Where was that blasted detective?
* * *
Jericho ran along the Processional Way.
How absurd it was to be running away with a loaded gun in his hand, instead of using it. But if he stopped, Xin would shoot him before he could even turn round and aim. The killer was trained to hit small targets and to use any window that presented itself. He swung his Glock like Moses swinging his staff, shouting, ‘Get out of the way!’ parting the sea of people, and ran to the black statue of Hadad, past grinning sculptures of crouching lions. The beasts looked as though they had poodles or mastiffs somewhere in their bloodline. Had the cultures of the ancient world ever even seen lions, or had they only existed in the limited imaginations of sculptors working to order? Perhaps they’d just been bad sculptors. Not everything that found its way into museums necessarily had to be any good. And what the hell was he thinking about, at a moment like this!
A family scattered to all sides in front of him.
Beyond Hadad, a row of tall, slender columns marched away meaninglessly, no longer supporting whatever it was they had once held up. Following an inner impulse, he flung himself to the right, heard the dull crack of a pistol being fired and the shot thud into the storm god, ran towards the glassed fourth wing—
And stopped.
Stepping into that glass corridor meant that he would be trapped in the museum, running round the square all over again. He could get to the James Simon Gallery by going left here, and right now, just for a moment, he was out of Xin’s sight—
He dropped to all fours like a dog, scuttled behind the pillars, seeking cover, then crept back the other way, and from the corner of his eye he saw Xin running into the glass hall. Jericho stuffed the Glock back into his pocket. From now on he was just one of many, trying like all the rest of them to avoid becoming a statistic on the evening news report. A tsunami of rumour and consternation swept through the museum entrance hall, so that nobody paid him any attention as he hurried outside, running rather than walking down the steps to the river. He crossed the bridge back where he had come this morning.
Nyela. The dossier.
He had to get to Muntu.
* * *
Things were calmer in the glass hall. Xin scanned the crowd for Jericho’s blond hair. His pistol cast a spell of fearful silence all around, but something was wrong. If Jericho had come through here before him, armed, shouting, running, people would be a lot less relaxed. Obviously they thought that Xin was a policeman of some kind, on patrol. He glanced along the corridor, its western wall glowing with noon sunlight. In front of him an obelisk from Sahuré’s temple, the pharaohs on their plinths, the glowering temple gate of Kalabsha – he couldn’t rule out that Jericho might have the nerve to be hiding behind any of these. He’d had ten seconds’ head start, maximum, but enough to get behind one of the pharaohs.
And if he’d gone north—
No. Xin had seen him run in here.
Cautiously, he pushed on, taking shelter among the museum visitors – who were growing visibly more nervous. He aimed his gun behind plinths, pillars, façades, statues. Jericho had to be somewhere in this hall, but there were no shots, nobody broke cover to dash away, there was no headlong frontal assault. Meanwhile the tension was building up to open terror, worry tipped over into the fear that perhaps this man was a terrorist after all. Armed men would be turning up shortly, he was sure of that. If he didn’t find the detective in a hurry, he’d have to disappear himself, leaving the job unfinished.
‘Jericho!’ he yelled.
His voice fell unheeded on the glass walls.
‘Come on out. We’ll talk.’
No answer.
‘I promise that we’ll talk, do you hear me?’
Talk, then shoot, he thought, but all was silent. Obviously he hadn’t expected Jericho to step out from the shadows with a look of cheery relief on his face, but what really enraged him was the total lack of any reaction – except, that is, that everyone around him was suddenly in a hurry to leave the wing. Seething, he stalked onward, saw a movement in among the pillars of the Kalabsha Gate and fired. A Japanese tourist staggered out of the shadows, hands clutching her camera and a look of mild astonishment on her face. She took one last picture as if by reflex and then fell headlong. Panic spread, unleashing a stampede. Xin took advantage of the confusion, ran to the end of the hall and looked wildly around to all sides.
