Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Something seems to have happened to Tommy,’ DeLucas said. ‘Lynn claims that somebody appeared in the control room and shot some other person, she’s scared out of her wits and—’

  ‘Hanna,’ Palmer snarled.

  ‘I think she’s been trying to tell me that Tommy’s been shot. But he’s not here, nor is anybody else.’

  ‘Crap,’ murmured Gore.

  ‘We have to make a decision,’ Palmer said. ‘Dana’s managed to stop Hanna from escaping. She had to kill him to do it, but before that he said—’

  ‘I caught what he said,’ DeLucas interrupted. ‘That this place is about to blow.’

  ‘So stop jabbering,’ Dana spat at her. ‘Will you kindly ensure that my guests are evacuated!’

  ‘I can’t be everywhere at once,’ DeLucas snapped back. ‘Tell her—’

  ‘Listen, Minnie, I’m not going to give up the base as easily as that, but she’s right, you have to get those people out of there.’

  Palmer stopped dead and gazed upwards at the shimmering oceans of stars, fading out over to the east where the sun glowed low on the horizon. He simply couldn’t imagine that all this might end.

  ‘Could be we still have time,’ he said. ‘Hanna must have given himself long enough to get away.’

  ‘He was in a hell of a hurry,’ Dana remarked.

  ‘Whatever. We’ll search the area while Kyra flies the guests to a safe distance on the Io.’

  ‘And where should I fly them to?’ Gore asked.

  ‘Take them to meet Callisto. Tell her to turn round right away. You should be in radio contact as soon as you’re up there. Then go back to the Chinese base.’

  ‘That’s madness,’ Dana said. ‘Forget it. How do you expect to find a bomb on a huge installation like this?’

  ‘We’ll look for it.’

  ‘Sheer idiocy! All you’re doing is putting your people in danger.’

  ‘You’ll be flying with the Io anyway.’ Palmer paid her no further attention, and turned to his crew. ‘Does anybody else want to fly with them? You have a free choice – we’re not the army here. I’m going to look for the thing. The bastard must have given himself at least half an hour!’

  Dana spread her arms to concede defeat.

  ‘Leland?’ Minnie DeLucas. ‘If what Lynn was telling me is true, maybe Hanna came up from underground. From the Great Hall.’

  ‘Good.’ Palmer nodded grimly. ‘Let’s start there.’

  London, Great Britain

  Had his suspicion been right, or did MoonLight really just mean ‘MoonLight’? There was uproar and disagreement in the Big O. The Moon was still besieged by the bot army, with no end in sight. No contact with Peary Base or Gaia. Merrick was hurrying, burrowing, scurrying from satellites to ground stations, but getting nowhere.

  Meanwhile the MI6 delegation were in a feeding frenzy over the theory that China might be behind the attack. It was a beautiful theory, it fit everything so neatly, temptingly. Gaia, well indeed, why would China have Gaia in their sights, but Peary Base – if that were destroyed, a substantial part of America’s lunar infrastructure would be knocked out. Not an attack on Orley, but on Washington’s supremacy. Knock the enemy off his feet. Weaken the American helium-3 industry. It had to be China! Beijing, or Zheng, or both of them.

  The CIA had barely joined the list of potential suspects than it was off again.

  ‘Whatever the truth of it,’ Shaw said, ‘we’ve reached a whole new level of helplessness.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Yoyo.

  Security departments at Orley subsidiaries worldwide were reporting back to the London situation room, but there were no concrete leads on further attacks. Norrington insisted that the corporation had to take every conceivable precaution. He hadn’t come up with any more information on Thorn. A photograph of Kenny Xin had been distributed which his own mother wouldn’t have recognised. A shuttle had set out from the OSS to the Moon, but it would take more than two days to reach Peary Base.

  ‘Norrington looks nervous to me,’ Jericho said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Yes, he’s fighting on too many fronts, opening up one campaign after another.’ Yoyo got to her feet. ‘If he carries on like this, he’ll bring the whole operation to a grinding halt.’

