The Lightning Stones

11

“Herbert Hoover, the president?” she asked, confused by the result.

Mercer nodded. “Before going into public service during World War One by running a charity that basically saved every man, woman, and child in Belgium from starvation, Bert Hoover made millions as a mining consultant and entrepreneur. He had businesses in China, Russia, and Australia. A few other places, too, I think.”

Harry said, “He was Mercer before Mercer was Mercer. Of course, Hoover was a Quaker, which means no booze, so I guess he was a more sober version of Mercer before Mercer was Mercer.”

“Thank you from the peanut gallery,” Mercer said and refocused on Kelly. “Sample 681 could be something geological he collected during his career. This could be the break this case needed.”

“How?”

“The Hoover Presidential Library,” he explained. “I have no idea where it is, but it should have archived everything there is to know about Hoover before, during, and after his presidency. If he collected this Sample 681 or had anything to do with it, the researchers there should be able to find it.”

She worked at the tablet for a moment. “It’s in West Branch, Iowa. That’s closer to Iowa City than Davenport, if that helps.”

“My knowledge of Iowa geography is limited, so I’ll take your word for it. Any contact information?”

“I have a phone number and e-mail address. How do you want to handle this?”

Mercer had suspected all along that this case would hinge on the science behind whatever Tunis and Jacobs were doing, so he wasn’t surprised that she was asking his advice on how to proceed. “We’ll call in the morning and simply ask if they know anything about a geologic sample labeled 681 that Hoover either collected or owned at one point in his life.”

“Simple as that?”

“Sometimes it can be,” he replied. “Have your people been able to get anything from the university servers about what kind of experiment they were working on in Minnesota?”

She shook her head in disgust. “Even if I had more people on this, both schools are in a panic, which means they’ve swung their legal departments into full battle mode. Neither administration will let us on their campus without warrants, or even talk to us without their lawyers present. We need subpoenas to get a look at any computer archives or research material, and right now we are having a hard time finding cooperative judges.”

“That pesky Constitution,” Mercer teased.

Hepburn threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I get it and am all for it. I even swore an oath to defend it. But it pisses me off when people use it to cover their ass rather than defend someone’s rights, you know. These college lawyers are more afraid of being sued by a relative than finding out the killers’ identity.”

Mercer couldn’t argue the point. “In that vein, it makes sense I call the library rather than you. Pardon the expression but we don’t want them thinking we’re making a federal case out of this. Better it comes from a civilian doing some innocuous research.”

It was clear Kelly didn’t like it, but she saw the wisdom behind his idea and nodded. She continued, “We did get a few people to talk off the record. Dr. Tunis was a climatologist, and apparently the experiment she and Abe Jacobs were working on was to be some sort of paradigm-shifting event in the field. One guy said if they were right about something, Al Gore was going to have to give back his Nobel Prize. Not sure what that means or if that’s good or bad given how serious climate change is.”

Mercer did his best not to roll his eyes. As a trained geologist he tended to think someone claiming to have found a trend in an earth system, especially something as chaotic as climate, with just a century or two, and sometimes much less, of actual data was at best fooling themselves — and at worst intentionally fooling others. He said mildly, “It’s an emotionally charged subject for a lot of people, and there are billions upon billions of dollars riding on research, so schools tend to be circumspect. You should keep on it, but I think our best bet is going to come from the Hoover Library.”

Agent Hepburn finished her smoked turkey sandwich and the last of her Scotch. “What time are you going to call them?”

“They’re an hour behind us, so ten thirty our time.”

“I’ll be here to listen in. You want anything in the morning? Doughnuts? Bagels?”

“Chocolate doughnuts,” Harry said excitedly.

“Nothing”—Mercer overrode him—“but thanks.”

“I’ll walk her out,” Harry volunteered, fumbling for his coat and Drag’s leash as a pretext. Mercer knew he was going for the hard sell on morning doughnuts. Mercer had done his part to limit Harry’s smoking, but he guessed there wasn’t much he could do if the octogenarian wanted to put himself into a sugar-induced coma. “Hello,” Jordan Weismann said seconds after Hepburn left. She padded into the library wearing one of Mercer’s old Penn State T-shirts. It came to just above midthigh. She had to have been awake for a few minutes because her hair had been tamed into a ponytail, and she’d managed to wash the puffiness from her sloe eyes. Her arm sling flattened one of her breasts while nearly forcing the other from the top of the shirt, and Mercer tried not to stare.

“Hi,” he said thickly, dragging his eyes up to hers. “How are you feeling?”

“Better, thanks. I’m still tired, but I feel a lot more human.”

