Diamonds and Blood

by B R Kingsolver

  I crossed quickly to the outer door and opened it a crack. I was just in time to see the door to the stairwell close. I followed, my image still blurred, closing doors behind me as quietly as I could.

  Faux-Sonia practically skipped down six flights, so I didn’t have to be terribly quiet or careful following her. She crossed the lobby to the front desk, and with a smile for the guy behind the counter, returned the room’s access card. But instead of walking out the front door, she took the elevator that led to the parking garage beneath the building.

  I considered taking the stairs, but the garage covered three levels, and I had no idea where the woman was parked. Instead, I donned my bitchy-fifty persona and got on the elevator with her. That gave me some time to study my new discovery as we rode down to the second parking level.

  She really was the spitting image of what Sonia would have looked like five years and twenty pounds before. I could have chalked it up to coincidence, but her search of Sonia’s room left that idea stillborn. So, a relative. Someone who heard about Sonia’s appearance in Montreal and figured there was an opportunity.

  When we reached the garage, the woman got into a sporty-looking red electric car and drove away. I memorized the license plate, then went back up to my room and opened my laptop.

  “You’re back quick,” Nellie said from the doorway between our rooms. “Where’s all the stuff you went to buy?”

  “Change of plans,” I said. I told her about faux-Sonia while I typed.

  “Like one of them dopegangers?” Nellie asked. “Is that a kind of mutation, sort of like yours?”

  “Doppelgangers,” I said. “I don’t think so. Maybe a younger sister or niece or something.” The car license plate search returned. “Yes!”

  Sabrina Kensington, address near Ricard’s home in northeast Montreal. I was right—she was a relative. Then I read a little further. Then I did a check on the information I had on Sonia. They had the same birthdate.

  “Or twins,” I said.

  “No shit?” Nellie leaned over my shoulder and read the information on the split screen. “Wow. But,” she pointed, “one was born in Saguenay, and one was born in Montreal. That would be, uh, difficult.”

  She was right. I shook my head at one more mystery to solve.

  My dad called on a secure line routed through my computer.

  “Do you have a few minutes?” he asked.

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Several things. First, the Capozzis do contract hits, but they haven’t done so in Montreal in about five years. That would lead me to believe they have someone in-house to handle such matters. Second, yes, there are a lot of inexpensive diamonds on the market throughout North America that are not coming through regular channels.”

  He took a deep breath. “Third, those stones you sent me are manufactured.”

  “What?” I sat bolt upright in my chair.

  “Yeah. Beautiful stones, but even those labeled E or F, and the one bag supposed to have minor flaws, are actually D flawless. So, I had them tested. They are all lab grown, type IIa. Kind of explains how he had so many stones of exactly one carat. The only natural stones are the blue ones.”

  “So, their value…”

  “About one-tenth of a natural stone. Of course, if the seller isn’t honest and doesn’t disclose their origin, then you can sell them for half price and make a killing. Market value of what you sent me would be around sixty to a hundred million wholesale if they were natural. Synthetic value about eight million. Nothing to sneeze at, but not the strike you hoped for.”

  “Chameleon diamonds,” I said.

  Dad chuckled. “I think that’s a rather apt description.”

  “Morgan was smuggling those out of Sierra Leone using an undercover courier,” I said, “and dodging the transaction fees.”

  “And selling them as natural,” Dad said. “Those six kilos you had could bring in as much as two hundred seventy-five million credits if sold as natural at retail.”

  “No wonder someone killed him.”

  “Not necessarily,” Dad said. “Why would anyone doubt him? Most synthetic stones are laser marked by international agreement. Why would someone as well respected as Joseph Morgan gamble everything on that kind of scam? It wasn’t like he needed the money.”

  “And if news of this gets out?” I asked.

  “It depends on how long it’s been going on,” Dad said, “and how widespread it was.”

  “It looks like about three years.”

  “The whole market in diamonds will collapse.”

  Mom also called that evening.

  “Hello, my darling. How are you and Nellie getting along?”

  “Just fine,” I said. “She’s really digging this fame stuff. I think she’s finally waking up to how much talent she has. We might be able to negotiate a hell of a deal when her contract with Entertaincorp expires.”

  “Well, tell her I said hello. Now, concerning this Seer342 you enquired about. Yes, I know who she is. Mid-level, very competent hacker. More on the creative side than technically gifted, but careful. She had a couple of big scores a decade or more ago, then got cautious. Nowadays, she mostly does contract jobs. In fact, she did the one you asked about on Hotel de Charm. It looks like she also brokered the data sale for the job, which brought in just enough to cover the hacking contract.”

  “Now that is interesting. I don’t suppose you could find out who let the contract?”

  “Nope. But if you have any candidates, I would look for bank transfers.” She gave me the dates and amounts of the contracts Clarissa had picked up.

  “What about the hack on J. Morgan?” I asked.

  “No contract that I can find, though the same tools and path were used on that hack as on the hotel job.”

  I immediately checked the dates against the bank accounts for all of Sonia’s aliases, and didn’t get a match. Sabrina Kensington transferred ten thousand credits to someone unknown on the date Clarissa picked up the contract for Hotel de Charm, but that wouldn’t have covered the contract.

