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Jericho nodded. It was obvious that Yoyo was right: Mayé had taken power with the help of the Chinese and, as agreed, hadn’t forgotten to reward them. But then why did they later want to kill him?’

‘And if it wasn’t the Chinese …’ said Yoyo, as if she had read his thoughts. ‘Last year, I mean.’

‘Then who?’

‘Is it that hard to guess? Mayé doesn’t miss a single opportunity to snub the Americans. He has their representatives imprisoned, breaks all contracts, aids and abets terrorist attacks on American institutions, even though he denies it outright in diplomatic circles. In any case, it was enough that Washington was threatening him with sanctions and invasion.’

‘It sounds like sabre-rattling.’

‘That’s precisely the question.’

‘So what then? The guy ruled for seven years. What happened in that time?’

‘He held his hand out. Finished the economy off. Made opposition members disappear, had them tortured, beheaded, who knows what else. Before long, Obiang looked like a philanthropist compared with Mayé, but now they had him by the neck. Mayé didn’t get involved with cannibalism, witchcraft and the whole black magic scene, but he was certainly developing considerable delusions of grandeur. He built skyscrapers that no one moved into, but he didn’t care, the important thing was how the skyline looked. He planned Equatorial Guinea’s own version of Las Vegas and wanted to set up an opera house in the sea. The final straw was when he announced that Equatorial Guinea was promoting itself to become a Space nation, to which end, and in all seriousness, he had a launching pad built in the middle of the jungle.’

‘Wait a second—’ It slowly dawned on Jericho that he had read something about it at the time. An African dictator who had built a space-rocket launch base and
bragged to the rest of the world that his country would be sending astronauts to the Moon. ‘Wasn’t that—?’

‘In 2022,’ said Yoyo. ‘Two years before he was overthrown.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Well, do you see any Africans in space?’

‘No.’

‘Exactly. He did send one thing up though. A news satellite.’

‘And what on earth did Mayé need a news satellite for?’

Yoyo circled her finger over her temple. ‘Because he wasn’t all there, Owen. Why do men get penis extensions? They’re nothing but space-rocket launch bases on a smaller scale. But the whole thing became a mockery because the satellite broke down just a few weeks after the launch.’

‘But it
was
launched.’

‘Yes, without a hitch.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Nothing really. Two years later, Mayé was liquidated, and Ndongo came back.’ Yoyo leaned back. Her entire posture said she was ready to call it a day and unwind. ‘You probably know more about that than I do. That was the part you researched.’

‘But I don’t know much about Ndongo.’

‘Oh well,’ Yoyo shrugged. ‘If you want to find out who footed the bill this time then you’ll need to take a close look at Ndongo’s oil politics. I’ve got no idea whether he has been as loyally devoted to China as Mayé was.’

‘Definitely not.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You said yourself that he would have attacked China pretty heftily. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Ndongo was put in there by the USA and taken out by China.’

‘So who took Mayé out?’

Jericho gnawed on his lower lip.

statement coup Chinese government

‘Something in this story doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘In the text fragment it’s about a coup that China is tied up in, but they can’t mean the coup of 2017. For one thing, that’s eight years ago. And in any case, everyone suspects Beijing was involved in it anyway, so why would they be hunting us down because of that? And another thing, it was explicitly about Donner and Vogelaar. But Vogelaar only comes up in connection with Mayé.’

‘Or was placed there by Beijing back then. Maybe as a kind of guard for Mayé. A spy.’

‘And Donner?’

‘Think back, it wasn’t just a coup last year. It was an execution. A concerted effort to get rid of witnesses. Mayé must have known something, or rather, he and his staff must have. Something so explosive that someone was prepared to kill him for it.’

‘Something about China.’

‘Why else would China have cleared someone out of the way that they themselves put in power? Perhaps Mayé became a liability. And Donner was one of his staff.’

‘And Vogelaar was the one who had contact with Beijing. As security chief, he was closest to Mayé. So he recommends decapitating Mayé’s regime.’

‘And they do. Apart from Donner.’

‘He gets away.’

‘And now Vogelaar is supposed to find him and give him the same send-off he gave Mayé. That’s why they’re after us. Because we know that Donner’s cover has been blown. Because we could beat Vogelaar to it. Because we could warn Donner.’

