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‘Is she really called Nyela?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Are you crazy?’ snorted Vogelaar. ‘No one uses their real name if their life is at stake. In any case, one beautiful day I arrive in my office, and there sits Kenny, waiting to explain the Chinese interests to me.’ Vogelaar puffed away, veiling himself in smoke. ‘He had this strange way of switching terminology when it came to his clients. Sometimes he spoke about the Communist Party, sometimes about the Secret Service, and at others it sounded like he was there in the service of the State oil trade. When I demanded a little more clarity, he wanted to hear my thoughts on the difference between governments and companies. I thought about it and realised there wasn’t one. Strictly speaking, I haven’t found one in over forty years.’

‘And Kenny suggested a coup.’

‘The Chinese were quite bitter about the American presence in the Gulf of Guinea. Remember that we’re talking about the time before helium-3; the area was like pure gold back then. Besides that, they felt they were entitled to something that Washington had helped itself to since time immemorial. I tried to make Kenny realise that there was a difference between
protecting
governments from guerrillas and actually overthrowing them. I told him about the Wonga Coup, about Simon Mann, how he was rotting in Black Beach because of it, and how the Briton had made himself look like a complete fool. He responded by sharing information about the overthrow of the Saudi Arabian royal family the year before, and I almost passed out. It had been obvious to all of us, of course, that China had supported the Saudi Islamists, but if what Kenny told me is true, then Beijing did more than just provide a little assistance. Believe me, I can smell bullshit from ten miles away upwind. Kenny wasn’t bullshitting. He was telling the truth, and so I decided to carry on listening to him.’

‘I guess he was on excellent terms with Mayé.’

‘They were certainly in contact. In 2016, Kenny was still in second rank, but I knew right away that the guy would soon pop up in a more exposed position.’ Vogelaar laughed softly. ‘If you meet him, he actually seems like a nice guy. But he’s not. He’s at his most dangerous when he’s pretending to be nice.’

‘Can anyone be nice in this business?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Of course. Why not?’

‘Well, take mercenaries for example.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, aren’t they all more or less – erm – racists?’

Good God, Yoyo, thought Jericho, what are you playing at? Vogelaar slowly turned his head to face her and let smoke billow out of the corner of his mouth. He looked like a huge, steaming animal.

‘Don’t be shy, speak your mind.’

‘Koevoet. Apartheid. Do I need to go on?’

‘I was a professional racist, my girl, if you’re directing that at me. Give me money, and I hate the blacks. Give me money, and I hate the whites. It’s real racists who screw up the fun. By the way, there are racists in the army too.’

‘But you’re for sale. As opposed to regular—’

‘We’re for sale, sure, but we don’t betray anyone. And do you know why? Because we’re not on anyone’s side. Our only loyalty is to the contract.’

‘But if you—’

‘We’re
unable
to commit any kind of betrayal.’

‘Well, I see it differently.’

Jericho was fidgeting uneasily on his chair. What was Yoyo thinking, impaling Vogelaar on the stake of her indignation, and now of all moments? He was just opening his mouth to interrupt when a trace of realisation flitted across her face. With sudden humility, she slurped on her cola and asked:

‘So who made contact with whom? Mayé with the Chinese? Or the other way around?’

Vogelaar looked at her, debating his answer. Then he shrugged his shoulders and poured an almost overflowing glass of rum down his throat.

‘Your people approached Mayé, as far as I know.’

‘You mean the Chinese,’ Yoyo corrected him.

‘
Your
people,’ Vogelaar repeated mercilessly. ‘They came and knocked the doors down, doors that were already wide open. After all, the point was that Obiang had dramatically misjudged things with Mayé. He wanted someone he could direct from behind the scenes, but he picked the wrong guy. Without helium-3, Mayé would probably still be in Malabo.’

‘But he did end up being a puppet just recently.’

‘Sure, but for the Chinese, the buffoon of a ranking world power. That’s different from letting yourself be spoon-fed by a terminally ill ex-dictator. When Kenny turned up at my place, he had already done his research and decided that we were the best match. So I listened to him calmly – and then refused.’

‘Why?’ wondered Jericho.

