Nomad (28 page)

“Maybe we should just go and knock on the door.” Giovanni held up his Beretta handgun. “We ask nicely.”

It was a good thing she had come along. Jess shook her head. “No, your guys are right. We’ve found Enzo, now we need to gather more information and form a plan. Patience.”

The walkie-talkie crackled softly. “
Hai visto?
"

“
Si, si
,” Giovanni answered.

“Tell them to hold their positions, only contact us if someone leaves the house.” Jess adjusted herself on the mattress to get a better look. Across the street, the side door of the house opened, spilling light into the garden. She nudged Giovanni’s shoulder. “Look…”

Enzo came out of the door, holding something in his hands. Another man followed him, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The sun was down now, twilight softening into darkness. A third man came out of the door, hunched over, talking to someone. He straightened up. And there
he
was, walking beside the third man.

Hector.

“
Che palle,
” Giovanni muttered, his knuckles going white as he balled his hands into fists, but he didn’t get up.

Enzo dropped what he had in his hands. A soccer ball. He kicked it to Hector, who ran forward and kicked it back. The other two men, their rifles slung across their backs, joined in the game.

“At least they’re treating him well,” Jess said softly.

She was almost shocked when Hector appeared through the doorway. A part of her didn’t really believe that Enzo had kidnapped Hector, or that it was even Enzo in Rome who attacked her. It seemed too far-fetched, too much of a coincidence. She squinted, tried to make out the faces of the other men. Were they the ones from Rome? She didn’t recognize them.

Giovanni gripped his Beretta. “I say we just go now.”

“No, we wait.” Jess watched soccer game across the street. “Those aren’t the guys that attacked me, so maybe they’re inside. We wait to see who else comes out, goes in. We wait for the light to go out, and then we go in.”

“We wait?” Giovanni growled. “Time is one thing we don’t have a lot of.”

Jess checked her watch. “We’ve got time.”

Across the street, Enzo knelt and picked up the soccer ball. He said something to Hector, then to the two men. They nodded, and one of them collected the soccer ball. They all walked back inside. A few seconds later a light clicked on in the room all the way to the right. It clicked off a minute later.

“I’d bet that’s the room they’re keeping Hector in,” Jess observed.

Giovanni nodded. “How long do we wait?”

“Let’s wait until after midnight. We can watch until then, see who goes in or out. We’re only an hour from the castle. Let’s get this done right, and we can be back home and safe.”

“And how long do we have?”

He meant until her father’s estimate of when Nomad would arrive.

“Thirty hours until things start to get weird.”

“Thirty hours? That’s what your father said?”

Jess nodded.

NASA and ESOC still maintained Nomad was more than a week away, but conflicting estimates flooded the news channels. Dr. Menzinger and several amateur astronomers predicted Nomad was just two days away, as her father had said. There was still some room for uncertainty, and maybe this explained NASA’s position, but Jess suspected worse. There wasn’t enough time to do anything, not enough time to evacuate cities. No way to evacuate an entire planet.

And Jess trusted her father. “My dad’s best guess is that Nomad will pass eighty million kilometers from Earth.”

“Best guess?” Giovanni raised his eyebrows.

Jess nodded slowly. “That’s as good a guess as we’re going to get. Might be closer. If it gets as close as twenty million kilometers, the gravity of Nomad will overcome the pull of Earth’s own gravity for anything on the surface, literally levitating anything not tied down, dragging it into space. At that distance, it’ll pop the Earth’s crust and turn the surface into a sea of molten rock.”

Giovanni’s face contorted as if he bit into lemon. “And at eighty million?”

Jess rubbed a hand across her face, calculating in her head. Tricks for performing quick mental arithmetic had been a game her father played with her as a teenager. “We’ll experience a brief tug upward a tenth of Earth’s gravity. It’ll generate tidal forces almost two hundred times the moon’s, with coastal tsunamis hundreds or even thousands of feet high.”

“And the Earth’s crust? What about earthquakes, volcanos?”

“Very difficult to predict. My dad did say we’ll probably get huge solar flares on its closest approach to the sun—about five hours before reaching the Earth. It’ll bathe the Earth in a shower of high-energy particles in the middle of the night. Light up the sky like a neon tube.”

If her father was right, these auroras would be the warning.

“In thirty hours the sky should light up. Then we’ll know for sure.” Jess glanced into the darkening sky. No shimmering light, not yet. “That should give us a four or five hour warning, more than enough time to get to the castle.”

Giovanni looked up and took a deep breath. “Thirty hours until the end.”

Jess felt him relax.

She stared at the house across the street, imagining how she would get in—her and Giovanni in the front, the two security men from the back, then quickly cover the side entrance. It would be over in a few seconds.

A couple walked slowly by in the street in front of the house, hand in hand.

Jess watched them pass in silence. She took a deep breath and exhaled long and slow. “People seem so calm.” The seaside town was mostly deserted, people having headed inland or into the mountains, but some had remained.

Jess turned to Giovanni. “In some places they’re burning down cities before Nomad even gets here.”

Giovanni nodded, his eyes fixed on the house across the street. “To exist is literally amazing—but that same wonder is also burdened with a finite end. There is a self-deception in denying the dark underside of existence, that the question, ‘Why am I here?’ is answered with resounding emptiness.”

Jess would usually roll her eyes at something like this, but now she nodded.

“In most of the world,” Giovanni continued, “even talking about death is unseemly; they only view the value of something based on its ability to enhance happiness or enjoyment. Just discussing death is viewed in bad taste, as if we’re immortal. So when the end comes suddenly, it’s no surprise that some people are running around tearing their hair out. But death is the only thing certain in life.”

