Death is Forever

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “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.

  Then he thought of what Wing had said about a girl and a woman manqué.

  “Manqué? I don’t think so,” Cole said. “This is quite a woman. Look at the subtle tension in her expression, a kind of elemental animal wariness watching from the depths of her eyes. There is innocence, too, an untouched quality, a gut honesty left over from a time before language came with its structure of truths and lies.”

  Wing’s eyebrows rose. “It’s a good portrait, but not that good.”

  “I know her,” Cole said simply.

  “What? How?”

  “I’ve never met her, but I know her work. I recognize her from the jacket photo on her book, Arctic Odyssey. On the book, her last name is given as Shane, not Windsor.”

  “Erin Shane Windsor,” Wing said. “She is the great-niece of Abelard Windsor.”

  For a moment Cole was very still, remembering some of the woman’s photos and at the same time hearing in his mind the eerie harmonics of wolves on the frozen tundra. The voices of wolves sang a truth known only to wild animals and restless men. And to a few women. Very few. Erin Shane Windsor was one of them. He’d sensed it in her photographs. It had caught him, held him, shaken him.

  Discovering Arctic Odyssey had been one of the few pleasures in Cole’s recent life. Even in memory, the intense sensuality revealed in the photographs remained vivid, textures of ice and sunlight and velvet shades of color that cried out to be touched. He’d been struck by something else in the photos, as well. The photographer had an unflinching appreciation of the balance of death and life, darkness and sun, ice and heat. The photographs had been powerful rather than sentimental, intelligent rather than pleasant. They had spoken to him on a level that bypassed civilization and language and lies.

  “Don’t bet ten million bucks that I’ll be able to seduce Erin Shane Windsor,” Cole said. “Her photos suggest that she’s neither stupid nor naïve, and a woman this attractive isn’t likely to be bored.”

  “Whether you seduce her or not is your choice. Your job will be to keep her from getting killed while she unravels Crazy Abe’s secret or until you find the mine yourself. After that, Miss Windsor no longer matters. Only the mine itself is important. That must be protected at all costs.”

  “Even at the cost of Erin Windsor’s life?”

  “Her life. Yours. My own. Next to that mine, nothing else is important. Nothing.”

  Cole gave Wing a measuring look. Those words sounded less like the owlish graduate of Harvard than like Chen Li-tsao, Wing’s uncle. Chen the Elder was a breathtaking pragmatist who used, rather than valued, human life. But Wing hadn’t been like that. He’d always seemed more gentle, softened by his Western education—as Cole had heard Uncle Li complain more than once.

  Wing had changed in the past five years.

  “The Chen family has been working on this a long time, haven’t you?” Cole asked slowly.

  “Ever since we became cer
tain the Brits were going to abandon Hong Kong to mainland ideologues. One of my uncles has been living with Abelard Windsor for longer than you have known him.”

  Cole rummaged through his visual memories. “The cook. The one Abe always called ‘the bloody ugly chink.’ The cook was there the night we got drunk. That’s how you found out about the gambling debt.”

  Wing didn’t say a word.

  Silently Cole let new understanding crystallize around the new facts.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, looking at Wing with new appreciation. “You’re going to buck the diamond cartel. I knew the Chen family was ambitious, but I didn’t think they were ready to take on the world.”

  “Not the world. Simply Consolidated Minerals, Inc.”

  “No difference, Wing. A cartel that can hold Uncle Sam and the Soviets by the same short hairs can squeeze the nuts off a Hong Kong clan.”

  “And the reason the cartel has such power is diamonds,” Wing said coolly. “In their implication for the balance of international power, diamonds are as pivotal right now as the atomic device that was exploded at Alamogordo almost a half century ago. But unlike a bomb, diamonds are subtle. Leverage rather than annihilation.”

  Cole smiled thinly. “The waterhole theory of power. It’s not what you own but what you control.”

  Surprised, Wing said, “Exactly. Diplomacy rather than war. Indirection rather than attack. Diamonds give control without causing national enmity, for who can hate the emperor that is neither heard nor seen nor named?”

