Havoc

New York City

The Upper East Side co-op had a commanding view of Central Park and the apartment towers beyond. It had four bedrooms, a study, and a small suite for a live-in servant. The dining table could seat a dozen. The owner stood on the balcony, the first brush of a spring breeze blowing through his dark hair. He wore black linen slacks, a black silk shirt, and black shoes. He scanned the park like a hawk eyeing an open meadow, as if he too were searching for prey. In one hand he held a slim cell phone. In the other he cradled a snifter of seventy-year-old cognac.

The man was in his mid-forties, unmarried but handsome enough to rarely want for female companionship. He hadn’t earned the money to buy the co-op; that had been earned generations earlier. His older brother ran the family’s empire, a far-reaching conglomerate with interests on four continents. A lesser man might have been jealous of the power his brother wielded, not only over the company but over the family as well. Yet because of the career path he’d chosen and what he’d done with the contacts he’d made, he was close to reaching a pinnacle of power his brother couldn’t even conceive.

The roots of the operation came from within his own family history, from a story he’d learned from his grandmother, so in a sense he’d been planning it since childhood, although he’d never told a soul. This was to be something he alone would accomplish. His brother needed an army of lawyers and accountants to keep the business running, while he was about to change history with a select few.

The cell phone rang. He answered it quickly. “Hello?”

“It’s me, darling, I was wondering if you’d reconsidered my proposal.”

It took him a moment to recognize the voice — Michaela Taftsbury’s, an international attorney from London currently working in New York — and to recall her proposal — a weekend at a bed and breakfast in Vermont.

“Michaela, I told you I can’t leave the city.”

“It’s a weekend, not a fortnight, lover. I haven’t seen you in so long.”

Best to end it now, he decided. While she was a passable conversationalist and highly charged in the bedroom, she was becoming bothersome. “And you won’t see me for even longer,” he warned, “if you keep pestering me.”

“Pestering? Pestering! Screw you. I thought we were having a little fun. If I’ve become a pest then to hell with you.” She hung up.

But the phone rang almost immediately. Damn it. He shouldn’t have dumped her before he got the call he was waiting for. Now he’d waste precious time assuaging her feelings so he could get her off the phone. He’d only break up with her later. He checked the phone’s caller ID feature. It was an international call with a country code he didn’t recognize. This was it!

“Poli?” he asked when he opened the connection.

“No names!” the one-eyed Bulgarian assassin hissed.

The man in New York ignored the rebuke. He was about to hear the news he’d waited for all his life. “Was it there?”

“At one point maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”

“What are you talking about? Was it there?”

“If it was there someone beat us to it a long time ago.”

“It’s gone?”

“I didn’t stick around long enough to explore the entire region, but it is safe to say that I believe it is all gone.”

“You didn’t ‘stick around’? I am paying you a great deal of money to more than merely ‘stick around.’”

“You’ve promised me a great deal of money,” the killer reminded sharply. “And I didn’t stay because they showed up.”

The disappointment was too much. The whole thing could have been wrapped up in a couple of days. Now he was being told the ore was gone. And then Poli’s statement finally cut through the man’s frustration. “Wait, ‘they’? Who are ‘they’?” But he knew. All too well, he knew, but still he persisted. “My God, man, you had an army behind you. Caribe Dayce’s men are more than ample protection.”

“Dayce’s dead and so are a lot of his men, so you can forget about paying him the other half you owed to get me to that village. I barely got out myself. This happened five days ago. It’s taken me this long to reach Khartoum.” A note of professional respect crept into Poli’s voice when he added, “You warned me the opposition was good. I had no idea a fire team could move like that.”

“They’ve had centuries to refine their craft. What of the American who was in the area?”

“Which one? There were two. A man and a woman.”

“I know nothing of the woman,” the man in New York admitted.

“In either case, I don’t know what happened to them. I was running the first instant the opposition showed up. Last I saw of the pair they were staked out and about to be executed by Dayce. It’s possible they were killed in the cross fire. I don’t know.”

