Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  A mineral discovery always sounds simple after the fact. The truth was that the old surveys identified all kinds of targets that geologists rushed out to investigate, only to find nothing. Planes flew back and forth across the Barrens towing instruments that recorded magnetic anomalies. Some of them turned out to be diamond pipes, some just turned out to be magnetic anomalies. That’s how it goes. No one had ever found a pipe under an esker, just like no one had ever found one under a lake. Jimmy was the first to do both.

  He’d probably discovered this one in the rain, hiking by on his way to somewhere else, and suddenly there it was—the whole hillside glowing like a ruby. That close to an esker, the garnets had normally been covered in dust and grit.

  Tabitha checked her watch. A black Suburban was waiting outside to take her to the east side heliport. She’d moved up again. Someone else was writing the President’s Daily Brief. Tabitha had a different reason for visiting the Oval Office now: Assistant Deputy to the Director of National Intelligence.

  The decapitation of Fan had been Tabitha’s operation. MI was the obvious way to do it. Although Fan had survived, the operation was deemed a success. The missile strike had crushed him. He hadn’t been seen since we returned him to the Chinese as an emotional wreck. They were repaying him for his long service by stripping him of control of his companies and handing his share to Mei.

  “I just need to dot a few i’s on the Chinese position,” Tabitha said. “Angel Minerals has a rich diamond mine. Who’s going to run it?”

  “Mitzi.”

  “I thought there was a clause in the original investment agreement that gave the twins control if Jimmy was out of the picture.”

  She gave a good imitation of someone swiping around among documents to locate important information she didn’t already have.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And Mei waived the right to exercise that provision. She says she’s confident in the management of Angel Minerals. The management of Angel Minerals is Mitzi Angel. I’m sure you’ll find it in there somewhere,” I said, pointing at her phone, “because I sent it to you yesterday.”

  Tommy tilted his chair back and was examining the ceiling. Tabitha took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I think you know there’s something we have to discuss. I’m sorry if it’s personally awkward for you.”

  I’d had a pretty good idea she’d get straight to Lily.

  “Are you asking me about the $2.5 million cashier’s check from the Montreal lawyer that ended up in George Wu’s account?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The way it worked—Fan was always jealous of Mei. She was the real business genius. He hated her for it. When we got the Canadians to lock her up, he used the opportunity to seize total control of their operations. He ran it like a triad gang. Maybe even crazier, because he’d developed a nasty crack habit by then. Mei was helpless. She had no access to funds. She asked Wu for help. But Wu thought she was finished. She needed to prove she was still a player.”

  “They call it ‘show money,’ ” Tommy said to Tabitha.

  “Thanks,” she said in a lethal purr. “I think I can keep up.”

  “Mei had already met Lily in Montreal,” I said. “Even though Lily had cheated her when the twins were buying Russian rough, Mei recognized how much Lily knew about diamonds, and went to Montreal to consult her about the investment in Jimmy Angel. So they had a connection before Mei was arrested on our extradition warrant.”

  Tabitha’s phone pinged. She glanced at it, dropped it in her slim black Montblanc document case, and snapped the catches with a look of satisfaction. There were throats to cut, and she was in a hurry.

  “I’m afraid this is bad for Lily,” she said, deftly wriggling her foot back into the dangling shoe. “Helping Mei was the same as helping China Hard Asset. We really don’t have any choice but to report this to the Canadians.”

  The idea that Luc didn’t have Lily pegged was the laugh of the day. What Tabitha really wanted was to force me to bargain for Lily. She would then control not Lily but me.

  “Before you strike the Canadians dumb with the news that Lily does business with the Chinese, Tab, take a quick peek at this.”

  I handed her a plain brown manila envelope. She sat there looking at it for a moment while the machinery in her head whirred through the possibilities. She darted a quizzical glance at me, tore the envelope open, and slid out a couple of the eight-by-ten screen grabs. The quality wasn’t good, but good enough to recognize Tabitha and Mei as they came out of the restaurant, their heads bent together in conversation.

