The Lightning Stones

21

Over the next forty-eight hours, Mercer put on an act. He left the brownstone only once, to accompany Harry to Tiny’s for a few drinks the second night, but other than that he busied himself at home. He polished all the brass accents in the bar. He caught up on some job offers, declining four and requesting additional information about another. Mostly, he made sure his behavior and conversations gave the appearance that he had given up any hope of finding the remaining crystals of Sample 681. He had indeed found two bugs planted in his house — one affixed under the edge of the bar and the other near his desk in his office, and Mercer was putting on a convincing show for whoever was listening in.

Agent Hepburn had sent him a text offering to post guards, but again Mercer declined, explaining that it would draw undue attention. It was better, he said, that the entire affair die for lack of interest.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t also making preparations. These he had actually started back in Kabul following their return from the cave. He had instructed one of the Gen-D Systems mechanics on how to build a proper Faraday cage for the sample he’d taken from the dead swami’s mouth. The makeshift contraption he’d cobbled together in the field showed he was on the right track, but he wanted to have something a bit better before transporting it.

The crystal had arrived in Washington, D.C., at the same time Mercer was landing in Des Moines. All of the photographs and notes he’d taken on the grotto/geode in the cave had preceded the package and had doubtlessly already been analyzed to death by perhaps the smartest person Mercer knew. Jason Rutland was his name, and he worked in Greenbelt, Maryland, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a sprawling campus off the Capital Beltway that housed perhaps the nation’s greatest concentration of scientists and engineers outside of Silicon Valley. Mercer had met Jason several years earlier, working on a different project, and Rutland had amazed Mercer with his brilliance, both in the laboratory and with his analytical skills. Breaking all stereotypes of the nerdy science genius, Jason was as slick as they came. He wore stylish clothes, drove a classic Ford Mustang, and was currently dating, in Harry’s estimation, the sexiest weather girl on any of the local news stations. Even Harry, the aging lothario, had been tongue-tied when the four of them had bumped into one another at Pimlico for the Preakness Stakes.

For the last three days, Jason had been sending Mercer regular text updates on his findings as he followed a hunch Mercer had given him. That hunch now looked more and more likely to pan out. It was on the morning of the third day, long before sunup, that Jason’s latest text came through. It read simply: “Found her.”

Mercer got the message when he woke at six, and he felt the surge of adrenaline. Minutes later he was sitting on his bar stool, making sure he was positioned closest to the bug Jordan had planted, and he dialed Rutland at home. The machine picked up. Mercer started leaving a message, but Jason’s hurried voice rang through the line. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t screening calls. I just got out of the shower.”

“Even if you were screening, I made the cut, so you don’t need to apologize.”

“Hey, good point. Never thought of that.” Jason was excited and speaking way too fast, a clear indication he’d gotten little sleep in the past few days. “I can’t believe you did it, Mercer. I mean, Amelia Earhart…after all these years. Are you sure she crashed near—”

Mercer cut him off before he could say anything more. “Not over the phone! You know better than most that the NSA records every call placed in the D.C. area.”

“Take it easy. You think the government cares about her?”

“I think the fewer people who know about this the better, because whoever finds her plane is going to become a household name.” He then added for the extra ears that might be listening in, “Funding that trip to Afghanistan tapped me out, so it’s going to take me at least a year to mount an expedition to the South Pacific.”

“Ah. Okay, then. Mum’s the word.”

“Thanks. Can you meet me?”

“Sure. Where?”

“Someplace public, but safe.”

“Pentagon Metro stop.”

Mercer knew it. This particular subway stop was right at the entrance to one of the most heavily defended buildings in the world. “Perfect. What time’s good for you?”

“I was just about to crash. I’m beat. How about late this afternoon — say five o’clock? No, make it six. That gets us past the worst of the rush.”

“Okay. Six o’clock at the Pentagon Metro stop, right by the building’s entrance.”

“I’ll bring all my findings.”

“Not that ridiculous man purse of yours.”

“It’s not a purse,” Rutland protested. “Felicia calls it a satchel.”

“Felicia can call it a kumquat for all I care, it’s still a purse.”

“Eff you,” Jason said, hanging up. Mercer clicked off his cell with a sly grin.

