Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  For the time being.

  In space everything might look very different.

  20 May 2025

  PARADISE

  Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, Southern China

  Owen Jericho knew he still had a good chance of entering Paradise today, and he loathed the idea.

  Other people loved it. To get there, you needed unbridled lust, the musty sweetness of a misdirected love of children, sadistic tendencies and an ego sufficiently deformed to sentimentalise anything objectionable that you might get up to. Many of those who desired access saw themselves as champions for the sexual liberation of the very ones they were laying their hands on. Control was more important to them than anything else. At the same time most of them considered themselves perfectly normal, and saw the people who got in the way of their self-realisation as the real perverts. Others claimed their legitimate right to be perverted; yet others saw themselves as businessmen. But hardly any of them had endured the shame of being described as sick and weak. It was only once they were up before the courts, when they summoned experts who testified to their inability to resist the call of their own nature, that they turned themselves into pitiably driven individuals in need of sympathy and healing. While still undiscovered, however, and in full possession of their intellectual powers, they were all too happy to withdraw to the playground of their clammy imaginations, the Paradise of the Little Emperors, which was indeed paradise from their vantage point, if not for the little emperors themselves.

  For them it was hell.

  Owen Jericho hesitated. He knew he shouldn’t have followed Animal Ma this far. He saw him, his eyes widened by archaically fat spectacle lenses into an expression of constant astonishment, crossing the square, elliptically swaying his bottom and hips. He owed this duck-like walk to a hip condition which created the false impression that he was easy prey. But Ma Liping, to give him his real name, hadn’t been given his nickname by accident. He was considered aggressive and dangerous. In fact he pretended to have been given the name Animal at birth, a bizarre act of showingoff, not least because he also pretended it embarrassed him. Ma was cunning too. He must have been, or else he wouldn’t have been able to lull the authorities into the sleepy conviction that he had forsworn paedophilia. As walking proof of the successful reintegration experiment, he worked for the police in the battle against the growing plague of child pornography in China, he provided instructions for the catching of small fry and apparently did everything he could to escape social ostracism.

  Five years in jail as a child abuser, he used to say, is like five hundred years in a torture chamber.

  This infectiously flourishing suburb of the urban network of Shenzhen in south China, with its boringly functional architecture, had allowed Ma, who was originally from Beijing, the chance to start again. No one knew him here, the local authorities didn’t even have a file on him. In the capital they knew where he was living, but the connection had become attenuated, since the paedophile scene was in a state of constant flux, and Ma could credibly suggest that he had lost contact with its inner circle. No one paid him any attention now; there were other things that needed doing. Fresh depths granted nauseating glimpses of worlds of unbelievable human wretchedness.

  Worlds like the Paradise of the Little Emperors.

  Lost in a morass of mental overload as they tried to protect, check and defraud 1.4 billion individuals all at the same time, the Chinese authorities increasingly resorted to private investigators to give them support. In hock to digitalisation, they relied on cyber-detectives, specialists in all kinds of criminality and dark online practices, and Owen Jericho had the reputation of being extraordinarily gifted in the field. His portfolio was impeccable when it came to cracking web espionage, phishing, cyber-terrorism and so on. He penetrated illegal communities, infiltrated blogs, chat-rooms and virtual worlds, tracked down missing people using their digital fingerprints and advised companies on how to protect themselves against electronic attacks, Trojans and malicious software. In England, he had dealt with several cases of child pornography so, when the hell of the ‘little emperors’ was revealed to a team of shocked investigators, he had been asked for support by Patrice Ho, a high-ranking officer in the Shanghai Police and a friend of his. As a result of this request he was now standing here, watching Animal Ma on his way into the old, abandoned bicycle factory.

  He shivered in spite of the heat. Accepting the commission had meant paying a visit to the Paradise of the Little Emperors. An experience that would leave traces in his cerebral cortex for the rest of time, even though he had had a fundamentally clear idea what he was letting himself in for. ‘Little emperors’ was what the Chinese, with an almost Italian besottedness, called their children. But there had been no way of avoiding the journey to Paradise, he had to log in and put on the hologoggles to understand just whom he was looking for.

