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‘One hundred thousand. In cash, to be clear! Money in exchange for the dossier.’

‘Here?’

‘Not here. Somewhere busy.’ With a nod of his head, he gestured outside. ‘Tomorrow at midday in the Pergamon Museum. That’s right around the corner. Take Monbijou Strasse down to the Spree, then go over the river to Museum Island and to the James Simon Gallery. That’s where the stream of tourists divides between the museums. We’ll meet at the Ishtar Gate opposite the Processional Way. Nyela and I will leave immediately afterwards, so make sure you’re on time.’

‘And where do you plan to go?’

Vogelaar stared at him for a long time.

‘You really don’t need to know that,’ he said.

* * *

‘Fantastic! So where are you going to get a hundred thousand euros from?’ Yoyo asked as they crossed the street to where the Audi was parked.

‘How should I know?’ Jericho shrugged. ‘It’s still better than a quarter of a million.’

‘Oh, much better.’

‘Okay.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘So what do you think I ought to have done? Tortured the truth out of him?’

‘Exactly that. We should have beaten it out of him!’

‘Great idea.’ Jericho felt his ear where it had been bandaged up. It was thick and puffy. He felt like a plush toy rabbit. ‘I can just imagine the scene. I hold him down while you beat him to a pulp with an antelope haunch.’

‘Good of you to mention it. I—’

‘And Vogelaar would have just let us do that to him.’

‘But I
did
beat him to a pulp with the antelope haunch!’

‘So you did.’ Jericho walked on, and opened the car door. ‘How did you get here anyway? Weren’t you supposed to be keeping an eye on Nyela?’

‘That just about beats everything.’ Yoyo flung open the passenger door, flopped down in her seat and twisted her arms into a knot. ‘You’d have ended up as cold cuts if I hadn’t come along, you arsehole.’

Jericho kept quiet.

Had he just made a mistake?

‘I don’t know where we’re going to get the money either,’ he conceded. ‘And I don’t want to count on Tu’s help, not automatically.’

Yoyo grumbled something he didn’t catch.

‘Well then,’ Jericho said. ‘Let’s go to the hotel, shall we?’

No answer.

He sighed, and started the car.

‘I’ll ask Tu, in any case,’ he said. ‘He can lend it to me. Or give it as an advance.’

‘Whver.’

‘Maybe he’s got some news for us. He’s been playing about with Diane since this morning.’

Silence.

‘I called him before I went into Muntu. Very interesting stuff he’s found out. Confirms everything that Vogelaar said. Should I tell you what Tu told me?’

‘’f y’wnt.’

He couldn’t get anything else out of her. All the way to the Hyatt, all she would do was spit out knotty strings of consonants. Jericho reported his conversation with Tu, in the cheery tones of a man pushing water uphill, until in the end he couldn’t keep up the pretence that nothing was wrong. In the Hyatt’s underground garage, he finally gave up.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

Arms folded, she stared dead ahead.

‘I behaved very badly. I should have thanked you.’

‘N’wrries.’ On the other hand, at least she wasn’t jumping out of the car.

‘Without you, Vogelaar would have killed me. You saved my life.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So, umm – thank you, okay? I mean that, really. I’ll never forget it. It was extremely brave of you.’

She turned her head and looked at him, her brows drawn down like thunder.

‘Why exactly are you such a halfwit?’

‘No idea.’ Jericho stared at the steering wheel. ‘Maybe I just never learned.’

‘Learned what?’

‘How to be considerate.’

‘I think that you can be, though. Very considerate.’ Her arms, folded tight, relaxed a little. They even slipped apart a bit. ‘Do you know what else I think?’

Jericho raised his eyebrows.

‘I think that you’re least considerate towards people you actually care about.’

He caught his breath. Not stupid, this one.

‘And who helped you with that little insight?’ he asked, nursing a suspicion.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was just thinking it’s the kind of thing that Joanna might have said.’

‘I don’t need Joanna for that.’

‘You didn’t happen to talk to her about me, then?’

‘Of course I did,’ she admitted straight away. ‘She told me that the two of you were an item.’

‘And what else?’

‘That
you
cocked it up.’

‘Ah.’

‘She said it was because you didn’t like yourself – you’re never nice to yourself –
not at all
nice to yourself.’

