This was the hot phase, and it had hung around here for a long time, long before the spot cycle began its early peak. Maybe these things were linked, in the way that cancer might be sparked by a random quark from Saturn zipping through your spleen. But this was no straight-line relationship. No one had yet figured out the way to read those particular runes.
There was the sound of a car scrunching across the gravel and Mo Sinclair drew up in a Suzuki Vitara, Annie in the back. Something different there, Lieberman thought. Mo didn't look as lost and dreamy as she had three hours earlier. She gave him half a smile. Annie jumped out of the open-topped vehicle, grinned, and said, 'We've been talking about it and this is the deal.'
'The deal?' he asked. He was wearing his Lone Wolf Solar Observatory baseball cap (which he liked to think of as office uniform) and not just out of vanity either. Sunburn was a real danger in this weather. 'What deal?'
'We show you Pollensa. You tell us what this stuff is all about. Okay?'
'You mean like… everything?'
'Everything.'
'Sure.' He shrugged. 'What little I know.'
'That will be nice,' Mo said coolly.
So he walked back into the building that served as quarters, back into his bedroom, and picked up the gear he'd need for his little tutorial. Then the first part of the tour began, on foot, the three of them sweating in the incessant heat. La Finca, it turned out, was even bigger than he had expected. Some fancy banking family from Madrid had owned the estate for almost two hundred years before getting caught up in the recession of the late eighties. By 1990, it was on the market, and Sundog — 'whoever they are,' Mo said pointedly — stepped in with an offer no one could match.
'But why here?' Lieberman asked as they walked over to the clifftop and caught a startling view straight out onto the empty blue waters of the Mediterranean. 'What kind of a place is this for astronomers?'
'You're supposed to be telling us that,' Annie objected, with the dogged lack of logic Lieberman associated with kids.
'It's private,' Mo said. 'You'll see on the way out how secure it is. One road in, with a locked guard post, the sea on the other side, and mountains everywhere else. Do astronomers need privacy?'
'Everybody needs privacy,' he said.
'Oh yeah,' Annie said, laughing. He could hear something tense in her voice and, for the life of him, couldn't understand what put it there.
'And it's not just here,' Mo said. 'Why do you think they've got two helicopters? There's some kind of place up in the mountains… they never talk about it when any of the locals are around. Or to anyone low on the food chain like me.'
'Maybe,' said Annie, 'they're all a bunch of spies!'
'Could be,' he said, trying to sound conspiratorial.
They both laughed then. It made Mo look a lot nicer, he thought — attractive, in a strained, skinny kind of way.
She stopped by the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the cliff top. The sea was a good hundred feet below, straight onto rock, no beach here, just the angry, relentless churning of the ocean.
But it was Mo he was looking at.
Just then she was close to beautiful, her long straight hair moving softly in the hot Mediterranean sea breeze. She looked like something precious that had been twisted and marked by some pain he could only guess at, something hard and strong and damaging, but still not cruel enough to take away everything that was attractive about her.
'Nice view,' she said, staring out at the ocean.
'Yeah,' he said, and looked. It was quite a sight. From the cliff edge you could see how perfectly La Finca had been positioned. The main house sat four-square, glowing golden in the bright morning sun, its plain rectangular lines broken now by the points of the cypresses lining the drives, and the smaller trees that marked paths into some adjoining ornamental gardens. A thin winding road led off from beyond the house, inland, rising gently into nothingness.
'That's the way in and the way out,' Mo said, watching him stare down the road. 'The only one, by car, anyway. There's no footpath except from the cove at San Vicente three miles off to the north, and that takes you through some pretty treacherous ground. Apparently it was mined during the Civil War in the thirties. Go south and you'd need to cling to the mountain for a good twenty miles before you ran into Soller. And don't even think about coming in by boat. There's no jetty down there, nothing. You see what I mean about privacy?'
'Idyllic, if you like that kind of thing.'
'Idyllic is the word, all right. Can you imagine how that banking family must have felt, having to leave all this?'
Lieberman let the question hang there, brooding on other losses.
It was Annie who finally broke the silence. 'Let's go into town,' she said.
Two minutes later they were sailing along the narrow private road in the Suzuki, the hot wind in their hair. A dour Spanish guardsman came out of his sentry box and opened an electronic green iron gate topped with spikes, a remote TV camera too. Then they were out of La Finca, driving slowly along a winding road, a dried-up rocky riverbed to the right and some low olive fields to the left. Finally, civilization appeared, with more and more country villas — big houses for the tourists and the rich weekend folk from Barcelona and Madrid.
They popped out of the mountains, crossed the narrow main road, and were in the town. Mo drove knowledgeably through a warren of narrow white-walled streets, parked in a space the size of a pocket handkerchief, then they climbed out of the car, Lieberman lugging the rucksack he'd brought with him. Annie took him by the hand, led him through two dark alleyways, before coming out in a large, open square, with a hulking church in the same golden stone as La Finca.
'We have money,' Mo announced.
'Their money.' Annie grinned.
Lieberman sat down on a battered metal chair, beside an even more battered tin table, and announced, 'Beer, ice cream, tapas. Let's party.'
'One beer,' Mo cautioned. 'Then I want some exercise.' 'Good,' he said, and looked for the waiter. Fifteen minutes later, they were out of the square, walking past the church and a cluster of ecclesiastical-looking buildings. The heat was so oppressive it felt tangible. Lieberman's checked shirt clung to his chest, and he could feel the sweat running in hot salty rivulets down his face.
They turned a corner, and stretching in front of them was a straight paved climb up a small hill to what looked like a chapel at the top.
Lieberman sighed and started to climb. Mo slowed to keep pace with him, always watching Annie, who raced ahead, never quite letting her go. As they reached the summit, he got the point. The sights were astonishing on all four sides. They gazed down into the town with a bird's-eye view. To the northeast was the broad sweeping bay of Pollensa, and, in the opposite direction, the long line of mountains that hid La Finca from the world.
Annie was seated on a stone bench underneath a scraggy cypress, trying to stay out of the sun. They joined her and she looked at Lieberman, smiled, and said, 'Your turn now.'
'Okay. We keep this short. Then you two can carry me back down that hill, since I doubt I can walk.'
'Wimp,' Annie said.
'I'm old,' he countered.
'Not that much.'
'Enough to know you should be wearing something on your head. Take this.'
He pushed the Lone Wolf baseball cap onto Annie's head and vowed to stand, as much as he could, in the shade of the cypress tree for the next half hour or as long as it took to bring this brief and — even to him — puzzling situation into the light.
The ground around the chapel was empty. No one else was dumb enough, he guessed, to brave the airless midday cauldron that had enveloped the island. He had his little notebook computer with the presentation notes on and a small portable telescope with an equatorial fork mount. Lieberman took out the scope, attached the fork mount to the body, then fitted the screen of the projector to the frame so that the image came straight out of the eyepiece and fell there, damn near perfect, and visible for everyone to see. They were watching him screw the thing together, and there was genuine interest there, in what he had to tell them, and maybe even in him too. They were curious, which he found both refreshing and satisfying.