The Lightning Stones

by Jack Du Brul

  Mercer nearly choked on his laughter, and even Harry, the butt of one of the better zingers either had heard in a while, had to laugh.

  “I thought FBI training was supposed to remove any vestiges of humor,” Mercer finally said, still chuckling.

  Kelly Hepburn shrugged out of her suit coat and hung it from the back of her bar stool. “That’s usually the case, but I was absent that day.”

  Harry placed an ice-filled glass in front of her and a can of soda. “Touché,” he said and tossed her a wink.

  “Is Jordan asleep?” Mercer asked.

  “Her fever is starting to break, so she’s drifting in and out. I was done questioning her anyway.” She poured cola into the glass, the ice popping and crackling as it chilled the beverage, and then she took a long swallow, wincing slightly as the carbonation hit her nose. “Dr. Mercer—”

  “It’s just Mercer,” he told her. “I only use my title to impress girls and maître d’s.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t count?”

  “Only if you can get us good tables,” Harry muttered without looking up from his drink.

  Hepburn smiled. “Okay, Harry. We’re even. Mercer, I think by now you can tell that this is no longer an FBI priority.”

  “I figured that would happen sooner or later. This isn’t terrorism in the traditional sense, so the urgency faded as soon as the shooters vanished again.”

  “Afraid so. I even requested a doctor come with me this morning to see Jordan and was turned down. Your and Harry’s friendship with higher-ups aside, I can only get a preliminary examination of the trash you recovered. Any detailed analysis will have to wait. Same thing with the computer servers at Hardt College and Northwestern. If we can’t get anything about Dr. Tunis’s work within a day, it gets dropped down the urgency list for a couple of weeks. I know this is personal for you, and I wanted to be honest, if nothing else.”

  Mercer nodded. “I appreciate that and I know you’re doing your best.”

  “There isn’t a whole lot to go on, not unless these screws strike again.”

  “And because they got what they needed from Abe and erased all the evidence from the two colleges, they’re long gone.”

  “Yup.” She took another long sip.

  “I assume this also means the case isn’t doing your career much good,” Mercer pointed out.

  “That shit hit the fan when your buddy, former director Henna, rained down on my boss four times removed.”

  “Sorry about that,” Mercer said. “I was trying to prevent a misunderstanding from turning into my public lynching.”

  “You were just trying to protect yourself and Jordan. Can’t blame you for that.” Agent Hepburn took another mouthful of soda and stood. She shrugged her jacket over her shoulders and fitted it around the Glock in its flat kidney holster. “Before I forget, I need a few hundred bucks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This isn’t a shakedown. Jordan is in no condition to travel, and she needs some stuff. Unless you want to comparison shop in the feminine hygiene aisle at Walgreens, I advise you pony up the cash and don’t ask any more questions.”

  Mercer hastily peeled two hundred-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over.

  She reached across and took another. “I should get the prelim from forensics about the trash this afternoon. I’ll be back then with whatever news they have and the stuff Jordan asked for.”

  —

  While Harry and Drag watched NCIS reruns in the bar and Jordan fought her fever in the guest bedroom, Mercer spent the rest of the day in his downstairs office, first contacting the owners of the Leister Deep Mine. He needed to tie up loose ends pertaining to the mine rescue class he had taught, ensuring final payment for renting part of the mine was sent and insurance coverage canceled. Then he wrote up the performance reviews for each member of the class, which occupied most of the afternoon.

  Jordan woke in the early evening, her fever broken but more exhausted than before. She managed a quick shower while Mercer and Harry changed her sweaty sheets, and she ate a few mouthfuls of soup before drifting off into a deep trouble-free sleep.

  Agent Hepburn called at around six and asked if it was too late for her to come over and review some of what she’d discovered. She arrived a half hour later just as Mercer was returning with bags of takeout food.

  Hepburn set several shopping bags on the floor near the hallway to the back bedrooms, a large one from CVS and the others from the Nordstrom at the Pentagon City Mall. It appeared that Jordan Weismann planned on being here for a while, which Mercer didn’t mind at all.

