In the next moment Yoyo hurried from the terminal, a crumpled shopping bag under her arm and Tu trotting in her wake. He was pulling his suitcase along behind him as though it were a recalcitrant child.
The taxi settled.
‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ Tu beamed.
‘Just what the detective ordered,’ Jericho reminded him amiably.
‘Enough strutting and preening, you two.’ Yoyo headed for the boarding hatch. ‘Is your jet cleared for take-off?’
It was as though her question had slammed on the brakes in Tu’s stride. He stopped, fumbled at the bare expanse of his scalp and tried to twist his fingers into the tiny short hairs there.
‘What is it?’
‘I forgot something,’ he said.
‘Say it’s not so.’ Yoyo stared at him.
‘It is. My phone. I just now thought, all I need to do is call the airport from the taxi, and then I realised—’
‘You have to go back to your room?’
‘Erm – yes.’ Tu left his suitcase where it was, turned around and hurried back to the lift. ‘I’ll be right back. Right back.’
When Xin heard that the elderly Chinese couple in front of him intended to book one of the Grand Hyatt’s finest and most expensive suites, he felt a warm glow of pleasure. Not because of any sudden spasm of altruism, but because the suite was on the seventh floor. Right where he wanted to be.
The husband put his thumb on the scanplate. A young receptionist offered to show the couple up to their room, and they strolled across to the lift together. Xin fell in behind them. As they stood there waiting for the lift, the wife turned to look at him, her curiosity as strong as an elastic band tugging her head around. She looked in bemusement at the tumble of hair over his shoulders, and in bafflement at his holospecs. She eyed the toes of his snakeskin boots dubiously, visibly nervous at the thought of having to share a hotel with the likes of him. Her husband stuck to her side, short and stocky, and stared at the gap where the lift doors met until they opened. They went into the lift together. Nobody asked whether he was with the group. The young receptionist smiled warmly at him, and he smiled back, just as warmly.
‘Seventh floor as well?’ she asked, in English just to be on the safe side.
‘Yes, please,’ he said.
Next to him, the Chinese woman stiffened, horribly sure now that he was living on the same floor.
Tu tore back the bedclothes but his phone wasn’t there, any more than it had been on the desk or on either of the night-stands. He rummaged through sheets, flung pillows aside, grabbed fistfuls of linen and damask, slid his fingers in between the mattress and the frame.
Nothing.
Who had he called last? Who had he been meaning to call?
The airport. At least, he had wanted to, but then he had decided to call later. He had even had the thing in his hand.
And he’d put it down.
He swept his eyes over the desk again, the chairs, armchair, carpeting. Incredible, he was getting old! What had he been doing just before? He saw himself standing there, his phone in his right hand, while there was something in his left hand too, something just below waist height—
Aha, of course!
Seventh floor.
The Chinese wife pushed herself brusquely past the young receptionist to get out of the lift, as though she feared that Xin might bite her at the last moment. Her husband, though, had a sudden access of Western etiquette, and took a step back to let the young woman go first, smiling broadly at her. Xin waited until the group was out of sight. The hotel corridors stretched around a sunny atrium space, four sides of a square, with the guest rooms along the front edges. He looked at the wall map. He was glad to see the receptionist and the Chinese couple had set off in the opposite direction from the rooms which Tu had taken.
He was alone.
The carpet muffled his steps. He passed a club lounge, turned into the next corridor, stopped, recalled Tu’s room numbers.
712, 717, 727.
712 was to his left. He walked on quickly, counting up. 717, also locked. His coat swung out around him as he stopped still, dead in the middle of the corridor. 727 was ajar.
Tu? Jericho? Yoyo?
One of the three of them would soon regret not having locked up.
Yoyo saw the gyrocopter first.
‘Where?’ Jericho yelped.
‘I think it’s headed this way.’ She ran to the edge of the skyport and stood there, hopping from one leg to the other. ‘Oh, shit! The cops. It’s the cops!’
Jericho had been chatting with the skycab pilot, but now he shaded his eyes with his hand. Yoyo was right. It was a police gyrocopter, coming closer, like the one he had seen above the Brandenburg Gate a few hours ago.
‘They could be here for any one of a thousand reasons.’
Yoyo hared across to him. ‘Tian will screw it all up.’
‘Nothing’s screwed up yet.’ Jericho nodded towards the skycab. ‘We’ll get in. That way at least they won’t see you leaping about up here.’
‘Ha!’ Tu called out.
He’d gone to have a pee, of course! And while he’d been peeing, guiding the stream with his left hand and holding the phone in his right, he’d had a momentary brainfart and had almost shaken the last drop off his phone and talked to his dick. Mankind at the mercy of communication technology. He felt outraged. A fellow should at least to be able to go to the toilet without having to communicate. There were limits. Nothing should make a man mix up his wedding tackle and his telephone.
So he had put the thing to one side – the phone that is – and had attended to the call of nature. The bathroom was inside the main suite, like a room within a room, with two doors, opposite one another. You could go into it from the bedroom and from the front lobby. Tu slid back the glass door by the bed and looked first at the toilet. The phone was lying there on top of the cistern.
Little bastard, he thought. Now to get out of here.
Xin went into the open room and looked about. A short front lobby led into a brightly lit larger room, obviously the suite. Directly to his right was a frosted glass door, closed. He could hear steps from behind it, and tuneless whistling. There was someone in the bathroom.
His hand slid under his emerald-green coat.
The gyrocopter settled down.
Yoyo squirmed back into her seat as though she wanted to melt into the upholstery. Jericho risked a glance outside. Two uniformed officers got out of the ultralight craft, went to the hotel clerk at the terminal and talked to him.
‘What are they after this time?’ grumbled the pilot, in German-accented English, and craned his neck inquisitively. ‘Even up in the air they don’t leave you alone.’
‘It’s good that they keep an eye on things though,’ Yoyo trilled cheerfully.
Jericho looked askance at her. He expected the hotel clerk to point across at them at any moment. If the patrol had brought photos with them, then they were sunk. The man gesticulated, pointed inside the terminal to the lifts.
Jericho held his breath.
He saw the policemen exchange a few words, then one of them looked across at the skycab. For a moment it seemed that he was looking straight at Jericho. Then he glanced away, and the two officers vanished beneath the terminal roof.
‘Let’s just hope that Tu doesn’t walk right into them,’ Yoyo hissed.
The steps came closer. He heard something clatter. A silhouette appeared behind the frosted glass and stopped there, right in front of the bathroom door.