Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Bingo. Three, one of them being Umar a-Hamid.’

‘The OPEC Foreign Minister?’

‘Correct. He fell off his horse in January and broke his leg. He’s recovered now. The nag was suspected of having connections in the Islamist camp. No, I’m just kidding. The next, Prokofi Pavlovich Kiselyev—’

‘Who in God’s name is that?’

‘The former Project Manager of Gazprom in West Siberia. He died in March, a car accident, reported to be his own fault. The man was ninety-four years old and half blind. That’s it for this year.’

‘You said there were three.’

‘I took the liberty of going further back. Which brings it to three. There’s always someone of course, one gets sick, another dies, a suicide here and there, nothing unusual. Until you look at the case of Alejandro Ruiz, the strategic second in command of Repsol.’

‘Repsol? Weren’t they taken over by ENI in 2022?’

‘It was discussed, but it never actually happened. In any case, Ruiz was, or is, quite an important figure in strategic management.’

‘And now? Which is it: was or is ?’

‘That’s the problem. We’re not sure if he can still be counted as being alive. He disappeared three years ago on an inspection trip to Peru.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Overnight. He vanished. Lost without a trace in Lima.’

‘What else do you know about him?’

‘Not much, but if you like I can change that.’

‘Please do. And thank you.’

Alejandro Ruiz—

Repsol was a Spanish–Argentine company, trailing at the bottom of the field’s top ten. There weren’t all that many points of contact between the Spanish and EMCO. Was she risking wasting her time? Did the disappearance of a Spanish oil strategist in Lima in 2022 have anything to do with this?

Palstein was a strategist too.

Her thoughts oscillated between this new information and Bruford’s film recordings, trying to make some kind of sense out of them, knotting the ropes of logic together.

And suddenly she knew who one of the men in the sunglasses was.

‘Really! I swear to you!’

They were sitting in a small café on the Fifth Avenue Southwest, just a few blocks away from the Imperial Oil Limited headquarters. Loreena was drinking her third cappuccino, and the intern was sucking at a Diet Coke and devouring an awe-inspiring breakfast, composed of porridge, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes and much, much more. Loreena’s analytical mind couldn’t help wondering why someone would drink Diet Coke in the face of neutron-star-like calorie compression. Fascinated, she watched as he led a spoon of warm gruel, saturated in maple syrup, towards his mouth for processing.

‘The Magnifier can’t perform miracles,’ said the intern. ‘The picture isn’t that sharp.’

‘But I saw the guy just two days ago, and he was this close to me.’ She held her hand in front of her face. Through the gaps between her fingers, she saw a sausage disappear. ‘ This close! ’

‘Which makes me a little concerned that you may have kissed him.’

‘Don’t be silly. He wanted to see my ID card. As if Palstein’s house were the Pentagon or something.’

The intern put his spoon down and wrinkled his forehead.

‘There’s nothing unusual about his security people keeping a check on things.’

‘And did they? Did they check up on things? What had they lost in the house anyway?’

‘As I said.’ He picked his spoon back up. ‘They were keeping a check that—’

‘All that cholesterol has blocked up your synapses!’ she said angrily. ‘It’s obvious that he would have security personnel around him, and police too – I mean, he didn’t exactly come bearing Christmas presents. But would you send your private bodyguard into an empty house opposite? After all, Palstein isn’t Kennedy. How likely is it that someone would shoot at him from there?’

His answer got lost amidst a struggle with an oversized piece of pancake.

‘Let’s assume the Asian guy was harmless,’ she continued. ‘He may have just been looking for a bathroom. That would either mean that Palstein’s people overlooked him, or that they weren’t interested in the fact that he went in. Both are unlikely.’

‘The two guys were talking to the policeman. They couldn’t even see him.’

‘And the woman?’

‘Are you sure she was one of them?’

‘She came out immediately after them. And besides, those security types all look the same. So, suppose that the Chinese guy is our killer.’

‘What makes you think he’s Chinese?’

‘Asian. It doesn’t matter.’ She leaned over. ‘Just think, will you, three security people! One standing close to the entrance. Two others chatting with a policeman, just a few metres away. And none of them notices the grotesquely overweight apparition entering a building they were supposed to be guarding?’

‘Perhaps the Chinese— the Asian guy was security too. Didn’t Palstein tell you that he only started using a security team after Calgary? I find that much more surprising.’

‘No, he didn’t.’ She rolled her cup around, mixing the espresso with foam. ‘Just that they’ve been guarding his house since Calgary.’

‘Well, it would have been better to take on someone else.’

Loreena stared at the foam and espresso mixture.

Would have been better—

‘Damn, you’re right.’

‘Of course I am,’ said the intern, scraping together the remains of the porridge. ‘About what?’

‘He can’t trust them.’

‘Because they’re a dead loss. Too dumb to—’

‘No, they’re not.’ Unbelievable! Why had she only thought of it now? The security people let the killer pass! In full knowledge of who he was! More than that, they distracted the policeman and kept their eyes on the surroundings to make sure no one stopped him from entering the house.

‘Good God,’ she whispered.

‘It’s not long ago that the ability to secure the necessary fossil fuel resources was crucial to the geopolitical role of a nation state. It was under this premise that we foresaw China leading the economic nations in the medium term, knocking the USA down to a distant second, followed by India.’

Gerald Palstein’s guest lectureship at UT Dallas, a state university in the suburb of Richardson, had brought around six hundred students into the lecture theatre, most of them budding managers, economists and information scientists. It was very popular, which was as much down to Palstein’s media savvy as to the fact that he was depicting a wide-screen panorama of failure, in which a Titanic of an energy industry rammed right into an iceberg called helium-3.

‘Russia’s role at this time was one of a major power as far as oil and gas were concerned. Gazprom was also referred to as a weapon. And no one used this weapon in the battle for Russia’s geostrategic role as ably as the country’s former president Vladimir Putin. Does anyone here still remember his nickname?’

‘Gasputin,’ called a young woman from the front row. There was laughter. Palstein raised his eyebrows approvingly.

‘Very good. At the time, the Americans looked on with concern as China openly flirted with Russia regarding its energy requirements, and also strengthened its contacts to OPEC. The latter was pleased of course. They hadn’t been courted like that in a long time and were hoping for a renaissance of their former status. And so the oil nations in the Gulf started to invest their money in the accounts of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, in Turkey and India instead of in American institutions, and China began to settle the bill for its oil supplies from Iran in euros instead of dollars. The balance of power shifted, along with the motivation for America’s efforts to free itself from dependence on Eastern oil supplies. In 2006, representatives from Saudi Arabia travelled to Beijing to sign a number of treaties. Even Kuwait was wooing China, because it was afraid of losing ground to Russia. China knew how to exploit all of that. Although I wouldn’t want to encourage any hate-filled stereotypes, one might picture the energy-hungry China of the first decade of our millennium as an octopus whose arms were silently unfurling, largely unnoticed, in the traditional mining regions of the Western oil multinationals. In the White House, they developed scenarios in which radical forces toppled the Saudi ruling dynasties, all based on the expectation that China would be involved and would ultimately station Chinese nuclear missiles in the Saudi desert. This fear was, as we now know, not completely unfounded. The fall of the house of Saud most definitely took place with concealed Chinese participation. And it’s certain that if the recent conflict between Islamist and monarchist forces had grown to epic proportions and caused a public clash between China and America, then the dawning potential of helium-3 would not have led Washington’s interest in another direction.’