Limit

by Frank Schätzing

Jericho nodded. ‘So what’s up with it?’

  ‘With the Vallis Alpina?’ Jennifer thought for a minute. ‘Nothing, as far as I know. But that needn’t mean anything.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ asked Norrington.

  ‘Very simple,’ Jericho said. ‘If we agree that the bomb was to be detonated in 2024, regardless of whether Gaia had been completed or not, the question arises as to why it didn’t happen.’

  ‘Because something got in the way,’ Jennifer reflected.

  Jericho smiled. ‘Because something got in someone’s way. Because someone was prevented from setting the thing off, one way or another. That means we should stop wondering about the where and the when, and concentrate on that person who possibly, in fact probably isn’t called Carl Hanna. So who was on the Moon or on the way to the Moon last year who could have detonated the bomb? What happened to make sure that it didn’t go off?’

  And meanwhile he was thinking: who am I telling all this to? Jennifer had mentioned the possibility of a mole, a traitor who drew his information from the inner security circle. Who was the mole? Edda Hoff, opaque and brittle? One of the divisional directors? Tom Merrick, that bundle of nerves responsible for communication security – could he have been responsible for the block that he was pretending to investigate? And apart from Andrew Norrington, was there someone listening to his hypotheses who shouldn’t have known about them? Always allowing that Jennifer hadn’t mentioned moles to distract attention from herself.

  How safe were they really in the Big O?

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

  The chronological recording was swiftly reconstructed. True to its name, the Grave-digger burrowed its way into the depths of the system and drew up a complete list, but because this encompassed activities carried out over several days, it looked like something that would keep you occupied for three rainy weekends.

  ‘Shit,’ whispered Sophie.

  But if you cut down the periods of time in question, the work went faster than you might have expected. And the faker’s trail ran like a pattern through the recordings, because after every action he erased his traces. The video of Hanna’s night-time trip, for example, had been recut while the Canadian had been exploring Gaia’s surroundings with Julian, or more precisely between a quarter past six and half past on the morning in question. Unambiguous proof that Hanna himself hadn’t set about erasing his traces.

  Where had she been at that point? In bed. Hadn’t got up till seven. Until then the lobby and the control centre had been populated only by machines. In a simultaneous projection, she screened all the recordings of the period during which the phantom had done his work, but no one left his room, no one crouched in a hidden corner operating the system from somewhere else.

  Impossible!

  Someone must surely have been wandering about the hotel at that time.

  Had these videos been manipulated too?

  She studied the recordings more precisely, and had the computer examine all the films for subsequently introduced cuts.

  Sure enough.

  Sophie stared at the monitor wall. This thing was getting increasingly weird. Everything she saw here, or rather didn’t see, was evidence of unsettling professionalism and strength of nerve. If it went on like this, in the end she would have to go through every single order in the vague hope that the faker might give himself away by some tiny blunder. Just as it had soared a moment before, her mood now plummeted. It was pointless. The stranger had used his time and opportunities to the full, he was ahead of her.

  Maybe she should approach the business the other way round, she thought. Start with the last significant event, the satellite failure. Perhaps the phantom hadn’t had time to clean up after himself when that happened.

  She isolated the passage from the conference call until it suddenly broke off, and had the computer play through the whole sequence again. Her own actions were visible in the reconstruction: her taking the call, informing Dana and Lynn in the Selene and putting it through to Julian Orley. After that—

  A shadow settled over her. She gave a start, threw her head back and sat bolt upright.

  ‘Erm – thought you might be hungry.’

  ‘Axel!’

  Kokoschka’s monolithic appearance darkened her desktop. He held a plate in his right hand. The bony claw of a rack of lamb protruded from it, a nutty smell of courgettes wafted towards her.

  ‘God, Axel!’ she panted. ‘You frightened the life out of me!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘Don’t worry. Phew! Shouldn’t you be tearing up walls and floors?’

  ‘Cerberus took us off the job,’ he grinned. ‘Hungry? East Friesian saltmarsh lamb.’

  He looked at her, to the side, at the floor, then dared to make eye contact again. Christ, no. She’d guessed it. German boy loves German girl. Kokoschka had fallen for her.

