Frank Schätzing - Limit

But the price per barrel collapsed, for ever. Open-cast extraction stopped overnight, leaving the companies that had driven the business unable to repair the damaged ecosystems. All that was left were ravaged tracts of land, increased incidence of cancer in the population – and companies such as Imperial Oil, a traditional business headquartered in Calgary, which for almost 150 years had made its money from extracting and refining oil and natural gas, and, in the end, increasingly from oil sands. Just as it was at the forefront of the industry, the lights went out, and Palstein, strategic director of the majority shareholder EMCO, which owned about two-thirds of Imperial Oil, had to go to Alberta to tell the management and a stunned workforce that they were being let go.

Perhaps because it was more effective to vent anger on one man than on the ohso-distant Moon, whose resources had led to the disaster, somebody shot at Palstein in Calgary. The deed of a desperate man, at least so most people saw it.

Loreena Keowa thought that there were good grounds for scepticism.

Not that she had an answer either. But how long could an embittered, unemployed shooter expect to escape justice? The attempted killing had been one month ago. A great many things about the theory of an enraged lone gunman didn’t make sense, and since Keowa was working anyway on a feature about the environmental destruction wreaked by the oil companies, Trash of the Titans , it made sense to her that she should look into the case in her own way. Even before helium-3, Palstein had been vocal about the need for his industry to switch direction. He was on record as being no friend of the oil-sands project, and she felt that he had been unfairly treated at the press conference in Anchorage. So she had offered him a TV portrait that would show him in a better light. In exchange, she hoped for some inside information about EMCO, the crumbling giant, and more even than that, she was excited at the thought of being able to help clear up the shooting, in the best tradition of American investigative journalism.

Maybe even solving the case.

Palstein had hesitated a while, and in the end invited her to visit him in Texas, in his house on the shore of Lake Lavon. He was convalescing from his injury here, and recovering from being the bearer of bad news. He made one condition: that for the first conversation, she should turn up without her camera team.

‘We’ll need pictures though,’ Keowa had said. ‘We’re a TV channel.’

‘You’ll get some. As long as I feel that I can trust you. But I can only take so many knocks, Loreena. We’ll sound one another out for an hour, and then you can fetch your crew. Or maybe not.’

Now, in the taxi bringing them downtown from the airport, Keowa went through her material one more time. Her camera crew and sound technician were lolling on the back seat, wrung out by the humid heat that lay across Texas far too early this year. EMCO was headquartered next door in Irving, but Palstein lived on the other side of town. They had a light lunch in the Dallas Sheraton, then Palstein’s driver arrived at the agreed time to fetch Keowa. They left town and drove through the untouched green belt, until the glittering surface of the lake became visible through the trees to the left. It had been a bumpy flight, followed by a plunge into the sauna-like Dallas temperatures, and she enjoyed the ride in an air-conditioned electric van. After a while the driver turned off into a smaller road and then onto a private driveway that led along the water to Palstein’s house, which looked, she mused, something like what she had been expecting. Palstein would have stuck out like a sore thumb in a ranch with buffalo horns and a pillared veranda. This was an airy arrangement of Cubist buildings around green open spaces, with glass frontages, soaring slender framework and walls that seemed almost weightless; all this suited his character much better.

The driver let her out. A well-built man in slacks and a T-shirt came towards her and asked politely for some identification. Two more men were patrolling down by the quay. She handed him her ID card, and he held it to the scanner on his phone. He seemed happy with what the screen told him, gave it back to her with a smile and beckoned her to follow him. They hurried through a Japanese garden and past a large swimming-pool, to a jetty where a boat was tied up.

‘Do you feel like a ride?’

Palstein was leaning against a bollard, waiting for her in front of a trim, snow-white yacht with a tall mast and furled sails. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt and looked healthier than last time they had met in Anchorage. The sling on his arm had gone. Keowa pointed to his shoulder.

‘Feeling better?’

‘Thanks.’ He took her hand and shook it briefly. ‘It tugs a little sometimes. Did you have a good flight, Shax’ saani Keek’?’

Keowa laughed, caught out. ‘You know my Indian name?’

‘Why not?’

‘Hardly anybody does!’

‘Etiquette demands that I keep myself informed. Shax’ saani Keek’ – in Tlingit that means the younger sister of the girls , am I right?’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘And I’m probably an old show-off.’ Palstein smiled. ‘So, what do you say? I can’t offer to take you sailing, that wouldn’t work yet with my shoulder, but the outboard works and there are cold drinks on board.’

Under other circumstances Keowa would have been suspicious. But what would have seemed manipulative from anyone else, was just what it seemed coming from Palstein: an invitation from a man who liked his boat and wanted to share a trip.

‘Lovely house,’ said Keowa, once they had motored out a little way from the shore. The heat stood there like a block over the water, not a whisper of a breeze ruffled the lake surface, but all the same it was more bearable than on land. Palstein looked back and then was silent for a minute, as though considering for the first time whether his homestead could be called beautiful.

‘It’s based on a design by Mies van der Rohe. Do you know his work?’

Keowa shook her head.

‘In my view, he’s the most important modern architect there was. A German, a great constructivist and a logical thinker. He aimed to tame the chaotic mess that technological civilisation churned out and frame it with order and structure. Mind you, he didn’t consider that order necessarily meant drawing lines and boundaries – he wanted to create as much open space as possible, a seamless transition between inside and out.’

‘And between past and future?’

‘Absolutely! His work is timeless, because it gives every age what we need. Van der Rohe will never stop influencing architects.’

‘You like clear structures.’

‘I like people who can see the whole picture. By the way, I’m sure you know his most famous motto: Less is more.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Keowa nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you know what I think? If we could perceive the world the way van der Rohe structured his work, we’d be aware of higher-order connections and we’d reach different conclusions. Clarity through reduction. Recognise what’s in front of you by clearing away the clutter. A mathematics of thought.’ He paused. ‘But you’re not here to hear me talking about the beauty of pure number. What would you like to know?’

‘Who shot you?’

Palstein nodded, almost a little disappointed, as though he had been expecting something more original.

‘The police are looking for one man, someone frustrated, angry.’

‘Do you still agree with their profiling?’

‘I’ve said that I do.’

‘Would you care to tell me what you really think?’

He put his chin in his hands. ‘Let’s put it this way: if you want to solve an equation, you need to know the variables. All the same you’ll fail if you fall in love with one of the variables and assign it a value that it might not have, and if I’m right, this is exactly what the police are doing. The stupid thing is, though, that I can’t offer any better explanation. What do you think?’