Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Get to the restaurant,’ he gasped. ‘Nyela—’

Jericho grabbed him under the arms without letting go of the Glock. He was heavy, much too heavy. All hell was breaking loose around them.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he grunted. ‘You’ve got to—’

Vogelaar stared at him. He sank slowly to the ground, and Jericho realised that Xin had shot him again. Panic swept over him. He scanned the crowd for the killer, spotted his shock of white hair. He only had moments before Xin would have another clear line of sight.

‘Get up,’ he screamed. ‘Get going!’

Vogelaar slipped from his grasp. His face was going waxen, mask-like, horribly fast. He fell on his back, and a gout of bright red blood gushed from his mouth.

‘Nyela – don’t know if – probably dead, but – perhaps—’

‘No,’ Jericho whispered. ‘You can’t die on me…’

A few metres away, a man was lifted up and flung forward as though by a giant fist. He flew through the air and then crashed to the ground, spread-eagled.

Xin was clearing his way through.

Vogelaar, Jericho thought desperately, you can’t just croak on me now, where’s the dossier, you’re our last hope, get up, for goodness’ sake. Get up. Get up!

Then he turned and ran as fast as he could.

Vogelaar stared into the light.

He had never been a religious man, and even now he found that the promise of heaven sounded tawdry and hollow. Why should every fool who’d ever drawn breath find their way to the Other Side? Religion was just one of those cracks this bug had never scuttled into. He couldn’t understand a character like Cyrano de Bergerac, who had spent a lifetime scoffing at religion and then felt a pang of fear at the last moment, humbly seeking forgiveness on his deathbed in case there was a God after all. Life ended. Why waste what time was left to him believing in some paradise? This was only the neon white light streaming down onto him from the ceiling, the artificial daylight of the museum hall. The white light that people spoke of after near-death experiences. The Hereafter, supposedly. In truth it was nothing but hallucinogenic tryptamine alkaloids flooding the brain.

How stupid of him not to have given Jericho the dossier! Done with now. Dead and gone. He felt a faint flicker of hope that he had been wrong about Nyela. Hope that she was still alive, that the detective could do something for her – if he got out alive. Otherwise the situation was beyond his control, beyond his concern – but it wasn’t the worst way to die, his last thoughts with the only person he had loved more than himself.

Now he was freed from his armour, his bug’s shell. Free at last?

Xin came into view.

Gasping and grunting, Vogelaar lifted his gun, or rather strained every muscle to do so. He might just as well have been trying to fling a dumbbell at Xin. The pistol lay in his hand, heavy as lead. He only just had strength enough left to shoot daggers from his eyes.

The killer curled his lips contemptuously.

‘Parameters, you idiot!’ he said.

Xin shot Vogelaar in the chest and stalked on past without giving the dead man a second glance. Did he have any cause to reproach himself? Had it been a mistake to order Mickey along to the museum at the last moment, so that nothing went wrong this time? Vogelaar had spotted the Irishman, had drawn the wrong conclusion – and all this time Nyela was hanging from two pairs of handcuffs in the cellar at Muntu. Unharmed, as Xin had promised.

Hadn’t he said that he’d let her live?

He’d done that, damn it!

Yes, he would have let them both live! He’d have been happy to let them live! Vogelaar hadn’t understood anything, the stupid ape. Now it was all past help, the laws cried out for vengeance. Now he had to kill the woman. He’d promised that too.

Xin began to run, driving the crowd before him like lowing cattle, dumb animals all trying to crush through the narrow gate at the same time. A girl in front of him stumbled and fell to the ground. He trampled her underfoot, flung another to the side, cracked the pistol grip against the side of an old man’s head, fought his way through, charged like a battering ram at the ruck of fleeing tourists and plunged out the other side, his gaze fixed on the Market Gate of Miletus, where Jericho had just vanished through into the next wing. He squeezed off a burst of fire, sending splinters flying from two-thousand-year-old carvings. People screamed, ran, flung themselves to the ground, the same old tiresome spectacle. Swinging his pistol like a club, he followed Jericho, saw him melt into the crowd of visitors thronging the Processional Way, and then in his place two uniformed figures ran out from a corridor off to the side, their weapons at the ready but without the first idea of who their enemy really was. He mowed them down without breaking stride. A bow wave of panic washed before him, all the way to Babylon.

Where was that blasted detective?

Jericho ran along the Processional Way.

How absurd it was to be running away with a loaded gun in his hand, instead of using it. But if he stopped, Xin would shoot him before he could even turn round and aim. The killer was trained to hit small targets and to use any window that presented itself. He swung his Glock like Moses swinging his staff, shouting, ‘Get out of the way!’ parting the sea of people, and ran to the black statue of Hadad, past grinning sculptures of crouching lions. The beasts looked as though they had poodles or mastiffs somewhere in their bloodline. Had the cultures of the ancient world ever even seen lions, or had they only existed in the limited imaginations of sculptors working to order? Perhaps they’d just been bad sculptors. Not everything that found its way into museums necessarily had to be any good. And what the hell was he thinking about, at a moment like this!

A family scattered to all sides in front of him.

Beyond Hadad, a row of tall, slender columns marched away meaninglessly, no longer supporting whatever it was they had once held up. Following an inner impulse, he flung himself to the right, heard the dull crack of a pistol being fired and the shot thud into the storm god, ran towards the glassed fourth wing—

And stopped.

Stepping into that glass corridor meant that he would be trapped in the museum, running round the square all over again. He could get to the James Simon Gallery by going left here, and right now, just for a moment, he was out of Xin’s sight—

He dropped to all fours like a dog, scuttled behind the pillars, seeking cover, then crept back the other way, and from the corner of his eye he saw Xin running into the glass hall. Jericho stuffed the Glock back into his pocket. From now on he was just one of many, trying like all the rest of them to avoid becoming a statistic on the evening news report. A tsunami of rumour and consternation swept through the museum entrance hall, so that nobody paid him any attention as he hurried outside, running rather than walking down the steps to the river. He crossed the bridge back where he had come this morning.

Nyela. The dossier.

He had to get to Muntu.

Things were calmer in the glass hall. Xin scanned the crowd for Jericho’s blond hair. His pistol cast a spell of fearful silence all around, but something was wrong. If Jericho had come through here before him, armed, shouting, running, people would be a lot less relaxed. Obviously they thought that Xin was a policeman of some kind, on patrol. He glanced along the corridor, its western wall glowing with noon sunlight. In front of him an obelisk from Sahuré’s temple, the pharaohs on their plinths, the glowering temple gate of Kalabsha – he couldn’t rule out that Jericho might have the nerve to be hiding behind any of these. He’d had ten seconds’ head start, maximum, but enough to get behind one of the pharaohs.