Feeling slightly foolish, he took a side door and trespassed through the Warden’s back garden, not daring to look towards the windows of the house. He climbed over a garden wall, half expecting an outraged shout, and found himself in the college car park. He crossed Parks Road, looking back at Wadham, and had a near-miss with a female cyclist wearing a long scarf and a Peruvian hat. Nobody was hanging about the college; there were only the usual motley students coming and going. He walked briskly north, away from Christ
Church, before turning left on Keble Road and back south on a parallel track along Giles Causeway. A black Jaguar was parked on the double yellow lines outside Christ Church, its motor purring. The chauffeur opened the rear door of the ministerial car and Webb sank into the red leather seat.
They joined the M40; the traffic moved smoothly enough along the motorway and through the endless grey suburbs of Ealing and Acton, but in Kensington the flow began to congeal like water turning to ice. The chauffeur looked worried. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. He picked his nose. He switched on Radio One and switched it off again.
“Where am I headed?” Webb asked.
“I have to get you to the Treasury Building by noon sharp, sir,” said the chauffeur, looking in the rear mirror.
“Relax. I’ll walk.” Webb left the chauffeur to the traffic jam. He walked along busy streets to the Mall, where he cut off through St. James’s Park. In Horse Guards, men dressed in red were responding with wonderful precision to the sharp, echoing commands of a sergeant major with a superb repertoire of insults. He moved quickly along Whitehall and turned into the Treasury building as Big Ben started to chime.
“Name?” said the thin man at the desk.
“Mister Khan.” The man gave Webb a look but ticked his name off. Webb waited in the inquiries office for some minutes, until a tall, cheerful man not much older than himself came to collect him.
“Tods Murray,” said the man, in an accent which Webb connected with polo and country clubs in Henley. The man’s handshake was weak and clammy. There was an impressively grand staircase but they squeezed into a small lift, and emerged on to a broad circular corridor with a red carpet. There was a smell of expensive coffee, probably Jamaican Blue Mountain. Tods Murray knocked at a door and led Webb into a small, comfortable office. At a heavy table
sat the Astronomer Royal and the Minister of Defence. The AR wasn’t smoking and Webb thought he looked a bit wild-eyed.
“Coffee?” asked the Minister, waving at a chair.
“No thank you, sir.”
“Something stronger, perhaps?”
“No.”
The Minister looked at Sir Bertrand, who shook his head, and then poured black coffee into a Worcester cup. “Would normally have held this meeting in Northumberland House, but we don’t want you wandering in and out of the MOD. Not that we think anyone’s keeping an eye on you, nothing so melodramatic. Just a belts and braces thing.”
“That’s good to know, Minister. I recall the last such reassurance.”
The Minister gave him a look.
“Is that a complaint, Webb?” the Astronomer Royal asked.
“Your theory,” the Minister said.
“Which one is that, Minister?”
“These suspicions about the signals from the robot telescope, a traitor on the Nemesis team and so on. We sent it all on to the CIA. They have reported that every American on that team had been thoroughly vetted and each one was regarded as loyal beyond question. Yankee White was the term used.”
“But Minister, a determined attempt was made to keep that manuscript from me. One of your own staff died in front of my eyes in Italy. Someone paid these people to kill me.”
Tods Murray responded, “If there was a leak, it didn’t come from the Eagle Peak team.”
The Minister said, “For all we know your assassin was a pathological liar. The whole business could have been local private enterprise. After all, you let it be known that you were very keen on that manuscript.”
Webb said, “But the Tenerife telescope. From the outset it
was responding too quickly. Transatlantic connections aren’t that fast.”
“Webb,” said the Astronomer Royal, “you made the connection during the graveyard watch. Transatlantic communication would have been quiet.”
Tods Murray added, “And the CIA telecommunications experts checked the routing. It’s fine.”
Webb shook his head stubbornly. “But La Palma was clouded over. I saw it myself.”
The Astronomer Royal picked up on that. “The Met Office tell us that the cloud was broken at the time of your observations, Webb. You just happened to log on to the Spot satellite at a moment when everything was overcast.”
“I was being fed false pictures.”
The Astronomer Royal sighed. “That is ludicrous.”
“And Leclerc?”
