Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Xin was catching up.

  Jericho rumbled along the promenade by the river, across the cobblestones, cut up a lorry and emerged onto a majestic boulevard fringed with grand Prussian buildings. He tried to remember how to get to the hotel from here. Up on its stilts, the Nissan lurched from side to side, always threatening to tip over. All of a sudden he realised that he had no plan. Not a glimmer! He was racing through central Berlin in a wrecked compact car with a dead woman at his side, and Xin was after him, growing inexorably closer.

  The traffic ground to a halt ahead. Jericho changed lanes. Another jam. Change again. A gap, a jam, a gap. Bumping from lane to lane like a pinball, he drove towards a huge equestrian statue which marked the beginning of a central island, planted with trees right down its length, a broad green lane dividing the traffic flows. He wrenched the wheel to the right, smashed into the kerb and climbed it. All of a sudden he was surrounded by pedestrians. He jammed the flat of his hand against the horn, veered about, frantically trying not to run anyone over, then the jam was past and he slalomed back down onto the road. He was going too fast, and the wheels had no grip on the road surface. The car skidded across the lanes towards the central reservation, lost contact with the tarmac. On two wheels, he was racing towards the line of trees, and he threw his weight to the side. Something slammed. The car shuddered, leapt violently, bark scraped, huge clouds of dust billowed up. The central island stretching away in front of him was almost empty of people, flanked by lime trees and by benches. To either side the traffic blurred behind the thick green foliage, an impressionist smear of cars, buses, bicycle rickshaws, colour, light, movement.

  He glanced backwards.

  Xin’s motorcycle was thrashing on under the low-hanging branches, hunting him like a beast of prey.

  Jericho accelerated. More people suddenly. A café, shady, romantic, jutting out into the tree-lined walk. Yelled curses, shaken fists, scurrying backwards. A kiosk with tall tables standing around, people playing pétanque. He was racing towards a crossroads, saw the traffic lights changing through a gap in the leaves, yellow, red, and then he was cutting under the noses of dozens of cars ready to move, and was on the next stretch of the central strip. The chorus of blaring horns died away behind him. Glance back, no sign of Xin. Jericho yelled hoarsely. Lost him! He’d shaken Xin off, at least for the moment. He’d won some time, valuable seconds, every second worth an eternity.

  Suddenly he also got his bearings back.

  A snack bar blocked his way, but the traffic was lighter on both sides. Jericho steered the Nissan out of the shadow of the trees, back down onto the road, and saw it on the skyline ahead of him, the Brandenburg Gate, still some way off. Not for the first time, he felt surprised at how grand it looked in photographs and how small it really was. The Prussian-era courtyards and palaces were giving way now to modern architecture, the bistros and shops were ending, there were fewer pedestrians about. Soon enough the boulevard would end at Pariser Platz, with the Academy of Arts, the French Embassy, the American, and he hoped he could turn off there. North or south, and then—

  Jericho squinted.

  Something was going on up ahead. To his left, the trees had ended, so that he could see the whole width of the boulevard. Horrified, he saw that he was coming to a roadblock. Whole sections of the road were barricaded off. A monstrous robot was stretching out its cantilevered arm, lowering some huge, long object down to the road surface, and he could see Xin’s motorcycle tearing towards him in his only remaining rear-view mirror.

  Jericho cursed. Whatever was being built up ahead had turned it into a blind alley for him. The construction robot was swinging an enormous steel girder slant-wise across the pavement and the road, while building workers waved away whatever cars had ended up here despite the road signs. There must have been announcements for the diversion, but of course he hadn’t seen them because he’d been tearing down the central reservation, and now there was nowhere to turn aside to, the girder was sinking lower, Xin was coming closer, he was readying his gun—

  Where was the control for the legs?

  The first of the workers had turned round and spotted him, jumped aside. Shots slammed into the rear of the Nissan. If he braked now, Xin would blow his head off, and if he didn’t, the girder would knock it clean off, nor could he turn around, he was going too fast, much too fast, and he couldn’t find the icon on the touchscreen—

  There! Not an icon at all, but a switch! A plain and simple, old-fashioned switch.