  Just a few minutes ago, another crisis meeting with MI5 had broken up, since the agencies now reckoned that domestic security was threatened. There wasn’t even a pause to draw breath. One discussion led straight into the next. The air twanged with the buzz of ideas, urgent purpose and determination. But there was an undertone too, a feeling that all this to-do was deluded, based on the belief that being there and acting busy would lead to answers.

  ‘So why’s he doing that?’ Jericho mused, following Yoyo outside. ‘Is he so worried?’

  ‘You don’t even believe that yourself. Norrington’s not an idiot.’

  ‘Of course I don’t believe it. He wants to put a spanner in the works.’ Jericho looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to them. Norrington was making phone calls in his room, and Shaw was doing the same in hers. ‘I just haven’t the first idea who we should trust to talk to about him.’

  ‘You mean that they could all be in it together?’

  ‘How would we know?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Yoyo looked across at Shaw’s open office door, dubious. ‘She doesn’t exactly look like a mole.’

  ‘Nobody looks like a mole, apart from moles.’

  ‘Also true.’ She fell silent for a while. ‘Good. Let’s break in.’

  ‘Break in? Where?’

  ‘The central computer. The drives we aren’t authorised for. Norrington’s patch.’

  Jericho stared at her. Somebody scurried past them, talking urgently into a phone. Yoyo waited until he was out of earshot, and dropped her voice in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it? If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you know yourself but do not know your enemy, then for every victory you gain you will suffer a defeat.’

  ‘Is that yours?’

  ‘Sun Tzu, Art of War. Written two and a half thousand years ago, and every word is as true as the day it was written. You want to know who’s pulling the strings? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, then. Your charming friend Diane will fish for Norrington’s password, and we’ll have a look around his parlour.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg! How is she going to do that?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows, all innocence. ‘I thought you were the cyber-detective.’

  ‘And you’re the cyber-dissident.’

  ‘True,’ she said, unruffled. ‘I’m better than you.’

  ‘How’s that?’ he asked, stung.

  ‘Aren’t I? Stop moaning, then, and give me some ideas.’

  Jericho glanced around. There was still no one paying them any attention. He might just as well have gone off to sleep somewhere, popping up every couple of hours with more ominous news to set them all scurrying.

  ‘Right then,’ he hissed. ‘We only have one chance, if that.’

  ‘We’ll do it, whatever it is.’

  Twelve minutes later Norrington left his glassed-in cubicle and joined one of the working groups, which was busy making telescopic observations of the Moon. He talked to them about this and that, and then went to fetch a coffee. Then he went to see Shaw in her office, briefly, and went back to work at his own desk.

  Access denied, said the computer.

  Baffled, he clicked on the file again, with the same result. It was only then that he realised he wasn’t logged on.

  But he hadn’t logged out when he left the room.

  Or had he?

  He glanced around the control room. Everybody was looking busy, except for the Chinese girl, who was standing not far from one of the workstations as though she didn’t know where to go.

  Norrington felt a gnawing doubt. Uneasy, he restarted the system to log himself in.

&nb
sp; * * *

  Yoyo watched him out of the corner of her eye. Nobody had noticed her slip into his office and log him out – it had only taken a few seconds. She pretended to be absorbed by one of the wall monitors, and pressed a button on her phone to send a signal up to the roof.

  * * *

  Jericho gave Diane the command to start recording.

  * * *

  Data coursed through the processors in the Big O. Nobody in the whole building had their own computer in the sense of an autonomous unit. All employees had a standardised hardware kit, a portable version of the boxy lavobots that Tu Technologies used. Everybody could access the Big O central computer from any jack or port, simply by logging in with name, eight-character password and a thumbprint. But not everybody had access to all the drives. Even the powerful sysadmins who managed the superbrain and issued passwords couldn’t access the whole machine. The ebb and flow of data in the Big O was like the roar and hum of traffic in a big city, and of course, the roar was loudest during normal working hours.

