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Jericho’s gaze turned to the stairway.

There were three entrances to the pillared central hall, where the altar had once stood. Vogelaar had said he’d be waiting there. He climbed the gleaming marble steps, went through the columns and found himself in a large, rectangular space, brightly lit, with another, smaller frieze running around its walls. From up here there was a good view of everything happening down at the bottom of the stairs, as long as you didn’t mind being seen in turn. Further back in the room, and you were safely out of sight.

Jericho looked at his watch.

Half past eleven. Time to explore the rest of the museum.

He left the temple hall the other way and went into the north wing, where he found other examples of Hellenistic architecture. And what if Vogelaar
didn’t
have
a dossier? He paced along the façade of the Mshatta palace, a desert castle from the eighth century. He was increasingly worried that the whole thing might be a trap. Romanesque windows marked the end of the north wing, but he couldn’t have said what he had seen in this part of the museum. As a scouting trip to learn the lie of the land, this was a wash-out. Stone faces stared down at him. He turned left. The way through to the fourth wing of the museum, the glass wing, led between rams and sphinxes, past pharaohs, through the temple gate from Kalabsha and beneath artefacts from the pyramid temple of Sahuré. Suddenly Jericho felt reminded of another glass corridor, the one where the ill-fated Grand Cherokee Wang had met Kenny Xin. An omen? With a grating sound, arms lifted, spear-tips were raised, granite fingers closed on the hilts of swords carved from stone. He went on, the daylight flooding in on him. To his right he could look through the windows that covered the whole wall, down to one of the bridges over this arm of the Spree, while to his left the inner courtyard of the museum stretched away. In front of him was an obelisk showing priest-kings gesturing strangely from the backs of glaring beasts, and in the corner was a statue of the weather god Hadad. Here the glass corridor joined the museum’s south wing and completed the circuit, leading back to the Babylonian Processional Way.

Twenty to twelve.

He went into the Pergamon hall for the second time, and found it besieged by art students who had parked themselves on the landing with sketch pads and were beginning to turn the glories of antiquity into rough sketches for their own future careers. He started up the steps with a feeling of foreboding. In the inner courtyard with the Telephos frieze, visitors were shuffling from one marble fragment to the next, seeking history’s secrets in the missing arms and noses. Jericho’s head pounded as he paced among the crippled heroes, eavesdropping on a father who was lecturing his offspring in muffled tones, stifling whatever faint glimmer of interest they might ever have had in ancient sculpture. With every date he mentioned, the kids’ frowns grew deeper. The look in their eyes spoke of honest bafflement – why were grownups so keen on broken statuary? How could anyone get through life without arms? Why not just fix the things? Their voices were older than their years as they feigned enthusiasm for smashed thighs, stone stumps and the fragmentary face of a king, without hope of escape.

Without hope of escape—

That was it. Up here, he was trapped.

Pessimist, he scolded himself. They had saved Vogelaar’s life, and furthermore the Telephos hall wasn’t the kitchen at Muntu. The exchange would take place, swift and silent. The worst that could happen would be that the documents didn’t
contain what the seller claimed. He tried to relax, but his shoulders had frozen solid with tension. The father was doing his best to enthuse his children for the beauty of a right breast, floating free, which must, he explained, have been part of the lovely goddess Isis. Their eyes darted about, wondering what was lovely or beautiful here. Jericho turned away, glad all over again that he was no longer young.

His thoughts were a whirl. He was caught up on a merry-go-round of ifs and buts as his feet carried him mechanically along the Processional Way.
If
Jericho and the girl got there at the time agreed,
if
Xin kept to the arrangement,
if
he could actually trust the Chinese assassin – but what if he couldn’t? Here and now, he was in danger of letting the last chance to free Nyela slip through his fingers, but she was in the clutches of a madman who quite possibly never even intended to let her, or him, live. He had decades of experience in finding his way out of tight spots, but it was no use. He was unarmed, without even a phone, in the middle of a crowded museum, and his chances of putting one over on Xin were slim – but it wasn’t impossible. Could he really afford not to use any tricks? Just how dangerous was this Mickey who was currently watching over Nyela? The Irishman gave the impression of being just another hapless career criminal, but if he worked for Xin, he had to be a threat. Nevertheless Vogelaar reckoned he could get rid of the guy, but first of all he had to deal with Xin.

