Charon's Landing

Falls Church, Virginia

Mercer’s Jaguar was a dark shadow as it crept along the wide driveway, its throaty V-12 harnessed to a purr, its Pirelli tires hissing against the damp asphalt. A fine mist silvered the night in the twin beams of the car’s headlights. His eyes strained to see the house he knew must be at the end of the lane. No one’s driveway could be this long.

He glanced at the odometer and saw that he’d come nearly a mile since leaving the main road. When he looked up, he finally saw the faint glow of Max Johnston’s home. The car rounded one more sweeping curve, and the house was laid out before him.

It was a massive Tudor with countless gables, oak crossbeams, and steeply pitched roofs that stretched for almost two hundred feet. While the house was enormous, its whimsical style gave it a less imposing feeling. Most of the numerous windows on the first two floors were lit, warming the damp evening with a pale radiance. Mercer counted eight chimneys before pulling his car up to the covered entrance.

A valet met him and swung open the long door of the XJS Jaguar. Mercer noticed several dozen limousines lined up at the side of the house in parade formation. He stepped from the car, allowing the young valet to slide into the leather bucket seat.

From within the home, Mercer heard the solemn vibrato of a cello accompanied by a violin and what sounded like a harpsichord. He could not name the piece, but he appreciated the beauty with which it was being played. Beneath the cuffs of his tuxedo, his beaten TAG Heuer was strapped firmly to his wrist. Nine-thirty. Perfect. The dinner, a boring affair he was sure, was over, and the real reception was just beginning.

He handed his invitation to a somewhat fuddled footman. Mercer was hours late, and the servant regarded him warily, his drooping eyes scanning the card and Mercer with equal suspicion.

“I fell into a bottle of vodka and couldn’t get up,” explained Mercer as he brushed past the doorman.

The entry hall was a story and a half high with wide plank floors and a plaster ceiling. A cherry wood table sat in the center of the foyer, its gleaming top nearly hidden by a beautiful arrangement of cut wildflowers. The room was scented by their subtle perfume. Above the table, a glittering crystal chandelier hung like a fragile stalactite.

In a room to Mercer’s right, servants were preparing the dining table to become a dessert buffet. Tortes, cakes, mousses, and numerous other sticky sweet creations covered the table that could easily seat thirty people. The classical strains of the trio grew louder as Mercer wandered through the dining room. The nine-foot doors at the far end led to a living room larger than most suburban houses.

The furniture was all nineteenth-century revival, Duncan Phyfe and John Henry Belter mostly. Four separate conversation areas quartered the huge space, couches, love seats, and chairs arranged around identical tables like defensive fortifications. The paintings were predominantly American primitives with the exception of a portrait by Sargent of a mother and daughter and a Grant Wood landscape. A bar had been set up along one wall, guests lined up and chatting away their wait for service.

The musicians were in the center of the room. Mercer watched them for a moment. There was something erotic about a female cellist, he thought. This one, not particularly pretty but eye-catching nevertheless, wore a deeply slit cream gown. Her stunning legs were wrapped around her instrument like a lover’s embrace. He felt like a voyeur as he watched her fingers working the strings and turned away before his expression got him into trouble.

Through the series of French doors at the far end of the room, Mercer saw a huge marquee tent and clusters of tables that the two hundred guests had used for dinner. He was just noticing that the bartender had lime juice to make a vodka gimlet when a hand grasped him on the shoulder.

“What’s a rogue like you doing at a place like this?”

Mercer turned, smiling as he recognized the distinctive voice. “Looking to ravage a Cabinet-ranking bureaucrat.”

Connie Van Buren stretched up to give him a kiss on the cheek. “God, you’re good-looking, and you smell nice too.”

“Ah, but Connie, you’re married.”

“My husband’s in New Mexico,” she teased.

“And my libido’s in storage.”

“Forever the bachelor,” she chided him mildly. “When are you ever going to get married?”

“I’ll marry the first woman who leaves the seat up for me.”

They had first met years before when Connie was working at the Interior Department and Mercer consulted for a German mining concern called Koenig Minerals. At the time, she was devoting a great deal of energy to blocking the company from opening a mine in Utah. They had one of the worst environmental records in the world. Mercer had stepped in at Koenig’s request and to Interior’s great relief, smoothly worked out a compromise that was acceptable to both parties. Connie and he had stayed in touch, keeping track of each other’s rise through their chosen professions.

