Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘This is quite a build-up.’ Shaw gave them a razor-thin smile. ‘Is there going to be another advertisement break, or will you get to the point?’

  The agent put the file down in front of him.

  ‘From now on, you can call him Neil Gabriel. He’s American, born in 1981 in Baltimore, Maryland. High school and US Navy, then after that he was with the police as an undercover detective. The CIA noticed him, recruited him and sent him off to New Delhi for an operation. He did such good work there that they let him stay several years. He became something of an expert on the region, but also a bit of a lone wolf. So he was telling the truth about India, although that’s about the only truth he did tell. In 2016 he left the good guys and signed up with African Protection Services.’

  ‘Hanna was with APS?’ Jericho blurted out.

  The man leafed through his pages. ‘Vogelaar mentions pretty nearly everybody in his dossier who was connected with the Mayé coup in 2017. There’s a Neil Gabriel in that list, although he was only with the outfit for a little while and then went independent. It looks as though he did jobs for the Zhong Chan Er Bu as well, at least Vogelaar says that Xin liked his work. So now that we’ve talked to our American friends, we know who Neil Gabriel is. Clearly APS must have split at the time. One part stuck with Vogelaar, while the others became Kenny Xin’s creatures.’

  Jericho listened, fascinated, and kept an eye on Norrington at the same time. The security number two was visibly distressed by the barrage of facts.

  ‘Right now we’re busy trying to unravel Hanna’s fake CV, pardon me, I mean Gabriel’s. We hope to find out who set him up with shares in Lightyears and Quan-time. People with serious money. This won’t be anywhere near as easy as it was to crack who he really is.’

  ‘You know one of them already,’ Jericho said. ‘Xin.’

  The agent turned towards him. ‘We don’t hold out much hope of getting a glimpse of him. He seems to just melt away into thin air whenever you think you have him in your sights.’

  ‘Was it easy to crack Hanna’s identity?’ Shaw asked.

  ‘Well, easy would be overstating the case. We have good contacts with our friends across the pond, and we couldn’t have done it without them. But the bottom line is’ – he paused, and looked at Norrington – ‘a quiet chat with the Central Intelligence Agency would have done the trick back at the start.’

  Norrington leaned forward.

  ‘Do you really think we didn’t talk to them?’

  ‘I have absolutely no wish to question your competence,’ the agent said, cheerily. ‘I leave that to others.’

  Jericho’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen, excused himself and went outside, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘Norrington knows,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Crap.’ Yoyo was silent for a moment. ‘I thought—’

  ‘Didn’t work out as we expected. Were you able to download everything, at least?’

  ‘I’ve been hard at work already! The search program can’t find anything about Thorn in Norrington’s data, but there’s some stuff about Hanna. He was a long way from being the only one who could have taken Palstein’s place. There was a regular queue of candidates: Orley’s business partners, it looks like, or people he wanted to do business with. Multi-billionaires, the lot of them, but Norrington always managed to find something to cavil at. Heart condition, high blood pressure, this one’s been in therapy, that one might be flirting with the competition, the other’s got close links with the Chinese government and he doesn’t like the look of it, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t help but think that he was being paid money to find reasons to rule them all out of going along.’

  ‘Maybe he was paid.’

  ‘And after all that, Hanna’s just smiles and sunshine. The perfect travelling companion for Julian Orley.’

  ‘And nobody double-checked?’

  ‘Norrington’s not just a line manager, Owen. He’s deputy head of security. If somebody like him recommends Hanna, then Hanna flies. Orley must have trusted him – after all he pays him a lot of money for his expertise.’

  ‘All right, I’ll talk to Shaw. Enough hide-and-seek.’

  She hesitated. ‘Are you sure that you can trust her?’

  ‘Sure enough to take the risk. If the whole thing turns out to be flim-flam, she’ll throw us out on our ear, but we’ll chance it.’

  ‘Good. I’ll spend some more time going through Norrington’s sock drawers.’

