Havoc

real expert on Skenderbeg is a Turkish historian named Ibriham Ahmad. I tried calling him in Istanbul but just left a message.”

“We have a theory,” Cali said. “Before his final battle against Darius, Alexander invaded Egypt and overthrew the Persian governor. According to history the people welcomed him openly and paved the way for the construction of the city of Alexandria, home to the famous library. During his stay in Egypt he went to the temple of Zeus- Ammon someplace in the Libyan desert. It was there that the oracle revealed to him that he was the son of Ammon, Egypt’s chief deity, and was thus a god himself. A year later he defeated Darius.”

“With you so far,” Ira said.

“What if Alexander received something else when he visited the oracle, like how to procure a great weapon fit for a god? Trade along the North African coast was well established by this time. It’s possible the priests had learned about magic rocks that could incapacitate an army and told Alexander where to find them.”

“What we think,” Mercer said, “is he sent a column to Central Africa, to the site near the Scilla River. There they mined some of the plutonium ore and erected a stele to commemorate their visit.”

“We think Alexander went into battle against Darius using an improvised radiological bomb,” Cali concluded. “We checked and the Battle of Arbela was carefully staged. Both Alexander and Darius knew when and where they were going to meet. It’s possible that in the days leading up to the battle Alexander had radiological dust spread around Darius’s encampment. His people would need little more protection than rags tied around their mouths so they didn’t inhale the plutonium, which is the only way plutonium is fatal by the way, while Darius’s men would suffer radiation poisoning. Nothing lethal but enough to incapacitate them and allow Alexander’s smaller army to wipe them out.”

“Now jump forward seventeen hundred years to Albania,” Mercer added, “and you have a general who holds off a huge army for decades using a talisman that once belonged to Alexander the Great. We think Skenderbeg used his alembic to dose the Ottoman Army with enough radiation to make them too sick to fight.”

“What happened to Skenderbeg?”

“He died in 1468 of natural causes,” Mercer said. “His men held out for another decade but eventually they were overrun.”

“And his alembic?” Ira had a dubious look on his pug face.

Mercer shrugged. “I’m hoping Professor Ahmad in Istanbul can answer that.”

“Admiral Lasko,” Cali said, “I know this all sounds like a bit of a stretch but there’s a line in Chester Bowie’s journal that ties it together somewhat. He left Brazzaville right after the abduction attempt and made his way across Africa to Alexandria. In his journal he wrote that given a couple of days he could have found Alexander’s hidden tomb. He knew there was a connection between Alexander the Great and his work.”

“From there,” Mercer went on, “he caught a steamer to Europe, where he did the one thing the Nazis would never suspect. He knew he was dying and wanted to reach America as fast as possible to tell Einstein what he’d discovered. He sent Einstein a telegram from Athens and Einstein wrote him back telling him to contact Otto Hahn, a nuclear physicist who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for being the first person to split a uranium atom.”

Cali interrupted. “Hahn wasn’t a Nazi, and he refused to work on Germany’s nuclear bomb program, so when Einstein contacted him about Chester Bowie he made arrangements for Bowie’s return to the United States the fastest way possible-the airship Hindenburg.”

“Are you telling me he was on the Hindenburg when it exploded?”

Mercer nodded. “Which makes me think that maybe the conspiracy theorists are right and the zeppelin was sabotaged. Only it wasn’t about discrediting the Nazis, but about preventing Bowie from giving the sample of plutonium to Einstein.”

“Jesus,” Ira exclaimed. “Who? How?”

