Havoc

Arlington, Virginia

By the time their connecting flight from Frankfurt touched down at Dulles Airport, thirty-six hectic hours had passed since Cali and Mercer were picked up at the mine by the Russian military. With no luggage except the bag of duty-free Jack Daniel’s Mercer had bought for his depleted bar, they were through Customs quickly. Ira had sent a government car to take them home. They’d agreed earlier they would drop Cali at her condo first. It had been a grueling couple of days and the promise of a budding relationship couldn’t overcome two exhausted, worn-out bodies.

Mercer saw her to her door, and together they checked out her cozy two-bedroom to ensure no one had been there in her absence. He felt like a teenager on a first date as they kissed under the porch light. It was their first since the mine. Without the bulky contamination suit, her long-limbed body was all bone and hard angles but fit perfectly in his arms. Their eyes were at almost the same level and neither closed them.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” Cali asked.

“And the day after that,” Mercer promised.

“I have to report in to NEST in the morning, then I’m taking a couple of days off.”

“And I don’t have any contracts lined up for two weeks.”

“I’ll see you at noon.”

The twenty-minute drive to Mercer’s brownstone passed in a contented blur.

The lights were on when he opened the door and he heard a voice. He tensed momentarily before recognizing Harry White’s jackhammer laugh. He climbed the spiral stairs up to the bar, his knee feeling better but still noticeable. As he passed through the alcove library and the French doors he heard another voice and laughed aloud, calling, “Booker Sykes, don’t you get in the habit of drinking my booze too.”

Book and Harry were sitting at the bar with a couple of drinks and a nearly depleted bowl of pretzels. A baseball game playing on the big television held Drag’s rapt attention, like he was almost following the action.

Mercer slapped Booker on the shoulder. “I already know your trip was a bust. Sorry about that. Are you and your men okay? When’d you get back?”

“Couple hours ago,” Sykes said. “And there isn’t anything wrong with us that some ice and a chiropractor can’t fix. What the hell do you mean bust?”

“I talked to the guy who blew up the stele.”

“Shit, man, you are a pessimist.” He waved his beer bottle. “Check it out.”

Mercer turned to see what he was talking about. On the floor behind one of the couches were three large backpacks. Mercer flipped open the biggest one. Inside was a bunch of gray stones. So exhausted by the past days, he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. He lifted one of the rocks from the bag. It was a lump of unremarkable granite about the size of a blackboard eraser. One side of it had been poorly smoothed. He looked closer at the tool marks. His eyes widened. He’d never be able to decipher it without expert help but he clearly recognized an Egyptian cartouche and hieroglyphic writing.

“It wasn’t blown up,” Booker explained. “Looks like they broke it apart with hammers or rifle butts. Rivers, Cieplicki, and I humped out every piece bigger than a marble.”

Mercer was grinning like an idiot. “Booker, you have my permission to drink as much of my booze as you want.” He tried to lift the bag. “Jesus, this thing must weigh a hundred pounds.”

“The lightest was a hundred and seventy-five according to the airline, which charged an extra four hundred bucks for the weight. That’s the reason I look like a question mark when I stand up.”

Mercer reached into the bag for another smaller piece, his smile fading when he realized he was actually holding two chunks of a seven-foot-long, six-hundred-pound, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. It would take months to put the stele back together, if it was possible at all.

“Hey, Mercer, check out behind the bar,” Harry said from his stool.

“Huh?” Mercer grunted distractedly.

He carefully set the pieces of stone back in the knapsack and stepped behind the mahogany-topped bar. Nothing seemed out of place. “What is it?”

“Nothing. Just wanted you to make me another drink.”

“Bastard.” Mercer scowled as he freshened Harry’s Jack and ginger and made a gimlet for himself. “How the hell are we going to put the stele back together?”

“That thing is in more pieces than Humpty Dumpty,” Harry commented. “You guys ever wonder what made them think the king’s horses could fix him?”

“No,” Booker and Mercer said in unison.

“Seriously,” Harry went on, “there must be five or six hundred pieces, most of them are freakin’ tiny, and the ones I examined at all look pretty much the same.”

