The Medusa Stone

Washington, D.C

The Willard Hotel has been around for generations and has gone through numerous transformations since the time it was the home away from home for senators and representatives, a time when politics wasn’t a full-time profession, merely a yearly calling. Renowned as one of the finest establishments in the city, the hotel’s Round Robin Bar exuded an aura of wealth and power and privilege with subdued lighting, heavy woodwork, and a skilled but unobtrusive staff.

Sipping his first vodka gimlet of the day, Mercer debated with himself whether he should have done a Nexis background check on Prescott Hyde. Certainly, the powerful news search system would contain general information on the Undersecretary; however, he hadn’t bothered. He had a sneaking suspicion that this meeting was a fool’s errand.

The Round Robin was surprisingly busy for a Tuesday. He overheard two men arguing a pending House bill a few stools down on the bar, and clusters of men and women were conferencing around the numerous low tables. Black-tied waitresses laden with trays of drinks and snacks danced around the furniture, their movements appearing choreographed. Mercer liked to see anyone, no matter who, do a job well. He suspected that these women were better waitresses than the people they served were public officials.

“Dr. Mercer?” The maître d’ was at Mercer’s shoulder. “Your party is here.”

“Thank you.” Mercer glanced at his aged Tag Heuer watch. To his surprise, Hyde was right on time.

Walking behind the maître d’, Mercer felt his stomach suddenly knot up. It was an old feeling, the sixth sense that had kept him alive countless times. It had saved him while working underground when millions of tons of earth were about to collapse and aboveground as well, when the danger was from men, not nature. It was telling him that something wasn’t right. He spun quickly, scanning the patrons in the bar. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but there was a tingle at the base of his neck and he didn’t know why. He swung back and followed the retreating maître d’ into the dining room.

The watcher was not certain if she had been seen; but her orders were clear. While Mercer’s glance had passed right by her as she sat unassumingly in a corner thumbing a Washington guide book, she felt it wasn’t worth the chance.

She reached into the pocket of her skirt, making sure her motions were masked by the folds of her sweater and double-clicked the micro-burst transmitter all of the team carried. Seconds later, another member of their detail walked in, alerted by a similar transmission from their cell leader. The woman did not acknowledge her teammate. She simply finished what little remained of her diet soda and signaled the waitress for her bill.

While no surveillance is immune from detection, usually no more than ten people are needed to maintain a twenty-four-hour watch on even the most paranoid target. Such was their interest in Mercer that all twelve operatives stationed in Maryland were assigned to shadow him and report on his every movement. As the woman walked out of the hotel to catch a taxi, she realized she hadn’t been told who Philip Mercer was or what the interest in him could be.

“Dr. Mercer, I presume?” Prescott Hyde laughed at his tired joke as he proffered a hand.

Hyde was in his early fifties, almost completely bald, with a fleshiness that showed self-indulgence. His face was dominated by a large chiseled nose that on someone else would have been distinctive but on him simply looked big. His chin was soft and his cheeks were rounded, giving him an open, comforting quality. But as Mercer shook his hand, he noticed that Hyde’s eyes were hard behind gold-rimmed glasses.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Undersecretary.”

“I thought we dispensed with that yesterday. Please, it’s Bill. My middle name is William, thank God. I can’t imagine going through life being called Prescott.” Hyde flashed another smile. His teeth were perfect. Capped.

Until they ordered, the conversation was dominated by Hyde, who turned out to be a gracious host, talking about the latest scandals within the halls of power with an insider’s knowledge and a gossip’s love of speculation. Mercer ordered another gimlet while they waited for their food. Hyde drank sparkling water.

“I wanted to make this a leisurely get-together,” Hyde said as their drinks were brought. “A sort of familiarization session because I have a feeling we will be working with each other for a while. However, I have a pressing appointment a little later on, so I am afraid our time is short.”

Hyde seemed to talk as if his words were thought out in advance, written down and practiced.

