Quyu. The market. Zhao by his side.
‘Everything okay?’ Zhao asked again.
‘Yes.’ Jericho rubbed his eyes. ‘We shouldn’t waste any time. Let’s get started.’
‘Why don’t you do the job with one of your teams?’
‘Because the job consists in protecting a dissident whose identity no one knows, apart from a handful of initiates. The fewer people get involved with Yoyo, the better.’
‘Does that mean you haven’t talked about the girl to anyone but me?’
‘No. I’ve met her flatmates.’
‘And?’
‘They don’t give much away. Do you know them?’
‘I’ve seen them. Yoyo says they know nothing about her double life. One of them isn’t interested in her, the other’s pissed off that she isn’t interested in him. He’s inclined to throw his weight about.’
‘You mean Grand Cherokee Wang?’
‘I think that’s what he calls himself. Ludicrous name. Windbag. What have they told you?’
‘Nothing. Wang’s not in a position to tell anybody anything. He’s dead.’
‘Really?’ Zhao frowned. ‘Last time I saw him he looked very much alive. He was boasting about some kind of roller-coaster he owns.’
‘He didn’t own anything.’ Jericho stared out across the crowded market. ‘I won’t try to fool you, Zhao. What we’re doing here can get dangerous. For everyone involved. Yoyo seems to have crossed some people who walk over corpses. That was why Wang had to die. I thought you should know that.’
‘Hmm. Okay.’
‘Are you still up for it?’
Zhao let a moment pass. He suddenly looked embarrassed.
‘Listen, about the money—’
‘It’s fine.’
‘No, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I’d help you even if there was nothing in it for me. It’s just – I need the money, that’s all. I mean, you saw those guys at the edge of the street, right?’
‘Dividing up the day?’
‘It would be easy to join in with that. Something is always coming up. Most people live by licking those guys’ boots. You get me?’
‘I think so.’
‘And they don’t do any of that for nothing, do they?’
‘Listen, Zhao, you don’t have to apol—’
‘I’m not apologising. I’m just setting you straight on a few things.’ Zhao stuffed the specs and scanner in his rucksack. ‘How long do you plan to keep this stake-out going?’
‘As long as necessary. I once spent three weeks outside a single front door.’
‘What, and she didn’t invite you in?’ Zhao opened the car door. ‘Well, somehow that fits.’
‘What do you mean?’
Zhao shrugged. ‘Has anyone ever told you you look like the loneliest man in the world? They haven’t? Take care of yourself, first-born!’
A thousand answers collected on the tip of Jericho’s tongue, but unfortunately not one that would have made him look as if he was in charge. He watched Zhao strolling unhurriedly across to Wong’s World, then turned round and drove back to his branch, where he parked the Toyota so that the scanner below the rear-view mirror captured part of the market. Then he got out, walked around the square and decided on two houses whose positions struck him as right. Each one had plenty of possible locations for the additional scanners. He fixed one under a crumbling window ledge, another in a crack in a wall. The devices, black, gleaming, pea-sized spheres, automatically probed their surroundings, and extended tiny telescopic legs to wedge themselves into the stone.
Wong’s World was covered.
A gust of wind ran through the clapped-out canyons of the triad city, tugging at awnings, clothes and nerves. By now it was unbearably sultry, the sky looked like a shroud. A few single, fat drops fell, harbingers of the deluge announced by the far-away rumble. Canopies flapped. Jericho put on his specs and stepped into the foyer of Cyber Planet.
In principle all the branches of the chain looked the same. You were welcomed by standardised machines lined up like terraced houses, with slits for cash and electronic interfaces for remote withdrawals. Two guards chatted behind a counter, never glancing at the monitors. A lot of the guests were regulars, or so it seemed. They didn’t spend long at the machines, but looked into eye-scanners, waited till the armoured glass doors opened, and stepped into the area behind with the hesitant gait of the newly blind.
Inside, games consoles and transparent couches were lined up side by side, each fitted with hologoggles. There was a shelf with room for two dozen full-motion suits, rings three metres in diameter, within which you could dangle in a sensor suit, in order to enjoy complete freedom of movement. Far at the back there were lockable cabins, toilets, showers and sleeping-capsules. The rear wall of the huge space was occupied by a kind of supermarket with a bar. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows gave a view of the street and the market. Apart from the guards in the foyer, there was no staff. Everything was automated. Theoretically, you need never leave the Cyber Planet, as long as you were prepared to be satisfied with fast food and soft drinks for the rest of your life. The chain drew you in with special offers of up to a year in which you had to do nothing other than wander through the virtual world wearing a pair of goggles, whether as a passive onlooker or an active designer. You had dreams and nightmares, lived and died.
Jericho paid for twenty-four hours. About half of the couches were occupied when he entered the room, most of them along the big display window. For impenetrable reasons, most of the visitors wanted to be close to the street, even though they were completely cut off from the outside world by goggles and headphones. Jericho spotted an empty berth from which he had a view of Wong’s World and the crossroads near where his car was parked, stretched out and tapped the arm of his goggles. The outside glass of the lenses turned into a mirror. He jammed the remote receiver of his phone in his ear and got ready for a long night.
Or several.
It was possible that Yoyo was miles away by now, leaving him and Zhao sitting like idiots in a nightmare delivery station.
He yawned.
All of a sudden it was as if all the light had been sucked from the streets. The storm front drew over Quyu, releasing streams of pitch-black water. Within seconds rubbish was floating down the road, people were running wildly in all directions, shoulders hunched, as if that were any protection against being completely drenched. The onslaught of a quick succession of violent thunder crashes edged closer. Jericho looked into a sky split by electricity.
A foretaste of destruction.
After an hour in which the street turned into a miniature version of the Yangtze and banked-up garbage formed a dinky little model of the Three Gorges Dam, it had passed. As quickly as it had come, the storm moved on. The murky broth drained away, leaving a vista of rubbish and drowned rats against a theatrical background of rising steam. Another hour later a glowing magenta ball had won its battle with the clouds and wasted its fire on streets that were free of tourists. Wong’s World welcomed a throng of pale figures, women peeped from tents and shacks, the stale promise of the night, or positioned themselves, scantily dressed, at the crossroads.
At around eleven o’clock a young man on the couch next to Jericho groaned, pulled the goggles from his eyes, sat up and vomited a stream of watery puke between his legs. The couch’s self-cleaning systems hummed immediately into action, sucked the stuff away and flooded the surface with disinfectant.