‘The serious injury to my ear. There.’
The screen filled with symbols. Jericho held his breath. The dossier was much bigger than he had thought. He immediately felt that ambivalent dread that you feel just before you enter the monster’s lair to see it in all its terrifying hideousness and ascertain its true nature once and for all. In a few minutes they would know the reason for the hunt that had claimed so many victims, almost including themselves, and he knew they weren’t going to like what they saw. Even Yoyo seemed hesitant. She put a finger to her lips and paused.
‘If I’d been him,’ she said, ‘I’d have provided a short version. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Jericho nodded. ‘But where?’
‘Here.’ Her finger wandered across to a symbol marked JKV Intro.
‘JKV?’ He narrowed his eyes.
‘Jan Kees Vogelaar.’
‘Sounds good. Let’s try it. Diane?’
‘Yes, Owen.’
‘Open JKV Intro.’
There sat Vogelaar, in shirt and shorts, on a veranda, under a roughly hewn wooden roof, and with a drink beside him. In the background, hilly scrubland fell away to the coast. Here and there palms were sticking up from low mixed vegetation. It was plainly drizzling. A sky of indeterminate colour hung over the scene and softened the horizon of a far-off sea.
‘The likelihood that I am no longer alive at this second,’ Vogelaar said without preamble, ‘is relatively high, so listen very carefully now, whoever you are. You won’t be having any more information from me in person.’
Jericho leaned forward. It was spooky, looking Vogelaar in the eyes. More precisely, they were looking at him through one of his eyes. Unlike in Berlin, he was ash-blond again, with a bushy moustache, light-coloured eyebrows and eyelashes.
‘There are no bugs here. You wouldn’t think intimacy was a problem in a country that consists almost entirely of swamp and rainforest, but Mayé is infected with the same paranoia as almost all potentates of his stamp. I think even Ndongo would have been interested in going on listening to the parrots. But as they’ve appointed me head of security, the task of snooping on the good people of Equatorial Guinea, particularly the ruling family and our valued foreign guests, has fallen to me. My task is to protect Mayé. He trusts me, and I don’t plan to abuse that trust.’
Vogelaar spread his arms in a gesture that took in the hinterland. ‘As you see, we live in paradise. The apples drop into your mouth, and as you would expect of any decent paradise, a snake is creeping around the place, and it wants to know that everything is under control. Kenny Xin doesn’t trust anyone. Not even me, although he describes himself as my friend and he was the one who got me this extremely remunerative job in the first place. Hi there, Kenny, by the way. You see, your suspicion was justified.’ He laughed. ‘I doubt very much that you know the guy, but he’s the reason why I’m presenting this file. Some of the attached documents deal with him, so let’s just say that in 2017, on the instructions of the Chinese oil companies and with the approval of Beijing, he organised the coup against Juan Aristide Ndongo and, with my help, or more precisely with the help of African Protection Services, carried it out and enthroned Mayé. The dossier records a chronicle of coups, internal information about Beijing’s role in Africa and much else besides, but at its heart there lies a quite different subject.’
He crossed his legs and wearily waved away a flying insect the size of a human fist.
‘Perhaps someone remembers the launch pad that Mayé had built on Bioko. International companies were involved, under the aegis of the Zheng Group, which allows us to assume that China had a hand in this as well. Personally I don’t believe that. Nor is it true, even though we’ve repeatedly sold the idea in public, that our space programme was an initiative one hundred per cent down to Mayé. In fact it was initiated by a group of possibly Chinese investors which, in my opinion – and contrary to their own account – is not identical with Beijing and was represented by Kenny Xin at the time. The fact is that this organisation wanted to fire an information satellite from our soil into space, supposedly as an investigation into new kinds of rocket propulsion. Mayé was supposed to be able to use the satellite for civilian purposes, with the proviso that the whole space project was presented as his own idea. I’ve attached the blueprints for the launch pad, along with a list of all the companies which helped to build it.’
‘He’s still taking the piss out of us,’ Yoyo hissed.
‘Hardly.’ Jericho shook his head. ‘He can’t take the piss out of us any more.’
‘But that’s exactly what he did in Muntu—’
‘Wait.’ Jericho raised his hand. ‘Listen!’
‘—the launch was scheduled for two days later. This meant that the preparations should actually have been completed, and only the satellite had still to be put on the tip of the rocket. That same night a convoy of armoured cars arrived in the grounds of the launch pad. Something was brought into the construction hangar and coupled with the satellite: a container the size of a very big suitcase or a small cupboard, fitted with landing equipment, jets and spherical tanks. The whole thing could be collapsed so that it didn’t take up much room. Only close contacts of Xin dealt with the delivery and assembly of the craft, no foreign constructors were present, not even anyone from the Zheng Group. Neither Mayé nor his people knew at this point that anything but the said satellite was to be fired into space. I’m not a specialist in space travel, by the way, but I assume that the container held a small, automatic spaceship, a kind of landing unit. My people photographed the arrival of the convoy and the container; you will find the pictures in the files KON_PICS and SAT_PICS.’ Vogelaar grinned. ‘Are you still watching, Kenny? While you deludedly thought you were observing me, did it never occur to you that we were observing you?’
‘So.’ Tu came out of the cockpit and joined them in the corridor. ‘We’re flying on autopilot. We’re on course for London via Amsterdam, so let’s have a dr—’
‘Shhh!’ hissed Yoyo.
‘—was of course interested in what was in that container,’ Vogelaar went on. ‘So I had to reconstruct the route it had taken – I should perhaps mention that the people who delivered it at dead of night were almost all Chinese. Anyway, we managed to trace the route of the plane that had brought it to Africa back through a series of intermediate landings. For obvious reasons I had expected that the plane had originally started off in China, but to my surprise it came from Korea, or more precisely from a remote airport in North Korea, near the border.’
In the background it had started raining heavily. A rising rustle mingled with Vogelaar’s words, a changing grey blurred the sky, scrubland and sea.
‘I’ve built up extensive contacts over the years. Not least with south-east Asia. Someone who still owed me something set about working out what had been loaded on at the airport. You must know, the whole area is extremely unsafe. There’s a lot of piracy in the surrounding waters, a high level of criminality, unemployment and frustration. The South has been paying for the North’s reconstruction since 2015, but the money is disappearing in a vast bubble of speculation. Both sides feel they’ve been tricked, and they aren’t happy about it. Corruption and black market dealings are flourishing as a result, and one of the most lucrative markets is the trade in Kim Jong Un’s former arsenal of weapons, particularly the warheads. Especially popular are the mini-nukes, small atom bombs with considerable destructive power. The Soviets certainly experimented with them, in fact all the nuclear powers did. Kim had a few too, hundreds even. Except nobody knows where they ended up. After the collapse of the North Korean regime, the death of Kim and reunification they had suddenly disappeared, and since they aren’t particularly big—’