Jericho pursed his lips. He lined up some counter-arguments, and each looked more threadbare than the next. He held them back. God knows they had better things to do here than rummage through their emotional baggage, but somehow he suddenly felt as if he’d been caught with his trousers down. As if Joanna had
stripped him bare and was marching him about by the ring in his nose. Yoyo shook her head.

‘No, Owen, she didn’t say anything bad about you.’

‘Hmm. I’ll think about it.’

‘Do that.’ She grinned. The way he surrendered seemed to have smoothed her ruffled feathers. ‘We mustn’t rule out the possibility that we’ll have to save one another’s lives a few more times.’

‘As I believe I’ve already said – any time!’ He hesitated. ‘About Nyela—’

‘My fault. After I screwed it up, I thought the best thing to do would be to come back quickly.’

Jericho felt his ear.

‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you did screw it up.’

Pounding the streets of Calgary and showing people the photograph of a possible gunman was more or less like knocking down an anthill and looking for one particular ant. Just a moment ago one and a half million people had been hard at work here, busy making more goods for the shelves and building more blocks on the streets of Canada’s fastest-growing city, industrious citizens flooding the streets, but now they seemed to have lost all sense of direction in an instant. Loreena welcomed the switch to helium-3 in the energy industry, but for all that she couldn’t bear the grim spectacle of mass unemployment, the decline of whole cities and provinces, the impending bankruptcy of countries which had made their money almost entirely from oil and gas. Ecologists had always had an idealistic vision of a smooth and manageable transition, with Mr Fossilosaurus given a gold watch and sent packing to a nice quiet retirement home, where he would then draw his last breath after a dignified decline, while ten billion people cheerily got their electricity from helium-3 generators. But transition had never gone smoothly, never in history. Not in the Cambrian epoch, not in the Ordovician, the Devonian, not at the end of the Permian, Triassic or Cretaceous, and not in the Upper Pleistocene either. That was when a new species called mankind appeared, a self-aware creature who added war and economic crisis to the catalogue of boundary events that already included volcanic eruption, meteorites, ice ages and epidemics. So the brave new world of clean fusion came hand in hand with a full-blown global economic crisis, whether the heralds of the new dawn liked it or not.

She put fruit, yoghurt and bread rolls onto her tray and took it over to the table, where the intern was already piling into his second stack of pancakes.

‘Yesterday was a damp squib then,’ he said.

Loreena shrugged. The Westin Calgary had the advantage of being near the Imperial Oil building on 4th Avenue Southwest, so after she had telephoned Palstein she had decided to take rooms for the night there for herself and the kid. After that they retraced the mysterious fat man’s steps. It was a dispiriting business. On Bruford’s video, he came in from the north. Most hotels were to the south, west or east though. He could have been staying in any one of them,
if
he had been staying in a hotel at all. Perhaps he even lived in the city. There was a clear Asian presence here. Just a walk away from the Bow River, the third largest Chinatown in Canada after Vancouver and Toronto stretched down Calgary’s lively Centre Street. In the Sheraton, not far from Prince’s Park Island, the staff thought that they remembered a tall, shabby-looking Asian man with a paunch on him, but he hadn’t been a guest. They had showed his picture around shops and restaurants, and had even paid a visit to Calgary International Airport, all to no avail. The only good news this morning for Keowa was her breakfast, a filling but not fattening tray of pineapple, sunflower seed rolls and low fat yoghurt.

Just as she was pouring a cup of herbal tea, Sina called, from the Vancouver desk for high society and other gossip.

‘Alejandro Ruiz, fifty-two years old. Last heard of as a member of the strategic board for Repsol, or more exactly Repsol YPF to give it its full name, incorporated in Madrid—’

‘I know all that already.’

‘Wait though! They’re market leaders in Spain and Argentina, for a long while they were the biggest energy corporation in private hands, they’re focused on exploration, production and refineries, they’re also world number three in LNG. They’ve never held any stake in alternative energies. Just to make up for it, the Mapuche Indians in Argentina have been bringing lawsuits against them like clockwork for the past twenty years, accusing them of polluting the groundwater.’

It was news to Loreena that this tribe was so litigious.

‘Are there even any Mapuche left?’

