Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Damn it, Kenny. We’ve been busted!’

‘No. My task right now is to protect Hydra from being unmasked. Does he know about it yet?’

‘I told him five minutes ago. He’d be glad of a personal call from you, otherwise I’ve got to sign off now, such a bloody mess! What happens if they track me down? What am I supposed to do then?’

‘Nobody’s going to get busted.’

‘But they’re bringing the dossier with them! I don’t know what’s in it. Perhaps it would be better—’

‘Just chill.’ The tearful whining at the other end was starting to make Xin feel ill.‘I’ll come to London as quickly as possible. I’ll be near you, and if things get tight I’ll get you out.’

‘My God, Kenny! How on earth could this happen?’

‘Pull yourself together,’ Xin snapped. ‘The only risk is that you lose your nerve. Go back to the others and act as if nothing’s wrong.’

‘I hope Hanna knows what he’s doing.’

‘That’s why I chose him.’

Xin finished the conversation, swapped his phone from one hand to the other and inspected the room. As might have been expected, he noticed thousands of things that weren’t right, things that were asymmetrical, things that were out of proportion, strange excrescences in the design, an irritating bouquet of flowers. The florist hadn’t been skilled enough to make the number of petals a multiple of the number of the flowers, thus giving the sorry effort some kind of mathematical meaning. For want of a self-contained idea, the supposedly aesthetic function failing to correspond to a structural one, the arrangement had something menacingly haphazard about it – a nightmare for Xin. The mere idea of being unable to produce a rationale for one’s actions was totally horrifying! He reluctantly dialled another number, held his mobile in his left hand, while the fingers of his right gripped the flowers and tried to correct the arrangement.

‘Hydra,’ he said.

‘How big is the dossier?’ asked the voice.

‘I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.’ Kenny pinched at a lily. ‘I’m sorry about what happened. Of course I’ll assume full responsibility, but we could do nothing more than threaten Vogelaar with torture and death. He must have passed on a copy of the dossier to Jericho.’

‘You’re not guilty,’ said the voice. ‘What’s crucial is that the block still stands. What do you have in mind?’

‘Change of tack. Take the heat off Jericho, Tu and Yoyo. Their deaths are no longer a priority, and we can’t influence what’s happening on the Moon. I remain convinced that the operation will be a complete success. The important thing now is to preserve Hydra’s anonymity.’

‘Do we agree on the weak points?’

‘From my point of view there’s only the one we’ve already discussed.’

‘That’s exactly how I see it.’

Xin considered the flower arrangement. Not really any better, still without any semiotic content. ‘I’ll take the next plane to London.’

‘Are you well enough equipped there?’

‘Airbike and everything. If necessary I can summon reinforcements.’

‘Gudmundsson is busy, you know that.’

‘My net stretches wide. I could set legions marching, but that won’t be necessary. I keep myself constantly at the ready, so that should do it.’

‘Tell me about the basic information in the dossier. Now that we’ve shelved email communication, unfortunately you can’t send it to me any more.’

‘But it was still right to take the pages off the net.’

‘Keep me posted.’

Xin paused.

Then he threw his phone on the bed and turned his mounting rage on orchids, lilies and crocuses. He had to leave Berlin as soon as possible, but he couldn’t even leave this room as long as the arrangement was subject to an unsatisfactory structure. The world was not random. Not haphazard. Everything had to yield a meaning. Where the meaning ended, madness began.

The head of a lily broke off.

Bobbing with fury, Kenny Xin tore the whole arrangement out of its bowl and shoved it in the bin.

Lynn had decided to search the subterranean areas of Gaia along with Sophie. Tim sensed the reason for that. She dreaded arguments with him, because she knew very well that she would no longer be able to keep up her pretence. She was still able to lie to herself. Her attitude alternated between moments of complete clarity, subjectivity and erupting fury. That abysmal, night-black fear dwelt once more in her every glance, the fear that might easily have killed her years before, and Tim thought he noticed something else in it, something vaguely insidious that frightened him to the core. As he poked through the casino with Axel Kokoschka, the chef, his concern swung from her to Amber, who was travelling with a suspected terrorist. Julian had received the information on a protected frequency, but how had he reacted? Peter Black was with him. Had they caught Carl?

What was happening right now on the Aristarchus Plateau?

Amber, he thought, come in! Please!

Gaia’s underground floors, by Dana’s estimation, deserved particular attention, because it was from there that a bomb would release its greatest destructive force. Michio Funaki and Ashwini Anand had been assigned to the staff accommodation areas, Lynn and Sophie to the underground greenhouses, aquaria and storage units. Gaia’s mirror world stretched down deep – but then staff plans for 2026 allowed for one employee per guest.

‘In the meantime I will try to reach the Peary Base,’ Dana had said before they went off in different directions.

‘How, without a satellite?’ Tim had asked.

‘Via the dedicated line. There’s a direct laser connection between Gaia and the base. We send the data back and forth via a system of mirrors.’

‘What do you mean, mirrors? Ordinary, common-or-garden mirrors?’

‘The first one is on the far side of the gorge. A thin, very high mast. You can see it from your suite.’

‘And how many are there?’

‘Not all that many. A dozen to the Pole. Arranged in such a way that the light-beam passes around crater rims and mountains. To reach shuttles, spaceships or even the Earth, of course you need satellites, but for intralunar communication between two fixed points there’s nothing better. No atmosphere to scatter the light, no rain – so I’ll set out our situation to them in the hope that they aren’t having any problems with their satellites there, but my optimism is muted.’

And then, after Lynn had disappeared with Sophie into the lift, Dana had taken him aside.

‘Tim, this is awkward for me. You know I don’t tend to beat around the bush, but in this case—’

He sighed, troubled by dark forebodings. ‘Is it about Lynn?’

‘Yes. What’s up with her?’

Tim looked at the floor, at the walls, wherever you looked to keep from returning the other person’s gaze.

‘Look, Lynn and I never had personal contact,’ Dana went on. ‘But she supported my appointment at the time, and trained me up, in the camp, on the Moon, confidently and competently, entirely admirable. Now she strikes me as irresponsible, erratic, belligerent. She’s changed completely.’

‘I—’ Tim hemmed and hawed for a moment. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

‘I didn’t ask you to.’

Her quizzical eyes fastened on his. Suddenly it occurred to Tim that Dana Lawrence wasn’t blinking. He hadn’t seen her blink for ages. He remembered a film, Alien , a quite old but still excellent flick that Julian loved, in which one of the crew members was unexpectedly revealed as an android.

‘I don’t know how I should answer that,’ he said.