The Lightning Stones

by Jack Du Brul

  It was over in a violent instant. The house was gone, and Mercer was left lying partially in an overturned bathtub on a rain-lashed bridge, with a once tranquil little stream raging less than a foot below the span. Beyond the bridge were islands of civilization sticking up from the floodwater—telephone poles like lonely sentries, buildings with water up to their eaves, and some buried even deeper so all he could see were their triangular roof peaks. Great swaths of the levee that had once protected the town from the Mississippi were missing, and the river was freed once again to flow where it wanted.

  Unlike the levee, the bridge was one of the highest vantage points that wasn’t in danger of collapsing. Mercer was safe for the moment but was frozen to the core, so undoing his belt and using it to lash himself to the bridge took all his concentration, and many minutes longer than it should have. Once he was secure he replaced the ball cap from his pocket on his head to prevent a little heat loss, and soon felt his body begin to shut itself down, as he knew it would. He became drowsy, and no amount of anger or need for revenge could prevent his lids from closing and his mind from turning to blackness. Mercer went slack, and would have eventually been washed from the bridge by a surge of water had he not had the foresight to tie himself off.

  —

  He woke three hours later, when the rain had finally stopped and the Army National Guard had launched a fleet of search and rescue helicopters. It was nearing four in the afternoon. The sun wasn’t exactly shining, but the day had brightened enough for the pilot of one of the Blackhawks to see a man roped to the bridge truss. He thought it was a corpse until the man raised a hand and started waving. Ten minutes later the rescue jumper came back aboard with the soaking man secured to a harness.

  A paramedic guided Mercer to a bench seat in the noisy cabin as the chopper lifted clear to continue the search. The medic tucked a Mylar space blanket around Mercer’s shoulders and said, “Apart from the fact you’re freezing and wearing Iowa State colors, are you all right?”

  “Let me guess,” Mercer managed to say with quivering lips and a shuddering jaw. “You’re all U of I fans?”

  “Hell no! We’re from the Illinois National Guard. We’re all Fighting Illini.”

  They were a more hated rival in the Big Ten for Mercer’s Penn State Nittany Lions than even the Hawkeyes. “Out of the frying pan…”

  He did manage to tell his rescuers about Veronica Butler and the one surviving armed man, knowing that making the report would lead to hours of questioning and the need to write up everything in triplicate—but he needed them to be on the lookout for the old woman and wary of the shooter at the same time.

  Within an hour, the chopper had picked up a full load of survivors from various roofs and trees and returned to the Illinois side of the river, where Mercer was soon warmed, hydrated, and settled in a National Guard tent. No trace of Roni or the armed man had been found. The gunman Mercer nailed with the shotgun was fished out of the Mississippi four miles downstream when his body had snagged on a channel marker. The injuries to the body were consistent with Mercer’s story, but without corroborating witnesses he was still treated with suspicion. Mercer was not exactly a prisoner in the Guard encampment, but he hadn’t been allowed to leave either.

  It wasn’t until a few hours later that his name was noticed by someone in the D.C. FBI office, and a call was made. A corporal walked into the tent with a cell phone and handed it over.

  “What’s this?” Mercer asked.

  “Get-out-of-jail-free card. My CO says you can now leave anytime.”

  He took the phone. “This is Mercer.”

  “Is there always so much death and destruction in your wake?” Special Agent Kelly Hepburn asked.

  Mercer grinned, tired and thankful, and said, “Yeah, on most days there is.”

  19

  With the area under evacuation orders, Niklaas Coetzer had had no problem finding a house to break into with his prisoner. He’d motored back almost to where they’d started before he spotted a place that was set far back from the flooding stream. Coetzer had grounded the Zodiac and hauled the nearly catatonic Roni Butler onto dry land. He used a folding knife to slash the inflatable’s remaining air cells and dragged the tattered remains of the boat with him to be disposed of later on.

  The farmhouse was larger than the one Roni had owned, a two-story with a minefield of children’s toys littering the lawn—bikes, miniature tractors, and the wrecked shell of a wading pool. The front door, unsurprisingly, wasn’t locked.

  “This is Bob and Ellie Loomis’s place,” Roni said when she finally realized where she was. “They’ve got kids. What are you planning on?”

  “I need dry clothes and transportation, and you need to tell me what you told him.”

  “I ain’t telling you nothing,” Roni snapped at him.

  He backhanded her so hard that her head snapped around and her lip split. “Yes, you will.”

  She laughed and thumbed the trace of blood from her mouth. “That the best you got, you foreign prick? I had a husband who would kick my ass for days straight. Gave me black eyes so often people thought I was part raccoon, and more broken bones than I can count. You better step up your game if you think a little love tap like that’s gonna make me talk.”

  “Shut up,” he snarled.

  “Or what? You’ll hit me again, you dickless asshole? You beat up old women? How badly did you screw up your life to end up here? Ever think about that?”

  “I said shut up!” Coetzer roared and jammed the barrel of his automatic pistol hard enough under Roni’s chin to force her onto her tiptoes.