‘Jericho!’ he shouted.
He ran back, stared down through the glass at the inner courtyard, turned his head. He could hear heavy boots approaching from the passage to the James Simon Gallery. His eye fell on the bridge leading away from the Pergamon Museum, swept along the pavement by the riverside—
There! Blond hair, Scandinavian almost, a good way off by now. Jericho was running as though there were devils after him, and Xin realised that the detective had tricked him. There was a crowd forming now between the statues of the pharaohs. Security personnel were trying to get through the rush of visitors coming the other way – and these guards had sub-machine-guns. He had wasted too much time, shed too much blood to expect these new arrivals not to shoot first and ask questions later. He needed a hostage.
A girl slipped on the gallery’s smooth polished floor.
With one leap, he was behind her, catching hold, hauling her up, and he pressed the muzzle of his pistol to her temple. The child froze and then began to cry. A young woman gave a piercing scream, stretched out her hands but was knocked aside by others running to escape, and her husband grabbed hold of her, held her back from rushing to certain death. The next moment, uniformed figures took up position either side of the parents, calling out something in German. Xin didn’t understand but he had a pretty shrewd idea of what they wanted. Without taking his eyes off them, he dragged the girl over to the tall windows and looked down to the bridge over the Spree, where by now a few gawkers had gathered.
He leaned down to the little girl.
‘It’ll all be all right,’ he said softly into her ear. ‘I promise.’ She didn’t understand a word of Mandarin of course, but the sibilant syllables had their effect. Her little body relaxed as though hypnotised. She became calmer, breathing in short, shallow gasps like a rabbit.
‘That’s good,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘Marian!’ Her mother screamed, raw misery in her voice. ‘Marian!’
‘Marian,’ Xin repeated amiably. ‘That’s a very pretty name.’
He pulled the trigger.
Cries and shouts went up as the windowpane burst apart under the impact of dozens of flechette rounds. He had swung the pistol away at the last moment. Splinters of glass flew around their ears. He shielded the girl from the shrapnel with his torso, then shoved her away, crossed his arms in front of his head and chest and leapt out. While the officers were still trying to work out what had happened, he had landed cat-like among the onlookers three metres below, and he began to run.
Jericho
Muntu was closed. Hardly pausing, Jericho fired two shots into the lock and then kicked in the door. It slammed back against the wall inside. He rushed headlong into the dining area, looked behind the bar and then jumped back: but the man staring at him with puzzlement in his eyes, a light-skinned African, was clearly dead. Yesterday’s chaos reigned unchallenged in the kitchen. Nobody had cleaned up since his fight with Vogelaar.
There was no sign of Nyela.
Frantically, he charged through the beaded curtain, flung open both toilet doors, then tugged uselessly at the handle of a third door – Private, it said, and it was locked. He shot out this lock as well. Worn stairs led down into the darkness. A smell of mould, and disinfectants. The chalky scent of damp plaster. Memories of Shenzhen, the steps leading down to Hell. He hesitated. His hand fumbled for the light-switch, found it. At the bottom of the stairs a light bulb glowed in its cage. Whitewashed plaster, a stained concrete floor, a spider scuttling away. He went down a step at a time, his Glock at the ready, his skin c
rawling, overcome by nausea. Kenny Xin. Animal Ma Liping. Who or what was awaiting him down below? What kind of creatures would leap out at him now, what images would burn their way into his brain?
He stepped off the last stair. He looked round. A short corridor, piled high with crates and barrels. A steel door, half open.
He went through, his gaze darting, gun ready.
Nyela!
She was squatting down on the floor with her arms behind her back, her mouth covered with tape. Her eyes glowed in the half-light. He hurried across to her, holstered his Glock, tore the tape away and put his fingers to his lips. Not yet. First he had to get her out of the cuffs. Her jailers had locked her to the pipework, and he didn’t imagine that the key would be lying about somewhere as a reward for keen-eyed detectives.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he whispered.
