The dog didn’t even lift an eyelid.
“Drag, up. Walk time.”
The basset rolled onto his side, his back to Harry, an annoyed growl rumbling from deep in his chest.
Harry walked over, favoring his prosthetic right leg, which always bothered him when he napped with it on. He shook the hound, causing waves of fat to ripple under the dog’s loose skin. Drag finally righted himself, his stubby legs barely able to keep his belly from rubbing the couch’s leather. He managed to get a single wag from his tail before it sagged like a deflated balloon.
Harry clipped the leash to his collar and, as his name implied, had to drag him from the couch and toward the library and the curving stairs beyond. Mercer smiled as he heard Harry tug the recalcitrant dog across the tile foyer to the front door. Harry called up, “If you finish with Ira before midnight I’ll be at Tiny’s.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay then, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Ira was already at a table when Mercer stepped into the trendy Thai bistro. A trio of women sipping cosmopolitans at the bar eyed Mercer as he entered the room carrying a never-used gym bag. He didn’t see them but spotted Ira at a table near the back. Ira already had a pair of drinks waiting. Lasko had removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, but couldn’t shed his thirty years in the military. He sat straight, with his fingers laced, while his eyes never rested.
“You look beat,” the deputy national security advisor said by way of greeting. They didn’t bother to shake hands.
“You have an eye for the obvious. The past few weeks and especially the past five days are something I wouldn’t mind forgetting.”
“I thought this was supposed to be a slam dunk. You go in, find some minerals to make the CAR rich. The UN gets to look good and a little rubs off on us.”
“Problem is the minerals aren’t there, which I suspected all along, and whatever riches the CAR might eventually have are going to line the pockets of warlords.”
“I read a brief about someone coming down from Sudan.”
“Caribe Dayce. Charming fellow. All muscle. Favors a machete. He’s dead.”
Ira didn’t show surprise. “You?”
“I wish.” A waiter came to take their orders. Mercer demurred. The sandwich he’d had earlier lay like a stone in his stomach. Ira ordered enough food for two. Mercer continued when the young Asian had stepped away. “Dayce actually had me and a woman named Cali Stowe staked out for a firing squad when this group of”—Mercer wasn’t sure what to call his rescuers—“soldiers came out of nowhere and gunned down all of his men.”
“Locals? Peacekeepers?”
“Neither. I don’t know who they were. They just came out of nowhere, did their thing, and warned me to never come back.”
“Who is Cali Stowe?” Ira rarely made comments until he had all the facts.
“That’s one of the things I’d like you to find out for me. She claimed to work for the CDC but when I called I got the impression she was using them as a cover. Also when we parted ways at Kennedy I saw her get into a government car. If she’s on Uncle Sam’s payroll I’d like to know why she happened to be the same place I was.”
“I can make a few calls. Anything else?”
Mercer plucked Chester Bowie’s canteen from the gym bag and set it on the table. He then withdrew the misshapen bullet from his pocket. The copper glinted in the restaurant’s dim lighting. “I’d like these looked at by an expert. Especially the bullet.” Mercer took nearly a half hour to tell him the story he’d heard from the old woman and lay out everything that had happened from the moment Cali had approached him in Kivu. Ira jotted a few notes on a napkin.
“White mercenary. Eye patch. Pauly or Poli. Eastern European accent. Got it.” The admiral set his pen aside and pushed away the near-empty plates. “So what’s your take?”
“At first I thought that village was where the U.S. mined its uranium for the Manhattan Project, but I can’t believe we’d kill off the witnesses.”
“Agreed. But where does that leave us?”
“It’s gotta be the Germans,” Mercer answered quickly. “They had a pretty sophisticated nuclear program during the war. Somehow they learned about a vein of incredibly concentrated uranium ore and sent out an expedition to get it.”
“And Chester Bowie?”
“It’s just a guess but maybe he was the prospector the Germans used to find the uranium. From what the woman told me it was just a few weeks or months after he left that a bunch of other white men arrived. If he got word to the Nazi high command, it would take about that long to put together a team and get them on the ground.”
“So he’s a traitor who helped the Nazis during World War Two?”
“Possibly. Or maybe he was coerced or didn’t know who backed his original exploration. That’s what I want to find out.”
“How?”
“I entered his name in a search engine and came up with over a hundred thousand hits. Bowie State University. Bowie, Maryland. Jim Bowie. Bowie knives. Teen sluts with big bowies. But I have a better plan to track him down.”
“Okay, I’ll leave you to that. What about the town now? Is the old mine still dangerous? I mean could someone go there and dig up their own concentrated uranium?”
“I doubt it. From what I saw it looks played out. Whoever mined it took everything. And as of three days ago the village no longer exists. In my report to Adam Burke I’m going to recommend that a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency go in once things calm down, just to make sure.”
“With Dayce dead, shouldn’t it be quiet now?”
“It’ll take a few weeks or months. With Dayce out of the way there will be a dozen or more petty warlords fighting to take over the remains of his army.”
Ira was quiet for a moment, furrows on his forehead extending up to the crown of his shaved skull. “How did Bowie find it in the first place?”
Mercer leaned back, a smile on his lips. He’d known Ira would get to the real mystery about the whole affair. “That’s the question nagging me since Cali and I got out of the CAR. The village isn’t even a blip on the map. The geology in the area doesn’t look conducive for uranium and yet sixty-odd years ago this guy walks into the jungle and starts to shovel overburden as though there was an X on the ground with a sign saying ‘Dig here.’”
“You have any idea how he did it?”
“Either he was the greatest prospecting geologist I’ve never heard of or the luckiest SOB in history.”
Ira motioned to the waiter that he wanted the bill, then stood. “I’ll call as soon as I learn anything.”
“What parts of this story do I keep out of my report to the United Nations?”
Ira didn’t have to think. “As much as you can. I told them about you as a favor to the President. It doesn’t mean I want you sharing any secrets with them. In fact, ax your recommendation about sending in a group from the IAEA.”
Having seen firsthand a number of UN failures in Africa and elsewhere, Mercer was inclined to agree. “I’ll contact Connie Van Buren at DOE.” Constance Van Buren was the secretary of energy, a longtime friend of Mercer’s. “I’ll see if she can send some of her own inspectors.”
“I’d wait on even that,” Ira said guardedly. “Let’s dig a little on our own before you contact her. You said the place is too dangerous now anyway.”
Ira Lasko had also picked up that there were elements to what had happened that didn’t add up. The admiral paused for a second, looking down at Mercer, who was sliding a credit card from his wallet. “What’s your sense of the group who took out Dayce and his men?”
“Don’t ask me how or why but I think they knew about the mine and had gone there to make sure Dayce didn’t discover it.”