Nemesis

Eagle Peak, Thursday Morning

Webb wakened with a jerk around 7 a.m., having had two hours’ sleep in the past twenty-four. The memory of that morning’s unsettling discovery came to him — but something else, an inspiration, was speaking to him like a voice inside his head. The Tenerife question would have to wait.

Fearful that the thought would fade as he came to, he focused on it single-mindedly, visualizing it in an assortment of bizarre contexts. He staggered to the bathroom and shaved off a two-day stubble under a shower, his eyes closed. He then dressed quickly, by now fully awake and easily able to resist the fatal inner voice telling him to stretch out again for a couple of minutes.

He tapped on Noordhof’s door, Number Four with a desert view, and tapped again. Noordhof appeared in underpants, swimming with sleep. The soldier, Webb noticed, had the beginnings of a pot belly.

“Colonel, I need to make a call to Europe.”

Noordhof scratched under his armpit. “Telephones are death, Oliver.”

“I’ve had an idea. It’s a long shot and it’s probably dead in the water. But if it’s right it leads us straight to Nemesis.”

Noordhof was instantly awake. “Okay. We’ll use the secure cable to Albuquerque. I’ll ask our Communications hotshots to route your call via some innocuous address. Who are you calling?”

“An old friend. She’s not in the asteroid business, not even in science. Nobody would have reason to connect her with Nemesis.”

“Give me ten minutes, then join me in the common room.”

Webb put on a heavy pullover and went outside, running around the building in sheer frustration. Judy’s Firebird was tinged with frost, and the tracks of small animals crisscrossed the car park snow, concentrating around the garbage bins.

“Join me, Oliver?” Judy asked, emerging from the main door in her grey tracksuit. “Ten minutes’ aerobic.”

“Thanks, Judy, but not this morning. You’ll stay within Noordhof’s hundred-metre circle, of course.”

She smiled enigmatically. Webb followed her trim, lithe frame as she took off through the trees at a fair pace, blonde hair bouncing. In spite of their weird heart-to-heart of only a few hours ago, she was still, to him, an enigma. Either she hadn’t grasped the responsibility she was carrying, or there were nerves of steel underneath that bouncy exterior.

Noordhof, now dressed in smart casual style, was waiting for Webb at the telephone. Shafer was in an armchair, covering a sheet of paper with equations; he gave Webb a friendly wave without looking up.

“Right. This call can’t be overheard at the US end but we can’t answer for Europe. We had to give you a local address because of the transatlantic delay. If your friend asks, you’re phoning from the Ramada Inn in Tucson. We’re reserving a room there in your name as a precaution. You’re doing the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, whatever. Dial out as usual. Just be extremely careful what you say. I’ll be listening on the kitchen extension.”

Webb dialled, and a few seconds later a male voice answered, “Western Manuscripts,” as clearly as if it came from three feet away.

“Virginia Melbourne, please.”

“She’s at home today.”

“Thank you.” Webb dialled her Bicester home number. It rang for nearly a minute; and then a contralto, somewhat husky voice said “Virginia Melbourne.”

“Hi, Virginia.”

A transatlantic pause, and then: “Ollie! How are you? Are you calling from Oxford?”

“Actually I’m in the States. What mischief are you up to, Virginia?”

“For starters, I’m standing here naked and dripping wet.”

“I’ll try not to think about that.”

“I’d rather you did, darling. Whereabouts in the States are you?” Noordhof, looking through the open doorway from the kitchen, visibly tensed.

“Arizona, doing the tour. I thought I’d treat myself to a warm Christmas for a change but I’m beginning to twitch. You remember that manuscript I was translating? Volume Three of Phaenomenis Novae, by Father Vincenzo?”

“Remember it, darling? We scoured the Bod looking for it. Did your lost photocopy ever turn up?”

“No. What about your original?”

“No. It’s still missing. And you just can’t steal a manuscript from Western Manuscripts: our archives are a hundred per cent secure. It’s the oddest thing.”

“Virginia, I need a favour.” Webb ignored the wicked chuckle in his ear. “You told me there’s an original?”

“The original. Our Bodleian copy was a Late Renaissance transcription made in Amsterdam. Looking at myself in the mirror, I’d say I have a pretty good figure.”

“Where can I get my hands on it?”

“The manuscript, you mean? It’s somewhere in Italy. I can’t be sure. Vincenzo’s not one of your big names, Ollie, not like Galileo.”

“Please, Virginia!”

“Well now, I might be able to rustle up a contact for you. I think one of the Jesuit priests at Castelgandolfo could point the way. Shall I look into it?”

“Please. Send me as much information as you can about the historical background to Phaenomenis. I’m preparing a monograph on comets, and I thought I’d say something about the Renaissance theories. Maybe draw up a chapter outline while I’m at the Grand Canyon.”

Virginia’s contralto voice dripped with unconcealed envy. “Some people have all the sodding luck. Can you access a terminal?”

Noordhof was tensed up again.

“Yes, I’m due to drop in on a colleague at the University of Arizona.”

“In that case I’ll scan things in and type something up, and put it on anonymous ftp. You should be able to access it through my home page within a couple of hours. But it’ll cost you.”

“Name your price.”

“A weekend in Paris?”

“Agreed.”

“A naughty one?”

Noordhof’s eyeballs were rolling.

“Virginia, I’m forever grateful. Byee.”

Elated, the astronomer turned to Noordhof. “Mark, I must get to Rome right away. I want to get my hands on a four-hundred-year-old manuscript.”

Noordhof was about to reply but the glass door banged open and there was the sound of running footsteps along the corridor. Judy entered the room panting, flushed and shaking. “Come quickly.”

The men left Kowalski and Sacheverell asleep and followed her at a fast trot to the cable car shed. She pointed upwards. A wisp of cloud was swirling around Eagle Peak; but then it cleared, and they could just discern a man dangling from the cable car, his arms at full stretch, legs waving.

Webb sprinted back to the observatory building and reappeared with a coastguard telescope and a tripod. They quickly set it up. In the eyepiece, Webb traced the cable up to the summit. The top platform almost filled the field of view. The car had stopped about twenty feet down from it. There was a clear three thousand feet of air between the man and the ground below. “It’s André. The door’s open and he’s hanging on to the edge of the floor. By the tips of his fingers, I think.”

“How the bloody hell?” Shafer asked.

Judy’s fists were at her mouth, clenched in fright. “How long has he been like that?”

Noordhof ran into the cable car winch house. Judy and Shafer followed him in, staring up through the big plate glass window. Webb stayed at the eyepiece. Noordhof moved over to the panel. It was on a gunmetal grey desk, with a large On — Off switch and a lever marked Up and Down.

“What are you doing, Mark?” Webb called in.

“I’m sliding the car up. He can’t hang on like that for more than a few minutes.”

“You’ll knock him off. He’ll hit the concrete platform.”

“It’s up or down. And his grip won’t last the trip down.”

Shafer was holding his head in his hands, looking up. “How long has he been hanging like that?”

“Try it slow,” Webb shouted in to the winch house.

Noordhof pulled the big switch to On. The motor whined and gears clashed. He turned the lever slowly from neutral towards its Up position. In the eyepiece of the telescope, Webb saw the little car jerk alarmingly, and Leclerc’s feet wave frantically in space. It edged up towards the platform. The Frenchman’s body drew alongside a concrete wall; it seemed to be scraping his back.

“Slow!” Webb shouted in. Then “Stop! He’s not going to make it. It’s the Eskimo suit. There isn’t the space. If we try to drag him through he’ll lose his grip.”

Noordhof sprinted out and put his eye to the telescope. Leclerc’s head seemed almost to be jammed in the space between platform and car. His arms were stretched full length above him, as if he was grasping for something almost out of reach. He was about one unattainable metre from safety.

The soldier ran back into the building, and reversed the direction of the lever. Webb saw the Frenchman drifting clear of the narrow gap, and then he was into open space. “He’s clear!” Noordhof put the lever to its maximum. The engine whine rose in pitch and the steel cable vibrated tautly, winding swiftly on to the big drum. They ran out and watched the little car sink towards them.

Leclerc was hanging motionless, his legs no longer waving. He was now well out from the cliff. Webb thought he was looking down. For the first few hundred feet the descent of the car seemed to be agonizingly slow; as it approached the halfway mark it seemed to be descending marginally faster, and although Webb knew that to be an illusion of perspective, he began to think that Leclerc might make it. But two thirds of the way down, at about a thousand feet above ground, the Frenchman lost his grip.

Judy screamed. Webb shouted No! Leclerc hurtled down with terrifying acceleration, arms and legs waving helplessly in the air. He hit a projection of the cliff a few hundred feet up and as many feet away from the horrified group. The muffled “Thud!” came above the whine from the winch house, and a shower of little stones and earth followed the body which bounced high before disappearing into the treetops.

Judy ran back to the main building without a word. Noordhof, Shafer and Webb ran through the trees. They found Leclerc without difficulty, a path of broken branches marking his flight path. Noordhof and Shafer paled, and Webb turned away. He found a quiet corner. His body tried to vomit but his stomach was empty.

Noordhof took off his blue anorak and covered the Frenchman’s head with it, stepping to avoid the dark red snow near the corpse. They searched around for heavy stones to secure the anorak in position.

Judy had coffee on the boil when they returned. Her eyes were red. Noordhof disappeared momentarily and returned with a half bottle of cognac which he emptied into the coffee percolator before Judy poured. Webb crossed to the kitchen sink and splashed icy water over his face, drying off with a dish towel. He felt reasonably calm inwardly and was surprised to find that he could not lift his mug without spilling the coffee. After the third attempt he left it on the table.

Shafer drank down half his coffee in one draught. “Okay Mark, talk about it. How could that possibly have happened? And what was he doing up top, anyway? He’s not an observer.”

Noordhof said, “This is how I see it. He goes up top for whatever reason, maybe just for the view. He pulls the lever but trips up when he gets to the car. End of our rocket man.”

“Truly an accident?” Judy asked in a shaky voice.

Noordhof shrugged. “What else?”

Murder, Webb thought to himself.

Judy’s hands were trembling and her eyes were tearful. So, maybe she was a good actress. He glanced at Noordhof. If he was an actor he was underplaying his hand: the soldier was cool and self-controlled. Webb was startled to find Willy Shafer looking at him closely, as if the Nobel man was reading his mind. Or maybe he’s wondering about me, Webb surmised.

Shafer said, “This is a police matter.”

“Sure.” There was a long silence.

Judy came back from the cooker and joined them at the table. Her speech was unsteady but composed. “You don’t have to say it, Colonel, we all know we can’t realistically involve the cops. There’s just too much at stake for questions. But if we don’t report this we put ourselves on the wrong side of the law. And the more we try to conceal this accident, the more we dig ourselves into a hole. We have to dispose of a body. How do we do this?”

Noordhof said, “We have to keep our eye on the ball here. This is arguably a military police matter but, Judy, I’m glad you see it that way. Frankly, the legalities don’t matter a damn. We just have to find Nemesis in the three days remaining to us, which includes today. That’s our overriding goal and nothing, not even death in the team, can be allowed to deflect us.”

Shafer spoke to Noordhof. “But we still have a body out there, Mark. And Leclerc must have relatives, maybe a family.”

“Leclerc was a widower with no family. His secretary was made to think he’d taken leave. Nobody in France knows where he is.”

Shafer looked as if he was trying to read the soldier’s mind. “You have access to people who can handle this type of situation, right?”

Noordhof sipped thoughtfully at his caffè corretto. “I’m amazed at your perspicacity, Willy, but I don’t suppose I should be since you’re on this team for your brains. Yes, I understand there are guys on the payroll who can handle this type of situation all the way from the scene of the death to the coroner’s report. I’ll make a call.” He toyed with a spoon. “I’ll let Kenneth and Herb sleep on, and inform them when they get up. McNally is due back from Toulouse later today. Look, we can’t let ourselves be paralysed by this. Some people will arrive in the next hour or two but they won’t come in and you’ll have no contact with them. Once they’ve left, Leclerc will have gone and it will never have happened.”

Noordhof changed the subject abruptly. “Oliver, what were Leclerc and you cooking up?”

Webb briefly wondered how much to tell. “I wanted to exploit André’s tremendous knowledge of Russian space capabilities. Particularly their launch hardware, degree of electronic sophistication and details of past space enterprises. We were going to liaise to find out what asteroids they could conceivably have reached and diverted in the past.”

Shafer said, “NASA and Space Command must be stuffed with people who know things like that.”

“SecDef requires a European involvement or two for political reasons. He was very clear about that. It’ll take a day or two to identify, brief and transport someone suitable over.”

“That’s too late,” said Webb. He was trembling. “I needed Leclerc today. This morning.”

“Are we coming apart here?” Shafer asked.

“Oliver,” said Noordhof, looking agitated. “Think of something. You must have a Plan B.”

“André was Plan B. Plan A was looking for something unusual in the sky, some signature of the Russian deflection of Nemesis. It wasn’t working as of three o’clock this morning.”

“Can you pick up on it again?”

Webb hesitated. “I can but we’re into the long shots. That phone call I made earlier.”

Noordhof said, “Long shots are all we have left. Yeah, what gives with that manuscript thing?”

Sacheverell wandered in, bleary-eyed and barefooted, wrapped in a white towelling gown. He poured himself coffee, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. He sipped at his coffee and gave it a startled look. He looked around, eyes blinking. He seemed to sense an atmosphere but said nothing.

Webb found that he could now just lift his coffee without spilling it. He gulped the hot liquid down.

Shafer said, “Out with it, man.”

“It’s thin. A manuscript went missing a couple of months back. A notebook by Vincenzo.”

“The Vincenzo?” Sacheverell asked sleepily.

“Yes. I was hoping to translate the eighteenth-century transcription in the Bodleian. I had a photocopy made but it went missing from my apartment before I had a chance to look at it. Nothing else was touched. I had a Chubb lock and secure windows and there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever took it (a) knew exactly what they were after, and (b) were highly skilled thieves. But now it gets really weird. I go back to the Library to get another photocopy, to be told that in the meantime their original too has gone missing. Now that just can’t happen. Understand, Herb, that we’re talking about security like that surrounding the Crown Jewels.”

Sacheverell looked baffled. “I guess I’m still asleep. What has a seventeenth-century monk got to do with anything?”

“Someone has gone to a lot of trouble. Maybe there’s something in Vincenzo’s notebook that people don’t want us to see.”

Sacheverell blinked. His gaze wandered towards the big window. When he spoke, there was a weariness in his voice. “I’m still asleep. This is a weird dream. Ollie’s brain is still wired up to ancient history only now he’s turned it into some kind of intellectual game for his personal amusement.”

“Just drink your coffee, Herb.”

“He’s freaked out by the responsibility we’re carrying here.”

Noordhof tapped the kitchen table. “Hey, you two. Don’t start.”

Webb said, “I’ve been thinking about the precision needed to guide Nemesis. You don’t just need to get a precise deflection, you also need to know where you’re deflecting from to six or seven decimal places. Very few Earth-crossers are known to that degree of accuracy. They wouldn’t dare plant radio beacons on it, for all to detect, and the chances are it would be out of radar range even if the Russians had a sufficient deep space radar facility. It seems to me they’d have to derive the pre-deflection orbit using optical data just as we do. Okay so maybe the cosmonauts sat on Nemesis for a year, navigating and computing until they got it all worked out. But there might just be a much easier way.”

Noordhof poured more coffee into Webb’s mug. The astronomer emptied it and Noordhof replenished. “Most of these orbits are chaotic, meaning that tiny uncertainties — just a few kilometres — build up so that after three or four hundred years the asteroid could be just about anywhere. But the converse is this.” Webb raised a finger in the air. “Suppose you did know precisely where it was four hundred years ago. That would give you a time base maybe fifty times longer than anything you could get with modern observations. Now if you had such an observation, even a very coarse one, you would tie down the modern behaviour of the orbit to a tremendous degree of precision. It would be just what you needed to target the asteroid.”

Sacheverell spoke to the sugar jar on the table. “There has to be an explanation for this and it can only be that I’m still dreaming. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, we can hardly find these things with wide aperture Schmidts and CCDs, never mind the lousy toys they had four hundred years ago.”

“I’m in no mood for an argument, Herb, but there’s precedent for this. Uranus was recorded over twenty times before it was finally recognized as a planet in 1781. I was looking for pre-discovery observations of Encke’s comet in old star maps and manuscripts. You need a strong telescope to see it nowadays, but it was seen a dozen or more times with the naked eye in the nineteenth century. Anything capable of a close encounter with the Earth could have been picked up with a two-inch refractor or even the naked eye.”

Sacheverell took another sip. “I might have known it. You’re into the old Clube and Napier rubbish. Did I get out of bed for this?”

“So what about the manuscript, Ollie?” Shafer asked. “If it’s gone what can you do about it?”

“My contact at the Bod tells me that one copy still remains. It’s the original, and it’s held by someone somewhere in central Italy. I want to find that manuscript and see what’s in it.”

Noordhof’s voice was dripping with incredulity. “Let me get this straight. Your conjecture is that information vital to the survival of the United States could be in this ancient manuscript.”

“All copies of which were quietly and systematically removed. There had to be a reason for that.”

“Ollie…” Noordhof was starting to play with a cigar. “I have to go with Herb on this. We’re almost out of time here. We can’t afford the luxury of eccentric diversions.”

“Now hold it right there, Colonel.” Shafer’s tone was firm. “We have to let Ollie run with this. Okay it sounds crazy to us. But he’s on this team because he knows his business and sometimes crazy ideas are the best.”

“Anyone got a match? I bow to your wisdom as exemplified by your Nobel Prizes, Willy. But I still think Ollie’s time would be better spent giving us a list of known near-missers that we could check out. And what if we pick up a suspect asteroid in Webb’s absence? We’ll need him here, not wandering around Europe looking for some missing ancient manuscript.”

Webb took this as a coded recognition that Sacheverell wasn’t up to it. He said, “I’ll be giving the team a list of known close approachers this morning. It’s still dark on Maui and some might be accessible from there right now. Others could be checked out on Kenneth’s telescope tonight. If all goes well I’ll be back before the deadline and no way will irrevocable decisions have been reached before then. Nor, I predict, will you have found Nemesis.”

Judy had found a box of matches in a kitchen drawer. Noordhof lit up. He fixed an intense stare on Webb and adopted a grim tone. “Ollie, I repeat what I was authorized to tell you. That if we don’t find Nemesis by the prescribed deadline the Administration will go on the working assumption that it won’t be found before impact, and will then adopt the appropriate posture.”

Webb said, “I know what that means, Colonel. But I’m convinced that this is something that has to be checked out.”

The soldier sighed. “We’re into the Christmas period, Oliver. Transatlantic flights will be booked solid.”

“I’ll bribe somebody off a flight if I have to.”

“I don’t like it. We need tight security for this operation, and we don’t get that with people wandering around Europe.”

“This is my last throw. I don’t have anything else.”

“Jesus.” Noordhof blew a contemplative smoke ring. “Okay. We’re having to take risks all the way here. Cross the Atlantic by the fastest possible route. Willy, take Judy’s car and give Webb a lift to Tucson. Judy’s not up to driving.”

“But I’ll go along for the ride,” she said. “I’m nearly through the bomb simulations.”

Webb asked, “What day is this?”

Noordhof groaned. “Ollie, it’s now Thursday morning, ten hundred hours Mountain Time. Our deadline is set in Eastern Standard Time, that is, the time on Washington clocks. Deliver Nemesis by midnight tomorrow EST. Which is to say, you have one day and twelve hours. If you don’t make it back here get this Royal Astronomer guy to endorse your identification. No offence, but for something like this I need confirmation.”

They stood up. Sacheverell shambled towards the refrigerator. Over his shoulder he said, “This is a joke. So far as I’m concerned Webb’s now out of it.”

“One last thing, Ollie. The Secretary of Defense wants a personal briefing from the team tomorrow evening at a secure location. We’ll need to know how you’ve progressed. You’ll be in Italy but contact us at Willy’s beach house, which is in Solana Beach, California. As before the line will be secure at the American end but just remember that telephones are death. It’s a question of balancing risks. Use a public booth, and if you have a shadow of doubt don’t phone.”

“I’ll give you my number to memorize in the car,” said Shafer.

“Herb,” Noordhof said, “I’ve got some bad news.”

Back in his room, Webb put his laptop computer into its case and squeezed clothes and papers into odd spaces. He stepped out of his room and moved down the stairs, along the corridor and out the front door.

Into the winch house. The car had locked into place, its door half open. Webb ignored it and crossed to the control desk. A vertical metal panel below the controls was held in place by four simple screws. He took out a pen and bent the clip, using it as a screwdriver, glancing back at the main building as he did. The panel came off easily.

Webb stuck his head inside, keeping well clear of the thick, live cable which rose from under the concrete and disappeared into the On — Off switch. A slight crackling of his hair told him that he was dangerously close to a high voltage. The design of the switch was simple. When the switch was moved to On, two metal prongs would make contact with two metal studs and so close the circuit. However at the back of the studs were two strong electromagnets, placed in such a way that, if current flowed through a second cable, the studs would be pulled back and no contact made whatever the position of the On — Off switch. This other cable, Webb assumed, went all the way to the upper platform. It was a device to ensure that the cable car could be moved only from whatever platform it was currently at.

But someone had earthed this second cable: a shiny new wire had been wrapped tightly round it and joined on to a metal rod freshly driven into the concrete. Which meant that the cable car was now controlled from the ground. Which meant that an ill-disposed individual on the ground could wait until Leclerc had stepped halfway out of the car and then suddenly pull it away, leaving Leclerc, off-balance, to fall into the gap between car and platform. Webb’s scalp began to tingle and he couldn’t have said whether it was his discovery or the electricity.