Back in the kitchen, he pulled open drawers, rummaged through the tools, steel, copper, chrome, looked around all the worktops and finally found what he was looking for: a cleaver. He hurried back down to the cellar.
‘Lean forward,’ he ordered. ‘I need some room.’
Nyela nodded and turned away from him so that he had a good view of her hands. The pipe was worryingly short. Just a few centimetres from her wrists, it turned into the wall and vanished into the crumbling mortar. He took a deep breath, concentrated, and brought the blade down. The whole radiator sang like a struck bell. He frowned. There was a dent in the pipe, but otherwise nothing had changed. He struck again, and a third time, a fourth, until the pipe burst open, so that he could prise it apart with the handle of the cleaver. The chain of the cuffs scraped through the gap.
‘Where—’ Nyela began to ask.
‘Over there.’ Jericho motioned with his chin, ordering her over to a metal work-table. ‘Back to the tabletop, palms down, as flat as you can. Pull the chain tight.’
Nyela’s features clouded over with a premonition of the dreadful news she knew she was about to receive. She did as he said, turning her hands about.
‘Don’t move,’ Jericho said. ‘Stay still, quite still.’
She looked down at the floor. He fixed his eyes on the middle of the chain, and struck. One blow broke the chain.
‘Now let’s get out of here.’
‘No.’ She stood in his way. ‘Where’s Jan? What happened?’
Jericho felt his tongue go numb.
‘He’s dead,’ he said.
Nyela looked at him. Whatever he had expected, bewilderment, shock, tears, didn’t happen. Just a quiet grief, her love for the man who now lay dead in the museum, and at the same time a curious nonchalance, as though to say, there it is then, so it goes, it had to happen sometime. He hesitated, then hugged Nyela tight for a moment. She responded, a gentle embrace.
‘I’ll get you out of here,’ he promised.
‘Yes,’ she said, tired, nodding. ‘I hear that a lot.’
* * *
There was nobody upstairs, just the dead man staring out from behind the bar as though waiting for an explanation of what had happened to him. Jericho hurried to the closed door of the restaurant and peered outside.
‘We’ll have to run for it.’
‘Why?’
‘My car’s a few streets away.’
‘Mine isn’t.’ Nyela leaned across the bar, opened a drawer and took out a data-stick. ‘Jan was using it earlier today. He must have parked it in front of Muntu.’
Yoyo had spoken of a Nissan OneOne. There was just such a car parked a few steps away, its legs drawn up. The cabin was egg-shaped, its design rather like a friendly little whale. The legs on either side were thick at the base, tapering towards the wheels. When the legs were stretched out flat, the cabin hung low to the ground, but if the driver drew in his wheels, the legs drew inward and upward, lifting the cabin. The low, aerodynamic profile, like a sports car, changed to become a compact, taller car. Jericho stepped out of the door and scanned the street. Shapes and colours seemed over-exposed in the noonday sun. There was a smell of pollen, and of baking tarmac. There were hardly any pedestrians to be seen, but the traffic had picked up. He put his head back and looked up at a cigar-shaped tourist zeppelin that bumbled cheerfully into view, its engines droning.
‘All clear,’ he called back inside. ‘Come on out.’
The car roof reflected the sky, the clouds and the buildings around, curving them into an Einsteinian space. Nyela unlocked the car, and the roof lifted like a hatch. The interior was surprisingly roomy, with a long bench right across it and extra folding seats.
‘Where to?’ she asked.
‘The Grand Hyatt.’
‘Got you.’ She swung herself inside, and Jericho slid in next to her. He saw that the Nissan’s steering column was adjustable. The whole thing could be swung across from the driver’s side to the passenger’s. The tinted glass filtered the harsher wavelengths out of the noonday light and created a cocoon-like atmosphere. The electric motor sprang to life, humming gently.
‘Nyela, I—’ Jericho massaged the bridge of his nose. ‘I have to ask you something.’
