The Medusa Stone

Somewhere over the Atlantic

Mercer sprawled across two first-class seats, his mouth agape and his jaw covered by a thin shadow of beard. His flight to Rome, Europe’s only major hub with connecting flights to Asmara, had left early, so he’d shaved and showered the night before. He desperately needed to review his work and correlate his findings with the Medusa photographs Prescott Hyde had finally sent him, but his eyes had refused to stay open. He had purchased two adjoining seats, planning on using the extra space to spread the material, but best intentions are just that: intentions. He fell asleep even before the jetliner took off.

Mercer’s sleep was troubled, and every once in a while a flight attendant would check on him as he muttered aloud in his dark dreams. There was a sheen of clammy sweat on his forehead. When he woke, his eyes were red-rimmed and gummy, and his mouth tasted awful. He looked around the quietly humming cabin, momentarily dazed, trying to clear the cobwebs of sleep from his brain. He was thankful to be released from his nightmares, but a thought had come to him in his sleep, something buried deep in his mind that vanished when he came awake. Once again he thought there was an inconsistency somewhere, something either Hyde or Selome or the kidnappers had said that didn’t make sense. Something, but he didn’t know what. Damn.

He caught the attention of a stewardess and ordered two black coffees and a glass of orange juice. They were waiting for him when he returned from the rest room, where he’d cleaned himself up. Selome Nagast was waiting for him as well, an enigmatic smile on her face.

“I hope you don’t mind?” She batted her eyes playfully. “I don’t have your expense account to enjoy myself with. I’m sitting in the back with the rest of the sardines, and I knew from Bill that you have two first-class seats.”

Mercer looked at her in shock. “Why didn’t you tell me you were taking this flight.” Apart from that one meeting at Tiny’s, he’d only spoken with her on the phone. “My expense account could have paid for another seat. After all, it’s your money I’m spending.”

Selome quickly grasped that Mercer was making a joke and not being boorish, and she smiled again. “I have to confess that it’s been a fantasy of mine to pay for a coach seat and sneak into the first-class area.”

“And I thought diplomats always enjoy the finer amenities.”

Selome seemed to take his comment to heart. “They do if they represent a wealthy country. I’m lucky when my government can afford to send me abroad. I pay for many of my missions myself.”

Mercer wondered which master she was serving now. Was she on a diplomatic mission for Eritrea, the land of her birth, or a covert assignment for her adopted state of Israel? It was easy to figure out Prescott Hyde’s interest in this affair. Under the guise of his undersecretary position and spouting humanitarian platitudes, he would certainly manage to reap personal financial gain as well as political cachet if Mercer found diamonds. But Selome Nagast?

Was her motivation the betterment of some of Africa’s poorest people, those who dwelled in what is referred to as the Fourth World? Or was she currently working for the Israeli Defense Force or the Mossad? Was there something darker behind her willingness to help his search?

They had another five hours together on the flight, and maybe, Mercer thought, he could find out.

“Never let it be said that Philip Mercer came between a woman and her secret fantasies,” he quipped. “But you must allow me a fantasy of my own. If they ask, tell the attendants that I picked you up on the plane and that you’re going to have a romantic tryst with me when we land.”

“Deal.” She shook his hand. He was surprised again by the strength of her grip and the warm feel of her skin.

“It’s nice to see you again.” Mercer slid back into his seat, making sure to bundle his papers into his two briefcases. “The last time we spoke face to face wasn’t one of my most productive meetings.”

“I don’t blame you for turning down Bill’s offer. It’s daunting, to say the least. I was more surprised that you changed your mind.” She looked into his eyes as if searching for an answer. “Why did you agree? What made you join us?”

Mercer deflected the question quickly. “Why did you pick me in the first place?”

“That’s easy. You’re reputed to be one of the best in the world at finding valuable minerals.”

“Keep talking like that and we’ll need another seat for my ego.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Why did you change your mind?”

Mercer gave her his most honest look. “I guess you could say that going after the impossible has become one of my trademarks. God, does that sound pretentious. But it is sort of true. After I refused Hyde, I spent that afternoon and most of the night looking for any indication that what he was saying was true,” he said, mixing fact with fiction. “While I couldn’t find any proof, I walked away with a gut feeling. I’ve learned to trust them before, and I just couldn’t refuse this time.”