Webb pulled his head out just in time to hear the observatory door close. He had been in plain view; but had he been seen? Hastily, he screwed the panel back into place. He walked briskly back to the observatory. Kowalski, in the corridor, was looking stunned. He shook his head without a word. Sacheverell’s voice came from the common room; it was raised in anger. Webb passed by to the Conference Room and logged in to Virginia’s home page. And while he transferred her Vincenzo files into his laptop computer, he pondered. There was a lot to ponder:

1. Fraudulent signals from a telescope;

2. a murdered colleague;

3. Leclerc’s disappearance before his murder;

4. a missing 400-year-old manuscript;

5. somewhere out there, a billion-ton asteroid, closing at twenty or thirty kilometres a second; and now

6. someone determined to make sure they didn’t find it.

Tucson, Thursday Afternoon

Shafer took the wheel and Webb flopped into the passenger seat, the lack of sleep suddenly catching up on him. In a moment Judy appeared. Webb scrutinized the contours of her tracksuit as she approached. She caught him at it and gave a bleak smile as she settled into the back seat. The curves, Webb decided, didn’t leave room for a pencil, let alone a weapon. He began to wonder if exhaustion was bringing out some latent paranoia.

They took off smoothly, Shafer taking the big car down round the hairpin bends with ease. Webb found himself peering anxiously into the trees. As they dropped below the snowline, the temperature rose marginally, and by the time the Pontiac had stopped at the gate separating the survivalists from Piñon Mesa, the air was mild. A smell of woodsmoke met Webb as he pulled the gate open.

They drove through the settlement, past a couple of dirty red Dodge trucks. An elderly man was sitting at a porch with a pipe and a gallon jar of some brown juice at his feet. He raised his hand in a friendly gesture as they passed. Shafer said that, given Nemesis, maybe the survivalists had the right idea, and Judy said that wasn’t funny.

Down the last stretch of hill; turn left; and put the foot down on the open road. Webb began to tremble; he couldn’t analyse the reason, but thought it was probably relief. Shafer turned on the radio and they listened to a rabid evangelist for a minute before replacing him with dentist’s waiting room music: Country and Western, easy on the mind, brought to you by Jim Feller and his Fellers.

A helicopter flew high in the opposite direction, its twin rotors glinting in the sunlight. Webb wondered if it was Leclerc’s hearse, with its specialist undertakers, but kept the thought to himself. Judy’s perfume was beginning to intrude again.

Some twenty miles to the south of Eagle Peak they pulled into a little cluster of shops and a café. Shafer bought Judy coffee in a paper cup while Webb disappeared into a nearby camping store. He emerged minutes later in a Hawaiian shirt, purple-rimmed sunglasses and Bermuda shorts, carrying a big brown paper bag.

They stared, astonished. Judy tried not to giggle. “Are you changing your personality, Ollie?” Shafer asked.

“You should see the underwear,” the astronomer replied, climbing into the Firebird. “No, I’m just trying to confuse the enemy. Who would connect Mister Showbiz with the quiet academic who arrived at Tucson Airport three days ago? So you’re the man who blew the Standard Model. A cool insight.”

“Hey, a theory screaming with singularities and eighteen free parameters? There had to be a better way.” Shafer thundered past a posse of bikers.

“But an electron as a Mobius strip? And what about your new stuff, a mind/vacuum interface? That is weird.”

“It’ll take a generation to become mainstream. Now listen to words of wisdom from your Uncle Willy. These days, Einstein wouldn’t get a job as a lab technician.”

“You mean…?”

“You have two possible career routes, Oliver. The easy route is this. Don’t stick your neck out, keep to beaten paths and get on lots of committees. In a word, look and act like Establishment Man. And in no circumstances, whatever — I emphasize this — step outside the mainstream. Don’t get any new ideas.”

“And the hard route?”

“Get a new idea. But one thing above all.”

“I’m gasping, Uncle Willy. More wisdom, quick.”

“Find Nemesis. Or your generation’s cancelled.”

Judy leaned forward, speaking to both men. “What are our chances?”

Webb said, “I’m scared to think about that.”

“You have less than two days to play your hunch, Ollie, and a big hunk of that will be spent flying,” she pointed out.

“Something bugs me about this,” said Shafer. “It’s the Zhirinovsky factor. The guy’s been in power for a couple of years, right? Say you were in his position. How long would it take you to get something like Nemesis going?”

“A lot more than two years,” said Webb thoughtfully. “To track an Earth-crosser with enough precision would take at least that long.”

“And we’d need to know just what we were pushing around,” Judy added. “Look at how variable the responses are in the simulations. It would mean a lot of spectroscopy, maybe even a soft-landing. Only then could you shepherd the asteroid in.”

“I guess it would take ten years and a lot of clandestine space activity,” Shafer proposed. “Which puts its origins right back in the Putin era. Well before Zhirinovsky.”

“So?”

“So all Russia wanted before the food riots was peace to develop their capitalist experiment.”

“What are you saying, Willy?” Webb asked.

“Something bugs me is what I’m saying.”

Judy suggested, “There was always an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the Red Army. Maybe a small group has been cooking this up for years, without knowledge of successive Russian Presidents.”

“Is it possible?” Webb asked.

“Undoubtedly,” she replied. “Big countries have mechanisms for keeping secrets, Ollie. A group of high-level conspirators could pull these levers to hide the Nemesis project from their own leadership.”

“For ten years?”

“It bugs me.”

Soon, they were speeding along broad streets and through prosperous Tucson suburbs. Shafer followed signs for the airport. They pulled over briefly at a trash can where Webb dumped the brown bag containing his RAF-supplied suit and Glen Etive pullover. At the terminal entrance, Shafer and Webb shook hands. Whaler gave him a wave from the back of the car, and then they roared off.

At the terminal, Webb found reassurance in the teeming crowds. He bought a psychedelic pink backpack with a Save the Whales motif and a few toiletries. The American Express card seemed to be an infinite source of funds and he momentarily played with the idea of a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro.

He joined a long line at a TWA reservation desk. After fifteen minutes of increasing frustration it became clear that the queue was static. He gave up and crossed to a cluster of telephones. A parcel-laden woman with a mouthful of keys made it just in front of him. She started to look for coins and Webb muscled her aside. A passing man let loose a stream of outraged invective. Webb literally snarled and the man backed off hastily. He dialled through to the TWA desk. A mechanical voice said please do not hang up you are on hold and he was treated to Mantovani’s “Music of the Mountains” for one, two, three minutes. Then one of the girls picked up the phone and he watched her as she typed at the computer terminal and said No sir, the Airbus is fully booked likewise all our flights to Rome this being the Christmas period but if Sir is really that desperate there is a flight to Paris in an hour and forty minutes and you might be able to connect from there except that everything is choc-a-bloc in Europe too and Air France are on strike oh it doesn’t leave from here, didn’t I say? Phoenix. Have a good day, sir.

Webb ran gasping to the taxi stand. A fat taxi driver was reading a newspaper. Webb said, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars for every minute less than a hundred minutes it takes you to get me to Phoenix airport. Plus the fare. Your time starts now.”

A wide range of human emotions expressed themselves in the taxi driver’s face, culminating in a delighted grin. Webb jumped in. The driver did it in ninety-five minutes, with cold desert wind streaming around Webb’s face from an open window and heavy metal blasting from the rear loudspeakers. At Phoenix, Webb handed over a fat wodge of notes to the grinning driver. Boarding was in progress and he made it with two minutes to spare.

First class on the BA flight to Paris via London was, incongruously, half empty. A Sophia Loren lookalike offered to tuck him in under a blanket but Webb, his head spinning with exhaustion, resisted the temptation.

She likes me, Webb told himself. He looked down on a range of snow-covered mountains, golden in the sun, wondered briefly where Nemesis would hit, and settled down to the story of Vincenzo.

Advanced Concepts

“We have nearly ten thousand strategic nukes. Seven thousand active, and another two on the reserve list.” Judy was wearing large gypsy earrings, a white T-shirt, classic Levi 501’s and Nike trainers. Dark sunglasses protected her eyes from the strong sunlight which streamed in through the cockpit window. Incongruously, she was wearing a pearl necklace.

McNally’s tone revealed his surprise. “The USA still has seven thousand bombs?”

“But they’re mostly the W-series, just a fraction of a megaton each. Great for knocking off cities and the like but no way do they have the punch to deflect a small asteroid. Not on our hundred-day guideline. No, Jim, if you’re looking for real action you have to go for the old B-53s. And we only have fifty of these.”

“One will do,” McNally declared.

“I don’t believe so. They’re not neutron bombs.”

“Let’s run with your B-53s for a moment anyway.” The NASA Administrator glanced at the compass and made a tiny adjustment on the joystick. Desert drifted below them. He had flown straight from Toulouse to Tucson where Judy and the jet had been waiting. He was now en route to the Johnson Space Center at Houston, first dropping Judy off at the Sandia National Laboratories, twelve square miles of nuclear wisdom tucked securely inside Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque. Judy was briefing him as they flew.

She produced a bar of dark chocolate, broke off a couple of squares and offered them to the NASA chief, who accepted happily. “Okay,” she said. “They’re the oldest nukes still in service. They’ve been operational since 1962. But they’re also the largest and they’re pretty lightweight for their power. That’s one of the nice things about nuclear weapons: the yield to weight ratio increases with power. The bigger the bomb the more punch per pound.”

“These B-53s — just how much punch are we talking about, Judy?”

“Nine megatons. Now that is destructive enough for any conceivable military target, but the bomb itself weighs only four tons. It’s a three-stage weapon. That’s classified information, by the way, but in the circumstances…”

“Don’t you people have anything bigger? I seem to recall the Russians exploded a fifty-megatonner once.”

“The Tsar Bomba. A wonderful thing,” Judy smiled. “It was really a hundred-megatonner but they configured it for fifty when they exploded it in Novaya Zemlya. Even then you could pick up its pressure wave on ordinary domestic barometers anywhere in Europe. We think it weighed thirty tons.”

“So, what have we got to match it?”

“Zilch. Our military asked permission to develop sixty megatonners way back in the fifties, but this was denied. We’ve always gone for precision targeting rather than massive zaps.”

McNally slid his sunglasses down his nose and looked over them at Judy. “We lack the nuclear punch to deflect Nemesis? Are you serious?”

“If it needs more than nine megatons.”

McNally took a few seconds to absorb this startling new information. “Tell me about your neutron bombs.” A small town was drifting about twenty thousand feet below them, narrow white roads radiating from it through the desert. A plume of smoke rose from a farmhouse some miles to their left.

“Jim, they’re just tactical tank-busters. Artillery shells with no more energy than a Hiroshima. Armoured personnel are hard to kill, but neutrons penetrate armour. Some tanks, like our M-1, are reinforced with depleted uranium, which is very dense and hard to penetrate with explosives. But listen, this is really smart. If you set off a neutron bomb you activate the depleted uranium so the soldiers find themselves cocooned in a radioactive tank at the same time as the neutrons from the bomb are penetrating it. At a few miles’ range their blood drains out from every orifice in a few minutes. Closer up and they just dissolve into a hot ooze. Closer still and they explode. More chocolate?”

McNally declined. He loosened his tie.

“But as a Nemesis killer, they’re far too small. They’re made that way so you don’t have military commanders wiping out too many towns at a time when they’re hitting Russian tank brigades in Europe. I don’t believe our stockpiles include neutron bombs in the multi-megaton range.”

The NASA Administrator responded to some chatter on the radio. “By the way, we’re now in New Mexico. What’s a three-stage weapon, Judy?”

She hesitated. “I guess I can say. Start simple, with a gun firing two sub-critical masses of uranium together. That’s fission for you, a straight one-stage atom bomb. The trouble is, it has limited power. The fission reaction is slow to develop and the bomb blows itself apart before all the fissile material is used. The Hiroshima bomb was only 1.4 per cent efficient, for example. You can’t get much more than a critical mass to explode. But fission bombs do give you a plasma a metre or less across with a temperature of about fifty million degrees, and that’s hot enough to start you on the fusion route, transmuting four hydrogen atoms into one helium one with the mass deficit emerging as energy through E = mc².”

“I’ve never been clear what form of hydrogen you use,” McNally said.

“That’s classified too, but what the hell. It varies. Liquid hydrogen is best but you can use compressed gas and we’ve even used a hydrogen-impregnated solid. Anyway, more than eighty per cent of the energy from a simple fission bomb comes out as X-rays. Teller and Ulam got the bright idea that, because the X-rays are moving at the speed of light — they are light — maybe you could use them to compress a large capsule of hydrogen at very high speed, before the assembly got disrupted. The fastest reaction at fission temperatures is between the heavy hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. So you stir these isotopes into the brew, light the touchpaper and retire a long way back. Four hydrogens fuse to give you one helium, as per undergraduate physics courses, but this leaves surplus mass in the form of a 14 MeV neutron and an eighteen MeV photon which is an impressive quantum of energy.”

“That’s a two-stage weapon, the touchpaper being an A-bomb.”

Judy finished the chocolate bar with a satisfied smile. “Correct. Not only Teller and Ulam, but also Sakharov in Russia got the radiation implosion idea. So let us give thanks unto these gentlemen for the hydrogen bomb. But why stop at two stages? If you want a bigger bomb, use the fusion explosion to compress and explode a third, fission stage. It makes for a dirty bomb but a powerful one, and no new scientific principles are involved. Each stage can be ten or a hundred times more powerful than the one before. No question, Tsar Bomba—King of Bombs — must have been a three-stager. There was even a Soviet design for a layer cake at one stage.”

“The mind boggles,” said McNally, his mind boggling.

More radio chatter. McNally explained, “We’re now entering restricted airspace. Let’s hope Noordhof fixed it like what he said he would.” He spoke into his mouthpiece and trimmed the aircraft. Far above them, two Tomcats passed swiftly across their bows, right to left. A third fighter appeared from nowhere and started to probe inquisitively, looking at them from all directions and keeping a safe twenty metres away. They flew on for some minutes. Then the pilot waved, and the jet tipped its wings and hurtled into the sky above.

“Judy, it seems to me you’re going to have to tart up a B-53, turn it into a neutron bomb.”

She brushed little flakes of chocolate off her white sweater. “But Jim, the way a neutron bomb works is that you let the neutrons escape during fission instead of absorbing them to create more energy. That means a neutron bomb will always be a low-energy device. If we’re going on a last-minute deflection, meaning we need energies in the megaton range, the neutron bombs we need don’t exist.”

“Make one, very very fast.”

She shook her head emphatically, setting her earrings swinging. “Jim, where is your sense of realism? Whether it could be done even in principle I don’t know. But it absolutely can’t be done in the time available.”

“Hey, that’s my line,” McNally complained. He nudged the joystick forwards and the altimeter needle began to drift slowly down.

“Jim. Just how much weight can you push into interplanetary space?”

“Depends where you’re going and how fast you need to get there. The old Galileo probe weighed about 750 pounds and it had a 2,500-pound spacecraft to push it around. But we used several gravitational slingshots to get it out to Jupiter.”

“Give me a number.”

“At the extreme? Think of four thousand pounds.”

“Six B-61s, each seven hundred pounds, ten feet long and a foot wide. A third of a megaton each if we use the Model Seven version. Could you launch those?”

“Maybe. But it’s not enough.”

Judy fingered her necklace thoughtfully. Suddenly her mind seemed to be elsewhere.

The Sandia Corporation’s newest building, Number 810, took up about 8,000 square metres of the centre of Technical Area One, deep inside Kirtland AFB. With the love of acronyms which characterizes large corporations everywhere, the building was labelled CNSAC: the Center for National Security and Arms Control. Security began with its physical layout, which had been designed so as to guarantee secure communications within and between the four elements of its programme: Systems Analysis, Advanced Concepts, Systems Assessment, and Remote Monitoring/Verification.

Judy loved Advanced Concepts. Its remit was to investigate new technologies whose development might threaten the defence of the USA, and to propose countermeasures in the event such techniques were identified. She loved the Group because of its creativity, the wonderful and wacky ideas which it tossed around, the sheer fun of it, like the vacuum bomb concept which they had been running with, pre-asteroid. There were no fools here.

Not even Advanced Concepts could stop the unstoppable. But at last, depending on answers she got here, Judy thought there might just be a way. An extremely long shot, longer even than Ollie’s deranged story about a manuscript. She turned into the secure building. Her slim fingers were still running over her pearl necklace.

Vincenzo’s Manuscript

Webb thought, plus ça change: I meet little cardinals at every conference. He looked out of the little window. The 747 had now entered the dark hemisphere of the Earth, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

Remarkably, given the ferocious attack on them by Vincenzo, the cardinals had provided him with an escape clause. Perhaps the Grand Duke had thrown a long shadow, and there had been a nod from His Holiness; who could say? At any rate, on condition that he recanted, cursed and reviled the said opinions, the Inquisitors declared, he would be sentenced only to life imprisonment.

Vincenzo now had a choice. He could die for his beliefs, like Giordano Bruno before him, who had gone to the stake convinced in the plurality of worlds. Along that route lay the rack and the strappado; and beyond that the stake. Or he could adopt Galileo as his role-model, and abjure on his knees, his hand on a Bible held by the Inquisitor.

Vincenzo recanted. The territio realis—showing him the horrific instruments of torture as a prelude to using them — had done the trick. He was duly sentenced to carcere perpetuo. Whether by nudging from the Grand Duke’s emissary was unclear, but the sentence was commuted to confinement, for life, to the estates of the Duke of Tuscany. Since the Duke owned much of northern Italy the sentence was, finally, nominal. Vincenzo and his mistress had spent the remainder of their days in obscurity, under the Duke’s protection.

The Grand Inquisitor had taken vows of poverty. However the small print, had there been any, did not forbid the possession of a wealthy brother. And like many wealthy Romans from the Emperor Hadrian onwards, the Inquisitor’s brother had a villa in the hills near Tivoli. It was a place to escape the hot, stinking, malaria-ridden plain of Rome during the summer months. And shortly after the trial, Vincenzo’s books and instruments were delivered, for disposal, to the Inquisitor, who was then in residence at his brother’s Tivoli villa.

The Cardinal recalled that Copernicus’s De Revolution-ibus Orbium Coelestium had been placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1616, whereupon, the following year, the Dutch heretics had published an Amsterdam edition. And Elzevirs of Leyden had been quick to publish the works of Galileo. He would allow no such embarrassments to fall on the Church again. Across the front cover of each of Vincenzo’s ten volumes, he wrote cremandum fore: they would be consigned to the flames.

What happened next is unclear, Virginia wrote. Maybe the Grand Duke’s Secretary had applied a little pressure. Whatever, Terremoto scored out cremandum fore and replaced the words with prohibendum fore: they were not to be burned, merely not to be read. A few copies were made but were lost, all but the one which had found its way to the Bodleian. Virginia had appended a surviving letter from the period:

The Grand Duke never succeeded in adding Vincenzo’s works to his great library. The Cardinal put them in a dark basement room in his brother’s house, hidden amongst the junk and detritus of a large family home; and there they remained, forgotten, for over a hundred years.

In 1740, a librarian from Florence by the name of Dr. Tomasso Bresciani was passing through a marketplace in Rome. He bought a sausage at a stall and took it away wrapped in an old paper. Unwrapping the sausage in the Triano park overlooking the Colosseum, he found the wrapper to be a letter from Vincenzo, now long dead. Webb imagined the good librarian choking on his sausage. The paper was traced to a junk collector and thence to a house belonging to the grandsons of a nephew of one of the Grand Inquisitors, who were selling off waste paper from their basement. Bresciani recovered the notebooks, which found their way to the famous Riccardian library in Florence, where they were indexed, filed, restored, bound, and once again forgotten.

They next turned up two hundred years later, in 1924, in the attic of a farmhouse in Provence. Another footnote: “Almost certainly Napoleon’s troops. They were forever looting museums and libraries from Italy and carting stuff over the Alps. Women too, I expect. Ollie, when are you coming back?”

Three thousand crates went north, some of which fell into Alpine torrents. Many of the remaining manuscripts, with a value beyond money, were turned into wrapping paper in Paris. Most were shredded and sold as scrap, an unparalleled act of vandalism by greedy Parisian businessmen. Phaenomenis was a lucky survivor.

They were then purchased from the farmer for pennies by the famous monk Helinandus (“copy of receipt scanned in if you’re interested”), and so they came back down the road, all the way to Rocca Priora, south of Rome, becoming part of the Cistercian monk’s famous collection of astronomical manuscripts.

A fact which made Webb sit up.

Unfortunately, Virginia’s note continued, along came the Second World War. While the Allies were advancing inland from Anzio, trainloads of good things were being taken north by the retreating Germans. One of those trainloads got stuck in a tunnel between Frascati and Rome, and in a bloody fight the partisans reclaimed the booty which included, but of course, a collection of manuscripts hastily taken from the monastery by some German officer. Unfortunately, in the confusion of Nacht und Nebel which is battle, some of the sacred relics, art treasures and rare manuscripts simply disappeared. Vincenzo’s manuscript has never been seen since.

There is of course the Bodleian transcript of the original by some anonymous Dutchman. Or was, darling. But as that too has now gone missing, along with your photocopy of it, it seems that the works of Vincenzo have vanished from the face of the Earth.

And at this point, Virginia stopped. She had scanned in her flowery signature; it took up almost the entire screen of his laptop.

Webb stared into the dark night. For the first time since Glen Etive, he fully believed that the task was hopeless. To find a manuscript which had gone missing in some forgotten skirmish almost a lifetime ago? In twenty-four hours?

He decided that he would send Virginia, the librarian with the steamy hormones, some flowers. He looked at his watch. He’d have to be quick: a planet without flowers was due along.

He had almost overlooked the last page, assuming it would be blank. But now he clicked the return button on his laptop and saw that Virginia had added a postscript to the end of her file:

“Ollie dear — you might want to get in touch with that Rocca Priora monastery. There are rumours.”

Monte Porzio

The short Atlantic night was drawing to a close, and a pale sun was beginning to illuminate a solid sheet of cloud which hid the ocean below.

Webb put his laptop aside and stretched. He tried to gather his thoughts.

