Havoc

Atlantic City, New Jersey

The tires of Mercer’s Jaguar convertible gave a slight chirp as he pulled into a spot near the top floor in the parking structure adjacent to the Deco Palace Hotel and Casino. He killed the engine but could do nothing to stifle the excited monologue Harry had kept up since getting off the Garden State.

“Then there was this time I was here, oh, must have been eighty-eight or eighty-nine with Jim Read. You remember Jimmy? For some reason he and I drifted apart when he got sober.”

“You drifted apart for the same reason feminists don’t hang out with pornographers,” Mercer said sarcastically.

Harry ignored his remark. “Anyway, we came up here and I have never seen someone as hot with the dice. Not Jimmy. I swear to God the dice would land on their edges for him. No, it was this little old biddy, well, she was probably five years younger than I am now, but could she roll. She must have gone on—”

“The way you’re going on now?” Mercer interrupted.

“Give me a break, will you. I haven’t been to a casino since you were in Canada.”

“That’s what, seven months, Harry?”

“Five. Tiny and I came up when you went back to finish your contract with DeBeers.”

Mercer unlimbered himself from the sports car. “And you took my Jag, no doubt.”

Harry held a Zippo to his Chesterfield and arched his brows at Mercer. “No doubt.”

From the elevator a moving walkway glided them through a long tunnel lined with advertisements for shows, restaurants, and of course, the gaming tables. Keeping with the hotel’s Art Deco theme, big band played over hidden speakers. The other guests riding with them were mostly older New Yorkers uniformly dressed in nylon sweat clothes in neon colors with gold chains resting on fleshy breasts for the women and mats of graying hair for the men. None of the couples spoke to each other. They seemed intent on getting to the games with as little distraction as possible.

The conveyor ended at the lobby. The expansive space was themed after the old iron-and-glass railway stations seen in hundreds of movies from the thirties and forties, but with Art Deco accents on the walls and numerous columns. The reception desk ran along one wall with a commanding view of the boardwalk and the ocean beyond. Opposite was a real locomotive, puffing ersatz steam, connected to a pair of beautifully restored Pullman cars. There were forests of potted palms and all the staff were dressed in period uniforms.

“There it is,” Harry said, pointing across the vast lobby to the Bar Americain.

“Leave it to you to find the bar.” Mercer checked his watch. They were a half hour early but he could use a drink.

They ducked into the bar, which was remarkably intimate despite its size. The room looked like it had been the set for Rick’s Café Americain from Casablanca. There was even a black piano player at an old upright, and while he was probably named Jamal or Antoine, his staff badge identified him as Sam.

Harry muttered, “I feel I should be wearing a tux and drinking champagne cocktails.”

They sat at the alabaster-topped bar. Harry ordered a Jack and ginger while Mercer asked for a gimlet.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”

Mercer recognized the voice at once, but couldn’t believe it. He swiveled on his bar stool. Cali Stowe wore a black suit with flared slacks and a cream silk shell. Her ruby hair danced and tangled to her shoulders. Her lips were such a bright red that he had trouble dragging his eyes to hers. There was humor in them that sparkled into a smile. She’d looked beautiful in Africa, unwashed and dressed in wrinkled safari clothes. Here she was absolutely stunning and it took Mercer a moment to get over his shock.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” he finally stammered and saluted her with his glass.

“Buy a lady a drink?” She didn’t wait for an answer and addressed the bartender. “Dewar’s rocks with a water back.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mercer said, “but you are about the last person in the world I expected to see here. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She took a sip from her drink. “I’m a compulsive gambler. Can’t stay away. Mortgaged the house, sold the car, the works. I live in a Dumpster out back.”

“I’m in love,” Harry said, then stood to introduce himself. “Harry White, at your servicing.”

She chuckled at his quip and they shook hands. “Hi, Harry. I’m Cali Stowe.”

Harry shot Mercer a glance before saying, “She was the one in Africa?”

She too gave Mercer an appraising look. “And now I’m here. What are the odds?”

“Pretty even if you’re meeting Serena Ballard.”

“Head of the class for the guy in the Armani sports coat.” She took the stool next to Mercer, forcing Harry to lean over the bar so he could ogle at her. “She and I spoke this afternoon, and imagine my surprise when she told me she already had a meeting to discuss Chester Bowie today.”

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.

“Why the hell would someone fund this guy? He was off his rocker.”

“Apparently this Professor Swartz didn’t think so. Since I found our link, you’re buying dinner.”

Mercer didn’t acknowledge her. There was something about the date that struck a chord. Princeton in the 1930s. What was happening at Princeton in the 1930s?

“Did you hear me?” Cali noted the faraway look in Mercer’s eyes.

And then Mercer remembered. Not what was happening at Princeton in the 1930s. The question was who. Without thinking he reached across and drew Cali to him, kissing her hard. “You are a genius!”

Flustered, but not disturbed by the sudden kiss, she asked, “What? What did I do?”

“Do you know who happened to be at Princeton in the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930s? Hell, he was there until he died in the fifties.” Mercer didn’t wait for an answer. “Albert Einstein, that’s who. And while he didn’t send that letter to President Roosevelt until just before the war detailing how his theories could create an atomic bomb, he must have suspected that Bowie was on to something and had this guy Swartz fund the expedition. Einstein knew Bowie hadn’t found adamantine, but believed that he might stumble on highly concentrated uranium, maybe a source with naturally occurring isotopes of U-235, which is usually refined from the more common U-238 in centrifuges. That’s what they needed to sustain a chain reaction.”

