The Medusa stone Read Online Free Page A

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 fefferent 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,