Nemesis (37 page)

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.

23
^h
00

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.

23
^h
30
Charta 40.
Die 28, h.6.

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.

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

If the stamp is red don’t take her to bed
If the stamp is blue it’s up to you

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.

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.