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‘If he really is,’ said Evelyn.

‘As Peter is
probably
dead, I’ll take his place. Okay? Responsibility for the group lies with me now, and from this moment I only want to hear constructive comments.’

‘I’ve got a constructive comment,’ said Rogachev.

‘Great stuff, Oleg,’ sneered Momoka. ‘Constructive comments are at a premium right now.’

Rogachev ignored her. ‘Aren’t the helium-3 mines a bit closer to the Aristarchus Plateau than the hotel?’

‘That’s right,’ said Julian. ‘Not half as far.’

‘So if we could get there—’

‘The mines are automatic,’ Momoka objected. ‘Peter told me. It’s all robots.’

‘Okay,’ said Evelyn thoughtfully. ‘Even so, they must have some sort of infrastructure, don’t they? Accommodation for maintenance staff. Some means of transport.’

‘There’s definitely a survival depot,’ said Julian. ‘Good idea, Oleg. So let’s go!’

The fact that their oxygen wouldn’t get them to the mining zone he left unspoken.

Hanna hurried towards his goal on the hypothetical line of fifty degrees longitude, pulling the shadow of the Ganymede at a rate of 1200 kilometres an hour across the velvet monotony of the northern Oceanus Procellarum. His gaze rested on the
controls. He couldn’t get any more speed out of the shuttle. He still had another hour and a quarter to go, but given the pitiful possibilities at Julian’s group’s disposal that was hardly cause for concern. Even if they managed to leave the plateau, he still had a luxurious amount of time to finish his task and leave the Moon. But whether Ebola would get there in time, now that everything was in chaos, was anybody’s guess. Admittedly he planned to wait as long as possible. But he would have to fly off sooner or later, alone if necessary. Those were the rules. Alliances served a purpose.

On his right there began a plain covered with tiny craters, which separated the northern Mare Imbrium from the Oceanus Procellarum. Behind it the helium-3 mining zone stretched into Sinus Iridum, the bay in which the Americans and the Chinese had got into such arguments the previous year. Kenny Xin had told him loads about that. Mad he might be, yet it was worth listening to him.

He looked wearily around.

The lock was bathed in a diffuse light. There was nothing to suggest that Locatelli had made it to the shuttle. And anyway, the noise of the bulkhead would give him away as soon as it opened. He turned his attention back to the controls and looked out of the window. A larger crater came into view, Mairan, as the holographic map on the console told him. The Ganymede had been travelling for a good twenty minutes now, and he was almost starting to feel something like boredom.

Okay then.

He stood up, grabbed his weapon with the non-explosive rounds and walked between the seats to the lock. The closer he got, the deeper he could see into the cabin, but at the moment it was actually empty. It was only when he was a couple of steps away that something massive and white entered his field of vision, something on the floor, and he stopped.

A survival backpack. At least that was what it looked like.

Did that mean Locatelli had actually done it?

He stepped slowly closer. Other details became visible, the shoulder of a piece of chest armour, a bent leg. It was only when he was standing so close to the glass that his breath condensed on it into a film of tiny droplets that he was also able to make out part of the face, a lifelessly staring eye, a half-open mouth. Locatelli seemed to be resting his back against the bulkhead, and he didn’t look particularly well, in fact he looked a bit dead.

Hanna’s fingers clutched the weapon. He rested his free hand on the sensor field, raised the bulkhead and took a step back.

Locatelli slumped out from the cabin like a sack and stared at the ceiling. His left arm weakly struck the floor, his fingers open as if he were begging for a final
pittance. His right hand, still in the lock, was wrapped around the lower edge of his helmet. There was no outward sign of injury, and in any case he had been able to take off his armour before he collapsed.

Hanna frowned, leaned forward and paused.

At that moment he realised that something was wrong. The unusually healthy colour of the man’s face might be just about compatible with his being a corpse – but Warren Locatelli was definitely the first dead person he’d ever seen sweating.

* * *

So, Hanna.

Locatelli cried out. With all his might he swung the helmet, hit Hanna’s arm, saw the weapon flying away, leapt up.

Hanna staggered.

