The Lightning Stones

16

Mercer downloaded e-mails to his tablet from a Wi-Fi hotspot in the New Delhi airport. He had been bcc’d on a note from one of Abe Jacobs’s office mates at Hardt College. In it, Professor Wotz outlined, as best he knew, what Abe had been helping Dr. Tunis with. Mercer suspected the two schools, Hardt and Northwestern, were still stonewalling direct access, so someone had asked around casually. Judging by the dates, this appeared to be something Kelly Hepburn had set in motion before her accident.

Mercer read with increasing interest. Their work was indeed groundbreaking, and given the right set of circumstances, their research was something any number of groups would never want to see reach the light of day. This made the list of suspects impossibly long.

Wotz’s description of Abe’s research into Sample 681 had jibed with what little Mercer had learned himself of the odd crystal’s electromagnetic properties. Wotz was a field biologist, so he was pretty light on the details, but he said Abe believed the mineral could help deflect deep-penetrating cosmic rays, so scientists could run subterranean cloud chamber tests that were uncontaminated by all outside influences — without having to run those tests in some of South Africa’s ultra-deep gold mines. He saw the mineral as a way to vastly reduce the cost of experimental climatology and cosmology.

Mercer thought Abe and Tunis were missing out on something far more important than climate science, although that was Susan Tunis’s specialty. If it were possible to replicate Sample 681’s properties in the lab, it would help solve one of the problems facing microelectronics products — they are constantly bombarded with cosmic rays, and each strike increases the chance of a glitch. A Qantas flight from Singapore had to make an emergency landing in 2008 when a pair of rapid descents injured more than a hundred passengers. Investigators thought it likely that a cosmic ray collision had interfered with data from an inertial referencing computer, which had caused the aircraft to plummet. Communication and other satellites had their service lives severely compromised because of the constant assault of supercharged elementary particles sweeping across the cosmos. An effective shield that didn’t add unnecessary weight would be a godsend to both industries, Mercer surmised. Even PCs on the ground suffered faults that erased unimaginable amounts of data.

Then there were massive solar discharges that have the potential to crash entire electrical grids, as happened in Quebec in 1989. Protecting power supplies from such storms was an expensive but necessary priority to utilities all over the world.

On top of that, doctors attributed a portion of cancers to cosmic rays hitting DNA at the exact moment of replication. Earth’s magnetic field routinely blocked most interstellar rays, but enough got through to cause noticeable trends in cancer rates.

It was laudable that Tunis and Jacobs were pushing the envelope in terms of climate and weather forecasting, but they were missing the true potential of what Abe had somehow inherited from Herbert Hoover.

Mercer’s flight was called. He tucked away the tablet and tried calling Agent Hepburn. Her Neanderthal partner, Nate Lowell, didn’t pick up, so the phone went to voice mail. He left her a generic message about following a lead, wished her a speedy recovery, and said he would call later. He tried reaching her through the George Washington University Hospital switchboard, but they could neither confirm nor deny a Kelly Hepburn was a patient there.

He called home. Jordan answered on the second ring. “You’ve reached the home of Philip Mercer.”

“Call the police,” Mercer said. “There’s a strange woman in my house insisting on answering my phone.”

“Mercer!” she cried. “I’ve been so worried. Are you okay?”

“Fine. Tired, actually, but everything went well. How are you doing?”

“Bored without you. My arm’s feeling better and there are some things I want to try out with it.”

“Really. Like what?” Mercer asked as if he didn’t understand where the conversation was going. To his shock and utter delight Jordan spelled out some very erotic and explicit activities she had planned for the two of them upon his return.

“Anything you’d like to add?” she asked with a husky chuckle.

“No, I think that covers the bases, and the outfield and the stands and a good part of the parking lot.”

“So are you heading home now?”

“I am,” he told her, “but I have to stop in Mumbai.”

“Why?” she asked, failing to mask her disappointment.

“I found a body inside a cave near the coordinates. I did some research, and I think he was a guru who died around 1881. The real expert on him is a professor in Mumbai, and since it’s a short detour I thought it better to meet face-to-face than to ask a bunch of potentially disrespectful questions over the phone. Apparently the academic is a descendant.”

“And you think knowing more about the dead guy can help.”

“It’s more of a case of it not hurting, I suppose,” he replied. “They just called my flight. I’ll give you a ring when I get the chance. How’s Harry?”

“He’s given up smoking, embraced temperance, and has started doing Zumba.”

Mercer laughed. “That sounds like Harry, always striving to make himself a better person.”

