Frank Schätzing - Limit

And that meant that he had to hack his way in.

He’d dared to do so twice. He’d succeeded twice.

At the time, he had sworn not to chance it a third time. He knew what he’d be in for if they caught wind of him. After Beijing had hacked into European and American government networks in 2007, the West had gone on a counter-offensive, supported by Russian and Arab hackers working off their own grudges. Since then, there was hardly anything China feared more than cyber-attacks. Accordingly, anybody infiltrating Chinese systems was shown no mercy.

With mixed feelings, he set to work.

A little later he had the access he wanted to various archives. Practically every area of the city was decked out with scanners hidden in the walls of houses, in traffic lights and signposts, in door handles and bell-pushes, in advertising hoardings, labels, mirrors, scaffolding and household devices. They scanned retinas, stored biometrics, analysed the way people walked and gestured, recorded voices and sounds. While the phone-tapping system had been brought to the peak of perfection some decades ago, using the American NSA system as a model, retinal analysis was a comparatively new phenomenon. The scanner could recognise individual structures in the human iris from several metres away and thereby identify a person. Microscopically small directional mics filtered the frequencies out of a noisy street crossing till you could hear one voice speaking quite distinctly. The real art of such surveillance lay in evaluating data. The system recognised wanted individuals by the way they moved, could recognise a face even obscured by a false beard. If Yoyo glanced just once into one of the omnipresent scanners, this would be enough to identify her retina, which had been data-captured first as she was born, again on her first day of school, and then at university enrolment. It had also been stored when she was arrested, and when she was released.

Jericho’s computer started sifting.

It analysed every twitch of Yoyo’s eyes, dived into the crystalline structures of her iris, measured the angle of her lips when she smiled, set up studies for the way her hair moved in the wind, calibrated the sway of her hips, the spread of her fingers as she swung her arms, the line of her wrist as she pointed, her average length of pace. Yoyo became a creature of equations, an algorithm which Jericho sent out into the phantom world of the police surveillance archive, hoping that it would meet its match there. He narrowed down the search window to the time right after she had vanished, but even so the system reported more than two thousand hits. He uploaded the stolen data to his hard drive, stored it under Yoyofiles and withdrew as quickly as he could. His presence had not been noticed. Time to begin evaluation.

Hold on, there was one piece of the puzzle missing. Unlikely though it might seem, this student with the grandiose name might actually have some information to offer. What was the guy called anyway? Grand Cherokee Wang.

Grand Cherokee—

At that moment, Jericho was struck by the realisation.

He had found out in his investigations that Wang had a part-time job at the World Financial Center where Tu’s company was headquartered. He handled the Silver Dragon—

And the Silver Dragon was a roller-coaster!

The roller-coaster had been set in motion, outside its usual hours. It looks as if whoever it was had been working up there .

Jericho gazed into empty air. His gut feelings told him that the student hadn’t jumped of his own accord, and it hadn’t been an accident. Wang was dead because he had known something about Yoyo. No, not even that! Because he had given the impression that he knew something about Yoyo.

This put the case in a whole new light.

He paced through the enormous loft, went into the kitchen and said, ‘Tea. Lady Grey. One cup, two sugars, milk as usual.’

While the machine attended to his order, he went over what he knew. Perhaps he was seeing ghosts, but his knack for spotting patterns and making connections where others saw only fragments had rarely let him down. It was obvious that there was somebody else after Yoyo, besides himself. This wasn’t in itself news. Chen and Tu had both voiced their suspicion that Yoyo was on the run. Both of them had also been doubtful that she was wanted by the police, even if Yoyo herself might believe just that. This time, she hadn’t been picked up by police officers as had happened twice before, rather she had vanished at dead of night. Why? The decision seemed to have been taken in great haste. Something must have made Yoyo fear a visit, in the next few minutes or hours, from people who did not have her best interests at heart. So what had she done before she took fright?

Had she been warned?

By whom? Against whom ? If Wang had been telling the truth, she had been alone at the time, so that meant that she might have had a call: Make sure you get out of there. Or an email. Perhaps nothing of the sort. Perhaps she had discovered something on the net, seen something on the news, that frightened her.

A diffident beeping sound from the kitchen let him know that his tea was ready. Jericho picked up the cup, burned his hand, cursed and took a little sip. He decided to call customer service to reprogram the machine. Two sugars was too sweet, one not sweet enough. Lost in thought, he went back to his office area. Shanghai police were not squeamish, but they were hardly in the habit of throwing suspects off the roof. More likely, Grand Cherokee Wang would have come round in a police station. The kid had wanted to play a bluff. A chancer, who hadn’t actually had anything to sell, and had tried his act with the wrong customer.

Whose toes had Yoyo been treading on, for heaven’s sake?

‘Breaking news,’ he said. ‘Shanghai. World Financial Center.’

Headlines and images grouped themselves together on the wall. Jericho blew on his tea and asked the computer to read him the latest reports.

‘Today at around 10.20 local time a man fell to his death from the Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong,’ said a female voice, pleasantly low-pitched. ‘Initial reports suggest that he worked in the building, with responsibility for watching and operating the Silver Dragon, the world’s highest roller-coaster. At the time he fell, the ride was in motion, outside of usual hours. The Public Prosecutor has opened proceedings against the ride’s owners. It has been impossible to establish so far whether this was an accident or suicide, but everything seems to point to—’

‘Show filmed reports only,’ said Jericho.

A video window opened. A young Chinese woman was standing in front of the Jin Mao Tower with the camera trained on her so that viewers could see the foot of the World Financial Center. Under a veneer of half-hearted distress she was glowing with joy at the thought that some nitwit had given her a headline in the summer silly season by obligingly dying for her.

‘It is still a mystery why the roller-coaster ride was even in motion, without passengers and outside of its usual hours,’ she was saying, imbuing portent and secrecy into every word. ‘An eyewitness video which happened to be filming the tracks when the accident happened has shed some light on the matter. If indeed it was an accident. There is no confirmation as yet of the identity of the dead—’

‘Eyewitness video,’ Jericho interrupted. ‘Identity of victim.’

‘The video is sadly not available.’ The computer managed to put a note of real regret into the announcement. Jericho had set the system’s affective level to twenty per cent. At this setting, the voice didn’t sound mechanical, but rather warmly human. The computer also had a personality protocol. ‘There are two reports on the dead man’s identity.’