Mercer said, “I’ll call Ira in the morning; he might have an idea who can reassemble it. There must be some forensic guys out there who have experience reconstructing bones. Maybe they can do something.” He didn’t sound optimistic.

“Should we tell him?” Booker asked Harry.

“He called me a bastard. I say let him twist awhile longer.”

“Tell me what?”

Booker kept looking to Harry, until the octogenarian threw up his arms. “I give up. Go ahead and tell him, only you’re no fun.”

“I spoke with Admiral Lasko as soon as we landed. We’ve got a meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center over in Greenbelt, Maryland, tomorrow morning at nine.”

“What’s there?”

“From what Ira tells me, magic.”

Greenbelt, Maryland, was on the opposite side of the nation’s capital from Arlington, and it took them two hours battling a nearly gridlocked Beltway to reach the exit. Fortunately, the Goddard Center was two miles from the I-95 and Mercer eased his Jaguar convertible to the main gate with five minutes to spare. Next to the gate was the public visitors’ center where a couple examples of NASA’s earliest rockets were on display in an outdoor garden.

“Nice lawn ornaments,” Booker remarked.

“Beats pink flamingos.”

After checking their identification and making sure they were on the day’s visitors list, a guard handed over two passes and directed them to a new building at the end of Explorers Road on the far side of the sprawling government research campus. Mercer parked in a large lot next to a storm runoff pond. A trio of ducks was lazing in the early morning sunshine.

The building was an unremarkable brick affair with only a few windows high on its façade. Mercer and Booker were met in the reception area by a twentysomething man in a white lab coat. Below it he wore black pants and a black T-shirt. Mercer assumed it was his black Miata among all the minivans and SUVs in the parking lot. He had slicked back dark hair and stylish glasses, not the image of a government scientist Mercer had pictured.

“Dr. Jacobi?”

“Alan Jacobi. You must be Dr. Mercer.”

“Call me Mercer.” They shook hands. “This is Booker Sykes.”

“Hi. Call me Alan.” He looked behind them. “Do you have the samples?”

“They’re in the car. Do you have a trolley or anything?”

“Oh sure.”

Ten minutes later they had the three bags in Jacobi’s lab. The room was at least fifty feet square, packed with workstations, computers, and sleek, humming boxes whose function Mercer could only guess.

“I have to say when I got the call from the White House yesterday I was pretty blown away. I mean we don’t do anything high-priority here.”

“What do you do?”

“As you know the Goddard Center is one of the leading research laboratories in the country for earth and space sciences. We run expeditions all over the world, and beyond for that matter. My lab here deals with three-dimensional holography and materials analyses. We’re adapting it for medical research and possibly archaeology.”

“And you think you can help.”

“Oh no doubt. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Mercer opened one of the backpacks and started removing fragments of the stele and setting them on a table. Jacobi picked up one of the bigger pieces, a twenty-pound misshapen chunk of stone that resembled a head of broccoli.

“This should work nicely for a demonstration.” He took the stone to a piece of equipment that looked like a microwave oven and set it inside. He closed the door and turned to a nearby computer. He spoke as he tapped at the keys. “What this machine does is scan a three-dimensional object into the computer, creating an exact digital reproduction down to one micrometer or one millionth of a meter.”

“Wow,” Mercer said.

“That’s nothing. They use machines like this in Hollywood all the time to turn clay models of monsters and spaceships and stuff into digital effects. My machine is just a lot more precise.”

He swiveled the screen to show them what the computer had created. It looked exactly like the chunk of stone, only the computer had rendered it in green. Jacobi made a few adjustments and the digital rock turned gray. “There.”

“So now what?” Booker asked.

“Now I scan every piece of stone into the computer. When I’m done I will tell it the approximate shape of the object and it will digitally put it all back together.” He waited for a reaction. “Ah, now’s the time you say ‘Wow.’ The fuzzy logic algorithms alone took me the better part of three years to perfect. I’m asking the computer to make tens of millions of decisions by itself as to how to reassemble the digital pieces. This is cutting edge stuff.” Jacobi laughed. “What did you think, I was going to glue this mess back together or something?”

