“Then I guess this scrape doesn’t bother you much?”
“Hell, yes, I just won’t admit it.”
Tish looked away and when she spoke, her voice had a serious timbre. “I want to thank you for saving my life today.” She chuckled. “Christ, does that sound like a cliche.”
Mercer smiled at her. “It’s the least I can do since your father once saved my life. How is Jack?”
“My father died about a year ago. You didn’t know?” Mercer’s face went ashen. “I tried to tell you back at the hospital, but that man came in.”
Mercer managed to croak, “How?”
“He was killed on an oil platform near Indonesia. It capsized in a freak typhoon.”
A numbness started at the base of his skull and raced through his body in seconds. He almost had to hold onto the bar for support. Without a word, Mercer ran up to his bedroom and returned a moment later holding a soggy scrap of paper, the telegram sent by Jack Talbot. He held it out to Tish, but she seemed reluctant for a moment, fearful of even touching the page. Finally, she took it and read it quickly.
Bewildered, she looked up at him. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” Mercer said slowly, “neither do I. But someone wants me involved in this, whatever ‘this’ is. And they were right about you being in danger.” He finished the beer and pulled another from the fridge. “You said at the hospital that you had no idea why you were under guard or why your father or whoever sent this telegram might think you’re in danger?”
“That’s right. Listen, I’m just a marine biologist. Who would want to kill me? And by the way, how did you know that man in my hospital room wasn’t a real doctor?”
“For one thing, he said he was a urologist, which was the same line I used to get past the FBI guards. One of them would have come to recheck my credentials. Also, no doctor making rounds would wear shoes as uncomfortable-looking as his.” Mercer shrugged. “As to why someone is trying to kill you, that is what we have to find out. It’s obvious that it has to do with the last voyage of the Ocean Seeker. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Tish was almost at the point of tears and had to slow her breathing before she could speak. “Do you think all those people were killed because of me?” She sobbed once.
Mercer came around the bar and took her into his arms. She sagged into him gratefully. Her hair smelled like hospital soap, and was smooth and slippery against his skin. He let thirty seconds go by before straightening up. Looking deeply into her eyes, he spoke softly. “I don’t think anyone was supposed to survive that trip. Now tell me about the last voyage.”
Tish took a moment to compose herself.
“A few weeks ago, seven gray whales were found beached just west of Hana on Maui. They were all dead. A biologist from the University of Hawaii performed a necropsy.”
“A what?” Mercer interrupted.
“Necropsy — an animal autopsy,” Tish replied as if everyone should know the word. “He found that their digestive tracts were clogged with minerals. About fifty-five percent silica, with some magnesium, calcium, and iron, plus traces of gold.”
“You’re describing lava.”
“That’s what the biologist thought as well. His theory was the whales had been attracted to the huge schools of plankton that would surround a new undersea volcano for its warmth. The whales, while feeding, would also ingest the particles of lava suspended in the water. Eventually, their digestive tracts would fill with the minerals and they could no longer feed.”
“So what happened then?”
“Well, NOAA was called in to investigate. An aerial search of the waters north of Maui showed nothing. No new island, no clouds of ash or even steam. Then some sonar buoys were dropped, and within twelve hours we had found our new volcano, about two hundred miles from the Hawaiian islands.
“The Ocean Seeker was sent out late last Thursday night.” Tish stopped speaking for several seconds. “Twenty-four hours later, the ship exploded. When I was first rescued, I just assumed that it had been some sort of accident, but now I don’t know what to think.”
Mercer poured her another glass of wine and opened another beer for himself. The adrenaline rush from a few hours ago was wearing off, leaving him thirsty.
“Why are all those pins in that map?” Tish said, changing the subject and referring to the map of the world hung behind the bar. It was studded with numerous pushpins in several different colors.
Mercer felt that the distraction would let Tish calm down enough to answer the dozens of questions he still had for her. “It’s a map of places I’ve been. The different colors indicate why I was there. Green is for pleasure, like most of the Caribbean islands. Red is for work overseas for the U.S. Geological Survey, mostly meetings in Europe and Africa. And blue is for private consulting work that I’ve done for various mining companies.”
Tish noted that this last category included some pretty exotic places — Thailand, Namibia, South Africa, Alaska, New Guinea and at least fifteen others. “Why is there a clear pin in central Africa? I can’t tell which country.”
Mercer looked pained as he replied. “The pin’s in Rwanda. I was there for six months in 1994 when the world looked on as 800,000 Tutsi tribesmen were slaughtered by the Hutu majority. I was on a consulting job when the violence erupted, and rather than run away, I joined a band of soldiers trying to defend fleeing villagers.”
“My God, why would you do something like that? I heard that the fighting was absolutely savage.”
“I was born in that part of the world. My parents and I lived in Rwanda during the early days of independence. I was too young to remember the massacre of 1964, but I’ve never lost my sense of loyalty to the Tutsi friends I had growing up.”
Tish knew he was keeping something from her, but she didn’t press. “And what about the clear pin in Iraq?”
Mercer smiled. “I was never there — and even if I was, I can’t talk about it.”
She threw him a cheeky grin. “Real James Bond, hush hush.”
“Sort of.” Mercer still carried scars from that mission. The information he had brought back had been the trigger for Operation Desert Storm. “Now tell me about your rescue.”
Tish spoke quietly. “The ship exploded late Friday night. I was on the fantail, rigging some acoustical gear. I didn’t hear or even see the explosion. One second, I was standing there, and the next I was in the water. There were a lot of flames. I remember that I couldn’t hear anything. I think I had gone deaf for a moment.”
“The concussion stunned your ears — it’s common. Go on.”
“There was an inflatable raft near me and I swam to it.”
Mercer interrupted again. “It was already inflated?”
“Yes, it was. Come to think of it, that’s awfully strange. They’re usually stowed in big plastic cylinders. Maybe the explosion released the CO2 used to inflate it.” That sounded a little far-fetched to Mercer, and he made a mental note to come back to it later. “I was in the raft all of the next day until the September Laurel rescued me.”
“That’s the freighter?”
“Yes. A couple hours later, a helicopter from the navy came to pick me up. The doctor on board gave me a shot, and when I came to, I was in D.C.”
“Can you describe the freighter?”
“I don’t know, it was just a ship. I don’t know the length or anything like that. It had a bunch of cranes and booms. There was a black circle with a yellow dot on the funnel, which was near the back of the ship.”
“What else can you tell me?”
Tish paused, her smooth forehead furrowed. There was something she wanted to say, Mercer could tell, but he didn’t think she was sure of the facts herself.
“I heard Russian,” she blurted out.
“Russian? Are you sure?”
“Well, no, not really.”
“When did you hear it?”
“When I was being pulled aboard the freighter. The crew were shouting orders to each other in Russian.”