“I understand. I’m afraid my afternoon is rather full too.” Paul Gordon, the former jockey who owned Tiny’s, ran a horseracing book in Arlington. With the Kentucky Derby only two weeks away, he and Mercer had some serious strategizing to do.

“All the better, then.” Hyde leaned back in his chair. “Tell me what you know about Africa.”

Mercer chuckled. “To begin with, I was born there, in the Congo. My father was a mine manager and my mother was a Belgian national. I’ve been back probably twenty-five times, and while I don’t speak any native languages other than a bit of Swahili, my French is good enough to get me by where English fails. If you want me to describe Africa’s history, the current political situation, and economic outlook, we’re going to be here for a while.”

“I wasn’t aware that you were born there, but Sam Becker told me that you’re somewhat of an expert.”

“Not really. I’m a miner, and Africa happens to be where most of the action is.” Mercer didn’t tell Hyde that he loved the continent. Despite all the cruelty, pain, and suffering he’d witnessed there and had experienced himself, he truly loved the land and its people. His parents had been killed by Africans in one of the many rampages, but he never once blamed the people for what happened. He smiled remembering the Tutsi woman who had hidden him in her village for nearly six months after her parents’ murder. When he recalled how she’d died during the ethnic cleansings in Rwanda in the mid-nineties, his smile faded.

“What do you know about Eritrea?” Hyde asked.

The question surprised him. Eritrea was a backwater even by African standards, and Mercer couldn’t guess Hyde’s interest.

“Located just north of the Horn of Africa on the Red Sea coast, bordered by Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. They’ve been independent from Ethiopia since 1993. Their struggle was a Cold War battleground between the U.S. and the Soviets in terms of arms and aid. Currently, Eritrea has nothing in terms of raw materials, industries, or hope. I’ve heard the people live on little more than the pride of being independent for the first time in modern history.”

“Very true, very true.” Hyde nodded at Mercer’s assessment. “There’s a chance you can change all of that if you’re interested.”

A waiter took their lunch orders before Hyde continued. “While most Eritreans are agrarian, cattle mostly, there is one major urban center, Asmara, the capital. It was the only city left standing after the war. The country’s in shambles. Per capita income hovers around one hundred and forty dollars a year. Still, the land can support the three million people living there, so starvation has yet to become a problem. But there are a quarter of a million Eritreans living in the Sudan, refugees deliberately not allowed to return because the influx of that many people would shatter the struggling economy. It’s a sore spot for the government because they want to bring the displaced home. However, they refuse aid, not wanting to become a debtor nation, and unless some miracle economic boom takes place, those people are going to rot in some of the worst refugee camps on the continent.”

From his briefcase, Hyde withdrew a thick manila file folder bound with rubber bands. “You have to understand that what I am about to tell you is strictly confidential. In fact, some of this information has only recently been declassified from ‘Top Secret’ down to ‘Eyes Only.’ ” Hyde slid some photographs from the folder across the table, pulling his hand back quickly as if the images could somehow contaminate him.

Mercer had been to Africa, knew the people, and was not immune to their suffering. He had seen some of the worst hellholes on earth while in Rwanda during their civil war. He could still feel the bony limbs of children he’d carried to aide stations where the struggle for food and medicine was a losing battle. He had seen the ravages of disease — cholera, malaria, and AIDS. He had watched human skeletons shuffle in miles-long lines escaping one war and walking into the teeth of another.

While these images haunted the darkest nightmares his sleep could generate, they could not prepare him for the six photographs before him. One showed an old man lying against a rusted drum, his legs looking like gnarled twigs. A feral dog chewed on one of his feet as the last of the man’s blood soaked into the ground. Another was of a young girl, her face peaceful in death, while in the background uniformed men waited in line to rape her corpse. Another showed a child — Mercer couldn’t tell the sex — waving at the camera with its body covered in suppurating wounds, dark leaking holes in its flesh that were eating away what little starvation had left behind.