“You certainly look less zombie-esque,” Mercer joked. “Can I get you something?”

“I’m thirsty. Do you have any ginger ale?”

“I’ve got plenty, just don’t tell Harry I’m breaking into his private stash.” Mercer moved behind the bar while Jordan laid herself on the couch and pulled up the antique steamer robe.

“Whenever I was sick as a little girl, my mother always gave me matzo ball soup and ginger ale. To this day I equate the soup with not feeling well and only drink ginger ale when I’m under the weather.”

“It’s the same for me and bouillon cubes,” Mercer said, bringing over an iced glass and a mini bottle of Schweppes. “Just the smell reminds me of having the flu when I was a kid and makes me nauseous.”

“Thank you,” Jordan said, snaking an arm out from the blanket to accept the glass he’d poured. A long sip cleared a little of the raspiness from her voice. “Where’s Harry?”

“He and Drag just walked Agent Hepburn out.” Mercer pointed to all the shopping bags. “Which reminds me, she bought out CVS and Nordstrom’s for you.”

“I needed some essentials,” Jordan said quickly. “But it was awfully nice for her to do this for me.” She pushed off the blankets and scissor kicked herself off the couch, giving Mercer another glance at her shapeliness.

It was a guileless maneuver that still managed to catch Mercer’s breath in his throat.

Jordan grabbed up all the bags and didn’t return for nearly thirty minutes. Harry didn’t return either, which told Mercer he and Drag had stopped by Tiny’s for a nightcap or two. When Jordan finally stepped out from the bedroom she wore a man’s white cotton oxford and some makeup, and her hair was brushed out past her shoulders. She looked at once sexy and vulnerable.

“So fill me in. What’s been happening since I’ve been out.”

“Our garbage run into the science building back at Hardt College has paid off. There was a piece of wax paper in the trash can. We were able to figure out it was once wrapped around something called Sample 681 and that it had something to do with Herbert Hoover. We’re going to call his presidential library in the morning to see if they can shed any more light on the mystery.”

“So no idea what this sample was or how it ties in with Abe and that other professor from Northwestern?”

“Neither school is talking officially,” he told her, “but the rumor mill has it they were working on some cutting-edge climate research.”

“One of my favorite topics,” Jordan confessed. “I wonder what they were doing.”

“I’ve been thinking about that for a while now, and the only reason I can see they were in that mine would have been to do an experiment where cosmic rays and other background radiation sources have been blocked by the earth. I think this dovetails into other work done at CERN to gauge the importance of cosmic rays in cloud formation. This isn’t really my field, but I recall the work may be part of an alternative theory to carbon dioxide being the sole driver of global warming over the past hundred years.”

Jordan’s eyes suddenly narrowed, and she sat up a little straighter on the couch. “No way. I know about that theory and can tell you it has already been debunked. Man-made carbon pollution is causing global warming, and anyone who says otherwise is a climate denier.”

As Mercer had told agent Hepburn earlier, climate change was an emotionally charged subject, and he could see that Jordan Weismann was more passionate than most. What amused him was how activists thought they were defending a scientific theory, when it was actually their own political and philosophical beliefs they fought to protect to the exclusion of all alternatives.

Normally he didn’t engage people in debates about their beliefs, but as a scientist he couldn’t let her last sentence stand without comment. “I don’t really follow the climate debate that closely, but I want to point out something you said that tells me you’re reading propaganda bullet points and not the literature produced by scientists.” Her eyes narrowed even further, and her entire body language became defensive. Mercer plowed on anyway. “Carbon pollution is not a scientific term. Even calling carbon a problem is an attempt to demonize something by association. People hear ‘carbon pollution’ and they think of dirty piles of ash or soot. We are not talking about coal dust or industrial slag. The topic at hand is carbon dioxide, the invisible gas you exhale about twenty-two thousand times a day and your houseplants breathe in. Calling it just carbon or carbon pollution is a PR stunt.

“Your second point of calling someone who questions the theory of global warming a ‘denier’ is disingenuous at best and deceitful at its worst. Most thinking people understand that greenhouse gases will raise the temperature of the planet. That is not really part of the debate. The question is by how much and what do we do about it. By labeling those who question the dogma, you are trying to reframe the topic so as to prove the other lie that gets tossed about all the time — that the science is settled. Science is never settled and anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

“Hold on one sec—”

Mercer cut her off. “Before you say anything, I am not questioning your belief in global warming or climate change or climate disruption or whatever the current name is. You have every right to believe whatever you want. What I don’t like is how some people try to spread the gospel with innuendo, half-truths, and smears.”

