Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Just give him that fucking computer!’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Jericho insisted. ‘As long as he doesn’t know where your computer is, he has to let you live.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Daxiong yelled at him.

  ‘Just give him the damned computer!’ Ziyi shouted.

  Yoyo walked to the table. Her fingers floated over a device hardly bigger than a bar of chocolate, connected to the keyboard and the screen.

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Jericho dejectedly. All the strength was oozing from his limbs. ‘He’ll kill you.’

  Zhao looked at him.

  ‘The way you killed Grand Cherokee Wang, Jericho?’

  ‘The way I— What?’

  Yoyo paused.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Jericho shook his head. ‘He’s lying. He’s—’

  ‘Just shut your mouth,’ yelled the fat guy, pulled his gun around and aimed it at Jericho, who saw with startling clarity every individual drop of sweat on the killer’s forehead, glittering like bubble wrap.

  Daxiong aimed at Zhao, whose eyes widened.

  ‘No!’ he yelled.

  The lighter clicked.

  Jericho saw Tony lifting his gun, then there were two shots in quick succession, and the fat guy collapsed. Everything happened at the same time. With a deafening bang the fair-haired man’s pistol went off and shot away half of Tony’s face. He tipped over and obstructed Daxiong’s view, while Ziyi squealed and Yoyo stormed towards the door. Zhao tried to grab her, missed her and fell headlong. Jericho reached for the gun on the floor. He grabbed the barrel, but Zhao was faster, while Ziyi was shooting wildly in all directions, forcing the blond guy to take cover behind the table.

  He ducked.

  Daxiong dashed forward, slipped in Jia Wei’s blood and cracked the back of his head on the floor-tiles, dragging Jericho with him. A burst of fire ploughed up the floor next to him. Jericho rolled away from the unconscious giant and saw Ziyi stride like a vengeful goddess over Tony’s corpse, shouting and firing indiscriminately. A moment later a bright red fountain sprouted where her right arm had been. The reports from Zhao’s pistol rang out as he ran outside. Ziyi hesitated. Glassy-eyed, she turned round, an expression of mild surprise in her eyes, and sprayed her pumping blood at the blond guy, spurting it into his eyes. The man raised a hand to protect himself, tried to avoid her dying body, lost his balance.

  Jericho leapt up. Ziyi’s severed arm twitched at his feet, and suddenly he was caught up in the vision of a theatrical performance. He was gratefully aware of something within him stepping aside and something else taking control of his thoughts and his motor abilities. He bent down, fumbled the gun from Ziyi’s slack fingers, aimed the muzzle at the stumbling hitman and pulled the trigger.

  Empty.

  With a yell, the blond guy slung the dead girl away from him, reached for his gun and, still blinded by Ziyi’s blood, fired his magazine off into the air. Jericho whirled out of the line of fire and without so much as another glance, he leapt over the prostrate bodies and hurried outside.

  * * *

  Xin briefly imagined how simple things might have been. Tracking down the girl and her computer. Knowing which one it was. Charming information out of her as to who he still had to worry about, which would have taken only a few minutes. Xin was sure that Yoyo was extremely susceptible to pain. She would quickly have told him what he needed to know.

  Fast work.

  Instead, Owen Jericho had turned up as if pulled out of a hat. Xin hadn’t the slightest idea what had sent the detective here. Hadn’t his disguise been perfect? Irrelevant for the time being. Dark and massive, the blast furnace loomed above him. Two airbikes were parked down below, between Yoyo and the stairs. In her confusion, she had probably spent a moment too long wondering which way was shorter, and meanwhile Kenny had managed to get outside and block her exit route. The tower of girderwork provided no opportunity for escape. So she had fled across the bridge connecting the control centre and the blast furnace, to the other side, into the middle of the jungle of walkways, equipment and pipes that ran riot around the crucible.

  He came after her, in no particular hurry. Each level of the furnace’s scaffolding was connected to the next by a flight of steps, but the way down was blocked by broken props. By now Yoyo too was aware of her mistake. She looked alternately upwards and at Kenny, as she pushed her way slowly backwards. Once again he was sure that he was going to win. He stopped.