“There was no sign of tampered switches in the wheel-house. It was an accident.” The Minister’s tone was final. “Let’s not get obsessive about this. Your suspicions were exhaustively investigated and found to be without foundation.” He pretended to read a sheet of paper. “However, you were not invited here for a discussion about your latent paranoia, Doctor Webb. We have other plans for you. But first, I’ll hand you over to Bertrand for some news.”
The Astronomer Royal said, “There is good and bad. The bad news is that the Americans have given up trying to reach Nemesis. There’s just no time.”
He gave Webb a moment to assimilate the information, and then added: “The good news is that Karibisha might miss. There’s an even chance. I’m afraid it’s going to be a cliffhanger right to the end.”
“They’ve seen Karibisha, then?”
“Yes. The US Naval Observatory managed to pick it up pre-dawn. They only have a short arc to go on. NASA’s best estimate is that its perigee will be one Earth radius. We will
have either an extremely close encounter or a grazing collision.”
“What do the errors look like on the target plane?” Webb asked.
“A very elongated ellipse, almost a narrow bar, passing from the Pacific through central Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico. One sigma on the long axis is two thousand kilometres, on the short one a couple of hundred.”
“We could still have an ocean impact, then?”
“Or a miss. The asteroid came within range of the Gold-stone radar some hours ago and they should be sharpening up on the orbit now.”
The Minister interrupted the technical exchange. “It says here it’s approaching us at fifteen miles a second and is four million miles away at the moment. It will pass the Earth in three days and”—he looked at his watch—“eight hours.”
“Can you imagine the public reaction if this gets out?” Tods Murray said.
The Minister looked as if he could. He added brown sugar crystals to his coffee. “I don’t know how much longer we can keep it quiet.”
Webb said, “With Karibisha’s orbit it will be the devil to detect until the very last hours. But once it clears the solar disc it will be visible even in binoculars, just immediately before dawn.”
“We’d like you to go to Mexico,” said the Minister, stirring. “To the point of closest approach.”
Webb puffed out his cheeks.
“Of course our satellite intelligence should let us know immediately whether this Karibisha has hit, but GCHQ do worry a little bit about signal failure at the critical moment due to electrical disturbances in the ionosphere. They’re not sure they could immediately tell the difference between a freakishly close encounter and a hit.”
“EMP, Webb,” Sir Bertrand explained.
“Frankly,” the Minister continued, “we want as many channels of communication as we can get, including old-fashioned transatlantic cable. It has been agreed with the Americans that there will be two scientific observers, one from America and one from Europe. On a matter of this supreme importance, HMG prefers to have a hit or miss verified not only by remote sensors but also by our man on the spot. You will understand that, depending on the outcome of the event, certain actions may be taken within minutes of it.”
Tods Murray said, “We’re asking you to take an even chance of being obliterated.”
The Minister adopted a tone of excessive politeness. “It doesn’t have to be you. Would you prefer we found someone to take your place?”
Webb felt the Astronomer Royal’s eyes on him. “I insist on going,” Webb said, heart pounding in rib cage. The Minister grunted his satisfaction.
“Do I know the American observer?” Webb asked.
The Minister looked at a sheet of paper. “A Doctor Whaler.”
“I know her.”
“The centre of the two-D error ellipse is somewhere over central Mexico, according to NASA,” said the Astronomer Royal. “Close to bandit country.”
The Minister peered at Webb closely. “You remain convinced that there was some sort of conspiracy to keep you from identifying Nemesis?”
“I do, sir. That’s why I insist on going. I want to keep my ear to the ground.”
“Mexico, Webb,” said the Astronomer Royal, for no discernible reason.
Webb said, “I’d like to see the NASA report.”
The Minister added more sugar, slurped and closed his eyes briefly with satisfaction. “That’s better. I’ll see you get it, Doctor Webb.”
Tods Murray said, “The Americans are setting up a link
from the epicentre and we will be waiting for your call. Should you, for whatever reason, not be in a position to use their link, then we can alternatively be reached through this number.” He slid a card across the table. “Of course we can’t imagine how such a situation would arise.”
“Don’t let this simple precaution feed your fantasies about a conspiracy, Doctor Webb,” said the Minister.
“I’m being reassured to death here,” said Webb.
