Fox One circled the fierce orange fireball at a safe height. Cars were beginning to stream out of Carthage towards the flames just beyond the town.
Cannon looked down without emotion at the fiercely blazing remains of the aircraft he had been scheduled to fly in. “I’ve got a schedule to keep. Carry on to Andrews. And ask Tinker to patch me through to the White House. We’d better let them know the Vice-President has just met with a tragic accident.”
Webb walked along the covered walkway, tingling with nerves. To his left a small waterfall poured off the roof.
The call to his old friend had converted ninety-nine per cent certainty to one hundred per cent. Nemesis was a deception and a fraud. It was a monstrous conspiracy.
He thought he knew why, and the answer terrified him.
Webb’s door was unlocked and the light was on. The sound of churning water came from within. Adjoining the bedroom was a long washroom with a vanity unit and a whirlpool tub. Judy was up to her chin in soap suds.
“Hi Oliver!” she waved a soapy hand as the astronomer passed.
Noordhof was straddling a heavy chair in the middle of the bedroom. His arms were folded on the back of the chair.
Webb kicked off his shoes and sat on the bed, at the pillow end, with his back to the ornate wooden headboard.
The churning stopped.
The colonel moved to the telephone, lifted the receiver and dialled. “A-okay here. Ten minutes.” He returned to his chair, and folded his arms again on the back, only this time he was holding an ivory-handled Colt revolver.
“What happens in ten minutes?” Webb asked, his mouth dry.
Judy emerged from the bathroom in a white dressing gown, her blonde hair wrapped in a towel. She sat down at a dressing table and started doing something to her eyelashes.
Noordhof said, “There’s nothing personal about this, Oliver. I like you. You’re just a little man way out of your depth. But before the squad turns up, I want to know how much you know. Do you know
anything
?”
“I know that Nemesis doesn’t exist.” Webb kept his eyes on Noordhof; but he sensed that Judy, at the dressing table, had suddenly frozen.
Noordhof showed surprise, then a flicker of admiration. “How in Hell’s name did you work that out, Doc?”
“Gut instinct.”
“Was that all?”
“Leclerc’s death was the first real thing. I think André got there before me. He came to me worried but didn’t live long enough to say why. I believe he’d worked out that the Russian deep space programme has a history incompatible with the multiple visits that would have been needed for a high-precision deflection. I also guessed that in the hours when he went missing, before he died, he realized it was a setup and he cleared out of Eagle Peak.”
“He tried. You were all under constant surveillance from the woods, Oliver. My people saw André, he saw them and took off in the cable car. Considering it had to look like an accident, I thought they showed real initiative at short notice.”
The soldier waved the pistol encouragingly, and Webb continued. “Item Two was Vincenzo’s manuscript. Quite a coincidence that I was translating it just before I was dragooned into your team.”
“You were slow on the uptake, Oliver. We thought we were going to have to ram the book down your throat.”
“I couldn’t understand why, if
Phaenomenis
had real information in it, the Russians would draw attention to it by stealing it from under my nose. What was it with these thefts? I began to suspect that I was meant to get hold of Vincenzo’s book, meant to identify Nemesis from it.”
Judy had finished with her eyelashes; she moved her chair next to Noordhof’s.
The Colonel scratched his head thoughtfully with the barrel of the revolver. “Good thinking, Oliver.”
“But a couple of things really got the alarm bells ringing.”
Noordhof waited politely.
“Karibisha. It’s too big. As a killing machine, it’s over-enthusiastic. At a million megatons it would set the whole world alight. The fireball would poison the atmosphere with nitric oxide. The Russians would have suffered tremendous damage along with the rest of the planet. They have first class people in this business and they would know that a Karibisha impact is global suicide.”
Noordhof tried to sound casual. “So did you share your suspicions?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Judy said, “I doubt it. He wouldn’t know who he could trust. Anyway, I believe he was out here before his suspicions crystallized.”
Webb kept talking. “I knew I was being manipulated. I went along with it because I had to know who, and why. Somebody
wanted
me to get that book,
wanted
me to find an asteroid in it. Now who would want that, and why? I thought long and hard about that.”
“Is that it?” Noordhof asked.