‘Oh yes! They’re in Argentina and Chile. Even if the Chilean government stubbornly denies that there’s
ever
been any such thing as the Mapuche. Makes you laugh, eh? Anyway, Repsol’s one of those companies where the lights are going out floor by floor. And Ruiz wasn’t just vice-president for strategy, which is what I thought yesterday, he was also directly responsible for petrochemical activities in twenty-nine countries, as of July 2022.’

‘That’s odd,’ said Loreena.

‘Why?’

‘I mean, given the way the company’s set up. Why would they make somebody strategic director who demands they diversify into solar power, and uses funny words like ethics?’

‘Most of the time they just put him on the payroll as their ecological conscience so they wouldn’t look dumb in public. He was a second-ranker in the corporate hierarchy, so he could bark but he couldn’t bite. But by 2022 the tanker was well and truly headed for the rocks. In a situation like that, you could have appointed an Andalusian donkey to the top job. Once it was obvious that Repsol was going to be one of the big losers, they needed a scapegoat at the helm, that’s all.’

‘By 2022 Ruiz had no chance of preventing catastrophe.’

‘I know. Still, he tried pretty much everything he could. He even tried striking a deal with Orley Enterprises.’

‘Say what?’ said Loreena, taken aback.

‘I watched a couple of videos. He gives a good impression, this guy. His wife and daughter in Madrid are distraught over whether he’ll ever turn up again. I’ll send you contact details for them, and for some of his colleagues at Repsol. Best of luck.’

‘You’re gonna call Ruiz’s old lady?’ the intern asked once she had finished speaking to Vancouver.

Loreena got up. ‘Any reason why not?’

‘The time. Also, you can’t speak Spanish.’

‘It’s half past five in the afternoon in Madrid.’

‘Hey, really?’ He licked grease off his fingers. ‘I thought it was always night in Europe when it’s day here.’

Loreena opened her mouth to answer, stopped, shook her head and went up to her room. She was pleased to get through on her first attempt. Señora Ruiz looked distracted, and tried to rebuff her at first but in the end was very helpful; above all, she spoke excellent English, as Loreena had secretly been hoping, since indeed she didn’t speak Spanish. They talked for about ten minutes, then she called one of the strategic team at Repsol, who had also been a friend of Ruiz out of the office. Sina had hunted down numbers for some more of his colleagues, but they were all newly unemployed.

She was interested by what she found out.

She looked out of the window. A grey sky brooded over the city, warning that all things must pass. Drizzling curtains of rain blurred the lines of the Calgary Tower, one hundred and ninety metres tall, built by the oil companies Marathon and Husky Oil back in the day. There was something skeletal about the high-rises.
A once-prosperous city was shedding weight fast, devouring its own reserves of stored fat. After thinking things over for a while, she called Vancouver again.

‘Can you reconstruct the last few days before Ruiz disappeared?’

‘Depends what you want to know.’

‘I’ve just been speaking with his wife, and one of his colleagues. Ruiz’s last stop before he flew on to Lima was in Beijing.’

‘Beijing?’ asked Sina, surprised. ‘What was Ruiz doing in Beijing?’

‘Yes, indeed. What?’

‘Repsol has no stake in China.’

‘Not quite true. There was definitely a joint venture with Sinopec – it had been planned for a while. Some kind of exploration deal. They spent a week bashing it into shape. I’m more interested in what he did on the last day, right before he left China. On 1 September 2022, to be exact. Apparently he was taking part in some conference that his colleague I spoke to knew next to nothing about. All he knew was that it took place outside Beijing. He reckoned there had to be some papers about it lying around somewhere, and he’ll have a look.’

‘Nobody knows what the conference was about?’

‘Ruiz was strategic director. Autonomous. He didn’t have to sit up and beg for every little thing. Señora Ruiz tells me that her Alejandro was a very warm-hearted, easygoing person—’

‘Sobs.’

‘I’m getting somewhere. He wasn’t the type to get upset over nothing. They had spoken on the phone just before the conference, and he was all smiles and sunshine. He had helped get the joint venture on its feet, he was in a good mood, he was cracking jokes and looking forward to Peru. But when he called from the plane to Lima, he seemed fairly downcast.’

‘This was the day after the mysterious conference?’