He didn’t want to look at the other three. Here were images of the worst humans could do to each other, and he felt the impotency he’d experienced in Rwanda. The tides of misery were endless, and no matter how much he’d thrown himself at the problem, it never went away. He was also enraged that the photographer had stayed behind the anonymity of his camera and not stepped in to help.

“I’m sorry that you had to see those before we ate,” Hyde said, but there was no apology in his voice. The pictures were designed to provoke a deliberate response and Mercer knew it. He steeled himself for what was to come. “I believe we have the ability to help these people, to give Eritrea hope for the first time.

“In 1989,” Hyde continued, “NASA and the U.S. Air Force launched a spy satellite code-named Medusa. It was meant to be the eyes of the Star Wars defense program. But there was an accident, and it crashed before completing a single orbit.

“As it came down, its cameras exposed a series of pictures. Because the area photographed was not deemed strategically important and because the Air Force hadn’t been able to calibrate the satellite, the photos lay forgotten for over a decade. Even after they were declassified, no one paid any attention to them. Much of what they show is gibberish even to those who developed the system.

“The clearest Medusa pictures show what is now northern Eritrea and eastern Sudan.” Hyde pulled more photos out of the file and placed them before Mercer.

Though familiar with satellite photography, Mercer had never seen pictures like these before. These shots, twenty in total, resembled X rays. It was as if he was looking inside the earth, rock strata showing up in various shades of gray, what he assumed to be underground water appearing as bright white rings and whorls cutting across each shot, all beneath a ghost image of the surface topography.

“These shots are of northern Eritrea, each one representing a deeper level below the surface. As Medusa went down, its onboard computer followed preprogrammed instructions, increasing the power to its photographic element between each picture,” Hyde explained as Mercer shuffled through the stack, noting similarities between them. It was like looking at a cutaway model, peeling back successive layers with each photograph.

Mercer was awed by the satellite’s capabilities. “What in the hell was this Medusa?”

“It had abilities that go far beyond what you see here. When I first became aware of these pictures, I asked the same question. The Air Force liaison who showed them to me equated Medusa to a medical CAT scanner or an MRI, which make old-style X rays seem like a throwback to the nineteenth century. We’re talking about one of the most sophisticated machines man has ever built. If it hadn’t crashed, Medusa would have forever put the United States on the forefront of orbital surveillance and intelligence gathering.”

“Fascinating.” Mercer had no idea where Hyde was heading with all of this, but he couldn’t help being intrigued. “But I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

“Let me show you this and see what you think.” Hyde pulled another picture from the file.

Mercer glanced at it quickly; it looked no different from the other Medusa pictures.

“One of the scientists who built the satellite was a geology buff. A rock hound is what he called himself. Anyway, while modeling for the system, he was tasked with developing computer simulations of what Medusa’s potential would be. Because so much of South Africa’s underground makeup, its geology, has been studied by mining companies, it’s one of the best-catalogued regions for what lies under the earth’s surface. What you are seeing there is what they believed the area around Kimberley, South Africa, would look like if Medusa were to use its positron camera on it.”

Mercer understood and then he saw it.

First known as Colesberg Kopje because of the small hillock on the African veldt that was nothing more than a blister on the open savanna, Kimberley had grown into a boom town before the turn of the twentieth century when diamonds were discovered there. Within a few years, a city had grown up on the plain and germinated the fortunes of such notables as Cecil Rhodes and the DeBeers Corporation. The diamonds had long since run out at Kimberley, but in their wake, the miners had left a mile-wide, mile-deep hole in the earth. It was the mouth of what was known as a kimberlite pipe.