  ‘That’s really sweet of you,’ she said, glancing at the plate.

  His grin widened and he set the dish down on a free corner of the desktop, next to her, along with a napkin and cutlery. Suddenly she realised that over the course of the past hour hunger had crept up on her and was devouring her from within. She greedily inhaled the aromas. Kokoschka had separated out the cutlets for her. She took one of the fragile ribs between her fingers and gnawed the butter-soft flesh from the bone, as she turned once again to the screens.

  ‘Whatcha doin’?’ asked Kokoschka.

  ‘Checking the recordings from the afternoon,’ she said with her mouth full. ‘To see if I can find something out about the satellite failure.’

  ‘Do you think we’ve really got a bomb?’

  ‘Not the faintest, Axel.’

  ‘Hmm. Weird. Doesn’t really bother me, to be honest.’ His forehead was covered with sweat. In visible contradiction to his words, he seemed nervous and twitchy, stepped from one leg to the other, sniffed. ‘So you’re trying to find out where the bomb is?’

  ‘No, I want to know who Hanna’s accomplice—’

  She stared at him.

  Kokoschka held her eye for a few seconds, then his eyes drifted down to the video wall. He was perspiring more heavily now. His bald head was drenched, a vein throbbed in his temple. Sophie stopped chewing, and paused with her chin thrust out and her cheek bulging.

  ‘Okay, you’ve probably known for ages,’ Kokoschka said wearily into the room.

  She gulped, and recoiled. ‘What?’

  He looked at her.

  * * *

  ‘Could we have a quick chat?’ Dana nodded to Lynn to follow her to the stairs that led from the Mama Quilla Club to the Luna Bar below it, and from there to the Selene and Chang’e. At that moment everyone’s attention was focused on Chuck, who stood there with a sly grin on his face, holding both hands, palms up and all ten fingers pointing upwards, stretched out in front of him.

  ‘What does the Pope mean when he does this?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Olympiada gloomily. Winter, unfamiliar with the habits of the Pontifex and clerical matters in general, shook her head in hopeful expectation that she might possibly get the punchline, while a chill gust of outrage blew all the benevolence from Aileen’s features. Rebecca Hsu sat next to her like a circus lion on a bar stool, and spoke into her hand computer in a hushed voice. Walo Ögi had absconded to his suite to read.

  ‘Chuck, please don’t.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Aileen.’

  ‘Don’t tell this one!’

  ‘What does the Pope mean?’ Winter giggled.

  ‘Chuck, no!’

  ‘Very simple.’ Donoghue snapped nine fingers closed, so that only the middle finger of his right hand was still pointing upwards. ‘The same as this, but in ten languages.’

  Winter went on giggling, Hsu laughed, Olympiada pulled a face. Aileen looked around at everyone, hoping for forgiveness, with a tortured, powerless smile on her face. Lynn processed none of this as she would usually have done. Whatever she saw and heard looked like a sequence of rattlin
g, stroboscopic flashes. Aileen accused Chuck of violating a joke-free zone called the Church, about which everyone had agreed, mercilessly wielding her falsetto scalpel, while Winter tee-heed inanely, a source of relentless torment.

  ‘We must assume that something has happened on the Aristarchus Plateau,’ Dana Lawrence said abruptly. ‘Something unpleasant.’

  Lynn’s fingers bent and stretched.

  ‘Okay, we’ll send Nina out in the shuttle.’

  ‘We should do that,’ Dana nodded. ‘And evacuate Gaia.’

  ‘Hang on! We said we were going to wait.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For Julian.’

  Dana glanced quickly at the seated group. Miranda Winter was chortling, ‘That’s great. Why in ten languages?’ while Chuck eyed them suspiciously.

  ‘Don’t you listen?’ she hissed. ‘I mentioned that Julian’s team might be in difficulties. We have no idea whether they’re going to turn up here, and we have a bomb threat. There are guests in the hotel now. We have to evacuate.’

  ‘But we’ve laid nine places for dinner.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘It doesn’t, Lynn. I’ve had enough. I’ll call everyone together. Meet at half past eight in the Mama Quilla Club, give it to them straight. Then we’ll send out a radio flare for Julian, Nina will go in search of them, the rest of us will take the Lunar Express to—’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re talking nonsense!’

