Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

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.