Death is Forever (2 page)

“Two people died getting this to me.”

Cole Blackburn looked at the small worn velvet bag in Chen Wing’s hand and asked, “Was it worth it?”

“You tell me.”

With a swift motion Wing emptied the contents of the bag onto the ebony surface of his desk. Light rippled and shifted as nine translucent stones tumbled over one another with tiny crystalline sounds. The first impression was of large, very roughly made marbles that had been chipped and pitted by use. Nine of the thirteen stones were colorless. Three were pink. One was the intense green of a deep river pool.

Cole’s hand closed over the green marble. It was as big as the tip of his thumb and surprisingly heavy for its size. He rubbed it between his fingers. The surface had an almost slippery feel, as though it had been burnished with precious oils. He turned the stone until he found a flat, cleanly chipped face. He bathed it with his breath.

No moisture collected on the smooth green surface.

Excitement stabbed through Cole. Without a word he walked to a liquor cart that stood against a nearby wall. He picked up a heavy leaded crystal glass and glanced at Wing, who nodded. Cole brought the green stone down the side of the glass in a single swift stroke.

The stone scratched the glass easily and deeply. The stone itself wasn’t marked.

At random Cole picked up other stones from the desk and drew them down the crystal surface. New scratches formed. The stones themselves remained untouched. He pulled a well-worn jeweler’s loupe from his pocket, angled the desk light to his satisfaction, picked up the deep green stone, and examined it.

The sensation was like falling into a pool of intense emerald light. Yet this was not an emerald. Even uncut and unpolished, the stone held and dispersed light in ways that only a diamond could. It shimmered between his fingers with each tiny movement of his hand. Light flowed and glanced among the irregularities in the stone’s surface and gathered in its luminous depths. There were no fractures and only two very minute flaws, both irrelevant to the diamond’s value. They lay just below the surface, where they would be cut and polished out of existence.

Cole looked at several more stones before he put his loupe back in his pocket and said, “White paper.”

Wing opened a desk drawer, extracted a pure white sheet of Pacific Traders Ltd. letterhead, and slid it across the desk. Cole pulled a small chamois bag from his pocket and removed a rough diamond that he knew was of perfect color. Uncut and unpolished, the stone had a natural octahedral shape. It looked almost manmade next to the worn, irregular stones from Wing’s bag.

Cole spaced the diamonds across the surface of the paper. One of the stones changed color subtly, becoming more coral than pink. The other pinks deepened to a lovely clear rose. Most of the white stones took on a blue sheen that exactly matched Cole’s diamond. One or two showed a very faint yellow cast to their white, a color shift that only an expert eye would have detected or cared about.

And the green stone burned more vividly still, an emerald flame against snow.

Cole lowered the loupe and studied the green diamond with both eyes again. It still glimmered with an internal fire that was both hot and cold.

Years before, in Tunisia, he’d seen a stone that was nearly the equal of this one. The smuggler who owned the rough claimed it had come from Venezuela. Cole didn’t believe it. But before he could raise enough cash to buy the truth, someone had sealed the smuggler’s lips by cutting his throat. The smuggler’s death hadn’t shocked Cole. When it came to diamonds, a man’s life was valuable only to himself, and his death could easily profit any number of people.

What did surprise Cole was that these diamonds had cost only two lives. He’d never seen a handful of diamonds to equal the ones resting on the white paper, drawing their color from the peculiar circumstances of their birth rather than reflecting their surroundings.

Cole picked up his own exemplar diamond, put it away, and examined the dark velvet bag that lay collapsed across the desk’s ebony surface. The velvet was old, so old that the passage of time and the hard surfaces of the diamonds inside had worn the cloth to near-transparency in places. The velvet didn’t care. It was dead.

But the stones weren’t dead, not in the same way. They shimmered with light and time and man’s insatiable hunger for the rare and valuable.

“What do you want from me?” Cole asked, watching the diamonds with brooding gray eyes.

For a moment Wing thought the question was directed at the stones. Though he’d known Cole for many years, the Hong Kong businessman didn’t claim to understand or predict the American prospector’s complex mind.

“Are they diamonds?” Wing asked.