“I noticed you were absent from dinner. You were supposed to be on my left side. Instead, I had to suffer through some mealymouthed lawyer who spoke in press releases.”

“I figured it would be bad, but I never imagined Max would invite the lawyers too.”

“Max invited everyone he knows in the city. It’s not every day you endow a forty-million-dollar think tank, and he wants to make sure no one forgets it.”

Mercer looked around as more guests filtered in from the tented patio. Connie was right. The room was filling with some heavy hitters. The Speaker of the House was deep in conversation with the President’s Chief of Staff, and behind them, several nationally recognized television journalists were hanging on the words of a very drunk senior senator. The Johnston Group was certainly getting a big endorsement from Washington’s elite.

“Where’s our host?” Mercer scanned the crowd, looking for Max Johnston.

“Oh, he’s here, basking in the glow. He and the President played golf this afternoon, and the Old Man gave his official endorsement. Max is throwing this party just to let everyone else kiss his ring.” Connie paused as she recognized a man tracking across the room toward her. “Damn. Robert Baird.”

“Who’s he?” Mercer noted the man striding through the crowd.

“He’s a lobbyist for the nuclear research division of Petromax Oil, one of Max’s lackeys trying to curry favor. Excuse me while I duck into the ladies’ room.”

Baird actually made an “aw shucks” arm gesture as he watched Connie’s ample bottom waddle from the living room. He looked at Mercer for a moment, deciding if he was someone worth presenting his case to since he had been talking to the Secretary of Energy. Mercer flashed a dull smile, and Baird went in search of more powerful prey.

Mercer was watching him slink back through the center set of French doors when he saw her. Her back was toward him, angled away as she spoke with last year’s Nobel Prize winner for chemistry. In the staid Washington social circuit, a revealing dress was seen as an affront to everything the city stood for. The women present, though formally dressed, still exuded an air of conservatism that precluded any ideas of sex.

But she looked as if she’d just come from a Hollywood awards show. Her dress, deeply black against her white skin, was cut so low in the back that with a little imagination, Mercer could almost visualize a shadow where the two halves of her buttocks split into tightly rounded hemispheres. The skin on her back was flawless. She was tall, but her height was not a distraction; rather it was a pedestal to admire her from. She turned and he saw her eyes.

The mineral beryl is a relatively common stone of little or no interest; in fact it’s considered a by-product of mica and feldspar mining. Yet when aluminum is present in its makeup, beryl becomes aquamarine and is considered a semiprecious stone. And when nature adds traces of chromium rather than aluminum, beryl becomes emerald, one of man’s most coveted gems. The depth of an emerald’s color is determined by the amount of chromium. Too much and the stone is dark, inky, and dead. Too little and an emerald is pale and faded. This color difference is called kelly. A perfect stone, one with depth to its color while maintaining its brilliance, is considered to have good kelly, and its value soars proportionately.

Her eyes were green. A perfect kelly green that shot through Mercer like a live wire. She looked at him for a moment, scraping her nails through short hair that was dark yet blond and auburn at the same time, held to her neat skull with just a trace of gel. Mercer felt like he was drowning.

Individually, the features of her face were perfect, softly rounded lips framing a sensual mouth that seemed just on the verge of laughter. Her cheekbones swept down the sides of her face with the grace of a gull’s wing, and her chin was strong with a slight cleft. Above her stunning eyes, her brows were wide and dark, shocking on such a delicate face but adding an undeniable magnetism. Her nose was small and gentle, very feminine.

From her high, broad forehead to her narrow throat, she was exquisite. There was no comparing her to the brassy trophy women that many of the men here called their wives. She had the looks of a fashion model, daunting and unobtainable, but he thought he noted a charm that those women didn’t possess.

She shifted her weight from one long leg to the other. Her dress clung to hips that curved from her narrow waist with unmatchable grace. The slit up the front swept aside to reveal one smooth inner thigh and, had Mercer been able to breathe, the sight would have taken his breath away. The front of her dress covered her body completely from her calves to her throat, but he noted that her unsupported breasts were small and high, the chill of the damp night forcing her nipples against the fabric.

“What can I get for you, sir?” The bartender distracted Mercer.

