Limit (107 page)

‘I know what they wanted!’ Yoyo waved her hand eagerly as if she were in a classroom. ‘They suggested building a launching pad.’

Jericho was jerked from his thoughts. ‘So it wasn’t Mayé’s idea at all.’

‘No, it wasn’t. He wanted to know what it was for of course. They said it was to shoot a satellite into space. He asked what kind of satellite. They said: “Just a satellite, it doesn’t matter what kind. Do you want a satellite? Your own, Equatorial Guinea news satellite? You can have it. The only important thing to us is the launch, and that no one finds out who’s behind it.”’

‘But why?’ asked Jericho, dumbfounded. ‘What did they have to gain from shooting Chinese satellites up from African soil?’

‘That’s what we wanted to know too, naturally. They told us there was a space treaty agreed in the sixties at the initiative of the United Nations, then signed and ratified by the majority of member states. It’s about who outer space belongs to, what they can or can’t do, and who can permit or forbid things. Part of the treaty is a liability clause, later put in concrete terms in a special agreement, which regulates all the claims regarding accidents with artificial celestial bodies. For example: if a meteorite falls into your garden and kills your chickens, you can’t do a thing. But if it’s not a meteorite but a satellite with a nuclear reactor, and it doesn’t fall on your chickens but right smack bang in central Berlin, then that would cause damage of astronomic proportions, not to mention the dead and wounded and the soaring cancer rate. So who would be liable for that?’

‘Whoever caused it?’

‘Correct. The state that sent it up, and the treaty dictates that the liability has no limits. If Germany can prove it was a Chinese satellite, then China has to cough up. The decisive factor is always whose territory something was launched from. So the more a nation launches, the higher the risk they run of having to pay up at some point. That’s why, according to the delegates, they were now negotiating with states who were willing to allow China to build launch pads on their territory and pass them off to the world as being their own.’

‘But that would make those states liable!’

‘Guys like Mayé don’t have any issues with driving their own people into ruin. He had long since piled the millions from the oil trade into private bunkers, just like Obiang did before him. The only thing he cared about was what was in it for him. So Kenny named a figure. It was exorbitantly high. Mayé tried to stay calm, while all the while he was pissing himself with joy under his tropical wood desk.’

‘Didn’t the whole thing seem completely absurd to him?’

‘The delegation claimed that Beijing was concluding deals like these for minimisation of risk. That the danger of a satellite falling was becoming less and less, and that it wasn’t to do with military operations, it was merely about the testing of a new, experimental initiative. The only thing Mayé had to do was strut about as the father of Equatorial Guinea space travel and pledge his lifelong silence about who was really behind it. And for that, they were prepared to pay for his satellite.’

‘What an idiot,’ commented Yoyo.

‘Well, think about it. Equatorial Guinea, the first African country with its own space programme.’

‘But didn’t anyone notice that loads of Chinese people were running around when they were building the launching pad?’ asked Jericho.

‘It wasn’t like that. There was an official announcement. Mayé informed the world that he wanted to get in on the space travel scene, invited specialists over to Equatorial Guinea, and of course the Chinese came too. The whole thing was organised perfectly. In the end, Russians, Koreans, French and Germans all ended up working on the launch pad too, without noticing whose tune they were dancing to.’

‘And the Zheng Group?’

‘Ah!’ Vogelaar raised his eyebrows admiringly. ‘You’ve done your research. That’s right, a large part of the construction was developed by Zheng. They had a team on site the whole time. They started in December and a year later the thing was up. On 15 April 2024, Mayé’s first and only news satellite was shot into space in a festive ceremony.’

‘He must have practically burst with pride.’

‘Mayé was obsessed with the thing. There was a model of it hanging in his office, it rode along the ceiling on a rail and then circled around him at his desk, the sun of Equatorial Guinea.’

‘But not for very long.’

