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‘I know. Nevertheless.’

‘I see!’ She tightened her lips into a hostile line. ‘You’re still pissed off because of Nyela.’

‘No, not in the least. Really, I’m not.’

‘Do you think that Vogelaar will try to shove you into the meat-slicer again?’

‘He’s unpredictable.’

‘He wants money, Owen! He chose to meet in a public place. What’s going to happen there?’

‘Owen’s right,’ Tu put in. ‘Do we know whether Vogelaar even has this dossier?’

Yoyo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I say. He
told
you about a dossier. Did he actually show you one?’

‘Of course not, he wants us to give him the—’

‘So he could have been bluffing,’ Tu interrupted her. ‘Precisely
because
he wants the money. He could try to get the drop on Owen in the museum and make off with the hundred thousand.’

‘Get the drop on him how?’

‘Like this.’ Jericho stretched out an index finger and put it to his temple. ‘It works, even in crowds.’

‘Well great!’ Yoyo squirmed in her seat from rage and frustration. ‘So that’s why you want to go into the museum on your own?’

‘Believe me, it’s safer.’

‘It would be safer with me and my haunch of antelope.’

‘I’m faster and more adaptable on my own. I don’t have to watch out for anyone but myself.’

‘Like you can look after yourself, bunnikins.’

‘I can look out well enough to save your skin twice.’

‘Oh, so that’s what it’s about,’ Yoyo huffed, turning red. ‘You’re worried you’d have to save my skin a third time. You think I’m a nitwit.’

‘You’re anything but a nitwit.’

‘So what am I?’

‘Could it perhaps be that you’re trouble?’

‘I should hope so!’

‘Yoyo,’ Tu said gently but firmly, ‘I think the decision’s been made.’

Yoyo had got herself worked up into a storm of indignation, and now came the cloudburst. Fat tears like raindrops gathered in the corners of her eyes, brimmed over her eyelids.

‘I don’t want to just sit about!’ she said in a ragged voice. ‘I got all of us into this mess. Don’t you understand that I want to do something?’

‘Of course we do. You’ll be doing something if you help me with the research.’

The waiter appeared and checked their table. Tu plunged his hand into the bowl, as though afraid that he hadn’t been giving due attention to the nuts.

‘We’ll haff to fime oup emryfing abou’ Orley,’ he muttered indistinctly. ‘On fop of all vat’ – he swallowed – ‘I want to know more about Zheng’s solo projects. After all, he’s the only Chinese entrepreneur who could go building a satellite launch pad anywhere on Earth without prior state approval. You see, my dear Yoyo, even if Owen were to beg me on bended knee to let him take you with him, I’d still refuse.’

Yoyo glowered at him. ‘You eat like a pig, just so you know.’

‘Are you going to help me or are you not?’

‘Have you two alpha males even considered letting Orley Enterprises know?’

‘I have,’ Tu said. ‘All the same, I don’t know exactly what we could tell them.’

‘That something is going to happen, at some point in time, though we don’t know what it is or what’s the target, but that they are possibly the victim.’

‘All admirably specific. Shall we also tell them that Zheng is behind the whole thing?’

‘Or Beijing. Or the Chinese Secret Service.’ Yoyo was visibly calming down. For the time being, it seemed that the dams would not burst. ‘We don’t know when the attack is going to take place – if indeed it
is
an attack. Mayé was deposed right around the time of the Moon crisis, it could even be that the crisis
was
the operation, but our text tells us something quite different. It’s still to come. But when? How much time do we have? We zoomed over to Berlin at Mach 2 to warn Vogelaar. We should send word to Orley Enterprises at the speed of light, even if our message is very vague.’

‘Excellent strategic argumentation,’ Jericho put in.

Yoyo leaned back. She looked only halfway mollified. Jericho knew what she was going through, the rage, the shame and the helplessness of a child who isn’t even allowed to clear up the mess she’s made; he knew that her father’s reproachful silence loomed up somewhere inside her. Like so many children, she had learned early enough that she wasn’t up to some unspoken standards.

There was a pimply boy who knew all about such things.

