Was he bored? Was his brain growing slack? Was he depotentiated? Not at all. He was unsettlingly wide awake. He lay down fully dressed on the couch, turned out the light and tentatively closed his eyes. Perhaps if he avoided official actions like getting undressed or going to bed, he might trick his body and mind, which seemed to think that they had to resist sleep the more clearly he attempted to achieve it.
Half an hour later he knew better.
It wasn’t over. Hydra still held him in its embrace, its poison would rage in him until he had finally understood its nature. He couldn’t pretend that none of it concerned him any longer just because no one was trying to kill him. You couldn’t decide on normality; things didn’t come to an end just because you’d buried them in the past. The nightmare continued.
Who was Hydra?
He turned the lights back on. Yoyo was right. They’d found out a hell of a lot of things, they’d thwarted the plans of the conspirators, they had good reason to be proud. At the same time he felt as if they’d been looking through the wrong end of a telescope all along. The closest things had drifted into the distance, into supposed insignificance, but in fact all you had to do was turn the telescope around and the truth would move into the foreground. He opened a bottle of Shiraz, poured himself a glass and systematically crossed all previous suspects off the list: Beijing, Zheng Pang-Wang, the CIA. On closer inspection all of these trails had turned in a circle, but there might have been one that he hadn’t properly understood, one that carried straight on.
The Greenwatch massacre.
The complete leadership of the environmental broadcaster, all wiped out. Why? No one was able to say what Greenwatch had been working on most recently, even though there were several suggestions that there had been a report on environmental damage by oil companies. Loreena’s ambition to clear up the Calgary attack had finally focused attention on the film that supposedly showed Gerald Palstein’s attacker. But given how quickly these pictures had spread, the massacre could hardly have taken place in order to prevent their further dissemination.
He had Diane play through the film sequence once more. Towards the end, as the camera swung round towards the stage, you could see that the square was full of people with mobile phones, and surrounded by television crews. A miracle, in fact, that Xin hadn’t been captured more often, fat suit and all, at any rate Hydra should have predicted that and factored it in, but equally that might have been the first error of reasoning.
Perhaps they’d been banking on it!
The longer Jericho thought about the sequence, the more Xin’s weird disguise and his stately way of creeping around seemed to be part of an act designed to present investigators with an Asian assassin just in case he was caught on camera – just as Zheng’s visible presence in Equatorial Guinea had left an elephant track in the Middle Kingdom. There was a glimpse of Lars Gudmundsson with his double game; Palstein was still alive by happy chance, leaving the way open for Carl Hanna; Loreena Keowa got to the bottom of that, costing ten people their lives and Greenwatch its memory.
Did that make sense? Not really.
Unless she’d found out things at Greenwatch that really put the pressure on Hydra.
Loreena had travelled in from Calgary. Possibly in possession of explosive information. She had immediately gone to the editorial conference, a meeting that Hydra had been able to prevent at the last minute, although this meant that the conspirators still didn’t know how much of the unwelcome research was already stored on the channel’s hard drives, because Loreena might have sent emails in the run-up!
That was it.
Jericho got to work. While it was approaching midnight in Shanghai, the noonday sun was shining on the other side of the Pacific. He had Diane draw up a list of all the relevant internet service providers and started phoning them, one after the other, always on the same pretext: he was calling on behalf of Loreena, because it was impossible to send or receive emails from her web address, and would they please be so kind as to take a look and see why that wasn’t working. Eleven times he was told that no Loreena Keowa was stored as a customer, three of the people he spoke to knew Loreena from the net, had learned of her death and expressed their dismay, for which Jericho thanked them in his best funeral-director voice. He only struck gold with the twelfth call. He was asked to give a password, which meant that she was registered there. Jericho promised to call back. Then he hacked his way into the provider’s system and put Diane to decoding Loreena’s password. Every data transfer had been recorded, so that within a few minutes he received information about Loreena’s mail provider. He rang back, gave the password, and asked if any emails sent over the last fourteen days were still stored in the system. They were stored for up to six weeks, he was told, and which ones did he wish to see?
All of them, he said.
Half an hour later he had viewed all the documents concerning the environmental scandal, which, under the title Trash of the Titans, had been supposed to form the core of that broadcast. It named a lot of names, but Jericho didn’t believe in a connection for a second. The massacre had occurred as a reaction to the last email sent. It contained the answers to all the questions.
Hydra’s identity.
Gerald Palstein
Director, Strategic Management, EMCO (USA), victim of an assassination attempt in Calgary on 21.4.2025, probable aim to prevent him from flying to the Moon (there are data on Palstein).
Assassin Asian, possibly Chinese.
(Chinese interests in EMCO? Oil-sand business?)
Alejandro Ruiz
Strategy manager (since July 2022) of Repsol YPF (Spanish-Argentinian). Nickname Ruiz El Verde, married, two children, conventional lifestyle, debt-free.
Disappeared in Lima, 2022, during an inspection tour (crime?). Previously several days at conference in Beijing, incl. joint venture with Sinopec. Last meeting outside of Beijing on 1.9.2022: subject and participants unknown (Repsol wants to look through documents, I’m waiting to be called back). 2.9. flew on to Lima, phone calls to his wife. Ruiz depressed and anxious. Cause probably previous day’s meeting.
Common factors Palstein, Ruiz:
Both men have tried to expand their companies’ areas of business in new directions, e.g. solar power, Orley Enterprises. Ethical standpoints. Against oil-sand mining. Opponents in their own camp.
Appointed strategy managers when the threatened bankruptcy of their companies leaves them with hardly any room to negotiate.
However: hardly any points of contact between EMCO and Repsol. According to Palstein, no personal contact between him and Ruiz.
Lars Gudmundsson
Palstein’s bodyguard, freelance operative for Texan security company Eagle Eye.
Career: Navy Seal, sniper training, moved to Africa to join Mamba private army, from there to APS (African Protection Services), possible involvement in coup d’état in West Africa, since 2000 back in the USA.
Playing false game: with his people, ensured that Palstein’s attacker was able to enter the building opposite Imperial Oil unimpeded (have informed Palstein of Gudmundsson’s betrayal and asked Eagle Eye about G. G. and his team have since gone missing).
Gudmundsson—
The name sparked something in Jericho’s mind. Following an intuition, he took out Vogelaar’s dossier again, and there it was: Lars Gudmundsson had belonged to the special unit that had brought Mayé to power – along with Neil Gabriel, aka Carl Hanna. They both seemed to have got on particularly well with Kenny Xin, so well, in fact, that they had worked for him in various ways and finally quit APS. Loreena’s email also included the film from the crime scene, a direct line to Repsol and the private number of the presumably widowed Señora Ruiz. He had Diane assemble further facts about the Spaniard, but didn’t come up with much more than the journalist had already put together. In film sequences and pictures the man looked sympathetic, positive and energetic.