  In a trice the Nissan had stretched out its wheels, becoming a low-slung, wide vehicle. The girder grew larger in front of Jericho’s eyes, much too fast, dark, threatening, less than a metre and a half off the ground, a thick grey line, an end point. In a ridiculous reflex he lifted his arm up in front of his face as the cabin of his car sank further downwards, then there was a splintering, crunching sound as the edge of the steel swept away what was left of the roof. He pressed himself down into his seat. As flat as a flounder, the car shot through beneath the girder; it was briefly night, then clear blue day again. The crossroads, a bus, an inevitable collision. As though a film had jumped frames, all of a sudden the Nissan was two metres further to the right, began to turn, skated across Pariser Platz, cyclists, pedestrians, the whole world running from him. Scrabbling to get the car back under control, he screeched towards the Brandenburg Gate. A police gyrocopter came into view above the bronze statue atop the Gate, an ultralight helicopter, half open, a loudspeaker voice booming down at him. His plan to speed through the Doric columns of the Gate and get away the other side was thwarted by a row of low bollards that blocked any such attempt. He braked. The Nissan fishtailed, slid, crashed against the bollards and came to a stop. Next to him, Nyela seemed to want to say something. She straightened up, then her body was flung forward and back again into her seat, as though she had had second thoughts.

  Jericho leapt clear of the wreckage.

  The gyrocopter sank towards him. He ran for his life, under the Gate and through to the other side, where the boulevard continued, becoming a main road several lanes wide. Far off he could see a tall, slim column, and the road forked here just in front of the Gate. Without even looking at the traffic lights or signs, he hurried through a zebra crossing. Brakes screamed, and there was a crash as somebody shunted the car in front. Weird. Were there really cars still on the road without proximity pilots? A superannuated convertible zipped under his nose, missing running over his feet by a hair’s breadth, and he heard furious yelling. He started back, then sprinted, reaching the other side by dashing past a lorry’s radiator grille, and ran into a cool green passageway. This was the Tiergarten, the green park at the heart of Berlin. Sand, gravel, quiet pathways. In front of him was the statue of a lion. More trees, opening out into lawns, paths branching out in all directions. He raced down one, running, running, running until he could be sure that there was nobody following him, no Xin and no gyrocopter. He only stopped when he got to a small lake, and bent down with his hands on his knees, his sides aching, a sour taste on his tongue. He fought for breath. Gasped, spat, coughed. His heart was pounding like a battering ram. As though it wanted to break out of his ribcage.

  An elderly lady looked across at him briefly, then turned her attention back to her little grandson, who was doing his best not to fall off his bike.

  Xin

  At last he had cleared the girder, but he had lost valuable time. He saw the Nissan racing away from him ahead, and he rode around the bus, leaning into the curve, taking aim. It looked as though the detective had lost control of the car. Good. Xin squeezed off a salvo just as a gyrocopter appeared above the Gate. To his astonishment, the police seemed to be paying more attention to his motorcycle than to Jericho, who at that moment jumped out of his car and ran away. The police dropped lower, faced the copter directly towards him; he heard shouted commands. He assessed the situation, thinking lightning-fast. The gyrocopter was still perhaps a metre above the ground. It was impossible to get p
ast, and if he shot at the copter,the police would have no qualms about opening fire in return. He yanked his bike around and roared off along the street that crossed the boulevard.

  The gyrocopter gave chase straight away. As he sped over the next crossroads, something splattered onto the tarmac in front of him, swelled up and set solid. They were firing foam cannon at him! One round of that in his spokes, and his ride would come to a sudden end. The stuff set instantly and hard as rock. Xin swerved, saw how the road in front of him led up over a bridge, turned right instead and found that he was back on the riverbank, on the Spree. If he hadn’t lost his bearings, this should lead back to the Museum Island. Not a good idea to pop up there again – it must be crawling with police by now. He heard the dry clattering of the copter behind him, then above him, then ahead. The gyrocopter set down, forcing him to brake to a stop. He wheeled about, a breakneck turn, and raced off the other way, only to spot another police flyer hanging, apparently motionless, over the dome of the parliament building, the Reichstag. It raced towards him.

