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‘Shit,’ he whispered.

He let go of the wheel as if it were made of red-hot steel, jumped from the rover, turned a somersault and skidded away across the smooth asphalt, as the vehicle dashed on with no one to stop it, straight towards Ganymede and the astronaut. A bright flash outshone the cold, white sun in the sky. The rover was hurled upwards, stood upright, and spat parts of its frame, splinters of chassis, scraps of gold foil and electronic components in all directions. Locatelli instinctively threw his arms together over his helmet. Beside him, debris ploughed grooves into the asphalt. He quickly rolled onto his back, then as he sat up he saw one of the wheels wobbling wildly towards him; he catapulted himself out of the way and got to his feet.

No!
Not on my watch!

Crouching and expecting the worst, he ran across the landing field, but his adversary had vanished. He saw the illuminated cabin climbing the lock shaft. A few minutes more. He couldn’t let the murderer steal the Ganymede and leave them in the desert. Heedless of the injuries he had dealt himself in his stunt, he ran under the body of the shuttle to the lock shaft. The lift cabin was gone, but the display showed a red light, and while it was red, Black had explained to them, the shaft couldn’t be retracted. The astronaut must still be in the lock, which was probably being filled with air at that very minute. Good, very good.

Locatelli panted, waited.

Green!

He struck the call button with the flat of his hand.

* * *

Hanna wasted no time taking off his helmet after leaving the lock. He hurried between the rows of seats to the cockpit. Had he killed Locatelli? Probably not. The man had jumped off, Hanna had seen his body flying through the vacuum, before the projectile had struck the rover. The wreck might have crashed on top of him, or he might have been hit by some of the flying debris. Without looking behind him, he slipped into the pilot’s seat and ran an eye over the display. He knew what the devices were for, he had had an opportunity to familiarise himself with the workings of all lunar vehicles some months ago. Thanks to Hydra’s perfect preparatory work he even knew enough to drive the spaceship back into orbit, and from there to the OSS, and he wasn’t alone on board as long as Ebola found a way of contacting him after communication had been blocked. Something he probably didn’t need to worry about. Ebola would make sure he got there, and appeared in the right place at the right time.

His fingers slid over the controls.

He hesitated.

What was that? The shaft wouldn’t move. The display was red, which meant that the cabin was currently being drained, or filled with air – or on its way!

He quickly turned around.

No, it was there, the space evenly lit behind the narrow windows, and deserted. Hanna narrowed his eyes. He paused. A sudden urge impelled him to get up and check, but he couldn’t afford any further delays, and the light had just switched from red to green.

Ganymede was ready to go.

* * *

‘There. There!’

Amber pointed excitedly into the sky. A long way off something was climbing steeply into the sky, something long that glinted in the sun.

‘The Ganymede!’

They had come hurrying down the path, mindless, breathless, in clumsy kangaroo leaps, back to the crane platform, only to discover that both rovers had disappeared. Not a soul far and wide. Black’s cries still echoed in Amber’s ears:

Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone m— No!

Carl?

She had run anxiously out onto the platform and seen what was left of the gondola in which Mimi and Marc should have been sitting. More precisely, there was no gondola. Just the useless back of a chair, twisted steel, the contorted scrap of a safety guard and behind it, wedged in, something white, something numbingly familiar—

A single leg.

Only an extreme effort of will had kept her from throwing up in her helmet, while the others had stared down into the gorge and kept a lookout for the missing man. But large parts of the valley were in shadow, so they couldn’t see anything at all.

‘They’re dead,’ Rogachev had stated at last.

‘How can you claim that they’re dead?’ Evelyn said excitedly.

‘That
is
a corpse.’ Rogachev pointed to the amputated leg in the ruined gondola.

‘No, that’s – that’s—’

None of them had managed to speak its name. What an unbearable idea, that the fate of that shredded individual would only be fulfilled when it gave that limb an identity and thus retrospectively supplied the facts.

‘We have to look for her,’ said Evelyn.

‘Later.’ Julian stared at the place where the vehicles had just been standing. ‘We have worse things to worry about right now.’

‘Don’t you think that’s bad enough?’ snapped Momoka.

‘I think it’s terrible. But first we have to find the rovers.’

‘Warren?’ Momoka resumed her mantra-like calls to her husband. ‘Warren, where are you?’

‘Assuming they managed it—’ Evelyn tried again.

