Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  I gave them diamond investment 101. For a fund like China Hard Asset, the million dollars they’d paid Jimmy Angel was peanuts. They wouldn’t miss the money if the exploration failed. On the other hand, if Jimmy discovered a diamond mine, the upside was in the billions.

  Tabitha propped an elbow on the desk and looked at me, her head tilted into the palm of her hand. “And from a single discovery, they could expand, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Stake more claims. Look for other targets.”

  “And they could introduce iDragon’s 5G on their own property.”

  “That’s what you’ve been thinking all along,” I said.

  “Makes sense, though,” Tommy said. “They say it’s for internal communications. Link up with their other industrial properties in Canada.”

  I nodded. “And they’d have an operating telecommunications system inside North America.”

  I got the idea that’s what they wanted me to say. They were nodding like proud parents whose dullard child has finally worked out two plus two.

  “All we really need to know now,” Tommy said, leaning back in his chair, “is how close they are to nailing a mine.” He clasped his hands behind his head, and arched his back. The name “Dream Boy” bulged out prominently on his massive chest. “Noodle that for me, Alex.”

  For me, the question was a simpler one: who was feeding me to the Chinese? Because one of them was.

  I reached across and stabbed a button on his desk. The windows cleared and the door unlocked with a loud snap. I shoved back my chair and got up.

  “Noodle it yourself, Dream Boy.”

  22

  I could hear her heels clacking along the sidewalk behind me. She caught up and slipped her arm through mine. Her hair floated out in the warm night air and brushed against my face. She gave my arm a squeeze.

  “You can’t run away from this, Alex. The department is leaking like a sieve.”

  “And you’re going to pin it on Tommy.”

  “He’s running the place.”

  We turned right onto Bleecker Street. The sidewalk was packed with the usual mix of New Yorkers heading for the bars and tourists searching for Pete Seeger.

  Tabitha’s default Village eatery was Via Carota, where a diner’s main responsibility was to ignore the movie star perched at the marble counter and concentrate on the food. But we walked past Grove Street and waded into the mass of people crossing Seventh Avenue.

  “Can I drop you somewhere, Tab?”

  She laughed and shot an elbow into my ribs. It was taking me a while to get used to the new Tabitha. She towed me into Murray’s Cheese.

  A guide had a crowd of foodie pilgrims gathered around him. He was explaining how the cheese shop that had occupied the same address for eighty years had morphed into a hallowed New York destination. The locals stamped around them in exasperation. Tabitha knifed her way through to the deli counter and shouted for two Pastraminators—a sandwich that had transformed pastrami, sauerkraut, jack cheese, jalapeño, and chipotle aioli into a cult.

  She led the way to a narrow sliver of park at the corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue. We sat on a bench and unwrapped the sandwiches. A river of yellow taxis streamed uptown. To the south, One World Trade Center cut a silver gash in the glowing sky. Tabitha popped the beer and handed me a can.

  As we ate, the city cocooned us in its noise. We finished the sandwiches and rolled up the foil wrappers and tossed them in the trash at the end of the bench. Tabitha swigged down the last of her beer and crunched the can. Her eyes took on a predatory look. She’d been a power forward at Vassar. She cocked her arm and sailed a two-pointer across the little park and into the bin on the other side.

  “You didn’t know about Jimmy Angel,” she said.

  “That Tommy was running him? No.”

  “How does that strike you?”

  “Stop trying to make me a witness for the prosecution. How does it strike me? It strikes me as par for the course. When do we ever tell each other anything until we have to?”

  “But the operational reason. He gave you a reason before he sent you up.”

  “A reason for recruiting Jimmy? FinCEN picked up a transfer from China Hard Asset.”

  “How?”

  “Routine surveillance.”

  “Come on, Alex. Since when would surveillance of a target like China Hard Asset be routine?”

  I finished my beer and waited for Tabitha to get to the point.

  “There’s another China Hard Asset connection. The twins put them into a company called Shanghai Specialty Fabrics. They make expensive, short-run materials for the women’s fashion industry. When top designers want an exclusive fabric, something no competitor can ever get, that’s one of the places they go for it.”

