Death is Forever (4 page)

The ache between van Luik’s eyes grew greater with each heartbeat. It would have been so much easier if there had been some unmistakable hint of treachery on Street’s part, some tangible proof of unreliability from the man on the other end of the line. But there wasn’t, which meant that some unknown and therefore utterly unpredictable force was at work to upset the fragile balance of ConMin’s Diamond Sales Division, a balance Hugo van Luik had spent his life trying to maintain, a balance that had been achieved at the cost of so many principles and ideals and lives.

Van Luik pictured the Australian scene in his mind, wondering whether Abe Windsor had finally babbled the secrets of his mine to the spinifex as he lay dying. A useless speculation in any case, for the spinifex had neither ears to hear nor mouths to communicate. All van Luik had was the fact that Jason Street had been told about a holographic will and had been shown sheet after sheet of manic poetry; and that, when drunk, Abelard Windsor would talk about diamonds as green as billabongs shaded by gum trees, diamonds as pink as a white girl’s nipples, diamonds the color and clarity of distilled water.

Futilely, fiercely, van Luik wished that he’d been able to turn Street loose years ago to use his quick, cruel skills. Street would have opened up the old man like a sturgeon, spilling the glistening caviar of truth. Or better yet, if possible, a swift death, a death that would have killed the secret of the mine as well…. But neither ideahad been approved by van Luik’s superiors.

Now it was too late.

“No one can prove the mine exists,” van Luik said softly, not even aware that he was speaking aloud. “He was, after all, quite mad.”

“Dream on, mate,” Street retorted. “The mine exists. They called him Crazy Abe and he might have been, but not like that. Diamonds were his children, his women, his country, and his god. I’ve heard a lot of lies in my day and bloody little truth. Hearing Abe talk about diamonds was like being a priest in the confessional. The truth, no matter how wild. I never got my hands on the stones in the bag, but I’d bet my life they were real.”

Silence stretched into a sigh. “The sixteenth verse. Read it.”

This time Street didn’t argue. Before he’d only feared that Abe Windsor would leave the secret of the diamond mine to someone other than his friend Jason Street. Now Street was certain. He’d sworn the poetry had nothing new to teach him.

He’d been wrong.

“‘It can be yours, all of it./Say goodbye to mallee root,/Say g’day to my queen,/Go a yard for each year of deceit,/Turn around once—see it?/Stupid merkin./Can’t find shit in a loo, can you?’”

Van Luik waited.

“Mallee root is rhyming slang for prostitute,” Street said tiredly, finding nothing new in the line. “There’s no map or local name like it on any of Abe’s properties or claims. As for his ‘queen,’ it’s probably his mine, right?”

Van Luik grunted.

“As for the rest, until you know where to stand and how long Abe was deceived, the words are useless. Same for ‘Take a map of Tasmania,/Find the little man in the boat./Go on, row on.’ The map of Tasmania is slang for pussy, and the little man in the boat is—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” van Luik cut in impatiently. “Knowing that Abe is talking to his heir doesn’t suggest any new interpretations to you?”

Street hesitated, then sighed. “Not a hope, mate. Not a bloody hope. But I doubt the chokies will have any better luck making sense out of the poem than we have. They were probably looking for maps or ore samples, anything that would point them in the right direction. It’s a big station, and Abe had mineral claims in other places as well.”

“But it must mean something to someone,” van Luik said harshly. “Windsor’s heir might be able to decipher it. That’s the possibility we must guard against now.”

“Do you know who the heir is?”

“Not yet. We should know soon.”

“Find out,” Street said. “I’ll take care of him. No worries, mate. With the heir dead and the mines abandoned, the government will let the claims lapse. I’ll file new ones, you’ll underwrite a real search, and the mine will eventually be found and controlled by us. No worries.”

“Even with the claims in hand, you’ll be no closer to finding the mine than you are right now.”

“No worries. I’ll find the bloody thing. All I need is time and money for equipment.”

Van Luik smiled weakly. If only it was that easy. But it wasn’t. Nothing about the Sleeping Dog Mines had been easy. Nothing at all. Since the instant of their discovery, the diamonds had been both a siren call and a threat of death.

The siren call had proved false. The threat could prove to be all too real.

