Without warning

No, thought Caitlin. I’m going to buy a couple of magnums of champagne and pass them around the surrender monkeys back there, to help celebrate the cosmic cornholing of the great Satan. Aloud she simply went: ‘You got it.’

Three minutes later they were cutting back across town in a grey Volvo station wagon, a late-model V40. A suction cap held a black plastic cradle to the windscreen just below the rear-view mirror. Caitlin leaned across Monique as they came to a red light, popping the glove box open.

‘Sweet,’ she said as she pulled out a small Magellan Meridian GPS receiver. ‘Is there a power cord in there? Look for a sort of flexi cord and an adaptor to plug into the cigarette lighter.’

Monique couldn’t find one, but the little yellow and black unit had three-quarters of a charge on it anyway. Caitlin powered it up as the lights changed and waited for the chime that would tell them it had linked to enough satellites to fix their position.

A frustrating few minutes passed, during which time she had to force herself to concentrate on the road. As full darkness covered the city, she could see the tell-tale glow of fires burning on the outskirts of the old centre, explaining the large number of emergency vehicles. Apparently not everyone was content to celebrate with a smirk and a snifter of Courvoisier.

The Magellan chimed once eliciting a small ‘Oh!’ from Monique. ‘Is this us?’ she asked. ‘Here, near Rue Ricaut?’

‘Yeah, that’s us. Does it have a route function? Can you work out how to get us to -’

The window shattered inwards with a huge, hollow boom and a tinkling of glass.

* * * *

11

EVENT HORIZON, CUBA

As a boy, Tusk Musso had loved visiting the city with his grandfather. For the Musso clan, that meant New York, the greatest city in the world. In the whole goddamn history of the world – except maybe for Rome, according to his grandpa, Vinnie Musso. There was a game they played, which Grandpa insisted little Tusk never tell his mother about, where they quickly lay on the footpath at the base of the highest building they could find, and then they just stared up at this monster looming over them, looking like it went all the way to heaven. They had to be quick, before the cops or security guards chased them off. The very first time they’d done it, when Tusk was only six, it had been a cool, overcast day, with a slight breeze dragging clouds across a lowering sky, and it looked for all the world like the Chrysler Building was gonna fall right down on top of them. Tusk had squealed with laughter, and not a little fear. He wasn’t allowed to say anything to Momma about it, of course, because she would’ve had a blue fit if she’d known that Grandpa Vinnie (whom she considered a very poor influence at best) had been letting her precious bundle roll around on the filthy pavement with the dog turds and cigarette butts.

Thank God they’re long gone, he thought, as he stood about two hundred yards back from the base of the event horizon and craned his head back to watch it climb away to heaven, feeling as small and insignificant as he had all those years ago at the feet of the tallest buildings in the world. Clouds drifted overhead, just as they had back in New York with Grandpa Vinnie. But these were wispier, less substantial, and held no threat of rain or sleet. They didn’t even hold out the promise of much shade from the late afternoon Caribbean sun. Musso narrowed his eyes against the still-intense glare of the day and watched as a patch of white that reminded him of a Spanish galleon floated serenely into the silvery haze at the edge of the affected area. At that distance, it created an effect similar to a stationary waterfall – all glistening silver, hanging down like a curtain.

And like a curtain, it moved. Not much, just a lazy drift back and forth across the ground, no more than a couple of yards in either direction. Just enough to wake up the primitive creature dwelling in the darkest parts of Musso’s mind, to fill him with an atavistic fear of whatever danger lay in the darkness just outside the mouth of the cave.

Musso the modern, rational man, dressed in a short-sleeve khaki shirt and olive drab pants, ground down on that ancient terror and watched, fascinated, as the cloud drifted into the energy wave. It seemed completely unaffected as it passed through. Its form became less distinct on the far side, but it was discernibly the same shape and size as before.

‘Seen any birds fly into it or out of it?’ he asked, still peering upwards.

Major Nuсez shook his head. ‘None. Some of my men say they saw large flights of birds moving away from here earlier today, but I do not know where they came from. And there are none here now. Not one.’