Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘I’m dying of hunger here,’ said the intern. ‘Where’s the menu?’

She put her phone away. ‘I hope you’ve been busy. Steaks for information. One to one.’

‘Should be enough here for a kilo of T-bone.’ He spread out a dozen sheets of paper in front of himself. ‘All right, watch this. I called Eagle Eye, the security company that provided Palstein’s bodyguard. Dished them up a story about a journalist in peril, working on a sensitive story, needs protection, told them you’d just recently met Gudmundsson, Palstein had told you a lot of good things about him, yadda yadda yadda. They told me that Gudmundsson’s a freelance and fairly busy keeping an eye on the oilman, so they’d have to see whether he still had any spare capacity, if not, they could put together a tailor-made team for you. By the way, they knew about you.’

Loreena raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh yes?’

‘From the web. Your reportage. They were pretty taken with the idea of protecting Loreena Keowa.’

‘Flattering. Do they use a lot of freelancers?’

‘Almost exclusively. Half of them are ex-police, the others are a mix of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and Green Berets, some of them were mercenaries, active right round the world. Then they use ex-Secret Service agents for logistics and information operations, they prefer CIA, Mossad or the Germans. They tell me that the Bundesnachrichtendienst have excellent contacts, and the Israelis of course, but sometimes they even get guys from the KGB wandering into Eagle Eye, even Chinese or Koreans. If you ask, they’ll give you the CV of any of their agents. They don’t keep these things secret, quite the opposite! The career histories are part of their reputation.’

‘And Gudmundsson?’

‘He’s half Icelandic, hence the name. Grew up in Washington. Ex-Navy SEAL, trained as a sniper, he’s got his hands dirty, you could say. When he was twenty-five he joined a mercenary army, Mamba.’

‘Never heard of them.’

‘They were operating in Kenya and Nigeria at the beginning of the century. Then he went on to a similar operation in West Africa called African Protection Services, APS for short.’

‘Hmm. Africa.’

‘Yes, but he’s been back in the States for five years now. He offers his expertise to private security companies, Eagle Eye and others, usually as project manager.’

Loreena thought it over. Africa? Was it important where Gudmundsson had worked before? What was certain was that he had betrayed one of his employer’s clients. She couldn’t rule out that Eagle Eye was involved there, but nor could she assume that that was the case. It was a well-respected company and their services were used by a lot of well-known figures. Interesting that Eagle Eye was already employing Gudmundsson at the time Ruiz disappeared. So what had Gudmundsson been doing on the night of the second to the third of September 2022? Where had he been the night Ruiz went missing? In Peru, perhaps?

‘Was that all?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else?’

‘Hey, come on there, that’s not bad.’

‘Might be enough for a roast potato.’ She grinned. ‘Okay, okay! And a couple of spare ribs.’

Exobiologists had come up with scenarios for extraterrestrial life where you would least expect it. Weird forms of life thrived in volcanic vents, braved oceans of sulphur and ammonia, sprouted under the icy crust of frozen moons or glided with splendid lethargy through the banded skies of Jupiter, giant creatures with wings like manta rays, buoyed up by hydrogen in their body cavities that kept them from crashing down to the gas giant’s metallic core.

At 6.30, one such creature was approaching Berlin.

Its skin shone in the cold, hard light of dawn as it curved slowly about and lost height. Its wingspan was almost a hundred metres. Its body and wings flowed seamlessly together, ending in a tiny vestige of a head that seemed to point to only rudimentary intelligence, compared with the size of the whole thing. But appearances were deceptive. In fact, this head brought together the whole calculating capacity of four autonomous computer systems which kept the monstrous body aloft, all under the supervision of pilot and co-pilot.

It was an Air China flying wing, coming in to land at Berlin. There was room on board for around one thousand passengers. The engineers who had built it were fed up with screwing their lifting surfaces onto canisters, and instead had created a low, hollow, symmetrical craft packed with seating all the way to its wingtips, an aerodynamic miracle. The giant’s engines were embedded in the stern. Because of the phenomenally large surface area, it generated thrust even at low engine speeds, while at the same time the ray-shaped wings made for increased lift and kept turbulence to a minimum. This reduced fuel consumption and kept engine noise to a socially acceptable sixty-three decibels. The designers had even done without windows for the sake of the aerodynamics. Instead, tiny cameras along the midline filmed the world outside and broadcast their pictures to 3D screens which simulated glass panes. Flying here was a feast for the senses. All the same, airsickness could strike those who had the cheap seats out in the wingtips, which could hop as much as twenty-five metres up and down when the aircraft banked, and bore the brunt of the turbulence.

By contrast, the man walking back to his seat from the on-board massage parlour with a spring in his step was enjoying the luxury of the Platinum Lounge. Here, the simulation showed him nothing less than the view from the cockpit, a fascinating panorama with perfect depth of field. He sank back into the cushions and shut his eyes. His seat was precisely on the aircraft’s axis, which was a stroke of luck considering how late he had booked. For all that, the people who had booked the flight for him knew his preferences. Accordingly, they had made sure they made their own luck. They knew that rather than take a seat just next to the axis, he would prefer to travel in a wingtip – or in the basket of a hot-air balloon, be dangled from a Zeppelin’s bag or clutched in the claws of the roc bird. A middle seat was a middle seat, and not up for negotiation. The closer a thing was to perfection, the less he could bear falling short of that ideal, and something inside him pushed him to set things right straight away.

He looked out at Berlin below him in the sunlight, surrounded by green spaces, rivers, sparkling lakes. Then the city itself, a jewel box containing many different epochs. Long shadows fell in the morning light. The flying wing banked in a 180-degree curve, then fell to earth, speeding over the tower blocks, the public parks and avenues, dropping quickly. For a moment it looked from his exposed vantage point as though they were headed straight into the runway, then the pilot lifted the nose and they landed, almost imperceptibly.

The mood inside the aircraft changed subtly. For the last few hours the future had been in abeyance, a matter of aerodynamics and good will. Now it came rushing back to them with all its demands. Conversation broke out, newspapers and books were hastily put away, the aircraft came to rest. Huge hatched gateways opened to let the passengers flood out to all corners of the airport. The man picked up his hand luggage, and was one of the first to leave the plane. His data were already stored in the airport security system here. Air China had sent his files across to the German authorities not twenty minutes after take-off in Pudong, and right now the footage from the on-board cameras was also being transmitted. As he neared the gates, the German computer already knew what he had eaten and drunk on board, which films he had watched, which stewardess he had flirted with and which he had complained to, and how often he had gone to the toilet. The system had his digital photograph, his voiceprint, his fingerprints, iris scan, and of course it knew his first stop in Berlin, the Hotel Adlon.