Maybe, Webb wondered, I’m being paranoid. Maybe in my excited state I’d misunderstood the wheelhouse circuitry. If so, Leclerc’s death made for a very strange accident; but an accident nevertheless?

And what about the fast response of the robotic telescope? Perhaps that’s all it was: a fast response, made possible by the quietness of the electronic flow across the Atlantic at that time of night.

On the other hand, Webb speculated, what if Leclerc’s death was murder, and the Tenerife observations were a fraud? It would have to mean that Leclerc had been getting close to Nemesis, and that someone on the team didn’t want it to be identified. That is, someone on the team wanted an asteroid to wipe out their country. Family, friends, home, community, even their dog if they had one, someone wanted the lot to go.

Webb was vaguely aware of being less worldly than the average street trader; but even allowing for his own limited insight into the human condition, he could not believe in a folly which plumbed such depths. The proposition made no sense.

Webb thought about his colleagues on the team. Six Americans — Mark Noordhof, Judy Whaler, Jim McNally, Willy Shafer, Herb Sacheverell and Kenneth Kowalski.

Noordhof had been chosen by the Secretary of Defense or the President, because of his knowledge of missile defence technology. Judy worked in a corporation at the heart of the nation’s defences. Both these individuals needed the highest possible security clearance and must have been vetted to death at various times in their careers.

McNally was NASA’s Chief Administrator, for God’s sake.

That left Shafer, Sacheverell and Kowalski. But these were all in a sense accidental choices. Willy Shafer was chosen for his eminence as a physicist. Sacheverell because he was conspicuous in the asteroid business (okay he’s an incompetent loudmouth but that didn’t alter the fact). Kowalski just happened to be director of a remote observatory with the facilities they needed. None of these people could have even known about the Nemesis threat, let alone manipulated themselves on to the team.

Okay, Webb thought, everyone is squeaky clean.

Therefore exhaustion is making me paranoid. Leclerc’s death must have been an accident, and the robot telescope just has a remarkably fast response.

It was just odd that, at the moment he had been panning the robot camera over the bright, sunny Tenerife landscape, the Spot satellite had shown the island to be thick with cloud.

The twelve hours of flight, coupled with the loss of another eight hours due to the contrary motion of aircraft and sun across the Atlantic sky, meant that the Jumbo landed at de Gaulle at nine o’clock, local time, on a grey, stormy Friday morning. Webb adjusted his watch. It was now 3 a.m. Friday in Washington. He estimated that he’d had about three hours’ sleep in the last three days.

No, Monsieur, the flights to Rome are fully booked. There is, however, a flight to Nice, laid on by some small company capitalizing on the Air France strike. There is one remaining seat but it is a standby and it is for Monsieur to turn up before somebody else gets it. Oh, did I not say? Not from here, from Orly. Monsieur is most welcome. Monsieur took a taxi whose driver was as responsive to the promise of a huge tip as his Tucson cousin.

The standby seat was taken.

Yes, Monsieur, Quai d’Orsay Aviation do operate an executive air taxi but Monsieur appreciates that we cannot fly him into Italy without the necessary paperwork and at this time of year the Italians would simply file their flight plan away for days. Monsieur’s fastest route is to fly to Chamonix, on the French side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, and proceed from there.

He used the twenty minutes they needed for flight preparation to telephone Eagle Peak, where it would be about one o’clock in the morning. Noordhof came on the line almost immediately. The conversation was terse:

“I’m in Paris, just about to leave for Chamonix, arriving at L’Aèrodrome Sallanches in maybe three or four hours. Can I be met?”

“I’ll fix it.”

The office of Quai d’Orsay Aviation was about the size of a broom cupboard, dingy and empty. Webb fumed for about five minutes until a handyman, a small man with a handlebar moustache, entered carrying a tool box and a polythene sandwich box. He led Webb to the entrance of a hangar. Webb almost fainted at the sight of the tiny, two-seater Piper Tomahawk. He froze at the open door of the little toy, but someone heaved on his backside and he was in. The “handyman” turned out to be the pilot and Webb thought what the hell, I died trying.

They were a full half hour on the slipway waiting for clearance, during which time the pilot kept looking at the low clouds and making increasingly dubious noises about the flying conditions, while gusts of wind shook the aircraft. By the time the Tomahawk was bumping its way into the dark clouds, propeller racing, Webb reckoned he had attained some new plane of terror.

They jiggled and bumped their way across France, passing first over fields laid out like a patchwork quilt, and then over the white-covered Massif Central, occasionally glimpsed through snow-laden cumulus. Webb declined the offer of a sandwich although Monsieur would find the pig’s brain filling quite delicious. Low, white clouds ahead turned out to be the Alps which, as they approached, increasingly dominated the field of view. The pilot pulled back on the joystick to gain height. Soon they were flying bumpily over the Mont Blanc massif. Through the clouds they glimpsed needle-sharp peaks, icy blue lakes, and isolated villages in the snow. Circling L’Aiguille du Midi, the pilot tilted the aircraft on its side so that Webb could look straight down at the crevasses and banded glaciers falling away from the big mountain. Then the Tomahawk righted itself, and the pilot took it unsteadily down through heavy snow. Webb glimpsed the tops of pine trees just below their wheels; then there was open ground and an orange windsock, and the pilot managed a brief “Zut!” as a gust of wind caught the wings at the moment of touchdown.

Alive on the ground, Webb inwardly swore that his feet would never leave solid earth again. He resisted the urge to kiss the snow and instead settled up with the pilot, whose eyes lit up with simple joy at the sight of so much ready cash. The pilot disappeared into a wooden hut at the edge of the runway, and ten minutes later was taken off in a taxi.

Webb waited, shivering in Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts as the snow gusted around him. Through occasional patches of blue he could make out formidable, jagged peaks towering all around. He looked at his watch. He was attracting the amused attention of a plump girl inside the hut. He was about to head for Chamonix when a bright red sports car gurgled on to the airport road. A man emerged with green Tyrolean hat, complete with feather, and a long green trench-coat.

Webb climbed in. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“I know,” Walkinshaw replied. “That’s why I hired the Spyder.” Bulls bellowed; a giant thrust Webb in the back; and in seconds they were on to the main road and moving at a speed which he associated with a race track.

They skimmed past a clutter of chalets and high-rise hotels on the left. On the right more chalets lay below an icy citadel, clouds swirling around its summit. Passing over a bridge Webb glimpsed turquoise, surging meltwater. Survival time two minutes, he thought for no reason.

“These chalets — aren’t they built in an avalanche zone?”

The civil servant shrugged. “What do rich foreigners know?” He turned on to a steep Alpine road whose route up the mountain towards the Mont Blanc tunnel was mapped out by crawling lorries. A notice advised snow chains and extreme caution. It came in several languages but to judge by his driving Walkinshaw seemed not to understand any of them.

Rain.

Rain, beating hard against a window.

Swish-swish.

The rhythmic swish-swish of windscreen wipers, and the hiss of tyres on a wet road.

The hum of an engine.

Heavy rain, driving hard. Powerful engine.

Webb drifted back to sleep.

The car slowed and turned. Headlights flickered in from outside. The car stopped and Walkinshaw stepped out, the door closing with a satisfying Clunk! Webb listened to his receding footsteps, the steady drumming of rain on the roof, and the thermal ticking from the cooling engine. There were voices outside.

Webb struggled up to a sitting position. His arms and legs were made of lead. An illuminated sign said Pavesi, and above it was a picture of a plump, smiling chef holding a roasted turkey on a tray. The clock on the dashboard read just after three, and the autostrada cafeteria was busy. The voices were coming from a group of truck drivers at the entrance of the cafeteria, one of whom made a dash for his truck, holding a newspaper over his head.

Walkinshaw appeared and ran towards the car with a paper cup, water streaming over his dome-like head. Webb lacked the energy to open his door. He handed a hot chocolate carefully to Webb, before settling into the car.

Walkinshaw sipped at his drink. “I have never seen anyone so exhausted.”

“I’m more concerned about you, Mister Walkinshaw. I don’t believe you’re a civil servant.”

“Actually, I’m a pianist in a brothel,” said Walkinshaw. Webb assumed it was a joke.

“And there is no Walkinshaw at the Department of Information Research. I checked.”

Walkinshaw’s face was a picture of injured innocence. “So? There might have been. Sir Bertrand is disappointed in you, Webb. He thinks you’re off on some eccentric tangent.”

“I probably am. I also believe someone on the team is trying to screw us up.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Finish your chocolate.”

Webb had scarcely done so before, once again, he flaked out.

He wakened again in the late afternoon, stretched out on the soft leather. The morning rain had gone and the sky was blue. Webb sat up. The terrible exhaustion had eased but he felt as if his blood had been drained off and replaced with water.

They were speeding over a cobbled road, with Trajan’s Column on the left, the Roman forum to their right and the Colosseum straight ahead. There was a mechanized chariot race around the Colosseum but Walkinshaw took it in his stride. They stopped at traffic lights, the lights turned green, and the traffic made a Brand’s Hatch start. Walkinshaw weaved swiftly up to the head of the traffic. The Appia Antica appeared ahead but they suddenly screamed off round a corner.

In minutes they had cleared the suburbs of Rome and were hurtling towards a large hill town some miles ahead. “Frascati,” Walkinshaw said. “The Embassy have given us the use of a house just beyond there.”

They trickled through the town and then started to climb through a winding road. There were signs for Tuscolo and Monte Porzio. Ahead, Webb glimpsed a cathedral dome straddling the summit of a hill some miles ahead, with ancient houses clustered around it like cygnets around a swan. The Spyder cannoned up the narrow road, and Webb’s knuckles showed white against the dashboard, and his scrotum thought it was being squeezed by a gorilla. At last the car growled and slowed, and they stopped at the large metal gates of a white villa.

Walkinshaw searched under some stones and triumphantly produced some keys. Then they were up a short, steep drive. There was a balcony, big enough to hold a party on, looking down on a panorama which probably had not changed in a thousand years.

“This belongs to one of the Embassy staff. It’s probably a safe house, and in any case we only need it for a few hours. However you are still Mister Fish, and you still look like a corpse in a freezer. Would you like to rest awhile?”

“I daren’t.”

He was aroused by sunlight on his eyes. He was in a king-sized bed. Cherubim hovered over him, and a saintly, bearded figure in the ornate ceiling had raised a glass of wine. A chandelier of pink Venetian glass was suspended almost overhead. Twin dragons guarded a wardrobe about twelve feet long underneath a mirror of similar size. He had a quick shower in an old-fashioned bathroom about the size of his Oxford flat, and found his way to a downstairs lounge. Walkinshaw was contemplating a lurid female photograph in a magazine. He stood up as Webb approached.

“Ah, much better. You no longer look like death warmed up.”

“What time is it?” Webb asked.

“Just after five o’clock. You’ve been out for an hour.”

“Oh my God. I have to get to a monastery. It’s not too far from here.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. I’m a solitary scholar researching a manuscript. And you look like something out of MI5.”

“At least I’ll give you a lift, time being what it is.”

Webb opened the car window and glanced at his watch. The plain of Rome stretched into the distance on his left, with its wonderful city shimmering in the haze. Beyond, the long spine of the Abruzzi Hills stretched to the south. The air blowing in the window was warm and scented, and the sky was blue.

And he had fifteen hours.

The Apiary

It was a fifteen-minute drive up a steep, narrow, tree-lined road. The monastery was contained within a wall about fifteen feet high, part of which was also the front of a church. A white marble saint with a lightning conductor running down his back stood atop its steepled roof. Behind the wall a tall bell-tower dominated the skyline.

There was a crowded car park. Walkinshaw put the seat back and covered his eyes with his ridiculous Tyrolean hat. Webb followed a family into what seemed to be a porter’s lodge, and passed through it to a shop, where he was met by the scents of a thousand flowers. A brisk trade in honey, royal jelly and some translucent green liqueur was under way, while the Virgin Mary, captured on canvas, stood with her eyes raised to Heaven and arms crossed on the wall behind the counter. Webb tried out his Italian: “I’d like to speak to the Father Abbot, please.”

The white-robed monk behind the counter raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “You have made an appointment?”

“Yes,” Webb lied. “But I’m only in Italy for a few hours.”

“Un àttimo.”

A few minutes later the monk reappeared. With him was an older man, nearly bald, with a ruddy face and a smile which, Webb thought, was less than wholly welcoming. “I’m Father O’Doyle,” he said in an American English with a strong hint of Irish. “The Father Abbot is in chapel but I’m responsible for visitors. No visitors are pencilled in to my diary for today. When did you write?”

“About six weeks ago,” Webb lied again. “My name is Fish. I’m from Cambridge. I’m trying to trace a book.”

“Ah, that explains it. You want the Father Librarian. Come with me.”

Webb followed the American monk out to the car park and back in through the church. About halfway down he led Webb off to a transept, produced a large key and unlocked a door. There was a short stretch of corridor. Webb noted a door, with an alarm and lights over it, protected by three locks. The monk caught Webb’s curious stare. “Our sacristy,” he said.

Through another locked door, Webb found himself outside again, in a large, square cloister. Father O’Doyle led the way along the covered cloister-walk. Webb was surprised to find Christmas lights and decorations strung between the pillars lining the walk. Faces looked down at them from barred windows. “Oblates,” the monk said, waving up.

They turned off and climbed some stairs. A handful of white-robed monks, hoods down, passed silently. Through a door, Webb found himself in a modern library. A few teenage students were scattered around desks. “I will leave you in the capable hands of our librarian.”

The librarian had the physique of a rugby player, but the muscle was turning to fat and his face was pale.

Webb tried out his rusty Italian. “My name is Larry Fish. I’m from Cambridge in England. I’m doing some historical research and have been directed to your library. I wrote some weeks ago.”

“I do not recall your letter. Did you not receive a reply?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been travelling.”

The monk bowed. “What do you seek, my son?”

“My informant was uncertain, but she thought that you might be in possession of the works of Vincenzo Vincenzi.”

A look of surprise passed over the librarian’s face, but quickly vanished. “A moment.” He disappeared momentarily through a door and returned with a set of keys. He said, “Follow me.”

Webb followed the monk out of the neon-lit, computerized library back down the stairs to the cloister and past a refectory with a long, heavy table and a small lectern. At the end of the cloister-walk was another set of stairs and the monk led the way down them and along a cool, dark stone-lined passage which ended in a massive wooden door. The monk used two keys. From the push he gave it, Webb inferred that, underneath the wood veneer, the door was basically a slab of steel. The monk punched in a number on a keypad and then locked the door behind them. “To control humidity and temperature,” he said. “I must remain with you, but also I must attend compline in an hour. And tonight, of course, we celebrate the birth of our Saviour.”

Webb took a moment to wander while the Father librarian stood at the door. Some of the books predated Gutenberg; many could have bought a Rolls-Royce, or a yacht, or a house. Here, handwritten, was Vitellio’s medieval compendium on optics, and next to it Kepler’s “supplement to Vitellio,” his Dioptrice, in which he described the principle of the camera centuries before Daguerre. Here, unbelievably, was Nicolas of Cusa’s 1440 De docta ignorantia of 1440, asserting that the universe is unbounded, and that all motion is relative, almost five hundred years before Einstein and the modern cosmologists. There was a little cluster of seventeenth-century comet books — Rockenbach, Lubienietski, Hevelius and others. And there was Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium—the 1617 Amsterdam edition — which had ushered in the painful birth of the scientific revolution. It was Aladdin’s cave, but Webb had no time to explore it. He turned to the monk, who simply said, “Opere di Vincenzo, qui” and took Webb to a shelf.

And there, indeed, were the Opere of Vincenzo; all but Volume Three.

“Volume Three, Father?”

“We have fifty thousand titles here, but unfortunately not the one you seek. It has been missing from our collection for sixty years.”

Webb’s heart sank. “How can I have been so misinformed? Volume Three was the one I sought.”

“And after sixty years, you are the second man to have asked for it in a week.”

You don’t say. “To be frank with you, Father, I’m desperate to see it. I’m involved in a scholarly dispute which only the works of Vincenzo can resolve.”

The librarian lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Perhaps you should speak to our Father Abbot. At this time of day, after chapel, he is often in his study. Follow me.”

The librarian left Webb facing the Abbot across a large desk. A computer terminal on the desk struck the astronomer as somehow odd. Unmonklike, he imagined Noordhof saying. The man was middle-aged, with a thin face and a classical Roman nose. He spoke with easy authority, in English, and had bright, alert eyes.

“So, Mister Fish, you are from Cambridge. Which college is that?”

Webb tensed. “Churchill.”

“On Madingley Road, as I recall. It is many years now. Tell me, that little coffee shop on Silver Street — what was it called?”

“There are a few,” Webb guessed.

“Lyons? Was that it?”

With a start Webb realized that he was being tested. He avoided the trap: “Rings no bells, I’m afraid.”

“How odd. Everybody knew Lyons in my time at Cambridge. I wasted my youth there.” Webb raised his hands expansively, Italian-style, and the Abbot dismissed the matter. “It was so long ago. Perhaps it no longer exists. However, it is not part of our Rule to engage in idle gossip. You seek the works of Vincenzo, Mister Fish. You see that our collection is incomplete. Are you aware of their history?”

“I understand that the partisans rescued them from the Nazis, along with sacred artefacts and works of art, at the end of the last war.”

The Abbot nodded. “It is also widely believed by local people that these things were returned to our monastery whence they were looted. Alas, Mister Fish, that persistent rumour is only partially true. Some treasures, some works of art, were not returned. The volume you seek is amongst them.”

Webb, feeling gutted, closed his eyes in despair.

The Abbot continued, “Vincenzo was a very minor actor in the great drama which was played out so long ago. Now had it been Galileo, great efforts would no doubt have been made to recover his works. But Vincenzo? Few have even heard of him.” The Abbot looked at Webb with curious intensity. “Is it so important, this scholarly dispute?”

“If only you knew, Father Abbot.”

“You can tell me no more?”

Webb shook his head.

The Abbot leaned back in his chair and looked at Webb thoughtfully over steepled hands. “I am left wondering what possible scholarly dispute can require such secrecy and lead to so much despair in your face.”

“I’m not at liberty to say. And I don’t come from Cambridge and my name isn’t Fish.”

The Abbot chuckled. “I thought as much. But we all have secrets to keep. I too have constraints on my freedom to talk.”

This guy knows something, Webb thought, maybe from the confessional. He toyed with the mad idea of blurting out the whole Nemesis story but immediately dismissed the thought. It would be seen as the ravings of a lunatic. He also suspected that the Abbot, faced with a choice between betraying a confession and permitting a holocaust, would tell the planet to get stuffed.

“You are leaving Italy soon?” the Abbot asked.

“I must. I came only for the manuscript.”

“All this way for a missing volume! If only I could help. Before you leave us, perhaps you should take the opportunity to see our monastery. There is an unusual mixture of styles here. You will have seen that our basilica is made in the style of a Greek cross, that is square, rather than in the medieval plan which has a long nave so as to represent the shape of the cross of Christ. The craftsmen who built our monastery were influenced by the Doric, which is simple and strong, rather than decorative. And yet our chapel is entered through a porch with a horizontal entablature supported by columns, more in the style of the decorative Corinthian order.” The Abbot smiled. “But I agree with your expression, Mister Fish. If you prefer, we can satisfy more bodily needs. We have many products. I recommend our liqueur, which is made of over thirty aromatic herbs according to a secret recipe which even I do not hold.”

Webb stood up. “Another time.”

“And our honey is famous. You must see our apiary.”

“Thank you. Unfortunately I have to get away.”

“Our beekeeper is Father Galeno. He is very old, and wanders a little, but he is a most interesting man to talk to. I said as much to your colleague.”

My colleague? Webb made for the door. “Thank you. Time doesn’t permit.”

The Abbot said again, “Our apiary, Mister Fish. Father Galeno is a very interesting man.”

God I’m thick, Webb told himself. The Abbot made the sign of the Cross and Webb said thanks for your help.

The Apiary was a square of grass the size of a small field beyond the bell tower. It was lined by dozens of box-shaped hives painted in bright primary colours. A monk, wearing a plastic hat with a protective veil, was bent over a hive with a metal bucket and a long, flat piece of metal. The air buzzed as Webb approached.

“Father Galeno?”

The Father Apiarist turned. He was a tall, thin man, in his middle eighties. He spoke in Italian and Webb was grateful for the six months he had spent in Rome some years previously. Bees were crawling over the monk’s white robe and his veil. His sleeves were tied with string at the wrists. “Would you like to buy some honey?”

“Not today.”

“Then you are here to be shown the wonderful life of the bee.”

“Unfortunately I have no time,” Webb said.

“No time. Now that is sad. We can learn much from the world of the bee.”

Behind the veil, Webb saw dark eyes, a curious mixture of vacancy and sharpness. Instinctively, he felt that an oblique approach was called for. “Tell me, Father,” Webb asked, “In your experience, is a bee conscious of its own existence?”

The man’s eyes lit up. “Undoubtedly. While the bee can see and hear, its real world is one of chemistry. It responds to smell and touch. Its mind cannot therefore be understood by us, whose world is sight and sound. True, it is deeply controlled by instinct in its daily toil, but yes, of course God in His wisdom has given it the ability to experience life in its own way.”

“But it has no reasoning power. It hasn’t the brain.”

There was a high-pitched cackle. “In that respect, does it differ from most of humanity? Only human arrogance makes us even try to understand the world as perceived by the bee. The essence of its consciousness will forever be a mystery to us, but not to the bee, and not to the Almighty.”

Webb tried to look pious. “Father, I’m here because of a book.”

“The bee does not learn its dance. It has been given to it by the Creator. Could blind evolution have taught a bee how to dance? What chemicals could combine to make a small insect dance an intricate code?”

“A book, Father.”

“Could blind chance make flower and bee come to depend on each other for their very survival? The functions of queen, worker and drone interlock so perfectly?”

“It’s a very old book.”

