The Range Rover came into sharp focus.
And, there, was Jessica.
“Why don’t you just take her now?”
“Not all is as it seems, I think,” the Englishman replied. “Whoever attacked Vivas—”
“Destroyed?”
“More of a flesh wound.” The Englishman grimaced and stroked a bandage covering the right side of his face. “The inner sanctum was unharmed, but the surface buildings…well, at least we don’t have to deal with the peasants, anymore.”
Salman clenched his jaw and shifted in his seat. “You think she attacked you?” He put the binoculars down.
“Someone is protecting her.” The Englishman tilted his head to one side. “Or someone is trying to kill her. Not sure which yet. But remember, she led us into an ambush once. We don’t want that to happen again. So we wait. We watch. We study the situation. We need to protect that merchandise, it may be more valuable, than, well, I was going to say the Vatican, but that’s gone, isn’t it?”
The Englishman let an uncomfortable silence settle.
“I have a man on the inside.”
“So you said.”
“Not just a man, but a man and two women.”
“How perfectly Italian of you.” The Englishman smiled at Salman’s scowl. “So, partners?”
“Si, partners.”
“Lovely. Make sure that man of yours doesn’t let them get too far.”
“Do not worry. I know where they are going.”
“Then we’re all settled?” The Englishman opened the passenger side door.
Salman grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “You remember, you have fancy guns and clothes, but you are in my country.”
“What’s left of your country, I think you mean.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, English. I have people, everywhere here. You cross me, I kill you in very unpleasant ways.”
The Englishman shrugged off Salman’s hand. “You can consider that understood, and that it cuts both ways.” He paused before stepping out. “And how do I know it wasn’t you that attacked Vivas? As you say, you have spies everywhere. How strange that I came across you, watching my city burn, and now you want to make a deal.”
11
THE SOUND OF children playing tinkled over the noise of waves crashing into the sand. A man sitting in a fabric recliner dug his toes into the hot sand of the beach, his nose in a book, and reached for his drink on a small rattan table next to him. Taking a sip, he held his drink aloft and inspected it. Empty. Just half-melted ice cubes glistening inside the condensation-streaked glass.
“Honey, could you get me another one?”
“What was it?”
“Rum and coke, but dark rum. The Cuban one.”
“I’ll get the waiter,” she replied, waving one arm in the air while coming up behind the man, her long blond hair pulled back in a bun under a wide-brimmed hat, dark sunglasses obscuring her eyes.
She was wearing her pink bikini today. It was the man’s favorite, and he wrapped his arm around her tanned waist and kissed her hip. Her skin was salty. Sweaty. The sun burned fiercely overhead in a perfect blue sky. The woman tousled the man’s hair playfully.
“Did you see this?” the man asked, putting his book down and picking up a folded newspaper from the rattan table. “Jovian meteor impacts in Northern Europe.”
“Is it bad?”
He slapped the paper back onto the table. “Worse is coming.”
“I thought the worst was over. It’s been two weeks, hasn’t it?”
“And just fifty weeks left,” the man said with a smile.
“Sir? Ma’am?”
A white-aproned waiter hovered over the man’s left shoulder.
“Another rum and coke, same as last time, with the dark Cuban,” the woman instructed.
“Yes, ma’am.” The waiter swiveled in the sand and took off for the bar.
“Why don’t you make sure Cassandra and Krista are okay?” the man said. “They’re playing with the Buchanan kids near the breakwater, looking for crabs.”
The woman shielded her eyes from the sun. She scanned to their right, past the leafy canopy of palm trees to the wooden dock. “I’ll go check. Maybe take them for a walk through—”
“Don’t go through the forest back to the condo. He’s there.” The man didn’t need to explain who he was.
“Then we’ll just go along the beach,” the woman replied with a smile.
“And we’re doing lunch with Susan and Phil, don’t forget.”
“I’ll get the kids ready.”
“Perfect.”
