Pandora's Curse

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

Because his overnight stay in Manhattan wasn’t really planned, the airline had held Mercer’s luggage from Pennsylvania for him at Reagan National. He presented his identification and baggage claim checks when he deplaned from the New York flight, and a skycap retrieved his bags from storage. He had little trouble finding a cab to take him home. The flight to Washington had lasted an hour and it felt good to sit again. His legs were sore from hours of wandering the Natural History Museum.

It was nearing ten o’clock at night and traffic was light as the taxi threaded around Arlington Cemetery and hooked up with I-66. He’d lived in Arlington for a little over seven years, and the amount of growth near his neighborhood was astonishing. It was only a matter of time before the ten blocks of row houses around his brownstone were replaced with high-rises and strip malls.

From the outside, his building was similar to all the others on the quiet street. It stood three stories tall and was faced with ruddy stone that was corbeled over the windows and the front door. The entry steps were cement flanked by wrought iron railings.

Under the streetlights, he recognized two of the cars parked behind his black Jaguar. The battered Plymouth Fury belonged to Paul Gordon, a retired jockey and the owner of a neighborhood bar called Tiny’s, and the Ford Taurus was Mike O’Reilly’s, one of Tiny’s regulars. Mercer left his bags on the sidewalk and fished his car keys from his pocket, chirping open the locks as he approached the sleek English convertible. He peered in to check the odometer. The last three numbers were 823, exactly as they should be, and the tenth’s wheel was between the six and seven.

“I’ll be damned,” Mercer said aloud. He was certain Harry White would have taken the car for a spin while he was in Pennsylvania, which is why he’d memorized the mileage before leaving.

Then he noticed that the odometer had rolled over a complete thousand miles, right down to the last hundred yards. “Oh, you sneaky old bastard.” He chuckled without malice.

Mercer grabbed up his matching bags and mounted the stairs. The front door was unlocked. While the outside of the brownstone was conventional, the inside was something else entirely. The whole structure had been gutted and rebuilt according to plans Mercer himself had drawn up. The front third of the building was a marble-floored atrium that soared up to the roof, with balconies overlooking it from the second-floor library and the third floor, where the master suite was located. Connecting the levels and partially blocking the view of the kitchen was a spiral staircase. The railings on the balconies had been custom made to match the antique stairs.

On the ground floor behind the kitchen and the laundry area were his home office and the dining room he used for a red-topped pool table. The unused dining table sat in a corner of the entry foyer in what should have been the living room. He heard a roar of laughter from the second floor. This was where he had his version of a family room. Only it was closer to an English pub with wainscoting on the walls, an oak wet bar fronted by six stools, a couple of couches and chairs, and his entertainment center.

He left his bags at the base of the spiral stairs and climbed up to the library. The cigar smoke wafting from the bar through the connecting French doors was as thick as a fire on a tobacco plantation. The couches had been pushed aside to make room for a folding table, and seated around it were Harry, Tiny, Mike O’Reilly and Mike’s brother-in-law, John Pigeon. The table was littered with ashtrays, half-empty glasses, and poker chips. The forest-green carpet beneath the table looked pale from all the spilled ash. They’d been here for hours. Maybe days, for all Mercer knew.

“You’re pushing it, Harry. You’re really pushing it.” Mercer tried to put some anger in his voice but failed. He didn’t care that Harry had let someone chauffeur him around in the Jag or had the guys over for cards. He’d expected no less.

“Hey, Mercer, welcome back,” Harry boomed. He might be eighty, but his voice carried the power of a train wreck, with half the charm. “Got any cash on you? Mike’s cheating and I think I’ll figure out how if you lend me a hundred.”

“You mind telling me how you managed to put a thousand miles on my car in two weeks?” Mercer noticed that Paul “Tiny” Gordon had two encyclopedia volumes on his chair so he could sit at the same height as the others.

“Oh, that. Well, Tiny and I decided to go to Atlantic City for the weekend.”

“That’s only four hundred miles round-trip.”

“Twice.” Harry’s attempt to look contrite appeared more self-satisfied than anything.

“And the other two hundred miles?”

“Errands.”

Tiny cut in, shouldering some of the blame. “I wanted to catch a few races at Belmont,” the former jockey said. “Besides, we needed to roll your car over to an even grand.”

“I hope to God you drove, Paul.”

When the diminutive Gordon laughed, he looked and sounded like a gnome. “I had blocks installed on the pedals of my car so I can drive it. To reach the gas in your Jag, I’d have to crawl on the floor and use my hands.”

