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Tu pursed his lips. ‘Hongbing and I could put a blog entry up on this forum she posted to. We could tell her—’

‘Forget it. Yoyo can do without you trying to make contact.’

‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t she at least send Hongbing some message?’

‘Because she’s frightened of dragging him into it. Right at the moment, she’s completely concentrated on just how much she can risk without bringing danger down upon herself
and other people
. How is she to know whether or not Chen’s under surveillance, or you? So she’s playing dead, and trying to get some information. She was safe in Quyu, for a while, but then she got word that I was on my way. Since then she knows that I’ve been there. And that someone was following me. With that, the Andromeda was done with as a hiding-place. She had to leave there as well, leaving no more sign than when she left her flat.’

‘This Zhao Bide,’ Tu said thoughtfully. ‘What part do you think he plays in all this?’

‘No idea. He was helping to set up the concert, so presumably he’s something to do with the Andromeda.’

‘A City Demon?’

‘He says no.’

‘On the other hand, he knows that Yoyo is a Guardian.’

‘Yes, but I get the impression that he knew nothing about the message she posted up on Brilliant Shit. It’s hard to place him. Definitely some of the Guardians are also City Demons. But not all the Demons are Guardians. Then there are people who help Yoyo without belonging to either group. Such as Zhao.’

‘And you think she trusts him?’

‘It looks as though he’d very much like her to. Mind you, she hasn’t told him where she ran off this time.’

‘She didn’t tell me or Chen either.’

‘Also true. That doesn’t get us any further though.’ Jericho looked at Tu reproachfully. ‘As you well know.’

Tu returned his gaze equably.

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Every time Yoyo has to run, the number of people she can trust with her whereabouts becomes smaller. But there have to be some who know quite well.’

‘And?’

‘And with all due respect, I’m wondering whether there’s anything you’ve been keeping from me.’

Tu steepled his fingers.

‘You think I know the rest of the Guardians?’

‘I think that you’re trying to protect Yoyo, and yourself as well. Let’s assume that strictly speaking you didn’t need my help at all. Nevertheless, you gave me this investigation to carry out so that you didn’t have to take action yourself. Nobody’s supposed to know that Tu Tian is unduly interested in a dissident’s whereabouts. Chen Hongbing on the other hand is Yoyo’s father, there’s no problem if he hires a detective.’

Jericho waited to see whether Tu would say anything about that, but all he did was take his crooked glasses off his nose and start polishing them on a corner of his shirt.

‘Let’s also assume,’ Jericho went on, ‘that you know where Yoyo skedaddles to when there’s trouble. And now Chen Hongbing comes along, knowing nothing whatsoever of all this, and asks you for help. Should you tell him what his daughter gets up to online, and that you know all about it? More than that, that you approve of what she does and you know where she’s hiding? He would go crazy, so you point him towards me and you also slip me the vital clue: the City Demons. By the way, Grand Cherokee Wang told me about them as well. That was how you told me where I should look. Your plan was simple enough: I find the girl, you keep a low profile, you don’t need to bare all to Chen, the father is reassured as to where his daughter is, and his friend can sleep soundly.’

Tu looked up briefly and kept on polishing his glasses, not saying a word.

‘For all that, what you didn’t know and still don’t, is who Yoyo’s enemies are, and what this whole thing’s about. That has unsettled you. Now that Yoyo has left the Andromeda, you’re groping around in the dark just like I am. Things have got complicated. You’re just as clueless and worried as Chen, and on top of that, someone’s dead.’

Breathe on glasses, polish with shirt.

‘Meaning that from now on, you
really
need me.’ Jericho leaned forward. ‘And this time it’s for a
real
investigation.’

Breathe, polish.

‘But to do that, I have to be
able
to investigate!’

With a dry snap, the arm of the glasses, patched already with sticky-tape, broke. Tu cursed under his breath, cleared his throat noisily and tried to put them back
on the bridge of his nose, where they balanced like a car about to slip off the edge of a cliff.

‘I could recommend you an optician, by the way,’ Jericho added drily. ‘But first of all you have to tell me what you’ve been keeping quiet so far. Otherwise I can’t help you.’

Otherwise, he found himself thinking, I could fall off a roof myself soon enough.

Tu drummed on the table with the arm of his glasses.