It was a nice enough day, and the Pentagon was close enough that Mercer decided to walk partway when the time came. There was just enough breeze for him to throw on a khaki Beretta shooting jacket. Holstered at his spine was one of their signature 9mm’s, the Model 92. He left his house with plain white earbuds stretching down to the phone he’d stuffed into one of the coat’s numerous pockets.

Mercer walked casually, glancing into the glass office windows of the buildings beyond his block of townhomes. In their reflections he saw no obvious signs of a tail, but his instincts told him he was being watched. He could feel the eyes on him.

An elderly man in a fedora and rumpled suit stepped out of one of the office buildings, raising an arm to get the attention of a driver parked at the curb. The two men exchanged a greeting as the rumpled guy slid into the passenger seat. Traffic was snarled enough that they only got a few feet before being forced to stop. For the next two blocks it seemed the car and Mercer were in a slow-speed chase, neither getting much ahead of the other. The traffic lights cycled from green to red so quickly that only a few cars could squirt through the nearly gridlocked intersections.

The two men ignored him on the sidewalk and conversed casually enough for Mercer to put them out of his mind and scan other places for a watcher.

The car turned at the next cross street, the driver accelerating hard to get away from the worst of the traffic in an annoyed display.

Mercer walked ten yards past the Pentagon City Station and turned so suddenly that he almost plowed over a diminutive Chinese woman and her even tinier mother. He paid them no attention, his face the picture of annoyance at himself because he’d apparently walked past his destination, but his eyes were watchful for anyone caught off guard by his sudden reversal. No one seemed startled or upset, other than the two people he’d nearly trampled.

He descended into the city’s subway.

He fished a SmarTrip Metro card from his wallet, touched it to the scan pad, and passed through the turnstile. Built in time for the nation’s bicentennial, the Metro stations still possessed a futuristic feel that made one think the trains entering and exiting were headed to distant planets, rather than other stops along the Blue or Yellow Line. When the train came, he loitered on the platform until the bell sounded and the doors were about to hiss closed, before jumping aboard.

Once again no one paid him the slightest attention. He began to have doubts. What if the listeners at the other end of the bugs in his house had given up after Jordan’s arrest, and he was putting on a performance for an audience that wasn’t there? He hated to think his elaborate plan was for naught, but on the other hand, if his adversaries had given up, that opened the door for him to work unimpeded.

It also meant that he’d forever lost his chance to find out who, and what, was behind Abe Jacobs’s murder.

That was a personal failure he would not contemplate, and so he refocused on the task at hand. He checked his tag. He had timed this perfectly. The appointed hour was just a minute away, and the subway was decelerating as it approached the Pentagon stop. The platform was crowded with commuters, many in civilian attire, many others in the uniforms of the four major military branches.

Mercer stepped into the press of humanity on the dimly lit platform, looking for Jason, but also watching for anything suspicious. He figured that of the original five-person team he’d encountered in the Leister Deep Mine, he had killed one in the Lauder Science Center at Hardt College, and another in Roni Butler’s kitchen, so he was looking for two perfect strangers and the leader — the man whose posture, walk, and movements he would know in an instant. It was an odd feeling. He’d gotten only a few fleeting glimpses of the guy, but it felt like he’d been studying the gunman for years.

He saw nothing except harried commuters wanting to get home. As he exited the platform, within sight of the entrance to the Pentagon itself, he felt a quick movement behind him. It was the rumpled guy from the car that he’d spotted earlier. He must have phoned in a description to someone already here at the station. The man made a hand signal over the heads of the streaming commuters. Mercer whirled in time to see Jason. The NASA scientist saw him too and raised a hand in greeting.

“Jason! No!”

It was too late. Jason had been spotted, and no sooner did he lower his hand than a shape slid through the crowd the way a shark parts a shoal of fish, and Jason’s leather satchel had been cut free of its sling. The shape moved on, leaving Jason in its wake, a surprised look on his face at the audacity of such a blatant robbery. He looked ready to give chase.

“No, Jason. Stop,” Mercer shouted as he himself was about to launch into a run to catch the thief. He felt something hard ram into his kidney and dig a little into his flesh. It took no imagination to know it was the barrel of a snub-nosed revolver.

