by Jack Du Brul
“He doesn’t know that you and I are working together?” Kerikov nearly shouted, panic forcing blood to his face in an angry flush.
“Of course not,” the other man soothed quickly. “He’ll think that the concern is mine. Don’t worry, Ivan. He doesn’t know of our deal at all.”
“Don’t fuck this up, or so help me God, death would be a relief from what I’d do to you.” He angrily hung up the phone, the cavalier attitude of his partner threatening to send him into cardiac arrest.
He’d been this close to his goals before and had them stripped away by perfidious greed and the work of Philip Mercer.
He lit another cigarette to steady his fraying nerves. He had only a few minutes to meet Alam and his two men for the trip down to Homer. Once he’d laid the false trail for Mercer, he could again concentrate fully on all the other aspects of Charon’s Landing.
Before he left the suite, he had one more call to make. The connection took a few seconds longer than normal as the signal was bounced off an orbiting satellite and converted to a marine band frequency. A female answered.
“Is this Hope?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” she chirped brightly.
“This is Ivan Kerikov. Tell your boss that we’re pushing up the strike by twenty-four hours. Make sure that you’re ready. I’ll be back in touch in the morning if there are any questions.”
The J. Edgar Hoover Building Washington, DC
The headquarters of the FBI was located in downtown Washington, a massive steel and glass building that more befitted a high-tech corporation than America’s premier law-enforcement agency. Behind the walls of the building named for the most vigilant American ever born, the FBI ran countless operations all over the nation, from the mundane to the most dangerous, each conducted with a thoroughness that many felt bordered on paranoia. Yet the tireless men and women of the Bureau knew that their work secured the nation as no other on earth.
Dick Henna had a suite of offices on the top floor. When it wasn’t necessary to impress guests and he needed privacy, he preferred one of the plain conference rooms several floors below. It was just one more way he tried to remain connected to his organization and not hide himself in the ivory tower of his position as had so many of his predecessors. Henna’s bulldog face was heavily jowled, with a sloped nose and small eyes. His body matched his face, wide shoulders and thick gut stacked on short legs. He looked like a Teamster enforcer from the union’s nefarious past. Despite his years spent steadily gaining positions in the agency and his year as the Director of the FBI, he’d never lost the look of an overworked street agent.
Across from him, Mercer slouched comfortably, none the worse after the attack and a night under FBI protective custody at the Willard Hotel, one of Washington’s finest. The bullet wound wasn’t deep, more of a nuisance than an injury, a weal that would mend in a few days. In deference to the meeting, he wore a suit, one that hung off of his long frame as easily as a favorite pair of jeans and rugby shirt. When the police had arrived at his brownstone the night before, with Henna and two cars of FBI special agents, they’d given him just enough time to pack an overnight bag before bundling him off to the Willard. Harry White was brought back to his own apartment for debriefing.
Until midnight, a tag team pair of investigators grilled Mercer over every element of the assault on his house, each retelling gleaning some other detail as he racked his brain for information. He was entirely honest and cooperative about the whole affair except that he maintained that he was alone when Harry had come over. Though he felt a tremendous sense of betrayal, he thought it best not to mention Aggie Johnston. As a favor to Mercer, Harry would verify that his friend was alone when he arrived.
Mercer hadn’t really had the time to analyze Aggie’s reaction. The FBI had kept him up so long that exhaustion had overwhelmed him even as he was retelling the events of the previous night. But he was disturbed by her sudden departure and what it could possibly mean.
Henna was uncharacteristically subdued. He’d spoken with Agent Peters’ widow the night before and was going to visit her later in the day. It was a duty he was not looking forward to but one that he wouldn’t allow anyone else to handle. Though he’d never met the young agent, he took Peters’ death as hard as if it were his best friend who would be buried the following day.
An aide stepped into the office with a tray of coffee. Mercer took his black and waited for Dick to dilute his with a heavy drop of milk and two spoons of sugar.
