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‘Lots, my lotus flower! Who wants to be filmed from dawn till dusk, as if the crap that you produce for the cinema wasn’t enough?’

‘I wouldn’t pose in front of your camera if you paid me!’

‘That is so funny! You really mean that? You start pissing yourself as soon as you
see
a camera.’

‘Nicely put, arsehole. Go and get it, then.’

‘You bet I will,’ snapped Locatelli, and turned on his heel.

‘Hey, Warren,’ called Evelyn, quietly rapt. ‘You’re not going all the way back just for—’

‘Yep.’

‘Wait!’ shouted Julian. ‘Take Amber’s camera, she’s right. You can film Momoka with it until she pleads for mercy.’

‘No! I’m going to get the damned thing!’

He stamped defiantly back in the direction of the ravine.

‘I know he doesn’t have an easy life with me,’ he heard Momoka saying quietly to the others, as if he couldn’t hear every single word, ‘but Warren’s only happy when something’s getting on his nerves.’

‘Quite honestly, you both seem to need that,’ Amber remarked.

‘Ah, yes.’ Momoka sighed. ‘I love it when he hits back. That’s when I love him most.’

* * *

Julian, advancing with the pace of a natural leader, had almost reached the plateau when he heard Sophie’s voice in his helmet. Parked some way off, he could just see the rovers via which he was connected to the Ganymede, and via it with Gaia.

‘What is it, Sophie?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, call from Earth. I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line for you. Please switch to O-SEC.’

O-SEC. Bug-proof connection. It meant that he had to sever his contact with the group. No one would be able to hear what his company’s security advisor had to tell him.

‘Fine.’ He obliged. ‘We’re on our own.’

‘Julian!’ Jennifer’s voice, urgent. ‘I won’t trouble you with an endless preamble. Lynn will have told you about the warning we received yesterday. We’ve just—’

‘Lynn?’ Julian interrupted her, surprised. He turned to the others and gestured to them to stop. ‘No. Lynn didn’t tell me anything about a warning.’

‘She didn’t?’ Jennifer said, puzzled.

‘When’s that supposed to have been?’

‘Last night. Edda Hoff talked to your daughter. Lynn wanted to be kept informed about the matter. Of course I assumed that she—’

‘What
matter
are we talking about, Jennifer? I don’t understand a word.’

Jennifer fell silent for a moment. The delay between Earth and Moon lasted only a second, but it was enough to create irritating little pauses.

‘Two days ago we received a warning from a Chinese businessman,’ she said. ‘He happened to come into possession of a garbled text document, and since then he’s been on the run. The text suggests – or seems to suggest – that one of the company’s plants is threatened with attack.’

‘What’s that you say? Hoff said
that
to my daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lynn? Lynn, are you there?’

‘I’m here, Dad.’

‘What’s going on? What’s all this about?’

‘I – I didn’t want to bother you with it.’ Her voice sounded quavery and upset. ‘Of course I—’

‘Lynn, Julian, I’m sorry,’ Jennifer cut in. ‘But there’s no time for all this. The Chinese guy called me again a short time ago, or one of his people did. They’re
coming straight to us. This morning they tried to find out more about the background to the document, and it ended in disaster. There were casualties, but they’ve got some new information.’

‘What kind of information? Jennifer, who—’

‘Wait, Julian. We’re in contact with the Chinese jet. I’ll put you through.’

A second passed, then a strange man’s voice was heard, amidst an atmospheric hiss:

‘Mr Orley? My name is Owen Jericho. I know you have a thousand questions, but I’ve got to ask you to listen to me now. By completing the document we’ve been able to discover that an information satellite was fired into the Earth’s orbit from African soil. The operator was the former government of Equatorial Guinea, General Juan Mayé, who took over in a coup.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Julian. ‘Mayé and his satellite. He made a laughing stock of himself with that thing.’

‘What you may not know is that Mayé was a straw man for Chinese lobbyists. It’s possible that he was put in power at the instigation of Beijing, but it was certainly done with their connivance. By now other people are in power in Equatorial Guinea, but during his time in office the Chinese sponsored his space programme. Does the name Zheng mean anything to you?’

‘The Zheng Group? Of course!’

‘Zheng made lots of their technology available to him at the time, and provided know-how and hardware. But the satellite was just a pretext to fire something else into orbit from Mayé’s state territory. Something that no official site would have allowed through.’