  The door to the conference room opened. Norrington hurried over to his office. Shaw, Merrick and the others got ready to go their separate ways.

  ‘Jennifer.’ Jericho moved to intercept her. ‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’

  She looked at him, her face expressionless.

  Peary Base, North Pole, The Moon

  In the end DeLucas had given up caring and had marched Lynn up to the top floor by main force, then along to Igloo 2, where she threw her a spacesuit, backpack and helmet, and threatened to beat her up if she didn’t pull herself together. She’d run out of patience, whether or not this was Julian Orley’s beloved daughter. The woman was clearly two sandwiches short of a picnic. Sometimes she seemed to be perfectly lucid, then at the next moment DeLucas wouldn’t have been surprised to see her crawling around on all fours, or stepping gaily into the airlock without putting her helmet on. She turfed the Ögis out of bed, who were mercifully cooperative and quick to understand the situation, but by the time she had got the whole crowd of them into one of the robot buses and over to the landing field, Palmer and his crew had already arrived and begun to search the caves. They turned the laboratories upside down as though carrying out a drugs raid, tore the mattresses from the bunks in all the bedrooms, looked into all the lockers and behind the wall panels, in the aquaria and the vegetable patches. Finally DeLucas, already in her spacesuit, her helmet under her arm, went into the Great Hall to join them. She hadn’t the first idea what a mini-nuke looked like. All she knew was that it was small, and could be anywhere.

  Where would she hide something like that? In the jungle of the greenhouses? In among the trout and the salmon?

  In the ceiling?

  She looked up at the Great Hall’s basalt dome. She felt a feverish desire to get out of there, to go with the guests. What they were doing here was crazy! The fact that Hanna had showed up in the control room didn’t remotely mean that the bomb had to be here in the underground. It could be anywhere in the whole vast complex.

  She peered indecisively into the corridors.

  What would make sense?

  What did people do when nuclear attack threatened? They built bunkers, underground bases for protection. That was because an atom bomb exploding up on the surface would destroy everything for miles around, but there was some chance of survival if you were in a reinforced bunker. Did that mean that the underground would survive at Peary Base?

  Hardly.

  She looked at her watch. Twenty to five.

  Think, Minnie! An atom bomb was an inferno, devouring everything in its path, but even a doomsday device could be deployed more or less optimally. Towns and cities were built on the surface, never mind all the tunnels, cellars and sewers below ground. If you wanted to destroy New York with an atom bomb, your best bet was to drop it from above, but life on the Moon demanded a mole’s-eye perspective once you’d lived there for a few months. If you wanted to destroy the base, really destroy it, it had to be done from inside. The bomb would have to tear apart the bowels of the plateau, and only then blaze up over the crater.

  It had to be down in the catacombs. Between the aquaria, the greenhouses, the residential quarters and the laboratories.

  She glanced across at the airlock.

  Hmm. She didn’t need to search beyond the airlock. There was nothing there.

  Wrong! That was where the unused part of the labyrinth began, and some of the passages led into the canyon.

  How had Hanna even managed to get into the igloo? Through the surface-l
evel airlocks? It was possible. But if he had, wouldn’t Wachowski have seen him on the screens? Well, maybe he had. Maybe Hanna had just strolled in, all above board and official, but if so, why hadn’t he gone from the ground floor to the control room on foot? It was only a couple of metres. Why had he taken the lift?

  Because he had come from underground.

  ‘Nothing here,’ said a tense voice over her helmet link.

  ‘Here neither,’ Palmer answered.

  And how had he got into the catacombs unnoticed?

  She walked towards the airlock. Hardly anybody ever went into the caves beyond. From here, the labyrinth burrowed endlessly into the massif and the crater wall beyond. It would have taken a whole army of astronauts weeks or months to search the labyrinth’s full extent, but DeLucas knew that the only logical place to look for the bomb was nearby, somewhere central, below the habs, and that meant the Great Hall and its immediate surroundings.

  She went into the airlock, put on her helmet and pushed the button that would pump the air out. When the airlock door on the further side opened, she switched on her helmet lamp and stepped out into the forgotten corridor beyond.