Mercer looked back to Harry, horrified that the octogenarian would drive that far. “You?”

“You need to have the tires rebalanced,” Harry suggested mildly. “It started to shimmy at a hundred miles an hour.”

“Oh, Christ.” Mercer rubbed his forehead. He went behind the bar to get a beer from the rebuilt lock-lever refrigerator next to the ornate back bar.

“While you’re back there,” Harry called jovially, “mind making me another Jack and ginger?”

“Yeah, grab me another beer,” Mike O’Reilly added.

“Might as well mix up another margarita.” This from John Pigeon.

Before answering, Mercer slid his wallet from his pants pocket and counted his cash, which totaled nearly three hundred dollars. Despite the late hour and his exhaustion, his decision was an easy one. “Get an extra chair, Pidge, and I’ll make it a pitcher.”

On one corner of the bar, Mercer’s mail lay stacked in a pile that was in imminent danger of spilling onto the floor. The deal with Harry was that he could stay at the house whenever Mercer was away as long as he got the mail and took care of phone messages. The deal didn’t include opening the mail, however. Mercer shook his head in mock frustration. One item caught his eye — a long, skinny tube, like those used for shipping posters.

“The one thing that was for you,” he said, holding it up for Harry to see. “And you didn’t open it.”

“I thought someone had mailed you a snake.”

“Actually, it’s your birthday present, only it’s a couple months late.” Mercer made the drinks, set them on the bar for John to dispense, and passed the tube to Harry.

“What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

“An anorexic anaconda. Just open the goddamned thing.”

Not one to stand on ceremony, Harry crushed out his cigar and tore the tube apart like a kid. Inside was a walking stick, a custom-made cane of black walnut capped with an ornate silver grip. Harry White had only one leg; he’d lost the other during his years as a sea captain following World War II. He didn’t have a noticeable limp, but Mercer had seen him wince a few times when he walked and knew it was time for his friend to bow to the inevitable.

“This ain’t bad,” Harry admitted.

Mercer took it from him, twisted part of the handle to release a secret catch, and pulled a gleaming thirty-inch sword blade from the cane.

Harry’s face lit up. “All right!”

“And the best part,” Mercer said, and twisted the sword near where the tang went into the handle. The blade came free, leaving a nine-inch-long wand with a screw cap set in the top end. Mercer opened it and gave it an appreciative sniff. The cane maker had gotten his final instructions before shipping his creation.

Harry took the handle, smelled its open end as Mercer had done, and laughed. The cane/sword was also a flask filled with Harry’s version of mother’s milk, Jack Daniel’s.

Harry’s eyes were bright blue and they were usually filled with mischievous sarcasm. Now they clouded over, unguarded, and showed how much Mercer’s gift meant to him. He looked up. “Thanks, Mercer,” he rasped quietly. “This is something else.”

“Happy birthday.” Mercer handed over five twenty-dollar bills and took a seat, muttering, “You still have to pay back the hundred.”

They played poker until midnight, talking mostly about Mercer’s upcoming trip. Mike was the only driver sober enough to get behind the wheel, so he said he’d give Tiny a ride back to his condo after dropping off Pidge. He offered the same service to Harry, but he’d already staked his claim to the couch. Harry lived only a dozen blocks away, yet he slept at Mercer’s at least once a week and never used either of the small guest rooms at the back of the house.

Orphaned when he was twelve and raised by his grandparents who were now also dead, Mercer had no family, which made his friendships all the more precious. His father had been a mining engineer as well, and he and Mercer’s mother, Siobhan, had died in one of the countless uprisings in central Africa. During his training for the Iraq mission, an Army shrink had told Mercer that his early loss had created in him an acute fear of abandonment and an overdeveloped sense of loyalty and responsibility. Mercer agreed and knew that, despite the more than four decades separating them, he valued Harry more than anything else in his life.

Mercer usually woke at dawn. However, he slept an hour later the following morning. He showered quickly, threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and went down to get the Washington Post from the stoop. He’d set the timer on the coffeemaker behind the bar last night. The brew was thick as tar, and the steam rising from it was strong enough to scald his eyes. He poured the pot into a carafe and made more coffee for Harry’s less masochistic tastes.

“Do you mind not making those pounding noises over there?” Harry grumbled as he came awake.

“That’s not me. It’s your head.”

Sitting up, Harry looked around the room, his mouth scrunched up as he tasted the aftereffects of a pack of cigarettes, a couple of cigars, and more whiskey than was strictly necessary. He coughed viciously. “Yeah, you might be right.”