The man craned his neck up to give the woman a kiss. Behind them, the waiter stopped at a respectful distance for them to finish before he deposited the drink next to the man.
“Thank you, Manuel,” said the man, taking the drink.
The ice cubes chinked together as he angled the glass back and took a long sip, feeling the sweet burn of the alcohol hitting his lips. What a beautiful day. He picked up his book and settled into the recliner.
NOVEMBER 7th
Fourteen Days A.N.
12
THE MORNING BROUGHT with it a luminous haze, soundless and still. It enveloped the farmhouse. Visibility was less than a mile. They couldn’t even see the hilltops next to them, but it was warmer, the temperature hovering near freezing.
Jess liked to sleep, relished the small moments where she could escape into it. Frightened, angry, excited were all things she experienced when she slept, but never sadness. Sadness was reserved for her waking world, and sadness was the thing she feared the most. She awoke stiff, but it was more from sleeping on the floor on a blanket, something she’d never get used to. When she opened her eyes, she found the smiling face of Elsa hovering over her, pulling on her blankets, asking her if she wanted tea.
Her fingers still ached, but the feeling and movement had returned. Her little finger on her left hand was still purple toward the tip, but that wasn’t enough to suppress an excitement that filled their small group that morning. There was an almost festive atmosphere as they packed up to leave, early that morning, shoving what they could into the Range Rover before all nine squeezed in again.
She’d been stubborn, and had refused to change paths, but now Jess felt some measure of relief for the first time since they left Castello Ruspoli. At least this wasn’t on her head, that they’d been forced this way, and maybe that was a good thing. The idea of trekking a hundred miles across sea ice seemed insane now. If you don’t laugh at the hand fate gave you, her father used to say, it was because you weren’t getting the joke. Today they’d reach Civitavecchia, Rome’s main port, and Giovanni had secured a berth with promises of the gold bars. By this time tomorrow they might be sliding across the Mediterranean on their way to Africa.
The rolling landscape, covered in ice, glistened under a patchwork of pregnant clouds. As they neared the coast, the terrain shifted from the brittle-skeleton trees of the countryside to an urban chaos of flattened buildings and twisted power transmission towers that clogged the hillsides. Smudges of fire-smoke rose needle-like from the valleys, rising and dissipating into the sun-infused yellow glow between black clouds.
They passed people in the towns, but they cruised into the encampments with their rifles raised, meeting the hollow stares of the ragged survivors they passed. They never needed to say it: Don’t try to stop us.
As they neared the coast, they saw fewer and fewer until there were no more.
“Just over the next hill,” Giovanni said, studying the map spread out in his lap. “We should see water.”
Leone was driving again, and he grunted at Giovanni’s prediction and downshifted. If the old man wasn’t feeling well, he was stoic about it. Next to Leone, though, Jess noticed Lucca’s cheeks streaked pink, a thin sweat on his forehead.
The Range Rover slid through the two-foot mush of ash and snow covering the road. The engine was knocking again, the same problem they had two days ago. Jus
t yesterday they’d replaced the spark plugs Massarra brought to them before she disappeared, and the engine was smooth. Today the knocking had returned, but in just a few hours they should reach some semblance of civilization, the evacuation center they’d been talking to over the radio. Elsa and Rita seemed more serious than usual, and even Roger wasn’t being his usual sarcastic self. Perhaps the meteor shower the night before continued to weigh on their minds.
Jess noticed Raffa sitting close to Rita, the two of them speaking quietly in Italian. Raffa played with his hands as he spoke, glancing at her, his face slightly flushed. Rita would drop a hand onto his arm from time to time and smile at things he said. A tiny moment of humanity in all the darkness of the last few days, Jess thought. Seeing them together lifted her a little.
She turned to Roger. “So it’s like the Perseids?”
