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.’

The brigadier general dropped his gaze. They were standing by the crumbling edge of a two-lane road, the bitumen surface shimmering in the heat a few hundred yards behind them, a natural phenomenon. The much more powerful haze directly in front was decidedly unnatural. The small convoy of Hummers and Cuban vehicles had pulled up here ten minutes ago and Musso’s heart was still beating hard from the sight. Any last, lingering doubts placed in the way of belief by his rational mind had been banished. Visible from well over the horizon, it not only reached up to the stratosphere, it curved away towards the horizon in both directions like a giant standing wave, raised by an unknowable deity.

It was alien.

It sat there, in front of him, utterly removed from any human context to give it meaning. He had no idea what it was, and having seen it up close for himself now, he doubted that anybody ever would.

‘You still got nothing, Lieutenant Kwan?’ he said.

Lieutenant Jenny Kwan shook her head. She seemed too young to Musso, almost baby-faced, but she was one of the smartest, scariest individuals he’d ever met. An MIT grad, Kwan was a Marine first lieutenant, the boss of an Incident Response Unit, which was a bland name for a bunch of very smart people trained to look for and respond to some of the worst things in the world: chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Her crew and equipment took up three of the seven Humvees that had driven deep into Cuban territory, escorted by Major Nuсez and a platoon of his men in a couple of old Soviet-era BMP-2s.

Musso had to hand it to the Cubans. This monstrosity wasn’t an abstract proposition for them, something to be intuited from indirect evidence provided by web links or satellite data. It was sitting literally a stone’s throw away, bisecting their country. Given all that, he was impressed by their professionalism and no-bullshit attitude, although Nuсez had probably picked his Praetorian guard for this gig. They helped Lieutenant Kwan whenever she asked for it, and kept to themselves when she didn’t. Not that Kwan was having any luck with her equipment – no matter what sensors or sniffers or magic wands she waved at the haze, it made not a damn bit of difference.

‘According to my readings, General, that thing isn’t even here,’ she told him.

‘Uh-uh,’ he muttered. They’d had the same result plugging into FAA and weather satellites back at Gitmo. As far as their technology was concerned, the haze didn’t exist.