“Why is it you look worse than I do and I was the one who was attacked last night?” Mercer tried to put some levity in his question, but he couldn’t cut through Henna’s morose air.
“I don’t know what it is about you, but since last night, the shit’s really hit the fan.” Henna shook his head sadly. “After you were attacked, I called the President, woke him, actually. He gave me the authority to dig around in the archives of the CIA and the National Security Agency for anything pertaining to Alaska or you.” Henna pulled a tightly folded piece of paper from his pocket, easing out the creases as he spoke. “The NSA came up with this about two hours ago.”
Mercer scanned the page, ignoring the bureaucratic language and extraneous words that littered any government document. The meat of the letter was that a man named John Krugger had entered the country twelve days earlier. “So?”
“The NSA’s computers automatically flag passports with suspicious names. They process thousands of yellow flags per week, names and aliases that are the same or sound similar to those of terrorists or other undesirables. Naturally, most of these are meaningless coincidences. Yet the computer will red-flag certain ones depending on our interest in the person being sought. This name sent up a red flag immediately.”
“Means nothing to me.” Mercer was nonchalant, though the hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to bristle with premonition.
“John Krugger is an Anglicized version of Johann Kreiger,” Henna said flatly.
Mercer shrugged his shoulders, but unconsciously he braced his feet as if expecting a physical blow.
“Johann Kreiger was a favorite alias of Ivan Kerikov, and according to the KGB, who still wants him dead, he has an English passport under the name of John Krugger.”
“Kerikov’s in the country?” Mercer rasped.
A thousand emotions swirled through him, undirected and random. Through the chaos, a pattern formed and a dominant desire cut through the tempest. Mercer wanted revenge. Ivan Kerikov, the mastermind behind Vulcan’s Forge, had nearly killed Mercer a dozen times over when the Russian stole that former KGB plot. Mercer had wanted a chance to kill the Russian then, but Kerikov hadn’t been close enough. He had expertly manipulated others to do his bidding while remaining safely outside the country.
But now, Kerikov was here, in America, on Mercer’s home turf, and he wanted another chance to bring the Russian down. His stomach tightened with fury.
“I want him, Dick.”
“We’ll discuss that later. Right now, we have to figure out why he’s here.”
“You think it has something to do with me and Alaska?”
“Since you cost him a hundred million dollars in Hawaii, I’m sure it will involve you, and, given the mood of the country and the administration, I assume everything has to do with Alaska.”
There was a knock on the door, and it swung open without invitation.
Dr. Lynn Goetchell was the senior lab analyst at the FBI’s Forensic Crimes Laboratory in rural Virginia and ruled her domain with the haughty demeanor of a benevolent dictator, her omnipresent lab coat taking on the importance of a robe of state. She sat next to Mercer, barely acknowledging his presence. It was not that she was a rude person, but the three doctoral degrees to her credit had called for sacrifices in her life, and social niceties had been one of the first to go. She wore a severe blue suit, and her only jewelry was a pair of paste earclips.
Mercer had no basis for reference, but he guessed that Goetchell hadn’t slept
since receiving the metal scrap from the Jenny IV. Her face was pale, and the bags under her eyes were a bruised purple. Mercer could smell traces of chemicals on her skin.
“I might as well tell you right now that I got absolutely nothing from that sample you gave me,” Lynn Goetchell admitted after the perfunctory introductions. “We’ve had less than twenty-four hours, which isn’t enough time for a definitive analysis, but I’ll stake my reputation that we won’t get much further with it.”
“What do you have so far?” Henna queried.
“It’s your basic stainless steel, unremarkable in every respect. The ink used to print the word ‘roger’ is a standard product produced under license by twenty different companies in this country alone. It’s untraceable. The presence of sodium and diatoms on the surface of the sample was explained by its immersion in seawater. Salt concentrates were consistent with the waters of the North Pacific and Prince William Sound. We ran it under a two-hundred-thousand-power scanning electron microscope and found nothing out of the ordinary-”
“What about where the metal was torn?” Mercer interrupted.