The voice became truculent. “You must speak to our Father Librarian.”

“It was taken from a train by partisans at the end of the Second World War.” Webb tried a shot in the dark: “And you were one of the partisans.”

The old man looked at Webb with surprise. “Now that is very strange.”

Webb waited. Bees were crawling over his exposed legs.

“This book: it is a volume by the heretic Vincenzo?”

Webb spoke quietly. “Father Apiarist, where can I find this book?”

The shutters came down, the eyes became vacant. “I cannot say.”

“Cannot?”

“Will not. I said this also to the other.”

A honeybee was crawling up Webb’s thigh. He tried to ignore it. “Why not?”

“Discussion of the matter is impossible.”

“Father, I don’t want to take it away, only to study it for a few hours. It is of the utmost importance.”

“No.”

“I have to see it.”

A bee had found its way under the old monk’s veil and was crawling over his lips. He had a face like a stubborn child. “Memories are long in the hills.”

“Memories?” The bees were thick on Webb’s shirt.

“It is your bright colours. They think you are a flower. Stand still or you will make them angry and they will sting your eyes.”

Webb tried again but he knew it was hopeless. “Father, please. I ask only to see this book by Vincenzo.”

The apiarist shook his head and turned to a hive. He pulled out a frame dripping with honey. The air filled with angry bees and Webb moved hastily back. “A young man with no time? Nonsense, you have all the time in the world. Come back when you can spare some for the bees. They can teach us much.” He banged the hive with the bucket and the sky blackened with insects.

Crazy old fool, Webb thought, flying for his life, with the high-pitched cackle of the Father Apiarist almost drowned out by the angry buzz of the honeybees swirling around his head.

Johnson Space Center

The taxi dropped McNally at the main gate. He spoke briefly to the security guard, who provided him with a visitor’s badge, and so NASA’s Chief Administrator entered the Johnson Space Center unannounced.

The Center was almost deserted; it was after all the day before Christmas. He was gambling on workaholism amongst the senior staff, but if necessary he would simply summon them from their families. He strolled alone through the rocket park, sparing the Saturn V booster a longing glance as he passed, and continued on along the Mall, past the administration buildings, the simulation and training facilities, the laboratories and warehouses which he ultimately controlled. At the far end of the mall was the Gilruth social and athletic center; it was a long walk. He entered the Center unrecognized and extracted a can of icy Coke from a machine. Then he climbed some stairs and looked down with pleasure at two teams of fifteen-year-olds playing basketball. A white-haired grandmother in a blue tracksuit was running around, whistle in mouth.

McNally made a couple of internal calls and returned to the game.

The Chief Engineer, a bulky, bearded man, appeared in two minutes and twenty seconds. They shook hands and he sat on a chair next to the NASA boss. “You into basketball, Jim?”

“I hate all sport. No, I’m into security. We can’t talk in our offices just yet.” The Engineer pulled a face.

Twenty seconds later the Deputy Administrator arrived, looking bemused, and sat on the bench in front of them. “My secretary told me you’re on vacation, Jim.”

McNally dispensed with social preliminaries. “I intend to mothball Deep Space Four. I expect to replace it with the European Vesta, which should arrive at White Sands in a C-14 within the next few days. The Albuquerque people will reconfigure it to be launched on an Air Force IUS, probably the same booster which we used for the Galileo probe. Frontiersman will take it up to two hundred miles. I want the Shuttle astronauts retrained. At least two Mission Specialists will be on board, a nuclear physicist and an astronomer. Neither will have any background in astronautics. I’m not yet at liberty to tell you what this is about. What I can say is that Vesta will go through as a Defense item. This package has to be ready to go in one hundred days maximum.”

“How many was that?” the Chief Engineer asked.

“One hundred. Maximum.”

Lesser men would have howled in outrage, protested the obvious impossibility. But the instruction was so preposterous, the autocratic decision so out of keeping with the consultative spirit of the NASA hierarchy, that the executives, senior and experienced men, immediately realized that only some grave situation could lie behind it.

“The Russians are supposed to be launching Vesta. What do they think about this?” the Assistant Administrator asked.

“They don’t know yet.”

The Chief Engineer stroked his beard thoughtfully. It was a mannerism which had started many years ago as a joke and had gradually become second nature. He itemized the points with his fingers. “Let’s look at this, Boss. Suppose we divide the problem into (1) crew training, (2) mission planning and (3) hardware development.”

McNally nodded.

“Take Item One. You know how the Mission Operations Directorate works. Crew training is so meticulous they practically tell the astronauts when they can go to the john. You’re well aware that training in a hundred days is impossible even for an experienced pilot, and that you can’t let a couple of rookies loose on a Space Shuttle.”

McNally bowed his head to indicate agreement.

There was an outburst of shrill screaming from below, echoing painfully from the gymnasium walls. The Chief Engineer let it die out before he continued: “Okay, now look at the broader mission-planning aspect, Item Two. For example, think about the documentation alone we need to create for the operational support. Transportation and flight rules, command plans, communication and data plans, mission control and tracking network plans, system operating procedures, operations and maintenance instructions, flight control operations handbooks, new console handbooks, software documentation. Hell, I’m running out of fingers and that’s just the documentation.”

McNally bowed his head again.

The Assistant Administrator said, “A lot of the MOD’s load will fall on their Flight Design and Dynamics division.”

McNally bowed.

“So. In a hundred days you expect them to carry through a flight design analysis leading to the development of flight design ground rules, develop the guidance, navigation and control software as well as design and construct any new hardware required, rig the MCC and the SMS’s for the flight in question, come up with performance analyses for the ascent, orbit manoeuvring, payload deployment, proximity operations — with rookie specialists carrying out EVA — plan the descent and landing phases, create new in-flight programmes for SPOC and develop integrated checklists for all of this. In a hundred days.”

“Maximum.”

The Engineer scratched his head. “What payload accommodation category are we talking about? Dedicated, standard, mid-deck?”

“We’ll be launching Vesta plus IUS plus four or five tons.”

“Jesus. Dedicated.”

The Assistant Administrator attempted reason. “Okay Jim, since we’re in Wonderland, we may as well take a broad-brush look at Alex’s Item Three, the hardware timescale. Look at the performance milestones for Cassini, starting say from the moment the Huygens probe was delivered. It took three months to test and integrate the probe with the spacecraft, right? Another four for JPL to integrate and test all the instrumentation. The probe was in our space simulators for another seven months. Then after it was delivered at Kennedy it took another six months to complete integration with the Titan/Centaur launch vehicle. If I’ve counted my fingers right that’s twenty months. And you’re looking for the same progress in three. Let’s inject some realism into this, Jim.”

McNally brushed the monstrous problems aside. “Look at Clementine One. From concept to system design was three months. Acquisition planning overlapped with that. Sure it was another year for the systems engineering and test, but the Europeans have done most of that work for us already. We had the spacecraft integrated with the ground subsystems in a couple of months. Look, the only thing that matters is the integration of Vesta with the launch vehicle, a standard Air Force IUS which will go up with the Shuttle. All it needs is a launch vehicle adaptor. We can do it in three months.”

The game below was getting noisy. McNally added, “For reasons of security I want to confine this to Johnson and Canaveral.”

“Where is this Vesta headed?” the Chief Engineer wanted to know.

“I don’t know.”

The Assistant Administrator laughed outright. McNally had now crossed the boundary from the preposterous to the insane. The Chief Engineer tried to keep his voice level, but it had an angry quiver to it. “Jim, I’d like you to explain something to me. How are we supposed to plan a mission if we don’t know where we’re going?”

McNally opened his mouth to reply, but the Deputy cut in. His eyes were icy: “Alex is right. What do I tell my MOD? With no destination, what is there for them to plan?”

“They plan for a high-speed, maximum precision flyby of an as yet unspecified interplanetary target, using the onboard radars for last-minute course correction.”

“You’ll never get off with this, Jim,” said the Chief Engineer. “MOD will refuse to issue a commit-to-flight certificate. Or somebody will trigger the yellow light system and force an internal review. And rightly so. This could be shaping up to another Atlantis disaster.”

“The responsibility for technical readiness is yours. I expect you, and your Safety and Mission Assurance Office, to deliver.”

“Jim, you’re asking me to send up half-trained astronauts on a string and sealing wax lash-up. I won’t do it. I won’t be responsible for the deaths of five or six people and the loss of a Shuttle.” The Chief Engineer stood up. “You’re forcing me to resign.”

McNally looked the engineer squarely in the eye. “Some guys who look like telephone engineers will be fixing your office phone shortly. That’s so the phone call you’re about to receive from the President of the United States is secure. That call will have three consequences. First, you’ll find out what this is about. Second, you’ll wish you hadn’t. And third, you’ll make the deadline if it kills you and I mean that in its literal sense. Similar calls will be going to Art and Jackie this afternoon. Until these calls are made, I have no authorization to tell you what this is about.”

If McNally had slapped the Engineer, the effect could hardly have been more startling. The man stared, amazed. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.

The Assistant Administrator recovered first. “If some major disaster happened at Byurkan, and Vesta had to catch a gravity assist window, that could justify our stepping in to help with a crash programme. Either that or a target of opportunity. It would have to be a joker, like a new comet. There would be no case to trigger a yellow light; they’re usually for cost overruns anyway. Which is it, Jim? Is Byurkan about to have a big disaster, or does some comet have to be intercepted real soon?”

That’s the trouble with these Princeton types. Too damn smart. McNally tried to adopt a poker face.

The Engineer had recovered sufficiently to talk. He sat down again and stared at the AA. “But a hundred-day timescale?”

McNally glanced at his watch. Eight hours. If Webb doesn’t deliver… Unconsciously, his mouth twisted in tension.

A whistle blew. The grandmother, red-faced, was waving her arms around. The sharp squeaking of trainers on wood came to a stop. An outburst of youthful cheering was followed by a tribal chant: the girls’ team had won.

The Engineer asked, “What instrumentation will be on board?”

McNally tried not to smile. Knowledge of the instrumentation would provide a strong clue to the nature of the mission. He finished his Coke. “A spectrometer for inflight target analysis. A short-pulsed laser for ranging: eight bursts a second and it only weighs a kilo. A high-resolution camera with a light CCD coupled to the laser. The setup has ranging accuracy of one metre and believe me we’re going to need it. There will be a military package on board.”

“You said this is a flyby?”

“A flyby. No slowdown, no soft landing. Vesta will do what it’s going to do on the hoof. The ranging is coupled to some megasmart electronics, and the probe will have to carry out some very sophisticated decision-making in maybe 0.1 of a second.”

The Engineer stared up at the high wooden ceiling. Finally he said, “I see resemblances to the Galileo project. JPL handled the overall project and Ames managed the probe system. So why not use the experience gained at Pasadena and Mountain View? Maybe we could even use the Galileo flight plans as a template. I’ll bring over key people from the JPL flight design team and get them working with our MOD. Get me your Mission Specialists right away and I’ll throw them into our flotation tanks on their first day. The moment you can specify their tasks I’ll configure the Mission Simulators. If you can get clearance to bring a few Vesta people over… and a target would be useful, Jim, when you’re ready to give me it.”

Engineers. Always finding obstacles until they smell a challenge. I’m not on top of these guys for nothing. McNally smirked.

The AA’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “The onboard military package. Should we be thinking of something like a bomb?”

Screw all Princeton smartasses to hell.

Santa Maria della Vittoria

The telephone was ringing as Walkinshaw opened the door. Webb had picked up the receiver before the civil servant could stop him.

The voice at the other end spoke in Italian. It was a second or two before Webb recognized it.

“Mister Fish?”

“Yes.”

“You have an interest in a manuscript?”

“Yes.”

“I think I can help you.”

Webb’s heart jumped. Instinctively, he tried not to sound too enthusiastic. “I’m very interested. Where is it?”

“The matter is not straightforward. Do you know the amphitheatre in Tuscolo?”

Webb had a fleeting vision. A picnic. A day out of Rome. Giovanni, and a couple of girls, and wine and sunshine, and Italian bread and cheese. “Yes, I do know it. It’s up the hill from Monte Porzio.”

“Time is very short, Mister Fish. Please be there in twenty minutes.” The receiver went down.

Webb looked at Walkinshaw in amazement. “I have a contact.”

Walkinshaw shook his head. “That’s impossible. This is a safe house. Nobody knows you’re here.”

Webb headed back to the door. “We’ll have to shift. The car will only take us so far and the rest is a climb.”

Walkinshaw held up a restraining hand. “Not so fast, Webb. Are you listening to me? Nobody is supposed to know you’re here.”

“Walkinshaw, I absolutely must have that manuscript.”

Walkinshaw followed the astronomer out to the car. “Are you listening to me, Oliver?”

The ignition keys were still in the car. Webb stood at the car door. “I don’t care. Look, we’re talking about the planet. Do you want to be fried? With your family? And your country? If this asteroid hits America what do you think they’ll do about it? I say they’ll launch a nuclear strike in revenge. The Russians will hit back in turn and we’ll be back to the Dark Ages even before Nemesis gets here. The world’s run by madmen, Walkinshaw, not rational people.”

“Webb, will you calm down. You’re exhausted and not thinking clearly. You are my responsibility. I can’t have you rushing bull-headed into this meeting. I need to know who knows you’re here and what you’re getting into.”

“There’s no time for stuff like that, you idiot. I have to take risks. I’m going. Stay here if you want.”

The car was smelling of hot plastic and the heat was deadly. Walkinshaw took the wheel, and they put the windows down. “Who was it?”

“The librarian.”

“Did you give him — or anyone — the villa’s phone number?”

“Of course not. I don’t even know what it is.”

“The address, then?”

“Absolutely not. Turn right.”

“Oliver, something is badly wrong here.”

“So you said. Left up here.”

The road took them up past villas with big wrought-iron windows, swimming pools and Dobermans wandering the grounds, and then they were into woods. There was an empty car park. The guard’auto had gone home. The sun was low in the sky. Memories came flooding back. Franca, that was her name; and Giovanni’s lady had been called Ambra.

“Stay put, Walkinshaw. I’m a solitary scholar, remember?”

Walkinshaw looked into the surrounding trees. His face was dark. “This is getting worse by the minute. Look around you. Why would he want to meet you in a place like this?”

“He doesn’t want to be seen talking to me, that’s all.”

Walkinshaw’s civil service urbanity was gone. “You lunatic. You don’t know what you’re walking into.”

There was a path through grass leading up to the little Roman amphitheatre a quarter of a mile ahead. A burly, white-robed figure was standing motionless on the stone steps. As Webb approached, the man moved away and disappeared into a nearby wood. Webb ran up to the amphitheatre. The undergrowth was dense but the monk’s path was clearly visible in the trail of bent and broken twigs. Puffing, Webb followed the trail and found himself in a broad Roman road, the big flagstones still in place after two thousand years. The trees formed a wide overhead canopy, and the road went steeply back down the hillside. The monk was standing motionless, about three hundred yards ahead. Webb walked smartly towards him.

At about a hundred yards, the monk walked off to the right, disappearing amongst the trees. It was getting dark and Webb ran forward, risking a fall on the ancient cobbles. Turning off along the librarian’s route, he found himself back at the car park.

Walkinshaw was standing at the car. He was peering at the monk alertly, as if sensing that something was wrong.

Something was wrong. From close up, the man had the wrong build for the librarian; he was too thin, the hair was not in the style of a monk’s tonsure. Walkinshaw shouted “Webb! Run!” and then there was a sharp Crack! and the civil servant, open-mouthed in amazement and pain, flopped down in a sitting position with his back to the car, with a red spot welling up from his chest.

Terrified, Webb turned to run but a pale, freckle-faced girl had appeared from the trees, and she too was carrying a pistol. She approached to just outside arm’s length and pointed the gun steadily at Webb’s chest.

They did Leclerc and now they’re going to do me.

Walkinshaw was sliding slowly sideways; his eyes were swimming in his head; he was gurgling; bright red, frothy blood was trickling from the corner of his mouth. The girl waved Webb back towards the car. He ignored her and moved towards Walkinshaw. The monk hit him in the face with the barrel of the gun. “You can’t leave him!” Webb shouted in English. “He needs help!” The monk understood. He fired into Walkinshaw half a dozen times, the civil servant’s body jerking and the pistol shots cracking into the dark woods, while Webb yelled obscenities and the girl gripped his hair tightly and held her gun at his head.

Then Webb was thrust into the back of the car while the man threw off the monk’s habit. He turned out to be an un-shaven youth with the expressionless face of the psychotic. He turned the key and took off down the Tuscolo road. Through his fear and rage, Webb thought that it hadn’t been necessary to run over Walkinshaw’s body and that the civil servant might still have been alive when the wheels went over him.

In Rome, the youth sped through EUR along the Via del Mare, which transformed into the Via Ostiense, and then they were through the Ostiense Gate, passing a white pyramid and rattling along the Viale Piramide. The woman was breathing heavily. Her pupils were dilated, and from time to time she would giggle for no clear reason. She kept the gun hidden under Webb’s buttock and the thought of an accidental sex change, which recurred whenever the car rattled over cobbles, wasn’t funny. He began to shiver uncontrollably, going alternately hot and cold, and a monstrous headache threatened. Strangely, to Webb, the emotion beginning to dominate in him was anger. He was angry at being pushed around, angry at being struck in the face, and angry for Walkinshaw and his family if he had one. It was a seething sense of outrage which he kept firmly in check.

They hurried along the side of the Tiber before cutting away from it, and Webb found himself orbiting the Victor Emanuele before speeding up the Via Nazionale. The man turned into the Street of the Four Fountains and pulled the car to a stop.

He turned and snapped his fingers in Webb’s face. “La chiesa. Vai indietro. Subito!”

The urge to slap the youth’s face was almost beyond Webb’s power to resist. He pushed open the car door, slammed it shut violently and crossed to one of the quattro fontane. The car horn hooted and the man gestured menacingly, waving him towards the church. Webb thrust a middle finger in the air. He splashed his face with the cool water and then sponged down his legs. There was nothing he could do about the dark patch on his shorts. He tossed the pink-stained handkerchief on to the road and looked at the inconspicuous little church with the flight of stairs leading up to a dull green door. Above the door, “Santa Maria della Vittoria” was written in gold lettering.

There was a brief gap in the flow of traffic and he crossed the street. He felt barely able to walk. On the steps he looked back; the young assassins were watching him intently. He pushed open the outer door. Assorted church notices; a collection box for “the deserving”; an inner door, brown and old. He went inside. The door closed behind him with a sudden pneumatic hiss and the Roman traffic switched off.

There was a musty smell, like a cellar or a second-hand bookshop.

Webb let his eyes adjust to the gloom. Rows of pews stretched to an altar, draped with white linen. Cherubim on the ceiling; crucifixes and statuettes; candles burning. And one human being, a young woman near the front sitting motionless, head down. She crossed herself and walked smartly off, her high heels clattering loudly in the confined space. Their eyes met briefly; she gave no sign of recognition.

Take it as it comes.

He stepped warily down the left aisle, heart thumping in his chest and leaning on the pews for steadiness. In a small transept was a white marble sculpture. The sun was streaming down on it from a high window and the sculpture seemed to glow, floating in space. A white marble woman was lying back and a half-naked youth stood over her, holding an arrow poised to plunge. The woman’s eyes were half-closed and her lips were parted. Around this couple were what looked like theatre boxes. Assorted gentlemen occupied these, their faces leering and gloating, eternally congealed.

It was bizarre.

“The Rapture of Saint Teresa.”

Webb whirled round. Elderly man. Iron grey hair, greying goatee beard, metal-rimmed spectacles. White linen suit, dark tie, expensive shirt; black ebony walking stick. Thin lips drawn into a smile. If he was an immediate threat, Webb couldn’t see how.

“She is three hundred years old and, as you see, very beautiful. Many regard her as Bernini’s finest work. And this church, being one of the best examples of late baroque in Rome, is a worthy setting for her. What do you think?”

Webb said it to hurt: “It looks like a porn show in a Berlin nightclub.”

The man winced. “What we are seeing, Mister Fish, is the climax of Saint Teresa’s mystical union with Christ. I believe that Bernini is telling us about a spiritual experience of such intensity that it can only be described to the herd, even remotely, by comparison with the sex act.”

Webb said, “You could read what you liked into it.”

The man sighed. “That is the way with much great art. But you disappoint me, sir. I see that you are a superficial man, a child of your time, just another mass-produced product of a technological Reich.”

Webb was trying hard to control his anger. “Was I brought here for this?”

The man’s smile broadened. “That’s the spirit! Actually, you are here because my instructions are to kill you.”

They emerged into the sunshine and walked arm in arm along a noisy, bustling street. Webb, in spite of himself, was glad of the support. The young assassins had vanished. At a small piazza a traffic policeman, dressed in white, stood on a raised pedestal, around which cars flowed like lava. An articulated truck was having difficulty negotiating a corner and the policeman was waving at it furiously.

“This way, cavaliere,” said the elderly man, pointing his ebony stick. “We shall have a beer at Doney’s.”

They turned up into a broad, gently sloping promenade, the Via Veneto. The street was reassuringly busy. Webb let himself be guided to a pavement table under a blue and white-striped awning. A dark young man with long, shiny hair approached. The older man casually placed his stick on the table, its metal tip pointing in Webb’s direction, and ordered a beer. Webb asked for un’aranciata.

A whistle blew, back down the hill. The articulated lorry wasn’t making it round the Piazza Barberini. Further up the Veneto, Webb saw a crop-headed marine with an automatic weapon; he was standing at the main door of the American Embassy, and he looked in a bad mood.

The man sipped at his beer. “I should have asked for a German lager. You are wired up like a cat about to spring, Mister Fish. Do try to relax. You must know that if I had wished it, you would by now be dead.”

“Who are you?”

“I think of myself as a surgeon.”

“I assume you set up the surgery in the Tuscolo woods,” Webb said.

“Overzealous amateurs. One must work with the material to hand.”

