“I’m in love,” Harry said, then stood to introduce himself. “Harry White, at your servicing.”
She chuckled at his quip and they shook hands. “Hi, Harry. I’m Cali Stowe.”
Harry shot Mercer a glance before saying, “She was the one in Africa?”
She too gave Mercer an appraising look. “And now I’m here. What are the odds?”
“Pretty even if you’re meeting Serena Ballard.”
“Head of the class for the guy in the Armani sports coat.” She took the stool next to Mercer, forcing Harry to lean over the bar so he could ogle at her. “She and I spoke this afternoon, and imagine my surprise when she told me she already had a meeting to discuss Chester Bowie today.”
Still not over his shock, and delight, at seeing Cali, Mercer asked, “So are you going to tell me who you really are? Because I know you don’t work for the CDC. Their human resources guy nearly choked when I asked about you.”
“Ever heard of NEST?”
“Part of the Department of Energy, isn’t it?”
“It stands for Nuclear Emergency Search Team. I’m a member. Our main function is to act as a rapid response force in the event of a nuclear bomb strike or an attack at a nuclear plant. Back in 2003 our charter was changed slightly after President Bush went before the country in his State of the Union address and made a serious boo-boo by saying Saddam had gone uranium shopping in Africa. Because of that gaffe NEST has also been tasked with finding and securing previously unknown sources of uranium. There are ten of us on a team searching the world for old uranium mines, and places where uranium might be found.”
“So you weren’t lying about how you found that village.”
A shadow passed behind her luminous dark eyes and she took a quick sip of her Scotch. Some of her freckles blurred into an angry flush. “Sort of but not exactly. Someone at the CDC contacted me about that village having the highest cancer rate on the planet. When I took that info to my bosses they played around with it for a while, talked it over in a dozen meetings and committees, and finally shelved it, saying, and I quote, ‘There are more pressing matters.’”
“Let me guess,” Harry chimed in, “you went out on your own?”
Cali nodded, her good humor returning. “If you noticed I’m sitting kind of funny, it’s because most of my ass was chewed off when I got back to our field office in New York.”
Unbidden, Mercer’s mind conjured up the image of her backside. He was in little hurry to force it away but he remarked, “I saw you getting into a Town Car.”
“The head of NEST, Cliff Roberts, came to get me personally. That’s when the butt chewing began. Part of my left cheek is still in that Lincoln.” Cali tossed hair from her forehead in a simple gesture that held Harry entranced. “They bluffed about firing me, then about suspending me. In the end I was ordered to take a week’s worth of personal days and come back,” she deepened her voice to an approximation of her superior, “‘with the proper attitude of a team player.’ I envy you, Mercer, for not having to deal with government BS.”
“One of my first jobs was working for the USGS. It wasn’t bad as bureaucracies go but I knew I’d never make it there for long.” He thought back to their time at the village, making certain connections now that he knew her true purpose in being there. Some discrepancies came to light. “When you stepped into the bush for a little privacy…?”
“I was checking a Geiger counter. If you were anyone other than a geologist, I could have done it in the clear and made up a story. You would have seen through the ploy in a second, forcing me into the jungle with tales of diarrhea.”
“Sorry to cause you the embarrassment. Now that I think of it you weren’t all that pale coming back and you made a miraculous recovery.”
She grinned. “I’m not a method actor and I wasn’t kidding about having an iron stomach.”
“So what did the Geiger tell you?”
“There wasn’t much radiation above normal ambient. However large the lode was, it was all cleared out back in the thirties or forties and erosion would have carried away any contaminated soil long ago.”
“I’m leaning toward the 1930s,” Mercer told her. “Not long after Chester Bowie made his discovery.”
“And then the Germans came to mine what Bowie left behind?”
“That’s my guess. From what little Ms. Ballard told me about Bowie, I doubt he was a traitor, so I think someone caught wind of his find later on and came back to clear out the vein.” Mercer ordered another round. Sam/Jamal/Antoine, the piano player, must have thought there were enough patrons in the bar to start in on a pretty good rendition of “As Time Goes By.” He must have played that song a dozen times a day. “So how did you find Bowie?” Mercer asked. “I traced him through his schooling.”
“IRS database.” Cali sucked on an ice cube and both Harry and Mercer paused to watch her sensual mouth in action. She noticed the scrutiny and quickly crunched down on the cube. It was an absentminded habit that drew more attention than she intended. “In matters of national security, NEST can access some pretty powerful databases. Since I’m out sick, I had one of my teammates do the search. He led me to Keeler so I called the school’s president and he passed on the information about Serena Ballard’s book. I called her et voilà, here I am.
“What I don’t get,” she continued, “is what that mine has to do with a loopy classics professor. Serena filled me in a little about Bowie’s theories and it doesn’t jibe at all with what we found. If he went out playing amateur archaeologist to prove his theory about ice age bones, he would have gone to Greece. How did he end up in Africa?”
“With luck Serena’s notes might shed a little light on the subject.”
“That reminds me,” Cali said quickly. “The president of Keeler is ticked at her. She was supposed to have returned her research material to the school years ago. So make sure I tell her that it all has to go back.”
A lone woman in her forties entered the dim bar. Unlike the tourists ebbing and flowing into the room, she wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. She had long blond hair and a chubby round face. Mercer put her height at about five three and her weight somewhere around his own. He guessed that there was Pennsylvania Dutch not too far down her family tree. She spotted the trio at the bar and made her way across the room. It had to be Serena Ballard.
“Dr. Mercer? Ms. Stowe?”
“You found us,” Cali answered.
“Hi, I’m Serena Ballard.”
“Please call me Cali.” Even seated on the stool, Cali was almost a head taller than the casino executive.
“And people generally call me Mercer.” He shook her hand, noting that her eyes were cornflower blue. “This is my friend Harry White.”
Harry didn’t repeat his servicing joke again. His instincts had been spot-on that Cali would see the humor. He didn’t think Serena Ballard would. “Pleased to meet you.”
Serena looked first at Mercer and then to Cali. “Three years after my book comes out and not one but two people suddenly show an interest.”
“Mercer and I are working on the same problem from different perspectives and came to the same conclusion — you. Can we get you a drink?”
“Just a diet Coke. Why don’t we grab a booth away from the piano.” She hoisted her bag. “I brought everything I could find. Actually there is a lot more than I remembered and it reminded me that I was supposed to return it all to Keeler College.”
Cali grabbed up her and Serena’s drinks. “The school’s president asked me to ask you about that.” She then quipped, “He made it sound as though there was a long line of scholars clamoring for the Chester Bowie files.”