“Yes. No. He knew President Hoover was once in possession of it but not the location. That I gave him from our archives.”
“That’s what we need to talk about, you and me. What else is in your archives? Because someone went back to Afghanistan a long time ago and mined the rest of the crystals. We need to know who, and where they are now.”
“Mike Dillman,” Smithson blurted. “He retrieved the rest of the stones. Mercer confirmed that to me in a phone call yesterday.”
“And what else did he confirm?” the masked man asked. He was not being overly aggressive, but Smithson could not stop trembling.
“There was a cave, and a grotto he said was a natural geode, and that all the crystals were gone, but he found Mike Dillman’s initials written in blood on a wall.”
“What did Dillman do with the crystals he took out of those mountains? Did he give them to Hoover?”
Smithson suddenly looked like he was going to throw up. Sweat erupted across his face and ran in rivulets into his already rain-soaked shirt collar. “I don’t know,” he whimpered. “There was no record of Dillman ever going back to the cave. Not in the official archives anyway.”
The second intruder strode across the room and kicked Smithson in the ribs. The archivist gasped and fell onto his side, curling into a ball and trying to reinflate his lung. “He’s lying,” the man sneered.
The leader stood and backhanded his subaltern so fast and so hard the masked man spun into the Sheetrock wall and almost fell to the floor. He snarled in Afrikaans, “Interfere with my interrogation again, and I will cut off your ball sack and use it to carry biltong.”
He switched back to English when addressing Smithson. “Sorry about my young companion. He gets a little carried away, ja?” The intruder sucked at saliva that had soaked one corner of his mask. “Now, mate, you just made a bad mistake, and it’s going to cost you unless you tell me the whole truth. See, I’ve been doing this a lot of years and I know things about how people talk and act when they lie. You didn’t lie just now, but you didn’t give the whole truth.”
Smithson looked around, his eyes wild and wide, like a feral animal about to be cornered. It couldn’t have been more obvious had he written “guilty” across his shining forehead.
“You said there was no record in the official archive,” the masked man said, adding quickly, “and I believe you. But what about the unofficial archive, eh? What’s in there about Dillman going back to empty out the cave?”
“I don’t know what’s in any unofficial archive,” Smithson said so unconvincingly that the mercenary didn’t bother hitting him.
“Try again, Sherman, or my partner here’s really going to get busy on those ribs of yours. And he’s still learning the trade, so to speak, so he could very easily puncture a lung by mistake and then we’re all jolly fooked, ja?”
To his credit, Sherman Smithson lasted thirty minutes. The team leader didn’t think the mild librarian had the strength, but he had seen stronger men crack in a tenth that time, so anything was possible. And to the mercenary’s credit, he had made certain that Smithson’s injuries weren’t life threatening, and used two full rolls of duct tape but left enough slack to truss him up and bury him under a mountain of clothes in a closet. In a day or two he’d be recovered enough from the beating to force his way out and eventually get to the neighbor’s house.
The two masked men planned on being long gone by then, and the stolen car they were currently driving burned beyond recognition.
17
Judging by the volume of rain sheeting from the plumbic sky, Mercer half expected to see pairs of exotic animals trudging along the side of the road in search of an ark. The deluge reminded him of a tropical cyclone he’d sat through in a small hotel in the Philippines, overlooking a fishing village that was all but wiped out by the time the storm abated. Though the wind now wasn’t as strong, the rain forced him to slow the SUV to a crawl. Midwesterners, knowing that this weather could spawn tornadoes, wisely stayed indoors or stopped their cars under overpasses. He had little traffic to contend with as he made his way south and east toward the Mississippi River, and a woman who potentially had another piece of the puzzle — hopefully the last piece to solving why Abe and the others had been murdered.
Mercer had made arrangements while still in Kabul for the shard of crystal. First he’d had a guy in Sykes’s motor pool hammer out a copper envelope to sheathe the stone. Not trusting the Afghan postal service, he’d flown it to New Delhi and express-shipped it from there to an acquaintance at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies who was salivating at the prospect of getting his lab equipment on something as fantastical as had been described. Mercer promised him equal authorship of any paper that came out of the discovery.
The woman Mercer was en route to visit was Veronica Butler, and for the last few years of Herbert Hoover’s life, she was his personal secretary while he lived in New York’s famous Park Avenue Waldorf Astoria. After his death in 1964, Butler had returned to her native Iowa and worked at the presidential library until her retirement a decade ago. In a call from Kabul following their extraction back to the Afghan capital, Sherman Smithson promised Mercer that if there were any secrets pertaining to the late president’s life, especially his link to Mike Dillman, then Roni Butler would be the only person to know. Smithson had promised to inform the woman about his interest, and make sure she was up to seeing him.
Mercer had tried to verify with Smithson when he’d landed in Des Moines that the elderly woman knew he was coming, but the library had closed early because of the weather and the archivist wasn’t answering his cell. He hit redial as he traveled on through the downpour, but now he wasn’t getting any cell coverage.
Mercer tried the radio, and after scanning the frequencies finally found an emergency broadcast alert that discussed the flooding all along the Mississippi River Valley. The monotone announcer rattled off a number of towns’ names that Mercer was unfamiliar with that were under mandatory evacuation. Fortunately the one where Veronica Butler lived wasn’t mentioned, at least not yet.
Two hours later than the satnav promised he should arrive, Mercer pulled up short of his destination at a police checkpoint near a large complex of buildings that served as the middle and high schools for an entire county. Yellow buses were parked along its front like elephants performing a nose-to-tail parade. A couple of police cars were pulled across the road with enough room to squeeze through if necessary. A cop wearing a poncho and a plastic cover over his wide-brimmed hat levered himself out of one of the black-and-whites and approached Mercer’s door.
Mercer lowered his window a crack. The sound of the storm wasn’t the sizzle of bacon like a normal rain but the roar of a waterfall. Drops splattered against the glass and pattered his face, so he had to wipe it after just a few seconds.
“Sorry, sir.” The cop had to shout over the storm. “Can’t let you pass. It’s too dangerous.”
“Has everyone been evacuated?”
“Near as we can tell. There’s about two thousand people packed into the schools.”
“Do you know a Mrs. Veronica Butler?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry. I’m from Urbandale, here to help with the flooding. Whoever you’re looking for will be in one of the school’s gyms. There are people inside to help folks locate loved ones. They’ll be able to help you out.”
He turned away before Mercer could thank him and strode back to the warm, dry interior of his cruiser. Mercer wheeled through the barrier and turned into the high school’s parking lot, which was full. He noted the majority of the vehicles were pickups, and not one of them was foreign built. He found a space near a baseball dugout and ran through the storm to the nearest school entrance. A couple of men stood in the doorway watching the rain and parted so Mercer could dash inside. Just a few seconds outside left his jeans soaked to the skin.