‘No idea.’
‘He did absolutely bugger all, is what he did!’
‘Hey, Daxiong!’ Yoyo railed at him. ‘What’s really at issue here? Just the fact that you can’t stand him.’
‘He’s a loudmouth.’
‘I trust him.’
‘But you can’t trust him.’
‘Wanxing is no loudmouth.’
‘Frogshit!’ said Daxiong, getting angry. ‘It’s all he bloody is!’
Kenny tilted his head. He didn’t really seem to know what to make of the argument.
‘If Wanxing talked to anyone at all about it, it was because he needed extra tools,’ Yoyo roared. ‘After you completely failed!’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘What?’
‘That Sara and Zheiying are in possession of this bloody message.’
‘What? Why them?’
‘Why? Are you blind? Because he fancies Sara.’
‘So do you!’
‘Hey,’ said Kenny.
‘You’re off your head,’ Daxiong snapped. ‘Shall we talk about your relationship with Zheiying? The way you make him look like an idiot just because he—’
‘Hey!’ Kenny yelled, throwing his computer at Daxiong’s feet. ‘What the hell’s going on? Are you taking the piss? Who’s Wanxing? Who are these other people? Who else knows about this? Say something, somebody, or I’ll blow the old guy to pieces!’
Yoyo opened her mouth and closed it again. She couldn’t take her eyes off the hitman, who seemed to have worked something out. That they were bluffing, keeping him at arm’s length. That they were actually staring past him, at the source of the hissing noise that Kenny hadn’t noticed because he had allowed himself to be distracted by the staged argument. Kenny, the bomb that had to be defused, like in the old films. Just another few seconds. The countdown approaching zero, half a dozen wires, all the same colour, but only one that you could cut through.
‘You’re in the crosshairs,’ she said quietly.
* * *
Xin looked at his display. It showed him what the scanner of the automatic rifle saw: Chen Hongbing, pressed into his seat. Part of the rear glass façade. A dark outline at the edge of the picture.
Something had appeared behind Chen.
‘If my father dies, you’re dead,’ said Yoyo. ‘Same if you attack us or try to escape. So listen. One of your airbikes is hovering outside the window right now. Owen Jericho is sitting on it, and he’s pointing something at you. I’m not familiar with these things, but judging by the size of it, I’d say that he could blow you to pieces with it, so try to keep your temper under control.’
Xin put his thoughts and feelings in order like an accountant. He’d get annoyed later. He had no doubt that Yoyo was telling the truth. If Chen died that second, he would die too. The girl and her enormous friend were unarmed, while he had a gun tucked into the top of his trousers – not much of an advantage really, because before he had drawn the gun he would be dead too.
‘What should I do?’ he asked calmly.
‘Turn off the trigger. That gun. I want my father to get up and come over to us.’
‘Right. To do that I’ll have to turn off automatic activation. I’ll have to touch it, okay?’
‘If this is one of your tricks—’ roared Daxiong.
‘I’m not about to commit suicide. It’s just a remote control.’
‘Go on,’ nodded Yoyo.
Xin tapped on the touchscreen and switched off the automatic trigger. The gun was no longer programmed to respond to Chen Hongbing’s movements. It was entirely under his control again.
‘Just a moment.’ He quickly keyed in swivel angle, rotation speed and fire frequency. ‘All done. Stand up, honourable Chen. Go to your daughter.’
Chen Hongbing seemed to hesitate.
Then he hurried from his chair and to the side.
Xin fell to the ground and pressed Start.
* * *
Cave-dwellers, savannah-runners: they’d experienced everything by the twenty-first century. They saw the rustling of the grass, heard what the wind carried to them, were astonishingly able simultaneously to respond to and intuitively assess a variety of stimuli. Some people drew more from their ancient inheritance than others, and some had preserved their instincts, developed over six million years of human history, to an extraordinary degree.
Owen Jericho was one of those.
