Other rumours said Benadir was infertile, the result of some kind of medical treatment. So she wasn’t perfect. Maybe there was a chance…
Paola sighed and put Doc from her mind. He was back in England now anyway.
Had she brought enough food for everyone, she suddenly wondered. Despite the enormous weight of the picnic, would there be enough? There was lots of bread and sliced meats and salad leaves. Luckily they all weighed nothing. Many cheeses - they were heavy. Artichoke hearts in oil and dressed olives, transferred from their heavy glass jars to lightweight plastic containers…
Paola fretted about amounts of food as she crossed the grass in the brilliant sunlight. She passed under a stand of trees and the heat of the sun on her head was replaced by cool shadow. She enjoyed the shade of the trees as she passed through it. She could smell the water of the lake now.
There it was, gleaming in front of her in the sunlight.
She crossed a curve of road, the Via Salesina and then she was on the lakeside grass. It was the perfect spot, and she’d chosen it carefully a few days earlier, preparing invitations and telling everyone where to come and find her.
Paola had to get here first, of course, to prepare things.
She was little annoyed to see that she didn’t have her perfect spot all to herself. There was a family here, with a blanket and some cushions spread out and a picnic of their own. A man, his heavily pregnant wife, their infant daughter and an objectionable little black poodle that was busily chasing a red ball. It yapped in triumph when it picked the ball up, causing the ball to drop from its jaws. It picked the ball up again, yapped again and lost it again. The poodle stared down at the red ball in puzzlement, baffled by this dilemma.
Paola sighed and turned away from them. The family were spread out under a stand of trees near the road. Paola deliberately moved away from them, as far as she could, and found a spot right beside the lake, under some trees of her own.
She took the blanket out of her hamper and spread it on the cool damp grass. It was a much nicer blanket than the family had, she thought with satisfaction. A much more stylish pattern on it. But should she have brought some cushions, like they had? Cushions were a good idea. Why hadn’t she thought of cushions? What if Sofia Forli expected such comforts? Would she be annoyed at Paola for failing to bring them? Would it adversely affect Paola’s career trajectory at Z5?
She sighed again. There was no point worrying now. It was too late for cushions. She peered into the hamper and happily inspected the neatly wrapped foods, all their fine the fragrances rising to her nose. The bread was still warm from the bakers, carefully packed on the other side of the hamper away from the cool bottles of wine, to keep everything at the right temperature.
Paola took out the bottles of wine and stood them on the blanket, searching for a level patch of ground where they’d stand up straight, like a neat row of soldiers. Then she took out the drinking glasses. They weren’t real glasses of course. She had paper cups for the water and lemonade and slender plastic goblets for the sparkling wine.
Paola looked at the bottles again, standing there in an obedient rank. They looked so good that she decided she’d have a glass after all. One could do no harm. She took a bottle and stripped away the foil from its top and then carefully released the cork with her thumbs. It came out with a loud pop and she glanced across at the family in embarrassment. The man and the woman were smiling at her with approval. Their little girl was some distance away. She had gone over to the poodle to help the dog with its quandary about the ball. Stupid dog, thought Paola. She hoped it wouldn’t shit everywhere. Or bark all the time and spoil her picnic.
The couple seemed nice enough, though. They waved to her and by way of reply, Paola lifted the bottle in a clumsy salute. The woman was really pregnant. My god, she’s heavy, thought Paola. She must be ready to pop like my bottle of wine.
She set the cork aside on the blanket and began to pour herself some wine into one of the plastic flutes. She sniffed it with satisfaction and admired its fine pale colour, so yellow it was almost white.
Then something odd happened.
The wine turned pink.
Everything turned pink.
Paola looked up at the sky and there was a flash of lightning. Then another. Then another.
Except the lightning was red.
6: Apocalypse
The red lightning flashed twice more over Paola.
Then a rush of wind tore past her and, instead of the seasonable warm breeze of a moment earlier, it was as hot as the air from an oven. A crackling, roaring noise rose up in the distance, from the heart of the parkland. Paola stared in unreasoning terror as the trees on the other side of the road burst into flames. One second they were normal trees on a normal day, the next they were burning like candles, from the base of their trunks to the tips of their branches.
The little girl was staring at the burning trees. The dog was barking at them.
And then it wasn’t just the trees. The grass was on fire. Flames swept across the lawns as if they were soaked in gasoline. Paola’s brain refused to take it in. This couldn’t be happening.
The little girl stood at the edge of the road, staring at the grass burning on the other side. The dog was barking furiously. The father was running towards the little girl.
He reached her and snatched her up just as the flames spread across the road and the grass on this side began to ignite. Paola dropped her wine and stood up. The father was running with the little girl in his arms. The dog stopped barking at the advancing fire and turned and ran after them.
Too late. The dog burst into flame.
The trees all around the lake were catching fire, burning like struck matches. The father reached the blanket where the mother was standing, shrieking in fear. She took the little girl from him just as the flames caught up with them.
Father, mother and little girl went up in flame.
The fire raced across the grass towards Paola.