  Almost immediately, she stumbled across Tommy Wachowski’s corpse.

  ‘Tommy,’ she gasped. ‘Oh my God!’

  Her knees trembling, she squatted down and played the cone of light over the body. His limbs were twisted as he lay there, his face deformed.

  ‘Leland!’ she called out. ‘Leland, Tommy’s here, and—’

  Then she realised that the interior radio network didn’t work this side of the bulkheads. She was in no man’s land, cut off from the world.

  She felt sick.

  Gasping, she fell to all fours. Cold sweat broke out all over her body. It was only by a mighty effort of will that she succeeded in not throwing up inside her helmet. She crawled away from the dead man on all fours like an animal, into the corridor, where she closed her eyes and quickly took in a few deep breaths. Once she dared open her eyes again, she saw a shadow in the light from her helmet. It was just a few paces away.

  For a second, her heart skipped a beat.

  Then she realised that there was nobody standing there, that this was just a narrow gap in the cave wall. She squinted, her eyes still watering from retching, then pulled herself together and stamped on her fear. She climbed to her feet like a puppet, walked across to the gap and looked inside. She saw that it was more like a crack than a corridor. Not very inviting. Nowhere you would choose to go of your own accord.

  And that, she thought, is exactly why you’ll go in.

  She drew in her shoulders and pushed her way in until the roof dipped sharply down and she had to crawl. Her breath caught and choked in her throat as the fear fought back. Then there wasn’t even room to crawl. She had to lie flat on her belly, feeling her heart hammering against the rock below her like a jackhammer. She considered turning back. This was going nowhere. Dead end. She would go one more metre. Gasping, she pushed herself on, following the scurrying disc of light, imagining what it would be like to be buried alive here, and then all of a sudden the passage opened wide and her fingers were scrabbling in a heap of rubble.

  That was it. End of the line.

  Or was it? She hesitated. The rubble looked odd. Not a natural pile. DeLucas stooped, and the light scurried over the stones and reflected off something buried in among them. She began to clear the rocks away with one hand, and then saw the surface of something bulky and metallic, smooth, machine-tooled, sleek.

  It couldn’t be anything else but—

  She shovelled the rubble aside madly, uncovering the thing. It was the size of a briefcase. She tugged it towards herself. There could be no doubt, now she saw the blinking display and the timecode running backwards from—

  ‘Oh no,’ she whispered.

  So little time. So little time.

  Frantic, clinging on to the bomb with both hands, she began to wriggle out. She had to get out of here, but the next moment her backpack was wedged against the low roof and she couldn’t move another inch. She was stuck fast.

  Waves of panic came crashing together over her head.

  London, Great Britain

  ‘You are crazy,’ said Shaw.

  Her workspace was an identical copy of Norrington’s office, modest and functional, the only difference being a few hints that she had a life beyond the Big O. Photographs showed that Shaw had a husband and grown-up children, that little kids somewhere called her granny. Jericho thought of the exile of his own existence, and had a hard time imagining this flinty-featured security chief as someone with wants and needs, hormones, a woman who had whispered and moaned and cried out with pleasure, limbs entangled. Jennifer Shaw was in charge of the safety of the world’s largest technology corporation. He wondered what her pet name was. At home, within her own four walls, between the TV set and the dental floss, was she Bunnikins or Mummy Bear? He glanced outside quickly, but Norrington’s office was out of sight from here.

  ‘Doesn’t all that give you pause for thought?’ he asked.

  ‘What makes me pause is the thought that you’ve been abusing my trust,’ said Bunnikins, or Mother Bear, sternly.

  ‘No, you’re not looking at it right. We’re trying to stop someone from abusing your trust.’ He drew up a chair and sat down. ‘Jennifer, I know we’re on very thin ice here, but Norrington lied about his relationship to Vic Thorn. He obviously knew him better than he’s letting on. Why would he do that if he had nothing to hide? He may have had perfectly understandable reasons to take Hanna under his wing, but given all the resources he has at his disposal, how come he couldn’t identify an ex-CIA man? Before the moon trip! And once he noticed that we’d cracked his pass-codes, well – what would you have done, in his place?’

