captors had given him Boodles gin or something. Harry must have known that he’d been abducted to the Mideast, but recognized that his abductors weren’t Muslims. Mercer should have made the connection, and that oversight rekindled his anger at himself. He wondered how many more mistakes he’d made and how much others had paid for them.
Selome continued. “Levine and his followers want to make Israel a totalitarian theocracy. He recognized what the Medusa photos revealed and knew such a discovery, accredited to him, would ensure him the prime ministership. He tried to have them stolen from your National Reconnaissance Office, but instead they were sold to Prescott Hyde. Hyde, too, saw something in them, something that would bolster his shaky position within the State Department. We learned about all of this shortly after Hyde bought them, and I was sent to the United States to work with him. Shin Bet paid off a member of the Eritrean mission in Washington to vouch for me so Hyde never knew of my connection to Israel. My mission was to gather intelligence, especially if Levine’s people tried to contact Hyde directly.
“Unfortunately for Hyde, he called you soon after I arrived in D.C. and you joined his search for the mine, shutting down that option for Levine’s agents. Hyde and his wife were killed the morning you and I left for Africa.”
Hyde dead too? Jesus, where was this going to end? “You left me in Rome to report your findings about Hyde to your control in Israel?”
“Is that how you figured out I was Israeli?”
“I was told by Dick Henna before we left Washington. Also, the night you came to Tiny’s Bar, my best friend, Harry, was kidnapped to Beruit.”
It was obvious from her expression that this was new information. “The old guy who introduced himself as you?”
“The same,” Mercer replied. “The abductors appeared to have Middle Eastern connections, so I figured Israel would fit in eventually.” He told her the whole story about Harry’s kidnapping and about the assassination at da Vinci Airport. “I didn’t know if you were on my side or not. Remember, you were working with Hyde when we met.”
“It must be Levine’s people holding your friend. After you turned down Hyde, they must have grabbed him to compel you to come to Africa and find the mine. The man killed in Rome was undoubtedly Ibriham Bein, Levine’s top agent.”
Mercer guessed Bein’s warning in Rome about not harming Selome was because the Israeli feared a problem if Levine’s plot had caused the death of a Shin Bet agent. They were already planning for the day they had Israel in their grasp.
“Levine’s a fascist,” Selome said bitterly. “I know that sounds strange for one Jew to call another that, but he is. He believes in the purity of the Jewish people and wants all others out of Israel. He wants to build concentration camps and corral the Palestinians in fenced stockades.
“He’s been planning this for years. I don’t know if you remember the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the eighties, but he was a major supporter of the operation. He said it was for humanitarian reasons, but even then he wanted to do away with the Palestinians who perform many of the menial jobs in Israel and replace them with African refugees.”
So, Mercer thought, he and Harry had gotten in the middle of an internal Israeli problem and not some international terrorist plot. Selome was trying to stop Levine from using the Medusa photographs to give himself unfair advantage in the elections. All of his suspicions about her ebbed away. For the first time he felt that he could trust her. A dam was breaking inside of him. He’d been on his own for too long and now he had an ally. He felt like hugging her. “So your job was to keep an eye on this group and report their activities?”
“And to stop them if I could. But we came to Eritrea before I got close.”
Suddenly something didn’t make sense. “I understand Levine is a maniac, but I also read that his election was all but guaranteed even before we left Washington. Why is he willing to ruin his chances by going after a worthless fifty-year-old diamond mine?”
“He’s not.” Selome laughed for the first time in a long time. “You already know we have no interest in the Italian facility. I think the Sudanese and their backers are looking for that one. That’s how they stumbled on us. Our two missions come from different directions but end at the same location.”
Mercer matched her smile, the horrors of the morning sloughing off at least for a few seconds. “Before you’d arrived in the valley, when I was exploring for the older workings, I’d already guessed that you were aware of another mine in the area.”
Mercer’s expression suddenly changed as a new thought struck him. The white rock he’d found in the kimberlite tailings was a stone-aged tool, a hammer used thousands of years ago to crush the ore to get at the precious gems. Suddenly everything tied together: Jews, ancient mines, religious fanatics. He finally realized why the stakes were so high, and it had nothing to do with diamonds.
“We’re on our way to talk to some priests who will confirm it, but yes, it is.” Selome smiled at his breathless wonderment. “It’ll be the greatest find of your life. The stuff of legend.”
When he said it, it came out as a whisper. “King Solomon’s Mine.”
The Eritrea-Sudan Border
Gianelli felt like a conquering Caesar as his trucks rumbled into Eritrea. He sat in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, the windows rolled down so he could smell the dry desert and hear the bellowing of the big twelve- cylinder turbo-diesels. Chuckling, he realized that the heavy-duty transporters loaded with mining gear and provisions weighed twice as much as the CV.35 light battle tanks Mussolini had used to invade Abyssinia. Kitted out in de rigueur khaki, with a bush hat clamped on his head and sunglasses protecting his eyes from the worst of the driving sun, Gianelli was at the very pinnacle of his life. Everything up to this moment, every deal and every decision, had led to this instant. Leading the trucks back to the mine that his uncle had opened decades before was the culmination of his existence. Let others wonder at his wealth and power — they were nothing, merely an extension of what had been handed to him through his family, a quirk of genetics. This was what he saw as his destiny.
Soon after the Eritrean refugees had left their camps in Sudan under the leadership of a nomad prince, Mahdi had approached Gianelli with his idea of searching ahead of the column so they could reach the mine more quickly. The refugees were covering only a couple of miles a day, and the lethargic pace rankled the Italian. Gianelli agreed and sent out a scout truck. Three days later the radio call had come saying they had found the mine in a bowl of land at the end of a narrow valley after hearing an explosion. Gianelli ordered the main convoy to bypass the refugees and speed to where the advance scouts waited. A short time after, another call from them reported a Toyota Land Cruiser driven by a white man was attempting to flee the valley. Gianelli’s first thought was the fools had given away their presence to Mercer, but realized that Mahdi’s people wouldn’t have made such a blunder.
He instructed the Sudanese rebels to stop the Toyota and made it clear that Mercer was not to be harmed. He learned a few hours later that Mercer had escaped through a mine field at the cost of one of Mahdi’s men. Gianelli cursed the whole team over the radio until his fist nearly crushed the microphone. Mahdi listened to the exchange as he sat on the back bench seat of the ten-wheeled Fiat truck. When his turn came, he took Gianelli’s wrath without comment. His employer was fully in his right. Mercer never should have escaped. His men’s failure was inexcusable, and their punishment, when the cargo trucks reached the valley, would be more severe than Gianelli’s verbal tirade.
The radio crackled again, and he snatched up the handset. “Yes?”
“We are back at the valley now and have it secured. The American left only three people here, Eritreans. They have some excavating equipment but are not working at the mine.”
“What are they doing?” Gianelli asked the leader of the advance detachment he had sent out to leapfrog the meandering refugee column.
“They were just digging into the side of one of the mountains. They haven’t said yet what they were looking for.”
