Limit (79 page)

And he knew where.

Looming over the grand buildings of the Bund was one of the most peculiar hotels in Shanghai. Like a huge lotus blossom, China’s symbol of growth and affluence, the roof of the Westin Shanghai Bund Center opened itself up to the sky. It made some people think of an agave, others of an outsize octopus extending its tentacles to filter birds and skymobiles out of the air. Jericho saw it only as a refuge whose manager played in the same golf club as himself and Tu Tian. A casual acquaintance without the bonus of familiarity, but Tu liked the man, and tended to use the hotel as accommodation for business partners too lowly for the WFC and the Jin Mao Tower. Jericho was also granted the indulgence of special conditions, a favour that he had so far never called on. Now, since he felt little desire to wander nomadically from bistro to bistro, he decided to make use of it. After he had landed
his bike by the front entrance, he stepped into the lobby and asked for a single room. The cameras set into the wall scanned him and passed the relevant information on to the receptionist. She smilingly greeted him by name, a sign that he was already on their files, and asked him to set his phone down on the touchscreen. The hotel computer compared Jericho’s ID with the database, authorised the reservation and uploaded the access code to Jericho’s hard drive.

‘Would you like us to take your car to the underground car park?’ the woman asked, and performed the trick of speaking with a smile even though her lips never met.

‘I’ve come on an airbike,’ said Jericho.

‘We’ve got a landing bay, as I’m sure you know,’ said the smile fixed to the corners of the receptionist’s mouth. ‘Do you want us to park your bike there for you?’

‘No, I’ll do that myself.’ He grinned. ‘Quite honestly, I need every hour of flying time I can get.’

‘Oh, I understand.’ The smile switched from routine politeness to routine cordiality. ‘Safe journey up there. Don’t forget, the hotel façade can take more knocks than you can.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

He left the lobby and flew his bike up along the glazed outside wall, constantly accompanied by his reflection. For the first time he became aware that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, as the regulations for airbikes demanded. Another reason to keep away from the police. If they found out that the bike wasn’t registered to him, it was going to be a tough thing to explain.

The landing pad was open and almost empty, aside from the hotel’s own shuttles. Nearly all twentieth-century visions of the future had assumed some form of private urban air traffic powered by lightbeams, taking it for granted that aerial traffic would shape the face of cities. In fact, the number of such skymobiles was tiny, and they were restricted to State and city institutions, a few exclusive taxi companies and millionaires like Tu Tian. In purely infrastructural terms, of course, there were good reasons for lightening ground traffic by exploiting the airborne variety, except that all these considerations faced a great Godzilla of a counter-argument: fuel consumption. To counteract the force of gravity you needed powerful turbines and a whole load of energy. The economical alternative, the gyrocopter, spiralled its way into the air by rotor power like a helicopter, but had the disadvantage of excessively massive rotor blades. Financially, the expense of making cars fly was entirely disproportionate to the effect, and airbikes, even though they were more economical and affordable, weren’t really an exception to that. They were still expensive enough to make Jericho wonder who could afford to supply a hitman with three – especially
customised models. The police, chronically underfunded? Hardly. Secret services? More likely. The army?

Was Kenny a soldier? Was the army behind all this?

With his backpack over his shoulder, Jericho took the lift to his floor and held his phone up to the infrared port beside the door to his room. It swung open, revealing a view of the room behind it. Fussy and staid, was his first impression. All in great condition, but stylistically nowhere. Jericho didn’t care. Within a few minutes he had freed Diane from her backpack and connected her up. That made this room his new investigation agency.

Would Kenny set the loft on fire?

Jericho rubbed his temples. He wouldn’t be surprised, but on the other hand he doubted that the hitman would wait in Xintiandi until he called. Kenny would try to arrest Yoyo on his own initiative, probably aware that Jericho wasn’t automatically prepared for collaboration just because he was waving a box of matches around.

‘Diane?’

‘I’m here, Owen.’

‘How’s the search for the password going?’

It was a stupid question. As long as Diane registered no success, he didn’t need to worry about where things went from here. But talking to the computer made him feel as if he was in charge of a little team that was doing everything in its power.