‘What was that?’

‘A bomb. A Korean atom bomb.’

Julian froze. He guessed,
feared
he guessed, what this man Jericho was getting at. He watched uneasily as the others scattered and gesticulated on the path.

‘The Koreans?’ he echoed. ‘What on earth do I have to do with—’

‘Not the Koreans, Mr Orley, but what Kim Jong Un’s abandoned ghost train left behind. We’re talking about the black market mafia. In other words, China, or somebody who’s hiding behind China, has bought a handy little atom bomb from Korean stock, a so-called mini-nuke. We’re sure that this bomb left the satellite just as it entered its orbit – so a year ago – then travelled on from there to an unknown destination. And in our opinion that destination is
not
on Earth.’

‘Just a moment.’
Not on Earth.
‘You mean—’

‘We mean it’s meant to destroy one of your space installations, yes. Probably Gaia. The Moon hotel.’

‘And what makes you suspect that?’ Julian heard himself saying in a remarkably calm voice.

‘The time delay. Of course there are a few variations. But none of them really explains why the thing has been up there for a year without being set off. Unless something got in the way.’ Jericho paused for a miserably long time. ‘Wasn’t Gaia originally supposed to have opened in 2024? And that was postponed because of the Moon crisis?’

Julian said nothing, as something was set in motion, slowly but inexorably, inside his head. The projectionist slipped by, put in the reel of film and—

‘Carl,’ he whispered.

‘Sorry?’ asked Jericho.

‘In the morning, two days ago,’ cried Julian. ‘My God! I saw it and didn’t understand. Carl Hanna, one of our guests. I ran into him in the corridor, he said he’d been looking for the exit and hadn’t found it, but he was lying! He was outside.’

‘Julian.’ Dana Lawrence joined in the conversation. ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong. You’ve seen the recordings. Carl definitely didn’t go outside.’

‘He did, Dana. He did! And idiot that I am, I even saw it. Down in the corridor, even though I didn’t understand it. Someone faked the recordings, re-edited the shots. He steps onto the gangway to the Lunar Express—’

‘And reappears a few seconds later.’

‘No, he was outside! He steps on it wearing a very clean suit, Dana, clean as a whistle! And when he comes out again there are traces of moon dust on his legs. That was what I was looking for the whole time, that subliminal certainty that something was wrong.’

‘Just a moment,’ Dana said sharply. ‘I’ll get the recordings up on screen.’

* * *

Clever Julian, thought Hanna.

He stood there motionlessly while the cantilever swung over the gorge, Mimi and Marc hung laughing over the abyss, and Black set the winch in motion, and he heard something that he shouldn’t have heard. But he was switched in. This time, once again, Ebola ensured that he was able to function, even though his room for manoeuvre was dramatically shrinking. He would never have expected to get busted, his identity was watertight. Not even when Vic Thorn had died had the operation been as precarious as it was right now. All of a sudden the planned course of action was out of the window; he had to act, carry out his mission prematurely, use the seconds, minutes at most, that Ebola had wangled for him to create the maximum possible confusion and take to his heels.

‘Have the hotel searched right now,’ Owen Jericho was saying. ‘This guy Carl, perhaps he’s been outside to hide the bomb in Gaia. Ask him—’

‘I
will
ask him,’ hissed Julian. ‘Oh, I’ll ask him!’

Yeah, right, thought Hanna.

The lift sank slowly into the gorge. Black stood by the winch, waving at the Californians. Wanted to know what it felt like being a kilometre above the ground.

‘Amazing!’ raved Parker. ‘Better than parachute jumping. Better than anything.’

Hanna got moving, stretched his arms out.

‘Can you speed the pace up a bit?’ asked Edwards. ‘Speed it up. Let us fly!’

‘Sure, I—’

With both hands Hanna grabbed Black by the backpack, pulled him away from the console, lifted him in the air and carried him to the edge.

‘Hey!’ The pilot reached behind him. ‘Carl, is that you?’

Hanna said nothing, walked quickly on. His captive turned, kicked his legs, tried to get a hold of his assailant.

‘Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone mad? – No!’

He hurled Black over the edge of the platform. For a moment the pilot seemed to find purchase in the void, then he fell, comparatively slowly at first, getting faster and faster. His shrill scream mingled with Mimi Parker’s.

