Charon's landing

“Oh, yes, I know him.” Philip Mercer had seen the Jenny IV, possibly boarded her. Maybe even now he was unraveling the mystery of her destruction. Kerikov had decided to spare Mercer’s life once before, but he would not do so again. He glanced at his watch, calculated time differences, and dialed a cellular phone he always carried.

Despite Kerikov’s earlier leniency, he knew exactly where Mercer lived, where he spent his time, even his favorite restaurants and bars. He had taken the precaution of having a private detective agency prepare monthly updates on Mercer’s movements in preparation for the time when he would exact his revenge for Vulcan’s Forge. Kerikov had been a shadow warrior his entire life, and it was time to once again strike from the shadows.

On the fourth ring, the phone was answered with a cultured “Hello.”

“We have a problem.”

Arlington, Virginia

At a little past seven the next morning, Mercer threw on a pair of khaki shorts and grabbed the Washington Post from his doorstep. His street was quiet this early on a Saturday. Washington’s famous Indian summer was in full force, and the humidity was on the rise. Sweat tickled the hair on Mercer’s chest as he turned back into his brownstone.

Unlike the other row houses on the street, which held anywhere from three to six families in spacious apartments, Mercer was the sole occupant of his, and he’d done more than a little remodeling to make the house into his home. The front third of the brownstone was a three-story atrium overlooked by an oak-shelved library on the second floor and his master bedroom on the third. An antique spiral staircase corkscrewed up to the other levels. The stairs had been salvaged from a rectory just prior to its demolition and cost almost as much as a luxury automobile.

Mercer scanned the headlines as he climbed up to the second floor. He smiled to himself as he passed through the library. Though he’d lived here for more than five years, he’d just recently unpacked his large collection of books; their dust jackets looked like bunting draped across the wood shelves. The leather reading chair looked inviting for a moment, but Mercer walked on, into the room that he called The Bar.

Most houses have a family room. Mercer’s had a bar, six stools lining an mahogany-topped counter with a brass footrail. Stemware hung from racks, and the ornately carved backbar was stocked better than most downtown establishments. The room felt like an English gentlemen’s club; dark green carpet, rich leather couches, and walnut wainscoting below the plaster walls. Because the only windows faced a narrow alley between his house and the neighboring brownstone, the bar always retained a dusky, intimate feel.

Mercer slid the newspaper onto the bar and walked around it to turn up the rheostat lights. The automatic coffeemaker had brewed a scalding potion so bitterly strong that the first sip made him wince. Perfect.

He slipped an instrumental CD into the stereo next to the old lock-lever refrigerator before settling down to read the day’s fare of disaster, scandal, and corruption. The Metro section made Washington’s murder rate read like sports scores. Cops 5-Dealers 1.

He finished the Post about an hour later. After pulling out the crossword for his friend Harry, Mercer folded the paper and left it on the corner of the bar and took a back set of stairs to the first floor. He threw a couple of frozen waffles into the toaster in the little-used kitchen, then went into his office.

The room was similar in decor to the bar, wood and brass and leather. A huge desk dominated the center of the room, a computer and its peripherals occupying a third of it and half the matching credenza. Mercer’s hand brushed against a flat slab of kimberlite as he strode into the room. The bluish rock resting on a side table was the lodestone of every diamond mine in the world and was a memento from one of Mercer’s many trips to the mines of southern Africa and his personal good-luck piece.

The twisted piece of metal he’d recovered from Alaska was locked in the upper drawer of his desk. He grabbed it and returned to the kitchen. The toaster had burned the waffles to the texture of roofing shingles, so he tossed them into the trash and headed back to the bar. He wasn’t that hungry anyway.

He retrieved a one-foot section of railroad track from the back bar and a shoe box filled with tins of metal polish, rags, and other cleaning items. As he started stroking the track with a polish-soaked piece of steel wool, he regarded the metal plate solemnly. The repetitive act of polishing had served him for years as a means to focus his thoughts on a single problem, and at the pace he was going, he’d have a few miles done before he figured out the significance of the plate.

It was ten inches long, four wide, and made of stainless steel. All its edges were ripped by the violent explosion that had destroyed the Jenny IV. The stencil roger, done in black ink, was its only identifying mark.

Mercer had gotten the crew list of the fishing boat from the Coast Guard before he’d left Alaska. No one even remotely connected to the ship was named Roger. He thought about the possibility that the letters weren’t a proper name, but no other option came to him. And even if it wasn’t a name, he still couldn’t decipher the meaning.

“Come on, Rog,” Mercer said to the plate. “Who in the hell were you and what were you doing on a fishing boat with personalized steel luggage?”

Mercer spent his life solving mysteries. Amassing clues as to where the earth hid her mineral wealth, interpreting data, and finally pointing to a spot and saying, “Dig here,” were stock-in-trade. He thrived on the challenge of millions of dollars and potentially hundreds of lives resting on his word, but he admitted that the enigma of the scrap of steel was beyond him.

The phone rang, its shrill tone scattering his thoughts. He glanced at his watch as he reached to pluck the portable from its recharging pad on the corner of the bar. It was quarter of ten. The call had to be either Tiny telling him that he had the Daily Racing Form and to come over, or Harry White reminding him not to forget the crossword.

It was neither.

“Dr. Philip Mercer?”

“Yes,” he replied warily. “Yes, who is this?”

“I’m sorry to bother you so early on a Saturday morning, sir. My name is Dan MacLaughlin. I’m the Chief of Police of Homer, Alaska.” His voice was deep and gruff but sounded tired.

“Christ, it’s not even five in the morning there.”

“I’m afraid this is the tail end of a shitty night rather than an early start to a good day. Were you acquainted with Jerry Small and his son, John? They ran a charter boat here called the Wave Dancer.”

MacLaughlin’s use of the past tense was not lost to Mercer. “You know I was or you wouldn’t be calling me. How’d they die?”

“I’m sorry to ask that way. I’m dog tired and pretty shook up. I’ve known Jerry ever since he moved here.”

“I’m sorry too, Chief. I didn’t mean to snap. What happened? An accident on the boat?”

“They were found earlier this morning by a neighbor who was getting back from the fish factory’s graveyard shift. It seems Jerry and John had themselves a couple of drinks at home and must have wanted to go out and get a few more. Well, they both passed out in Jerry’s pickup. The truck was still in the garage; the door was closed with the engine running. That was what brought his neighbor over, the running engine. Well, we figure that the fumes got ’em both.”

“Jesus,” Mercer breathed.

“The reason I called is, Coast Guard records show you were on that charter when Jerry found the Jenny IV. That makes you one of the last people to see them alive. Well, it seems the two of them had been fighting. There were bruises all over them. Jerry had two black eyes and John’s mouth was pretty busted up. Like I said, I’ve known Jerry for a while, and he and John got along better than most parents and kids, so this fight kinda seems out of character. I was just wondering if they had any problems when you were on the charter boat with them. Arguing, fighting, anything like that?”

“No. They seemed to get along just fine. Finding that derelict shook us all a bit, but they weren’t fighting.” Mercer was genuinely shocked that Jerry and John had brawled. He never suspected that they would have family