by Jack Du Brul
“Isn’t Ibriham Ahmad, Skenderbeg guru and professor at the University of Istanbul,” Harry finished for him.
“Who was he?” Cali asked.
Harry shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. It’s not like any of us asked him for ID.”
“Toss me the phone, will you, Harry?” Mercer rifled through his wallet for a slip of paper. He held it up. “This is the phone number of the nurses’ station in the Aswân hospital.” Mercer dialed and let it ring for a minute before someone picked up. It took a few moments to find someone who spoke English. Harry smoked through a cigarette. Cali went to the kitchen to get some ice for Mercer’s knee. “I’d like to speak with Devrin Egemen,” Mercer said when an English-speaking doctor came on the line. “He’s a young Turkish man brought in with a gunshot to the leg a couple of days ago.” Mercer shook his head as he listened. He thanked the doctor and hung up. “Devrin left the hospital yesterday without permission. They don’t know where he went.”
After a pause Cali asked, “What does this mean?”
“Other than the fact he sacrificed himself to stop Poli and Al-Salibi,” Mercer replied, “we’ll never know who he was.”
“Consider this,” Harry said. “They guarded their secret so closely that the world expert didn’t know about them. Now they’ve gone back to ground.”
“Our government is negotiating the location of Alexander’s tomb with the Egyptians so we get the alembic, so hopefully they’ll never need to emerge again.”
“Well I do have something else,” Harry said in a brighter tone. “After I transcribed Chester Bowie’s notes about adamantine I finished the rest of his letter. As we all know he was partially right about the mythological ore and was dead bang on about how the ancient Greeks created mythological monsters out of fossil bones. He has another theory that might be worth checking out.”
“What’s that?” Mercer asked warily.
“He believed that the story of Jason and the Argonauts is true, sort of. He believed that the Golden Fleece Jason sought was actually a treasure barge used to pay for the protection for a queen of Thessaly’s children when she sent them to live in the kingdom of Colchis. He thinks the barge sank in a storm on the Black Sea off the coast of present-day Turkey.”
Mercer and Cali broke out in laughter.
“What?” Harry said, looking from one to the other.
“No more adventures, my friend. Chester Bowie’s got his place in the history books. If someone else wants to prove the rest of his ideas they’re welcome to it. I’m done.”
“That goes double for me,” Cali agreed. “I want nothing more to do with Bowie, ancient legends, or myths.”
“Hey, come on,” Harry wheedled. “There could be a fortune out there for us. Think about it, a treasure barge loaded with loot. We’d be rich.”
“I’ve got everything I want right here.” Mercer put his arm around Cali as he spoke. She nestled into his embrace.
“Oh great.” Harry threw up his hands. “You end up with the girl and I’ve got nothing.”
“You’ve got the satisfaction of knowing you helped mankind,” Cali said sweetly.
“That don’t pay the bar tabs,” he groused.
“And I’ll pay you back the twenty grand I borrowed in New Jersey,” Mercer added.
Harry suddenly looked like he wanted to be anywhere but in this room. “Ah, you, ah, don’t have to bother.”
Trepidation crept into Mercer’s voice. “Why? What did you do?”
“You know I was on a roll, right, at the craps table, I mean, and if you’re on a streak you keep going, right? Well, Tiny knows a guy who floats a game. It was a sure thing. I couldn’t lose so I sort of borrowed something of yours for collateral.”
“You didn’t?”
“I did.”
“Did what?” Cali asked, switching attention between the two men.
Harry looked at her with an expression more pitiful than anything Drag was capable of. “I used Mercer’s Jag to cover my marker.” He turned to Mercer. “If it makes you feel any better I lost the rest of my thirty grand, too. Besides, Ira promised to cover all your expenses. We can get your car back no problem, or better yet buy a new one. And I swear on my soul Tiny and I will never borrow it, either.”
Mercer’s head was cradled in his hands. “Harry, when the vodka and Percocets wear off, you and I are going to have a very long talk about boundaries—like how I need to set some. Drinking twenty grand worth of my booze over the years isn’t the same as hawking my car.” He looked at his old friend with a rueful smile. “And you don’t have a soul.”
