‘There is no doubt any longer about Andre Donner,’ she said in English.
Tu stopped in the middle of a question.
‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Very good. I think we can go.’
‘When will you want my report, Superintendent?’
‘What kind of question is that, Inspector! As soon as possible. The director of prosecutions is breathing down our neck.’
Curtain, applause, Yoyo thought.
‘Are you done?’ Svenja Maas looked from one to the other, disgruntled to be so abruptly ignored.
‘Yes, we don’t want to discommode you any further.’
‘You are not – erm – discommoding me.’
‘No, you are right of course, it was a pleasure. Goodbye, and best wishes to Dr Voss.’
Svenja Maas shrugged and led them out to the lobby, where they said goodbye. Tu marched ahead, sped up on the stairs, and practically raced along the corridor. Yoyo scurried after him. The last of her calm was gone. They didn’t need any authorisation to leave. They went out into the car park and headed for the Audi, when suddenly a commanding voice rang out from the building.
‘Mr Tu, Miss Chen!’
Yoyo froze. Slowly she turned, and saw Dr Marika Voss standing on the steps, her chin raised.
They’ve noticed, Yoyo thought. We were too slow.
‘Please forgive our hasty departure.’ Tu raised his arms apologetically. ‘We wanted to say goodbye, but we couldn’t find you.’
‘Was everything as you had hoped?’
‘You were extremely helpful!’
‘I’m glad of that.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘Well, then, I hope that you make progress with your investigations.’
‘Thanks to your help, we shall make great strides.’
‘Good day to you.’
Dr Voss marched back inside, and Yoyo felt as though she had turned to butter in the sunshine. She slid into the Audi, and melted onto the seat.
‘Do you have it?’ Tu asked.
‘I have it,’ she replied, with the last of her strength.
Svenja Maas wasn’t exactly offended, but she was rather peeved. As she went back into the autopsy theatre she felt a nagging suspicion that the Chinese policeman hadn’t really been interested in her, just in keeping up some Asiatic notion of etiquette. She went to the furthest tables and noticed that his young inspector had put the sheet back up over Donner’s corpse, though not very neatly. She tugged at it irritably, and found that the whole thing was crooked. She turned the sheet down.
She saw straight away that something was wrong. Vogelaar’s right eye wasn’t looking good, but the left eye was horrible.
With a dark presentiment, she lifted the lid.
The glass eye was missing.
For a moment she flushed hot and cold at the thought that she would be blamed. She had left the eye in its socket, but only because she wanted to take it out later and show it to a prosthetics expert. They had noticed something odd about it. It looked as though it had something inside, maybe some sort of mechanism with which Vogelaar could see, perhaps something else. They hadn’t really considered it significant.
Obviously they had been wrong.
Electrified, she ran from the theatre and up the stairs. She found Dr Marika Voss in the corridor.
‘Are the Chinese police still here?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘The Chinese?’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows. ‘No, they just left. Why?’
‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’
‘What’s up?’ the older woman demanded.
‘They took something with them,’ Maas stammered. Bastards, landing her in it like this!
‘With them?’ Voss echoed.
‘The eye. The glass eye.’
The doctor hadn’t been in the team who had examined Donner. She knew nothing about the eye, but she understood all the same that they would be in trouble.
‘I’ll call the guards at the gate,’ she said.
The car glided along the main road on the hospital campus, past the stern red-brick buildings, the peaceful lawns and paths, the shady trees.
‘Hey,’ Yoyo said, frowning. ‘What’s going on up ahead?’
Somebody came running out of the guards’ cabin, a man in uniform. He raised his hands as though directing an aeroplane on the runway. At the same time, the barrier began to drop. Obviously the fuss was about them.
‘I should imagine we’ve been found out.’
‘Great. Now what?’
‘All down to you.’ Tu looked across at her. ‘How do you like Berlin? Do you want to stay?’
‘Not at any cost.’
‘Thought not,’ he said, accelerated and shot under the barrier, so close that Yoyo was surprised not to hear it scrape across the roof. Behind them, the guard’s yells drifted like pollen on the summer air.
Hotel Adlon
The symbol shimmering on the display showed many twisting reptilian necks, all springing from a single body. Nine heads. The symbol of Hydra.
Xin clapped the phone to his ear.
‘We’ve sent you data from several major Berlin hotels,’ said the caller. ‘No luck with the smaller ones. There’s a hell of a lot of them – all Berlin seems to be nothing but hotels. The problem was that working so fast, we couldn’t get into every single computer—’
‘Understood. And?’
‘No hits.’
‘They must be staying somewhere,’ Xin insisted.
‘They’re not in any of the international chains. No Chen Yuyun and no Owen Jericho. However, I can give you more details of the warning that reached London yesterday. I’ll send you the text. Do you want to hear it first?’
‘Spit it out.’
Xin listened to the fragmentary sentences that he already knew so well. He considered just how dangerous this fire might be that Yoyo and Jericho had started. It was hardly a fragment by now. They had decrypted almost ninety per cent of the message. All the same, the really important parts, the decisive information, was still missing. And it hadn’t been Jericho, or the girl, who had called Edda Hoff, but a man called Tu. Hoff was number three in the Orley security chain of command, and Xin knew very little about her, other than that she was quite unimaginative and accordingly would never exaggerate, or downplay, a threat.
‘Hoff made the decision on her own account, and she told the whole corporation that there may perhaps be an attack, without pretending that she had any real information,’ the caller said. ‘Gaia was informed as well, just like every other link in the corporate network, but they saw no reason to change the programme up on the Moon. Hoff seems to have let all the right people know.’ The caller didn’t dare name names over the telephone, even though it was practically impossible that anyone might be listening in on this connection. On the other hand, they had never expected that the encrypted messages piggy-backing on harmless email attachments could be cracked.
‘Tu,’ said Xin thoughtfully.
‘That’s the name he gave. I’ll send you over his mobile number. We don’t know where he was calling from.’
Unlike the astonishing diversity of given names, the number of Chinese family names was limited indeed. The vast majority of Chinese people shared just a few dozen clan names, mostly monosyllables – the so-called Old Hundred Names. It was not uncommon for an entire village to be called Zheng, Wang, Han, Ma, Hu or Tu. Nevertheless Xin couldn’t shake off the feeling that he had heard the name Tu quite recently, and in connection with Yoyo.
‘Have you taken those pages down from the web?’ he asked, since inspiration failed to strike.