Quyu, the Zone, the forgotten world. The perfect place if you wanted to disappear without trace.
The little bike workshop wasn’t in Quyu proper, but it was close enough to function as a gateway in or out. Jericho sighed. He found himself forced to take a step that he didn’t like at all. He often worked with the Shanghai police, as he had done just recently. He had good relations with them. The officers would sometimes help him with his own cases, depending on whether they had their own irons in the fire in the cases of corruption or espionage that Jericho was looking into. For all that, they worked shoulder to shoulder when it came to fighting monsters such as Animal Ma Liping. His reputation among the police force was growing, even before he had rooted out the paedophile. When he went out drinking with members of the force, they let it be known that they would like to pass on information if he needed it, and ever since the nightmare in Shenzhen his friend Patrice Ho, a high-ranking officer, owed him a major favour, and had made it clear that this could be a peek into police databases. Jericho would have been all too pleased to call in the favour now, but if the authorities really were after Yoyo, he couldn’t even think about it.
And that meant that he had to hack his way in.
He’d dared to do so twice. He’d succeeded twice.
At the time, he had sworn not to chance it a third time. He knew what he’d be in for if they caught wind of him. After Beijing had hacked into European and American government networks in 2007, the West had gone on a counter-offensive, supported by Russian and Arab hackers working off their own grudges. Since then, there was hardly anything China feared more than cyber-attacks. Accordingly, anybody infiltrating Chinese systems was shown no mercy.
With mixed feelings, he set to work.
A little later he had the access he wanted to various archives. Practically every area of the city was decked out with scanners hidden in the walls of houses, in traffic lights and signposts, in door handles and bell-pushes, in advertising hoardings, labels, mirrors, scaffolding and household devices. They scanned retinas, stored biometrics, analysed the way people walked and gestured, recorded voices and sounds. While the phone-tapping system had been brought to the peak of perfection some decades ago, using the American NSA system as a model, retinal analysis was a comparatively new phenomenon. The scanner could recognise individual structures in the human iris from several metres away and thereby identify a person. Microscopically small directional mics filtered the frequencies out of a noisy street crossing till you could hear one voice speaking quite distinctly. The real art of such surveillance lay in evaluating data. The system recognised wanted individuals by the way they moved, could recognise a face even obscured by a false beard. If Yoyo glanced just once into one of the omnipresent scanners, this would be enough to identify her retina, which had been data-captured first as she was born, again on her first day of school, and then at university enrolment. It had also been stored when she was arrested, and when she was released.
Jericho’s computer started sifting.
It analysed every twitch of Yoyo’s eyes, dived into the crystalline structures of her iris, measured the angle of her lips when she smiled, set up studies for the way her hair moved in the wind, calibrated the sway of her hips, the spread of her fingers as she swung her arms, the line of her wrist as she pointed, her average length of pace. Yoyo became a creature of equations, an algorithm which Jericho sent out into the phantom world of the police surveillance archive, hoping that it would meet its match there. He narrowed down the search window to the time right after she had vanished, but even so the system reported more than two thousand hits. He uploaded the stolen data to his hard drive, stored it under Yoyofiles and withdrew as quickly as he could. His presence had not been noticed. Time to begin evaluation.
Hold on, there was one piece of the puzzle missing. Unlikely though it might seem, this student with the grandiose name might actually have some information to offer. What was the guy called anyway? Grand Cherokee Wang.
Grand Cherokee—
At that moment, Jericho was struck by the realisation.
He had found out in his investigations that Wang had a part-time job at the World Financial Center where Tu’s company was headquartered. He handled the Silver Dragon—
And the Silver Dragon was a roller-coaster!
The roller-coaster had been set in motion, outside its usual hours. It looks as if whoever it was had been working up there.
Jericho gazed into empty air. His gut feelings told him that the student hadn’t jumped of his own accord, and it hadn’t been an accident. Wang was dead because he had known something about Yoyo. No, not even that! Because he had given the impression that he knew something about Yoyo.
This put the case in a whole new light.
He paced through the enormous loft, went into the kitchen and said, ‘Tea. Lady Grey. One cup, two sugars, milk as usual.’
While the machine attended to his order, he went over what he knew. Perhaps he was seeing ghosts, but his knack for spotting patterns and making connections where others saw only fragments had rarely let him down. It was obvious that there was somebody else after Yoyo, besides himself. This wasn’t in itself news. Chen and Tu had both voiced their suspicion that Yoyo was on the run. Both of them had also been doubtful that she was wanted by the police, even if Yoyo herself might believe just that. This time, she hadn’t been picked up by police officers as had happened twice before, rather she had vanished at dead of night. Why? The decision seemed to have been taken in great haste. Something must have made Yoyo fear a visit, in the next few minutes or hours, from people who did not have her best interests at heart. So what had she done before she took fright?
Had she been warned?
By whom? Against whom? If Wang had been telling the truth, she had been alone at the time, so that meant that she might have had a calclass="underline" Make sure you get out of there. Or an email. Perhaps nothing of the sort. Perhaps she had discovered something on the net, seen something on the news, that frightened her.
A diffident beeping sound from the kitchen let him know that his tea was ready. Jericho picked up the cup, burned his hand, cursed and took a little sip. He decided to call customer service to reprogram the machine. Two sugars was too sweet, one not sweet enough. Lost in thought, he went back to his office area. Shanghai police were not squeamish, but they were hardly in the habit of throwing suspects off the roof. More likely, Grand Cherokee Wang would have come round in a police station. The kid had wanted to play a bluff. A chancer, who hadn’t actually had anything to sell, and had tried his act with the wrong customer.
Whose toes had Yoyo been treading on, for heaven’s sake?
‘Breaking news,’ he said. ‘Shanghai. World Financial Center.’
Headlines and images grouped themselves together on the wall. Jericho blew on his tea and asked the computer to read him the latest reports.
‘Today at around 10.20 local time a man fell to his death from the Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong,’ said a female voice, pleasantly low-pitched. ‘Initial reports suggest that he worked in the building, with responsibility for watching and operating the Silver Dragon, the world’s highest roller-coaster. At the time he fell, the ride was in motion, outside of usual hours. The Public Prosecutor has opened proceedings against the ride’s owners. It has been impossible to establish so far whether this was an accident or suicide, but everything seems to point to—’