The Medusa Stone

Venice, Italy

Giancarlo Gianelli brooded with his back to the windows in the spacious drawing room of his ancestral home located on the Grand Canal. The windows — huge floor-to-ceiling affairs of leaded glass and wrought iron — were over three hundred years old, made at a time when the glassmaker’s art was still being perfected. There was a blister in each of the eight hundred individual panes where the blower’s pipe had once been inserted into the molten glass. The sunlight streaming through them cast a grid shadow on the floor that matched its checker pattern of beige and rose carrera marble.

The room’s furniture were all antiques, each piece exceptional in its own right but coming alive when blended with the rest of the surroundings. It was a room of extraordinary wealth and was only one of forty-three in the home. Gianelli, too, looked as if he were a furnishing for the house, an elegant addition placed just so. His sports coat had been custom made in Milan, his shirt of Egyptian cotton, and his tie had been given to him personally by the late Gianni Versace. He was the epitome of an Italian merchant prince, comparable with the Renaissance Medicis.

Today, the planet was a small place. Anyone had global accessibility in just a few hours with jet aircraft or instantly with the telephone and the Internet. Thus the days when men with vision could generate wealth in direct accordance to the risk were all but gone. Only a few still retained the kind of independence to function without the constraints of obfuscating lawyers and miserly bankers. Giancarlo Gianelli was just such a person.

As the last male heir in a dynasty that stretched back more than six centuries, Gianelli stood at the apex of all his clan had struggled to achieve. In two months the last of his six daughters would be married, and all that would remain to give him succor as he eased into the second half of his fifties was the fabled history of his family. While he had two sons by two separate mistresses, neither of them could ever assume the Gianelli mantle. It was possible that this lack of an heir gave him the recklessness to draw himself away from the legitimate portions of his businesses and delve deeper into the shadows of what his family had created.

The twentieth century had been good to his family. His grandfather had added not one, but two new fortunes, first at the turn of the century when the manufacturing revolution reached the Italian peninsula and again during the fascist reign of Benito Mussolini, when he switched the Gianelli companies to wartime production under the direct patronage of Il Duce. During the 1930s and early 40s the Gianellis rivaled the Fiat Corporation in size and scope, manufacturing everything from submarines to infantrymen’s mess kits.

Giancarlo’s father had taken the reins in 1955 and shepherded Gianelli SpA, the principle holding company, through the turbulent but profitable 1960s, the downturn of the 70s, and into the meteoric 1980s. He turned over stewardship to his son, Giancarlo, just weeks before the American stock market crash of October 1987. Though Giancarlo’s first years as CEO were trying, the company remained one of Italy’s largest and most profitable.

Looking out the windows, Giancarlo could see a few gondolas on the Grand Canal, mostly empty, for the boats were used mainly by the tourists and it was still too early for them. There were several Vaporetti plying the wide waterway, the lumbering old boats acting much like public buses would in any other city. Around them dodged sleek, polished water taxis, many of them occupied by businessmen, again like any other city in the world. In the distance, the sixteenth-century Rialto Bridge arced gracefully across the canal.

It was April in Venice, a magic time of year. The sun’s rays were warm enough to make strolls along the narrow streets comfortable yet the heat wasn’t enough to turn fetid the sewage that tended to choke the canals later in the summer. The shop owners were happy and expectant, eagerly awaiting the tourists’ imminent arrival. By July, their smiles would be forced, their bonhomie worn a little thin, and by August they would be downright surly because they had made a year’s income and were ready to be rid of the droves.

The phone chimed.

“He’s leaving in two days’ time, Mr. Gianelli,” the caller said without preamble.

“What do you think of his chances?” Giancarlo asked.

“He’s good. Some say the best, but I don’t believe he can find it.”

“Why do you say that?” Gianelli wasn’t paying the informer enough to trust his deductions. Raw information was one thing, but Giancarlo would do the interpretations himself.

“Time, Mr. Gianelli.” The response was immediate, as if the question had been expected. “Hyde gave Mercer a six-week window for his exploration, and Mercer himself wants to be in Eritrea by this weekend. He’s really lit some fires here to get things moving. He may be the best mineral prospector in the business, but with only a week to get organized he won’t be able to find his asshole with his hemorrhoid creme.”

Gianelli grunted with distaste.

“He’s made a lot of progress securing equipment and material, but he can’t get started for at least another week once he’s in Africa. It’ll take him that long to sort out the logistics of it all.”

“And then?”

“Well, Eritrea may be a small country when you look at it on a world map, but when you’re exploring it on foot or from a vehicle, it’s a big, rugged place.”

“Are you any closer to getting a copy of the Medusa photographs?” Gianelli asked. “Those pictures are a sure way of narrowing our own search.”

“No,” the caller replied. “I explained to you before. Hyde never lets them out of his sight. I’ve already checked the National Reconnaissance Office’s archives, and there was only that one set created, something to do with the material they are made from being impossible to photocopy or scan.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

“Will Hyde give them to Mercer?”

“I believe so, yes. But he doesn’t have them now. Hyde won’t turn them over until Mercer is ready to leave.”

“Hyde’s reason being security?”

“Or paranoia.”

“We should be able to get those photos from Mercer once he’s in Eritrea.” Gianelli was speaking more for his benefit than his listener’s and realized that this discussion went beyond the caller’s need to know. He changed tack. “When is Selome Nagast going back to Asmara? Will she be with Mercer?”

