‘Just wait here until we take off,’ he said. ‘And don’t say a word to anyone until we do.’
The chief case officer was just on his way to the police skyport when his phone rang. Before he could take the call, he saw an officer running across the flight pad towards him.
‘We’ve got Baldy,’ he heard her shout.
He hesitated. The call was from one of the men he had detailed to find out more about what Tu was up to in Berlin. Meanwhile the policewoman had stopped in front of him, breathlessly holding her phone out under his nose. It showed a picture of the man who was, right now, lying on the dissection table with splinters of pencil in his frontal lobe.
‘I’ll call back,’ he said into the telephone. ‘Two minutes.’
‘Mickey Reardon,’ the policewoman told him. ‘An old fossil from the Irish underground, a specialist in alarms systems. He’s been freelancing for every Secret Service you could mention ever since the IRA decommissioned their weapons twenty years ago, and he’s worked for a lot of outfits that are half political, half organised crime.’
‘An Irishman? God help us all.’
He couldn’t have liked it any worse if Reardon had turned out to be ex-North Korean People’s Army. Whenever a regular army or a resistance movement lost its raison d’être, it would spit out creatures like Reardon, who would often make deals with international Secret Services if they weren’t working for organised crime outright.
‘Who did he work for?’
‘We only know some names. He was with the US Secret Service a lot, then for Mossad, Zhong Chan Er Bu, our own guys. Quite the multi-talent, very clever at shutting down security systems but also at installing them. He was wanted for a number of instances of grievous bodily harm, and suspected of murder as well.’
‘Reardon was armed,’ said the inspector thoughtfully. ‘Meaning he was on a mission. Donner gets rid of him, then he’s shot. By our white-haired gentleman. Is this a Secret Service operation? Reardon and Mr White on one side, Donner and Mr Blond on the other side, Blondie tries to help Donner—’
He had almost forgotten that he was on his way to the Grand Hyatt.
‘We need to get moving,’ his sergeant said.
So it was only once they were in the air that he remembered he had been going to call someone back.
The jet taxied onto the runway. Tu choked back his engines and waited for permission to take off. He was far more nervous than he was letting on. Strictly speaking, Jericho was right. What they were doing here flew in the face of reason. They were picking a fight with the German police for no reason at all. Indeed, the police might even have been able to help them.
They might not have, though.
Tu had his own bitter experience of the arbitrariness of state power, which had certainly left him with scars, though he tried hard not to jump at shadows. Admittedly, his paranoia was rooted in events that lay twenty-eight years back. Here he was, though, holding the others hostage to his own mistrust, especially Yoyo, who was most receptive to such paranoid behaviours for reasons of her own. There was no doubt that he was manipulating them. He tried to persuade himself that he was doing the right thing, and perhaps he was even right about that, but it wasn’t about that, hadn’t been for a long time now. As he had walked the streets of Berlin at night with Yoyo, he had realised that the only difference between Hongbing’s paranoia and his own was that he was more cheerful about it. His old friend wandered the vaults of his memory forlornly, while he strode through them, whistling cheerfully. Compared with Hongbing, he was fighting fit, but he couldn’t fight hard enough to cope with all that life had to throw at him, not on his own.
So he had told her something of the past, and all he had achieved was to make her more confused and depressed. None of it was any help. He would have to tell her the rest as well, tell her what he had never told anybody else except Joanna, tell her the whole story. He would assume Hongbing’s tacit approval, and he would cut the whole miserable tangle just as soon as the opportunity presented itself. He would have much preferred it if Hongbing himself had told Yoyo the truth, but this way was good as well. Anything was better than silence.
We have to close the door on our past, he thought. Not run away from it, not escape into success or into depression.
The voice in his earphones gave him permission.
Tu brought the jet engines up to speed and engaged thrust. The acceleration pushed him back into his seat, and they took off.
Only a few minutes later the chief case officer learned that Tu had arrived by private plane, an Aerion Supersonic. The rooms in the Hyatt were abandoned; the Chinese mogul and his companions had obviously left. Perhaps they were still in Berlin, since they hadn’t checked out, and the Audi that Tu had hired at the airport was still in the Grand Hyatt’s underground parking. This was the car whose registration number had set the case team onto his trail.
On the other hand, there was a corpse in one of the rooms.
The inspector ordered his team to secure the mogul’s jet, just in case. Then a few minutes after that, he learned that he had lost the decisive moment by paying attention instead to Mickey Reardon’s identification. He let rip with a string of curses so ripely inventive that the case officers all around him froze in their tracks, but it was no use.
Tu Tian had left Berlin.
Aerion Supersonic
‘Of course she can read memory crystals,’ Jericho yelled into the cockpit, as if Tu had asked him whether he washed every day.
‘A thousand apologies,’ Tu shouted back. ‘I’d forgotten she was a sort of surrogate wife.’
Jericho lifted Diane’s compact body from his backpack, connected it to the ports of the on-board electronics and set up the monitor on its seat bracket. The Pratt & Whitney turbines wrapped the Aerion in a cocoon of noise. The trapezoid-winged craft was still climbing. Sitting next to him, Yoyo was working on Vogelaar’s glass eye, unscrewing it and taking from it a glittering structure about half the size of a sugar lump. Tu circled the plane. Berlin tilted towards them through the side windows, while at the same time the sky on the other side turned a deep, dark blue.
‘Hi, Diane.’
‘Hi, Owen,’ said the soft, familiar voice. ‘How are you?’
‘Could be better.’
‘What can I do to make you well?’
‘Plenty,’ Yoyo said in a quietly mocking voice. ‘One day you’ll have to tell me if she’s a good kisser.’
Jericho grimaced. ‘Open the Crystal Reader, Diane.’
A little rod slid from the front of the computer, sheathed in a transparent frame. The jet swung back to the horizontal and went on gaining height. Below them the massive scab of urban development made way for green-brown-yellow arable land, patchworked with small wooded areas, roads and villages. As if daubed on, rivers and lakes shimmered in the afternoon sunlight.
‘I’ll be really pissed off if that great mess in the Charité wasn’t worth it,’ growled Yoyo. She leaned across to Jericho and set the cube in the surround, and the tiny drawer slid shut again.
‘Everyone made sacrifices,’ he said wearily, while Diane uploaded the data. ‘After all, Tian was prepared to chuck a hundred thousand euros to the four winds.’
‘Not to mention your ear.’ Yoyo looked at him. ‘Or at least the snippet of your ear. The atomic layer of your—’