“Does that mean you believe that the diamonds exist?” There was a breathless quality in her question.

“No, it means I don’t mind spending six weeks and a lot of your money searching.” Mercer meant to sound harsh. He was not about to get trapped into giving her any false hopes.

The sun coming through the porthole caught the claret highlights in her hair. “You may convince yourself with talk like that, Dr. Mercer, but you don’t convince me.”

“Well, maybe I believe a little bit. But not much.” He grinned. “Tell me about yourself.”

Before responding, Selome ordered tea for herself and a croissant. Mercer downed the last of his coffee and ordered a third cup. “My mother is Eritrean and fell hopelessly in love with an American serviceman stationed at Kagnew Base, a U.S. military installation on the outskirts of Asmara that was used to monitor Soviet communications during the Cold War. When my family learned of the affair, my mother was forbidden from ever seeing him again. But they were one night too late, I’m glad to say, or I wouldn’t be here now.

“When he learned of her pregnancy, my grandfather sent my mother to Italy, where we have other family, but she snuck back soon after I was born. As I understand the story, when my grandfather saw me for the first time, he took me in his arms and laughed aloud when I peed on him. After that, I became his favorite grandchild. My mother was forgiven.”

Selome Nagast smiled again. For the first time Mercer felt she was showing her true self. “I went to school in Italy and spent two years in London studying economics. Afterward, I worked for the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in Europe, raising awareness of what was happening in our country.”

“I did some research on your war for independence,” Mercer cut in, “and found the parties involved more than a little confusing.”

“While they may be fierce fighters, my people are not known for originality,” Selome agreed. “At various times during our war with Ethiopia, we were represented by the ELF, the PLF, and eventually the ELF-PLF, none of whom agreed with each other. We wasted years with factional fighting. Believe me, it’s confusing for an Eritrean too.” There was little pride in her voice. “The war would have ended much earlier if we had left the political squabbling until after victory.”

“And after the war ended, how did you get involved in the government?” asked Mercer. “Don’t be offended, but I know it’s… shall I say, difficult… for an African woman to be as highly placed as you.”

“Difficult isn’t the word,” Selome concurred, her tone bitter. “In most African nations, the only prerequisite for leadership is a penis. It really isn’t important if there’s a brain attached to it. Someday Africans will learn not to allow dictators and despots to rule their lives.”

“And until then?”

“We’ll blame European colonialism and Western bigotry and continue to slaughter each other wholesale.”

“Harsh,” Mercer replied.

“But true,” Selome rejoined quickly. “You’ve been to Africa. I know you’ve seen it.”

She went silent for a long time. He had seen her expression a hundred times. It was on the local news nearly every night in D.C. It was the look of a mother whose child lay dead in the streets from drug-related violence she was powerless to stop.

“It’s not hopeless,” he said softly, seeing tears at the corners of her eyes.

“That will be up to you,” Selome replied. “At least for us. We’ve known peace for only a short time, and already factionalism is starting to pull us apart. Religion will be the curse of Eritrea, not the tribalism that has torn apart a lot of other African nations. But the outcome will be the same. Devastation.

“Muslims and Christians are already rattling their sabers from church and mosque alike, calling for the elimination of the other. Sudan’s Muslim government isn’t helping, exporting their version of fanaticism. Bandits raid us constantly, killing those who don’t believe in Allah. Have you ever been to the Sudan?”

“No.”

“Pray you never go. I’ve been to the refugee camps a number of times. In fact, I was on the trip where those photographs Bill Hyde showed you were taken.”

Mercer winced, remembering.

“When we finally ousted the Ethiopians, they practiced a scorched-earth policy during their retreat,” Selome explained. “They burned villages, destroyed roads and bridges and irrigation dams. They even cut down nearly every tree in the country in an effort to demoralize us. The trees lining the streets in Asmara are the tallest in Eritrea because all others were hauled back to Ethiopia. No matter how bad off we were when the Ethiopians withdrew, it is nothing compared to the ruin found in the Sudan. There are roving bands of guerrillas, terrorizing everyone, some allied to the government, others to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and still others that are just mercenaries looking to capitalize on the bloodshed. Slavery is rampant and some say government sanctioned.”

