The Lightning Stones

7

The sound of sirens grew steadily louder as the pair raced hand in hand across the campus. The snow was deep enough that Mercer needed to hold on to Jordan so he could help tow her through the taller drifts. If he hoped to find anything before the cops shut down the campus he would have to hurry. And because Jordan had spent time with Abe more recently, even if she hadn’t been to his office here at Hardt, she might see anomalies that he did not, so he didn’t consider abandoning her and sprinting ahead.

Mercer had no idea how long they would have once they reached the science center. Units from nearby towns would roll in to assist, and eventually county and state cops as well. Still, Mercer figured ten minutes at least before one of the responding officers left their cordon and actually swept the Lauder Building. After that, everything would become a crime scene, and they’d be faced with the same bureaucratic obstacles he’d managed to avoid in Minnesota.

Students had scattered from the building. Many were rushing across the rural campus for the purported security of their dorms. Others remained hidden behind cars in the adjacent parking lot. As they approached the battered front entrance doors, Mercer made sure no one could see his weapon and start a fresh wave of panic. A boy and girl huddled behind a bench on the cleared flagstone plaza in front of the modernist building. The science center’s fire alarm wailed in rhythmic pulses that beat in on Mercer’s brain.

He approached the duo hiding behind the bench. “Listen. I’m an off-duty cop,” he said, and let them see the butt of the pistol. “When the uniforms arrive, make sure they know we’re inside.”

The wide-eyed girl and the goateed boy both nodded, not questioning why an off-duty policeman would need to bring a civilian woman into the building with him.

Mercer led Jordan inside. The lobby was a mess, with broken furniture, ruined carpeting, and junked bits of the SUV scattered on the floor. It was also thankfully deserted. But as loud as the alarm had sounded outside, now that they were in the building, the shriek was enough to make the two of them physically cringe. It was nearly impossible to talk.

Wordlessly, Mercer took Jordan’s hand again and together they mounted the external ramp, mindful of where the car had smashed through the handrail and window. The floor was littered with glass shards, and a cold wind blew in through the jagged hole. Farther up and around they climbed until they reached the second-floor landing. To their left was a balcony that overlooked the main atrium and afforded a great view of the dangling solar system mobile. From the railing the installation’s details stood out beautifully. Earth’s moon was covered in miniature craters, and Saturn’s rings were rendered in fantastical colors.

To the right was an open space littered with overturned couches and chairs that showed the tire tracks where the Honda had turned around. Leading away was a broad corridor lined with a series of closed doors that Mercer guessed were classrooms. Three-quarters of the way down the long hallway he could see fire-blackened Sheetrock, and he watched the spray of water pouring from the overhead sprinklers. The pressure wave from the initial explosion had blown the covers off most of the fluorescent lights and shattered the bulbs, so the hall was dimly lit but flashed brilliantly every couple of seconds when an emergency strobe light fired off in time with the siren. The effect was like that of a creepy fun house. Mercer yanked out his pistol when a student dashed from the shelter of one of the classrooms and raced past them without as much as a sideways glance.

He watched the student vanish down the ramp, bent low in a naturally defensive crouch, and then Mercer turned back to check the hallway again. He spotted movement — a shadow shifting behind the gray curtain of water pouring down through the fire suppression system. Mercer could understand a reluctant student hiding out in a classroom six doors down from the explosion, but not someone lurking just on the far side of where the blast occurred. The outline paused its pacing of the hallway and seemed to study them through the falling water.

Instinct and experience took over. Jordan was a pace or two ahead of Mercer. He launched himself at her, throwing his left arm around her waist and twisting her to the floor. He rolled over her as they landed, extending his right hand so that her body was covered by his and his pistol was aimed at the mysterious figure. Jordan was just taking in a breath to shout her angered protest at being manhandled when the hallway filled with the mechanical crash and subsonic judder of a silenced auto pistol discharging its deadly load.

The air in the corridor came alive with plaster dust and gunpowder smoke and a heavy mist of water blown sideways by the fusillade fired through the sprinkler cascade. Bullets chewed everything they touched, showering the couple with shredded batting from the ceiling acoustical tiles and bits of plastic from a fluorescent light cover.