Jess frowned. “That’s morbid.”

“See what I mean?” The edges of Giovanni’s mouth curled in the saddest of smiles. “Most of the time this is a philosophical question, but now…”

“I see what you mean,” Jess admitted.

“Just weeks ago,” Giovanni added, “many people wouldn’t believe scientists who said we were destroying the Earth with global warming. Now they believe these same scientists who say that the Earth is about to be destroyed by some invisible object, some speck in space that they can’t even see yet—and they scream in panic because it is
their
lives that may be ending, not the lives of their children.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I believe in the primacy of action.” Giovanni thumped his chest, taking his eyes off the house. “I am here! I believe in living in the moment, in living life to its fullest, even to the end.” He looked her in the eye.

In the twilight darkness, Jess stared into Giovanni’s eyes. She held his gaze, felt his warmth beside her on the mattress. This might be the last time she ever saw a man look at her like that. A sense of urgency rushed through her; all the fear she’d been holding in rippled up her back, tingling her scalp. I am here, she repeated in her head. I am alive.

She reached around Giovanni and pulled him to her, kissed him hard on the mouth. She slid on top of him, kissing his eyes, his forehead, his neck while she unbuttoned his shirt.

Above them, the first stars of the last night glittered.

29

V
ACA,
I
TALY

LEANING AGAINST THE cool concrete of the balcony enclosure, Jess pulled her jeans back on and stared up at the stars. No shimmering light, nothing unusual. Just the sliver of a crescent moon rising.

The pain of living, the fear of dying—their lovemaking was desperate, almost violent, but also quiet. Tendons and muscles strained in near silence. They both listened for any crackle of the walkie-talkie that might signal something happening at the house. Now that it was over, Jess retreated and pulled her limbs into herself, curling into a ball.

Giovanni was still undressed, lying naked on the mattress, his chin flat to the ground, straining to see through the drain gap. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his slacks, rumpled on the floor beside him, and lit one with a gold lighter he produced from the same pocket. The concrete enclosure of the balcony provided shielding so that nobody across the street would see it.

Jess smiled at him. She’d seen him smoking before, at the castle. “You didn’t strike me as the type that smoked.”

Giovanni returned her smile. “You think these might kill me?” Leaning down, he glanced through the drain gap again. “I quit, years ago, but...”

“Give me one.”

Shrugging, Giovanni handed her his cigarette and reached to take another from the pack.

Jess took the cigarette and lifted it to her lips, taking a deep drag. The smoke burned her throat, her lungs, and she coughed. She hadn’t smoked since she was a teenager, and even then only to rebel. Coughing again, she frowned at the cigarette, then stubbed it out against the concrete wall. “That’s gross.”

Giovanni looked at the cigarette he just took from the pack and nodded. “You’re right.”

“Zio,”
the walkie-talkie crackled.

Dropping the cigarette, Giovanni grabbed the walkie-talkie.
“Si.”

“Alla ingressa.”

They both flopped onto the mattress and looked through the drain gap. The front door to the house opened, illuminating the gravel walkway. Two men stepped out, followed by Enzo. They stopped, exchanged a few words, and Enzo retreated and closed the door behind them.

“It’s them,” Jess hissed. “The men that attacked me in Rome.” It was unmistakable. The tall man had his arm in a sling, the same arm Jess had twisted. She hoped it was broken.

Walking through the front gate and down the sidewalk to a car, the men drove off.

“This is it,” Jess whispered. “This is our chance.”

She stood and limped to the couch inside the apartment. They kept the lights off. Grabbing a headlamp from the coffee table, she clicked it on and scribbled on a notepad.

Giovanni grabbed his clothes, and, hunched over, walked to the couch while he pulled his slacks and shirt on. “Now? We go now? I thought you said we should wait until after midnight?”

“This changes everything. Two of them just left, and I doubt he has more than two other men in there with him.” She pointed at her drawing on the notepad. “Your security guys say there is one large living room in the back, right?”

Giovanni nodded.

“And I bet there is a kitchen off that.” She scribbled again. “A bathroom somewhere in the middle, and two bedrooms off to one side. That right side room, the light hasn’t gone on since we saw them go in with Hector?”

Giovanni spoke into the walkie-talkie softly, asking a question. It crackled a response. “No, it hasn’t,” he confirmed.

“So I bet that’s where Hector is. Right now is our best chance. You and I go in through the front door, your two security men in through the rear. We get Hector while they surprise Enzo and his guys in the back.”

Nodding, Giovanni smoothed his pant legs. “Good, good, so we go?”

“We need a way to coordinate going in.” Jess looked at Giovanni. “Synchronize our watches or something?”

“Why don’t I just give them a signal on the walkie-talkie?”

Jess stared at him for a second. Yeah, that was a better idea. “Perfect.”

“So we go now?”

“The sooner, the better, while those guys are gone. Can you explain to your men?”

Nodding, Giovanni walked to the back of the apartment, next to the door. While he explained the plan over the walkie-talkie, Jess grabbed a bullet proof vest—a benefit of the Ruspoli armory—from the couch and secured it around her torso, gripping and pulling the Velcro tabs tight. Nomad might be coming tomorrow night, but this night she intended to live through. Giovanni walked back from the door, stooping to pick up his own vest.

“So we’re all set?” Jess grabbed the AK assault rifle.

“The guards are going around the back right now. When I give the signal, ‘
Ora
,’ they’ll crash the rear entrance.” He looked at Jess inspecting the AK as he secured the straps on his vest, then he picked up his Beretta from the table.