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.”