A girl in a short, lime-green skirt sat down at a nearby table, facing Webb. She had an uneducated, Sicilian peasant look about her. She scanned the menu without once looking in his direction.

Webb said: “Society has rules.”

Little wrinkles above the lips disapproved. “Mister Fish, you increasingly disappoint me. The rules are for herd control! To obey them, it is enough to have a spinal cord. The free man makes his own rules.” An outburst of car horn blaring came from the piazza down the hill.

The waiter left a little printed bill. Webb waited until he had gone. “Why am I still alive?”

The man sighed. “You remain alive, for the moment, because of my greed. It seems that you are proving troublesome to some people. You seek a manuscript. I have found out where this manuscript is; in fact, I have held it in my hands. My instructions were to liquidate you before you got your hands on it. A simple enough task, for which I was offered a sum of money. I can now access the book whenever I please and well, here you are. As for the sum of money, it was strikingly large. So large that it made me wonder.”

Webb stared at the man in open disgust. “A man died so that you could have spending money? I regret even having to breathe the same air as you.”

“If that is a problem for you, it can easily be remedied.”

“What do you know about this manuscript? How did you know where I was?”

A hand waved casually in the air. “The details escape me.”

“Where does the Father Librarian come into it?”

“A naive fool, sold a plausible story.”

“And your overzealous amateurs?”

“They too were easily manipulated, like all young idealists. Told they were striking a blow for the people, they were eager to believe it.”

Webb sat back. He eyed the man speculatively. “What am I worth?”

The man fingered the ebony stick absent-mindedly. “One million American dollars. And in cash, the only medium of exchange I recognize. Already I have received half.”

Webb sipped at his orange juice. He was beginning to feel nauseous, and found himself taking deep breaths. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Indeed. And the question I have to ask is, where does the value lie? In your death, or in the book? If in the book, then perhaps I now have in my possession something whose true value is, shall we say for the sake of a figure, ten million dollars.”

“I begin to understand.”

“Are you in a position to offer me ten million dollars for it?”

“No,” Webb lied.

The man’s face adopted a disapproving expression. “That is unfortunate, Mister Fish.”

“And I intend to steal the book back from you.”

The man laughed incredulously. “I admire your honesty, if not your sense of self-preservation. How do you propose to do that?”

Webb finished off his drink.

The man continued: “I have seen this book. The how and why need not concern you. I have pored over its pages, every line, every letter. But it has defeated me. In its pages I see no hidden treasure, no secret diamond mines, no plans of invasion. But, Mister Fish, you know something about this manuscript. Something which may allow you to unlock its secret. You may therefore succeed where I have failed.”

“That is possible, given your level of intelligence.”

“It is also possible that you will insult me once too often.”

Webb said, “I think not. Because you’re going to let me walk away from here.”

The man nodded. “It is in my interests to do so. If the value lies in your carcass, I will never see you again. But if it lies in the book, you will risk your life to return for it. I am gambling half a million dollars by letting you walk free against ten million dollars if you come back for it. A reasonable risk to take, is it not?”

“Let me anticipate your proposition. I’ll unlock the secret of the book. In return you will promise to leave me alone and sell or blackmail your paymasters with whatever I come up with.”

“You have a formidable intelligence, young man. That is dangerous. I will have to take great care.”

“No, I’m thick. That’s why I’m in this position. Why don’t you just throw me in a cellar and force me to decipher it?”

“Because you would invent some story even if you found nothing. Only if you return for the book will I know for certain that it truly contains something of greater value even than your life.” The man finished his beer, patting his mouth with a handkerchief. “I doubt if you intend to keep your part of the bargain. When you return, if you do, you will attempt to steal the book.”

“I doubt if you intend to keep your half. Once I’ve given you the information I’m out of bargaining power.”

“Life is a risk, my friend. Consider the one I am taking with my paymasters.”

“May they meet you, one dark night.”

“I will leave you here. You will remain seated for ten minutes, after which you may do as you please. If you attempt to leave before ten minutes have passed, your day will turn into everlasting night.”

“The manuscript?” Webb asked.

“You and it will connect. If you attempt to escape with it you will be killed without warning, and I will settle for the other half million dollars in exchange for your carcass. But enough talk of death, my unworldly friend. Tonight is Natale, a celebration of birth. Why not proceed to the Piazza Navona, where the crowds are already gathering, filled with the joy of Nativity? Find a seat at the Bar Colombo if you can, and enjoy yourself. Be alone and carry nothing electronic.”

“Do something for me,” Webb asked. “It will complete the bargain.”

The man raised his eyebrows.

“Kill the bastards who murdered my companion.”

The man laughed, exposing a row of gold fillings. “You see! Under the veneer we are not so different! I advise you to change your clothes before the police start making connections. And then come to the Colombo within the hour, young man, and find me the hidden message, and live to enjoy your grandchildren.” The man picked up his walking stick and handed a ten thousand-lira note to the waiter, before sauntering down the hill. Near the Barberini, Webb lost him in the crowds.

Webb turned his chair slightly to get a better view of the tables. About nine feet away a silver-haired man, perhaps a banker, was reading Il Giornale. A young man from the north, in Levi’s and a black sweatshirt with Princeton University written across it, was staring openly at the Sicilian girl. She was throwing occasional sly glances at him. Two workmen with vast bellies were sharing a joke. A middle-aged nun was sipping a cappuccino. Their eyes met and she smiled coldly at him.

Surely not the nun?

No, the young man.

An elderly priest came through from the back of the café and the young man rose. They went off, arms linked Italian-style. Webb played with the toothpicks for ten minutes, then got up and headed down the hill, trembling, nauseous, and light-headed with relief. At the piazza, the articulated truck was jammed halfway round the corner, unable to move forwards or back. The street echoed with the blare of car horns and the traffic cop had disappeared.

Before he turned the corner, Webb glanced back up the hill. The banker was folding away his newspaper.

Webb knew the geography of Rome. He had spent six productive months with colleagues from the university, two years — or was it two million years? — ago. Some instinct told him to head for the Trastevere, the territory of noialtri, the people apart, who did not always speak freely to the law. He turned right along the Viale del Tritone, and headed across the city by foot. Once over the Garibaldi Bridge, he quickly lost himself in a maze of narrow streets, avoiding children on mopeds and three-wheeled motofurgoni loaded with big flagons of wine.

In a small square a frutteria lady was setting out her wares for the evening, heaving a massive box of tomatoes on to a table. A white-haired flower lady, an espresso perched on a cobble at her feet, stared with hypnotic fascination at Webb’s beachwear. Through an archway into a busy little square, cluttered with tables where men with wrinkled faces sat nibbling, drinking, watching the world go by. Wonderful smells drifted out of a hosteria.

A woman was sweeping out the doorway of a clothes shop. She buongiorno’d and followed Webb in. He tried the word for “underpants” in three languages and ended up, red-faced, surrounded by a gaggle of women trying to help. Half an hour later he emerged in a neat dark suit, in the style of an Italian businessman. He crossed the square to a tiny little cobbler’s shop. The man looked at Webb’s mass-produced sandals with polite amusement. Webb waited another half hour while the sun set and the cobbler tapped away at a last, a row of little nails projecting from his mouth. When the black leather shoes eventually appeared, they were of fine quality, and a quarter of the price Webb would have paid in Oxford. He had a coffee in a bar, letting the trembling in his body subside, and watched two youths playing a noisy game of pinball. Fifteen minutes later, he exchanged lire for a pile of gettone and fed them into the café’s telephone.

While he waited to connect, he looked at his watch. Walkinshaw had been dead for less than two hours.

And Webb had only ten left.

Casa Pacifica

The President faced Noordhof across the Oval Office desk, gazing at the soldier without a blink. “Let’s hear it again, Colonel,” he said over steepled hands.

“Sir, there is the possibility of a leak.”

“I must be going deaf. For an unbelievable moment I thought you said there was the possibility of a leak.”

“Leclerc is on a marble slab pending disposal,” said Noordhof in an unsteady voice. “He had an accident with a cable car.”

The President raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “He’s your rocket man?”

“Yes, sir. He and Webb, the other European, were supposed to identify Nemesis.”

“So what does this Webb have to say?”

“We can’t find him,” said Noordhof.

The President’s tone was flat. “My hearing’s gone again. Would you repeat, slowly and clearly, what you just said?”

“He’s missing. We’ve lost him.”

Grant pursed his lips and gave the soldier a long, steady stare. He finally said, “Okay, Colonel. Now tell me how you pulled off this amazing feat.”

“Sir, I don’t know how. He’s just disappeared.”

The President let a full minute pass while Noordhof prayed for a great earthquake to swallow him up.

“We lost a strategic H-bomb in Alaska once, a B-43 as I recall,” Grant reminisced. “And it wasn’t inventory shrinkage either. Turned out some Alaskan Command Air Defense guys thought they’d found a way round the Permissive Action Links. They tried to blackmail Uncle Sam with it. Not that the Great Unwashed ever got to hear about that little escapade.”

“What happened, sir?”

“We couldn’t go through the courts with a thing like that, of course. There was an unfortunate air crash. But you, Colonel, you do things on the grand scale; you’re on course to lose the planet. We face annihilation if we don’t find this frigging asteroid and nuclear holocaust if we’re seen looking. And so far you’ve managed to spring a leak and lose half your team in four days. Magnificent.”

A red blush spread over Noordhof’s face. The President turned to the CIA Director. “You got light to throw on this farce, Rich?”

The CIA Director stuffed tobacco into his pipe from an old black pouch on his lap. “Nope.”

“But someone knows about your team,” said the President.

“That’s impossible. These are just accidents,” said Heilbron unconvincingly.

“This is beginning to sound like the last message from the Titanic,” the President said.

“You can’t scare me, Mister President, I’m too old. We’re doing our human best.”

“If that’s your best, I’d hate to see you people on a bad day.”

They drove out of Casa Pacifica in a cramped little Fiat with tinted windows, and joined Interstate Five heading south. The Stars and Stripes fluttered over Pendleton Marine Corps base to the left; to the right, half-naked bodies lay sprawled out on Red Beach or splashed in the Pacific shimmering beyond. Late-afternoon traffic was pouring up from San Diego. The Secret Service man drove carefully, watching the ebb and flow of traffic around him, searching with practised eyes for the anomaly in the pattern, the car which lingered too long, the strangeness in the proportion. But there was only the Buick in the rear mirror, a steady forty yards behind.

“Okay, Colonel, fill me in. What’s the word on your team?” asked Bellarmine, removing his dark glasses.

“We have more on the Leclerc — Webb thing,” said Noordhof. “I’ve had Nicholson from our Rome Embassy nosing around. This is weird, sir, but it seems the story starts in a monastery, in some mountain area south of Rome. It’s run by monks.”

“A monastery run by monks?” Bellarmine asked sarcastically.

“Yes, sir. It seems they have this famous library of old books, called the Helinandus Collection or something. All very securely held, fire-proofed, steel doors, smart electronics and so on. Local rumour has it that they are holding loot which was taken from the Germans at the end of the War, including a lot of books. One of them might be a manuscript written by an Italian called Vincenzo. But it’s just local folklore.”

“Do I know this guy Vincenzo?”

“I doubt it, sir, he’s been dead three hundred and fifty years.”

The Secretary of Defense sounded perplexed. “How does this connect with anything whatsoever?”

“This Webb guy gets it into his head that there’s something in this missing ancient tome that will let him identify Nemesis. Naturally everybody assumes he’s just flipped.”

The driver was looking at something in his rear mirror.

“Well, has he or hasn’t he?”

“That’s the thing, Mister Secretary. We tell the Brits what’s going on, they send out one of their people to nursemaid Webb, and the last thing we hear is that Webb’s minder gets seven rounds from a Beretta 96 pumped into him and is then run over with his own hired car. Now if Webb has been chasing some chimera, how come his minder gets bumped off?”

“Unless he did it himself,” suggested Bellarmine. “What’s the word on him?”

“He’s just disappeared. Nobody knows where he is.”

“And how does that leave the great asteroid hunt?” Bellarmine asked.

A decrepit white car sailed by them, filled with students. A long-haired girl blew a kiss and then the car was past. Bellarmine’s driver blew out his cheeks in relief.

“In chaos.”

The driver slowed down and turned off at a sign saying “Solana Beach”; the Buick followed. He manoeuvred a few turnings and drove along a street with notices on pavements and in windows saying “No Vacancies,” “Real English Beer,” “Debbie’s Delishus Donuts $1.50.” Bellarmine stared out at this other America, at the little holiday groups on the sidewalks eating delishus donuts and wearing kiss-me-quick hats, strange people who were content to stroll aimlessly, without benefit of sharp-eyed protectors or jostling reporters.

Then the driver skimmed past an elderly woman with thick spectacles trying to reverse an orange Beetle, and turned into a quiet row of shabby beach houses. He drove slowly along for fifty yards and pulled to a stop at one of them. The street was absolutely quiet. No signs of life came from within the house. Heavy lace curtains hid its interior. A window shutter was dangling half off; the next storm would finish it. The driver frowned.

“Stay put, sir. That’s an order.” In the driving mirror, he watched the manoeuvrings of the orange Beetle. It eventually kangaroo’d off round the corner. “Okay, sir. Let me check out the house.”

“Clem, it’s okay. You’re strung up like a violin string,” said Bellarmine.

“Sir, this is irregular. I’d be a lot happier if one of us checked it out.” Clem saw waiting assassins, Bellarmine dying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk, terrifying congressional inquisitions.

“Forget it. Come for me in a couple of hours. And cheer up, man. If the golfball buzzes you know where I am.”

The cars drove off and Bellarmine waved Noordhof on into the house. The Secretary of Defense stood on the sidewalk, alone. He felt a strange exhilaration. The second most powerful man in the world had an overwhelming but unfulfillable urge: to go for a stroll.

Bellarmine walked up the concrete driveway and round the side of the house. There was a dirty white side door, half open, facing into a small hallway, cluttered with buckets, sacks of dog meal, logs and boots. A deep-throated baying came from within the house. A voice shouted “In here, Mister Secretary.” Bellarmine, who hated all dogs, stepped into the untidy hallway. A door opened and he froze with fear as the Hound of the Baskervilles rushed for him, baying excitedly.

“Get down, Lift-off! Welcome to my beach house, sir. I’m fixing us up with a royal concubine.”

Solana Beach

Bellarmine followed the ponytailed scientist along the corridor and through slatted swing doors. The kitchen was brightly lit, surgically clean and chaotic. Rows of gleaming sharp knives dangled from hooks on a wall. On a worktop next to a large stove was a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a supermarket chicken and a clutter of spices and unopened bottles of wine and liquor. A small balding man of about fifty, wearing an apron which made him look like a big Martini bottle, was chopping spring onions. His movements were slow and deliberate, as if the process was unfamiliar to him.

“Do you guys know each other?” asked Shafer, disappearing through another set of swing doors. The Director of NASA put down the vegetable knife, wiped his hands on the apron and shook hands with the Secretary of Defense. Bellarmine nodded; the NASA Director said I guess we sing for our supper here and Bellarmine said he’d do a fan dance if it got him answers. Then a voice from next door shouted “Help yourself to a drink!” Bellarmine poured two large sherries, emptied one and filled it up again.

Shafer reappeared with a wodge of papers stapled together. There was a knock at the door and the Great Dane started a deep-throated baying. Sacheverell walked into the kitchen. “Get down, you slobbering idiot!” Shafer yelled.

“Nice friendly dog, Shafer,” said Sacheverell, while it eyed him, growling, from under the swing doors.

“Yeah,” said Bellarmine. “Makes for a nice secure house. Anyways, the media think I’m on vacation at Nixon’s old place. Right. I’m here for a briefing. Get started.”

Shafer said, “Jim, drop that for now. Let’s go next door.”

Next door was a large living room. One wall was taken up by a long blackboard covered with equations. At the far end of the room a bay window looked out over the sea. Books and papers were scattered over wicker chairs, television, computer, couch, floor.

Bellarmine made his way through the clutter to the big bay window. The floor creaked and SecDef felt it give a little. On the beach below, a few girls sat topless, drinking wine and chattering. A hundred yards out at sea some young men were skilfully balancing on surfboards while big Pacific waves rolled under them and broke up hissing on the sand, or hit an outcrop of rock over to the right with a Whump! and an explosion of spray. Shafer appeared through the swing doors with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Sir, come back from the window. We had a landslip and you’re overhanging the cliff. We’re propped up by timbers, but I don’t know how long my beach house has got before it slides into the sea.”

Bellarmine turned from the window and shared a couch with a clutter of journals and books. The others settled down on casual chairs, except for McNally, who shared a cushion with the Great Dane in front of a wood fire.

The Secretary of Defense spoke slowly and clearly, as if to make sure his words were fully assimilated. “In just over ten hours’ time I report to an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council. The President, the Chiefs of Staff, myself and others may take certain decisions on the basis of information given me here. I need three things from you people. First, do you confirm the damage estimates given us by Sacheverell? Some of us had difficulty taking his stuff on board. Second, have you come up with some means of nullifying this threat? Third, have you found this asteroid? Now, Colonel, what exactly has your team delivered? What about the simulations Sacheverell here showed us? Is he serious?”

Shafer, standing at the swing doors, poured himself a whisky. “They sent me your little cartoons, Herb, and I’ve done a few runs of my own. Of course we don’t know what they’ve posted us but I’ve guessed we’re in the hundred-thousand-megaton ballpark, give or take. I broadly agree with your calculations. If and when Nemesis hits, America will be incinerated.”

Bellarmine looked blankly at the Nobel physicist.

“You missed out on a few little details,” Shafer continued. “Nuclear reactors scattered over the countryside, petro-chemical smog from burning oil, coal deposits set on fire for a few centuries, stuff like that. And you weren’t quite right on the fireball. It’s primarily the blanket of fire spreading over the top of the atmosphere that will set us alight down below: Ernst Öpik saw that way back in the fifties. Another little oversight, Herb, was the counterflow, the air rushing to fill the vacuum left by the rising fireball. Still, since we’re all dead by then, I don’t suppose we care.”

Bellarmine pointed dumbly at the Jack Daniel’s. Shafer crossed the room with the bottle and filled his glass, continuing the critique as he did. “And I guess you used a pretty coarse grid for your ocean simulations, Herb. It’s not just the tsunami you have to worry about. It’s the plume of water thrown forty miles into the air, and the superheated steam shooting around. The sea bed would crack open and you’d get a rain of molten boulders thrown for one or two thousand miles. God knows what would happen to coastal areas. In your San Diego scenario people would have broiled before they drowned. And if you’d used an ocean-wide grid you’d have found that the coastal areas don’t get hit by one wave. They get hit by a succession, at more or less fifty-minute intervals. You’d replace seaboard cities by mudflats.”

“Okay,” said Bellarmine, “I believe you. If it hits we’re finished. Now the sixty-four thousand-dollar question and I want to hear a good answer. Colonel, have you found Nemesis?”

Noordhof said, “No, sir.”

There was a heavy silence.

Noordhof broke it. “Mister Secretary, you gave us five days. It’s unreasonable. And we have almost no chance of picking it up by telescope until collision is imminent. We’re down to Webb.”

“Forget it,” said Sacheverell, sounding peeved.

Shafer said, “Look, we’re not even sure of the major types of hazard. We just don’t know what’s out there. The British school think that fireball showers or dark Halleys or giant comets are an even bigger risk than your Nemesis-type asteroids.”

“Unmitigated crap,” declared Sacheverell.

“So what now?” Bellarmine asked.

The Nobel physicist moved some books and sat down on a wicker chair. “Another drink, I guess.”

There was a knock and the sound of footsteps. Shafer roared at the Great Dane, and disappeared through the swing doors. Someone was saying “Oh Jerusalem! City of Joy! I made it!” Judy Whaler walked into the room.

“You’re five minutes late, Judy. Mister Secretary, may I present our nuclear weapons expert?” Bellarmine nodded.

“Carburettor trouble,” Whaler explained, sinking into a wicker chair. “Kenneth’s looking after the shop but I have bad news about that. The forecast for tonight is thickening cirrus over southern Arizona.”

Bellarmine’s voice was grim. “Let me be clear about this. Are you saying the Nemesis search is over?”

“The telescopic search, yes. We won’t make your midnight deadline, Mister Secretary.”

There was a silence as they absorbed Judy’s words.

“You heard about the Rome thing?” Noordhof asked, thrusting a large Jack Daniel’s into her hands.

She nodded and took a big gulp. “Kenneth told me. First André and now Ollie.”

Noordhof said, “We don’t know what’s going on over there.”

“Where does this Webb’s ancient manuscript come in?” Bellarmine wanted to know.

The Colonel answered, “It’s gone missing, which drew Ollie’s attention to it in the first place. His idea was that if you had an observation hundreds of years old it would give you a long time base and a very accurate orbit, which is what the Russians would need to target the asteroid. If there really is a moving star recorded in the book, we could use it to work out which asteroid it refers to, and so identify Nemesis.”

Sacheverell said, “Mister Secretary, it’s a fantasy thing. We can forget it. Webb should never have been on the team.”

Shafer shook his head. “I disagree. The Italian business suggests that Ollie is on to something.”

The Colonel asked, “With only ten hours left to identify Nemesis, and Arizona clouded over, we’re just about finished. Can’t you give us more time?”

“No. Because every day carries the risk that Nemesis will hit before we’ve had time to take appropriate action. Because the longer we delay the greater the risk that Zhirinovsky learns that we know about Nemesis and decides to pre-empt any punch we might want to deliver. Because no matter what time you’re given you’ll always want more. The NSC want answers by midnight tonight. Your failure to deliver does not buy you more time.”

Shafer poured Bellarmine his fourth drink of the evening. “And nullifying the threat?” SecDef asked. “Say you magically identify it in the next few hours? Presumably you hit it with the Bomb?”

“We got those coming out of our ears,” said Noordhof.

