Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Learned what?’

  ‘How to be considerate.’

  ‘I think that you can be, though. Very considerate.’ Her arms, folded tight, relaxed a little. They even slipped apart a bit. ‘Do you know what else I think?’

  Jericho raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I think that you’re least considerate towards people you actually care about.’

  He caught his breath. Not stupid, this one.

  ‘And who helped you with that little insight?’ he asked, nursing a suspicion.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was just thinking it’s the kind of thing that Joanna might have said.’

  ‘I don’t need Joanna for that.’

  ‘You didn’t happen to talk to her about me, then?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she admitted straight away. ‘She told me that the two of you were an item.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘That you cocked it up.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She said it was because you didn’t like yourself – you’re never nice to yourself – not at all nice to yourself.’

  Jericho pursed his lips. He lined up some counter-arguments, and each looked more threadbare than the next. He held them back. God knows they had better things to do here than rummage through their emotional baggage, but somehow he suddenly felt as if he’d been caught with his trousers down. As if Joanna had stripped him bare and was marching him about by the ring in his nose. Yoyo shook her head.

  ‘No, Owen, she didn’t say anything bad about you.’

  ‘Hmm. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Do that.’ She grinned. The way he surrendered seemed to have smoothed her ruffled feathers. ‘We mustn’t rule out the possibility that we’ll have to save one another’s lives a few more times.’

  ‘As I believe I’ve already said – any time!’ He hesitated. ‘About Nyela—’

  ‘My fault. After I screwed it up, I thought the best thing to do would be to come back quickly.’

  Jericho felt his ear.

  ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you did screw it up.’

  Calgary, Alberta, Canada

  Pounding the streets of Calgary and showing people the photograph of a possible gunman was more or less like knocking down an anthill and looking for one particular ant. Just a moment ago one and a half million people had been hard at work here, busy making more goods for the shelves and building more blocks on the streets of Canada’s fastest-growing city, industrious citizens flooding the streets, but now they seemed to have lost all sense of direction in an instant. Loreena welcomed the switch to helium-3 in the energy industry, but for all that she couldn’t bear the grim spectacle of mass unemployment, the decline of whole cities and provinces, the impending bankruptcy of countries which had made their money almost entirely from oil and gas. Ecologists had always had an idealistic vision of a smooth and manageable transition, with Mr Fossilosaurus given a gold watch and sent packing to a nice quiet retirement home, where he would then draw his last breath after a dignified decline, while ten billion people cheerily got their electricity from helium-3 generators. But transition had never gone smoothly, never in history. Not in the Cambrian epoch, not in the Ordovician, the Devonian, not at the end of the Permian, Triassic or Cretaceous, and not in the Upper Pleistocene either. That was when a new species called mankind appeared, a self-aware creature who added war and economic crisis to the catalogue of boundary events that already included volcanic eruption, meteorites, ice ages and epidemics. So the brave new world of clean fusion came hand in hand with a full-blown global economic crisis, whether the heralds of the new dawn liked it or not.

  She put fruit, yoghurt and bread rolls onto her tray and took it over to the table, where the intern was already piling into his second stack of pancakes.

  ‘Yesterday was a damp squib then,’ he said.

  Loreena shrugged. The Westin Calgary had the advantage of being near the Imperial Oil building on 4th Avenue Southwest, so after she had telephoned Palstein she had decided to take rooms for the night there for herself and the kid. After that they retraced the mysterious fat man’s steps. It was a dispiriting business. On Bruford’s video, he came in from the north. Most hotels were to the south, west or east though. He could have been staying in any one of them, if he had been staying in a hotel at all. Perhaps he even lived in the city. There was a clear Asian presence here. Just a walk away from the Bow River, the third largest Chinatown in Canada after Vancouver and Toronto stretched down Calgary’s lively Centre Street. In the Sheraton, not far from Prince’s Park Island, the staff thought that they remembered a tall, shabby-looking Asian man with a paunch on him, but he hadn’t been a guest. They had showed his picture around shops and restaurants, and had even paid a visit to Calgary International Airport, all to no avail. The only good news this morning for Keowa was her breakfast, a filling but not fattening tray of pineapple, sunflower seed rolls and low fat yoghurt.