“My money’s on the Germans themselves and here’s why. In the last few pages of his diary Bowie said an officer came to his cabin. He killed the officer, believing that the Germans had found out who he was and weren’t going to let him off the airship. That’s when he wrote down his story and tucked it in the safe. He tied Einstein’s name to a tag on the outside and heaved it out the window. But what makes me think it was the Germans and Bowie wasn’t being paranoid is that the airship was delayed coming into Lakehurst because of a storm. But what if the captain was ordered to wait because the Nazi higher-ups were trying to think of a way to destroy it? I don’t know if you’re aware, but after the Hindenburg blew up the Germans refused to let anyone help clean up the debris. They sent over teams themselves to haul the zeppelin’s skeleton back to Germany. That could have been cover to find Bowie’s safe in the wreckage, only he was a step ahead of them and heaved it over the side above Waretown, New Jersey.”

“I think it was the Janissaries,” Cali offered. “I think they realized they’d made a mistake letting Bowie go in Brazzaville, somehow learned he was going to be on the Hindenburg, and had someone in the United States in place to take it out.”

Ira scratched his bald head. “I might have a third candidate, one that might squirrel all your theories.” He reached into the middle drawer of his desk and placed an item on the blotter.

Mercer recognized it at once. “That’s the bullet the old woman gave me in Africa.”

“I sent it to the FBI lab at Quantico,” Ira said. “This, my friend, isn’t a German round but a 7.65-by-25 shell casing from either a pistol or a PP Sh submachine gun, which if you aren’t aware, was the standard automatic weapon for the Soviet Army during World War Two.”

“The Soviets?” Mercer and Cali said as one and then fell silent.

Mercer hadn’t expected this at all. He was certain that it was the Germans who were after Bowie. As far as he knew the Soviet Union didn’t even have a nuclear program until spies infiltrated the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, so why would they want plutonium five years earlier? He was about to mention this when Cali spoke up.

“It makes perfect sense,” she said. “We know the Soviet Union had spies at Los Alamos, which is how they got the plans for the bomb. Stalin knew more about it than Truman when they met at Potsdam and the President mentioned we had a weapon that would end the war. What has never made sense to me and a lot of people who studied the history was how the Soviets were able to create their own bomb so soon after the Japanese surrender. Rather than the decades we expected to have nuclear dominance, we lost it in just four years.

“The entire western third of Russia had been devastated by the war,” Cali went on. “Whole cities were destroyed and millions of people were left homeless. The Soviets didn’t receive any of the aid we gave to Europe to rebuild. In fact they had to spend money to shore up their holdings in Eastern Europe. I know Stalin was a ruthless tyrant, but the economics don’t pan out. They didn’t have the resources to keep their people from starving while trying to rebuild their own country, occupy Eastern Europe all the way to Germany, and spend a hundred billion dollars building their own bomb. Even with the plans provided by Stalin’s spies, it takes a tremendous amount of sophistication and resources to refine fissionable materials.” She caught Mercer’s eye. “But what if he already had those materials? If the Russians had some of the ore, it would dramatically reduce the amount of time and the cost it would take to build an atomic bomb. They could easily do it in four years and still do everything else I mentioned.”

“Makes sense,” Ira said thoughtfully. “I’ve got a lot of contacts in Russia, and since the collapse they’ve been pretty forthcoming with information from the bad old days. I’ll ask around to see if what you surmise is true.” He looked at Mercer. “What about you? Where do you want to take this?”

“Cali spoke with her supervisor at NEST. We’ve got them tracing the disappearance of the Wetherby.”

“How do you know she disappeared?”

“Simple. Nowhere in the history books does it say Enrico Fermi experimented with plutonium ore in the 1930s, so he must have never received the samples, ergo the Wetherby vanished. Also I think someone should take a look at that stele Cali and I saw in Africa. There could be clues on it about how much ore Alexander’s people mined.”

“Is that important?” Ira asked. “I mean come on, we’re talking ancient history.”

“If we’re only right about Alexander possessing a radiological bomb or dispersal device, then I’d agree, but the Janissaries who nabbed Cali last night act as though the alembic is lying around for someone to find.”

“You told me over dinner that you think that part of the Central African Republic is still pretty hot. I don’t want to send a team in there unless you’re sure it’s important.”