“Yes.”

“No chance of deception?”

Cole shrugged. The motion made light move over him. Raw black silk gleamed in his sport coat. His hair was the exact color and luster of the silk. His skin had been weathered in the wild places of the world. Fine lines radiated out from his eyes, legacy of a life spent squinting into the light of a desert sun or the flare of a miner’s lamp. Above his left temple a scattering of silver showed in his thick hair. He looked older than his thirty-four years. By every measure that mattered, he was.

“There’s always a chance of deception,” Cole said. “But if these were made by a man, he’ll be the ruin of every miner and diamond mine in the world.”

Wing smiled.

“If you’re worried,” Cole said, “I can find someone in Darwin with a thermal inertia tester. Nobody’s beat that test, not yet.”

This time it was Wing who shrugged. “Unless you brought an instrument with you, there’s no time. These stones must be on their way in a few hours.”

“Where are they going?”

“America.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Kimberley.”

Cole was silent. When he spoke, his voice was neutral. “South Africa’s deposits are pretty well played out.”

“Not Kimberley, Africa. The Kimberley Plateau, here in Australia.”

Wing smiled as though enjoying the chance to show that he understood the difference between the two Kimberleys. It was a common enough mistake. People automatically linked diamonds with Africa, despite the fact that the biggest diamond mine in the world, the Argyle, was in the remote tropical deserts of the state of Western Australia.

Cole smiled in return, but there was little humor in the hard curve of his mouth. “Did the Chen family invest in the Argyle mine on the basis of these stones?”

“I didn’t say Argyle, only Kimberley.”

Swiftly Cole thought through the possible implications. If those stones came from the Argyle, the cartel that controlled the world’s supply of diamonds had made a major new discovery and had become a little richer in the process.

But if the stones were from some new source, the diamond game had a new player and all hell was about to break loose.

Either way, life would become very interesting for the man holding that handful of bright diamond markers in the coming international shoving match.

“Kimberley, Australia,” Cole said, pinning Wing with gray eyes that were as clear as glacier ice. “Is that where the stones were found?”

For the first time Wing hesitated. “They came to me from there, but as to where they were originally found…” He turned his narrow hands palm up.

“Are there more?”

“This is all that came to me,” Wing said carefully.

Cole walked to the window and looked out over the palms that framed the front lawn of the government casino in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, fifteen hundred miles from the Kimberley Plateau. The hard tropical sun and humidity-hazed sky made the Timor Sea look like spun aluminum.

The sun’s heat radiated through the double panes of glass in the window close to Cole. In the background came the vague hum of machinery as the casino’s air conditioning filtered out tobacco smoke from the gaming rooms below and at the same time cooled the steamy, overbearing heat of tropical October. It was high spring down under. The buildup had already begun.

Buildup, the season when animals died and men went crazy.

Tropical Australia in October was one of the few places on earth Cole found unlivable. For some reason the heat and humidity in the eucalyptus and acacia scrublands affected him more than the same conditions in Venezuela or Brazil.

But inside the Darwin casino, man’s machinery kept the tropics at bay, delivering high-tech air that had neither the savor nor the character of any climate or country. If not for the Aboriginal drawings on the wall, the room could have been located anywhere from Hong Kong to Johannesburg, London to Los Angeles, Tel Aviv to Bombay. The furnishings were a fusion of Western woods and Eastern artistic traditions. The clothes combined Eastern fabrics with Italian design flair.

“Were these diamonds mined in the Kimberley?” Cole asked, being blunt because there was no longer anything to gain from circumspection.

“I hoped you could tell me.”

Cole’s eyes narrowed beneath black eyebrows. Wing wasn’t usually evasive, not when he wanted something.

But then Wing didn’t usually walk around with a major fortune in uncut diamonds in his pocket. He and his family were too pragmatic to dabble in a commodity whose market price was controlled by a well-entrenched cartel. The Chens usually stuck to mining and refining metallic ores whose names were familiar only to space scientists and weapons makers.

“I can’t tell you positively where the diamonds came from,” Cole said, “but I can tell you they
didn’t
come from the Argyle.”

“The stones speak to you?” Wing asked skeptically.

