Limit

by Frank Schatzing

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Neal Stephenson and Peter F. Hamilton, an epic science-fiction novel from Germany''s most successful thriller writer.

The first space elevator connects the Earth to the Moon, prompting a breathless race between the Americans and Chinese to get to the Moon''s helium-3 - the rare element that promises to solve all the world''s energy problems.

In Shanghai, cyber-detective Owen Jericho has been hired to find Yoyo, a missing girl, but what started as a routine investigation soon develops into a nightmarish hunt. There''s a crazed assassin hot on his heels, all because Yoyo accidentally stumbled onto a secret society called Hydra - and now it''s not just her life at risk.

Following the Hydra trail takes Jericho and Yoyo round the world and finally to the Gaia, the Moon''s very first hotel, where a billionaire entrepreneur is entertaining some of the world''s richest and most influential men and women

But the secret society that is Hydra has its own plans for the Earth - and the Moon. And nothing and no one will be allowed to stand in its way.

Release date: November 7, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 736

Sample

I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep—

Good old Frankie-boy. Untroubled by urban transformation, as long as there was a stiff drink waiting for you when you woke up.

Vic Thorn rubbed his eyes.

In thirty minutes the automatic alarm signal would rouse the early shift from their beds. Strictly speaking he couldn’t have cared less. As a short-term visitor he was largely free to decide how he was going to spend the day, except that even guests had to adapt to a certain formal framework. Which didn’t necessarily mean getting up early, but they woke you anyway.

If I can make it there,

I’ll make it anywhere—

Thorn started unfastening his belt. Because he thought staying too long in bed was degrading, he didn’t trust anyone else’s automatic devices to allow him to spend as little time of his life as possible asleep. Particularly since he liked to decide for himself who or what summoned him back to consciousness. Thorn loved turning his music systems up to the max. And he preferred to entrust his wake-up call to the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Junior, the disreputable heroes of times past, for whom he felt an almost romantic affection. And up here nothing, nothing at all, was conducive to the habits of the Rat Pack. Even Dean Martin’s now famous observation that ‘You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on’ was physically invalidated, and nor would the inveterate toper have been able to indulge his predilection for falling off his bar-stool and tottering out into the street. At 35,786 kilometres above the Earth’s surface there were no prostitutes waiting for you outside the door, just lethal, airless space.

King of the hill, top of the heap—

Thorn hummed along with the tune, mumbling a wonky-sounding New York, New York. With a faint twitch, he pushed himself away and floated off his bunk, drifted to the small, round porthole of his cabin and looked outside.

* * *

In the city that never slept, Huros-ED-4 was on the way to his next assignment.

He wasn’t bothered by the cold of space or the total lack of atmosphere. The sequence of day and night which, at such a vast distance from the Earth, was in any case based more on general agreement than on sensory experience, held no validity for him. His alarm call was made in the language of the programmers. Huros-ED stood for Humanoid Robotic System for Extravehicular Demands, the 4 placed him along with another nineteen of his kind, each one two metres tall, torso and head entirely humanoid, while their exaggeratedly long arms in their resting state recalled the raptorial claws of a praying mantis. When required, they unfolded with admirable agility, and with hands that were able to perform extremely difficult operations. A second, smaller pair of arms emerged from the broad chest, packed with electronics, and these were used to provide assistance. The legs, however, were completely absent. Admittedly the Huros-ED had a waist and a pelvis, but where the hips would have been in a human being there sprouted flexible grippers with devices that allowed him to fasten himself on wherever he happened to be needed. During the breaks he looked for a sheltered niche, connected his batteries to the mains supply, topped up the tanks of his navigation nozzles with fuel and settled down to a spot of mechanical contemplation.

By now the last break was eight hours ago. Since then Huros-ED-4 had been working away industriously in the most diverse spots of the gigantic space station. In the outer zone of the roof, as the part turned towards the zenith was called, he had helped to swap ageing solar panels for new ones, in the wharf he had adjusted the floodlights for Dock 2, where one of the spaceships for the planned Mars mission was currently under construction. Then he had been dispatched a hundred metres lower to the scientific payloads fastened along the cantilevers, to remove the defective platinum parts from a measuring instrument designed to scan the surface of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Ecuador. After this reconditioning had been successfully completed, his task was to go back inside the spaceport to investigate one of the manipulator arms that had ceased to function in the middle of a loading process.

