Avalanches don’t come with blue lights.
The man’s legs were shaking, whether with cold or relief he didn’t know. The light cone was drifting up and down in a sweeping pattern, snow hurtling through the beam.
It occurred to him that a man in a Glencoe blizzard, dressed only in boxer shorts, probably had a life expectancy of minutes. Already his back was a mass of sharp, freezing pain. Hastily, he reached in for corduroy trousers and sweater, pulled them on and slipped into climbing boots. He tripped over untied laces, picked himself up and ploughed through deep snow to the edge of the ridge overlooking the Lost Valley. The sweater, he realized, bought him at most another five minutes: the wind was going through it like a chainsaw through butter.
The light cone rose and approached. It was scanning the mountain slopes. Suddenly light flooded the ground around him. An intense spotlight rose into space and approached; the roar became overwhelming; the ground vibrated. Dazzled, the man caught a glimpse of a whirling rotor passing straight overhead. A giant insect, a yellow flying monster of a thing, circled him and then sank towards a sloping patch of snow about thirty yards away. It almost vanished in the blizzard kicked up by its rotors. It tried to settle down, backed off, tried again, but its undercarriage slithered over the snow and the machine slid perilously sideways towards the edge of a precipitous drop. The pilot gave up and rose over the man’s head.
A spider emerged in silhouette from the side of the machine, and began to sink down on a swaying thread. It settled on to the knee-deep snow within arm’s length of him, resolving itself into a young airman in a khaki-coloured flying suit. “Flt Lt A.W.L. Manley” was stencilled on his helmet. “Doctor Webb?”
Webb stared in astonishment, and nodded.
“You’re coming upstairs. Quickly, please.”
Five hundred miles to the southeast, in Paris, the Atlantic storm had softened from the harsh reality of a potentially lethal blizzard to a bitter, wet, gusty wind.
As was his custom, the professor left his apartment at 7:30 a.m. precisely. Dark clouds swirled just above the rooftops, a newspaper streaked along the road and a solitary pigeon was attempting a speed record; but he was well clad in trenchcoat and beret, and as usual he walked the two hundred yards to the Café Pigalle. There he took off his sodden trench-coat and sat at the marble bar. Without waiting to be asked, Monique served him two strong espresso coffees and a croissant with butter and strawberry jam, which he consumed while watching the early morning Parisians scurrying past.
At eight fifty, as he always did, he set out along the Rue d’Alesia, jumping over the flowing gutters and avoiding the bow waves from passing trucks. He turned off at the church of St-Pierre de Montrouge and headed briskly towards the Sorbonne. He had no reason even to notice the man purchasing cigarettes at the kiosk. The man was squat and bulky, with grey hair close-cropped almost to the scalp. His bull neck was protected from the rain by the pulled-up collar of his sodden jerkin. A policeman stood on the edge of the pavement next to the kiosk, his back to the professor, watching the flow of traffic through the little waterfall pouring from the brim of his sodden cap.
As the professor drew level with the kiosk, the squat man suddenly turned. “Professor Leclerc?”
Startled, Leclerc looked into the man’s eyes, but they showed no expression. “Who are you?”
From the corner of his eye the professor saw a big Citroën pull up, the rear door open and another man step out: thin, tight-lipped, with eyes set back in his head. Suddenly, and instinctively, the professor was afraid.
“Please come with us, Professor.”
“Why? What is this?”
“I do not know. A matter of national security. Get into the car.”
Thinking assassination, Leclerc turned to run; but powerful arms seized him, held him in a painful neck lock. He wriggled furiously, his beret falling to the ground, but another pair of hands twisted an arm behind his back. Half-choked, he tried to shout but he was pushed into the back seat of the car, one man on either side of him. Leclerc forced his arm free and hammered on the rear window. The policeman turned away a little more, his back squarely to the professor. The driver took off swiftly, cutting into the path of a taxi. The man at the kiosk tidied his newspapers, the Parisians scurried by, and the policeman, water streaming down his shiny cape, tossed the beret into a litter bin while keeping his eye firmly on the glistening rush-hour traffic.
The warm ocean which powered the Atlantic storm was also dumping its energy into the far north of the planet; here the air, turned away from the sun, was exposed to interplanetary cold; here, it responded to the Earth’s ancient rotation, and circulated anticlockwise around the Arctic Ocean: a huge blizzard howled out over the pack ice and the seals, the killer whales and the sunless wastelands.
The blizzard rampaged over the pole, down through Alaska and the North West Territories, passed over a thousand miles of Baffin Island, and howled through a few Inuit hunting groups who knew it as the Chinook, a hostile force which drove itself up nostrils and winkled out tiny gaps in snow goggles. The blizzard was still a blizzard over Quebec Province and New York State but, far from the oceanic heat engine, it was beginning to die. Even so, swirling along Broadway and Times Square, the dying snowstorm could still send late evening theatre crowds scurrying into warm bars, and traffic cops into a state of sullen paranoia.
Passing over the Great Lakes, the wind went into a rapid decline until, in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, it finally died, leaving only snowflakes drifting down on sleeping houses: a traditional Christmas, all Bing Crosby, Silent Night, and Christmas trees glittering from a million dark windows.
In at least one Maryland suburban home, however, the night was neither still nor silent, and the owner barely heard the chime of the doorbell above the party hilarity and the raucous dance music. Reluctantly, Hilary Sacheverell detached herself from her white-haired, tall dancing partner, and weaved a path through the party. In the hallway she stepped over a young couple sitting together on the floor, backs to the wall. She opened the door, a smile half-formed on her face in expectation of late arrivals. A gust of freezing night air wafted around her exposed shoulders and she shivered.
Two men, in their thirties, one white, one black. Strangers. Snow sprinkled their heads and dark coats like tinsel decoration. A black Buick convertible had somehow snaked its way through the Mercs and Dodges which cluttered the driveway. A third man, in the Buick, just discernible through its dark windscreen. The woman was suddenly alert.
“Mrs. Sacheverell?” the black man asked.
She nodded uneasily.
“Is your son here?”
“Which one?”
“We’re looking for Doctor Herbert Sacheverell, ma’am.”
“Herby is here,” she said. “Is there a problem?”
“If we could just have a word with him.”
A hardness about the eyes; a professional alertness. Some instinct prevented her from inviting them in from the bitter cold. “Wait a moment, please.”
It was a full minute before she found a skeletally thin, middle-aged man with thick spectacles and red, spiky hair seated at the kitchen table with the Ellis woman. A near-empty bottle of Jim Beam stood between them. The girl had her elbows on the table and was resting her head in cupped hands, staring into Sacheverell’s blue eyes with open admiration. Sacheverell, thus encouraged, was extolling the merits of legalizing cannabis, itemizing the points with the aid of his bony fingers.