Jess turned from the boy and looked around her at the rough-hewn rock walls adorned with finely detailed hanging tapestries. Twenty feet overhead, massive wooden beams supported a ceiling of terracotta tiles, and an enormous dark wood chandelier hung down from there, almost to head height. Sitting upright, she found herself surrounded by a sea of brightly colored pillows. A man sat at the foot of the bed. Two other men stood at a distance in the corner of the room. The small boy retreated and pulled on the man’s arm.
He looked familiar, his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail over broad shoulders and his face square-jawed with a scar above his left eye. “Signora, how are you…?” Leaning forward, he touched her leg.
Jess recoiled and pulled her left leg away from him. Her mind was groggy, but she remembered falling, and being carried here. She remembered being in considerable pain. What happened?
“Uh, who are you?” She bunched the pillows up to cover her leg. She was still wearing her jeans and sneakers, with her hoodie on top. That reassured her.
The man sat back. “I am sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Her mother’s voice echoed from a hallway, and an instant later Celeste appeared through the bedroom door, rushing to her side. “Jessica, you’re awake! Finally! Oh, thank goodness. I was worried. You gave us a scare. This is Baron Ruspoli. You remember, from the museum tour?”
The ache behind her eyes was returning, and in moving her tongue she tasted the metallic tang of blood. A breeze from open windows mercifully pulled some freshness into the musty room.
“Please, call me Giovanni.” The man stood but continued to hover over her, the boy clinging to his side.
The boy. Hector, Jess remembered. The Baron’s son.
Jess craned her neck to one side to look out the half-open door to the room leading into the hallway. No one else out there. She looked back at the two men in the corner of the room. “Mom, are—”
“Everything is all right, Jessica.” Celeste sat beside her. “You took a nasty spill.” She glanced at the Baron, then looked back at Jess. “Those policemen weren’t here for you.”
“Scusi, that back door was supposed to be locked,” added Baron Giovanni. “It is not safe to go out.”
Jess winced. She must have cracked her skull. Her, of all people, with her skills, how could she have fallen like that? Alcohol, her nonchalance, her conviction that she could control any situation and was immune to any danger, let alone the simple everyday ones. She could climb the most treacherous mountains, but walking down a path had apparently done her in.
She felt the goose egg on the side of her head, and asked her mother: “Where are we?”
They were supposed to stay one night in a small cottage on the side of the castle; part of the whirlwind Castles in Chianti mini-tour Jess had organized. They were not in that cottage.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I moved you into our private quarters,” Giovanni said. “This is a room in the main tower of the castle. The doctor is on his way.” Giovanni slipped his hands into his pockets and took a step back while clearing his throat. “Of course, I had your mother’s permission.”
“It’s fine,” Jess grunted. “I mean, thank you. It’s very nice.” She pushed her arms down to sit higher, and pain lanced from her head through her shoulders. She slumped into the pillows, thinking the Baron was probably more afraid of a lawsuit than trying to be nice.
“Nico and Leone saved you,” Celeste said, her voice soothing, motioning to the two men standing behind Baron Giovanni.
One of the men, the younger one, waved a tiny salute. He was Nico, their tour guide from earlier. She’d rather have someone a little more important than their tour guide be her knight in shining armor. Admittedly, this Nico possessed a boyish charm—tousled brown hair pulled back to one side, a carefully groomed beard on a slender, smiling face. Jess managed to smile back.
The old man beside him had poked his head into the museum earlier. White flyaway hair over a deeply tanned scalp. The pipe in his mouth looked as though it was permanently fitted there.
“You would have fallen right off the ledge, twenty feet at least.” Celeste added. “No word of exaggeration, they might very well have saved your life.”
How could she have been so careless? This was embarrassing. Rock-climber extraordinaire. Tripping over a pebble. She did her best to sit upright. “Thank you, Nico and Leone,” she said. “Thank you, everyone. But we should be going.”
She wanted to head back to Rome.
