Limit

  ‘A lot of people think that,’ Tu commented. ‘A lot of people think that I’m a fat old coot who doesn’t have an optician and eats canned crap. Do you really think that Yoyo got away from you because the Great Bear was that dumb? He sent you off on your tour of the underworld, and you meekly followed his directions.’

  Jericho had to admit that he was right.

  ‘Anyway, Tian, now you know why I don’t want to trouble my contacts,’ he said. ‘The police might be somewhat surprised. By now they’ll have found out that Wang was Yoyo’s flatmate. They’ll make inquiries and they’ll find out that I’m looking for the girl. Then they’ll start putting two and two together: a dead student, possibly murdered, a dissident with a record, a detective asking questions about one who’s also looking for the other. They shouldn’t be able to draw these conclusions; I want to be able to investigate discreetly. I might end up giving them the idea that they should pay more attention to Yoyo.’

  ‘I understand.’ Tu’s fingers glided across the tabletop, and the wall across from them became a screen. ‘Have a look at this, then.’

  He saw the glass corridor and the door to the roller-coaster boarding platform, from the perspective of two security cameras.

  ‘How did you get the footage so quickly?’ asked Jericho, surprised.

  ‘Your wish was my command.’ Tu giggled. ‘The police put an electronic lock on it, but something like that’s not a problem for us. Our own surveillance network is linked in with the in-house cameras, apart from which we also hacked into some totally different systems. There would only have been trouble if they’d put a high-security block in place.’

  Jericho considered this. Security blocks were commonplace. The fact that the officers in charge hadn’t bothered to install one told him something about how important they considered the case to be. Another indication that the police didn’t have Yoyo on their radar at all.

  Two men appeared in the glass corridor. The shorter man walking in front had long hair and was fashionably dressed, with appliqués on his forehead and cheekbones. It was clearly Grand Cherokee Wang. A tall, slim man in a well-tailored suit walked behind him. There was something dandyish about his combed-back, brilliantined hair, thin moustache and tinted glasses. Jericho watched the way he turned his head about as he walked, scanning the whole corridor and resting his eyes for a fraction of a second on the security camera.

  ‘Smart operator,’ he muttered.

  The two of them went to the middle of the corridor and disappeared from the corner of one camera’s view. The other showed the two of them entering the glass box of the control room with its console.

  ‘They talk for a while.’ Tu switched to fast-forward. ‘Nothing very much happens here.’

  Jericho watched Grand Cherokee gesticulating with jerky speed, obviously showing the other man how the control unit worked. Then the two of them seemed to converse.

  ‘Now watch this,’ Tu said.

  The film slowed down again to real time. The two men still stood next to one another. Grand Cherokee took a step towards the taller man, who stretched out an arm.

  The next moment, the student collapsed, crashed his face into the edge of the console and fell to the ground. The other man took hold of him and pulled him back to his feet. Grand Cherokee staggered. The stranger held him tight. On a cursory examination, it must have looked as though he were holding up a friend who had had a sudden dizzy spell. A few seconds went by, then Grand Cherokee fell to his knees again. The tall man squatted down next to him and talked to him. Grand Cherokee doubled over and then lurched to his feet. A little while later the tall man left the control room, but then stopped and turned back. For the first time since he had stepped into the corridor, he turned his face to the camera.

  ‘Stop,’ said Jericho. ‘Can you blow him up?’

  ‘No problem.’ Tu zoomed the torso and face until they filled the screen. Jericho squinted. The man looked like Ryuichi Sakamoto playing the Japanese occupier in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.

  ‘Does he remind you of anybody?’ Tu asked.

  Jericho hesitated. The resemblance to the Japanese actor–composer was striking. At the same time he had a creeping feeling that he was barking up the wrong tree. The film was ancient, and Sakamoto was well above seventy.

  ‘Not really. Send the picture over to my computer.’

  Tu let the clip play on. Grand Cherokee Wang left the control room and then recoiled from the stranger. The two of them were lost to view for a while, then the tall man came back into sight. He went into the control room and started working at the console.

