“So what’s her deal?” Harry finally asked, blowing a jet of smoke ceilingward.
Mercer told him everything that had happened since he first heard the shooters open up with their automatic weapons in the Leister Deep Mine, all the way to his phone call to Dick Henna, an old friend who had once been the director of the FBI. Mercer had been forced to leave a message — Henna had become withdrawn ever since his wife, Fay, had died of a sudden stroke. He had hoped to catch Dick and stave off a full FBI assault on his house.
His backup plan was to call the D.C. field office in the morning and explain who he was and what had been happening. Though he loathed government bureaucracies, the FBI was the agency best equipped to check the papers he had recovered from Abe Jacobs’s trash. That evidence was still sealed in the scrubs bag in order to prevent the fragile paper from drying out and disintegrating.
“Any idea who is behind all this?” Harry asked when the story and second pair of drinks were done.
“None,” Mercer conceded. He had hoped the retelling would give him some sort of insight. “With his office ruined by the sprinklers and his house more than likely leveled, looking into Abe’s connection is a dead end unless we get something from the papers we salvaged.”
“What about the scientist he was helping? Anything on her?”
“Susan Tunis was her name. I don’t know anything about her other than Abe agreed to assist in her research. And don’t ask me what that was, because he never told me. All he did was hint that it was something revolutionary.”
“Apparently revolutionary enough to kill for,” Harry added.
Mercer then realized the mistake he had made. He had figured the timing of the attack had coincided with Abe’s arrival at the mine, so he had concentrated his efforts on investigating his old friend. He hadn’t considered that another team of gunmen would have gone to wherever this Susan Tunis worked and sanitized her home and office as they had done to Jacobs’s. Mercer could chalk it up to exhaustion or the need to protect Jordan Weismann, but he knew the truth was he’d screwed up. He should have forced that state cop, Gerard, to use whatever pull he had to get the feds to Tunis’s known addresses as soon as possible.
Mercer knocked back the last of his drink so that the ice cubes rattled against his lip.
Maybe he was kidding himself. A Minnesota state policeman didn’t stand a chance of getting the FBI to change their entrenched procedures. The gunmen had a large window in which to operate before any real pursuit coalesced. Maybe he’d get lucky and some sharp agent would have added two and two and gotten four, but he wasn’t optimistic. Hell, they hadn’t even figured out his role in the attack at Hardt College.
Mercer debated having a third drink, won the debate, but only made it a small one. While he was sipping it, Harry shrugged into a blue windbreaker and unfurled Drag’s leash. The dog heard the leash’s rattle, cocked one ear, and lifted one sagging eyelid but otherwise didn’t show the slightest interest in moving from the couch.
“And this is why,” Harry said as he clipped the leash to Drag’s collar, “I didn’t name you ‘Walk.’ ” He had to skid the stubborn dog across the slick leather for a ways before Drag gained his feet and jumped off the sofa.
It took a full minute of cajoling and dragging to get the basset to the front door, Harry muttering good-natured curses the entire way.
9
They had to have used lasers on the windows to detect the glass vibrations and translate that into voices and sounds, because they knew someone was coming to the front door. Harry’s hand was inches from the knob when the door blew inward. Immediately, dark shapes swarmed into the foyer. They must have realized the layout of the house with its towering ceiling made tear gas all but useless and flashbangs were too loud in such a tight neighborhood, so they came instead with overwhelming force.
Harry went down under the weight of three men wearing forty-odd pounds of tactical gear including vests and riot-shield helmets. Drag went berserk as soon as his master fell to the hard marble floor. He clamped his jaws on the nearest target, which turned out to be one of the men’s butts. The guy howled at the pain while Drag tried but failed to find purchase on the slick Carrera tile so he could tear out a chunk of his gluteus.
Mercer heard the commotion and ran past the library to the balcony. Even with three men already atop Harry White, more poured through the front door, assault rifles and shotguns held high and at the ready.
Drag was either shaken off or more likely lost interest because he let go and moved out of the way of the tactical assault team. There were eight in total. Three held Harry, and three others kept their weapons trained on Mercer while two more spiraled up the stairs, never taking their sights off Mercer, who had wisely dropped his barely touched drink and laced his fingers behind his head.
“Mercer,” Harry wheezed from the bottom of the pile. “Someone at the door for you.”
At that moment two more strangers entered the house, a man and a woman, both wearing dark suits, though hers appeared of better cut and quality. Both had automatic pistols in their hands. The woman, blond and about forty, held hers low and relaxed, while her partner kept his up by his head, alert and seemingly eager to pop off a few if the need arose.
“Stand down,” Mercer shouted, trying to regain some modicum of control. “There is a third person in the house. A woman. Jordan Weismann. She is asleep here on the second floor in a back bedroom.”
“Who the hell are you?” the man in the suit hollered up.
“Philip Mercer, the guy you are here to talk to. The eighty-year-old you so righteously took down is a friend. You are FBI, right?”
By then, the tac-team members who had come up the stairs forced Mercer to his knees, frisked him, and cuffed his hands behind his back with a zip tie. Satisfied they had him secure, another agent mounted the stairs to take charge of the prisoner, while the first pair went to search the rest of the house.
The men pinning Harry to the floor finally started to get back to their feet. They looked sheepish and knew tonight’s exploits would be the source of a great deal of teasing once they returned to the Hoover Building. It took a trio of them to wrestle some geezer to the ground, and one of them had a tooth-marked ass thanks to the old man’s fat dog.
“Got one,” the tactical guy yelled from the upstairs bedroom. “It’s a woman and she’s out cold.”
“Be careful,” Mercer warned him. “She has a broken collarbone.”
“Are you Philip Mercer?” the male agent asked, all bulging eyes and puffed-up chest.
“I just said I was no more than ten seconds ago,” Mercer snorted. He turned his attention to the female agent. He could tell by her suit and bearing that she was actually in charge and not her testosterone-fueled partner. “You could have just called me, you know.”
“True,” she said and holstered her boxy Glock automatic, “but where’s the fun in that?”
“Where exactly is the fun in all this?” Harry spat. His clothes were a mess, his lip was bloody, and in all the excitement Drag had peed on the floor. White motioned to the offending puddle with a cuffed hand. “It’s your fault he had an accident, so one of you tinhorns is going to clean it up.”
“Shut up, you old fart,” the male agent barked.
Harry whirled on him, his mouth a grim, tight line, and his eyes so focused the FBI agent couldn’t turn away. He was like a chicken mesmerized by a cobra.
“Just so you know, Sunnybuck”—Harry’s voice was hard, grating, like some Old Testament prophet raging at the furies—“when your daddy was still sucking your granny’s tit and long before he realized his little mushroom prick could do more than piss in his diaper, I was in the goddamned merchant marines convincing kamikazes to dance with the wrong end of my fifty-cal. So fuck you and your ‘old fart’ crack and clean up my dog’s pee.” Still in a huff he turned to Mercer. “This kind of shit keeps up around here, and I think I’m gonna get my own place again.”