The Medusa Stone pm-3

by Jack Du Brul

  “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.

  Monastery of Debre Amlak

  Northern Eritrea

  The monastery’s closest source of electricity was more than a hundred miles due east, in the city of Nacfa, so any illumination after sundown came from either candles or oil lamps, and both were expensive and hard to obtain. With the exception of Midnight Mass, they were used sparingly, and thus life in the monastery was dictated by the rising and setting of the sun. Other than the late-night service, it was rare to find a monk up and about in the darkness of night.

  On the day following Dawit’s outburst, another monk only a few years younger than Dawit had spoken privately with Ephraim, verifying what the older brother had said. There were secrets here in the monastery and maybe now the time was at hand for them to be revealed. Since returning from his private retreat, Brother Ephraim spent his nights praying and meditating deep into the dead hours, a single candle burning in his room. He had taken no food since returning from his desert walk and precious little water. His eyes were glazed with exhaustion, and his beard had become wild and unkempt. He did not notice the stale smell of sweat on his body nor the pebbled layer of grime on his normally well-cleaned teeth.

  A milky-white shaft of moonlight shone through the single window of Ephraim’s cell and fell unerringly on the ancient book set on his rough wooden desk. Ephraim’s hands rested next to the book, just out of the circle of light, a string of rosaries twined between his long fingers, almost binding them together. The book was leather-bound, its two covers locked together with a tarnished brass clasp. The pages were so old that they had swollen, giving the book a tattered appearance even though it had been lovingly protected for eight hundred years.

  Ephraim had been given the book during the final confession of his predecessor, just hours before the man had died during their exile from Eritrea. Ephraim had sworn to the dying
abbot on the sacred vows of the confessional that he would guard the book and turn it over to the next head brother when his time came. Under no circumstances, he promised, would he ever open it. Never would his eyes rest on the handwritten parchment within its covers. Even as Ephraim agreed to these last requests, he read the book’s title. It was written in Ge’ez, one of Ethiopia’s ancient languages. He translated the arabesque-looking script easily.

  The Shame of Kings.

  His hands had begun to tremble, and the text had almost slipped from his grasp. He felt like Adam in the Garden holding the ill-gotten apple, the luscious fruit poised at his lips. Ephraim knew immediately that the book contained an evil as deadly as original sin. At that moment, he began to finally understand the man dying before him. He turned his gaze to the frail figure lying on the simple cot so far away from their home, knowing the answer but unable to prevent his eyes from asking the question.

  “Yes,” came the breathless answer. “I read it and God damned me for it, he damned us all. I could not help myself. At the time, I felt as if it was God’s will that I read the words and break the silence. It was only when I finished, on the night of November 13, 1962, that I realized it was Satan himself who seduced me into reading the book.”

  Ephraim stared at him.

  “Don’t you recognize the date? The day after I finished the Shame of Kings, Ethiopia officially annexed Eritrea. It was the beginning of the end for our country, Ephraim: the Ethiopian occupation, the pogroms, the immeasurable suffering under the Dergue. And it was I who caused the war. My hubris brought about God’s wrath! He punished me for reading this book by destroying our homes, laying waste to our lands, and killing hundreds of thousands of our people. All because I could not refuse to read what is written in that accursed book, the dark companion to our greatest religious texts.”

  Within the faith there were two ancient books, Kebra Nagast: The Glory of Kings and Fetha Nagast: The Justice of Kings. While largely unknown in the Western world, these two books predated most notable Christian writings by many hundreds of years, coming first from Egyptian Copts at least a thousand years ago. The works chronicled the visit of Makeda, The Queen of the South, to the land of Israel, and the life of her son Menyelek, who was fathered by the King of Israel. They told of Menyelek, spiriting the Tabernacle of the Law of God from Jerusalem, transferring His terrestrial seat to Aksum in what is now northern Ethiopia. The books attested that the rightful kings of Ethiopia from those far-off days until the reign of Haile Selassie were thus the direct descendants of Noah and Abraham and Moses, the chosen Children of God.

  Being a Christian, Ephraim possessed a faith grounded in the teachings of Jesus and his Apostles and Disciples, yet his beliefs were based on a much older faith, that of the Jews, the first believers in the one true God, blessed even if they did not see Christ as His son. While unfamiliar with later Jewish works like the Talmud, Ephraim knew well the earlier teachings, believing strongly in the Old Testament and the Kebra Nagast and the Fetha Nagast.

  The validity of what was written in the Kebra Nagast had been a point of contention among religious scholars soon after its discovery. But in the nineteenth century, Western missionaries returned from Africa with tales of black-skinned Jews living in Ethiopia who practiced a much older, and some said purer version of the faith. The question of whether these people, called Falashas—Outsiders—were really Jewish was answered in 1984 when Israel executed Operation Moses, a secret program run by the Mossad to bring as many Falashas as possible to Israel at a time when the Ethiopian famine was at its worst.

  How it came to pass that this unknown third book, The Shame of Kings, fell into the hands of the Christian monastery, Ephraim could not say. Yet he sat at the bedside of the dying abbot holding the volume in one hand, his other resting on the withered shoulder of the priest.

  “Swear to me, Ephraim, that you will not read it. There are things within those pages that were never meant for man’s eyes.” The old abbot’s voice had the strength of a guttering candle. “I lost my faith that night. It was too much for me to believe that a god, our God, could allow such an outrage, such an abomination.”

  “I swear it to you,” Ephraim readily agreed, wishing he had not even touched the unclean work. “On the sanctity of your confession in the eyes of God, I will never again look at this book.”

  It now lay just inches from his hands, bathed in eerie moonlight. Ephraim knew he had to read it. A cold wind rattled the fragile windowpane and flickered the nearly spent candle sitting in a pool of its own wax. The weak flame cast bizarre shadows on the raw stone walls, familiar shapes in the room taking on ominous dimensions. He felt a chill run the length of his spine.

  Why do you test me so, Lord? Am I to be like Job, forced to endure hardships so you can prove to Lucifer that man’s love for you can not be corrupted? I fear that I am not strong enough. Is my test not to read this book? Is it Your will that these words are never again seen by the eyes of man? Or is your mission for me to read it and bring its truths to light?

  The night wore on, Ephraim lighting another candle from the embers of the last, filling his room with fresh light. The moon tracked across the sky so that it no longer beamed onto the table but instead rested on the simple crucifix hanging over Ephraim’s bed. He stared at the image intently, feeling His suffering on the cross, and for the first time in days, Ephraim felt a lightness in his chest. The answer to his dilemma was before him. Christ had died for our failures and to knowingly fail Him was sinful, but it was still to be forgiven, the deed condemned, not the man.

  At almost the same instant he turned back to his desk and undid the book’s clasp, Brother Dawit cried out in his sleep and died in his own room. But by the time Ephraim learned of this the following morning, he had read the book, and the death of the aged monk was no longer such a tremendous concern.

  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 ha
ve 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?”