The spaceport: that meant descending a bit further along the outside of the station, to a ring 180 metres in diameter, with eight berths for incoming and outgoing moon shuttles, and a further eight for evacuation pods. Leaving aside the fact that the ships anchored there were passing through a vacuum rather than through water, what went on around the ring was not much different from what happened in Hamburg or Rotterdam, the big terrestrial seaports, meaning that it too had cranes, huge robot arms on rails, called manipulators. One of these had packed in halfway through the loading process of a freight and passenger shuttle that was to start its journey to the Moon in only a few hours’ time. The arm should have been working, but with mechanical stubbornness it absolutely refused to move, and instead hung, effectors spread, half inside the shuttle’s loading area and half outside, which meant that the ship’s opened body couldn’t be closed.

On stipulated flight-paths, Huros-ED-4 passed alongside docked shuttles, airlocks and connecting tunnels, spherical tanks, containers and masts until he reached the defective arm that glinted coldly in the unfiltered sunlight. The cameras behind the visor on his head and the ends of limbs sent pictures to the control centre as he passed close by the construction and subjected every square centimetre to detailed analysis. The control constantly compared these pictures with the images located in his data storage system, until it had found the reason for the failure.

The control instructed him to clean the arm.

He stopped. Someone in his central steering module said, ‘Fucking shit!’, prompting a query from Huros-ED-4. Although programmed to respond to the human voice, he could detect no meaningful order in the exclamation. The control room neglected to repeat the words, so at first he did nothing but examine the damage. Tiny splinters were wedged into the joint of the manipulator. A long, deep gash ran diagonally across the top of the joint’s structure, gaping like a wound. At first sight the electronics seemed to be intact, meaning that the damage was purely material although serious enough to have caused the manipulator to switch off.

The control room issued an instruction to clean the joint.

Huros-ED-4 paused.

Had he been a human being, his behaviour might have been described as indecisive. At length he requested further information, thus indicating in his own vague way that the task was beyond his capabilities. Revolutionary a piece of engineering though he was – sensor-based steering, sensory impression feedback, flexible and autonomous operation – robots were still machines that thought in templates. He probably knew they were there, but he didn’t know what they were. Likewise, he recorded the tear, but was unable to match it with familiar information. As a result the defective places did not exist for him. Consequently it was hard to tell exactly what he was supposed to be cleaning, so he didn’t clean anything at all.

A smattering of consciousness, and robots would have realised that their lives were mercifully free of anxiety.

* * *

But everyone else was anxious enough to be going on with. Vic Thorn had had a long shower, listened to ‘My Way’, put on a T-shirt, trainers and shorts, and had just decided to spend the day in the fitness studio when the call came from headquarters.

‘You could be useful to us in solving a problem,’ said Ed Haskin, under whose responsibility the spaceport and the systems attached to it fell.

‘Right now?’ Thorn hesitated. ‘I was planning to spend a bit of time on the treadmill.’

‘Right now would be better.’

‘What’s up?’

‘It looks as if there are problems with your spaceship.’

Thorn bit his lower lip. A thousand alarm bells went off in his head at the idea that his take-off might be delayed. Bad, very bad! The ship was supposed to leave the port at about midday, with him and another seven astronauts on board, to relieve the crew of the American moon base who, after six months of selenic exile, were succumbing to hallucinations of tarmac roads, carpeted flats, sausages, meadows and a sky full of colour, clouds and rain. On top of that, Thorn was scheduled to be one of the two pilots for the two-and-a-half-day flight and, to cap it all, to be leader of the crew, which explained why they were talking to him rather than anyone else. And there was another reason why any hesitation struck him as more than inopportune—

‘What’s up with the crate?’ he asked, with deliberate indifference. ‘Doesn’t it want to fly?’

‘Oh, it wants to fly all right, but it can’t. There was a glitch during loading. The manipulator broke down and blocked the hatches. We can’t shut the freight area.’

‘I see.’ Relief flooded through Thorn. A defective manipulator could be dealt with.

‘And you know why it broke down? Debris. A heavy fall.’

