“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.