Cole simply looked at the other man.

“How can you be so certain?” Wing demanded. “Argyle has pink diamonds.”

“The Argyle mine is a bort hole filled almost entirely with industrial diamonds. Sure, there are pinks in the place, but these pinks are darker, cleaner, and a hell of a lot bigger than anything the Australians have admitted to finding. It takes the patience of an Indian stone polisher to make jewelry out of Argyle’s junk.”

Wing stirred the diamonds with his fingertip. Light pooled and gleamed as though the stones were wet. “Are you saying these aren’t Australian diamonds?”

“No. Just that they’re not from the Argyle itself. Hell, Wing, there are seventy different companies working the Kimberley Plateau. Nobody has found much but industrial-grade goods.” Cole paused before adding, “At least that’s what ConMin has been putting out.”

Wing grunted, his skepticism matching Cole’s. Con-Min told the world what it wanted the world to hear about diamonds, period. Real intelligence was hard to come by, which was why Wing had called in Cole. “What else do the stones tell you?”

“They’re alluvial.”

“Explain, please.”

“They’ve been out of the mother pipe a long, long time, washed out by erosion.”

“Is that bad?”

Cole shook his head. “Jesus, you still don’t know shit from schist, do you?”

“You didn’t disparage my questions when we were partners.”

“When we were partners you didn’t bait me with a handful of fantastic rough,” Cole shot back. “These diamonds are the cream of some old, eroded diamond pipe. The flawed goods and small stuff have been destroyed by time. The stones that survived all had the corners rounded off their natural crystalline shape.”

“That’s good?” Wing asked dubiously.

“When it comes to cutting time, yes. Stones dug fresh and sharp from a pipe lose half their weight in cutting and polishing. These alluvial stones will lose no more than twenty percent between the rough state and some spoiled lady’s finger.”

“Then these stones are at least thirty percent more valuable than nonalluvial rough diamonds of an equal weight?” Wing asked quickly.

Cole smiled. Wing didn’t need to know much about diamonds to keep a balance sheet in his head. That was one of the reasons Cole trusted his former partner. He knew what motivated Chen Wing.

Profit.

“When you take into account color and size as well,” Cole said, “you’ve got at least a million dollars wholesale sitting on your desk, as is. Cut and polished, those stones are worth one hell of a lot more.”

“How much more?”

“Depends on how badly someone wants them. The fancies—”

“Fancies?” Wing interrupted.

“Colored diamonds. They’re bloody rare, and a true green is the rarest of them all. Wherever that lot came from, it’s God’s own jewel box.”

“Are there mines like that?”

“In Australia? Not that I know of.”

“Are there such mines anywhere?” Wing demanded impatiently.

“Ever hear of Namaqualand? Southwest coast of Africa, just below the mouth of the Orange River?” Cole asked.

Wing shook his head.

“About sixty years ago a geologist called Hans Merensky was prospecting on Crown holdings there. He came across some diamonds lying together on top of the ground, neat as eggs in a quail’s nest.”

Though he said nothing, Wing sat straighter in his chair and leaned closer to Cole.

“Everywhere Merensky looked he found more diamonds,” Cole said. “Soon he couldn’t hold them all in his hand. Most of them were too big to fit down the neck of his canteen. He had to store them in candy tins.”

With a soft grunt Wing looked at the small handful of diamonds on his desk and imagined the sensation of making an even bigger find.

“Yeah,” Cole said in a low voice. “That’s how I felt when I first heard the story. Every diamond hunter lies awake at night and dreams of how it would feel to find a jewel box like that.”

“Jewel box. You’re serious, then?”

“Jewel box, diamond trap, concentrated gem gravels—call it what you will. It’s a place where time and water and gravity have done the heavy work of mining for you. They’ve worn away the softer rock, carried away the dross, and concentrated the diamonds.”

“I don’t understand.”

Cole curbed his impatience. “Diamonds are heavier and far harder than most minerals, so they sink in quiet parts of river bends, collect behind boulders or in tree roots, or get caught in gravel. Gold does the same thing for the same reason. It’s heavy. Most of the big diamond finds started with men looking for placer gold.”