Thorn sighed. Space debris, whose unwelcome omnipresence was down to an unparallelled orbital congestion, begun in the 1950s by the Soviets with their Sputnik launches. Since then, the remnants of thousands of missions had circulated at every altitude: burnt-out propulsion stages, decommissioned and forgotten satellites, wreckage from countless explosions and collisions, from complete reactors to tiny fragments of shrapnel, drops of frozen coolant, screws and wires, bits of plastic and metal, scraps of gold foil and vestiges of flaked-off paint. The constant fracturing of the splinters with each fresh collision meant that they were breeding like rodents. By now the number of objects larger than one centimetre was estimated at 900,000. Barely three per cent of these were constantly monitored, and the ominous remainder, along with billions of smaller particles and micrometeorites, was on its way elsewhere – in case of doubt, with the inevitability with which insects ended up on windscreens, towards wherever you happened to be.

The problem was, a wasp hurtling at a luxury limousine with the momentum of an identically sized fragment of space debris would have developed the kinetic energy of a hand-grenade and written off the vehicle in an instant. The speeds of objects moving in opposite directions became extreme in space. Even particles only micrometres across had a destructive effect in the long term: they ground away at solar panels, they destroyed the surfaces of satellites and roughened the outer shells of spaceships. Near-Earth debris burned up sooner or later in the upper layers of the atmosphere, but only to be replaced by new debris. With increasing altitude its lifetime extended, and it could theoretically have survived for all eternity at the level at which the space station was orbiting. The fact that several of the dangerous objects were known and their flight-paths could be calculated weeks and months in advance provided a certain consolation, because it allowed the astronauts just to steer the whole station out of the way. The thing that had crashed into the manipulator plainly hadn’t been one of those.

‘And what can I do about it?’ asked Thorn.

‘I know, crew time.’ Haskin laughed irritably. ‘Tightness of resources. The robot can’t sort it out all by itself. Two of us will have to go out, but at the moment I’ve only got one staff member available. Would you jump in?’

Thorn didn’t think for long. It was very important for him to get out of there on time, and besides, he liked space-walks.

‘That’s fine,’ he said.

‘You’ll be going out with Karina Spektor.’

Even better. He’d met Spektor the previous evening in the crew canteen, an expert in robotics, of Russian origin, with high cheekbones and cat-green eyes, who had responded to his attempts at flirtation with seeming willingness to engage in further international understanding.

‘I’m on my way!’ he said.

* * *

—in a city that never sleeps—

Cities tended to generate noise. Streets in which the air seethed with acoustic activity. People drawing attention to themselves by beeping, calling, whistling, chatting, laughing, complaining, shouting. Noise as social putty, coded into cacophony. Guitarists, singers, sax players in house doorways and subway tunnels. Disgruntled crows, barking dogs. The reverberation of construction machinery, thundering jackhammers, metal on metal. Unexpected, familiar, wheedling, shrill, sharp, dark, mysterious, noises that rose and fell, that approached and fled, some that spread like a gas, others that caught you right in the pit of the stomach and the auditory canal. Background noises of traffic. The flashy bass baritone of heavy limousines vying with dainty mopeds, with the purr of electromobiles, the grandiloquence of sports cars, souped-up motorbikes, the thumping get-to-the-side of the buses. Music from boutiques, footstep concerts in pedestrian precincts, strolling, shuffling, strutting, rushing, the sky vibrating with the thunder of distant aeroplane turbines, the whole city one great bell.

Outside the space city:

None of that.

Familiar as the sounds might have been inside the living modules, laboratories, control rooms, connecting tunnels, leisure areas and restaurants distributed across an overall height of 280 metres, there was a ghostly feeling the first time you left the station for EVA, ‘Extravehicular Activity’, the external maintenance service. Suddenly, without transition, you were out there, really out there, more out there than anywhere else. Beyond the airlocks all sound stopped. Of course you didn’t go entirely deaf. You could hear yourself very clearly, and you could hear the rush of the air-conditioning unit built into the spacesuit, and of course the walkie-talkie, but it was all being played out inside your own portable spaceship.