That the Canadian would see through his bluff and shoot him a moment later had been Locatelli’s worst-case expectation. So, two seconds after the attack, what surprised him most of all was that he was still alive. Countless times during the sequence of eternities that had passed since the shuttle lifted off, he had tried to imagine the situation and calculate his chances. Now here they were, and there was no longer any time to think, not even to wonder or catch his breath. Trusting, in the Celtic manner, to the effects of a good shout, loud and inarticulate like an attacking horde, he thrashed away at his opponent with his helmet, again and again, without a pause, without giving him the slightest opportunity to retreat, saw his knees bending, aimed at the top of his shaven head, struck again, as hard as he could. The Canadian made a grab for him. Locatelli dealt him a kick to the shoulder. God knew he had fought quite enough in his life, both often and enthusiastically, but never with a professional hitman, as Hanna plainly was when you looked at things with a lucid eye, so for the sake of certainty he brought the helmet down on his head once more, even though the man hadn’t moved a muscle for ages, grabbed for the curious weapon, staggered a few steps back and took aim.

Spurts of blood from the back of Hanna’s head, on the floor.

Locatelli’s hand was shaking.

After a while, quivering with fear, he risked stepping forward again, crouched down and held the barrel to Hanna’s temple. No reaction. The Canadian’s eyes were shut and his breathing was heavy. Locatelli blinked, felt his heartbeat gradually slowing down. Waited. Nothing happened. Went on waiting.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Gradually he was starting to believe that the man really was unconscious.

Where should he put him? He thought frantically. Perhaps he should chuck him in the lock and simply get rid of him on the flight. But that would have been murder,
and even at his most reckless Locatelli was no murderer. And he wanted to know why Peter, Mimi and Marc had had to die, what Hanna’s crappy aims had been. He needed information, and anyway, Momoka, Julian, the others, were stuck on the Aristarchus Plateau! He had to get back and fetch them, that had absolute priority.

And how, smart-arse?

His gaze wandered to the cockpit. He knew how to drive a racing car, how to sail a yacht into the wind. But he hadn’t the faintest idea about Hornets, or about where the Ganymede was headed, how high and how fast it flew. Nothing on board was designed to lift his spirits. Here the Canadian, who would eventually come round, there the unfamiliar world of the cockpit. He hadn’t the first clue. He would have to learn, and fast.

No. First of all he had to put Hanna somewhere.

Nothing occurred to him even after he had gone on thinking for a few minutes longer, so he dragged the motionless body towards the cockpit, dumped it behind the co-pilot’s seat and looked around for something to tie it up with.

There didn’t seem to be anything like that on board either.

Right. At least no one could say things were getting boring.

One of the last works of the venerable Sir Norman Foster stood on the Isle of Dogs, a droplet-shaped peninsula in London’s East End. Bent into a U at this point, the Thames flowed around an area of business districts, elegantly restored docks, exclusive apartments and preserved remainders of social housing, whose traditional inhabitants were reduced to the status of extras in this affluent architectural idyll. As early as the 1990s, well-to-do Londoners had discovered the hidden charms of the area for themselves; artists, galleries, medium-sized companies had moved here to bear down on the crumbling working-class estates like so many pest controllers. After over two decades of violent social tensions, the last stretches of estate streets had now been lovingly restored, as if by museum curators, and the families living there had been made protected species, which meant turning them, with financial support, into the kind of happy social case that stressed managers were able to envy without drawing suspicions of cynicism.

In 2025 there was no one left on the Isle of Dogs who was still really poor. Certainly not in the shadow of the Big O.

The construction of the new headquarters of Orley Enterprises had begun even in Jericho’s day, the year before the fear of losing Joanna had sent him to Shanghai. In the south-east of the Isle of Dogs, in the former Island Gardens, resting on a low plinth – if you could call a twelve-storey complex low – was an O two hundred and fifty metres in diameter, circled parabolically by an artificial orange moon which contained several conference rooms and was reached via airy bridges. More than five thousand staff swarmed around the light-flooded atriums, gardens and open-plan offices of the big glass torus, busy as termites. A flight pad had been worked into the roof area so skilfully that the curve of the O was preserved from every perspective. Only as you approached it from the air did you notice that the zenith of the building was not arched but flat, a surface with two dozen helicopters and skymobiles arranged on it.

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.