“I don’t know yet. I’d guess she’ll be flying with Mercer. When I find out her travel plans, I’ll let you know.”

“Anything on your suspicions about her?”

“Nothing. But my intuition tells me that there is more to her than she’s saying.”

“Your intuition also made you sell those pictures to Hyde for a fraction of what I would have paid,” Giancarlo said acidly. “She’ll be out of Washington in a few days. If there’s anything to discover about her, I will handle it from this end. More than likely your instincts are picking up the fact she’s sleeping with Hyde.”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it. He’s a pig and she’s a living goddess,” Major Donald Rosen of the National Reconnaissance Office said.

“It doesn’t matter. Just keep me informed. You may be able to atone for your earlier mistake.” Gianelli hung up the phone.

So, he mused, Hyde has found his expert to dig in the desert for him. While it was a complication that Gianelli didn’t particularly relish, it wasn’t totally unexpected and he might be able to make it work for his own needs. He would have preferred getting the Medusa pictures from Major Rosen, but Hyde had beat him to them. Now he had to try and steal them from Mercer in Asmara. He thought about taking both Mercer and the pictures and using the American as his own prospector. Giancarlo currently had people scouring the Eritrean wastelands, but his teams certainly didn’t have Mercer’s expertise. Taking Mercer alive, however, wasn’t the priority, the pictures were. He reached for the phone again to put into motion just such a plan, recalling how it had all started.

Eritrea had been an Italian colony starting at the end of the nineteenth century and had been the major staging point for their conquest of Ethiopia in 1935. That war had been particularly brutal, fought between a modern mechanized army on one side and horse soldiers on the other. The outcome was almost inevitable, especially after the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on the region that Italy, with her own weapons manufacturers, including the Gianellis, totally ignored.

Soon after taking power and long before the war that preluded World War Two, Mussolini had set about creating a modern nation in the hardscrabble desert. For decades there were fortunes made in Eritrea, and it happened that Gianelli’s family made most of them. Such was their interest in Eritrea that Giancarlo’s great-uncle, Enrico, had lived in a villa outside Asmara and ran much of the country as a virtual slave state.

Enrico was not as shrewd as his older brother, who ran the entire corporation, but he was a Gianelli and knew how to wring profits from every venture: plantations of fruit trees and coffee, timber, salt production, and the importation of amenities for Eritrea’s growing Italian population. However, Enrico did have one interest outside the family’s traditional spheres that he pursued vigorously. He was an amateur geologist and spent countless months casting about the countryside in search of raw minerals.

He’d convinced himself, and to a much lesser extent, his older brother, that there was gold in the mountains near the border with Sudan. Enrico spent a fortune digging into nearly every mountain that looked interesting. He kept poor records of his work, and most mines were abandoned and forgotten the day they proved barren. Frustrated, his elder brother finally ordered Enrico to stop wasting money and resources on his foolish hobby, but this just made Enrico redouble his efforts. There was one particular mining venture that he was certain would prove valuable. He believed he had found not gold but diamonds.

Giancarlo had all of the family papers concerning Enrico’s Folly, as it was called, and had studied them as a child, captivated by the legend. But none of them ever told where this particular shaft had been sunk. Enrico dutifully recorded legitimate aspects of his business affairs, but withheld information about the mine.

Just after New Year’s of 1941, it was found that Enrico had been falsifying the account ledgers to cover up the fact that his fabled diamond mine had cost more than all his other ventures combined and put a severe dent in the Gianellis’ profits from the colony. He was recalled to Italy immediately. The family patron even sent a private plane with fighter escort to ensure that Enrico returned.

This happened the same time as the British, under General Platt, were sweeping into Eritrea. Enrico had cabled saying he was looking forward to returning to Venice, not only to get away from the fighting, but also to talk with his brother about the mine.

Giancarlo had read that particular cable many, many times because it was the last anyone ever heard from Enrico. The plane to take him home was shot down over the Mediterranean by British Hurricane fighters, and all knowledge of the mine was lost with it.

As a boy, Giancarlo had promised himself that someday he would return to Eritrea and find Enrico’s diamond mine. The dream never left him, but it would be years before he could fulfill it. By the time he was in a position to pursue the legend, he was occupied with the rest of the company and his family. At times during his career, he’d been tempted to mount a search, but Eritrea’s war for independence was raging, and the likeliest areas for the exploration were some of the most hotly contested and oft-bombed regions in the country. Also, even decades after Italy’s brutal occupation, the name Gianelli was still cursed in Eritrea and he doubted they would welcome his investigation.

But with the independence struggle over and his obligations to his family coming to a close with his daughter’s wedding, he knew that now was the time. Expense on this venture meant nothing — a billion lira, ten billion? What did it matter? All of his life he had done what was expected of him, but this once, like Enrico, he wanted something for himself. If he was successful, he had a plan to make this a very lucrative venture, though timing would be critical. The diamond syndicate in London had a major meeting in two months, and Gianelli needed to be able to show them a lot of stones, several thousand carats at least, if he was to force them to accept his demands. He had already divested himself of all South African stocks because if he pulled this off, that country would become a financial sinkhole.

If he did not succeed? Gianelli shrugged. A few accountants would scratch their heads and wonder where the money went, but that was it. Giancarlo really couldn’t lose.

But he knew he would pull this off, for surely what Hyde’s satellite pictures had seen and what Enrico Gianelli had found were one and the same.