“Shearing tears consistent with violent explosions, implosions, or rending force. Anything could have torn it apart. I can’t give you anything more specific than that. There were no traces of chemicals around the damaged sections, no blast residue or explosives.”
“Dead end,” Mercer said miserably.
“Yes,” Goetchell agreed. “We found only one thing that couldn’t be detected with a visual inspection. Using computer extrapolation we discovered that the fragment was torn from a cylinder approximately thirty-seven-point-nine inches in circumference.”
Mercer did the math in his head and envisioned a stainless steel tube about twelve inches wide. It still told him nothing. “So where does that leave us?”
“That leaves us with the other evidence recovered from the Jenny IV.” Goetchell pulled a folder from her briefcase. “Autopsy reports, and very poor ones too. I should have the license of Anchorage’s Medical Examiner yanked.”
She opened the slimmer of the two files, the last words written about the men who had died on the Jenny IV. “The skeletal remains found in the boat’s cabin were too far gone to get much. The level of carbonization of the bone fragments indicates a fire of over eight hundred degrees, consistent to the combustibles found on boats — wood, plastic, and fuel. There wasn’t even enough to do a DNA analysis. Identification had to be made through dental records.”
“And the body I found on the deck?”
“Cause of death was severe burn trauma. He’d lost forty percent of his body mass to the flames. His lungs were so scorched that even if he’d survived the fire, he’d have died within hours.” She passed around a series of gruesome photographs. The corpse was as horribly disfigured as Mercer remembered, burned hands with skin peeled back like shredded paper, charred stumps that had once been his legs, and a face more ruined than Mercer thought possible. There were no eyelids, ears, or nose, and the lips had burned away to reveal crooked yellow teeth.
“What’s this one?” Henna held up one of the pictures.
Goetchell peered at it. “It wasn’t labeled in the ME’s report, but it looks like a picture of a cell biopsy. They look like subcutaneous fat cells.”
“They look like they’ve collapsed,” Mercer remarked. He’d watched enough science programs on television to know a healthy cell structure. These looked like haphazard bricks on a crumbling wall. The cell walls, usually well defined and rigid, were smeared and distended.
Dr. Goetchell took the picture from Henna, studying it much more carefully. “I’ll be damned. I missed that entirely. Another mystery on top of everything else.”
“What could cause that?” Mercer asked.
“An increase in extracellular salts, sugars, and proteins will cause cells to leach out water in an effort to rebalance the concentration,” Lynn Goetchell lectured patiently. “If the chemical imbalance is bad enough, the cells can’t excrete enough water to dilute their protective fluid. They drain themselves and subsequently collapse, or more accurately implode. It starts out as a protective function that ends up destroying the cells themselves.”
“What could make it start in the first place?” Henna asked. He was out of his element entirely and doing his best to keep up.
“Any number of chemical compounds could do it. The human body is very attuned to toxicity in its environment. Also, when a body is frozen, this kind of damage will occur.”
“Jesus,” Mercer exploded. “Freezing. Why the hell didn’t I think of that before?”
“What’s the big deal?” Henna shook his head. “The body was recovered from Alaska in unseasonably cold weather. It’s no surprise that the body was freezing.”
Mercer turned to him as a thin tendril of the mystery began to unravel. “Dick, pay attention to the tenses. She didn’t say when a body freezes; she said when a body is frozen.” He glanced to Lynn Goetchell and was rewarded with a slight nod. “What are we talking about — temperatures below two hundred degrees Fahrenheit?”
“The destruction to the cells is complete, and since the reaction wasn’t timed, there’s no way to calculate.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mercer replied. He tore a piece of paper from the legal pad at Henna’s elbow and pulled a pen from the inside of his jacket. Henna and Goetchell watched silently as Mercer wrote out the name whose meaning had eluded them all: roger.
“Now, that piece of steel was ripped just at the end of the last letter r, right?” He didn’t wait for a response. “But what if it wasn’t an r at all.” He continued the upper arm of the letter, curling it down to spell out rogen.