‘
They’re dead
,’ Rogachev cut her off in a voice of ice. ‘Five people are missing. At least two of those are alive, otherwise both vehicles couldn’t have disappeared, but the others are down there. Do you want to abseil down there and poke about in the dark?’

‘How do you know it isn’t – it isn’t Carl down there?’

‘Because Carl’s alive,’ Amber had said wearily, to keep things short. ‘I think he has Peter and the others on his conscience.’

‘What makes you so sure about that?’

‘Amber’s right,’ Julian had said. ‘Carl’s a traitor, I realised that a few minutes ago. Believe me, we do have a bigger problem than that here! We urgently have to think about how we—’

At that moment Amber saw the shuttle rising on the horizon. For a moment it seemed to stand still above Cobra Head, then it came towards them and suddenly got bigger.

It’s flying this way, she thought.

The armoured body was gaining form and outline, but also, worryingly, altitude. Whoever was flying the Ganymede plainly didn’t plan to land and pick them up. The machine moved silently overhead, accelerated, turned in a northerly direction, shrank to a dot and disappeared.

‘Julian, call Gaia,’ urged Evelyn. ‘They’ve got to pick us up from here.’

‘It’s not going to happen.’ Julian sighed. ‘The connection’s been broken.’

‘Broken?’ cried Momoka, horrified. ‘How come it’s broken?’

‘No idea. I did say we had a bigger problem.’

Xin’s transformation back from a lion-maned Mando-Progger to a perfectly normal contract killer was as good as complete when his contact called.

On the way back from the Grand Hyatt he had constantly asked himself what the two policemen had been doing there. No doubt about it, they had been after Tu – Jericho and the girl as well – but to what end? Jericho wasn’t mentioned by name in Berlin, so the investigators had their sights set on Tu. Why him, of all people?

On the other hand he didn’t care. Admittedly he had had to disappear without having achieved anything, but his intuition told him he had arrived too late anyway. The group had cleared off. So what? What were they going to do? Vogelaar and his wife were dead, the crystal was in his possession. While he put his wigs and fake beards away, he took the call.

‘Kenny, damn it, how could that happen?’

No
Hydra
, no other greeting. Just anxious whispering. Xin hesitated. His contact was beside himself.

‘How could what happen?’ he asked warily.

‘It’s all going down the tubes! This guy Tu and this Jericho guy and the girl, all the contraband is on its way to us, and they
know
! They know everything! About
the parcel, about the
attack
! They’ve even had a chance to talk to Julian Orley.
Our cover’s being blown!
’

Xin froze. The Mando-Progger’s Tartar beard lay in his hand like a small, dead animal.

‘That’s impossible,’ he whispered.

‘Impossible? Well, then perhaps you could come
here
! Right now the company’s being hit by a devastating earthquake.’

‘But I’ve got the dossier.’

‘So have they!’

A volley of oaths rained down on Xin, taking in, amongst other hardships, the unmasking of Hanna and the activation of the communication block. The latter had been planned as an emergency measure in case details of the attack were to seep through prematurely to the Moon. Something no one at Hydra had seriously reckoned with, but that was exactly what had happened.

‘When was the net jammed?’ asked Xin.

‘During the linkup.’ The other man breathed sharply into the receiver. ‘Over the next twenty-four hours the Moon will be cut off from everything, but we can’t keep the block going for ever. I just hope Hanna gets the situation under control. Not to mention Ebola.’

Ebola. Hanna’s right hand was a specialist when it came to infecting supposedly independent systems and weakening them from within. That Ebola had managed to interrupt the fatal linkup could be seen as a brilliant manoeuvre, a skilful turnaround in the adverse wind of circumstances, but unfortunately on a leaking boat.

Vogelaar had outwitted him.

No! Xin forced himself to calm down. They weren’t leaking yet. He had chosen Hanna and Ebola because they knew how to improvise and would keep the upper hand, regardless of how inauspicious the circumstances might be. He planned not to waste a second brooding on the possibility that the undertaking might go wrong.

‘And how are you going to force this Tu and his rat-pack to see sense?’ the other man raged. ‘You’ve lost Mickey Reardon, two of your people died in Shanghai, you can’t count on Gudmundsson and his team at the moment, they’re otherwise engaged, so how do you think—’

‘Not at all,’ Xin cut in.

Puzzled, his contact fell silent.

