The Medusa Stone pm-3

by Jack Du Brul

  “Won’t you both sit down?” Henna decided his irritation of this intrusion wasn’t important. “And tell me what’s so secret and urgent.”

  “Colonel?” Morrison said, indicating that Baines should take point in this conversation.

  “Mr. Henna, I, ah,” Baines stammered, then paused for a moment as if to collect his thoughts. “Well, it started nearly three years ago when my office was tasked with stemming the flow of classified material streaming out of the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO is one of the most secret organizations in the government and was allowed to use their own internal security for the protection of sensitive material. They did an exemplary job for years. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, secrets began leaking. The Air Force has more personnel seconded to the NRO than any other branch, and we were instructed to put an end to the leaks.”

  “Are we talking about another Aldrich Ames case here, like what happened at the CIA?” Henna interrupted.

  “In a way, though there didn’t seem to be any political motivation behind the thefts. Our threat came from opportunistic employees using information for profit.”

  “What kind of secrets are we talking about?”

  “Let me give you an example of an arrest we made two years ago. A secretary for one of the NRO’s satellite photograph analysts had a husband who traded futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Using information from our Keyhole-11 spy bird, she was able to tell him that Argentina was about to suffer a severe loss of their winter wheat crop due to an insect infestation. Using that information, he made something like twenty-seven million dollars selling wheat futures short before the knowledge was made generally available.”

  “So, we’re talking stock fraud?” Henna settled back in his seat. He’d been thinking that this had to do with Mercer and Harry White and was relieved that apparently it didn’t.

  “In that case, yes. We brought in the Securities and Exchange Commission to handle the public side of the investigation. They made the arrest, keeping NRO’s involvement a secret. Both husband and wife will be out of prison sometime at the end of the next century.” Baines spoke more confidently now. “Anyway, that’s just one example. Other cases we found were perpetrated by military personnel, and arrests were handled through the Judge Advocate General’s office.”

  Baines paused again and the FBI director knew that the colonel was getting to the heart of the matter. “Six weeks ago, a case came across our desk, one that took us until the day before yesterday to crack. We made an arrest and learned the case has much wider implications than any previous. I felt it prudent to include civilian authorities, notably your office, as soon as possible. My commanding officer agreed and subsequently briefed Admiral Morrison. It was the Admiral’s idea that you and I meet before I continue with my investigations.”

  Morrison interrupted the younger man. “Some material was stolen from an archive at the NRO. The Air Force major who perpetrated the theft, Donald Rosen, was arrested last night and is looking at about five hundred years in prison for his crime. The materials were photographs that had been sent to his office by mistake. He recognized their ‘Ultra Top Secret’ classification and stole them. Heads have already rolled for the screw-up that put the pictures on his desk in the first place, but that’s an internal matter.”

  Baines took up the story again. “He held on to the pictures for only a week before finding a buyer, selling them for a mere five hundred thousand dollars. You have to realize we’re talking about military secrets that could compromise a very delicate ongoing program. Their potential value is incalculable.”

  Henna suddenly knew precisely where the conversation was headed. “Let me guess. You want us to handle the investigation into Undersecretary of State Prescott Hyde and determine exactly what he did with the Medusa photographs?”

  He could have thrown a live cobra on the floor and gotten a more relaxed reaction from the two men.

  “How much more do you know?” Morrison was the first to find his voice, though he could not hide his astonishment. He had jumped to his feet.

  “Tom, sit down, for Christ’s sake,” Henna said. “Your secret is still safe. As far as I know, only a handful of people are aware of the Medusa pictures.”

  “You don’t understand. There are three Medusas orbiting the earth as we speak. Do you think a nation like China would sit idle knowing the capabilities of our newest-generation spy satellite? Shit, the pictures Hyde bought were from the first prototype, and that thing was a dinosaur compared to the latest ones. There’s a lot more at stake than a handful of photographs of the Sahara Desert!”

  “Yeah, there is.” Henna saw that the conspiracy around Harry’s kidnapping was taking another turn for the worse. Stolen pictures from the NRO, Jesus! “We’ll get to that in a minute. Tell me what happened next.”

  “Rosen must have realized his asking price was too low after selling them to Hyde,” Baines continued. “Between the sale and his apprehension, he contacted someone in Europe; we have no way of knowing exactly who because the calls went to an encryption exchange, but we narrowed the field to Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia or Albania.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Henna interrupted, thinking about the religious wars raging in Albania and the former Yugoslav states. Was this another connection to Islamic terrorists, like the charter flight to Beruit?

  “What?”

  “Finish your story and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “There were a dozen calls of various durations, the final one only hours before Rosen was arrested,” Morrison said. “That is one side of the investigation that we’ll handle ourselves, possibly using the CIA and INTERPOL if anything shows promise, but we wanted to come to you with Prescott Hyde. He works for the government, but he’s a civilian so we’re going to need your office to spearhead the investigation.”

  “The investigation is already underway,” Henna snorted. “In fact, I think we’ve got enough to bring the son of a bitch in for formal questioning. Do you remember Philip Mercer?”