  “Can I offer you something stronger than a Coke this time?” Harry asked.

  “Is that Johnnie Blue?” she asked, eyeing the distinctive bottle amid lesser brands of Scotch on the back bar.

  “Aye, lassie,” Harry said in an atrocious brogue.

  Knowing how expensive it was, she asked Mercer if he minded. “Not in the slightest,” he assured her. “If you ask me, Scotch tastes like a blend of…” He was going to say “yak urine and iodine” but held his tongue. “Let’s leave it that I don’t drink the stuff and you’re welcome to all you want. Harry, get me a gimlet while you’re back there, will ya?”

  “On it.”

  Mercer pulled sandwiches, salads, and soups from the takeout bags and even conjured real silverware from a drawer behind the bar. He gave Agent Hepburn the latest on Jordan’s condition and said that he felt she would be up and around the following day. For her part she told Mercer and Harry that Jordan’s father confirmed he had once worked with Abe Jacobs but questioned why his name came up in the course of investigating the retired metallurgist’s murder. Hepburn told him it was routine, but the man became even more suspicious when asked about his estranged daughter. He did say that Jordan and Abe had been friendly when she was younger, but neither had seen Jacobs in years. When he pressed Hepburn about how and why this was pertinent, she hid behind national security and quickly ended the telephone interview.

  “So her story checks out,” Kelly Hepburn concluded. “You both are clear as far as the Bureau is concerned. Like you in Minnesota, she really was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Didn’t think it was otherwise,” Mercer said, “but it’s good to know. What else have you found out?”

  “Everything I didn’t need to know about wax paper, for one thing.”

  “Come again?”

  “Wax paper. The tech guys went through all the garbage you recovered from Abe Jacobs’s office. Everything was pretty standard—basic computer paper, candy wrappers, an empty apple sauce container, opened envelopes with addresses that all check out as legit, paper coffee cups, junk mail, broken rubber bands, as well as a large square of wax paper that according to the nerds is yellowed enough and shows enough signs of the paraffin’s degenerative long-chain molecular blah blah blah so it is at least fifty years old, possibly much older.”

  Mercer stopped chewing his roast beef. “That might mean something.”

  “Thought you’d think so.” Amid the shopping bags was a slim leather case, almost like a laptop bag but smaller and much more stylish. Agent Hepburn grabbed it and brought it to her place at the bar. From it came a notebook stuffed with photographs and a tablet computer. She fired up the tablet, flicked her finger through a few apps and a few screens, and presented it to Mercer.

  It was a picture of wax paper all right, dingy yellow compared to the fresh milky sheets he doubtless had in his kitchen and had never used. The paper was crinkled and curled like it had been wrapped around something irregular and maybe the size and shape of a carrot. He could see there was faded printing on one part of the paper, and try as he might he couldn’t make it out, even by tightening in on it using the tablet’s zoom.

  “Any idea what it says?” he asked.

  She took the computer back, flicked through a couple of other pictures, and presented it to him once again. It was a close-up and digitally enhanced image of the fa
int writing. “Best they could do.”

  It read:

  camole 681

  ne b l oorer

  “Any idea what it means?” Kelly asked when Mercer had been studying it for nearly thirty seconds, his brow tight over his gray eyes and his mouth held firm.

  “Could your people make anything out of it?” he asked back.

  “No. Nothing. As a favor—remember this is now low priority—one of the lab rats sent it through a decryption program and some handwriting analysis logarithms but got nowhere. And that is about all the tech support I’m going to get unless we can find some definitive link to international terrorism. And don’t bother with Google, Bing, or Yahoo. I spent a couple hours on them and turned up all kinds of crap but nothing relevant.”

  Harry had shrugged a pale blue windbreaker over his oft-laundered white button-down and was just unfurling Drag’s leash when he walked behind Mercer and Kelly and looked at the tablet’s screen. “Did you look up ‘sample six eight one’ instead of ‘camole’?”