  If you knew how, you could listen to the roar. Not by listening to every part of it at once. The information that coursed through the network was encoded of course, in bits and bytes. But if you knew the precise moment when a piece of information would be sent from A to B, you could record that transmission and then set to work painstakingly filtering out individual data packets, then you could apply powerful decoder programs to unlock the words and images inside. At the moment the system was fairly quiet, so that it was easy enough to isolate Norrington’s data packet right at the moment when he logged on. And Diane began her calculations.

  Six minutes later, she had the eight-character password. It took her another three minutes to crack the software that had carried Norrington’s thumbscan to the central processors, and now she had his print as well.

  Jericho stared at the prize. Now there was only one more hurdle to clear. Once logged on, nobody could log in again using the same personal data without raising a flag – no more than you could ring your own front doorbell while you were already inside in the living room.

  They had to lock Norrington out again.

  * * *

  The chance came a little while later. Norrington was called to a pow-wow, but he spent a long time lingering near the workstations which gave him a view of his office. Edda Hoff chivvied him along. He hemmed and hawed, but finally gave up his watchpost and went into the room, not without casting one last, mistrustful look behind himself.

  Jericho smiled at him.

  He and Yoyo had switched places. One of the basic rules of surveillance was not to let the target see the same face the whole time. Now she was upstairs, waiting for his signal. The door to the conference room clicked shut. Unhurriedly, Jericho was on his way across to Norrington’s office when the conference-room door opened again, and Shaw emerged.

  ‘Owen,’ she called.

  He stopped. He was ten, perhaps twelve steps from Norrington’s office. He could be going anywhere.

  ‘I think perhaps you should join the discussion. We’ve sifted some more data from Vogelaar’s dossier, material which has to do with your friend Xin, and the Zheng Group.’ She glanced about. ‘By the way, where are your colleagues?’

  Jericho went over to join her.

  ‘Yoyo’s on Vic Thorn’s trail.’

  Her habitual scowl softened to a smile. ‘Could be that you’ll be quicker about it than MI6 with your enquiries. And Tu Tian?’

  ‘We’ve given him the day off. He has a business to run.’

  ‘Splendid. God forbid that the Chinese economy should falter. The American crash was quite enough. Are you coming?’

  ‘Right away. Give me a minute.’

  Shaw went back inside without quite closing the door. Jericho strolled casually back to Norrington’s office. Somebody at one of the workstations looked up at him, then back at the screen. Without stopping, Jericho stepped into the little room, logged Norrington out and then walked purposefully across to the other side, and to the conference rooms. Just before he joined the others, he sent Yoyo the agreed signal.

  * * *

  Straight away, she typed Norrington’s name. The system asked for authorisations. She entered the eight-character password, squirted Norrington’s thumbprint and waited.

  The screen filled with icons.

  ‘There you go,’ Yoyo whispered, and told Diane to download Norrington’s personal data.

  ‘As you wish, Yoyo.’

  Yoyo? How nice. Owen must have stored her voiceprint. She watched eagerly as Diane’s hard drive gulped down one data packet after another, holding her breath for the Download complete message.

  * * *

  Jericho was just as impatient, waiting for the signal that would tell him that the transfer had worked and that the false Norrington was now logged out. Once that happened, there was one more thing for him to do: leave the conference, go across to the office and log the deputy head of security back in, so that Norrington would not notice the theft later.

  At that moment, Norrington stood up.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, smiled at the assembled talking heads, and left.

  Jericho stared at his empty chair. Yoyo, he thought, what’s going on? Why’s it taking so long?

  Should he leave too, and catch up with Norrington? Stop him from going into his office? What would that look like? Norrington was already on edge at the idea that the central computer had simply shut him out, and if Jericho took any action, he would certainly suspect trickery. Ill at ease, he resisted the urge. He sat there hoping for the all-important signal, and tried to look interested.

