“About time,” the Astronomer Royal growled over the telephone. “The Houseman would like to know the right ascension of Praesepe. Another damned freebie for you, Mister Kahn.”
Webb had been dreading it for weeks; he felt himself going pale. He went smartly back to his flat and quickly stuffed clothes, toiletries, papers and false passport into his backpack. A casual eavesdropper would probably not know that a Houseman was a fellow of Christ Church College; nor that Praesepe, the Beehive, was a star cluster. He took down a perspex star globe from the top of a wardrobe, blew off the dust and found Praesepe: its right ascension — its longitude in the sky — was nine hours and thirty minutes. His watch read ten minutes past nine. That gave him twenty minutes to reach Christ Church College, presumably the main entrance at St. Aldates. Enough time for Webb, but not for the casual eavesdropper to work out the AR’s message even if it had been recognized as coded. The fact of speaking in code was itself disturbing information. As an afterthought, Webb grabbed his laptop computer on the way out.
Feeling slightly foolish, he took a side door and trespassed through the Warden’s back garden, not daring to look towards the windows of the house. He climbed over a garden wall, half expecting an outraged shout, and found himself in the college car park. He crossed Parks Road, looking back at Wadham, and had a near-miss with a female cyclist wearing a long scarf and a Peruvian hat. Nobody was hanging about the college; there were only the usual motley students coming and going. He walked briskly north, away from Christ Church, before turning left on Keble Road and back south on a parallel track along Giles Causeway. A black Jaguar was parked on the double yellow lines outside Christ Church, its motor purring. The chauffeur opened the rear door of the ministerial car and Webb sank into the red leather seat.
They joined the M40; the traffic moved smoothly enough along the motorway and through the endless grey suburbs of Ealing and Acton, but in Kensington the flow began to congeal like water turning to ice. The chauffeur looked worried. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. He picked his nose. He switched on Radio One and switched it off again.
“Where am I headed?” Webb asked.
“I have to get you to the Treasury Building by noon sharp, sir,” said the chauffeur, looking in the rear mirror.
“Relax. I’ll walk.” Webb left the chauffeur to the traffic jam. He walked along busy streets to the Mall, where he cut off through St. James’s Park. In Horse Guards, men dressed in red were responding with wonderful precision to the sharp, echoing commands of a sergeant major with a superb repertoire of insults. He moved quickly along Whitehall and turned into the Treasury building as Big Ben started to chime.
“Name?” said the thin man at the desk.
“Mister Khan.” The man gave Webb a look but ticked his name off. Webb waited in the inquiries office for some minutes, until a tall, cheerful man not much older than himself came to collect him.
“Tods Murray,” said the man, in an accent which Webb connected with polo and country clubs in Henley. The man’s handshake was weak and clammy. There was an impressively grand staircase but they squeezed into a small lift, and emerged on to a broad circular corridor with a red carpet. There was a smell of expensive coffee, probably Jamaican Blue Mountain. Tods Murray knocked at a door and led Webb into a small, comfortable office. At a heavy table sat the Astronomer Royal and the Minister of Defence. The AR wasn’t smoking and Webb thought he looked a bit wild-eyed.
“Coffee?” asked the Minister, waving at a chair.
“No thank you, sir.”
“Something stronger, perhaps?”
“No.”
The Minister looked at Sir Bertrand, who shook his head, and then poured black coffee into a Worcester cup. “Would normally have held this meeting in Northumberland House, but we don’t want you wandering in and out of the MOD. Not that we think anyone’s keeping an eye on you, nothing so melodramatic. Just a belts and braces thing.”
“That’s good to know, Minister. I recall the last such reassurance.”
The Minister gave him a look.
“Is that a complaint, Webb?” the Astronomer Royal asked.
“Your theory,” the Minister said.
“Which one is that, Minister?”
“These suspicions about the signals from the robot telescope, a traitor on the Nemesis team and so on. We sent it all on to the CIA. They have reported that every American on that team had been thoroughly vetted and each one was regarded as loyal beyond question. Yankee White was the term used.”
“But Minister, a determined attempt was made to keep that manuscript from me. One of your own staff died in front of my eyes in Italy. Someone paid these people to kill me.”
Tods Murray responded, “If there was a leak, it didn’t come from the Eagle Peak team.”
The Minister said, “For all we know your assassin was a pathological liar. The whole business could have been local private enterprise. After all, you let it be known that you were very keen on that manuscript.”
Webb said, “But the Tenerife telescope. From the outset it was responding too quickly. Transatlantic connections aren’t that fast.”
“Webb,” said the Astronomer Royal, “you made the connection during the graveyard watch. Transatlantic communication would have been quiet.”
Tods Murray added, “And the CIA telecommunications experts checked the routing. It’s fine.”
Webb shook his head stubbornly. “But La Palma was clouded over. I saw it myself.”
The Astronomer Royal picked up on that. “The Met Office tell us that the cloud was broken at the time of your observations, Webb. You just happened to log on to the Spot satellite at a moment when everything was overcast.”
“I was being fed false pictures.”
The Astronomer Royal sighed. “That is ludicrous.”
“And Leclerc?”
“There was no sign of tampered switches in the wheel-house. It was an accident.” The Minister’s tone was final. “Let’s not get obsessive about this. Your suspicions were exhaustively investigated and found to be without foundation.” He pretended to read a sheet of paper. “However, you were not invited here for a discussion about your latent paranoia, Doctor Webb. We have other plans for you. But first, I’ll hand you over to Bertrand for some news.”
The Astronomer Royal said, “There is good and bad. The bad news is that the Americans have given up trying to reach Nemesis. There’s just no time.”
He gave Webb a moment to assimilate the information, and then added: “The good news is that Karibisha might miss. There’s an even chance. I’m afraid it’s going to be a cliffhanger right to the end.”
“They’ve seen Karibisha, then?”
“Yes. The US Naval Observatory managed to pick it up pre-dawn. They only have a short arc to go on. NASA’s best estimate is that its perigee will be one Earth radius. We will have either an extremely close encounter or a grazing collision.”
“What do the errors look like on the target plane?” Webb asked.
“A very elongated ellipse, almost a narrow bar, passing from the Pacific through central Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico. One sigma on the long axis is two thousand kilometres, on the short one a couple of hundred.”
“We could still have an ocean impact, then?”
“Or a miss. The asteroid came within range of the Gold-stone radar some hours ago and they should be sharpening up on the orbit now.”
The Minister interrupted the technical exchange. “It says here it’s approaching us at fifteen miles a second and is four million miles away at the moment. It will pass the Earth in three days and”—he looked at his watch—“eight hours.”