“There were other things. No way could Karibisha have been seen that close to the sun with the claimed precision. The NASA report you showed me yesterday had to be a lie. After that, things have been falling into place quickly.”
The Colonel shrugged. “Yeah, the NASA report was a rush job. You threw us by asking for it. All those phoney US Naval Observatory observations, Goldstone radar data and so on. What the heck, you gave us less than a day.”
“Why me, Mark? Why choose me for your team?”
“We chose you with care, Oliver. We knew you were set on finding some comet in old star charts. So we supplied you with an asteroid instead. We got rid of all copies of Vincenzo but one to raise its profile in your thick head and to make
sure you didn’t go making comparisons. You were supposed to be a pushover but you turn out to be a giant headache. I knew you were trouble when I saw you checking the switching circuit in the wheelhouse. You weren’t supposed to do that, Ollie. And your damn robot telescope had us in a real panic. I had to stall you for a full day while we got a team to rig the circuitry. And still you saw through it.”
Judy had unwound the towel from her head and was rubbing her hair with it.
“I’m glad I was a pain but you still had me fooled up to a point. I thought you were trying to stop me identifying the asteroid. It was some time before it dawned on me what you were really about, that you were actually trying to stop me finding that there is no asteroid.”
Noordhof said, “The manuscript thing was CIA false flag recruitment at its best. They used a real artist, the best Renaissance document forger in the business. Even the nib of the pen was right for the period in case somebody thought to use neutron activation analysis on the ink. Vincenzo’s book, of course, was the genuine article. All this guy had to do was add the moving star. It had to match the orbit of a real Earth-grazer, it had to be good enough to fool the manuscript experts, and like you say we had to get rid of every copy except the one with the insert in case anyone thought to make comparisons.”
“I suppose he had an unfortunate accident?”
“The forger? Yeah, he swallowed hydrochloric acid, can you imagine?” Noordhof shook his head sorrowfully. “Don’t worry, Ollie, I’ll be more humane. And you’ve still got five minutes.”
“I’m curious about one thing,” Webb said, to keep the conversation going. “Where did my so-called assassin come into it?”
Noordhof looked glum. “A sideshow that went wrong. I fixed it so you would have to buy the lousy manuscript. Uncle Sam was supposed to pay a couple of million bucks for
it; half for me, half for my Italian counterpart—not that he’d have lived to collect it. But the guy gets greedy. He guesses the manuscript might be worth a lot more so he sells you a story about a contract on you and tries to jack up the payment for himself.”
A thunderclap shook the room and the light flickered briefly. Webb asked, “What’s the story when I don’t report in at
T
equals Zero?”
“Another accident, of course.”
“You expect to get away with that?”
Noordhof’s eyes glinted. “Ollie, we expect to get off with a nuclear strike.”
Webb let it sink in slowly. “I was afraid of that.”
“Yeah, and with a few thousand nukes pouring into the Evil Empire, who’s going to notice some Brit going missing in Mexican bandit country?” The soldier glanced at his watch. “By the way, you’ve got four minutes. How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.”
Now Judy was patting her legs dry with the towel. She looked around and dragged over a coffee table with a box of paper handkerchiefs and a heavy marble ashtray.
“Is the President in on this?” Webb asked.
“Poor Ollie, still on planet Mars. Things don’t work that way, friend. If the Chief knew about it, how could he deny it? We’re protecting him. Nemesis is the nuclear button, but if it’s going to work the Chief has got to believe in it.”
“I think I can see how it works,” said Webb. “The nonexistent asteroid grazes the atmosphere. An electromagnetic pulse shorts out your electronic systems and you lose all contact with the White House. So the President thinks the non-existent asteroid has hit, the shock wave is on the way in and America is on the way out. So he gets the nukes away while he can.”
“Got it in one,” Noordhof said with genuine admiration. “We will have total control over everything coming into the President’s War Room, wherever it is. There will be a
perfect simulation of an asteroid strike, and when the smoke clears, it turns out it was all a grazing encounter like you say but tears of joy and ring out the bells, America is still with us and the Bear is dead.”
“And Karibisha?”
“We were going to shift perigee into the Gulf at the last minute but in this weather ain’t nobody going to see it here, so why bother.”
“Post-encounter?”
“The Earth has deflected it back into the sunlight.”