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ said Diane.

Jericho gave a start. Was that humour? Not bad. He lay down on the huge bed with its gaudy yellow cover and felt terribly tired and useless. Owen Jericho, cyber-detective. Hilarious. He had been supposed to find Yoyo, and instead he’d put a psychopath on her trail. How in God’s name would he explain that to Tu, let alone to Chen Hongbing?

‘Owen?’

‘Diane?’

‘Someone’s uploading a post to Brilliant Shit.’

Jericho jolted upright.

‘Read it to me.’

At first he was disappointed. It was a list of coordinates, with no sender or any kind of accompanying text. Time, input code, nothing else.

An address in Second Life.

Did it come from Yoyo?

With leaden head and arms, he pulled himself upright, walked over to the little desk where he’d put his screen and keyboard, and took a look at the short text. At length he found a single letter that he’d probably overlooked: a D.

Demon
.

Jericho took a look at his watch. Just after eleven. At twelve o’clock Yoyo was waiting for him in the virtual world. As long as the message really did come from her and wasn’t another attempt by Kenny to locate him. Had he given away the address of the blog to the hitman? Not as far as he remembered. Kenny surely couldn’t be so cunning as to turn up all of a sudden in Brilliant Shit as well, but caution was plainly advised. Jericho decided not to take a risk. From now on he would put any online communication through the anonymiser.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

There was nothing he could do.

After a few minutes the turbulent sea of his nerves was calm once more. He dozed off, but he didn’t sink into a relaxing sleep. Just below the surface of his consciousness, he was haunted by images of creeping torsos that weren’t human beings, but failed designs of human beings, grotesquely distorted and incomplete, covered with blood and mucus like newborn babies. He saw legless creatures, their faces nothing but smooth, gleaming surfaces, split down the middle by obscenely twitching pink openings. Half-charred lumps teetered towards him like spiders on a thousand legs or more. Eyes and mouths suddenly opened up in a scab of shapeless tissue. Something blind stretched towards him, darting a gnarled tongue between fanged jaws, and yet Jericho felt no fear, just a weary sadness, since he knew that in another life all these monstrosities had been as human as he was himself.

Then he fell, and found himself back on a bed, but it was a different bed from the one on which he had lain down. Dark and damp, lit by feeble moonlight that fell through a dirty window and outlined the bleak, bare room where he had ended up, it seemed to exert a curious power over him. Lucidly dreaming, he realised that he must be in his comfortable, boringly furnished room, but he couldn’t sit up and open his eyes. He was bound to this rotting mattress as if by magnetic force, swathed in weird, dry silence.

And in the midst of that silence he suddenly heard the click of chitin-armoured legs.

Jagged feet scratched at the edges of the bedcover, snagged in the fabric and drew fat, segmented bodies up to him. A wave of anxiety washed over him. His horror was due less to the question of what the armoured creatures wanted to do to him, than to the most terrible of all realisations: that a perfidious dream had slung him back into the past, to a phase of his life that he thought he had long since overcome. His rise through society in Shanghai, the peace that he had made with Joanna, his arrival in Xintiandi, it was all revealed as a fantasy, the real dream, from which the invisible insects were now waking him with their rustles and clicks.

Close beside him, someone had begun to whimper, in high, singing tones. Everything sank back into darkness, because the fact that his eyes were closed was starting to defeat the vision of that terrifying room. His mind found its way back to reality, except that nobody seemed to have told his body. It didn’t respond, it wouldn’t move. He was starting to fight against that weird rigidity by emitting those whimpers, real sounds that anyone who had been in the room could have heard as clearly as he did himself, and finally, by summoning all his powers, he managed to move the little finger of his left hand. He was wide awake by now. He remembered stories about people who – having apparently passed away – had been carried to the grave, while they actually saw every moment with crystal clarity, and without the slightest chance of being able to attract anyone’s attention, and he whimpered still louder in his panic and despair.

It was Diane who rescued him.

‘Owen, I’ve cracked Yoyo’s password.’

