‘I have some news,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
‘In Jennifer’s office. We can speak openly. Wait a moment.’ He listened to a soft voice in the background, then said, ‘Look, the best thing to do is call again, direct to her number, okay?’
‘You can tell her straight away that—’
‘Tell her yourself.’
He hung up. Yoyo squirmed around impatiently on her chair. She was burning to tell him about the dossiers Norrington had put together on the guests and staff at Gaia. Diane had done a lightning search, comparing Norrington’s supposed findings with publicly available biographies on the net and found no significant discrepancies, except perhaps for the fact that Evelyn Chambers was telling some whopping lies about her age. As for the staff at Gaia, two Germans, an Indian and a Japanese, they had been chosen by the director of the hotel, Dana Lawrence, who in turn had got the job on the strength of a report from Norrington, knocking four other highly qualified candidates out of the running. Norrington hadn’t actually turned any of these other four down flat, quite the opposite, it was rather that Lawrence’s track record put all the others in the shade. Lynn Orley had made the final appointment, and she would have had to have been insane to refuse Lawrence the job, given such excellent references. It was only when you looked closer that you realised that Lawrence’s official CV on the net was strangely different. Certain jobs that she had supposedly held made her just the right woman for the job in Gaia, but online they were missing, or didn’t quite match up. It was certainly the career of a dedicated professional, but if you wanted to assume the worst, you could easily say that Norrington had massaged the facts to help Lynn make her decision. Yoyo saw nothing at all wrong in assuming the worst.
Eager to know what the others would make of her findings, she typed in Shaw’s name and was just about to let the computer make the call when she heard a noise.
A lift had stopped outside on the gallery. She heard the doors slide apart.
Yoyo froze. Nobody was supposed to be in the Big O right now except for the security patrols and the tireless crew down in the situation room. She strained her ears, becoming aware of her surroundings for the first time. She was sitting at somebody’s workplace, an entirely interchangeable, uniform cell; employees kept their personal possessions in the mobile units that let them log in anywhere needed, throughout the building. Diane lay to her left, beneath the holographic display, a slim, shimmering machine, while on her right was a wheeled set of drawers, probably containing all the clutter that a computer still couldn’t replace, even in 2025.
She opened the top drawer, peered into it, opened the next one down.
She glanced at the panoramic windows. London’s night was slowly giving way to early morning light, but over in the west it was stubbornly dark. She could see the office interior reflected in outline in the windowpane, the workstations, the door in the wall behind her that led through to the hallway and the gallery.
She could see a silhouette in the hallway.
Yoyo ducked. Whoever it was hesitated. A man, judging by the height. He was just standing there, staring.
He had to take her by surprise. It could be that Shaw still didn’t know about the hacking. It would be one thing to overpower Yoyo and get hold of the computer, but then there would be Jericho to deal with. Perhaps there would be a way to lure him upstairs. Assuming that the two of them hadn’t told Tu Tian what they were up to, it might be enough to get rid of them and then the computer as well, then it would be as if none of this had ever happened, nobody would ever suspect that—
Rubbish! This was wishful thinking from start to finish. How would he explain it once they were both dead? The surveillance system would show everything. Why grab Jericho’s computer, when it didn’t hold anything that wasn’t also stored in the Big O mainframes? Shaw could get at his data any time she liked, which is what she would do if he killed two people up here – not to mention the fact that he’d never manage that, since in stark contrast to people like Xin, Hanna, Lawrence and Gudmundsson, he wasn’t a killer. It wasn’t game over for Hydra yet, but for him it certainly was. Even making a break for it was as good as a confession of guilt, but if he stayed, he might just as well put the cuffs on himself. There wasn’t any point cleaning up his trail now. He had to get out of here, drop out of sight!
He had enough money for a new life, quite a comfortable one at that.
The open-plan office lay in twilight.
How much had she learned? Had Jericho’s computer been able to retrieve his deleted emails and reconstruct them?
Where was the girl?
He was torn between the urge to find out more and the need to get away. He looked across the room, then his feet carried him forward as though of their own accord. He stepped into the office. It looked empty. The overhead lights were dimmed. Two workstations away, monitor screens glowed, and he saw the modest little box that Yoyo had left there, the one they called Diane. He should search the office. The workstations offered various hiding-places. Indecisive, he walked a little way into the room, paced this way and that, looked at the clock. Xin must be here by now, he should get out, but the monitors glowed like the lights of some safe refuge.
He hurried across to the workstation, bent down and had his hands on the little computer when the room burst into life behind him.
Petite though she might have been, Yoyo was also muscular and in good shape, so she had no trouble in picking up a fairly heavy office chair and taking a swing. As Norrington spun round to face her, the back of the chair caught him full-on, slamming into his head and his chest and knocking him backwards onto the desk. He grunted, and scrabbled for a handhold. Yoyo swung at him again, from the side this time, and he fell to the floor. Even as he landed there on his back next to Diane, she flung the chair aside and drew from her belt the scissors she had found in the drawer. She landed hard on his chest with both knees.
There was an audible crack. Norrington made a choking, hacking sound. His eyes bulged. Yoyo clamped the fingers of her left hand around his throat, leaned down low and shoved the point of the scissors so hard against his balls that he could feel it poised there.
‘One false move,’ she hissed, ‘and the Westminster Abbey Boys’ Choir will be glad to make your acquaintance.’
Norrington stared at her. Suddenly, he swung at her. She saw his clenched fist flying at her, ducked aside and drove the scissors deeper into his crotch. He flinched with his whole body and then froze completely, simply staring at her again.
‘What do you want from me, you madwoman?’ he gasped.
‘I want a little talk.’
‘You’re crazy. I came up here to see whether everything’s okay, whether you need anything, and you—’
‘Andrew, hey, Andrew!’ she interrupted. ‘That’s crap. I don’t want to hear any crap.’
‘I just wanted—’
‘You wanted to swipe the computer. I saw that, thanks. I don’t need any more proof, so get talking. Who are you working with, and what do they want? Were we right about Peary? Who’s pulling the strings?’
‘With the best will in the world, I don’t know what you’re—’
‘Andrew, you’re being foolish.’
‘—talking about.’
Dark red swamped her vision, glowing and all-consuming. Utterly forgotten was any chance that the man beneath her might have had nothing to do with the deaths of her friends, with the agonies that Chen Hongbing had gone through while Xin had him trapped in front of the automatic rifle. Forgotten any idea that she might be wrong about him, that Norrington might have had nothing to do with any of this. Every cell of her body burned with hatred. She wanted, she needed a culprit, here, now, at last, anyone to blame before she lost her mind, a bad guy to stand in for the monsters who had tortured the people she loved, the people whose love she needed. Her loved ones, who had seen things that they couldn’t talk about, things that clamped a mask over their faces. She jerked back her arm and rammed the scissors into Norrington’s thigh, stabbing so hard that skin and flesh parted like butter before the blades, and the point scraped hard against the bone. Norrington screamed like a stuck pig. He raised both hands and tried to shove her away. Still wrapped in her red rage, she yanked the improvised weapon from the wound and set the point against Norrington’s genitals again.