‘What snake?’ his friend asked, puzzled.
‘Forget it,’ Jericho said. ‘Christian stuff. Could you make sure that I don’t have to put down roots here?’
‘We owe you a favour.’
‘Fuck the favour. Just get me out of here.’
There was nothing he yearned for so much as the chance to leave the factory and Shenzhen as quickly as possible. He was suddenly enjoying the deference normally reserved for folk heroes and very popular criminals, but he wasn’t allowed to leave until eight. He dropped the hire car off at the airport, took the next plane for Shanghai, a Mach 1 flying wing, and checked his messages in the air.
Tu Tian had been trying to contact him.
He called back.
‘Oh, nothing in particular,’ said Tu. ‘I just wanted to tell you your surveillance was successful. The hostile competitors admitted to data theft. We had a talk.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Jericho without any particular enthusiasm. ‘And what came out of the talk?’
‘They promised to stop it.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s a lot. I had to promise to stop it too.’
‘Excuse me?’ Jericho thought he had misheard. Tu Tian, whose company had proved to have fallen victim to Trojans, had been absolutely furious. He had spared no expense to get his hands on the, as he put it, pack of miserable blowflies and cockroaches so presumptuous as to spy on his company secrets. ‘You yourself wanted to—’
‘I didn’t know who they were.’
‘And excuse me, but what difference does that make?’
‘You’re right, absolutely none at all.’ Tu laughed, in great humour now. ‘Are you coming to the golf course the day after tomorrow? You can be my guest.’
‘Very kind of you, Tian, but—’ Jericho rubbed his eyes. ‘Could I decide later?’
‘What’s up? Bad mood?’
Shanghai Chinese were different. More direct, more open. Practically Italian, and Tu Tian was possibly the most Italian of all them. He could have performed a convincing version of ‘Nessun dorma’.
‘Quite honestly,’ Jericho said, ‘I’m wiped out.’
‘You sound it,’ Tu agreed. ‘Like a wet rag. A rag-man. We’ll have to hang you out to dry. What’s up?’
And because fat Tu, for all his egocentricity, was one of the few people who granted Jericho an insight into his own inner state, he told him everything.
‘Young man, young man,’ Tu said, amazed, after a few seconds of respectful silence. ‘How did you do it?’
‘I just told you.’
‘No, I mean, how did you get wise to him? How did you know it was him?’
‘I didn’t. It was just that everything pointed in that direction. Ma is vain, you know. The website was more than a catalogue of ready-produced horrors, with men forcing themselves on babies and women forcing little boys to have sex with them before laying into them with a hatchet. There were the usual films and photographs, but you could also put on your hologoggles and be there in 3D, and at various things happening live as well, which gives these guys a special kick.’
‘Revolting.’
‘But most importantly there was a chat-room, a fan forum where these people swapped information and boasted to each other. Even a second-life sector where you could assume a virtual identity. Ma appeared there as a water spirit. I suspect most paedos aren’t familiar with that kind of thing. They tend to be made of more conventional stuff, and they don’t much like talking into microphones, even with voice-changer software. They’d rather type out all their bullshit on the keyboard in the old-fashioned way, and of course Ma joined in and there he was. So I got the idea of adding my own contributions.’
‘You must have felt like chucking!’
‘I’ve got a switch in the back of my head and another in my belly. I usually manage to turn off at least one of them.’
‘And back in the cellar?’
‘Tian.’ Jericho sighed. ‘If I’d managed that, I wouldn’t have told you all this crap.’
‘I understand. Go on.’
‘So, every imaginable visitor to the page is online, and of course Ma, the vain swine, is on there too. He disguises himself as a visitor, but you notice that he knows too much, and he has this huge need to communicate, so that I start suspecting that this guy is at least one of the originators, and after a while I’m convinced that it’s him. A little while ago, I subjected his contributions to a semantic analysis – peculiarities of expression, preferred idioms, grammar – and the computer narrows the field, but there are still about a hundred known internet paedophiles who are possible suspects in this one. So I have the guy analysed while he’s online and writing, and his typing rhythms give him away. Just about every time. That leaves four.’
‘One of them Ma.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re convinced it’s him.’
‘Unlike the police. They, of course, are convinced that Ma is the only one of the four that it isn’t.’
‘Which is why you went out on your own. Hmm.’ Tu paused. ‘All due respect to your approach, but didn’t you recently tell me the nice thing about i-profiling was that the only fighting you have to do is against computer viruses?’
‘I’ve had it with brawling,’ Jericho said wearily. ‘I don’t want to see any more dead, mutilated, abused people, I don’t want to shoot anyone, and I don’t want anyone shooting at me. I’ve had enough, Tian.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Completely. That was the last time.’
Back at home – although it wasn’t really a home any more, filled as it was with removal boxes that he had spent several weeks packing, making his life look as if it came from a props store and had to be returned in its original packaging – Jericho suddenly had a creeping fear that he’d gone too far.
It was just after ten when the taxi set him down outside the high-rise building in Pudong that he would leave in a few days to move into his dream flat, but every time he closed his eyes he saw the half-decaying baby lying in the shack, the army of organisms that had pounced upon it to consume its flesh; he saw Ma’s knife flashing down at him, again he felt the moment of deadly fear, a film that would now be on constant rerun, so that his new home threatened to become a place of nightmare. Experience alone told him that thoughts were by their nature drifting clouds, and that all images eventually faded, but until that happened it could be a long and painful period of suffering.
He shouldn’t have taken on that damned mission!
Wrong, he scolded himself. True despair lurked in the subjunctive, in the spinning-out of alternative plot strands that weren’t alternatives because each one had only one path that it could travel down. And you couldn’t even tell whether you were travelling voluntarily, or whether someone or something was impelling you – and Christ, what that something might be, there was no way of knowing! Are we just a medium for predetermined processes? Had he had a choice about whether or not to take on the mission? Of course, he could have turned it down, but he hadn’t. Didn’t that invalidate any idea of choice? Had he had a choice about whether or not to follow Joanna to Shanghai? Whichever path you took, you took it, so there was no choice at all.
A trite acknowledgement of the bitter truth. Perhaps he should write a self-help manual. The airport bookshops were full of self-help manuals. He himself had even seen some warning against self-help manuals.
How could you be so wide awake and at the same time so tired?