Knowing he’d be forgiven, Harry’s old face scrunched up in a matching grin. He lofted his highball in a salute. “You’re a prince and I don’t care what anyone else says about you.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Cali said. They both downed their cocktails and as Cali went behind the bar to recharge their glasses she said, “There’s something I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?” Mercer asked.
“We’re pretty sure the Janissaries sank the Wetherby on the Niagara River but we discounted them being behind the destruction of the Hindenburg. Was it the Russians who blew it up or the Nazis themselves who sabotaged it?”
“I’m afraid that’s one more mystery piled up on all the rest. Hell, it really could have been an accident after all.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Not really. I’ve never liked coincidences. Someone wanted to stop Chester Bowie from telling the world about the plutonium. We’ll just never know who.”
Postscript
May 6, 1937
Princeton, New Jersey
The rain continued to fall as evening turned to night. It wasn’t a fresh spring storm but something darker and uglier that kept people indoors and huddled under blankets. The residential street on Princeton’s campus was deserted. The only motion was the swaying of naked branches and the flutter of sodden leaves stripped from the trees by the wind.
A shadow detached itself from where it had cowered behind a parked car, and approached a white two-story house. Its street number, 112, was affixed to the steps leading up to the broad front porch. The home was an unassuming Greek revival with black shutters and just a tiny patch of front lawn. The man who approached had never been there but had corresponded with its occupant numerous times.
He knocked on the door. His suit was soaked through and because he wore no hat his longish hair hung past his collar in greasy strings.
A woman opened the door. She was in her fifties and slender, with dark hair just turning to gray and a pinched, severe expression. She had the look of a guard dog and said nothing when she eyed the unkempt stranger with the thick mustache and crazed eyes.
“Is he here? I must speak to him.” The stranger spoke in a heavy accent that was more guttural than the woman’s native German.
“He is not seeing anyone tonight. Go away.” She made to close the door and the stranger blocked her by slamming his hand against the wood and sending the door crashing back to its stops. Glass rattled in the windowpanes.
“You cannot come in,” she said forcefully.
The stranger ignored her protests and stepped into the entryway, his shoes squelching on the floor. He looked around, his eyes narrowing. “Are you here?” he called.
A gentle voice called from further in the house, “Wer ist, Helen?”
“A man, Herr Doctor,” Helen Dukas said in German. “I do not know who he is and I don’t like the look of him.”
The most celebrated scientist of his day emerged from the kitchen wearing baggy trousers and a cardigan. His hair was a wild tangle atop his head and he smelled of pipe tobacco. While he was normally an affable man, there was concern and sorrow etched around his eyes and mouth.
He studied the stranger dripping rainwater on his carpet but didn’t seem to recognize him. Then his eyes went wide as he realized who the man was.
“How could you do it, Nikola?” Albert Ein
stein thundered in an accusatory tone.
Nikola Tesla met his piercing gaze. “I had to stop you, Albert. I couldn’t let you unleash that horror on the world.”
“As soon as I heard the news on the radio I knew you had done it.”
“I know an anarchist, a Croatian immigrant who was more than willing to help me,” Tesla said defiantly. “You left me no choice. Writing to you about natural transuranic elements was just an intellectual exercise. You were never supposed to try to find them.”
“Are you mad?” Even as he said it Einstein knew the Serb inventor was. “Do you think blowing up an airship full of innocent people will stop others from seeking out such elements? My God, man, in a few years we will be able to create them in a laboratory.”
“To what end?” Tesla shot back. “We both know there can be only one outcome of such research. You and I are the only two people in the world who can foretell the death and destruction. We can not spread that knowledge.”
“Nikola, you must understand that a war is coming, a war for the very soul of humanity. We have to be ready. It is only a matter of time before Hitler grabs more territory Germany lost after the Great War, and a clash between America and Japan over the Pacific is inevitable. Teller and Fermi and Szilard and I have seen this coming and have been working on a plan so we have a weapon before the Nazis. We could stop such a world war from even starting with a single demonstration of its power but we need that plutonium. Otherwise it might take us a decade to create a bomb. We were planning on telling the President as soon as we verified the sample Bowie was bringing us from Africa. If we started work right away Teller thinks that with a couple pounds of plutonium we could have a working weapon by 1939. Now we must wait and pray that somehow Bowie managed to ship some ore separately. If he didn’t then all is lost because only he knew the mine’s location.
