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He leaned down to the little girl.

‘It’ll all be all right,’ he said softly into her ear. ‘I promise.’ She didn’t understand a word of Mandarin of course, but the sibilant syllables had their effect. Her little body relaxed as though hypnotised. She became calmer, breathing in short, shallow gasps like a rabbit.

‘That’s good,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

‘Marian!’ Her mother screamed, raw misery in her voice. ‘Marian!’

‘Marian,’ Xin repeated amiably. ‘That’s a very pretty name.’

He pulled the trigger.

Cries and shouts went up as the windowpane burst apart under the impact of dozens of flechette rounds. He had swung the pistol away at the last moment. Splinters of glass flew around their ears. He shielded the girl from the shrapnel with his torso, then shoved her away, crossed his arms in front of his head and chest and leapt out. While the officers were still trying to work out what had happened, he had landed cat-like among the onlookers three metres below, and he began to run.

Muntu was closed. Hardly pausing, Jericho fired two shots into the lock and then kicked in the door. It slammed back against the wall inside. He rushed headlong into the dining area, looked behind the bar and then jumped back: but the man staring at him with puzzlement in his eyes, a light-skinned African, was clearly dead. Yesterday’s chaos reigned unchallenged in the kitchen. Nobody had cleaned up since his fight with Vogelaar.

There was no sign of Nyela.

Frantically, he charged through the beaded curtain, flung open both toilet doors, then tugged uselessly at the handle of a third door –
Private
, it said, and it was locked. He shot out this lock as well. Worn stairs led down into the darkness. A smell of mould, and disinfectants. The chalky scent of damp plaster. Memories of Shenzhen, the steps leading down to Hell. He hesitated. His hand fumbled for the light-switch, found it. At the bottom of the stairs a light bulb glowed in its cage. Whitewashed plaster, a stained concrete floor, a spider scuttling away. He went down a step at a
time, his Glock at the ready, his skin crawling, overcome by nausea. Kenny Xin. Animal Ma Liping. Who or what was awaiting him down below? What kind of creatures would leap out at him now, what images would burn their way into his brain?

He stepped off the last stair. He looked round. A short corridor, piled high with crates and barrels. A steel door, half open.

He went through, his gaze darting, gun ready.

Nyela!

She was squatting down on the floor with her arms behind her back, her mouth covered with tape. Her eyes glowed in the half-light. He hurried across to her, holstered his Glock, tore the tape away and put his fingers to his lips. Not yet. First he had to get her out of the cuffs. Her jailers had locked her to the pipework, and he didn’t imagine that the key would be lying about somewhere as a reward for keen-eyed detectives.

‘I’ll be right back,’ he whispered.

Back in the kitchen, he pulled open drawers, rummaged through the tools, steel, copper, chrome, looked around all the worktops and finally found what he was looking for: a cleaver. He hurried back down to the cellar.

‘Lean forward,’ he ordered. ‘I need some room.’

Nyela nodded and turned away from him so that he had a good view of her hands. The pipe was worryingly short. Just a few centimetres from her wrists, it turned into the wall and vanished into the crumbling mortar. He took a deep breath, concentrated, and brought the blade down. The whole radiator sang like a struck bell. He frowned. There was a dent in the pipe, but otherwise nothing had changed. He struck again, and a third time, a fourth, until the pipe burst open, so that he could prise it apart with the handle of the cleaver. The chain of the cuffs scraped through the gap.

‘Where—’ Nyela began to ask.

‘Over there.’ Jericho motioned with his chin, ordering her over to a metal work-table. ‘Back to the tabletop, palms down, as flat as you can. Pull the chain tight.’

Nyela’s features clouded over with a premonition of the dreadful news she knew she was about to receive. She did as he said, turning her hands about.

‘Don’t move,’ Jericho said. ‘Stay still, quite still.’

She looked down at the floor. He fixed his eyes on the middle of the chain, and struck. One blow broke the chain.

‘Now let’s get out of here.’

‘No.’ She stood in his way. ‘Where’s Jan? What happened?’

Jericho felt his tongue go numb.

‘He’s dead,’ he said.

Nyela looked at him. Whatever he had expected, bewilderment, shock, tears,
didn’t happen. Just a quiet grief, her love for the man who now lay dead in the museum, and at the same time a curious nonchalance, as though to say, there it is then, so it goes, it had to happen sometime. He hesitated, then hugged Nyela tight for a moment. She responded, a gentle embrace.