‘So he would come down from his high horse. He was disappointed of course. And uneasy too, because he had opened up and made himself vulnerable. Then I told him that perhaps there was a chance after all. But for that he would have to throw more on the scales than the commission for a coup. I made it clear to him that I was tired of the trench warfare, this constant haggling for jobs, but that, on the other hand, I would bore myself to death if I went off to live in some villa somewhere. I was nearing some sort of retirement, but I didn’t want it to be of a retiring nature.’

‘So you asked for a position in Mayé’s government. That’s quite an unusual request for a mercenary.’

‘Kenny understood. A few days later we met with Mayé, who banged on at me for two long hours about his lousy family, and Kenny had to make all kinds of promises to him. There was no way there was a position in it for me too! He kept me in suspense for hours on end, then he switched sides, to cuddly old Uncle Mayé, and pulled the rabbit out of the hat.’

‘And offered you the position of security manager.’

‘The funny thing is that it was Kenny’s idea. But he buttered the old guy up so much he thought it was his own. So the deal was done. The rest was child’s play. I took care of the logistics, put commandos together, organised the weapons and helicopter, the usual rigmarole. You know the rest. The Chinese were adamant that the whole thing had to go off without any bloodshed and that Ndongo had to leave the country unscathed, and we managed all of that.’

‘Beijing didn’t seem to have that many concerns last year.’

‘There was much more to play for last year. In 2017 it was just about an adjustment to the power relationships.’

‘
Just
, sure.’

‘Oh, come on! Everyone knew that clever journalists would write clever articles sooner or later. Beijing’s role was clear just from the redistribution of the mining licences. And so what? People are used to “arranged” changes in government. But they’re less used to killings. Especially when you’re trying to clean up your image. The Party hadn’t forgotten the Olympic gauntlet-running of 2008. That’s also why the House of Saud got off so lightly in 2015 when the Islamists captured Riyadh. It was Beijing’s condition for financing the fun. Anyway, we advanced into Malabo,
Mayé squeezed his fat ass into the seat of government, I built up EcuaSec, the Equatorial Guinea Secret Service, had the entire opposition imprisoned, and that was that.’

‘And that didn’t make you sick?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Sick?’ Vogelaar put the glass to his lips. ‘I only got sick once in my life. From rotten tuna.’

Jericho shot Yoyo a look like daggers. ‘And then what?’

‘As expected, Kenny landed on his feet shortly after we heaved Mayé into power and ended up with more authority. Equatorial Guinea became a playground to him. Every few weeks he would relax in the lobby of the Paraíso, a hotel for oil workers, where he treated himself to hookers and waited for my reports. We had agreed in Cameroon that I would keep an eye on Mayé—’

‘So that was the deal.’

‘Of course. As I said, it was Kenny’s idea. No one got as close to Mayé as I did. He accepted me as a close confidant.’

‘A confidant who also happened to be spying on him.’

‘Just in case the fatty escaped our leash. I was being watched too of course. That’s Kenny’s principle, how he builds up his clique: everyone keeps an eye on everyone else. But I always had one more pair of eyes than the others.’

‘Yes, made of glass,’ scoffed Yoyo.

‘I see more with one healthy one than you do with two,’ retorted Vogelaar. ‘I quickly found out who the moles were that Kenny had set on me. Half of EcuaSec was infiltrated. I didn’t let on that I knew of course. Instead, I began to watch Kenny myself; I wanted to find out more about him and his men.’

‘All I know is that he’s completely insane.’

‘Let’s just say he loves extremes. I found out that he lived in London for three years, assigned to the Chinese military attaché, and spent two years in Washington, specialising in conspiracy. Officially, he belonged to Zhong Chan Er Bu, the military news service, the second department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army. Unfortunately my contacts there turned out to be scarce, but I did know a few people who had worked with Kenny in the past in the fifth office of the Guojia Anquan Bu, the ministry for state security. According to them he had outstanding analytical abilities and an instinct for how people’s minds work. They also commented that when it came to sabotage and contract killing, he handled things with quite a – well, uncompromising attitude.’

‘In other words, our friend was a killer.’

‘Which in itself isn’t any cause for alarm. But there was something else too.’

Vogelaar paused to light another cigar. He did it slowly and elaborately, switching
from the spoken word to smoke signals and immersing himself in his own thoughts for a while.

