Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Hey, Warren,’ called Evelyn, quietly rapt. ‘You’re not going all the way back just for—’

‘Yep.’

‘Wait!’ shouted Julian. ‘Take Amber’s camera, she’s right. You can film Momoka with it until she pleads for mercy.’

‘No! I’m going to get the damned thing!’

He stamped defiantly back in the direction of the ravine.

‘I know he doesn’t have an easy life with me,’ he heard Momoka saying quietly to the others, as if he couldn’t hear every single word, ‘but Warren’s only happy when something’s getting on his nerves.’

‘Quite honestly, you both seem to need that,’ Amber remarked.

‘Ah, yes.’ Momoka sighed. ‘I love it when he hits back. That’s when I love him most.’

Julian, advancing with the pace of a natural leader, had almost reached the plateau when he heard Sophie’s voice in his helmet. Parked some way off, he could just see the rovers via which he was connected to the Ganymede, and via it with Gaia.

‘What is it, Sophie?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, call from Earth. I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line for you. Please switch to O-SEC.’

O-SEC. Bug-proof connection. It meant that he had to sever his contact with the group. No one would be able to hear what his company’s security advisor had to tell him.

‘Fine.’ He obliged. ‘We’re on our own.’

‘Julian!’ Jennifer’s voice, urgent. ‘I won’t trouble you with an endless preamble. Lynn will have told you about the warning we received yesterday. We’ve just—’

‘Lynn?’ Julian interrupted her, surprised. He turned to the others and gestured to them to stop. ‘No. Lynn didn’t tell me anything about a warning.’

‘She didn’t?’ Jennifer said, puzzled.

‘When’s that supposed to have been?’

‘Last night. Edda Hoff talked to your daughter. Lynn wanted to be kept informed about the matter. Of course I assumed that she—’

‘What matter are we talking about, Jennifer? I don’t understand a word.’

Jennifer fell silent for a moment. The delay between Earth and Moon lasted only a second, but it was enough to create irritating little pauses.

‘Two days ago we received a warning from a Chinese businessman,’ she said. ‘He happened to come into possession of a garbled text document, and since then he’s been on the run. The text suggests – or seems to suggest – that one of the company’s plants is threatened with attack.’

‘What’s that you say? Hoff said that to my daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lynn? Lynn, are you there?’

‘I’m here, Dad.’

‘What’s going on? What’s all this about?’

‘I – I didn’t want to bother you with it.’ Her voice sounded quavery and upset. ‘Of course I—’

‘Lynn, Julian, I’m sorry,’ Jennifer cut in. ‘But there’s no time for all this. The Chinese guy called me again a short time ago, or one of his people did. They’re coming straight to us. This morning they tried to find out more about the background to the document, and it ended in disaster. There were casualties, but they’ve got some new information.’

‘What kind of information? Jennifer, who—’

‘Wait, Julian. We’re in contact with the Chinese jet. I’ll put you through.’

A second passed, then a strange man’s voice was heard, amidst an atmospheric hiss:

‘Mr Orley? My name is Owen Jericho. I know you have a thousand questions, but I’ve got to ask you to listen to me now. By completing the document we’ve been able to discover that an information satellite was fired into the Earth’s orbit from African soil. The operator was the former government of Equatorial Guinea, General Juan Mayé, who took over in a coup.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Julian. ‘Mayé and his satellite. He made a laughing stock of himself with that thing.’

‘What you may not know is that Mayé was a straw man for Chinese lobbyists. It’s possible that he was put in power at the instigation of Beijing, but it was certainly done with their connivance. By now other people are in power in Equatorial Guinea, but during his time in office the Chinese sponsored his space programme. Does the name Zheng mean anything to you?’

‘The Zheng Group? Of course!’

‘Zheng made lots of their technology available to him at the time, and provided know-how and hardware. But the satellite was just a pretext to fire something else into orbit from Mayé’s state territory. Something that no official site would have allowed through.’

‘What was that?’

‘A bomb. A Korean atom bomb.’

Julian froze. He guessed, feared he guessed, what this man Jericho was getting at. He watched uneasily as the others scattered and gesticulated on the path.

‘The Koreans?’ he echoed. ‘What on earth do I have to do with—’

‘Not the Koreans, Mr Orley, but what Kim Jong Un’s abandoned ghost train left behind. We’re talking about the black market mafia. In other words, China, or somebody who’s hiding behind China, has bought a handy little atom bomb from Korean stock, a so-called mini-nuke. We’re sure that this bomb left the satellite just as it entered its orbit – so a year ago – then travelled on from there to an unknown destination. And in our opinion that destination is not on Earth.’

‘Just a moment.’ Not on Earth. ‘You mean—’

‘We mean it’s meant to destroy one of your space installations, yes. Probably Gaia. The Moon hotel.’

‘And what makes you suspect that?’ Julian heard himself saying in a remarkably calm voice.

‘The time delay. Of course there are a few variations. But none of them really explains why the thing has been up there for a year without being set off. Unless something got in the way.’ Jericho paused for a miserably long time. ‘Wasn’t Gaia originally supposed to have opened in 2024? And that was postponed because of the Moon crisis?’

Julian said nothing, as something was set in motion, slowly but inexorably, inside his head. The projectionist slipped by, put in the reel of film and—

‘Carl,’ he whispered.

‘Sorry?’ asked Jericho.

‘In the morning, two days ago,’ cried Julian. ‘My God! I saw it and didn’t understand. Carl Hanna, one of our guests. I ran into him in the corridor, he said he’d been looking for the exit and hadn’t found it, but he was lying! He was outside.’

‘Julian.’ Dana Lawrence joined in the conversation. ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong. You’ve seen the recordings. Carl definitely didn’t go outside.’

‘He did, Dana. He did! And idiot that I am, I even saw it. Down in the corridor, even though I didn’t understand it. Someone faked the recordings, re-edited the shots. He steps onto the gangway to the Lunar Express—’

‘And reappears a few seconds later.’

‘No, he was outside! He steps on it wearing a very clean suit, Dana, clean as a whistle! And when he comes out again there are traces of moon dust on his legs. That was what I was looking for the whole time, that subliminal certainty that something was wrong.’

‘Just a moment,’ Dana said sharply. ‘I’ll get the recordings up on screen.’

Clever Julian, thought Hanna.

He stood there motionlessly while the cantilever swung over the gorge, Mimi and Marc hung laughing over the abyss, and Black set the winch in motion, and he heard something that he shouldn’t have heard. But he was switched in. This time, once again, Ebola ensured that he was able to function, even though his room for manoeuvre was dramatically shrinking. He would never have expected to get busted, his identity was watertight. Not even when Vic Thorn had died had the operation been as precarious as it was right now. All of a sudden the planned course of action was out of the window; he had to act, carry out his mission prematurely, use the seconds, minutes at most, that Ebola had wangled for him to create the maximum possible confusion and take to his heels.