  She saw the madness in his eyes and knew if she so much as swallowed he’d pull the trigger. A tense second passed before the South African pulled his weapon from her throat and pushed her farther into the house. It was dank from the rain and dark from the lack of electricity. Light filtering in through the windows was weak and watery.

  He thrust her into a kitchen chair. The table had been cleared prior to the Loomis family’s evacuation, but the dirty dishes were left in the sink and the plastic tray attached to a high chair near the table was littered with uneaten Cheerios. Coetzer rummaged through the drawers; he didn’t find tape, but a ball of string would suffice.

  Roni thought about resisting, but in the end she let him tie her to the chair. The twine was thin, so he had to wrap it around her wrists and ankles multiple times to make certain she couldn’t move.

  “I am sorry about this,” he said as he worked. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. But hey, your friend from the library? We tied him up just like this—he’s fine and you will be too. Just tell me what you told Philip Mercer and I will leave.”

  He wasn’t looking at her when he was talking, but Roni could still tell he was lying. Sherm Smithson had told her that the men who trussed him up and tossed him into the back of his closet had worn masks the entire time. But Mercer’s presence at her house had altered their plans, and neither one had covered his face. And this man was so easily identifiable that she knew he couldn’t let her live.

  “As to your earlier question, about what made me the way I am? That’s a story that started with my grandfather, Piet Coetzer. He was an expert marksman who would have represented South Africa at the Olympics in Berlin. When the war broke out a couple of years later, our country narrowly sided with the Allied cause rather than stay neutral. My paps knew his duty. He became famous for training thousands of soldiers how to shoot, so they could join the Allies in defeating the Nazis. He even wrote a training manual. He was a great man, my grandfather, and he inspired me to join the military when I was of age.

  “Only problem was…I accidentally shot and killed a man during a training exercise. He was a black man, and he outranked me. This was right after the blacks took over my country, and so I was charged with murder. It was race politics bullshit and everyone knew it, but I had to stand trial. They acquitted me, and yet I was forced out of the army anyway. So I became a mercenary. You k
now what this means?”

  “You’re a hired gun. A thug.”

  The man sucked at his teeth. It was a nervous tic she’d noticed since their time in the boat.

  He nodded. “Now we’re called contractors…and we’re paid a king’s ransom to risk our necks so your soldiers don’t have to fight. But back then…yeah, we were hired guns. I worked for some good people, mostly as a bodyguard and doing hostage rescue. I never shot first and I never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me. I lived by a soldier’s code.”

  “And soldiers slap old women?” Roni sneered.

  “One patrol went horribly wrong,” he replied with a trace of bitter regret. “We were on a mission to rescue three aid workers who’d been snatched from a bush hospital, when we came across a camp in the jungle. I believed these were our kidnappers, and we were putting the men under observation when the fighting started. I don’t know which side fired first, but it turned into a fookin’ mess…guys were dropping left and right. That’s the only time in all the years before or since that I ever got shot. A few of my mates were dead and a couple of us were pretty banged up, me included, so we retreated back to the hospital to report what had happened.

  “Turns out they weren’t the terrorists we were looking for—just a bunch of zoo types looking for monkeys or apes or some goddamn thing. They patched me up as best they could, but the police wanted to question me about the incident. I had to get out of the country, and by the time I found another doctor to look at my injury, well, there wasn’t much he could do. After that, jobs became harder to find and I became a lot less choosy…and eventually, as you said, I became a hired ‘thug.’ ”

  Coetzer cinched the final knot and regarded Roni with hard eyes. “So, what did you tell Mercer?”

  “I gave him my peach cobbler recipe,” she replied, without missing a beat.

  “Lady, I don’t want to hurt you but I will just the same. I work for a very big corporation now, and there’s a lot of money riding on the success of my mission. The kind of money even rich people kill over. Billions of dollars. Tell me and I’ll go away, and I’ll make sure you are never bothered again.”

  “You start with flour and shortening, and don’t dream of using anything but fresh peaches.”

  “What is it with you pigheaded Americans?”

  “I’ve seen your face,” Roni said. “I know your voice. You are going to kill me as soon as I tell you what you want. Sherman’s girlfriend freed him already, and he called me when you were outside my house. He told me you and your sick little partner wore masks. Now that I can identify you, you have to kill me. I might be old but I want to keep on living, so I’m going to prolong this for as long as I can. And the whole time you’re hurting me, the pain will be my reminder that I am still alive. You’ll also need baking powder, ground cinnamon—”

  The next slap was harder than anything her late husband had ever doled out, and Veronica Butler realized she wasn’t going to make it nearly as long as she’d first thought.

  —

  Twenty minutes later, Niklaas Coetzer hid the remains of the Zodiac underneath a rusted car in the barn behind the farmhouse. The car itself was covered by a tarp that looked like it hadn’t been removed in a generation. The old woman he buried in a stand of trees about two hundred yards from the road. The rain had turned the ground into a soupy mess that made digging difficult, so the grave was much shallower than he would have liked.

  On the other hand, he figured that once the evacuees returned, they would care more about rebuilding their lives than searching for the body of their elderly neighbor who had refused to evacuate. If by some miracle Philip Mercer survived, he would suspect what had happened to her, and he might be able to galvanize a search, but ultimately to what end? Coetzer himself would be long gone, and what the Butler woman had told him meant the trail for the last of the mineral had gone cold for them both. The mission was over.

