The Medusa stone Read online

  "Some of our people think so too. If there is a diamond-bearing pipe in Eritrea, it could mean economic prosperity for a nation that has absolutely no other prospects."

  Mercer reined in his excitement, forcing neutrality into his voice. "Intriguing, but from what I know of the region, there has never been any indication of diamonds or their marker minerals in the area. I can't say for certain that Eritrea has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb, but it's pretty unlikely that a find like this has gone unnoticed for the past hundred years. Especially since Eritrea fell under British protection after World War Two. The Brits rarely miss things like this."

  "But they didn't have Medusa," Hyde said. "Because Medusa was destroyed before it was calibrated, we have no way of knowing the depth of the pipe or exes,ough omission. He hadn't liked the Undersecretary on the phone yesterday, and he liked him even less now.

  The man from State continued, playing his final hand. "If you're concerned about security, I can tell you that, while not really sanctioned, I did bring in someone from Eritrea's embassy here in Washington. I didn't go into many details, merely hinting at the possibility of a tremendous mineral find, testing the waters for possible opposition if we took the initiative ourselves. As you can guess, our plan was literally jumped on. While not getting full sanction from their government, I've managed to get you the next best thing." Hyde paused and smiled. "If you're willing to go, that is."

  "Finding the pipe, if it's even possible, would take months. That's a big chunk of time, and my time doesn't come cheap. I'm going to need to think about this awhile. How about I give you an answer in a week or two?" Something was up here. Hyde still wasn't telling him everything, and no matter how interesting the project, Mercer was getting a bad feeling. He saw his tablemate's stricken expression. "Is that a problem?"

  "No, no," Hyde covered. "It's just that I led my Eritrean associate to believe that this could be done quickly. Already plans are in motion, you see."

  Suddenly the restaurant became very uncomfortable. That prickly feeling was back with a vengeance. Mercer knew when he was about to be railroaded, and rather than wait to blow Hyde off later, he made his decision. He stood abruptly. "Then I guess I'm the wrong person for the job. Sorry. I'm familiar with how to handle national secrets, I know a few myself, so rest assured what was discussed here will go no further. Please don't try to contact me again."

  He wasn't particularly angry about being lied to. From a government employee, he almost expected it, but that didn't mean he was going to waste any more time listening either. There was another agenda in place here, some shadowy plan that either Hyde wouldn't discuss or couldn't. Not that the reason really mattered to Mercer. He might be in a professional rut, but he knew Hyde's proposal wasn't the way out of it.

  He didn't pay any attention to the businessman at a table in the bar working from an open briefcase. The case hid a sophisticated unidirectional microphone. The entire conversation had been recorded.

  College Park, Maryland

  The tape deck had been placed in the center of the small, faux-wood dining table, the four chairs clustered around it occupied by the station chief and the three senior members of his team. All of them had listened to the recording just forty-five minutes after Mercer's exit from the Willard Hotel.

  "Comments?" the team leader, Ibriham, invited at last.

  "Sounds like a bust," the only woman present stated. "He's not going to jump at the bait."

  "I agree," said another.

  "I was surprised by the level of detail Hyde went into with this one," the team's most experienced operative noted. "The last two he approached got far less from him than this Philip Mercer."

  "True," the leader said. "However, neither of those engineers had Mercer's reputation. I read through his dossier from Archive. His academic and field qualifications are impeccable, and he has a substantial resume with American covert activities, first during the Gulf War and later during the Hawaii crisis and last year when the Acer all along, but had to try the other two first because he was unavailable."

  "What should we do?" the woman asked. "It's obvious Dr. Mercer isn't interested. Do we wait and see who is next on Hyde's list?"

  "I don't think so," Ibriham replied. "We need to take the initiative now. We've burned nearly a quarter of our budget already, and the operation hasn't really started yet. We need to get more actively involved. Without results, we may soon be recalled. And this mission's too important to let that happen."

  Already he had a plan in his mind.