  “The guy who handled the crisis in Hawaii?”

  “And the one in Alaska too. He has the pictures and is on his way to Africa with them, Eritrea specifically. He left early this morning.”

  Henna spent the next half hour detailing Mercer’s involvement with Prescott Hyde, from the initial approach to search for the diamonds, through Harry White’s kidnapping and the subsequent shoot-out at Dulles. “Did anyone from NRO do a hard analysis of the pictures?” he asked in conclusion.

  “No, not really,” Morrison admitted. “The bird hadn’t been calibrated when we lost her. The pics looked like a bunch of junk to our people.”

  “Well, they’re not junk to the group who perpetrated that attack at Dulles.”

  “We need to get that material back. Not only is it highly classified, but it’s also evidence,” Baines said.

  “No. What we need to do is haul in Prescott Hyde, I mean today, right now and then let Mercer figure out just what the hell is going on.”

  “Dick, we can help Eritrea later. Dig up the diamonds in a few months or something. We have to get those pictures back.” Morrison’s voice was backed with every ounce of command in his body but Henna didn’t even blink.

  “Tom, if you want to pick up Hyde on your own authority and have this make the six o’clock news tonight, be my guest. But if you want the help of this office, then we do it my way.”

  A tense minute passed, the gleaming pendulum of the wall clock knifing through the time, carving the seconds away.

  “All right,” Morrison relented. “If we do it your way, what happens now?”

  “I get an arrest warrant from Justice and we all go over to pay Hyde the worst visit of his life.”

  Morrison looked over at the still quiet Baines. “What do you think, counselor?”

  “Once we have Hyde, we can send someone to Africa to get the photographs from the man Mercer.”

  “Ass covering, Tom?”

  “Mine’s on
the line. Goddamn right I’m going to cover it. Let’s get it over with.”

  * * *

  Henna rode with Morrison in the back of a Bureau car, Baines sitting in the front with the driver. Three other dark sedans followed them in convoy as they headed toward Fairfax, Virginia. Before leaving FBI headquarters, Henna phoned Hyde’s office and determined the undersecretary wasn’t at work and hadn’t shown up all morning. He then called Hyde’s home but the line was disconnected. Fearing that Hyde had already fled, Henna fast-tracked a warrant through the Justice Department and put together a small team to make the arrest.

  As they drove, he sorted details in his head, mentally writing items on note cards and shuffling them randomly, searching for patterns. It was an old trick that served him well. On the first card was Rosen with the stolen Medusa photographs followed by their purchase by Hyde. After that, everything could fit together any number of ways. He wondered if, after Rosen sold them, he was approached by a group in Europe who also wanted them, someone from the Balkans, for example. It was possible that Harry’s neighbors heard one of those languages and not Arabic. When Mercer refused Hyde’s offer, the terrorists had kidnapped Harry to force him to go to Africa to find the diamonds for them. From security briefings, Henna knew that Iran supported Muslim groups in Albania and Serbia and also had ties to the factions in Beruit. The tie-in was circumstantial at best, but it was a good lead.

  That still left Hyde and his motivation. Money was the most obvious answer. He was using his position at the State Department to deal himself in on any potential wealth, Henna thought. He bought the pictures himself, then hired Mercer for the expedition. But where, Henna wondered, would he get that kind of money? And then he realized Israel, through Selome Nagast, was footing the bill. Hyde paid for the photographs and they were paying for everything else. The reasons were obvious when he considered the Iranian connection. Israel was trying to prevent some terrorist group from securing a new font of untraceable wealth, an unknown diamond mine.

  He was thinking about his upcoming interview with Hyde and knew he could use any information he got from the undersecretary to get the Mossad to open up about their operation. He’d always felt that America’s security arrangement with the Jewish state was too one-sided. This was a perfect opportunity to level the playing field.

  Henna’s first inkling of a disaster in the making came in the form of a police siren’s rising Doppler screaming behind the convoy. An instant later, a cruiser rocketed passed the FBI vehicles in a bejeweled blur, its bubble lights flashing sapphire and ruby. They were on the Little River Turn-pike, just beyond the Beltway, and the police car raced through traffic lights with little more than a tap on its brakes. Another siren was approaching fast.

  Because of traffic, it took them a further twenty minutes to get to the residential neighborhood where Hyde had his home. It was an affluent subdivision, each four- and five-bedroom house built on more than an acre of land with plenty of old trees to shield neighbor from neighbor. The newly macadamed streets were spotlessly clean, and the telephone poles had yet to darken with the patina of age.

  The closer they got to Hyde’s street, the darker the sky became and the thicker became the awful stench of burned wood and melted plastic.

  Beginning ten houses from Hyde’s, the street looked like a riot scene. The police had established a cordon behind which the curious gathered anxiously. Henna’s credentials got him through with only a moment’s delay and they drove on, the car weaving around police cruisers, fire engines, and idling ambulances in a slow slalom. When the breeze tugged at the clouds of smoke, they could see the bright inferno that had been Prescott Hyde’s slice of the good life.

