Nomad by Matthew Mather Read Free Book Online Page B

Giovanni’s father hired you to work here.”
    Nico nodded. “Seven years ago he took me in. He was like a father to me, and I did my best to look after him when he got sick, even when Giovanni left.” He let out a long sigh. “Ah, I forget myself. I really should not talk of the Baron’s family.”
    Where was Giovanni’s father now? In Florence, Jess guessed, but she didn’t want to pry, so she switched topics. “The police who were here this morning, did Giovanni really just shoo them away?”
    “Yes.”
    “He can do that?”
    Nico grinned at Jess. “This is not America. The Ruspolis, well…I wouldn’t worry, not while you are his guest.”
    “And Leone mentioned something about a controversia , what was that about?” Jess whispered.
    Glancing to his right, toward the cable car and the castello on the opposite side of the gorge, Nico replied, “I don’t know.” He shrugged and jerked the cord tight, earning a muffled complaint from Giovanni thirty feet overhead. “Of that, I have no idea.”
     
     
     

8
     
    R OME, I TALY
     
     
     
     
    BEN PULLED BACK the curtains of his hotel room window and peeked out. Brilliant sunshine streamed in from a perfect blue sky. The traffic growled, and people shuffled by in the street, some shopping, some sipping coffees in the café.
    A beautiful day for predicting the end of the world.
    “Well, have a look in the back!” Ben shouted into his cell phone. Mrs. Brown, their seventy-eight-year-old administrative assistant, was going deaf. She refused to retire, and there was no way Ben would fire her. She’d been a part of his life longer than he could even remember now. “Yes, I know what time it is. I’m very sorry.”
    Almost ten at night in Boston. He’d dragged her out of bed to search his office, to dig through the mountains of papers and boxes he’d accumulated in his thirty years at Harvard-Smithsonian. He needed data, really old data. Spools of tape he’d collected that dated back to the 1970s, before he’d even started at Harvard as a student, along with magnetic tapes; floppy disks from the 80s; CDs from the 90s. Ben was a pack rat, his office the epitome of the disorganized professor, but he knew what he needed was in there.
    Ben let go of the curtain, casting the hotel room back into darkness. “Mrs. Brown, I know this is difficult, but please keep searching. This is an emergency.” He rubbed one temple to try to ease back a throbbing headache. The fate of the world might rest in the eyesight of Mrs. Brown, twice over a great-grandmother. “I’ll stay on the line while you look.”
    Pushing mute on his phone, he turned to Roger, his grad student, sitting cross-legged on the room’s double bed. Although the Grand Hotel was fancy, the rooms were tiny. Ben had installed himself at the sliver of a working desk near the window, so the only other place to work was on the bed.
    “Did you get the new data downloads?” Ben asked.
    “Just getting them now,” Roger replied. A nest of papers surrounded him, his face staring into his laptop screen. “The wireless in this hotel sucks. Even if I get it downloaded, it’s going to take time to unpack and normalize.”
    It was one thing to say you had the data, but another to decode it. Never mind trying to figure out how to read the magnetic tapes or floppy disks he had Mrs. Brown hunting for. Just trying to make sense of the compression algorithms and file formats of ten years ago was proving more difficult than Ben had imagined. He would bet the other teams were having the same problems. Making sure apples were apples wasn’t easy, especially over the Grand Hotel’s feeble wireless connection, four thousand miles from the office.
    “Just make it happen. This is important.”  Ben clicked off the mute on his phone. “Yes, that’s right,” he yelled. “The one marked 'Red Shift 1977', that’s the one.” Mrs. Brown might be old, but she was a wizard at picking through Ben’s messes. “And you