By the time he’d ordered a gimlet and turned back toward the French doors, she was gone. Damn.

He took his drink, absently muttering a thanks. It was then that he became aware he’d been physically aroused just by that quick glimpse of her. That hadn’t happened to him since his eighth-grade class had a twenty-one-year-old substitute for a week.

“You can put my clothes back on.”

“Excuse me?” Mercer turned and his breath jammed in his throat. She was even more beautiful up close. Her lips had an enticing pout that he unconsciously felt himself swaying toward.

“You just undressed me with your eyes, and I’d appreciate it if you put my clothing back on, Dr. Mercer.” The mischievous glint in her eyes showed that she was relishing Mercer’s discomfort. He guessed her age at early thirties, that perfect moment in a woman’s life when she retains the beauty of youth but tempers it with the knowledge of experience.

“You know who I am?” Mercer was incredulous. He was certain that he would remember her if they’d met before.

“My, how quickly they forget.” She laughed and started to walk away, her backside switching from side to side while the narrow ridge of her spine remained straight. A few paces away, she turned back. “We met yesterday morning.”

She was lost in the crowd by the time Mercer realized who she was. He had been so enraptured by her looks that he had never paid attention to her voice, throaty yet soft, alluring and… recognizable.

Mercer nearly spilled his drink as he lunged into the crowd looking for her. She had been his vocal opponent at George Washington University. He had a hard time reconciling that shabbily dressed girl with the stunning beauty who’d just walked away. What in the hell was a militant environmentalist doing at a reception hosted by one of the largest oil companies in the world?

He moved forward quickly, apologizing to guests as he brushed by in his search. Suddenly, a man turned, and they bumped nearly face to face. Both were startled by the contact. Mercer saw that the man had gone nearly white when he saw Mercer, but his color returned quickly, and his handsome face split into a broad grin.

“Mercer, I didn’t think you were going to make it.” Max Johnston seemed genuinely pleased to see Mercer at his party.

Johnston was in his early sixties but looked ten years younger; his body was thin and wiry, honed from a legendary workout routine and biannual triathlons. His face was lined and weathered from the Texas sun where he was raised, but he had acquired a veneer of Ivy League polish that masked his origins. His hair was still thick and wavy, silvered just at the temples. He grasped Mercer’s hand and pumped it vigorously.

The person Max had been speaking with drifted off.

“I had to mug a headwaiter to get his tuxedo.” Mercer smiled back. “Quite a turnout, congratulations.”

“I have a lot of hope for the Johnston Group,” Max said as if reading from a prepared speech. “The President set a challenge to get America off its oil addiction, and I think we can help.”

“Isn’t that like cutting off your nose to spite your face?” joked Mercer.

“Hardly. Petromax is so diversified that shutting off our oil imports may actually help the company. In fact, I just closed a deal to sell off our last three supertankers. No, we’re ready to help shape the future.”

“Aren’t you involved with the exploration of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge?” Despite his desire to find that woman again, Mercer found himself drawn into a conversation with his host.

“Yes, but that’s only a small part of what we’ve planned. The oil we pull from the Refuge will provide Petromax with the capital to establish itself as the leader in alternative energy technology. We’ve already started pilot programs, and our lab people are close to developing a commercial hydrogen-cracking unit using seawater as fuel. Fusion thinking has taught us that there is more energy in matter than we had ever imagined.” Johnston held up a half-full glass of champagne. “There’s more power in this glass than mankind has produced since our first fire in some cave two hundred thousand years ago, and day by day we are getting closer to getting at it.”

Mercer looked past Johnston’s shoulder and saw the woman walking toward them, her body swaying to the chamber music while her eyes remained locked with his. He sensed he was about to be in the middle of a conflict between Johnston and the environmentalist. “Uh-oh.”

Max turned, following Mercer’s line of sight and muttered, “Oh, shit.”

“You know her?”

Before Max could answer, she was with them, slipping a slim arm under Max’s in a familiar gesture. Max regarded her indulgently for a moment, then turned back to Mercer to make the introductions. Before he could speak, she piped up.

“I apologize for lying to you, Dr. Mercer.” Her smile numbed him. “We have met once before yesterday, but I doubt you’d remember. It was about ten years ago in Houston, when Petromax announced the discovery of the Edwards Plateau Oil Field. I remember that you were wearing an olive-colored suit with a black-patterned tie. You were the only man there without a cheesy cowboy hat.”

