‘There you are at last!’ Yoyo called.
Tu rushed from the terminal, leaning forward as he ran as though trying to outrun his own legs. He tumbled into the cabin, slumped down into the seat across from them and signalled to the pilot.
‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ Jericho observed, while the cab swung its jets downward.
‘Two.’ Tu held up his index and middle finger to make the point, then realised he had just made a V for victory and grinned. ‘They didn’t see me though.’
‘Idiot,’ Yoyo spat at him, softly.
‘Well, do please excuse me.’
‘Don’t do anything like that again! Owen and I were sweating bullets.’
They lifted off. The police gyrocopter dwindled away behind them on the landing platform, then the pilot accelerated and left Potsdamer Platz behind. Tu looked out of the window, indignant.
‘Feel free to keep sweating,’ he said. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet.’
‘What were the cops doing down there?’
‘They went into your room. Speaking of which, you left it open.’
‘I did not.’
‘That’s odd.’ Tu shrugged. ‘Well, maybe it was room service.’
‘Whatever. They won’t find anything there. I didn’t leave anything behind.’
‘Didn’t forget anything?’
‘Forget?’ Yoyo stared at him. ‘Is this really you, asking me, whether I forgot anything?’
Tu cleared his throat several times in a row, took out his phone and called the airport. Of course you forgot something, Jericho thought to himself. Same as we all forgot something. Fingerprints, hair, DNA. While his friend was on the phone, he wondered whether it might not have been smarter after all to let the local authorities know what was gong on. Tu seemed to share Yoyo’s antipathy to the police, but Germany was not China. So far Germany had no obvious interests at stake in this drama that they were all living through. In the meantime, they had begun to act more and more like the outlaws. Although they weren’t the ones who had committed the crimes, it must seem that they were up to their necks in guilt.
Tu snapped his phone shut and looked at Jericho for an age, while the skycab raced towards the airport.
‘Forget it,’ he said.
‘Forget what?’
‘You’re wondering whether we shouldn’t just give ourselves up.’
‘I don’t know,’ Jericho sighed.
‘I do, though. Until we know what’s in this dossier, and we’ve spoken to the delightful Edda Hoff one more time, we won’t trust any intelligence agency in the world.’ Tu pointed to his own temple, twirling his finger meaningfully. ‘Except this one.’
The massacre in the Pergamon Museum had thrown police headquarters into an uproar that made a hornets’ nest look quiet. And now this as well – a dead Indonesian room-service worker, a man with no record of misbehaviour, who spoke hardly any German, whose whole job was to dole out soap, toilet paper and bedtime sweets. The risks of such a job were grumbling guests or messy rooms, not a broken neck when the body lotion began to run out.
Setting aside the two dead police from the museum for a moment, several people had some obscure connection with this new death. A murdered restaurateur from South Africa, who had taken another man with him as he died, killing the mystery man with a pencil – suggesting that he had skills mostly lacking in the restaurant business. Then his black wife, who had been shot in her car and then driven halfway across town. There was the driver to consider as well, a white man, blond, who had clearly been trying to help Donner in the museum but who had become a target in turn, drawing fire from Donner’s killer, another mystery man, tall with white hair, a bristling moustache, wearing a suit and spectacles. Then there was a Chinese industrialist, head of a Shanghai technology enterprise, who had himself claimed to be a policeman and had stolen Donner’s glass eye, helped by a young Chinese woman. Then last of all the Indonesian man, whose role in life had been to make sure that guests were never left lacking in the bathroom and that they always found a little treat on their pillow at bedtime.
Puzzling, all very puzzling!
Sensibly, the investigating team didn’t attempt to solve all the puzzles at once, even though there were some obvious conclusions to be drawn. Whoever else he was, the white-haired man was clearly a professional killer; the glass eye held some secret around which the whole business probably revolved; and the Indonesian victim had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. For the moment, however, the Chinese business mogul would be at the centre of the investigation – less because they wanted to understand his motives than because they simply wanted to pick him up as soon as possible. The three rooms that he had taken in the Grand Hyatt didn’t look as though the guests would be returning any time soon. All that was known for sure was that Tu and the woman had driven back from the Institute of Forensic Pathology to the hotel at full tilt, had told the concierge to put the Audi down in the car park, and then had vanished into the lobby, chatting.
What had they been chatting about?
The concierge remembered quite clearly. They had been planning to meet some third person in the Sony Center, because the fat man had said that he wanted ‘something sweet’. Oh, and the woman had been very, very pretty! The police officers pressed the concierge on whether he understood Chinese, and he said he didn’t, that the two of them had been speaking English. This made the head of the enquiry team suspicious – Dr Marika Voss had reported that they had spoken Chinese to one another in the autopsy theatre. Just to be on the safe side, he had sent two men over to the Sony Center, not expecting that they would find anyone there, and set his team to digging up exactly how Tu had arrived.
The longer he thought about it, the more certain he felt that Tu and the blond man were in it together.
The skycab had needed only a trifling eight minutes to get to the airport, but it seemed like an eternity to Jericho. In his thoughts, he was imagining what the case team would be doing. What would they prioritise? Who would their enquiries focus on? He had been at the scene of the shooting himself, and witnesses had seen him running towards the Tiergarten. They would want to know more about him. It certainly counted against him that he had been carrying a gun in the museum, although ballistics would show that he hadn’t shot Nyela. As for Yoyo and Tu, they had impersonated police officers and then maltreated a corpse, on top of which Tu had driven a hole through the highway code, but the police had several leads to follow. In a way, that was good, since it meant that they would be that much slower making progress. They would have to check identities, draw up timelines, take statements, look for motives. They would get bogged down in speculation.
On the other hand, they had been notably efficient so far. They had turned up at the Grand Hyatt impressively fast, meaning that they already had Tu in their sights. It wasn’t clear yet whether they knew about his jet, or indeed whether they had made the assumption that he would be leaving Berlin at short notice.
The skycab circled above the airport.
They lost height, banking about in a broad curve. They could see Tu’s Aerion Supersonic from here. Its stubby wings, set far back on the fuselage, made it look like a seabird, craning its neck curiously, as eager to be gone as they were. The skycab pilot tilted the jets, let the machine sink down, and landed with a gentle rocking motion not far from the plane. Tu handed him a banknote.
‘Keep the change,’ he said in English.
The size of the tip made the pilot leap to attention and offer his help in loading the jet. Since they didn’t even have luggage to unload from his cab, apart from Tu’s small suitcase, he asked whether there was anything else he could do for them. Tu thought for a moment.