'A' for Argonaut (19 page)

The day after he railed on the Arabs, Vangaler joined her back at Boyko’s jungle headquarters, a stately French Riviera-style palace he called Villa del Mar. It sat on the crest of a hill at the edge of his mining compound, MecaMines, surrounded by fenced-in security, just outside of Mbuji-Mayi. Located on the only hill, Boyko’s palace dominated the area. It was just one of many estates he owned, in addition to his place in Presqu’ile de Banana, in luxury resorts like Cap d’Antibes, Bellagio, and the Seychelles.

Vangaler and Chiang were two of a kind. Neither was interested in formalities. So, he pulled back the cone-shaped net canopy, arranged the pillow on the ivory silk bedspread that covered the circular bed that floated from the ceiling a foot off the floor. He pulled a glass-topped coffee table over beside the bed and set out a half-dozen lines of 85% pure cocaine cut with caffeine.

“Have some nose candy,” he ordered. They had a strange relationship. He needed her to keep Boyko at bay; she needed him for the same reason. Though she had no interest in drugs, she was highly adaptable to whatever it took to achieve her ends. She followed him and took three blasts. He smiled down on her, petting her head, as close as he ever came to human feeling.

“Mmmmh,” she murmured, looking up at him from her job. “It won’t be long now.”

Twenty

Boston

S
oft sheets of rain floated down from a dull sky that shadowed Tremont Street, adding to the grayness over the Revolutionary War era graves in the Granary Burial Ground by Boston Common, the site shared now by Paul Revere, John Hancock, and the five American victims of the Boston Massacre. There was an early chill in the summer air, foreshadowing the frost due in the early fall. Down Tremont Street from the burial ground, Maran climbed the old iron-clad cement steps leading up from the subway. He stepped across Tremont and walked several doors to the right of the McDonald’s on the corner just down Boylston Street from what was left of Boston’s strip clubs and peep shows.

Mantville’s store was located on the third floor of the Jewelry Mart, an Empire-style stone edifice, sooty with age. As he entered Maran noted what must have been fashionable décor sixty years earlier. Faded fabric in rococo print draped windows too dirty to see through above an Art Nouveaux maple counter. The glass display case showed a scant supply of what looked, even to Maran’s unschooled eye, to be middle-of-the road watches and jewelry.

Harold Mantville wore a trim black Salvadore Dali mustache. Razor-cut wavy black hair tipped in silver crowned the man’s head.

It takes all kinds
, Maran thought.

“Mr. Mantville, Rodney Davis,” Maran said. Handing the jeweler one of the bogus business cards Levine had given him along with three $10,000 custom packs of Amex Single-Signer Travelers Checks, a passport, and a Platinum credit card.

“They say you’re the man to see in Boston when it comes to diamonds. I’m working on an article for The Retail Diamond World Magazine.”

It wasn’t a lie. Maran had obtained the assignment under his assumed name. He showed Mantville the press pass he got from Retail Diamonds World Magazine, the diamond trade’s magazine of record. He’d learned early in his covert career how effective a press pass was in opening doors otherwise inaccessible. Getting the assignment, with its requisite press pass, was a no-brainer: an e-mail followed by a quick phone call. Maran simply proposed to research and write a feature story profiling the leaders of the world diamond industry, something the editor of the periodical snapped up, having had the idea on his agenda for too long already. Maran’s proposal opened with the offer to submit the story on speculation.

“Oh!” Mantville said mockingly. “The press! I’ve never spoken to such an important person before. What can I do for you, Mr. Davis?” Mantville had a nervous tick that made him keep blinking his eyes and squinching his face, damp with sweat.

“I need some information. Hoping you can help,” Maran answered, ignoring the crack.

“What kind of information, Mr. Davis?”

Maran cut to the chase. “Large diamonds. D-perfect. How do they appeal? Who buys them? Who sells them? Where do they get them?”

“Large diamonds?” Mantville’s voice was guarded.

“That’s right. Diamonds used by renegade forces in West Africa to buy weapons. Blood diamonds.”

Mantville’s voice rose. “What would I know? Why ask me? Who sent you?”

“I’m told you’re the go-to guy in diamonds here in Boston.” Maran had learned long ago that flattery often opened some otherwise cautious doors.

“I can’t help you. You’re trouble!”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m particularly interested in one stone that you sold.”

Mantville’s lips trembled.

“Who? Who did I sell a stone to?”

His voice was shrill now.

“Get out! Leave me alone! I don’t know anything‌—‌nothing‌—‌nothing to tell you. Get out of my store!”

A noise. Mantville’s head turned to the rear of the store. A man stepped out of the back room. He smiled, flashing the grills that covered his teeth. Maran was looking into the nose of a 9mm automatic. He recognized it as a Makarov, the pistol used in the Cold War by East German assassins from STASI’s secret police.

“Rodney Davis?” the assailant snarled. “Down on the floor.”

He had a near British or Dutch accent.

Afrikaner?

“
Hee Yeah!”
Maran’s voice expelled the guttural sound from his stomach. It came out like something inhuman. It took all the will power he had in him, but he balanced on his injured leg, bent his stronger right knee and power-pitched his foot in a vicious slash that audibly snapped the arm that held the gun.

A shot reverberated through the small office.

My face! Again!

Maran grabbed at the wound that sliced his cheek. He felt his fingers slip, drenched with blood. The gun lay midway between them on the floor. Before he could make another move, the foreigner ran down the hall and exited through an open window, landing three stories below on the rain canopy in the front of the diamond building.

Experience kicked in.

