While Harry and Drag watched NCIS reruns in the bar and Jordan fought her fever in the guest bedroom, Mercer spent the rest of the day in his downstairs office, first contacting the owners of the Leister Deep Mine. He needed to tie up loose ends pertaining to the mine rescue class he had taught, ensuring final payment for renting part of the mine was sent and insurance coverage canceled. Then he wrote up the performance reviews for each member of the class, which occupied most of the afternoon.
Jordan woke in the early evening, her fever broken but more exhausted than before. She managed a quick shower while Mercer and Harry changed her sweaty sheets, and she ate a few mouthfuls of soup before drifting off into a deep trouble-free sleep.
Agent Hepburn called at around six and asked if it was too late for her to come over and review some of what she’d discovered. She arrived a half hour later just as Mercer was returning with bags of takeout food.
Hepburn set several shopping bags on the floor near the hallway to the back bedrooms, a large one from CVS and the others from the Nordstrom at the Pentagon City Mall. It appeared that Jordan Weismann planned on being here for a while, which Mercer didn’t mind at all.
“Can I offer you something stronger than a Coke this time?” Harry asked.
“Is that Johnnie Blue?” she asked, eyeing the distinctive bottle amid lesser brands of Scotch on the back bar.
“Aye, lassie,” Harry said in an atrocious brogue.
Knowing how expensive it was, she asked Mercer if he minded. “Not in the slightest,” he assured her. “If you ask me, Scotch tastes like a blend of…” He was going to say “yak urine and iodine” but held his tongue. “Let’s leave it that I don’t drink the stuff and you’re welcome to all you want. Harry, get me a gimlet while you’re back there, will ya?”
“On it.”
Mercer pulled sandwiches, salads, and soups from the takeout bags and even conjured real silverware from a drawer behind the bar. He gave Agent Hepburn the latest on Jordan’s condition and said that he felt she would be up and around the following day. For her part she told Mercer and Harry that Jordan’s father confirmed he had once worked with Abe Jacobs but questioned why his name came up in the course of investigating the retired metallurgist’s murder. Hepburn told him it was routine, but the man became even more suspicious when asked about his estranged daughter. He did say that Jordan and Abe had been friendly when she was younger, but neither had seen Jacobs in years. When he pressed Hepburn about how and why this was pertinent, she hid behind national security and quickly ended the telephone interview.
“So her story checks out,” Kelly Hepburn concluded. “You both are clear as far as the Bureau is concerned. Like you in Minnesota, she really was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Didn’t think it was otherwise,” Mercer said, “but it’s good to know. What else have you found out?”
“Everything I didn’t need to know about wax paper, for one thing.”
“Come again?”
“Wax paper. The tech guys went through all the garbage you recovered from Abe Jacobs’s office. Everything was pretty standard — basic computer paper, candy wrappers, an empty apple sauce container, opened envelopes with addresses that all check out as legit, paper coffee cups, junk mail, broken rubber bands, as well as a large square of wax paper that according to the nerds is yellowed enough and shows enough signs of the paraffin’s degenerative long-chain molecular blah blah blah so it is at least fifty years old, possibly much older.”
Mercer stopped chewing his roast beef. “That might mean something.”
“Thought you’d think so.” Amid the shopping bags was a slim leather case, almost like a laptop bag but smaller and much more stylish. Agent Hepburn grabbed it and brought it to her place at the bar. From it came a notebook stuffed with photographs and a tablet computer. She fired up the tablet, flicked her finger through a few apps and a few screens, and presented it to Mercer.
It was a picture of wax paper all right, dingy yellow compared to the fresh milky sheets he doubtless had in his kitchen and had never used. The paper was crinkled and curled like it had been wrapped around something irregular and maybe the size and shape of a carrot. He could see there was faded printing on one part of the paper, and try as he might he couldn’t make it out, even by tightening in on it using the tablet’s zoom.
“Any idea what it says?” he asked.
She took the computer back, flicked through a couple of other pictures, and presented it to him once again. It was a close-up and digitally enhanced image of the faint writing. “Best they could do.”
It read:
camole 681
ne b l oorer
“Any idea what it means?” Kelly asked when Mercer had been studying it for nearly thirty seconds, his brow tight over his gray eyes and his mouth held firm.
“Could your people make anything out of it?” he asked back.
“No. Nothing. As a favor — remember this is now low priority — one of the lab rats sent it through a decryption program and some handwriting analysis logarithms but got nowhere. And that is about all the tech support I’m going to get unless we can find some definitive link to international terrorism. And don’t bother with Google, Bing, or Yahoo. I spent a couple hours on them and turned up all kinds of crap but nothing relevant.”
Harry had shrugged a pale blue windbreaker over his oft-laundered white button-down and was just unfurling Drag’s leash when he walked behind Mercer and Kelly and looked at the tablet’s screen. “Did you look up ‘sample six eight one’ instead of ‘camole’?”
“What are you talking about?” Agent Hepburn asked.
“When the paper creased through the first line it cut off the bottom curve of an S and the bottom tail of the letter p. It’s not ‘camole 681.’ It’s ‘Sample 681.’ And in the second line, the letters o-o-r-e-r are rarely ever seen in sequence except in proper names like Moorer.”
It took Harry nearly fifteen minutes to get Drag out of the house and to a spot in the neighborhood he deemed worthy to soil and finally back indoors. By then, Mercer and Kelly had checked out several dozen people with last names ending in oorer online. The only one that seemed a remote possibility was the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer, even though he’d been dead for more than a decade.
Harry laboriously shucked his coat and settled back onto his bar stool. Kelly wrinkled her nose at the smell of Chesterfield cigarettes clinging to him. “Any luck?” he asked, sipping at the watery remnants of his third Jack and ginger of the day.
“Not much,” Mercer admitted.
“Figured you wouldn’t. Names ending in oorer aren’t that common. That’s why I think the first r isn’t an r at all.”
Mercer groaned. He should have known Harry would have figured something out. The octogenarian had been doing crosswords for over sixty years and any number of other word games as well. He had once seen Harry guess a Wheel of Fortune puzzle with only a single letter showing and only three others eliminated from play. Where the FBI’s brain trust and computer logic failed, good old-fashioned experience could prove invaluable.
“I think that first r is a v. It’s oover, not oorer.”
“Okay,” Hepburn said. “That leaves us with Nebl Oover.” She typed quickly. “And it’s meaningless.”