  “What are you talking about?” Agent Hepburn asked.

  “When the paper creased through the first line it cut off the bottom curve of an S and the bottom tail of the letter p. It’s not ‘camole 681.’ It’s ‘Sample 681.’ And in the second line, the letters o-o-r-e-r are rarely ever seen in sequence except in proper names like Moorer.”

  It took Harry nearly fifteen minutes to get Drag out of the house and to a spot in the neighborhood he deemed worthy to soil and finally back indoors. By then, Mercer and Kelly had checked out several dozen people with last names ending in oorer online. The only one that seemed a remote possibility was the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer, even though he’d been dead for more than a decade.

  Harry laboriously shucked his coat and settled back onto his bar stool. Kelly wrinkled her nose at the smell of Chesterfield cigarettes clinging to him. “Any luck?” he asked, sipping at the watery remnants of his third Jack and ginger of the day.

  “Not much,” Mercer admitted.

  “Figured you wouldn’t. Names ending in oorer aren’t that common. That’s why I think the first r isn’t an r at all.”

  Mercer groaned. He should have known Harry would have figured something out. The octogenarian had been doing crosswords for over sixty years and any number of other word games as well. He had once seen Harry guess a Wheel of Fortune puzzle with only a single letter showing and only three others eliminated from play. Where the FBI’s brain trust and computer logic failed, good old-fashioned experience could prove invaluable.

  “I think that first r is a v. It’s oover, not oorer.”

  “Okay,” Hepburn said. “That leaves us with Nebl Oover.” She typed quickly. “And it’s meaningless.”

  Mercer finally saw the pattern that Harry must have picked up on. “The first letter isn’t n. Remember how the bottom of the S got cut off in ‘Sample.’ Same thing here. The top of the first letter is missing. I think it’s an H.” Mercer’s eyes suddenly widened as everything came home in a clarifying rush. He knew the name written on the paper, and it made perfect sense even if he didn’t yet know why it was there. “Cross the l so it’s a t and then tell me what you get.

  She typed “Hebt oover” into a search engine, and the tablet kicked back the answer that had eluded her best nerds for most of the afternoon—Herbert Hoover.

  11

  “Herbert Hoover, the president?” she asked, confused by the result.

  Mercer nodded. “Before going into public service during World War One by running a charity that basically saved every man, woman, and child in Belgium from starvation, Bert Hoover made millions as a mining consultant and entrepreneur. He had businesses in China, Russia, and Australia. A few other places, too, I think.”

  Harry said, “He was Mercer before Mercer was Mercer. Of course, Hoover was a Quaker, which means no booze, so I guess he was a more sober version of Mercer before Mercer was Mercer.”

  “Thank you from the peanut gallery,” Mercer said and refocused on Kelly. “Sample 681 could be something geological he collected during his career. This could be the break this case needed.”

  “How?”

  “The Hoover Presidential Library,” he explained. “I have no idea where it is, but it should have archived everything there is to know about Hoover before, during, and after his presidency. If he collected this Sample 681 or had anything to do with it, the researchers there should be able to find it.”

  She worked at the tablet for a moment. “It’s in West Branch, Iowa. That’s closer to Iowa City than Davenport, if that helps.”

  “My knowledge of Iowa geography is limited, so I’ll take your word for it. Any contact information?”

  “I have a phone number and e-mail address. How do you want to handle this?”

  Mercer had suspected all along that this case would hinge on the science behind whatever Tunis and Jacobs were doing, so he wasn’t surprised that she was asking his advice on how to proceed. “We’ll call in the morning and simply ask if they know anything about a geologic sample labeled 681 that Hoover either collected or owned at one point in his life.”

  “Simple as that?”

  “Sometimes it can be,” he replied. “Have your people been able to get anything from the university servers about what kind of experiment they were working on in Minnesota?”

  She shook her head in disgust. “Even if I had more people on this, both schools are in a panic, which means they’ve swung their legal departments into full battle mode. Neither administration will let us on their campus without warrants, or even talk to us without their lawyers present. We need subpoenas to get a look at any computer archives or research material, and right now we are having a hard time finding cooperative judges.”