“Honey, those hats are the symbol of the greatest state in the Union.” Max turned from the girl and looked Mercer in the eye. It was a look of trepidation. “Well, then, I guess introductions aren’t really necessary, since you two know each other.”

Mercer found his voice. “I could still use a little help here.”

Max gave her a fond smile. “This is my daughter, Agatha.”

“My grandmother had to suffer through life with the name Agatha.” She stuck out her hand, which Mercer took like a pilgrim grasping a religious icon. “But I’ll be damned if I will. Please call me Aggie, Dr. Mercer.”

It was as if an elemental force passed between their hands. Mercer held onto her long after a simple introduction demanded, long after mutual attraction expected. Long after… it was only when Max delicately coughed that he reluctantly let her go. Their eyes remained locked, clear green to cloudy gray, virgin earth to stormy sky.

“I only use my professional title when I call for dinner reservations. Please drop the ‘Doctor’ and just call me Mercer. Everybody does.”

Aggie pulled back a half step. “Are you so ashamed of your accomplishments that you’re trying to hide your identity? My God, you single-handedly destroyed an entire mountain in India when you staked out the Ghudatra mines. What about your work in Australia? How many aborigines had to be relocated after the firm you worked for pegged a hundred thousand acres for an opal mine? Don’t be modest, Dr. Mercer. To some, you’re a hero. Right, Daddy?”

Max Johnston was looking uncomfortable. He glanced around, making sure that none of his well-heeled guests had heard his daughter’s outburst. It was clear he’d listened to her views so many times that he could repeat them by rote.

“That’s enough, Aggie. You promised to be my hostess tonight and not spout your drivel,” Johnston hissed. “Christ, you’re about as considerate as your mother was.”

He turned to Mercer. “Sorry about that. Let’s go get a drink.”

He put a strong arm around Mercer’s shoulder and led him away. Mercer turned his head and saw the look of utter hatred Aggie directed at her father.

“You don’t have any kids, do you?” Max asked as the bartender fixed another gimlet and refilled the host’s champagne flute.

“No. I realized young that I can barely take care of myself, so how the hell could I care for a child?”

Max smiled, relaxing slightly. “She’s my greatest joy and I’ve been proud of every one of her accomplishments, even if they were designed to get back at me. Do you know she graduated at the top of her class at grad school? She got a degree in environmental engineering, of all things. She is quite brilliant, but she wastes it on these quixotic quests. I guess she never really had to grow up. I spoiled the hell out of her. Hell, I still do, by letting her screw around with that ecological group.”

Mercer had no interest in the problems between Max and his daughter. Though he lent a patient ear, he had to make one comment. “Max, she’s a grown woman. Shouldn’t she be making her own choices?”

“If I let other people have choices, none of this would be here today.” Max waved his glass around the room. Mercer couldn’t tell if he was being flippant or serious.

“I shouldn’t burden you with this.” Max’s public persona was back. “She and I still get along on occasion. Here, have another drink.” Mercer allowed Max to put yet another gimlet in his hand. “Will you excuse me? I’ve got to go say hello to Connie Van Buren.”

Max Johnston drifted back into the crowd, leaving Mercer thankfully free again. He finished the first drink Max had given him then took a small sip from the second. He smiled to himself as he looked around the opulent room. It didn’t matter how rich a person was, common problems still reared their ugly heads.

Max Johnston wore his somewhat openly. He was a widower, his wife having succumbed to an alcohol-induced suicide wish. Mercer recalled her drinking problem when he’d first met Max in Houston. An hour into the party, Barbara Johnston was so drunk that Max had to have his chauffeur take her back to their limousine. Six years later, after countless rehab programs that the media intrusively reported, Barbara washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of vodka. Her suicide note said, “Gone to sleep, please wake me when life is easier.” And now Max was fighting with his daughter in front of some of the most powerful people in the country.

If that was the price of success, decided Mercer, Max could have it all.

He didn’t see Aggie as he scanned the room, and felt a small measure of relief. Speaking to her now would be uncomfortable at best. Within a few minutes, he was talking with the co-chair of the Johnston Group’s scientific arm, the ugly scene of a moment earlier all but forgotten.