“Leave it be, or I drop you and take my chances in the confusion.” The voice was a Brooklyn cliché.

There was no way this old guy had been part of the assault team at the mine. Mercer tried to turn to get a better look at the man’s face. His earlier impression was a bad shave, sallow skin, and drooping eyes. As had been intended, Mercer could better describe the hat the man wore than his features. Whoever he was, Mercer realized he was good at this.

“I’m putting a pair of zip cuffs in your hand.” Mercer felt the wiry length of plastic press against his palm. “Secure them around your ankles.”

When he bent to comply, Mercer felt his Beretta being lifted from its pancake holster. It was a good thing he wasn’t sentimental about guns, because that one was about the fourth or fifth he’d lost. The gunman stayed close enough that no one rushing by them saw or suspected a thing.

“Thanks for the piece,” the New Yorker said.

Mercer straightened, and he was abruptly shoved from behind. The plastic tie around his ankles meant he fell like a sawn-down tree and took the brunt of the impact on his hands, wrists, and arms. A woman gasped at his collapse. Mercer turned to see the rumpled suit and cheesy gangster hat vanish out of the building lobby. He moved well for an older man.

“Are you okay?” a pretty petty officer in navy camouflage asked. She looked more closely and saw the white plastic band securing Mercer’s legs together. She got suspicious. “What’s going on?”

“Remember the ‘knockout game’ from a couple of years ago?” Mercer said, feigning anger. “I think this is similar. I felt something around my ankle, then someone pushed me. Down I went.” He fished into his pocket for a folding pocketknife. The blade easily sliced through the plastic.

She helped him to his feet. “Do you want me to get an MP?”

“No,” Mercer said. “It was just some stupid kids who are long gone. Thank you for your help.”

“My pleasure, sir,” she replied and headed off without a backward glance.

By then Jason had made his way over. He looked a little pale. Mercer asked, “Are you all right?”

“Never been mugged before. Don’t like that feeling one bit.”

Mercer straightened one of his earbuds so the integrated microphone was close to his lips. “Book, you got him?”

Jason’s expression registered surprise.

“Oh yeah,” Mercer heard over his cell connection to Sykes. “It was a skinny white kid wearing baggies like a gangbanger. Dumbass nearly tripped on those stupid pants coming up the escalator. Wait a second…what kind of car did you tag earlier?”

“Six-year-old silver Caddie. That’s what the older guy got into.”

“Bingo. Kid just dove into a silver STS. Pennsylvania plates, but two’ll get you ten it’s a rental from Dulles.”

“I’m in on that action. The rumpled guy sounded like he’s from Brooklyn — bet they came down on the JFK-to-Reagan shuttle. That’s where they rented the Caddie.” He hadn’t even noticed the kid in the Cadillac’s backseat. They must have been a professional black bag crew, most likely hired as outside contractors to supply and monitor the bugs, and then tasked today with the robbery.

Mercer was casually scanning the crowd when his blood turned cold.

The team leader. The animal Mercer had vowed to put down.

He was there watching the whole thing, looking down onto the subway from the top of the escalator. The man was mostly shadow from this distance, but Mercer recognized the tilt to his head and the way he carried his shoulders. He must have been waiting for Mercer to recognize him, because he gave a mocking wave and vanished from sight.

Mercer cursed into the microphone. “Book, guy at the top of the escalators.” He pushed his way to the mechanical stairs. Normally Washingtonians are conditioned to stay to the right if they intend to stand so others can climb the escalator on the left, but such niceties vanished during rush hour, leaving the entire breadth of the escalator blocked.

Booker Sykes heard the panic in Mercer’s voice. “What guy?” he asked crisply. “Describe him. There are dozens.”

“My height, white, medium/large build. I don’t know hair color or what he’s wearing.”

Sykes was positioned in a room at the nearby DoubleTree hotel, glassing the Pentagon through some borrowed special-ops binoculars. He wasn’t looking for a man who fit the description; there were too many. Instead he looked for someone moving fast through the crowd — and there were none. “No one like that’s drawing attention, Mercer. The Caddie is pulling away. You sure you don’t want it followed?”