Before getting off the couch, Harry rolled up his pants leg and strapped on the flesh-colored prosthetic limb. He slid his thin arms into the sleeves of an over-laundered blue oxford, buttoning it over the undershirt he’d slept in.

“I’ve always wondered,” Mercer said, pouring a cup of coffee for his friend and adding several spoons of sugar, “if you slept in your clothes at home.”

“Only on those nights I pass out.”

“Every night, huh?”

“Let’s just say most nights and leave it at that.” Harry went off to use the guest bathroom and Mercer scanned the newspaper.

A scandal involving Washington’s school board couldn’t hold his interest for more than the headline. Because so much of his work took place overseas, Mercer was more interested in international news. He read about the upcoming Universal Convocation. The article had a photograph of the Sea Empress, the ship the pope was using for his meeting. Although the vessel was the largest cruise liner ever built, she was as sleek as a race yacht, with raked decks and funnels on each of her two hulls. Somewhere he’d read that a lap around the enormous catamaran was half a mile. Harry returned as Mercer was finishing another piece about a German company that had agreed to pay $1.2 billion in reparations to slave laborers they had used in their factories during the war.

“Hey, last night you never said when you were leaving for Greenland.” Harry sat at the bar near Mercer. He’d taken the time to shave the silver stubble from his lantern jaw.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Mercer replied, sliding the crossword puzzle over to him.

Seated or standing, the two men were the same height, but this news made Harry slump in disappointment. He preferred Mercer’s company more than the use of his house. He took a gulp of coffee and lit a cigarette.

“I know, the timing kind of sucks,” Mercer added. “This is an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up.”

“I guess I can’t blame you. Joining the Surveyor’s Society must be a hell of a thing for you.”

“How many childhood dreams really do come true?” The question was asked seriously.

“Besides losing your virginity? Not many.” Harry’s wrinkled face broke into a smile. “I’m glad for you, but I don’t envy you. What’s that place like this time of year?”

“Believe it or not, spring is just starting. July is when the ice packs that surround Greenland break up. We’ll probably be one of the first ships over this year. The weather should be in the low twenties though I think storms can blow up at any time and the temperature can drop below zero in about five minutes.”

“You’re nuts.”

Mercer laughed but didn’t argue.

While Harry worked at the crossword, Mercer grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen from his office and began a list of things he wanted to bring. For a job, he usually knew exactly what items were needed. This was the first time in a while, however, that he would work in such harsh conditions and he wanted to be prepared.

“Ten down,” Harry White interrupted. “A five-letter word for friend? Middle one’s ‘o.’ ”

Mercer looked at him pointedly. “Mooch.”

“Bastard.”

“Try crony.”

An hour later, as Harry thumbed through the rest of the Washington Post, Mercer was getting together some of the equipment on his list. Later, he would need to go to a specialized outfitter’s store for the things he’d need, but many of the small items he had lying around the house. Some were elusive though.

“Harry, have you seen my glacier glasses?”

Twisting on his bar stool, the octogenarian shot him a withering look and his voice dripped sarcasm. “Don’t you remember? I borrowed them the last time I climbed Mount Everest.”

“Just for that, I’m going to lock up my liquor when I’m gone and ban you from smoking in here.” Such clean living would probably kill him in a week.

“Hey, I was kidding.” Harry backpedaled quickly. “There’s no need to get nasty. When you’re done today, you going over to Tiny’s? It’s two-for-one night, which means double-fisted drinking.”

“No. I want to do some research on the Internet. I’d like to find out more about Project Iceworm and this Camp Decade we’re going to reopen.”

During his lunch at the Society, Charles Bryce had also told Mercer about an Air Force plane that had crashed a few months before the base closed. The search for the wreckage had been extensive and it should have been easy to spot the plane on the ice, but no trace was ever found. He hoped to find something about that as well, just for curiosity’s sake.

“Suit yourself,” Harry said, grabbing his new cane for the walk home. “You leaving from Dulles or National?”

“Dulles. You mind giving me a ride?”

“That’s why I asked.”

“Thanks. Come by around noon.”

Harry left, and a few minutes later Mercer went on his shopping trip. Considering the list of items and the work he had to do tonight, he realized that he shouldn’t have stayed in New York for an extra day. However, anything he forgot here could most likely be purchased in Iceland before they boarded the Njoerd for the run to Ammassalik, Greenland. He also trusted Charlie Bryce about Geo-Research being a first-class outfit. Surely they’d take care of him.