“We will consider your solution,” van Luik said.

“Don’t consider too long. This operation is balls-up enough as it is.”

The line hummed, telling Street that van Luik had disconnected.

Despite the dense legal language, Cole Blackburn only had to read the partnership contract once. He had a nearly perfect memory. It was a quirk of mind that had sometimes helped him and more often had brought him pain. Too many things had happened to him that he would rather forget.

The agreement itself was quite clear. The contract allowed Cole to purchase half interest in BlackWing Resources for the sum of one dollar U.S. In return, he would agree to sign over to BlackWing his interests in any Australian mining claims or patents he held. At the moment, that amounted to zero claims and patents. BlackWing had been worth $10 million U.S. five years ago, when Cole had sold his half to the Chen family. Since then, the value of the company had at least doubled.

Beneath all the legal bells and whistles, Cole was being offered $10 million in equity for the investment of a dollar, plus mining claims and patents he didn’t hold. The contract itself was fully executed except for his own signature. Everything was clear except the reason for the offer.

That was why Cole had spent the past nineteen minutes reading between the contract’s lines. Granted, circumstances surrounding the dissolution of his partnership with Wing had been unusual. The family of Chen had paid Cole $5 million partly to soothe him for the loss of a lover who was their daughter, Wing’s sister. But now the shrewd clan that controlled a sizeable portion of Hong Kong and Macao seemed to be offering him twice that much for no reason he could see.

It made him nervous.

He was no lawyer, but he was sophisticated enough to see that there were no loopholes, no tricks built into the partnership agreement, no obvious or subtle way for the Chen family to recoup from Cole Blackburn the missing $9,999,999.

Without signing, he dropped the document back on the desk. “It’s too early for Christmas.”

Wing shrugged. “It’s not a gift. The present geologists at BlackWing are either too inexperienced or too corrupt to find what we want.”

“And what’s that?”

“Diamond mines,” Wing said succinctly.

“Why do you want them? You’ve got a half-dozen Pacific Basin holdings that pay better returns than the average diamond mine.”

Wing rubbed his palms together thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Have you looked at oil prices lately? At gold? At copper? Iron? Uranium? They are, as you Americans say, in the toilet.” He smiled slightly. It had been a long time since he had used American slang.

“Diamonds have had their own problems,” Cole said. “What cost sixty-two thousand dollars American per carat in 1980 costs about twenty thousand at the moment.”

“Yes, but take a slightly longer view and you’ll find that in 1974 the same diamond cost only forty-three hundred dollars per carat. Trust me, my friend. I have done my research carefully. Diamonds are the only commodity to have increased in real value over the last fifty years.”

“Thanks to the cartel.”

Wing sighed. “They’re bloody geniuses, aren’t they? At meetings of the UN, countries argue and do nothing. At meetings of Consolidated Minerals, Inc., countries agree and make money. ConMin is the only monopoly in history that has channeled rather than set free the inherent greediness of man. Prices rise, but slowly. Long-term stability, not short-term profits. ConMin has an almost Chinese appreciation of time.”

“And power.”

“That too,” Wing agreed softly. “That most of all.”

“So the Chen family wants a diamond prospector who owes nothing to the diamond cartel.”

Wing was momentarily startled. He’d seen Cole only infrequently in the five years since his sister Lai had broken her engagement to the American. In that time, Wing had forgotten that Cole’s mind was as quick as his well-conditioned body.

“Yes, that is precisely what we want,” Wing admitted.

Cole leaned back in the sleek leather chair and listened to his own instincts. He was used to operating on them at times and in places where more than money was at stake. His instincts had urged him to come to Darwin on the strength of Wing’s cryptic phone call.

Instincts…or sheer restlessness.

Whichever was speaking, Cole was ready to listen. He still didn’t know precisely what Wing wanted. More accurately, Cole didn’t know what the Chen family wanted. But he did know that touching the luminous green diamond had made him feel more alive than he’d felt in years.

Listening carefully to his inner silence, waiting to hear the whisper of instincts telling him to avoid an unseen trap, Cole waited for another minute. He heard nothing but the quickened beating of his own heart. He’d found diamonds and diamond mines all over the world. He had made and lost small fortunes, and large ones as well, but he’d never found the equal of Wing’s green diamond.