  However, I might be able to pressure Clarissa.

  Chapter 21

  I spoke with Tom about going back to Safari so I could track down Clarissa, and he suggested I wait until Wil came into town.

  “You know I can’t leave Nellie unprotected,” he said, “and I’m not sure me alone is enough backup for you. Girl, you have a talent for finding trouble.”

  My parents and Wil often mentioned that talent as well.

  With nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, I played video games with Nellie, went to dinner with her, and then accompanied her to Le Sommet for her act.

  Nellie always did three sets, and things were running normally. She was in fine voice, and the audience was loving it. We were sitting at the table with Tom and the rest of her security team between her second and third set when a guy came up and asked her to dance.

  My radar immediately went off. I was not inherently prejudiced against vampires, but I didn’t date them. I didn’t mind an occasional hickey but breaking the skin and sucking my blood is going a little too far.

  Tom informed the would-be lothario that Ms. Barton was performing, not socializing, and Nellie offered to autograph something for him.

  The guy didn’t take the hint, and I noticed Tom’s tension level seemed a little high. Such situations were common, and we had a lot of practice at defusing things.

  Billy stood and walked around the table, taking up a position standing behind the vamp. Then another vamp slid in behind Billy. I looked around and saw a number of vampires standing around watching us.

  “Friends of yours?” I asked Tom as I leaned close to him.

  “Friends of ours,” he said and briefly touched his finger to the bruise around his eye.

  “Oh, my. So many innocent bystanders,” I said.

  “Don’t you have to pee?” he said.

  I turned to Nellie. “I need to pee. Come with me.” I pushed away from the table,
scooting my chair in between the vamp and Nellie. Grabbing her arm, I pulled her up and around Tom toward backstage. As we passed him, Tom stood, blocking the vamp’s path.

  “Is there a problem?” Nellie asked as we rounded the stage.

  “Yeah. Let’s get backstage,” I said, practically dragging her to the door that would take us out of the bar’s main room.

  Vampires are fast, and a guy suddenly came between us and the door almost before I knew he was there. “Hey, pretty ladies. Where you goin?”

  The self-satisfied smirk on his face disappeared when my foot lifted him off the floor. I pulled Nellie past him and elbowed him in the face with my free arm.

  The sounds of a brawl erupted behind us. The guard at the door opened it for us with one hand, while his other hand held a stun gun. I pushed the door closed behind us and pulled my own stunner out of my bag.

  When I let go of Nellie’s arm, she started toward her dressing room.

  “Hey, no, not that direction,” I said.

  She stopped and looked back at me.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” I told her, “but that was a setup out there.” I noticed that the stage had a cloth skirt from the stage level to the floor. “Get under there and stay there. Do you have your pistol?”

  She stopped, her eyes wide, and spread her arms. “Do I look like I have a place to hide a pistol?” Other than a necklace and a couple of bracelets, her outfit consisted of skin-tight shiny purple pants, a belly-baring tight silver halter top with a deep-V neckline, and four-inch heels.

  “Get under there,” I said, pressing my Mini-Stealth into her hand. Before she took another step, she checked to see if it was loaded, whether there was a bullet in the chamber, and if the safety was set. My dad would have been proud of her.

  I couldn’t imagine why the vampires who had been following me would choose to start something in a place as crowded as Le Sommet, but my feeling was that I was their target and not Nellie. I set the locks on the door, then moved away from where I left her, blurred my image, and hid behind some equipment pushed up against the wall. The stun gun had a range up to twelve feet, so I shifted it into my left hand and drew my pistol.

  A crash, like a table being smashed, came from the front, along with the crackling sounds of stun guns. It didn’t sound as though the fight was winding down. Most bar fights didn’t last very long before security or the cops broke them up. And a brawl in an upscale club, such as Le Sommet, was uncommon. But the vamps had gone out of their way to start a fight with security. That made me nervous.

  From my vantage point, I could see down the hallway toward Nellie’s dressing room. There was another door on the other side of the stage, so I tried to keep one eye on the hallway and one eye toward where someone might come around the back of the stage.

  After a couple of minutes, I caught movement in the hallway. Someone crept along from the direction of Nellie’s dressing room. A man with a pistol peeked out into the open space behind the stage. He wasn’t a vampire, but I didn’t recognize him, and I knew all the Entertaincorp security personnel. I steadied my pistol, aimed, and shot him in the knee.

  The guy cried out and crumpled to the floor, leaning against the wall in the hallway.

  I couldn’t make out the words, but someone down the hall spoke, and the wounded man responded. Another minute, and another man appeared. Crouching down and grabbing the first man by the shirt, he started pulling the wounded guy back down the hall. I could only see part of the second man, but I aimed and fired.

  There wasn’t any indication if I hit him, but he stopped pulling the wounded man away.

  The noise of the fight in the front room was punctuated by the sound of a gunshot. In its wake, the overall volume fell significantly, then the boom, boom, boom of a much larger pistol. My heart was in my throat. I had friends out there, and there were hundreds of innocent people who had no interest in the fight.