He had driven the bike right up to the glass façade, clutching his rapid-fire rifle, held so that the red laser dot was resting on Kenny’s back. He hung there like a dragonfly, well aware that the hitman must have heard the hissing of the jets long before, but Kenny had shown no sign of turning round. He wasn’t prepared for an attack from that direction. They had him over a barrel.
Yoyo said something and pointed at her father.
The laser dot quivered between Kenny’s shoulder blades.
Chen’s thin, lanky body tensed, the hitman bent his arms. It was possible that he was holding something in his left hand, which he was using with his right.
Then it happened – and Jericho’s ancient legacy took hold. His perception sped up so quickly that the world seemed to be heading for a standstill and all sounds dropped to sub-audible levels. There was nothing but a dull background hum. As if he had become weightless, Chen slowly rose from the chair, moved away from the seat, centimetre by centimetre, left leg braced against the floor, right leg bent as he tipped to the side. It was a preparation for a leap, and even before it had really begun, Kenny showed that he was about to throw himself to the floor. Jericho registered all of this, Chen’s escape and Kenny’s dive, intuitively made connections between them and centred his attention on the remote-controlled gun. Even before it began to turn on its tripod, he knew exactly what was about to happen. Chen was able to escape because the gun was no longer aimed at him. The hitman wasn’t running away from Jericho’s gun, he was fleeing his own, which he was at that very moment directing to fire at the windows.
The same evolutionary calculation that had saved hunters millions of years before taught Jericho to climb a second before the barrel spat its first bullets. He had changed position by the time they left the muzzle.
Then things speeded up.
The gun on the tripod swung around and rattled off its rounds, then turned further on its axis. All the windows exploded. The burst took in Jericho’s bike, but he had managed to climb high enough to avoid being hit himself. Two of the bullets struck the rotating wheels of the engine. There was a sound like a cracking bell. The airbike took a terrible blow.
It dropped.
* * *
‘Down!’ yelled Daxiong and threw himself sideways. Three hundredweight had to get moving, but almost all of Daxiong’s colossal body was muscle, so he managed to shove Yoyo and reach Chen Hongbing with a few long strides, the gun following after him. Bullets drilled into the wall and ceiling. Wood, glass and plaster sprayed from gaping holes. Daxiong saw Yoyo fall. At a frequency of eight rounds per second, the gun shredded the door they had been standing outside just a moment before, kept on turning, pursuing him as he breathlessly tried to flee. He collided with Hongbing and pulled him to the floor.
The wall exploded above their heads.
* * *
Jericho fell.
Apparently unconnected factors combined unexpectedly, including the principles of construction of flying machines, the effects of heavy ballistics and the ambitions of the city parks commission. Tokyo, for example, symbolised a people that had always lived in a state of extreme self-confinement, which was why you hardly ever saw a tree there. Shanghai, on the other hand, was bursting with parks and tree-lined streets, which enormously enhanced the quality of life, and was also ideal when it came to considerably softening the fall of an airbike plummeting from about twelve metres in the air. Encouraged by the humid climate, the birch trees in the hinterland of Siping Lu had grown luxuriously rampant. The bike crashed into the dense foliage
of a tree-top and threw Jericho off. He toppled into the branches, which grew denser as he fell; he flailed around, fell further, whipped by twigs and thrashed by thickening boughs until at last he managed to cling on to one and dangled from it, legs flailing, four to five metres above the courtyard.
Too high to jump.
Where was the airbike?
A crunching and splintering announced that he had overtaken the machine on his way down. It was raging high above him. He threw his head back and saw something flying at him, tried to get out of its way, too late. A branch crashed against his forehead.
When his eyesight had cleared, the airbike was coming straight at him.
* * *
Xin rolled over.
Dense clouds of plaster dust formed before his eyes. Near the shattered door he saw Yoyo creeping over to her father on her elbows. By now the spinning rifle had completed its first circuit, and was moving on, still spitting fire, to its second.
‘Yoyo, get out!’ he heard Daxiong shouting. ‘Get out of here!’
‘Father!’