  ‘I’m talking nonsense?’

  Chuck got to his feet and smoothed his trouser legs.

  * * *

  ‘I really thought you knew,’ Kokoschka said, embarrassed.

  Sophie shook her head in mute horror.

  ‘Hmm.’ He wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Doesn’t really matter anyway. Bad moment, I guess.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve fallen – I’ve sort of fallen – oh, forget it. I just wanted to say that I really… erm—’

  Sophie melted with relief. Her hand strayed to the plate, but her belly hadn’t yet accepted the fact that Kokoschka had only wanted to declare his love, and it categorically refused to take in any more food.

  ‘I like you too,’ she said, trying to make sure that the like really meant like and nothing more.

  Kokoschka rubbed his fingers over his spanking clean chef’s jacket.

  ‘I can’t wait to see if you find something,’ he said, looking at the display.

  ‘Me too, you can be sure of that.’ Switch of topic, thank heavens. She looked at the picture details, the list of recordings, the data flow. ‘The whole thing is very mysterious. We—’

  She took a closer look.

  ‘What’s that?’ she whispered.

  Kokoschka pushed in closer. ‘What?’

  Sophie paused the reconstruction program. There was something. Something weird that she couldn’t quite place. A kind of menu, but a sort she’d never seen before. Simple, compact, connected to a rat’s tail of data, bundles of commands that had been sent only seconds before the breakdown of communication from Gaia. She understood a bit of computer language. She could read a lot of it, but this cryptic sequence of commands would have been meaningless in her eyes, if some of the codes hadn’t seemed familiar.

  Codes for satellites.

  The command to freeze communications had come from Gaia. She could see when and from where it had happened.

  She knew who had done it.

  ‘Oh, my Christ,’ she whispered.

  Fear, terrible, long-suppressed fear flooded all her cells, all her thoughts. Her fingers started trembling. Kokoschka leaned down to her.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked

  All sign of shyness had fled. The German’s eyes peered from his angular head. She spun round in her chair, opened a drawer, reached for a piece of paper, a pen, as she now no longer trusted the computer system. She hastily scribbled a few words on the paper, folded it together and pressed the little paper packet into his hand.

  ‘Take this to Tim Orley,’ she whispered. ‘Straight away.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She hesitated. Should she tell him what she had found? Why not? But Kokoschka, with his childish temperament, was unpredictable, strong as a bear, capable of running off and thumping the person in question, which might prove to be a mistake.

  ‘Just take it to Tim,’ she said quietly. ‘Wherever he is. Tell him to come here straight away. Please, Axel, be quick. Don’t waste any time.’

  Kokoschka turned the packet over in his fingers and stared at it for a second. Then he nodded, turned round and disappeared without another word.

  * * *

  ‘We can’t evacuate,’ Lynn insisted feverishly. Her fingers became claws, her perfectly filed nails pressed into the flesh of her palms. ‘We can’t gamble with the trust of our guests.’

  ‘With the greatest respect, have you gone mad?’ whispered Dana. ‘This place could go up at any minute, and you’re talking about abusing the trust of your guests?’

  Lynn stared at her and shook her head. Chuck strode resolutely forward.

  ‘Enough of this nonsense,’ he said. ‘I demand to know right now what’s actually going on here.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dana. ‘We’re just considering sending Nina Hedegaard to the Artistarchus Plateau on the Callisto, in case there really is something—’

  ‘Listen, girly, I may be old, but I’m not stupid.’ Chuck leaned down to Dana and brought his great leonine head level with her eyes. ‘So don’t underestimate me, okay? I run the best hotels in the world, I’ve built more of the things than you will ever set foot in, so stop trying to bullshit me.’

  ‘No one’s bullshitting you, Chuck, we’ve just—’

  ‘Lynn.’ Donoghue spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. ‘Please tell her to drop it! I know this conniving expression, this whispering. Obviously there’s a crisis, but can you please tell me what’s happening here?’

