Judy came back from the cooker and joined them at the table. Her speech was unsteady but composed. “You don’t have to say it, Colonel, we all know we can’t realistically involve the cops. There’s just too much at stake for questions. But if we don’t report this we put ourselves on the wrong side of the law. And the more we try to conceal this accident, the more we dig ourselves into a hole. We have to dispose of a body. How do we do this?”
Noordhof said, “We have to keep our eye on the ball here. This is arguably a military police matter but, Judy, I’m glad you see it that way. Frankly, the legalities don’t matter a damn. We just have to find Nemesis in the three days remaining to us, which includes today. That’s our overriding goal and nothing, not even death in the team, can be allowed to deflect us.”
Shafer spoke to Noordhof. “But we still have a body out there, Mark. And Leclerc must have relatives, maybe a family.”
“Leclerc was a widower with no family. His secretary was made to think he’d taken leave. Nobody in France knows where he is.”
Shafer looked as if he was trying to read the soldier’s mind. “You have access to people who can handle this type of situation, right?”
Noordhof sipped thoughtfully at his caffè corretto. “I’m amazed at your perspicacity, Willy, but I don’t suppose I should be since you’re on this team for your brains. Yes, I understand there are guys on the payroll who can handle this type of situation all the way from the scene of the death to the coroner’s report. I’ll make a call.” He toyed with a spoon. “I’ll let Kenneth and Herb sleep on, and inform them when they get up. McNally is due back from Toulouse later today. Look, we can’t let ourselves be paralysed by this. Some people will arrive in the next hour or two but they won’t come in and you’ll have no contact with them. Once they’ve left, Leclerc will have gone and it will never have happened.”
Noordhof changed the subject abruptly. “Oliver, what were Leclerc and you cooking up?”
Webb briefly wondered how much to tell. “I wanted to exploit André’s tremendous knowledge of Russian space capabilities. Particularly their launch hardware, degree of electronic sophistication and details of past space enterprises. We were going to liaise to find out what asteroids they could conceivably have reached and diverted in the past.”
Shafer said, “NASA and Space Command must be stuffed with people who know things like that.”
“SecDef requires a European involvement or two for political reasons. He was very clear about that. It’ll take a day or two to identify, brief and transport someone suitable over.”
“That’s too late,” said Webb. He was trembling. “I needed Leclerc today. This morning.”
“Are we coming apart here?” Shafer asked.
“Oliver,” said Noordhof, looking agitated. “Think of something. You must have a Plan B.”
“André was Plan B. Plan A was looking for something unusual in the sky, some signature of the Russian deflection of Nemesis. It wasn’t working as of three o’clock this morning.”
“Can you pick up on it again?”
Webb hesitated. “I can but we’re into the long shots. That phone call I made earlier.”
Noordhof said, “Long shots are all we have left. Yeah, what gives with that manuscript thing?”
Sacheverell wandered in, bleary-eyed and barefooted, wrapped in a white towelling gown. He poured himself coffee, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. He sipped at his coffee and gave it a startled look. He looked around, eyes blinking. He seemed to sense an atmosphere but said nothing.
Webb found that he could now just lift his coffee without spilling it. He gulped the hot liquid down.
Shafer said, “Out with it, man.”
“It’s thin. A manuscript went missing a couple of months back. A notebook by Vincenzo.”
“The Vincenzo?” Sacheverell asked sleepily.
“Yes. I was hoping to translate the eighteenth-century transcription in the Bodleian. I had a photocopy made but it went missing from my apartment before I had a chance to look at it. Nothing else was touched. I had a Chubb lock and secure windows and there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever took it (a) knew exactly what they were after, and (b) were highly skilled thieves. But now it gets really weird. I go back to the Library to get another photocopy, to be told that in the meantime their original too has gone missing. Now that just can’t happen. Understand, Herb, that we’re talking about security like that surrounding the Crown Jewels.”
Sacheverell looked baffled. “I guess I’m still asleep. What has a seventeenth-century monk got to do with anything?”
“Someone has gone to a lot of trouble. Maybe there’s something in Vincenzo’s notebook that people don’t want us to see.”
Sacheverell blinked. His gaze wandered towards the big window. When he spoke, there was a weariness in his voice. “I’m still asleep. This is a weird dream. Ollie’s brain is still wired up to ancient history only now he’s turned it into some kind of intellectual game for his personal amusement.”
“Just drink your coffee, Herb.”
“He’s freaked out by the responsibility we’re carrying here.”
Noordhof tapped the kitchen table. “Hey, you two. Don’t start.”
Webb said, “I’ve been thinking about the precision needed to guide Nemesis. You don’t just need to get a precise deflection, you also need to know where you’re deflecting from to six or seven decimal places. Very few Earth-crossers are known to that degree of accuracy. They wouldn’t dare plant radio beacons on it, for all to detect, and the chances are it would be out of radar range even if the Russians had a sufficient deep space radar facility. It seems to me they’d have to derive the pre-deflection orbit using optical data just as we do. Okay so maybe the cosmonauts sat on Nemesis for a year, navigating and computing until they got it all worked out. But there might just be a much easier way.”
Noordhof poured more coffee into Webb’s mug. The astronomer emptied it and Noordhof replenished. “Most of these orbits are chaotic, meaning that tiny uncertainties — just a few kilometres — build up so that after three or four hundred years the asteroid could be just about anywhere. But the converse is this.” Webb raised a finger in the air. “Suppose you did know precisely where it was four hundred years ago. That would give you a time base maybe fifty times longer than anything you could get with modern observations. Now if you had such an observation, even a very coarse one, you would tie down the modern behaviour of the orbit to a tremendous degree of precision. It would be just what you needed to target the asteroid.”
Sacheverell spoke to the sugar jar on the table. “There has to be an explanation for this and it can only be that I’m still dreaming. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, we can hardly find these things with wide aperture Schmidts and CCDs, never mind the lousy toys they had four hundred years ago.”
“I’m in no mood for an argument, Herb, but there’s precedent for this. Uranus was recorded over twenty times before it was finally recognized as a planet in 1781. I was looking for pre-discovery observations of Encke’s comet in old star maps and manuscripts. You need a strong telescope to see it nowadays, but it was seen a dozen or more times with the naked eye in the nineteenth century. Anything capable of a close encounter with the Earth could have been picked up with a two-inch refractor or even the naked eye.”
Sacheverell took another sip. “I might have known it. You’re into the old Clube and Napier rubbish. Did I get out of bed for this?”
“So what about the manuscript, Ollie?” Shafer asked. “If it’s gone what can you do about it?”
“My contact at the Bod tells me that one copy still remains. It’s the original, and it’s held by someone somewhere in central Italy. I want to find that manuscript and see what’s in it.”