‘Not even three weeks. First a temporary failure, then radio silence. The news spread of course. Mayé became the subject of ridicule and malice. It wasn’t that he really needed a satellite; after all, he had coped perfectly well without one before. But he had taken his place in international circles, he wanted to be part of it all and now he had to contend with this major fall. He made a proper fool of himself, and even the Bubi in Black Beach were rolling around in their cells with laughter. Mayé was frothing with rage, screaming for Kenny, who informed him that there were more pressing concerns. And there were. The Chinese and Americans were threatening each other with military action, each of them accusing the other of having stationed weapons on the Moon. I advised Mayé to hold back, but he kept on and on. Eventually, at the beginning of June, when the Moon crisis was just starting to defuse, Kenny
travelled to Malabo for talks. Mayé refused to restrain himself, demanding a new satellite immediately. But then he made a mistake. He mentioned his suspicion that there was more behind the launch than the testing of some experimental initiative.’

Jericho leaned forward. ‘What did he mean by that?’

Vogelaar blew smoke, in memory of bygone times.

‘It was something he’d heard from me. Something I had found out. About the whole project.’

‘So you had the whole thing investigated?’

‘Of course. I kept a closer eye on the building of the ramp and the launch than Kenny would have liked, but in such a way that he didn’t notice. In the process, I stumbled upon inconsistencies. I told Mayé about it and impressed upon him the need to keep it to himself, but the idiot had nothing better to do than threaten Kenny.’

‘How did Kenny react to it?’

‘In a nice manner. And that was what concerned me. He said that Mayé didn’t need to worry, that there would be some way of agreeing on things.’

‘That sounds like a pre-announced execution.’

‘That’s exactly what I thought. A lot of fuss had been caused by that point. So the only option was to find out the whole truth, to increase the pressure on Kenny so much that he couldn’t simply get rid of us. And I did find out. When Kenny next turned up, Mayé received him in the company of his most important ministers and military staff. We confronted him with the facts. He was silent. For a long time. A very long time. Then he asked us if we realised we were playing with our lives.’

‘The beginning of the end.’

‘Not necessarily. It showed that he was taking us seriously. That he wanted to negotiate.’ Vogelaar laughed joylessly. ‘But Mayé messed the whole thing up again by demanding horrendous sums, practically a genuflection. Kenny couldn’t give him what he wanted. He seemed to be making things easy for Mayé though, and I genuinely got the impression that he didn’t want things to escalate, but Mayé, in his arrogance, was unstoppable. By the end he was screaming that the whole world would find out about it all. Kenny stood up, hesitated. Then he gave a broad grin and said, Okay, I give in. You’ll have what you desire, Mr Dictator, give me two weeks. He said that and then left.’

Vogelaar watched the smoke from his cigar float away.

‘At that moment I knew that Mayé had just condemned us all to death. He may have been basking in the belief of being the victor, but he was already dead. I didn’t waste any time convincing him otherwise, and just went home. My wife and I packed our bags. I always have a few identities up my sleeve, an escape plan or something.
The following morning we disappeared from Equatorial Guinea. We left all of our possessions behind, everything apart from a suitcase full of money and a pile of false papers. Kenny’s henchmen were on our heels right away, but my plan was perfect. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to go underground. We dodged them again and again until we had thrown them off. Once we got to Berlin, we became Andre and Nyela Donner, a South African agricultural engineer and a qualified lawyer from Cameroon with a gastronomic background, and looked for some premises. The day we opened, Ndongo was filling his pants in Malabo, and Mayé was dead. Everyone who knew about it was dead.’

‘Apart from one person.’

‘Yes.’

‘So what was the space programme really about?’

Vogelaar stretched out a finger and pushed a half-full glass over the tablecloth. The rum sparkled in the light of the paper lamp, a frenzy of movement and reflection.

‘Come on, don’t make me keep asking. Why did it all happen?’

The mercenary propped his chin in his hands meditatively.

‘It should be me asking who’s coming after the two of you.’

‘Oh, sure!’ Yoyo glared at him angrily. ‘What do you think we’ve been doing the whole day?’

‘Obviously I’m asking myself the same thing.’

‘Probably Zhong Chan Er Bu,’ conjectured Jericho. ‘The Chinese Secret Service. After everything you’ve told us.’

‘I’m not so sure any more. I’ve since started to believe that Kenny’s strange delegation represented neither the Chinese government nor the Chinese space travel authorities. Both of them are probably still none the wiser that they were used as a pretext.’

