“From what Ira tells me, magic.”
Greenbelt, Maryland, was on the opposite side of the nation’s capital from Arlington, and it took them two hours battling a nearly gridlocked Beltway to reach the exit. Fortunately, the Goddard Center was two miles from the I-95 and Mercer eased his Jaguar convertible to the main gate with five minutes to spare. Next to the gate was the public visitors’ center where a couple examples of NASA’s earliest rockets were on display in an outdoor garden.
“Nice lawn ornaments,” Booker remarked.
“Beats pink flamingos.”
After checking their identification and making sure they were on the day’s visitors list, a guard handed over two passes and directed them to a new building at the end of Explorers Road on the far side of the sprawling government research campus. Mercer parked in a large lot next to a storm runoff pond. A trio of ducks was lazing in the early morning sunshine.
The building was an unremarkable brick affair with only a few windows high on its facade. Mercer and Booker were met in the reception area by a twentysomething man in a white lab coat. Below it he wore black pants and a black T-shirt. Mercer assumed it was his black Miata among all the minivans and SUVs in the parking lot. He had slicked back dark hair and stylish glasses, not the image of a government scientist Mercer had pictured.
“Dr. Jacobi?”
“Alan Jacobi. You must be Dr. Mercer.”
“Call me Mercer.” They shook hands. “This is Booker Sykes.”
“Hi. Call me Alan.” He looked behind them. “Do you have the samples?”
“They’re in the car. Do you have a trolley or anything?”
“Oh sure.”
Ten minutes later they had the three bags in Jacobi’s lab. The room was at least fifty feet square, packed with workstations, computers, and sleek, humming boxes whose function Mercer could only guess.
“I have to say when I got the call from the White House yesterday I was pretty blown away. I mean we don’t do anything high-priority here.”
“What do you do?”
“As you know the Goddard Center is one of the leading research laboratories in the country for earth and space sciences. We run expeditions all over the world, and beyond for that matter. My lab here deals with three- dimensional holography and materials analyses. We’re adapting it for medical research and possibly archaeology.”
“And you think you can help.”
“Oh no doubt. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Mercer opened one of the backpacks and started removing fragments of the stele and setting them on a table. Jacobi picked up one of the bigger pieces, a twenty-pound misshapen chunk of stone that resembled a head of broccoli.
“This should work nicely for a demonstration.” He took the stone to a piece of equipment that looked like a microwave oven and set it inside. He closed the door and turned to a nearby computer. He spoke as he tapped at the keys. “What this machine does is scan a three-dimensional object into the computer, creating an exact digital reproduction down to one micrometer or one millionth of a meter.”
“Wow,” Mercer said.
“That’s nothing. They use machines like this in Hollywood all the time to turn clay models of monsters and spaceships and stuff into digital effects. My machine is just a lot more precise.”
He swiveled the screen to show them what the computer had created. It looked exactly like the chunk of stone, only the computer had rendered it in green. Jacobi made a few adjustments and the digital rock turned gray. “There.”
“So now what?” Booker asked.
“Now I scan every piece of stone into the computer. When I’m done I will tell it the approximate shape of the object and it will digitally put it all back together.” He waited for a reaction. “Ah, now’s the time you say ‘Wow.’ The fuzzy logic algorithms alone took me the better part of three years to perfect. I’m asking the computer to make tens of millions of decisions by itself as to how to reassemble the digital pieces. This is cutting edge stuff.” Jacobi laughed. “What did you think, I was going to glue this mess back together or something?”
“No, not at all,” Mercer said to hide the fact that that’s exactly what he thought would happen. “A digital image is perfect. How long will it take?”
“I’ll get a couple of post docs in here to do the scut work of imaging the fragments. That’ll take some time because the imagers are slow and we have to number each piece if you want to reassemble the real thing.” His voice rose in pitch as he finished his sentence, as if asking if his team could avoid the tedium of cataloguing every fragment.
“No, I think you should number them. We might need the actual artifact.” Mercer just wanted the rebuilt stele. He thought it would look great in the bar.
“You got it then.” Jacobi shrugged, knowing he wouldn’t be doing the work anyway. “You passed a cafeteria on your way to this building. Why don’t you give us a couple of hours and we’ll see what we come up with.”
Mercer and Book Sykes returned to Jacobi’s lab at eleven thirty.
“Perfect timing,” the young scientist said to greet them. “We’re just about finished with the last small pieces.” The bits of the stele were lying on workbenches and atop equipment. All of them were in individually numbered glassine envelopes like the police use for collecting evidence.
“Well done.” Mercer smiled.
“I forgot to ask what this thing looked like originally. I was told it was a stele but I have no idea what that is.”
“A small obelisk. It was about seven feet tall.”
“The computer
“I’m finished with the last one,” a post doc said, removing a chip of stone from the digital imager and slipping it into a clear envelope numbered eight hundred and sixty-three.
Mercer decided he’d hire someone to rebuild the stele for him.
“Okay then,” Jacobi said from his desk. He drew an obelisk using a wireless pen. “Like that?”
“A bit skinnier.”
“Got it.” He typed in the size. “Seven feet. And here we go.”
Mercer blinked and a realistic representation of the stele was on the screen in front of him. He could plainly see the hieroglyphs covering all four sides as the image rotated in space. “Holy shit. How long would it have taken if you didn’t know what it looked like?”
“Oh, God, at least a minute,” Jacobi replied smugly.
As Jacobi zoomed in on the stele’s surface, Mercer could see where Ahmad and his men had smashed it. There were a few chips missing that either Book didn’t find or that had been powdered by the blows. Still there was more than enough to work with from what Jacobi had been able to reconstruct.
Mercer shook his hand. “Thank you. You did an amazing job. I can see how this could help doctors map out how to rebuild broken bones and archaeologists to put ancient pottery back together. Truly remarkable.”
“I wish I could tell you why the government wanted something like this in the first place, but it’s classified.”
Booker Sykes smirked. “Only reason is to put blast zones back together after an explosion, to determine what type of bomb was used.”
Jacobi went pale. “How did you, I mean that’s, you couldn’t…”
Sykes clamped a big hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, man. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Mercer and Booker drove straight to the Smithsonian. Mercer had called while Jacobi’s people were imaging the stele, and used his White House credentials to arrange for one of their top Egyptologists to be waiting. He’d also left a voice mail for Cali at NEST, telling her the hunt was on again.
