Frank Schätzing - Limit

Finn joined in.

It was the worst thing he could have done. Even an irritated twitch of his eyebrows would have saved her, a hint of incomprehension, but he just laughed and started rubbing her between the legs until she was terrified, even as her fingers clawed at the hem of his trunks and pulled them down, to liberate the engorged beast within.

Water monkeys, she thought. We’re water monkeys!

Uh! Uh!

‘I’d leave it if I were you,’ she heard Nina Hedegaard saying, just before the water started splashing. ‘He’ll bring you nothing but frustration and a whole host of problems.’

As if struck by lightning they parted. Finn reached irritably for his trunks. Heidrun dipped her head beneath the surface, breathed in crater water, came back up and coughed her lungs up. Scooping water like a paddle-steamer, Nina passed them on her back.

‘Sorry, I didn’t want to spoil your fun. But you should really think about it.’

And that was that.

Heidrun lacked the genetic prerequisites for blushing, but at that moment she could have sworn she turned beetroot , a beacon of embarrassment. She stared at Finn. To her infinite relief nothing in his expression suggested that the past few minutes had been embarrassing to him, only regret and a vague understanding that it was over. He plainly still wanted her, and she wanted him a bit less, but at the same time she felt an urgent longing for Walo, and the desire to kiss Nina for her intervention.

‘Yeah, we’ – Finn grinned crookedly – ‘were just about to go upstairs.’

‘So I saw,’ Nina said sullenly. She swam powerfully over to them and stood up in the water. ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. The rest is your business. They’re starting to get worried up there. Julian’s group still isn’t back, and neither are the satellites.’

‘Didn’t Julian say anything?’ Heidrun asked, her whole body still one big heartbeat. ‘This morning, I mean.’

‘No, he said they’d be showing up later. Too busy a schedule, says Lynn.’

‘Then that’s how it is.’

‘Seems odd to me.’

‘Julian would definitely have tried to get through, to you first of all,’ said O’Keefe.

‘Yeah, great, and what would you do, Finn, if you didn’t get through? You’d be on time! So as not to worry the others. And I’m not stupid, there’s more to it than that. There’s something they aren’t telling me.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Dana Lawrence, the cold fish. Lynn. Who knows? Dinner’s now been arranged for nine, by the way.’

Heidrun could tell by the tip of Finn’s nose that he was thinking exactly the same as she was, whether they shouldn’t make use of that time in his suite. But it was a pale, threadbare thought, less than a thought, in fact, since it came not from the head, not from the heart, but from the abdomen, whose coup had just been permanently thwarted. Finn slipped over and gave her a quick kiss. There was something conciliatory, something final about it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up and join the others.’

After the conversation with Palstein, Jericho had taken a trip around the highly armed information centre and introduced Jennifer to the contents of his rucksack.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘The fourth member of the alliance.’

‘Diane?’ An eyebrow rose in her grumpy face.

‘Mm-hm. Diane.’

‘I see. Your daughter or your wife?’

Since then Diane had been alternately connected to the public internet and the internal, hacker-protected intranet of the Big O, a system locked against the outside world, with no way in, but no way out either. Jennifer had summarily authorised him to access parts of the company’s own database, equipped with a password that allowed him to trace the global network of the company, its history and its staff structure. At the same time, thanks to Diane, he was working on familiar ground. Without the company of Tu or Yoyo, who had wanted to visit the fat guy for a few minutes and had been overdue since then, he felt miserably alone, just a messenger, good enough to lay his head on the line for others, but not to be taken into anybody’s friendly confidence.

Pah, friends! Let the two of them wallow in misery. At last he was warmed again by Diane’s soft, dark computer voice, untroubled by any kind of sensitivity.

He asked her to go through the net for arrangements of terms, Palstein , attempted murder , assassination , assassin , Orley , China , investigations , discoveries , results , etc. On the oil manager’s initiative, the Canadian authorities had sent a large supply of pictures and film material which he, Edda Hoff, a member of the IT security department and a woman from MI6 were now assessing together. If only Palstein had been willing to hand over the video that supposedly showed his attacker, they could presumably have spared themselves all that wretched work. Diane brought him things she’d found about the Calgary shooting the way a cat brings in half-dead mice, but where the rest of the decoding of the text fragment was concerned she was poking around in the dark. Clearly the hurricane murmur of the dark network had fallen silent. In contrast, pictures, reports, assessments and conspiracy theories about Calgary were flooding in, but without shedding light on anything.

He went to see Jennifer Shaw.

‘Good to see you.’ Jennifer was in a video conference with representatives of MI6, and waved him in. ‘If you’ve got anything new—’

‘When was Gaia originally supposed to open?’ Jericho asked, pulling up a chair.

‘You know that. Last year.’

‘When exactly?’

‘Okay, it had been planned for late summer, but projects like that are never as ready as you hope they’re going to be. It could have been autumn or winter.’

‘And because of the Moon crisis—’

‘No, not just because of that.’ Norrington came into the room. ‘You’re in the temple of truth here, Owen. We’re happy to admit that there were technical delays. The unofficial opening was scheduled for August 2024, but even without a crisis we’d hardly have managed it before 2025.’

‘So the completion date wasn’t foreseeable at the time?’

‘Why do you ask?’ one of the MI6 people wanted to know.

‘Because I’m wondering whether the mini-nuke was put up there only in order to destroy Gaia. Something people knew would be finished, but didn’t know when . But when the satellite was started, it wasn’t finished.’

‘You’re right,’ the MI6 man said thoughtfully. ‘They could have waited for the launch, in fact they should have done.’

‘Why should they?’ asked another one.

‘Because every atom bomb gives off radiation. You can’t store a thing like that on the Moon indefinitely, where there’s no convection to carry away the heat. There’s a danger of the bomb overheating and going off prematurely.’

‘So it was definitely supposed to detonate in 2024,’ Jennifer surmised.

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Jericho. ‘Was it or is it meant only for Gaia? How much explosive do you need to blow up a hotel?’

‘Lots,’ said Norrington.

‘But not an atom bomb?’

‘Not unless you want to contaminate the whole site, the wider surroundings,’ said the MI6 man.

Jericho nodded. ‘So what’s up with it?’

‘With the Vallis Alpina?’ Jennifer thought for a minute. ‘Nothing, as far as I know. But that needn’t mean anything.’

‘What are you getting at?’ asked Norrington.

‘Very simple,’ Jericho said. ‘If we agree that the bomb was to be detonated in 2024, regardless of whether Gaia had been completed or not, the question arises as to why it didn’t happen.’