  ‘I’m wondering why the security guards didn’t react to that,’ Tu pronounced.

  ‘To what?’ Jericho asked.

  ‘What do you mean, to what?’ Tu stared at him. ‘To what you can see here!’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Well, the two of them had a spat, didn’t they?’

  ‘Did they?’ Jericho leaned back. ‘Aside from the fact that Wang fell to the ground twice, nothing happened at all. Maybe he’s doped up or drunk, or not feeling well. Our oily friend helps him back to his feet, that’s all. Also, the guards have a hundred storeys to watch here, you know how it works. They don’t spend their whole time staring at the screens. Anyway, is there any exterior footage?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s only put through to the Silver Dragon control room.’

  ‘Meaning that we can’t—’

  ‘That they can’t,’ said Tu. ‘We certainly can.’

  Just at that moment the tall man left the control room, walked along the corridor and vanished into the next part of the building. Tu started another clip. The screen split up into eight smaller pictures, which taken together showed the whole course of the Silver Dragon’s track. One of the cameras showed Grand Cherokee standing at the end of the last carriage and looking behind himself again and again.

  Then he stepped out onto the track.

  ‘Freeze,’ Jericho called. ‘I want to see his face.’

  There was no doubt about it, Grand Cherokee’s face was frozen in a mask of panic. Jericho felt a mixture of fascination and horror.

  ‘Where does he want to go?’

  ‘He’s put some thought into it,’ Tu said in a low voice, as though talking out loud would make the terrified man on the tracks fall off. Meanwhile, the Silver Dragon left the platform and passed from one camera view to the next. ‘There are connections between the track and the building on the way round. With a little luck, he’ll reach one.’

  ‘He won’t though,’ said Jericho.

  Tu shook his head silently. Horrified, they watched Grand Cherokee die. For a while neither said a word, until Jericho cleared his throat.

  ‘The time stamps,’ he said. ‘Once you compare them there’s no doubt that it was our friend who started the Silver Dragon. And something else strikes me. We only saw his face twice, and it wasn’t clear either time. He knew how to keep his back to the camera as well.’

  ‘And what conclusions do you draw from that?’ Tu asked hoarsely.

  Jericho looked at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you and Chen – you’ll have to get used to the idea that Yoyo has a professional killer after her.’

  No, he thought, wrong. Not just Yoyo.

  Me too.

  * * *

  Tu Technologies was one of the few companies in Shanghai with its own private fleet of skymobiles. In 2016 the World Financial Center had been retro-fitted with a hangar for skycars above the offices on the seventy-eighth floor. It had room for two dozen vehicles, half belonging to the company that owned the building, most of these being huge VTOL craft for evacuation. Since Islamist terrorists had steered two passenger jets into the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center not even a quarter-century ago, there had been growing interest in skymobiles with every passing year, leading to the development of various models. By now nearly every newly built super-high-rise in China had flight decks. Seven of
the vehicles belonged to the Hyatt: four elegant shuttles with steerable jets, two skybikes and a gyrocopter. Tu’s fleet consisted of two of the helicopter-like gyros and the Silver Surfer, a gleaming ultra-slim VTOL. Last year Jericho had had the treat of piloting it for a few hours: a reward for a job instead of him billing them. It was a wickedly expensive piece of technology. Now Tu was sitting in the pilot seat. He wanted to visit Chen Hongbing, and then had to meet some people for business in Dongtan City, a satellite city of Shanghai on Chongming Island in the Yangtze, which held the record as the world’s most environmentally friendly city. Tu Technologies had developed a virtual canal for the city, which was already threaded with dozens of real canals; their glass tunnel would create the illusion of gliding along through a town in the age of the Three Kingdoms, that beloved cradle of so many stories between the Han and the Jin dynasties.

  ‘We’ve become the world number-one polluters,’ Tu explained apropos of Dongtan. ‘Nobody poisons the planet as chronically as China does, not even the United States of America. On the other hand, you won’t find anyone else as thorough in applying alternative sustainable designs. Whatever we do, we seem to do it to the limit. That’s what we understand by yin and yang these days: pushing the very boundaries.’