All around you, in the vacuum, perfect silence reigned. You saw the mighty structure of the station, peered through illuminated windows, saw the icy radiance of the floodlight batteries high above, where enormous spaceships were being assembled, spaceships that would never land on a planet and only existed in weightless suspension, you were aware of industrial activity, the turning and stretching of the cranes on the outer ring and the shuttles from the inner zone, you observed robots in free fall, so like living creatures that you felt like asking them the way – and intuitively, overwhelmed by the beauty of the architecture, the far-away Earth and the coldly staring stars, their light undispersed by the atmosphere, you expected to hear mysterious or dramatic music. But space stayed mute, its sublimity orchestrated only by your own breath.

In the company of Karina Spektor, Thorn floated through the emptiness and silence towards the defective manipulator. Their suits, fitted with steering nozzles, enabled them to navigate precisely. They slipped across the docks of the vast spaceport embraced by the tower-like construction of the space station, wide as a freeway. Three moon shuttles were currently anchored on the ring – two of them fixed to airlocks, Thorn’s spaceship in the parking position – and also the eight plane-like evacuation pods. Basically the whole ring was one great switching yard, around which the spaceships constantly changed location to keep the symmetrically constructed station in balance.

Thorn and Spektor had left Torus-2, the distributor module in the centre of the port, and headed for one of the external locks not far from the shuttle. White and massive, with opened loading hatches, it rested in the sunlight. The frozen arm of the manipulator loomed high above them, bent abruptly at the elbow and disappearing into the cargo zone. Huros-ED-4 hung motionless by its anchor platform. With his gaze fixed on the blocked joint, there was something unsettling about his posture. Only at the very last moment did he move slightly to the side so that they could get a glimpse of the damage. Of course his behaviour was not the result of cybernetic peevishness, as a Huros doesn’t even have the beginning of a notion of selfhood, but his images were now surplus to requirements. From now on what mattered were the impressions that the helmet-cameras sent to the control room.

‘So?’ Haskin asked. ‘What do you think?’

‘Bad.’ Spektor gripped the frame of the manipulator and drew herself closer to it. Thorn followed her.

‘Odd,’ he said. ‘It looks to me as if something’s brushed against the arm and torn this gaping hole, but the electronics seem to be undamaged.’

‘Then it should move,’ Haskin objected.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Spektor. She spoke English with a Slavic smoothness, rather erotic, Thorn thought. A shame, in fact, that he couldn’t stay another day. ‘The impact must have released lot of micro-debris. Perhaps our friend is suffering from constipation. Did the Huros perform an environmental analysis?’

‘Slight contamination. What about the splinters? Could they have caused the blockage?’

‘It’s possible. They probably come from the arm itself. Perhaps something’s got twisted, and it’s under tension.’ The astronaut studied the joint carefully. ‘On the other hand, this is a manipulator, not a pastry fork. The object would have been seven or eight millimetres long at the most. I mean it wasn’t an actual collision, it should really be able to cope with something like that.’

‘You certainly know your way around these things,’ Thorn said appreciatively.

‘Party trick,’ she laughed. ‘I hardly deal with anything else. Space debris is our biggest problem up here.’

‘And what about this?’ He leaned forward and pointed to a spot where a tiny, bright shard protruded. ‘Could that come from a meteorite?’

Spektor followed his outstretched index finger.

‘At any rate it comes from the thing that hit the arm. The analyses will tell you more.’

‘Exactly,’ said Haskin. ‘So get a move on. I suggest you get the thing out with the ethanol blower.’

‘Have we got one of those?’ Thorn asked.

‘The Huros does,’ Spektor replied. ‘We can use his left arm, there are tanks inside and nozzles on the effectors. But it’ll take two of us, Vic. Have you ever worked with a Huros?’

‘Not directly.’

‘I’ll show you. We’ll have to turn him off partially if we want to use him as a tool. That means one of us will have to help stabilise him, while the other—’

At that moment the manipulator stirred into life.

The huge arm stretched out of the loading-space, pushed backwards, swivelled, grabbed the Huros-ED and shoved it away as if it had had enough of its company. Thorn automatically pushed his companion downwards and out of the collision zone, but couldn’t keep the robot from striking her shoulder and whirling her around. At the last second Spektor managed to cling on to the frame, then the manipulator crashed into Thorn, dragged him away from her and from the ring and catapulted him into space.

Back! He had to get back!