  And right on cue, the green Bentley came slowly up the crowded street. Minnie Ho at the wheel and Tommy riding shotgun. They stopped a dozen yards away, deep in conversation, waiting for the light to change on Sixth.

  “You’re telling me Minnie Ho gets her fabrics from a company owned by the twins and the Chinese brass?”

  “Alex, they own her business.”

  “I thought Minnie’s financing came from her father.” Ho Wang Wei was a Chinatown tycoon who ran a private banking operation.

  “That’s right,” Tabitha said. The light changed, and the Bentley glided across the street. She gave me time to connect the dots.

  “And China Hard Asset owns him too,” I said.

  “Lock, stock, and barrel.”

  I felt a little sick. You’d think I’d be used to it. The business I’m in—it locates the soft tissue of your heart and surrounds it with a hard shell. Lately that shell had been flaking off in bits. But it wasn’t warmth or human tenderness that seeped in. It was despair. I watched the Bentley turn down a narrow lane and disappear.

  “Must be in a hurry,” I said. “They didn’t even stop for a Pastraminator.”

  “As if,” Tabitha said. “She has a guy holding a parking spot outside Minetta Tavern. Tommy will have the thirty-three-dollar burger.”

  “And he always gets the same booth, so you probably have it wired.”

  “Minnie will have her usual. Island Creek oysters, grilled, and a half bottle of the Meursault,” she said, confirming the table was miked.

  “Uh-huh, but correct me if I’m wrong. You haven’t caught Tommy feeding secrets to Minnie. If you had, he’d be tied to a board with a wet cloth on his face in one of those black sites we’re not supposed to know about.”

  We left the park and made our way back to Clarkson Street. I opened the window to let in the night air. My office was in the basement. The window opened onto an alley. Only the rats would hear the rest of what we had to say.

  “So you ran a wire, got nothing, and now you want me to help set up Tommy.”

  She watched me closely for a moment, letting that ice-green gaze chill its way across my face.

  “I wouldn’t need any help with that,” she said, and let the statement lie there like a cocked gun. If the business of the night was to show me who was going to be in charge, she wasn’t wasting time.

  “Let’s put Tommy and his Chinese-asset girlfriend aside for the moment,” she said. “This diamond action in the Arctic—it’s now a top priority. We have to understand it. I don’t know everything the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell the president in those meetings in the Situation Room she’s being called to every day. But I write the Daily Brief, so I know the headlines. Right now we have two aircraft-carrier battle groups from the Seventh Fleet steaming through the South China Sea. They’re there to give the Chinese something to think about, because at the moment they are giving us plenty, and frankly, we don’t know what’s up.”

  She had a slim folder with her. It was stamped with the seal of the president of the United States. She flipped it open and ran her eyes down a page.

  “Know anything about NORAD?” she said, closing the folder and getting up.

  “Only that it’s our milit
ary air defense alliance with Canada.”

  “We have a flight from Teterboro tomorrow. We’re visiting the Colorado headquarters. Departure nine P.M. That should give you enough time.”

  “For what?” I said.

  She gave me a level look. “Let’s not fence, Alex. You’re going to see your father tomorrow. No one knows more about how to judge the prospects of a diamond discovery than he does. We have a puzzle to solve, and he has some of the pieces. But he doesn’t have all of them. I think we’re all agreed that the twins’ diamond play is about more than money. We’re going to meet some people who think so too.”

  “And now I report to you, is that it, Tab?”

  We were both standing now. She seemed very close. Her hair drifted around her face, and she flung it away with an exasperated gesture. “Why the hell don’t you just kiss me.”

  And I grabbed her and ran my hands into her hair and kissed her beautiful, soft mouth. Maybe it was anger at Lily, or at Tab herself, or maybe I just didn’t have the antibodies anymore. I kissed her again, and then I tore myself away. The green gaze had lost a little ice.

  “Alex,” she murmured.

  And I took her wrist and pulled her through the door, and we went outside into the night.

