“I didn’t stick around long enough to explore the entire region, but it is safe to say that I believe it is all gone.”
“You didn’t ‘stick around’? I am paying you a great deal of money to more than merely ‘stick around.’”
“You’ve
The disappointment was too much. The whole thing could have been wrapped up in a couple of days. Now he was being told the ore was gone. And then Poli’s statement finally cut through the man’s frustration. “Wait, ‘they’? Who are ‘they’?” But he knew. All too well, he knew, but still he persisted. “My God, man, you had an army behind you. Caribe Dayce’s men are more than ample protection.”
“Dayce’s dead and so are a lot of his men, so you can forget about paying him the other half you owed to get me to that village. I barely got out myself. This happened five days ago. It’s taken me this long to reach Khartoum.” A note of professional respect crept into Poli’s voice when he added, “You warned me the opposition was good. I had no idea a fire team could move like that.”
“They’ve had centuries to refine their craft. What of the American who was in the area?”
“Which one? There were two. A man and a woman.”
“I know nothing of the woman,” the man in New York admitted.
“In either case, I don’t know what happened to them. I was running the first instant the opposition showed up. Last I saw of the pair they were staked out and about to be executed by Dayce. It’s possible they were killed in the cross fire. I don’t know.”
“I will make inquiries. You’d best come to New York. I have a feeling you’ll be needed here.”
“My flight’s in two hours.”
Mercer knew exactly how he’d find Chester Bowie, and he began his search with the optimism of the fatally misguided. He worked under the logical assumption that Bowie wasn’t the luckiest SOB in history and that he was a trained geologist, and a damned good one at that. He also assumed that a guy older than fifty wouldn’t trek into one of the remotest spots on the globe without a support team. Placing the excavation at the village sometime in the early 1940s and working backward Mercer guessed that Bowie would have graduated from college no earlier than 1913. He gave himself a cushion of another five years and decided to begin his search in 1908.
The next step was simple and that was to search the electronic database for Academics Who’s Who for the years between 1908 and 1945. The computer search took less than a second and came up with no Chester Bowies. Not yet concerned, Mercer pushed the search back to 1900, the oldest records on the database, and still came up empty.
He leaned back at his desk and wondered if Bowie hadn’t been a good student in college or, worse, if he’d been a self-taught geologist. Mercer was so sure of his investigative technique, he hadn’t considered either alternative. He idly brought up Bowie’s name on the search engine again and for a fruitless hour called up and scanned random entries.
He wouldn’t let go of the idea that Bowie had formal training. No one could have found the uranium deposit without it. He phoned the alumni offices of a dozen schools with preeminent geology departments. No Chester Bowie. He called all the major mining schools and still no Bowie, even going back to 1900, which would have made Bowie at least sixty when he went to the CAR. He ate lunch hunched over his computer and let his answering machine pick up the twenty incoming calls. Dinner was Chinese delivery, which he also ate at his desk, and he finally called it a night past one.
He was at his desk at six the following morning, the coffee at his elbow strong enough to take the enamel off his teeth. He continued on with the search engine until nine, when he called the company that ran the Who’s Who Web site. He talked his way past two secretaries and finally got the chief archivist on the line. She introduced herself as Mrs. Moreland. From the frailty of her voice he guessed that she might have graduated a couple of years before Chester.
“How can I help you, Dr. Mercer?”
He thought it prudent to use his title, and to embellish the story somewhat. “I’m a field geologist, Mrs. Moreland, and I’ve just returned from Central Africa, where I came upon a grave in a remote village. The headstone said that the man who was buried there, one Chester Bowie, died in 1942. A village elder remembered the man was also a geologist who had come to the region by himself and that he was mauled to death by a lion.”
“How awful,” the elderly librarian said.
“Yes. He went on to say that the village has experienced nothing but bad luck ever since, cattle diseases, drought, and the like. He believes that because Bowie’s family doesn’t know how or where their ancestor died that his spirit still haunts them. It sounds a little strange to us, but animism is the prevalent faith in this part of Africa.”
“Dr. Mercer, I’m from New England. I know all about ghost stories.”
“I promised the headman that I would try to contact the Bowie family to tell them what happened to Chester.”
“And you think I can help?”
“It’s a hunch but I believe he was a rather gifted geologist and it’s possible that you have records of his academic career. Your records online go back only to 1900 and I was wondering if you could dig back a couple more years.”
“No digging required. We are about to load the years 1890 to 1899 onto the site. Give me a moment.” She typed so slowly that Mercer spelled out the name in his head. “And here we are. Chester T. Bowie, class of 1899 from Keeler State in New Jersey.”
He knew it. “Thank you, Mrs. Moreland. I can contact the college. Hopefully they have records going back that far that give some family history.”
“I’m not sure if that will help.”
Her tone sent a stone plummeting to the base of Mercer’s stomach. “How so?”
“It indicates here that this Chester Bowie graduated summa cum laude with a degree in ancient Greek history.”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t think this is your man. He wasn’t a geologist. He was a historian.”
Mercer cursed and immediately sensed Mrs. Moreland’s disapproval over the phone. He apologized, thanking her for her time. He stared into space for a minute, his hand still holding the portable phone. “What the hell,” he said and dialed information for the small New Jersey college.
“Our records go back to the day the school was founded by Benjamin Keeler in 1884,” a perky coed named Jody in the alumni office assured Mercer when he asked.
“I’m looking for information about Chester Bowie. He graduated in 1899.”
“Oh sure,” Jody said as though she knew the man. “Bowie the booby.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, it’s a nickname he had. He is sort of, like, a legend here.”
“How so?”
“He was a student here and then became a teacher. I guess he was a real whack job. He vanished in the 1930s or something.”
The timing could fit had Mercer been wrong about the African woman’s age. “Why do you say he was a whack job?”
“I’m not sure. Students here use his name if someone does something stupid, like you know ‘pulling a Chester.’ It’s just, like, a thing we say.”
Mercer had thought using the word “like” so often had died out a decade ago. “Is there anyone in the office who could give me a bit more information?”
“Um, not really. I’m here by myself and I don’t know when my boss is coming back. She’s on maternity leave.” Jody went quiet before perking up once again. Her voice jumped several octaves. “But hey, there was like this book written a couple years ago. This woman wrote it and she had a section about Bowie the booby. She gave a couple of signed copies to the school. There’s one here someplace.” She fumbled through a bunch of drawers, slamming them so the metal rang in Mercer’s ears. “Yes! I found it.