  "I believe Philip Mercer's the man we want. Hyde failed to recruit him through normal means, so it's up to us to get him with other, harsher tactics. We need to get leverage on this man, something to force him to Eritrea. Not only as Hyde's agent, but ours as well. From the dossier, I know he has no living family, but we have to find a weakness we can exploit, some vulnerability. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that is off-limits. This takes our highest priority. Mercer must be in Eritrea within two weeks."

  "So you're saying our operational perimeters are wide open?"

  "Yes. Use any means necessary to compel him into accepting Hyde's offer. We know that bribery won't work--he is too wealthy--but there's something out there that will coerce him. I need you to find it. And use it. Any more questions?" Ibriham received nothing but accepting looks. "Good. Get to work. I'll stay on Archive, but I doubt I'll turn up anything more."

  Ibriham dismissed the others and headed into their command room, closing the door behind him. He booted up the main computer terminal and logged on to the Internet, using the World Wide Web as a conduit to the secure Archive database. While his eyes were on the monitor, his mind was elsewhere.

  Born into a family who had resided just outside the walls of Jerusalem for the past nine hundred years, he was no stranger to either tradition or sacrifice. In his youth, many of Ibriham's friends had been Christians and Muslims, but his family was part of a small handful of Palestinian Jews who'd lived for generations in the Holy Land. For centuries that distinction made little difference. But then strife came. Since Israel's creation, first Ibriham's neighborhood and later his family had been shattered by divided loyalties, torn between clan and God. He, too, faced the personal dilemma. On one side was the fiery Palestinian in him, raging to see his people free from outsiders for the first time since Saladin's conquest five hundred years earlier. On the other was the desire for a homeland for his displaced fellow Jews, a place where once and for all they would no longer fear pogroms and anti-Semitism.

  Much like Americans during their Civil War, his family was ripped asunder. One of Ibriham's uncles had been shot and killed by another during the Infitata, the Palestinian uprising that swept the West Bank and Gaza during the 1980s.

  Ibriham had tried to stay out of it, but he, too, was swept into the violence. It happened after the murder of a favorite cousin, a young woman of promise who was slain by Israeli security forces for being at the wrong place at the wrong time following a PLO demonstration in 1989. Ibriham changed that day. He took up arms and began a new life of violence. Putting aside the morals that had shaped his youth, Ibriham deliberately became that which all abhorred. He became a terrorist, one druitwill make believers out of everyone. Even if he is friends with Henna, do you really think Mercer will stand in our way?"

  Yosef was pleased to see the passion in his nephew's eyes. This would be his last mission. He'd only agreed to come in order to help Ibriham on his first command. None of the others even knew they were related. "No, he won't."

  Arlington, Virginia

  Despite what he'd said to Hyde, Mercer couldn't leave this one alone. No sooner had he gotten home than he found himself at his desk poring through reference books and the volumes of information available on the Internet. Darkness settled heavily, leaving the city washed by the pink glow of streetlamps, but the passage of day to night had gone unnoticed. While many would find such research work tedious, Mercer enjoyed it. Searching for one fact invariab
ly led to countless other avenues of research, and a tug at any of these steered him to even more. It was easy to become lost in such a deluge of information, but Mercer was able to distill what he wanted, his mind sifting through mountains of useless data for the few elements he found important. It was a gift that he exploited to its fullest.

  His final report to Yukon Coal lay forgotten on his word processor as he tore through the material searching for a trace of validity in what Prescott Hyde described existed in northern Eritrea.

  He turned up nothing. The geology of the region was all wrong for a kimberlite pipe. Eritrea stood at an edge of the Great Rift Valley, and while there had been active volcanism in the region millions of years ago, there was no indication that diamonds were present. None of a diamond's tracer elements had been found, nor had there been any recorded discoveries of alluvial stones, those washed away from a vent by rivers or streams. Nothing he could find pointed to even a hint that Eritrea was the home of a potential strike.