Compared with the silenced machine pistol, Mercer’s P-38 roared like a cannon in the hallway’s confines. It was an assault on all the senses and one he tried to repeat, but the pistol jammed after firing just the single bullet, a hasty shot he hadn’t aimed as much as hoped had gone in the direction of the shooter.

The analytical side of his brain knew that the eighty-year-old spring inside the pistol’s magazine no longer had the yield strength it once possessed. In effect the magazine spring had been crushed flat over the years by the bullets Mercer had loaded so long ago, and could no longer bounce back into its original shape. The weapon fired the first round with no problem, but the next bullet in line didn’t rise high enough out of the grip to be caught by the slide and chambered. Mercer would have to pop out the bullet and refeed it manually.

He thought through all this even as he peeled Jordan off the floor and half dragged her into a classroom. They just reached cover when another burst of autofire raked the corridor, some rounds thudding into the classroom’s wooden door and others pinging off its frame. Mercer quickly noted that there were doors connecting this room to the next and, he assumed, to those farther down the hallway. This room was a chemistry lab, with long parallel rows of workstations stacked with beakers, pipette racks, and ceramic crucibles suspended over unlit Bunsen burners. He pressed Jordan flat to the floor behind one of the rows.

“Stay here.”

“Don’t worry,” she panted. “I’m never following you again.”

“Smartest thing you’ve said all day.”

The connecting door was closed but unlocked. Mercer first cleared his pistol’s jammed action and inserted another round into the chamber. He then thumbed all the remaining rounds from the defective magazine and held them ready in his left hand. He gave little thought to the fact he was facing a machine pistol with what amounted to a single-shot gun, and that his adversary knew he was armed. He needed answers, and taking this guy down was the only way he was going to get them.

He checked the next classroom before committing himself. It was a typical schoolroom, with a teacher’s desk and lectern in front of a blackboard that faced about twenty students’ desks. A few posters lined one wall while the other was windows looking out over a quad. Police cars were careening into view, their strobes flashing against the morning snow.

Mercer went on through the next room, and then the next. In this one, a clone of the previous, he could hear the roar of water still sluicing through the overhead pipes and discharging into what was presumably Abe Jacobs’s office. The gunman hadn’t fired again, and Mercer wondered if he was still waiting just beyond the veil of water. He wondered too why the gunmen had left a man behind. The only reason was that he and Jordan were the shooter’s intended quarry. The driver had to have warned the leader that he had been made, and a hasty trap had been set here at Abe’s office to not only destroy the scientist’s work but to take out whoever it was who’d been dogging them since Minnesota. The lone gunman could then escape in the pandemonium.

He had to give it to these guys. It was a good plan that very nearly worked. He was just about to go through to the next room when behind him he heard Jordan Weismann scream.

He’d been flanked!

Mercer whirled and ran back as hard as he could. He streaked through the intervening rooms without seeing them and burst back into the chemistry lab. For a moment it looked like one of the students had taken Jordan hostage. The gunman had a smooth baby face and a thatch of dark hair slicked down to his head by a dousing under the sprinklers. He looked no more than seventeen but was probably twenty or more. A silenced Mini Uzi dangled from a sling off his shoulder while he held a black automatic pistol to Jordan’s temple, his other arm snaked around her neck in a choke hold that barely allowed her toes to touch the floor. He doubtless expected Mercer to stop or at least slow his headlong charge.

The shooter was too young to have learned the lesson that you never play chicken with someone with nothing to lose.

Mercer kept coming at a full sprint. He watched the gunman’s eyes widen when he realized his tactical mistake, and he was just pulling his pistol from Jordan’s temple to aim at Mercer when Mercer brought his own gun to bear and fired the only round he would need. The 9mm bored a hole through the shooter’s forehead and erupted out of the back of his skull in a gout of pink and white and gray that splattered the wall behind them like an obscene imitation of a Rorschach test.

The gunman was punched back by the impact and nearly dragged Jordan to the floor as his body fell. She managed to disengage herself from the crumpling figure, and when she saw the ruin that was the back of his head she screamed into the echoes left in the gunshot’s wake.

