‘I tried to collect information about Yü Shen. It was a difficult task. Officially, the department doesn’t exist, and it’s actually very similar to the hell court. It recruits its members from prisons, psychiatric institutions and clinics for brain research. You might say they search for evil. For highly gifted people whose psychic defect is so far over the inhibition threshold that they would normally be locked away. But, with Yü Shen, they get a second chance. Not that they want to make them into better people there, mind, it’s more about how to use their evil. They carry out tests. All kinds of tests, the type you wouldn’t even want to hear about. After a year, they decide whether you’ll be reborn in freedom, for example in the military or Secret Service, or whether you’ll live out your life in the hell of the institution.’
‘It sounds like an army of butchers,’ said Yoyo, disgusted.
‘Not necessarily. Some Yü Shen graduates have gone on to have incredible careers.’
‘And Kenny?’
‘When Yü Shen tracked him down, he had just turned fifteen and was in an institution for mentally disturbed young offenders. Most of what happened before that remains in darkness. It seems he grew up in bitter poverty, in the corner of a settlement where not even tramps dare to go. A father, mother, and two siblings. I don’t know much more detail than that. Just that one night, when he was ten years old, he poured two canisters of petrol onto his family’s corrugated iron shack while they were all sleeping. Then he blocked up all the escape routes with barricades he had spent weeks making out of rubbish, hooked them all up so that no one could get out, and set the whole thing on fire.’
Yoyo stared at him.
‘And his—?’
‘Burnt to death.’
‘The whole family?’
‘Every one of them. It was pure chance that some shrink got wind of it and took the boy away with him. He declared that Kenny possessed outstanding intelligence and well-developed clarity of thought. The boy didn’t deny anything, didn’t utter a single word in attempt to explain why he had done it. For four years he was passed around circles of experts, each of them trying to get to the bottom of his behaviour, until ultimately Yü Shen became aware of his existence.’
‘And they let him loose on humanity!’
‘He was declared to be healthy.’
‘Healthy?’
‘In the sense that he was in control of himself. They didn’t find anything. No mental illness that features in the textbooks at any rate. Just a bizarre compulsion for order, a fascination with symmetry. Classical symptoms of compulsive behaviour, but overall nothing that could brand him as being insane. He was just – evil.’
For a while, there was an uneasy silence. Jericho thought back over what he knew about Xin. His love of directing the action, the eerie ability he had of reading people’s minds. Vogelaar was right. Kenny was evil. And yet he had the feeling that wasn’t all there was to it. It was as if some dark code underlay his behaviour, one that he followed and felt bound to.
‘Now, in the meantime I had no reason to mistrust Kenny. Everything was running like a well-oiled machine. Beijing kept to its promise not to get involved, Mayé was enjoying the status of an autonomous ruler. Oil flowed in return for money. Then the decline came. The whole world was talking about helium-3, everyone wanted to go to the Moon. Interest in fossil resources kept falling, and Mayé couldn’t do a thing about it. Nothing at all. Neither executions nor fits of madness could help.’ Vogelaar flicked ashes from his cigar. ‘So, on 30 April 2022 he called me to his office. As I walked in, he was sitting there with a number of men and women, who he introduced to us as representatives of the Chinese Air and Space Travel Ministry.’
‘I know what they wanted!’ Yoyo waved her hand eagerly as if she were in a classroom. ‘They suggested building a launching pad.’
Jericho was jerked from his thoughts. ‘So it wasn’t Mayé’s idea at all.’
‘No, it wasn’t. He wanted to know what it was for of course. They said it was to shoot a satellite into space. He asked what kind of satellite. They said: “Just a satellite, it doesn’t matter what kind. Do you want a satellite? Your own, Equatorial Guinea news satellite? You can have it. The only important thing to us is the launch, and that no one finds out who’s behind it.”’
‘But why?’ asked Jericho, dumbfounded. ‘What did they have to gain from shooting Chinese satellites up from African soil?’
‘That’s what we wanted to know too, naturally. They told us there was a space treaty agreed in the sixties at the initiative of the United Nations, then signed and ratified by the majority of member states. It’s about who outer space belongs to, what they can or can’t do, and who can permit or forbid things. Part of the treaty is a liability clause, later put in concrete terms in a special agreement, which regulates all the claims regarding accidents with artificial celestial bodies. For example: if a meteorite falls into your garden and kills your chickens, you can’t do a thing. But if it’s not a meteorite but a satellite with a nuclear reactor, and it doesn’t fall on your chickens but right smack bang in central Berlin, then that would cause damage of astronomic proportions, not to mention the dead and wounded and the soaring cancer rate. So who would be liable for that?’
‘Whoever caused it?’
‘Correct. The state that sent it up, and the treaty dictates that the liability has no limits. If Germany can prove it was a Chinese satellite, then China has to cough up. The decisive factor is always whose territory something was launched from. So the more a nation launches, the higher the risk they run of having to pay up at some point. That’s why, according to the delegates, they were now negotiating with states who were willing to allow China to build launch pads on their territory and pass them off to the world as being their own.’
‘But that would make those states liable!’
‘Guys like Mayé don’t have any issues with driving their own people into ruin. He had long since piled the millions from the oil trade into private bunkers, just like Obiang did before him. The only thing he cared about was what was in it for him. So Kenny named a figure. It was exorbitantly high. Mayé tried to stay calm, while all the while he was pissing himself with joy under his tropical wood desk.’
‘Didn’t the whole thing seem completely absurd to him?’
‘The delegation claimed that Beijing was concluding deals like these for minimisation of risk. That the danger of a satellite falling was becoming less and less, and that it wasn’t to do with military operations, it was merely about the testing of a new, experimental initiative. The only thing Mayé had to do was strut about as the father of Equatorial Guinea space travel and pledge his lifelong silence about who was really behind it. And for that, they were prepared to pay for his satellite.’
‘What an idiot,’ commented Yoyo.
‘Well, think about it. Equatorial Guinea, the first African country with its own space programme.’
‘But didn’t anyone notice that loads of Chinese people were running around when they were building the launching pad?’ asked Jericho.
‘It wasn’t like that. There was an official announcement. Mayé informed the world that he wanted to get in on the space travel scene, invited specialists over to Equatorial Guinea, and of course the Chinese came too. The whole thing was organised perfectly. In the end, Russians, Koreans, French and Germans all ended up working on the launch pad too, without noticing whose tune they were dancing to.’
‘And the Zheng Group?’
‘Ah!’ Vogelaar raised his eyebrows admiringly. ‘You’ve done your research. That’s right, a large part of the construction was developed by Zheng. They had a team on site the whole time. They started in December and a year later the thing was up. On 15 April 2024, Mayé’s first and only news satellite was shot into space in a festive ceremony.’