Half an hour later, he became aware of her perfume. He hadn’t noticed it before, it was so subtle. Mercer noted the wolflike stares from the men and the jealous glances from the women and knew Aggie Johnston was behind him. He turned around. She looked as if she’d recovered from the confrontation with her father, but he noticed a shadow behind her impossibly green eyes that hadn’t been there before. Mercer knew it was best to act as if nothing had happened rather than rattle off some platitude about relationships.

“I never got a chance to rebut your attack on my profession.”

Aggie gave Mercer a smile of thanks, a small lift of her lips that pleased him inordinately. Yet when she spoke, sarcasm edged her voice raw. “My father’s company retains four entire law firms and a whole army of public-relations experts. They make excuses faster than the rest of the company produces environmental disasters. I’m sure you can toe the party line with the rest of them.”

She paused, regarding him clinically. “Let me guess. You’ll tell me how what you do creates jobs all over the world and gives hope to starving people who are still living in the nineteenth century. Does this sound about right?”

Mercer guessed she was a typical “cause and effect” protester. If there was an effect in the world, she’d join the cause. She would no doubt belong to numerous organizations, favoring new ones as they gained popularity. Harry White derisively called these people “flavor-of-the-month liberals.” It wouldn’t matter that some of her beliefs might be diametrically opposed to others as long as they were politically correct and au courant.

He used this to his advantage when he came back at her just as hard. “Do you know how many millions of young girls are denied a useful life because they have to carry water to villages often miles away? They are reduced to the level of pack animals because they don’t have access to a well and a mechanical pump. Accessible water is such a commonplace item that you simply take it for granted, but to many in the world it is a luxury that they can only dream of.

“Those jobs that I help create, the ones you scoff at, can free those women. When a company I work for starts paying employees, it affects not only them but their families and villages. It gives people hope. Christ, to deny them that is to return to the colonial period of human exploitation. Is that what you want?”

It didn’t matter how beautiful he thought she was, he would never allow himself to be pushed around. His reputation, both good and bad, stood as his testament and he would defend it no matter what.

Her smile was patronizing and taunting. “Nice try, Dr. Mercer. To most, that would have worked. Though I believe in women’s rights and I deplore our treatment, I am an environmentalist, not a feminist. I’m not a Socialist or an anti-technologist either, so the rest of your arguments are moot. I have my beliefs and you have yours. They do not correspond.”

“Did anything I said during that class yesterday make sense to you?” Mercer was hoping for a common ground, a reason to keep her near him.

“No, not at all. It might have impressed the students, but clichés and hyperbole don’t impress someone who is truly informed. And as to your theory that humans are conforming to evolution by destroying our environment, well that’s just bullshit and you know it.”

He found her use of profanity alluring. “Mark my word, as we learn more about evolution and extinction, we’re going to find that behavior contributes as much to a species’ demise as changes in environment or any other factor. If our actions contribute to our destruction, then that’s the deal nature dealt us. Period.”

“And you see no reason to change that?” she challenged.

“I see no way to stop it. The Chinese government plans to provide refrigerators to every household in the country. The antiquated technology they use would pump out so many CFCs and other ozone-depleting gases that any counteraction in the West would be futile. We couldn’t regulate fast enough to prevent the greenhouse effect you so fear. Why isn’t the Planetary Environment Action League trying to stop them? Groups like yours are adept at stirring controversy and garnering headlines, but you don’t attempt to offer workable solutions. You don’t have enough facts behind your outcries, so you appeal to emotions to get your point across. You probably agree with the results of the Earth Summit in Rio, right?”

“I attended it,” Aggie shot back proudly.

“Do you remember Article 15 of the Rio Declaration?”

Aggie shook her head.

“I forced myself to memorize it because it made me so disgusted, I never wanted to forget it. ‘Lack of scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.’ That means there doesn’t need to be proof for action to be taken. Taxpayers’ money can be spent on some problem that may not even exist. Unbelievably, the United States signed this garbage, potentially handing over billions of dollars with no way of knowing how the money is being spent.

“You think you’re trying to change the way mankind cares for the planet? Another document signed at Rio called Agenda 21 effectively states that the only way to stop environmental damage in the Northern Hemisphere is to pour tons of money into the third world nations of the Southern Hemisphere. Does that make any sense to you? I certainly don’t get it. Like I said in class yesterday, if you’re ashamed of our accomplishments, I’m sorry, but some of us are proud of them.”