  Another quieter gunshot was followed by two more loud booms.

  I jerked my attention back to the wounded man in the hallway. Two men ran forward and grabbed the guy, half lifting him, then dragged him back down the hall.

  Staying low, I moved across the room until I was looking directly down the hall, which was lit only by the exit sign at the end. I raised my pistol, and as the door at the end of the hall opened, fired three times.

  “Nellie, you stay right where you are!” I yelled, then headed down the hall, staying close to the wall. In the faint light of the exit sign, I could see the blood trail. When I reached the door, I found a blood smear and splatter on one wall, showing that at least one of my bullets had found a home.

  With my form still blurred, I kicked the door open, diving through and rolling to the side. Scanning the parking lot, I saw three men, one leaning heavily on one of the others. The third man was bent over to one side and stumbling. I steadied my pistol and fired at the two men leaning on each other. They stumbled and both went down.

  A car lurched forward with a squeal of tires and pulled up between me and the men I was chasing. Doors opened on the side away from me.

  Steading myself, I fired at the driver’s window. The window showed a star and spiderweb pattern. I fired again. The doors of the car slammed shut, the tires squealed, and the car sped away.

  For the first time, I became aware of police sirens and emergency lights flashing. The getaway car swerved, turned sharply, sideswiped a parked car, and smashed through a low fence to exit the parking lot. Several police cars wheeled into the lot, and cops jumped out, brandishing weapons.

  Figuring that discretion was called for, I put my pistol in my bag and crawled away from them. When I reached the building, I hugged the wall until I worked around the other side of the building, then unblurred my form. Walking the rest of the way around the building, I found more cop cars and more cops in front.

  I watched as the cops brought people out of the club, frisking them and searching purses. Three vampires in handcuffs and ankle shackles sat against a police car. Tom stood off to the side with the head of Le Sommet’s security, talking to a detective, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  He saw me and rushed over. “Where’s Nellie?”

  “Under the stage the last time I saw her.”

  “Under the stage? Is she all right?”

  “I think so. I chased off all the bad guys who were waiting in her dressing room.”

  He whirled and started toward the front door. I reached out and grabbed his arm.

  “Slow down, Tom. Be careful in there. She has a gun.”

  He hesitated, then as he understood what I was saying, he nodded.

  The police let us back in the club, and we made our way backstage. The club was a mess, with broken and overturned furniture, plenty of broken glass, and everything wet from spilled drinks. Then there were the two bodies forensics was taking pictures of. Even vampires had problems recovering when they had large holes blown in them.

  “Your work?” I asked Tom.

  He rolled his eyes toward the detective accompanying us and didn’t answer.

  “Nellie!” I shouted as we crossed through the door to backstage. “It’s okay to come out.”

  Tom and I walked around the back of the stage, and suddenly Nellie stuck her head out from under the stage skirt.

  “Are you okay?” she asked us. “Everybody okay?”

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Tom said. “Jordy took a ding and had to go to the hospital, but it’s not bad. We’ll go get him when we get through with the cops.”

  She crawled out, jumped to her feet, and hugged Tom so hard I was afraid she might strangle him.

  “I was so worried when I heard all the shots,” she said. “What in the hell were those people thinking?”

  “Uh,” I pointed to the pistol dangling from her hand. “You might want to be careful with that thing.” I wasn’t the only one she was making nervous. The detective was eyeing the gun warily.

  “Oh, it’s okay. The safety’s on,” she sai
d, reversing her hold on the pistol and handing it to me. I checked it and put it away.

  “Inspector,” a uniformed cop called, “There’s blood over here.”

  I turned to see him looking at the pool of blood at the entrance to the hallway.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you’ll find more down the hall.”

  The cop flipped on the light switch, and we could see the smear of blood down the hall where the wounded man had been dragged. I could also see a couple of my footprints in the blood. Telling the truth suddenly looked like the best strategy for dealing with the cops.

  “What happened?” the inspector asked. “Oh, and who are you?”

  I pulled out my Chamber ID and my temporary Entertaincorp ID. “Elizabeth Nelson, of Nelson Security. I’m on contract to provide security to Ms. Barton.”

  I gave him a raised-eyebrow look, and he took the hint, showing me his ID and saying, “Detective Inspector Bromley.”

  I told them about the men in the hall, and after we all put on paper booties and plastic gloves, I took the cops down the hallway. It was obvious where the second man was standing when I shot him. We opened the back door, a cop propped it open, and we walked out to the parking lot.

  Pointing, I said, “I think I hit another one over that direction, then their getaway car showed up. Interesting car. You may find some window glass, but I don’t think my bullets penetrated.”

  “Bulletproof glass?” Bromley asked. He shook his head. “That’s rather interesting. Any idea how badly they were wounded?”

  “At least one of them hospital bad. I shot the guy in the hall in the knee, and his leg was bent at a very unnatural angle.”

  Bromley nodded. “We’ll alert the hospitals. What caliber?”

  “Three-eighty. He shot at me first.”

  The inspector chuckled. “I’m sure he did.”