‘I’ll get you out of here,’ he promised.

‘Yes,’ she said, tired, nodding. ‘I hear that a lot.’

* * *

There was nobody upstairs, just the dead man staring out from behind the bar as though waiting for an explanation of what had happened to him. Jericho hurried to the closed door of the restaurant and peered outside.

‘We’ll have to run for it.’

‘Why?’

‘My car’s a few streets away.’

‘Mine isn’t.’ Nyela leaned across the bar, opened a drawer and took out a data-stick. ‘Jan was using it earlier today. He must have parked it in front of Muntu.’

Yoyo had spoken of a Nissan OneOne. There was just such a car parked a few steps away, its legs drawn up. The cabin was egg-shaped, its design rather like a friendly little whale. The legs on either side were thick at the base, tapering towards the wheels. When the legs were stretched out flat, the cabin hung low to the ground, but if the driver drew in his wheels, the legs drew inward and upward, lifting the cabin. The low, aerodynamic profile, like a sports car, changed to become a compact, taller car. Jericho stepped out of the door and scanned the street. Shapes and colours seemed over-exposed in the noonday sun. There was a smell of pollen, and of baking tarmac. There were hardly any pedestrians to be seen, but the traffic had picked up. He put his head back and looked up at a cigar-shaped tourist zeppelin that bumbled cheerfully into view, its engines droning.

‘All clear,’ he called back inside. ‘Come on out.’

The car roof reflected the sky, the clouds and the buildings around, curving them into an Einsteinian space. Nyela unlocked the car, and the roof lifted like a hatch. The interior was surprisingly roomy, with a long bench right across it and extra folding seats.

‘Where to?’ she asked.

‘The Grand Hyatt.’

‘Got you.’ She swung herself inside, and Jericho slid in next to her. He saw that the Nissan’s steering column was adjustable. The whole thing could be swung across from the driver’s side to the passenger’s. The tinted glass filtered the harsher wavelengths out of the noonday light and created a cocoon-like atmosphere. The electric motor sprang to life, humming gently.

‘Nyela, I—’ Jericho massaged the bridge of his nose. ‘I have to ask you something.’

She looked at him, the life draining from her eyes.

‘What?’

‘Your husband was going to give me a dossier.’

‘A— My God!’ She pressed her hand to her mouth. ‘You don’t have it? He couldn’t even get the dossier to you?’

Jericho shook his head, silent.

‘We could have blown the bastards’ game for good and all!’

‘He had it with him?’

‘Not the one from the Crystal Brain, Kenny has that one, but—’

Of course he does, Jericho thought, tired.

‘But the duplicate—’

‘One moment!’ Jericho grabbed her arm. ‘There’s a duplicate?’

‘He wanted to give it to you.’ She looked at him, pleading. ‘Believe me, Jan had no choice, he had to sacrifice you and the girl! That wasn’t in his nature, he wouldn’t have double-crossed you. He always—’

‘
Where is it
, Nyela?’

‘I thought he’d have told you.’

‘Told me what?’ Jericho felt he was going mad. ‘Nyela, damn it all, where did he have—’

‘Have, have!’ She shook her head furiously, spread out her fingers. ‘You’re asking the wrong questions. He
is
the duplicate!’

Jericho stared at her.

‘What do you m—’

Her throat opened out in a red fan. Something warm sprayed out at him. He flung himself down onto Nyela’s lap. Above him, the Nissan’s cabin exploded, the foam seat stuffing splattered about his ears. Still bending down, he grabbed hold of the steering wheel, tugged it towards himself, revved up and sped away. A salvo stitched through the car’s carbon-fibre hull with a dry staccato. Jericho raised his head just far enough to see over the dashboard, then felt Nyela slump heavily against his shoulder, and he lost control. The car careened down the street, lurched into the opposite lane and climbed the pavement, leaving the squeal of brakes and blare of horns in its wake. Pedestrians scattered. At the last moment, he wrenched the wheel to the left to come back across to his side of the street, almost colliding with a van. As the van swerved aside and rammed several parked cars, he bumped up onto the kerb on his own side and steered for the Spree.

There, tall, white-haired, he saw the angel of death.

Xin fired as he ran, coming directly towards him. Jericho nudged the wheel again.
The Nissan threatened to tip over, the cabin was too high up on its legs, the wheels too close together for manoeuvres like this. He scanned the dashboard desperately. Xin had stopped to take aim. With a loud crack, part of the wrecked roof broke away. The Nissan raced towards Xin, and Jericho braced himself for an impact.

