Mercer let the escalator deposit him on street level and he stepped aside so others could get off. Behind him was the massif that was the Pentagon, while ahead were acres of parking and a bus loading/unloading plaza that was still crowded even now. He had come here with a plan, and it had worked. Getting at the leader would have been a coup, but it was not meant to be. He would just have to be satisfied that the trap he had set was sprung so quickly.
He scanned the bus loading plaza. Book was right. There were dozens of Metrobuses, and as three left the terminal two more arrived to pick up the queues of tired commuters.
He looked for the man, peering over the heads of people to see passengers in the window seats on the buses. Commuters swirled around him in a coordinated ballet to cram as close together as possible while maintaining personal distance. It was a delicate act. Mercer continued to look as one man to his right clicked off a Bluetooth headset and turned toward him. Mercer was barely aware of the commuter, but then the man quickly spun into him with a powerful jerk of his shoulders, a fist held just below Mercer’s sternum.
The knife was a classic killing weapon, with a six-inch blade of blackened steel and a thin handle so it was concealable. A proper strike should slice under Mercer’s rib cage, cleave through his diaphragm, pierce a lung, and, with an upward jerk and twist, shred his heart. And this had been a proper strike.
The impact forced Mercer to double over, and his hands instinctively went to the point where he’d been struck. In the first microseconds after the blow he wasn’t sure what had happened, only that he felt a dull pain exploding from under his chest. Mercer’s fingers found those of the man who’d barreled into him, and something razor sharp, too.
In another instant he figured out what had happened, and Mercer wrapped the man’s hands in both of his, and squeezed with everything he had.
Not knowing what to expect on this outing, Mercer had worn a Kevlar vest he’d gotten from Booker. Jason was wearing one, too. Mercer wore his beneath the Beretta shooting jacket. While most bulletproof garments are susceptible to knife thrusts, this one had a double weave that prevented blades from penetrating. The knife had stopped dead and because it didn’t have a protective hilt, the man’s hand had slipped from the handle onto the blade — and before he could pull away, Mercer clamped his own hands around the knife wielder’s fingers and squeezed.
Mercer quickly released his grip and brushed past the guy before anyone around noticed that something horrifying had just occurred. He was fifteen feet away and still striding before the attacker’s nervous system registered what had just happened. He raised his painful hand to the air, his eyes going wide while the knife clattered to the ground. A jet of dark arterial blood spurted in a spray that caught one woman across the face and spattered against another’s dress uniform.
Like nearly everyone else, Mercer turned back when he heard the woman’s horrified scream. He saw his assailant’s raised hand through the crowd, his wrist clamped off with his good hand but blood continuing to bubble and drip from the nearly severed fingers and thumb, the digits flopping obscenely as he swayed. The man dropped to his knees. As the crowd closed off Mercer’s view, he backed away.
“Book?” he called into the tiny mic.
“You’re clean. All eyes are on that dude. What’d you do?”
“He tried to stab me, but that vest you got me stopped the blade. I sliced his fingers against his own blade.”
“From here it looked like you practically de-gloved his hand.” Booker Sykes was not squeamish, but even he made a disgusted sound at the spectacle down below.
“Watch for their lead guy, Book,” Mercer chided. “That was another of his lackeys.”
“You’re still clean. I’m just a little queasy. That was nasty.”
Mercer backed himself against a concrete planter so no one could come up behind him. His heart raced and his hands shook; had he not thought to wear the vest, he’d be dead. As it was, he had been so intent upon finding the leader that he never saw his subaltern until it was far too late. Mercer had gotten lucky…and no matter how much he’d always depended on it, he still rebelled at the truth that chance plays such a large role in life.
Moments later Jason Rutland approached. He hadn’t dashed up the escalator like a bull going after a matador’s cape, the way Mercer had almost fatally been goaded into doing. Mercer hated himself for being so easily manipulated. Jason pointed back over his shoulder. “Someone got stabbed back there.”
“It was one of them,” Mercer spat. “I think it might have been the young guy driving the Honda back in Ohio. Come on, let’s get out of here.” MPs were already showing up to take control of the situation. Mercer led Rutland to the next bus in line, and the two boarded. It wasn’t so crowded that Mercer couldn’t check every passenger for the team leader. No one else got on.
Jason held up a flash drive shaped like a Star Wars character. “Here.”
Mercer took it, smiling a little at the cartoonish face staring back at him. “This it?”
“Yup.”
The bus lurched as it pulled away from the loading plaza. After thirty seconds, Sykes came over the radio to tell Mercer that no one was following the bus. They were clear. And he was leaving his observation post.
Mercer thanked him and pulled out the second earbud. He shoved it in his pocket. There was some blood on his shirt and jeans, but the spots were dark enough that no one seemed to notice. He adjusted his coat to better hide them anyway. “Talk to me.”
“Are you okay?” Jason asked with genuine concern. He wasn’t used to seeing Philip Mercer rattled.
“Fine. Even though everything went pretty much as I expected today, I still feel they pulled one on me, you know.”
“Well, you almost got stabbed.”
“Not that. The taunt. That effete little wave he gave me — as if to say his weakest effort is better than my best. It pissed me off.”
“I’d still go with getting stabbed as the low point of my day, but to each his own…”
Mercer shook his head as if to clear it. “On to the important stuff. Tell me what you’ve got.”
“Right,” Jason said, unconvinced that Mercer could let the other stuff go, but understanding it was best to move on. “I calculated the volume of the geode from the pictures you took, like you asked. Then I weighed the sample you shipped from India and ran the numbers to come up with a range of weights for the crystals taken from the cave and loaded onto Amelia Earhart’s Electra. I cross-matched this figure by examining each individual cell within the geode to get exact sizes for every crystal. That gave me the precise weight of gems. Considering the volume of stones and the need for some protective sheathing, the logical place to put them was in the plane’s nose storage compartment. That gave me an approximate distance from the radio equipment as well as the navigational instruments.”
“Okay so far.”
“This was all pretty straightforward math, something you could have done yourself.”
“I would’ve needed to take off my shoes and socks for some of the longer calculations,” Mercer replied. “What next?”
“I modeled the electromagnetic variances induced by the crystal you gave me. That is some weird voodoo juju, by the way. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
“I don’t think anyone has,” Mercer remarked.
“Did you know it’s just shy of a diamond’s hardness on the Mohs scale?”
“No.”
“And its electrical properties are all over the spectrum. Conductor, insulator, semi — heck, it could be a Josephson junction too for all I know. It also acts as a step-up amplifier in micropulsed applications.”