Xin waited till the bullets had passed by him, then jumped up and slipped his index finger over the touchscreen of the remote control, stopped the weapon, pulled his finger down and to the right, and the gun followed his movements, and spat a burst of fire at the very spot where Chen and the giant were just getting back to their feet. The bullets missed them by millimetres. Still crouching, they staggered into the next room. Xin fired into the wall, but the masonry had already survived the first shots.
Whatever. In there they were trapped.
He calmly swung the gun round to the left. In a fierce staccato the gun hammered its rounds into the concrete, ploughed through a half-shattered shelf and brought it crashing down completely. A line of craters appeared in quick succession, tracing a line that continued all the way to the girl on the floor.
Yoyo stared at it. Panicking, she tried to get to her feet, but she was ridiculously slow. Her eyes widened when she realised that she was about to die.
‘Bye bye, Yoyo,’ he hissed.
* * *
Turbine mouth downwards, the airbike crashed through the branches as if to kill Jericho and swallow him up at the same time.
He had to jump!
The splintering and crashing came to a stop. The machine’s rump had jammed less than half a metre above him and come to a juddering standstill.
Bark, leaves and twigs rattled down on him. He looked into the shattered rotors of the turbine, swung towards the trunk and spotted a branch below him that might support his weight.
Worryingly thin, on closer inspection.
Too thin.
The rain of twigs resumed.
He had no choice. He dropped, climbed back up, felt the wood yielding under his weight and wrapped his arms around the trunk.
* * *
Xin heard the scream, which had come not from Yoyo but from the giant, who stormed in from the next room, hurled himself like a demolition ball against the tripod and brought it crashing down. The rifle pointed at the ceiling now, bringing down lumps of brick the size of fists. Xin pressed Stop and drew his handgun. He saw Hongbing running over to Yoyo, who leapt to her feet and pulled open what was left of the splintered door to the flat.
As Xin took aim at her, Daxiong pulled his legs away.
Xin collapsed onto his back and nimbly rolled sideways. Daxiong crashed to the floor. Xin raised his pistol, but the giant pushed himself up with amazing dexterity and knocked it from his hand. Xin gave him a kick at the spot where his wardrobe-sized chest met his chin, which must therefore have been something like an Adam’s apple. Daxiong’s pharaoh beard splintered. The giant staggered backwards and uttered a choking croak. With a racing dive Xin was on the pistol, grabbed hold of its butt, felt himself being grabbed and held aloft like a child. Kicking out in all directions, he struggled in vain to free himself from the man’s grasp. Daxiong’s great paws gripped him like vices as he carried him to the glass façade.
His plan was obvious.
Xin reached back and fired haphazardly. A muffled groan led him to assume that he had hit his target, although it didn’t keep Daxiong from hoisting him higher and violently hurling him through one of the windows. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame. Under other circumstances the impact would have meant certain death, but the injury had cost the giant some of his strength. Xin spread his arms and legs like a cat, tried to find something to hold on to and caught hold of a strut that hadn’t been shattered in the hail of gunfire. His body swung outside. For a moment he looked down at the green sea of leaves below him, tensed his muscles to get back inside, saw Daxiong’s fist flying at him and slipped away.
He fell – a little way.
In an instant he spotted and grabbed the bulky box of the air-conditioning system. A jolt ran through his body, his hands clawed around the box, which scraped sideways. Far below him there was crashing, splintering and rattling as if a huge animal were raging in the tree-tops.
Jericho? That was exactly the spot where the detective had fallen.
No matter. He had to get back into the flat. Using all his strength he pulled himself up, braced his feet against the masonry and started climbing.
* * *
Jericho clung desperately to the tree trunk. His feet slipped. No bark to claw on to. Just three metres above the ground he decided to let go, pushed himself away, landed on both feet, lost his balance, fell on his back and saw the airbike plunging down on top of him.
Motorbike falls from tree and kills detective.
There were headlines that you didn’t want to imagine in print.
