“Shit.” Anger crept back into Mercer’s voice. “So how do we find the new key? Is there a clue?”
“Yeah.” Harry pointed to the second paragraph, a one-line non sequitur that Mercer had glossed over when he read the text. “This line here. Second tea into cup in six. I’m pretty sure it’s another doublet. Change tea into cup in six words and the second word is a clue. I scanned the rest of the letter and found five more doublet clues.”
“Can you figure them out?” Mercer asked anxiously.
“Might take me a while, but sure.”
Mercer slid Harry’s drink out of his reach. “Then get to work.”
After making a pot of coffee strong enough to melt a spoon, Mercer sat next to Harry as he began writing out words. There were literally hundreds of combinations and they wouldn’t know if they were right until all five had been figured out.
“Damn,” Harry muttered after a minute. “I’m beginning to hate Chester Bowie.”
“Why?”
“You only need four words to change tea into cup. It goes: tea, tap, cap, cup. The other two are just filler and I don’t even know where to put them. I could make it tea pea pet put pup cup or it could be tea sea sep sap cap cup.”
“Wait, what’s sep?”
“Abbreviation for separate. General rule for doublets is if it’s in the dictionary you can use it.”
“Well I’m not as good at these things as you but why don’t you give me the second hint and I’ll see what I can do.”
Harry leafed through Bowie’s note to Einstein and read out the next doublet. “‘Fourth games into balls in nine.’ Changing only one letter at a time, turn the word ‘games’ into the word ‘balls’ in nine words. The fourth word’s our clue. After that we have: ‘fourth gout into full in ten, second east into west in four,’ and finally there is ‘third dire into fine in four.’”
Mercer wrote out the first and last word of the second clue on a piece of paper, realized how much harder it would be with five-letter words versus three, and silently switched papers with Harry to give him the more difficult puzzle.
“Just for that I want my drink back,” Harry said without looking up.
Mercer slid the highball glass back to his friend and together they set to work.
At eleven o’clock they compared notes. Mercer had filled line after line on his paper but had made no progress, while Harry was pretty sure he had three of them, albeit they were the easiest. He’d deciphered the last two, coming up with west, lest, last, east and dire, dive, five, fine. Seeing that one of the clue words, “five,” was a number, he’d cracked the first doublet and came up with tea, ten, tan, tap, cap, cup.
“So we have ten, something, something, lest, five,” Mercer said, emptying Harry’s overflowing ashtray into a metal bucket he kept for that sole purpose.
“It must be a math problem. Ten plus something lest five, or ten minus something less five.”
“Ten times?” Mercer suggested.
“Genius,” Harry shouted and bent to his paper again. “Games into balls.” He spoke aloud as he wrote out. “Games, dames, dimes, times, ah, tiles, tills, fills, falls, balls. Perfect.”
“Way to go, Harry,” Mercer applauded. “Figure out the last one and we’re in business again. You know the fourth word has to be a number.”
“Give me a minute.” A few minutes passed. Harry finally looked up. “You realize that Bowie wrote this just before he tossed the safe.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Just think what kind of mind he had to create the doublets and then write out the letter to Einstein making sure he kept his word count straight. He could do this stuff in his head without really thinking about it. And from the sound of it he’d been through hell and back.”
“From what I’ve gathered, he was an eccentric, that’s for sure,” Mercer said. “And from the tone of this letter it sounds like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
“Oh, I’d say he’d crossed the verge and was deep into la-la land.”
Mercer asked Harry for Drag’s leash so he could take the mangy basset for his last walk of the night. From long years of experience, he knew Harry wouldn’t leave until he’d solved the code, and even then he’d sleep on the leather couch rather than return to his dingy one-bedroom apartment up the block.
Mercer dragged the old basset to the circular stairs, and once he got him going the dog made good progress, the fat of his belly rippling as it scraped over the stair treads. He even waddled across the polished marble foyer. Usually Harry had to drag him to the door but for Mercer he was a little less stubborn.
Mercer had just reached the front door when the doorbell chimed. He automatically checked the TAG Heuer strapped around his wrist. It was quarter past eleven. No one visited at this hour unless the news was bad. He thought for a moment about running upstairs for the Beretta nine-millimeter he kept in his bedside table, but he caught a glimpse of his visitor through the door’s side lights. He smiled and opened the door.
Cali Stowe wore jeans and a black tank top with a man’s white oxford shirt thrown over it. Mercer got the impression she’d dashed over in a rush. She wore no makeup and her red hair was a little disheveled, but still she looked beautiful, in that vulnerable way men love but women never understand.
Then three things struck Mercer at once. Cali hadn’t returned his smile, he’d never given her his home address, and there were two men standing behind her.
“Sorry,” she said sadly. “They didn’t give me much choice.”
One of the men showed Mercer the pistol he held to Cali’s back.
Anger came in hot black waves. “Who are you?” Mercer demanded.
“Why don’t we step inside, Dr. Mercer,” the gunman said.
Both men had dark hair and dark complexions, with thick mustaches, but they appeared more Mediterranean than Middle Eastern. The one with the gun was Mercer’s height and had a slender build and an angelic face that belied the weapon in his hand. The other was older, his mustache and hair shot with silver, and shorter, five seven or so. While both wore conservative dark suits, Mercer had the impression that the shorter man was the leader.
“Are you okay?” Mercer asked Cali as he stepped back from the door.
“I’m fine,” she said.
He couldn’t see any bruises on her and she wasn’t limping, but Mercer knew that in front of these two Cali wouldn’t tell him if she was hurt. She was too brave for that.
“What do you want?” Mercer demanded of the one he thought was the leader.
“I am here to deliver a warning, Dr. Mercer, nothing more.” The man had an accent Mercer couldn’t place and spoke gently, almost like a priest.
“Warn me about what?”
“You must stop your search for the Alembic of Skenderbeg. The more you look the more you help others who are also searching for it.”
If one of them didn’t have a gun in his right hand, Mercer would have laughed at them. “Friend, I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what an alembic is or who Skenderbeg is, so why don’t you leave and we’ll pretend this never happened.”
“It is much too late for that.”
“Jesus!” Mercer recognized the voice, and his reaction suddenly tripped Cali’s memory too. She blanched.
“That was you in the village,” Mercer said. “You saved Cali and me.”
“Had I known you would continue your quest,” the man agreed, “I would have delayed my attack and let Caribe Dayce kill you.”
“We’re not on any quest,” Mercer said, somehow feeling more in control. Had these two wanted them dead they wouldn’t be talking, and the gunman had lowered his weapon, which Mercer realized was the first gun he’d seen in a long time that wasn’t firing at him. “We’re trying to find out what happened to the uranium that was mined near that village almost seventy years ago. This has nothing to do with your Allergy of Skinbag, or whatever it is.”