Mercer suspected he loved playing the bad cop.
“I don’t understand,” Jordan said. “What are you saying?”
“I am saying that Samantha quickly broke down and confessed. She was paid by an organization she works for to target Kelly Hepburn. They even let her borrow an SUV so she wouldn’t get hurt.”
“What?! What organization is it?”
“Just knock it off, Jordan,” Mercer snapped. “She worked for the Earth Action League. You work for them too, I suspect.” Jordan looked at him incredulously. “I should have listened to my damned gut at the very beginning, back at Abe’s house. I thought I heard footsteps upstairs when I entered, but I wasn’t sure. Then I found you asleep — but you’d been casing the house for your buddies, and threw off your clothes and hopped into bed and only pretended to be out. It was all an act. I’m assuming you were picked to search his place in case things went wrong down in the mine because you actually did know Abe when you were young, and he and your father did teach together.”
Jordan said nothing.
“The Honda Fit we chased was your car, wasn’t it? Who was the driver? A boyfriend or just a comrade in arms?”
She refused to answer. It didn’t matter. She was up to her neck with these freaks. Mercer plowed on. “Things got a little dicey at Hardt College with bullets flying everywhere and men holding guns to your head, but you never broke your cover. You played it perfectly. And when it was all said and done, I believed you were as much a target in all of this as I was, and all of a sudden the opposing side had a spy living in my goddamned guest room.” He slapped the coffee table and Jordan winced, but she would not meet his eye.
“You told them what we found in Abe’s trash. How this linked to Herbert Hoover. You fed them the coordinates I got from Sherman Smithson. That’s how they knew to hire the local fighters and have them in position to ambush us when we found the cave. When we escaped, your people then did what I had already planned to do. They went to the Hoover Library to find out if there were any other possible leads that Smithson hadn’t thought of. There was. A woman named Veronica Butler. A woman I saw kidnapped, and who I presume is dead right now.”
Jordan took that news like a slap.
Mercer went on, coldly dispassionate. “I thought it odd that the team leader let Smithson live. They gunned down Abe and his colleagues, so why not just shoot Smithson too? Odder still was the fact the gunmen told him that they had found a lot of information in Abe’s office. They made a point of telling him that, I think, because that piece of information was supposed to get back to me. It was a plant, a plausible explanation as to why they kept in step with my own search. They were making sure I never came to suspect the real source of their information.
“What’s funny,” Mercer said to the two FBI agents, “is that I remembered Jordan telling me she’d lost her cell phone when Abe’s house burned, so I checked my home phone records after the ambush in Afghanistan. I wasn’t suspicious of her, just thorough. There was nothing but numbers I recognized. She hadn’t contacted anyone.
“Then this morning on the flight from Des Moines I saw in a magazine the same plastic bracelet Jordan’s been wearing since we met. I remember it jangling her first night here when she was petting Drag. Only now I know it’s the latest-gen smartwatch that doubles as a cell. She’s been in touch with her people all along.”
Jordan kept her silence.
“What I don’t understand is why target me?” Kelly Hepburn asked. “You specifically told them I was lead on this investigation so they would try to kill me. Why? It wasn’t like we had any clues. Nate and I were stalled.”
When Jordan remained stubbornly mute, Mercer said, “I imagine she was standing just outside of this room that first night when you two burst in here like Rambo and Ripley from the Alien movies. We thought she was asleep, but she must have heard something to set off an alarm. Or maybe she figured without you, I’d be completely cut out of the investigation. I think you said something along those lines when we had dinner here.”
“And without your help,” Hepburn said, nodding at the logic, “the FBI’s investigation wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Why?” Mercer asked Jordan. “There are people dead over this, you were shot at and could have been killed. You asked me if what I was doing was worth dying for. I’m asking you the same thing.”
“Am I under arrest?” Jordan asked. Her voice was much harder than Mercer had ever heard it, and he wondered if he was hearing the real Jordan Weismann for the first time.
“Not yet,” Kelly said.
Jordan looked at all three of them before saying, “Then I’m not saying a freaking word.”
“Fine.” Kelly nodded to her partner. “Nate, do the honors.”
The big agent crossed the room. He had the presence of mind to yank Jordan off the couch by her uninjured arm. “Jordan Weismann, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit the murder of a federal agent.” She yelped when he crossed her wrists behind her back and slapped on a pair of stainless-steel cuffs.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say…” He rattled off a rapid-fire Miranda warning. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”
“Go to hell, you fascist pig.”
Mercer shook his head sadly. “I think I know what this is about.” Lowell and Hepburn turned to him. “She and I got into an argument over global warming before I left, and I got a glimpse of what a fanatic she is — so certain in her beliefs that dissent can’t be tolerated. I’ve been saying for years that the topic of climate change is no longer about science or policy, but moral imperative. Some believe they’re saving the planet, and anyone who doesn’t recognize the rightness of their crusade becomes an impediment. This then becomes de facto justification for almost any action. Whenever you read about the climate you see words like may, might, or potentially. Weasel words that have no place in real science. But soon these caveats get dumped in the name of expediency, and people are left with the impression that climatologists can actually predict the weather in a hundred years.”
“The science is settled, you son of a bitch,” Jordan snapped. “Ninety-seven percent of climatologists agree that—”
Mercer cut her off. “What do they agree on, Jordan? That the earth is warming. The number who agree with that should be one hundred percent, not ninety-seven. That humans have contributed to that warming. Again it had better be one hundred percent, or those three percenters are complete fools who don’t understand what the science really says. But what about stating that the current warming is unprecedented? That it is dangerous? That we have to suspend all industries that use fossil fuels or risk the planet turning into a burned-out husk? Do you really think ninety-seven scientists out of a hundred agree in lockstep with what are essentially either points of policy or individual assessments of risk?
“The ninety-seven percent I hear tossed around is as worthless as when someone tells you that a particular year is one-hundredth of a degree hotter than any other because of global warming. That’s statistical noise, not proof of the need to decarbonize our society.”
“You’re just a denier, Mercer,” she said. “You patronize me and say I take the truth of climate change on faith, but you dismiss it simply because it stands in the way of all your fossil fuel cronies who want to frack the whole planet.”
“I never said I denied anything,” Mercer replied. “But you have accepted the climate dogma without question. I was once pretty sure science would win out in the end, and the belief that the planet is doomed if we don’t return to the eighteenth century would be reexamined in light of new research. Now? Climatology has been hijacked by politicians and environmental activists, and I’m not so sure sanity will ever prevail.