Havoc - v4 (12 page)

Still not over his shock, and delight, at seeing Cali, Mercer asked, “So are you going to tell me who you really are? Because I know you don’t work for the CDC. Their human resources guy nearly choked when I asked about you.”

“Ever heard of NEST?”

“Part of the Department of Energy, isn’t it?”

“It stands for Nuclear Emergency Search Team. I’m a member. Our main function is to act as a rapid response force in the event of a nuclear bomb strike or an attack at a nuclear plant. Back in 2003 our charter was changed slightly after President Bush went before the country in his State of the Union address and made a serious boo-boo by saying Saddam had gone uranium shopping in Africa. Because of that gaffe NEST has also been tasked with finding and securing previously unknown sources of uranium. There are ten of us on a team searching the world for old uranium mines, and places where uranium might be found.”

“So you weren’t lying about how you found that village.”

A shadow passed behind her luminous dark eyes and she took a quick sip of her Scotch. Some of her freckles blurred into an angry flush. “Sort of but not exactly. Someone at the CDC contacted me about that village having the highest cancer rate on the planet. When I took that info to my bosses they played around with it for a while, talked it over in a dozen meetings and committees, and finally shelved it, saying, and I quote, ‘There are more pressing matters.’”

“Let me guess,” Harry chimed in, “you went out on your own?”

Cali nodded, her good humor returning. “If you noticed I’m sitting kind of funny, it’s because most of my ass was chewed off when I got back to our field office in New York.”

Unbidden, Mercer’s mind conjured up the image of her backside. He was in little hurry to force it away but he remarked, “I saw you getting into a Town Car.”

“The head of NEST, Cliff Roberts, came to get me personally. That’s when the butt chewing began. Part of my left cheek is still in that Lincoln.” Cali tossed hair from her forehead in a simple gesture that held Harry entranced. “They bluffed about firing me, then about suspending me. In the end I was ordered to take a week’s worth of personal days and come back,” she deepened her voice to an approximation of her superior, “‘with the proper attitude of a team player.’ I envy you, Mercer, for not having to deal with government BS.”

“One of my first jobs was working for the USGS. It wasn’t bad as bureaucracies go but I knew I’d never make it there for long.” He thought back to their time at the village, making certain connections now that he knew her true purpose in being there. Some discrepancies came to light. “When you stepped into the bush for a little privacy…?”

“I was checking a Geiger counter. If you were anyone other than a geologist, I could have done it in the clear and made up a story. You would have seen through the ploy in a second, forcing me into the jungle with tales of diarrhea.”

“Sorry to cause you the embarrassment. Now that I think of it you weren’t all that pale coming back and you made a miraculous recovery.”

She grinned. “I’m not a method actor and I wasn’t kidding about having an iron stomach.”

“So what did the Geiger tell you?”

“There wasn’t much radiation above normal ambient. However large the lode was, it was all cleared out back in the thirties or forties and erosion would have carried away any contaminated soil long ago.”

“I’m leaning toward the 1930s,” Mercer told her. “Not long after Chester Bowie made his discovery.”

“And then the Germans came to mine what Bowie left behind?”

“That’s my guess. From what little Ms. Ballard told me about Bowie, I doubt he was a traitor, so I think someone caught wind of his find later on and came back to clear out the vein.” Mercer ordered another round. Sam/Jamal/Antoine, the piano player, must have thought there were enough patrons in the bar to start in on a pretty good rendition of “As Time Goes By.” He must have played that song a dozen times a day. “So how did you find Bowie?” Mercer asked. “I traced him through his schooling.”

“IRS database.” Cali sucked on an ice cube and both Harry and Mercer paused to watch her sensual mouth in action. She noticed the scrutiny and quickly crunched down on the cube. It was an absentminded habit that drew more attention than she intended. “In matters of national security, NEST can access some pretty powerful databases. Since I’m out sick, I had one of my teammates do the search. He led me to Keeler so I called the school’s president and he passed on the information about Serena Ballard’s book. I called her
et voilà
, here I am.