“But the EMP! You can’t fake that over the whole of America.”
“No but while we’re zapping Russia a couple of our nukes will go off prematurely and give us the real thing. Who’s going to tell the difference?”
“And Russia just lets it all happen.”
“BMDO tell us they can handle the response. Provided we get in an overwhelming first strike, our losses will be acceptable. And if a couple of their nukes get through, we have even more EMP to add to the confusion.”
“Acceptable losses,” Webb said thoughtfully. “I have one question.”
“Sure.” Noordhof waved the Colt invitingly. “You still have three minutes.”
“Why? Zhirinovsky, right?”
“Zhirinovsky, right. We have an overwhelming nuclear advantage now. But he’s catching up fast. In a few years we’ll be back to the old parity only this time we’ll be facing a raving lunatic and it’s only a matter of time before he decides to zap us except that on account of some of us love our country we’re trying to do something positive about that.”
“The guy is just bombast. And he probably won’t survive the next Russian election.”
“Thank you, Oliver, you’re full of surprises, I didn’t know you included political analysis amongst your talents.”
Noordhof leaned forward to say more, waving the gun at
Webb. There was a crackle and a tremendous bang, and the lights went out. Webb froze in the pitch black. When they came on a second later Noordhof’s eyes were wide and he was holding the Colt at arm’s length, and it was pointing straight at Webb’s chest. The soldier re-folded his arms.
Webb glanced at Judy, but her eyes betrayed nothing. “One last question.” He suppressed an urge to panic. “What about the New Mexico scorpion here?”
Judy gave a cold smile.
“We needed an ear in the team. A scientist to make sure things went smoothly, to make sure y’all got the right ideas at the right times and nobody started getting any wrong ideas. Doctor Whaler came on the personal recommendation of right-thinking people at the highest level in the National Security program.”
“After all, Oliver, my job is to preserve peace through revolutionary and visionary means,” Judy said.
“Revolutionary? I don’t think so. Nemesis is a hoary old ploy, a border incident created to justify war.”
She continued. “But what a wonderful challenge! And morally justifiable, contrary to what you seem to think. What’s the point of a short-lived peace if it’s just an interlude before annihilation? What we’re facing is a Ghengis Khan with nukes. The threat posed by his weapons of mass destruction is just too great. Surely Mark’s philosophy is right? Seize the moment, and settle the issue for all time.”
“Skipping the tedious legalities,” Webb suggested. A thunderclap shook the French windows.
The Colonel said, “You know the old saying, Ollie. My country, right or wrong.”
“Respect for the tedious legalities is what separates men from monkeys. And you from me.”
The soldier faked a smile. “Negative, Oliver. The vital difference between us is that I’m holding the gun.” He glanced again at his watch. “Anything else you want to know?”
“You’re not going to shoot me.”
Noordhof raised an eyebrow.
Webb took a deep breath. He could hardly speak. “I have protection.”
“Sure you have. I can’t wait to hear about it.”
“A couple of hours ago I was sent a fax.
‘When is a custard pie not a custard pie?’
The desk will confirm it.”
“He’s right,” Judy said.
“Yeah, we know. It got us puzzled. It should have been intercepted but the stoopid girl . . .”
“It’s signed by my Uncle Willy Lumparn, who doesn’t exist,” Webb said, trying to put a confident edge into his voice. “But look up Lumparn in an atlas. Check it out. It’s a circular lake a few miles across in Aaland, which is a Baltic island, property of Finland.”
“Maybe you should get to the point quickly, Ollie. Your time’s up.” Noordhof raised his gun, pointing it at Webb’s chest. Uncertainty was flickering across the soldier’s face.
The dark nozzle of the gun was filling Webb’s universe. “I’ll keep it simple, Mark. Lumparn is an old impact crater. Custard pies get thrown as in Laurel and Hardy movies. The fax is asking me whether we’re in a custard pie situation. They’re asking me whether an asteroid is being thrown, whether Nemesis is real. I’m here to find out. You surely don’t think I kept my suspicions to myself? And if I don’t give the right coded reply at the right time, Project Nemesis blows up in your face, your President doesn’t launch and you try to find some part of the world where you can hide from the Mongoose squad, say like the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You’re coming apart at the seams, Mark, you and your insane plot.”