  But those satellite pictures suggested otherwise. Mercer could not deny that the Medusa pictures of Eritrea looked remarkably like the computer projections of the environs around Kimberley. There might be hundreds of reasons for this similarity, most notably an error in the modeling, but he could not let go the possibility that Hyde was right, that an unknown kimberlite pipe lay out there waiting to be discovered.

  He was shocked by how much he wanted it to be true. He'd never been to Eritrea, knew no Eritreans, but he wanted this for them badly. He wanted it for himself too. There hadn't been a kimberlite pipe discovered in more than a decade, and he wanted to be the one who found the next. He admitted that his reasons might be more selfish than charitable, but if he could find diamonds, everyone would win.

  Mercer spent the rest of the day running down possible leads, but all the evidence pointed to a mistake on Hyde's part. Yet, against all of his scientific training, he found himself searching for evidence to fit Hyde's theory rather than allowing a hypothesis to develop out of the accumulated facts. He couldn't shake the feeling that Hyde was somehow right.

  Earlier in the afternoon, he found he was correct to turn down Hyde's offer. He had telephoned Dick Henna at the FBI, but the director was in New York, so he'd spoken with Marge Doyle, the deputy director and the real hands-on head of the organization. Mercer didn't know her well, but she knew of him and went out of her way to provide Mercer with an outline of Hyde, his past and his furnment stretched back to the drafting of the Constitution. The Hydes had played significant roles during every major watershed in our history, from the Revolution through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the development of the United States as a superpower during the forties and fifties. Hyde's father had served with Eisenhower when he was Supreme Allied Commander during World War Two and later as President, working closely with Allen Dulles during the early years of the CIA and with Adelai Stevenson at the United Nations.

  Prescott Hyde had turned out to be the only disappointment the family had ever produced. He was barely holding on to his current position as an Undersecretary of State, a job given to him more out of nepotism than individual achievement. He'd already shown a great deal of ineptitude during his brief tenure heading the State Department's Africa section, missing the clues of a coup in Zambia last year and so insulting South Africa's ambassador that the man returned to his homeland for two weeks in protest.

  Mercer suspected that if Prescott had not been one of the Hydes, he would have been fired months ago. As it stood, Mercer wondered just how much time the man had left. The current President was more interested in foreign relations than domestic issues, and he liked to have the best people leading the charge for him. Mercer guessed that one more screw-up on Hyde's part and he would be out on his ass.

  Hence, Eritrea. If Hyde could pull it off, not only would he save his floundering career but could also add himself to the anointed pantheon of his ancestors. Thus Hyde's motivation was more personal than professional, and Mercer was glad he had flatly refused the contract offer. To get involved with someone gambling to save a sinking career would be foolish at best.

  At eight, Mercer logged off his system, his eyes gritty with fatigue and his stomach making not so subtle noises. Maybe when he had the time to delve into it again he would, but for now he put Eritrea out of his mind. Tomorrow he would work on his report to Yukon Coal.

  He went into the kitchen and pulled a frozen entree from the packed freezer, set his oven to the prescribed temperature, and slid the stiff meal onto the center rack, confidently ignoring the directions about peeling the film from certain portions. While his meal was transformed from a frozen mass to a gelatinous one, he spiraled up the circular stairs to the master suite and took a long shower.

  Precise to the minute, he was back in the ground-floor kitchen when the oven timer beeped. He ate standing just a few steps from a polished birch table long enough to seat eight, using a plastic fork while one of the countless drawers contained matched silverware for a dozen. Finally he tossed the press-form tray into the garbage, and left his house for the short walk to Tiny's.

  Paul "Tiny" Gordon was behind the bar as usual, and the diminutive former jockey had a vodka gimlet poured by the time Mercer crossed the barroom to sit next to a slouched Harry White. Already, Mercer felt the tension in his shoulders ease. There were only a handful of other people in the bar.

  "I read somewhere that people who drink on a Tuesday are either drunks or alcoholics," Harry said, looking at Mercer.