“Positive. But we can end this now if you find that guy.” Mercer did his best to bull his way up the escalator, but he was making poor progress, and earning a lot of angry looks.

“I still have no illicit movement. There must be a hundred people out here and twenty buses. He could have jumped onto any of them.”

Mercer stopped fighting, sagged a little. He’d been defeated and he knew it. The man wouldn’t give himself away by running from the scene. He’d come here to taunt Mercer, show him how big his organization was, to brag that they could get muscle down here from New York, and finally to vanish without a trace as the ultimate insult.

Mercer let the escalator deposit him on street level and he stepped aside so others could get off. Behind him was the massif that was the Pentagon, while ahead were acres of parking and a bus loading/unloading plaza that was still crowded even now. He had come here with a plan, and it had worked. Getting at the leader would have been a coup, but it was not meant to be. He would just have to be satisfied that the trap he had set was sprung so quickly.

He scanned the bus loading plaza. Book was right. There were dozens of Metrobuses, and as three left the terminal two more arrived to pick up the queues of tired commuters.

He looked for the man, peering over the heads of people to see passengers in the window seats on the buses. Commuters swirled around him in a coordinated ballet to cram as close together as possible while maintaining personal distance. It was a delicate act. Mercer continued to look as one man to his right clicked off a Bluetooth headset and turned toward him. Mercer was barely aware of the commuter, but then the man quickly spun into him with a powerful jerk of his shoulders, a fist held just below Mercer’s sternum.

The knife was a classic killing weapon, with a six-inch blade of blackened steel and a thin handle so it was concealable. A proper strike should slice under Mercer’s rib cage, cleave through his diaphragm, pierce a lung, and, with an upward jerk and twist, shred his heart. And this had been a proper strike.

The impact forced Mercer to double over, and his hands instinctively went to the point where he’d been struck. In the first microseconds after the blow he wasn’t sure what had happened, only that he felt a dull pain exploding from under his chest. Mercer’s fingers found those of the man who’d barreled into him, and something razor sharp, too.

In another instant he figured out what had happened, and Mercer wrapped the man’s hands in both of his, and squeezed with everything he had.

Not knowing what to expect on this outing, Mercer had worn a Kevlar vest he’d gotten from Booker. Jason was wearing one, too. Mercer wore his beneath the Beretta shooting jacket. While most bulletproof garments are susceptible to knife thrusts, this one had a double weave that prevented blades from penetrating. The knife had stopped dead and because it didn’t have a protective hilt, the man’s hand had slipped from the handle onto the blade — and before he could pull away, Mercer clamped his own hands around the knife wielder’s fingers and squeezed.

Mercer quickly released his grip and brushed past the guy before anyone around noticed that something horrifying had just occurred. He was fifteen feet away and still striding before the attacker’s nervous system registered what had just happened. He raised his painful hand to the air, his eyes going wide while the knife clattered to the ground. A jet of dark arterial blood spurted in a spray that caught one woman across the face and spattered against another’s dress uniform.

Like nearly everyone else, Mercer turned back when he heard the woman’s horrified scream. He saw his assailant’s raised hand through the crowd, his wrist clamped off with his good hand but blood continuing to bubble and drip from the nearly severed fingers and thumb, the digits flopping obscenely as he swayed. The man dropped to his knees. As the crowd closed off Mercer’s view, he backed away.

“Book?” he called into the tiny mic.

“You’re clean. All eyes are on that dude. What’d you do?”

“He tried to stab me, but that vest you got me stopped the blade. I sliced his fingers against his own blade.”

“From here it looked like you practically de-gloved his hand.” Booker Sykes was not squeamish, but even he made a disgusted sound at the spectacle down below.

“Watch for their lead guy, Book,” Mercer chided. “That was another of his lackeys.”

“You’re still clean. I’m just a little queasy. That was nasty.”

Mercer backed himself against a concrete planter so no one could come up behind him. His heart raced and his hands shook; had he not thought to wear the vest, he’d be dead. As it was, he had been so intent upon finding the leader that he never saw his subaltern until it was far too late. Mercer had gotten lucky…and no matter how much he’d always depended on it, he still rebelled at the truth that chance plays such a large role in life.