Jordan took a couple of calming breaths before she spoke. “Saying you believe in climate change is the same as saying you believe in evolution or that smoking causes cancer. These are scientific facts.”

“Completely true,” Mercer agreed. “The faith I mention comes into play when researchers try to project out a hundred years what the earth will be like. Evolutionary biologists don’t extrapolate the future from the fossil record to convince the public they know how the common gray squirrel will change over the next hundred years. The more activist climate scientists attempt that all the time. And any oncologist worth his salt will tell you they don’t know how the chemical triggers in smoke actually cause lung tissue to turn cancerous, only that they do.

“The earth has been warming since the middle of the Victorian age. That is a fact. How and why are up for debate and what happens in the future is pure guesswork and usually not very educated guesswork at that. A cleaner environment, using less fossil fuel, saving forests, and reducing consumption in general are all noble and lofty goals, but people can’t be guilted or frightened into wanting to realize them. Nor lied to. Groups that think creating ever scarier future scenarios will change society are deluding themselves and ultimately delaying more fundamental and obtainable environmental objectives.”

He could see Jordan’s hard flinty edge beaten dull by his words, and it was his turn to take a breath.

“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word to show she recognized she’d hit a nerve. “Why don’t we talk about something less controversial, like the Middle East or abortion?”

He chuckled. “Sorry. Sometimes I get on my soapbox when science is used to push an agenda because then it is no longer science…it’s marketing.”

They sat in silence for a moment, until Jordan finally gave him a mischievous grin and said, “So…Sample 681?”

“Yes,” Mercer replied. “Back to the topic at hand. The Hoover Library. Hopefully there will be something there that lays out exactly what’s going on and what makes Sample 681 worth so many lives.”

“You’re sure you’ve never heard of it?” Jordan asked.

“No. That name sounds like a catalog number from a mineral collection and not a scientific description. I can envision it sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere wedged between Samples 680 and 682.”

“Any idea how Abe came to have it?”

“None. It could have been loaned to him or to Hardt College. It could have been something he brought with him from Carnegie or Penn State. Hell, it could have been something he found in a garage sale two weeks ago. Agent Hepburn is working on subpoenas to look into computer archives. I’ll ask her tomorrow to add information pertaining to Sample 681 to the list. Could be it’s something Dr. Tunis heard about at Northwestern. Then she discovered Abe had it and asked him to bring it to her underground laboratory.”

“I guess there’s no real point in trying to speculate, is there?” Jordan said, a little dejected by the enormity of what they didn’t know.

“We’re just getting started,” Mercer assured her. “That’s the problem with the Internet. People today are used to having their questions answered with the click of a button. We can’t get discouraged yet. It’s still early times.”

She chuckled. “E-mail was too slow growing up, so we started texting and then edited that down to just tweeting. Now a hundred and forty characters are too much so no one looks beyond the hashtag.”

“We were still passing handwritten notes when I was in school, and the only phone anyone had hung on the wall in their kitchen.” Mercer looked at her in the silence that followed and finally said, “I guess I didn’t need to remind you that I grew up in the Dark Ages…I think I’m going to call it a night.”

Jordan got off the couch and met him in the middle of the room. Her eyes were now soft, and she touched his arm with her good hand. “I want to thank you again for taking me in. I remember now that Abe talked about you once or twice, and I can see how you made such a lasting impression on him.” She turned to head to bed but paused and looked at him once more. This time there was an impish lift to her lips. “And trust me when I tell you that there are women out there who kept the notes you gave them as girls, and they wish whatever you wrote on them was still true.”

Before Mercer could think of anything to say she ducked into her room and closed the door.

Mercer waited until quarter of eleven the following morning to call the Herbert Clark Hoover Presidential Library. He hadn’t yet heard from Kelly Hepburn and his call to her cell had gone to voice mail, so he went ahead with the investigation without her.

It took a few minutes to establish his bona fides and to track down a staffer who could help him with his rather esoteric request. He was finally put in touch with a researcher named Sherman Smithson who’d been a fixture at the Iowa institution for years.

“I am not familiar with that particular sample, Dr. Mercer,” Smithson said in a pinched nasal accent, “and most of what we have here are paper archives and not bits of rocks and minerals, but I can check some databases for you so long as you understand that most people actually come to us to do primary research of this nature.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Smithson.” Mercer recognized that had he been overly familiar and used the man’s Christian name, Smithson probably would have ended the call on a pretext. “And I am certainly grateful for your help. There actually might be a law enforcement connection to this piece, so whatever you can do will be a tremendous help.”

