“Thank you, meneer.”
“See you next week.”
Coetzer hung up the phone and immediately called the airlines. Before returning to Paris he had another destination in mind. He held on the line until a customer service representative asked him where he wished to travel.
“Washington, D.C.,” he replied. Hanging around the Midwest to see if Mercer’s body was discovered was not an appealing prospect. He planned to confirm Mercer’s fate much more directly.
20
Mercer came through the door as tired as he’d ever been in his life. His body was sore from the punishment it had taken over the past week, and the clothes he’d bought at a discount store near the National Guard staging area were as itchy as fiberglass. He wanted nothing more than a shower and some serious rack time. What he got was a blur launching itself at him before he had time to react. A warm mouth was pressed to his and the elasticity of firm breasts was mashed against his chest.
“Don’t say a word,” Jordan breathed into him. She was panting with desire. “On the pool table. Right now.”
“Harry?”
“He’s at Tiny’s.” She had his shirt open and her tongue on his skin while her hands were working on his belt.
His pants loosened, Jordan maneuvered them both so the backs of her thighs were pressed against the billiards table’s rail. She thumbed down the sweatpants she’d been wearing and her panties as well. Mercer freed himself of his boots, and legged out of his khakis. Their mouths parted for the barest moment it took Jordan to pull the T-shirt over her head. Her arm was out of the sling, but the quick movement made her wince. Rather than pause, the pain goaded her so that she ground herself against Mercer’s leg.
Coming off a long winter, her nude body was pale and without tan lines. She was athletic but not too thin, with womanly curves as beautiful as any sculpture. Mercer’s hands roamed her body, tweaking and gently pinching in places that made her squirm and moan. Frantic, she guided him inside her and his exhaustion sloughed away. They were not gentle, but ravenous and uncaring about anything but the carnal pleasure of the act. When it was over, Jordan lay sprawled across the green felt, her breasts high, her nipples so stiff they ached, and her lower body quivering with aftershocks.
“Wow,” she finally said. “We have to do that again.”
He smiled down at her. “I’m not twenty. I need some time.”
“I’ll feed you oysters…and red meat for stamina,” she promised, a rapturous smile on her face. He helped her to her feet and she swayed against him, her eyes half closed. “You’re good at that.”
“I’ve been practicing by myself since I was about thirteen, and with other women since my senior year of high school.”
She slapped him playfully and gathered up her clothes. “I’ll meet you in the bar in a minute. Make me a mojito. There’s mint in the fridge, and then I want you to tell me everything that’s happened since you left.”
He gave her more than a minute and used the time to shower quickly and change into some comfortable jeans and a black polo shirt. He was waiting in the bar with a Heineken in his hand when she emerged from the guest bedroom. She had washed her face and applied some artful makeup. She wore the same sweats but had changed shirts. By the way she moved he knew she wasn’t wearing a bra.
The oysters she mentioned wouldn’t be necessary.
She kissed him on the fly, scooped up her drink, and flopped onto the couch. “I feel like I’ve been impaled. Thank you.”
“No…thank you,” he replied, and saluted her with the distinctive green bottle. “How’s your arm?”
“Better, thanks. I should have it in the sling, but I’m sick of it. Tell me all about your trip. Was Afghanistan awful?”
“It’s not the worst place I’ve been,” Mercer admitted, and moved to a chair next to her. “But not too far off, either. The rough part was that the men who attacked us at Abe’s house were a step ahead; they had deployed a force in Afghanistan by the time we arrived at the cave.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“I spoke with Sherman Smithson about that. He told me the terrorists interrogated him the day before yesterday, and they let slip that they had learned about the cave’s location and Herbert Hoover’s involvement with the lightning stones from documents they recovered from Abe’s office.”
“Before we got there?”
“I didn’t think they had the time to do much of a search. I guess I was wrong.”
“Were you ambushed?”
Mercer nodded. “It was a little hairy. Apart from their assault rifles these guys were packing mortars and RPGs. If not for Booker Sykes and his men, they would have killed me for sure.”
Jordan had gone a little ashen, but her voice was firm. “Mercer, you have to stop this. You’re putting your life in danger. For what? Some rocks? Revenge? Are those things worth dying for?”
“It doesn’t much matter now anyway,” he told her.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I also learned that Mike Dillman tried to have the rest of the crystals flown back to the United States. Only they never arrived.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They were aboard Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra when she went down over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.”
“Whoa. Amelia Earhart? Really?”
“ ’Fraid so. Unless someone’s willing to fund a multimillion-dollar search with no guarantees for success, the crystals, and Miss Earhart, will remain forever lost.”
“Hmm…so that means you and I have some time to get to know each other a little better. I have to admit I’ve been mooning about like a teenage girl since you left.”
“Mooning? I think I like that.”
She smiled shyly. “There’s something about you, Mercer. You’re…different. I find I want to know all about you. Do you have family? What your favorite movie is. Everything.”
The doorbell rang.
Mercer stood. “I guess we don’t have the time to get to know each other, after all.”
Her eyebrows knitted. “Sure we do. Whoever it is, send them away.”
He walked to the library overlooking the front atrium and shouted, “It’s open.” The door swung in and Mercer watched two people enter. Both wore suits. He waved them up and he rejoined Jordan.
“Who is it?” she asked. He said nothing. A look of concern spread across Jordan’s face. “Mercer, what’s going on?”
“Her story didn’t hold up,” he said gravely.
“What are you talking about? Whose story?” Jordan had pulled the steamship blanket up to her shoulders.
“The girl whose car hit Agent Hepburn’s. Her story. At first it seemed fine — she was a Starbucks employee and a student at Maryland, so the fact that she was on the road and rammed into Kelly’s sedan sounded like a plausible accident. But other things have been bothering me, so I phoned Kelly Hepburn’s partner yesterday from Iowa and begged him to look a little deeper.”
“And I did,” Special Agent Nate Lowell said as he stepped into the rec room. He removed his sunglasses and folded them into his suit pocket. Entering behind him, on crutches, was Kelly Hepburn. Her head was swathed in crisp bandages and her leg was in a tall plaster cast.
She smiled at Mercer and said, “It turns out that the girl, Samantha Rhodes, constantly chats with friends on her cell phone while driving from work to school. We pulled those records and saw from the tower pings that she always drives a route to class that’s a half mile from where she hit me.”
Lowell took up the story. “I leaned on her to explain why she’d taken a different route, and I told her she targeted Kelly on purpose. She said no, but I started yelling and playing all that bad cop shit.”