by Jack Du Brul
“And I recommend you go to hell.”
Mercer turned his attention back to Kelly, rolling his eyes at Jordan’s obstinacy. “Good to see you back on your feet, so to speak.”
“I’m not medically cleared yet, but I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”
“What are the docs saying?”
“I’m in the leg cast for five weeks, which already sucks after just a few days.”
“And your noggin?”
“Concussion. My vision was blurry for a day and I had the mother of all headaches, but as long as I don’t get another tap on the head I’ll be fine.”
“How much of your hair did they have to shave?”
“Enough that I’ll be wearing hats once the bandages come off.” She looked at Mercer with a funny grin. “You know it was the boobs, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, Mercer, it was Jordan’s boobs. That’s why you didn’t suspect her, or if you did, you ignored your gut. It’s kind of pathetic…but I can’t say as I blame you. They are very impressive. Either nature was kind to her or she dropped thirty grand at a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon’s office—and if you say which is correct, I will tear off one of your arms and beat you with it.”
Mercer grinned, not fully denying her accusation. “I’m sure there was more to it than just that.”
“There’s a reason it’s the oldest trick in the book. It works. Me, on the other hand, I didn’t trust her from the moment I laid eyes on her.”
“Woman’s intuition?”
“Call it whatever you like, but I knew she was hiding something behind that rocking bod and pretty face.”
“And me? Was my little head doing the thinking for me?”
“You’re a man, Mercer. The software can’t override the hardware.” Kelly winced at her own bad turn of phrase. “I did not just say that.”
Mercer laughed. “And I didn’t hear it.”
“Anyway, I truly think Jordan told her handlers to have me targeted because she felt I was onto her. She had you wrapped around her finger, and Nate wasn’t a factor since he thought this whole case was a waste of time, but I was a danger to her.”
“Makes sense,” he agreed.
“Also, if I am being honest, I think she saw me as a rival too, and wanted me out of the picture.”
“That’s ridiculous, Kelly.”
“Don’t be dense. You know what I mean—and while you might have just showered, she absolutely reeks of sex, Mercer.” Before he could say anything, Kelly Hepburn put up her hands. “I’m not here to judge.”
Mercer started to speak, but was at a genuine loss for words. All that came out was a laugh.
Then it was Kelly’s turn to laugh. “You’re so predictable…In fact, I think you’re already considering asking me out on a date.”
“I am?”
“You are, but I wouldn’t do it until your house no longer smells like the last woman who was here.”
“Duly noted.”
“And make sure not to ask in front of Nate. He’s a little overprotective…which explains why he plays macho asshole whenever he’s around you.”
“Also noted. Anything else?”
“My favorites are Thai and French, and unless you’re triple-jointed or own a Jaws of Life you aren’t getting anywhere with me until after the cast comes off…maybe. Now I have to go. Walk me out.”
Mercer had to admit, she had grabbed his attention.
They started out of the room, and Kelly paused at the top of the stairs, leaning against her crutches. She looked Mercer in the eye. “Nate was right, wasn’t he? About it being bullshit you’re going to find Amelia Earhart’s plane?”
A conflicted look crossed Mercer’s face. He held up a finger to his lips to indicate Kelly should be quiet. “Yeah,” he said. “It was bullshit. Amelia Earhart will never be found. I like yanking your partner’s chain.” He leaned in close enough to smell the shampoo Agent Hepburn used on her hair. It was a scent he decided he liked, and he whispered, “It occurred to me that Jordan had the run of my house for more than a week. It could be bugged.”
She gave him a look that told him she hadn’t thought of that, but should have. She asked casually, “So, what’s next for you?”
He led her out, walking in front of her when they got to the stairs. Because of how they spiraled, Kelly had to take them especially slow. “I’m going to scour the Internet looking for a set of Jaws of Life,” Mercer replied.
“Funny.”
