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‘Great heavens above,’ he cried out. ‘What happened to his eye?’

‘He was attacked with a pencil,’ the trainee doctor said, not without some admiration in her voice. ‘Straight through the bone and into the brain.’

‘And how exactly did that happen?’

Yoyo put two fingers onto Vogelaar’s right eyelid and lifted it. It seemed to have no particular temperature, neither cold nor warm. While Svenja Maas was explaining about angle of entry and pressure, she pressed her middle finger and thumb into the corner of the eye. The eyeball seemed to sit much too firmly in the eye socket, more like a glass marble than soft and slippery, so that for a moment she wasn’t sure that Jericho hadn’t been right after all, and she shoved her fingers deeper into the socket.

Resistance. Were those muscles? The eye wasn’t coming out, rather it tugged backwards, leaking some kind of fluid, like a cornered animal.

That wasn’t a glass eye, not on her life.

‘The shaft splintered,’ Maas said, walking over to the organ table between the corpse and the wash-basin, where something lay in a transparent plastic bag on a tray. Quickly, Yoyo pulled her fingers out of the socket, just before Maas happened to glance over at her. She thought she heard a squelching sound as she did so, reproachful, tell-tale. Tu hurried to block the sightlines again. Yoyo shuddered. Could the woman have heard something? Had there been anything to hear, or had she just imagined it, expecting an eye socket to squelch as you take your fingers out?

The surface of the calm lake inside her began to ruffle. There was something sticky on her fingers. Jericho had been wrong! While Tu twinkled at Svenja Maas,
asking interested questions about her work, she plunged her fingers into Vogelaar’s left eye socket. Straight away she could feel that this was different. The surface was harder, definitely artificial. She pushed further, flexed her middle finger and thumb. All the while, Tu was asking learned questions about the improvised use of drawing equipment as weapons. Maas pronounced that everything could be a weapon, and stepped to the left. Tu declared that she was absolutely right, and stepped to the right. The pathologists at the middle table were busy with Nyela.

Yoyo took a deep breath, high on mint rub.

Now!

The glass eye popped out, almost trustingly, and nestled into the palm of her hand. She slipped it into her jacket, closed Vogelaar’s sunken eyelid as best she could and saw that she had caused lasting disfigurement. Too late. She quickly pulled the sheet back up over his face and took two steps to Tu’s side.

‘There is no doubt any longer about Andre Donner,’ she said in English.

Tu stopped in the middle of a question.

‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Very good. I think we can go.’

‘When will you want my report, Superintendent?’

‘What kind of question is that, Inspector! As soon as possible. The director of prosecutions is breathing down our neck.’

Curtain, applause, Yoyo thought.

‘Are you done?’ Svenja Maas looked from one to the other, disgruntled to be so abruptly ignored.

‘Yes, we don’t want to discommode you any further.’

‘You are not – erm – discommoding me.’

‘No, you are right of course, it was a pleasure. Goodbye, and best wishes to Dr Voss.’

Svenja Maas shrugged and led them out to the lobby, where they said goodbye. Tu marched ahead, sped up on the stairs, and practically raced along the corridor. Yoyo scurried after him. The last of her calm was gone. They didn’t need any authorisation to leave. They went out into the car park and headed for the Audi, when suddenly a commanding voice rang out from the building.

‘Mr Tu, Miss Chen!’

Yoyo froze. Slowly she turned, and saw Dr Marika Voss standing on the steps, her chin raised.

They’ve noticed, Yoyo thought. We were too slow.

‘Please forgive our hasty departure.’ Tu raised his arms apologetically. ‘We wanted to say goodbye, but we couldn’t find you.’

‘Was everything as you had hoped?’

‘You were extremely helpful!’

‘I’m glad of that.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘Well, then, I hope that you make progress with your investigations.’

‘Thanks to your help, we shall make great strides.’

‘Good day to you.’

Dr Voss marched back inside, and Yoyo felt as though she had turned to butter in the sunshine. She slid into the Audi, and melted onto the seat.

‘Do you have it?’ Tu asked.

‘I have it,’ she replied, with the last of her strength.