“Your flight leaves from Heathrow in three hours,” said Tods Murray. “The same need for security applies, and you are still Mister Fish from the moment you leave this building.”
“Phone in from Mexico the instant the asteroid has passed overhead,” the Minister said as Webb reached the door.
“What if it hits?”
The Minister showed surprise. “We’ll know. You won’t call in.”
Outside the Treasury building, Webb found a telephone and made a brief call. Then he went to a Barclays Bank and drew two thousand pounds in the name of Mr. L. Fish, and took a taxi to the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. In the atrium he stood underneath the jaws of the long-necked
Diplodocus
which greets visitors to that great museum, while Japanese tourists and school parties swirled around him.
In five minutes, Judge Dredd emerged from the Japanese tourists and the school parties. He was red-eyed, skinny and stooped, had long, black, filthy uncombed hair and was dressed in Oxfam cast-offs. All he lacked, Webb thought, was the anorak.
They shook hands. Webb noticed the slightly red-rimmed eyes of his old friend.
He hasn’t changed
, Webb thought.
Still living in the virtual world while the real one passes him by. I was like you not so long ago
.
“Jimmy! How’s life treating you?”
Judge Dredd shrugged. “You know.”
And as socially clueless as ever
.
“Jimmy, I need some help. Look, I don’t have any time as I have a plane to catch. Would you mind sharing a taxi with me to Heathrow and I’ll explain as I go? I’ll pay the return fare, don’t worry. It’s worth a hundred pounds to me to have you even listen to my problem.”
“A hundred? In the name o’ the wee man where do ye get money like that, Ollie? Are you cracking banks these days?”
Webb laughed. “No, still at the Oxford institute. They actually pay me to pursue my hobby.”
They random-walked their way through the crowds and on to Cromwell Road. Webb waved down a taxi, asked for the airport, and closed the window connecting them to the driver. He passed over a hundred pounds in small denominations.
There was a certain honesty about Judge Dredd. He took the money with pleasure, without feigning reluctance or asking why. “Well, Ollie, I’m listening with both ears.”
“I need to break into a highly secure American installation.”
The Judge sniffed. “America’s neither here nor there. But if you’re talking about the Milnet, that’s a big problem. And if it’s air-gapped there’s nothin you can do unless you’re on the inside. Is it VMS, Unix, Win NT or what?”
“It’s Unix-based.”
“You need a name and a password. Usernames are nae bother. But ye’ll no get in without a password.”
“I need access to the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque.”
Judge Dredd displayed rows of yellow teeth. “So that’s where the money’s coming from? You’ve got in with the KGB, right?”
“Come on Jimmy, you know I’m a peace activist.”
“Aye, and I’m Napoleon Bonaparte.” He paused thoughtfully, drumming his skinny fingers lightly on his knee. “The Holy Grail is the password file.”
“Which you can’t access because you need a password to log in, in the first place.”
The man looked at Webb with amusement. “You always were a bit of a lamer, Ollie. If it was an ordinary business it could be easy. The Citibank job wasn’t even clever. The number of Freds and Barneys I’ve come across in passwords would crack you up. If there’s a modem at the other end we could just keep dialling and hanging up automated-like.”
“Transatlantic, isn’t that expensive?”
Judge Dredd giggled. “I never paid for a transatlantic call yet. It would be unprofessional. But it’s crass 1980s stuff and it takes ages. And these days most places automatically block you after a few misses.”
“Jimmy, I need an answer within thirty-six hours.”
“Thirty-six hours! Ye’re away wi’ the fairies, Ollie. These jobs take weeks.”
“Is it beyond you?” Webb asked to provoke.
Judge Dredd thought about it. “I’m thinkin, I’m thinkin. Sometimes ye can get the password file from FTP or CGI scripts. You don’t even need to log in, you just do an anonymous download. The CIA and NASA were cracked that way through ordinary web browsers, exploitin a programme called PHF.” A dreamy look flitted across the man’s face, as if he was reliving some past triumph. “But after the Rome Lab job the military started installing a lot more firewalls. A decent packet-level firewall restricts you to a couple of machines inside their network. Mind you, there’s ways round that now, with packet fragmentation and the like. Of course you spread the probes and attacks around, and nothin is traceable. The Rome Lab attackers leapfrogged their way in through phone switches in South America.”