“I will make inquiries. You’d best come to New York. I have a feeling you’ll be needed here.”

“My flight’s in two hours.”

Mercer knew exactly how he’d find Chester Bowie, and he began his search with the optimism of the fatally misguided. He worked under the logical assumption that Bowie wasn’t the luckiest SOB in history and that he was a trained geologist, and a damned good one at that. He also assumed that a guy older than fifty wouldn’t trek into one of the remotest spots on the globe without a support team. Placing the excavation at the village sometime in the early 1940s and working backward Mercer guessed that Bowie would have graduated from college no earlier than 1913. He gave himself a cushion of another five years and decided to begin his search in 1908.

The next step was simple and that was to search the electronic database for Academics Who’s Who for the years between 1908 and 1945. The computer search took less than a second and came up with no Chester Bowies. Not yet concerned, Mercer pushed the search back to 1900, the oldest records on the database, and still came up empty.

He leaned back at his desk and wondered if Bowie hadn’t been a good student in college or, worse, if he’d been a self-taught geologist. Mercer was so sure of his investigative technique, he hadn’t considered either alternative. He idly brought up Bowie’s name on the search engine again and for a fruitless hour called up and scanned random entries.

He wouldn’t let go of the idea that Bowie had formal training. No one could have found the uranium deposit without it. He phoned the alumni offices of a dozen schools with preeminent geology departments. No Chester Bowie. He called all the major mining schools and still no Bowie, even going back to 1900, which would have made Bowie at least sixty when he went to the CAR. He ate lunch hunched over his computer and let his answering machine pick up the twenty incoming calls. Dinner was Chinese delivery, which he also ate at his desk, and he finally called it a night past one.

He was at his desk at six the following morning, the coffee at his elbow strong enough to take the enamel off his teeth. He continued on with the search engine until nine, when he called the company that ran the Who’s Who Web site. He talked his way past two secretaries and finally got the chief archivist on the line. She introduced herself as Mrs. Moreland. From the frailty of her voice he guessed that she might have graduated a couple of years before Chester.

“How can I help you, Dr. Mercer?”

He thought it prudent to use his title, and to embellish the story somewhat. “I’m a field geologist, Mrs. Moreland, and I’ve just returned from Central Africa, where I came upon a grave in a remote village. The headstone said that the man who was buried there, one Chester Bowie, died in 1942. A village elder remembered the man was also a geologist who had come to the region by himself and that he was mauled to death by a lion.”

“How awful,” the elderly librarian said.

“Yes. He went on to say that the village has experienced nothing but bad luck ever since, cattle diseases, drought, and the like. He believes that because Bowie’s family doesn’t know how or where their ancestor died that his spirit still haunts them. It sounds a little strange to us, but animism is the prevalent faith in this part of Africa.”

“Dr. Mercer, I’m from New England. I know all about ghost stories.”

“I promised the headman that I would try to contact the Bowie family to tell them what happened to Chester.”

“And you think I can help?”

“It’s a hunch but I believe he was a rather gifted geologist and it’s possible that you have records of his academic career. Your records online go back only to 1900 and I was wondering if you could dig back a couple more years.”

“No digging required. We are about to load the years 1890 to 1899 onto the site. Give me a moment.” She typed so slowly that Mercer spelled out the name in his head. “And here we are. Chester T. Bowie, class of 1899 from Keeler State in New Jersey.”

He knew it. “Thank you, Mrs. Moreland. I can contact the college. Hopefully they have records going back that far that give some family history.”

“I’m not sure if that will help.”

Her tone sent a stone plummeting to the base of Mercer’s stomach. “How so?”

“It indicates here that this Chester Bowie graduated summa cum laude with a degree in ancient Greek history.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t think this is your man. He wasn’t a geologist. He was a historian.”

