The physicist took the phone again. “Hi Ollie. Yes we have the picture here… that was a brilliant insight… I warned you: what did your Uncle Willy say about getting a new idea?… Listen, we have a problem here, in the form of high cirrus. It’s beginning to creep in over Southern Arizona… two magnitudes, five, who knows?… it’ll slow us to a crawl… yes, I agree… it’s down to you, Ollie, you must follow through on your insight… yes, he means it… he won’t say… my interpretation is that you have ten hours and then they feel free to nuke Russia… I don’t know, two hundred million or something… you and I know that, Ollie, but what do politicians know?… they couldn’t handle the concept… they like certainties… sure, none of us asked for it… ” Light sweat was beginning to form on Shafer’s brow. Judy poured him half a tumbler of Scotch. There was more conversation, then “Ollie says that as a British citizen he needs to get his instructions direct from HMG.”
Noordhof nodded his head fiercely. “Yes! Tell him I’ll fix it. And tell him I’ll see what help we can give at the European end.”
Bellarmine said, “No, no, no. Webb must be seen to act alone.”
Shafer spoke quietly into the telephone, and then replaced the receiver. He looked round the group. His eyes half-closed with relief and he exhaled. “He’s going through with it. Judy, I know how you feel but look what’s at stake.”
“He must be helped,” Judy insisted.
Shafer looked at the Secretary of Defense with raised eyebrows. Bellarmine looked grim. He said, “If covert American action is spotted by the Russians…”
“But if Oliver fails…”
Poetry unexpectedly entered McNally’s soul. “We’re stuck between the Devil and the deep blue sea.”
“We’re clouding over,” Judy reminded them. “And Hawaii’s out of it. Ollie’s our only hope and he surely has no chance on his own.”
“He meets the hit man in a couple of hours,” said Shafer.
“Oh boy. Do we know where?” Noordhof asked. Shafer shook his head.
The soldier raised his hands helplessly. “So what the hell can we do?”
The Abruzzi Hills
Webb, feeling like a rag doll, drifted with the crowds.
It was now dark. He crossed the bridge and walked in the general direction of the Piazza Navona. He made a determined decision to relax and enjoy his last hour, and came close to succeeding. The air was caressingly warm; the smells wafting out of coffee shops and trattorie were exquisite; and the ladies, it seemed to him, were exotically beautiful.
He wandered randomly along a cobbled side-street and into a little church. There was a Nativity scene, with little hand-painted donkeys and people. The straw in the stable was real which made the stalks about forty feet tall on the scale of the figures. It was simple stuff, a childlike thing in a complex world. Someone had put a lot of love into it. It brought him close to tears, and he didn’t know why. Webb the sceptic, the rational man of science, sat quietly on a pew for half an hour and, unaccountably, left feeling strangely the better.
He passed by the Navona and walked along to the Spanish Steps. The throng was nearly impenetrable. Italian chatter filled the air. Kilted shepherds were on the steps, playing some sort of thin, reed-like bagpipes.
Time to move. Webb started to push his way through the crowd.
A tap on the shoulder. “Taxi, signore.” A dark-skinned man with an earring.
Nice one, Webb thought. A precaution in case surveillance had been set up for him in the Piazza Navona. He realized that he must have been followed from the moment he left Doney’s Bar.
Webb followed the taxi driver away from the piazza along the Via Condotti. A red carpet stretched the length of the street. There was a sprinkling of couples, and families with tired children, and ebullient groups of youths. A yellow taxi was waiting at the end of the lane and the driver opened the rear door for him.
The taxi sped through town, heading south past the floodlit Colosseum. Webb assumed he would be heading for some suburban flat but the driver was speeding past tall tenements and heading for the ring road, out of town. The astronomer didn’t attempt conversation; the night would unfold as it would.
The driver turned on to the ring road and off it again in a few minutes. He slowed down as they approached a lampadari, a two-storeyed glass building filled with lamp-shades of every conceivable style, every one switched on, and forming an oasis of blazing light in the darkness. The driver took the taxi at walking pace round to the back of the building, the car lurching over rough pot-holed ground. A dark saloon car was waiting, and a short, tubby man was leaning against it with a cigarette in his mouth. Webb got out, and the man ground his cigarette under foot.
“Piacere,” said the man, shaking Webb’s hand. He led Webb to the saloon and politely opened the back door. The taxi driver reversed and drove off the way he had come, while the new driver took off with Webb, still heading south. The road was straight but the surface was poor. There were bonfires at intervals along the side of the road, and shadowy figures flickering around them, and parked cars. Fields lay beyond, in darkness.
They stopped briefly at an autostrada toll. A policeman was chatting to the toll official. Webb could have touched his gun. The driver collected a ticket and then they were off again. They passed under a large illuminated sign saying “Napoli 150km.” The tubby driver held out a packet of Camel cigarettes over his shoulder. Webb declined. They passed villages atop hills, lights blazing, looking like ocean liners suspended in the sky. Over to the left Webb could make out a spine of mountains; these would be the Abruzzi, whence came the shepherds and the werewolves. They drove swiftly along the autostrada for about half an hour, far from Rome, heading south.
A green illuminated sign in the distance resolved itself into a sign saying “Genzano,” and the driver went down through the gears and turned off. A solitary, weary official at the toll took a note from the driver and then they were winding along a narrow country road, heading towards the hills.
The road started to climb, steeply. The driver went down into second, the transmission whining briefly. They passed between houses in darkness, along a cobbled street little wider than the car. Then the car was through the village and still climbing steeply, its headlights at times pointing into the sky.
The road turned left and there were poplars on either side. Left again, through a wide gateway, and the sound of tyres rolling over loose stones. The driver stepped out, slamming the door. Webb could make out the outline of a villa. There were low, rapid voices. Then footsteps approached the car and stopped. The driver opened the door, grinning.
“Ivrea, Pascolo. Please to come with me, professore.”
In the near pitch-black, Webb followed the sound of the driver’s footsteps. There was a smell of honeysuckle. As his eyes adapted he began to make out a two-storeyed villa. It looked as if it might have a dozen rooms. There was a garden on three sides, two or three acres of lawn dotted with low bushes. A little spray of water arced into the sky from a fountain, sparkling in moonlight. Behind him were poplars and beyond that the stony slopes of a mountain: as far as Webb could tell in the dark, they were maybe a thousand feet from the summit. The fourth side of the little estate was bounded by a low wall with stone urns along it. Beyond the wall was a black sky, ablaze with the winter constellations, every one an old friend.
“This house is so isolated that not even thieves come here. Okay?”
“I get the message.”