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Who was Hydra?

He turned the lights back on. Yoyo was right. They’d found out a hell of a lot of things, they’d thwarted the plans of the conspirators, they had good reason to be proud. At the same time he felt as if they’d been looking through the wrong end of a telescope all along. The closest things had drifted into the distance, into supposed insignificance, but in fact all you had to do was turn the telescope around and the truth would move into the foreground. He opened a bottle of Shiraz, poured himself a glass and systematically crossed all previous suspects off the list: Beijing, Zheng Pang-Wang, the CIA. On closer inspection all of these trails had turned in a
circle, but there might have been one that he hadn’t properly understood, one that carried straight on.

The Greenwatch massacre.

The complete leadership of the environmental broadcaster, all wiped out. Why? No one was able to say what Greenwatch had been working on most recently, even though there were several suggestions that there had been a report on environmental damage by oil companies. Loreena’s ambition to clear up the Calgary attack had finally focused attention on the film that supposedly showed Gerald Palstein’s attacker. But given how quickly these pictures had spread, the massacre could hardly have taken place in order to prevent their further dissemination.

He had Diane play through the film sequence once more. Towards the end, as the camera swung round towards the stage, you could see that the square was full of people with mobile phones, and surrounded by television crews. A miracle, in fact, that Xin hadn’t been captured more often, fat suit and all, at any rate Hydra should have predicted that and factored it in, but equally that might have been the first error of reasoning.

Perhaps they’d been
banking
on it!

The longer Jericho thought about the sequence, the more Xin’s weird disguise and his stately way of creeping around seemed to be part of an act designed to present investigators with an Asian assassin just in case he was caught on camera – just as Zheng’s visible presence in Equatorial Guinea had left an elephant track in the Middle Kingdom. There was a glimpse of Lars Gudmundsson with his double game; Palstein was still alive by happy chance, leaving the way open for Carl Hanna; Loreena Keowa got to the bottom of that, costing ten people their lives and Greenwatch its memory.

Did that make sense? Not really.

Unless she’d found out things at Greenwatch that
really
put the pressure on Hydra.

Loreena had travelled in from Calgary. Possibly in possession of explosive information. She had immediately gone to the editorial conference, a meeting that Hydra had been able to prevent at the last minute, although this meant that the conspirators still didn’t know how much of the unwelcome research was already stored on the channel’s hard drives, because Loreena might have sent emails in the run-up!

That was it.

Jericho got to work. While it was approaching midnight in Shanghai, the noonday sun was shining on the other side of the Pacific. He had Diane draw up a list of all the relevant internet service providers and started phoning them, one after the other, always on the same pretext: he was calling on behalf of Loreena, because it was impossible to send or receive emails from her web address, and would they
please be so kind as to take a look and see why that wasn’t working. Eleven times he was told that no Loreena Keowa was stored as a customer, three of the people he spoke to knew Loreena from the net, had learned of her death and expressed their dismay, for which Jericho thanked them in his best funeral-director voice. He only struck gold with the twelfth call. He was asked to give a password, which meant that she was registered there. Jericho promised to call back. Then he hacked his way into the provider’s system and put Diane to decoding Loreena’s password. Every data transfer had been recorded, so that within a few minutes he received information about Loreena’s mail provider. He rang back, gave the password, and asked if any emails sent over the last fourteen days were still stored in the system. They were stored for up to six weeks, he was told, and which ones did he wish to see?

All of them, he said.

Half an hour later he had viewed all the documents concerning the environmental scandal, which, under the title
Trash of the Titans
, had been supposed to form the core of that broadcast. It named a lot of names, but Jericho didn’t believe in a connection for a second. The massacre had occurred as a reaction to the last email sent. It contained the answers to all the questions.

Hydra’s identity.

Gudmundsson—

The name sparked something in Jericho’s mind. Following an intuition, he took out Vogelaar’s dossier again, and there it was: Lars Gudmundsson had belonged to the special unit that had brought Mayé to power – along with Neil Gabriel, aka Carl Hanna. They both seemed to have got on particularly well with Kenny Xin, so well, in fact, that they had worked for him in various ways and finally quit APS. Loreena’s email also included the film from the crime scene, a direct line to Repsol and the private number of the presumably widowed Señora Ruiz. He had Diane assemble further facts about the Spaniard, but didn’t come up with much more than the journalist had already put together. In film sequences and pictures the man looked sympathetic, positive and energetic.

But after the meeting in Beijing he’d been worried.

And then he’d disappeared.

Why had that sudden change occurred? Because he’d experienced or learned something at the meeting that stressed him? Right, but more likely because he could no longer be sure of his life. If Alejandro Ruiz had actually fallen victim to a crime, it was because someone had wanted to keep the contents of that meeting from becoming public.

Had Hydra killed Ruiz because he knew about Operation Mountains of Eternal Light? But in that case how was Palstein involved? Loreena found striking factors in common between the two. Might Palstein have been informed about Hydra’s plans?

Jericho took a sip of Shiraz.

