Palstein stared into his glass.
‘Take this from someone who’s managed to escape Xin several times. He was ahead of us in London and Berlin, and he cost us a lot of lives. He’s a phenomenal marksman! Definitely not somebody who’s going to miss a target just because he trips, especially when he’s got an unobstructed view. But even if we were willing to accept that stumbling drew the first shot to your shoulder rather than your head, the second would have got you before you reached the ground.’ Jericho paused. ‘You were hit, nevertheless, Gerald. But certainly, however much you’ve risked and invested, it can’t have been in your interest to come away with a serious injury. And I know very few marksmen who could pull off such a precision shot as the one in Calgary: hitting a man while he pretends to slip, without giving him anything more than a completely harmless flesh wound that will heal very quickly. A masterpiece, after which with the best will in the world, no one could suspect that you’d cleared the way for Gabriel – or shall we call him Hanna? – to join Julian’s group. Even in the unlikely event that someone discovered details about the operation, you’d covered your tracks. Against this background, Loreena’s discovery of the video can hardly have troubled you that much, can it? It too was factored in.’
‘I admired Loreena for her sharpness of mind,’ said Palstein. He was listening with great interest to the lecture.
‘Of course you did,’ said the detective. ‘Except that you wouldn’t have predicted in a million years that she would dig out Ruiz and establish a connection with a very particular meeting in Beijing three years ago. At that point things got tight, very tight.’
‘I warned Loreena,’ sighed Palstein. ‘Several times. You may not believe it, but I was very keen to spare her that death. I liked her.’
‘And Lynn?’ Julian said, quietly severe. ‘What about Lynn? Didn’t you like her?’
‘I was prepared to make sacrifices.’
‘My daughter.’
Palstein thoughtfully slipped his finger along the edge of his glass.
‘Seven people in Quyu,’ Jericho went on. ‘Ten in Vancouver, Vogelaar, Nyela. Even Norrington couldn’t have imagined that working with you would be quite like that. And purely out of interest, who took care of Greenwatch?’
‘Gudmundsson.’ Palstein stiffened. ‘We had to make sure that there was no editorial conference. I told him to disappear immediately after the operation.’
‘Which wonderfully confirmed your victim status once again. Gerald Palstein, betrayed by everybody. Might I also take the opportunity to ask you what happened to Alejandro Ruiz?’
‘We had to disassociate ourselves from him.’
Should he tell them how Xin and Gudmundsson had put the Spaniard on a boat while the city of Lima slept, and introduced him to the world of marine life? What sharks, crabs and bacteria had left of him rested in the silent darkness of the Peruvian ocean trench. No, too many details. They’d never get out of here.
‘He was a weakling,’ he said. ‘He was more than happy to do something about helium-3, convinced as he was that we were merely going to blow up a few digging machines. When Hydra met at Song’s house on the evening of 1 September, it turned out that I’d misjudged him. Unlike everyone else, by the way. I selected the heads of Hydra very carefully over a period of months. They had to have influence, and the power to divert large sums into fake projects without anyone asking any questions. But above all they had to be willing to do anything. As expected, when Xin and I presented Operation Mountains of Eternal Light, it only came as a surprise to Ruiz. He was completely horrified. Turned white as a sheet. Stormed out.’
‘He threatened to blow Hydra’s cover?’
‘His next step was predictable.’
‘Which meant that his fate was too.’
Palstein ran his hands over his eyes. He was tired. Shockingly tired.
‘And how are you going to prove all this?’ he asked.
‘It’s been proved already, Gerald. Joe Song’s confessed. We know the heads of Hydra, and right at this very minute they’re all getting visits from representatives of their national authorities. They will find snake icons and white noise on the computers of some of the world’s biggest oil companies. Really titanic stuff, Gerald. Regardless of borders and ideologies. You were the initiator of the joint venture between Sinopec, Repsol and EMCO, you turned the meeting in Beijing into a summit, but it’s Hydra that’ll make you go down in history.’ Jericho paused. ‘Except that your name will not be mentioned in very flattering contexts. By the way, how did you get hold of guys like Xin?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, Owen.’ Julian, who had until then been sitting with legs crossed, sat forward. ‘It should be: how did Xin get hold of people like Gerald.’
‘In Africa,’ Palstein said calmly. ‘In Equatorial Guinea, 2020, when Mayé was still of interest to EMCO.’
‘Why all this, Gerald?’ Julian shook his head. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you go so far?’
‘You’re seriously asking me that?’ Palstein stared at him listlessly. ‘To defend my interests. Just as you defend yours. The interests of my sector.’
‘With atom bombs?’
‘Do you seriously imagine I wouldn’t have done absolutely anything to solve the problems in a peaceful manner? Everybody knows how much I fought to steer the dinosaur in a different direction to the one it was cheerfully heading in, towards the hurtling meteorite that would seal its extinction. In most alternative sectors we could have held our own. But we missed all opportunities, we neglected to buy Lightyears, to get Locatelli on our side, even though it was already clear that helium-3 would mean the end for us. And I even tried to get a foothold in the helium-3 business, as you know, except that I wasn’t given permission to draw up an agreement with you.’
‘Which you were on the point of doing.’
‘In the event of failure, yes. Not if two atom bombs had just destroyed the helium-3 mining infrastructure and set things back by decades.’
And suddenly, enraged by the wasted potential of his plan, he jumped to his feet, fists clenched.
‘I’d calculated everything, Julian! The consequences if we’d destroyed either the space lift or Peary Base, but it was only the double whammy that produced the best results. Like China, the Americans would have had to deploy conventional rockets to carry helium-3 to Earth, which would never have happened! Everyone knows that China’s extraction is running at a loss. But even if they’d taken such a step, the extracted quantities would have remained pitiful. You would have had to build a new space lift, a new space station, and that would have taken at least twenty years. You wouldn’t have had it financed as quickly as you did the first time. And only if shuttle transports had been possible from the orbit to the Moon would you have been able to rebuild the infrastructure up there, and even that would have taken years, maybe decades.’
‘But in forty or fifty years it’ll all be over anyway. Then you’ll be finished, because there’ll be nothing left!’
‘Forty years, yes!’ snorted Palstein. ‘Forty years of business left to us. Four decades of survival, in the course of which we could have made up for the mess made by all those idiots, my predecessors included. We could have reorganised. As long ago as 2020 I commissioned an analysis of all the possible scenarios of what would happen if helium-3 extraction were carried out successfully within a precise time frame. It meant our annihilation. We had to stand up to you!’