“If my experience as Secretary of Defense has taught me anything, it’s this. There is no problem that can’t be solved with the use of enough high explosive.”

Noordhof said, “Sir, we need to know what we’re targeting. The Bomb is no good if we create a shower of fragments or a big dust ball heading for us.”

“I think I’ve found the solution to that,” said Judy, her voice betraying satisfaction. She put down her drink and walked over to the blackboard. She drew a string of dots joined by a straight line. Next to it she depicted an irregular shape with an arrow pointing towards the line. “We make a necklace from small atomic bombs, maybe neutron bombs. We fire the probe at Nemesis, as nearly head-on as we can. As the probe approaches it shoots off little neutron bombs in such a way that they’re strung out in a line. The line cuts in front of Nemesis like so, and we set the bombs off in sequence, each one bursting just as it reaches the asteroid, say a kilometre or two above its surface.”

“Nemesis has to run through a bomb alley,” said Shafer.

“Yes. They’re just toys, each one no more than a dozen Hiroshimas, so that each one gives a gentle push to Nemesis, not enough to break it up even if it’s made of snow. But the cumulative effect is a big push, the same as if we’d given the asteroid a single hefty punch. We’re going to explode the bombs directly in front of Nemesis, to brake its forward motion so as to let the Earth get past before the asteroid reaches our orbit. That’s more energy-efficient than a sideways deflection.”

McNally said, “In the frame of reference of Nemesis it’s just peacefully coasting along and suddenly bombs appear out of space and start exploding in its face. It’s simple.”

“All truly brilliant ideas are simple,” Shafer asserted. “And we can space the neutron bombs thousands of kilometres apart so they don’t interfere with each other.”

“Simple in principle but extremely difficult in practice,” she said. “I have a detailed design study under way at Sandia. One way or another, we’ll have something workable within the hundred-day guideline.”

Bellarmine clapped his hands together in satisfaction. “Well done, Doctor Whaler. McNally, what you have to do is deliver her atomic necklace. What do you have to say about that?”

It was McNally’s turn to use the blackboard. “Willy and I have identified a route. It’s extremely difficult.” He scribbled on the board with yellow chalk. “The Russians are due to launch a comet probe built by the French. It’s called the Vesta. We thought if we could get hold of it without arousing suspicion…”

“McNally, the Reds must have their antennae at full stretch. What in Christ’s name do you suppose they’ll think if we grab this probe from them?”

“Mister Secretary, we think we’ve found a way. The French have built a duplicate, for electronics testing and the like. We often do the same. It’s not up to full specification but it might do for the purpose. If we could get our hands on this duplicate probe along with the detailed plans we might configure it to deliver Judy’s necklace. We’ll need to bring over the French engineers under an oath of secrecy.”

“But Vesta is too heavy for anything but the Soviet booster,” objected Sacheverell.

“That was for a long interplanetary trip, soft landing on several comets as it went. Most of that weight is in the fuel tanks and the metal darts for penetrating surfaces. We’re going to strip all of that out along with the scientific instrumentation. We’ll use four Shuttles in two pairs, two carrying Judy’s atomic necklace and two carrying Vesta duplicates, the French one, and one we’ll knock up ourselves from their plans. Or we might use one Shuttle four times. We’ll have specialists on board to mate the necklace with its Vesta clone. Then we’ll launch from 200 miles up with inertial upper stages like the one we used for Galileo. It’s just about possible to get a dozen of Judy’s bombs up that way. But we’re talking very smart system development, navigational equipment and so on. We’re cannibalizing existing systems all the way. I have teams on it now. We might — I say might — do it inside the magic one hundred days.”

“I’ll ask the CIA Director to come up with some cover story for your launches,” Bellarmine promised.

“Point him in the direction of Venus probes,” suggested Shafer.

The SecDef put his glass on the floor and wandered back to the bay window, picking his way over books. A gust of young laughter came up from below. Someone was tuning up a guitar and a bonfire was getting started, pieces of drift-wood being thrown on to the flames, and faces flickering red around it. Someone had lit a cigarette and it was being passed around after each puff. Kids these days, Bellarmine thought.

Shafer said, “I hope you’re not too hungry, Mister Secretary. Royal Concubine takes an hour to prepare.”

Bellarmine came back, flopped on to the couch and leaned forward, resting his chin heavily on his hands. He said: “The sharp end is that we haven’t found Nemesis.”

The telephone rang. Shafer picked it up and said “Ollie!” The effect was like pulling the pin of a hand grenade. Everyone rose to their feet. The Great Dane, sensing atmosphere, leaped up.

The conversation was one-sided and carried on for some minutes, Shafer interspersing the occasional grunt. Finally he said, “Hold the line, Ollie.”

“What’s going on, Willy?” asked Noordhof.

Shafer spoke rapidly, his hand over the mouthpiece. “Webb’s phoning from a public box in the boondocks. Some guy was paid to bump him off. This hit man has the manuscript. He works out that it must have something valuable in it but can’t see what. So he makes a pact with Ollie. He lets Ollie go to see if he’ll come back for the book. If Ollie does, thereby risking his life, that proves to the killer that the manuscript is worth more than the contract price on Webb. The deal is that Ollie agrees to decipher the manuscript and the hit man then lets him go. The guy figures he can then sell the manuscript to his paymasters or blackmail them with its secret message.”

Bellarmine was aghast. “This is a highly dangerous situation.”

McNally said, “Ollie hasn’t a hope.”

Shafer’s hand was still over the mouthpiece. “He can kill Webb when he’s got the information out of him, collect his blood money and then proceed to the blackmail. Ollie knows this but he still has to go for the manuscript in the hope of getting away with it.”

Judy was looking agitated. “He’s going straight to his death. Tell him to pull out.”

Noordhof took the telephone from Shafer. “Webb. You have to make contact with the killer… use your initiative… of course he expects you to try… look, there’s no other way… Mister, get this: you have no choice in the matter.”

Bellarmine took a turn. “Webb, this is the Secretary of Defense. I’ll give it to you straight. The White House requires the identification of Nemesis within ten hours, failing which we shall proceed on the assumption that Nemesis will not be identified before impact.”

Bellarmine listened some more. His mouth opened in astonishment, and he turned, aghast. “He’s thinking of pulling out.”

“I’ll fix the yellow bastard,” said Noordhof angrily, but Shafer grabbed the soldier roughly by the arm and hauled him back.

The physicist took the phone again. “Hi Ollie. Yes we have the picture here… that was a brilliant insight… I warned you: what did your Uncle Willy say about getting a new idea?… Listen, we have a problem here, in the form of high cirrus. It’s beginning to creep in over Southern Arizona… two magnitudes, five, who knows?… it’ll slow us to a crawl… yes, I agree… it’s down to you, Ollie, you must follow through on your insight… yes, he means it… he won’t say… my interpretation is that you have ten hours and then they feel free to nuke Russia… I don’t know, two hundred million or something… you and I know that, Ollie, but what do politicians know?… they couldn’t handle the concept… they like certainties… sure, none of us asked for it… ” Light sweat was beginning to form on Shafer’s brow. Judy poured him half a tumbler of Scotch. There was more conversation, then “Ollie says that as a British citizen he needs to get his instructions direct from HMG.”

Noordhof nodded his head fiercely. “Yes! Tell him I’ll fix it. And tell him I’ll see what help we can give at the European end.”

Bellarmine said, “No, no, no. Webb must be seen to act alone.”

Shafer spoke quietly into the telephone, and then replaced the receiver. He looked round the group. His eyes half-closed with relief and he exhaled. “He’s going through with it. Judy, I know how you feel but look what’s at stake.”

“He must be helped,” Judy insisted.

Shafer looked at the Secretary of Defense with raised eyebrows. Bellarmine looked grim. He said, “If covert American action is spotted by the Russians…”

“But if Oliver fails…”

Poetry unexpectedly entered McNally’s soul. “We’re stuck between the Devil and the deep blue sea.”

“We’re clouding over,” Judy reminded them. “And Hawaii’s out of it. Ollie’s our only hope and he surely has no chance on his own.”

“He meets the hit man in a couple of hours,” said Shafer.

“Oh boy. Do we know where?” Noordhof asked. Shafer shook his head.

The soldier raised his hands helplessly. “So what the hell can we do?”

The Abruzzi Hills

Webb, feeling like a rag doll, drifted with the crowds.

It was now dark. He crossed the bridge and walked in the general direction of the Piazza Navona. He made a determined decision to relax and enjoy his last hour, and came close to succeeding. The air was caressingly warm; the smells wafting out of coffee shops and trattorie were exquisite; and the ladies, it seemed to him, were exotically beautiful.

He wandered randomly along a cobbled side-street and into a little church. There was a Nativity scene, with little hand-painted donkeys and people. The straw in the stable was real which made the stalks about forty feet tall on the scale of the figures. It was simple stuff, a childlike thing in a complex world. Someone had put a lot of love into it. It brought him close to tears, and he didn’t know why. Webb the sceptic, the rational man of science, sat quietly on a pew for half an hour and, unaccountably, left feeling strangely the better.

He passed by the Navona and walked along to the Spanish Steps. The throng was nearly impenetrable. Italian chatter filled the air. Kilted shepherds were on the steps, playing some sort of thin, reed-like bagpipes.

Time to move. Webb started to push his way through the crowd.

A tap on the shoulder. “Taxi, signore.” A dark-skinned man with an earring.

Nice one, Webb thought. A precaution in case surveillance had been set up for him in the Piazza Navona. He realized that he must have been followed from the moment he left Doney’s Bar.

Webb followed the taxi driver away from the piazza along the Via Condotti. A red carpet stretched the length of the street. There was a sprinkling of couples, and families with tired children, and ebullient groups of youths. A yellow taxi was waiting at the end of the lane and the driver opened the rear door for him.

The taxi sped through town, heading south past the floodlit Colosseum. Webb assumed he would be heading for some suburban flat but the driver was speeding past tall tenements and heading for the ring road, out of town. The astronomer didn’t attempt conversation; the night would unfold as it would.

The driver turned on to the ring road and off it again in a few minutes. He slowed down as they approached a lampadari, a two-storeyed glass building filled with lamp-shades of every conceivable style, every one switched on, and forming an oasis of blazing light in the darkness. The driver took the taxi at walking pace round to the back of the building, the car lurching over rough pot-holed ground. A dark saloon car was waiting, and a short, tubby man was leaning against it with a cigarette in his mouth. Webb got out, and the man ground his cigarette under foot.

“Piacere,” said the man, shaking Webb’s hand. He led Webb to the saloon and politely opened the back door. The taxi driver reversed and drove off the way he had come, while the new driver took off with Webb, still heading south. The road was straight but the surface was poor. There were bonfires at intervals along the side of the road, and shadowy figures flickering around them, and parked cars. Fields lay beyond, in darkness.

They stopped briefly at an autostrada toll. A policeman was chatting to the toll official. Webb could have touched his gun. The driver collected a ticket and then they were off again. They passed under a large illuminated sign saying “Napoli 150km.” The tubby driver held out a packet of Camel cigarettes over his shoulder. Webb declined. They passed villages atop hills, lights blazing, looking like ocean liners suspended in the sky. Over to the left Webb could make out a spine of mountains; these would be the Abruzzi, whence came the shepherds and the werewolves. They drove swiftly along the autostrada for about half an hour, far from Rome, heading south.

A green illuminated sign in the distance resolved itself into a sign saying “Genzano,” and the driver went down through the gears and turned off. A solitary, weary official at the toll took a note from the driver and then they were winding along a narrow country road, heading towards the hills.

The road started to climb, steeply. The driver went down into second, the transmission whining briefly. They passed between houses in darkness, along a cobbled street little wider than the car. Then the car was through the village and still climbing steeply, its headlights at times pointing into the sky.

The road turned left and there were poplars on either side. Left again, through a wide gateway, and the sound of tyres rolling over loose stones. The driver stepped out, slamming the door. Webb could make out the outline of a villa. There were low, rapid voices. Then footsteps approached the car and stopped. The driver opened the door, grinning.

“Ivrea, Pascolo. Please to come with me, professore.”

In the near pitch-black, Webb followed the sound of the driver’s footsteps. There was a smell of honeysuckle. As his eyes adapted he began to make out a two-storeyed villa. It looked as if it might have a dozen rooms. There was a garden on three sides, two or three acres of lawn dotted with low bushes. A little spray of water arced into the sky from a fountain, sparkling in moonlight. Behind him were poplars and beyond that the stony slopes of a mountain: as far as Webb could tell in the dark, they were maybe a thousand feet from the summit. The fourth side of the little estate was bounded by a low wall with stone urns along it. Beyond the wall was a black sky, ablaze with the winter constellations, every one an old friend.

“This house is so isolated that not even thieves come here. Okay?”

“I get the message.”

Suddenly floodlights illuminated the grounds, dazzling him. Two dark shapes bounded round from the back of the villa. They looked like small, swift ponies except that they turned out to be large, swift alsatians. They leaped playfully up on Pascolo who, Webb thought, should have gone down like a skittle by the laws of Newtonian mechanics.

“Ciao, Adolfo, come stai?” Ivrea cried, pulling at their ears. “Ed anche tu, Benito! and now, professore, I take you to my aunt. Basta, ragazzi! She is a grand woman. You stay here with us.” The dogs were bounding excitedly around Webb now, and beginning to snarl. Pascolo roared at them and they fell away obediently.

She was waiting for them at the main door, in a flood of light. She was tall, dressed in the traditional black, with bright, alert eyes set in a deeply wrinkled face. She smiled courteously and raised her hand in the fascist salute. “Buon Natale,” she said in a firm voice. Educated Florentine accent, Webb thought, not the coarse peasant dialect of Pascolo Ivrea.

“Ah, Merry Christmas. How do you do?” Webb replied in his best Italian. “You are very kind to let me come here,” he added, as if he had a choice.

The woman smiled. “The English are good people. Pascolo, the dogs, must I teach you manners? Now, professor, please let me show you my home.”

Mussolini was a good man. Il Duce stared at Webb from every square foot of the hallway. Old photographs showed him looking noble, looking thoughtful, looking inspirational. Here he was, the great horseman, the great poet, the bluff countryman. Il Duce and her father went back to childhood. Papa had looked after the countryside for the fascisti and the Leader. Everyone was with him. In the good times Benito would come here to relax, when he had to get away from the plotters and the schemers in Rome.

And here am I with Papa, the old lady said with quiet pride, pointing to a slim, attractive teenage girl standing beside a horse and a tall thin man with riding crop and boots. Next to them was a relaxed and smiling Mussolini, looking quite human, Webb thought, when he wasn’t posturing. Benito, Papa used to say, whatever happens anywhere else, do not worry about here. Here in the hills the people are with you; they understand you. That was before the traitors and the partisans, of course.

Of course, Webb said.

Then there were the slippers of some pope in a glass case, more faded pictures of Mussolini looking noble, a brick from some holy place, and a tiny private chapel, candles freshly lit. Then the old lady excused herself, disappearing along a corridor, and Pascolo explained that he would be taking her to her beach house at Terracina in the morning but please to follow me, professore.

Webb followed Pascolo up marble stairs to a landing. The man opened a solid oak door. The room was large, plain and comfortable. It had a double bed, a chest of drawers and a large desk, and a shower room led off. The desk came with an Anglepoise lamp, a pile of paper and a couple of pens, but not, a quick scan revealed, with Phaenomenis Novae. French windows led out to a broad balcony.

“Va bene?” Pascolo asked.

“First class, Pascolo. Do you leave early tomorrow?”

“Si.”

“Do you have something for me?” Webb kept his voice casual.

There was no hesitation. “Sure, professore. I go with my aunt now to collect it.”

At least, Webb thought, he could contemplate the business of escape. Webb wandered round the big empty mausoleum. A Christmas tree about nine feet tall, decorated with illuminated bells, looked lost in the big sitting room. There was no telephone. He went out to the grounds. Adolfo and Benito leapt around playfully enough and then chased each other around the house. Over the low balustrade the ground swept down for about three thousand feet to a plain which stretched into the haze. Webb thought he could see a thin glimmering strip on the horizon, like the sea reflecting moonlight, maybe fifty miles away. He could see that the village was dominated by a cathedral, lit up for Christmas.

The motorway, the one along which Webb had been taken, was the autostrada del sole connecting Rome and Naples. Lights were drifting up and down it. He reckoned he was about fifty miles south of Rome, probably north of Cassino, south of Frosinone. That put him high in the Abruzzi Hills. Down on the autostrada, modern Italy flowed briskly past; up here, they ticked off the calendar in centuries.

He went out the main gate and set off down the hill. The village seemed deserted. He passed a big white building, like a cantina, which had open ground in front of it and wooden benches and chairs laid out, damp with dew. He walked down the narrow, steep street. Wizened faces looked out of windows. Conversations stopped as he approached and started up again as he passed.

The cathedral was a masterpiece of frescos. Its high altar was a blaze of candles. It was also empty. Webb went back up the street.

“Il padre?” he called up to an ancient hag, wrinkled and nearly toothless. There was a voice from the back of the room, and an outburst of gabbling from other houses. Then a stream of something incomprehensible was aimed at Webb from several directions at once. He heard “solo domenica” a few times.

He tried “Servizio postale?” There was an outburst of cackling; he’d said something funny. Someone told him to collect it at Genzano. More faces were appearing at windows.

Webb had one last shot, a throwaway to which he already knew the answer: “È un telefono qui?”

More merriment. The Man from Mars was proving an endless source of fun.

In an hour the dogs started barking and a small, blue, rusty Fiat turned into the drive and disgorged Pascolo, a little fat wife and an amazing brood of children. The children swirled around the house, teased the dogs and threw things over the garden wall and into the fountain.

Dinner in the big kitchen seemed to make no allowance for Christmas. It was an affair of huge steaming pots, huge plates of spaghetti al sugo, huge tumblers of cold white wine and tiny humans leaping off in random directions without warning. Pascolo’s wife smiled and nodded and chattered away in some thick dialect of which Webb caught about one word in ten. They told him the wine came from his fascist aunt’s vineyards and he declared it to be superb which explained why he was drinking so much. After dessert — a massive, cream-covered treacle tart — Pascolo vanished.

Webb, his nails unconsciously digging into the table-cover, waited for the manuscript. After twenty minutes he gave up and plodded up to his room. He kicked a chair in frustration and flopped on to the hard mattress. Pascolo had radiated simple honesty for the entire evening, giving nothing away — maybe because he had nothing to give.

There was a knock at the door. Webb stood up apprehensively, dreading the appearance of Walkinshaw’s killers. But it was only the old lady. In her hand was a small red leather book. Webb sensed that she wanted to talk; he indicated a chair and sat on the edge of the bed.

“You are a scholar. You study history.”

“That is so.”

“How did you learn that I have the book?”

Webb tried a lie. “The Father Apiarist.”

She smiled with pleasure. “Ebbene! At last Franco has spoken. That was a bad night.”

“A bad night?”

Her eyes seemed to look beyond Webb. “Many terrible things were done, all those years ago. You are sure that he did explain?”

“Yes, but not in detail. Perhaps you could tell me more.”

As she began to pour out her story, he sensed that it was something she had bottled up for years, that a ghost was being laid to rest. He listened attentively. “My brother was a partisan. His father disowned him and so this house has come to me. It happened in 1944. The Allies had moved inland from Anzio and already they were shelling Grottaferrata. Kesselring had summoned forces out of nothing and the battle was a hard one. But by May the Germans were streaming north. And then we heard that they had filled a train with munitions and guns, but also with wine and sacred relics from the Monastery. This was too much. Our own former Allies robbing us as they fled. And then God created for us a miracle. The train with the holy relics and the wine and the guns was stopped at a tunnel. One of their big guns was too wide to go through. For the first time the fascisti and the partisans joined forces. In the dark we attacked. We killed Germans.

“And then was the great tragedy. While the Germans were still being killed, and we were quickly unloading the wagons, we started to fight amongst ourselves. In the dark I ran away along the railway track, with my arms full of whatever I had snatched. But then two partisans jumped out from the ditch of the embankment. They had machine guns. They raised them to shoot me. The air was full of noise and smoke. In the half dark I recognized my brother and he recognized me. There was only a second to act. He turned his gun on his friend, a boy from the same village. He killed his friend to save me, his sister and enemy. We did not say a word. I ran into the dark.

“We have never spoken of this. As to what I had rescued from the train, it was worth little. Communion wine, silver cups, candlesticks, and a few old books. I never dared to return them.”

She smiled. “I am glad that Franco has decided to speak at last. He must believe that after all this time the boy’s family will forgive him.”

A small boy appeared at the door, followed by his even smaller, dark-eyed sister, finger in mouth. The old lady continued: “Your colleague tells me that you will need peace and quiet to study the book. The children are excited by Natale, but will be in bed soon. Non sul letto, Ghigo, tu sei senza cervello?” The children ran off giggling. She stood up.

“I’m very grateful to you, Signora. I wish you good night and every happiness.”

Webb opened the French windows. He was light-headed from a mixture of relief and exhaustion. A cool breeze flowed into the room, bringing some sub-tropical scent with it. Car headlights were drifting up and down the distant autostrada. Some animal cry came up from the olive groves below, and he could hear the wind rustling through the poplars at the side of the villa.

He had the book.

He looked at the ancient leather cover. Faded gold lettering said Phaenomenis Novae. Underneath was printed Tomo III.

It was old and faded. It had a musty smell. On the flyleaf was a date, 1643, and a neatly written dedication in Italian

To the Most Illustrious, Esteemed and Generous Leopoldo, Granduca di Toscana

And below that, the name of the author, Father Vincenzo of the Order of Preachers.

Across the top of the flyleaf someone had written cremandum fore in a thin, neat hand, then scored out the cremandum and replaced it with prohibendum.

Webb flicked through the pages.

It was more of an astronomer’s working notebook than a manuscript. There was page after page of a faded spidery scrawl in Latin and Italian, page after page of drawings — the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, lunar craters — hot off the eyepiece of Vincenzo’s telescope. The bold new frontier of science, of nearly four centuries ago.