  Animal Ma stepped through the factory door.

  After the city planners had, unusually, revealed no inclination to tear down the collection of mouldy brick buildings, artists and freelancers had moved in, including a gay couple who repaired antiquated electrical devices, an ethno-metal band who vied with one another to see who could make the most noise and shake a deserted fitness studio to its foundations, and Ma Liping, with his shop buying and selling all kinds of goods, from cheap imitations of Ming vases to moulting songbirds in portable bamboo cages. The investigator from Shenzhen who was working with Jericho had started observing Ma on 20 May, and had not let the man out of sight for two days. He had followed him from his home to the old factory and back, he had taken photographs, followed every one of his limping steps and drawn up a list of his customers’ comings and goings. According to this list, during that time a grand total of four people had wandered into the shop, one of them Ma’s wife, an ordinary-looking southern Chinese woman of indeterminable age. What made the small number of customers more surprising was the fact that Ma and his wife lived in a six-storey house, big and nicely presented by local standards, which Ma couldn’t possibly have afforded on the small income that he got from the shop. His wife, as far as anyone knew, didn’t do anything at all except cross the street to the shop several times a day and stay there for some time, perhaps to do office stuff or serve customers who never came.

  Apart from two men.

  For a whole series of reasons Jericho had reached the conviction that Ma, if he wasn’t alone, was at least the driving force behind the Paradise of Little Emperors. Once he’d managed to narrow the circle of suspects down to a handful of child abusers who were currently rampaging on the net or had attracted attention there some time before, he had homed in on Animal Ma Liping. It was here, however, that his ideas and those of the authorities parted company. While Jericho saw a storm-cloud of clues over Shenzhen, in the opinion of the police it was a man from the smoggy hell of Lanzhou who was attracting the most suspicion, and a raid was being organised there at that very minute. In Jericho’s view there was no doubt that the police would find much of interest in Lanzhou, just not the thing they were looking for. In the Paradise the beast reigned, the snake, Animal Ma, he was sure of it, but he had been instructed to take no further steps for the time being.

  An instruction that he basically intended to ignore.

  Because apart from the fact that the case bore Ma’s trademark, the fact that he was married gave Jericho food for thought. He had nothing against reformation and change, but Ma was clearly homosexual; he was a gay paedophile. It was also striking that the men who came to the shop only reappeared several hours later. Thirdly, the shop didn’t seem to have anything remotely like fixed opening times, and last of all no one could have wished for a better place to carry out dark practices than the abandoned bicycle factory. All the other occupants used side-buildings with direct access to the street, leaving Ma as the only one with premises off the internal courtyard and the only one who ever set foot in it, apart from a few children who trickled in and out.

  From Shanghai Jericho ha
d instructed the investigator to pay a visit to the shop, take a look around and buy something unimportant, if possible something that Ma stocked in his storeroom. This meant that Jericho was already familiar with the shop by the time he followed Ma across the square that morning. He waited for a few minutes in the shadow of the factory wall, passed through the gate, crossed the dusty area of the courtyard, climbed a short flight of stairs and stepped inside the crammed shop, which was filled with shelves and tables. Behind the counter the shop’s owner was busy with jewellery. A bead curtain separated the sales area from an adjacent room, and a video camera was fixed above the doorway.

  ‘Good morning.’

  Ma looked up. The enlarged eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses studied the visitor with a mixture of suspicion and interest. No one he knew.

  ‘I heard you had something for every occasion,’ Jericho explained.

  Ma hesitated. He set aside the jewellery, cheap, tarnished stuff, and smiled shyly.

  ‘Who, if I might ask, says that?’

  ‘An acquaintance. It must have been here, yesterday. He needed a birthday present.’

  ‘Yesterday—’ Ma mused.

