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don’t use that code any more. For another, a departmental order was issued after the last discovery: anything to do with the Eye
Collector is to be communicated via secure channels only. The press is making mincemeat of us as it is, thanks to your reports. You honestly think we’d broadcast such sensitive information to
every radio ham within range?’
    Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sky was growing even darker.
    ‘No shit?’ Zorbach said incredulously. He ran his fingers through his wet hair.
    ‘No, no fucking radio traffic. We didn’t broadcast a thing.’ Stoya stared at him with a mixture of suspicion and anger. ‘Now drop it, Alex, and tell me the truth: How the
devil did you know we’d found a body here?’

76
    (13 HOURS 57 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
    ALEXANDER ZORBACH
    ‘It’s getting worse,‘ I said, looking round the consulting room. ‘I’ve started hearing voices now.’
    As I had on my very first visit, I wondered where it all went, the money cascading into the clinic from its numerous private patients. The psychiatric institute made a shabby enough impression
from the outside. Inside, it was even more in need of renovation. On my previous visits I had seen my doctor in three different consulting rooms. They had differed only in size and the location of
the many discoloured watermarks streaking the walls from ceiling to scuffed linoleum floor.
    ‘I didn’t spend as long at university as you, Dr Roth. I never got to post-traumatic disorders, that’s why I’m asking you now: Could there be some
connection…?’
    … With the fact that I shot a woman seven years ago?
    The consultant eyed me intently from behind his desk and said nothing. Dr Martin Roth was a talented listener, a characteristic that had predestined him to be a psychiatrist. To my surprise he
smiled faintly. I couldn’t recall him ever doing so before during our sessions together, and it struck me that he’d chosen to trial this innovation at a thoroughly inappropriate
juncture.
    While I was sitting there, nervously crossing my legs and itching for a cigarette, his smile grew broader. It made him look even younger than he did already. At our first meeting I’d
mistaken him for a student, not the expert whose treatment of the celebrated psychiatrist Viktor Larenz had hit the headlines in my paper a few years earlier.
    I had underestimated him like many people before me, but one hardly expected a leading authority in the field of complex personality disorders to look so youthful. Roth’s skin was smooth,
almost rosy, and the whites of his eyes were brighter than the new T-shirt he wore under his sports coat. All that betrayed his true age was a receding hairline.
    ‘For a start,’ he said eventually, removing a slim folder from the perspex filing tray beside him, ‘calm down. There’s no cause for concern.’
    No cause for concern? ‘Yesterday I heard some nonexistent voices on a nonexistent police radio frequency, and you say I’ve no need to worry?’
    He nodded and opened the folder. ‘All right, let’s review your medical history. You underwent treatment after the incident on the bridge. You were suffering from severe perceptual
disorders at the time.’
    My nightmares had spilled over into my life.
    That was the best description I could give. I smelt, heard, and ultimately saw things that had previously haunted me in my dreams. Not always the woman and baby on the bridge. Two weeks
after the tragedy, for instance, I dreamt that shafts of lightning kept hitting the ground just beside me at one-second intervals. I ran for my life, lacerating my bare feet on the broken glass and
rusty cans that lined my route. Noticing far too late that the lightning had driven me on to a rubbish dump with a shiny gold tree protruding from its midst, I instinctively sought shelter beneath
its branches.
    I knew that trees could attract lightning and felt sure I’d been lured into a trap. The realization that I might be