  “I can name it—the diamond tiger. Be careful, Wing. You could fall off and get eaten.”

  “Or I could ride and be ruler.”

  “That’s always the lure, isn’t it?”

  “You should know. You have ridden before.”

  “Not really,” Cole said, shrugging. “Not the way you mean. I don’t give a damn for international power games.”

  “But you have played them in the past, and you have played very, very well.”

  “Only until I figured out how to get people to leave me alone,” Cole said.

  Wing smiled faintly. “Only Americans believe they are free. It gives them a certain, ah, piquancy.”

  Ignoring the other man, Cole looked at the photo of Erin Shane Windsor. Before he’d been asked to choose, Cole would have said without hesitation that Crazy Abe’s placer diamond mine was worth whatever it took to own it. But now Cole was being asked to make the choice, and the answer was as unexpected as the green diamond had been.

  The life of a woman who was able to create Arctic Odyssey was worth more than God’s own jewel box.

  But only to Cole. If Erin Shane Windsor was to survive being Crazy Abe’s heir, she would need all the help she could get.

  Cole knew the Chen family. If he turned down Uncle Li’s offer, the clan would forge a new IOU, using it as bait for the next prospector on their list, a prospector who probably wouldn’t appreciate wilderness photographs of the sort that could put a man in touch with his own soul.

  Without a word Cole took the IOU and the picture of Erin from the desk. He put the two pieces of paper in his pocket, careful not to look at the photo again. He didn’t want to sense the innocence that lay as deeply within Erin Shane Windsor as her wariness. Whether she knew it or not, a place had been reserved for her aboard the diamond tiger, where there was only one rule: Don’t fall off, or you’ll be eaten bones and all.

  And the innocent were always the first to fall.

  “All right, Wing. Tell Uncle Li he has his man.”

  5

  Los Angeles A day later

  Cole’s Qantas flight had been forced to land from the west because the Santa Ana wind was sweeping over the Los Angeles basin. Now, four hours later, the wind finally was dying. The San Gabriel Mountains at the east edge of the basin were still clear and stark, but the smog that had been pushed out to sea was beginning to filter back into the high-rise canyons of the city center. Pollution turned the late-afternoon sky an unappetizing shade of orange.

  He tried to rub the fatigue of two trans-Pacific airplane flights from his neck as he studied the central city from his thirty-eighth-floor window. The queen city of the Pacific Rim was spread around him like an architect’s drawing. Close by were the international headquarters of half the money-center banks of the Southwest, plus buildings wearing the logos of the most powerful of the Seven Sisters. Unlike the diamond cartel, the rulers of the world oil trade were welcome to operate in the United States.

  That had always amused Cole. The two cartels operated the same illegal way. The only difference between them was that oil was an essential and diamonds were a luxury.

  Just beyond the tall buildings, in a four-block stretch along Hill Street, the Jewelry Mart lay, a mixture of aging business buildings and gleaming new high-rises. The Jewelry Mart was second only to Manhattan in importance in the gold and gemstone trade.

  The handful of diamonds in Cole’s briefcase would be like a grenade thrown into the midst of these diamantaires.

  Smiling at that prospect, he closed the long metal window blinds to shut out the distractions of the city. He reached for the coffee mug he’d kept filling from the BlackWing office’s bottomless electric coffeepot. Ignoring the heat and bitterness of the liquid, he swallowed a mouthful and then another one, hoping that caffeine would help him focus. He felt faintly disoriented, as though he’d left part of his mind somewhere over the empty Pacific.

  One by one he began rolling up the maps that he’d spread on the broad hardwood table. Carefully he returned each map to its own cardboard tube and placed them in the storage rack. The maps belonged to BlackWing’s L.A. headquarters. He’d spent most of the last two hours poring over the best Western Australia maps BlackWing could offer, looking for some hint of a suggestion, searching for the faintest of clues to point the way to the source of Crazy Abe Windsor’s diamond mine.