“Oh wait,” Jordan said as if giving color commentary at a sporting event. “What’s this? Yes, he just shut off the workout DVD, poured a Jack and ginger, and he’s fishing in his pocket for his Chesterfields. He was a better person for all of…eight seconds, ladies and gentlemen.”

Mercer heard Harry over Jordan’s teasing chuckle. “I’d give you a spanking, young lady, but your behind’s so tight I’d probably break my hand.”

“Talk to you soon,” Mercer said with a smile. “And watch yourself because he’s more than willing to test that hypothesis.”

He didn’t like lying to her, but if his suspicions were right it would be better for them both that he had. At least in the short term. Long term? Who knew? He boarded the Boeing jumbo jet and took his seat in first class. He was asleep before the plane even left the ground, and only had a vague recollection of being awoken for a meal.

It was pouring rain when he finally left the climate-controlled confines of the modern air transportation system, once again stepping back into nature. The sky was pewter colored and blotchy and looked like it hovered just a few feet over the ground. The concrete and asphalt around the terminal ran with runoff that poured through downspouts with the force of fire hoses. The sound of rain muted the occasional honks of taxis jostling for position, the cried greetings of drivers picking up loved ones, and the rumble of shuttle buses as lumbering and ponderous as dinosaurs. Passing cars hydroplaned as they went, kicking up rooster tails that rivaled those of offshore racing boats. The air was chilled and heavy. Mercer’s leather bomber was more than adequate, but he ducked back into the terminal and bought the first baseball cap he could find, a black one with a stylized red bird above the brim.

He had to wait with a dozen other passengers for a minibus to take him to the closest rental car lot, but as a preferred customer he found his name on a lighted board outside their office/garage directing him to his vehicle, an SUV only slightly smaller than the beast he’d driven just a few days earlier.

He plugged his destination into the satellite navigation system, thankful for it since he had no idea where he really was. He tried the radio, got a slot of static and something that sounded even more jarring than what had been playing at the Gen-D Systems compound in Kabul, and decided to let the storm be his companion.

By the looks of things he had a couple-hour drive, and once again marveled at the vast expanses of the American Midwest. Iowa in particular, even under a biblical storm, looked like it was nothing but wide-open spaces.

Sherman Smithson turned the lock on his front door and sniffled. He was coming down with a cold, which made the past week of rain even more miserable. Despite his somewhat precise nature, what others called prissy, Smithson wasn’t a small man. He topped out at over six feet, and for a year back at Iowa State he had been on the Cyclones football practice squad. He was forty-seven now, and what physique he had once possessed had slouched into humped shoulders and a pronounced belly that he couldn’t muster enough pride to be ashamed of. What bothered him was the retreat of his ginger hair that had left him just a horseshoe fringe around his shiny scalp. Mrs. Jenkins, one of the volunteers at the Hoover Presidential Library, had rightly dissuaded him from the comb-over several years back.

He would never grace the cover of a magazine, but he had been able to win the affections of Alice Holmes, a childless widow only a couple years his senior. She worked for a lawyer in Iowa City but lived only a few miles from his home near the library in West Branch. He had been looking forward to cooking her dinner tonight, but with all this rain there were flood warnings for eastern Iowa, especially along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. She had opted to stay with a friend in the city rather than chance driving out into the storm.

As a native Hawkeye, he didn’t think the flooding was any worse now than when he was a boy, but Alice, a transplant from Chicago, was convinced that each storm was getting worse and that something had to be done about it. He thought she should brave it out so they could have spent a cozy weekend trapped in his house by the rain with some nice wine and Trivial Pursuit, Genus Edition.

He stepped into his overheated house and sneezed.

Maybe it was best she didn’t come over. The living room was gloomy, the light coming in through the windows somehow menacing, and the rain cascading off the eaves made it impossible to see more than a few feet into the back or side yards. Smithson reached to flip on the light switch, when a hand clamped over his wrist and he was yanked into his house and tossed bodily to the floor. The front door closed with a solid thunk. He tried to scramble to his feet, his hands coming up in a defensive stance like he’d seen in movies, but an unseen foot kicked out and connected with the side of his knee. He yelped at the stabbing agony and collapsed, clutching the joint and whimpering.

“Eh, enough of that,” a voice said in a guttural accent, something foreign — likely European. “If I wanted to break it, I would have.”