Mercer cursed and immediately sensed Mrs. Moreland’s disapproval over the phone. He apologized, thanking her for her time. He stared into space for a minute, his hand still holding the portable phone. “What the hell,” he said and dialed information for the small New Jersey college.

“Our records go back to the day the school was founded by Benjamin Keeler in 1884,” a perky coed named Jody in the alumni office assured Mercer when he asked.

“I’m looking for information about Chester Bowie. He graduated in 1899.”

“Oh sure,” Jody said as though she knew the man. “Bowie the booby.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, it’s a nickname he had. He is sort of, like, a legend here.”

“How so?”

“He was a student here and then became a teacher. I guess he was a real whack job. He vanished in the 1930s or something.”

The timing could fit had Mercer been wrong about the African woman’s age. “Why do you say he was a whack job?”

“I’m not sure. Students here use his name if someone does something stupid, like you know ‘pulling a Chester.’ It’s just, like, a thing we say.”

Mercer had thought using the word “like” so often had died out a decade ago. “Is there anyone in the office who could give me a bit more information?”

“Um, not really. I’m here by myself and I don’t know when my boss is coming back. She’s on maternity leave.” Jody went quiet before perking up once again. Her voice jumped several octaves. “But hey, there was like this book written a couple years ago. This woman wrote it and she had a section about Bowie the booby. She gave a couple of signed copies to the school. There’s one here someplace.” She fumbled through a bunch of drawers, slamming them so the metal rang in Mercer’s ears. “Yes! I found it. Science Beyond the Fringe: Alchemy to Perpetual Motion and Those who Sought the Free Lunch by Serena Ballard.”

Mercer was more than a little intrigued that a historian of ancient Greece was in a book about junk science. He thanked Jody and hung up, typing the title on an Internet bookseller’s site.

And there it was: Science Beyond the Fringe by Serena Ballard. The book had been published three years earlier and by the looks of it hadn’t done well. There were no readers’ reviews and the site indicated the book was already out of print.

Next he typed the author’s name onto a search engine and came up with an uninspired Web site dedicated to the book. As the title implied, the book chronicled pseudo-scientists in their bizarre quest to invent the impossible. On the single-page site were short paragraphs about some of the stranger folks — a dry cleaner from New York who tried to patent his interstellar telephone, a mechanic from Pennsylvania who spent his life trying to draw usable power from static electicity, and another from California who was convinced he’d deciphered the language of humpback whales.

Mercer got the sense that the book was written with tongue firmly planted in cheek and thought it might make an amusing read. At the bottom of the page was a link where he could e-mail the author so he dashed a quick note to Serena Ballard explaining his interest in Chester Bowie and giving his telephone number.

To his astonishment his phone rang in less than a minute.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Mercer?”

“Yes. Is this Serena Ballard?”

“It is. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to get your e-mail.”

“About half as much as I appreciate you getting back to me,” Mercer said. She had a beautiful throaty voice.

“According to the Web counter on that old site you just doubled the number of hits since it went online.”

“I have the feeling the book didn’t do as well as you’d hoped.”

She chuckled. “The publisher lost my princely advance of one thousand dollars. In truth, Science Beyond the Fringe was a labor of love. I sent it to publishers on a lark.”

“Still, writing a book is a hell of an accomplishment.”

“I did it for my grandfather. If you saw the Web site you might have noticed the bit about the guy in Pennsylvania who tried to harness static electricity.”

“Your grandfather?”

“He was inspired by a machine he read about in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and knew he could make it work. He spent every night and weekend in his garage tinkering away. He burned it down once and spent a week in the hospital after nearly electrocuting himself. He got a chance to read my book before he died, but never knew that I managed to get it published. You indicated you wanted some information about Chester Bowie.”

“What can you tell me about him and what did he do to merit a mention in your book?”

“Bowie taught ancient history at a place called Keeler College here in New Jersey.”

“You’re in New Jersey?”