* * *

Svenja Maas wasn’t exactly offended, but she was rather peeved. As she went back into the autopsy theatre she felt a nagging suspicion that the Chinese policeman hadn’t really been interested in her, just in keeping up some Asiatic notion of etiquette. She went to the furthest tables and noticed that his young inspector had put the sheet back up over Donner’s corpse, though not very neatly. She tugged at it irritably, and found that the whole thing was crooked. She turned the sheet down.

She saw straight away that something was wrong. Vogelaar’s right eye wasn’t looking good, but the left eye was horrible.

With a dark presentiment, she lifted the lid.

The glass eye was missing.

For a moment she flushed hot and cold at the thought that she would be blamed. She had left the eye in its socket, but only because she wanted to take it out later and show it to a prosthetics expert. They had noticed something odd about it. It looked as though it had something inside, maybe some sort of mechanism with which Vogelaar could see, perhaps something else. They hadn’t really considered it significant.

Obviously they had been wrong.

Electrified, she ran from the theatre and up the stairs. She found Dr Marika Voss in the corridor.

‘Are the Chinese police still here?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘The Chinese?’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows. ‘No, they just left. Why?’

‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

‘What’s up?’ the older woman demanded.

‘They took something with them,’ Maas stammered. Bastards, landing her in it like this!

‘With them?’ Voss echoed.

‘The eye. The glass eye.’

The doctor hadn’t been in the team who had examined Donner. She
knew nothing about the eye, but she understood all the same that they would be in trouble.

‘I’ll call the guards at the gate,’ she said.

* * *

The car glided along the main road on the hospital campus, past the stern red-brick buildings, the peaceful lawns and paths, the shady trees.

‘Hey,’ Yoyo said, frowning. ‘What’s going on up ahead?’

Somebody came running out of the guards’ cabin, a man in uniform. He raised his hands as though directing an aeroplane on the runway. At the same time, the barrier began to drop. Obviously the fuss was about them.

‘I should imagine we’ve been found out.’

‘Great. Now what?’

‘All down to you.’ Tu looked across at her. ‘How do you like Berlin? Do you want to stay?’

‘Not at any cost.’

‘Thought not,’ he said, accelerated and shot under the barrier, so close that Yoyo was surprised not to hear it scrape across the roof. Behind them, the guard’s yells drifted like pollen on the summer air.

The symbol shimmering on the display showed many twisting reptilian necks, all springing from a single body. Nine heads. The symbol of Hydra.

Xin clapped the phone to his ear.

‘We’ve sent you data from several major Berlin hotels,’ said the caller. ‘No luck with the smaller ones. There’s a hell of a lot of them – all Berlin seems to be nothing but hotels. The problem was that working so fast, we couldn’t get into every single computer—’

‘Understood. And?’

‘No hits.’

‘They
must
be staying somewhere,’ Xin insisted.

‘They’re not in any of the international chains. No Chen Yuyun and no Owen Jericho. However, I can give you more details of the warning that reached London yesterday. I’ll send you the text. Do you want to hear it first?’

‘Spit it out.’

Xin listened to the fragmentary sentences that he already knew so well. He considered just how dangerous this fire might be that Yoyo and Jericho had started. It was hardly a fragment by now. They had decrypted almost ninety per cent of the message. All the same, the really important parts, the decisive information, was still missing. And it hadn’t been Jericho, or the girl, who had called Edda Hoff, but a man called Tu. Hoff was number three in the Orley security chain of command, and Xin knew very little about her, other than that she was quite unimaginative and accordingly would never exaggerate, or downplay, a threat.

‘Hoff made the decision on her own account, and she told the whole corporation that there may perhaps be an attack, without pretending that she had any real information,’ the caller said. ‘Gaia was informed as well, just like every other link in the corporate network, but they saw no reason to change the programme up on the Moon. Hoff seems to have let all the right people know.’ The caller didn’t dare name names over the telephone, even though it was practically impossible that anyone might be listening in on this connection. On the other hand, they had never expected that the encrypted messages piggy-backing on harmless email attachments could be cracked.

‘Tu,’ said Xin thoughtfully.

