In the silence that followed, Mercer and Cali exchanged a look. This wasn’t what Mercer expected at all. Apart from exporting Wahhabi fanatics to the four corners of the globe, Saudi Arabia had never threatened her neighbors. Ibriham Ahmad was saying that the Saudis were responsible for the greatest terrorist attack in history and now wanted to use a dirty bomb against their neighbors.
“And just so you understand our culpabilities as Janissaries in what has transpired recently,” Ahmad added, “Salibi’s great-grandmother was the woman who stole my mentor’s heart. I can only assume she told Salibi about the alembic and its fearsome potential.”
Mercer couldn’t care less about that. He was still grappling with the reason why anyone in Saudi Arabia would perpetrate such an act. “I don’t get it,” he said after a moment. “Why?”
“Think like Khomeini thought,” Ahmad said, wanting Mercer to come to the right conclusion on his own. “This is war, Dr. Mercer, and all war is about power. Be more cynical than you usually are.”
“Oil,” Cali said. “Caspian oil.”
“Sorry, Mercer, but Miss Stowe gets to move to the head of the class.”
She turned to Mercer. “What we were talking about back at your house. About how the only way to defeat fundamentalism is to make oil obsolete. Well, the only way for the Saudi government to maintain their house of cards is if they continue to be our principal source of oil. If we start getting crude from the Caspian Sea, they become marginalized.”
“Two major pipelines are already running, one to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and another will transport a million barrels a year to the Turkish city of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean,” Ahmad said.
“Poli’s orders are to take out the Caspian oil infrastructure?” Mercer asked, then went on to answer his own question. “Won’t work even if he got his hands on a lot more plutonium. Nothing short of nuclear bombs or a full-scale invasion could take out all the refineries, tanker ports, pipelines, and terminals surrounding the Caspian. I’m no petroleum geologist but I’ve seen pictures of Baku. The infrastructure in just that city alone is enormous.”
“You’re not being cynical enough. You don’t need to destroy those things you mentioned. All that need happen is to introduce suicide bombings at a few key locations and have clerics and imams in place to rile the faithful. In short order there will be dozens, or hundreds, of ‘martyrs’ ready to kill themselves, believing they are fighting a holy war against Christianity when in fact they are preserving Saudi oil interests. In a few months oil from the Caspian will slow to a trickle and Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC will be secure.”
“Do they have such clerics in place?”
“I’ve heard them in the mosques of Baku and Istanbul, Ankara and Groznyy, where Chechens are already employing suicide bombers for their own aims.”
“What the hell is wrong with the world?” Mercer said rhetorically, hating that he saw the logic behind the plot.
“The question I often ask myself,” Ahmad replied sadly, “and one that is more difficult to answer is, What remains right with the world?”
Mercer would never let himself fall into that trap. He’d spent a lifetime searching for the good amid the chaos. The image that would be with him longest from his most recent time in Africa wasn’t the misery and bloodshed. It was the refugee giving him the tomato for saving his family, an intimate act of friendship that he would cherish forever.
It was too easy to give in to the hate and ugliness. He’d been numbed by Tisa’s death, struck hollow by his own loss, but he realized just now that he was allowing that pain to turn him away from who he’d always been. Yes, he would mourn her for the rest of his life, but that wasn’t the same as allowing her passing to poison him.
Harry White had been trying to tell him that all along. Mourning wasn’t about how a person’s death made you feel. It was about what that person’s life did and how you carry forward with those memories. The choice is yours.
“We’re going to stop them.” There was a flinty edge to Mercer’s voice, honed by a new sense of confidence he hadn’t realized he’d lost.
Cali noted the difference and gave him a long sideways glance. She smoothed the goose bumps that pricked the skin of her arms.
“My duties as a Janissary are to protect the Alembic of Skenderbeg,” Ahmad said rather pompously. “Beyond that we have no responsibilities. If Feines attempts to locate it directly we will act. However, the plutonium ore and what he does with it isn’t our concern.”
“What about your responsibilities as a human being, for Christ’s sake?”
“It is not for his sake I do anything, Miss Stowe. I have devoted my life to protecting the people of this planet from a devastating weapon, as have all the men who have come before me. I think that is enough to ask.”
“Bullshit!” Mercer was nearly shouting.
Again Ahmad arched his eyebrow, a half smirk canting his dense mustache.
Mercer went on, hotly. “You’ve been feeding us just enough clues to whet our appetites and keep us going. You wanted us involved because you needed our help. You couldn’t have pulled off the salvage job in New York, but you practically led us to it by planting that canteen in Africa.”
Ahmad’s jaw loosened and his dark eyes widened. “How did you know?”
“Two reasons.” Mercer was on a roll and checked off fingers as he spoke. “First of all the woman who gave it to me seemed unsure of it. It even slipped from her hands. A canteen like that would have been very familiar to her since it was probably her job to fetch water, but she acted like she’d never seen it before. Secondly there’s no way in hell the canvas would have survived seventy years in the jungle. You gave it to that woman a couple of days before we entered the village because you knew we were coming.”
Cali was as stunned by Mercer’s deductions as Ahmad. “Wait, Mercer, how did he know we were going to be in that village?”
“Remember when I told you I was there on behalf of the United Nations looking for a mineral deposit I knew wouldn’t be there? It was a setup from the beginning. What’s his name, Adam Burke, the UN representative who requested I go, wanted me to find the plutonium mine instead.” He turned to Professor Ahmad. “I assume you know him.”
“You’re mangling his name,” Ahmad said. “It’s not Adam Burke. It’s Ah-dham Berk with a silent r. He was a student of mine fifteen years ago.”
Mercer had never met the man, only spoken to him on the phone a couple of times, and he hadn’t detected an accent. He would have never guessed that Berk, with a silent r, was Turkish. He sounded more American than Mercer did.
“So yes, I did set you up.” Ahmad suddenly sounded very tired, but also relieved to get the truth out. “You have rather unique talents and contacts that no one within the Janissary Corps possesses. And you, Miss Stowe, I hate to admit, are as much a victim of my machinations as Dr. Mercer.”
“What?” she cried.
“Who do you think made available the information about the elevated cancer rates in that village? You haven’t had time to speak to him much but perhaps you will recognize my pupil, Devrin’s, voice when he returns with our vehicle. He was the one who called posing as an archivist from the Centers for Disease Control.”
“What would have happened if Cali and I hadn’t met?” Mercer asked.
“It was inevitable,” Ibriham said dismissively.
“No it wasn’t,” Cali shot back. “I would have gone on alone if some stupid kid hadn’t used my truck for target practice.” Ahmad gave her a patient, long-suffering look. “That was you?”
He nodded.