  23

  The street was quiet when we came out. A lone figure leaned against the fender of a red sports car, scrolling through her phone. “Don’t tell me that’s Annie,” Tabitha said.

  At seventeen, my daughter looked more like twenty. Something I wasn’t happy about. Not that there weren’t other things that bothered me more at the moment. Such as the fact she worked for Minnie Ho.

  “Wow,” Tabitha said when they shook hands. “Is that raw silk?”

  “A special rayon. We have an exclusive on it,” Annie said, plucking at her T-shirt while she ran her eyes over Tabitha’s outfit. “That’s the latest Co, isn’t it?” she said, eyeing the shirt. “It really slays.”

  We said good night. Tabitha picked an imaginary piece of lint from my lapel, smiled at Annie, and clacked off into the warm night. I got into the passenger seat as Annie started the car, revved the engine, and picked her way swiftly out of the Village and onto the West Side Highway. She drove fast and well, showing off how quickly she could run up through the gears and daring me to complain when she blew through amber lights. At Seventy-Second Street she got off the expressway and took Riverside Drive. We were passing the Soldiers and Sailors monument before she said what was on her mind.

  “Dad, you’re still with Lily, aren’t you? I mean, don’t you go to Montreal to explore the viability of a shared life?” I knew where phrases like that came from. My ex, Pierrette, could make a relationship sound like elective surgery. “Because, Dad, I just don’t know how aware you are. That woman—Tabitha?—she could eat you alive.”

  We got off Riverside Drive and took West End Avenue to Ninety-Fourth Street. Annie slid the Miata into a spot a few doors down from the apartment.

  “She wasn’t even wearing a bra.”

  Think about all the available responses from an adult male to a remark like that from his daughter, and if you get a number higher than zero, you’re ahead of me.

  I had a shock of recognition as soon as we walked in. The Andy Warhol print of David Bowie that Pierrette had hung at the end of the hall was back in place. She’d taken it with her when our marriage broke up. Against her objections, Annie had insisted on moving into the apartment when I started spending time in Montreal. She’d spent a lot of her childhood here. Pierrette loathed the idea, but at least it gave her the chance to hang the Warhol in my face.

  The place had been repainted. The pale gray of the living room made a perfect background for the huge blowups of fashion shoots Annie had pinned to the walls. My old sofa blazed in a tiger-stripe velvet. Ditto the easy chair. Annie made me sit, and disappeared to the kitchen to return with a frosted pitcher and a single long-stemmed glass with three small round onions skewered on a toothpick. She handed me the glass, filled it, and returned the pitcher to the fridge.

  I took a sniff. “Martini.”

  “Gibson,” Annie said. “It’s where you put in onions instead of olives. It’s more chic.” She sat down and watched me take a sip. “You notice I’m not drinking,” she said, “even though I think the rules are totally brain-dead. I mean, twenty-one? Hello? You can die for your country, but you can’t have a drink in New York state?”

  “Were you planning to die for your country?”

  “They call that sophistry, Dad,” she said, giving me what she thought of as her withering look. “It’s where you’re just trying to look smart.”

  “And good luck with that, right?”

  Annie was a serious kid. She’d spent most of her life in the company of adults, even more when Pierrette and I split up and they’d moved full-time to Tuxedo Park. Pierrette had inherited the property—a four-thousand-square-foot house on a lake. Tuxedo Park was a private village with controlled access and its own police force. Not exactly teeming with teenagers.

  She’d also suffered things that set her apart from other kids. An assault by Russian gangsters. Capture by a psychotic killer who’d held her and Pierrette hostage at the house to lure me to a showdown. It ended in the killer’s death, but it’s not like that made everything OK. Nothing would make everything OK. What made it better, though, was Minnie Ho.

  Minnie had given her a job and enrolled her in the design program at Cooper Union. Using her muscle as a top designer, she’d worked out a deal where Annie got credit for the work she did at Minnie’s studio.

  I was grateful to Minnie for what she’d done for Annie. And Tommy was the closest person I had to a friend. Now I was going to spy on them.

