘Diane,’ he said. ‘The fourth member of the alliance.’
‘Diane?’ An eyebrow rose in her grumpy face.
‘Mm-hm. Diane.’
‘I see. Your daughter or your wife?’
Since then Diane had been alternately connected to the public internet and the internal, hacker-protected intranet of the Big O, a system locked against the outside world, with no way in, but no way out either. Jennifer had summarily authorised him to access parts of the company’s own database, equipped with a password that allowed him to trace the global network of the company, its history and its staff structure. At the same time, thanks to Diane, he was working on familiar ground. Without the company of Tu or Yoyo, who had wanted to visit the fat guy for a few minutes and had been overdue since then, he felt miserably alone, just a messenger, good enough to lay his head on the line for others, but not to be taken into anybody’s friendly confidence.
Pah, friends! Let the two of them wallow in misery. At last he was warmed again by Diane’s soft, dark computer voice, untroubled by any kind of sensitivity.
He asked her to go through the net for arrangements of terms, Palstein, attempted murder, assassination, assassin, Orley, China, investigations, discoveries, results, etc. On the oil manager’s initiative, the Canadian authorities had sent a large supply of pictures and film material which he, Edda Hoff, a member of the IT security department and a woman from MI6 were now assessing together. If only Palstein had been willing to hand over the video that supposedly showed his attacker, they could presumably have spared themselves all that wretched work. Diane brought him things she’d found about the Calgary shooting the way a cat brings in half-dead mice, but where the rest of the decoding of the text fragment was concerned she was poking around in the dark. Clearly the hurricane murmur of the dark network had fallen silent. In contrast, pictures, reports, assessments and conspiracy theories about Calgary were flooding in, but without shedding light on anything.
He went to see
Jennifer Shaw.
‘Good to see you.’ Jennifer was in a video conference with representatives of MI6, and waved him in. ‘If you’ve got anything new—’
‘When was Gaia originally supposed to open?’ Jericho asked, pulling up a chair.
‘You know that. Last year.’
‘When exactly?’
‘Okay, it had been planned for late summer, but projects like that are never as ready as you hope they’re going to be. It could have been autumn or winter.’
‘And because of the Moon crisis—’
‘No, not just because of that.’ Norrington came into the room. ‘You’re in the temple of truth here, Owen. We’re happy to admit that there were technical delays. The unofficial opening was scheduled for August 2024, but even without a crisis we’d hardly have managed it before 2025.’
‘So the completion date wasn’t foreseeable at the time?’
‘Why do you ask?’ one of the MI6 people wanted to know.
‘Because I’m wondering whether the mini-nuke was put up there only in order to destroy Gaia. Something people knew would be finished, but didn’t know when. But when the satellite was started, it wasn’t finished.’
‘You’re right,’ the MI6 man said thoughtfully. ‘They could have waited for the launch, in fact they should have done.’
‘Why should they?’ asked another one.
‘Because every atom bomb gives off radiation. You can’t store a thing like that on the Moon indefinitely, where there’s no convection to carry away the heat. There’s a danger of the bomb overheating and going off prematurely.’
‘So it was definitely supposed to detonate in 2024,’ Jennifer surmised.
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Jericho. ‘Was it or is it meant only for Gaia? How much explosive do you need to blow up a hotel?’
‘Lots,’ said Norrington.
‘But not an atom bomb?’
‘Not unless you want to contaminate the whole site, the wider surroundings,’ said the MI6 man.