Fingers flying, he tried to regain control over his steering nozzles. He was followed by the pirouetting torso of the Huros-ED, which was getting closer and closer, as Haskin and Spektor’s shouts rang in his ear. The robot’s abdomen hit his helmet. Thorn somersaulted and started circling helplessly as he was slung over the edge of the ring-level and hurtled from the space station at terrifying speed. He realised with horror that in attempting to protect his companion he had lost his only chance of saving himself. In wild panic he reached around him, found the switches for the steering nozzles, turned them on to stabilise his flight-path with short blasts, to slow his circling trajectory, found he couldn’t breathe, realised that his suit had been damaged, that it was all over, waved his arms around, tried to scream—

His scream froze.

Vic Thorn’s body was carried out into the silent, endless night, and everything changed in the seconds of his death, everything.

The island wasn’t much more than a rocky outcrop, set on the equator like a pearl on a string. Compared with other nearby islands, its charms were rather modest. In the west a quite impressive cliff rose from the sea, crowned by tropical rainforest, which clung dark and impenetrable to jagged volcanic slopes, and was inhabited almost exclusively by insects, spiders and an unusually ugly species of bat. Streams had dug cracks and gorges, collected into waterfalls and poured thundering into the ocean. On the eastern side, the landscape fell in terraces, intermingled with rocky elevations and largely bare. You would have looked in vain for palm-lined beaches. Black basalt sand marked the few bays that gave access to the interior. Rainbow-coloured lizards sunned themselves on stone pillars amidst the crashing waves. Their day consisted of catapulting themselves several metres into the air and snapping for insects, the meagre climax of an otherwise unclimactic repertoire of natural spectacles. Overall, the Isla had hardly anything to offer that didn’t exist in more beautiful, bigger and higher forms elsewhere.

On the other hand its geographical location was impeccable.

It actually lay exactly at the middle of the Earth, where the northern and southern hemispheres met, 550 kilometres west of Ecuador and thus far from any air routes. There were no storms in this part of the world. Major accumulations of cloud were a rarity, lightning never flashed. During the first half of the year it sometimes rained, violently and for hours at a time, without the air growing particularly cooler. Temperatures hardly ever fell below twenty-two degrees Celsius, and usually they were significantly higher than that. Because the island was uninhabited and economically useless, the Ecuadorian parliament had been more than happy to lease it, for the next forty years in return for an invigorating boost to the state economy, to new tenants whose first job was to rename Isla Leona as Isla de las Estrellas: Stellar Island: island of the stars.

Subsequently part of the eastern slope disappeared under an accumulation of glass and steel that promptly united the fury of all animal conservationists. But the building had no effect on the island’s ecology. Flocks of noisy seabirds, unperturbed by the evidence of human presence, daubed cliff and architecture alike with their guano. The creatures were untroubled by ideas of beauty, and the humans had their minds on higher things than swallow-tailed gulls and ringed plovers. In any case, not many people had set foot on the island for a long time, and everything indicated that it would remain a rather exclusive place in future as well.

At the same time, nothing fired the imagination of the whole of humanity as much as this island.

It might have been a rough pile of bird-shit, but at the same time it was considered the most extraordinary, perhaps the most hopeful place in the world. In fact the actual magic emanated from an object about two nautical miles off the coast, a gigantic platform resting on five house-sized pontoons. If you approached it on misty days, at first you couldn’t see what was so special about it. You saw flat structures, generating plants and tanks, a helicopter landing pad, a terminal with a tower, aerials and radio telescopes. The whole thing looked like an airport, except that there was no runway to be seen. Instead, a massive cylindrical construction grew from the centre, a gleaming colossus with bundles of pipes meandering up its sides. Only by narrowing your eyes could you make out the black line that emerged from the cylinder and soared steeply upwards. If the clouds were low, they engulfed it after a few hundred metres, and you found yourself wondering what you would see if the sky cleared. Even people who knew better – in principle, then, anyone who had managed to get through the high-security area – expected to see something where the line ended, a fixed point on which the overstretched imagination could settle.

But there was nothing.

Even in bright sunshine, when the sky was deep blue, you couldn’t see the end of the line. It became thinner and thinner until it seemed to dematerialise in the atmosphere. Through field-glasses it just disappeared a little higher up. You stared until your neck ached, with Julian Orley’s now legendary observation in your ears, that the Isla de las Estrellas was the ground floor of eternity – and you started to sense what he had meant by it.