  She slid the black-and-whites into a side pocket of her case, smoothed her skirt and got up. A blush stole up her throat, but that was probably anger rather than embarrassment. She kept her expression blank.

  “The flight to Montreal?” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and opened them. A slight frown creased her forehead as she tried to figure out how I could have found her. She wasn’t going to ask. In the end she just gave a little shrug, picked an imaginary piece of lint from my lapel, and brushed the fabric lightly with her fingertips.

  “You boys have a great day,” she said.

  * * *

  “Ouch,” Tommy said as he studied the copies I gave him. He shuffled through them slowly one by one. “How did you get them?” he asked, cocking his head and tilting a print to the light for a better look. I told him about the trip to Montreal that I’d seen listed in the flight log on the secretary’s jet on the first trip to Yellowknife. He nodded. “And you were spending a lot of time in Montreal, and Lily was living there. You don’t believe in coincidence, so you thought it might have something to do with you. You checked, and found the passenger was Tabitha. That gave you her arrival date in Montreal.”

  “Then it was just a matter of feeding her image to the NSA and letting their facial-recognition software rummage through Montreal.”

  “But you don’t really have anything on Tabitha. So she met Mei and planned the whole operation to take out Fan.”

  “Even if she had the authority, how are her bosses going to like that a Treasury dick busted her so easy?”

  We went outside. Tommy’s Eldorado was parked in front. The October air was tart with the scent of dried leaves. A couple of kids on hoverboards came whizzing up the street, holding hands and grinning at each other. She puckered her lips and popped him a kiss. We stood there with our hands in our pockets, two guys with girl trouble, watching them go by.

  “As soon as he knew Mei could still play, Wu made plans to dump Fan, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Fan was pretty much out of it by then. The document he initialed at the pipe, it actually transferred control to Mei. Wu knew Fan wouldn’t even read it.”

  Betrayal had been dished out all around. There was enough for everybody. When he wasn’t guarding his expression, Tommy looked desolate. I didn’t know exactly where he was with Minnie. We weren’t charging her with anything. What would be the point? It would just tell the Chinese that we knew about the wire. One way or another we’d have to try running her as a double. Tommy would have to be part of that.

  I knew how that went. Lily wasn’t just a diamond thief. She had stolen from me. Not the diamonds she was still running—the stolen rough or the large gems with doubtful provenance. That’s just the diamond trade. There has to be theft. It’s part of what glitters. What she stole from me was something else. The shell that guarded me. That I had put together piece by piece from childhood. She chipped away at it with the intensity of her emotions.

  Then came tenderness. The only tenderness I’d ever received had come from Lily. It took my breath away. And that’s what lays you open. The tenderness. Now Tommy was learning what it cost.

  51

  No bathing suit this time. The ocean was too cold. Annie crossed the lawn in a wetsuit, ran onto the dock, and hopped down into the Laser. She tossed off the line
and tacked out into the bay. When she was clear of the point, the ocean breeze caught the sail. The boat heeled, and she shot her feet under the hiking straps. She went tearing across the wind, the slender yellow hull bouncing over the waves in bursts of spray.

  “She’s strong,” I said.

  “You were pretty good yourself,” Dad said.

  “I had that old, gaff-rigged dinghy. It still had canvas sails. The centerboard weighed a ton.”

  “And you stood it on its side, just like she’s doing now. If it was blowing a gale, so much the better.” He grinned and shook his head. “Your mother was petrified. She could barely watch.”

  This was a new development. The happy family past. I’d already glimpsed scenes from this fairy tale. Annie would mention some event from my golden childhood in African diamond camps. I let it go.

  I have no complaint about how I grew up. There were good people along the way. Maybe a little rough. They gave me what I needed. My parents were too busy with their own misery. I wasn’t hearing that part from Annie.

  We went back inside and sat down at the bench in his little lab. I opened the Ziploc and dumped the garnets on a sheet of clean white paper.