‘They thought there was something monstrous about him,’ he continued. ‘Which my gut instinct had told me too, although I couldn’t really say why. So I tried to delve deeper into Kenny’s past. I found the usual military service, his studies, pilot training, arms certificate, all the normal stuff. I was just about to give up when I stumbled on a special unit with the beautiful name of Yü Shen—’

‘Lovely,’ said Yoyo sarcastically.

‘Yü Shen?’ Jericho wrinkled his forehead. ‘That rings a bell. It has something to do with eternal damnation, doesn’t it?’

‘Yü Shen is the Hell God,’ Yoyo explained to him. ‘A Taoist figure based on the old Chinese belief that hell is divided up into ten empires, deep inside the earth, each of which is ruled by a Hell King. The Hell God is the highest power. The dead have to answer to him and the judges of hell.’

‘So that means everyone goes to hell?’

‘To start with, yes. And everyone appears before a special court, according to his or her actions. The good ones are sent back to the surface and are reborn in a higher incarnation. The bad ones are reborn too, after they’ve served their time in hell, but as animals.’

Jericho looked at Vogelaar.

‘So what was Kenny Xin reborn as?’

‘Good question. A beast in human form?’

‘And what was he before?’

Vogelaar sucked at his cigar.

‘I tried to collect information about Yü Shen. It was a difficult task. Officially, the department doesn’t exist, and it’s actually very similar to the hell court. It recruits its members from prisons, psychiatric institutions and clinics for brain research. You might say they search for evil. For highly gifted people whose psychic defect is so far over the inhibition threshold that they would normally be locked away. But, with Yü Shen, they get a second chance. Not that they want to make them into better people there, mind, it’s more about how to
use
their evil. They carry out tests. All kinds of tests, the type you wouldn’t even want to hear about. After a year, they decide whether you’ll be reborn in freedom, for example in the military or Secret Service, or whether you’ll live out your life in the hell of the institution.’

‘It sounds like an army of butchers,’ said Yoyo, disgusted.

‘Not necessarily. Some Yü Shen graduates have gone on to have incredible careers.’

‘And Kenny?’

‘When Yü Shen tracked him down, he had just turned fifteen and was in an institution
for mentally disturbed young offenders. Most of what happened before that remains in darkness. It seems he grew up in bitter poverty, in the corner of a settlement where not even tramps dare to go. A father, mother, and two siblings. I don’t know much more detail than that. Just that one night, when he was ten years old, he poured two canisters of petrol onto his family’s corrugated iron shack while they were all sleeping. Then he blocked up all the escape routes with barricades he had spent weeks making out of rubbish, hooked them all up so that no one could get out, and set the whole thing on fire.’

Yoyo stared at him.

‘And his—?’

‘Burnt to death.’

‘The whole family?’

‘Every one of them. It was pure chance that some shrink got wind of it and took the boy away with him. He declared that Kenny possessed outstanding intelligence and well-developed clarity of thought. The boy didn’t deny anything, didn’t utter a single word in attempt to explain why he had done it. For four years he was passed around circles of experts, each of them trying to get to the bottom of his behaviour, until ultimately Yü Shen became aware of his existence.’

‘And they let him loose on humanity!’

‘He was declared to be healthy.’

‘Healthy?’

‘In the sense that he was in control of himself. They didn’t find anything. No mental illness that features in the textbooks at any rate. Just a bizarre compulsion for order, a fascination with symmetry. Classical symptoms of compulsive behaviour, but overall nothing that could brand him as being insane. He was just – evil.’

For a while, there was an uneasy silence. Jericho thought back over what he knew about Xin. His love of directing the action, the eerie ability he had of reading people’s minds. Vogelaar was right. Kenny
was
evil. And yet he had the feeling that wasn’t all there was to it. It was as if some dark code underlay his behaviour, one that he followed and felt bound to.

‘Now, in the meantime I had no reason to mistrust Kenny. Everything was running like a well-oiled machine. Beijing kept to its promise not to get involved, Mayé was enjoying the status of an autonomous ruler. Oil flowed in return for money. Then the decline came. The whole world was talking about helium-3, everyone wanted to go to the Moon. Interest in fossil resources kept falling, and Mayé couldn’t do a thing about it. Nothing at all. Neither executions nor fits of madness could help.’ Vogelaar flicked ashes from his cigar. ‘So, on 30 April 2022 he called me to his office. As I walked in, he was sitting there with a number of
men and women, who he introduced to us as representatives of the Chinese Air and Space Travel Ministry.’