Her Riccardo problem, she should have dealt with that sooner. Working illegally in Italy wasn’t a criminal offense, and the lies about the sale of the equipment, the lawyer could sort out. She just had to get back to Rome.
Giovanni caught her gazing outside. “That’s L’Olio,” he said, thinking she was noticing the tree in the middle of the courtyard, “our matriarch, the old olive tree. Did you visit her yet?”
The tree merited a mention in the castle tour brochure. Jess shook her head, but took a closer look now—the tree’s roots dug their way into the ground like old arthritic fingers, gnarled and misshapen, an equally tortured knot of branches spreading out above the roots in a half-dead tangle.
“Over three thousand years old,” Giovanni added. “She was here when the Etruscans dug their caves into the hills below us.”
“It’s beautiful,” Jess lied. To her, the tree appeared to be in pain, hanging on to a bitter end. She’d never be like that. She’d refuse to hang on past her time.
“You didn’t finish the tour?” Giovanni looked at Jess, then Celeste. “Then I insist. Please make use of these rooms, and I will take you on a proper tour of the castle myself.” He smiled and nodded. “When you are feeling better, of course.”
Jess smiled thinly. “We can’t—”
“I do have a confession.” Giovanni smiled awkwardly.
This threw Jess off. She blinked. “A confession?”
“I did not recognize you when first we met. Out of context, you understand. Then after you were brought here, your mother mentioned your name. Jessica Rollins. Of course! I recognized you then. I am a fan of extreme sports, Jessica. I have seen your videos on the YouTube, watched more than a few times your ascent and mid-climb BASE jump from El Capitan. I am a big fan. I apologize for not knowing you immediately.”
She would never admit it, but being recognized still gave Jess a little thrill, even if she kept a pained look on her face, more so that she was on her back in a bed for nothing more than stumbling.
“It would be an honor if you’d allow me to show you and your mother around the castle myself. Please.”
Jess was about to say no again, but Celeste jumped in. “We’d love to. That is very generous.” She glanced at Jess, frowned, then returned to smiling at the Baron.
Giovanni’s smile broadened. “Then it’s settled. I’ll go out and see when the doctor will arrive.” He excused himself and exited the room. Hector trailed after him.
Nico stepped forward then, extending one hand to Celeste. He then bowed and kissed the hand she offered in return. Her mother blushed. “A pleasure, Madame Tosetti, a real pleasure.” Straightening up, he took a step toward Jess. She edged away. “And Jessica, I look forward to seeing more of you as well,” he said.
“Your family is from here?” growled a voice from behind Nico. The old man, Leone, having finally plucked his pipe from between his lips, was holding it now in one hand, and glowering at Nico and Jess.
“Our family was from the valley below here, many generations ago,” Celeste explained. She glanced at Nico. “Are you from here?”
“From Napoli. I came here looking for work, years ago. Giovanni’s father took me in.”
Leone grunted. “I have work that needs attending. Good day, Madame Tosetti, Madame Rollins.”
“Thank you again, Leone.” Celeste said. The old man no sooner disappeared than another arrived, suitcases under both arms.
“Old Leo
ne is a little grumpy,” explained Nico, turning to the doorway. “Ah, and this is Enzo,” he added, introducing the small man who deposited their luggage just inside the door.
“Buongiorno,” Enzo said, his voice bright. “Anything you need, you come to me.”
Enzo had a thin, angular face with a goatee and a large mole on his left cheek. A brown pork-pie hat covered his head, which Jess imagined was balding. “Thank you very much, but I’m feeling…”
Nico bowed. “Enzo, let’s leave our guests.”
“Yes, yes. I have a few more bags to bring in. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” Celeste replied.
Jess looked at her mother once the men were gone. “What’s going on?”