Moments later Jason Rutland approached. He hadn’t dashed up the escalator like a bull going after a matador’s cape, the way Mercer had almost fatally been goaded into doing. Mercer hated himself for being so easily manipulated. Jason pointed back over his shoulder. “Someone got stabbed back there.”

“It was one of them,” Mercer spat. “I think it might have been the young guy driving the Honda back in Ohio. Come on, let’s get out of here.” MPs were already showing up to take control of the situation. Mercer led Rutland to the next bus in line, and the two boarded. It wasn’t so crowded that Mercer couldn’t check every passenger for the team leader. No one else got on.

Jason held up a flash drive shaped like a Star Wars character. “Here.”

Mercer took it, smiling a little at the cartoonish face staring back at him. “This it?”

“Yup.”

The bus lurched as it pulled away from the loading plaza. After thirty seconds, Sykes came over the radio to tell Mercer that no one was following the bus. They were clear. And he was leaving his observation post.

Mercer thanked him and pulled out the second earbud. He shoved it in his pocket. There was some blood on his shirt and jeans, but the spots were dark enough that no one seemed to notice. He adjusted his coat to better hide them anyway. “Talk to me.”

“Are you okay?” Jason asked with genuine concern. He wasn’t used to seeing Philip Mercer rattled.

“Fine. Even though everything went pretty much as I expected today, I still feel they pulled one on me, you know.”

“Well, you almost got stabbed.”

“Not that. The taunt. That effete little wave he gave me — as if to say his weakest effort is better than my best. It pissed me off.”

“I’d still go with getting stabbed as the low point of my day, but to each his own…”

Mercer shook his head as if to clear it. “On to the important stuff. Tell me what you’ve got.”

“Right,” Jason said, unconvinced that Mercer could let the other stuff go, but understanding it was best to move on. “I calculated the volume of the geode from the pictures you took, like you asked. Then I weighed the sample you shipped from India and ran the numbers to come up with a range of weights for the crystals taken from the cave and loaded onto Amelia Earhart’s Electra. I cross-matched this figure by examining each individual cell within the geode to get exact sizes for every crystal. That gave me the precise weight of gems. Considering the volume of stones and the need for some protective sheathing, the logical place to put them was in the plane’s nose storage compartment. That gave me an approximate distance from the radio equipment as well as the navigational instruments.”

“Okay so far.”

“This was all pretty straightforward math, something you could have done yourself.”

“I would’ve needed to take off my shoes and socks for some of the longer calculations,” Mercer replied. “What next?”

“I modeled the electromagnetic variances induced by the crystal you gave me. That is some weird voodoo juju, by the way. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“I don’t think anyone has,” Mercer remarked.

“Did you know it’s just shy of a diamond’s hardness on the Mohs scale?”

“No.”

“And its electrical properties are all over the spectrum. Conductor, insulator, semi — heck, it could be a Josephson junction too for all I know. It also acts as a step-up amplifier in micropulsed applications.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it can take an electromagnetic signal and amplify it a thousandfold — or conversely, I think, diminish it to nothing. And it could work as a propagating cascade effect. It’s hocus-pocus stuff.”

“Jason, first…slow down. You’re talking way too fast. Second, you’re using physics on a simple geologist. And third, I am less interested in what it can do now than in what it did back in 1937.”

“Got it.” The physicist took a deep breath. “In a nutshell, your hunch was right. These crystals would have warped Earhart’s radio transmissions, as well as the signals reaching her radio direction finder. Also, with the amount of crystal on board, about twenty-three kilos, it would have messed with the navigator’s chronometer. When he took sun and star shots and compared them to his charts, his faulty timepiece would have sent them hundreds of miles off course, and they never would have known it. We know her radio kept receiving signals from the USS Itasca anchored off Rowland Island, and they could occasionally hear her, but their communications were distorted by the lensing effect of the crystal stored in the plane’s nose.”

“Here’s the million-dollar question,” Mercer said. “Were you able to tell by the amount of crystals aboard just how badly Fred Noonan’s navigation was off?”