  “These were all collected by Jimmy?” he said.

  I nodded. “They’re from the lab he had on his houseboat. They’re the same as the ones I showed you last time.”

  He plucked one with his tweezers and placed it in the middle of the sheet. Then he opened a drawer and took out a clear-plastic tray with about a dozen garnets in it. “These are from the new mine,” he said, his eyes alight with the interest that only a mineral could put there.

  The garnets flared and shimmered in the sunlight. He picked one up with the tweezers and placed it beside the first one. A field lens hung from his neck on a long cord. He angled a powerful light onto the desk and studied each stone through the lens, one after the other. When he was through he put them back, Jimmy’s on the paper and the one from the new discovery in the plastic tray.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, swinging the screen of his iMac around and tapping with two fingers at the keyboard. A deep red garnet flamed into view on the screen. “I took this with the microscope. The violet, purple, and ruby tints come from the high chrome content.” His voice had a gentleness it never had at other times. “That’s why some of them look like rubies. Chrome is what gives rubies the same bloodred color. The actual compound is chromium oxide. It indicates the stone’s origin in a high-pressure zone in the upper mantle. The same high pressure required to squeeze graphite, or any other form of carbon, into the carbon form we want—diamond.”

  He tapped a key and the image disappeared, and he turned back to the garnets on the bench.

  “I don’t have to test these,” he said when he was through examining them. “There’s nothing like these garnets anywhere. The stones you took from the houseboat are the same as the ones from the new mine. There was only ever one target. That silly map of Jimmy’s with the exploration targets marked.” He waved his hand. “Baloney.”

  “And the garnet with the soil?”

  He stared at the stones for a minute. When he looked at me, his worn face had crinkled into the bitter smile it was used to.

  “Really, Alex, am I so decrepit?” He picked up a pair of tweezers and tapped the plastic tray. “That was from Clip Bay. Jimmy put it there. He salted the target.”

  “I didn’t tell you the garnet was from Clip Bay. How did you know that?”

  He was an old man now, but his blue eyes still had a cutting edge. His glance took a slice at me. I could feel the air on my cheek as the blade swished by. He got up and put the cover on the microscope, switched off the iMac, and put away the plastic tray of garnets from the mine. He used a tin diamond scoop to gather up the garnets I’d brought, poured them into the Ziploc, and handed me the bag.

  He wasn’t as tall as he’d been, had a slight stoop now. But he was all sinew and hard edges, and in his summer uniform of starched white shirt, khaki pants, and blue canvas shoes, he looked as spare and tough as ever. He stuck his chin out and let me have a good look at the expression that had tormented my childhood.

  “It didn’t take a genius to put it together,” he said scornfully. “The word was out that Jimmy’s remains had been discovered at Clip Bay. You were investigating his disappearance. Then you show up here with a bunch of Jimmy’s garnets and give me that one with a bit of dirt. Where else would you have got it?”

  “And you knew it couldn’t be from Clip Bay because it didn’t match the soil?”

  “Oh, please.” His voice was like ice. “These were the best garnets anyone has ever seen, and you found one in the heart of the original discovery zone? That area was explored with a fine-tooth comb. It had to have been put there.”

  “Mitzi said that target had been missed, because the shape of the pipe was concealed by its location at the edge of the inlet.”

  He gave me a pitying look. “I’ll bet she did.”

  We left the lab and went out the side door. As we came around the side of the house, the wind snatched the field lens dangling from his neck and whipped it out behind him. He grabbed the cord and tucked the lens in his shirt, and we watched the gusts tear off the whitecaps and fling them downwind.

  Annie sat well back, trying to keep her bow up, but it was rough, and as we watched she plowed into a trough and the Laser flew up and she dumped.

  “She’s OK,” I said.

  Dad held up a hand to shelter his eyes from the glare. “She’ll stand on the centerboard,” he said, “and haul it back up.” By the time three big waves had rolled by she’d righted the boat and heaved herself back in and was bashing through the water, the Laser heeled right over to drain the water from the cockpit.

