Nemesis (29 page)

The Cardinal recalled that Copernicus’s
De Revolution-ibus Orbium Coelestium
had been placed on the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
in 1616, whereupon, the following year, the Dutch heretics had published an Amsterdam edition. And Elzevirs of Leyden had been quick to publish the works of Galileo. He would allow no such embarrassments to fall on the Church again. Across the front cover of each of Vincenzo’s ten volumes, he wrote
cremandum fore
: they would be consigned to the flames.

What happened next is unclear, Virginia wrote. Maybe the Grand Duke’s Secretary had applied a little pressure. Whatever, Terremoto scored out
cremandum fore
and replaced the words with
prohibendum fore
: they were not to be burned, merely not to be read. A few copies were made but were lost, all but the one which had found its way to the Bodleian. Virginia had appended a surviving letter from the period:

Reverend Father. His Holiness has prohibited a book in octavo entitled
Phaenomenis Novae
, in ten volumes, by Vincenzo Vincenzi, son of Andrea Vincenzi of Florence.
The book contains many errors, heresies, and pernicious and schismatic propositions. I am informing your reverence so that you may promulgate an edict prohibiting the book, ordering booksellers and private individuals to surrender whatever copies they possess, on pain of established penalties. I note that your reverence discovered copies of the
Republic
and
Demonomania
of Jean Bodin, in a bookshop of your city. These were indeed, by order of Gregory XIV of blessed memory, condemned. All copies of the above book are to be burned on seizure. Your zeal in these matters is well known to His Holiness and to the Congregation, and we do not doubt that you will apply it to the matter in hand, in the service of our Lord God. May He preserve you in His holy grace. I commend myself to your prayers.

Rome, 30 August 1643.

Of your reverence, fraternally,

The Cardinal Terremoto

The Grand Duke never succeeded in adding Vincenzo’s works to his great library. The Cardinal put them in a dark basement room in his brother’s house, hidden amongst the junk and detritus of a large family home; and there they remained, forgotten, for over a hundred years.

In 1740, a librarian from Florence by the name of Dr. Tomasso Bresciani was passing through a marketplace in Rome. He bought a sausage at a stall and took it away wrapped in an old paper. Unwrapping the sausage in the Triano park overlooking the Colosseum, he found the wrapper to be a letter from Vincenzo, now long dead. Webb imagined the good librarian choking on his sausage. The paper was traced to a junk collector and thence to a house belonging to the grandsons of a nephew of one of the Grand Inquisitors, who
were selling off waste paper from their basement. Bresciani recovered the notebooks, which found their way to the famous Riccardian library in Florence, where they were indexed, filed, restored, bound, and once again forgotten.

They next turned up two hundred years later, in 1924, in the attic of a farmhouse in Provence. Another footnote: “Almost certainly Napoleon’s troops. They were forever looting museums and libraries from Italy and carting stuff over the Alps. Women too, I expect. Ollie, when are you coming back?”

Three thousand crates went north, some of which fell into Alpine torrents. Many of the remaining manuscripts, with a value beyond money, were turned into wrapping paper in Paris. Most were shredded and sold as scrap, an unparalleled act of vandalism by greedy Parisian businessmen.
Phaenomenis
was a lucky survivor.

They were then purchased from the farmer for pennies by the famous monk Helinandus (“copy of receipt scanned in if you’re interested”), and so they came back down the road, all the way to Rocca Priora, south of Rome, becoming part of the Cistercian monk’s famous collection of astronomical manuscripts.

A fact which made Webb sit up.

Unfortunately, Virginia’s note continued, along came the Second World War. While the Allies were advancing inland from Anzio, trainloads of good things were being taken north by the retreating Germans. One of those trainloads got stuck in a tunnel between Frascati and Rome, and in a bloody fight the partisans reclaimed the booty which included, but of course, a collection of manuscripts hastily taken from the monastery by some German officer. Unfortunately, in the confusion of
Nacht und Nebel
which is battle, some of
the sacred relics, art treasures and rare manuscripts simply disappeared. Vincenzo’s manuscript has never been seen since.

There is of course the Bodleian transcript of the original by some anonymous Dutchman. Or was, darling. But as that too has now gone missing, along with your photocopy of it, it seems that the works of Vincenzo have vanished from the face of the Earth.

