Frank Schätzing - Limit

She was interested by what she found out.

She looked out of the window. A grey sky brooded over the city, warning that all things must pass. Drizzling curtains of rain blurred the lines of the Calgary Tower, one hundred and ninety metres tall, built by the oil companies Marathon and Husky Oil back in the day. There was something skeletal about the high-rises. A once-prosperous city was shedding weight fast, devouring its own reserves of stored fat. After thinking things over for a while, she called Vancouver again.

‘Can you reconstruct the last few days before Ruiz disappeared?’

‘Depends what you want to know.’

‘I’ve just been speaking with his wife, and one of his colleagues. Ruiz’s last stop before he flew on to Lima was in Beijing.’

‘Beijing?’ asked Sina, surprised. ‘What was Ruiz doing in Beijing?’

‘Yes, indeed. What?’

‘Repsol has no stake in China.’

‘Not quite true. There was definitely a joint venture with Sinopec – it had been planned for a while. Some kind of exploration deal. They spent a week bashing it into shape. I’m more interested in what he did on the last day, right before he left China. On 1 September 2022, to be exact. Apparently he was taking part in some conference that his colleague I spoke to knew next to nothing about. All he knew was that it took place outside Beijing. He reckoned there had to be some papers about it lying around somewhere, and he’ll have a look.’

‘Nobody knows what the conference was about?’

‘Ruiz was strategic director. Autonomous. He didn’t have to sit up and beg for every little thing. Señora Ruiz tells me that her Alejandro was a very warm-hearted, easygoing person—’

‘Sobs.’

‘I’m getting somewhere. He wasn’t the type to get upset over nothing. They had spoken on the phone just before the conference, and he was all smiles and sunshine. He had helped get the joint venture on its feet, he was in a good mood, he was cracking jokes and looking forward to Peru. But when he called from the plane to Lima, he seemed fairly downcast.’

‘This was the day after the mysterious conference?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And did she ask him why?’

‘She supposed that something must have gone wrong in Beijing, something that really got to him, but he didn’t want to talk about it, she tells me. All in all he seemed like a different person, he was in a very uncharacteristic mood, upset and nervous. Then he called her one last time from Lima. He sounded desperate. Almost scared.’

‘This was just before he disappeared?’

‘The same night, yes. It was the last she heard from him.’

‘And what am I to do now?’

‘Dig around, as usual. I want to know what kind of meeting he was attending in China. Where it happened, what it was all about, who was there.’

‘Hmm. I’ll do what I can, okay?’

‘But?’

Sina hesitated. ‘Susan wants another word with you.’

Loreena frowned. Susan Hudsucker was the Greenwatch number one. She had an idea what was coming, and come indeed it did, just as she expected: when, Susan asked, did Loreena expect to be done with her documentary about the oil companies’ environmental sins? If at all possible, they wanted to broadcast Trash of the Titans while there were still titans around, and didn’t she think she might be barking up the wrong tree with Palstein?

Loreena said she was trying to solve an attempted murder.

Susan said that Greenwatch wasn’t the FBI.

But it could be that the shooting had a lot to do with the subject of her documentary.

Susan was sceptical, although on the other hand Loreena wasn’t someone that even she could push around.

‘Maybe you should bear in mind that what you’re doing could be dangerous,’ she said.

‘When has our work ever not been dangerous?’ snorted Loreena. ‘Investigative work is always dangerous.’

‘Loreena, this is about an attempted murder !’

‘Listen, Susan’ – she paced up and down the hotel room like a tiger in a cage – ‘I can’t give you all the details right now. We’ll take the first plane to Vancouver tomorrow morning and call an editorial conference. Then you’ll all see that this is an extremely hot story, and that we’ve already got a whole lot further than the darn police. I mean, we’d be fools not to stick with this one!’

‘I don’t want to stand in your way. It’s just that we have an awful lot else to do as well. Trash of the Titans needs to be finished, I can’t take you off that task.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘But I do worry.’

‘Apart from all that, I did a deal with Palstein. If we solve this case, he’ll give us the deep dirt on EMCO.’

Susan sighed. ‘Tomorrow we’ll decide what happens next, okay?’

‘But by then Sina has to—’

‘Tomorrow, Loreena.’

‘Susan—’

‘Please! We’ll do everything you want, but first we have to talk about it.’

‘Oh, shit, Susan!’

‘Sid will come fetch you. Let him know in good time when you’re landing.’

Gritting her teeth, Loreena paced the room, thumped her clenched fist on the wall several times and then went back down to the restaurant, where the intern was digging into a huge portion of chocolate mousse.

‘Why do you stuff your face like that all the time?’ she snarled at him.

‘I’m having a growth spurt.’ He raised his eyes sluggishly. ‘That doesn’t seem to have been a particularly good call to Señora Ruiz.’

‘No, that was fine.’ She slumped down sulkily into her chair, looked into the empty cup and rattled the empty teapot. ‘The not particularly good call was with Susan. She thinks we should be concentrating on Trash of the Titans .’

‘Oops,’ said the intern. ‘That’s not good.’

‘All the same, we fly to Vancouver first thing tomorrow and we’ll sort it out. I’m not going to let it slip through my fingers now!’

‘So we’re still working on Trash of the— ’

‘No, no!’ She leaned down. ‘ I will be working on Trash of the Titans . You take a good look at Lars Gudmundsson.’

‘Palstein’s bodyguard?’

‘That’s the guy. Him, and his team. I found out that he worked for an outfit in Dallas called Eagle Eye – cute name, huh? Personal protections, mercenaries. Check Gudmundsson out, tell me his shoe size and his favourite food. I want to know everything there is to know about the guy.’

The intern looked uncertain. ‘What if he notices something? Catches us sniffing around after him?’

Loreena gave him a thin smile. ‘If he notices anything, we’ve made a mistake. And do we make mistakes?’

‘I do, sure.’

‘I don’t. So eat up before I get sick from watching you. We’ve work to do.’

They were sitting in the lobby by the fireplace. Tu listened to their report as he guzzled down nuts by the handful. He was scooping them from the little bowl by his vodka martini faster than he could gulp them down, so that his cheeks filled out like a squirrel’s in the autumn.

‘One hundred thousand,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘And that’s his final price.’ Jericho fished around in the bowl. A single remaining peanut sought to escape his clutches. ‘Vogelaar won’t be beaten down.’

‘Then we’ll pay him.’

‘Just so we’re all on the same page here,’ said Yoyo, smiling sweetly, ‘ I don’t have a hundred thousand.’

‘So what? Do you really think that I flew the whole way here just to give up because of a measly hundred thousand? You’ll have the money tomorrow morning.’

‘Tian, I—’ Jericho managed to catch the nut between finger and thumb, and popped it into his mouth, where it rattled around on his tongue, lonely. ‘I wouldn’t like to see you shell out the money.’