Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Why is it you look worse than I do and I was the one who was attacked last night?” Mercer tried to put some levity in his question, but he couldn’t cut through Henna’s morose air.

“I don’t know what it is about you, but since last night, the shit’s really hit the fan.” Henna shook his head sadly. “After you were attacked, I called the President, woke him, actually. He gave me the authority to dig around in the archives of the CIA and the National Security Agency for anything pertaining to Alaska or you.” Henna pulled a tightly folded piece of paper from his pocket, easing out the creases as he spoke. “The NSA came up with this about two hours ago.”

Mercer scanned the page, ignoring the bureaucratic language and extraneous words that littered any government document. The meat of the letter was that a man named John Krugger had entered the country twelve days earlier. “So?”

“The NSA’s computers automatically flag passports with suspicious names. They process thousands of yellow flags per week, names and aliases that are the same or sound similar to those of terrorists or other undesirables. Naturally, most of these are meaningless coincidences. Yet the computer will red-flag certain ones depending on our interest in the person being sought. This name sent up a red flag immediately.”

“Means nothing to me.” Mercer was nonchalant, though the hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to bristle with premonition.

“John Krugger is an Anglicized version of Johann Kreiger,” Henna said flatly.

Mercer shrugged his shoulders, but unconsciously he braced his feet as if expecting a physical blow.

“Johann Kreiger was a favorite alias of Ivan Kerikov, and according to the KGB, who still wants him dead, he has an English passport under the name of John Krugger.”

“Kerikov’s in the country?” Mercer rasped.

A thousand emotions swirled through him, undirected and random. Through the chaos, a pattern formed and a dominant desire cut through the tempest. Mercer wanted revenge. Ivan Kerikov, the mastermind behind Vulcan’s Forge, had nearly killed Mercer a dozen times over when the Russian stole that former KGB plot. Mercer had wanted a chance to kill the Russian then, but Kerikov hadn’t been close enough. He had expertly manipulated others to do his bidding while remaining safely outside the country.

But now, Kerikov was here, in America, on Mercer’s home turf, and he wanted another chance to bring the Russian down. His stomach tightened with fury.

“I want him, Dick.”

“We’ll discuss that later. Right now, we have to figure out why he’s here.”

“You think it has something to do with me and Alaska?”

“Since you cost him a hundred million dollars in Hawaii, I’m sure it will involve you, and, given the mood of the country and the administration, I assume everything has to do with Alaska.”

There was a knock on the door, and it swung open without invitation.

Dr. Lynn Goetchell was the senior lab analyst at the FBI’s Forensic Crimes Laboratory in rural Virginia and ruled her domain with the haughty demeanor of a benevolent dictator, her omnipresent lab coat taking on the importance of a robe of state. She sat next to Mercer, barely acknowledging his presence. It was not that she was a rude person, but the three doctoral degrees to her credit had called for sacrifices in her life, and social niceties had been one of the first to go. She wore a severe blue suit, and her only jewelry was a pair of paste earclips.

Mercer had no basis for reference, but he guessed that Goetchell hadn’t slept since receiving the metal scrap from the Jenny IV . Her face was pale, and the bags under her eyes were a bruised purple. Mercer could smell traces of chemicals on her skin.

“I might as well tell you right now that I got absolutely nothing from that sample you gave me,” Lynn Goetchell admitted after the perfunctory introductions. “We’ve had less than twenty-four hours, which isn’t enough time for a definitive analysis, but I’ll stake my reputation that we won’t get much further with it.”

“What do you have so far?” Henna queried.

“It’s your basic stainless steel, unremarkable in every respect. The ink used to print the word ‘roger’ is a standard product produced under license by twenty different companies in this country alone. It’s untraceable. The presence of sodium and diatoms on the surface of the sample was explained by its immersion in seawater. Salt concentrates were consistent with the waters of the North Pacific and Prince William Sound. We ran it under a two-hundred-thousand-power scanning electron microscope and found nothing out of the ordinary-”

“What about where the metal was torn?” Mercer interrupted.

“Shearing tears consistent with violent explosions, implosions, or rending force. Anything could have torn it apart. I can’t give you anything more specific than that. There were no traces of chemicals around the damaged sections, no blast residue or explosives.”

“Dead end,” Mercer said miserably.

“Yes,” Goetchell agreed. “We found only one thing that couldn’t be detected with a visual inspection. Using computer extrapolation we discovered that the fragment was torn from a cylinder approximately thirty-seven-point-nine inches in circumference.”

Mercer did the math in his head and envisioned a stainless steel tube about twelve inches wide. It still told him nothing. “So where does that leave us?”

“That leaves us with the other evidence recovered from the Jenny IV .” Goetchell pulled a folder from her briefcase. “Autopsy reports, and very poor ones too. I should have the license of Anchorage’s Medical Examiner yanked.”

She opened the slimmer of the two files, the last words written about the men who had died on the Jenny IV . “The skeletal remains found in the boat’s cabin were too far gone to get much. The level of carbonization of the bone fragments indicates a fire of over eight hundred degrees, consistent to the combustibles found on boats — wood, plastic, and fuel. There wasn’t even enough to do a DNA analysis. Identification had to be made through dental records.”

“And the body I found on the deck?”

“Cause of death was severe burn trauma. He’d lost forty percent of his body mass to the flames. His lungs were so scorched that even if he’d survived the fire, he’d have died within hours.” She passed around a series of gruesome photographs. The corpse was as horribly disfigured as Mercer remembered, burned hands with skin peeled back like shredded paper, charred stumps that had once been his legs, and a face more ruined than Mercer thought possible. There were no eyelids, ears, or nose, and the lips had burned away to reveal crooked yellow teeth.

“What’s this one?” Henna held up one of the pictures.

Goetchell peered at it. “It wasn’t labeled in the ME’s report, but it looks like a picture of a cell biopsy. They look like subcutaneous fat cells.”

“They look like they’ve collapsed,” Mercer remarked. He’d watched enough science programs on television to know a healthy cell structure. These looked like haphazard bricks on a crumbling wall. The cell walls, usually well defined and rigid, were smeared and distended.

Dr. Goetchell took the picture from Henna, studying it much more carefully. “I’ll be damned. I missed that entirely. Another mystery on top of everything else.”

“What could cause that?” Mercer asked.

“An increase in extracellular salts, sugars, and proteins will cause cells to leach out water in an effort to rebalance the concentration,” Lynn Goetchell lectured patiently. “If the chemical imbalance is bad enough, the cells can’t excrete enough water to dilute their protective fluid. They drain themselves and subsequently collapse, or more accurately implode. It starts out as a protective function that ends up destroying the cells themselves.”