Nonsense. These were ludicrous hypotheses. Ruiz had disappeared
immediately
after the meeting. Before he could open his mouth. Why would they have given Pal-stein three years to bring his knowledge to the people? Calgary had clearly served
the purpose of slipping an agent into Orley’s tour group, and also Palstein was
alive
, even if it was only by chance. Since then there had been no more attempts on his life, even though opportunities had arisen. Gudmundsson, for example, constantly near him for professional reasons, could have killed him with a close-range bullet at any time.

And why hadn’t he done it?

And why hadn’t he done it
before
? Before Calgary?

Hydra had managed to infiltrate Palstein’s inner circle, his security men. Why go to all that effort? A public event. Agents distracting the police. Kenny Xin, firing from an empty building? Why so
laborious
?

Because it was supposed to look like something that it wasn’t.

No doubt about it: the connection between Lima and Calgary, between Ruiz and Palstein, existed. Loreena’s research led directly to Hydra, otherwise the butchers of Vancouver wouldn’t have murdered ten people and got rid of their computers. So what had
really
happened on 21 April in Canada?

The meeting in Beijing provided the key.

He was about to phone Repsol in Madrid when the doorbell rang. Startled, he looked at his watch. Twenty past one. Drunks? The bell rang again. For a moment he toyed with the idea of ignoring it, then he went to the intercom and looked at the screen.

Yoyo.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in a puzzled voice.

‘How about you press the button?’ she snapped at him. ‘Or do I have to announce my visits in writing first?’

‘It’s not exactly the time of day when you expect visitors,’ he said as she stepped into his loft, her motorbike helmet under her arm. Yoyo shrugged. She set the helmet down on the central kitchen counter, ambled into the living area and glanced curiously around in all directions. He followed her.

‘Pretty.’

‘Not quite finished.’

‘Still.’ She pointed at the open bottle of Shiraz. ‘Is there another glass?’

Jericho scratched himself irritably behind the ear as she slipped out of her leather jacket and threw herself on his sofa.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Wait.’

He looked across to her and brought out a second glass. In the gloom of the lounge a reddish glimmer indicated that she had lit a cigarette. After he had filled her glass, they sat there for a few minutes, drinking in silence, and Yoyo sent smoke signals issuing from the corners of her mouth, encoded explanations for her
presence. She stared into the void. From time to time the heavy curtains of her eyelashes seemed to want to wipe away what they had seen, but whenever she looked up her gaze was as lost as before. More than ever she reminded him of the girl in the video film that Chen Hongbing had shown him a week and a half before.

A week and a half?

It could just as easily have been a year.

‘And what are you up to at the moment?’ she asked, glancing at Diane.

‘Wondering what’s brought you here.’

‘Didn’t you want to go to bed? Get some sleep at last?’

‘I’ve tried.’

She nodded. ‘Me too. I thought it would be easier.’

‘Sleeping?’

‘Carrying on from where you’ve left off. But it’s like reaching into the void. A lot of things no longer exist. The control centre at the steelworks. The Guardians. And I’ve seen Grand Cherokee’s room with all his stuff in it, as if he were about to come back. Spooky. On the other hand, college is college. The same professors, the same lecture theatres. The same administration that makes sure you don’t start thinking too independently. The same chicken coop, the same battles and trivia. I listen to music, I go out, watch television, remind myself that everyone else is even worse off than me, that I could be dead, and that the banality of everyday life has its good side. I try to convince myself that I should be feeling relieved.’

Jericho crossed his legs. He sat in silence on the floor in front of her, his back resting against a chair.

‘And then the thing I’ve been waiting for all my life happens. Hongbing takes me in his arms, tells me how much he loves me and showers me with tragedies. The whole terrible story. And I know I should be letting off fireworks for this moment, I should die of pity, go mad with joy, throw my arms around his neck, the bastards have no power over us now, it’s all going to be okay, we can talk to each other at last, we’re a family! Instead’ – she blew smoke-snakes in the air – ‘my head feels like a chest of a thousand drawers, everyone stuffs whatever he feels like into it, and now my father’s joining in! I think, Yoyo, you miserable little cripple, why don’t you feel anything? Come on, now, you’ve got to
feel
something, after all, you wished—’ She reached for her glass, downed the contents and sucked the remaining life from her cigarette. ‘You so wished he would talk to you! Even when Kenny held his bloody gun to my head, I thought, no! I don’t want to die without finding out what threw
his
life so far off the rails. But now I know, I just feel … full.’

Jericho turned his glass around in his hand.

‘And at the same time hollowed out,’ she went on. ‘That’s crazy, isn’t it? Nothing
moves me! As if this isn’t the world as I used to know it, but a mere copy of it. Everything looks as if it’s made of cardboard.’

‘And you think it’ll never be normal again.’

‘It scares me, Owen. Maybe everything’s all right with the world, and
I’m
the copy. Maybe the real Yoyo was shot by Xin after all.’

Jericho stared at his feet.

‘In a sense she was.’

‘Xin stole something that night.’ She looked at him. ‘Took something. Took me away. I can no longer feel what I should be feeling. I’m no longer able to give my father the respect I should. Not even to burst dramatically into floods of tears.’