  Just as she was pouring a cup of herbal tea, Sina called, from the Vancouver desk for high society and other gossip.

  ‘Alejandro Ruiz, fifty-two years old. Last heard of as a member of the strategic board for Repsol, or more exactly Repsol YPF to give it its full name, incorporated in Madrid—’

  ‘I know all that already.’

  ‘Wait though! They’re market leaders in Spain and Argentina, for a long while they were the biggest energy corporation in private hands, they’re focused on exploration, production and refineries, they’re also world number three in LNG. They’ve never held any stake in alternative energies. Just to make up for it, the Mapuche Indians in Argentina have been bringing lawsuits against them like clockwork for the past twenty years, accusing them of polluting the groundwater.’

  It was news to Loreena that this tribe was so litigious.

  ‘Are there even any Mapuche left?’

  ‘Oh yes! They’re in Argentina and Chile. Even if the Chilean government stubbornly denies that there’s ever been any such thing as the Mapuche. Makes you laugh, eh? Anyway, Repsol’s one of those companies where the lights are going out floor by floor. And Ruiz wasn’t just vice-president for strategy, which is what I thought yesterday, he was also directly responsible for petrochemical activities in twenty-nine countries, as of July 2022.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Loreena.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I mean, given the way the company’s set up. Why would they make somebody strategic director who demands they diversify into solar power, and uses funny words like ethics?’

  ‘Most of the time they just put him on the payroll as their ecological conscience so they wouldn’t look dumb in public. He was a second-ranker in the corporate hierarchy, so he could bark but he couldn’t bite. But by 2022 the tanker was well and truly headed for the rocks. In a situation like that, you could have appointed an Andalusian donkey to the top job. Once it was obvious that Repsol was going to be one of the big losers, they needed a scapegoat at the helm, that’s all.’

  ‘By 2022 Ruiz had no chance of preventing catastrophe.’

  ‘I know. Still, he tried pretty much everything he could. He even tried striking a deal with Orley Enterprises.’

  ‘Say what?’ said Loreena, taken aback.

  ‘I watched a couple of videos. He gives a good impression, this guy. His wife and daughter in Madrid are distraught over whether he’ll ever turn up again. I’ll send you contact details for them, and for some of his colleagues at Repsol. Best of luck.’

  ‘You’re gonna call Ruiz’s old lady?’ the intern asked once she had finished speaking to Vancouver.

  Loreena got up. ‘Any reason why not?’

  ‘The time. Also, you can’t speak Spanish.’

  ‘It’s half past five in the afternoon in Madrid.’

  ‘Hey, really?’ He licked grease off his fingers. ‘I thought it was always night in Europe when it’s day here.’

  Loreena opened her mouth to answer, stopped, shook her head and went up to he
r room. She was pleased to get through on her first attempt. Señora Ruiz looked distracted, and tried to rebuff her at first but in the end was very helpful; above all, she spoke excellent English, as Loreena had secretly been hoping, since indeed she didn’t speak Spanish. They talked for about ten minutes, then she called one of the strategic team at Repsol, who had also been a friend of Ruiz out of the office. Sina had hunted down numbers for some more of his colleagues, but they were all newly unemployed.

  She was interested by what she found out.

  She looked out of the window. A grey sky brooded over the city, warning that all things must pass. Drizzling curtains of rain blurred the lines of the Calgary Tower, one hundred and ninety metres tall, built by the oil companies Marathon and Husky Oil back in the day. There was something skeletal about the high-rises. A once-prosperous city was shedding weight fast, devouring its own reserves of stored fat. After thinking things over for a while, she called Vancouver again.

  ‘Can you reconstruct the last few days before Ruiz disappeared?’

  ‘Depends what you want to know.’

  ‘I’ve just been speaking with his wife, and one of his colleagues. Ruiz’s last stop before he flew on to Lima was in Beijing.’