“It seems you have fallen on the estate of a fan. Who, perhaps, doesn’t particularly want to be sued? They assume that that’s what all Americans do. Sue.” Celeste grinned with a sense of mischief. She often seemed to be thinking the same thing as her daughter. “Giovanni is a very nice man, don’t you think? Why don’t we relax, take our time? We don’t need to be in Rome for a few days, do we? For this surprise of yours?”
Jess’s father’s conference ended in three days. That was when Jess planned on trying to get them together. “We’re not in a hurry.”
“Good, then we can stay a few days,” Celeste said cheerfully. “I like it here, and I think you could use a day off your feet.” Her mother winced, looking at her left leg. “Sorry, you know what I mean.”
“A warning,” a voice announced. They looked behind them. The Baron was showing his face in the doorway. “The doctor—he will be here in two minutes. The doctor. Two minutes.”
Enzo was observing Baron Ruspoli ahead of him, fawning over this new American girl and her mother. He saw the way he looked at the younger one. This little dove with her broken wing. “Here are the rest of the bags,” Enzo called out as he barged past the Baron, dropping what he carried onto the floor.
He smiled at the Baron, then at Jessica. He had to admit, she was beautiful—long blond hair, slender, but with fire in her eyes. If he were a Baron himself, he would try to do more than only imagine many nights with her. He would show her his love…
But he had to smile. He could only pretend.
He had to be careful, after all. He couldn’t go back to prison. Not after the last time.
“Is that all, Baron?” Enzo asked.
The Baron put a hand on Enzo’s shoulder. “Yes, thank you. And please, whatever Jessica and Celeste need, you make sure that you provide it for them.”
Enzo turned to smile at the women. “Whatever they need.”
Looking at the Baron, Enzo smiled at him as well. Soon the Baron would also be getting what he needed. Soon the pig would pay for his crimes.
NOMAD
Survivor testimony #JR6;
Event +55hrs;
Name: Sergio Solano;
Reported location: Denver, Colorado;
We took off from the Seattle area just after half past three. The airspace was officially closed, as it was everywhere. By then the water had already dropped ten feet in the Tacoma Narrows, leaving us with six or seven hours. At least, that’s what they said. Enough time for me to get my son and fly back the three hours to Dallas in my Cessna Citation jet. They were wrong. Not enough time. Forty-five minutes into the flight, I’d climbed to thirty-three thousand feet, scanning the airspace for any oncoming aircraft as all ATC were down. Bright blue skies, no pressure fronts along the whole route. A perfect day.
Then all hell broke loose. Bands of white light appeared in the sky, rippling, and a second later the electronics went blank. Just like that. Everything gone. No GPS, no digital displays. My old Citation works off manual hydraulics, thank God, so I switched to dead reckoning and the six-pack of analog controls. Straight ahead, a black smudge appeared. It seemed to engulf the entire horizon. Never seen anything like it. It stretched up, high into the sky, higher than any thunderhead I’d ever seen. Those usually flatten out at the tropopause, at the edge of the stratosphere, thirty or even forty thousand feet. This was a black wall, shooting into the sky far beyond that.
I changed course away from it and was picking up my altitude when a shock wave hit us. Damn near tore the plane apart, dropped us to twenty thousand before I regained control. By the time I looked back, the wall had mushroomed into an inky black pool spreading across the sky… I put us down in Denver after the second shock wave ripped into us. A black cloud enveloped us by the time we secured the jet on the empty runway. That was two days ago. Now there’s three feet of it in the streets, a suffocating sludge coating everything… I don’t know how long we’ll be able…
Transmission ended high ionization static. Freq. 9660 kHz.
Subject not reacquired.
OCTOBER 17th
7
Rome, Italy
Ben plumped up his hotel pillow and shut his eyes for the hundredth time. He hadn’t slept the entire night before, and had spent the day fighting his way through a foggy hangover. Usually this was the recipe for a night of sleeping like the dead, but his brain couldn’t stop spinning in its hamster wheel.
For most of the day he’d been cooped up in Müller’s meeting, trading heated discussions, some almost ending in fistfights, with fellow scientists he’d known for years. After that, he’d been corralled, forced into signing non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements in exchange for getting access to Müller’s data and joining the “team”.
