Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Read, please.’

‘Shanghai Satellite writes: The dead man is apparently one Wang Jintao. Wang was a student at—’

‘The second.’

‘Xinhua agency reports: The dead man has been positively identified as Wang Jintao, also known as Grand Cherokee, who studied—’

‘Reports on the precise circumstances of death.’

There were a great many reports, as it turned out, but nobody wanted to commit to a particular story. Nevertheless, they made up an interesting picture. It was certain that somebody had set the Silver Dragon free ten minutes early, before the paying passengers had arrived. Grand Cherokee’s job had been to set the system in motion and look after the morning customers, which basically meant working the till and starting the ride. Nobody was supposed to be up there with him at the time of the incident, although there were indications that perhaps somebody had been there after all. Two staff in the Sky Lobby said that they had seen Wang meet a man and go into a lift with him. Further clues came from the eyewitness video, it seemed, which apparently showed Wang moving around on the tracks as the ride was already in motion.

What the hell had Wang been doing out there?

A short article in the Shanghai Satellite speculated that he could have set the ride going without meaning to. Suicide seemed the more likely explanation. On the other hand, why would somebody wanting to commit suicide pick his way along the track when he could have simply leapt from the open stretch of the boarding platform? Especially, another article added, since there were increasing indications that Wang hadn’t actually jumped but had been run over by the train as it came bearing down on him.

Accident after all? At any rate, nobody was talking about murder, although here and there some commentators speculated about an accident caused by someone other than Wang.

Two minutes later Jericho knew better. Xinhua reported that the surveillance camera footage was now being examined. Wang had apparently been accompanied by a tall man who left the floor right after Wang fell. The two men seemed to have had an argument, Wang had certainly been moving along the track with no safety gear, and the train had run into him level with the southern pillar.

Jericho drank his tea and considered.

Who was the murderer?

‘Computer,’ he said. ‘Open Yoyofiles.’

More than two thousand hits. Where should he begin? He decided to set a profile match of ninety-five per cent, which left 117 files where the surveillance system thought that it had seen Yoyo.

He ordered the computer to select files with direct eye contact.

There was only one, immediately by the block where Yoyo lived, recorded at 02.47. Jericho wouldn’t have been able to say exactly where the scanner was, but he suspected it was in a signpost. Exact coordinates were stored in a separate file. There was no doubt that the woman over there on the other side of the street was Yoyo. She was sitting on an unmarked motorbike, no licence plates, her head tilted down, both hands on a crash helmet. Just before she put it on, she lifted her gaze and looked directly into the scanner, then she put down the mirrored faceplate and sped away.

‘Gotcha,’ muttered Jericho. ‘Computer, rewind.’

Yoyo took the helmet briskly off again.

‘Stop.’

She looked him straight in the eyes.

‘Zoom, two hundred and thirty per cent.’

The new technology of the wall could give him a life-size view of Yoyo. The way she sat there on her bike, every detail clear in three-dimensional surroundings, it was as though he had opened a door out onto the night from his loft. He had judged the zoom quite well. Yoyo looked about three or four centimetres taller now than in real life, and the image was pin-sharp. A system that could recognise the structure of an iris from all the way across the street wasn’t nicknamed ‘the freckle-counter’ for nothing. Jericho knew that this would be his last good look at Yoyo for some time, so he tried to read what he could out of it.

You’re frightened, thought Jericho. But you hide it well.

Also, your mind is made up.

He stepped back. Yoyo was wearing pale jeans, knee-boots, a printed T-shirt down over her hips and a short puffy jacket of patent leather that looked as though it might have come from one of the spray cans he had found in her room. Most of the slogan printed on her shirt was in shadow, or under the jacket, and only a little showed where the jacket was open at the front. He would look into that later.

‘Find this person in the folder called Yoyofiles,’ he said. ‘Ninety per cent match.’

Straight away he got the answer, seventy-six hits. He considered having the computer play all the films, but told it instead to plot the recordings’ coordinates onto a city map of Shanghai. A moment later the map came up on the wall, showing Yoyo’s route, where she had gone on the night she disappeared. The last sighting had been just across from Demon Point, the little e-bike and hybrids workshop. After that, the trail went cold.

She was in the forgotten world.

Yoyo had only remained undiscovered in Quyu because there were hardly any surveillance systems there. Even so, Quyu wasn’t a slum in the classic sense, not to be compared with the festering shantytowns that surrounded Calcutta, Mexico City or Bombay and oozed out into the surrounding countryside. As a global city on a par with New York, Shanghai needed Quyu the way the Big Apple needed the Bronx, meaning that the city left the district in peace. It didn’t send in the bulldozers, or the riot police. In the years after the turn of the millennium, the historic inner-city areas and slums in the Shanghai interior had been torn down systematically until those boroughs were free of any sort of authentic history. Where the outer district of Baoshan ran up against this new Shanghai core, Quyu had grown up and been allowed to grow, much as a landowner might allow scrubland to grow in order to save the cost of a gardener. Quyu, north-west of Huangpu, now marked the crossover to swathes of makeshift settlements, vestigial villages, run-down small towns and abandoned industrial estates – a Moloch that grabbed more of the surrounding land each year, guzzling down the last remnants of a region that had once been rural.

Quyu was internally autonomous, and externally it was watched as closely as a prison camp; it was one of the most impressive examples of twenty-first-century urban poverty. The population was made up of people displaced from their original homes in the heart of Shanghai, of those who had lived here even before Quyu absorbed their small towns, of migrants from poor provinces lured to the promised land of the global city and living on temporary residence permits that no one ever checked, of battalions of illegal labourers who didn’t officially exist. Everybody in Quyu was poor, though some were less poor than others. Most money was made in drugs or in the leisure sector, largely prostitution. The social structure of Quyu’s population was unregulated in every way, with not a hint of health insurance, oldage pension or unemployment benefit.

But it was still more than just a horde of beggars.

After all, most of them had work. They manned the assembly lines and the building sites, they cleaned the parks and streets, drove delivery trucks and cleaned the houses of the better-off. They would turn up like ghosts in the regulated world, do their job and then vanish again once they were no longer needed. They were poor because everybody living in Quyu could be replaced at twenty-four hours’ notice. They stayed poor because, in the words of the wise old sage Bill Gates, they were part of a global society divided into those who were networked and those who weren’t. In Quyu, nobody was networked, even if they owned a mobile phone or a computer. Being networked meant playing the same high-speed game as the rest of the world, not letting your attention lapse for a second. It meant sifting out the relevant information from the irrelevant, grabbing advantages that lapsed as soon as you logged off. It meant being better, faster, leaner, more innovative and more flexible than the competition at every moment, it meant moving home when required, switching jobs.