‘There’s no longer any point in eliminating Tu’s group,’ Xin explained to him. ‘The facts of the situation have become common knowledge, the dissemination of the dossier can no longer be stopped. Everything else is decided on the Moon.’

‘Damn it, Kenny. We’ve been busted!’

‘No. My task right now is to protect Hydra from being unmasked. Does
he
know about it yet?’

‘I told him five minutes ago. He’d be glad of a personal call from you, otherwise I’ve got to sign off now, such a bloody mess! What happens if they track me down? What am I supposed to do then?’

‘Nobody’s going to get busted.’

‘But they’re bringing the dossier with them! I don’t know what’s in it. Perhaps it would be better—’

‘Just chill.’ The tearful whining at the other end was starting to make Xin feel ill.‘I’ll come to London as quickly as possible. I’ll be near you, and if things get tight I’ll get you out.’

‘My God, Kenny! How on earth could this happen?’

‘Pull yourself together,’ Xin snapped. ‘The only risk is that you lose your nerve. Go back to the others and act as if nothing’s wrong.’

‘I hope Hanna knows what he’s doing.’

‘That’s why I chose him.’

Xin finished the conversation, swapped his phone from one hand to the other and inspected the room. As might have been expected, he noticed thousands of things that weren’t right, things that were asymmetrical, things that were out of proportion, strange excrescences in the design, an irritating bouquet of flowers. The florist hadn’t been skilled enough to make the number of petals a multiple of the number of the flowers, thus giving the sorry effort some kind of mathematical meaning. For want of a self-contained idea, the supposedly aesthetic function failing to correspond to a structural one, the arrangement had something menacingly haphazard about it – a nightmare for Xin. The mere idea of being unable to produce a rationale for one’s actions was totally horrifying! He reluctantly dialled another number, held his mobile in his left hand, while the fingers of his right gripped the flowers and tried to correct the arrangement.

‘Hydra,’ he said.

‘How big is the dossier?’ asked the voice.

‘I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.’ Kenny pinched at a lily. ‘I’m sorry about what happened. Of course I’ll assume full responsibility, but we could do nothing more than threaten Vogelaar with torture and death. He must have passed on a copy of the dossier to Jericho.’

‘You’re not guilty,’ said the voice. ‘What’s crucial is that the block still stands. What do you have in mind?’

‘Change of tack. Take the heat off Jericho, Tu and Yoyo. Their deaths are no
longer a priority, and we can’t influence what’s happening on the Moon. I remain convinced that the operation will be a complete success. The important thing now is to preserve Hydra’s anonymity.’

‘Do we agree on the weak points?’

‘From my point of view there’s only the one we’ve already discussed.’

‘That’s exactly how I see it.’

Xin considered the flower arrangement. Not really any better, still without any semiotic content. ‘I’ll take the next plane to London.’

‘Are you well enough equipped there?’

‘Airbike and everything. If necessary I can summon reinforcements.’

‘Gudmundsson is busy, you know that.’

‘My net stretches wide. I could set legions marching, but that won’t be necessary. I keep myself constantly at the ready, so that should do it.’

‘Tell me about the basic information in the dossier. Now that we’ve shelved email communication, unfortunately you can’t send it to me any more.’

‘But it was still right to take the pages off the net.’

‘Keep me posted.’

Xin paused.

Then he threw his phone on the bed and turned his mounting rage on orchids, lilies and crocuses. He had to leave Berlin as soon as possible, but he couldn’t even leave this room as long as the arrangement was subject to an unsatisfactory structure. The world was not random. Not haphazard. Everything had to yield a meaning. Where the meaning ended, madness began.

The head of a lily broke off.

Bobbing with fury, Kenny Xin tore the whole arrangement out of its bowl and shoved it in the bin.

Lynn had decided to search the subterranean areas of Gaia along with Sophie. Tim sensed the reason for that. She dreaded arguments with him, because she knew very well that she would no longer be able to keep up her pretence. She was still able to lie to herself. Her attitude alternated between moments of complete clarity, subjectivity and erupting fury. That abysmal, night-black fear dwelt once more in her every glance, the fear that might easily have killed her years before, and Tim thought he
noticed something else in it, something vaguely insidious that frightened him to the core. As he poked through the casino with Axel Kokoschka, the chef, his concern swung from her to Amber, who was travelling with a suspected terrorist. Julian had received the information on a protected frequency, but how had he reacted? Peter Black was with him. Had they caught Carl?