  ‘He bought a make-up set. Art Deco. Green, gold and black. A mirror, a powder compact.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ His suspicion vanished, replaced by eagerness. ‘A lovely piece of work, I remember. Was the lady pleased?’

  ‘The lady who received the present was my wife,’ said Jericho. ‘And yes, she was very pleased.’

  ‘How wonderful. What can I do for you?’

  ‘You remember the design?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She would like more from the same series. If there are any more.’

  Ma widened his smile, glad to be of service since, as Jericho knew from the investigator, there were still a matching brush and a comb to buy. With his curious rolling gait he came out from behind the counter, pushed a little stepladder against one of the shelved walls and climbed up it. Comb and brush shared a drawer quite high up, so that Ma was occupied for a few seconds while Jericho scanned his surroundings. The sales room was probably just what it looked like. The counter had a kitschy fake Art Nouveau front, behind which ivory-coloured pearl necklaces dangled. Beyond it, barely visible, lay the second room, perhaps an office. In the midst of all the junk a surprisingly expensive-looking computer adorned the counter, its screen turned towards the wall.

  Ma Liping reached up and clumsily brought down the goods. Jericho didn’t risk going behind the counter. The danger was too great that the man might turn towards him at that very moment. Instead he walked a little way along the counter until the screen display appeared reflected in a glass case. The glowing surface was divided into three, one part covered with characters, the other half divided into pictures showing two rooms from the perspective of surveillance cameras. Although he couldn’t make out any details, Jericho knew that one of the cameras was directed at the sales room, because he saw himself walking around in the window. The other room looked gloomy and it clearly didn’t contain very much furniture.

  Was it the back room?

  ‘Two very beautiful pieces,’ said Ma, as he came down from the ladder and set the comb and brush down in front of him. Jericho lifted both up, one by one, ran his fingers expertly through the bristles and inspected the teeth. Why did Ma need a camera to monitor his back room? Checking the area towards the courtyard made sense, but did he want to watch himself at work? Unlikely. Was there another means of access from outside leading to that room?

  ‘One tooth is broken,’ he observed.

  ‘Antiques,’ Ma lied. ‘The charm of imperfection.’

  ‘What do you want for it?’

  Ma quoted a ridiculously high price. Jericho made a no less ridiculous counteroffer, as the situation demanded. At last they agreed upon a sum that allowed both of them to save face.

  ‘While I’m here,’ Jericho said, ‘there’s something else that occurs to me.’

  Antennae of alertness grew from Ma’s temples.

  ‘She has a necklace,’ he went on. ‘If only I knew something about jewellery. But I’d like to give her a suitable pair of earrings and, well, I thought—’ He pointed rather helplessly to the displays in the counter case.

  Ma relaxed. ‘I have some things I could show you,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m afraid it won’t be much use without the chain.’ Jericho pretended he needed to have a think. ‘The thing is, I’ve got some meetings to get to, but this evening would be the ideal time to surprise her with them.’

  ‘If you brought me the chain—’

  ‘Impossible, I have no time. That is, wait a moment. Do you get email?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then it’s all fine!’ Jericho acted relieved. ‘I’ll send you a photograph, and you look for something suitable. Then I’d just have to collect it later. You’d be doing me a big favour.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Ma bit his lower lip. ‘When would you be coming, round about?’

  ‘Yeah, if only I knew. Late afternoon? Early evening?’

  ‘I’ve got to go out for a while too. Shall we say from six? I’d be here for another good hour after that.’

  Faking gratitude, Jericho left the shop, walked to his hire car two streets away and drove to a better area in search of a jewellery shop. After a short time he found one, had them show him necklaces in the lower price range and asked to be allowed to take a photograph of one with his mobile phone, so that he could send the picture, he said, to his wife for inspection. Back in the car he wrote Ma a brief email and attached the photograph, but not before he had attached a Trojan. As soon as Ma Liping opened the attachment, he would unwittingly load the spy program onto his hard drive, from where it would transmit the drive’s contents. Jericho couldn’t assume that Ma was stupid enough to store incriminating content on a publicly accessible computer, but that wasn’t what he was concerned with in any case.

