techniques they’d employed against the former soldier.
If the information hadn’t come from
She put her car into gear and pulled away, needing all of her concentration to keep the vehicle on the narrow road. One other question worked into the back of her mind. What could possibly be so valuable that Schroeder had dismissed an enormous shipment of gold as only “a small part of it”?
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Because his overnight stay in Manhattan wasn’t really planned, the airline had held Mercer’s luggage from Pennsylvania for him at Reagan National. He presented his identification and baggage claim checks when he deplaned from the New York flight, and a skycap retrieved his bags from storage. He had little trouble finding a cab to take him home. The flight to Washington had lasted an hour and it felt good to sit again. His legs were sore from hours of wandering the Natural History Museum.
It was nearing ten o’clock at night and traffic was light as the taxi threaded around Arlington Cemetery and hooked up with I-66. He’d lived in Arlington for a little over seven years, and the amount of growth near his neighborhood was astonishing. It was only a matter of time before the ten blocks of row houses around his brownstone were replaced with high-rises and strip malls.
From the outside, his building was similar to all the others on the quiet street. It stood three stories tall and was faced with ruddy stone that was corbeled over the windows and the front door. The entry steps were cement flanked by wrought iron railings.
Under the streetlights, he recognized two of the cars parked behind his black Jaguar. The battered Plymouth Fury belonged to Paul Gordon, a retired jockey and the owner of a neighborhood bar called Tiny’s, and the Ford Taurus was Mike O’Reilly’s, one of Tiny’s regulars. Mercer left his bags on the sidewalk and fished his car keys from his pocket, chirping open the locks as he approached the sleek English convertible. He peered in to check the odometer. The last three numbers were 823, exactly as they should be, and the tenth’s wheel was between the six and seven.
“I’ll be damned,” Mercer said aloud. He was certain Harry White would have taken the car for a spin while he was in Pennsylvania, which is why he’d memorized the mileage before leaving.
Then he noticed that the odometer had rolled over a complete thousand miles, right down to the last hundred yards. “Oh, you sneaky old bastard.” He chuckled without malice.
Mercer grabbed up his matching bags and mounted the stairs. The front door was unlocked. While the outside of the brownstone was conventional, the inside was something else entirely. The whole structure had been gutted and rebuilt according to plans Mercer himself had drawn up. The front third of the building was a marble- floored atrium that soared up to the roof, with balconies overlooking it from the second-floor library and the third floor, where the master suite was located. Connecting the levels and partially blocking the view of the kitchen was a spiral staircase. The railings on the balconies had been custom made to match the antique stairs.
On the ground floor behind the kitchen and the laundry area were his home office and the dining room he used for a red-topped pool table. The unused dining table sat in a corner of the entry foyer in what should have been the living room. He heard a roar of laughter from the second floor. This was where he had his version of a family room. Only it was closer to an English pub with wainscoting on the walls, an oak wet bar fronted by six stools, a couple of couches and chairs, and his entertainment center.
He left his bags at the base of the spiral stairs and climbed up to the library. The cigar smoke wafting from the bar through the connecting French doors was as thick as a fire on a tobacco plantation. The couches had been pushed aside to make room for a folding table, and seated around it were Harry, Tiny, Mike O’Reilly and Mike’s brother-in-law, John Pigeon. The table was littered with ashtrays, half-empty glasses, and poker chips. The forest- green carpet beneath the table looked pale from all the spilled ash. They’d been here for hours. Maybe days, for all Mercer knew.
“You’re pushing it, Harry. You’re really pushing it.” Mercer tried to put some anger in his voice but failed. He didn’t care that Harry had let someone chauffeur him around in the Jag or had the guys over for cards. He’d expected no less.
“Hey, Mercer, welcome back,” Harry boomed. He might be eighty, but his voice carried the power of a train wreck, with half the charm. “Got any cash on you? Mike’s cheating and I think I’ll figure out how if you lend me a hundred.”
“You mind telling me how you managed to put a thousand miles on my car in two weeks?” Mercer noticed that Paul “Tiny” Gordon had two encyclopedia volumes on his chair so he could sit at the same height as the others.
“Oh, that. Well, Tiny and I decided to go to Atlantic City for the weekend.”
“That’s only four hundred miles round-trip.”
“Twice.” Harry’s attempt to look contrite appeared more self-satisfied than anything.
“And the other two hundred miles?”
“Errands.”
Tiny cut in, shouldering some of the blame. “I wanted to catch a few races at Belmont,” the former jockey said. “Besides, we needed to roll your car over to an even grand.”
“I hope to God you drove, Paul.”
When the diminutive Gordon laughed, he looked and sounded like a gnome. “I had blocks installed on the pedals of my car so I can drive it. To reach the gas in your Jag, I’d have to crawl on the floor and use my hands.”
Mercer looked back to Harry, horrified that the octogenarian would drive that far. “You?”
“You need to have the tires rebalanced,” Harry suggested mildly. “It started to shimmy at a hundred miles an hour.”
“Oh, Christ.” Mercer rubbed his forehead. He went behind the bar to get a beer from the rebuilt lock-lever refrigerator next to the ornate back bar.
“While you’re back there,” Harry called jovially, “mind making me another Jack and ginger?”
“Yeah, grab me another beer,” Mike O’Reilly added.
“Might as well mix up another margarita.” This from John Pigeon.
Before answering, Mercer slid his wallet from his pants pocket and counted his cash, which totaled nearly three hundred dollars. Despite the late hour and his exhaustion, his decision was an easy one. “Get an extra chair, Pidge, and I’ll make it a pitcher.”
On one corner of the bar, Mercer’s mail lay stacked in a pile that was in imminent danger of spilling onto the floor. The deal with Harry was that he could stay at the house whenever Mercer was away as long as he got the mail and took care of phone messages. The deal didn’t include opening the mail, however. Mercer shook his head in mock frustration. One item caught his eye — a long, skinny tube, like those used for shipping posters.
“The one thing that was for you,” he said, holding it up for Harry to see. “And you didn’t open it.”
“I thought someone had mailed you a snake.”
“Actually, it’s your birthday present, only it’s a couple months late.” Mercer made the drinks, set them on the bar for John to dispense, and passed the tube to Harry.
“What is it?” he asked suspiciously.
“An anorexic anaconda. Just open the goddamned thing.”
Not one to stand on ceremony, Harry crushed out his cigar and tore the tube apart like a kid. Inside was a walking stick, a custom-made cane of black walnut capped with an ornate silver grip. Harry White had only one leg; he’d lost the other during his years as a sea captain following World War II. He didn’t have a noticeable limp, but Mercer had seen him wince a few times when he walked and knew it was time for his friend to bow to the