Mercer turned to walk away, leaving Aggie speechless and a little slack-jawed. “Just a bit of trivia before I go. The very same scientists you rely on for proof of global warming were writing articles in the 1970s stating that pollution was actually cooling the planet, forcing us into a new ice age. When you can back up your clichés and hyperbole with facts, we’ll talk again.”

He was gone before Aggie could react.

Because Mercer had been the last to arrive at the party and was the first to leave, the valet was able to pull his Jaguar to the porte cochere only moments after he strode through the front doors. Mercer was angry at himself for getting into the conversation in the first place and wished he’d been thinking with his big head rather than his little one. He couldn’t deny an attraction, but that was as far as he’d let it go.

Mercer slid into the seat and closed the door with a slam. Just as he pulled the shifter from park, white knuckles rapped the passenger window. Startled, he pressed the power lock button and Aggie Johnston slipped into the Jag. Without a word, Mercer pulled away, the engine growling happily as he applied too much throttle.

As Mercer jinked onto the main road, Aggie pulled a pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter from a small purse. She glared at him, defying a comment about her smoking as she lit up, the flame like a harsh flare in the intimate glow of the dash.

He waited out her silence, wondering where this would lead and secretly happy she’d followed him.

“I hate him almost as much as I love him.” Mercer knew she was speaking about her father. “In so many ways he’s the kindest, most thoughtful man I think I’ll ever meet, but I can’t help opposing him. He’s a health nut, so I started sneaking cigarettes from the staff when I was fourteen, hoping to get caught, but he never noticed. He still doesn’t know I smoke. Because he made all of his money in the oil business, I decided, even before I knew what it meant, that I would become an environmentalist.”

The window slid down and Aggie tossed her spent cigarette into the darkness. “I sometimes wonder if he’s noticed anything I’ve done. Lord knows he never noticed my mother’s desperation until it was too late.”

Mercer knew that she just wanted to talk, so he remained quiet.

“She killed herself when I was getting my master’s. I found out from the chauffeur Dad sent to bring me home for the funeral. You’d think that she and I would have been close, but we really weren’t. I cried at the funeral and I still cry sometimes now, but it isn’t loss that causes it. It’s pity. She was a pitiable person, really.

“My only strong memories of her are when she was drunk and one time, just before her suicide, when I nearly caught her in bed with another man. I wanted to blame my father so badly, but I can’t. She had a self-destructiveness that forced her to stay, to give her a reason to keep abusing herself with booze and affairs. She would have killed herself even if she had left him. You talked about mankind’s fate earlier. Well, the fate of Barbara Johnston was to die by her own hand, and nothing was going to stop it.”

Mercer glanced at Aggie. Her hands were trembling as she lit another cigarette, but her voice had remained steady. It didn’t take a trained psychologist to understand the emotional conflicts that made up her personality and motivated her actions. Her anger at her father had driven her to champion causes that opposed him. And that anger didn’t stem from her mother’s death but her own inability to stop it. Everything warned him to stay away from her, but he found himself drawn by her contrast of toughness and vulnerability.

“Where do you live?” he asked as they approached the nation’s capital.

“Georgetown. I have a condo on the canal.”

They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip, but somehow the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. She directed him to her street with one-syllable prompts or simple nods of her head. Her condo building had once been a warehouse along the C&O Canal. Mercer knew that the units started at a quarter of a million dollars and rose dramatically from there.

Rain had started falling, pelting the windshield with dappled splashes as he pulled up to the building’s entrance. Aggie waited for the wind to die down, her purse held across her lap, her slim body enfolded by the wide bucket seat of the Jaguar. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost timid.

“I didn’t want to fight you tonight. In fact, I think I wanted to seduce you.” She looked at him, waiting for a reaction that he refused to give. “When I first met you, I had this noble image of you. I thought you were different from the rest of them. I guess it was just a schoolgirl crush.”

She opened the door and unlimbered herself from the car. Before she vanished into her building, she ducked her head back into the Jag. “I’m glad I learned disappointment at a young age.”

The door closed softly and she was gone.

“The old Mercer charm strikes again,” he muttered, hurt by her statement.

