With both thumbs, he began to press pieces from the sheet. They popped out with a gentle click and fell to the floor, where they lay scattered like the parts of some kind of intelligence test. Next he took the neck of the guitar off the main body and slid out a pipe, forty centimetres long, and snapped this into two equal parts. Several narrower sections of pipe fell out and rolled over the carpet. Hanna swept them together into a heap, opened his suitcase and emptied the contents of his washbag in front of him. He put the shower gel, the shampoo and the kneadable earplugs all within reach, pulled the top off one of his two tubes of moisturiser, squeezed a clear stream of what was inside onto one of the components and then pressed another against it. Straight away the moisturising cream and the plastic panel pieces reacted chemically with one another. Hanna knew that at this stage he couldn’t afford the slightest mistake, that there was no way of adjusting what he built. He worked with clarity and concentration, without haste, then unscrewed one of the golf balls, took out tiny electronic components, assembled more parts and slotted them into place. In a few minutes he was holding something flat in his hands, a device with a pipe sticking out from the front like the muzzle of a pistol, which indeed it was. It looked curiously archaic. It had a grip, but instead of a trigger, there was simply a switch. Hanna took the remaining pieces and built an identical device, examined both weapons minutely and then went on to the next stage of his work.
Here he took apart various bits of kit from his washbag and then put them back together in a different order until he had made twenty projectiles, each with chambers that had to be filled separately. Working with the utmost care, he put tiny quantities of the shower gel into the left chambers, and shampoo into the right, and then sealed the capsules. He took the short shells from the neck of the guitar and put into each one a piece of earplug and a small gelatine capsule from a pack of indigestion tablets. Last of all, he put a payload into the tip of each shell, loading five into the handle of the first weapon he had built and then five into the second. Then he put the base of the guitar back onto the body, fastening the neck in place with an expert twist. He collected the last scraps left over from the plastic sheet and shoved them under everything else in his suitcase. He packed the tubes and bottles back into the washbag and then paused as he picked up the aftershave.
Ah yes.
He looked at the bottle thoughtfully. Then he lifted the cap, held it up in front of his throat and pressed the nozzle briefly, firmly.
The aftershave was aftershave.
Nobody crossed his path as he left the suite.
He was wearing spacesuit, harness and survival pack, his helmet clamped under his arm. One of the loaded guns was nestled against his thigh, hidden in a pocket of the same material as the spacesuit so that nobody would notice it. He was also carrying five loose rounds of ammunition. Granted, he hardly expected to need to use the pistol tonight. If everything went as planned, he would never be forced to use it at all, but experience had taught him that errors could creep into the tidiest plan with the persistence of cockroaches. Some time or other the gun could turn out to be very useful indeed. From now on, it would be with him at all times.
With nobody around, Gaia’s vast body breathed the atmosphere of a monument that had outlived its builders. Far below lay the deserted lobby. He waited for the doors of E2 to slide apart, entered the cabin and pressed 01. The lift zoomed down to the underground level. He got out in the basement and followed the signs to the wide corridor they had come along just a few hours before, empty here as well, bathed in cold white light and filled with a monotonous hum. Hanna stepped onto one of the conveyor bands. It started up, passing the airlocks that led up to the lunar surface, then the vast hallway that led to the garage – as the hotel’s underground landing field was called – then a branch corridor to a narrow tunnel, two kilometres long, leading dead straight to the small helium-3 reactor that supplied Gaia’s energy during the lunar night. At the end of the corridor he stepped off the conveyor and looked through a window into the station hall. The Lunar Express was sitting on its tracks, linked to the corridor via gangways. He went inside the train and walked down between the empty seats to the driver’s chair. The on-board computer was activated, the display all lit up. Hanna entered a code and waited for authorisation. Then he turned round, took a seat in the first row and stretched out his legs.
He would have been able to do none of this if he had been just a regular guest. But Ebola had got everything ready for him. Ebola made sure that there was nothing Carl Hanna couldn’t do here on the Moon, no locked doors, no access forbidden.
Slowly, the Lunar Express drew out.
In his forty-four years of life so far Hanna had grown well used to keeping things clear-cut. In India he had taken part in a whole series of covert operations that would hardly have marked him as a friend of the country if he had been exposed. At the same time he had a circle of local friends and lived with Indian women. He worked against his hosts’ interests, undermining the federal democracy’s economic and military autonomy, but unlike many of his colleagues he didn’t spend his time in cheap bars, seedy joints or expensive clubs that held an alcohol licence. He didn’t tip toddy or whisky down his gullet or make racist remarks about the locals when he thought nobody was listening; instead he took care to integrate himself, he rented a neat little flat in the heart of New Delhi and developed a passion for curries and the spice market. He wasn’t by nature a man who made friends quickly, but over the years the country’s culture and people grew on him, and for a while he even flirted with the idea of settling down on the banks of the Yamuna. His job required a talent to deceive and a steady stream of lies, but if he wasn’t actually at work, he tried to live an absolutely normal life out there, following the country’s motto Satyameva Jayate, truth alone shall prevail. He felt no contradiction in such a Janus-faced existence, rather it helped him, Hanna the citizen, break all connections with Hanna the consummate liar, so that they never got in one another’s way.
And now too he was enjoying the ride even with the task ahead of him; he enjoyed the unending vistas of the Mare Imbrium, the play of shadows over Plato, the rugged threat of the polar mountains drawing closer, the train’s rapid climb. Once more the darkness of the crater’s shadow engulfed him as the train raced along the chasm between Peary and Hermite, towards the American moon base, at 700 kilometres an hour.
Then, without warning, it slowed.
And stopped.
The Lunar Express clung to a lonely mountainside amidst the no man’s land of the polar craters, less than fifty kilometres from the base. Hanna stood up and went to the middle of the train, where lockers lined the aisle. He rolled up the door of one of these and glanced briefly at the box of kit stored behind it, then studied the assembly plan on the back wall. He heaved down an oval platform with folding telescopic legs and eight little spherical tanks. It had short arms with nozzles that could turn in all directions, and two loaded battery packs. A thick column rising from the platform ended in a crossbar with hand-grips, between which a display gleamed. It was simplicity itself to assemble the thing: after all the grasshopper had been designed for emergencies, when the tour guide might be incapacitated and the guests had to cope for themselves. When it was fully built it stood on coiled legs and had enough room for two astronauts, the one in front steering. Hanna walked it over to the airlock, went back to the locker, took out a toolbox and a device with a readout screen, storing both under a hatch on the grasshopper’s floor. Then he put on his helmet and let the suit carry out the usual diagnostics before he started evacuation. A few seconds later the outer bulkhead opened. He climbed onto the hopper, took out his computer, clipped it on at the side of the control panel and opened the outer hatch.