“Law enforcement?”

Mercer could picture Smithson wrinkling his nose at something so beneath the lofty tower of pure academic research. He’d taken the wrong tack trying to whet the archivist’s interest. He made up the blandest story he could imagine. “Well, I might have exaggerated about law enforcement, but a certain Ohio college might be receiving a stern letter from the dean of the geology department at a university in Pennsylvania if what I suspect is true and Sample 681 was taken some decades ago without permission or even a formal requisition.”

“Ah, I see.” Smithson seemed mollified that this was about nothing more than an old tiff between schools. “Well, let’s hope we can set this straight. What is it exactly you need from us, Dr. Mercer?”

“Anything you can tell me about this Sample 681, but mostly I’m interested in where it came from and when it was collected.”

“Do you suspect President Hoover collected it himself?”

“It’s possible, but it’s just as likely it came from someone else on his behalf, or was sent to him so he could assess its value. At this stage I really don’t know.”

“Very well. I know of two places I can check quickly and a third that might take some time. How about you leave me your telephone number and I will call by this afternoon with anything preliminary. Is that satisfactory?”

“More than,” Mercer assured him, rattled off his cell number, and thanked him before ending the call.

“Good morning,” Jordan said, stepping into the rec room.

Mercer had heard her showering twenty minutes earlier and had been expecting her entrance. She wore new jeans and an American Eagle hoodie with plain white sneakers. For being bought by someone else, the jeans and sweatshirt fit her perfectly.

“Morning,” Mercer greeted her. Harry just waved from his perch at the bar. It was Friday and the crossword was getting tough. “How are you feeling?”

“So much better,” she said.

“Want some coffee?”

“God, yes. And to tell the truth I’m starving.”

“We were supposed to have doughnuts,” Harry said, glancing up from the newspaper, “but Kelly isn’t here yet.”

“You’ll have to check the fridge. I have no idea what Harry’s guests brought over for their octogenarian orgy the other night.”

“Octogenarian? Bah,” said Harry with a disdainful wave of his hand. “A couple of those silver foxes were barely into their seventies. As to orgy? Well, those weren’t blue M&M’s you saw being passed around.”

Jordan winced. “And on that note I am officially no longer hungry.”

“I’m never going to eat again,” Mercer agreed.

Harry smiled like the Cheshire cat and then stood. “Come on, honey,” he said to Jordan. “There’s plenty of food downstairs, and no one brought anything blue other than their hair. Mercer, get her coffee.”

He set a steaming mug onto the table in front of the couch and placed a newly bought half-gallon milk jug and some sweetener packets swiped from some restaurant long ago next to it. While he waited he dialed Kelly Hepburn’s number, and this time someone answered. He was pretty sure he recognized the voice. “Agent Lowell?”

“Yeah, who is this?”

“It’s Philip Mercer. Why are you answering Agent Hepburn’s phone?”

“ ’Cause she can’t,” he said bluntly. “She was in an accident this morning. Her cell got crushed. The phone company’s now routing her calls to me.”

Mercer was filled first with dread and then anger. With everything going on, there was no way Kelly Hepburn had an accident. But before he voiced his suspicions, he asked about her condition.

“Don’t know yet. She’s in surgery at George Washington University Hospital. From what I hear from the EMTs who drove her, her leg’s busted and she took a blow on the side of the head.”

“Hit and run?” Mercer asked, suspicious that the driver was one of the shooters from Minnesota, possibly even the team leader.

“No. It was an eighteen-year-old coed named Samantha Rhodes rushing from her job at a Starbucks to class at the University of Maryland.”

“No shit,” Mercer said, shocked and oddly relieved. He had pictured men dressed in black tactical gear with silenced machine pistols held just out of view as they rammed into Kelly’s car.

“Yeah, no shit.” Lowell sounded a little rattled by what had happened to his partner, but he was quickly regaining his distaste for Mercer. It was in his tone.

“What did happen exactly?” Mercer asked, feeling more on an even keel. This really could be just a weird coincidence. Though he hated them with a passion, he was enough of a realist to know they happened.

“The District PD says the girl swerved to miss a cat that had run into the road and plowed into the side of Kelly’s car. Kelly’s leg was broken, and she slammed her head into the side window hard enough to shatter the glass. That’s the injury the EMTs were most worried about. She’s conscious and all, but groggy, you know.”

“Concussion,” Mercer said.

“Sounds like it,” Lowell agreed. “Why are you calling her?”

“I’m following up on a lead from the trash I recovered from Abe Jacobs’s office. I have a call in to the Hoover Presidential Library about this Sample 681. Did Kelly tell you about it?”