Now he was being offered the chance to find a whole mine full of them, God’s own jewel box.

Cole pulled a pen from his pocket and signed his name on the contract and its copies with quick, slashing strokes. Saying nothing, he folded one contract and put it in his breast pocket. Then he pulled a dollar bill from his wallet, clipped the bill to the remaining contracts, and flipped the papers back across the ebony desk.

“All right, partner,” Cole said. “Tell me about this diamond mine you want me to find.”

Wing’s smile was amused. “The Chen family didn’t hire you merely because you’re a brilliant prospector, although you are. We brought you into this because you have a verbal promise from Abelard Windsor of a fifty-percent interest in Sleeping Dog Mines Ltd. as a full repayment of gambling debts incurred by him during a night of playing Two Up.”

For an instant Cole was too surprised to say anything.

Wing allowed his small smile of triumph to spread into a grin. It was the first time he had ever seen Cole off-balance.

“That was twelve years ago,” Cole said. “Christ, I didn’t even know you then.”

Wing made a dismissing motion with his hand. “Did Mr. Windsor ever pay off that debt?”

Cole made a sound too harsh to be called laughter. “There were times Crazy Abe couldn’t remember from one day to the next what happened. He was just too drunk. I was a long way from sober myself. So was everybody else at the station.”

“Do you have an IOU?”

“Old Abe wasn’t that crazy,” Cole said dryly. “Besides, it wasn’t serious gambling. We were just killing time in a station shack, waiting out the first storm of the wet.”

“This was found at the station,” Wing said.

He drew a frayed, worn piece of paper from the center desk drawer. He handled the paper very carefully, holding it by the corner as though to avoid smudging it…or leaving fingerprints.

Cole leaned forward and read the faded writing.

I owe Cole Blackburn half of Sleeping Dog Mines

Because I lost at 2-up one too many times!

Abe Windsor’s signature and the date were written across the bottom of the sheet in a fine, formal Victorian hand.

“The Chen family has taken the liberty of having two handwriting experts certify this document, so you need not fear embarrassment on that score,” Wing said calmly. “Even without the note, it is a legitimate gambling debt. With the note, the debt will be promptly recognized by the Australian government when you press your claim.”

“But I won’t.” Cole’s voice was soft and final. “Crazy Abe is sly and mean as a snake in the blind, but he’s never screwed me. He fed me, gave me a place to sleep out of the rain, and as much beer as I could swim in.” Cole’s voice changed, becoming more matter-of-fact. “I’ve seen Sleeping Dog One. That hole is never going to produce anything but bort. And if the old man has found a jewel box in one of the other Dogs, he’s welcome to it. I sure as hell won’t try to screw him out of a lifetime strike in the name of a gambling debt I never took seriously.”

“Crazy Abe doesn’t need his mines anymore. His body was discovered in the bush yesterday.”

Cole looked away for a moment. When he looked back, his eyes were the color of winter rain. “God grant a quiet rest to that unhappy old bastard. Going walkabout with him was like stepping back in time, a century at least, sometimes more like ten centuries. Despite his Continental education, he was a real primitive.”

“So I gather from reading his poetry. There is much of it, and all of it is bad.”

Wing produced a battered tin box from the belly drawer of his desk. Inside lay several documents and a supply of rough paper waiting to be filled with future poetry. He picked up one of the documents and scanned it quickly, frowning.

Cole smiled crookedly. “He wrote poetry by the yard. Which one is that?”

“Something called ‘Chunder from Down Under.’ I am told that the late Mr. Windsor regarded this particular piece of doggerel as a kind of rhyming treasure map, a guide that would lead his heir to the diamond deposit.”

“What?”

“The key to locating the lost mine is hidden somewhere in this swamp of rhyme and memory,” Wing said, handing the sheets across the desk.

Silently Cole scanned the closely packed lines, reading at random.

“The ‘candy tins’ is an interesting, er, metaphor, but as a treasure map it leaves a lot to the imagination,” Cole said.

“There’s more of it,” Wing said, trying and failing to keep the hope from his voice. “But I fear it is all…difficult.”

“Or simply insane. They didn’t call him Crazy Abe because they couldn’t think of another name. That old man didn’t just march to his own drummer, he had his own bloody band.”