And at this point, Virginia stopped. She had scanned in her flowery signature; it took up almost the entire screen of his laptop.

Webb stared into the dark night. For the first time since Glen Etive, he fully believed that the task was hopeless. To find a manuscript which had gone missing in some forgotten skirmish almost a lifetime ago? In twenty-four hours?

He decided that he would send Virginia, the librarian with the steamy hormones, some flowers. He looked at his watch. He’d have to be quick: a planet without flowers was due along.

He had almost overlooked the last page, assuming it would be blank. But now he clicked the return button on his laptop and saw that Virginia had added a postscript to the end of her file:

“Ollie dear—you might want to get in touch with that Rocca Priora monastery. There are rumours.”

The short Atlantic night was drawing to a close, and a pale sun was beginning to illuminate a solid sheet of cloud which hid the ocean below.

Webb put his laptop aside and stretched. He tried to gather his thoughts.

Maybe, Webb wondered, I’m being paranoid. Maybe in my excited state I’d misunderstood the wheelhouse circuitry. If so, Leclerc’s death made for a very strange accident; but an accident nevertheless?

And what about the fast response of the robotic telescope? Perhaps that’s all it was: a fast response, made possible by the quietness of the electronic flow across the Atlantic at that time of night.

On the other hand, Webb speculated, what if Leclerc’s death was murder, and the Tenerife observations were a fraud? It would have to mean that Leclerc had been getting close to Nemesis, and that someone on the team didn’t want it to be identified. That is, someone on the team wanted an asteroid to wipe out their country. Family, friends, home, community, even their dog if they had one, someone wanted the lot to go.

Webb was vaguely aware of being less worldly than the average street trader; but even allowing for his own limited insight into the human condition, he could not believe in a folly which plumbed such depths. The proposition made no sense.

Webb thought about his colleagues on the team. Six Americans—Mark Noordhof, Judy Whaler, Jim McNally, Willy Shafer, Herb Sacheverell and Kenneth Kowalski.

Noordhof had been chosen by the Secretary of Defense or the President, because of his knowledge of missile defence technology. Judy worked in a corporation at the heart of the nation’s defences. Both these individuals needed the highest possible security clearance and must have been vetted to death at various times in their careers.

McNally was NASA’s Chief Administrator, for God’s sake.

That left Shafer, Sacheverell and Kowalski. But these were all in a sense accidental choices. Willy Shafer was chosen for his eminence as a physicist. Sacheverell because he was conspicuous in the asteroid business (okay he’s an incompetent loudmouth but that didn’t alter the fact). Kowalski just happened to be director of a remote observatory with the facilities they needed. None of these people could have even known about the Nemesis threat, let alone manipulated themselves on to the team.

Okay, Webb thought, everyone is squeaky clean.

Therefore exhaustion is making me paranoid. Leclerc’s death must have been an accident, and the robot telescope just has a remarkably fast response.

It was just odd that, at the moment he had been panning the robot camera over the bright, sunny Tenerife landscape, the Spot satellite had shown the island to be thick with cloud.

The twelve hours of flight, coupled with the loss of another eight hours due to the contrary motion of aircraft and sun across the Atlantic sky, meant that the Jumbo landed at de Gaulle at nine o’clock, local time, on a grey, stormy Friday morning. Webb adjusted his watch. It was now 3 a.m. Friday in Washington. He estimated that he’d had about three hours’ sleep in the last three days.

No, Monsieur, the flights to Rome are fully booked. There is, however, a flight to Nice, laid on by some small company capitalizing on the Air France strike. There is one remaining seat but it is a standby and it is for Monsieur to turn up before somebody else gets it. Oh, did I not say? Not from here, from Orly. Monsieur is most welcome. Monsieur took a taxi whose driver was as responsive to the promise of a huge tip as his Tucson cousin.

The standby seat was taken.

Yes, Monsieur, Quai d’Orsay Aviation do operate an executive air taxi but Monsieur appreciates that we cannot fly him into Italy without the necessary paperwork and at this time of year the Italians would simply file their flight plan away for days. Monsieur’s fastest route is to fly to Chamonix, on the French side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, and proceed from there.