Rather than giving himself time to digest what had just occurred, he decided to thrust it out of his mind until later. But as he dialed his car phone and listened to it ring three thousand miles away, he knew that Aggie’s outburst about being disappointed had been directed more at her father than at him. About her desire to seduce him, well, she wasn’t the first woman he’d blown it with and most certainly wouldn’t be the last.

The ringing stopped. “You have reached the home of Howard Small. I’m sorry I’m not here to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”

“Damn it.” Mercer cut the connection without leaving a message.

At eighteen years old, Jamal Lincoln had lived a life that was all too common in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. A gang member at thirteen, he saw his first action two weeks later when he was caught in the cross fire of a deal gone bad. He’d picked up the gun his cousin Rufus dropped when a nine-millimeter blew his teeth out the back of his head, and sprayed rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger. He didn’t hit anything, but the feeling it gave him was the beginning of a life that would have an inevitable outcome.

A week after that shoot-out, he’d pumped two slugs into the chest of a convenience-store clerk and used the thirty-seven dollars that that man’s life had been worth to buy his first vials of crack. He slowly worked his way up through the gang, promotions coming as his body count rose. He lost his virginity at fourteen when Nyeusi Radi, the gang leader who bragged that his name meant “Black Thunder” in Swahili, gave him a prostitute for his birthday. Jamal was still in school and spent his time roaming the hallways or lurking outside school grounds selling drugs and recruiting for his gang. On both counts he was too adept. By the time he was seventeen, he had survived enough firefights to become one of Radi’s chief lieutenants.

Radi was twenty-four, a millionaire with time running out. Everyone knew that his luck would end soon. The life he led would kill him eventually, and the longer he held on, the closer his death came. And Jamal, now eighteen, was next in line to take over the gang, make the real money, have the real power. That’s why he resented being sent on this mission outside his turf to nail some guy he’d never even heard of.

Earlier that night, Radi had invited Jamal into his crib, a series of large rooms carved out of a rundown apartment block in Anacostia. Radi had told him what to do and gave him a clean piece; all the while this creepy white dude watched them from a couch near Radi’s desk. Everything about the white guy screamed cop, but the dude didn’t even blink when Radi told Jamal to waste this other guy out in Arlington.

As Jamal was leaving the room, the white guy came up off the couch and grabbed him by his bare bicep. Jamal’s arms were big, roped with muscle held taut beneath glossy skin. The guy’s fingers were thin, pale, and bony, yet they sank so deeply into Jamal’s arm that he was staggered by the pain.

“Make it look like a mugging. Take his watch, wallet, whatever you want, but make sure he’s dead. If he isn’t, you will be.”

“Who da fuck you think you are, motherfucker?” Jamal shouted, trying to pull his arm away.

The hand around his bicep tightened, forcing Jamal to his knees. “Willis, tell your dog to stop yapping, or I’ll tear his arm off and beat him to death with it.”

“Jamal, do the guy, all right? Don’t ask no fucking questions.” Nobody ever called Radi by his given name, and nobody ever put an edge of fear to his voice, but he was frightened by the white man in the dark suit.

“I’ll do it, Radi.” Jamal looked toward his leader, surprised to see him heave a sigh of relief.

According to the recently stolen Rolex he wore, Jamal had been pacing the street for three hours. No cops had cruised by during the wait, and Jamal had seen only a few brothers, mostly zebras, blacks trying to pass themselves off as white. He felt fairly safe, a little exposed but anonymous enough. No matter how he felt, there was no way he was going to leave the neighborhood until he’d done the guy. He didn’t want to face that white dude ever again.

He’d thought about ducking into the bar up the street, especially since the rain started. His fake ID was good enough, but he didn’t want anyone getting a good look at him. Once the guy was dead, all a witness would be able to say was that the attacker was a young black male in a dark leather coat. Christ, that’s half the fucking city.

Jamal saw the sweep of light across the dark buildings and knew that a car had turned onto the street. He spun and saw the headlights of a vehicle about six blocks up, just past that bar. The big Glock 17 in his pocket suddenly seemed lighter. It was eleven-fifteen and all the other houses had been quiet for hours. This had to be his man coming.

A beat-up Chevy Cavalier pulled out from the parking spot directly in front of Tiny’s just as Mercer turned onto his street. Not one to avoid providence, he pulled his Jag into the spot without so much as a second thought and headed into the bar. It was a quarter past eleven on a Saturday night, and there was no way he was going home without a nightcap or two.

