“Get on with it, man,” d’Avejan insisted.
“Ja. Okay. So the ISI guys we hired made contact when they thought they had the best advantage, but their assault went to crap pretty quick. The Gen-D fighters had a chopper fitted with rockets. Parvez lost six men KIA and another eight wounded.”
“I thought you said they were good, these Pakistanis you knew.”
“When I met Parvez Najam in Somalia he was part of the Pakistani contingent of UN troops trying to stabilize the country during the whole Blackhawk incident. He was and remains a top-notch soldier, meneer, but sometimes combat does not go as planned. Especially when he had no warning that the geologist would have air cover.”
“Okay.” Roland blew a breath and took a gulp of his vodka soda. “Did they learn anything?”
“Yes. They found a cave. He sent me video. There was an old body in it that looked like it had been there for years and a natural grotto that appeared to have been picked clean, but there were no minerals of any note, at least none he could determine. I have uploaded everything from his report to the secure account you set up.”
“Anything else?”
“One odd thing. There was a storm during the firefight, and one of his men was struck by lightning and several more bolts landed extremely close. You told me this mineral might have odd electromagnetic powers. It stands to reason that if lightning was striking so hard and so fast, then perhaps the American managed to secure a small sample.”
D’Avejan snapped, “Small? Why small? He could have carried out sacks of the stuff.”
“No, meneer, the men identified him quite clearly and saw he carried nothing with him but a pistol. He was not the one who looted the cave. That had to have been Dillman years ago.”
“So the bulk of mineral is still out there? That is what you are saying?”
“Yes, and I think I know how to find it.”
D’Avejan listened while his special facilitator outlined his proposal, nodding approvingly as its chance of success sounded high. Outsourcing contractors from the Pakistani intelligence service had been a gamble that hadn’t paid off, but what he heard now sounded like a winning plan to secure the last of the mineral for use aboard the Akademik Nikolay Zhukovsky.
“All right,” d’Avejan said when his subaltern finished. “Make it happen and I’ll give you a bonus large enough to retire on.”
The former mercenary started a sarcastic reply but held his tongue. He may have worked for Roland d’Avejan and Eurodyne for the past two years, but being part of a corporation hadn’t blunted the rougher edges of a lifetime spent in and around combat zones stretching across three continents.
“Dankie, meneer.”
16
Mercer downloaded e-mails to his tablet from a Wi-Fi hotspot in the New Delhi airport. He had been bcc’d on a note from one of Abe Jacobs’s office mates at Hardt College. In it, Professor Wotz outlined, as best he knew, what Abe had been helping Dr. Tunis with. Mercer suspected the two schools, Hardt and Northwestern, were still stonewalling direct access, so someone had asked around casually. Judging by the dates, this appeared to be something Kelly Hepburn had set in motion before her accident.
Mercer read with increasing interest. Their work was indeed groundbreaking, and given the right set of circumstances, their research was something any number of groups would never want to see reach the light of day. This made the list of suspects impossibly long.
Wotz’s description of Abe’s research into Sample 681 had jibed with what little Mercer had learned himself of the odd crystal’s electromagnetic properties. Wotz was a field biologist, so he was pretty light on the details, but he said Abe believed the mineral could help deflect deep-penetrating cosmic rays, so scientists could run subterranean cloud chamber tests that were uncontaminated by all outside influences — without having to run those tests in some of South Africa’s ultra-deep gold mines. He saw the mineral as a way to vastly reduce the cost of experimental climatology and cosmology.
Mercer thought Abe and Tunis were missing out on something far more important than climate science, although that was Susan Tunis’s specialty. If it were possible to replicate Sample 681’s properties in the lab, it would help solve one of the problems facing microelectronics products — they are constantly bombarded with cosmic rays, and each strike increases the chance of a glitch. A Qantas flight from Singapore had to make an emergency landing in 2008 when a pair of rapid descents injured more than a hundred passengers. Investigators thought it likely that a cosmic ray collision had interfered with data from an inertial referencing computer, which had caused the aircraft to plummet. Communication and other satellites had their service lives severely compromised because of the constant assault of supercharged elementary particles sweeping across the cosmos. An effective shield that didn’t add unnecessary weight would be a godsend to both industries, Mercer surmised. Even PCs on the ground suffered faults that erased unimaginable amounts of data.
Then there were massive solar discharges that have the potential to crash entire electrical grids, as happened in Quebec in 1989. Protecting power supplies from such storms was an expensive but necessary priority to utilities all over the world.
On top of that, doctors attributed a portion of cancers to cosmic rays hitting DNA at the exact moment of replication. Earth’s magnetic field routinely blocked most interstellar rays, but enough got through to cause noticeable trends in cancer rates.
It was laudable that Tunis and Jacobs were pushing the envelope in terms of climate and weather forecasting, but they were missing the true potential of what Abe had somehow inherited from Herbert Hoover.
Mercer’s flight was called. He tucked away the tablet and tried calling Agent Hepburn. Her Neanderthal partner, Nate Lowell, didn’t pick up, so the phone went to voice mail. He left her a generic message about following a lead, wished her a speedy recovery, and said he would call later. He tried reaching her through the George Washington University Hospital switchboard, but they could neither confirm nor deny a Kelly Hepburn was a patient there.
He called home. Jordan answered on the second ring. “You’ve reached the home of Philip Mercer.”
“Call the police,” Mercer said. “There’s a strange woman in my house insisting on answering my phone.”
“Mercer!” she cried. “I’ve been so worried. Are you okay?”
“Fine. Tired, actually, but everything went well. How are you doing?”
“Bored without you. My arm’s feeling better and there are some things I want to try out with it.”
“Really. Like what?” Mercer asked as if he didn’t understand where the conversation was going. To his shock and utter delight Jordan spelled out some very erotic and explicit activities she had planned for the two of them upon his return.
“Anything you’d like to add?” she asked with a husky chuckle.
“No, I think that covers the bases, and the outfield and the stands and a good part of the parking lot.”
“So are you heading home now?”
“I am,” he told her, “but I have to stop in Mumbai.”
“Why?” she asked, failing to mask her disappointment.