As a child, every August her father would make the pilgrimage to the top of Slide Mountain in the Catskills to watch the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. “The Perseids are a cloud of debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle,” he’d explain, the same every year as though she wouldn’t remember. “The Earth’s orbit sweeps through the cloud starting every July, finishing in August.” It was her favorite memory; of warm, humid evenings, her father urging her up the trails, the air scented with pinesap and moss and baked rock from the hot sun of the day. Something she’d never experience again, she realized with a stab of regret.
“Sort of,” Roger replied, sitting in front of Jess.
Beside Jess, Giovanni fiddled with the controls of the shortwave. He had it plugged into the cigarette lighter of the truck. Hector was squeezed between them, and Giovanni had given him a small radio of his own to play with, an old FM they’d found batteries for.
“But what meteor shower was that last night?” she asked.
“My calculations say they were the Jupiter Trojans. They’ve never come near Earth before. Or, I guess I should say, we’ve never gone anywhere near them. Everything’s changed now.” He held up his laptop and pointed at a collection of dots in front of, and behind, Jupiter’s orbit. “See these groups here? They’re called the Trojan asteroids.”
He put his laptop back down. “They’re a collection of leftover debris that were scooped into stable orbits by Jupiter’s gravity, sixty degrees in front and behind it, in its Lagrangian points. Problem is, Nomad punched straight through L4, the Trojan grouping. And you see this?” He held up the laptop again. “Gravitational slingshot straight into Earth’s orbit.”
“Already? I mean, that’s way out at Jupiter.”
“Jupiter ain’t where it used to be, and neither are these. We’re fourteen days since Nomad, and Mercury's already shot out past Mars. Gravitational slingshot. Same mechanism that’s firing these Trojan asteroids at Earth like a Gatling gun.” Roger fidgeted with his thumb, chewing on the nail. “Everyone’s heard of the Asteroid Belt, but the truth is, there are twice as many asteroids in the Jupiter clusters.”
“How big are these things?” Jess asked. The Perseids were sometimes spectacular, but it was just a light show.
“Maybe a million over a kilometer in diameter.”
Giovanni played with the shortwave’s dials, but was listening to their conversation. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Not bad?” Roger didn’t even bother to resort to sarcasm. “A kilometer-sized asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. One. The planets have been in more-or-less stable orbits for billions of years, and these Trojan asteroids collected like dust in the corner of a room. A million planet-killers are on the loose. Nomad blew a gust of air through the solar system, and now the dust is everywhere.”
“Won’t we be able to predict what will hit us? Maybe with this?” Jess patted her backpack in her lap.
“In the sim tool, a thousand of the biggest Trojans are mapped, along with clusters of others. We should be seeing another cluster the night after tomorrow.”
“Should we find somewhere to hide?”
“That cluster should hit on the other side of the planet, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it, but there will be another two or three days after that. Give me the disks, let me work on decoding them, I might be able to tell more.”
“When we get on the ship, we’ll do it together, okay?”
“Sure, but—”
“Hey, Jess, listen!” Giovanni nudged her shoulder. He turned up the volume on the shortwave.
“Station Saline, do you read…” crackled a voice over the radio. “This is Captain Ballie Booker of the RNLB Jolly Roger.”
The Jolly Roger, a British coast guard ship, was one of the first survivors they contacted on the shortwave after Nomad hit. Giovanni grinned at Jess and pressed the radio’s talk button. “Reading you five by five, Jolly Roger. This is Station Saline. Ballie, it is good to hear your voice, my friend. Over.”
“Ah, mate, not as good as hearing yours. I have news. Over.”
“What news? Over.”
“Those survivors you contacted?” said Ballie Booker’s voice over the radio. “The ones on Sugarloaf Mountain, in Florida? A boat picked them up last night, mate!”
The knuckles on Giovanni’s hands, gripping the shortwave microphone, went white. The hair on the back of Jess’s own arms prickled in excitement. Giovanni’s grin spread almost from ear to ear as he looked at Hector, then at Jess. In all of this mess, a small victory.
“You saved them, mate,” added Ballie. “And they told me to tell you, thank you.”
“That’s good news,” Giovanni said into the microphone, his voice choked.
