Frank Schätzing - Limit

Dana looked with revulsion at Kokoschka’s charred and smoking body. At last she had managed to put out the remaining fires. She couldn’t imagine what kind of inferno was currently raging in Gaia’s sealed-off neck, but there too the flames must already have consumed much of the oxygen that had been there at the outset. The life-saving mask filled her lungs with oxygen, and a visual barrier protected her eyes against the stinging smoke, but the real problem was that she wasn’t going to get out of here very quickly.

And all because of Julian’s crazy daughter!

What the hell was up with Lynn? Never, not during her interviews for the job, and not afterwards, either, had she ever given the impression of being mad. Controlling, certainly. Almost pathological in her striving for perfection, but she also seemed to be more or less perfect. Even until a few days previously, Dana wouldn’t have been able to say anything else about Lynn Orley, except that she was the legitimate architect of three extraordinary hotels, and completely capable of running a global company.

Then, as a complete surprise, the first symptoms of paranoia had appeared and, initially uneasy, Dana had seen a certain potential in them, because the change in Lynn’s nature predestined Lynn for the role of scapegoat. She hadn’t let an opportunity pass to discredit Julian’s daughter and feed suspicions of her dishonesty. But back in the Mama Quilla Club, with Donoghue bellowing in her ear, she had suddenly been filled with the worry that Lynn might spoil everything. For the sake of caution she had followed her, but Lynn had only withdrawn to her suite, so she had gone on to the control centre, to find Sophie Thiel, incapable of any kind of dissemblance, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Weak nerves, that one, although she deserved to be admired for her meticulous detective work. Dana’s only mistake had promptly become an albatross – not immediately manipulating the recordings after she’d sent the search parties off on their wild goose chase. With a single glance Sophie had worked out that her boss had started the communications block during the conference call between Earth and Moon, on the pretext of loading the video of the corridor. Clever, Sophie, really clever. Aware that digital messengers were terribly indiscreet, Sophie had relied on pen, paper and Kokoschka, and given the infatuated lunkhead the task of looking for Tim, to tell him who the real enemy was. It was only chance that she had ended up in the control centre at the right time; otherwise she might have been unmasked even sooner.

Now the recordings had been corrected, although that probably didn’t matter any more. The opportunity to lock both guests and staff away in Gaia’s head on the pretext of a meeting, and turn their air off, so that she could head for Peary Base, had been irrevocably missed. She was trapped.

Dana breathed deeply into her mask.

The circulators hummed around her. They did battle with the sooty remains of the flames, sucked up the toxic components and pumped fresh oxygen into the wing. More in a spirit of sportsmanship than anything else, Dana got to work on the bulkhead beyond which escalators led down Gaia’s arm into the lower levels, turned on the automatic settings, tried muscle power, with no success. And how could it have worked? In the hermetically sealed area, the partial destruction of the oxygen had produced a slight but serious reduction in pressure. Until it was resolved, the armour plating wasn’t going to budge an inch. She could safely ignore the bulkhead opposite, behind which lay Gaia’s uncontaminated half. It would take at least two hours until pressure was restored. Time enough to wonder about how that bloody detective had managed to penetrate Hydra’s data banks. Any other setbacks could have been coped with, for example the bomb sustaining damage when it fell into the crater, or Julian’s unexpected appearance in the corridor when Hanna had come back from his night-time excursion. Dana had manipulated the data, and skilfully blurred all the traces. No reason for panic.

But then everything had spun out of control.

At the same time, Hydra seemed to have emerged strengthened from its setback with Thorn, and they had agreed to give it a second try, with a team this time. No one was being recruited from NASA now. Thorn had been a happy chance: a generally popular bastard, yet in spite of his ostentatious joviality he was nobody’s mate, and was free of any moral principles whatsoever. Years ago, Hydra had sensed his corruptibility; when he had still been training in simulators on Earth, they had observed him and finally made him an offer that he, by now elevated to the rank of moon base commander, had turned down without a flicker of an eyelash, but also with a request for double the money. When this turned out not to be a problem, everything else had gone like clockwork. In the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, work was coming to an end, Hydra’s buyers had been successful in the black market of international terrorism. A masterpiece of criminal logistics was taking shape, conceived by a phantom that Dana had never met, but whose master of ceremonies she knew very well.

Kenny Xin, the crazed prince of darkness.

Even though he was the very model of a psychopath, and she found him in many respects unappealing, Dana could not conceal a certain admiration for him. For the architecture of the conspiracy of which she had been a part for years, crossing continental and cosmic bridges, Hydra couldn’t have wished for a better stress analyst. Immediately after Thorn’s death, Xin, more familiar than anyone else with the pandemonium of freelance spies, ex-Secret Service men and contract killers, had engaged in a conversation with Dana – a former Mossad agent, specialising in the infiltration of luxury hotels, which meant that she was particularly qualified for Gaia – and had also come up with the ideal cover of a Canadian investor to win Julian’s trust.

But judging by events, the prince of darkness had lost control of the situation.

Dana wondered if there was anyone still alive in the hotel. The area that she was trapped in looked deserted, but she didn’t know who had been in Gaia’s head when the oxygen had gone up. If luck had been on her side, they would all have been there. Not that she had any particular predilection for mass murder, but the group’s fate had been sealed the minute Carl Hanna’s cover had been blown. Dana was sure that the man would reach the moon base, but she couldn’t know when and whether she would be able to contact him. By blocking communications, she had tried to allow him a little time; however, if Jennifer Shaw and that detective managed to contact Peary Base via NASA, it would be a real disaster. Hanna had a better chance of carrying out his mission if there was no one waiting at the North Pole to stop him.

The idea of the communications block had also been a well-aimed and timely arrow from Kenny Xin’s inexhaustible quiver of far-sighted ideas. Sending the staff off in search of the bomb had been a doddle. Like listening in on Tommy Wachowski, the deputy commander of the base, although of course not asking him for help in the search for the Ganymede. To her great relief, they had known nothing at the Pole about a planned attack, a clear indication that neither Jennifer Shaw nor NASA had been able to get a warning to them before communications had broken down. Then she had manipulated the laser connection so that calls from the base were received only on her phone. Now she just had to wait until Hanna called, and leave the hotel for good.

But first she would have to get rid of the guests. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t send that crowd to the Pole and risk them getting there before Hanna and telling stories about atom bombs. No one from the group must reach the base.