Mercer ran to her and took her up in his arms, turning her so she couldn’t see the stain seeping from the corpse’s head into the tile floor. Over the shrieking fire alarm he told her she was okay…it would be okay…meaningless platitudes, but as so often in the past they did the trick. Jordan soon stopped shuddering and gave him a hard squeeze before straightening out of his embrace.

“That was a hell of a risk to take with my life,” she said, trying to sound tough, but she was obviously rattled and unsure whether to be grateful, angry, or to just give in to her terror.

“By the time I pulled the trigger, I was only about twelve feet away. I could have made that shot at twice the distance.”

“Who are you? Seriously. What geologist can shoot a gun like that?”

“One who spends too much time in dangerous places” was all Mercer had the time to tell her. “Someone must have heard the shot. The police are going to be swarming this building in minutes. Come on.”

They made their way down the hallway. Icy wind blew in from shattered windows, and there was no way to avoid ducking under the streaming sprinkler heads. The water felt like it was just a couple of degrees above freezing. Their leather jackets protected their bodies, but both had water streaming down their faces and under their collars after just a few seconds’ exposure. Mercer withheld telling Jordan that the dousing had washed some of the shooter’s blood and brain from the back of her coat.

Mercer had feared Abe’s office had taken the brunt of the makeshift explosive’s force but was pleased to find that the devastated room just off the hallway seemed to be a receptionist’s office, with banks of three-drawer filing cabinets, a sofa and coffee table, and a large desk that had once been covered in papers. Those files lay sodden and charred like giant confetti all over the antechamber’s floor. The sofa had been blown against the wall and flipped, while the remains of the coffee table were four stainless-steel legs and a metal framework standing in a sea of broken glass. The fire the gunmen had hoped to start never took root. Even without the multiple sprinkler heads pouring a constant rain into the space, the finishes and furnishings were too institutional to burn.

Each of the three doors opposite the entrance was made of solid wood, and one of them remained locked. The other two had been ripped off their hinges by automatic fire, the area around their handles shredded by high-powered rounds until the doors simply fell open. Each office beyond had windows that overlooked a parking lot, and each had been ransacked enough to prove that it hadn’t belonged to Abe Jacobs. In one, Mercer saw the framed diplomas for a Professor Judith Murray. The other office was the work space for Dr. Anthony Wotz. Both rooms had suffered blast damage, ruined windows especially, but it was the gushing sprinklers that had caused the most destruction.

Mercer assumed that his and Jordan’s arrival had stopped the gunmen from accessing the last office, Abe’s no doubt. They must have known his office was located off the reception area but didn’t know the exact suite number, and it was dumb luck they chose the wrong two doors first. A rare piece of misfortune for the gunmen, and Mercer knew well that fortune not only favored the bold but also the prepared.

He loaded another round into the P-38 and held the weapon at an angle at the spot where the lock entered the jam outside of Abe’s office and pulled the trigger. As before, the report was an assault on the ears far beyond even the wail of the alarm. Mercer kicked open the door and stepped into Abe Jacobs’s campus office.

The room was packed floor to ceiling with boxes of papers and books. More paper spilled off a couch onto the floor in a long avalanche of data and notations. Abe’s desk was buried under heaps of scientific journals and spiral-bound notebooks. An ancient computer monitor took up one corner of the desk, with a monstrous CPU sitting on the floor next to it, twenty-year-old tech that would not recover from the shower of water pulsing from the overhead pipes.

Mercer didn’t know what to expect when he’d gotten here. A clue perhaps about what was going on. Instead he faced a mountain of possible clues. Any one of the notebooks, any single article in one of the hundreds of journals, could indicate what had gotten Abe and the others killed. He had first feared there wouldn’t be enough to go on from here. Now he realized there was too much information to sift through in any meaningful time frame. Even if the authorities gave him unfettered access starting at this moment, it would take a month to sort all the boxes and files and tote bags and baskets and piles of paperwork that Abe had surrounded himself with.

There was only one logical move he could make since he and Jordan were out of time. He grabbed the trash can that had sat next to Abe’s office chair. He dumped out about a gallon of water and saw that the can was about half full of random papers and one blackened banana peel. Whatever was in there likely included the last items his mentor was working on before he left for Minnesota. If Mercer was going to catch a quick break, he figured it was in Abe Jacobs’s trash can.

