Frank Schätzing - Limit

When he crept out of the air-conditioned passages at Pudong, it felt as though he’d been slapped in the face with a hot towel. The sun hung amidst streaks of high cloud, an unfriendly, glaring dot. Slowly it clouded over. He looked over to the World Financial Center, standing off to one side behind the Jin Mao Tower. Grand Cherokee had been walking along those tracks, as though on a tightrope? Incredible! Either he’d gone mad, or circumstances had left him no choice. He logged on to the internet and loaded up the eyewitness footage on his phone. The shot was very shaky, but zoomed in crisp and clear. It showed a tiny figure up on the tracks.

‘Diane,’ he said.

‘Hello, Owen. What can I do for you?’

‘Enhance the video I have open. Get me everything you can with contrast and depth of field. Freeze every three seconds.’

‘As you say, Owen.’

He walked over to the bottle-opener, crossed the shopping mall and went up to the Sky Lobby.

Tu’s company took up floors 74 through 77, with the hotel above and the viewing platform and roller-coaster crowning the lot. A woman smiled warmly at Jericho and wished him good morning. Everyone knew her. Her name was Gong Qing, China’s newest female superstar, who had won an Oscar last year and had other things to do with her time than checking who came and went at Tu Technologies. Tu’s staff were used to it, they simply returned her greeting and went right on past, while visitors were asked their name and invited to place their palm on the actress’s outstretched right hand. Jericho did this too. Briefly he felt the cool surface of Gong Qing’s transparent 3D projection box. The system read his fingerprints and the lines on his hand, scanned his iris and stored his voiceprint. Gong Qing confirmed that he was already stored in the system and didn’t trouble to ask his name. Instead, a friendly look of recognition flitted across her features.

‘Thank you, Mr Jericho. It’s a pleasure to see you again. Who would you like to see, please?’

‘I have an appointment with Tu Tian,’ Jericho said.

‘Go up to the seventy-seventh floor. Naomi Liu is waiting for you.’

In the lift, Jericho silently paid tribute to Tu’s trick of managing to get a different well-known face for the reception routine every three months. He wondered how much Tu had paid the actress, left the lift and stepped into a vast room that took up the whole floor. All four floors of Tu Technologies were modelled this way. There were no little territories of desks and offices, no empty lifeless corridors. The staff roved around a manifold workscape assisted by their luggage-like lavobots, which carried an interfaced computer in their innards along with storage space for whatever material a staffer might need for that day’s work. All the staffers had their own personal lavobot, which they would pick up at reception in the morning and which followed them around from desk to workplace and docked there. There were open workspaces, closed cubicles, team spaces for brainstorming, and glassed-in soundproofed offices fitted with adjustably tinted glass. In the middle of every floor was a lounge oasis with sofas, a bar and a kitchen, harking back to the fireplaces which early man had gathered around two millennia ago.

We don’t just give our staff work to do, Tu used to say. We give them a home to come to.

Naomi Liu sat at her desk flanked by a curved conical screen two metres high. The screen, like the surface of her desk, was transparent. Documents, diagrams and film clips ghosted across the surfaces, as Naomi opened or shut them with her fingertips or gave voice commands. When she spotted Jericho, she bared her pearl-white teeth in a smile.

‘And? Happy with your new holowall?’

‘I’m afraid not, Naomi. The holograms don’t carry your scent to me.’

‘You exaggerate so elegantly.’

‘Not at all. My senses are rather sharper than other people’s. Don’t forget, I’m a detective.’

‘Then of course you’ll be able to tell me what perfume I’m wearing today.’

She looked at him half expectantly, half mocking. Jericho didn’t even try to guess a brand name. All perfumes smelled the same to him, flowers ground to powder and dissolved in alcohol.

‘The best,’ he said.

‘That answer gets you through to see the boss. He’s in the mountains.’

The ‘mountains’ were a shapeless seating range in the back of the room, its elements ceaselessly adjusting with a life of their own to the bodies which climbed or sprawled over it. You could flop down, climb up or lounge about. The range was stuffed with nanobots which made sure that the range itself constantly shifted position, as did the bodies that had plumped down into it. Experts held that thought came more easily when the body changed posture more often. Practical results bore them out. Most of Tu Technologies’ trailblazing ideas had been hatched in the cradling dynamic of the mountains.

Tu was enthroned right at the top, with two project managers, looking like a proud, fat kid up there. When he spotted Jericho, he broke off the conversation, slid down and got to his feet puffing and grunting, making futile attempts to smooth his rumpled trousers. Jericho watched patiently. He was sure that the trousers had already looked like that first thing in the morning.

‘An iron would work wonders there,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Tu shrugged. ‘These are all right.’

‘Aren’t you a bit old to go climbing about like that?’

‘Really?’

‘You came down that slope about as elegantly as an avalanche, if you’ll pardon my saying so. You might slip a disc.’

‘My discs are not up for discussion. Come along.’

Tu led Jericho to one of the glassed-in offices and shut the door behind them. Then he turned a switch so that the glass tinted itself dark and the ceiling began to glow. In a few seconds, the walls were completely opaque. They took seats at the oval conference table, and Tu settled, an expectant look on his face.

‘So, what have you got?’

‘I don’t believe that the authorities are looking for Yoyo,’ Jericho said. ‘At least, not the usual security organs.’

‘Is she still at large?’

‘I imagine so, She’s gone to ground in Quyu.’

To his surprise, Tu nodded, as though he had expected nothing less. Jericho told him everything that had happened since last time they spoke. Afterwards, Tu sat there in silence for a while.

‘And what are your suspicions regarding this student who died?’

‘My guts tell me he was murdered.’

‘Well, hooray for your guts.’

‘He lived in Yoyo’s flatshare, Tian. He wanted to drum some money out of me for information which he probably didn’t even have. Maybe he was playing the same game with somebody else, who was less patient with that sort of thing. Or maybe he really did know something, and was got out of the way before he could tell anybody.’

‘You, for instance.’

‘Me, for instance.’ Jericho gnawed at his lip. ‘Well, it’s a theory. But it sounds plausible to me. Yoyo clears off, her flatmate makes gnomic remarks about knowing where she is, he wants money and then he falls off the roof. It rather raises the question of who helped him do that. The police? Not on your life! They would have put the kid through the wringer, not tossed him overboard. Apart from which, they would only have one reason to go after Yoyo, and that would be if they had exposed her. Has there been even a single policeman up here to see you?’

Tu shook his head.

‘They’d have come here, you can bet your life on that,’ Jericho said. ‘Yoyo works for you. They’d have been knocking at Chen’s door, and squeezing Yoyo’s flatmates for information. None of that happened. She must have been stepping on somebody else’s toes. Somebody less squeamish.’