by Jack Du Brul
“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 O
hio. 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 t
he 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.”