* * *

Xin leapt aside.

The car sped past him like a giant runaway pram. Xin fired after it, heard brakes squealing, dodged out of the path of a limousine by a hair’s breadth and stumbled across to the other lane, forcing a motorcyclist to veer crazily. The bike skidded and slanted. Xin dodged away again, felt something brush against him, and he flew through the air; he slammed full length against the pavement, on his front. A compact car had struck him, and now the driver was roaring away. Other cars stopped, people climbed out. He rolled onto his back, moved his arms and legs, saw the motorcyclist running towards him and fumbled for his pistol.

‘Good God!’ The man leaned over him. ‘What happened?’ he asked in English. ‘Are you all right?’

Xin grabbed his gun and shoved it under the man’s nose.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said.

The motorcyclist turned pale and scuttled backwards. Xin leapt to his feet. A few steps took him to the bike, and he swung himself into the saddle and thrashed off towards the Spree, where he drew up, tyres squealing, and looked about in all directions.

There! The Nissan. It ran a red light, vanished southwards.

* * *

Jericho looked about and saw him coming.

He had gone the wrong way. The Audi was somewhere else entirely. He could have changed cars by now, got out of this wrecked Nissan and away from the dead woman. The corpse was flung about this way and that, and kept thumping against him. He looked all over the dashboard for the control that would let the legs down. Pretty nearly everything was controlled via the touchscreen, there must be some symbol somewhere there, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept having to dodge, swerve, brake, accelerate.

Xin was catching up.

Jericho rumbled along the promenade by the river, across the cobblestones, cut up a lorry and emerged onto a majestic boulevard fringed with grand Prussian buildings. He tried to remember how to get to the hotel from here. Up on its stilts, the Nissan lurched from side to side, always threatening to tip over. All of a sudden he realised that he had no plan. Not a glimmer! He was racing through central Berlin
in a wrecked compact car with a dead woman at his side, and Xin was after him, growing inexorably closer.

The traffic ground to a halt ahead. Jericho changed lanes. Another jam. Change again. A gap, a jam, a gap. Bumping from lane to lane like a pinball, he drove towards a huge equestrian statue which marked the beginning of a central island, planted with trees right down its length, a broad green lane dividing the traffic flows. He wrenched the wheel to the right, smashed into the kerb and climbed it. All of a sudden he was surrounded by pedestrians. He jammed the flat of his hand against the horn, veered about, frantically trying not to run anyone over, then the jam was past and he slalomed back down onto the road. He was going too fast, and the wheels had no grip on the road surface. The car skidded across the lanes towards the central reservation, lost contact with the tarmac. On two wheels, he was racing towards the line of trees, and he threw his weight to the side. Something slammed. The car shuddered, leapt violently, bark scraped, huge clouds of dust billowed up. The central island stretching away in front of him was almost empty of people, flanked by lime trees and by benches. To either side the traffic blurred behind the thick green foliage, an impressionist smear of cars, buses, bicycle rickshaws, colour, light, movement.

He glanced backwards.

Xin’s motorcycle was thrashing on under the low-hanging branches, hunting him like a beast of prey.

Jericho accelerated. More people suddenly. A café, shady, romantic, jutting out into the tree-lined walk. Yelled curses, shaken fists, scurrying backwards. A kiosk with tall tables standing around, people playing pétanque. He was racing towards a crossroads, saw the traffic lights changing through a gap in the leaves, yellow, red, and then he was cutting under the noses of dozens of cars ready to move, and was on the next stretch of the central strip. The chorus of blaring horns died away behind him. Glance back, no sign of Xin. Jericho yelled hoarsely. Lost him! He’d shaken Xin off, at least for the moment. He’d won some time, valuable seconds, every second worth an eternity.

Suddenly he also got his bearings back.

A snack bar blocked his way, but the traffic was lighter on both sides. Jericho steered the Nissan out of the shadow of the trees, back down onto the road, and saw it on the skyline ahead of him, the Brandenburg Gate, still some way off. Not for the first time, he felt surprised at how grand it looked in photographs and how small it really was. The Prussian-era courtyards and palaces were giving way now to modern architecture, the bistros and shops were ending, there were fewer pedestrians about. Soon enough the boulevard would end at Pariser Platz, with the Academy of Arts,
the French Embassy, the American, and he hoped he could turn off there. North or south, and then—