An attack, then. Or not? In the next couple of minutes, before he reached the Pergamon hall. Unarmed and with no plan.

Not a glimmer!

No, he
couldn’t
attack. The only way to get one over that madman was blind luck, but what if Xin actually intended to keep his promise? What if Vogelaar failed in his attempt to put one past him, and in failing, actually
caused
Nyela’s death, not to mention his own?

Trick him? Trust him? Trick him?

* * *

Five minutes earlier, in the James Simon Gallery.

‘I understand you,’ Xin says gently. ‘I wouldn’t trust me either.’ He’s close behind Vogelaar, the flechette pistol hidden under his jacket.

‘And?’ Vogelaar asks. ‘Would you be right?’

Xin considers for a moment.

‘Have you ever got to grips with astrophysics?’

‘There were other things in my life,’ Vogelaar snarls. ‘Coups, armed conflict—’

‘A pity. You would understand me better. Physicists are concerned, among other things, with the parameters of a stable universe. Or indeed of any universe which could come into existence at all, as such. There’s a long list of facts to deal with, but it all comes down to two different points of view. One of them says that the universe is infinitely stable, that it never even had any choice but to develop in the form in which we know it. If things had been different, perhaps no life would have been able to arise. Pondering such matters though is as pointless as wondering what your life might have been like if you’d been born a woman.’

‘Sounds fatalistic, boring.’

‘Philosophically speaking, I quite agree. Which is why the other camp likes to speak of the infinite fragility of the universe, of the fact that even the smallest variation in initial parameters could lead to fundamental changes. A tiny little bit more mass. Just a very few less of this or that elementary particle. The first camp says that all sounds too contingent, and they’re right. But the second viewpoint does come closer to the way we imagine existence to be. What if … ? For myself, I prefer a vision of order and predictability, grounded in binding, non-negotiable parameters. And that’s the spirit in which we made our agreement, you and I.’

‘Meaning that you can always come up with some reason you needn’t keep your promise.’

‘You have a petty mind, if I may be so bold as to say so.’

Vogelaar turns around and stares at him.

‘Oh, I already see what you mean! I understand how you see yourself. Might the problem perhaps be that your’ – he waved his hand in the air in a circle – ‘idea of universal order doesn’t hold true for your fellow mortals?’

‘What’s up all of a sudden, Jan? You were calmer just a moment ago.’

‘I couldn’t give a damn what you think about that! I want to hear you say that Nyela will be safe if I keep my side of the bargain.’

‘She’s my guarantee that you’ll keep it.’

‘And then?’

‘As I have said before—’

‘Say it again!’

‘My goodness me, Jan! Truth doesn’t become any more true just from being repeated.’ Xin sighs and looks up at the ceiling. ‘If you like, though. As long as Mickey’s with her, Nyela’s fine, she’s safe. If everything else goes according to our agreement, nothing will happen to either of you. That’s the deal. Are you content?’

‘Partly. The devil never does anything without his reasons.’

‘I appreciate the flattery. Now do me a favour and move your arse.’

The Market Gate of Miletus.

Xin’s words in his ear. What if he turned round, right now, this moment? Ran through the museum full tilt, tried to reach the restaurant before him? That would definitely change the parameters! But to do that he would have to know exactly where Xin was. He had stayed behind as they went into the south wing. Vogelaar had turned round once to try to spot him, but hadn’t been able to see him among the hordes of tour groups. He didn’t doubt that the killer was watching his every step, but he also knew that from now on in, Xin would stay invisible until the time was ripe. Jericho and the girl were sitting in a trap in the Telephos hall. He would show up as though out of thin air, shoot twice—

Or would it be three times?

Trust him? Trick him?