  Henna’s self-satisfaction disappeared. He was no arson specialist, but he knew enough to realize that an accelerant, no doubt gasoline, had been used to start the fire and was still burning. Hyde’s house would have been soaked through to create a conflagration of this size. Given the number of emergency vehicles on the scene, the fire must have been called in half an hour ago or earlier.

  The driver eased the sedan to a stop two hundred feet from the fire, close enough for them to feel the heat from the blaze as they stepped from the vehicle. Even as Henna watched, a section of roof collapsed into the churning guts of the building, sending up a fireworks display of popping sparks and burning bits of paper and fabric. The air was laced with the petrochemical stench of melting roof shingles, making Henna close his eyes when the wind shifted into his face. Two pumper trucks siphoned water from separate hydrants and showered the house with ballooning arcs, but still the place burned. Heat washed off the building in visible waves.

  The structure was a total loss. The siding had burned through in places to reveal the skeletal fingers of the house’s framing. On the far side of the house had stood a chimney, but all that remained was a seven-foot stump. The rest of it lay across the charred lawn in an elongated pile of debris.

  Henna saw his theories burning in the fire. Without Hyde, there was no case and all the theorizing in the world wouldn’t change that fact. He had no doubt that when the house cooled, they would discover the undersecretary’s body amid the ruins.

  “You’re Henna?” The question came from a fireman much older than those fighting the blaze. His face was weathered like tree bark, and when he pulled off his helmet, his hair was pure white. “The cop at the barricade radioed me you were here. Mind telling me why the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is here with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs?”

  Henna figured the man was the commander of Fairfax’s fire department. He put out his hand. “I can’t tell you the particulars right now, I’m sorry.” The fireman had a tight grip, his hands deeply callused. “Anyone in there?”

  “Not alive, if that’s what you’re asking.” The fireman turned to look at the fire over his broad shoulder. “Judging by the two cars smoldering in the driveway, I’d say the house was occupied. The forensic teams may be able to scrape a few bits of bone and some goo into a bag, but don’t expect much.”

  “What’s your read?” Henna asked.

  “Some squirrel killed the occupants, then torched the house to cover his tracks or delay the investigation. It’ll take a while, but we’ll find it’s a case of murder.”

  Henna nodded, his eyes naturally drawn to the walls of fire that erupted from the house. He’d known it at the first police siren, but hadn’t wanted it to be true. Whoever was responsible, Middle Eastern terrorists or Balkan extremists, it was clear they were one step ahead. And with Hyde out of the way, their tracks were well covered. Until he could contact Mercer, he could only hope his friend knew what he was doing because right now Henna certainly didn’t.

  “When do you think you can get some men in there to verify?” Colonel Baines asked.

  The chief looked back at the fire just in time to see a wall fall outward to the lawn, an explosion of flame and wood that drove his men back half a dozen yards. “We may not get a team in there until after midnight.”

  “Anything we can do to help?”

  “Yeah, make it rain.” The chief turned away to rejoin his men, leaving Henna and Morrison and Baines alone with their questions.

  Leonardo da Vinci Airport

  Rome, Italy

  Mercer and Selome walked side by side toward the Ethiopian Airline gate for their flight to Asmara. Mercer carried his two matching briefcases while Selome sported a slender leather valise hanging from a shoulder strap. Her long legs matched Mercer’s pace, both of them striding through the crowds in an effort to stretch their cramped muscles. They joked easily, regaling each other with horror stories from past flights.

  At the Ethiopian Airlines counter, Selome switched from English to Amharic when she addressed the willowy ticket agent. Mercer listened in for several seconds before realizing he couldn’t understand a word. She turned to him, asking for his ticket, which he quickly produced. Selome and the agent spoke again, their voices rising before Selome seemed satisfied.
<
br />   Selome was scowling when she led him away from the counter. Over half of the two hundred waiting room seats were occupied, all the passengers either Eritrean or Ethiopian. Looking at their faces, Mercer realized that Selome’s exquisite beauty and her thick hair were more the norm that the exception. There were a number of older women, wrinkled and bowed by life, but the younger ones were all attractive. On the other hand, the men were slight, too delicate to be considered handsome.

  “Be thankful I was here,” Selome said as she and Mercer took seats. “They had you as a standby passenger for coach. You might have been bumped from the flight if I hadn’t checked you in. I doubt that witch at the counter”— she tossed her head—“was going to tell you until you tried to board the plane.”

  “You sound like you’re not coming with me.”

  Selome nodded, her hair cascading over her face. She tamed it with a flick of her wrist. “I’ve got a meeting in London tomorrow. I’ll meet up with you in Asmara the day after. I never asked — where are you staying?”

  Mercer took this news in stride. “The Hotel Ambassoira.”

  “Good choice, one of our country’s finest. But don’t expect too much,” she cautioned. “The Ambasoira was built during the occupation.”

  “Ethiopia’s?”

  “No, Italy’s. The hotel dates back to the twenties,” she grinned. “And unless you’re a masochist, avoid their coffee, and never take the plumbing for granted. I believe that Habte Makkonen is going to meet you at the airport. I don’t know him, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.”