‘And Kenny?’

‘He might be Vogelaar’s Chinese contact.’

Jericho’s brain was throbbing. If the yarn they were spinning was actually true, then Donner’s life was hanging by a silk thread.

No, there had to be more to it. It wasn’t just about them preventing Donner from being killed. That was part of it, certainly, but the real reason for the brutal hunt of the last twenty-four hours was something else. Someone was worried that they could find out what Donner
knew
.

He stared out into the night and hoped they weren’t too late.

A glowing circuit board. A mildewed spider’s web against a black background. Colonies of endlessly interwoven deep-sea organisms, the neuron landscape of an endlessly sprawling brain, a cosmos slipping away. At night, and seen from a great height, the world looks like anything but a globe illuminated only by streetlamps, neon signs, cars and house lights, by exhausted taxi drivers and shift workers, by the perpetual search for diversion and by worries which find their expression in sleeplessness and apartments lit up into the early hours. What – in the eyes of an extraterrestrial observer – might look like a coded message, actually means: Yes, we
are
alone in the universe,
everyone for themselves and all for one, and we’re here in the dark wilderness too, except that we’re underdeveloped, poor and cut off from everything.

Jericho stared indecisively out of the window. Yoyo had dozed off in her seat, the jet was preparing for landing. Tu didn’t like engaging in conversation while he was at the controls. Left to his own devices, Jericho had tried for a while to wring information about Ndongo’s current time in office out of the internet, but the media interest in Equatorial Guinea seemed to have vanished with Mayé’s departure. He suddenly felt his motivation ebbing away. Yoyo’s light, melodic snoring had the air of a soliloquy to it. Her chest rose and sank, then she gave a start and her eyes rolled under her eyelids. Jericho watched her. It was almost as though the confusing moment of intimacy they had shared had never happened.

He turned his head and let his gaze wander out over the ghost of light as it become steadily denser. At a height of ten kilometres, he had felt a gnawing loneliness, too far from the Earth, not close enough to the skies. He was grateful for every metre that the plane sank closer to the ground, allowing the strange pattern to form familiar pictures again. Buildings, streets and squares created the illusion of familiarity. Jericho had been in Berlin a number of times. He spoke German well, not perfectly, because he had never made the effort to learn it, but what he could say was accent-free. As soon as he put his mind to swotting up on a language he mastered it in a matter of weeks, and, in any case, just listening was enough to be able to understand.

He fervently hoped that they would find Andre Donner still alive.

At 04.14, they landed in Berlin Brandenburg airport. Tu set off to arrange a hire car. When he came back he was morosely waving an Audi stick.

‘I would have preferred another make,’ he moaned as they crossed the neon wasteland of the parking lot in search of their vehicle. Jericho trotted behind him with his rucksack slung over his shoulder, accompanied by a shuffling and sedated-looking Yoyo, whom they had barely managed to wake. Apart from Diane and some hardware, he had nothing else with him. Tu had refused to take him to Xintiandi before their departure so he could pack a few essentials. Not even Yoyo had been permitted to go back to her apartment, although she been bold enough to protest, making Tu see red.

‘No discussion!’ he had scolded her. ‘Kenny and his mob could be lying in wait. They’d either finish you off right on the spot or follow you to me.’

‘Then just send one of your people instead.’

‘They’d still follow them.’

‘Or just let me—’

‘Forget it!’

‘For God’s sake! I can’t just run around in the same smelly clothes for days on end! And nor can Owen, right? Or can you, Owen?’

‘Don’t try ganging up on me. I said no! Berlin is a civilised city; I hear they have socks, underwear, running water and even electricity there.’

There was electricity; that much was true. But beyond that a hot shower or the scent of fresh laundry seemed light years away in that deserted, car-packed hangar. Tu hurried past dozens of identical-looking metal and synthetic-fibre bodies, swinging his full to bursting travel bag, chivvied the others along and finally spotted the dark, discreet limousine.

‘The car’s not bad at all,’ Jericho dared to comment.

‘I would have preferred a Chinese make.’

‘What are you talking about? You don’t drive a Chinese car. Not even when you’re in China.’

