D’Avejan opened a top desk drawer and pulled out a fresh cell phone from the pile. He had to call a legitimate number, but at least his end of the conversation was entirely anonymous. He dialed and waited while the signal bounced halfway around the globe, switching from phone to satellite feed to radio transceiver and finally through an antiquated PBX machine tucked into the dim corner of a ship’s radio room.
“Where are you?” d’Avejan asked by way of greeting. He spoke in English, the only language he and the man he had phoned shared.
“At my desk doing paperwork. What about you?”
“Don’t get smart, Lev. Are you still in Vladivostok?”
“Nyet,” replied the captain of the Akademik Nikolay Zhukovsky. “We left about five hours ago.”
“Is everything set?” D’Avejan regretted asking the question as soon as it passed his lips. Lev Shukov wouldn’t have slipped out of Russia’s easternmost port had he not been ready.
Fortunately the taciturn sea captain kept his biting retort to himself and simply said, “Everything except the most important thing.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” the Frenchman responded quickly. “I’m working on it.”
“You might want to work quicker. We have a hard deadline for the first shot, and so far the ionizing medium we have aboard won’t — how you say — cut it. I can pump terawatts of energy into the stratosphere, but without the right medium is like pissing through a fire hose. Try all you want you will not put out fire.”
“Lev, it’s not as bad,” d’Avejan countered. “Our lab-grown crystals are just slower. But as of today we have another piece of real crystal. I will make arrangements to chopper it out to the ship while you’re en route.”
“And you? Do you come to see your triumph?”
“I don’t know yet. My real triumph won’t happen for months. But I might join you anyway to at least witness the beginning of this historic endeavor.”
“Either way,” Shukov grunted, “send Marlboros. I could not find any in Vladivostok, and I’m stuck smoking these Turkish cigarettes that taste like donkey ass.”
“You’d know, Lev,” d’Avejan teased, obviously relieved that the ship was away and now beyond Pickford’s reach. Unbeknownst to but a handful of people at Eurodyne, the whole Luck Dragon Trading deal was cover to acquire the specialized Russian ship and finance certain modifications to her.
“Ha, you French and your sense of humor. For record, Jerry Lewis is not funny and neither is that douchebag mime.”
“No arguments there.” Roland’s father had loved Marcel Marceau. Roland had hated both his father and his given name, and thus France’s most beloved street performer as well. He turned serious. “Just make sure you get into position on time. There’s too much riding on this operation to blow it now.”
He clicked off the phone and fed it to the shredder. He was pleased. Things were in motion now, and soon momentum would reach a point where they couldn’t be stopped. He brushed a hand down the front of his suit pants, felt his arousal becoming even stronger than before, and reached for the intercom on his desk. “Odette, would you please lock the outer door and come in here.”
5
It was eight thirty in the morning when Mercer rolled up to Abe Jacobs’s little faux-Tudor house just outside a side gate of the college where he’d last taught and had chosen to retire. Apart from the surrounding stone wall, the school was indistinguishable from the charming town of Killenburg, Ohio. Located on the banks of a feeder stream to Raccoon Creek, which eventually drained into the Ohio River, Hardt College had just celebrated its one hundred twentieth year. Its founder, Konrad Hardt, was a German émigré who had never spent a moment past his tenth birthday in a classroom, but had been a genius of mechanical design. His inventions streamlined industrial manufacturing in such diverse businesses as cigar rolling, railway lanterns, and thread bobbins.
Hardt had recognized the importance of education, and upon his death bequeathed a grant large enough to buy virtually the entire town of Killenburg and create what he thought a liberal arts college should be. He modeled it somewhat on the nation’s first coeducational college across the state in Oberlin, Ohio. Hardt College had been coed since its founding — its namesake had seven daughters and no sons and was rumored not to have had a choice in the matter. The school had grown over the years and now had a total of two thousand students, as opposed to its first graduating class of just thirteen.
The town was as much a part of the school as the school was of the town. In fact Killenburg would have long since become a ghost town when an upstream hydro project siphoned off half its stream — and thus the motive power for the two mills that had once employed its citizens. The presence of the school was what kept the town alive, and it remained a quaint enclave. If not for the changes in clothing styles and the makes of cars, Mercer could imagine Killenburg looking much like it had fifty, even a hundred years ago.
As with the rest of the town, the street in front of Abe Jacobs’s house was lined with stately oaks that would provide ample shade in the summer and coat the ground in a Technicolor carpet come autumn. Spring was still far enough off that the trees were just skeletal silhouettes against a cloudy sky. The steep-roofed Tudor was of tan stucco with real wood-beam accents and late-Gothic-style mullioned windows.
His old mentor had chosen Hardt because several friends from his days at Carnegie Mellon had settled here. For its size, the private college had a strong science program, thanks to an endowment that had allowed it to construct a dedicated building four years earlier with state-of-the-art labs and enough high-tech toys to keep even Abe and his coterie of aging geeks enthralled.
Mercer imagined that Abe’s final years had been happy ones. Some men retire to golf courses or fishing holes; Abe Jacobs would have retired to an experimental laboratory. That’s the kind of man he was.
Mercer killed the engine and forced his hands to relax on the wheel of his rental. He stepped from the SUV. The air was oddly colder here than in Minnesota, and still carried the hoary blade of winter. Thick snow covered much of the lawn and any other spots that hadn’t been hit by plow or shovel. Though Mercer hadn’t visited Abe since he had come to Hardt, there were certain things he knew would remain consistent, and one was the moldy cement frog crouched next to the front door. Beneath it, as he knew after doing this countless times at Penn State, was a spare front door key. In some categories, Abe was lacking in originality — security and decorating among them.
The house smelled of pipe tobacco and was outfitted in a style likely called midcentury bachelor. The heat had been absentmindedly left on, so it was at least seventy-five. The furniture was all too big for the spaces and had been shoved against walls, so little paths ran from room to room. The prints and paintings on the walls were all garage-sale rejects that Abe had owned forever. His favorite, an aerial shot of Jerusalem, hung over a brick fireplace with a blackened mantel. Off the living room was a kitchen done up in harvest-gold-colored appliances and a dappled linoleum floor that looked like the mummified hide of a long-dead giraffe. A Formica table and 1960s vintage chairs designed to impart some futuristic vision of mankind’s seating needs took up much of the floor. The table was spread with old newspapers, trade magazines, and loose envelopes.
Most of the drapes were at least partially closed, so the house remained dim even as the sun struggled to burn through the morning clouds. There were two other rooms on the downstairs floor — a formal dining room that hadn’t seen a meal served since McDonald’s recorded their billionth, and Abe’s study, which Mercer decided to search last. He climbed the narrow stairs, sending a cadence of creaks through the home. Off the tiny landing at the top of the steps was a bathroom so dated the toilet tank was affixed to the wall a good four feet above the bowl, and the mirror over the pedestal sink was losing its silver backing, so that Mercer’s reflection appeared in sepia tones. Somehow the old looking glass made him smile. Abe would have looked better with a few of his wrinkles blurred by the mirror.