  ‘This isn’t what I wanted,’ he called out.

  Yoyo’s features blurred. For a moment he thought he was about to see her bursting into tears again.

  ‘I never planned to give you the thing,’ she cried.

  ‘Yoyo, I’m sorry!’

  ‘Then fuck off!’

  ‘Have I broken my word?’ He put all the hurt he could muster into his words. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Kiss my butt!’

  ‘Why don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Anyone who trusts you dies!’

  ‘Your people started it, Yoyo. Be sensible, I just want to talk to you.’

  Yoyo looked behind her, looked up, and turned her gaze back to Kenny. She had almost reached the steps leading to the next level. He set his pistol down in front of him and showed her the palms of both hands.

  ‘No more violence, Yoyo. No bloodshed. I swear.’

  She hesitated.

  Come on, he thought. You can’t get down. You’re in a trap, little mouse. Stupid little mouse.

  But suddenly the mouse seemed anything but helpless. He uneasily wondered who was actually playing games with whom here. The girl was in shock, sure, but as she approached the stairs she no longer resembled the tear-drenched Yoyo who had been ready to hand him her computer just a minute before. In her catlike agility he recognised his own alertness, practised over the years and based on stubbornness, suspicion, deviousness and a will to survive. Yoyo was stronger than he’d imagined.

  As soon as she leapt onto the steps he knew that any further diplomacy was a waste of time. If there had ever been a chance of coaxing the girl down, it was gone.

  He picked up his gun.

  The wail of a turbine rose up behind him. Kenny turned round and saw Jericho sitting on the saddle of one of the airbikes, trying to get the vehicle started. He weighed up his options in a flash, but Yoyo took priority. He ignored the detective and hurried after the escaping girl whose footsteps made the passageway above him tremble, and watched through the bars as her silhouette dashed away. A few leaps and he was up there. He found himself in a ravine of struts and pipes, and caught a glimpse of flying hair as Yoyo disappeared behind a rusty pillar; then her footsteps hammered towards the next floor up.

  She was slowly turning into a nuisance. High time to bring this matter to a close.

  He chased after her, floor after floor, until she had nowhere left to go. A few metres above her the furnace tapered, ending in an inlet through which coke and ore had been funnelled in earlier times. Above it rose an angular, winding structure that culminated in a massive exhaust outlet, making the construction visible even from a distance. Vertical scaffolding-rods led to the highest point, about seventy metres up. Nothing beyond that but open sky. No escape was possible, unless you dared to pick your way about twenty metres along a pipe leading sharply downwards, and jump another ten metres down onto the enormous pot-like tank in which it ended.

  He listened. It was surprisingly quiet up here, as if the vague and distant sounds of the city and the background noise of Xaxu were a sea that surged below him. The turbines of large aircraft sang somewhere in the stratosphere.

  Xin threw his head back. Yoyo had disappeared.

  Then he saw her climbing. She clung to the stanchions like a monkey, pulled herself higher up, and he understood that there probably was a possible escape route. A conveyor belt abutted the inlet. It ran down from the top of the furnace to the ground, steep, but walkable.

  The bitch.

  Did he actually need her alive? She had rea
ched her hand out to the computer, there was no doubt which one it was. It was still in the control room … except he didn’t know who she’d talked to about the matter.

  Cursing, he began his ascent.

  A loud hissing sound came towards him. With one hand clamped to the scaffolding and the other gripping his gun, he turned his head.

  The airbike was coming straight at him.

  * * *

  Jericho had stalled the first bike he tried. It was a new model, very different from the ones he was used to. The controls gleamed from a flat user interface, there was nothing mechanical on this one. He slipped from the saddle, jumped onto the second airbike, whose engine was running, and ran his hand over the touchscreen. He was luckier this time. The machine reacted like a goaded bull, bucked and reared and tried to throw him off. His hands gripped the handles. Before, they’d been vertical, now they curved upwards and could be twisted in all directions. The bike circled wildly. The display blinked like the lights on a fruit machine. Just by chance Jericho touched two of them, and the carousel-ride came to an end, but he was carried instead towards the front of the control room; he shifted his body weight, narrowly avoiding collision, and flew in an extended 180-degree turn. His eyes scoured the surroundings.