  He drove back to a place near the factory and waited.

  Ma had opened the attachment shortly after one o’clock, and the Trojan had started transmitting straight away. Jericho connected his mobile to a roll-out screen and received, sharp and in detail, the impressions from the two surveillance cameras. They captured their surroundings in wide-screen mode, unfortunately without sound. On the other hand, a few moments later he received confirmation that camera two actually was monitoring the back room separated off with beads, when Ma disappeared from one window and appeared again immediately in the other one, shuffled over to a sideboard and fiddled with a tea-maker.

  Jericho appraised the furniture. A massive desk with a swivel chair and worn-looking stools in front of it, obliging visitors to assume a petitioner’s crouch, some ramshackle shelves, with stacks of paper on the worn plywood, files, wood-carvings and all kinds of horrors like silk flowers and industrially manufactured statues of the Buddha. Nothing to suggest that Ma placed any value on the personal note. No painting interrupted the whitewashed monotony of the walls; there were no discernible signs of that symbiotic connection produced by spouses looking at each other from little frames at work.

  Ma Liping, happily married? Ludicrous idea.

  Jericho’s eye fell on a narrow, closed door opposite the desk. Interesting, but when Ma set down his tea and opened it, he merely revealed a view of tiles, a wash-basin and a piece of mirror. Less than half a minute later the man appeared again with his hands on his flies, and Jericho had to acknowledge that the supposed entrance was probably a toilet.

  In that case why was Ma monitoring the damned room? Whom did he hope or fear to see there?

  Jericho sighed. He waited patiently for an hour. He watched as Ma, with the photograph of the chain in front of his eyes, assembled an assortment of more or less matching earrings and seized the unexpected appearance of a customer as the opportunity to fob off on her a remarkably ugly set of tableware. He watched Ma polishing glass jugs and ate dried chillies from a bag until his tongue burned. At about three o’clock th
e so-called wife entered the shop. Supposedly unobserved, in a state of married familiarity, as they both were, one might have expected to see them exchange a kiss, a tiny act of intimacy. But they met as strangers, talked to one another for a few minutes, then Ma closed the front door, turned the open/closed sign around, and they went together into the back room.

  What followed needed no soundtrack.

  Ma opened the toilet, let his wife step inside, glanced alertly in all directions again and pulled the door closed behind him. Jericho waited tensely, but the couple didn’t reappear. Not after two minutes, not after five, not even after ten. Only half an hour later did Ma suddenly come storming out, and into the sales room, where the figure of a man could now be seen outside the glass-panelled entrance. As if frozen, Jericho stared at the half-open toilet door, tried to make out reflections in the mirror, but the bathroom didn’t yield up its secrets. Meanwhile Ma had let in the new arrival, a bull-necked, shaven-headed man in a leather jacket, bolted the door again and walked ahead of the new arrival into the back room where they both made for the lavatory and disappeared inside.

  Amazing. Either this deadly trio liked to party in a confined space or the toilet was bigger than he thought.

  What were the three of them getting up to?

  Over an hour and a half went by. At ten past five the guy in the leather jacket and the woman reappeared in the office and came out to the front. This time it was she who opened the sales room, let the bald guy out and followed him, carefully closing the door behind her. Of Ma himself there was no sign. From six o’clock onwards, Jericho guessed, his efforts would be directed at customers and profit, explicitly on complementing a necklace with earrings, but until then, God alone knew what monstrous activities he was pursuing. Meanwhile Jericho thought he had understood the purpose of the second camera monitoring the office. Taking care that no one saw him when he disappeared into the miraculous world of the lavatory, Ma would be equally keen to avoid anyone waiting for him when he came back. The camera probably also supplied a picture to the toilet.