Mercer lay in the wet grass while the loader crabbed across the road and fell down into the final ditch at the bottom of the access route. The engine kept power going to all four tires, but the bucket had buried itself into the swampy ground. The wheel spin managed to kick up an impressive amount of semifrozen mud, but the loader wasn’t going anywhere.
He heard the Ford hit the public road and begin a long, smooth acceleration away from the mine. They had gotten away with murdering seven people. Mercer had no idea what they’d stolen in the backpack — some part of the experiment, no doubt. He couldn’t begin to speculate what would be worth the cold-blooded murder of so many innocents.
All Mercer could do was lie on his back in the rain, knowing he’d failed to bring justice for his mentor. He ached everywhere.
Mercer was still there, six minutes later, when he finally heard sirens approaching the mine. By then, he had already decided what he had to do. It would have nothing to do with justice. It was too personal now. What came next was revenge.
3
A state cop took Mercer’s statement while a female paramedic patched up some abrasions on his left shoulder and right knee. He’d hit the muddy ground hard enough to tear the thick fabric of his coveralls and flay open good-size patches of skin. An ankle was also sore, but it was something a few ibuprofen and a couple of vodka gimlets could handle. A dozen more cops had descended on the mine while a team from the ME’s office had removed the body of the hoist operator from his cab. Forensic people photographed the blood spatter and the arc of shiny brass shell casings that had spewed from the machine pistol that had killed him.
“Come on,” the state detective said incredulously. “You expect me to believe that you hung on to the bottom of the elevator cage as it rose fifteen hundred feet?”
He spoke with a midwestern flatness, and his suit had come from a discount chain store. His name was Paul Gerard and he was about fifty, with a silvery crew cut and a drinker’s florid nose. The skin around where he’d once worn a wedding ring was still slightly puckered. Divorced less than a year. Self-made cliché was Mercer’s estimation.
They were sitting in a glassed-in cubicle near the main lift hoist that had once been offices when the mine was open.
Mercer winced when some spray was shot into his shoulder wound. “We’ve gone over this. I discovered the bodies, and the driver confirmed I borrowed his bucket loader. Bill—”
“Gundersson.”
“Right. Gundersson. You’ve seen the bullet holes on that thing for yourself. That alone proves the gunmen wanted to stop me, right?”
Gerard refused to respond. Mercer plowed on anyway. “I followed them from the experiment chamber, and the only way I could have reached the surface in time to keep after them was to hold on to the underside of the elevator cage.”
The detective looked down at his little notepad and changed subjects.
“How was it you happened to be there at the right time?”
“Right time?” Mercer couldn’t believe the cop would use such an idiotic phrase.
“You know, right after these shooters show up and kill six people down there.”
“Abraham Jacobs just arrived here today. I assume he was the primary target.” Mercer paused. “Correction. He and the others were collateral damage. Whatever they took away in the backpack was the primary target.”
“Any ideas what was in it?”
“None whatsoever,” Mercer replied. He gave a grateful nod to the paramedic after she’d applied a wide adhesive bandage to his shoulder.
“How are you on your tetanus shot?” she asked, closing up her large orange medical case.
“Two years out, so I’m good.”
“All right, I cleaned out the wounds and gave you some topical antibiotics. If you start showing signs of infection like redness or purulence, or if you suffer fever or chills, please consult a physician.”
“I will. Thank you.” Mercer turned his attention back to Detective Gerard. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what was stolen if you go through the computer down there. It’ll have detailed descriptions of what they were up to.”
“And it was this Abraham Jacobs running the show?”
“No. He was lending a hand. The lead researcher was Susan Tunis. I think she’s a PhD in chemistry or atmospherics or something. As I understand it, Abe was just an adviser.”
“So why did you chase the gunmen?”
It was a reasonable question and one that Mercer had been asking himself for years because this wasn’t the first time he’d encountered armed men. Far from it. “Why did I go after them?” he repeated Gerard’s question. “I did it because if I hadn’t, no one else would have.”
“You some kinda hero?” the detective sneered with a cop’s offense at civilians taking the law into their own hands.
Mercer didn’t want to antagonize the police, so he bit back an angry retort and lied to the man instead. “No, Detective, I just saw the murdered corpse of an old friend and lost my judgment for a few minutes.”
Gerard, given the answer he wanted to hear, nodded. “Let me ask you something else. Do you think this was terrorism?”
“Does my opinion really matter? With seven people gunned down by men toting automatic weapons, the FBI will be calling this terrorism just so they can go after the shooters. ATF will get involved, as will every other acronym-happy division of Homeland Security. You’re only asking me questions now because the feds haven’t rolled in from the Twin Cities, and those agents, in turn, will be supplanted by the big boys flying here from D.C. But I’ll tell you the truth, Detective Gerard. This was a robbery, pure and simple. They were after whatever Abe Jacobs had brought with him this morning, and they killed all the witnesses. As to your inevitable follow-up, again I have no idea what it was or why they attacked here and not at Abe’s lab back at his school.” Mercer paused. “Are we done?”
Gerard closed his notebook and slipped it inside a jacket pocket. The pen he kept fiddling with. “You were right about the feds. I’m just babysitting the scene until they show. The guys that went down into the mine are there to secure the scene. They can’t touch dick.”
“Piss you off?” Mercer asked.
“Soon as I got the call and heard automatic weapons were used, I knew I was gonna be low man on the totem pole.”
Mercer wasn’t unsympathetic. “I’ve worked with a lot of feds over the years. One-on-one they’re okay. It’s when you face them as a bureaucracy that they all begin to suck.”
Gerard snorted. “That’s it exactly. I thought you said you’re a mining engineer. How’d you ever tangle with the FBI?”
“I’m a favorite target of some pretty extreme environmental groups.” Which was true, but not the real reason Mercer had so much experience with terrorism and counterterrorism techniques. That mostly came, like today, from being in the wrong place at the wrong time but still willing to do something about it. He asked the state detective, “How’d you like to do me and this investigation a huge favor?”
Gerard looked guarded once again. He cocked an eyebrow.
“The feds are going to need twelve to eighteen hours just to get the ball rolling, time that this investigation can’t afford. You and I both know the gunmen’s pickup has already been dumped and the shooters have scattered. There won’t be any fingerprints or DNA, so that’ll be a dead end. The only real clues are going to be in Abraham Jacobs’s lab.”