* * *

Like the goddess Kali, the Orley conglomerate had many arms growing from its torso, so many that at some point Tu got fed up with following links and flowcharts. The company presented some excellent targets for attack. The hotel project was nominally part of Orley Space, which was responsible for the space programme and ancillary technologies, but then again it wasn’t, because private travel to the Space Station and the Moon came under Orley Travel. For helium-3 mining and freight, NASA and the US Treasury were the people to talk to, but then again so were Orley Space and Orley Energy, whose main business was building fusion reactors. The further they delved into the labyrinthine structures of the company, the less they felt they knew about where the ‘operation’ might be aimed. Orley Entertainment produced films such as
Perry Rhodan
, which had made the Irish actor Finn O’Keefe one of the top earners in the movie world; it was also experimenting with the next generation of 3D cinema, and had built an Orley Sphere in several cities around the globe, each a huge spherical arena for grandiose concerts and events, seating thirty thousand visitors. Currently a concert on the OSS was in the planning stages, to be given by David Bowie – almost eighty years old – and this of course was Orley Entertainment’s brief, but Orley Space and Orley Travel were also part of the project. There was a division for marketing and communication, Orley Media, as well as an innovation incubator where young researchers tweaked tomorrow’s world into shape – this was Orley Origin. Once you got to the internet, the conglomerate grew and ramified like a spiral galaxy. When Diane tried the simple keyword
news
, it came up with a complete agenda for the twenty-first century. Everything was new, and everything really did mean
everything
, since there was hardly a field
of human endeavour where Orley Enterprises wasn’t trying to plant their flag, all of course with fervent belief and noble intent. There seemed no end to their search by the time they found OneWorld, an initiative which Julian Orley had founded to prevent global collapse; it poured forth projects for prevention and adaptation as reliably as the gushing geysers of Iceland, constantly testing new fuels and reagents, new kinds of engine, new this that and the other, all the way up to the meteorite shields which were being developed aboard the OSS in collaboration with Orley Space and Orley Origin.

And all of this under the aegis of Julian Orley, icon, philanthropist and eccentric, more like a rock star than a business mogul, smiling youthfully, the promise of endless adventure on his lips; he was America’s ally and at the same time nobody’s partner, a concerned citizen, generous patron, unpredictable genius, a master of time and space, the high priest of what-if, a man who seemed to hold the patent on planet Earth and interplanetary space, even on the future itself.

Diane also informed them that Gaia, the hotel on the Moon, was now open for a select group of guests led by Julian and Lynn Orley. The trip was organised by—

‘That’s enough for me,’ Tu declared, and called company headquarters in London, asking to be put through to Central Security. Jennifer Shaw, the chief of security, was in a meeting, and her deputy, Andrew Norrington, was travelling. In the end Tu spoke to a woman called Edda Hoff, number three in the hierarchy, who wore her hair in a pageboy cut like a crash helmet. She had all the personality and approachability of an electronic voice menu: if you want to report a terrorist attack, please say ‘one’. For bribery, corruption and espionage, say ‘two’. If you wish to attack us yourself, please say ‘three’. She spoke as though Orley Enterprises spent the whole day fielding calls from people warning of dark deeds or announcing their own.

Tu sent her the text fragment. She read it carefully, without a flicker of expression passing across her mask-like face. She listened calmly to his explanations. It was only when Tu started talking about the hotel that her features came to life, and she raised her eyebrows so that they almost met her black fringe.

‘And what makes you so sure that the attack is going to target Gaia?’

‘I heard that it was open for business,’ Tu explained.

‘Not officially. The first group of visitors arrived there a few days ago, Julian Orley’s personal guests. He himself—’ She stopped speaking.

‘Is up there?’ Tu completed the sentence for her. ‘
That
would make me nervous!’

‘There’s nothing in the document about the timing of the operation,’ she said somewhat pedantically. ‘It’s all rather vague.’

‘What’s not so vague is that innocent people have lost their lives because of this document,’ Tu said, almost cheerfully. ‘They’re dead, dead as doornails, definitely
dead, nothing vague about it, if you see what I mean. As for ourselves, we’ve also risked our lives so that you can read it.’

Hoff seemed to consider. ‘How can I reach you?’

Tu gave her his phone number, and Jericho’s.

‘Do you plan to do anything about it?’ he asked. ‘And if so, when?’