Only one thought lodged in her terrified brain. Survival. She turned and ran towards the lake. It was only three strides away, but even so the soles of her shoes were singed by the time she leapt from the shore and into the water. She stood there in the shallows for a moment, looking back. Her picnic hamper disappeared in a puff of flame and smoke. The trees she had been sitting under began to burn with a fury.
Then the heat from the shoreline became too intense.
Paola moved out into deeper water. In the immensity of her terror she began to fear that the water itself would burn. She turned and began to swim clumsily out into the lake.
She reached the middle of the lake and stayed there. It was the only place she felt safe. Paola floated here, rotating slowly and looking back at the shore. It was a circle of fire. It seemed like the world had ended. Hell had come to Earth and she was the last person left alive, paddling feebly here in the cold green water of Lake Salesina.
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to watch the end of the world. She clutched the silver cross that hung around her neck and prayed until she was shivering so hard that she couldn’t get the words out.
Paola had no idea how long she floated there in the centre of the lake, silent and shaking and petrified, but her limbs were beginning to chill and cramp when she heard something.
A shuddering thunder of sound, sweeping towards her. What new horror was this? Paola didn’t want to look and see. She kept her eyes shut. The sound grew louder and louder, but she still didn’t look. Then she felt a black shadow sweep across her, cutting off the sun.
The sun high above her in the sky had been the only normal thing left, the only fixed point, the only connection with the world she’d once known.
And now it was gone.
And a terrible fierce wind was blowing, a strange and unnatural wind, coming down at her from the sky.
Paola Rimmini had witnessed more horror today than she had imagined in her entire life. She had exhausted her last reserves of strength and
her body was going into terminal shock.
But Paola was tough. Inside her was a stubborn little flicker of courage and defiance. The apocalypse may have arrived, with the howling beast of revelation hanging in the sky above her and a dark cyclone blowing from what had once been the heavens.
But Paola discovered she was no longer afraid. She had reached the limit of her fear.
She forced herself to open her eyes and face whatever it was that was coming.
She saw that all around her the water was stirred and frothed in a frenzy from the tempest that was battering down on her. She looked up and saw, hanging in the air above her, a helicopter.
Its rotor blades were a blur of motion. A door on the side of the helicopter was open and a face was peering down at her.
Sofia Forli.
*
After they winched Paola up to safety and wrapped her in blankets, the helicopter turned and circled the park. Paola looked down at what had once been lush green. Now it was smouldering ash. The fire had died out everywhere except at the very fringes, where small orange tongues of flame still flickered.
The scorched area extended across roads and playing fields, all now dead grey ash with the green of the lake at the centre of it.
And then, staring down in exhaustion, Paola noticed something odd.
The burnt zone formed a perfect circle.
She tried to tell Sofia Forli about this, but she was too tired. Her eyes drifted shut…
“She’s out,” said the medic.
Sofia nodded and sent a message for a team to be waiting at the airport to take Paola to hospital. They were so close to Linate that they were back on the ground within five minutes. As Paola was transferred onto a stretcher, Sofia ran back to the hangar which housed Z5’s Milan HQ. It was a vast space dominated by the glass cube of her office, nicknamed the Aquarium, which looked down onto the workshops and office cubicles below.
Sofia hurried up the stairs to her office and sank down in the chair behind her desk. She clicked on her computer screen and there was Marion Palfrey, waiting impatiently in London.
“I’m here,” said Sofia.
“Did you manage to retrieve your operative?”
“Yes. She’s suffering from hypothermia, but we think she’ll be all right.”
“Hypothermia? In the middle of a fire?” said Marion Palfrey. Then she thought for an instant. “She found a body of water and took refuge in it.”
“Yes, that’s right. There’s no other way she would have survived.”
Marion nodded. “I don’t suppose you managed to get anything useful out of her?”
“Only one thing. She said just before the fire started there was a red flash in the sky, like lightning.”
“Like lightning. I see.”
“There is no question but that the fire was set by some kind of artificial means,” said Sofia. “Its boundaries were formed with great precision. As if someone drew a circle on a map.” Sofia fought for a moment to keep her voice from shaking - with rage. She wanted to find the hand which had drawn that circle.
And cut if off.
Marion Palfrey seemed to sense something of what she was feeling. She paused and looked at Sofia and said, “Any idea about casualties?”
“Not yet. But anyone who was within that circle will be dead. No question. Paola was the only one to get out.”
“No one else made it into the water?”
“No one else was close enough. It all happened terribly quickly.”
Marion Palfrey looked thoughtful. “Yes. The speed of spread, the precise boundaries, the way it died out so promptly… everything sounds remarkably like the fire that Tom encountered in Cambridge. You’ve seen the report.”
Marion was the only person who called Doc ‘Tom’.
Sofia nodded. “You know we were supposed to be with Paola,” she said. “A whole group of us from here at Linate. And if we hadn’t been running late, we would have been right at the heart of the fire. Just like Doc was in Cambridge. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Doesn’t it make you think that someone is deliberately targeting Z5?”
“It might do, if these were the only fires.”