Kimberlite was the name given to a diamond mine’s lodestone. In fact, Mercer had a large chunk of it in his home office that acted as his good luck piece. The two minerals went hand in hand, much like gold and quartz. The kimberlite pipes are channels to the earth’s heart, openings where molten material, including diamonds, are thrust up toward the surface under tremendous pressure. Born in the planet’s liquid interior, diamonds are nothing more than elemental carbon, no different from coal or the graphite found in pencils, except that nature spent a little more time cooking the atoms and compressing them into perfect crystals. From their first discovery on the Indian subcontinent, Mercer knew, diamonds have had the power to captivate men and drive nations to war. Their dazzling beauty is the mirror reflection of our own greed, and their purity is the foil to humanity’s ugliness.

Placing the Kimberley computer projection next to one of the actual Medusa pictures, Mercer quickly traced nearly a dozen similar features between the two. Rather than let his imagination run wild, he studied them more closely. But the truth was right there. His heart raced, and his fingers and palms began to sweat as excitement tore into him. Such a discovery was made once in a lifetime, and Hyde was setting it right in front of him. Buried in the wasteland of northern Eritrea was a kimberlite pipe very much like the one discovered accidentally a century and a half ago in South Africa. He looked up at Hyde, his amazed expression verifying Hyde’s suspicion.

“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 exactly where it is on the map. It could be anywhere between the surface and ten thousand feet underground. It’s impossible to tell until we get a man on site, stake the area out, so to speak, and assay it for what treasures lie hidden.”

Despite himself, Mercer felt drawn to the possibilities. The pragmatic side of him knew the chances that what was on the picture was actually a kimberlite pipe were remote. And even if it were, it was likely it didn’t contain diamonds; many pipes had been found to be barren. Or its glittering cache had been washed away by erosion over the eons since the vent first reached the surface if, in fact, it ever had. A team could spend a lifetime scouring the wilderness and never find even a trace of the pipe.

On the other hand…

“You can guess why I wanted to talk with you now,” Hyde said. “I’ve got to warn you that the best we can give you from the pictures is a two-hundred-square-mile area for your search in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. But I’ve every confidence you can find the kimberlite pipe and prove whether or not there are diamonds present.”

Hyde paused while a waiter cleared their plates. “I also have to tell you that until independence, that part of Eritrea saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war and is littered with a quarter-million land mines courtesy of Ethiopia’s Soviet backers. And bandits from Sudan prey on the region regularly. Just a few months ago, I got word about an Austrian archaeologist who was killed, butchered really, very close to the epicenter of the search area.”

“Is this part of your sales pitch?” He should have been turned away by those two admissions, but Mercer’s interest increased. He’d talked with Harry about his need for a challenge that went beyond his normal job, and Hyde was laying a big one on him.

“No.” Hyde smiled disarmingly. “But I want to tell you everything I know. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. This mission is not without its risks, and I want you to be fully apprised before you make a decision.”

“Why don’t you just turn this over to the Eritreans?” Mercer asked, circling a finger at the waiter. He didn’t know if Hyde was still thirsty, but he wanted another gimlet.

“Good question. And I can answer it very simply. Medusa does not, nor has it ever existed.”

Mercer looked at him, puzzled.

Hyde continued. “While the Air Force may have given me these pictures, they’re still considered secret. It took a lot of persuasion for them to allow me to bring you into this, but there was no way they would allow us to show them to a foreign power. My armed forces liaison could neither verify nor deny that other satellites with similar capabilities haven’t been launched since Medusa was lost. For purposes of national security, these pictures do not exist.”

Mercer waited for Hyde to continue, for he knew there was another motive. He had lived in and around official Washington long enough to know that ulterior motives were as common as tourists on the Mall.

“The other reason is strictly a policy decision from my office.” Hyde leaned forward conspiratorially. “What I want to do is present the government of Eritrea a fait accompli, not just a suspicion of fabulous wealth, but the exact location of the diamonds, potential worth, and proper means of extraction. I understand this kind of work is your stock and trade. I want you to go to Eritrea, find the kimberlite pipe, then figure out the value of the vent and just how to get the diamonds out of the earth.”

Mercer said nothing, but he was certain Prescott Hyde was lying to him. Maybe not directly, but lying through 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.