She looked at him, the life draining from her eyes.
‘What?’
‘Your husband was going to give me a dossier.’
‘A— My God!’ She pressed her hand to her mouth. ‘You don’t have it? He couldn’t even get the dossier to you?’
Jericho shook his head, silent.
‘We could have blown the bastards’ game for good and all!’
‘He had it with him?’
‘Not the one from the Crystal Brain, Kenny has that one, but—’
Of course he does, Jericho thought, tired.
‘But the duplicate—’
‘One moment!’ Jericho grabbed her arm. ‘There’s a duplicate?’
‘He wanted to give it to you.’ She looked at him, pleading. ‘Believe me, Jan had no choice, he had to sacrifice you and the girl! That wasn’t in his nature, he wouldn’t have double-crossed you. He always—’
‘Where is it, Nyela?’
‘I thought he’d have told you.’
‘Told me what?’ Jericho felt he was going mad. ‘Nyela, damn it all, where did he have—’
‘Have, have!’ She shook her head furiously, spread out her fingers. ‘You’re asking the wrong questions. He is the duplicate!’
Jericho stared at her.
‘What do you m—’
Her throat opened out in a red fan. Something warm sprayed out at him. He flung himself down onto Nyela’s lap. Above him, the Nissan’s cabin exploded, the foam seat stuffing splattered about his ears. Still bending down, he grabbed hold of the steering wheel, tugged it towards himself, revved up and sped away. A salvo stitched through the car’s carbon-fibre hull with a dry staccato. Jericho raised his head just far enough to see over the dashboard, then felt Nyela slump heavily against his shoulder, and he lost control. The car careened down the street, lurched into the opposite lane and climbed the pavement, leaving the squeal of brakes and blare of horns in its wake. Pedestrians scattered. At the last moment, he wrenched the wheel to the left to come back across to his side of the street, almost colliding with a van. As the van swerved aside and rammed several parked cars, he bumped up onto the kerb on his own side and steered for the Spree.
There, tall, white-haired, he saw the angel of death.
Xin fired as he ran, coming directly towards him. Jericho nudged the wheel again. The Nissan threatened to tip over, the cabin was too high up on its legs, the wheels too close together for manoeuvres like this. He scanned the dashboard desperately. Xin had stopped to take aim. With a loud crack, part of the wrecked roof broke away. The Nissan raced towards Xin, and Jericho braced himself for an impact.
* * *
Xin leapt aside.
The car sped past him like a giant runaway pram. Xin fired after it, heard brakes squealing, dodged out of the path of a limousine by a hair’s breadth and stumbled across to the other lane, forcing a motorcyclist to veer crazily. The bike
skidded and slanted. Xin dodged away again, felt something brush against him, and he flew through the air; he slammed full length against the pavement, on his front. A compact car had struck him, and now the driver was roaring away. Other cars stopped, people climbed out. He rolled onto his back, moved his arms and legs, saw the motorcyclist running towards him and fumbled for his pistol.
‘Good God!’ The man leaned over him. ‘What happened?’ he asked in English. ‘Are you all right?’
Xin grabbed his gun and shoved it under the man’s nose.
‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said.
The motorcyclist turned pale and scuttled backwards. Xin leapt to his feet. A few steps took him to the bike, and he swung himself into the saddle and thrashed off towards the Spree, where he drew up, tyres squealing, and looked about in all directions.
There! The Nissan. It ran a red light, vanished southwards.
* * *
Jericho looked about and saw him coming.
He had gone the wrong way. The Audi was somewhere else entirely. He could have changed cars by now, got out of this wrecked Nissan and away from the dead woman. The corpse was flung about this way and that, and kept thumping against him. He looked all over the dashboard for the control that would let the legs down. Pretty nearly everything was controlled via the touchscreen, there must be some symbol somewhere there, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept having to dodge, swerve, brake, accelerate.