  The huge hangar was brightly lit. The in-house VTOLs rested one next to the other like stranded whales. As Tu steered his manta-flat vehicle over to the starting strip, the glass doors at the front of the hangar slid aside. He swung the machine’s four jets to horizontal and accelerated. A howling roar filled the hall, then the Silver Surfer shot out over the edge of the building and fell down towards the Huangpu. Two hundred metres above ground, Hu lifted the machine’s nose and steered it over the river in a wide curve.

  ‘I’ll give Hongbing a toned-down version,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell him that the police aren’t after Yoyo, but that she might believe they are. And that she’s still in Quyu.’

  ‘If she’s still in Quyu,’ Jericho threw in.

  ‘Whatever. What will you do next?’

  ‘Sift the net, hoping that Yoyo might have left another message. Take a good close look at a fast food chain called Wong’s World.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Probably only exists in Quyu. Yoyo’s waste-paper basket was spilling over with Wong’s World wrappers. Thirdly, I need information on the Guardians’ current projects. Meaning the full picture,’ he said with a sideways glance. ‘No cosmetic alterations, no cards up your sleeve.’

  Tu looked like a deflated balloon. For the first time since Jericho had known him, he looked helpless. The glasses hung uselessly on his nose.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ he said penitently.

  ‘That’s good.’ Jericho pointed to the bridge of his nose. ‘Tell me, can you actually see anything with those things?’

  Without a word, Tu opened a box in the middle of the instrument panel, took out a completely identical pair of glasses, put them on and threw the old ones behind him. Jericho spent a moment wondering whether his eyes had been playing tricks on him. Were there really a dozen more pairs stored there?

  ‘Why do you repair your glasses with sticky-tape if you’ve got so many you could just throw them away?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not? That pair was all right.’

  ‘It was a long way from – oh, never mind. As far as Hongbing is concerned, I think that sooner or later he’ll have to learn the whole truth. What do you say? In the end, he’s Yoyo’s father. He has a right to know.’

  ‘But not yet.’ Tu flew over the Bund, brought the Silver Surfer lower and turned south. ‘You have to treat Hongbing with kid gloves – be very careful what you say to him. And something else: this business with Grand Rococo’s mortal remains, or whatever the guy was called – well, I reckon there’s no chance of getting at his effects, but I’ll think a little more about it. You’re mostly interested in his phone, is that right?’

  ‘I want to know who he telephoned ever since Yoyo disappeared.’

  ‘Good, I’ll do what I can. Where should I drop you?’

  ‘At home.’

  Tu bled off some speed and steered towards Luwan Skyport, only a few minutes from Xintiandi on foot. As far as the eye could see, the traffic was jammed solid in the streets, only the cabin cars on the COD track sped along. His fingers manipulated the holographic field with the navigation instruments, and the jets swung down to the vertical. They sank gently down as though in a lift. Jericho looked through the side window. Two city gyrocopters were parked at the edge of the strip, both painted with the markings that identified them as ambulances. Another was just taking off, lifted terrifyingly close to them and roared off towards Huangpu at full power. Jericho felt something in his hip pocket vibrate, took out his phone and saw that somebody was trying to reach him. He picked up the call.

  ‘Hey, little Jericho.’

  ‘Zhao Bide.’ Jericho clicked his tongue. ‘My new friend and confidant. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Don’t you miss Quyu?’

  ‘Give me a reason to miss the place.’

  ‘The crab baozi in Wong’s World is excellent.’

  ‘You found the shop, then.’

  ‘I even knew the place. I’d just forgotten what it was called. It’s in what you might call the civilised part of Xaxu. You must have driven this way when you came. It’s a sort of covered street market. Great big place.’

  ‘Good. I’ll have a look at it.’

  ‘Not so fast, Mr Detective. There are two markets. The branches are one block apart.’

  ‘There isn’t a third?’

  ‘Just these two.’