“No, not at all,” Mercer said to hide the fact that that’s exactly what he thought would happen. “A digital image is perfect. How long will it take?”

“I’ll get a couple of post docs in here to do the scut work of imaging the fragments. That’ll take some time because the imagers are slow and we have to number each piece if you want to reassemble the real thing.” His voice rose in pitch as he finished his sentence, as if asking if his team could avoid the tedium of cataloguing every fragment.

“No, I think you should number them. We might need the actual artifact.” Mercer just wanted the rebuilt stele. He thought it would look great in the bar.

“You got it then.” Jacobi shrugged, knowing he wouldn’t be doing the work anyway. “You passed a cafeteria on your way to this building. Why don’t you give us a couple of hours and we’ll see what we come up with.”

Mercer and Book Sykes returned to Jacobi’s lab at eleven thirty.

“Perfect timing,” the young scientist said to greet them. “We’re just about finished with the last small pieces.” The bits of the stele were lying on workbenches and atop equipment. All of them were in individually numbered glassine envelopes like the police use for collecting evidence.

“Well done.” Mercer smiled.

“I forgot to ask what this thing looked like originally. I was told it was a stele but I have no idea what that is.”

“A small obelisk. It was about seven feet tall.”

“The computer can do the digital reassembly without knowing the parameters since there’s only one way the bits and pieces fit exactly, but knowing its size and shape will save a whole lot of computing power and time.”

“I’m finished with the last one,” a post doc said, removing a chip of stone from the digital imager and slipping it into a clear envelope numbered eight hundred and sixty-three.

Mercer decided he’d hire someone to rebuild the stele for him.

“Okay then,” Jacobi said from his desk. He drew an obelisk using a wireless pen. “Like that?”

“A bit skinnier.”

“Got it.” He typed in the size. “Seven feet. And here we go.”

Mercer blinked and a realistic representation of the stele was on the screen in front of him. He could plainly see the hieroglyphs covering all four sides as the image rotated in space. “Holy shit. How long would it have taken if you didn’t know what it looked like?”

“Oh, God, at least a minute,” Jacobi replied smugly.

As Jacobi zoomed in on the stele’s surface, Mercer could see where Ahmad and his men had smashed it. There were a few chips missing that either Book didn’t find or that had been powdered by the blows. Still there was more than enough to work with from what Jacobi had been able to reconstruct.

Mercer shook his hand. “Thank you. You did an amazing job. I can see how this could help doctors map out how to rebuild broken bones and archaeologists to put ancient pottery back together. Truly remarkable.”

“I wish I could tell you why the government wanted something like this in the first place, but it’s classified.”

Booker Sykes smirked. “Only reason is to put blast zones back together after an explosion, to determine what type of bomb was used.”

Jacobi went pale. “How did you, I mean that’s, you couldn’t…”

Sykes clamped a big hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, man. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Mercer and Booker drove straight to the Smithsonian. Mercer had called while Jacobi’s people were imaging the stele, and used his White House credentials to arrange for one of their top Egyptologists to be waiting. He’d also left a voice mail for Cali at NEST, telling her the hunt was on again.

A small woman in her sixties wearing a threadbare cardigan despite the rising heat was pacing the steps outside the Museum of Natural History, where she’d said she’d meet them.

She saw them mounting the steps and descended toward them with quick birdlike movements. “Do you have it?” she asked breathlessly. “You’re sure it was placed by Alexander the Great. Do you know what a find this is? I must study the actual stele.” She said all this in a rush, her words blending together in her excitement. “You are Dr. Mercer and Mr. Sykes, right?”

Mercer smiled. “That’s right. You’re Emily French?”

“Yes. I’ve already accosted two sets of tourists coming into the museum, hoping they were you. I just can’t believe this. There are so few new discoveries in Ptolemaic Egyptology anymore, at least that the Egyptians don’t publish themselves first.”

“Ptolemaic?”

