Death is Forever

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “They’re vsi or vvsi, or flawless,” Cole said.

  “What?”

  “Very small imperfection or very, very small imperfection.”

  “I wasn’t looking for flaws. It’s just…the colors. My God, I didn’t know that colors like this existed short of rainbows and lasers. So pure. So damned pure.”

  “You should look in your mirror more often,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The green diamond is a dead match for your eyes.”

  Her head snapped up at the personal comment. Suddenly she realized she was standing very close to a man she didn’t know, his hand was cupped beneath hers, and his breath was mixing with hers in an intimacy that should have terrified her. For the space of one shared breath, two, three, she waited for fear to spread through her body, a fear that had been brutally beaten into her seven years ago.

  Her pulse raced, but not from fear. It came from an elemental female response to being close to a man she found very attractive. The realization that she was once again capable of a sexual response to a man went through her mind like sunrise through night, changing everything it touched.

  “Which of Abe’s mines did those diamonds come from?” she asked, her voice low, almost husky.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are there more like these?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Erin looked at the powerful, impassive stranger who was still standing close to her. “What do you know, Mr. Blackburn?”

  “That I prefer to be called Cole.”

  She retreated across the room, opened the curtains, and looked out over the glittering city that was condensing from the darkened sky.

  “What do you know about the source of these diamonds, Cole Blackburn?”

  “They’re probably Australian, but not from any known mine. They’ve been out of the mother pipe a long, long time. The green diamond is unique. The pinks are superb. All but one of the whites is of the first water.” He paused, then added calmly, “I also know that if you keep your inheritance, you’ll have to give up standing in front of windows.”

  Swiftly she turned to face him. “What does that mean?”

  “Ask your father.”

  “My father is a difficult man to reach. You’re right here. I’m asking you.”

  “If I tell you,” Cole said, “you’ll have a thousand doubts and questions to match. If your father tells you, you’ll believe him. That will save time.”

  “It would be even quicker if you tell me right now.”

  “Whoever owns the Sleeping Dog Mines is a deer at the beginning of hell’s own hunting season,” Cole said.

  “Why?”

  “The colored diamonds are unique. ConMin has nothing like them in its vaults.”

  “So?”

  “If there’s a mine full of stones like yours, ConMin has to control that mine’s output or lose its monopoly. Monopoly is power. Right now ConMin has enough power to cut deals with First World nations, to control Second World nations as often as not, and to buy Third World nations outright. The Sleeping Dog Mines threaten ConMin’s power,” Cole said, “which threatens the entrenched interests of various nations who have a stake in the diamond tiger. When you ride that tiger, the only rule is survival. ConMin has ridden for more than a century.”

  Erin looked at the gleaming, shimmering stones. “You make my legacy sound more like a curse than a gift.”

  “It is.” Cole looked at his watch. “Call your father. The first thing he’ll want to do is have the diamonds appraised. Make very certain that the appraiser does not have ConMin connections, or the appraisal will be worse than useless. I’d give you the name of a reliable appraiser, but then your father would assume conspiracy.”

  “You must know my father quite well.”

  “I’ve never met him, but I’ve dealt with men like him. I’m one myself.”

  “CIA?” she asked coolly.

  “No. Survivor.”

  When Cole looked up from his watch, Erin froze. His intensity was as real as the diamonds she held. He was wholly focused on her in the same way that she focused on her photography when she worked. At that instant she was the only thing in the world that existed for Cole Blackburn. To be the focus of such scrutiny was both unnerving and exhilarating.

  “You don’t like taking orders,” Cole said in a soft voice, “and I don’t like giving them. But I know what the stakes are. You don’t. At least two people died getting those stones into your hands. I’m betting that you’re intelligent enough not to defy me for no better reason than temper. If I’m wrong, I’ll survive. You won’t. You have a choice. Trust your father, trust me, or trust God that the next stranger coming through that door doesn’t have a gun in one hand and a revised version of Crazy Abe’s will in the other.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that, Erin Shane Windsor. Think very hard. And while you’re at it, think about ‘Uncertain Spring’ and the gosling that froze to death in an unexpected blizzard.”

  For a slashing instant she remembered the cruel, beautiful dawn when she’d discovered the gosling lying rigid beneath a glittering shroud. She’d wept at seeing the tiny body encased in ice.

  And then she’d taken out her camera to catch the brutal perfection of a time and a place and a dawn that owed nothing to man.

  “Life has always defined death, and death, life,” Cole said, watching her intently. “Anyone who understands that as clearly as you do should be able to decide how much a diamond mine that might not exist is worth—but whether or not the mine exists, owning it could cost your life. When you understand that, you’ll sell your inheritance to someone who knows the territory.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you pay me for a mine that might not exist?”

  “More than you need. Less than your life is worth.” He turned and walked to the door, opened it. “I’ll call you at the end of the week. If you want to reach me before then, call BlackWing. The number is in the tin box with the rest of your legacy.”

  The door closed, leaving Erin alone with a handful of extraordinary diamonds.