‘I knew what I was doing when I hired you. It’s just that it wouldn’t do you any good if I give you the names of the other five Guardians. They’ll have gone to ground as well.’

‘For one thing, I have a trail to follow. For another, I have an ally.’

‘Zhao Bide?’

‘Even if he’s not a City Demon, he’ll know their faces. I need names and photos.’

‘Photos, that will take some time.’ Tu dug around in his ear. ‘You’ll get the names. Anyway, you know one of them already.’

‘Really?’ Jericho raised his eyebrows. ‘Who?’

‘His nickname’s Daxiong – Great Bear.’

‘The man-mountain with the cannonball head?’ He tried to imagine Daxiong being politically aware, armed with an intellect that could put the Party in uproar. ‘I can hardly believe that. I was convinced that his bike had a higher IQ than him.’

‘A lot of people think that,’ Tu commented. ‘A lot of people think that I’m a fat old coot who doesn’t have an optician and eats canned crap. Do you really think that Yoyo got away from you because the Great Bear was that dumb? He sent you off on your tour of the underworld, and you meekly followed his directions.’

Jericho had to admit that he was right.

‘Anyway, Tian, now you know why I don’t want to trouble my contacts,’ he said. ‘The police might be somewhat surprised. By now they’ll have found out that Wang was Yoyo’s flatmate. They’ll make inquiries and they’ll find out that I’m looking for the girl. Then they’ll start putting two and two together: a dead student, possibly murdered, a dissident with a record, a detective asking questions about one who’s also looking for the other. They shouldn’t be able to draw these conclusions; I want to be able to investigate discreetly. I might end up giving them the idea that they should pay more attention to Yoyo.’

‘I understand.’ Tu’s fingers glided across the tabletop, and the wall across from them became a screen. ‘Have a look at this, then.’

He saw the glass corridor and the door to the roller-coaster boarding platform, from the perspective of two security cameras.

‘How did you get the footage so quickly?’ asked Jericho, surprised.

‘Your wish was my command.’ Tu giggled. ‘The police put an electronic lock on it, but something like that’s not a problem for us. Our own surveillance network is linked in with the in-house cameras, apart from which we also hacked into some totally different systems. There would only have been trouble if they’d put a high-security block in place.’

Jericho considered this. Security blocks were commonplace. The fact that the officers in charge hadn’t bothered to install one told him something about how important they considered the case to be. Another indication that the police didn’t have Yoyo on their radar at all.

Two men appeared in the glass corridor. The shorter man walking in front had long hair and was fashionably dressed, with appliqués on his forehead and cheekbones. It was clearly Grand Cherokee Wang. A tall, slim man in a well-tailored suit walked behind him. There was something dandyish about his combed-back, brilliantined hair, thin moustache and tinted glasses. Jericho watched the way he turned his head about as he walked, scanning the whole corridor and resting his eyes for a fraction of a second on the security camera.

‘Smart operator,’ he muttered.

The two of them went to the middle of the corridor and disappeared from the corner of one camera’s view. The other showed the two of them entering the glass box of the control room with its console.

‘They talk for a while.’ Tu switched to fast-forward. ‘Nothing very much happens here.’

Jericho watched Grand Cherokee gesticulating with jerky speed, obviously showing the other man how the control unit worked. Then the two of them seemed to converse.

‘Now watch this,’ Tu said.

The film slowed down again to real time. The two men still stood next to one another. Grand Cherokee took a step towards the taller man, who stretched out an arm.

The next moment, the student collapsed, crashed his face into the edge of the console and fell to the ground. The other man took hold of him and pulled him back to his feet. Grand Cherokee staggered. The stranger held him tight. On a cursory examination, it must have looked as though he were holding up a friend who had had a sudden dizzy spell. A few seconds went by, then Grand Cherokee fell to his knees again. The tall man squatted down next to him and talked to him. Grand Cherokee doubled over and then lurched to his feet. A little while later the tall man left the control room, but then stopped and turned back. For the first time since he had stepped into the corridor, he turned his face to the camera.

‘Stop,’ said Jericho. ‘Can you blow him up?’

‘No problem.’ Tu zoomed the torso and face until they filled the screen. Jericho squinted. The man looked like Ryuichi Sakamoto playing the Japanese occupier in Bertolucci’s
The Last Emperor
.

