It had been too dark to see her mouth. Even from a few yards away her face had been a pale oval struggling just above the surface. Leper Alma. She’d bobbed in the water as she’d said those words, he recalled now. A wave had passed close by, raising her head slightly, but also covering the lower part of her face as she spoke.
It hadn’t been leper. The second syllable had been her clearing seawater from her mouth. Lep Alma. He was close and his hands began to work faster, the dull metal between his fingers growing bright under the chemical and physical assault.
The solution came and he dropped the polish-soaked rag on his desk and rolled back in his chair. She’d either said Le Palma or La Palma. He turned to the computer, unconcerned that his fingers left smudges on the keyboard as he typed the names into the search engine.
The computer turned up tens of thousands of matches, but just fifteen minutes after starting in on the first entry he was on the phone to a geologist in Cambridge, England, named Robert Wright. Mercer didn’t know Wright, but the Ph.D. was mentioned prominently on several Web pages about La Palma. After an hour-long conversation, he made a frantic call to Admiral Lasko.
“Ira, it’s Mercer. We’ve been searching in the wrong place. I misheard what Tisa said. It wasn’t Leper Alma. She said La Palma.”
“We know,” Lasko said.
“Huh? How?”
“I put the NSA’s cryptoanalysis computers on it. Their report was sitting on my desk yesterday morning. They tore apart the words phonetically and came up with a couple thousand matches. The most obvious was La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, volcanic but dormant.”
“Not according to the scientist who’s spent his entire career studying the place. I just got off the phone with him.”
“You’re talking about Dr. Wright? I’ve already had people go over his research and frankly we’re not that impressed. On more than one occasion he’s been accused of falsifying data to fit his model.”
“Are you willing to take the chance he’s wrong?”
“We’re taking a wait-and-see attitude right now.”
“Ira, listen to me. This whole thing has been Tisa’s way of warning me about a La Palma eruption. I’m certain of it. Obviously she did it far enough in advance so we could do something about it. But I don’t think we have time for your wait-and-see attitude. If you’ve read some of what Dr. Wright predicted, you understand the consequences.”
“Give me a little credit, will you? A team’s already been sent to the island to monitor the situation. They arrive today. Another group with equipment more sophisticated than anything Wright has seen should get there tomorrow. We’re on it, Mercer, but right now there’s no need to panic.”
“Have you told the president?”
“I passed it up to Security Advisor Kleinschmidt. I don’t know if he took it any further.”
“We have to find her, Ira.”
“Who? Tisa?”
“That mountain’s going to blow no matter what your teams tell you. She’s the only person who knows when. We need her, damn it.” Mercer slowed, taking a breath to calm himself. “I agree that monitoring the island is the best course right now, but we have to talk with Tisa before it’s too late.”
“Even if we wanted her, we don’t have a clue where she is.”
“I’m working on that,” Mercer countered quickly. “If I pinpoint where I think she is, will you authorize a rescue?”
“I… I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can do.”
“Then that’s all I’ll ask.” Mercer cut the connection and felt better than he had in days. He was able to put the appalling consequences of a La Palma eruption out of his mind only because he was thinking about Tisa. She had the answers he needed, and Ira was beginning to box himself into a corner to allow Mercer to find her.
With most of his luggage spread from Canada to Vegas to the bottom of the Aegean Sea, Mercer went to the second-floor guest room where he kept an old set. From the bar, Harry saw him lugging the bags upstairs. “What are you doing?”
“Packing.”
“For where?”
“Africa, at the least. China if I get lucky.”
“You gotta talk to your travel agent. Your itineraries are all screwed up.”
Once he had both bags packed, he returned to the bar with the box full of sixteen-by-sixteen-inch satellite pictures from the imaging company in California. He’d requested they be stacked chronologically so that the first ten pictures showed the same spot on the earth over the past five years. The next set was an adjacent segment of ground over the same period of time. Dividing the file box in half, Mercer handed Harry one of the two magnifying glasses he’d brought up from his office. He turned up the bar lights and explained how the pictures were organized.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Look for clouds that don’t move.”
“Huh?”
“Tisa told me the valley of Rinpoche-La is fed by a geothermal hot spring. There should be waste heat from the spring that will show up as steam. If each picture of the same spot shows a cloud, we’ve got a possible hit.”
“Not a bad idea. How many pictures?”
“Two thousand. And if we don’t find her in this batch, I’ll order more.”
Harry bent to the first picture, muttering. “And they say chivalry is dead. You do remember that Romeo only killed himself over Juliet. He didn’t force his best friend to go blind.”
Mercer couldn’t suppress a smile. “Less discussion, more dissection.”
They gave up late that afternoon. Neither was trained in the arcane art of photo interpretation and the pictures didn’t have anywhere near the resolution Mercer expected. In the images shot from a hundred miles above the earth, glaciers looked like the dense, stationary clouds they were searching for. In five hours they’d located thirty-five potential locations for Rinpoche-La and had covered barely a quarter of the pictures Mercer had bought.
They did end up going to Tiny’s after having some Chinese food delivered for dinner. As for Harry’s threat to get Mercer blind drunk, they had only two drinks apiece. Both had headaches from squinting at pictures all day and weren’t in the mood to add to the pain.
Mercer took Drag out for the last time just before midnight and climbed the spiral stairs to bed. By the time he finished brushing his teeth and using the urinal tucked in a corner of the master bathroom, the basset was spread across both pillows. Mercer didn’t have the heart to disturb the old dog so he resigned himself to the corner of one pillow he’d been left and settled in for another round of nightmares.
The phone rang at two fifteen. Mercer was wide awake before the end of the first shrill chime. He knew who was calling and what he’d hear. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying for a moment to retain the simplicity he was about to lose. True, the call might bring him closer to Tisa, but it would also introduce him to a world on the brink of Armageddon. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said life as he knew it was about to end.
On the second ring he answered by saying, “It’s already happening, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Ira sounded like he hadn’t been to sleep yet. “A deep strata seismograph indicates La Palma’s becoming alive.”
“How long until a car gets here?”
“Ten minutes, maybe less.”
“Where am I headed?”
“The White House.”
“See you there.” Mercer cut the connection.
THE WHITE HOUSE
The rain that had been falling for days finally abated, leaving the streets clean and fresh. Halos of mist draped the streetlamps. At this hour there was no traffic or pedestrians. Even the city’s homeless were hibernating.
The Cadillac carrying Mercer swung into the back entrance of the Executive Mansion and braked at a guardhouse. After vetting the driver and passing a mirror under the chassis to search for bombs, the guard asked Mercer for identification and checked his name against an electronic clipboard. The car was waved through.