  7

  Los Angeles

  For a long time Erin stood motionless, staring at the rough diamonds in her palm, absorbing a reality she’d never known before, watching light shift and shimmer through their mysterious crystal cores. Curious, she touched the tip of her tongue to the green stone. It was cool, clean, faintly salty. She tasted her own skin for comparison. Less salt. She tasted one of the colorless diamonds. No taste at all.

  He held this stone, not the others.

  She could see him cradling the green diamond in his palm, smoothing his thumb over it, watching the heart of summer shimmer and glow in his hand.

  The salt I tasted came from his skin.

  A strange shimmer of awareness shot through the pit of her stomach. What unnerved her even more was that she wanted to taste the stone again.

  I tasted him.

  Erin shoved the stones back into the worn velvet bag as though she’d been burned. Restlessly she picked up the first sheet of poetry and began to look for clues to the location of a diamond mine that might or might not exist. She scanned the sheets quickly, then more slowly, frowning.

  When she was finished, she read the sheets again, shaking her head. None of it made sense. Although diamonds were mentioned several times, drinking, pissing, and screwing were mentioned much more often. There was no mention of a mine at all.

  Muttering about crazy old men, Erin stuffed the pages back into the tin box and picked up the will again. When she finished reading it, and its warning, she felt no more at ease. Remembering her conversation with Cole Blackburn wasn’t any comfort either.

  Whoever owns the Sleeping Dog Mines is a deer at the beginning of hell’s own hunting season.

  You make my legacy sound more like a curse than a g
ift.

  It is. Trust your father, trust me, or trust God that the next stranger through that door doesn’t have a gun in one hand and a revised version of Crazy Abe’s will in the other.

  The words echoed uneasily in Erin’s mind as she stood in the silent room. Mysteries were her father’s meat and wine. He lived in a world where every act was examined, cut into thin sections, put under an electron-scanning microscope, with the results argued at the highest levels of government. It was a world where every man had more than one shadow, where names changed more often than Paris fashions, where betrayal was the only thing that could be trusted.

  Her father’s world.

  Her brother Phil’s world.

  Her ex-fiancé’s world.

  Erin’s head moved in an abrupt, negative gesture that sent streamers of hair sliding across her cheek. Automatically she brushed the strands aside. Just as automatically she brushed aside memories that had nothing new to teach her. Treachery existed. Betrayal existed. She accepted that.

  But she no longer existed for them.

  Seven years ago she’d been a victim in an undeclared war. She wasn’t a victim any more. She’d learned to defend her body with techniques both ancient and modern. She’d learned to defend her mind by discovering other worlds, incredible worlds, places where ice was alive and mountains radiated light, places where people laughed and shared their last bite of food with a hungry stranger, places where death existed, yes, but as a natural extension of life processes rather than as a premeditated act of perversion and political power.

  Perhaps there was even a place out there where the incredible green stone was real, a place where the restlessness in her body would be stilled, a place where she could trust men again.

  And if not all men, then at least one.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Erin asked herself softly. “You can’t answer that question alone. What’s important is the future, not the past.”

  The phone felt cool in Erin’s hand, smooth, an impossibly perfect surface against her sensitive skin. It was the thing she found most startling about civilization, all rough surfaces smoothed into a beguiling perfection. A false perfection, because beneath the surface terrible things seethed, waiting to explode into life. The primitive world was exactly opposite, its rough surfaces concealing a serenity of emotion that was beguiling…and also, in its own beautiful way, false.

  Primitive and civilized shared one central truth: Death always waited for the unwary, the unlucky, or the unwise.

  But life also waited, a fire burning beneath ice.

  Erin punched in the telephone number that remained the same no matter where her father happened to be stationed at any given time. When the phone was answered, she spoke quietly, clearly, and hung up.

  Then she sat on the bed, stared at the handful of stones that could be diamonds or glass, and waited for Matthew Windsor to be summoned by his beeper to return his daughter’s call.

  8

  Beverly Hills

  People don’t walk up to you and hand you a million bucks in a tin box. Not in the real world. Not even in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It’s just flashy glass, baby. Next time this Blackburn guy calls he’ll be selling you a map to the mine.

  Matthew Windsor’s cool, faintly impatient voice echoed in Erin’s ears as she stared at the phone she’d just hung up. She hissed out a curse. Part of her agreed with her father. Another part of her believed that the stones were real, because Cole Blackburn was real.

  All too real.

  She turned away from the phone but couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation. After a few more verbal pats on the head, her father had agreed to make “discreet inquiries around D.C.” for Erin. When—and if—he had anything interesting, he would call.

  She hadn’t argued. As a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, her father had access to every database in the government, from the FBI to the U.S. Geological Survey.

  She was still running the conversation through her mind when the phone rang. The instant she picked up the receiver, her father began speaking in a clipped voice.

  “Describe Cole Blackburn,” Windsor said.