“We’ve got to go.”

“The trash,” Jordan said archly. “That’s all you’re taking?”

“Feel free to load up on old copies of the International Journal of Powder Metallurgy or some of these other outdated rags,” Mercer replied as he retreated back through the reception room and into the corridor. By now he was soaked to the skin and shivering. He looked back. Jordan was right behind him, her hair plastered to her head and her lips white and bloodless. The phrase “drowned rat” came to mind. He imagined he didn’t look any better.

Rather than retrace their steps down to the atrium, they went deeper into the building. Mercer took a moment to hide Abe’s pistol above the ceiling tiles in a classroom at the end of the corridor. He also emptied the trash can and stuffed the sopping contents minus the banana peel under his coat and led Jordan down a set of fire stairs to the main floor. There they found an emergency exit and stepped out into the chaos of a campus on lockdown.

“Keep your hands up and limp like you hurt your leg,” Mercer warned as they started walking toward a parking lot.

“What? Why?”

“So the police don’t shoot us and so we can get a ride out of here before anyone figures out we’re suspects in all this.”

“But we didn’t do anything wrong,” Jordan protested. Then her voice rose to a cry when she tried to lift her arms over her head. “Oh, shit. Ouch.”

“What is it?” Mercer asked, instantly concerned. He turned to see her beautiful dark eyes widening in pain and confusion. She couldn’t raise her left arm above her shoulder.

“I don’t know. My arm. I did something to it. It’s killing me.”

He looked around. In a distant parking lot, police cars were blocking access to the science building, while behind the cordon, ambulances and other emergency vehicles were lining up to treat the unknown number of victims. A uniformed policewoman standing next to her cruiser spotted them and started waving them to her. Her partner covered the building from the other side of the black-and-white with a twelve-gauge pump action up to his shoulder, as if a shotgun would be any use at that range.

Mercer studied Jordan’s arm for a second. There was no outward sign of damage. Her scarlet leather jacket hadn’t been holed by a bullet, nor was it camouflaging any sign of blood. He suspected that when he tackled her upstairs he had bruised or dislocated her shoulder or broken her collarbone. None of these conditions was life threatening. “Ignore it for now,” he said as kindly as he could. “I know it hurts, but we need to get out of here as quickly as we can or we’ll be stuck for days. Okay?”

She bit her lower lip, a gesture Mercer found irresistible in women. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but she nodded bravely. As more adrenaline wore off her pain would only increase.

Mercer took on an exaggerated limp as they shuffled first past the snowdrifted lawn surrounding the science center and then into the parking lot, where the police had lined up.

“Hurry,” the female cop said as they approached, her hair tucked under her peaked cap and her eyes hidden behind mirrored shades. She directed them to the back of her car so that its bulk was between them and the building with its unknown number of shooters.

“I hurt my knee,” Mercer said as soon as they were safely behind the cruiser.

“What happened?” The cop ignored his claim of injury.

“I don’t know.” Mercer spoke fast and put a high-pitched manic edge to his voice as if he was barely keeping it together. “We were on the second floor. We heard something downstairs and then this big explosion. We had to run past the office that blew up and then we heard gunfire. Well, I think it was gunfire — it sounded weird, muted like. Well, then two big booms. Bang, and then a few seconds later bang again. We were in the stairwell by then. That’s where I fell and hit my knee. I tripped Jordan here. She says her shoulder’s hurt too.” He turned to her. “I am so sorry, Jord.”

“We’re out and safe,” Jordan said, rubbing his arm as if he needed soothing to calm down. “That’s all that matters.”

“Did you see anyone or anything?” the woman cop asked. She eyed Mercer as if he were a suspect. For his part, Mercer slowly unzipped his jacket so she could see the strange bulkiness underneath was caused by the batch of wet papers from Abe’s trash.

“No. Nothing.” Mercer acted as though he just realized the papers he had tried to protect were sopping. “Goddamnit. I need these.”

“Please, sir, stay focused,” the officer said.

Jordan piped up, “Um, like, my arm is freaking killing me.” She rubbed the joint theatrically.

