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‘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.’

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,’ said 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.’

‘Orley Enterprises.’ Yoyo frowned quizzically.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Tu grinned slyly. ‘The world’s biggest technology corporation. We were just talking about them! If you ask me, that throws a whole new light on the matter. It seems to have less to do with some violent handover of power in Equatorial Guinea and much more to do with who’s top dog—’

‘—out in space.’ Jericho felt his ear. Right now he felt as though he’d been slogging and stumbling along a rutted country road for hours, and had just found out that the main road was running alongside. According to Vogelaar, their problems had begun in 2022 when a delegation paid a visit, supposedly from the Chinese aerospace ministry; Mayé had seen all his hopes dashed and was ready to take any deal. He signed a contract which could hardly have been more absurd, but Kenny stood for Beijing, and so Mayé had believed that he was dealing with an official delegation.

‘Good.’ He steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s forget Mayé for a moment. Yoyo, do you remember what Vogelaar said about the launching pad? Who built it?’

‘The Zheng Group.’

‘Exactly, Zheng. And who is Zheng’s biggest competitor?’

‘America.’ Yoyo frowned again. ‘No. Orley Enterprises.’

‘Which more or less amounts to the same thing, if I’m not mistaken. Orley helped the Americans towards lunar supremacy, and he’s always just ahead of Zheng, any way you look at it. So Zheng turns to espionage—’

‘Or to sabotage.’

‘I see that you’ve got it.’ Tu scrabbled around in the Brazil nuts and pistachios. ‘They’re talking about an
operation
, and the fact that Vogelaar
continues to represent a grave risk
because he
knows all about
something. But what kind of operation could this be where people have to die in droves to keep it secret?’

Yoyo’s face clouded over.

‘An operation that’s not been carried out yet,’ she said slowly.

‘I think so too,’ Jericho said, nodding. ‘Vogelaar doesn’t seem to know anything about the
nature
or its
timing
, but he could send the whole thing sky-high if he made
a
public comment about the facts behind the coup
. The whole world still believes that Ndongo got the presidency back under his own steam, or with Beijing’s help—’

‘Quite, and just for once we’re not going to fall into the usual trap,’ said Tu. ‘Then there’s more.
Furthermore, Orley Enterprises –
blah blah –
have no reason to suspect disruption
. And—’

‘
Nobody there suspects everything
.’

‘So they suspect something.’ Yoyo looked from one to the other. ‘Isn’t that right? I mean, that’s what you’d say if they know
something
.’

‘We can’t assume that the second phrase is actually complete, just because it looks it,’ Jericho said. ‘What’s quite clear is that Orley Enterprises is part of the picture somehow. Then Zheng stands on the other side. The disaster in Equatorial Guinea is all down to some faked-up space programme that he got onto its feet. Zheng represents Beijing, although he could be acting on his own account. Julian Orley stands for Washington, he’s the saviour of the American space programme and Zheng’s natural enemy—’

‘That’s only true to a limited extent,’ Tu butted in. ‘Julian Orley is English himself, if I’m not mistaken, and he only plays that game with the Americans because they’re useful to him. Even he’s just acting on his own account.’

‘So what’s going on here? A proxy war?’

‘Possibly. We’ve known since last year if not before that the Moon’s got the potential to cause a crisis.’

‘Vogelaar sees things differently,’ Yoyo threw in. ‘He reckons that Beijing was just a bluff on the part of whoever was actually behind the Equatorial Guinea satellite programme.’

‘Call it Beijing or call it Zheng.’ Tu shrugged. ‘Do we really want to rule out the possibility that if a global corporation planned an attack on a rival, its government would give tacit approval?’

‘Do dogs get in dogfights?’

‘Wait a moment.’ Jericho put his fingers to his lips. ‘Orley Enterprises – haven’t they just been in the news? There was a report about the Moon crisis a few days ago, and—’

‘Orley is always in the news.’

‘Yes, but this time there really was something new.’

‘Of course!’A spark of recognition lit up in Yoyo’s eyes. ‘Gaia!’

‘What?’

‘The hotel! The hotel on the Moon! Gaia!’

‘That’s right,’ Jericho said pensively. ‘They’re planning a hotel up there.’

‘I think they’ve even built it by now,’ Tu said, frowning in thought. ‘It was
supposed to be ready last year, and then there were delays thanks to the helium-3 flare-up. Nobody knows what it looks like. Orley’s big secret.’

‘You can find all kinds of speculation on the net,’ said Yoyo. ‘And you’re right, it
is
ready. Sometime round about now there’s even supposed to be— Hmm.’

‘What?’

‘I think there’s supposed to be an inaugural trip. Some gang of filthy rich guests are flying up there. Maybe even Orley himself. Utterly exclusive.’

Jericho stared at her. ‘Are you saying that the operation might have to do with this hotel?’

‘Interesting.’ Tu ran his fingers through the sparse growth at the sides of his head. ‘We should get to work straight away. We’ll have to learn all the latest about Orley Enterprises. What’s up right now? What’s planned in the near future? Then we’ll have a look at the Zheng Group. Once we have Vogelaar’s dossier on top of all that, we’ll probably be one giant leap further. When were you going to meet this guy, anyway?’

‘Tomorrow noon,’ said Jericho. ‘At the Pergamon Museum.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Of course you haven’t. Three thousand years of Chinese civilisation puts everything else just that little bit out of focus.’ Jericho rubbed his jaw and looked at Yoyo. ‘By the way, I don’t think it’s a good idea if we both turn up there.’

‘Now wait a moment!’ she protested. ‘So far we’ve been through everything together.’