  “Big,” Erin said, running through a kaleidoscope of impressions in her mind. “Even bigger than Phil. Not fat. Hard. Caucasian. American accent. Intelligent. Confident. Moves well. Black hair. Gray eyes. Well-defined mouth, off-center smile. Faint scar along left jawline. Random scars on his hands. Big hands, by the way. Long fingers. No rings. Expensive clothes but not fancy. There’s nothing fancy about the man. In all, I suspect he’d make a bad enemy.”

  Windsor grunted. “You’ve got a good eye. That’s Blackburn to a T.”

  “I’m a photographer, remember? I make my living looking at things.” She waited. Only silence came over the line. “What’s going on, Dad? Is Cole Blackburn a con man?”

  “I can’t go into it on the phone, baby.”

  Anger flashed through Erin. Part of it sprang from her loathing of the world she’d run from for seven years, but most of her anger came from even older memories of being shut out of the enigmatic world of spy and counterspy that consumed so much of her father’s life.

  “Did Blackburn show you any identification?” Windsor continued.

  “Just himself. To a T, I believe you said. Should I believe what he told me?”

  “Baby, I can’t—”

  “Yes or no,” she cut in. “One word.”

  “It’s not that easy. I’ll be in L.A. tomorrow. We can talk about it then.”

  Erin looked at the phone as though it had grown fur. “You’re coming to L.A.?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. I haven’t seen you for almost a year.” His voice changed, becoming harder. “Just to make sure I don’t miss you, stay put in the hotel room. Have room service take care of the food. Rest up. Do you hear me, baby?”

  “Yes,” she said, understanding that Windsor didn’t want her to leave the room. “But I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not wild about it myself,” he said flatly.

  There was a three-beat pause before she said, “All right. I’ll be here when you get here.”

  “In your room.”

  “In my room,” she said between clenched teeth.

  There was the sound of air rushing, as though Windsor had let out a relieved sigh. “Thanks. It means a lot to me. I love you, baby.”

  Before she could answer, her father was gone. Throughout her life, he’d told her many times that he loved her, but for the past seven years he hadn’t waited to find out if she loved him in return.

  Slowly Erin hung up the phone and wandered restlessly around the room, turning on lights against the darkness beyond the closed drapes, wondering why her father had insisted she stay in the room.

  Maybe he’ll tell me tomorrow.

  Maybe not.

  Matthew Windsor had spent his entire life in the forest of mirrors that nation-states created to mislead one another. Discretion was as natural as his heartbeat. Most of his life had been lived in places he couldn’t admit to having been, not to his wife or his daughter, perhaps not even to the son who had also become an officer of the CIA.

  She understood the necessities of her father’s work, but she resented his job deeply, not only because of what it had done to her but also because of what it had done to the intelligent, thoughtful, loving man she knew her father to be. Secret wars meant secret lives, and secret lives made human trust impossible.

  Erin wanted to trust her father, just as she wanted to trust the rest of the world. But trusting everyone wasn’t a very bright way to live and could be a very painful way to die. She’d been lucky once.

  Next time she might not live to learn.

  9

  Beverly Hills One day later

  Late-afternoon light burned through the west-facing windows of the hotel suite. As the shafts of sunlight flowed across the rosewood tabletop, thirteen rough crystals shimmered to life. Erin Windsor stood very near the table, bent o
ver her camera equipment, totally focused on the stones. She was consumed by the pure colors, entranced in a dazzling new world seen through the extreme close-up lens of her camera.

  She’d spent the day totally focused on the mysterious, breathtaking crystals, waiting for her father. More than once she’d despaired of capturing the subtle play of light and the violently pure colors, the flashing glitter and fathomless shadows, the tiny rainbows chained among the curved hollows that high magnification revealed on the surface of the stones. When she turned the diamonds just so, light fragmented across the table. When she turned the stones another way, light glowed from within like flame burning within ice. When she turned them yet another way, light pooled and shimmered as though the crystals were alive, breathing.

  “Are you really diamonds?” she muttered in a combination of frustration and curiosity.

  The afternoon light changed, deepened, becoming a golden torrent. The crystals burst into flame.

  For an instant Erin froze over her camera, transfixed by the changed stones. They were a song sung in silence, inhuman in their beauty, the translucent tears of a rainbow god.

  Suddenly she didn’t care if the crystals were diamond or YAG, zircon or quartz. She worked like a woman possessed, triggering the camera, shifting stones, composing shots, reloading film, driven by the stones’ savage beauty and her own equally savage need to capture the instant when crystal and light became lovers, each transforming the other.

  Not until the light was spent within the crystals and the stones slept once more did Erin straighten and move away from the camera. Unconsciously she put her hands in the small of her back and stretched, relieving the tension of hours bent over the arrangement of lens and bellows and tripod. She felt exhausted and exhilarated at once, an explorer returning from an undiscovered land, her mind full of new visions and yet hungry for more.

  Reluctantly she turned away from the stones and looked at her watch, wondering if she should set up some fixed-light shots or if her father would arrive soon, bringing with him unanswered questions from a past she didn’t want to discuss. Maybe he would have answers for her future instead, answers she could listen to without feeling angry and betrayed.