“I had to run about a million simulations to get a mean that made sense, but I did it. The real trick was estimating how much of the electromagnetic disturbance effect Dillman was able to block with whatever he shielded the sample in. I went by the KISS principle and figured he’d do just enough to keep from getting pounded by lightning, but would not have known to block the effects at shorter distances, wavelengths, and frequencies. This is the stuff that would have messed with the jewels in a chronometer or the crystals in an old radio set.”

“That gave you a hard number?”

“No, but solid estimates. That’s why I needed so many runs on the Goddard mainframe. You were right. She was nowhere near Howland, their intended destination. I estimated they started flying northeast as intended, but over time they would have arced more east than north.”

“Putting them where exactly?” Mercer had already made travel arrangements covering most of the South Pacific. He’d booked through to Fiji, Tarawa, Nauru, and Majuro in the Marshall Islands, not knowing the aviatrix’s final flight path. And if pilot Earhart and navigator Noonan had really screwed up, he also had tickets for Auckland. Jason’s answer would narrow that list down to one destination.

“Best I can tell they would have run out of fuel near Wallis and Futuna.”

“Who?”

“Wallis and Futuna are islands, not people. They’re French. Wallis is more northerly than Futuna, and I think they went down near the latter.”

“What’s the closest international airport.”

“I’d go with Fiji. Samoa is closer to Wallis, but Fiji’s closer to Futuna.”

“Now for another million-dollar question. Did she get close enough to see the island and attempt to land, or did she run out of fuel short of there and ditch in the ocean?”

“That I can’t tell you, Mercer. But the tallest peak on Futuna is about seventeen hundred feet. They could have seen that for forty or fifty miles, depending on visibility. If she had the gas she would have beelined there.”

“Populated?”

“What am I, Wikipedia?” Jason asked. “I found the place for you. You want its full history, too?”

Mercer smiled. “I suspect by now you are the world’s foremost authority on Wallis and Futuna, even if you’ve never been there.”

Rutland looked sheepish and prideful at the same time. “I like to be thorough.”

“Populated?”

“Yes. Today about five thousand, most of whom live in just two towns. Back when Earhart crashed I bet there were half that number. Interestingly there’s an uninhabited island just off of Futuna called Alofi. Rumor has it cannibals ate the people who lived there sometime in the nineteenth century, and no one has ever gone back. So to answer your unasked question, yes, it is remote enough to have kept her crash site secret for eighty years.”

Mercer paused as he remembered something. He fished out his phone and dialed.

“Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?” a woman answered.

“There was an incident within the past few minutes at the Pentagon Metro stop.”

“Yes, sir, we are aware of it. Do you have something additional to report?”

“Yes. The injured man, the one whose hand was cut up, is a person of interest in the attack at Hardt College in Killenburg, Ohio.” The gunfight on campus had been featured prominently on the national news. “Show his photograph to witnesses. They will recognize him as the driver of the Honda that tore through the science building.”

“Who is this, please?”

“I was on campus when the attack occurred and saw the same man again today at the Pentagon. It looked like he tried to knife someone, but he was the one who ended up being injured.”

“Your phone is coming up blocked on my screen, sir. May I have your name?”

“No. I’m sorry. Contact Special Agent Kelly Hepburn or Nathan Lowell out of the FBI D.C. field office — they’ll be able to piece together the chain of events. I’m positive the man wounded today at the Pentagon, and the Honda driver at Hardt College, are the same person. Thank you, and good-bye.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket, then said to Jason, “That should keep him off the streets for a while even if no one can make the identification. Where were we?”

Jason shook his head slightly at Mercer. “We were discussing Amelia Earhart being on or near either the island of Futuna or Alofi, and how Fiji is your best bet flying from the States.”

“Already arranged,” Mercer said, grateful that it was one of his preselected jumping-off points.

“Wish I could go with you,” Jason said, a bit enviously. “It would be the chance of a lifetime to be in on this.”

“You can have all the credit, I promise. The last thing I want in my life is fame. What about the stuff we let them take when they grabbed your purse?”

“Satchel!”

“Kumquat,” Mercer parried. “And you wouldn’t have used it if you didn’t want it swiped. Now you have a legitimate excuse when Felicia asks.”