He looked up quickly. Lynn Goetchell instantly understood where he was leading, but Henna was still baffled, the corners of his mouth hanging down in concentration. Mercer finished the remainder of the word with a flourish, filling in the letters that had been torn away by the explosion aboard the Jenny IV: nitrogen. And then he added the word he knew preceded it on the twelve-inch-diameter cylinder that rested within the doomed ship’s hold: liquid nitrogen. He went so far as to add the triangled circle that denotes biohazard.
“I’m willing to bet that there was a hell of a lot more than one tank of liquid nitrogen on the Jenny IV,” Mercer said triumphantly. “I remember that her stern-mounted crane and all of her radio antennas had snapped off. Now it makes sense. The fire must have boiled the liquid nitrogen in the holds. Since I found one body still in his bunk, the fire must have consumed the ship quickly. The other crewman was on the deck when the heat of the flames caused the tanks to explode. The ship would have been engulfed in a fog of supercooled gas that snuffed the flames. That’s why he was so badly burned in some areas and unaffected in others. The fire was put out before it could finish roasting him.” Mercer paused, imagining the agony of such a death. He shivered off the gruesome image. “The intense temperature change would have weakened the cranes and antennas. They snapped under their own weight.”
Henna looked at Goetchell for confirmation.
“It makes sense given the preliminary findings of the autopsy. Nitrogen liquefies at three hundred thirty-eight degrees below zero, about seventy-seven degrees above absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, more than cold enough to do this type of cellular damage. And it doesn’t require expensive refrigeration equipment like liquefied hydrogen or helium. A fire near the cylinders could conceivably cause them to boil and rupture, spilling their contents in an evaporative cloud. And that kind of cold will weaken metal, plastic, and wood to the point where they can collapse under even minor strain. There isn’t a physics student in the country who hasn’t seen a nail dipped in liquid nitrogen shatter when hit by a hammer.”
“Why?” Henna directed his question at Mercer like a pistol shot.
“Hey, give me a moment. Ten seconds ago we didn’t even know what she was carrying.”
In the ensuing silence, the large white-faced clock on the wall clicked through five minu
tes, its thin red second hand ratcheting off the time mechanically, uncaringly. Mercer stretched out, his eyes staring into a middle distance that only he saw.
“Where did they get it?” Mercer asked softly. “It doesn’t make sense that they got the nitrogen from the mainland and brought it out to sea with them. More than likely, they were conveying it to port when the fire occurred. Where the hell did they get tanks of liquid nitrogen in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska?”
“One more on the list of mysteries,” Henna said pessimistically.
“Not so fast.” Mercer turned to Lynn Goetchell. “Can you give me the date and time of death?”
“The body was discovered on the seventeenth and the Medical Examiner put the time of death at early afternoon the day before. I can’t prove it, but I’ll bet that he wasn’t off by more than a few hours.”
“Afternoon of October sixteenth.” Mercer turned to Henna. “I need a phone and a couple of hours and I’ll tell you where they got those cylinders. Hopefully, I’ll be able to give you a why after that.”
“Forget it. You’ve done your part.”
“What are you talking about?” Mercer was shocked that his friend was taking him out of the loop.
“If it hasn’t slipped your mind, there have been two attempts on your life in the past couple of days. You’re out of it as of right now.”
“Dick, don’t turn bureaucrat on me now. You still have no idea what’s happening, which means the attempts on my life aren’t going to stop. If I’m at risk, then I want a say in the investigation.”
“Forget it, Mercer,” Dick Henna repeated sternly. “I’ve got nearly two hundred agents working in and around Alaska right now, looking for anything that may threaten the opening of the Arctic Refuge and the building of the second Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and so far they’ve turned up nothing. Christ, two gas stations in Anchorage were firebombed last night no more than five blocks from our field headquarters. Now that we’ve gotten a lead, my personnel are the ones who are going to track it down. Not you.”