One of Wheelock’s men ran to it and poked it with his rifle before yelling, “Camera only! No explosive charge!”
Wheelock radioed for his men at the front of the property to hold their positions, but Carabinieri officers on hearing the shots, opened the gate and motored to the house, their weapons drawn. That precipitated a shouting match between the senior officer and Wheelock about discharging weapons. Mickey came outside again and demanded to know what was happening, but everyone ignored him. Marcus was heading toward the Lucite fence at the edge of the cliff because he heard a commotion coming from the beach.
He leaned over and saw two men—who later would be identified as journalists from a British tabloid—shouting and waving that they wanted their drone back.
“Unbelievable,” Marcus mumbled.
He didn’t notice the man speaking into his phone standing near the journalists, and he didn’t see his blond hair under his baseball cap.
“What’s all the noise, Gunar?” the blond man was asked over the phone.
“Idiot with drone tried take pictures. Guards shoot it down.”
“They’re at the house?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Marcus Handler. He looking from top of cliff right at me. If I have rifle, I can shoot motherfucker in head.”
21
“Can you come see me at the hotel?”
Marcus hadn’t recognized the number on his phone.
“How’d you get my number?” he asked.
“I asked Mikkel for it,” Celeste said.
He was alone in the living room of Villa Shibui, involved with his first after-dinner Scotch. Mickey was out, taking a walk on the beach, Noemi Pennestrì was clearing up in the kitchen, and the girls were upstairs with their Italian grandparents.
“Why do you want to see me?”
“It’s very important, Marcus. Please come.”
“You’re going to have to try harder than that.”
“I’ve had another vision,” she said. “It’s terribly urgent. I didn’t know why it was so important until Colonel Carter educated me.”
He heard Carter in the background, sounding like a parrot perched on her shoulder. “Tell him I’ve got to talk to him too.”
“Colonel Carter says—”
“I heard him.”
He looked out the window at the soft, evening light and at the fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue—Mickey had ordered in an entire case for him.
“Why tell me,” he said. “Why not talk to Mickey?”
“He told me to go through you on everything,” she said. “He values you greatly, you know.”
He resigned himself to the drive to Reggio Calabria. “I’ll come,” he said.
*
He saw the two of them near the rear, but not wanting to waste time, Marcus placed his drink order with the bartender on his way. The Scotch and ice arrived before they had gotten much beyond small talk. The young waiter laughed approvingly when Marcus ordered his next round before tasting the first.
“Got to like a man who likes his liquor,” Carter said, sipping a beer and munching peanuts. “Celeste told me it’s okay for me to go first with what I’ve put together. Kind of like the appetizer to her main course.”
“Entertain me,” Marcus said.
“Oh, I intend to,” Carter said. “Like I told you, my friend Antonio at CUFOM has been sorting through his databases at my behest, plus he put out a message to the Italian and European UFO community for any sightings that weren’t previously logged. I think I’ve got some really compelling data to share with you. Let’s start four years ago, specifically in the week preceding the abduction of the Andreason family. I’ve made a little PowerPoint presentation, if you’ll allow me.” Carter opened his laptop to the first slide, a map of Europe. “All righty,” he said, “as I understand it, you don’t know exactly what time the abductions occurred—could have been on the night of the twelfth or the early morning of the thirteenth.” Marcus nodded his agreement and Carter went on, “This dot over Brest in France represents a UFO sighting at 10:59 p.m. Here’s the video of the sighting, taken with a mobile phone camera by a teenager walking home from a friend’s house.”
To Marcus’s eye, it was a classic, small bright light flashing through the sky type of nonsense he’d seen countless times online, each time eliciting a yawn.
The next slide had a dot over the south of France.
“Now, at 11:01 p.m.,” Carter said, “an Air France pilot on descent to Lyon at an altitude of approximately eight thousand feet, radioed air traffic control that an ultra-bright yellow light flashed across his field of view at an extraordinary speed. He wanted to know if there were any missile launches in the vicinity. He was informed there were none.”
The next slide had a dot over Corsica.
“At 11:03, we’ve got another video, this one taken by a German tourist on northern Corsica, smoking a cigar on his balcony. Here it is.”
It was another fast-moving orb against a black sky, with the German providing a soundtrack of his shouting at his wife to come look at what he was seeing.
“That was the last report that night to make it into CUFOM’s database,” Carter said, “but look at this.”
The last slide was a view of Europe connecting the dots and projecting the line across the Tyrrhenian Sea where it intersected with Reggio Calabria.
Carter dinged the screen with his finger and said, “A minute or two later, the UFO would have been right smack over their house. Now, what do you think of that?”
Marcus had already finished drink number one and was searching the room for the waiter and drink number two. “Fascinating,” he said.
“Well, I can tell you’re not impressed,” Carter said. “Admittedly it’s
