Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Of course I did,’ she admitted straight away. ‘She told me that the two of you were an item.’

‘And what else?’

‘That you cocked it up.’

‘Ah.’

‘She said it was because you didn’t like yourself – you’re never nice to yourself – not at all nice to yourself.’

Jericho pursed his lips. He lined up some counter-arguments, and each looked more threadbare than the next. He held them back. God knows they had better things to do here than rummage through their emotional baggage, but somehow he suddenly felt as if he’d been caught with his trousers down. As if Joanna had stripped him bare and was marching him about by the ring in his nose. Yoyo shook her head.

‘No, Owen, she didn’t say anything bad about you.’

‘Hmm. I’ll think about it.’

‘Do that.’ She grinned. The way he surrendered seemed to have smoothed her ruffled feathers. ‘We mustn’t rule out the possibility that we’ll have to save one another’s lives a few more times.’

‘As I believe I’ve already said – any time!’ He hesitated. ‘About Nyela—’

‘My fault. After I screwed it up, I thought the best thing to do would be to come back quickly.’

Jericho felt his ear.

‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you did screw it up.’

Pounding the streets of Calgary and showing people the photograph of a possible gunman was more or less like knocking down an anthill and looking for one particular ant. Just a moment ago one and a half million people had been hard at work here, busy making more goods for the shelves and building more blocks on the streets of Canada’s fastest-growing city, industrious citizens flooding the streets, but now they seemed to have lost all sense of direction in an instant. Loreena welcomed the switch to helium-3 in the energy industry, but for all that she couldn’t bear the grim spectacle of mass unemployment, the decline of whole cities and provinces, the impending bankruptcy of countries which had made their money almost entirely from oil and gas. Ecologists had always had an idealistic vision of a smooth and manageable transition, with Mr Fossilosaurus given a gold watch and sent packing to a nice quiet retirement home, where he would then draw his last breath after a dignified decline, while ten billion people cheerily got their electricity from helium-3 generators. But transition had never gone smoothly, never in history. Not in the Cambrian epoch, not in the Ordovician, the Devonian, not at the end of the Permian, Triassic or Cretaceous, and not in the Upper Pleistocene either. That was when a new species called mankind appeared, a self-aware creature who added war and economic crisis to the catalogue of boundary events that already included volcanic eruption, meteorites, ice ages and epidemics. So the brave new world of clean fusion came hand in hand with a full-blown global economic crisis, whether the heralds of the new dawn liked it or not.

She put fruit, yoghurt and bread rolls onto her tray and took it over to the table, where the intern was already piling into his second stack of pancakes.

‘Yesterday was a damp squib then,’ he said.

Loreena shrugged. The Westin Calgary had the advantage of being near the Imperial Oil building on 4th Avenue Southwest, so after she had telephoned Palstein she had decided to take rooms for the night there for herself and the kid. After that they retraced the mysterious fat man’s steps. It was a dispiriting business. On Bruford’s video, he came in from the north. Most hotels were to the south, west or east though. He could have been staying in any one of them, if he had been staying in a hotel at all. Perhaps he even lived in the city. There was a clear Asian presence here. Just a walk away from the Bow River, the third largest Chinatown in Canada after Vancouver and Toronto stretched down Calgary’s lively Centre Street. In the Sheraton, not far from Prince’s Park Island, the staff thought that they remembered a tall, shabby-looking Asian man with a paunch on him, but he hadn’t been a guest. They had showed his picture around shops and restaurants, and had even paid a visit to Calgary International Airport, all to no avail. The only good news this morning for Keowa was her breakfast, a filling but not fattening tray of pineapple, sunflower seed rolls and low fat yoghurt.

Just as she was pouring a cup of herbal tea, Sina called, from the Vancouver desk for high society and other gossip.

‘Alejandro Ruiz, fifty-two years old. Last heard of as a member of the strategic board for Repsol, or more exactly Repsol YPF to give it its full name, incorporated in Madrid—’

‘I know all that already.’

‘Wait though! They’re market leaders in Spain and Argentina, for a long while they were the biggest energy corporation in private hands, they’re focused on exploration, production and refineries, they’re also world number three in LNG. They’ve never held any stake in alternative energies. Just to make up for it, the Mapuche Indians in Argentina have been bringing lawsuits against them like clockwork for the past twenty years, accusing them of polluting the groundwater.’

It was news to Loreena that this tribe was so litigious.

‘Are there even any Mapuche left?’

‘Oh yes! They’re in Argentina and Chile. Even if the Chilean government stubbornly denies that there’s ever been any such thing as the Mapuche. Makes you laugh, eh? Anyway, Repsol’s one of those companies where the lights are going out floor by floor. And Ruiz wasn’t just vice-president for strategy, which is what I thought yesterday, he was also directly responsible for petrochemical activities in twenty-nine countries, as of July 2022.’

‘That’s odd,’ said Loreena.

‘Why?’

‘I mean, given the way the company’s set up. Why would they make somebody strategic director who demands they diversify into solar power, and uses funny words like ethics?’

‘Most of the time they just put him on the payroll as their ecological conscience so they wouldn’t look dumb in public. He was a second-ranker in the corporate hierarchy, so he could bark but he couldn’t bite. But by 2022 the tanker was well and truly headed for the rocks. In a situation like that, you could have appointed an Andalusian donkey to the top job. Once it was obvious that Repsol was going to be one of the big losers, they needed a scapegoat at the helm, that’s all.’

‘By 2022 Ruiz had no chance of preventing catastrophe.’

‘I know. Still, he tried pretty much everything he could. He even tried striking a deal with Orley Enterprises.’

‘Say what?’ said Loreena, taken aback.

‘I watched a couple of videos. He gives a good impression, this guy. His wife and daughter in Madrid are distraught over whether he’ll ever turn up again. I’ll send you contact details for them, and for some of his colleagues at Repsol. Best of luck.’

‘You’re gonna call Ruiz’s old lady?’ the intern asked once she had finished speaking to Vancouver.

Loreena got up. ‘Any reason why not?’

‘The time. Also, you can’t speak Spanish.’

‘It’s half past five in the afternoon in Madrid.’

‘Hey, really?’ He licked grease off his fingers. ‘I thought it was always night in Europe when it’s day here.’

Loreena opened her mouth to answer, stopped, shook her head and went up to her room. She was pleased to get through on her first attempt. Señora Ruiz looked distracted, and tried to rebuff her at first but in the end was very helpful; above all, she spoke excellent English, as Loreena had secretly been hoping, since indeed she didn’t speak Spanish. They talked for about ten minutes, then she called one of the strategic team at Repsol, who had also been a friend of Ruiz out of the office. Sina had hunted down numbers for some more of his colleagues, but they were all newly unemployed.