  The Silver Surfer settled to a halt. Tu shut down the engines.

  ‘I’ll be needed in the Andromeda until seven,’ Zhao said. ‘At least until the Pink Asses have made it onstage, which isn’t always so straightforward. After that I’m free.’

  Jericho considered. ‘Good. Let’s take up our posts. One of us watching each branch. Could be that Yoyo and her friends come by.’

  ‘And what’s that worth to me?’

  ‘But Zhao, little Zhao!’ Jericho expostulated. ‘Are those the words of a worried lover?’

  ‘They’re the words of a Quyu lover, you hopeless idealist. What about it? Do you want my help or don’t you?’

  ‘How much?’

  Zhao named a price. Jericho haggled him down to half that, for form’s sake.

  ‘And where shall we meet?’ he asked.

  He gave him directions. ‘Half past seven.’

  ‘I hope you understand that this is the most boring job in the world,’ Jericho said. ‘Sitting still and keeping your eyes peeled without nodding off to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t bust my balls about it.’

  ‘I absolutely shan’t. See you later.’

  Tu gave him a sideways look.

  ‘Are you sure you can trust this guy?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps he’s talking himself up. Perhaps he just wants the money.’

  ‘Perhaps the Pope’s a pagan.’ Jericho shrugged. ‘I can’t do much wrong with Zhao Bide. All he has to do is keep his eyes open, nothing else.’

  ‘You know best. Stay available just in case I can find poor Grand Sheraton’s phone. Somewhere between his spleen and his liver.’

  Quyu

  When Jericho travelled back to the forgotten world, the traffic was flowing thick as honey. Pretty brisk by Shanghai standards, then. It meant getting home on time, a hot dinner and children sleepy but still awake so that Mum and Dad could put them to bed together.

  On the other hand, if you came from Europe, and were used to things moving a bit faster, every minute on the streets of Shanghai was among the more irksome experiences that life had to offer. Statisticians claimed that the average car-driver spent six months of his urban life sitting at red lights, but that was nothing compared with the amount of life wasted in Shanghai traffic jams. Since CODs had ceased to be appropriate for a visit to Quyu, because they would stand out there like frogs with win
gs and arouse Yoyo’s suspicions, Jericho had no option but to collect his own car from the underground car park. In the afternoon he had sent Diane off in search of Zhao Bide on the net, with no result. There was no one by that name on record. Quyu didn’t exist, and neither did its inhabitants.

  However, there were the other five Guardians, right there as expected, in the university lists.

  Yoyo herself had left no new traces after her piece on Brilliant Shit. Once again Jericho wondered who would send a professional hitman after a dissident who, while she was plainly troublesome, wasn’t exactly high risk. Leaving aside the police, State elements were certainly involved. The Party was riddled with secret agents like mould in gorgonzola. No one, probably not even the highest officials, knew the full extent of their interpenetration. Against this background there was a covert operation whose goal lay in preventing the distribution of information that Yoyo should never have been able to get hold of.

  Which called for more than killing the girl.

  Because if her forbidden knowledge came from the net, it was very probably stored on her computer. A circumstance that didn’t do much to improve Yoyo’s chances of survival, but made it harder to kill her. As long as the whereabouts of the device was unclear, she couldn’t simply be gunned down in the street. The killer had to get hold of the computer, and not only that, he would have to find out whom she had passed her knowledge on to. His task was that of an epidemiologist: to curb the virus, bring all the infected parties together, eliminate them and, last of all, eliminate the first carrier.

  The question was where the epidemiologist was at that moment.

  Jericho had expected to be pursued. That morning the killer had still been travelling in a COD. He could have swapped vehicles by now, as Jericho had done. Zhao’s description of the man matched the video recordings from the World Financial Center, but Jericho doubted that the stranger would show himself to him. On the other hand, the guy didn’t know that Jericho had seen his face, thought he was undiscovered and was perhaps becoming reckless. Whatever the truth of the matter, he would have to be careful not to be too successful in his search for Yoyo, and deliver her up for the slaughter.