“We’ll take care of you in a second, ma’am,” the cop said, and turned back to Mercer. “Are you sure you didn’t see anything? We have reports of a car chase across campus.”

Mercer kept his attention on the wet bundle of papers and answered distractedly, “Ah, no we didn’t see anything. Like I said, we were in a second-floor chem lab. There was some kind of disturbance downstairs and then this really loud explosion. Jordan and I ran for it as soon as the sprinklers put out the little bit of fire that was in the hallway. Then the gunshots and we fell in the stairs and now we’re here.” He looked at her with the innocence of a child.

For her part, the cop seemed a little less suspicious of this slightly hysterical man and the woman who needed to keep touching him so he’d stay calm. In her non — politically correct mind she figured he was gay and the woman had more balls than him. “Do you have ID, sir?”

“Upstairs in my briefcase,” Mercer said without hesitation.

The officer was about to ask a follow-up question when her radio blared. She listened to the acronym-laced call and spoke into her shoulder mic. “No, nothing since. Just students and faculty exiting the building.” She listened again. “Roger that.” She made a dismissive gesture in Mercer and Jordan’s direction. “Get back behind the fire engines. There are EMTs and ambulances to take you to Presbyterian if your injuries are bad enough.”

“Thank you,” Jordan said. She looped her good arm under Mercer’s shoulder, pressing up against his body so she could help him walk behind the police barricade.

“You’ll get an Oscar for sure,” Mercer whispered into her ear as they struggled another block away from the science center.

“I played Mrs. Higgins in high school,” Jordan told him.

“Who?”

“My Fair Lady? Mrs. Higgins? Henry Higgins’s mother?” Seeing she wasn’t getting anywhere, Jordan gave up. “Your acting wasn’t too bad, either,” she said.

“I was channeling my inner Harvey Weinstein from Independence Day.”

“That was Harvey Fierstein,” Jordan corrected him. Her face was pale and not from the cold. She couldn’t stop herself from cradling her bad arm with her good. “Harvey Weinstein is a movie producer.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” By the time they reached the rows of ambulances and fire engines swarming with emergency personnel, Mercer had all but abandoned his fake limp so that he wasn’t drawing attention to himself. Jordan shivered against him, and even he had to admit the chill was creeping into his bones. They needed dry clothes.

A pair of EMTs saw them coming and marched to them with blankets ready to throw over their shoulders. “Are you two okay?” one asked. He was short, with a cheesy mustache but a genuinely concerned expression.

“Hit my knee,” Mercer said quickly, “but it’s feeling better. Jordan’s the worst off. She has a sore shoulder. Not sure why.”

At that the two paramedics all but ignored Mercer and bustled Jordan to the ambulance’s open doors, where heat blasted from the vents in an almost visible wave. They sat her on a gurney, and the medics peeled back the blanket and started manipulating her shoulder joint, asking her over and over what hurt, where, and how badly. While they worked on her, Mercer found spare scrubs in a locker next to the emergency vehicle’s side door. No one was paying him any attention, so he sat on the threshold and pulled off his boots and jeans. Even exposed to the cold air his skin felt warmer being out of the wet denim. He slid on two layers of the thin cotton pants, drawing the waist strings tight. He used a pair of ACE bandages to fashion himself some socks and soon had his boots back on. Moments later he had a scrub top on under his sweater and jacket and felt almost human again. The scrubs had been sealed in a clear plastic bag. He wrapped the still-wet papers inside it before sticking them inside his coat along with all the stuff he’d had in his jeans pockets. The jeans he folded into a bundle around his damp socks.

He approached the EMTs still huddled over Jordan. “What’s the verdict?”

“If she’d let us cut away her jacket we can confirm,” the mustached paramedic said, “but I think her collarbone is broken.”

“Hospital, then?” Mercer asked.

“Most likely.”

Jordan chimed in, “Listen, guys, I don’t doubt that it is broken, but I don’t want you wasting your time on me.”

She looked past the two hovering EMTs and gave Mercer a wink. He could have kissed her. She intuitively knew they couldn’t be taken to the ER in an ambulance because there would be no escape once they were logged into the hospital’s system.