‘We’ll let Gaia know. Within the next couple of hours.’ The corners of her mouth lifted slightly, giving the illusion of a smile. ‘Thank you for letting us know. We’ll call you.’

The screen went dark.

‘Was that a woman?’ Yoyo wondered out loud. ‘Or a robot?’

Tu snorted with laughter. ‘Diane?’

‘Good evening, Mister Tu.’

‘Just call me Tian.’

‘I shall do so.’

‘How are you, Diane?’

‘Thank you, Tian, I’m very well,’ Diane said in her warm alto voice. ‘What can I do for you?’

Tu turned back to the others. ‘I’ve no idea who or what Edda Hoff is,’ he whispered. ‘But compared with her, Diane is
definitely
a woman. Owen, I owe you an apology. I’m beginning to understand you.’

‘Is there someone close to you whom you can trust unreservedly?’

Lynn thought about this. Her first instinct was to say Julian’s name, but suddenly she felt uncertain about this. She loved her father and admired him, and of course he trusted
her
. But whenever she saw herself through his eyes she was terrified by the image of the woman with sea-blue eyes, the woman Julian called his daughter, and the worst of it was that she could only ever see herself through his eyes, that even as a child she had yearned for his approval as a plant turns towards the sun. But she wasn’t that woman. So how could she trust
him
, since clearly he knew nothing at all of how she felt, didn’t know that she was just a puppet on strings, a shape-shifting monster, a mimic, a tumour, a thing?

‘Who are you thinking of at the moment?’ asked ISLAND-II.

‘Of my father. Julian Orley.’

‘Julian Orley is your father?’ the program asked, just to be sure.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s not the person you trust, though.’

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact. The man sitting across from her leaned forward. Lynn breathed heavily, and the sensors in her T-shirt dutifully registered her breathing and stored it in the database. The polygraph measured her body temperature, pulse, heartbeat and even her neuronal activity; the program scanned her voice frequencies as she spoke, measured her gestures, the way her pupils expanded or contracted, every movement of her eye muscles, each drop of sweat that formed. With every passing second of measurement, Lynn supplied more information for ISLAND-II, giving the program more to work with when it made statements about her.

The man seemed to stop and think for a moment. Then he smiled encouragingly. He was strongly built, completely bald, with friendly, thoughtful eyes. He seemed to be able to look through every veil that Lynn had wrapped around herself, her diorama of concealment, to pierce every layer with his glance but without that cool invasive gaze that psychologists so often used to put their patients under the microscope.

‘Good, Lynn. Let’s stick with the people around you right now. Tell me the names of the people you feel close to right now. And please leave a couple of seconds between every name.’

She looked at her fingernails. Talking to ISLAND-II was like walking a tightrope in the darkness to an unknown goal – along a torch-beam. The trick of it was to think of yourself as just as unreal as the program. The best thing was that there was no way of making a fool of yourself. For instance, Lynn had no idea at all whether there had ever been a real person who had served as the model for the bald man; the only thing she knew for sure was that it was impossible for him to feel contempt for her concerns. ISLAND-II – the
Integrated System for Listening and Analysis of Neurological Data
– was only as human as the therapists had programmed it to be.

‘Julian Orley,’ Lynn repeated – although the program had already struck him from the list of people she trusted – and she obediently included a brief pause. ‘Tim Orley – Amber Orley – Evelyn Chambers – that’s all of them, I think.’

Evelyn? Did she really trust America’s most powerful talk-show queen? On the other hand, why not? Evelyn was a friend, even if they hadn’t spoken much since the trip began. But the question had been about people she felt close to. What did ‘close’ have to do with trusting a person?

The man looked at her.

‘I’ve learned a great deal about you in the past quarter of an hour,’ he said. ‘You’re
afraid. Less because of any actual concrete threats than because you have thoughts which make you horribly afraid. For as long as you do that, you can’t feel anything else. And then because you’ve lost that ability to feel, you lurch into a depression, this makes you more afraid, and most of all you’re afraid of fear itself. Unfortunately, when you’re in this frame of mind, every one of your thoughts grows to monstrous size, so you make the mistake of imagining that there’s some substance to what you’re thinking and that’s to blame for your condition. So you try to get rid of them at the level of substance, and you end up doing entirely the opposite. They only look like monsters, but the more seriously you take them, the bigger and stronger they grow.’