  Chuck had stopped being Chuck. He’d turned into a battering ram, he was trying to get inside her, to overwhelm her, but she wouldn’t let him in, wouldn’t let anyone in, she had to resist! Julian. Where was Julian? Far away! Just as he always had been, throughout her life. When she was born. When she needed him. When Crystal died. When, when, when. Julian? Far away! All the responsibility rested on her shoulders.

  ‘Lynn?’

  Don’t lose control. Not now. Hold off the breakdown that was clearly coming with the inevitability of a supernova, long enough to act. Hold off Dana, her enemy. And everyone else who knew. Each one of them was her enemy. She was completely alone. She could only rely on herself.

  ‘Please excuse me.’

  She had to act. Bumble, hum, buzz, bzzzz. A swarm of hornets, she ran down the stairs to the lift.

  * * *

  Chuck watched her open-mouthed.

  ‘What’s up with her?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Dana.

  ‘I didn’t mean to insult her,’ he stammered. ‘I really didn’t. I just wanted to—’

  ‘Do me a favour, okay? Go and join the others.’

  Chuck rubbed his chin.

  ‘Please, Chuck,’ she said. ‘It’s all okay. I’ll keep you posted, I promise.’

  She left him standing there and went after Lynn.

  * * *

  It wasn’t that Axel Kokoschka thought he was overweight, or not really. On the other hand his art represented the compatibility of genuine gourmet cuisine with the requirements of a fitness society fixated on the burning of calories. And in those terms he was overweight. Firmly resolved to reduce the fifteen kilos that he weighed up here at least to fourteen, he hardly ever used the lifts. Here again he leapt from bridge to bridge, forcing his burly body up one floor after another, and then took the flight of stairs to the neck. The area between Gaia’s shoulders and head was little more than a mezzanine where the passenger lifts stopped, and only the freight elevators and the staff lift continued to the kitchen. W
here the side neck muscles would have been in a human being, stairs led to the suite wing below, swinging into the head with its restaurants and bars. The neck was also a storage area for spherical tanks of liquid oxygen to make up for any leakage. The tanks were hidden behind the walls and took up a considerable amount of room, so that only Gaia’s throat was glazed. A number of oxygen candles hung in wall holders.

  Kokoschka snorted. Without resorting to the scales, he knew he had in fact put on some weight over the past few days. No wonder Sophie had been a bit stand-offish with him. He would have to work out more often, go to the gym, on the treadmill, or else his fleshly contact would be restricted to fillets, schnitzels and mince.

  There was no one in Chang’e. Selene, a floor up, was also contenting itself with its own company, and so was the Luna Bar. To judge by the voices, the gang was right up at the top. Strangely, Kokoschka barely felt frightened, in spite of the possible risk of death. He couldn’t imagine an atom bomb, or an atom bomb exploding. And besides, they hadn’t found anything, and wouldn’t such a thing give off radiation? He was far more concerned about Sophie. Something had startled her. All of a sudden she had seemed absolutely terrified, and then there was that scribbled note that she had given him to give to Tim.

  But Tim Orley wasn’t there. Only the Donoghues, Rebecca Hsu, Miranda Winter, and the Russian’s sad wife sat hunched over their drinks, looking dazed. Funaki said Tim had been there just before he arrived, and had asked after Lynn, while as for her, she had lost her head a few moments before.

  ‘And I hadn’t done anything,’ Donoghue mumbled to nobody in particular. ‘I really hadn’t.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Aileen looked sagely around. ‘She’s looked stressed lately, don’t you think?’

  ‘Lynn’s okay.’

  ‘Well that’s how it seemed to me. Not you? Even in the space station.’

  ‘Lynn’s okay,’ Chuck repeated. ‘It’s this hotel manager I can’t stand.’

  ‘Why not?’ Rebecca raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s just doing her job.’

  ‘She’s hiding something.’

  ‘Yes, then—’ Kokoschka made as if to leave the Mama Quilla Club. ‘Then—’

  ‘My experience tells me so!’ Chuck slammed his hand down on the table. ‘And my prostate. Where experience fails, my prostate knows. I’m telling you, she’s shitting the lot of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out that she was pulling the wool over all our eyes.’