“Sounds like bullshit to me. That piece of wax paper could have been wrapped around his lunch for all we know.”

“It was over fifty years old, according to your own experts,” Mercer countered.

“There’s nothing there, Mercer. Take what I’m about to say any way you want, but our part of the overall investigation is a sideshow, you get me? The real work is being done at the crime scenes in the Midwest. Not here in Washington. Agent Hepburn was only letting you stay involved so you could feel you were doing something to help your dead friend. As soon as we finished our interview of you and that Weismann girl, we were officially done. Understand?”

“No,” Mercer snapped. “This could lead to something.”

“It would be a waste of critical manpower. Let the FBI do the investigating and we’ll leave the rocks and shit to you.” Lowell killed the connection.

Mercer wanted to toss his cell across the room but calmly thumbed it off and slipped it back into his jeans pocket. There was nothing less imaginative or more risk averse than the bureaucratic mind. He retrieved his phone and dialed the hospital only to be told that the FBI, in cooperation with her immediate family, was withholding all information on Agent Hepburn as a matter of policy.

He pocketed the phone again and slumped onto a bar stool. He glanced at Drag. The dog gave a halfhearted wave of its tail and closed its eyes. Harry and Jordan trooped up from the kitchen with plates laden with leftovers including lobster mac and cheese, brisket, and some homemade bread that still smelled like it was fresh from the oven. “Looks like someone stole your lollipop,” Harry said.

“Kelly Hepburn was in a car accident this morning.” Mercer continued speaking into the astonished silence. “She has a broken leg and what sounds like a concussion. I can’t get word from the hospital because of an FBI blackout, but Lowell was kind enough to share the fact that the Bureau doesn’t much care about our inquiry with the Hoover Library. For all practical purposes we’re dead in the water.”

“Shit,” Harry spat.

“That about sums it up, yes.”

“What about the people who killed Abe?” Jordan asked.

“The FBI is going to keep investigating, of course, but from what I gather from Lowell, we’re no longer relevant.”

“What about calling Dick Henna again,” Harry suggested.

“It’s one thing to use him for some protection, it’s another to ask him to interfere with an active investigation. I just can’t do that.”

Jordan asked, “What happens now?”

“Not sure. I guess it depends on what we learn from the archivist at the library. If it’s something credible we pass it on to Lowell, I guess, and hope they follow up.” He didn’t add that no matter what they passed on, he was not going to back off his own inquiries.

It was nearing four o’clock when the phone rang. Mercer recognized the Iowa area code. He clicked it on before it could ring a second time. “This is Mercer.”

“Dr. Mercer. Sherman Smithson here.”

“Mr. Smithson, glad you could call back so quickly. Thank you.”

“Not at all. It has been my pleasure,” the archivist replied, a little less reserved and fussy than he’d been earlier. “Doubly so because I think I have been successful.”

“Really?”

“Indeed. President Hoover was in possession of something he called Sample 681. It was sent to him by a man named Mike Dillman sometime after World War One but before Hoover became president. I am sorry I can’t be more specific than that.”

“Do you know anything about this Dillman character?”

“No, I am sorry to say. I’ve never heard of him before today, and I did perform a cross-reference check for you through our databases. He appears nowhere else in President Hoover’s papers. On a lark I also checked for him on the Internet. I turned up dozens of people with that name, but none appeared in any historical context. This may be something you would wish to pursue further.”

“I will, of course,” Mercer said. “How about anything more on Sample 681?”

“There you run into a bit of luck. It was the president who gave it that number classification for his personal collection of geological samples. Mike Dillman called it a ‘lightning stone’ in a letter he wrote to the president that came with the sample. In it he gives longitude and latitude reference lines for where he found it. At least that’s what I think they are.”

Mercer opened Google Earth on his computer. “Would you read them to me, please?”

“Certainly.”

Mercer’s fingers entered the numbers as soon as Smithson rattled them off. The stylized globe on the flat-screen display rotated and then began zooming in on the precise location. Mercer let out a groan before it was even halfway to the coordinates.

“What is it, Dr. Mercer?” Smithson asked.

“Sample 681 came from south-central Afghanistan.”

“Ah, that explains the last line in the note Dillman sent along.”

“What does he say?”

“He writes, ‘Mr. Hoover, many places claim to be the navel of the world — Delphi and Jerusalem to name but two. I can assure you, however, where I found this sample is Earth’s one and only anus.’ That seems apt from what I’ve heard of the country.”

“And just my luck,” Mercer said without enthusiasm, “I get to play planetary proctologist.”