“I thought so.” They crossed the foyer and Mercer opened the door for her. From the top of the stoop he scanned the street. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. His Jag was where it should be. Traffic was normal, and he didn’t see anyone sitting in a car watching the brownstone. He did spot Nate Lowell bent over the open rear door of his government sedan, presumably talking to Jordan.
“Do you think it is bugged?”
“It’s possible,” Mercer said. “She has contacts in the area with enough juice to stage that car accident.”
“So, Earhart—are you serious?”
“I am. I’ll know roughly where she went down in just a couple of days, tops. Physically finding the plane will probably take longer.”
Kelly Hepburn already had her phone out of her jacket pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling Nate. I’m still on medical leave, so I can’t call in a team to sweep your house. He can.”
“Put that away,” Mercer said. “You’ll tip our hand more than my gaffe a second ago about finding the plane. Maybe if my place is bugged they’ll believe I was bullshitting about the plane in order to irk your partner.”
Kelly saw the wisdom in that and slid her phone back into her inside pocket.
“Do you want protection?” she asked.
“No. I don’t think it’s necessary. For someone like Jordan, or the girl that crashed into you, this is a crusade. A way to prove their commitment to the cause. To the men above, I suspect money is the real motivation. There’s no need to waste more on me if they believe the trail’s cold.”
“Okay,” Agent Hepburn said, though she looked a little dubious. “So we’ll be in touch in the next day or so, when there’s something to report.”
“Right-o,” said Mercer.
Hepburn was right to be leery of his seeming disinterest in hunting down the remaining killers. Had she known Mercer better, she would have realized that he had been on the defensive for far too long, and was now ready to take the fight to his enemies.
21
Over the next forty-eight hours, Mercer put on an act. He left the brownstone only once, to accompany Harry to Tiny’s for a few drinks the second night, but other than that he busied himself at home. He polished all the brass accents in the bar. He caught up on some job offers, declining four and requesting additional information about another. Mostly, he made sure his behavior and conversations gave the appearance that he had given up any hope of finding the remaining crystals of Sample 681. He had indeed found two bugs planted in his house—one affixed under the edge of the bar and the other near his desk in his office, and Mercer was putting on a convincing show for whoever was listening in.
Agent Hepburn had sent him a text offering to post guards, but again Mercer declined, explaining that it would draw undue attention. It was better, he said, that the entire affair die for lack of interest.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t also making preparations. These he had actually started back in Kabul following their return from the cave. He had instructed one of the Gen-D Systems mechanics on how to build a proper Faraday cage for the sample he’d taken from the dead swami’s mouth. The makeshift contraption he’d cobbled together in the field showed he was on the right track, but he wanted to have something a bit better before transporting it.
The crystal had arrived in Washington, D.C., at the same time Mercer was landing in Des Moines. All of the photographs and notes he’d taken on the grotto/geode in the cave had
preceded the package and had doubtlessly already been analyzed to death by perhaps the smartest person Mercer knew. Jason Rutland was his name, and he worked in Greenbelt, Maryland, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a sprawling campus off the Capital Beltway that housed perhaps the nation’s greatest concentration of scientists and engineers outside of Silicon Valley. Mercer had met Jason several years earlier, working on a different project, and Rutland had amazed Mercer with his brilliance, both in the laboratory and with his analytical skills. Breaking all stereotypes of the nerdy science genius, Jason was as slick as they came. He wore stylish clothes, drove a classic Ford Mustang, and was currently dating, in Harry’s estimation, the sexiest weather girl on any of the local news stations. Even Harry, the aging lothario, had been tongue-tied when the four of them had bumped into one another at Pimlico for the Preakness Stakes.
For the last three days, Jason had been sending Mercer regular text updates on his findings as he followed a hunch Mercer had given him. That hunch now looked more and more likely to pan out. It was on the morning of the third day, long before sunup, that Jason’s latest text came through. It read simply: “Found her.”