“Without an atomic deterrent there is nothing to stop that Austrian paper hanger from taking over all of Europe or the militarists in Japan from continuing their expansion. You not only killed the passengers of the Hindenburg, you’ve sentenced millions more to die needlessly.”
Already close to the breaking point because others had profited from his genius while he languished in a Manhattan cold-water flat, Tesla said nothing, his lips working like a fish gulping air.
A string of saliva dripped unnoticed from the corner of his mouth as the enormity of what he’d done echoed in his fractured mind and the last vestiges of sanity slipped quietly away. He started to sob.
“Come inside and warm up,” Einstein said softly. “Let us get you some dry clothes.”
He placed a hand on Tesla’s shoulder. Tesla shoved him away, his expression feral. He said nothing as he raced from the house and back into the storm.
“Who was that?” Einstein’s longtime secretary asked.
“The man who has prevented me from averting a second world war.”
Author’s Note
Since reading it in the ninth grade I’ve believed Homer’s Odyssey is the archetype of today’s action thrillers, the one that set the standard for everything we have out there today. It has a hero who has to overcome staggering odds. It has exotic locals, fantastic chases, epic battles, and yes, even sex. While I chose not to copy Homer’s formula of a man trying to get home to his family (Would you really believe Mercer fighting to get back to his brownstone knowing only Harry and Drag were waiting to welcome him?), I wanted to pay homage to this masterpiece in my novel. I think once you know I slid in some references, and you’ve recently brushed up on your Homer, they’re fairly easy to spot.
A one-eyed giant of a man named Poli Feines is of course the Cyclops, Polyphemus. In The Odyssey, Odysseus escapes the monster using a bunch of sheep as cover, like the flock Mercer saved in Africa, and in the end does leave the Cyclops blinded. Calypso in The Odyssey becomes enamored of the hero, and at one point saves his life by supplying him with a girdle that buoyed him above the waves just before he drowned—a little like how Cali Stowe saved Mercer at the end of the book.
Others are certainly more obscure. One of Odysseus’s adventures found him caught between the Scilla and the Charybdis, which were a whirlpool and a sea monster. In my book it’s Mercer who’s caught between the Scilla River and a rebel general named Caribe Dayce. There are a few other references sprinkled throughout the novel and you might have fun finding them, or you might be like my wife and think I have too much time on my hands.
Speaking of time, the cipher Chester Bowie used to hide his message to Einstein based on Lewis Carroll’s doublets is a real word game, one I wasted too many hours playing. It’s actually a lot of fun when you can get them to work. Some of them include turning head into tail, ape into man, or four into five, or you can make up your own.
And on the subject of Chester Bowie, if you liked his theory about the monsters of Greek mythology being the bones of extinct animals, I highly recommend the book The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which lays out a pretty good case for how some of these mythical creatures could have been devised.
I’d also like to clarify an intentional inaccuracy. Herb Morrison’s famed eyewitness account of the Hindenburg tragedy wasn’t broadcast over the radio—it was actually recorded to be the voice-over for a movie news company—but I wanted to include those immortal words in my prologue. Most everything else about the crash is true however. It was most likely water-repelling dope used to coat the airship that first caught fire from an engine spark and caused the catastrophe. Skenderbeg is a real person out of Albanian history who revolted against his former Ottoman masters. And scientists are still studying the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo, Gabon, only it is geologically impossible for any highly radioactive deposits to have survived to this day as they do in the book. Of course a natural reactor was geologically impossible until one was discovered in 1972.
And what of Alexander’s tomb? It still hasn’t been discovered. So who’s to say there isn’t something inside to explain how he managed to conquer so much of the ancient world?
Truth is always stranger than fiction.
Books by Jack Du Brul
Deep Fire Rising
River of Ruin
Pandora’s Curse
The Medusa Stone
Charon’s Landing
Vulcan’s Forge