  "What's the difference?"

  "Alcoholics have to go to meetings," Harry deadpanned.

  "And this from the guy who thinks booze is the missing link on the food chain," Mercer smiled. "Old joke, Harry."

  "What do you want? I'm an old man." In his largtty with fd the empty glass on the bar, paying no heed to the direction of his friends' stares. "Tiny, pour me another and put it on Mercer's tab." It was only then that Harry noticed Tiny was looking past his shoulder. He turned. "Holy shit."

  The woman smiled at the attention, though Mercer was sure she was self-conscious.

  Maybe it was because Harry had mentioned Aggie yesterday or maybe because Hyde had Mercer thinking about Africa, but he couldn't tear his eyes from her. She was beautiful, with an African's poise and allure. Studying her, Mercer didn't experience the usual gut clench he'd had for the past months. Rather, in its place was a new feeling, something a bit lower than his stomach and eminently more enjoyable.

  She strode to the bar, gliding over the scuffed linoleum with a dancer's grace, her narrow hips swiveling to the delight of the three men. "Good evening." Her accent was untraceable, but her voice matched her face, melodious and provocative. "I'm looking for Dr. Philip Mercer. He wasn't at his home and I was told that he sometimes comes here. Have any of you gentlemen seen him?"

  Harry was the first to find his voice. "Yes, I'm Philip Mercer. What can I do for you, beautiful lady?"

  She thrust out one slim hand to shake Harry's. "Dr. Mercer, I'm Selome Nagast from the Eritrean embassy. I was supposed to be at your meeting today with Prescott Hyde."

  "Your presence would have graced a rather fruitless luncheon, I'm sure." Harry leered, coming to his feet and pouring on the charm.

  Mercer debated with himself about how long to allow the charade to continue.

  "I'm sorry I couldn't make it. Bill told me what happened, and if you don't mind, I'd like this opportunity to state our case once more, this time from the side of the people you can help."

  "Miss Nagast," Mercer broke in, sensing that she was becoming uncomfortable with Harry's lustful looks. "I'm Mercer. This is a friend of mine, Harry. He suffers terribly from a multiple personality disorder. Just before you came in, he thought he was Rita Hayworth."

  Selome Nagast barely missed a beat. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Hayworth. I've been a fan ever since seeing Gilda on television."

  Harry looked as if he could have killed Mercer as he shook the woman's hand once more. "Just a little j
oke," he chuckled, "one that Mercer ended too quickly and will surely pay for. Can he buy you a drink, miss?"

  "A white wine, I think."

  "In a place like this?" Tiny said from behind the bar. "You must be adventurous."

  A moment later, he set an eight-year-old French chardonnay from his private stock in front of her.

  Mercer gathered her drink and a fresh one for himself. "Why don't we take a booth?"

  She followed him to a leatherette bench seat just below a smoke-grimed plate-glass window. Rather than analyze Selome Nagast's presence at Tiny's and how Hyde's dossier mentioned he frequented the establishment, Mercer started speaking as soon as they were comfortable.

  "I spent most of the afternoon going over Hyde's proposal, and what I said earlier at the Willard still stands. I'm sorry, Miss Nagast, but I must decline your offer. I can neither refute nor prove what those photographs show, but I s as quickly as possible. He was impressed by Selome and her determination but he also knew she was fooling herself. In fact, he'd fooled himself too. He'd wasted a day looking for the pipe because he too wanted it to be there. He saw a trace of defeat in her eyes and wanted to take her hand as a physical reassurance.

  "We are going to pursue this," Selome said, surprising steel in her voice.

  "I wish you luck, I really do. I'm sorry I can't help you."

  She got up to go, but Mercer could not let her leave on such a sour note. He reached out and touched her wrist. "Listen, I could be wrong. You could be sitting on the biggest diamond strike in history, but you must prepare yourself to be disappointed. No matter what, it's going to take a long time."