Yoyo smiled smugly. ‘I’ve found the missing years. Does the name ArmourGroup ring any bells with you?’
‘It does. It’s a London security giant.’
‘In 2008 ArmourGroup took on a mandate in Kenya. Around that time, a smaller company, Armed African Services, went through a de-merger. Vogelaar’s Mamba was operating in the same crisis area. They crossed paths, perhaps one of them approached the other and borrowed some ammunition or something, but to cut a long story short they took a liking to one another and formed APS in 2010, with Vogelaar at management level. Do you see?’
‘I do. So Mayé overthrew Ndongo with the help of APS. But who paid APS?’
‘That’s exactly the point. Mayé was incredibly friendly with China.’
‘You mean—’
‘I mean that we assumed the whole time that the coup attempt discussed in the text fragment was the one from last year. But Beijing would have had far more reason to pull the strings in 2017.’
‘And how did Mayé’s coup go?’
‘Without a hitch. As a precaution, Ndongo was out of the country. But no one seemed particularly surprised by it. No resistance, no fatalities. The only one who was shocked was Obiang. Mayé had numerous opposition members imprisoned, including Obiang’s closest confidants, Teodorin supporters, Gabrielists—’
‘Because he had no intention of stepping down.’
‘Bingo.’
‘And Vogelaar became his security boss.’
‘Yep.’
‘Is there proof that China was tied up in it?’
‘Owen, what’s wrong with you?’ Yoyo reprimanded him. ‘There’s never proof, you know that. But on the other hand you would have to be a zombie to overlook the fact that Exxon, Marathon and Co. got the chop immediately after the putsch, whereas the Chinese company Sinopec was suddenly swimming in oil from Equatorial Guinea. Then there’s Mayé’s speeches: they owed the Chinese their gratitude, China had always been a brother, blah blah blah. When it came down to it, he wholeheartedly agreed to his country being sold out to China.’
Jericho nodded. It was obvious that Yoyo was right: Mayé had taken power with the help of the Chinese and, as agreed, hadn’t forgotten to reward them. But then why did they later want to kill him?’
‘And if it wasn’t the Chinese…’ said Yoyo, as if she had read his thoughts. ‘Last year, I mean.’
‘Then who?’
‘Is it that hard to guess? Mayé doesn’t miss a single opportunity to snub the Americans. He has their representatives imprisoned, breaks all contracts, aids and abets terrorist attacks on American institutions, even though he denies it outright in diplomatic circles. In any case, it was enough that Washington was threatening him with sanctions and invasion.’
‘It sounds like sabre-rattling.’
‘That’s precisely the question.’
‘So what then? The guy ruled for seven years. What happened in that time?’
‘He held his hand out. Finished the economy off. Made opposition members disappear, had them tortured, beheaded, who knows what else. Before long, Obiang looked like a philanthropist compared with Mayé, but now they had him by the neck. Mayé didn’t get involved with cannibalism, witchcraft and the whole black magic scene, but he was certainly developing considerable delusions of grandeur. He built skyscrapers that no one moved into, but he didn’t care, the important thing was how the skyline looked. He planned Equatorial Guinea’s own version of Las Vegas and wanted to set up an opera house in the sea. The final straw was when he announced that Equatorial Guinea was promoting itself to become a Space nation, to which end, and in all seriousness, he had a launching pad built in the middle of the jungle.’
‘Wait a second—’ It slowly dawned on Jericho that he had read something about it at the time. An African dictator who had built a space-rocket launch base and bragged to the rest of the world that his country would be sending astronauts to the Moon. ‘Wasn’t that—?’
‘In 2022,’ said Yoyo. ‘Two years before he was overthrown.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Well, do you see any Africans in space?’
‘No.’
‘Exactly. He did send one thing up though. A news satellite.’
‘And what on earth did Mayé need a news satellite for?’
Yoyo circled her finger over her temple. ‘Because he wasn’t all there, Owen. Why do men get penis extensions? They’re nothing but space-rocket launch bases on a smaller scale. But the whole thing became a mockery because the satellite broke down just a few weeks after the launch.’
‘But it was launched.’
‘Yes, without a hitch.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Nothing really. Two years later, Mayé was liquidated, and Ndongo came back.’ Yoyo leaned back. Her entire posture said she was ready to call it a day and unwind. ‘You probably know more about that than I do. That was the part you researched.’
‘But I don’t know much about Ndongo.’
‘Oh well,’ Yoyo shrugged. ‘If you want to find out who footed the bill this time then you’ll need to take a close look at Ndongo’s oil politics. I’ve got no idea whether he has been as loyally devoted to China as Mayé was.’
‘Definitely not.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You said yourself that he would have attacked China pretty heftily. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Ndongo was put in there by the USA and taken out by China.’
‘So who took Mayé out?’
Jericho gnawed on his lower lip.
statement coup Chinese government
‘Something in this story doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘In the text fragment it’s about a coup that China is tied up in, but they can’t mean the coup of 2017. For one thing, that’s eight years ago. And in any case, everyone suspects Beijing was involved in it anyway, so why would they be hunting us down because of that? And another thing, it was explicitly about Donner and Vogelaar. But Vogelaar only comes up in connection with Mayé.’
‘Or was placed there by Beijing back then. Maybe as a kind of guard for Mayé. A spy.’
‘And Donner?’
‘Think back, it wasn’t just a coup last year. It was an execution. A concerted effort to get rid of witnesses. Mayé must have known something, or rather, he and his staff must have. Something so explosive that someone was prepared to kill him for it.’
‘Something about China.’
‘Why else would China have cleared someone out of the way that they themselves put in power? Perhaps Mayé became a liability. And Donner was one of his staff.’
‘And Vogelaar was the one who had contact with Beijing. As security chief, he was closest to Mayé. So he recommends decapitating Mayé’s regime.’
‘And they do. Apart from Donner.’
‘He gets away.’
‘And now Vogelaar is supposed to find him and give him the same send-off he gave Mayé. That’s why they’re after us. Because we know that Donner’s cover has been blown. Because we could beat Vogelaar to it. Because we could warn Donner.’
‘And Kenny?’
‘He might be Vogelaar’s Chinese contact.’
Jericho’s brain was throbbing. If the yarn they were spinning was actually true, then Donner’s life was hanging by a silk thread.
No, there had to be more to it. It wasn’t just about them preventing Donner from being killed. That was part of it, certainly, but the real reason for the brutal hunt of the last twenty-four hours was something else. Someone was worried that they could find out what Donner knew.
He stared out into the night and hoped they weren’t too late.
Berlin, Germany
A glowing circuit board. A mildewed spider’s web against a black background. Colonies of endlessly interwoven deep-sea organisms, the neuron landscape of an endlessly sprawling brain, a cosmos slipping away. At night, and seen from a great height, the world looks like anything but a globe illuminated only by streetlamps, neon signs, cars and house lights, by exhausted taxi drivers and shift workers, by the perpetual search for diversion and by worries which find their expression in sleeplessness and apartments lit up into the early hours. What – in the eyes of an extraterrestrial observer – might look like a coded message, actually means: Yes, we are alone in the universe, everyone for themselves and all for one, and we’re here in the dark wilderness too, except that we’re underdeveloped, poor and cut off from everything.