  * * *

  Later that night I logged onto the secure server. I typed in the code Tab had given me. It transferred me out of the FinCEN domain to a temporary file at the NSA. If the data posted to the file had stayed in the FinCEN domain, Tommy could have found it and discovered what Tabitha didn’t want him to discover. That he was now officially a target.

  I doubted it would have surprised him. Tabitha was smart, but you could see her coming. She was too excited by her power not to use it. I would bet real money that Tommy was sitting at home that night looking at a code-protected NSA file of his own. That one would reveal a target too.

  Me.

  It wasn’t personal. Intelligence is a game of check and double-check. It’s governed by foundational assumptions. One of them is that nothing is coincidence. No one just happens to be somewhere, with someone, at a certain time. So in a business where duplicity is just the common cold, you pay attention to who’s sneezing.

  24

  I got up before dawn and put on my shorts and ran the block to Central Park. At that hour there were only dedicated runners on the Bridle Path. I picked a guy who looked my age and tried to stay with him. Maybe he could hear me pounding along behind him on the dirt, because as we passed the Guggenheim, he put the pedal down and went up the hill fast, leaving me behind.

  I’d had little to do with my father since I moved out of his last diamond camp in Africa. As soon as I was old enough. We’d met once when I was investigating his role in a stock-market fraud around a diamond called the Russian Pink. Just the prospect of seeing him again filled my mouth with a bitter taste.

  I settled into a steady run and did a couple of laps of the reservoir—three miles. I managed to blow most of the anger out of my head and into the cool morning air. How could one old man create so much havoc.

  But he would know what to make of the stone. No mineral could keep a secret from him, and for sure not a garnet.

  * * *

  We left at six A.M. to beat the traffic. We drove up to Ninety-Sixth and took the traverse through Central Park and kept on straight to the FDR. Annie had the top down. Her tawny hair flailed in the wind. We went down the East River to Thirty-Fourth Street and took the Queens-Midtown Tunnel under the river and onto the Long Island Expressway.
/>   On the way we covered a lot of territory. Annie confided that her pronouns were she and her; that Pierrette’s new boyfriend, an orthodontist named Glenn, “with two n’s,” had an eighty-two-foot ketch he kept at Newport; and that the fashion industry produced 150 billion pieces of new clothing every year, almost all of which ended up in landfills.

  “Dad, it can’t go on!”

  “No.”

  “The fashion industry must accept responsibility for what it does to the planet.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Annie launched into a passionate speech that included the horrors of microfibers and, on the plus side, a new way of making silk from orange peels being pioneered in Italy.

  “Dad, seven hundred thousand tons of orange peels that would have ended up in a Sicilian landfill are now a fabric!”

  Two hours later we crossed the causeway at the end of Long Island. Orient Harbor sparkled to our right. In front of the yacht club, kids were rigging their dinghies and tacking out to catch the morning breeze. We drove into the village of Orient. Massive shade trees spread their leaves above the old white church. Past the town, we turned onto a sandy lane that wound through a pine grove and came out at a gray-shingled house with white trim. The parking area blazed with a fresh load of bleached clamshells. A bank of wild roses filled the air with scent. The brass lantern mounted by the door glowed from a recent polish.

  Annie leapt from the car and charged through the door. By the time I got inside, she was giving Mrs. Cutler a hug and telling her not to bother. But I doubted anything short of chaining her in the basement could keep Dad’s housekeeper from whatever the moment called for. In this case, breakfast, and we were sitting at the gleaming table spooning scrambled eggs out of a china serving dish before we’d been inside five minutes. Dad inspired that kind of service. If you wanted to know why, you’d have to ask someone other than me.

  He looked older, more sunken in on himself. But his white hair was still thick and his eyes bright with watchfulness, and he still had that way of setting his jaw that reminded me what a ruthless bastard he was. He kept darting his eyes from Annie to me and back again. I wasn’t supposed to know about the regular trips Annie made out here. She wanted a relationship with him. She had a hunger for family. I was an only child, and so was Pierrette. With all that had happened to her, Annie felt adrift. She knew how I felt about my father, although I’d never said a word about it to her.