“Touché,” Jason conceded. “You mentioned the bad guys have some of the mineral already, so I couldn’t fudge its electromagnetic qualities since that’s something they can test for themselves. What I did was distort the pictures you sent of the empty geode so that it looks like the amount of recoverable crystals is about ten percent less than what was really there. Even if they rerun my numbers they will come up with the answer I want them to.”

“They won’t be able to tell the pictures were doctored?”

“Please,” Jason said, obviously insulted. “We’ve got photo equipment at Goddard that Hollywood doesn’t have yet. I could make images that show the geode filled with leprechauns, and the best computer analysis in the world would say they’re genuine.”

“Okay, okay. Where are you sending them?” In case his adversaries had access to airline databases, which was likely given their sophistication and reach, Mercer planned to cancel all his flight reservations except the destination Jason had chosen for his ruse. Of the flights he’d arranged under Booker Sykes’s name, he’d keep the two tickets to Fiji.

“They’ll think the plane went down at a place called Gardner Island. It’s part of the island nation of Kiribati, formerly the Gilberts, of which Tarawa is the most famous. Gardner is more in line with Earhart’s intended course than Futuna, and has the added bonus of being an atoll where people claim they’ve found clues that she did indeed crash.”

“Really?”

“Oh, absolutely…Earhart hunting is a cottage industry. Bits and pieces purported to be from her Electra have been found all across the South Pacific. Gardner’s just the most recent. Before that, one of the prevailing theories was that she and her plane were captured by the Japanese. She was tried and executed for spying, and the Electra ended up in some secret warehouse like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Neat theory…except the U.S. occupied Japan for seven years following the war and never found any secret warehouses.”

“I said theory, not fact.”

“Sorry,” Mercer said, a little distracted. He was already running equipment checklists in his head. Some of what he thought they would need should be available in Fiji, while some would have to be brought in. “This is all really good, Jason. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Piece of cake, my friend. All I want in return is the right to keep studying these lightning stones of yours. It is spooky, spooky stuff. Between its attraction to lightning and all its other bizarre properties, it’s best that it sits in a nice safe laboratory.”

“Let me ask you…” Mercer said. “I get that these crystals are unusual, but a lot of people are dead over them — and someone has shelled out a lot of money to lay their hands on the source lode. Why?”

It was clear that Rutland had considered the question already but didn’t like his answer. “The short answer is I don’t know. There are a ton of possibilities, but for any of them to be commercially applicable, you’d need a lot more of the crystals than have been found — or a way of growing them yourself.”

“Susan Tunis and my friend Abe were investigating how cosmic rays affect cloud formation, and how that interaction is likely to naturally regulate global temperatures. If their findings are correct, that could mean the climate is nowhere near as sensitive to man-made carbon dioxide as we’ve been led to believe.”

“Meaning what…that global warming won’t be as bad as everyone says?”

Mercer nodded. “That’s what they were researching. Because the claims of climate change are so broad and so far into the future, many of them are unfalsifiable. They were trying to prove something very specific so that at least part of the hysteria can be put to rest. Abe was using the Herbert Hoover crystal sample to protect the experiment from galactic ray contamination. So there is research potential for this stuff, but any commercial application would need a lot more than has ever been discovered.

“There has to be something else, Jason, something that makes it unique. Do me a favor, and keep thinking about what someone who obviously has no morals could use it for. They’ve killed to get their hands on it, so I imagine their final intentions are pretty shady. Think weapons.”

“Sure,” Jason said. “I’ll game some potential military applications and see what makes sense.”

“I want you to be careful. These bastards are ruthless. There’s no way they can trace you to me. I never used your name and my phone wasn’t tapped. All the same, keep a low profile for a few days, take Felicia someplace if you can get away, all right?”

“She can’t get time off from the station, but I’m heading to Houston for a conference in a couple of days. There’s no reason I can’t bump up my plans.”

Mercer hit the bell to tell the bus driver he wanted off the bus and held out a hand. “Thanks. With any luck in a week or so you can go down in history as the man who located Amelia Earhart’s airplane.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be the schlub you sent out to do the grunt work.” Mercer chuckled. “People remember Howard Carter, not the Egyptian shoveler who actually dug out King Tut’s tomb.”