The key to Nemesis, in his hands.

So run off into the dark night?

Pascolo: mine host, or a jailer?

The dogs: friendly, or killers on a snap of the fingers from Pascolo?

Webb looked at his watch. 10 p.m. Two in the afternoon in Arizona, 4 p.m. in Washington.

Eight hours.

A twinge of pain in the jaw warned Webb that he had been unconsciously clenching it. His hands trembling, he picked up the typescript and began to read.

Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto

A hundred pages. Drawings, charts, notes. Written in a scrawl both flowery and spidery, the ink little faded after four hundred years. Webb had no way of guessing what the Grand Duke had thought of Vincenzo’s work, if indeed he had ever set eyes on it.

The apparent lack of supervision had to be an illusion: somewhere, a mechanism for control was in place. But the identification of the crucial text was going to take the same length of time wherever he was, and at least here he wasn’t fleeing over mountains and could study Phaenomenis. Webb looked at his watch. He would give himself until midnight, and then make his break.

Resisting the urge to rush at it, he started slowly and methodically through the pages of Phaenomenis. It took him half an hour.

Nothing.

He rubbed his eyes and slipped quietly down the darkened stairs to the kitchen. Childish sleeping noises came from one of the rooms as he passed. He found the light switch and went into the big kitchen. He made himself a sandwich with salami and a rosetta, and tiptoed back up to his room with it. Of jailers or dogs, there had been not a sign.

Back in his room, Webb went through it again, a line at a time.

He was beginning to see a problem with Vincenzo: there was nothing Novae about his Phaenomenis. He had always come second. Sunspots, craters on the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter: they were all there, but they had all been seen earlier by somebody else. Galileo, Huygens, Schroter — these were the sharp men of the new age, and they had all been there before him. Vincenzo had tried; but at the end of the day, he was a failure.

And still nothing.

Webb started on it a third time.

Line one: Observationes an 1613.

Line two: oriens Januarius occidens

The remaining page was taken up by a simple drawing:

The page was completed by a couple of lines at its foot:

Die 2, h.12 a meridie. 1 et 3 conjuncti fuerunt secundum longitudinem.

So. On 2nd January 1613, at midnight, Jupiter had satellites 4 and 2 (that would be Callisto and Europa) on its left, with 1 and 3 (Io and Ganymede) to the right. Io and Ganymede had then changed places in the early hours of the third.

All of which could be worked out in minutes on a modern computer.

He nibbled at his sandwich; it was painfully spicy. Every page was turning out much the same as the last. None of them connected with hysterically screaming terrorists and determined killers, let alone Nemesis.

Webb took another break; he was beginning to have a problem with keeping his eyes open.

He put out the lamp and walked on to the verandah. A half-moon hung low in the sky, and the fields and hills glowed a gentle silver. Far to the north the horizon was tinged with orange; that would be Rome and the villages of the Castelli, and the towns scattered over the Campagna. He took five minutes to breathe in the honeysuckled air.

A solitary car was hurtling down the autostrada. Probably, someone heading back for a long weekend with his family in Naples or Palermo, escaping from a car factory in Turin or Milan where the young men of the mezzogiorno went to make big money. He went back in, switched on the lamp, and started on his third read of the book.

Charta 40.

Fixa A distabat a Jove 23 semidiametres: in eadem linea sequebatur alia fixa B, quae etiam precedenti horam observata fuit.

Something.

Webb stared dully at Vincenzo’s scrawl.

Take it slow.

A star had moved. Vincenzo had shown it in position A, whereas in the previous hour it had been in position B.

By now Webb had looked at this drawing several times. Jupiter, the orbiting planet, is a moving target seen from Earth, itself an even faster-moving platform. The giant planet therefore drifts against the stellar background. Centre a telescope on Jupiter, and any nearby star will seem to drift past it from one night to the next, reflecting mainly the Earth’s motion.

But that rate of drift was maybe one degree a day. On the scale of Vincenzo’s drawing, this star had moved about ten Jupiter diameters. Vincenzo would probably have been looking at Jupiter near opposition, when the disc of the planet was not quite resolvable by eye, maybe fifty seconds of arc. The star had therefore moved five hundred seconds of arc, or eight minutes of arc, or about one eighth of a degree, in the course of an hour. Three degrees a day.

This star was moving.

A moving star, seen in a small telescope nearly four hundred years ago.

An asteroid, tumbling past the Earth.

Through his exhaustion, Webb smiled. Nice one, Vincenzo.

And good evening, Nemesis.

Martini, Bianca, Giselle and Claudia

Webb looked at his watch through unfocused eyes.

Half an hour to midnight. At midnight, Bellarmine’s “aggressive posture” would come into play, a stance based on the working assumption that America was destined for annihilation. But that was midnight in Washington: to get there, the meridian had to cross the Atlantic, a journey taking six hours.

Six hours and thirty minutes to get out of this time warp, away from medieval Italy, back to the real world with real people, and computers and telephones; and then identify Nemesis from Vincenzo’s little sketch, and make the vital call.

Six and a half hours, six of them drawing on the curvature of the Earth.

He put the book securely in his inside pocket and fastened the little button. He crossed to the bedroom door and opened it quietly. Harsh light flooded on to the stairwell. There might have been a faint scuffle downstairs, like a dog turning on its side: probably from the kitchen. The smell of the evening’s spaghetti sauce met him faintly as he passed. A dog’s head in outline rose under the kitchen table, ears raised in silent curiosity: Benito. The Führer would be around.

Quietly, Webb opened the main door and then he was out, on a warm starry night, with a ten-million-dollar manuscript.

There has to be a catch.

The light from Webb’s bedroom illuminated the grounds as far as the wall. The half-moon was rising, and there were dark, still shadows which might contain anything. He stood next to the fountain, listening to it tinkling down and holding his face up to the delicate spray. Then he strolled round towards the back of the house. To Webb’s taut nerves, his footsteps were jackboots on gravel, crashing through the still of the night. He reached the wall and leaned on it, looking out over the valley. The stone was cold on his hands, the countryside asleep. The fields were dark too, and filled with gnarled old witches frozen in grotesque shapes: olive trees, barely visible in the dark. And beyond was a black mass, the cathedral, a still giant lowering over a jumble of shadows.

Just getting some fresh air.

He lay on the wall, put a leg over and rolled. It was an alarming drop and he hit the earth with a solid thump, then rolled some more into a perfumed bush. He jumped up, gasping, and ran into the dark, keeping low against the wall. The wall curved away and there were twenty yards of open field to the road.

The road was too open. He changed his mind in mid-flight and turned through a right angle, charging down the field, towards the witches, not daring to glance behind. It took him into the light from his bedroom, a billion-candlepower searchlight flooding the field like a football stadium.

Webb weaved from side to side, hearing stretched to the limit and expecting at any second to hear the noisy panting of running dogs. His back muscles ached in agonized anticipation of a bullet smashing its way through his backbone.

He reached the trees and dodged wildly through them, but he was now out of sight of the villa and the mountain beyond. He stopped, puffing, and looked fearfully back up, leaning against a tree while blood pounded in his ears.

No dogs, no riflemen, and it can’t be this easy.

Webb suddenly realized that he could be under surveillance from right here, amongst the trees. Time passed, as he let his eyes adapt and his breathing get back under control. Time to peer into the twisted black shapes surrounding him.

A faint scuffling, maybe thirty yards away. No doubt some animal.

Again. Closer.

Far, far away, he heard the whine of a car. It passed.

Webb turned and stumbled towards the village. A thin branch hit him painfully in the face, scratching his cheek. Through the trees he could glimpse lights twinkling on the plain beyond the autostrada. The olive grove came to an end at what seemed to be an ancient defensive ditch about thirty feet deep. The ditch stretched off to the right and merged with a steep, rocky slope in the distance. To his left, Webb could make out the rear of the cantina, about fifty yards away, with the road just beyond it.

No sound of pursuit. No scuffling from the shadows.

Stealthily, he moved to the edge of the trees. He literally felt weak at the knees. There was a low wall and on the other side of it the road leading into the village. Inky, jagged shadows lined the cobbled road. Moonlight reflected brilliantly from a small open window in the village.

He climbed the wall and stepped quietly on to the cobbled road. He kept in the shadows as much as possible on the way down to the village, and stopped in the shadow of the first building, a derelict wine cellar. The smell of sour wine drifted out of a grilled window.

Too many shadows; but quiet. Quiet like a cemetery.

A dog howled, the sound coming from about fifty yards ahead. Webb froze, terrified. Another one, back up the hill, took up the wolf call. He looked behind: underneath his bedroom — that would be the kitchen — another light had come on. The animals subsided. He padded hastily along the medieval street, almost tip-toeing on the cobbled stones, and almost within arm’s length of the houses on either side. If a trap had been set, this was the place. Into the cathedral square. Light was flooding out of the open cathedral doors.

The cathedral bells crashed into life. Webb literally jumped in fright. He flew across the square. A final short stretch of houses. People were coming out of doors. He almost ran into an elderly couple in the near-dark “Buon Natale!” he shouted, and then he had cleared the village, the cobbles giving way to a rutted track with vines and olives on either side.

He loped down, and then he was running full pelt down the deserted track, with the sound of the bells in his ears. About half a mile down from the village the track joined on to the slip-road for the autostrada and he slowed, puffing and laughing with relief. The man at the autostrada toll was reading a newspaper, cigarette dangling from mouth. Webb passed unnoticed.

He crossed the deserted autostrada and sat on a low wall, baffled. It had been too easy. In a minute a car’s headlights appeared, approaching from the south. He stepped on to the autostrada, still breathless. The headlights flooded him; he waved his hands, suddenly realized that the car had appeared suspiciously on cue, and stumbled back off the road, crouching behind the wall in an agony of uncertainty. The car passed at speed, its exhaust roaring into the distance.

Safer to wait for a truck.

He waited. A couple of cars drove past on the opposite carriageway. Webb used the passing headlights to check the time and wondered if he had been right to let the first car pass.

Fifteen minutes went by, during which, with increasing desperation, he tried willpower and prayer. But no car came.

A voice? Maybe; but it was on the limit of hearing. Webb put it down to an illusion caused by pounding blood and overwrought senses. And then, distinctly, there was the low sound of a female laugh. He walked along the emergency lane, catching occasional murmurs of conversation as he approached, although not enough to make out the sense.

A car was parked in a police layby about a hundred and fifty yards from where he had been waiting. Human figures were just discernible in its red tail-lights.

“Buona sera!”

A woman of about thirty emerged from the shadows. Her mini-skirt was leather and absurdly short, and her legs were skinny. “Good evening,” Webb said.

“Chi sei?”

“Sono un Inglese.”

“Ma che ci fai qui?”

“Mi sono perso.”

The woman turned to the shadows behind her. “Dice di essere un turista che si è perso. Forse sta cercando un letto per la notte.” Somebody laughed, short and sharp.

“My name is Claudia,” she said to Webb, in heavily accented English. “Can we do some business? Look, I’m clean.” She delved into her blouse and pulled out a little card. Webb held it to the tail-light of the car. There was a photograph of herself and a warning in several languages. The English one said

There were a lot of stamps. They looked red but presumably that was the tail-light.

“Actually, I was looking for a lift to Rome.”

The woman laughed and said something incomprehensible over her shoulder. “You have to pay for our time, bell’uomo. And there are four of us.”

“There’s no problem with that.” Four ladies of the night, services rendered. Webb almost smiled at the reaction in Accounts.

The car was small, two-door and smelled of stale cigarettes. Webb found himself squeezed into the back between Claudia, who turned out to be red-headed, and a girl with long dangling earrings and smooth skin who announced herself as Giselle.

The front seats went back and another two women slipped in, into the front. Claudia said, “We were just going anyway. Business is cattivo at Christmas.”

The driver turned to Webb. She had short hair in tight curls; she was wearing a black choker and her eyes were heavy with mascara. “This is Martini and my name is Bianca,” she said in educated English. “I’m a criminal lawyer. I make a lot of money.”

“How do you do? I suppose these are your clients.”

“What about you, Englishman?”

“Un professore matto.”

She laughed. “In cerca della pietre filo sofali.”

Webb’s credentials as a mad professor established, the little car eased itself on to the autostrada and then took off briskly; and four whores, a nerve-shattered scientist and the secret of Nemesis headed swiftly towards Rome.

The Werewolf Club

Il Lupo Manaro, the Werewolf Club. A part of Rome which Christmas had not reached, and where white light was the only taboo.

The small car turned out to have a powerful engine, and on the trip back to Rome the speedometer needle hovered at a deeply satisfying one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. There was a lot of repartee in a strong local dialect, most of which went over Webb’s head. Wedged between Claudia and Giselle, he was treated to their bony thighs pressing against his. Claudia’s hand kept straying to his knee.

Within an hour and a half the great plain of Rome was glittering below them and soon they were rattling noisily into quiet suburbs, and down towards Cinecittà. There were still crowds promenading at 1 a.m. in central Rome. Webb tried to keep his bearings from monuments and places he knew.

An alarm bell began to ring in his head.

They cut left at the Colosseum and seemed to be heading south; but then they made a sharp turn north. A sign said Circo Massimo and there were tall floodlit ruins on a hill to the right; and then the criminal lawyer was taking them past the Mouth of Truth, over the Palatine Bridge, across the dark Tiber, and into the maze of narrow crowded streets of the old ghetto.

This was no good: he needed the airport, fast. He said, casually, “You can let me out anywhere, ladies.”

Claudia sniggered, Martini laughed wildly, and Webb’s heart sank, his growing suspicion that he had never escaped hardening up.

The car turned off at a triangular piazza and drove some way into a narrow lane, pulling into the kerbside. The five of them tumbled out. Martini and Bianca were into some noisy exchange, all Italian exuberance, Bianca’s long earrings swinging like pendulums. Claudia was having trouble with her stiletto heels on the cobbles, and Webb’s legs were in agony with returning circulation; they linked arms for mutual balance.

Ditch her and run? Webb reckoned he might get ten yards.

A group of young men and their ladies approached, singing and giggling, and receded into the dark.

A lane leading off a lane, and there was Il Lupo Manaro, strobing the dark corners with green and pink neon. A notice at the entrance told them that

There were photographs of a rotund middle-aged man, attempting to give an air of mystery to his unmysterious features with beard, top hat, cape and wand. Even at one o’clock in the morning it was antiquated corn.

Webb said, “Thank you for the lift. I ought to go now.”

Claudia was smiling with her mouth. “But you have to pay for our time, remember? Settle up in here.”

“Five minutes?”

“Ten.” Claudia took Webb by the hand and led him in.

Cones of ultraviolet light, thrown down by spot lamps in the ceiling, interspersed the deep gloom. Synthetic fibres passing through the beams glowed a deep purple, and diamonds, if they happened to be real, sparkled and fluoresced. There was, Webb noticed, a lot of fluorescence around. He was startled to see Claudia’s lips and eyelids glowing a brilliant green.

A mature woman with an air of having seen and done it all, once too often, said “Buona sera!” and it was buona sera all the way through a maze of perspex doors into the heart of the club. A luminous purple shirt front and cuffs approached from the shadows like the Invisible Man, and materialized at the last into a figure of oriental features and indeterminate age.

They were ushered to a low table near the centre of the room and lay out on settees, Roman style, Claudia and Giselle flopping down on either side of him. They seemed to be well known in the club, Bianca in particular being on the receiving end of a lot of greetings.

Candles were lit at the table; they burned red and blue and gave off a strange herbal smell, which mingled with the already dense smell of Havana in the air. Expensive minks were scattered casually over the backs of settees, occupied by couples in various degrees of intimacy and angles to the horizontal. Martini and Bianca shared, Martini casually stroking the lawyer’s legs, which were draped over her own. Webb began to wonder about them. A waiter approached and Martini ordered gin fizz all round. The warmth, the narcotic perfume and his exhaustion were like heavy chains.

A small transparent dance floor was lit up from below by a moving kaleidoscope of primary colours. Half a dozen couples were on it, and a phallic rhythm was being banged out by four seasoned characters in an illuminated corner near the stage, their leader’s sweaty face leering into a microphone and more or less singing while his big hairy hands flickered between cymbals and kettle drums. Big hairy faces with canine teeth glared down from the walls, in glowing pictures which interspersed with sketches of nubile maidens in varying degrees of Eastern promise.

Bianca leaned over towards Webb. “The police keep closing this place down,” she said over the music. “But it keeps opening up again under new management. Different names up front.”

“I expect you have one or two clients here.”

“A few tourists and provincials apart, they are all my clients.”

Webb suddenly realized that in the Lupo Manaro he could be dismembered with an axe, and nobody would notice a thing.

“Look, I need to pay you and go.”

Bianca smiled and shook her head. “First, we have a surprise for you.”

Martini waved into a dark corner of the club. A fat man in a dinner suit leaned over Claudia and, ignoring Webb, made some remark. Claudia laughed and kissed the man, who vanished into the gloom. Webb was startled to catch the eye of a black-bearded character in a velvet tuxedo at a table a few yards in front of him. The man blew a kiss. “Not you, stupid!” he said, waving to someone at the back of the club.

A slow melody began to ooze out of a saxophone; Martini and Bianca wandered on to the floor and started to dance, hugging each other closely.

“Sei stanco?” Claudia asked Webb, entwining her skinny arms around his neck, her luminous lips almost touching his. “Are you tired?”

“Ah, maybe I need some fresh air.” He grabbed his gin fizz.

She pulled back and laughed. “You are so inhibited, Englishman. But tonight, for you, love is free. Why not relax and enjoy life? While you can,” she added enigmatically.

Webb had a desperate inspiration. “Teach me to tango, then.”

The woman squealed with delight and led Webb on to the dance floor. As they reached the floor she whispered something to the man with the sax, who grinned; and the tempo was suddenly sharp and bouncy.

“Popcorn!” cried Claudia, wriggling her bottom, flinging her hands above her head, gyrating and shaking her breasts all at once. It resembled no tango Webb had ever seen. The stage cleared apart from the two of them. His desperate inspiration, to make a break for the rear, had died the moment he saw the heavies off-stage, watching his performance with dispassionate eyes. He concentrated on Claudia, clumsily trying to match her pitching and yawing, while sweat wet his brow and lurid visions of holocaust grew larger by the minute.

After a frenzied minute the tune slowed to a halt like a train coming into a station, there was a smattering of applause and Claudia, grinning and perspiring, led him by the hand back to the settee, where two men and a woman were now seated. The older man Webb had last seen at Doney’s; his grey hair was now reflecting pink in the club lighting. The other two he had last seen viciously murdering Walkinshaw in the dark Tuscolo woods.

Webb took the indicated space between the young ones. Claudia, suddenly aloof, joined Giselle on another settee. Martini and Bianca were deep in some woman talk. They paid him no attention.

The pink-haired man pulled round a chair to face Webb. “Good evening, Mister Fish.” His spectacle lenses were reflecting the reds and blues from the spotlights and candles. “You have been successful?”

“Yes.”

“We have a bargain, remember?”

“How do I know you’ll keep your half of our deal? The moment I tell you what I know, you could finish me.”

“That was what made our bargain so interesting. Neither of us seemed likely to keep it. You might try to steal the manuscript, I might decide to kill you. But if you do not now tell me—allora, my friend has a stiletto in his pocket, only a few centimetres from your kidneys. I have seen him at work with it. It is a particularly distressing death.”

Sweat was coming out of every pore in Webb’s skin. “There is something in the manuscript.”

There was a roll of drums. A little fat man came on and jabbered into a microphone in Italian, and then on strode Mephisto, complete with pointed black beard, top hat and a long black cloak with red inner lining. There was whistling and laughter as a short-haired peroxide blonde in a sequined bathing suit wheeled on a table. The magician bowed and got into his act, which involved the appearance and disappearance of lighted cigarettes, glasses of water, doves…

“Something in the manuscript,” hissed into Webb’s ear.

Webb fumbled with the button on his inside pocket and produced Phaenomenis with shaking hands. He flicked to a page and pointed to Vincenzo’s Latin script. “Here. In this paragraph. A coded message. Renaissance scholars did this. Instead of announcing a discovery in plain Latin they made up…”

“The message?” the man said harshly, every line of his face contorted with greed.

Applause. A guillotine was being trundled on to the stage, one of its wheels squeaking. It was a heavy wooden structure, twelve feet tall, topped by a massive steel blade which gleamed red, white and blue in the strobing lights. The blade hissed down and a watermelon split into two with a heavy thump. Mephisto was calling for a volunteer, to general high-pitched merriment. A Scotsman, a fat Glaswegian with a Gorbals accent, was shouting garbage as three of his equally drunk friends hustled him on to the stage. The blonde seized his arm and his friends staggered off, laughing wildly.

“Must I force everything past your teeth?”

“The Duke of Tuscany hid part of his wealth. I suppose for insurance against a rainy day. But it seems he didn’t trust his courtiers. Vincenzo was unworldly, and he owed his life to the Duke.”

The Scotsman had used rope and chains to tie Mephisto on a plank, with the help of the magician’s assistant; now he was sliding it on a metal hospital trolley until the magician, face up, had his neck under the blade. The Scotsman clattered off the little stage at speed.

“Speak, Fish!” But now the little fat man was on stage again, patting his brow with a handkerchief and demanding total silence due to the perilous nature of the experiment. The peroxide blonde looked solemn. A curtain was pulled, and the audience went still. The blonde pulled a string. The blade accelerated rapidly down. There was a slicing noise which shook Webb’s already jangled spine. A bloody head, eyes bulging and veins stringing from its neck, rolled out from under the curtain. The blonde screamed hysterically, the audience rose in pandemonium and then the curtain was pulled back and Mephisto was standing, head in place and chains at his feet. There was an outburst of relief and laughter and the audience thundered their applause.

“My patience is exhausted.”