  “You think Mitzi knew Jimmy salted Clip Bay?” I said.

  “I think everybody knew but you.”

  Annie was headed straight in now. The wind was right behind her. She had the sail out like a spinnaker. The mast bent with the strain and her hair lashed in the wind. It was a sight that should have filled me with elation. Instead, something more familiar crept into my heart.

  “It wasn’t Jimmy who brought the garnets, was it.”

  “Jimmy had his own lab. He would never have asked anyone’s opinion. Not about G10s that good. He was too obsessed with secrecy.”

  He turned from watching Annie. He had something even more enjoyable to look at, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss it. My face.

  “I can tell you now. It was Mitzi. And she wasn’t alone. She brought someone else along.”

  A wave hit the seawall, and a gust whipped the spray into our faces. He never even blinked. His eyes bored into me.

  “Lily,” I said.

  And for the first time, his smile was one of real joy.

  * * *

  Annie put the top up on her Miata before we left. “We don’t want to yell all the way back,” she said, although she looked as if it wouldn’t bother her—hair in a mad tangle, salt crystals sparkling on her skin.

  Dad made a big show of saying goodbye to Annie. I ignored the hand he offered me. We were through the village and crossing the causeway before I could shake his gloating expression from my mind. Annie had been shooting me meaningful looks since we left.

  “Someday you are going to have to put the past behind you, Dad.”

  “Absolutely.”

  She pulled out and shot by a line of cars slowing for the Greenport turnoff. “I know Grampa wasn’t always the best father.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about him anymore. I was thinking about somebody else’s dad. Mitzi’s. And the tears she’d shed as we sat on the ridge while the crime-scene guys picked up Jimmy’s bones. Who was she crying for?

  They were all running a play. Jimmy was setting up the twins; the twins, each other. We were drawing a bead on Fan while the puppet masters in Beijing were twitching the strings on us. Mitzi probably thought her dad was going to blow it again. Outsmart himself by trying to
cheat an investor. She’d worked for a discovery too. Every summer of her life. The long sampling months in a tent camp pitched by the latest diamond target. I knew what that felt like. Did she hate him? I don’t know. But she grabbed some garnets and made her own deal on the side.

  The straightest arrow in the game was Lily. All she wanted was diamonds.

  “This can’t just be me talking, Dad,” Annie said, breaking into my reverie. “This is an opportunity for us, for a father and daughter, to really communicate.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  With that out of the way, she launched into a passionate lecture on sustainable fashion. I hung on as long as I could, but my fingers couldn’t bear the combined weight of recycled ocean plastics and Lily’s betrayal, and I slipped off into my bleak world.

  If Mitzi had brought Lily to Dad’s lab, it was because she had to. The question was: Why? What possible motive could Mitzi have for including Lily in such a closely guarded secret as the phenomenal garnets? When I’d visited Dad the first time, he’d said the garnets had come to him about a month before. When I thought back, I remembered a short trip Lily had made to New York around that time. I needed a way to connect the different events. The best way to do that was to arrange them in chronological order.

  I already had some reliable dates from Montreal surveillance tapes, the log I’d looked at on the plane, and my own trip to New York when Tommy told me about Jimmy’s disappearance. So I made a provisional list:

  Tabitha flies to Montreal to meet Mei.

  Lily goes to New York.

  Mitzi and Lily visit Dad with garnets.

  Obviously, a link was missing. Something had to happen between Tabitha’s meeting with Mei and Lily’s trip to New York. Something that accounted for the trip. It wasn’t hard to understand what that had to be. A meeting between Lily and Mei.

  “Dad,” Annie exclaimed as we cleared Riverhead and got onto the Long Island Expressway, “this is, like, literally, a matter of life and death! Fashion is a trillion-dollar industry and one of the biggest polluters in the world. In America, we throw out the weight of the Empire State Building in clothes every year. That can’t go on!”