me.
“Then they led me to their car and just started to drive. I had no idea what was going on until you opened the door. What is it with you, anyway? First it was Africa and then Atlantic City and now tonight. Do you go anywhere where there aren’t armed goons gunning for you?” Her raised voice alerted Drag. He ambled over and flopped onto his back in front of Cali, instantly defusing her anger. She bent to rub his ample belly. Looking up at Mercer, she said, “For some reason I never pictured you with a dog.”
“Drag’s not mine. He’s Harry’s.”
“Harry’s here?”
“Upstairs working on Chester Bowie’s damned word games. This one’s a little more complex than the first one we got from the archive. Why don’t you head up. I’ve got to walk Drag. I’ll be back in a second.”
“Do you think those men…?”
“They’re gone. I believed him when he said he just wants to warn us off.”
“And did he?”
Mercer’s eyes tightened for an instant; then he smiled. “Not by a long shot.”
Cali straightened and kissed Mercer softly on the cheek. “Sorry about blowing up like that. I was just-”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Mercer returned to the brownstone after Drag had sniffed at every car tire, lamppost, and fire hydrant in a two-block radius before finding one worthy of peeing on. When he opened the door, he heard Cali’s ringing laughter from the bar and he silently thanked Harry for dispelling the last of her misgivings.
Harry had poured her a stiff Scotch and was showing her the codes. When Mercer came into the room, Harry cast him a wicked look. “Cali told me what happened. I told her she has it all wrong. You hired those guys just so you’d finally have a woman in your house.”
“Desperate times,” Mercer shot back. He moved behind the bar to pour himself another cup of coffee, only this one he laced with a generous dram of brandy. “Has he shown you the codes?” he asked Cali. “Or has he just been besmirching my character?”
“He cracked the last one.”
“I think,” Harry said. “Gout into full; gout, pout, pour, four, which is our clue by the way, then foul, fowl, bowl, boll, bull, full.”
“So the key is?”
Harry checked his notes. “Ten times four less five.”
“Forty minus five,” Mercer said. “Thirty-five. Have you started looking for the words?”
A shadow crept across Harry’s blue eyes. “Yeah and I may be all wrong. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
“What do you have?”
“Counting every thirty-fifth word gives us this.”
He showed the paper to Mercer: “Deer Albert nick cola was right trains urine nick elements dew exist in nature.”
“See what I mean?” Harry said, waving away a cloud of cigarette smoke that was drifting toward Cali’s face. “Bunch of gobbledygook if you ask me.”
Mercer read the sentence again and again, speeding up, slowing down, and inserting random pauses. Two words kept thrusting themselves to the forefront of his mind. Nick cola. Nick…cola. Nickcola. Nickola. Nikola. “Holy shit!”
“What?” Cali and Harry cried in unison.
“Tesla,” Mercer said and suddenly the rest of the sentence became clear. He blanched. “We’re in trouble.”
“Damn it, what does it mean?”
“Dear Albert,” Mercer said, still grappling with what Chester Bowie had discovered. “Nikola was right, transuranic elements do exist in nature.”
“Oh my God,” Cali gasped. Mercer wasn’t surprised she understood right away. She was a nuclear scientist after all.
Harry still didn’t get it. “So what?”
“Transuranic elements are elements above uranium on the periodic table,” Mercer replied. “They can only be produced in a lab by a nuclear reactor. Most of them decay in a few seconds but there’s one that lasts years-hell, millennia. Chester Bowie’s adamantine isn’t naturally enriched uranium, it’s fucking plutonium. And raw plutonium doesn’t need expensive refining with centrifuges and a staff of scientists to be made into a weapon. Its stuff is ready to go. Instant dirty bomb. A terrorist’s wet dream come true.”
Arlington, Virginia
“I have to call my boss at NEST,” Cali said at once. “We have a national emergency on our hands.”
“In due time,” Mercer cautioned. “I want us to get everything together first. Figure out what we know and determine what we need to find out. Once we’re ready, you can present it to your nuclear response team while I’ll go to Ira Lasko at the White House.”
Cali looked uncertain.
“Besides,” he went on, “it’s almost midnight. We should be able to put a report together by morning if we work through the night.”
She relented. “Okay.”
“Harry?”
“What the hell,” the old man said. “I’ll get plenty of rest when the big sleep comes.”
“Thanks, I owe you a favor.”
“Actually you owe me twenty thousand favors, but who’s counting?” He set to work on Chester Bowie’s thirty-page letter to Albert Einstein.
Mercer made a less sadistic pot of coffee for Cali while she slipped into the guest bedroom to clean herself up a bit. When she came back her eyes were clear and bright and her hair was tucked into a ponytail. She’d applied lip gloss which accentuated her generous mouth.
“Mind my asking why you have women’s toiletries in your guest bathroom?” she said teasingly.
“They’re Harry’s,” Mercer deadpanned. “Old letch is a cross-dresser.”
“Something’s bothering me,” Cali said, taking a seat at the bar. “Actually everything’s bothering me but what I don’t understand is how can there be naturally occurring plutonium. That’s physically impossible.”
“Not at all. Traces of it are found all over the planet. What’s more difficult to explain is a large concentration of it and I think I know the answer. Ever heard of Oklo, Gabon, in West Africa?” Cali shook her head. “In the early seventies a French team discovered unusual ratios of isotopes in a bunch of uranium deposits. The discrepancy was tiny but important. Something had happened to the uranium.
“At first they thought the sample had been contaminated in the lab or at the site, but they ruled it out. The only logical conclusion was that at some time-and they later figured out it was about two and a half billion years ago-the natural uranium deposit had gone critical.”
“And started a chain reaction,” Cali finished. “I
“That’s exactly right. The water that seeped down to the uranium deposits was high in calcium, which acted just like the control rods of a nuclear power plant. The water also kept the reactor cool enough to allow for a sustained chain reaction.”
“How long did it burn, do you know?”
“Estimates range between five hundred thousand and a million years.”
“Wow.”