  ‘Beijing?’ asked Sina, surprised. ‘What was Ruiz doing in Beijing?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. What?’

  ‘Repsol has no stake in China.’

  ‘Not quite true. There was definitely a joint venture with Sinopec – it had been planned for a while. Some kind of exploration deal. They spent a week bashing it into shape. I’m more interested in what he did on the last day, right before he left China. On 1 September 2022, to be exact. Apparently he was taking part in some conference that his colleague I spoke to knew next to nothing about. All he knew was that it took place outside Beijing. He reckoned there had to be some papers about it lying around somewhere, and he’ll have a look.’

  ‘Nobody knows what the conference was about?’

  ‘Ruiz was strategic director. Autonomous. He didn’t have to sit up and beg for every little thing. Señora Ruiz tells me that her Alejandro was a very warm-hearted, easygoing person—’

  ‘Sobs.’

  ‘I’m getting somewhere. He wasn’t the type to get upset over nothing. They had spoken on the phone just before the conference, and he was all smiles and sunshine. He had helped get the joint venture on its feet, he was in a good mood, he was cracking jokes and looking forward to Peru. But when he called from the plane to Lima, he seemed fairly downcast.’

  ‘This was the day after the mysterious conference?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And did she ask him why?’

  ‘She supposed that something must have gone wrong in Beijing, something that really got to him, but he didn’t want to talk about it, she tells me. All in all he seemed like a different person, he was in a very uncharacteristic mood, upset and nervous. Then he called her one last time from Lima. He sounded desperate. Almost scared.’

  ‘This was just before he disappeared?’

  ‘The same night, yes. It was the last she heard from him.’

  ‘And what am I to do now?’

  ‘Dig around, as usual. I want to know what kind of meeting he was attending in China. Where it happened, what it was all about, who was there.’

  ‘Hmm. I’ll do what I can, okay?’

  ‘But?’

  Sina hesitated. ‘Susan wants another word with you.’

  Loreena frowned. Susan Hudsucker was the Greenwatch number one. She had an idea what was coming, and come indeed it did, just as she expected: when, Susan asked, did Loreena expect to be done with her documentary about the oil companies’ environmental sins? If at all possible, they wanted to broadcast Trash of the Titans while there were still titans around, and didn’t she think she might be barking up the wrong tree with Palstein?

  Loreena said she was trying to solve an attempted murder.

  Susan said that Greenwatch wasn’t the FBI.

  But it could be that the shooting had a lot to do with the subject of her documentary.

  Susan was sceptical, although on the other hand Loreena wasn’t someone that even she could push around.

  ‘Maybe you should bear in mind that what you’re doing could be dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘When has our work ever not been dangerous?’ snorted Loreena. ‘Investigative work is always dangerous.’

  ‘Loreena, this is about an attempted murder!’

  ‘Listen, Susan’ – she paced up and down the hotel room like a tiger in a cage – ‘I can’t give you all the details right now. We’ll take the first plane to Vancouver tomorrow morning and call an editorial conference. Then you’ll all see that this is an extremely hot story, and that we’ve already got a whole lot further than the darn police. I mean, we’d be fools not to stick with this one!’

  ‘I don’t want to stand in your way. It’s just that we have an awful lot else to do as well. Trash of the Titans needs to be finished, I can’t take you off that task.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘But I do worry.’

  ‘Apart from all that, I did a deal with Palstein. If we solve this case, he’ll give us the deep dirt on EMCO.’

  Susan sighed. ‘Tomorrow we’ll decide what happens next, okay?’

  ‘But by then Sina has to—’

  ‘Tomorrow, Loreena.’

  ‘Susan—’

  ‘Please! We’ll do everything you want, but first we have to talk about it.’

  ‘Oh, shit, Susan!’

  ‘Sid will come fetch you. Let him know in good time when you’re landing.’

  Gritting her teeth, Loreena paced the room, thumped her clenched fist on the wall several times and then went back down to the restaurant, where the intern was digging into a huge portion of chocolate mousse.

