'A' for Argonaut (15 page)

P
assion flowers and towering bougainvillea overhung the white shell path to Boyko’s holiday retreat in Presqu’ile de Banana. A profusion of crimson blossoms blanketed the walkway as ever-present honey bees droned away. The double front mahogany doors opened wide onto a foyer floored in Spanish tiles. That in turn expanded into an area that included a wood-paneled library lined on one wall with rare books. A zebra-skin sofa in the center of the room was surrounded by alabaster sculptures. Unidentifiable electronic music blared from unseen loudspeakers. The back wall opened on an emerald lawn. It was garlanded with evergreens sculpted in geometrical shapes: pyramids, corkscrews, and mushrooms.

“‘Chateau de Serein
,’ classic gardens in the jungle,” Boyko liked to say.

The day after Boyko enlisted Amber, he had begun immediately to prepare her for his mission, delivering his coup de grace to the world’s markets with dirt cheap, perfect diamonds.

Previously, he had used his own sources to distribute his stones. Even though his grand plan was only in the experimental stage, it was proving to be a spectacular success. The world’s financial markets were already in a panic.

“How many stones?” Amber asked. She had no interest, but she wanted Boyko to believe there was more on her mind than her son.

“Ten-thousand. One carat each. At ten-thousand per carat, retail,” he lied automatically.

“Why so much?”

“The stones are flawless‌—‌completely flawless‌—‌with a blue hue.”

“That’s a hundred-billion dollars worth of diamonds,” Amber gasped.

“That’s more than the annual world sales.”

“You’re quick.”

Amber’s ponytail bobbed as she shook her head in disbelief.

“In your dreams. Never heard of it.”

No! This gives Boyko control over KoeffieBloehm Diamond Mining. Where would that end? Where does it leave me and Tony?

“I knew you did your homework, but you’ve underestimated. In one mine alone right here in the DRC, it has been established that there is an untapped resource base of 262 million carats. And we have ways of getting more.”

He didn’t tell her how he was dumping his rough stones on the market at ridiculously discounted prices, three thousand pounds of them, seven million carats: equivalent to Angola’s annual output.

“Why do you need me?”

“Up to now, it’s been child’s play. We’ve been smuggling cut stones in by the bag. In order to make this work we have to go big, very big. You’re uniquely equipped to deliver the large number of finished diamonds we are planning to prepare. We need Chaim Tolkachevsky, your father’s Antwerp cutter, Antwerp’s biggest, the only one equipped to handle this many stones. Also, we like the way he cuts, and we know of his problem; we can trust him to keep our secret. His cutters never need to know where he’s getting the rough merchandise.”

He came around the table and stood behind her, running his hands over her shoulders. Her skin crawled as she felt him lean over to peer into her cleavage.

“I want you to make the final delivery.”

“I get the picture,” she said with a seductive smile she hoped would mask her insincerity.

He returned to his seat, reached under the table, and pulled out a crocodile hide folder from which he removed a Belgian passport, a health certificate, an automobile license, and a wallet-sized document that identified Amber as a certified Angolan Gemological Institute gemologist. Her real name was on all the documents. The photo on the passport was hers. There was no need to falsify her identity since she still had a clean slate with the government. Neither she nor her Chinese spy father had ever been caught smuggling diamonds out of Angola or the Congos.

“So what’s new that you now need me now?”

A large grin broke out over Boyko’s face.

“I thought you made your money running guns, servicing dictators.”

“A pittance. The money involved in our new diamond-merchandising plan will stagger your imagination. And we have the channels that have made it successful already. And now we are ready for you to help us take it to a new level.”

“I’ve heard about those channels. Coercion. Murder. Torture.”

Amber’s voice cracked as she struggled to veil her disdain. “I don’t figure. You own the biggest mine in the DRC. You’re already flooding the market,” she added. “Diamond prices are down all over the world.”