“The anointed has returned,” Harry White growled over the stereo as Mercer walked in. “What happened? They close the open bar or did they just close it to you?”

Mercer took his customary seat next to Harry and sipped the gimlet that Tiny had poured as soon as he’d entered. Tiny fingered the material of Mercer’s tux, nodding his approval.

Mercer shook his head sadly. “No one appreciates the old lamp shade on the head gag anymore.”

Tiny’s was exactly what Mercer needed to forget about Aggie Johnston and her problems. He and Harry bantered with a biting sarcasm that would wither most people, but neither would have it any other way. An hour and a half went by, Mercer’s couple of nightcaps turning into an entire milliner’s shop as he and Harry as well as a few of the other regulars drank their wallets empty. Tiny closed the place at one, making sure to call cabs for those patrons too drunk to drive and assigning moderately sober drivers for the rest. Harry left with Mercer, each of them with two bottles of beer in hand for their walk home. Harry lived five blocks away in the opposite direction from Mercer. He began swaying up the street after a few parting jibes about Mercer’s tuxedo.

Mercer left his car and turned down the street, taking swallows from one bottle as he went, though each footfall made him dribble a little beer. He knew he was really drunk when his feet crossed each other and he nearly sprawled on the sidewalk. He glanced around, his blurred eyes trying to penetrate the darkness to see if anyone had noticed, but the street appeared quiet.

He continued, draining the first beer as he crossed onto the block just before his. Rather than fighting open the other, a task he knew would be impossible in his state, he simply carried it with him, each dangling by its neck in his hands. He tripped again stepping to the curb on his block and laughed at himself. He’d heard from enough people that alcohol was a depressant, but right now he had that perfect buzz that made everything funnier than hell, even the shadowy figure that stepped from behind a van parked a few paces from him.

Mercer saw the blow coming and willed his body to tense, but his alcohol-deadened nerves wouldn’t respond. He was completely limp, and that saved his life. The pistol butt laid into his face, snapping his head so hard that he corkscrewed to the sidewalk. A vicious kick to the ribs turned him over twice, and he went with it, rolling away from his assailant, giving himself enough distance to get to his feet.

He staggered up, blood slicking the right side of his face and dripping into his mouth with a metallic salty taste. The Glock came down, its nine-millimeter muzzle leveled at Mercer’s chest.

The suddenness and ferocity of the attack would have frozen a normal man, but Mercer’s reactions were quick — if dulled by the gimlets. The alcohol coursing through his body filled him with a reckless courage. He leaped forward, ignoring the Glock, his evening shoes sliding across the rain-soaked cement. The gun never went off.

Jamal Lincoln was thrown off guard by Mercer’s assault and hadn’t squeezed hard enough on the integrated trigger safety of the unfamiliar weapon. He shifted the big semiautomatic in his hand, feeling the safety disengage an instant before Mercer crashed into him. The gun was aimed at his intended victim’s chest and at this range would blow him halfway down the block.

Mercer still had the beer bottles in his hands and swung them with all of the strength he could muster, each arm whipping inward so that the two bottles smashed into Jamal’s head simultaneously. The full bottle exploded on impact, showering them both with frothing beer and shards of green glass while the empty bottle remained intact, knocking Jamal off balance. His right arm whirled across his body so when he fired, the shot ricocheted off a building across the street. Jamal almost blacked out from the blow but retained enough control to push against Mercer just as the return stroke of the bottle came at him, missing him by inches.

The unbroken bottle whizzed by Jamal’s head, the force of the swing leading Mercer into a natural follow-through, and without thinking he plunged the remains of the shattered bottle deep into his assailant’s throat. The jagged glass cut through skin and muscle and arteries with only spongy resistance. The Glock dropped as Jamal reeled away, clutching at his shredded throat. It was the last voluntary movement he would ever make.

Mercer fell to the ground at the same time as Jamal, the alcohol, shock, and fear draining his strength. Darkness crept into his mind, cutting his vision down to a haze-filled tunnel. Even the lights that had snapped on in response to the shot were just distant points, fading even as more of them lit the street. He laid his head against the cold concrete as a siren began to wail someplace in another reality.

“You’re dead, aren’t you, Howard? They got you already,” Mercer mumbled to the cement before he passed out.