Free The Medusa stone by Jack du Brul Page A

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.
    width="1em"> "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, Mussolin. Just keet 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