“Amber, dear. A conscience? The cartel has controlled diamond prices for a century. Now it’s our turn, the new KoeffieBloehm.”

She ignored his brag.

“I’ve known Chaim Tolkachevsky since I was a child. What does he get?”

“He’ll get a fair shake.”

“What about me?”

“What did you make last year?”

“I’m sure you know.”

“When I discovered you, it was the luckiest day in your life. You and Tolky will be partners. Split one-percent any way you want. If money is not that important to you, we know what is. And we have him.”

She shuddered. Her face blank.

“One percent?”

“We’re talking billions in total sales.”

Amber entered his bedroom
at the back of the first floor. The walls were covered with deep red, silk-and-gold ornaments. Gold-framed mirrors lined the ceiling at angles that made it impossible to avoid seeing yourself no matter where you stood. Convention meant nothing to Boyko. Weirdly out of season, a small Christmas tree filled a corner of the room, at its foot, a profusion of opened gift packages left over from a party to which she hadn’t been invited. She knew some of the gifts were for Tony. An aroma of patchouli stirred the hate in her.

He was sitting in a lounge chair looking out the window at the hills beyond the pastures where his prized Arabian horses grazed. Patches of sunlight flickered through purple-flowered wisteria that crept over the arbor. A sleeping snake was draped across a branch of a jacaranda tree.

“Is it poisonous?” Amber asked

“Viper. Defanged. Like you. Like all my pets.”

“
Asshole,”
she thought.

Raised to be an athlete, Amber had always been confident of her ability to compete with men. Now, confronted with the Animal, she wasn’t so sure. She pondered the irony. In front of her the warm wind rippled through the saw grass; gladioli swayed in the wind like dancers in a mystical ballet; his horses grazed in the meadow that flowed up to the hills.

How could such an evil bastard have such taste?

But she was certain of one thing: Whatever humiliation she was forced to endure, whatever intimate favors he demanded, nothing would keep her from escaping with Tony. She willed herself to a higher plane, one far above common human experience, beyond pain. Nevertheless, fury percolated deep in her being.

Earlier they had dined on his favorite delicacies, fried crocodile bites and spicy monkey brains. He could smell the hint of musk in her skin. He recognized it as
Serge Lutens Clair de Musc.
He might have been an expert in weapons, but he kept up with all things important to his kind of woman. Amber was that and more.

As she advanced towards him, the light behind her accentuated the contours of her body beneath the translucent gown. Boyko grinned as the flimsy fabric played over her burnished legs. His eyes drank in her seductiveness. She felt his mind stalking her like a tiger.

Hah! You fool.

She had tweaked her nipples in advance. They had popped to attention, detonators. She knew precisely the extent to which her body intoxicated men. Her breasts quivered as she approached, careful to take the heavy steps needed to trigger the theatrical show. Her dark ocher eyes narrowed, catlike, accentuated by lavender eye shadow and thick liner. He failed to notice her pupils. They were honed to a pinpoint by rage. He responded as she wished.

You may enter me, you animal. But you can never touch me.

“A drink?” he offered. “You know I can give you anything you want: wealth, freedom, your son.”

“This isn’t the time to talk business,” she purred. She leaned towards him, took the drink from his hand, and rose, lifting herself to his face. Her eyes vied with the sway of her body to capture his attention. He was naked now. Rampant. She took a swallow of her drink, put her glass down on the antique side table and catered to his demands. Her motions were slow, deliberate. She threw her head back, shaking her mane of hair, and feigned passionate deliberation. With one hand she pulled his head against her breasts; with the other, she took him over the edge.

Disgust was a luxury she could not afford. She had made her oath.

Vermin. I will end your days.

She pushed him back on the bed.

He sighed, contented.

Asshole
.

Sixteen

New York City

W
ith The Bird on board, Maran’s team of hackers didn’t take long to plow through the Pentagon’s entire file of ex-operators and identify a contact for Maran. Coincidentally it was an old colleague, Mini Eitan.