A light finally went on. Smithson saw two men. Both wore black leather jackets, like bikers, but without any patches or insignia. They wore dark shirts and jeans with work boots, not Western styled. But what held his attention and weakened his resolve were the black ski masks both men wore over their faces. All he saw were eyes that bulged from the holes in the knitted wool, and mouths that looked too large and too red. Meant just to hide their features, the masks made them look all the more terrifying. Neither man had a visible weapon, but at this point they didn’t need them.

The leader of the two, the man who had tossed him so casually to the floor, hunkered down so he could look Smithson in the eye. “We have a couple of questions and we’ll leave you alone. Okay?” He slurped as though his mouth was filled with saliva.

Smithson could only nod. He was grateful he had urinated before leaving the library because the small trickle that just ran down his leg was the entire contents of his bladder. The masked man seemed not to notice.

“I couldn’t ask you outright, okay, so we had to do it this way. See? I am not a bad sort, really. It’s just that I’m asked to do some rough stuff sometimes. Hell, man, I started out as one of the good guys. I used to protect workers in Angola from terrorists. There are a lot of kiddies out in the world today who still have their daddies ’cause of me. I’m telling you so you aren’t so scared, okay. Tell me what I need to know and we go. I’ll need to tie you up, you understand, but we won’t hurt you.”

“Nik?” the other man prompted.

“Nee! There’s no need for more killing.”

“What do you want?” Sherman Smithson asked through gritted teeth. His knee felt hot and swollen. He stayed sitting on the floor, the joint cradled in his hands.

“The same thing your friend Philip Mercer wanted. We found that Sample 681 was once owned by your President Hoover, from a file in Ohio that gave the location where it was discovered. Mercer learned all that from you, ja?”

“Yes. No. He knew President Hoover was once in possession of it but not the location. That I gave him from our archives.”

“That’s what we need to talk about, you and me. What else is in your archives? Because someone went back to Afghanistan a long time ago and mined the rest of the crystals. We need to know who, and where they are now.”

“Mike Dillman,” Smithson blurted. “He retrieved the rest of the stones. Mercer confirmed that to me in a phone call yesterday.”

“And what else did he confirm?” the masked man asked. He was not being overly aggressive, but Smithson could not stop trembling.

“There was a cave, and a grotto he said was a natural geode, and that all the crystals were gone, but he found Mike Dillman’s initials written in blood on a wall.”

“What did Dillman do with the crystals he took out of those mountains? Did he give them to Hoover?”

Smithson suddenly looked like he was going to throw up. Sweat erupted across his face and ran in rivulets into his already rain-soaked shirt collar. “I don’t know,” he whimpered. “There was no record of Dillman ever going back to the cave. Not in the official archives anyway.”

The second intruder strode across the room and kicked Smithson in the ribs. The archivist gasped and fell onto his side, curling into a ball and trying to reinflate his lung. “He’s lying,” the man sneered.

The leader stood and backhanded his subaltern so fast and so hard the masked man spun into the Sheetrock wall and almost fell to the floor. He snarled in Afrikaans, “Interfere with my interrogation again, and I will cut off your ball sack and use it to carry biltong.”

He switched back to English when addressing Smithson. “Sorry about my young companion. He gets a little carried away, ja?” The intruder sucked at saliva that had soaked one corner of his mask. “Now, mate, you just made a bad mistake, and it’s going to cost you unless you tell me the whole truth. See, I’ve been doing this a lot of years and I know things about how people talk and act when they lie. You didn’t lie just now, but you didn’t give the whole truth.”

Smithson looked around, his eyes wild and wide, like a feral animal about to be cornered. It couldn’t have been more obvious had he written “guilty” across his shining forehead.

“You said there was no record in the official archive,” the masked man said, adding quickly, “and I believe you. But what about the unofficial archive, eh? What’s in there about Dillman going back to empty out the cave?”

“I don’t know what’s in any unofficial archive,” Smithson said so unconvincingly that the mercenary didn’t bother hitting him.

“Try again, Sherman, or my partner here’s really going to get busy on those ribs of yours. And he’s still learning the trade, so to speak, so he could very easily puncture a lung by mistake and then we’re all jolly fooked, ja?”

To his credit, Sherman Smithson lasted thirty minutes. The team leader didn’t think the mild librarian had the strength, but he had seen stronger men crack in a tenth that time, so anything was possible. And to the mercenary’s credit, he had made certain that Smithson’s injuries weren’t life threatening, and used two full rolls of duct tape but left enough slack to truss him up and bury him under a mountain of clothes in a closet. In a day or two he’d be recovered enough from the beating to force his way out and eventually get to the neighbor’s house.

The two masked men planned on being long gone by then, and the stolen car they were currently driving burned beyond recognition.