  He scoped out another four houses until he found another one that hadn’t been destroyed by the flood. There was no car in the driveway, but in the barn he found a small off-road buggy with knobby tires and a fifteen-horse engine. The key was in the ignition.

  Coetzer motored out of the area heading west, away from the Mississippi and the rescue efforts that would be launched as soon as the rain let up, and a little more than an hour later he came across a town large enough to have a bus terminal. He hid the ATV and joined a dozen other wet-weather refugees who boarded the next Greyhound, not knowing or caring its destination so long as it took him away.

  Tradecraft dictated he switch buses a couple of times before he eventually found himself in Dallas, Texas. He booked himself into an anonymous hotel near the airport, took one of the longest showers of his life, and slept for twelve straight hours. When he woke, he ate breakfast in his room while his clothes were being laundered, feeling very much like a new man.

  Only then did he check in with Roland d’Avejan. As expected, his employer wasn’t pleased with the news Coetzer related.

  “Amelia Earhart?” d’Avejan scoffed after spewing profanities for a solid minute. “She had to be lying.”

  “That’s what she said, and by that point she was no longer capable of holding anything back from me.”

  There was a pause. Coetzer could sense that the Frenchman wanted to ask how he could be certain but was hesitant to know the details. Instead he asked, “What about the American who has been such a thorn in our side?”

  “Philip Mercer? I have every reason to believe he is dead, meneer.”

  “But you did not see him die?”

  “That is correct. The last time I saw him he was trapped in a house that was being swept down a river. Moments after I left him I saw the house smash into a bridge. It was totally destroyed. However, until his body is recovered I will always assume that he somehow managed to survive.”

  “Your famous caution?” This was said with some snide derision.

  “It has kept me alive while so many of my comrades have fallen,” Coetzer replied without rancor.

  He recognized that his employer was still seething mad and just wanted to goad somebody so he would feel in control again. Coetzer kept regular tabs on d’Avejan, and several other key people at Eurodyne, in case he ever needed leverage. He was aware, therefore, of d’Avejan’s escalating OCD and suspected that as soon as the call ended, the Frenchman would step into his en suite shower and sear his body with custom-made acidic soap. He supposed this behavior was preferable to beating his wife or mistress, but the fetish unnerved Coetzer.

  D’Avejan grunted. “I guess we will have to make do with the sample passed down to me through my family, and the shard you recovered in the mine in Minnesota. Along with the artificial crystal we managed to grow in the lab we can go forward, but it will take a great deal more time for the effects to become noticeable. And that always leads to the possibility that we will be discovered.”

  “That explains the need for the Zhukovsky?” Coetzer knew the true purpose behind the shell company called Luck Dragon had been to shield the stockholders from knowing they had purchased a mothballed Soviet-era research ship. “Because she can remain at sea she will be much harder to detect than a land-based antenna array.”

  “That is correct,” d’Avejan said. “Also, she is nuclear powered, so she is one hundred percent self-sufficient. No one can track her power usage from a grid and ask why we are using so many megawatts of electricity. Once we start operations, the change will be slow but steady, and most importantly the atmosphere will react exactly as the climate models predicted. In ten months or so, the world will once again clamor for Eurodyne’s products.”

  Coetzer allowed d’Avejan’s words to echo uninterrupted for a moment. “Beaming energy into the sky to raise the world’s average temperature seems dangerous to me, meneer.”

  “The energy itself does nothing. The change is created in the way the energy is channeled through the crystals and affects the magnetic fields around the earth. By marginal
ly strengthening the fields, we will allow fewer cosmic rays to penetrate the atmosphere and help seed cloud formation. Because of their albedo properties, clouds reflect sunlight back into space and reduce planetary heat absorption. Fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds, which means Earth’s temperature will start to rise after a nearly two-decade-long pause. Scientists have been unable to explain why this happened, but now they won’t have to.

  “Climate change will once again become a dominant issue, and not just among the Western elites. When the thermometer really starts to rise, everyone will demand their governments do something. Europe, America. China. It doesn’t matter where. They will all feel the heat, so to speak. Coal markets will collapse while investments in wind and solar will double, triple even, and Eurodyne will be right there to fill the need.

  “But more important than our stock price is the fact that mankind will actually confront the realities of global warming and deal with the issue once and for all. Levels of carbon pollution will actually go down, and the catastrophic rise in temperature so long predicted will never materialize. When enough of the world’s energy needs are met with renewables, we will dial back the beam transmitted from the Zhukovsky, cloud cover will return to normal, and the excess heat we helped generate will dissipate. Like a vaccine, we will give the world a mild dose of global warming so that nations can build a real defense against it.”

  “So there is no real danger?”

  “I am not a scientist,” d’Avejan said. “But I’ve been told the Americans have a system called HAARP in Alaska that fiddles with the upper atmosphere and magnetic fields all the time to no great detriment. I have been assured our system is not dissimilar. It would have been better if we had been able to find the original cache of gems, but our artificial ones will have to do.”