Xin wasn’t sane. He didn’t live in the real world, he lived in some
abstraction
of reality. Which was actually a reason to trust him. His madness forced him to cling to order. Perhaps Xin wasn’t even
able
to break a promise, as long as all the parameters were observed.

He shrugged his way through the crowds and approached the entrance to the Pergamon hall, a smaller gate in the Hellenistic façade, which was just now being cleaned and restored. To leave a clear view of the architecture, the museum had clad it with glass walls rather than shrouds. The glass reflected the spotlights from the ceiling, and the statues and the columns all around, the visitors, himself—

And someone else.

Vogelaar stared.

For the length of a heartbeat he was helpless against rising panic. Iron bands clamped his ribcage, and an electric field paralysed his legs. Rage, hate, grief and fear pooled like a thrombosis in his feet, which became numb, refused to take one more step. Instead of horror at all the things that could happen to Nyela, he felt the searing certainty of what had most probably already happened.

As long as Mickey’s with her, Nyela’s fine
—

Then why was Mickey in the museum?

Because Nyela was no longer alive.

It could only be that. Would Xin have allowed her to stay in the restaurant unguarded? Vogelaar walked on as though drunk. He had failed. He had surrendered to the childish hope that the madman might keep his promises. Instead, Xin had ordered the Irishman to come along to the museum to share the work of killing. That was all. Just as Nyela had never had a chance, right from the start,
he too would die along with Yoyo and Jericho, in the little room at the top of the temple, if not before.

The thought acted like an acid, dissolving his fears in a trice. Ice-cold rage flooded in instead. One by one, his survival mechanisms clicked into place, and he felt the metamorphosis, felt himself become once more the bug he had been for most of his life. He marched onwards, chitin-clad, through the gate and into the Pergamon hall next door. Watchful, he waved his antennae, saw the entire hall through faceted eyes: over there, at the opposite end of the great hall, another gate that was the partner of the one he had come through, tiny, almost ashamed to be so small but nevertheless bravely doing its work, one narrow little bypass in the flow of bodies through the museum, pumping tirelessly. To his left, isolated parts of the frieze standing alone on pillars and pedestals; to his right the temple with the stairway, up above the colonnade, leading through to the Telephos hall where Jericho and the girl would be, waiting for a dossier that they would never see now, that they would never need. It would have all been so simple, so quickly over and done with. He would have been a hundred thousand euros richer, and he would have handed them the second dossier. The duplicate that apart from him only Nyela had known about—

Had known?

How could he be
sure
that she was dead?

Because
she was.

Wishful thinking. No part of a bug’s existence.

Vogelaar’s jaw worked back and forth. Platoons of tourists thronged the stairway to the colonnade, many sitting on the steps as though planning to have lunch there. Vogelaar spotted a younger group all armed with sketch pads and pencils, their faces fixed in concentration, rapt in their struggle with immortal art. A few curious passers-by were peering over their shoulders. He swept his eyes across the students, one by one, and stopped at a pale girl with a sharp nose who had gathered no admirers around her. He walked up to her, unhurried. On the white sheet of paper, Zeus fought the giant Porphyrion, and the two of them together fought the girl’s artistic ineptitude, her inability to breathe life into the scene. She must have had a good twenty pencils in the case next to her, and the number was obviously inversely proportional to her talent. Clearly every euro of tip money from the evening job waiting tables went on her art supplies. She was throwing money away in the deluded belief that in art, having the right kit is half the struggle.

He leaned down to her and said in his friendliest voice, ‘Could you perhaps – excuse me! – lend me one of your pencils?’

She blinked up at him, startled.

‘Just for a moment,’ he added quickly. ‘I want to jot something down. Forgot my pen, as always.’

‘Hmm, ye-e-es,’ she said, slowly, obviously upset at the thought that pencils might be used for writing as well. In the next moment she seemed to have come to terms with the idea. ‘Yes, of course! Pick any one.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

He chose a long, neatly sharpened pencil which looked sturdier than the rest, and straightened up. Xin was watching him at this moment, he had no doubt. Xin saw everything and would draw his own conclusions from whatever Vogelaar did, meaning that he only had seconds.