Mercer got the message when he woke at six, and he felt the surge of adrenaline. Minutes later he was sitting on his bar stool, making sure he was positioned closest to the bug Jordan had planted, and he dialed Rutland at home. The machine picked up. Mercer started leaving a message, but Jason’s hurried voice rang through the line. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t screening calls. I just got out of the shower.”
“Even if you were screening, I made the cut, so you don’t need to apologize.”
“Hey, good point. Never thought of that.” Jason was excited and speaking way too fast, a clear indication he’d gotten little sleep in the past few days. “I can’t believe you did it, Mercer. I mean, Amelia Earhart…after all these years. Are you sure she crashed near—”
Mercer cut him off before he could say anything more. “Not over the phone! You know better than most that the NSA records every call placed in the D.C. area.”
“Take it easy. You think the government cares about her?”
“I think the fewer people who know about this the better, because whoever finds her plane is going to become a household name.” He then added for the extra ears that might be listening in, “Funding that trip to Afghanistan tapped me out, so it’s going to take me at least a year to mount an expedition to the South Pacific.”
“Ah. Okay, then. Mum’s the word.”
“Thanks. Can you meet me?”
“Sure. Where?”
“Someplace public, but safe.”
“Pentagon Metro stop.”
Mercer knew it. This particular subway stop was right at the entrance to one of the most heavily defended buildings in the world. “Perfect. What time’s good for you?”
“I was just about to crash. I’m beat. How about late this afternoon—say five o’clock? No, make it six. That gets us past the worst of the rush.”
“Okay. Six o’clock at the Pentagon Metro stop, right by the building’s entrance.”
“I’ll bring all my findings.”
“Not that ridiculous man purse of yours.”
“It’s not a purse,” Rutland protested. “Felicia calls it a satchel.”
“Felicia can call it a kumquat for all I care, it’s still a purse.”
“Eff you,” Jason said, hanging up. Mercer clicked off his cell with a sly grin.
It was a nice enough day, and the Pentagon was close enough that Mercer decided to walk partway when the time came. There was just enough breeze for him to throw on a khaki Beretta shooting jacket. Holstered at his spine was one of their signature 9mm’s, the Model 92. He left his house with plain white earbuds stretching down to the phone he’d stuffed into one of the coat’s numerous pockets.
Mercer walked casually, glancing into the glass office windows of the buildings beyond his block of townhomes. In their reflections he saw no obvious signs of a tail, but his instincts told him he was being watched. He could feel the eyes on him.
An elderly man in a fedora and rumpled suit stepped out of one of the office buildings, raising an arm to get the attention of a driver parked at the curb. The two men exchanged a greeting as the rumpled guy slid into the passenger seat. Traffic was snarled enough that they only got a few feet before being forced to stop. For the next two blocks it seemed the car and Mercer were in a slow-speed chase, neither getting much ahead of the other. The traffic lights cycled from green to red so quickly that only a few cars could squirt through the nearly gridlocked intersections.
The two men ignored him on the sidewalk and conversed casually enough for Mercer to put them out of his mind and scan other places for a watcher.
The car turned at the next cross street, the driver accelerating hard to get away from the worst of the traffic in an annoyed display.
Mercer walked ten yards past the Pentagon City Station and turned so suddenly that he almost plowed over a diminutive Chinese woman and her even tinier mother. He paid them no attention, his face the picture of annoyance at himself because he’d apparently walked past his destination, but his eyes were watchful for anyone caught off guard by his sudden reversal. No one seemed startled or upset, other than the two people he’d nearly trampled.
He descended into the city’s subway.
He fished a SmarTrip Metro card from his wallet, touched it to the scan pad, and passed through the turnstile. Built in time for the nation’s bicentennial, the Metro stations still possessed a futuristic feel that made one think the trains entering and exiting were headed to distant planets, rather than other stops along the Blue or Yellow Line. When the train came, he loitered on the platform until the bell sounded and the doors were about to hiss closed, before jumping aboard.