  No trace of Yoyo or Zhao.

  He gradually got the knack of turning. He brought the bike up, but neglected to pivot the jets at the same time, which immediately got him into trouble again, because the bike now soared into the sky like a rocket. He felt himself sliding helplessly out of the saddle, and struggled with darting fingers to correct the mistake, regained control, and took another turn with his eyes on the blast furnace.

  There they were!

  Yoyo had made it to the inlet, where the conveyor belt began, followed by Zhao, who hung two metres below her in the scaffolding. Jericho forced the machine upwards, in the hope that it would react as he wished. He saw the hitman give a start and hunch his shoulders. Less than half a metre away from him, Jericho swung the airbike round, turned a circle and bore down on the furnace once more. On the edge of the conveyor belt, Yoyo was looking charmingly helpless. He understood exactly why as he flew over the belt. Where there should have been rollers and struts, part of the construction had simply broken away. For a long stretch only the side braces remained. Getting down from there would have required the skills of a professional tightrope-walker.

  Yoyo was trapped.

  He cursed himself under his breath. Why hadn’t he taken the blond guy’s pistol off him? There had been weapons lying around all over the control centre. He watched furiously as Zhao’s head and shoulders appeared over the rim. With one bound the hitman was on the inlet. Yoyo recoiled, went down on all fours and gripped the brace of the conveyor belt. She nimbly let herself down on it until her feet touched a rod further below, tried to find a halfway solid footing, began lowering herself down, hand after hand, inch after inch—

  Slipped.

  Horrified, Jericho saw her fall. A jolt ran through her body. At the last second her fingers had closed on the rod she had just been standing on, but now she was dangling over an abyss a good seventy metres deep.

  Zhao stared down at her.

  Then he left the cover of the girderwork.

  ‘Bad mistake,’ Jericho snarled. ‘Very bad mistake!’

  By now his glands were firing considerable salvos of adrenalin, whipping his heartbeat and blood pressure up to heroic levels. With each passing second, he was more in control of the machine. Carried on a wave of rage and euphoria, he sent the airbike shooting forward and took aim at Zhao, who was at that moment crouching, about to climb down to Yoyo.

  The hitman saw him coming.

  Baffled, he came to a halt. The bike shot over the conveyor belt. Anyone else would have been swept into the depths, but Zhao managed to pirouette himself back onto the edge of the inlet. His gun clattered far below. Jericho turned the bike and saw the blond guy staggering out of the control centre and getting onto one of the remaining airbikes. No time to worry about him too. His fingers twitched in all directions. Where on the display – no, wrong, you did it with the handlebars, right? He just had to bring the right handlebar down a touch—

  Too much.

  The bike plummeted like a stone. Cursing, he caught it, climbed, put his foot down and then immediately decelerated until he hung, jets hissing, right under the wildly flailing Yoyo.

  ‘Jump!’ he shouted.

  She looked down at him, her face distorted, as her fingers slipped millimetre by millimetre. Gusts of wind grabbed the bike and carried it away. The girders trembled as Zhao jumped gracefully from the edge of the inlet and landed on the lower part of the scaffolding. The hitman plainly didn’t suffer from any kind of vertigo. His right hand came down to clutch her wrist. Jericho corrected his position, and the bike spun back under Yoyo.

  ‘Jump, for God’s sake! Jump!’

  Her right foot struck his temple, and he couldn’t see or hear a thing. Now he was underneath her again, looking up. He saw Zhao’s fingers stretching out, touching her ankle.

  Yoyo let go.

  It was a bit like having a sack of cement dropped on him. If he had imagined she would land elegantly on the pillion, he could think again. Yoyo clutched his jacket, slipped off the bike and dangled from him like a gorilla from a rubber tyre. With both hands he pulled her back up, as the bike hurtled towards the ground.

  She shouted something. It sounded like maybe.

  Maybe?

  The turbine noise rose to a scream. Yoyo’s fingers were everywhere, in his clothes, his hair, his face. The dusty plain rushed up at them, they would be smashed to pieces.