‘That’s the name he gave. I’ll send you over his mobile number. We don’t know where he was calling from.’

Unlike the astonishing diversity of given names, the number of Chinese family names was limited indeed. The vast majority of Chinese people shared just a few dozen clan names, mostly monosyllables – the so-called Old Hundred Names. It was not uncommon for an entire village to be called Zheng, Wang, Han, Ma, Hu or Tu. Nevertheless Xin couldn’t shake off the feeling that he had heard the name Tu quite recently, and in connection with Yoyo.

‘Have you taken those pages down from the web?’ he asked, since inspiration failed to strike.

‘That channel of communication has been closed.’

Xin knew what the decision entailed, so he understood why his caller was so sullen. The man at the other end of the line had himself suggested the piggy-back encryption, and had written the code. It had served them well for three years. Hydra’s heads had been able to exchange messages in real time, functioning as one great brain.

‘We’ll get over it,’ he said, trying to sound friendly. ‘The net served its purpose for us, and more, and it’s all down to you! Everybody respects your contribution. Just as everybody will understand why we decided to break off simultaneous communication so close to our goal. The time has come when there’s nothing more to say. All we can do is await developments.’

Xin hung up, stared down at his feet and shifted them to a parallel position, ankles and instep exactly the same distance apart, not touching. Slowly, he drew his knees inwards. How he hated the tangled web of accident and circumstance! As soon as he felt the hairs on his calves begin to brush against one another, he adjusted his feet, shifted his thighs, his arms, his hands, his shoulders, positioning them symmetrically along the line of an imaginary axis, until he sat there as an exact mirror image, one side of his body the perfect reflection of the other. This usually helped him to get his thoughts in order, but this time the technique failed. He felt dizzy with self-doubt, blindsided by the thought that perhaps he’d done everything wrong, that hunting Yoyo down had only made things worse.

Thoughts and afterthoughts.

Losing control.

His heart hammered like a piston. Only one last nudge, he felt, and he would burst apart into a thousand pieces. No, not him. His shell. The human cloak called Kenny Xin. He felt like a host body for his own larval self, like a cocoon, a pupa, the mid-stage of some metamorphosis, and he was horribly afraid of whatever it was that was eating him from the inside. Sometimes it grew, flexed itself and choked the breath in his throat, and he couldn’t tame it, couldn’t take the strain any longer; at these moments he had to give the beast something to calm it, just as he had allowed it to burn the hut where his torturers had kept him. Unredeemed, sick and poverty-stricken as they were, he had given them to the flames, and in that moment had felt himself made free, cleansed of all suffering, his mind clear and unclouded. Since then he had often wondered whether he had gone mad that day, or been cured of madness. He could hardly remember the time before. At most, he remembered his disgust at living in this world. His hatred towards his parents for having given birth to him, even if at such a tender age he knew little of just how he had been thrust into this world. He only felt certain that his family was responsible for his life, which was already enough to make him hate them, and that they were making it a living hell.

That there was no sense to his existence.

It was only after the fire that the sense of it all became clear. Could he be mad when suddenly everything made sense? How many so-called sane people spent their days in the most senseless activities? How much of accepted morality was based on ritual and dogma, with not the least shred of sense to it? The fire had broadened his horizons, so that all at once he recognised the plan, creation’s twisting labyrinthine paths, its abstract beauty. There was no way back from here. He had moved up to a higher level which some might call madness, but which was simply an insight of such all-illuming power that he had to struggle to contain it. Any attempt to share it with others was mere vanity. How could he explain to others that everything he
did flowed from a higher insight? It was the price that he paid, by making other people pay.

No. He hadn’t made things worse.

He had had to make sure!

Xin imagined his own brain. A Rorschach universe. The purity of symmetry, predictability, control. Slowly, he felt his calm return. He stood up, plugged the phone into the room’s computer console and uploaded the hotel reservation lists. He went through them one by one. Naturally he didn’t expect to see Chen Yuyun or Owen Jericho turn up in the lists. Hydra’s hackers had gone through the lists several times over once they had broken into the hotel systems. He didn’t exactly know what he expected to find, he only knew that he felt he would find
something
.