Once again no one paid him the slightest attention. He began to have doubts. What if the listeners at the other end of the bugs in his house had given up after Jordan’s arrest, and he was putting on a performance for an audience that wasn’t there? He hated to think his elaborate plan was for naught, but on the other hand, if his adversaries had given up, that opened the door for him to work unimpeded.
It also meant that he’d forever lost his chance to find out who, and what, was behind Abe Jacobs’s murder.
That was a personal failure he would not contemplate, and so he refocused on the task at hand. He checked his tag. He had timed this perfectly. The appointed hour was just a minute away, and the subway was decelerating as it approached the Pentagon stop. The platform was crowded with commuters, many in civilian attire, many others in the uniforms of the four major military branches.
Mercer stepped into the press of humanity on the dimly lit platform, looking for Jason, but also watching for anything suspicious. He figured that of the original five-person team he’d encountered in the Leister Deep Mine, he had killed one in the Lauder Science Center at Hardt College, and another in Roni Butler’s kitchen, so he was looking for two perfect strangers and the leader—the man whose posture, walk, and movements he would know in an instant. It was an odd feeling. He’d gotten only a few fleeting glimpses of the guy, but it felt like he’d been studying the gunman for years.
He saw nothing except harried commuters wanting to get home. As he exited the platform, within sight of the entrance to the Pentagon itself, he felt a quick movement behind him. It was the rumpled guy from the car that he’d spotted earlier. He must have phoned in a description to someone already here at the station. The man made a hand signal over the heads of the streaming commuters. Mercer whirled in time to see Jason. The NASA scientist saw him too and raised a hand in greeting.
“Jason! No!”
It was too late. Jason had been spotted, and no sooner did he lower his hand than a shape slid through the crowd the way a shark parts a shoal of fish, and Jason’s leather satchel had been cut free of its sling. The shape moved on, leaving Jason in its wake, a surprised look on his face at the audacity of such a blatant robber
y. He looked ready to give chase.
“No, Jason. Stop,” Mercer shouted as he himself was about to launch into a run to catch the thief. He felt something hard ram into his kidney and dig a little into his flesh. It took no imagination to know it was the barrel of a snub-nosed revolver.
“Leave it be, or I drop you and take my chances in the confusion.” The voice was a Brooklyn cliché.
There was no way this old guy had been part of the assault team at the mine. Mercer tried to turn to get a better look at the man’s face. His earlier impression was a bad shave, sallow skin, and drooping eyes. As had been intended, Mercer could better describe the hat the man wore than his features. Whoever he was, Mercer realized he was good at this.
“I’m putting a pair of zip cuffs in your hand.” Mercer felt the wiry length of plastic press against his palm. “Secure them around your ankles.”
When he bent to comply, Mercer felt his Beretta being lifted from its pancake holster. It was a good thing he wasn’t sentimental about guns, because that one was about the fourth or fifth he’d lost. The gunman stayed close enough that no one rushing by them saw or suspected a thing.
“Thanks for the piece,” the New Yorker said.
Mercer straightened, and he was abruptly shoved from behind. The plastic tie around his ankles meant he fell like a sawn-down tree and took the brunt of the impact on his hands, wrists, and arms. A woman gasped at his collapse. Mercer turned to see the rumpled suit and cheesy gangster hat vanish out of the building lobby. He moved well for an older man.
“Are you okay?” a pretty petty officer in navy camouflage asked. She looked more closely and saw the white plastic band securing Mercer’s legs together. She got suspicious. “What’s going on?”
“Remember the ‘knockout game’ from a couple of years ago?” Mercer said, feigning anger. “I think this is similar. I felt something around my ankle, then someone pushed me. Down I went.” He fished into his pocket for a folding pocketknife. The blade easily sliced through the plastic.
She helped him to his feet. “Do you want me to get an MP?”