There! Blond hair, Scandinavian almost, a good way off by now. Jericho was running as though there were devils after him, and Xin realised that the detective had tricked him. There was a crowd forming now between the statues of the pharaohs. Security personnel were trying to get through the rush of visitors coming the other way – and these guards had sub-machine-guns. He had wasted too much time, shed too much blood to expect these new arrivals not to shoot first and ask questions later. He needed a hostage.
A girl slipped on the gallery’s smooth polished floor.
With one leap, he was behind her, catching hold, hauling her up, and he pressed the muzzle of his pistol to her temple. The child froze and then began to cry. A young woman gave a piercing scream, stretched out her hands but was knocked aside by others running to escape, and her husband grabbed hold of her, held her back from rushing to certain death. The next moment, uniformed figures took up position either side of the parents, calling out something in German. Xin didn’t understand but he had a pretty shrewd idea of what they wanted. Without taking his eyes off them, he dragged the girl over to the tall windows and looked down to the bridge over the Spree, where by now a few gawkers had gathered.
He leaned down to the little girl.
‘It’ll all be all right,’ he said softly into her ear. ‘I promise.’ She didn’t understand a word of Mandarin of course, but the sibilant syllables had their effect. Her little body relaxed as though hypnotised. She became calmer, breathing in short, shallow gasps like a rabbit.
‘That’s good,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘Marian!’ Her mother screamed, raw misery in her voice. ‘Marian!’
‘Marian,’ Xin repeated amiably. ‘That’s a very pretty name.’
He pulled the trigger.
Cries and shouts went up as the windowpane burst apart under the impact of dozens of flechette rounds. He had swung the pistol away at the last moment. Splinters of glass flew around their ears. He shielded the girl from the shrapnel with his torso, then shoved her away, crossed his arms in front of his head and chest and leapt out. While the officers were still trying to work out what had happened, he had landed cat-like among the onlookers three metres below, and he began to run.
Jericho
Muntu was closed. Hardly pausing, Jericho fired two shots into the lock and then kicked in the door. It slammed back against the wall inside. He rushed headlong into the dining area, looked behind the bar and then jumped back: but the man staring at him with puzzlement in his eyes, a light-skinned African, was clearly dead. Yesterday’s chaos reigned unchallenged in the kitchen. Nobody had cleaned up since his fight with Vogelaar.
There was no sign of Nyela.
Frantically, he charged through the beaded curtain, flung open both toilet doors, then tugged uselessly at the handle of a third door – Private, it said, and it was locked. He shot out this lock as well. Worn stairs led down into the darkness. A smell of mould, and disinfectants. The chalky scent of damp plaster. Memories of Shenzhen, the steps leading down to Hell. He hesitated. His hand fumbled for the light-switch, found it. At the bottom of the stairs a light bulb glowed in its cage. Whitewashed plaster, a stained concrete floor, a spider scuttling away. He went down a step at a time, his Glock at the ready, his skin crawling, overcome by nausea. Kenny Xin. Animal Ma Liping. Who or what was awaiting him down below? What kind of creatures would leap out at him now, what images would burn their way into his brain?
He stepped off the last stair. He looked round. A short corridor, piled high with crates and barrels. A steel door, half open.
He went through, his gaze darting, gun ready.
Nyela!
She was squatting down on the floor with her arms behind her back, her mouth covered with tape. Her eyes glowed in the half-light. He hurried across to her, holstered his Glock, tore the tape away and put his fingers to his lips. Not yet. First he had to get her out of the cuffs. Her jailers had locked her to the pipework, and he didn’t imagine that the key would be lying about somewhere as a reward for keen-eyed detectives.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he whispered.
Back in the kitchen, he pulled open drawers, rummaged through the tools, steel, copper, chrome, looked around all the worktops and finally found what he was looking for: a cleaver. He hurried back down to the cellar.
‘Lean forward,’ he ordered. ‘I need some room.’
Nyela nodded and turned away from him so that he had a good view of her hands. The pipe was worryingly short. Just a few centimetres from her wrists, it turned into the wall and vanished into the crumbling mortar. He took a deep breath, concentrated, and brought the blade down. The whole radiator sang like a struck bell. He frowned. There was a dent in the pipe, but otherwise nothing had changed. He struck again, and a third time, a fourth, until the pipe burst open, so that he could prise it apart with the handle of the cleaver. The chain of the cuffs scraped through the gap.
‘Where—’ Nyela began to ask.
‘Over there.’ Jericho motioned with his chin, ordering her over to a metal work-table. ‘Back to the tabletop, palms down, as flat as you can. Pull the chain tight.’
Nyela’s features clouded over with a premonition of the dreadful news she knew she was about to receive. She did as he said, turning her hands about.
‘Don’t move,’ Jericho said. ‘Stay still, quite still.’
She looked down at the floor. He fixed his eyes on the middle of the chain, and struck. One blow broke the chain.
‘Now let’s get out of here.’
‘No.’ She stood in his way. ‘Where’s Jan? What happened?’
Jericho felt his tongue go numb.
‘He’s dead,’ he said.
Nyela looked at him. Whatever he had expected, bewilderment, shock, tears, didn’t happen. Just a quiet grief, her love for the man who now lay dead in the museum, and at the same time a curious nonchalance, as though to say, there it is then, so it goes, it had to happen sometime. He hesitated, then hugged Nyela tight for a moment. She responded, a gentle embrace.
‘I’ll get you out of here,’ he promised.
‘Yes,’ she said, tired, nodding. ‘I hear that a lot.’
There was nobody upstairs, just the dead man staring out from behind the bar as though waiting for an explanation of what had happened to him. Jericho hurried to the closed door of the restaurant and peered outside.
‘We’ll have to run for it.’
‘Why?’
‘My car’s a few streets away.’
‘Mine isn’t.’ Nyela leaned across the bar, opened a drawer and took out a data-stick. ‘Jan was using it earlier today. He must have parked it in front of Muntu.’
Yoyo had spoken of a Nissan OneOne. There was just such a car parked a few steps away, its legs drawn up. The cabin was egg-shaped, its design rather like a friendly little whale. The legs on either side were thick at the base, tapering towards the wheels. When the legs were stretched out flat, the cabin hung low to the ground, but if the driver drew in his wheels, the legs drew inward and upward, lifting the cabin. The low, aerodynamic profile, like a sports car, changed to become a compact, taller car. Jericho stepped out of the door and scanned the street. Shapes and colours seemed over-exposed in the noonday sun. There was a smell of pollen, and of baking tarmac. There were hardly any pedestrians to be seen, but the traffic had picked up. He put his head back and looked up at a cigar-shaped tourist zeppelin that bumbled cheerfully into view, its engines droning.