“Yes, the time when Egypt was ruled by the Greeks, 331 to 30 B. C. It ended with Cleopatra, who was actually Cleopatra VII but no one would make movies about the first six. Oh, listen to me. I’m babbling. Let’s go to my office and take a look, shall we?”

“How can this possibly be a matter of national security?” she asked as she led them through the public part of the museum and into a warren of offices on the third floor. “This is an ancient artifact, not the plans for a nuclear bomb or something.”

Mercer almost gasped at how closely she’d guessed.

“We’re not at liberty to discuss that, ma’am,” Book replied in his deepest baritone.

“Oh, my.” She led them into her cramped and cluttered office, making an apology for the mess as if it wasn’t always so chock-full of books, stacks of papers, and knickknacks.

“And, Mrs. French,” Mercer added, “you are not allowed to discuss this matter with anyone. What I believe is written on the stele could change history and lead to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries since Tutankhamen. If I am correct and these findings are made public you will receive all due credit, I assure you.”

Her enthusiasm waned until Mercer slipped the computer disc into her laptop and the stele appeared on the screen. She plucked a pair of large glasses from her desk and settled them on her tiny nose. Mercer showed her how to use the mouse as Jacobi had taught him, to manipulate the image and zoom in on specific spots.

“It’s magnificent,” she breathed. “Look there, that’s the sign for battle. Here’s something about a burial, a king perhaps.” She kept changing her point of view, peering at the computer with her face only inches from the screen. “Some of this is in ancient Greek but here’s a cartouche. Let me see. It is about a king’s burial. That’s…Oh my Lord!” She looked across her desk at Mercer and Book, her eyes wide and owlish behind her glasses.

“Alexander the Great,” Booker said. “We know.”

“We believe the stele reveals the location of his tomb. It was placed near an old mine in Central Africa after Alexander’s death.”

“His tomb?” Her enthusiasm peaked again. “His actual tomb? Do you know how many people have searched for it over the years?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you do a full translation of the stele?” Mercer asked.

“Of course. It will take me some time, hieroglyphs are open to interpretation. They tell a story more than lay out words like a sentence.”

Mercer handed her a business card from a gold-and-onyx case he’d gotten as a gift years earlier from a petroleum heiress he’d dated for a short time. The number on the card was an answering service, so he scribbled his cell and home numbers on the back. “You can call me day or night.”

For dinner Cali cooked Mercer, Book, and Harry pasta carbonara, which she claimed was her best recipe and which made the men fear her worst. Her disappointment that she couldn’t be alone with Mercer had given way to excitement when he explained what they’d done that day and showed her a copy of Jacobi’s disc.

After the meal they settled in the bar with brandies, still talking and speculating about the possibilities. Beyond the alembic, Alexander’s tomb was rumored to be the richest, most magnificent in history. His crystal-and-gold sarcophagus was said to be the greatest work of art ever produced in the ancient world.

Mercer was on his second snifter when his phone rang. The conversation died with words still poised on lips. “Hello.”

“I have good news and bad news,” Emily French said without preamble.

“Okay,” Mercer said, drawing out the word, hoping but trying not to.

It took her five minutes to explain her findings. She summed up by telling him she’d e-mail the entire translation. He gave her the address, set the cordless back on the coffee table, and roared with laughter. The others stared at him, but soon his laughter caught on and they started to chuckle and laugh along with him, until Harry finally said, “Are you going to let us in on the joke?”

Mercer actually had to wipe tears from his eyes and take several deep breaths, and still the laughter was in his voice. “It was there all right.”

“The tomb’s location.”

“Yup. He wasn’t buried in Alexandria or the Sawi Oasis as some scholars speculate. They took his body south along the Nile and buried him in a cave at the very head of a valley they called Shu’ta.”

“So we go find this valley, grab the alembic, and put an end to this nightmare,” Cali said.

“Not so fast.” Mercer chuckled again. “Emily French did some research on our behalf and discovered the exact location of the Shu’ta Valley. In the process she learned that in 1970 it was submerged under about a hundred feet of water when they built the Aswân High Dam. I still want to go see it for myself but she says the area is totally inaccessible.” The irony of it all made Mercer break out in laughter all over again.