“Einstein sent Bowie to find the uranium?”

“That’s the only theory that fits the facts.” Mercer spoke faster and faster. “Somehow, God knows where, Bowie found something in his studies that mentions the location of Zeus’s adamantine mine. Maybe he made the connection to uranium or maybe it was someone else, but his idea eventually gets Einstein’s attention. Einstein knew that Fermi and a couple of others were working on creating a nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. He believed that Bowie’s adamantine might just be the uranium isotopes the team needed for their experiment, so he gets Princeton to fund the expedition.”

“So what happened? The first sustained chain reaction didn’t occur until 1942.”

Mercer was surprised she knew the date but had to remind himself that Cali wasn’t a medical researcher, as she’d once claimed. Instead she was a trained nuclear specialist and would surely know the history of her chosen field. “The girl at Keeler told me he vanished. Chester Bowie never made it back from Africa with his samples, leaving Fermi’s group to enrich their own uranium.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We can’t be sure that he found a vein of U-235.”

“Come on, Cali, it was strong enough to kill dozens of people over the years from acute radiation sickness. I’ve never heard of a case of natural uranium doing that, especially since their village is a good half mile from the mine. You need proximity to radiation to feel its effects.”

She conceded the point with a nod. “So what happened to Bowie?”

“No clue. He could have been eaten by crocodiles on his way out. Eaten by a rival tribe for all I know. If he died out there, then he’s carrying a sample of whatever the Germans came back to take later on.”

“There’s no way we’re ever going to find his body after all these years.”

It was Mercer’s turn to admit his enthusiasm was getting the best of him, but he wasn’t going to admit defeat. “I won’t let the trail just die here. There must be something. Maybe there are archives at Princeton. Letters between Bowie and Einstein. I think I read someplace that he kept pretty complete records of his correspondence.”

“Should be easy enough to get,” Cali said. “Princeton’s not that far. If we leave early enough we can get there when they open tomorrow.”

“You’re on. I’ll book this room again for Harry. He and I can head back to D.C. the day after. We should finish reading Bowie’s notebooks first. There may be other clues.”

“Agreed, but not before you buy me dinner. It’s near enough eight now.” Cali suddenly became aware that her nipples were pressed against the silk of her sleeveless shell. She’d long ago admitted she didn’t have much in the way of breasts; she also knew men would look no matter the size. She gave Mercer high marks for not leering. “I’m just going to run down to my room for a minute. I’ll meet you at the elevators in the lobby.”

Cali finally came down from her room fifteen minutes later, and while the effects were subtle, she’d taken the time to apply some makeup and fix her hair. Mercer felt like a slob for not showering earlier. They dined at a restaurant in the hotel called Margeaux, and despite the urgency they’d felt up in Mercer’s room, they took their time over crocks of onion soup, Dover sole and Beef Wellington, and thick wedges of Black Forest cake. Mercer had left the wine selection to Cali since his only knowledge of the vintner’s art was to avoid anything that comes in a box. When they finished their meal, the bottle was empty and the restaurant was nearly deserted.

It wasn’t until their conversation drifted into a companionable silence and lingering glances that the guilt slammed into Mercer like a sledgehammer blow. He hadn’t known the exact moment their working dinner had become a date, his first since Tisa, but that’s how he felt about it now and the delicious meal turned sour in his stomach. He thought he’d given no outward sign but somehow Cali picked up on his distress.

“Are you okay?”

Lying is what he should have done, blamed eating too much, and moved on. It would have been easy and he could have kept Tisa’s memory locked away, barely reined, but still under control. But before he could open his mouth, the idea of lying faded. Tisa’s memory wasn’t under control. It was controlling him. It wasn’t reined; it rode free across his mind, and until he exorcised it, it would always be there.

“I lost someone very dear to me six months ago.” Cali had to lean across the candlelit table to hear him. “Tonight was the first time since then I’ve had dinner with a woman. This dinner wasn’t a date, but sitting here with you it was easy to imagine it was. I was overwhelmed by guilt.”

“Thank you for sharing that. I know it couldn’t have been easy.”

“I have a tendency to keep stuff locked away.”

“What man doesn’t?”

Mercer gave a low chuckle. “True. I guess it’s just easier than admitting there’s something wrong. You pretend you can handle the pain, and usually you can, but sometimes…”

“Sometimes you need to talk.”

“Talk or just admit to yourself it’s okay to have feelings.”

“Women often complain about men shutting them out,” Cali said. “I’ve had my share of that, but I also came to realize that men’s silences can be just as cathartic as when women vent. The dangerous guys, the ones you have to look out for, are the ones that don’t even allow themselves the silence. I’ve never lost anyone close to me, so I can’t imagine how it feels. I will say that you seem to be handling it pretty well. I think we had a good time tonight. I know I did. Had you not been dealing with her death, you wouldn’t have allowed yourself even this.”

Cali let that sink in before setting her napkin on the table. They stood and made their way back to the elevator. “Why don’t we meet here at seven?”

“Okay. Sorry to end the night on a down note.”

Her smile was the most charming he’d ever seen on her. “You ended it perfectly.” When her elevator reached her floor, she gave his cheek a gentle kiss. “See you in the morning.”

Mercer held the elevator open until she was in her room. He thought he’d come off sounding like a morose dolt pining for an unrequited love, and she thought the night had ended perfectly. He repeated to himself something Harry was fond of saying: “The only thing you’ll ever truly understand about a woman is what she’ll let you understand.”