  They had him trapped.

  Xin thrashed his bike onward, headed for the Reichstag, the river to his right. Tourists were thronging up the grand stairway outside, and the promenade opened out. There was government architecture all along the river here, steel and glass dotted here and there with petite little trees, elegant topiary. Sightseeing boats chugged along the Spree, took a curve further along the river and went under a filigree bridge.

  And above everything, the two copters.

  Xin aimed for the bridge. A group of young people scattered in front of his eyes. He revved hard, sat up on his back wheel, gunned the engine for all it was worth and shot over the edge. For a moment the motorcycle hung above the water; the river below him was a sculpture of glass, the gyrocopters hung in the sky as though nailed there. Xin felt a pleasant breeze on his skin, an intimation of what it would be like to live a completely different life, but there was no other that he could live.

  He took his hands from the handlebars.

  The surface splintered into kaleidoscopes, water thumped in his ears. He tried to get away from the sinking bike as fast as he could. The front wheel caught him a blow across the hip. He ignored the pain, surfaced, pumped his lungs full of air and dived again, deep enough not to be seen from the air. With powerful strokes, he made for midstream, one of the tourist boats thrumming above him. He had been trained to stay underwater for a long while, but he would have to surface sooner or later, and he had two copters to deal with. They would split up, one of them looking for him upstream, one downstream. His reflexes racing, he saw the dark bulk of the sightseeing boat moving away above him, and kicked his way up. He surfaced with his head just by the stern of the boat, which sat low enough in the water that he could grab one of the stanchions down by the windows. He slipped, grabbed hold again, clung tight and peered up into the sky, partly obscured by the boat’s deck and viewing platforms.

  One of the gyrocopters was circling over the spot where he had gone under. He could hear the other one, but not see it. In the next moment it appeared, directly over the ship, and Xin slipped underwater again without letting go of the stanchion. He held his breath for as long as he could. When he risked another look, they were just passing under a bridge.

  The copter was moving away.

  He let the boat carry him along for a little while longer, then pushed away, swam to the bank and hauled himself up. There was a concrete embankment in front of him, with a busy road running beyond it. As far as he could see, the police were still searching on the other side of the bridge. He felt for his wig, but it was on the bottom of the Spree by now. He quickly tore off the false beard, peeled off his jacket, left everything there in the water and crept ashore, dripping wet. He had lost his gun as well, but had been able to keep hold of his phone, which was waterproof, thank God. He felt the reassuring grip of the money belt around his waist that held credit cards and the memory crystal. Xin made a point of carrying credit cards around with him, even if they were reckoned to be old-fashioned and everybody made purchases using the ID codes in their phones. He didn’t like to show up on records when he went clothes shopping though.

  Not far away was an express railway, up on its viaduct. He glanced up and down the street. It curved away to a building with a glass dome and gleaming blocks clustered about it, which had to be Berlin’s main railway station. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, swept back his smooth, dark hair and walked along the street, quickly but without haste. Traffic streamed past him. He saw another gyrocopter a little way off, but since by now he hardly matched the description of the man the police were looking for, he felt fairly safe. He resisted the impulse to quicken his pace. In ten minutes he had reached the station concourse, and took cash from an ATM with one of his cards. He found a leisurewear store and bought jeans, trainers and a T-shirt. The salesgirl, studded with appliqués, looked at him in astonishment. He dressed in the clothes that he had bought and asked the salesgirl for a plastic bag. He paid cash, stuffed his wet clothes into the bag and then dropped it into a pavement rubbish bin outside, and went back to the Hotel Adlon by taxi.

