But after the meeting in Beijing he’d been worried.
And then he’d disappeared.
Why had that sudden change occurred? Because he’d experienced or learned something at the meeting that stressed him? Right, but more likely because he could no longer be sure of his life. If Alejandro Ruiz had actually fallen victim to a crime, it was because someone had wanted to keep the contents of that meeting from becoming public.
Had Hydra killed Ruiz because he knew about Operation Mountains of Eternal Light? But in that case how was Palstein involved? Loreena found striking factors in common between the two. Might Palstein have been informed about Hydra’s plans?
Jericho took a sip of Shiraz.
Nonsense. These were ludicrous hypotheses. Ruiz had disappeared immediately after the meeting. Before he could open his mouth. Why would they have given Pal-stein three years to bring his knowledge to the people? Calgary had clearly served the purpose of slipping an agent into Orley’s tour group, and also Palstein was alive, even if it was only by chance. Since then there had been no more attempts on his life, even though opportunities had arisen. Gudmundsson, for example, constantly near him for professional reasons, could have killed him with a close-range bullet at any time.
And why hadn’t he done it?
And why hadn’t he done it before? Before Calgary?
Hydra had managed to infiltrate Palstein’s inner circle, his security men. Why go to all that effort? A public event. Agents distracting the police. Kenny Xin, firing from an empty building? Why so laborious?
Because it was supposed to look like something that it wasn’t.
No doubt about it: the connection between Lima and Calgary, between Ruiz and Palstein, existed. Loreena’s research led directly to Hydra, otherwise the butchers of Vancouver wouldn’t have murdered ten people and got rid of their computers. So what had really happened on 21 April in Canada?
The meeting in Beijing provided the key.
He was about to phone Repsol in Madrid when the doorbell rang. Startled, he looked at his watch. Twenty past one. Drunks? The bell rang again. For a moment he toyed with the idea of ignoring it, then he went to the intercom and looked at the screen.
Yoyo.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in a puzzled voice.
‘How about you press the button?’ she snapped at him. ‘Or do I have to announce my visits in writing first?’
‘It’s not exactly the time of day when you expect visitors,’ he said as she stepped into his loft, her motorbike helmet under her arm. Yoyo shrugged. She set the helmet down on the central kitchen counter, ambled into the living area and glanced curiously around in all directions. He followed her.
‘Pretty.’
‘Not quite finished.’
‘Still.’ She pointed at the open bottle of Shiraz. ‘Is there another glass?’
Jericho scratched himself irritably behind the ear as she slipped out of her leather jacket and threw herself on his sofa.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Wait.’
He looked across to her and brought out a second glass. In the gloom of the lounge a reddish glimmer indicated that she had lit a cigarette. After he had filled her glass, they sat there for a few minutes, drinking in silence, and Yoyo sent smoke signals issuing from the corners of her mouth, encoded explanations for her presence. She stared into the void. From time to time the heavy curtains of her eyelashes seemed to want to wipe away what they had seen, but whenever she looked up her gaze was as lost as before. More than ever she reminded him of the girl in the video film that Chen Hongbing had shown him a week and a half before.
A week and a half?
It could just as easily have been a year.
‘And what are you up to at the moment?’ she asked, glancing at Diane.
‘Wondering what’s brought you here.’
‘Didn’t you want to go to bed? Get some sleep at last?’
‘I’ve tried.’
She nodded. ‘Me too. I thought it would be easier.’
‘Sleeping?’
‘Carrying on from where you’ve left off. But it’s like reaching into the void. A lot of things no longer exist. The control centre at the steelworks. The Guardians. And I’ve seen Grand Cherokee’s room with all his stuff in it, as if he were about to come back. Spooky. On the other hand, college is college. The same professors, the same lecture theatres. The same administration that makes sure you don’t start thinking too independently. The same chicken coop, the same battles and trivia. I listen to music, I go out, watch television, remind myself that everyone else is even worse off than me, that I could be dead, and that the banality of everyday life has its good side. I try to convince myself that I should be feeling relieved.’
Jericho crossed his legs. He sat in silence on the floor in front of her, his back resting against a chair.
‘And then the thing I’ve been waiting for all my life happens. Hongbing takes me in his arms, tells me how much he loves me and showers me with tragedies. The whole terrible story. And I know I should be letting off fireworks for this moment, I should die of pity, go mad with joy, throw my arms around his neck, the bastards have no power over us now, it’s all going to be okay, we can talk to each other at last, we’re a family! Instead’ – she blew smoke-snakes in the air – ‘my head feels like a chest of a thousand drawers, everyone stuffs whatever he feels like into it, and now my father’s joining in! I think, Yoyo, you miserable little cripple, why don’t you feel anything? Come on, now, you’ve got to feel something, after all, you wished—’ She reached for her glass, downed the contents and sucked the remaining life from her cigarette. ‘You so wished he would talk to you! Even when Kenny held his bloody gun to my head, I thought, no! I don’t want to die without finding out what threw his life so far off the rails. But now I know, I just feel… full.’
Jericho turned his glass around in his hand.
‘And at the same time hollowed out,’ she went on. ‘That’s crazy, isn’t it? Nothing moves me! As if this isn’t the world as I used to know it, but a mere copy of it. Everything looks as if it’s made of cardboard.’
‘And you think it’ll never be normal again.’
‘It scares me, Owen. Maybe everything’s all right with the world, and I’m the copy. Maybe the real Yoyo was shot by Xin after all.’
Jericho stared at his feet.
‘In a sense she was.’
‘Xin stole something that night.’ She looked at him. ‘Took something. Took me away. I can no longer feel what I should be feeling. I’m no longer able to give my father the respect I should. Not even to burst dramatically into floods of tears.’
‘Because it isn’t over yet.’
‘I want it back. I want to be me again.’
She lit another cigarette. Again they were silent for a while, lost in smoke and thoughts.
‘We haven’t yet woken up, Yoyo.’ He threw his head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘That’s our problem. For three days I’ve been trying to tell myself that I don’t want to have anything more to do with Hydra. Or with Xin and all the freaks that frolic in my head when everyone else is asleep. I furnish my life with knick-knacks, I try and make it look as normal and unspectacular as possible, but it feels wrong. As if I’d ended up on a stage—’