  She looked levelly at him with her grey-blue eyes.

  ‘I would have nailed you to the wall.’

  ‘Quite!’ Jericho slapped his hand down on the desk. ‘And what does he do? Comes slinking in, lets the MI6 fellows haul him over the coals and then rushes off again. Now, you told me that it was Edda Hoff who passed on my theory that Thorn had been supposed to arrange the attack, and that she told the security services too. Shouldn’t we suppose that she told Norrington as well?’

  ‘She’s certain to have done so. Edda is extremely conscientious.’

  ‘But when I went into his office to talk to him about it, he acted as though it were a complete surprise! Even though, by that point, he must have known we were thinking along those lines. And don’t you get the feeling that all his activity is actually slowing down the Big O’s attempts to find anything out, rather than helping?’

  ‘I have told him that we’re fighting on too many fronts at once.’ Shaw gave him a level look. ‘And what should I do about that, in your opinion? Relieve him of his duties because of one or two odd bits of behaviour? Have his data searched?’

  ‘I think you know quite well what you should do.’

  Shaw was silent.

  * * *

  Two doors down, Norrington was dialling a number on his phone, his fingers trembling.

  He had made mistakes. He’d reacted without stopping to think. The noose was tightening, since they would find proof, and once they decided to put him through the wringer he would lose his nerve, he’d break down, he’d spill the beans. He was an idiot to have got involved in the whole thing to begin with, from the moment they offered him money to suggest Thorn for a second mission. But it had been so much money, so incredibly much, and there was the promise of much more once Operation Mountains of Eternal Light was done with, once the course of history had been changed. He had been a quick learner in the school of corruption, and had risen to be one of Hydra’s chief planners, had fed the many-headed monster with information about the OSS, about Gaia and Peary Base. He had even come up with the shadow network which the conspirators used to communicate their murderous plans. A white-hot inferno, disguised as mere white noise. He had met Hydra’s immortal h
ead, the brains behind the whole scheme, the criminal mastermind whose identity only six other people knew. It had been seven, but one of them had got cold feet. That was when Norrington had learned that if need be Hydra would sooner cut off one of its own heads than let it turn blabbermouth.

  He mustn’t end up in Secret Service hands.

  Xin picked up.

  ‘We’ve been found out, Kenny! Just like I told you we would be.’

  ‘And I told you to keep your nerve.’

  ‘You go to hell with your know-it-all remarks! MI6 blew Gabriel’s identity. Jericho and the girl hacked into my data. I don’t know when Shaw’s going to shut the trap on me – it could be that I already wouldn’t be allowed out of the building. Get me out of here.’

  Xin was silent for a moment.

  ‘What about Ebola?’ he asked. ‘Do they know about her, too?’

  Norrington hesitated. For some reason, he just couldn’t get used to Dana’s code-name.

  ‘They don’t know anything about her, nor about the rest of it. They just know that the bomb’s at Peary. But of course the next thing they’ll do is make use of all my data, and then they’ll take another look at everybody whose appointment I approved.’

  ‘Are you sure that Jericho’s been talking to Shaw about you?’

  ‘No idea,’ he groaned. ‘I hope he hasn’t yet. Under the circumstances, nothing’s certain.’

  Xin thought.

  ‘Good. I’ll be on the flight deck in five minutes. Maybe you should try getting Jericho’s computer out of the building.’

  ‘Maybe we should try painting the Moon yellow and putting a smiley face on it,’ Norrington snapped. ‘They mustn’t get their hands on me, Kenny, don’t you understand? I have to get out of here! ’

  ‘Everything’s all right.’ Suddenly Xin’s voice took on that soft, sibilant note. ‘Nobody’s going to get their hands on you, Andrew. I promised to be there, and I keep my promises.’

  ‘You hurry up, damn you!’