  Jericho

  As far as he remembered, the Hyatt was south of the Tiergarten park, but then he lost his bearings among all the forked paths and duck-ponds, and wandered from one idyllic glade to the next. He could hear traffic sounds some indefinable way off. The sun shone down on him, unnaturally bright. He was overcome by nausea, a stitch yanked at his ribs, there was a pain spreading down from his shoulder to his left arm. The sky, the trees, the people around were all sucked into a red tunnel. Was this what a heart attack felt like? He stumbled across to a bush, his knees weak as wax, and threw up. After that he felt better, and he made it as far as the main road. At a crossroads he recognised several of the buildings, saw a Keith Haring sculpture and realised that the Grand Hyatt was just around the corner. He could have sworn that he’d been in the park for hours, but when he looked at his watch, he saw that not even fifteen minutes had passed since he had crashed at the Brandenburg Gate. It was just before half past twelve.

  He called Tu.

  ‘We’re upstairs in your room. Yoyo and I—’

  ‘Stay there. I’m coming up.’

  Since Diane was in Jericho’s room they had made it their command centre, so as to be able to research further and keep trying to decrypt more messages. In the lift, his thoughts shifted gear, becoming inordinately clear, self-aware. He hadn’t often been so completely at a loss. So incapable of acting. Nyela had been as good as safe, and he had still lost her.

  ‘What happened?’ Tu jumped to his feet and came towards him. ‘Is everything—’

  ‘No.’ Jericho reached into his jacket, fished out the packages of money and threw them onto the bed. ‘Here’s your money back. That’s all the good news there is.’

  Tu picked up one of the packages and shook his head.

  ‘That’s not good news.’

  ‘It’s not.’ In curt sentences, he described how events had unfolded. Striving to remain objective, he only managed to make the whole story sound more dreadful. Yoyo grew paler with every word.

  ‘Nyela,’ she whispered. ‘Whatever have we done?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He rubbed his hands over his face, tired, dispirited. ‘It would have happened one way or another all the same. All we did was keep her alive a couple of minutes longer.’

  ‘No dossier.’ Her face clouded over. ‘All for nothing.’

  ‘According to Nyela, he must have been carrying it around with him!’ Jericho walked over to the window and stared out, seeing nothing. ‘Vogelaar had sold us out to Xin, but he was trying to turn the tables one more time. At the last moment, whatever it was that moved him to do so. He wanted me to have that dossier.’

  ‘Curses and maledictions.’ Tu punched a fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘And Nyela’s quite sure—’

  ‘Was sure, Tian. She was sure.’

  ‘—that he had it with him? She specifi
cally said—’

  ‘She said that Kenny had got hold of the original.’

  ‘The memory crystal.’

  ‘Yes. But apparently there was a duplicate.’

  ‘Which Vogelaar was going to bring into the museum.’

  ‘Wait a moment.’ Yoyo frowned. ‘That means that he still has it on him?’

  ‘Irrelevant.’ Jericho pressed two fingers against his brow. Now they really were at a dead end. ‘The police will have taken it as evidence. But good, that means we have nothing more to decide. From now on, we aren’t working on our own any more. I imagine we can trust the local authorities here, so that means—’

  He stopped.

  He heard Tu speaking as though through cotton wool, heard him saying something about surveillance cameras that would have got his picture in the museum, that they would have put his picture out on the wanted list by now, that you couldn’t trust the authorities anywhere in this world. But more clearly, more meaningfully now, he heard again the last words that Nyela had ever spoken:

  You’re asking the wrong questions. He is the duplicate!

  He is the duplicate?

  ‘My God, how simple,’ he whispered.

  ‘What’s simple?’ Tu asked, baffled.

  He turned around. Both of them stared at him. There it was again, his assurance, that he thought he had lost.

  ‘I think I know where Vogelaar hid his dossier.’

  Hotel Adlon

  Xin took out the memory crystal, turned it between his fingers and smiled. Useless knowledge. All in all, he could rest content. Paying no attention to the grand interior, he strode across the hotel lobby, went up to his suite and tried his phone before anything else. The manufacturer’s guarantee said that it was waterproof up to twenty metres, and indeed it was working as well as ever. Looking at the display, he saw that his contact had been trying to reach him, just before he had got his sights on Vogelaar.