Jess took his hand in hers and squeezed the talk button. “What’s your position, Jolly Roger? Over.”
“Ah…” The radio crackled. “…France, we managed to get into La Roche yesterday. Or what we think was La Roche. Tricky business getting in past the ice. Total mess, like everywhere else. Scavenged a little more food, found some diesel. We’ll not be stopping again till we steam around Gibraltar. The devastation is bad, mate. Everywhere. And you? Are you on the move? Over.”
“We are near Rome. We are heading for evacuation ships at Civitavecchia. Over.”
The radio hissed. Jess was about to repeat herself and confirm they were still in touch when the response came: “Say again. Did you say Civitavecchia? Over.”
“Affirmative, Jolly Roger. Over.” Jess was rusty with her radio voice procedure. She did the basics in the Marines, but never used it much. Giovanni had been teaching it back to her.
More radio silence.
“Mate, that’s news to us,” came Ballie’s voice after another long pause. “On what frequency?”
“Seven-four-four-zero,” Giovanni said, pulling his sheaf of papers from a bag by his feet, his survivor logs. He leafed through them, finding the scribbled notes of their contact with the Civitavecchia port authority.
“That’s not a maritime frequency. Who were you talking to? Over.”
“Port authority of Civitavecchia. Over.”
“Noted, Station Saline. I’ll pass that information along to the other groups.”
Where Giovanni’s shortwave was a small portable device, with 200 Watts of transmission power, the Jolly Roger had a maritime emergency transmitter of 5,000 Watts with a hundred-foot-high whip antenna. They were able to keep in touch with more of the survivor groups, on a more frequent basis.
Jess took the microphone from Giovanni. “Jolly Roger, I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you ever heard of something called Vivas?”
“Say again?”
“Vivas. Some kind of bunker system for the super wealthy.”
The radio hissed quietly. “Funny you should say that, because last night the skip was really in, yeah?”
The “skip” in radio talk meant that atmospheric conditions were good, that radio waves bounced off the ionosphere and ground making it possible to talk over very long distances, all the way around the world.
“We talked to your friend Corporal Zaski
n of the Russian border patrol, out in the Gobi desert. He told me they’d found a bunker out there in the middle of nowhere. Private airport full of Gulfstream jets, just sitting on the runway. Totally locked down. Bunch of rich bastards, right? Over.”
Jess locked eyes with Giovanni. She pushed the talk button. “Do us a favor, Ballie? Don’t report our location to anyone.”
“Say again, Station Saline?”
“Do not report our location to anyone. We had a run in with a Vivas group yesterday. It was destroyed.”
“Destroyed?”
“Someone attacked it. We don’t know who.”
“Roger. Will not report your location to anyone else. Anything we can do? Over.”
“Not for now. We’ll be in touch. Station Saline out.”
Jess turned off the radio. “What the hell is going on?” she said quietly to Giovanni.
He said nothing, his face blank.
“And something else,” she whispered. “How much morphine did you give me?”
“Two ampules. Why?”
“Did you take any more? For the wound in your side? Because I did an inventory this morning, and half of it is gone from the med kits. And I noticed the Vicodin tablets were missing when I did inventory two days before that.”
Giovanni shrugged. “In the rush to get away from Vivas, perhaps it was lost.”
“Maybe.” Jess held Giovanni’s gaze, then glanced around the truck, at Elsa, Rita, but stopping at Roger.
The truck crested a ridge, and through the luminous mist, a line of blue appeared.
“Capo,” said Leone, his gruff and usually monotone voice now filled with excitement, “il mare.” He pointed through the windshield. He pointed at the ocean.
Jess noticed everyone sat upright to get a better look, but Roger slumped lower in his seat, pulling the laptop screen closer.
Giovanni pulled out his map again and inspected it. He traced one finger along the road they were on and then tapped one spot on the map. Looking up, he squinted, leaning forward to get a better look through the window. “The main ports are to the right of the city.”
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 9