  But they weren’t smashed, they didn’t die. He had clearly done something right, because at the same moment as her hands closed around his shoulders and she pressed her torso against his back, the bike shot straight upwards again.

  ‘Maybe—’

  The words were shredded by the squall. The blond guy was approaching on the left, his face a mask of dried blood, from which hate-filled eyes stared across at them.

  ‘What?’ he shouted.

  ‘Maybe,’ she yelled back, ‘next time you’ll learn to fly the thing first, you fucking idiot!’

  * * *

  Daxiong floated to the surface.

  His first impulse was to ask Maggie for a cappuccino, with plenty of sugar and foam, of course. That was why they were here, after all. To have breakfast together, since Yoyo had appointed Andromeda as her summer residence again, as Daxiong jokingly put it, except that right now it seemed to make more sense to go into hiding in the steelworks for a while.

  Maggie only ever brought coffee for him. The others, Tony, Yoyo, Maggie herself, Ziyi and Jia Wei preferred tea, like good Chinese. And like good Chinese they had wontons and baozis for breakfast, they ate pork belly and noodles in broth, swallowed down half-raw shrimps, the whole deal, while for unfathomable reasons his heart still beat for the Grande Nation and was devoted to the buttery, warm smell of freshly baked croissants. By now he was even toying with the possibility that he might have French genes, which anyone who saw his face would strenuously have denied. Daxiong was as Mongolian as a Mongolian could be, and Yoyo was forever rattling off all the wonders of the fun, authentic China that had no need of imported Western culture. Daxiong let her talk. For him, the day began with a proper milk foam moustache. Maggie had called and croaked ‘Breakfast!’ into the receiver, and Ziyi had yelled and screamed.

  Why had she done that?

  Oh yes, he’d been dreaming. Something terrible! Why would anyone dream something like that? He, Ziyi and Tony had driven over to the blast furnace, following Maggie’s call, when two of those flying motorbikes, which were too expensive for him ever to have afforded one, had landed on the control centre platform, where a third one already stood. Amazing. As he approached, he had tried to get through to Maggie, to ask her what kind of guys these were, but she hadn’t replied. So they had decided to take the guns out of their saddle-bag
s, just in case.

  A funny dream. They were having a party.

  They were all enjoying themselves, but Jia Wei couldn’t really join in, because there wasn’t much left of him, and Maggie had a sore stomach. Tony was missing half of his face, oh dear, that seemed to be why Ziyi had started screaming, now everything fitted into place, and what on earth kind of people were these?

  Daxiong opened his eyes.

  * * *

  Xin exploded with fury.

  With simian agility, he leapt back down over the scaffolding, struts and steps. His airbike was still on the platform, engine running. Far below, the detective was wrestling with the hijacked machine, busy driving himself and Yoyo to their deaths.

  Jericho, that thorn in his side!

  He’s on his way out, Xin thought. I’ve got the computer, Yoyo. Who can you have spoken to apart from your few friends here, and they’re dead. I don’t need you any more.

  Then he saw Jericho wresting control of the machine, gaining height, moving away from the blast furnace—

  And being forced back down again.

  The blond guy!

  Kenny started waving both arms.

  ‘Kill them all!’ he yelled. ‘Finish them off!’

  He didn’t know if the blond guy had heard him. He leapt energetically over the edge of the walkway, landed with a thump on the steel of the platform, and ran to his bike. The turbine was running. Had Jericho been fiddling around with it? Before his eyes, the two bikes set off at great speed, and disappeared into the intricate labyrinth of the steelworks. He pivoted the jets to vertical. The machine hissed and vibrated.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted.

  The airbike was slowly lifting off, when something whistled past his head so close that he felt the draught. He turned the machine in the air and saw the bald-headed giant from the control centre, a gun in each hand, firing from both muzzles. Nosediving, Xin attacked him. The giant threw himself to the ground. With a snort of contempt he pulled the airbike back up and flew after the others.

  * * *

  Daxiong sat bolt upright. His heart was thumping, the sun was beating down on him. Across the shimmering fields of slag the vanishing airbikes quickly gained distance, but one of the bikes was unmistakably hounding the other and trying to force it to land.