Nothing, not even a sixth of terrestrial gravity, could save a person falling into an abyss from a height of one thousand metres.

‘Julian?’ called Sophie. ‘Miss Shaw?’

‘What’s going on?’ snapped Dana.

‘Radio silence. Both gone.’ She tried in turn to re-establish connection with headquarters in London and with Julian, but all communication had been interrupted immediately after the start of the video showing the miraculous sullying of Hanna’s trouser legs in the sterile surroundings of a gangway. The Canadian, small and cheerful, went for a walk on the corridor conveyor belt, unnoticed by anyone.

‘Julian? Please come in!’

‘Try to reach the Earth in the conventional manner,’ said Dana. ‘Oh, don’t worry, let me do it.’

‘She pushed Sophie aside, pulled up a menu, switched from LPCS on direct
aerial connection to the terrestrial Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, targeted ground stations, which was just possible within view of Earth, but Gaia seemed to have been deprived of her sensory organs. Lynn stared, her hand in front of her mouth, at the monitor wall, while Sophie shifted nervously from one leg to the other.

‘I was carrying on the conversation quite normally when—’

‘Don’t apologise before I start blaming you,’ Dana yelled at her. ‘Keep on trying. Perform an analysis. I want to know where the problem lies. Lynn?’

Lynn turned her head as if in a trance.

‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’

‘What?’

Rigid with fury, Dana left the control centre. Lynn followed her into the hall like a robot.

‘I think—’

‘Sorry!’ Dana flashed her inquisitorial grey-green eyes. ‘You’re my boss, Lynn, and that means I have to be respectful. But now I have to ask you very clearly what yesterday’s warning was about.’

Lynn looked as if she had been recalled to life after a long period of unconsciousness. She raised a hand and studied its palm as if it contained something very attractive.

‘It was all pretty vague.’

‘What was vague?’

‘Edda Hoff called and said a few people were planning some sort of attack on an Orley plant. It sounded – well, vague. Not like anything to worry about.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about it straight away?’

‘I didn’t think it was necessary.’

‘I’m the manager
and
the security officer of this hotel, and you didn’t think it was necessary?’

Lynn stopped studying the palm of her hand and stared furiously back.

‘As you have already observed, Dana, I am your boss and, no, I
didn’t
think it was necessary to inform you. According to Hoff it was an
extremely vague
suspicion that
somewhere
in the world at
some
point an attack on
one
of our plants was planned, which was why she wanted to talk to me or Julian and not to
you
, and Julian had enough on his plate, so
I
asked to be kept informed. Does that answer your question?’

Dana took a step nearer. As if the prospect of disaster were not hovering about the hotel, Lynn found herself immersed in fascinated thoughts about the mysteries of the Dana physiognomy. How could such a sensually full mouth look so hard? Was the pallor of the face, framed by coppery red, due to the light, to a genetic predisposition
or merely to Dana’s bitterness? How was it possible to seethe with rage and yet reveal such mask-like indifference?

‘Maybe you missed a few things back there,’ the manager said quietly. ‘But there was talk of this hotel being blown up by an atom bomb. One of your guests seems to be involved in it. We’ve lost contact with your father and with Earth. You should at any rate have talked to me about it.’

‘You know what?’ said Lynn. ‘You should get on with your work.’

She left Dana standing and went back to the control centre. The video of Hanna was still flickering on the monitor wall. The manager followed her slowly.

‘I’d love to,’ she said icily. ‘Are you overworked, Lynn? Are you up to this? A moment ago you looked as if you’d been paralysed.’

Sophie looked up and away again, not liking what she saw.

‘I’m afraid we’ve had a satellite failure,’ she said. ‘I can’t reach Earth or Ganymede or Callisto. Shall I try the Peary Base?’

‘Later. First we’ll have to talk through the next few steps. If what we’ve just heard is true, we’re threatened with catastrophe.’

‘What kind of catastrophe?’ asked Tim.

Locatelli caught his breath.

He saw Black disappearing just as he stepped from the shadow of the ravine and back into the sunlight. He stared at the scene as if nailed to the spot. It wasn’t easy to tell who had pushed whom into the gorge, and he had switched the gang down there to mute, but there was no doubt that it had been deliberate.