“It seems Vincenzo hid some part of the Grand Duke’s treasure on his behalf, recorded the location in his notes in code, but then died before he could tell the Duke where he’d hidden it.” Webb had scarcely slept in days; it was the best he could do at that hour in the morning.

“And now, my good friends, one last illusion. Another volunteer, please.” His eyes ranged over the audience and settled on Webb. “You, sir!” he said, pointing dramatically. Forty pairs of eyes turned.

“Stay in your seat.” But the man in the velvet tuxedo grabbed Webb’s arm, laughing, and pulled him to his feet. The hit men hauled at his other arm. The audience laughed and clapped at the tug-of-war which was rapidly becoming bad-tempered. Webb shouted “Okay! I surrender!” and there was more applause as he picked his way between settees and climbed the steps. He slipped the book back in his pocket. From the stage Webb could just make out, beyond the footlights, Martini and the assassins forcing their way hastily towards the exit.

“Try to stay calm,” Mephisto murmured in English, and Webb’s heart jumped. “My friends,” the magician addressed the audience theatrically, “you see before you a man.” There was a snort from somewhere beyond the footlights and someone giggled. “There is one thing wrong with a man. And that is, he is not a woman. It is a fault which we in our world of illusion can put right. God created woman by removing a rib.” The blonde gripped Webb’s arm firmly as the magician leaned down and swiftly produced a bright orange chainsaw from under the table, trailing an electric cable. The audience roared.

“Do we dare to repeat God’s experiment?” Cries of Yes! Si! came from forty throats. The chainsaw burst into life. Mephisto produced a half-bottle of some spirit from an inside pocket and drank it in a single draught, the blonde jumping as the saw swung towards her. More laughter. “Now Doctor Mephisto is drunk enough. Let the surgery begin. Let us remove a rib from this man. I ask someone to inspect this box.” The saw waved erratically towards off-stage.

A box was wheeled on, and the velvet tuxedo man, keeping a weather eye on the buzzing chainsaw, tapped the walls, jumped up and down on the floor and declared that this was an okay box no nonsense. The blonde led Webb into the box and the door closed. He stood in pitch black. The sound of heavy chains being wrapped round and round the box came in magnified. The sound from the chainsaw rose in pitch and then there was the deafening racket of splintering wood. He backed into a corner before realizing that somehow the saw was not penetrating the box. There was another sound, a panel sliding at ground level. Light flooded in from the floor. A hand was beckoning urgently and Webb climbed down a short wooden ladder. A light-skinned man, dressed in blue overalls, put a finger to his mouth. Another one, with the face of a patrician Roman, was wearing the full uniform of a Colonel of the Carabinieri. He nodded curtly to a woman of about twenty-five, her eyes covered with a red Venetian mask and a sequined red cloak draped around her shoulders, and she climbed the short ladder unsteadily in red high-heeled shoes. Little bells tinkled around her midriff as she brushed past Webb.

“They’ll be waiting for me at the back,” Webb whispered, blinking in the light. “I saw them run out.”

“I know. The name’s Tony Beckenham, by the way, from Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy. And this is Colonel Vannucci of the SDI, the Italian Security Service.”

“How do you even know about me?”

“Your American colleagues. And Walkinshaw’s people.”

“But how did you find me? Nobody could possibly have known where I was.”

“Nonsense. We just followed the manuscript trail. The old bat in the hills has been telling that story for the past fifty years.”

The colonel was looking agitated. “Mister Fish, this is not-ta time for talk. The danger is extreme. We recognize at least seven wanted criminals in the club. It is amazing good fortune for us. But they will kill you without a thought and shoot their way out. Until the squadra arrives I have only three people here and we cannot return fire in a public place.”

“What then?”

“Hide! Back on stage!”

“Beckenham, I want you to open up the Planetological Institute in the Via Galileo and I want a car standing by to take me there.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool.”

The sound of whistling and clapping penetrated through the stage floor. A wooden panel opened from above and a pair of long sequined legs in red high heels emerged, climbing unsteadily down the steps.

“Go, go!” Vannucci said, pushing Webb back to the ladder.

“I want to be in Oxford in three hours maximum. I don’t care if you have to charter a Jumbo.”

Vannucci was forcing Webb up the ladder.

“And I need a fast laptop computer on board. I left mine in the safe house.”

A scared look came over Beckenham as it dawned on him that Webb was serious. Vannucci was practically lifting the astronomer upwards.

“With a Linux interface,” Webb shouted down, disappearing.

“A what inner face?”

Inside the dark box again, Webb felt himself being trundled some yards, he guessed to just off-stage. The band started up on some sleepy tune, rose to a finale.

Footsteps approached. Webb fell against the side of the box as it was tilted up. It was wheeled for maybe ten yards and then a tremendous Crack! erupted within it. A man shouted, angry and frightened; a woman screamed; running footsteps.

Somebody kicking hard at the base of the box. Webb, drenched in sweat, took two feet to it and it burst open. Beckenham, the policeman and a woman in a black cocktail dress dragged him out and on to his feet. All three with guns and the woman, in addition, with an evening bag. A walrus-moustached janitor in a glass booth crouched, quivering, behind a chair, eyes wide with fear. It could have been a scene from a comedy.

Webb was about to speak when the woman grabbed him violently by the hair and hauled him down on to his knees. At the same instant a bullet smacked into a whitewashed wall next to his face; Webb actually glimpsed it, spinning and buzzing, on the rebound. Then the policeman was hauling open a red emergency exit door, and an alarm bell screamed into life, and Webb was being thrust into the narrow lane outside. He fell heavily.

The woman appeared, hauled Webb to his feet and pushed him ahead of her along the lane. Webb got the message and took off like a hare. He sprinted round a corner and almost collided with the young Tuscolo killers rushing out of the Werewolf Club. Webb dived to the ground. The hard cobbles knocked the breath out of him. From behind he heard two sharp bangs, and two bright yellow flashes briefly lit up the neon-strobed lane. The young ones fell like sacks. The lane emptied, people stampeding into the club or disappearing into doorways. The Tuscolo woman’s face was a foot from Webb’s. She had long black hair, her eyes were half-closed and quite lifeless, and something like porridge was oozing from a neat black hole in the centre of her forehead; the youth was clutching a long, thin knife, but he too was lifeless. The alarm was deafening in the narrow lane.

Webb got up and swayed, on the verge of fainting. The woman, about ten yards away, was calmly putting her high-heeled shoes back on. He said, “Can we get a move on here?” but his voice came out as an inaudible whisper.

Oxford, the Last Minutes

A squadra volante car whisked Vannucci, the woman and Webb across the city to the Istituto di Planetologia in four minutes. The doors were already open and a tousle-haired caretaker was engaged in an animated exchange with two Carabinieri, his hands waving dramatically. He unleashed a stream of Italian at Webb as the astronomer ran past, into the lighted building.

He ran up a flight of stairs and along a dark corridor towards Giovanni’s office. He had used a visitor’s password two years ago and there was no chance that it would still be valid; he would just have to rouse Giovanni at home. He tried his old username and password anyway and — joy! — it worked: the Linux window appeared.

Webb looked at his watch and, yet again, converted to the Eastern Standard time zone. He had been in the Werewolf Club for nearly an hour, and he had four hours left to identify Nemesis.

What he had to do was run the known Earth-crossers backwards in time, perturbing their orbits with the gravitational pull of the planets, and seeing how close each asteroid had been to the Earth in the Year of Our Lord 1613, on 28 November.

He took a minute to think. They would have fast orbit integrators here but he wouldn’t know their names or modes of operation. The one he used at Oxford, developed by the celestial mechanics group at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, was based on Bulirsch-Stoer and symplectic routines and probably as fast as anything on the planet.

The future orbit of an asteroid or comet can be approximated by a series of straight-line steps. Each step takes so much time to compute. The greater the length of the stride, the fewer are needed in total, and so the faster the orbit is calculated. However large strides, although fast, lead to unreliable results: no real asteroid ever moved in a series of straight lines. An orbit computed with very large steps deviates more and more from reality. A computation with very small steps is highly precise but takes a very long time. Webb’s quandary was that he needed high precision but had very little time.

A message on the terminal wished him a Merry Christmas but regretted that the Oxford Institute mainframe was down for maintenance over the festive season.

He had no access to the Armagh computers.

He dialled in to the Observatory’s home page for the telephone number and called through. Paolo, luckily, had been prevented by poverty from joining his family in Turin this Christmas, and as usual he was working late. The Italian student immediately arranged to put the programmes on to anonymous ftp, which would allow anyone to gain access to them. Webb had them into Giovanni’s machine in minutes and then transferred them on to half a dozen floppy disks, along with the planetary ephemerides for the past four hundred years, and the orbital elements of all known near-Earth asteroids.

He now had what he needed. Everything but time.

He typed in a brief e-mail message to Eagle Peak:

It was Enrico Fermi’s coded wartime message announcing that the atom had been split. Willy Shafer would understand it, but not a casual hacker.

He ran back out of the building to the police car, which took off, blue light flashing, through the town.

Vannucci glanced at Webb in the flickering light from the streets. “I would love to know what this is about.”

Webb stayed silent.

“A countryman of yours is brutally killed on Italian soil. I do not like that. If I had my way you would now be answering questions in La Madama.”

“But you’re prevented by instructions from above, right?”

The policeman lit up a Camel cigarette. “Your little book. Was it worth it?”

Webb thought of Leclerc hurtling to his death, and Walkinshaw riddled with bullets, and the young ones with holes through their brains. He nodded. “Definitely. Was anyone hurt in the club?”

“You mean apart from the people who died in front of your eyes? One of my men is in the San Salvadore, undergoing emergency surgery.”

“The people who died were the ones who killed Walkinshaw. The older man with me in the club set it up. They were after the book. That’s all I can tell you. A grilling in the questura would yield no more.”

Vannucci took a reflective puff at his cigarette. “I would not be so sure of that.”

“Your lady — what a brilliant shot.” She looked back at Webb from the front passenger seat and gave a cool smile. Her English was good: “Given the poor light, I thought I did well.”

This one won’t need counselling, Webb thought. He looked out at the scenery speeding past and suddenly felt cold. “This isn’t the way to the airport.”

“We’re taking you to the military airfield at Ciampino.”

They reached it in ten minutes. The police car drove straight on to the runway. An executive jet was waiting, door open, headlights on, engines whining, Beckenham at the steps with laptop computer in hand. Webb grabbed the little computer from Beckenham, shook hands briefly, and then the door was closed and the aircraft accelerated swiftly forwards.

As the jet curved into the sky, Webb glanced down at Rome by night, a great luminous spider’s web divided by the Tiber. But there was no time for the luxury of terror. He fed in the programmes from the floppy disks.

Beckenham had done well at short notice. It was a fast little machine; it might take say ten minutes to explore the past history of each Earth-crosser back to 1613. There were five hundred known Earth-crossers. So, the identification process could take up to eighty-five hours. Three and a half days, day and night.

He had three and a half hours.

A supercomputer would do the job in minutes. He could have tried to download the Armagh programmes across to the Rutherford-Appleton HPC if he had had access, but he hadn’t. It might take days to get into the supercomputer from the outside, and they probably had batch jobs booked up for days after that. He could attempt to muscle in now by wielding the AR or the Chairman of Council, but that could attract attention, and that attention could lead to a nuclear attack.

He could e-mail the information through to Kowalski. But there were no encryption arrangements between Eagle Peak and either Oxford or the aircraft. An e-mail message could circle the globe and touch down in half a dozen states before it reached its destination. Too dangerous: he might as well use a loudhailer.

And if the traitor on the team — if there was a traitor on the team — got to the message first, there was no telling what mischief might be done.

Having exhausted every alternative, Webb turned to the little toy on his lap.

The trick, as he saw it, was to go for the candidates most easily diverted. Leclerc would have fed in knowledge of past Russian probes and given him a more targeted list. Still, he could use the standard list of potential hazards, starting with Apophis, Nereus and other obvious choices. With luck, Nemesis would be on the list of known potential hazards and he would have it within a few hours. That was the theory.

He clicked on an icon, and the machine asked him a few questions. Are you integrating the orbit forward or back in time? How long would you like the integration to go? What positional accuracy (in AU) would you like on the termination date (the more accurate the required position, the slower the integration)?

The preliminaries over, the machine got down to specific orbits. First it asked him for the semi-major axis of the orbit; then its eccentricity; and then the three angles defining the orientation of the orbit in space: inclination, longitude of ascending node, longitude of perihelion. The orbit’s size, shape and orientation in space defined, it finally requested one last number: the true anomaly, a precise date at which the asteroid was at its point of closest approach to the sun (Julian date, please).

There was care to be exercised. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII, on the advice of his Jesuit astronomer Clavius, had taken ten days out of the Christian calendar which had, over the centuries, gradually drifted out of phase with the seasons. The Catholic nations had taken this up at once. By the time the English had reluctantly joined up in 1752, eleven days had had to be taken out of the Protestant calendar and the peasantry had duly rioted, being reluctant to pay double rent. Vincenzo’s observation, having been made in seventeenth-century Italy, was therefore 28 November by the Gregorian calendar. But Webb then had to convert this to the Julian date, a steadily ticking clock used by astronomers to bypass the vagaries of peasants and politics. This is reckoned from 1 January 4713 BC. Julian days start at noon. A Julian day is therefore shifted by twelve hours relative to the civil day and twelve hours at twenty-five kilometres a second is the difference between a million-kilometre miss and a hit.

He dug into the Astronomical Ephemeris and converted Vincenzo’s Catholic date to the appropriate Julian Day. From then on, Webb hoped, it would be plain sailing.

He started with Nereus.

Two little spots on the screen, one yellow and one blue, began to whirl rapidly around a fixed central disc, eventually coming to an abrupt halt with 28.11.1613 (Greg.) showing in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The process had taken about twenty minutes. The spots were nowhere near each other. On to the second asteroid on the easy-to-shift list. And then the third.

Over the English Channel, as the little jet sank along its approach path, and Webb punched in a succession of increasingly implausible candidates, it began to look as if Nemesis was not amongst the known Earth-crossers. At the moment the wheels made screaming contact with the runway he scored off the last candidate in his list of possibles. None of them had fitted Vincenzo’s observation. Either good men had died chasing a phantom, or Nemesis was an asteroid known only to the Russians.

Webb settled into the back of a ministerial Jaguar and started on the Mission Impossibles, the asteroids which could not realistically be shifted in orbit. The car sped him along the M25 at a hundred miles an hour; either the driver was taking a chance or the police had been asked to turn a blind eye.

There was nothing else to be done. They were impossible because they were too fast to shift, but deadly — because of their speed — if somehow diverted nevertheless. He made the identification just as the car turned off on to the M40. He ran the program again, pushing the accuracy as far as he dared. The program now took thirty agonizing minutes to complete, but the result was identical, and suddenly the multiple insanities which had dominated his life these past few days — the Inquisition, the mad bee-keeper, the crazy old fascist lady, the greedy assassin and his weird and wicked companions — all were sloughed out of his mind and dumped in the dustbin of history. I’ve beaten the lot, he thought triumphantly. He picked up the carphone, tingling with excitement, and dialled through to the Astronomer Royal’s ex-directory home number.

“Sir Bertrand, I have it. I’m about fifteen minutes from the Institute.”

“Say no more.”

Webb stood at the front door of the Institute, flapping his arms in the early morning cold. Traffic was non-existent. He exchanged hellos with a group of noisy revellers, the young men in dinner suits, their ladies shivering in ball gowns, dinner jackets covering their bare shoulders. After half an hour a dark Rover turned off Broad Street, the wet road glistening in its headlights. The car mounted the pavement outside the Bodleian and stopped, its headlights switching off. The figures inside made no move to leave the car, and he couldn’t make them out; they might have been lovers.

Ten minutes later the Astronomer Royal’s Jaguar also turned off Broad Street and drove past the Rover, along Park Road. The AR emerged, wrapped in a long black coat, a Homburg and a heavy white scarf. A gust of icy air blew round the corridor as the AR opened up, locking the door behind them and putting the bolts into floor and ceiling.

Webb led the way without conversation to his basement room. He cleared a space at his desk and they leaned over Vincenzo’s manuscript, opened at the page with the moving star. The AR, his breath misting in the unheated air, looked at it and then at Webb, eyebrows raised.

“Well?”

“The Latin says it’s a moving star.”

“Laddie, I was reading Ovid when you were still in nappies. What’s the significance of this?”

“The point is, nothing else in Vincenzo’s notes stands out. Apart from the moving star, all he records are Saturn’s rings, star clusters, Moon craters and so on. This can only be a close encounter with a celestial missile.”

“Did you get me out of bed at four o’clock in the morning for this?”

Webb’s heart sank. “I did.”

“I was rather hoping that your identification, when you made it, would be based on a solid foundation. You seriously claim that this identifies the asteroid?”

I don’t believe I’m hearing this. “Yes sir, I do.”

Sir Bertrand looked at Webb incredulously from under his bushy eyebrows. “Yes, Webb, I’m afraid that is your style, the inverted pyramid. I have long been aware that solid groundwork, on which this Institute has built a world-class reputation, is too tedious for you. I am also aware that you are given to flights of, shall we say, speculative fancy. However, on this occasion you have excelled yourself. You build a superstructure which would have us identifying an asteroid, panicking half the planet if it got out, firing spacecraft into the blue and triggering incalculable political repercussions. And you do it on the basis of two points on a four hundred-year-old manuscript.”

“Sir Bertrand, I grant you I sometimes feel as if I’m wading through treacle in this place, but would you like to tell me what else it could be?”

“A simple misidentification of a star. Or an internal reflection in a flawed lens. And they were all flawed four centuries ago. A comet unconnected with the asteroid in question. Or even a couple of variable stars which winked on and off on successive nights.”

“Men have killed for this manuscript.”

“I don’t want to know that.”

“It’s relevant information. They haven’t killed because Vincenzo saw an internal reflection.”

“Utter bilge. I cannot endorse your identification.”

“I don’t know why people are even bothering with your seal of approval. What do you know?” Webb was past caring.

“Perhaps because high officials in America would rather place the future of their country in a pair of safe hands, rather than those of some immature young maverick. From what I am now hearing, they were wise to do so.”

“I’m about to give you the name of this asteroid, Sir Bertrand. And when I do, keep in mind that its orbit is chaotic. A chaotic orbit means two things. One, a tiny perturbation applied early enough can yield a huge change in orbit. Two, to exploit the chaos you need to know the orbit with fantastic precision. Phaenomenis Novae not only identifies the asteroid, it gives a four hundred-year time base, exactly what they needed for high-precision manoeuvring.”

“Webb, do you not understand?” The Astronomer Royal’s tone was despairing. “We need solid, hard-headed evidence, not wild speculation.”

“When they decided to use this particular asteroid, they must have known of this close encounter. They must have raked through every manuscript they could find covering the period, and then decided to get rid of the only two copies of Vincenzo in existence. The one at the Bodleian, and this one, stolen from the Helinandus Collection sixty years ago.”

“You are deranged. Perhaps you should take to writing cheap thrillers.”

“Take a look at this,” Webb said. He fed in a disk, typed at the keyboard and stood back. The Astronomer Royal sat down heavily on Webb’s chair and watched the two little spots rapidly trace out orbits. “I’m running time backwards in the Solar System. The blue one is the Earth, hence the circular track. The yellow one, that’s the suspect.”

While the little blue Earth whirled on its circular orbit, the yellow spot representing the asteroid traced out an elongated ellipse; two trains, each on a different track. The tumbling digital calendar measured the progress of the Wellsian time machine as it hurtled back through the internal combustion era, the wars and revolutions, the fall and rise of kingdoms, backwards through the years in minutes. And as time passed, it became clear that the yellow ellipse was not fixed in space, but was slowly rotating as the asteroid sped round it. On several occasions it happened that, unknown to the creatures inhabiting the blue spot, the yellow one passed dangerously close overhead, and that the things which mattered so much to them — wars, treaties, revolutions, history — were within an ace of being swept aside in a single, incinerating half-hour. The yellow and blue spots approached more and more closely and then, finally, touched. The whirling spots stopped, fused together on a single pixel of the screen, and the calendar froze. On the twenty-eighth of November, 1613 AD.

“The same night Vincenzo saw the moving star,” Webb said. “I’ve also checked the background constellation and the angular rate, and they fit. It’s beyond coincidence.”

The Astronomer Royal expelled a great lungful of misty breath. He tossed his hat on the desk and wandered over to Webb’s bookcase, pretending to read the titles. Webb gave him time.

“We had a near miss then?” the AR finally said, flicking through the pages of Methods of Mathematical Physics.

“Yes, sir. It passed within seventy thousand kilometres of the Earth.”

“What?” Putting the book down. “That’s treetop level!”

“And easily seen in Vincenzo’s telescope, especially if it’s an old cometary sungrazer, maybe slightly outgassing a few centuries ago. The surprise is that others didn’t spot it.”

“Which asteroid is this?”

“Karibisha. Eccentricity point seven, orbital inclination just 2.5 degrees, which guarantees a succession of close encounters over the centuries. Semi-major axis just over 2.1 AU.”

“Is it hard to detect?” the AR asked.

“Practically impossible. By the way, ‘Karibisha’ is a Swahili word of welcome.”

“A word of welcome. How beautiful, even at four o’clock in the morning. With an eccentricity like that no wonder it’s hard to see.”

Webb nodded in agreement. “It’s coming at us out of the Sun. It will be invisible right up to the last few days or hours.”

Sir Bertrand put the book back and ran his hands through his white hair. He picked up a telephone. “The perfect weapon. We’re in the nick of time. If you’re wrong, Webb…”

“Unfortunately there’s a problem,” Webb said.

“Yes?” Tension suddenly edged into the Astronomer Royal’s voice. His fingers hovered over the telephone dial.

“That impossible hundred-day guideline which NASA are using for the rendezvous project.”

“What of it?” The AR steeled himself like a man waiting for a punch.

Webb delivered it. “Nemesis hits in forty.”