  Cole might as well have taken a nap. BlackWing’s maps were designed to locate metallic ore claims—iron or nickel, uranium or gold. They didn’t give him many of the fine geological details that he needed to find diamonds.

  He glanced at his watch, but what caught his eye was the copy of Arctic Odyssey that lay open on the desk. He’d turned to the book repeatedly in the past twenty-four hours, as though it would somehow help him under stand the woman he was about to meet. The photograph that most haunted him covered two pages. It showed dawn and tundra, ice and nesting geese. “Uncertain Spring” could have been a trite portrayal of seasonal regeneration, but it wasn’t. Instead, the photo showed an arctic dawn where life hung on by a bloody fingernail.

  Slowly Cole ran his fingertips over the picture, as though he could feel as well as see it. The photo captured a freezing summer dawn. In the background, seen through low streamers of windblown snow, more ghostly shapes than living flesh, adult geese put their heads to the screaming wind as they flattened themselves protectively over their nests.

  In the foreground of the picture, beneath a transparent shroud of ice, lay a gosling that would never feel the warmth of the rising sun. The small creature’s death was agonizing, as was the beauty of the new day and the determination of the adult geese to save their remaining offspring.

  Looking at “Uncertain Spring,” Cole knew that Erin Windsor had discovered the frailty, even the absurdity, of life.

  He only hoped she had learned something about the value of life as well, her own included. If she had, she would be happy to take BlackWing’s offer—three million dollars for her interest in an Australian diamond mine that might not even exist.

  Brooding over the photo, he wondered if Erin Windsor would recognize the danger of being owner of a unique diamond mine whose output ConMin couldn’t control or bury with the contents of their huge London vault. Certainly Matthew Windsor would know the danger to his daughter. Any professional intelligence analyst would be able to calculate the danger down to the last bit of money, adrenaline, and blood.

  Cole hoped that,
at twenty-seven, Erin would still listen to her father’s advice. If she did, she’d be satisfied with BlackWing’s offer. If not, there would be hell to pay.

  And Erin would be the one paying it.

  He glanced again at his Rolex, then at the battered tin box with its burden of priceless gems and worthless poetry. He slipped the tin box into a briefcase secured with a combination lock and fitted with a steel handcuff. With a wry smile he clicked the cuff into place around his left wrist, knowing that he was more the briefcase’s prisoner than vice versa. Then he went out of the office, locking the door behind him.

  The thirty-eighth floor of the BlackWing Building contained the executive suites. The building was expensive and discreet, like BlackWing itself. Cole took the elevator down to street level and reentered the push and pull of the everyday world in downtown Los Angeles. The other offices in the building were vomiting their nightly portion of commuters. Clerks and craftsmen and brokers crowded the lobby.

  Cole and the chained briefcase didn’t attract any attention. Besides BlackWing, the building housed dozens of gemstone wholesalers and jewelry dealers. Men of a dozen nationalities and all races came and went frequently, carrying similar briefcases. It was another sign of the care Chen Li-tsao had exercised positioning BlackWing for its assault on the diamond tiger.

  A black Mercedes limousine waited at the curb. Its driver leaned against the gleaming front fender, waiting with a look of professional indifference on his face. When Cole emerged from the building, the driver straightened and moved to open the rear door of the limo.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Blackburn. Still going to Beverly Hills?”

  “Yes.”

  The driver was young, athletic, Chinese, and had hands calloused by martial arts. He spoke with a relaxed southern California accent. Cole knew without looking at the driver’s license that one of the man’s names would be Chen. A branch of the Chen family had been established in America since 1847.

  The driver ignored the Santa Monica Freeway, where afternoon traffic was already starting to congeal. Keeping to the surface streets, the limousine reached Beverly Hills in twenty minutes. The lights were just starting to come up in the high-rises along Wilshire Boulevard and the boutiques of Rodeo Drive when the limousine pulled under the awning of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and stopped. A uniformed bellman opened the back door.