Sofia stared at her for a moment in stricken silence. Then she said, “There have been more?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. In California, near Lake Tahoe, in Katoomba in south eastern Australia close to Sydney, in the Black Forest in Germany…”
“My god. All over the world.”
“Yes, with no discernible pattern. And I don’t think we can hope that’s the end of the list,” said Marion Palfrey. “We should expect more.”
“But what can we do?”
“Find whoever is causing them and put a stop to it, obviously.”
“Obviously,” said Sofia sourly. “But we have no idea who is doing it, or why, or perhaps most importantly how.”
Marion smiled, like a teacher acknowledging an attentive pupil. “Precisely. Well put.”
“So I shall get my people to analyse samples of the ash from the Parco Forlanini. I assume you are doing the same with the Cambridge blaze.”
“Professor Nuntovi is doing so as we speak.”
“Well, I shall let you know our results here as soon as we have any.”
“And until we put a stop to this at the source,” said Marion Palfrey, “there is only one thing we can concentrate on.”
“Fighting fires.”
“Precisely.”
7: Sir Fred
Doc smiled across the table at Sir Frederick Lassen, known to the world at large as Sir Fred. For a knight of the realm, a distinguished ecologist and world famous wildlife campaigner, Lassen was a reassuringly down to earth man. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some of these scones?” he said. “They’re home baked. My housekeeper makes them fresh every day. And the jam is home made, too. From fruit we grow in our gardens.”
He gestured towards the wide open French windows at the back of the chaotic kitchen, leading out into the equally chaotic gardens, of which there seemed to be several acres. Sir Fred lived in the estate of a converted priory near Potters Bar, a suburb north of London. The place was a sprawling collection of buildings surrounded by vegetable gardens and sheds full of animals. On his way in Doc had spotted chickens, geese and ducks, none of which seemed strictly confined to their sheds. Rather, they were roaming freely around the place.
Lassen indicated the plate of scones in front of him. “I could really do with some help.”
Doc smiled politely and shook his head. “No thanks. I’ve already had breakfast.”
“Pity,” said Lassen, splitting a scone with a knife and spooning large amounts of bright red jam on to both pieces. “This raspberry is particularly good.” He took the spoon and dug it into a bowl of a thick, smooth white substance. He added a dollop of this to the layer of jam on the scone, leaving a residue of red on the white stuff in the bowl. “And this is just spectacular, you really have to try this.” He waggled the spoon at Doc.
“Home made cream?” suggested Doc.
“Home made goat cream,” said Lassen with satisfaction. “It makes all the difference knowing the animal it came from.”
Doc hadn’t noticed any goats on the way in, but he wasn’t surprised.
“Here, at least try some of the cream,” said Lassen. He dug around in a pile of cutlery lying on the table, amongst the piles of books, beer bottles, empty and half empty mugs of tea, pens, notebooks, mobile phones - some of them in a state of dismantlement - CDs, pears, apples, potatoes, newspapers and field glasses.
And the table was one of the more tidy spots in the kitchen.
Finding a clean teaspoon, Lassen dug it into the goat cream and proffered it to Doc. It seemed that refusal was not an option. Doc accepted the spoon gingerly and tasted the cream.
It was delicious.
“See?” said Lassen triumphantly. Then he resumed gnawing at his scone, while Doc outlined the reason for his visit.
Lassen was a man who has f
ought all his life to try and preserve the natural world. In recent years, however he had narrowed the focus of his campaigns. After witnessing the horrific ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in Australia in 2009, he had decided that this was the enemy he would devote his life to combating. With the threat of global warming, such fires were becoming rapidly more dangerous.
Since then Sir Fred - or ‘Sir Fried’ as he became known by the tabloids, because of his anti-fire campaigning - had devoted all his considerable resources to researching ways of stopping such conflagrations. He and his team had come to be recognised as the world’s foremost authorities on the subject. And not just wildfires but those in urban areas, too.
As Lassen put it, “Fire is fire.”
Now Sir Fred paused in the act of devouring his scone. He was a big man with a red face framed by long greying hair and an unruly grey beard, which was currently streaked with home made raspberry jam and goat cream. He seemed to be listening for something. Doc fell silent, and listened as well.
There was a furtive quacking sound. Lassen turned his big head and stared at the French windows behind him. Doc stared, too. The windows were open and a small green-headed duck had wandered in. The duck stared at them.
Lassen clapped his hand loudly and bellowed, “Back outside!” The duck did a neat 180 degree turn and marched back through the French windows again. Lassen nodded with satisfaction and reached for another scone.
This man was the world’s leading expert on the prevention of fires.
“So you’ve come about the incident in Cambridge?” said Lassen, applying jam to his scone in liberal quantities.
“Not just Cambridge. Katoomba, Lake Tahoe, the Schwarzwald, Milan…”
“I hadn’t heard about Milan,” said Lassen, glumly putting aside his scone. The big bear of a man seemed to have suddenly lost his appetite.
“A large area in a public park.”
Lassen nodded and sighed, his chin sunk to his chest. “Many casualties?”
Hard Targets: A Doc Palfrey Omnibus Page 11