Wing sighed. “We suspected as much. We were rather hoping the poetry would mean something special to you.”

“And if I find this mine, under the contract I just signed, half of my interest is yours, as co-owner of BlackWing Resources Ltd. In short, the Chen family thinks I’m going to find Crazy Abe’s jewel box for you.”

Wing nodded once.

“Then you just lost a ten-million-dollar gamble,” Cole said calmly. “The jewel box may exist, but it sure as hell wasn’t in Sleeping Dog One. That’s a pipe mine, not a placer pocket. Dog One’s diamonds haven’t been washed out of the lamproite. Getting them out is a hammer-and-blast job, and then you have to crush the lot to get to the diamonds. You’ll get sharp-edged junk. Ninety-five percent of it is bort.”

Wing didn’t look impressed.

Cole made an impatient noise. His new partner just didn’t understand the difference between the extraordinary, exquisite stones in that worn velvet bag and the largely worthless crap that Crazy Abe had gouged from his Sleeping Dog Mines. Like most people, to Wing diamonds were diamonds—the emperor of gems, the most valuable stone on earth.

“Wing, the biggest diamond Abe ever got out of Dog One was maybe fourteen carats, flawed, fractured, and the color and clarity of bad coffee.”

Wing didn’t move.

Cole leaned forward. “You aren’t listening to me.” He pulled the contract out of his breast pocket and tossed the document on the desk. “Rip it up, and while you’re at it, burn that forged IOU. I’m not interested in screwing the Chen family out of ten million dollars.”

“We consider it an investment.”

“In bort?” Cole asked sardonically.

“In the future.”

Cole realized that Wing was utterly serious, which meant that the Chen family was willing to spend millions on a long shot. There could be only one reason for a gamble of that magnitude.

Someone believed there was a high-grade placer diamond mine on one of Abe’s claims.

“What makes you think I can find that mine after the Chen family and all its resources have failed?” Cole asked.

“What makes you think we have failed?”

Cole’s expression was both cynical and amused. “You wouldn’t be calling me in if you had a chance in hell of success on your own. We were partners, but we never were million-dollar buddies. I know you. You know me. Cut the bullshit and tell me what’s going on.”

“Mr. Windsor’s heir is a girl. A woman.”

“There’s a big difference between a girl and a woman,” Cole said dryly.

“Only to an American.” Wing shrugged. “To me she is a female manqué.”

“Lacking what?”

“A man.”

“Haven’t you heard? A modern woman needs a man like a snake needs ice skates.”

Wing laughed softly. “She isn’t one of those cold females who want only power. She was engaged once. Presumably, her appetites are normal, if rather suppressed at the moment.”

“What happened?”

“Officially the man decided he wasn’t ready for marriage.”

“Unofficially?”

“He was a spy, a Soviet intelligence agent who tried to use the girl to gain access to secret information. Her father and brother are American intelligence agents. All that was almost seven years ago. She was twenty at the time. She has stayed away from men since.”

“Smart woman.”

“There are lessons to be learned from the past.” Wing hesitated, then added delicately, “This young female may have learned caution too well. The same might be said of you.”

Cole’s mouth flattened into a thin line. He and Wing both understood that the remark referred to Chen Lai, Wing’s sister, a woman of exquisite form and infinite betrayal.

“I learned long ago that diamonds are more enduring than women,” Cole said.

“And more alluring?”

Cole shrugged.

“If a woman was all that stood between you and ‘God’s own jewel box,’ what then?” Wing asked.

For a moment Cole thought about the shimmering green diamond. There was an extraordinary rarity and beauty to the stone that transcended whatever dollar value man might put on it.

Without waiting for an answer, Wing reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a palm-sized picture. He slid the glossy color photo past the diamonds.

Cole glanced at the picture the way a poker player looks at his last card—with a single, comprehensive, expressionless glance.

The woman in the picture had long, shiny, mahogany hair. Where the sun struck it, deep auburn fire burned. Her skin was neither brown nor pale, having instead a golden cast that suggested time spent outdoors in active movement rather than lying oiled and passive on a beach. Her mouth was well defined, full, and smiling. Her eyes were a luminous shade of green that made Cole think of the diamond.