“What I don’t get,” she continued, “is what that mine has to do with a loopy classics professor. Serena filled me in a little about Bowie’s theories and it doesn’t jibe at all with what we found. If he went out playing amateur archaeologist to prove his theory about ice age bones, he would have gone to Greece. How did he end up in Africa?”

“With luck Serena’s notes might shed a little light on the subject.”

“That reminds me,” Cali said quickly. “The president of Keeler is ticked at her. She was supposed to have returned her research material to the school years ago. So make sure I tell her that it all has to go back.”

A lone woman in her forties entered the dim bar. Unlike the tourists ebbing and flowing into the room, she wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. She had long blond hair and a chubby round face. Mercer put her height at about five three and her weight somewhere around his own. He guessed that there was Pennsylvania Dutch not too far down her family tree. She spotted the trio at the bar and made her way across the room. It had to be Serena Ballard.

“Dr. Mercer? Ms. Stowe?”

“You found us,” Cali answered.

“Hi, I’m Serena Ballard.”

“Please call me Cali.” Even seated on the stool, Cali was almost a head taller than the casino executive.

“And people generally call me Mercer.” He shook her hand, noting that her eyes were cornflower blue. “This is my friend Harry White.”

Harry didn’t repeat his servicing joke again. His instincts had been spot-on that Cali would see the humor. He didn’t think Serena Ballard would. “Pleased to meet you.”

Serena looked first at Mercer and then to Cali. “Three years after my book comes out and not one but two people suddenly show an interest.”

“Mercer and I are working on the same problem from different perspectives and came to the same conclusion—you. Can we get you a drink?”

“Just a diet Coke. Why don’t we grab a booth away from the piano.” She hoisted her bag. “I brought everything I could find. Actually there is a lot more than I remembered and it reminded me that I was supposed to return it all to Keeler College.”

Cali grabbed up her and Serena’s drinks. “The school’s president asked me to ask you about that.” She then quipped, “He made it sound as though there was a long line of scholars clamoring for the Chester Bowie files.”

Once they were settled at a corner booth, Serena emptied the contents of the collapsible briefcase onto the table. There were about ten musty notebooks, several old manila folders, and clutches of loose papers. Mercer, Harry, and Cali started leafing through the notebooks. It was clear from the eager look on her face that Serena wanted to help but had little to add. “There isn’t much I can tell you. I looked through some of this in my office but I’m afraid it didn’t jog my memory. As I told you over the phone, I wrote the book a long time ago and Chester Bowie wasn’t a very big part of it.”

“How did you first hear about him?” Cali asked over the top of a brittle notebook.

“My father-in-law went to Keeler. He was the one who told me about him when I was working on the book. Even though he vanished sometime in the 1930s, students still talked about Bowie the booby when my father-in-law was a student. I just contacted the school and told them I was writing about Bowie. They sent me everything they had in their archives.”

Cali continued to press. “You hadn’t come across his name in any other source?”

“No, sorry.” Serena sipped at her soft drink. “What is this all about?”

Mercer set aside the notebook he was thumbing through. “We found a canteen in a small village in Central Africa that once belonged to Chester Bowie. An old woman there remembered him from her childhood. She also told us that shortly after Bowie left, other white men came and killed a number of people.”

“My God, that’s awful. Why would they do such a thing?”

Mercer just shrugged, since she didn’t need to know about the uranium mine. “We don’t know. We hoped that this material might provide a clue.”

Serena bit her lower lip. “Are you two looking into this for yourself or is this some kind of government thing?”

“I work for the government,” Cali replied. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you in what capacity. Mercer’s a civilian consultant.”

Mercer tried to suppress a smile. Cali had put just the right hint of intrigue in her voice for Serena Ballard to make her own inference and also to make the offer without being asked. “I was going to let you keep this stuff overnight so I can return it to Keeler, but if this is something official you should keep it until you’re done with it. Just get it back to me so I can forward it.”

Mercer gave her his best smile. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll send it to Keeler myself, with the promise that we’ll keep you informed as best as we’re able.”

Serena beamed at being included. “I can’t ask for anything more.” She stood. “Oh, and good to my word I got you some rooms compliments of the Deco Palace Hotel. You should be in the system already. Just give your names to one of the receptionists.”