“Yes, I’m the marketing director for the new Deco Palace Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. It’s great. Have you ever been here?”

“No, but I have a friend who considers Atlantic City his third home.”

“Third home, wow.”

“Not that impressive because he uses my place as his second. Anyway back to Bowie.”

“Chester Bowie taught ancient history at Keeler. From what I recall from my research he was a real flake. He muttered to himself all the time and always wore a cape around campus.”

“And what did he do to merit a mention in your book?” asked Mercer.

“Well he wasn’t a scientist but he was a crackpot. That’s why he’s in there. He was convinced that the creatures from Greek mythology actually existed.”

“You mean griffins, Medusa, and giant three-headed dogs?”

“Yup.”

“I guess that would certify him as a crackpot.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Serena admitted. “What Bowie believed is that ancient Greek farmers plowing their fields discovered bones from animals that went extinct in the last ice age. Not knowing how the skeletons fit together, he believed they created all kinds of fantastic monsters from the bones, mixing and matching as they went along and then inventing stories about their creations.”

Mercer absorbed what she’d just said and couldn’t find any quick flaws in Bowie’s theory. It was a simple, elegant answer to a question he’d never considered, but it got him no closer to explaining how Chester Bowie came to be at a high-grade uranium deposit in Central Africa where he presumably vanished in the mid-1930s.

“He had no other interests? Geology for example?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” Serena paused. “I hate to say this but I don’t remember much about him. I wrote the book a few years before I got it published, and Bowie was only a couple of paragraphs. I still have boxes at home with some of my old research material. There might be something in one of them. I could look through it and mail you anything I find.”

Mercer considered her offer. He doubted he was on the right track even though the dates somewhat corresponded with what he knew. This could very well be the wrong Chester Bowie. However, he had nowhere else to turn. Pressed by a vague sense of urgency, he asked, “Would it be possible for me to come up and get them?” He sensed hesitancy. “I assure you I’m not a stalker or anything. I can even meet you at the hotel.” Mercer knew he’d have to bring Harry. The old bastard would pout for weeks if he knew Mercer had gone to a casino without him.

“Well, I suppose so. I can go home at lunch and grab the stuff. I’m pretty sure I know which box it’s in. Are you in New York?”

“No. D.C.” Mercer checked his watch. “How about five o’clock in the lobby.”

She gave a small laugh. “This hotel is huge. We’d never find each other. How about the Bar Americain. It’s right next to the casino’s main entrance.”

“Bar Americain it is. Five o’clock. And, Serena, thank you.”

“I’m glad I can help. I’ll even see what I can do about getting you a room comped.” Then she added as an afterthought, “I never asked. What’s this all about, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you when we meet. Suffice it to say that Chester Bowie found something and it sure wasn’t minotaur bones.”

Mercer checked the time again and decided it was still too early for Harry to be at Tiny’s, so he called White’s apartment. When he got no answer he tried Tiny’s but even the owner, Paul Gordon, wasn’t there. He climbed the back stairs up to the rec room to refresh the inch of tar-thick coffee fused to the bottom of his mug. Harry was slouched at the bar, pen poised over the Washington Post crossword, a Bloody Mary within easy reach.

“Morning,” he growled.

Mercer shook his head slowly. “Help yourself to my paper and booze.”

“Already done, my boy, already done.”

“Feel like going for a ride?”

“No.” Harry didn’t look up from the puzzle. “Tiny’s getting some guys together for a poker game tonight. I’m gonna crash on your couch this afternoon to rest up for it.”

“I’m going to Atlantic City.”

Still Harry remained slouched, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Drag, get your leash. You’re spending the day with Uncle Tiny.”

The dog raised himself over the back of the couch to regard his master through bloodshot eyes. His head was bowed so that his ears dangled past his long gray muzzle. He gave one soulful bawl.

“Sorry, pooch, I’m exchanging your crap for a game of craps today.”

“We’re getting a room for the night. Go home and pack. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

“I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”