Carl Hanna strained his neck too, craning from the seat of the helicopter to look up stupidly into the blue, while below him two finback whales ploughed the azure of the Pacific. Hanna didn’t waste a glance on them. When the pilot pointed out the rare animals yet again, he heard himself murmuring that there was nothing less interesting than the sea.

The helicopter curved round and roared towards the platform. The line blurred briefly in front of Hanna’s eyes, seemed to dissolve, and then it was clearly visible in the sky again, as straight as if drawn by a ruler.

A moment later it had doubled.

‘There are two of them,’ observed Mukesh Nair.

The Indian brushed the thick black hair off his forehead. His dark face glowed with delight, the nostrils of his cucumber-shaped nose flared as if to inhale the moment.

‘Of course there are two.’ Sushma, his wife, held up her index and middle fingers as if explaining something to a child in reception class. ‘Two cabins, two cables.’

‘I know that, I know!’ Nair waved her impatiently away. His mouth twisted into a smile. He looked at Hanna. ‘How amazing! Do you know how wide those cables are?’

‘Just over a metre, I think.’ Hanna smiled back.

‘For a moment they were gone.’ Nair looked out, shaking his head. ‘They simply disappeared.’

‘That’s true.’

‘You saw that too? And you, Sushma? They flickered like a mirage. Did you see—’

‘Yes, Mukesh, I saw it too.’

‘I thought I was imagining it.’

‘No, you weren’t,’ Sushma said benignly and rested a small, paddle-shaped hand on his knee. Hanna thought the two of them looked as if they’d been created by the painter Fernando Botero. The same rounded physiques, the same short, inflated-looking extremities.

He looked out of the window again.

The helicopter stayed an appropriate distance from the cables as it drifted past the platform. Only authorised pilots from NASA or Orley Enterprises were allowed to fly this route when they brought guests to the Isla de las Estrellas. Hanna tried to catch a glimpse of the inside of the cylinder, where the cables disappeared, but they were too far away. A moment later they had left the platform behind, and were swinging in towards the Isla. Below them, the shadow of the helicopter darted across deep blue waves.

‘That cable must be really thin if you can’t see it from the side,’ Nair reflected. ‘Which means it must actually be flat. Are they cables at all?’ He laughed and wrung his hands. ‘They’re more like tapes, really, aren’t they? I’ve probably got it all wrong. My God, what can I say? I grew up in a field. In a field!’

Hanna nodded. They had fallen into conversation on the flight here from Quito, but even so he knew that Mukesh Nair had a very close relationship with fields. A modest farmer’s son from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, who liked eating well but preferred a street stall to any three-star restaurant, who thought more highly of the concerns and opinions of simple people than of small-talk at receptions and gallery openings, who preferred to fly Economy Class and who craved expensive clothes as much as a Tibetan bear craves a tie. At the same time Mukesh Nair, with an estimated private fortune of 46 billion dollars, was one of the wealthiest people in the world, and his way of thinking was anything but rustic. He had studied agriculture in Ludhiana and economics at Bombay University, he was a holder of the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest Indian order for civilian merits, and an unchallenged market leader when it came to supplying the world with Indian fruit and vegetables. Hanna was intimately acquainted with the CV of Mr Tomato, as Nair was generally known, having studied the careers of all the guests who were travelling in for the meeting.

‘Now look, just look at that!’ shouted Nair. ‘That’s not bad, is it?’

Hanna craned his neck. The helicopter hovered along the eastern slope of the island so that they could enjoy a perfect view of the Stellar Island Hotel. Like a stranded ocean steamer it lay on the slopes, seven receding storeys piled up on top of one another, overlooking a prow with a huge swimming-pool. Each room had its own sun terrace. The highest point of the building formed a circular terrace, half covered by a huge glass dome. Hanna could make out tables and chairs, loungers, a buffet, a bar. Amidships lay a part that had been left level, plainly the lobby, bounded to the north by the stern-shaped construction of a helicopter landing pad. Architecture alternated with sections of rough stone, as if the architects had been trying to beam up a cruise-ship right in front of the island, and had miscalculated by a few hundred metres towards the centre. It seemed to Hanna that parts of the hotel grounds must have been blown into the mountain with explosives. A footpath, interrupted by flights of steps, wound its way down, crossed a green plateau whose design looked too harmonious to be