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?”
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.