Jericho stared at him in amazement.

‘They were very convincing, Jericho.’

‘But the Party must have realised what was happening in their name. Mayé must have mentioned it on official state visits.’

‘Nonsense, think about it! There were no Chinese government visits to Equatorial Guinea, just as Mayé was never invited to the Forbidden City. No one wanted to be seen with him. A little minister of the energy authorities might pop up coyly here and there, but otherwise Chinese oil people kept their heads down. Beijing had always emphasised the fact that its only relationship with Equatorial Guinea was strictly trade-related.’

‘But they didn’t have any problems with being photographed with dictators in Mugabe’s era.’

‘They didn’t overthrow Mugabe. After a coup, it’s not the done thing for the initiators to draw attention to themselves. The Chinese are more careful nowadays.’

‘But what about Zheng?’

‘What about him?’

‘The Zheng Group works for the Chinese space travel authority. Scrub that, they
are
the space travel authority, and they did construction work for Mayé too. It must have come out then that official positions had been used as a pretext.’

‘Who says Zheng was consulted? Inside an authority, there are those that know and those that don’t. His company accepted a commission on the free market. And so what?’

‘The Party allowed their most important construction company to build a foreign launch pad.’

‘You can’t control companies like Zheng or Orley; not even the Party can do that, nor do they want to. The Chinese prime minister has shares in Zheng, so that would have meant keeping an eye on himself too. On the contrary, Beijing welcomed the fact that Zheng responded to the invitation to tender, because it made espionage there easier.’

‘So why did you become suspicious?’

Vogelaar smiled thinly.

‘Because I’m always suspicious. That’s how I found out that Kenny left Zhong Chan Er Bu in 2022. He now works purely on a freelance basis for the military Secret Service.’

‘Just a second,’ said Yoyo. ‘The coup that brought Mayé to power—’

‘Was financed by Chinese oil companies, ratified by Beijing and executed by the Chinese Secret Service, with our help.’

‘And the launching pad?’

‘That had nothing to do with it. The launching pad just brought new protagonists onto the scene. Beijing was only ever concerned with commodities. The people that talked us into the launching pad had other interests.’

‘So Kenny changed camps?’

‘I’m not sure whether he did or not. Perhaps he just broadened his circle of activity. I don’t think he explicitly contravened Beijing’s interests, rather that he saw someone else’s interests as being more important.’

‘And the Mayé coup?’

‘The launching pad people were to blame for that. It’s possible that the Party approved of it. But they were certainly never asked.’

‘Is that what you believe or what you
know
?’

‘What I believe.’

‘Vogelaar,’ said Yoyo insistently. ‘You have to tell us what you found out about the launching pad, do you hear?’

Vogelaar put his fingertips together. He fixed his gaze on his thumbs, brought them towards the tip of his nose and then looked at the ceiling. Then, slowly, he nodded.

‘Okay. Agreed.’

‘Tell us.’

‘For a quarter of a million euros.’

‘What?’ Jericho fought for air. ‘Have you gone insane?’

‘For that you’ll get a dossier, everything’s in it.’

‘You’re crazy!’

‘Not in the slightest. Nyela and I have to go underground, and right away. A large part of my fortune is frozen in Equatorial Guinea. What I was able to take with me is tied up in Muntu and the apartment upstairs. By tomorrow I’ll have flogged whatever I can, but Nyela and I will have to start again from scratch.’

‘Damn it, Vogelaar!’ exploded Yoyo. ‘You truly are the most filthy, ungrateful—’

‘One hundred thousand,’ said Jericho. ‘Not a cent more.’

Vogelaar shook his head. ‘I’m not negotiating.’

‘Because you’re not in a position to. Think properly now. It’s a hundred thousand or nothing.’

‘You need the dossier.’

‘And you need the money.’

Yoyo looked as though she wanted to drag Vogelaar straight off to the slicing machine. Jericho kept an eye on her. If it came to it he was prepared to give the South African a good going over with the Glock, but he doubted that Vogelaar would let it go that far again. They had to reach an agreement with him somehow.

He waited.

After what felt like an eternity, Vogelaar breathed out, long and slow, and for the first time Jericho sensed the big man’s fear.