Tu’s jet had landed in Heathrow at a quarter past four. While it was still on the runway, the company’s security forces had welcomed them and brought them to the firm’s helicopter, which flew them straight to the Isle of Dogs. Further north stretched the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, vainly straining to be a match for the Big O, which towered over everything else in sight. Private boats, tiny and white, moved about on the waters of the renovated docks. Jericho saw two men stepping onto the landing pad. The helicopter turned in the air, settled on the pad and opened its side door. The men’s steps quickened. One, with black, wiry hair and a mono-brow, held his right hand out to Jericho, then reconsidered and held it out to Yoyo.
‘Andrew Norrington,’ he said. ‘Deputy head of security. Chen Yuyun, I assume.’
‘Just Yoyo.’ She shook his outstretched hand. ‘The honourable Tu Tian, Owen Jericho. Also very honourable.’
The other man coughed, wiped his palms on his trouser-legs and nodded at everyone.
‘Tom Merrick, information services.’
Jericho studied him. He was young, prematurely bald, and clearly afflicted with inhibitions that kept him from looking anyone in the eye for longer than a second.
‘Tom is our specialist in all kinds of communication and information transmission,’ said Norrington. ‘Did you bring the dossier?’
Instead of replying, Jericho held the tiny cube into the light.
‘Very good!’ Norrington nodded. ‘Come.’
The path led them inside the roof onto a grassy track and across a bridge, beyond which there stretched a bank of glass lifts. The eye was drawn down into the open interior of the Big O, criss-crossed by further bridges. People hurried busily back and forth across them. A good hundred and fifty metres below him, Jericho saw lift-like cabins travelling along the loop of the hollow. Then they stepped into one of the high-speed lifts, plunged towards the ground and through it, and stopped on sub-level 4. Norrington marched ahead of them. Without slowing his pace, he made for a reflective wall that opened silently, and they plunged into the world of high security, dominated by computer desks and monitor walls. Men and women spoke into headsets. Video conferences were under way. Tu straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose, made some contented noises and craned his neck, transfixed by so much technology.
‘Our information centre,’ Norrington explained. ‘From here we stay in contact with Orley facilities everywhere in the world. We work according to the specifications of our subcontractors, which means that there are no continental heads, only security advisers to the individual subsidiaries, who report to London. All company data come together here.’
‘How far under the ground are we?’ asked Yoyo.
‘Not that far. Fifteen metres. We had a lot of problems with groundwater at first, but things are sorted out now. For understandable reasons we had to protect Central Security, avoid any kind of attacks from the air, for example, and if necessary the underground of the Big O serves as a nuclear bunker.’
‘That means that if England falls—’
‘—Orley will still be standing.’
‘The King is dead, long live the King.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Norrington smiled. ‘England isn’t going to fall. Our country is changing, we had to accept the disappearance of the red telephone boxes and the red buses, but the Royal Family is non-negotiable. If it comes to the crunch, we still have room for the King down here.’
He led them into a conference room with holographic screens running all the way around it. Two women stood in hushed conversation. Jericho recognised one of them straight away. The deep black pageboy cut over the pale face belonged to Edda Hoff. The other woman was plump, with appealing if grumpy features, blue-grey eyes and short, white hair.
‘Jennifer Shaw,’ she said.
In charge of Central Security, Jericho completed in his head. Guard dog number one in the global Orley empire. Hands were shaken again.
‘Coffee?’ asked Jennifer. ‘Water? Tea?’
‘Something.’ Tu had spotted a memory crystal reading device, and was making resolutely towards it. ‘Anything.’
‘Red wine,’ said Yoyo.
Jennifer raised an eyebrow. ‘Medium-bodied? Full-bodied? Barrel-aged?’
‘Something along the lines of a narcotic, if possible.’
‘Narcotic and anything,’ nodded Edda Hoff, went outside for a moment and came back in as the others were taking their seats. Tu put the crystal in the reader and nodded to everyone.
‘With your permission we’ll let an old rascal speak first,’ he said. ‘It is to him that you owe your glimpse into the sick brain of your enemies, and in any case I should like to sweep away any remaining doubts about our credibility.’
‘Where is the man now?’ Jennifer leaned back.
‘Dead,’ said Jericho. ‘He was murdered right in front of my eyes. They were trying to stop him passing on his knowledge.’
‘Plainly without success,’ said Jennifer. ‘How did you come into possession of the crystal?’
‘I stole his eye,’ said Yoyo. ‘His left one.’
Jennifer thought for a second.
‘Yes, you should baulk at nothing. Let your dead friend take the floor.’
‘The whole thing, erm, seems to be some sort of satellite breakdown,’ said Tom Merrick, the IT Security supervisor, after Vogelaar had evoked Armageddon under West Africa’s streaming sky. ‘At least that’s what it looks like.’
‘What else could it be?’ asked Jericho.
‘Right, that’s a bit complicated. First of all, satellites aren’t things that you can click on and off as you feel like it. You have to know their codes if you want to control them.’ Merrick’s gaze slipped away. ‘Okay, you can find out that kind of thing through espionage. You can knock out a communications satellite with directed data streams, for a few hours or a day, you can also destroy it with radiation, but what we have here is a total breakdown, you understand? We can’t contact either Gaia or Peary Base.’
‘Peary Base?’ echoed Tu. ‘The American moon base, right?’
‘Exactly. For that one all you’d need to do is black the LPCS, the lunar satellites, because of the libration, but—’
‘Libration?’ Yoyo looked blank.
‘The Moon seems to stand still,’ Norrington cut in before Merrick could reply. ‘But that’s an illusion. It does in fact rotate. Within one Earth rotation, it turns once on its own axis, with the effect that we always see the same side. That’s a thing called bound rotation, typical, by the way, of most of the moons in the solar system. However—’
‘Yes, yes!’ Merrick nodded impatiently. ‘You have to explain to them that the angular velocity with which the Moon circles a larger body, in terms of its own rotation—’
‘I think our guests would like you to keep it simpler, Tom. Basically the Moon, because of its rotation behaviour, wobbles slightly. As a result, we get to see more than half of the Moon’s surface, in fact it’s almost sixty per cent. Conversely, the marginal regions disappear at times.’
‘And they disappear from radio range,’ Merrick broke in. ‘Conventional radio requires visual contact, unless you have an atmosphere that reflects radio waves, but there isn’t one on the Moon. And at the moment the North Pole and Peary Base are in the libration shadow, so they can’t be reached directly from the Earth via radio waves. So the Moon has been equipped with ten satellites of its own, the Lunar Positioning and Communication System, LPCS for short, which circle one another within range of the base. We’re in constant contact with at least five of them, so we should be able to contact Peary, regardless of libration.’