“If the mine’s played out like you said, what’s the point?”
Mercer had no answer. But he would find it.
New York City
The Upper East Side co-op had a commanding view of Central Park and the apartment towers beyond. It had four bedrooms, a study, and a small suite for a live-in servant. The dining table could seat a dozen. The owner stood on the balcony, the first brush of a spring breeze blowing through his dark hair. He wore black linen slacks, a black silk shirt, and black shoes. He scanned the park like a hawk eyeing an open meadow, as if he too were searching for prey. In one hand he held a slim cell phone. In the other he cradled a snifter of seventy-year-old cognac.
The man was in his mid-forties, unmarried but handsome enough to rarely want for female companionship. He hadn’t earned the money to buy the co-op; that had been earned generations earlier. His older brother ran the family’s empire, a far-reaching conglomerate with interests on four continents. A lesser man might have been jealous of the power his brother wielded, not only over the company but over the family as well. Yet because of the career path he’d chosen and what he’d done with the contacts he’d made, he was close to reaching a pinnacle of power his brother couldn’t even conceive.
The roots of the operation came from within his own family history, from a story he’d learned from his grandmother, so in a sense he’d been planning it since childhood, although he’d never told a soul. This was to be something he alone would accomplish. His brother needed an army of lawyers and accountants to keep the business running, while he was about to change history with a select few.
The cell phone rang. He answered it quickly. “Hello?”
“It’s me, darling, I was wondering if you’d reconsidered my proposal.”
It took him a moment to recognize the voice — Michaela Taftsbury’s, an international attorney from London currently working in New York — and to recall her proposal — a weekend at a bed and breakfast in Vermont.
“Michaela, I told you I can’t leave the city.”
“It’s a weekend, not a fortnight, lover. I haven’t seen you in so long.”
Best to end it now, he decided. While she was a passable conversationalist and highly charged in the bedroom, she was becoming bothersome. “And you won’t see me for even longer,” he warned, “if you keep pestering me.”
“Pestering? Pestering! Screw you. I thought we were having a little fun. If I’ve become a pest then to hell with you.” She hung up.
But the phone rang almost immediately. Damn it. He shouldn’t have dumped her before he got the call he was waiting for. Now he’d waste precious time assuaging her feelings so he could get her off the phone. He’d only break up with her later. He checked the phone’s caller ID feature. It was an international call with a country code he didn’t recognize. This was it!
“Poli?” he asked when he opened the connection.
“No names!” the one-eyed Bulgarian assassin hissed.
The man in New York ignored the rebuke. He was about to hear the news he’d waited for all his life. “Was it there?”
“At one point maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about? Was it there?”
“If it was there someone beat us to it a long time ago.”
“It’s gone?”
“I didn’t stick around long enough to explore the entire region, but it is safe to say that I believe it is all gone.”
“You didn’t ‘stick around’? I am paying you a great deal of money to more than merely ‘stick around.’”
“You’ve promised me a great deal of money,” the killer reminded sharply. “And I didn’t stay because they showed up.”
The disappointment was too much. The whole thing could have been wrapped up in a couple of days. Now he was being told the ore was gone. And then Poli’s statement finally cut through the man’s frustration. “Wait, ‘they’? Who are ‘they’?” But he knew. All too well, he knew, but still he persisted. “My God, man, you had an army behind you. Caribe Dayce’s men are more than ample protection.”
“Dayce’s dead and so are a lot of his men, so you can forget about paying him the other half you owed to get me to that village. I barely got out myself. This happened five days ago. It’s taken me this long to reach Khartoum.” A note of professional respect crept into Poli’s voice when he added, “You warned me the opposition was good. I had no idea a fire team could move like that.”
“They’ve had centuries to refine their craft. What of the American who was in the area?”
“Which one? There were two. A man and a woman.”
“I know nothing of the woman,” the man in New York admitted.
“In either case, I don’t know what happened to them. I was running the first instant the opposition showed up. Last I saw of the pair they were staked out and about to be executed by Dayce. It’s possible they were killed in the cross fire. I don’t know.”
“I will make inquiries. You’d best come to New York. I have a feeling you’ll be needed here.”
“My flight’s in two hours.”
Mercer knew exactly how he’d find Chester Bowie, and he began his search with the optimism of the fatally misguided. He worked under the logical assumption that Bowie wasn’t the luckiest SOB in history and that he was a trained geologist, and a damned good one at that. He also assumed that a guy older than fifty wouldn’t trek into one of the remotest spots on the globe without a support team. Placing the excavation at the village sometime in the early 1940s and working backward Mercer guessed that Bowie would have graduated from college no earlier than 1913. He gave himself a cushion of another five years and decided to begin his search in 1908.
The next step was simple and that was to search the electronic database for Academics Who’s Who for the years between 1908 and 1945. The computer search took less than a second and came up with no Chester Bowies. Not yet concerned, Mercer pushed the search back to 1900, the oldest records on the database, and still came up empty.
He leaned back at his desk and wondered if Bowie hadn’t been a good student in college or, worse, if he’d been a self-taught geologist. Mercer was so sure of his investigative technique, he hadn’t considered either alternative. He idly brought up Bowie’s name on the search engine again and for a fruitless hour called up and scanned random entries.
He wouldn’t let go of the idea that Bowie had formal training. No one could have found the uranium deposit without it. He phoned the alumni offices of a dozen schools with preeminent geology departments. No Chester Bowie. He called all the major mining schools and still no Bowie, even going back to 1900, which would have made Bowie at least sixty when he went to the CAR. He ate lunch hunched over his computer and let his answering machine pick up the twenty incoming calls. Dinner was Chinese delivery, which he also ate at his desk, and he finally called it a night past one.
He was at his desk at six the following morning, the coffee at his elbow strong enough to take the enamel off his teeth. He continued on with the search engine until nine, when he called the company that ran the Who’s Who Web site. He talked his way past two secretaries and finally got the chief archivist on the line. She introduced herself as Mrs. Moreland. From the frailty of her voice he guessed that she might have graduated a couple of years before Chester.
“How can I help you, Dr. Mercer?”
He thought it prudent to use his title, and to embellish the story somewhat. “I’m a field geologist, Mrs. Moreland, and I’ve just returned from Central Africa, where I came upon a grave in a remote village. The headstone said that the man who was buried there, one Chester Bowie, died in 1942. A village elder remembered the man was also a geologist who had come to the region by himself and that he was mauled to death by a lion.”