“The Alembic of Skenderbeg.” He said it almost reverently. “You don’t even know what you’re searching for, Doctor, but I must tell you to stop. We have saved your life twice.”
“That was you last night at the casino?” Cali asked.
He nodded. “Yes. A mercenary has been hired to retrieve the alembic and we have managed to follow his movements. We tracked him first to Africa and then to Atlantic City last night. But at the casino we underestimated the size of his forces and didn’t know he had rented a helicopter.” He turned his gaze to Mercer. His eyes appeared haunted, like he knew too many secrets. “You led them to a clue they would have never found. What was it by the way?”
“A safe,” Mercer said, guilt edging into his voice as he again thought about Serena Ballard and all the others. “A classics professor brought back ore samples from Africa. He had gone there believing he’d found the source of the metal Zeus used to forge Prometheus’s chains. What he found was a vein of unusually powerful uranium, not the mythical adamantine.”
The two men exchanged a look when Mercer said the word “adamantine,” as if they knew of it. “Was there anything else?”
“The safe’s owners said there was nothing else in it but the ore samples,” Mercer lied, praying that Harry wouldn’t come out to the library overlooking the foyer. “The mercenary—”
“Poli Feines,” the man with the pistol offered.
“He stole the safe before I had a chance to verify, but I have no reason to doubt what the owners said. They knew nothing beyond the fact that the safe had been tossed from the Hindenburg.”
Again the two men glanced at each other. “Interesting,” the leader said at last. “But it changes nothing. I came here to warn you. You are caught up in an ancient battle you can’t possibly understand. I beg you to end your investigation now. You have been lucky so far that I have been in a position to save your life. The next time you might not fare so well.”
The two men backed toward the door, the one holstering his pistol. Cali and Mercer remained where they stood. “And know this, Dr. Mercer, if I could find you and Ms. Stowe so easily, Poli Feines will be able to do so as well.”
“Who are you?” Mercer asked before they disappeared into the night.
The leader paused, considering the question. He searched Mercer’s eyes and found whatever it was he was looking for. “Janissaries,” he said at last and closed the door.
It was as though the room had been dark and suddenly there was light. Mercer took a deep breath and stepped close to Cali. He rested his hands on her thin shoulders and looked her in the eye. What he saw was anger rather than fear. “Are you okay?”
“I’m pissed,” she answered and stepped back just a bit. Her freckles stood out in relief against her smooth, pale skin and her small ears were reddened. She didn’t need comforting. She needed to vent. “They came in through a supposedly alarmed window right into my bathroom. I was a soldier for God’s sake and I didn’t even hear them. They turned on the light and I just kept on sleeping. They had to shake me awake. Which I will admit was one of the scariest moments of my life. You can imagine what I was thinking. But, Jesus, then they never said a goddamn thing. That was the worst part. They held out clothes for me and motioned me to get dressed. Weird thing was they shielded their eyes so they could only see my feet when I got out of bed, so I figured they weren’t going to rape me.
“Then they led me to their car and just started to drive. I had no idea what was going on until you opened the door. What is it with you, anyway? First it was Africa and then Atlantic City and now tonight. Do you go anywhere where there aren’t armed goons gunning for you?” Her raised voice alerted Drag. He ambled over and flopped onto his back in front of Cali, instantly defusing her anger. She bent to rub his ample belly. Looking up at Mercer, she said, “For some reason I never pictured you with a dog.”
“Drag’s not mine. He’s Harry’s.”
“Harry’s here?”
“Upstairs working on Chester Bowie’s damned word games. This one’s a little more complex than the first one we got from the archive. Why don’t you head up. I’ve got to walk Drag. I’ll be back in a second.”
“Do you think those men…?”
“They’re gone. I believed him when he said he just wants to warn us off.”
“And did he?”
Mercer’s eyes tightened for an instant; then he smiled. “Not by a long shot.”
Cali straightened and kissed Mercer softly on the cheek. “Sorry about blowing up like that. I was just—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Mercer returned to the brownstone after Drag had sniffed at every car tire, lamppost, and fire hydrant in a two-block radius before finding one worthy of peeing on. When he opened the door, he heard Cali’s ringing laughter from the bar and he silently thanked Harry for dispelling the last of her misgivings.
Harry had poured her a stiff Scotch and was showing her the codes. When Mercer came into the room, Harry cast him a wicked look. “Cali told me what happened. I told her she has it all wrong. You hired those guys just so you’d finally have a woman in your house.”
“Desperate times,” Mercer shot back. He moved behind the bar to pour himself another cup of coffee, only this one he laced with a generous dram of brandy. “Has he shown you the codes?” he asked Cali. “Or has he just been besmirching my character?”
“He cracked the last one.”
“I think,” Harry said. “Gout into full; gout, pout, pour, four, which is our clue by the way, then foul, fowl, bowl, boll, bull, full.”
“So the key is?”
Harry checked his notes. “Ten times four less five.”
“Forty minus five,” Mercer said. “Thirty-five. Have you started looking for the words?”
A shadow crept across Harry’s blue eyes. “Yeah and I may be all wrong. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
“What do you have?”
“Counting every thirty-fifth word gives us this.”
He showed the paper to Mercer: “Deer Albert nick cola was right trains urine nick elements dew exist in nature.”
“See what I mean?” Harry said, waving away a cloud of cigarette smoke that was drifting toward Cali’s face. “Bunch of gobbledygook if you ask me.”
Mercer read the sentence again and again, speeding up, slowing down, and inserting random pauses. Two words kept thrusting themselves to the forefront of his mind. Nick cola. Nick…cola. Nickcola. Nickola. Nikola. “Holy shit!”
“What?” Cali and Harry cried in unison.
“Tesla,” Mercer said and suddenly the rest of the sentence became clear. He blanched. “We’re in trouble.”
“Damn it, what does it mean?”
“Dear Albert,” Mercer said, still grappling with what Chester Bowie had discovered. “Nikola was right, transuranic elements do exist in nature.”
“Oh my God,” Cali gasped. Mercer wasn’t surprised she understood right away. She was a nuclear scientist after all.
Harry still didn’t get it. “So what?”
“Transuranic elements are elements above uranium on the periodic table,” Mercer replied. “They can only be produced in a lab by a nuclear reactor. Most of them decay in a few seconds but there’s one that lasts years — hell, millennia. Chester Bowie’s adamantine isn’t naturally enriched uranium, it’s fucking plutonium. And raw plutonium doesn’t need expensive refining with centrifuges and a staff of scientists to be made into a weapon. Its stuff is ready to go. Instant dirty bomb. A terrorist’s wet dream come true.”