‘Funny,’ said Tu, as the car read the data from the stick and obediently opened its doors. ‘Such a talented investigator, but in some respects you’re from the Stone Age. I drive a Jaguar, and Jaguar is a Chinese make.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since three years ago. We bought it from the Indians, just like we bought Bentley from the Germans. I would just as happily have taken a Bentley of course.’

‘Why not a Rolls?’

‘Under no circumstances! Rolls-Royce is Indian.’

‘You two are nuts,’ yawned Yoyo, and lay down across the back seat.

‘Listen,’ said Jericho, as he slid onto the passenger seat. ‘They don’t automatically become Chinese models just because you buy them. They’re English. People buy them because they like English cars, and that’s precisely why you buy them too.’

‘But they belong—’

‘—to the Chinese, I know. Sometimes the entire globalisation process just seems like one big misunderstanding.’

‘Oh, come on, Owen! Really!’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Comments like that didn’t have any punch even twenty years ago.’

Tu steered the car in slalom through the aisles, whose uniformity was only outdone by the fact that they seemed so infinite in number. ‘I’d rather you told me whether you’ve found out anything else that might be of interest to us.’

Jericho gave him a brief overview of Ndongo’s unsuccessful attempt to reform the country and do business with the United States again, and of Mayé’s subsequent coup, Beijing’s obvious implication in it and Mayé’s China politics. He also mentioned the dictator’s growing delusions of grandeur, his failed space programme and his violent removal from power.

‘The official story is that Mayé and his clique fell victim to a Bubi revolt which was supported by influential Fang groups,’ he said. ‘Which would be plausible. But Obiang certainly wasn’t behind it. Since his expulsion to Cameroon he’s become quite a hermit and, according to rumour, is fighting his final battle against cancer.’

‘And it wouldn’t have been the sons either?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ Tu clicked his tongue. ‘There’s surprisingly little information about what’s been happening there over the last year, don’t you think?’

Jericho gave him an appraising look. ‘Is it just my imagination, or do you know something that I should know?’

‘
Oída ouk eidós
,’ said Tu innocently.

‘That’s not Confucius.’

‘I know, are you impressed? It’s Plato, Socrates’ apologia: I know that I know not.’

‘Show-off.’

‘Not at all. It’s perfectly fitting for what I’m trying to say. I do know that there’s an explanation for the diminished interest in Equatorial Guinea, but I just can’t work out what it is. I know it’s something obvious though. Something that’s right in front of our noses.’

‘Does it also explain why there was hardly any public speculation about involvement from abroad?’

‘Ask me after I’ve figured out what it is.’

Jericho listened to the navigation system for a while.

‘Look, the problem is that the coup wouldn’t have been possible without outside help,’ he said. ‘It’s clear that Mayé was installed there by the Chinese, so one would assume that America did it. But our text fragment says something different, that China had its finger in the pie too. If that’s correct, then the submissive servant wasn’t submissive enough when it really came down to it.’

‘You mean he was no longer willing to comply with Beijing’s wishes?’

‘Yoyo and I are leaning towards the view that he and his inner circle could even have become dangerous for China.’

‘Which would explain why the Chinese build him up first and then kill him,’ concluded Tu.

‘And accept the considerable disadvantages too.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oil. Gas. Ndongo had never been Beijing’s friend.’

Tu opened his mouth. For a moment he looked as though he had grasped something which had far-reaching implications. The he clapped his lower jaw back up. Jericho raised an eyebrow.

‘You wanted to say something?’

‘Later.’

They fell silent. Yoyo had fallen asleep on the back seat again. Once they were finally on the autobahn, dawn began to break and the traffic became busier. The navigation system issued muted directions. They approached Berlin Mitte, were directed towards Potsdamer Platz and, by 5.30 a.m., had secured spacious rooms on the seventh floor of the newly renovated Hyatt. An hour later, they sat down to breakfast. The choice was more than ample. Yoyo had overcome her tiredness and was shovelling immense quantities of scrambled eggs and bacon into her mouth. Tu, much less picky, instead made his way diagonally through what was on offer, managing to combine smoked fish and chocolate spread in such a repulsive way that Jericho had to avert his gaze. As usual, Tu didn’t even seem to register what he was eating. He noisily watered down the melange with green tea and started to talk: