Vulcan's Forge (22 page)

Mercer backed away and turned to the FBI agent, his smile ironic. “The last person who told me that was left tied up in an office in New York and he already had his gun drawn.”

The agent, not catching Mercer’s graveyard humor, sensed a threat and pulled his service weapon. “I said, place your hands on your head. You too, Dr. Talbot.”

The agent stepped forward. He was Mercer’s age, but had a baby face under a mop of light blond hair. Mercer noted that his gun hand was very steady. Another agent joined the first.

“I’ve been instructed to take you downtown. You’re not under arrest, so please go easily.”

“I don’t think so. You’d better make this official,” Mercer replied with a slow smile. He turned around and lowered his hands behind his back. As if by programming, the second agent came forward and slapped on a pair of handcuffs. “Think of how good you’ll look to your friends when they see you captured us in irons.”

When they were in the agents’ brown sedan heading back into the city, Tish whispered, “Why in the hell did you do that?”

“I want to see the reaction of whoever has summoned us. It might tell me a lot.”

The car ducked into the city via Route 66, and exited just north of the Lincoln Memorial, then streaked down Constitution Avenue, parallel to the Mall, where countless tourists sweated in the Washington heat while viewing the monuments. They turned left onto 15th Street as Mercer expected. He was certain they were headed for the J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, but just before reaching the Treasury Building, the car slowed and made another left onto East Executive Avenue. A moment later they entered the White House grounds through a back gate. Mercer and Tish glanced at each other, speechless.

The car pulled into an underground garage just behind the White House. The agents escorted Tish and Mercer to an already waiting elevator. Two more agents joined them there. Mercer noticed, just as the elevator doors closed, that the garage didn’t smell of oil and was absolutely spotless. He suspected that the garage was washed every day to prevent a stray spark from lighting any spilled oil.

The elevator took them up to the ground floor and disgorged them into a blue-carpeted hallway. Young staffers rushed past, reports and faxes clutched in their fists as if their jobs meant the safety of the free world. Which, in reality, they did. Only a few stopped to notice the cuffs that secured Mercer’s hands behind his back. He wondered if they thought he was a fellow staffer sacrificed to some as yet unknown scandal.

“I won’t give any of you away,” he called over the din of the countless ringing phones.

The agents pushed him roughly down the hall past numerous cramped offices until they reached a cluttered desk just outside a wide door. The presidential seal hung from the wall behind the desk.

“Miss Craig, this is Philip Mercer and Tish Talbot. Is everything set inside?”

“Yes, it is,” the plump woman said. She looked up at Tish and smiled sweetly. “You poor dear, I’ve heard about what you’ve been through. Come with me. I’m sure you’d love to freshen up a bit.”

Tish looked at Mercer, stricken.

“It’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Tish allowed the President’s personal secretary to lead her away.

Mercer turned to the agents flanking him. “Well, gentlemen, let’s get on with it.”

They opened the door and Mercer stepped into the Oval Office.

Mercer’s first impression was that the office was much smaller than he had imagined. He envisioned the President governing the country from a much larger room. He stepped over the seal embroidered into the pale blue carpet and studied the people in the room. He recognized most of them. Seated were Admiral C. Thomas Morrison, Richard Henna of the FBI, and Catherine Smith, the President’s chief of staff. Mercer guessed that the bald man standing against the far wall was the director of the CIA. The President sat behind his desk, his large hands resting on the leather top. Ms. Smith wore a conservative suit, white blouse, and a muted bow at her throat, and the assembled men were all wearing the customary Washington uniform—conservative suit, white shirt, and muted tie. Only Admiral Morrison, in his summer whites, and Mercer, still in the black clothing from the break-in, were dressed any differently.

“Mr. President, I wish to congratulate you.” The President looked at Mercer quizzically. “I saw in the paper a couple days ago that your wife’s dog just had puppies.”

“We are not here to discuss dogs, Dr. Mercer,” Paul Barnes, the head of the CIA, said sharply, clipping each word.

“We’re not going to discuss anything until I know why Tish Talbot was brought to Washington and why she was placed under FBI protection.”

“She is no longer a concern of yours,” Barnes snapped.

“I’m beginning not to like you, friend.” There was no malice in Mercer’s voice, but his gray eyes hardened.

“Dr. Mercer, we will answer all of your questions in turn. Rest assured that Dr. Talbot’s ordeal, as you put it, is at an end. She is upstairs right now with my wife and the puppies you just mentioned. She will be looked after.” The President cut through the mounting tension.

“Christ,” Henna exclaimed as he realized that Mercer was cuffed. “Get those damn things off him and leave us.”

The two agents removed the handcuffs and skulked from the room. Mercer helped himself to a cup of coffee from the silver urn next to the fireplace and took the last available chair.

“So you wanted to see me,” Mercer said innocently, taking a sip of coffee.

“Dr. Mercer, you have a lot of explaining to do,” Henna replied. “But first we all want to express our gratitude to you for saving Dr. Talbot’s life in the hospital. How did you know that the man in the room was an impostor?”

“Lucky guess,” Mercer demurred. “We both used the same cover to get into her room. I figured your watchdogs might let in one urologist, but not two. I also noticed that his shoes were too uncomfortable looking for a doctor making his rounds. It was a calculated risk, but at worst I was risking an assault charge from an irate citizen. It turned out I was right. Who was he, anyway?”

“Josef Skadra, a Czech-born agent who used to freelance for the KGB.”

“Do you have any idea who he was working for when he went after Dr. Talbot?”

“We’re not certain,” Henna admitted. “Remember, you didn’t leave him or any of his team in the position to answer questions.”

“Dr. Mercer, you are here to answer questions, not ask them.” Barnes spoke again.

“Paul, take it easy,” the President cautioned. “Dr. Mercer is a guest here, not a prisoner.”

“Before you start asking questions, why don’t I fill you in on what I know,” Mercer said, and the President nodded.

“On the night of May 23, 1954, an ore carrier named
Grandam Phoenix
sank about two hundred miles north of Hawaii in the middle of the Musicians Seamounts, a five-hundred-mile-long string of undersea volcanoes. Whether she was destroyed by the nuclear blast that occurred that night or she was already sinking, I don’t know. The bomb was under about seven thousand feet of water when it went off.” Mercer’s audience was too dumbstruck to speak, so he continued. “I pinpointed the epicenter by triangulating time delays and Richter scale differences from six different stations in Asia and the United States. The sharp spike recorded on the seismograph tapes that night is identical to ones measured after underground nuclear tests. There is no natural occurrence that even remotely resembles it.

“Since that time, seven large vessels have sunk in a fifty-mile radius of the explosion’s epicenter, including, most recently, the NOAA research ship,
Ocean Seeker
.”

“What are you talking about?” Henna finally found his voice.

“Let me finish and you’ll see. That many ships sinking in such a relatively small area is strange enough, but there is a connection between them that defies random mishap. Of the seven ships that went down, only three had survivors—a tanker in 1968, a container ship in 1972, and the
Ocean Seeker
. The four other vessels, the ones where no one survived, all had something in common, very accurate bottom-scanning sonar. The trawlers lost since 1954 use them for finding shoals of fish, a cable layer sunk in 1977 would use it for locating a smooth path on the ocean floor, and a Chilean survey ship was mapping the Pacific basin in 1982 when it vanished without a trace.”

“Is that from the list of vessels you received from that law office in Miami?” asked Henna.

“Yes. I stared at it for quite a while until I saw a connection between all the ships that sank with no survivors. Once I saw that they all had bottom-scanning technology, I pieced together what it was they may have seen. I believe they were all sunk so they wouldn’t report a new volcano building its way to the surface.”

“Is this volcano connected to the nuclear detonation?” the President asked.

“I’m certain that it is. I believe that the explosion was the trigger that started the volcano’s eruption. The area around Hawaii, including the Musicians Seamounts, contains an intraplate hot spot. Put simply, a hot spot is a localized area of intense heat deep in the earth’s mantle that punches holes through the crust as a tectonic plate slides across it, forming chains of volcanoes that are progressively older the further from the spot they are.

“By detonating a nuclear bomb over a hot spot, weakening the crust further, magma from the lithosphere was given a new, artificial outlet.”

“Why would somebody want to do that?”

“I have no idea, but it’s proved to be worth killing for.”

“Let’s get back to more recent history,” Henna prompted.

“The
Ocean Seeker
was sent out on an unscheduled survey to find the cause of some whale deaths. The whales had been found beached on Hawaii about a month ago with their digestive tracts filled with lava particles. Tish Talbot was an invited guest on the expedition. Twenty-four hours after leaving port, the ship exploded and Tish was thrown into the sea. After her rescue, she was transferred to George Washington University Hospital for observation. I received a telegram the day after she was admitted to the hospital saying she was in grave danger.”

“Who sent the telegram?”

“It was signed by her father, but I later found out her father has been dead for a year, so I don’t know who sent it. It’s obvious that someone wanted me to get involved.”

“Why?”

“Mr. President, that is the million-dollar question.”

“This is a waste of time,” Paul Barnes snorted. “He’s got more questions than answers.”

“You’re right, I do have a lot of questions. Why was Tish Talbot purposely saved when the
Ocean Seeker
was destroyed? The
Seeker
has the most sophisticated sonar systems found outside the U.S. Navy, so Tish being found alive breaks a well-established pattern. Why was she held prisoner for a few days before her official ‘rescue’ by a freighter called the
September Laurel
? And then why did someone try to have her killed?”

“Are these all things she told you?”

“No, I’ve figured it out myself. When the ship exploded she was thrown clear by the blast and suddenly there was an inflatable raft right next to her.”

“The raft could have been dislodged by the explosion,” Admiral Morrison pointed out.

“Impossible. The raft would have been shredded, not inflated. She also told me she swam to it, but admitted that she could barely hear anything. How could she have swam in the turbulent water around a sinking vessel if the blast had stunned her so badly? I’m certain there was someone aboard who was forewarned about the ship’s destruction and whose job it was to save her life.”

The men in the room all exchanged glances. Mercer felt that they knew something he didn’t.

“To get back to your question about why Dr. Talbot was brought to Washington and placed under the protection of the FBI, you must know that we received a warning a couple of days before the
Ocean Seeker
disaster.”

The President spoke slowly. “We felt putting her at George Washington University Hospital would raise less suspicion than bringing her to Walter Reed. You see, she is the only living witness to a terrorist act directed at the heart of America.” He pulled out the letter sent from Takahiro Ohnishi and read it aloud.

“ ‘To the President of the United States. After World War II, Europe, faced with economic necessity, released her long-held colonies and let them struggle through the arduous process of independence. Some made the transition smoothly, while others continue to struggle internally and with their former masters. It is a painful chapter of human history that is still being inked in blood.

“ ‘It is time now that the United States, too, face economic realities. The colonies that America maintains must be released, and that is how we on Hawaii feel we’ve been treated by you. The four-trillion-dollar debt that you carry is a burden too heavy to maintain. The stopgap efforts that you and your predecessors have attempted have done little but stave off the complete collapse of your system.

“ ‘While U.S. tax dollars flood the coffers of foreign nations and banks and bloat already engorged government contractors, the American people slide deeper into an unquestioning torpor spawned by inane rhetoric and slick presentations.

“ ‘Mr. President, this cannot be allowed to continue for Hawaii. The people of Hawaii are by origin not white Europeans nor should they be governed by them. We are a separate people with different beliefs and a different set of values, and it is wrong that we too should be bankrupted by the dying system to which you cling.

“ ‘You must realize by now that mankind does not thrive with cultural diversity. We are a tribalist species, one most comfortable within well-defined groups, and it is wrong to deny this. The idea of a ‘melting pot’ is as outdated as the ‘white man’s burden.’

“ ‘I fear that soon the United States will join that growing list of nations torn by factional fighting and I do not wish to see this come to pass for my people. Hawaii’s transition to independence must be made peaceably, but it must be made. Already plans are being implemented to draw us away from the United States and establish ourselves as a sovereign nation. Do not attempt to resist this action. I can promise peace, but only if you do not interfere.