Jericho stared at her. ‘Are you saying that the operation might have to do with this hotel?’
‘Interesting.’ Tu ran his fingers through the sparse growth at the sides of his head. ‘We should get to work straight away. We’ll have to learn all the latest about Orley Enterprises. What’s up right now? What’s planned in the near future? Then we’ll have a look at the Zheng Group. Once we have Vogelaar’s dossier on top of all that, we’ll probably be one giant leap further. When were you going to meet this guy, anyway?’
‘Tomorrow noon,’ said Jericho. ‘At the Pergamon Museum.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Of course you haven’t. Three thousand years of Chinese civilisation puts everything else just that little bit out of focus.’ Jericho rubbed his jaw and looked at Yoyo. ‘By the way, I don’t think it’s a good idea if we both turn up there.’
‘Now wait a moment!’ she protested. ‘So far we’ve been through everything together.’
‘I know. Nevertheless.’
‘I see!’ She tightened her lips into a hostile line. ‘You’re still pissed off because of Nyela.’
‘No, not in the least. Really, I’m not.’
‘Do you think that Vogelaar will try to shove you into the meat-slicer again?’
‘He’s unpredictable.’
‘He wants money, Owen! He chose to meet in a public place. What’s going to happen there?’
‘Owen’s right,’ Tu put in. ‘Do we know whether Vogelaar even has this dossier?’
Yoyo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I say. He told you about a dossier. Did he actually show you one?’
‘Of course not, he wants us to give him the—’
‘So he could have been bluffing,’ Tu interrupted her. ‘Precisely because he wants the money. He could try to get the drop on Owen in the museum and make off with the hundred thousand.’
‘Get the drop on him how?’
‘Like this.’ Jericho stretched out an index finger and put it to his temple. ‘It works, even in crowds.’
‘Well great!’ Yoyo squirmed in her seat from rage and frustration. ‘So that’s why you want to go into the museum on your own?’
‘Believe me, it’s safer.’
‘It would be safer with me and my haunch of antelope.’
‘I’m faster and more adaptable on my own. I don’t have to watch out for anyone but myself.’
‘Like you can look after yourself, bunnikins.’
‘I can look out well enough to save your skin twice.’
‘Oh, so that’s what it’s about,’ Yoyo huffed, turning red. ‘You’re worried you’d have to save my skin a third time. You think I’m a nitwit.’
‘You’re anything but a nitwit.’
‘So what am I?’
‘Could it perhaps be that you’re trouble?’
‘I should hope so!’
‘Yoyo,’ Tu said gently but firmly, ‘I think the decision’s been made.’
Yoyo had got herself worked up into a storm of indignation, and now came the cloudburst. Fat tears like raindrops gathered in the corners of her eyes, brimmed over her eyelids.
‘I don’t want to just sit about!’ she said in a ragged voice. ‘I got all of us into this mess. Don’t you understand that I want to do something?’
‘Of course we do. You’ll be doing something if you help me with the research.’
The waiter appeared and checked their table. Tu plunged his hand into the bowl, as though afraid that he hadn’t been giving due attention to the nuts.
‘We’ll haff to fime oup emryfing abou’ Orley,’ he muttered indistinctly. ‘On fop of all vat’ – he swallowed – ‘I want to know more about Zheng’s solo projects. After all, he’s the only Chinese entrepreneur who could go building a satellite launch pad anywhere on Earth without prior state approval. You see, my dear Yoyo, even if Owen were to beg me on bended knee to let him take you with him, I’d still refuse.’
Yoyo glowered at him. ‘You eat like a pig, just so you know.’
‘Are you going to help me or are you not?’
‘Have you two alpha males even considered letting Orley Enterprises know?’
‘I have,’ Tu said. ‘All the same, I don’t know exactly what we could tell them.’
‘That something is going to happen, at some point in time, though we don’t know what it is or what’s the target, but that they are possibly the victim.’
‘All admirably specific. Shall we also tell them that Zheng is behind the whole thing?’
‘Or Beijing. Or the Chinese Secret Service.’ Yoyo was visibly calming down. For the time being, it seemed that the dams would not burst. ‘We don’t know when the attack is going to take place – if indeed it is an attack. Mayé was deposed right around the time of the Moon crisis, it could even be that the crisis was the operation, but our text tells us something quite different. It’s still to come. But when? How much time do we have? We zoomed over to Berlin at Mach 2 to warn Vogelaar. We should send word to Orley Enterprises at the speed of light, even if our message is very vague.’
‘Excellent strategic argumentation,’ Jericho put in.
Yoyo leaned back. She looked only halfway mollified. Jericho knew what she was going through, the rage, the shame and the helplessness of a child who isn’t even allowed to clear up the mess she’s made; he knew that her father’s reproachful silence loomed up somewhere inside her. Like so many children, she had learned early enough that she wasn’t up to some unspoken standards.
There was a pimply boy who knew all about such things.
Like the goddess Kali, the Orley conglomerate had many arms growing from its torso, so many that at some point Tu got fed up with following links and flowcharts. The company presented some excellent targets for attack. The hotel project was nominally part of Orley Space, which was responsible for the space programme and ancillary technologies, but then again it wasn’t, because private travel to the Space Station and the Moon came under Orley Travel. For helium-3 mining and freight, NASA and the US Treasury were the people to talk to, but then again so were Orley Space and Orley Energy, whose main business was building fusion reactors. The further they delved into the labyrinthine structures of the company, the less they felt they knew about where the ‘operation’ might be aimed. Orley Entertainment produced films such as Perry Rhodan, which had made the Irish actor Finn O’Keefe one of the top earners in the movie world; it was also experimenting with the next generation of 3D cinema, and had built an Orley Sphere in several cities around the globe, each a huge spherical arena for grandiose concerts and events, seating thirty thousand visitors. Currently a concert on the OSS was in the planning stages, to be given by David Bowie – almost eighty years old – and this of course was Orley Entertainment’s brief, but Orley Space and Orley Travel were also part of the project. There was a division for marketing and communication, Orley Media, as well as an innovation incubator where young researchers tweaked tomorrow’s world into shape – this was Orley Origin. Once you got to the internet, the conglomerate grew and ramified like a spiral galaxy. When Diane tried the simple keyword news, it came up with a complete agenda for the twenty-first century. Everything was new, and everything really did mean everything, since there was hardly a field of human endeavour where Orley Enterprises wasn’t trying to plant their flag, all of course with fervent belief and noble intent. There seemed no end to their search by the time they found OneWorld, an initiative which Julian Orley had founded to prevent global collapse; it poured forth projects for prevention and adaptation as reliably as the gushing geysers of Iceland, constantly testing new fuels and reagents, new kinds of engine, new this that and the other, all the way up to the meteorite shields which were being developed aboard the OSS in collaboration with Orley Space and Orley Origin.