  * * *

  Ever since he could remember, Norrington had suffered gut-ache and stomach cramps whenever he was scared. He made for the toilet, sank down, grunting, and then left with a lighter step. He was at the door of the conference room, holding the handle in his hand, when all of a sudden he had the feeling that someone was staring at the back of his head. Not someone, something, some grinning, goggle-eyed bogeyman. He stopped dead, and whipped round towards his office.

  Nobody there.

  For a second he hesitated, but the whatever-it-was was still staring at him. Slowly he crossed the space, walked into his office and around his desk. Everything seemed to be in order. He tapped the touchscreen and tried to open one of his files.

  Access denied.

  Norrington stumbled backwards, looked around in a panic. What was happening here? A system error? Not on your life! He felt a trickle of ice creep up his spine as he remembered how Jericho had niggled at the matter of Vic Thorn, and what a stupid mistake he’d made in replying. Why hadn’t he just admitted that they’d been friends, good friends at that? What the hell would that prove, that he’d known Thorn, even if the guy turned out to be a terrorist a thousand times over?

  He opened a login window and typed in his name.

  The system told him that he was already logged in.

  * * *

  Download complete.

  ‘At last,’ Yoyo said, logged Norrington out and sent the message to Jericho’s phone.

  * * *

  Norrington stared at his screen.

  Somebody was helping themselves to his data.

  His fingers trembling, he tried again. This time the system accepted his codes and let him in, but he knew all the same that they had been through his files. They had got hold of his access data and they’d been spying on him.

  They were onto him.

  Norrington steepled his index fingers, and put them to his lips. He was fairly sure that he knew who ‘they’ were, but what could he do to stop them? Demand that Jericho’s computer be searched? Then the detective would cast his loyalty in doubt. Norrington would have to agree to a search of his own data if he didn’t want to arouse suspicion, and that would be the beginning of the end. Once they started to piece together his deleted emails—

  One moment though. Jericho was sitting in the conference room. It might have been Jericho who had logged
him out, but he could hardly have anything to do with what had just happened. One of the others, either Tu Tian or Chen Yuyun, was sitting in front of Jericho’s computer right now – what kind of stupid name had he given it? Diane? It was probably the girl. Hadn’t she been roaming through the control room just a while back, looking as though she had nothing better to do?

  Yoyo. He had to get rid of her.

  ‘Andrew?’

  He jumped. Edda Hoff. Pale and expressionless under her lacquered black pageboy cut. Expressionless? Really? Or wasn’t there rather a gleam in her eye, the sly look of someone watching a trap to see who will walk into it?

  ‘Jennifer rather urgently needs you to come back for the rest of the meeting.’ She drew her eyebrows together, infinitesimally. ‘Is everything all right? Are you not feeling well?’

  ‘The tummy.’ Norrington got to his feet. ‘I’m fine.’

  * * *

  The way he came back to the conference table set alarm bells ringing for Jericho. The man’s face was a jaundiced yellow colour, and his forehead was creased and lined with worry. There was no mistaking that Norrington knew exactly what was going on, but instead of pointing the finger at him and demanding an explanation, he sat down to suffer in silence. If any further proof of his perfidy were needed, Norrington had just supplied it.

  ‘Possibly I should recap on the—’ he began, when all of a sudden more faces appeared on the video wall, and the Xin working group broke in to have their say.

  ‘Miss Shaw, Andrew, Tom—’ One of the new arrivals held up a thin file. ‘You’ll want to hear this.’

  ‘What have you got?’ Shaw asked.

  ‘It’s about Julian Orley’s good friend Carl Hanna. He’s a Canadian investor, and he’s worth fifteen billion, isn’t that right?’

  ‘That was his story,’ Norrington said, nodding.

  ‘And you checked him out.’

  ‘You know that I did.’

  ‘Well, everybody makes mistakes. We asked around a little. In the end the CIA dug up his family tree.’

  Expectant silence.

  ‘Hey.’ The man smiled at each of them in turn. ‘Anybody want to get to know the guy a little better? After all, this is somebody you people decided you could trust to go on a trip with Julian Orley.’