He used the twenty minutes they needed for flight preparation to telephone Eagle Peak, where it would be about one o’clock in the morning. Noordhof came on the line almost immediately. The conversation was terse:

“I’m in Paris, just about to leave for Chamonix, arriving at L’Aèrodrome Sallanches in maybe three or four hours. Can I be met?”

“I’ll fix it.”

The office of Quai d’Orsay Aviation was about the size of a broom cupboard, dingy and empty. Webb fumed for about five minutes until a handyman, a small man with a handlebar moustache, entered carrying a tool box and a polythene sandwich box. He led Webb to the entrance of a hangar. Webb almost fainted at the sight of the tiny, two-seater Piper Tomahawk. He froze at the open door of the little toy, but someone heaved on his backside and he was in. The “handyman” turned out to be the pilot and Webb thought what the hell, I died trying.

They were a full half hour on the slipway waiting for clearance, during which time the pilot kept looking at the
low clouds and making increasingly dubious noises about the flying conditions, while gusts of wind shook the aircraft. By the time the Tomahawk was bumping its way into the dark clouds, propeller racing, Webb reckoned he had attained some new plane of terror.

They jiggled and bumped their way across France, passing first over fields laid out like a patchwork quilt, and then over the white-covered Massif Central, occasionally glimpsed through snow-laden cumulus. Webb declined the offer of a sandwich although Monsieur would find the pig’s brain filling quite delicious. Low, white clouds ahead turned out to be the Alps which, as they approached, increasingly dominated the field of view. The pilot pulled back on the joystick to gain height. Soon they were flying bumpily over the Mont Blanc massif. Through the clouds they glimpsed needle-sharp peaks, icy blue lakes, and isolated villages in the snow. Circling L’Aiguille du Midi, the pilot tilted the aircraft on its side so that Webb could look straight down at the crevasses and banded glaciers falling away from the big mountain. Then the Tomahawk righted itself, and the pilot took it unsteadily down through heavy snow. Webb glimpsed the tops of pine trees just below their wheels; then there was open ground and an orange windsock, and the pilot managed a brief
“Zut!”
as a gust of wind caught the wings at the moment of touchdown.

Alive on the ground, Webb inwardly swore that his feet would never leave solid earth again. He resisted the urge to kiss the snow and instead settled up with the pilot, whose eyes lit up with simple joy at the sight of so much ready cash. The pilot disappeared into a wooden hut at the edge of the runway, and ten minutes later was taken off in a taxi.

Webb waited, shivering in Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts as the snow gusted around him. Through occasional patches of blue he could make out formidable, jagged peaks towering all around. He looked at his watch. He was attracting the amused attention of a plump girl inside the hut. He
was about to head for Chamonix when a bright red sports car gurgled on to the airport road. A man emerged with green Tyrolean hat, complete with feather, and a long green trench-coat.

Webb climbed in. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“I know,” Walkinshaw replied. “That’s why I hired the Spyder.” Bulls bellowed; a giant thrust Webb in the back; and in seconds they were on to the main road and moving at a speed which he associated with a race track.

They skimmed past a clutter of chalets and high-rise hotels on the left. On the right more chalets lay below an icy citadel, clouds swirling around its summit. Passing over a bridge Webb glimpsed turquoise, surging meltwater. Survival time two minutes, he thought for no reason.

“These chalets—aren’t they built in an avalanche zone?”

The civil servant shrugged. “What do rich foreigners know?” He turned on to a steep Alpine road whose route up the mountain towards the Mont Blanc tunnel was mapped out by crawling lorries. A notice advised snow chains and extreme caution. It came in several languages but to judge by his driving Walkinshaw seemed not to understand any of them.

Rain.

Rain, beating hard against a window.

Swish-swish.

The rhythmic swish-swish of windscreen wipers, and the hiss of tyres on a wet road.

The hum of an engine.

Heavy rain, driving hard. Powerful engine.

Webb drifted back to sleep.

The car slowed and turned. Headlights flickered in from outside. The car stopped and Walkinshaw stepped out, the door closing with a satisfying Clunk! Webb listened to his receding footsteps, the steady drumming of rain on the roof,
and the thermal ticking from the cooling engine. There were voices outside.