With all his strength he catapulted himself sideways. The airbike struck the ground beside him with such force that he was afraid the arsenal of weapons would go up, but he was spared that disaster at least. The bike lay on its side; two jets and part of the casing had come off. As a result it had ceased to function as a flying machine. He looked up, but the tree-tops obscured the view of Chen’s flat. When he staggered to the house wall he thought he saw a foot disappearing over the window ledge and narrowed his eyes.
The foot was gone.
He looked around, discovered a back door, pressed the handle and found it was open. Behind it, the corridor lay in darkness. Cool air drifted towards him. He slipped inside and took a moment to find his bearings, saw a turn in the corridor and followed its course. After a short flight of steps he found himself beside the lift-shaft. Ahead of him, the hall stretched to the front door. A series of loud thumps came from the stairwell. Someone was charging down the stairs like an elephant. Jericho jerked backwards, hid behind the lift-shaft and waited to see who would appear in the hall.
It was Daxiong. The giant staggered and rested his arm against the wall. His jacket was torn and bloodstained over his right shoulder. A few quick steps and Jericho was beside him.
‘What’s going on? Where are Yoyo and Chen?’
Daxiong spun around, fist ready to strike. Then he recognised Jericho, turned and stumbled towards the front door.
‘Outside,’ he snorted.
‘And Kenny?’
‘Outside too.’
His knees gave. Jericho grabbed him under the arms.
‘Stand up,’ he panted.
‘I’m too heavy.’
‘Nonsense. I’ve rocked bigger babies than you before. What do you mean outside?’
Daxiong clawed one of his great hands into Jericho’s shoulder and shifted his weight to him. Of course he was too heavy. Far too heavy. Almost like dragging a medium-sized dinosaur around with you. Jericho pulled the door open, and they staggered together into the sunlight.
‘I threw him out,’ wheezed Daxiong. ‘Out of the window. The bastard.’
‘I think the bastard’s crept back in again.’ Jericho quickly scanned the surroundings. A car and a bike were on the move, some way apart.
‘They must be here somewhere – there!’
Between the vehicles Yoyo waved at them from th
e other side of the road. She was on the saddle of one of the two motorbikes on which she and Daxiong had arrived. Beside her, Chen Hongbing shifted nervously from one foot to the other. Yoyo pointed to the second motorbike and shouted something.
‘Exactly,’ growled Daxiong. He took his hand off Jericho’s shoulder and stomped unsteadily off. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
* * *
The pagoda-like roof of the building flattened in the middle section, by the shaft of the stairwell. Xin had parked his airbike next to it when he’d gone down to the fourth floor and now he charged back into the open, gun at the ready, safety-catch released in haste, bleeding from a thousand cuts. He ran to the edge of the roof. The pagoda sloped gently below him and hid most of the street, but he could still make out the struts for the new elevated highway and the park on the other side.
He saw Yoyo and her father standing next to a footbridge.
He took aim and realised that his magazine was empty. With a howl of rage he threw the gun away, ran to his airbike, sat on it, started the engine and climbed until he had a wider view of the whole road. Jericho and Daxiong were running along it. They had crossed the central reservation and were now halfway over the bridge. The traffic surged along below them. From the air they looked like mice in a lab run. One of them was limping.
The giant. He had hit him.
Xin reached down into the weapon chamber and brought out a sub-machine-gun. Jets wailing, he plunged.
* * *
Jericho saw him coming. He grabbed Daxiong – running in front of him, bent almost double – by the sleeve of his jacket and pointed into the air.
‘Shit,’ gasped Daxiong. He raised both arms to alert the others to the bike, and groaned. His face was contorted with pain. But Yoyo had also realised the danger she was in. She jumped from her motorbike and started running as fast as she could towards the park, with Hongbing hot on her heels.
‘Daxiong,’ yelled Jericho. ‘We’ve got to get back.’
‘No!’
‘We’ll never make it.’
He gave the giant a shove and pushed him to the point where the walkway crossed the central reservation, next to one of the massive pillar constructions on which the rails of the maglev were going to run. Prongs jutted out from it at regular intervals. Jericho swung himself over the parapet and started climbing down. He hoped Daxiong would be able to summon the strength to follow him. There was no way he could carry the guy down there.