Maran attacked Mantville like a hunger-maddened beast of prey that had just sprung on dinner after stalking it for hours. He seized the jeweler by the throat. Mantville’s head hit the plaster in a loud crack as Maran lifted him off his feet, pinned him against the wall on his tiptoes. Maran’s fingers plunged into the softness of the exposed notch just under Mantville’s windpipe. He pressed his stiffened, now rod-like fingers, down to he point where any more pressure would have killed the man. He gripped the collarbone. Their grimaces matched.

“What’s going on here?” Maran growled. “Answers! Now! Lie to me and I’ll choke the life out of you. You’re a fool if you doubt my ability to crush you like the filthy rodent you are.” Maran’s green eyes shot into Mantville’s like steel-cutting lasers. In that moment, he had transformed. No longer a thinking human being but a trained animal focused on an enemy that represented nothing more than a life-threat, some
thing,
not some
one,
to be extinguished if necessary. Maran was ready to do whatever it took.

Mantville was unhinged. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know,” he pleaded. “Don’t hurt me. Please!”

Maran jerked his hand off Mantville’s throat. He ripped his shirt open, swinging his body in a complete half circle and smashing it against the wall again.

“I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!” Mantville pleaded.

“Who is he?” Maran’s voice rumbled off the old marble walls.

“Roelf‌—‌Roelf Diederichs. But‌—‌”

“Shut up. Answers. The accent. Where is he from?”

“I don’t know that. I never saw him before.”

“Roelf Diederichs. A black Afrikaner? What is he doing here? Who is he with?”

“He came in with a reference from Abner Dolitz. I thought he had to be legitimate! Dolitz sold me the diamonds.”

“Dolitz?” Maran shot back, pleased at the confirmation. Blood streamed down his neck. It ran over his shirtfront.

He loosened his grip. The jeweler was still pinned to the wall, looking like a prop for a Wes Craven horror movie.

“Dolitz. Big store. New York,” Mantville gasped. “Forty-seventh Street. Also wholesale. Big-time! Large high-quality diamonds. Very special. A ‘viewer.’ KoeffieBloehm. Cartel.” The diamond cartel held what they called a “viewer sale” about ten times a year. Each sale was worth many millions of dollars. There were only 100 “viewers” in the world, the only parties the cartel would sell to. The stability of diamond prices was dependent on the number of gems the cartel decided to release at its viewer sales.

“Special?” Maran asked.

“The cut. Not a regular brilliant. Never saw it before. Unique. The most sought after blue. Perfect stones. D-Perfect, as perfect as perfect can be. Fabulous. Even with the extra facets,” Mantville said.

“Facets?”

“All of the stones are cut with additional facets, giving them more fire. Cut that way. Unique style. Dolitz calls it the ‘Chrysanthemum cut.’”

He denied stocking the Chrysanthemum diamonds. Maran had no time to search. The jeweler reached under the counter and came up with a fresh package of clean polishing cloths. He handed Maran one to staunch the blood on his face and mop his neck. Maran pressed the cloth to the wound. The flow of blood slowed.

“So the stones are perfect. They’re cheap. Where do they come from?” Maran demanded.

“I have no idea. I can’t figure it out. They are so beautiful, he’d never have to discount them. Now they’re flooding the market. Selling like hotcakes.”

“How did the eggplant know I was coming?” Maran snapped sarcastically. He took license with his own race.

A crowd was gathering outside. He didn’t have time to wait for an answer. The whine of a police siren propelled Maran through the door of the store down the hall to the grimy back stairs. He limped out a rear door into the alley. At the end, he pushed through the crowd gathered outside the front of the building. Blood seeped through the cloth. He pressed it harder against the wound, doing his best to shield it from view. At the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets, he grabbed a taxi.

Maran stepped into the
BANG! office, his face bandaged.

“So! Rusty razor? Cut yourself?” Sergei quipped.

“Long story. I need an update‌—‌fast; I have to pack.”

“Where to?”

“The Pentagon,” Maran answered. He picked up an unopened pack of hard-biting Gitanes Brunes on the desk and held it up.

Sergei
.

He shook his head.

“Bad enough, dose yourself with carcinogens, you have to do it with French cigarettes?” he reprimanded his Russian friend.

“Paris is still the most beautiful city in the world,” Sergei reminded him.

“Too bad it’s full of Frenchmen.”

“Sexist.”

“Anyway, Capetown’s prettier,” Maran parried.

He went upstairs to pack.

When he finished, he sat at the makeshift desk in the loft and read Sergei’s report on Dolitz. It startled him:

“Dolitz opened a small coin shop and built the business on fencing stolen jewelry and coins for friends who were lifting them from their parents. The business grew so fast that he began laundering money for the local Mafia family. Because of his underground connections, Dolitz is able to skim 12-percent as a profit margin from the per carat fee he pays to an unknown cutter in Antwerp. He converts the funds to cashier’s checks and launders them through a series of paper companies registered at ATZ Paribas in Paris. Hundreds of millions of dollars have passed through the Paribas bank to Saud Global Roses and from Roses to Celestial International Exchange. The money trail ends there; Celestial turns out to be a wholly owned sub of Roses, headquartered in Mecca. Roses is controlled through direct associates by various Islamist terrorist organizations.”

Later, Maran recounted the scene at Mantville’s to Sergei. In the past Maran had had no time for false remorse, moral analysis. He did what had to do. And that was it.

Now? Am I slipping?

The images of his butchered team came back to the fore. They were always there, occupying space not too far in the back of his mind.

“I could have killed him like that,” he said snapping his fingers. “I don’t like what I’ve become. In the past, it all seemed worth what I had to give up for duty and country.”

“And now?” Sergei asked.

“I have to get into Africa,” he said. “But first‌—‌Luster.”