She went on, “After an explosion like that there are probably a lot of hurt kids in there, and the gunmen are still on the loose. I don’t want to be responsible for some injured cop or gut-shot student not making it to the hospital because I took his or her ambulance.”

The men were obviously torn between helping an attractive, though mildly injured woman and the possibility of saving a life during a crisis. In the end, many EMTs are adrenaline junkies and want to be there for the dramatic rescue, so after exchanging a knowing look with his partner the spokesman of the pair said, “As long as you promise to go straight to the hospital.” He glanced at Mercer. “You have a car?”

“Two-minute walk from here,” Mercer assured him, not adding that it was currently half submerged in the pond, and cops were probably approaching the stranded rental as if it were John Dillinger’s getaway car.

“Okay. You know where Presbyterian Memorial is?”

“I was born there,” Mercer lied.

The EMT nodded. “Take her straight there. If she thinks her arm’s sore now, give it more time and it’ll get worse without treatment.”

They swaddled Jordan in several blankets and helped her out of their ambulance. “Thanks,” she said. “You guys are wonderful.”

“Just take it easy from now on.”

She rewarded them with another smile and let Mercer lead her away. Out of earshot she said, “We don’t have a car and you have no idea where the hospital is. I’ve stuck with you this far, but I am not kidding when I say my arm is really hurting.”

“Trust me,” Mercer said. “We’ll be on our way in no time.”

News vans were starting to pull onto the campus but were being held back behind a second police cordon. Mercer and Jordan passed through this one without being questioned and were soon in another parking lot where students were aimlessly milling around. He approached one kid sitting in a parked car with its engine running. The door was open while he listened to a live news broadcast from a radio reporter standing about twenty feet away.

“How would you like to be a hero?” Mercer asked when he was within speaking distance.

The student looked up at them. “Huh?”

“A friend of ours was just taken to the hospital, but we weren’t allowed to ride in the ambulance with her and we’re hoping you can give us a ride.”

“Where’d they take her? Presbyterian?” the kid asked. He was clean-shaven and dressed in an expensive overcoat, although his jeans were ratty and his shirt was wrinkled. Mercer guessed the coat was a recent Christmas gift. The white late-model BMW station wagon was likely a hand-me-down from his mom.

Mercer shook his head. “No, they mentioned another hospital. I’m sorry, we’re not from around here.”

“Presbyterian is the closest, but there’s also St. Agnes about ten miles farther east.”

“That’s the one!” Mercer crowed. “St. Agnes. That’s where they took her. The ambulance guys said something about an orthopedic specialist on staff there.”

“Please,” Jordan said, giving him a pout with promise.

Any doubt the kid had vanished in her liquid dark eyes. “Sure,” he said. “Um, hold it a second, I need to clean up a little.” He shoved used takeout wrappers and water bottles from the front seat into a plastic FoodLand bag and tossed it into the back cargo area. Mercer helped situate Jordan in the front seat and got her belted, explaining to the kid, who said his name was Alex, that she hurt her arm in the stampede outside the science building.

A minute later they pulled out through Hardt College’s main gate, and thirty minutes after that Jordan was explaining to an emergency room doctor at St. Agnes Hospital that she had slipped on some ice in her driveway and she thought she had broken her arm. When the subject of the attack on the local school came up, she and Mercer pled ignorance. Two hours later, Mercer delivered Jordan, in a fresh white sling, into a newly rented Hertz SUV he had ordered sent to the hospital parking lot.

She was on enough painkillers that she didn’t respond when he asked her if she wanted to get anything out of her car. He figured she shouldn’t be alone for the next couple of days, but Mercer wasn’t about to hang around Kellenburg, Ohio, playing nursemaid, so he just let her sleep and turned the Chevy in the direction of his home near Washington, D.C. When she was up to it, he’d get her back to pick up her car somehow.

He placed a mental wager that by the time he arrived at his brownstone, the FBI would have made the connection between the parallel attacks by running the registration for the vehicle he’d abandoned on the campus pond.

He made a call to an old friend, hopefully to forestall a trip to the Hoover Building. Being proactive, rather than reactive, was a philosophy that had always served him well.