A twitch ran through his paralysed body. Jericho sat up. The computer’s voice had broken the spell, dream images gurgled away down the drain of oblivion. He took a few deep breaths before asking:

‘What was it?’

‘
Eat me and I’ll eat you alive.
’

My God, Yoyo, he thought. How overdramatic. At the same time he was grateful that she had clearly chosen the access code in a fit of rebellious romanticism, rather than opting for the more secure variation of a random sequence of letters and digits, which would have been much harder to decode.

‘Download the content,’ he said.

‘I’ve done it.’

‘Save it in Yoyofiles.’

‘With pleasure.’

Jericho sighed. How was he going to wean Diane off her habit of saying
With pleasure
? Much as he liked her voice, her tone, the words bothered him more each time. There was something servile about it that he found repulsive. He rubbed his eyes and squatted on the edge of the desk chair, his eyes fixed on the monitor.

‘Diane?’

‘Yes, Owen?’

‘Can you— I mean, would it be possible for you to delete the phrase
With pleasure
from your vocabulary?’

‘What do you mean exactly?
With pleasure
? Or
the phrase with pleasure
?’

‘With pleasure.’

‘I can offer to suppress the phrase for you.’

‘Great idea. Do that!’

He almost expected the computer to grant his wish with another
With pleasure
, but Diane just said silkily, ‘Done.’

And how amazingly simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it years ago? ‘Show me all the downloads in Yoyofiles from May of this year, sorted by time of day.’

A short list appeared on the screen, totalling about two dozen entries. Jericho skimmed them and concentrated his attention on the time leading up to Yoyo’s escape.

There was something.

His weariness fled instantly. About half an hour before Yoyo left her flatshare, data had been transferred to her computer, two files in different formats. He asked Diane to open one of them. It was a shimmering symbol of intertwined lines. It pulsed as if it were breathing. Jericho took a closer look.

Snakes?

It actually did look like a nest of snakes. Snakes twining into a kind of reptilian eye. It seemed to rest in the centre of a body, from which the snake bodies emerged: a single, surreal-looking creature that somehow reminded Jericho of school visits.

Where did snakes go creeping around all over the place in mythology?

He looked at the second file.

Jericho rubbed his chin.

You didn’t have to be particularly intelligent to understand what it meant. Three websites were to be exchanged. He wondered how Yoyo had got hold of the data. He asked Diane to open the three pages at the top, one by one, all of which were innocuous and generally accessible pages.
friends-of-iceland
was a blog. In it, Scots emigrants to Iceland swapped experiences, provided useful tips to new arrivals and those who were thinking of emigrating, and put photographs on the net.
en-mediode-la-suiza
was also devoted to the charms of living abroad. Produced in Spain, the page provided a great deal of visual material about Switzerland, in the form of 3D films. Jericho looked at some of them. They had been filmed from a plane or helicopter.
At a low altitude he flew over Zürich, landscapes of the canton of Uri and picturesque collections of houses and barns that lay scattered along a winding river.

Brainlab.de/Quantengravitationstheorie/Planck/uni-kassel/32241/html
, finally, came from Germany and consisted of closely typed lines of text, examining over twelve pages a phenomenon that physics described as ‘quantum foam’. It described what happened if you applied quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity to the so-called Planck length, which gave you foaming space–time bubbles and at the same time a scientific dilemma, because those bubbles overrode the calculations of General Relativity. The text was remarkable for its lack of paragraphs, and was plainly written for people whose notion of ecstasy involved a blackboard scribbled all over with formulas.

Scotland, Spain, Germany. The joys of Iceland. The beauty of Switzerland. Quantum physics.

Hardly designed to provoke fear and horror.

Curious, he called up the websites that were supposed to be swapped. Vanessa Craig was revealed as a student of agricultural science from Dallas, Texas, who was spending a few months on an exchange programme in Russia. In her online diary she wrote quite unexcitingly about her little university town near Moscow. She was homesick and lovesick and complained of the low temperatures responsible for the innate melancholy of the Russian soul. Behind
Hoteconomics,
an American website offering up-to-the-minute economy news, was
Littlewonder
, an Austrian portal for handmade toys, specialising in the needs of pre-school children.