They knew one another from Eitan’s old days with Israel’s Yamam, its elite counter-terrorism unit. The dual military-police detachment ran “K or A,” Kill or Arrest, counterterrorism ops against Gaza’s Palestinian Hamas killers who were launching rockets from mosques and kindergartens into Israel’s border towns like Sderot where hundreds of innocent civilians were being killed. It was on a joint secret Yamam-SAWC mission that Maran and Mini Eitan had become friends.

Now Mini counted the New York Diamond Dealers Club as one of his clients and Jacques Levine, executive director at the Club, needed help. The Club, the largest diamond bourse in the U.S., had a problem, one that had wide-ranging consequences that were spreading out everywhere. The price of diamond gemstones was plummeting all around the world and it was bringing the financial markets with it.

The problem was tailor-made for Maran’s needs.

Headed for New York
, he left Boston’s Logan Airport on the first flight just days after Sergei set up shop. The pain was still killing him inside and out; his head, legs, and back ached. Worse, the pain was still lodged deep in his soul. But he was grateful for whatever hope he had left. Outside LaGuardia Airport, he waved down one of the unregistered black Town Cars referred to as “hustlers” by the regular cabbies. He didn’t have time for the taxi waiting line. A large Sikh wearing a white cotton turban and a full black beard sat behind the wheel. Maran slid in. The Lincoln had hardly left the curb when the driver identified himself as a Punjabi Sikh and started railing against Muslims‌—‌all Muslims.

“Why doesn’t your President realize? Wrong as it may be, burning a book? Pissing on a corpse? What is that compared with millions cheering the taped videos when Muslims murder Westerners: Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheik beheading the Jewish Daniel Pearl, your own Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan massacring 13 U.S. servicemen, your American Naveed Haq attacking the Seattle Jewish Federation and murdering a young woman, the Muslim gang led by Youssouf Fofana torturing, what was his name‌—‌Ilan …”

“Halimi,” Maran reminded.

“Right. And that guy at the Jewish day school in Toulouse, killed the rabbi, his two little sons and an eight-year old girl?”

“Mohammed Merah,” Maran said, getting sick.

They zipped through Queens, over the East River on the 59th Street Bridge.

“Anytime, any place in the world people are getting blown up, it’s always the Muslims,” the Sikh ranted

Maran recalled the history between these two groups. The Sikhs and Muslims in the Punjab, which straddles the border between India and Pakistan, had been at each other’s throats since at least 326 B.C. That was the year Alexander the Great invaded from the north through the Hindu Kush. Maran knew the history. Filled with incidents of terrorism. The Sikhs and Muslims hated one another. He normally disapproved of such blanket discrimination, but in this case, he felt that the guy, at the least, had a point to make.

“The western world better soon remember that Israel, derided by the Left as “Zionists,” is the only democracy in the Middle East and the entire Arab world united to attack that country’s independence as soon as it was birthed in 1947,” the driver added.

Maran thought about that, particularly the reference to the “Left.” It was his firm conviction that the idea of the political spectrum as a straight line from Left to Right was another example of political propaganda designed to mask the fact that both ends were extremes and anti-democratic. The truth, he knew, was that both were statist, subverting individualism to the state, and that the line was not horizontal but a circle, with U.S. democracy on one pole and the extremes of the Left and the Right joined together in communist and fascist totalitarianism at the opposite.

Maran patted his jacket under his left arm to feel his .45 caliber H&K USP Compact Tactical Pistol. As always, it was loaded with eight jacketed hollow-point bullets that would stop a raging water buffalo in its tracks. He had shown the airline agent his phony U.S. ATF agent’s documentation and packed it in his stored luggage. He knew he was on his way to take an assignment that would subject him to exactly the kind of pressure his doctors had warned him to avoid at all cost. He also knew that avoidance could not include the clearing of his honor.