“And don’t you worry,” Harry said, shaking her hand, “the hotel will more than make up the cost by the time I’m through tonight.”

After Serena had gone, they received their room cards at the reception desk. Harry dumped his overnight bag on Mercer with the vague promise to be back before they left Atlantic City in the morning. He gave his cane a jaunty wrist flick with each pace as he headed for the craps tables. Their rooms were on different floors, so Mercer gave Cali half of the documents Serena had provided and kept the other half for himself. They made arrangements to meet for dinner at eight.

Mercer decided against a quick shower and instead sat himself in a club chair in his room and began scanning Chester Bowie’s notebooks. After leafing through just a dozen pages he was convinced that Jody, the alumni receptionist at Keeler College, was correct. Bowie was a whack job. His writing style rambled from subject to subject with no discernible pattern. In one paragraph he railed against Sir Arthur Evans’s work on Minoan culture at Knossos and in the next he gave scientific reasons why the sun couldn’t have melted Icarus’s wax-and-feather wings. He wrote that the boy must have blacked out from hypoxia and crashed into the sea, as if the mythological story was fact.

Once he’d established in his mind that the bones of ice age creatures were the basis for demons and monsters, Chester Bowie treated all the ancient myths as if they were real and sought to explain them logically. Or at least as logically as he could. He believed that the famous Gordian knot was simply a hedge maze at the entrance to Phrygia and Alexander the Great merely chopped it down with his sword.

Mercer was well into the third notebook when the phone rang. “Hello?”

“I forgot what room you are in,” Cali said breathlessly.

“1092.”

“I’ll be right up. I found it.”

A minute later he opened the door to Cali’s insistent knock. She blew into the room, her eyes alight. She’d removed her blazer and he could see the shape of her small breasts and how they moved under the silk of her shell. “Chester Bowie was certifiable but he was also a genius.”

Mercer found himself immediately caught up in her enthusiasm. “What did you find?”

“Adamantine.”

“Huh?”

She threw him a teasing smile. “Not the geologist you thought you were?”

“Always suspected I wasn’t,” Mercer replied. “What’s adamantine?”

“In Greek stories of creation, after the gods had fashioned the earth,” she glanced at a note card, “Epimetheus and his brother were given the job of fashioning all the animals. Some were given wings, others claws, some got speed, some got strength. Unfortunately Epimetheus gave out all the best attributes, so when it came to man he had nothing left in his bag of tricks and he asked his brother for advice. The brother told him what would make an appropriate gift to man so Epimetheus went up to the heavens and lit a torch from the sun and bestowed fire to man, making him superior to all creatures. As you might imagine this wasn’t what Zeus, chief god of all the gods, had in mind. In anger—”

Mercer finished the story. “In anger Zeus had Epimetheus’s brother, Prometheus, chained to a mountain where birds ate his spleen.”

“Exactly.” Cali checked her card again. “It was Mount Caucasus and it was his liver, actually. The chains were reportedly made of unbreakable metal called adamantine that Jupiter himself had mined. Only Hercules’ strength was enough to break the links and free Prometheus.”

“So what does this have to do with Bowie?”

“Don’t you see? Through his research he thought he had found Jupiter’s secret adamantine mine. He went to Central Africa to prove that adamantine really existed, just one more step in proving that everything about ancient mythology was real. But instead of some legendary metal he discovered a vein of naturally enriched uranium.”

Mercer shook his head. “Hold it. He trekked into the most remote part of the world because he thought he’d found the mother lode of an imaginary metal.”

Cali grinned at his skepticism. “I’ll do you one better. He got a grant from Princeton in the fall of 1936 to go looking for his adamantine mine.”

“Princeton? Princeton backed this lunatic?”

“To the tune of two thousand dollars. Not large by today’s standards but in the 1930s that’s not chump change.” She handed him a memo on Princeton letterhead. The letter, from a Professor Swartz at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, stated that indeed Bowie had been given two thousand dollars to pursue his work on procuring ‘the elemental metal you outlined in your grant request.’ Mercer read the short note a second time, as if not believing his first reading. He looked up. Cali had a smug look on her face.