“What’s the reason for their war?”

“Religion. The government in Khartoum is Islamic and has made life unbearable for those in the south who are mostly Christian and animists. If this war is allowed to spread, we will see the same thing in Eritrea. And you are the key for preventing this from happening. It’s an old axiom that hatred is the fuel of the hopeless and peace the progeny of the satisfied.”

Watching her face, Mercer felt confident that Selome Nagast’s loyalties lay in her native Eritrea. He didn’t doubt that she also worked for the Israeli secret police, but for this mission her only goal was the welfare of her people in Africa. Knowing this peeled away only one layer of complication, however. He felt there were still depths here that he didn’t know.

Before leaving home, Mercer had spoken extensively with Dick Henna about the preliminary findings of Harry’s abduction. The private jet that had spirited him out of Washington had been chartered by a corporation in Delaware, but the company was just a post office box, a front. They had been unable to track the fleeing Gulfstream except for a report that it was seen flying over Maryland’s eastern shore low enough to burn leaves off trees. They also had a sighting in Liberia, where it landed to refuel before continuing east. The plane’s final destination was Lebanon. A CIA agent arrived at the airport in Beruit just in time to see an older man bundled into a van and taken away. He’d lost the vehicle in traffic near the city’s Christian Quarter.

A Mideastern connection was further confirmed by Harry’s few neighbors who had heard the abduction. The language they described spoken by the kidnappers sounded like Arabic. The only neighbor to see anything reported that the four men all wore black coats and jeans and had dark complexions and dark hair.

All this matched with what Mercer and Henna had seen at the airport. Henna still didn’t have any identification of the one kidnapper’s body, but he assured it was only a matter of time. He did, however, have better luck tracing the weapons.

“The U.S. Army maintains the largest database in the world of the ballistic characteristics of various individual weapons,” Henna explained. “Each weapon has microscopic differences from its mass-produced counterparts, small flaws that affect the shape of the rounds they fired. Identifying these traits is painstaking, but it’s possible to trace a single weapon from just the smallest fragments of expended bullets or shell casing.

“The Army Ballistics Laboratory,” Henna said, “has been looking for these weapons for a while. The Kalishnikovs were traced back to our peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in the late eighties. Both recovered weapons had been used against our Marine garrison. One gun, carried by the man who jumped into the jet engine, has claimed an American life before, an Army sergeant sitting in a café in 1984 near the harbor in Old Beruit.”

There was that Beruit connection again. “How the hell did they get here?” Mercer asked.

“Good question, but what’s got me wondering is: where have they been for the past fifteen years?”

Mercer and Henna had talked about the weapon’s significance and that Harry’s kidnappers were apparently Islamic fanatics — who but a fanatic would allow himself to be sucked into a jet engine — but neither man could explain how these facts meshed with a potential diamond mine in Africa. Selome’s affiliation with Israel only deepened the mess. But having talked with her as the Boeing hurtled across the Atlantic, he felt certain that her interest was with Eritrea, not Israel.

“Are you okay?” Selome placed her hand on his wrist, a reassuring touch. “You faded away for a moment, and it looked like you were in pain.”

“I’m all right,” Mercer lied. He so wanted to talk with her, with anyone really. Bottling up his concern for Harry was tearing him apart. He noticed Selome’s hand on his arm. Her fingernails were as long as stilettos, bloodred from multiple coats of varnish. She saw Mercer staring at her hand and let it lie there a moment longer before withdrawing it. He looked at her with a kind of longing, not of desire, but of the need to express himself. He wanted to trust her so he could release some of what he held inside. He wanted to tell her about Harry and about how it was his fault that he’d been kidnapped and beaten. He needed to talk, but he just looked at her mutely. His pain must have been obvious because she reached over and caressed his cheek. It was an intimate gesture that surprised them both.

“I’m all right,” Mercer said again, feeling something new sparked by that touch. He found he couldn’t look her in the eye.

This could be a real complication, he thought.