Exactly what team he was joining wasn’t obvious yet.
Müller had shrugged off his attempts to gain a private audience. A constant battalion of dark-suited-sunglass-wearing goons surrounded the old man. Ben had waited, insisted that they need to speak, but he’d been politely told that it would have to wait.
The rest of the evening he spent poring over the numbers, running simulations on his laptop, accessing what data he had, but to do more he needed Roger’s help, and he hadn’t been able to find his student. Somehow the kid was suddenly unavailable, his cellphone turned off, totally disappeared.
He was probably off having drinks with some young Italian girls. That’s what Ben would be doing, if he was young, single, and on the prowl in Rome. He couldn’t blame him, and he didn’t know the urgency.
Then again, Roger didn’t really drink alcohol. He was too much of a sports nut, and enjoyed chiding Ben over his late nights and wine. That didn’t stop Ben from noticing all the pain pills his student seemed to be taking, but then this was a discussion for another time.
Right now, Ben needed some sleep. Tomorrow was a new day, and maybe things would look different. He closed his eyes for the hundredth-plus-one time.
“What the Hell is that?” Bernie jabbed a finger at his computer screen.
Paul, his research partner, had his attention focused on a small TV jammed into a corner of a shared office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He stared at a grainy image of people on top of a wall, hacking off chunks of concrete with crowbars and pick-axes. “That’s the Berlin Wall coming down!” Paul replied. “The end of the Cold War. 1989, an amazing year, huh?”
After combing through twelve-years’ worth of data collection from the first all-sky optical survey, the Red Shift project, Bernie had never seen anything like this. “A signal flare in Gliese 445. You know. Red dwarf. Constellation Camelopardalis.”
“Say again?”
“It’s not supposed to be visible to the naked eye.” Bernie grabbed a sheaf of papers and shuffled through them. “A massive wide-spectrum flash. Too fast for a nova, but not regular like a pulsar, either.” He squinted and checked other data. “And it doesn’t have the signature of an M-dwarf.”
Paul sighed, his eyes still glued on those demolishing the Wall. “There’s a million things we can’t identify. Today, I mean. There were a million yesterday. A million more tomorrow. Just make a note and move on.”
Outside it was darkening, the lights coming
on between the red brick buildings of the Harvard campus, a light dusting of snow on the grass.
“Sure. You’re right.” Bernie pushed a floppy disk into the drive of the IBM/400 minicomputer and saved the data anyway. He could investigate later. Maybe get Dr. Müller to take a look sometime.
Ben jumped up in bed, soaked in a cold sweat, his pillow bunched into a ball, the sheets twisted around him. His heart pounded in his chest.
It was if he were just there, thirty years ago, back in his first office at Harvard in the eighties. Gliese 445. Could it be possible? Maybe it was just a coincidence.
Maybe.
Other dreams crowded his mind, too.
Nightmares of skies filled with fire, of mountains tipped into oceans, of space and time balanced on the brink of nothing, swallowed into the edge of infinity. A sense of wonder filled his dread, an awe of the universe moving around him, of what his mind was able to see beyond what his eyes could.
What if he was right?
What if his random guess of more than thirty years before turned out to be correct? But the data had never fit the models. It had never been more than another unexplained flash in the sky. Gliese 445.
Now it wasn’t just about himself. Thirty years ago was before he was married, before he had children. His intellectual mind might feel awe, but as a father, he felt only creeping desperation and hopeless frailty.
Still breathing hard, his heart slowed, the terror receding, but still there under every thought. Ben checked his cellphone. Five a.m. No way he was going to get back to sleep now.
Have a shower. Soak some caffeine into the bloodstream and look at the numbers again. Roger had to be back. He couldn’t tell his student why, but he could certainly wake him up and get him working. Tell him it was a secret project. He could get him downloading data from their systems back home.
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