‘Does he remind you of anybody?’ Tu asked.

Jericho hesitated. The resemblance to the Japanese actor–composer was striking. At the same time he had a creeping feeling that he was barking up the wrong tree. The film was ancient, and Sakamoto was well above seventy.

‘Not really. Send the picture over to my computer.’

Tu let the clip play on. Grand Cherokee Wang left the control room and then recoiled from the stranger. The two of them were lost to view for a while, then the tall man came back into sight. He went into the control room and started working at the console.

‘I’m wondering why the security guards didn’t react to that,’ Tu pronounced.

‘To what?’ Jericho asked.

‘What do you mean, to what?’ Tu stared at him. ‘To what you can see here!’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Well, the two of them had a spat, didn’t they?’

‘Did they?’ Jericho leaned back. ‘Aside from the fact that Wang fell to the ground twice, nothing happened at all. Maybe he’s doped up or drunk, or not feeling well. Our oily friend helps him back to his feet, that’s all. Also, the guards have a hundred storeys to watch here, you know how it works. They don’t spend their whole time staring at the screens. Anyway, is there any exterior footage?’

‘Yes, but it’s only put through to the Silver Dragon control room.’

‘Meaning that we can’t—’

‘That
they
can’t,’ said Tu. ‘We certainly can.’

Just at that moment the tall man left the control room, walked along the corridor and vanished into the next part of the building. Tu started another clip. The screen split up into eight smaller pictures, which taken together showed the whole course of the Silver Dragon’s track. One of the cameras showed Grand Cherokee standing at the end of the last carriage and looking behind himself again and again.

Then he stepped out onto the track.

‘Freeze,’ Jericho called. ‘I want to see his face.’

There was no doubt about it, Grand Cherokee’s face was frozen in a mask of panic. Jericho felt a mixture of fascination and horror.

‘Where does he want to go?’

‘He’s put some thought into it,’ Tu said in a low voice, as though talking out loud would make the terrified man on the tracks fall off. Meanwhile, the Silver Dragon
left the platform and passed from one camera view to the next. ‘There are connections between the track and the building on the way round. With a little luck, he’ll reach one.’

‘He won’t though,’ said Jericho.

Tu shook his head silently. Horrified, they watched Grand Cherokee die. For a while neither said a word, until Jericho cleared his throat.

‘The time stamps,’ he said. ‘Once you compare them there’s no doubt that it was our friend who started the Silver Dragon. And something else strikes me. We only saw his face twice, and it wasn’t clear either time. He knew how to keep his back to the camera as well.’

‘And what conclusions do you draw from that?’ Tu asked hoarsely.

Jericho looked at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you and Chen – you’ll have to get used to the idea that Yoyo has a professional killer after her.’

No, he thought, wrong. Not just Yoyo.

Me too.

* * *

Tu Technologies was one of the few companies in Shanghai with its own private fleet of skymobiles. In 2016 the World Financial Center had been retro-fitted with a hangar for skycars above the offices on the seventy-eighth floor. It had room for two dozen vehicles, half belonging to the company that owned the building, most of these being huge VTOL craft for evacuation. Since Islamist terrorists had steered two passenger jets into the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center not even a quarter-century ago, there had been growing interest in skymobiles with every passing year, leading to the development of various models. By now nearly every newly built super-high-rise in China had flight decks. Seven of the vehicles belonged to the Hyatt: four elegant shuttles with steerable jets, two skybikes and a gyrocopter. Tu’s fleet consisted of two of the helicopter-like gyros and the Silver Surfer, a gleaming ultra-slim VTOL. Last year Jericho had had the treat of piloting it for a few hours: a reward for a job instead of him billing them. It was a wickedly expensive piece of technology. Now Tu was sitting in the pilot seat. He wanted to visit Chen Hongbing, and then had to meet some people for business in Dongtan City, a satellite city of Shanghai on Chongming Island in the Yangtze, which held the record as the world’s most environmentally friendly city. Tu Technologies had developed a virtual canal for the city, which was already threaded with dozens of real canals; their glass tunnel would create the illusion of gliding along through a town in the age of the Three Kingdoms, that beloved cradle of so many stories between the Han and the Jin dynasties.