  “That pesky Constitution,” Mercer teased.

  Hepburn threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I get it and am all for it. I even swore an oath to defend it. But it pisses me off when people use it to cover their ass rather than defend someone’s rights, you know. These college lawyers are more afraid of being sued by a relative than finding out the killers’ identity.”

  Mercer couldn’t argue the point. “In that vein, it makes sense I call the library rather than you. Pardon the expression but we don’t want them thinking we’re making a federal case out of this. Better it comes from a civilian doing some innocuous research.”

  It was clear Kelly didn’t like it, but she saw the wisdom behind his idea and nodded. She continued, “We did get a few people to talk off the record. Dr. Tunis was a climatologist, and apparently the experiment she and Abe Jacobs were working on was to be some sort of paradigm-shifting event in the field. One guy said if they were right about something, Al Gore was going to have to give back his Nobel Prize. Not sure what that means or if that’s good or bad given how serious climate change is.”

  Mercer did his best not to roll his eyes. As a trained geologist he tended to think someone claiming to have found a trend in an earth system, especially something as chaotic as climate, with just a century or two, and sometimes much less, of actual data was at best fooling themselves—and at worst intentionally fooling others. He said mildly, “It’s an emotionally charged subject for a lot of people, and there are billions upon billions of dollars riding on research, so schools tend to be circumspect. You should keep on it, but I think our best bet is going to come from the Hoover Library.”

  Agent Hepburn finished her smoked turkey sandwich and the last of her Scotch. “What time are you going to call them?”

  “They’re an hour behind us, so ten thirty our time.”

  “I’ll be here to listen in. You want anything in the morning? Doughnuts? Bagels?”

  “Chocolate doughnuts,” Harry said excitedly.

  “Nothing”—Mercer overrode him—“but thanks.”

  “I’ll walk her out,” Harry volunteered, fumbling for his coat and Drag’s leash as a pretext. Mercer knew he was going for the hard sell on morning
doughnuts. Mercer had done his part to limit Harry’s smoking, but he guessed there wasn’t much he could do if the octogenarian wanted to put himself into a sugar-induced coma. “Hello,” Jordan Weismann said seconds after Hepburn left. She padded into the library wearing one of Mercer’s old Penn State T-shirts. It came to just above midthigh. She had to have been awake for a few minutes because her hair had been tamed into a ponytail, and she’d managed to wash the puffiness from her sloe eyes. Her arm sling flattened one of her breasts while nearly forcing the other from the top of the shirt, and Mercer tried not to stare.

  “Hi,” he said thickly, dragging his eyes up to hers. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better, thanks. I’m still tired, but I feel a lot more human.”

  “You certainly look less zombie-esque,” Mercer joked. “Can I get you something?”

  “I’m thirsty. Do you have any ginger ale?”

  “I’ve got plenty, just don’t tell Harry I’m breaking into his private stash.” Mercer moved behind the bar while Jordan laid herself on the couch and pulled up the antique steamer robe.

  “Whenever I was sick as a little girl, my mother always gave me matzo ball soup and ginger ale. To this day I equate the soup with not feeling well and only drink ginger ale when I’m under the weather.”

  “It’s the same for me and bouillon cubes,” Mercer said, bringing over an iced glass and a mini bottle of Schweppes. “Just the smell reminds me of having the flu when I was a kid and makes me nauseous.”

  “Thank you,” Jordan said, snaking an arm out from the blanket to accept the glass he’d poured. A long sip cleared a little of the raspiness from her voice. “Where’s Harry?”

  “He and Drag just walked Agent Hepburn out.” Mercer pointed to all the shopping bags. “Which reminds me, she bought out CVS and Nordstrom’s for you.”

  “I needed some essentials,” Jordan said quickly. “But it was awfully nice for her to do this for me.” She pushed off the blankets and scissor kicked herself off the couch, giving Mercer another glance at her shapeliness.