  ‘Why do you stuff your face like that all the time?’ she snarled at him.

  ‘I’m having a growth spurt.’ He raised his eyes sluggishly. ‘That doesn’t seem to have been a particularly good call to Señora Ruiz.’

  ‘No, that was fine.’ She slumped down sulkily into her chair, looked into the empty cup and rattled the empty teapot. ‘The not particularly good call was with Susan. She thinks we should be concentrating on Trash of the Titans.’

  ‘Oops,’ said the intern. ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘All the same, we fly to Vancouver first thing tomorrow and we’ll sort it out. I’m not going to let it slip through my fingers now!’

  ‘So we’re still working on Trash of the—’

  ‘No, no!’ She leaned down. ‘I will be working on Trash of the Titans. You take a good look at Lars Gudmundsson.’

  ‘Palstein’s bodyguard?’

  ‘That’s the guy. Him, and his team. I found out that he worked for an outfit in Dallas called Eagle Eye – cute name, huh? Personal protections, mercenaries. Check Gudmundsson out, tell me his shoe size and his favourite food. I want to know everything there is to know about the guy.’

  The intern looked uncertain. ‘What if he notices something? Catches us sniffing around after him?’

  Loreena gave him a thin smile. ‘If he notices anything, we’ve made a mistake. And do we make mistakes?’

  ‘I do, sure.’

  ‘I don’t. So eat up before I get sick from watching you. We’ve work to do.’

  Grand Hyatt, Berlin, Germany

  They were sitting in the lobby by the fireplace. Tu listened to their report as he guzzled down nuts by the handful. He was scooping them from the little bowl by his vodka martini faster than he could gulp them down, so that his cheeks filled out like a squirrel’s in the autumn.

  ‘One hundred thousand,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘And that’s his final price.’ Jericho fished around in the bowl. A single remaining peanut sought to escape his clutches. ‘Vogelaar won’t be beaten down.’

  ‘Then we’ll pay him.’

  ‘Just so we’re all on the same page here,’ sai
d Yoyo, smiling sweetly, ‘I don’t have a hundred thousand.’

  ‘So what? Do you really think that I flew the whole way here just to give up because of a measly hundred thousand? You’ll have the money tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Tian, I—’ Jericho managed to catch the nut between finger and thumb, and popped it into his mouth, where it rattled around on his tongue, lonely. ‘I wouldn’t like to see you shell out the money.’

  ‘Why not? I’m the client.’

  ‘Well, as to that.’

  ‘Am I somehow not your client?’

  ‘Actually that’s Chen, and he doesn’t have a—’

  ‘No, actually it’s me, and I’ll pick up the tab!’ Tu said emphatically. ‘The main thing is that your friend hands over the dossier.’

  ‘Well that’s very – noble of you.’

  ‘Don’t fall on my neck weeping. This is what we call expenses.’ Tu dismissed the topic. ‘As for myself, I can report that after some hours spent in the pleasant but somewhat sexless company of your Diane, we’ve identified the provider who hosted those dead letter boxes.’

  ‘You decoded the message?’ Yoyo yelped.

  ‘Shhh.’ Tu twinkled merrily at the waiter, who had come to exchange the empty bowl for another, brimming with nuts. He chomped away and waited until the man was out of earshot. ‘First of all I tracked down the central router. Very sophisticated system, that. The web pages were bounced from server to server until they appeared to be hosted in several different countries. If you track them all back though, you end up at one single, common server. And that – marvellous to report! – is in Beijing.’

  ‘Blimey!’ Yoyo exclaimed. ‘Who’s the host?’

  ‘Hard to say. Mind you, I’m afraid that this server might turn out not to be the last link in the chain either.’

  ‘If we had some way of tracking each and every page routed out from there—’

  ‘There’s no list, if that’s what you mean. Anyway, Diane is working with the latest miraculous software from Tu Technologies, so she found some more dead letter boxes in the web which respond to the same mask.’ A reverential look passed over Tu’s features. He looked at each of them in turn. ‘The text is now a little longer.’