The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  The chill was still running up and down my spine like a squirrel gone mad. All of my senses started going into overdrive. It was like that moment when you had committed yourself to that next step, and all of your weight was transferring from your back foot to your front foot as it came down—and you realized at the last second that your own foot was about to betray you by stepping on an anti-personal mine—and there was nothing you could do, it was too late. That split-second was like an eternity, time enough to think of all the people you loved, all the things you hadn’t done yet, what your last woman had felt like. The taste of her, the smell of her, the way you made her laugh, how she made you feel, and then time finally caught up with you. The foot came down, and time blew up in your face. Slowing, slowing, and then stopping. Completely, and forever.

  If you saw it happen to others, you learned. Then when it was your turn, if you were lucky, if you were smart, if you were fast, and most of all, if you were warned, you might get away with if your Guardian Angel was riding with you at the time. Mine was.

  There had been the slightest glimpse of a give-away, and my subconscious mind saved me when it realized that my conscious mind wasn’t going to. I was frozen solid, as tight as rock, balanced on my trailing foot. Slowly, and carefully, I drew back that next step, putting it back down where it had started. Never taking that step had saved my life.

  I pressed on the sensor pad that operated the laser sights on the H&K. It glowed a dull orange where it touched the infrared beams crisscrossing the hall in front of the door. There was no time for this. The poor bastard lying in the hallway had been a diversion, nothing more. Enrico had expected me to get this far. He’d known that one man couldn’t have stopped me.

  The trigger beams must be connected to something basic but powerful. Something that wouldn’t break down on him, but powerful enough to make sure the kill was secure. I had almost obliged him. I was lucky that it was a passive system, and not an active system that would have taken out the first fool who walked in.

  I had been maintaining intermittent contact with Evie, and when I’d gotten into the last hallway, and described what I saw, the relayed orders were to ‘Pull out’.

  There was something more here, I could feel it, taste it in the air. I did a time check. Four minutes flat. Time to go, Ronnie was right. The hallway to the front door on this side of the third floor was only two steps to my right. The laser showed no IR beams, so I stepped into the hallway. At the far end of the hallway, there was the front door. And inside a cocoon of IR beams, Terry sat slumped in a chair. It looked like he was tied to it, or he would have fallen to the floor. There was blood all around the chair, and even down the back of his white shirt. It was all over the area where the chair was. Terry was dead, of that I had no doubt. There was too much blood, and the angle of his head was wrong.

  This was Enrico’s way of sending me a message. If I’d come in this door, the one listed with the PTT, I would have had time to realize that Enrico had won, maybe. Then I would have been dead.

  There was nothing for us here. Terry had told anything and everything he knew before he died. What anyone would do when they broke, and everyone has a breaking point. The trick is to only answer what you’re asked. Never volunteer information, and hold out until you don’t care anymore if they kill you. Then you’ve done your job.

  I retraced my steps as carefully and as accurately as I could until I was out of the same door I’d entered. Then I took the stairs as fast as humanly possible, until I got to the lobby and then I casually walked out of the building and turned for the cars. They were right there, not three steps from the door.

  Evie was sitting on the front passenger seat facing the side walk with the passenger door open to hide the launcher she was holding in her left hand. She was scanning the street, the intersections, and the second and third floor windows, as well as the roofs. Her head made steady turns, left to right, then back again, while she shifted her body in the seat at the end of each turn, catching the blind spot. She was getting better at this as we went along. Not bad at all.

  The surprise was that Therese was behind the wheel of the Audi, but when you thought about it, it made sense. She said she loved sports cars, and she drove a Jag at home, so… why not?

  The ‘Vette was in front of the Audi, and as I passed her, Evie gave me a thumbs up, and when I’d slipped into the open passenger side door of the ‘Vette, both cars took off at max speed which was limited somewhat by the Audi, to say the least. As we careened around the first turn we came to, Ronnie yelled at me over the growl of the engine.

  “Better buckle up, Jeffry!”

  The Side-G force the car was generating as we made the turn was taking up all of my attention at the moment. The door had closed itself as we burned away from the apartment complex, and I’d been bracing myself since. What a driver! Who knew?

  “Thanks for the reminder, I’ll get right on that.”

  Actually I did. The best way to get killed in a car crash was to be thrown out of the car, then get run over by another car. Or hit a brick wall when you got thrown through the window, door, what-have-you, at the speed the car is traveling at the time. Which is usually fast. That’s how accidents happen, losing control of the vehicle, which was much more prevalent at high speeds.

  About twenty minutes later we pulled over on the side of the highway to Geneva, and I took back the driver’s role, while Ronnie stayed with me in the ‘Vette, and Ted joined us. There was no reason I could think of not to start the general interrogation while we drove. Therese kept the wheel in the Audi, allowing for Evie to ride shotgun.

  We were done with Zurich, and none too soon for me. I’d called the Bomb Squad in on the apartment as we sped away, and I hoped nobody would be hurt. I’d learned some additional character traits from the experience, but Enrico was still a man of many mysteries. In the end though, all a mystery is someone else’s secret, and if that person tells anyone, then it’s a conspiracy, and not a secret anymore.

  One mystery was made very clear by the stop-off. Terry was dead.

  That’s why he didn’t call. Now, Terry wasn’t a good guy in any sense of the word, until the end, when he’d come clean and joined the team by virtue of baring his soul and being field-deputized. The problem was that Enrico had now killed a member of the team. It was indirect, and it was stretching the team member role, but there it was. Now I had a reason beyond the existing ones to bring this guy in. Like it had been needed. This guy had been trying to take out the members of my team since the first morning we’d walked out of the hotel.

  When the time came, I didn’t think for a minute that he’d come in alive. That would make him very dangerous. Very dangerous indeed.

  ~

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  T

  he drive to Geneva turned out to be uneventful giving Ronnie and I a chance for a good long chat with Ted Dawson. The gist of his story went something like this:

  When he’d been on a break in Rio, he’d been approached by a stranger who started buying him drinks. The conversation went around in the usual manner, then this guy had started talking about work, and what Ted did for a living, and specifically the contract he was on in Brazil. This ‘guy’ had called himself Enrico.

  It turned out that Enrico was working for someone else himself, and that someone was very interested in the work Ted was doing. Enough so that they were willing to pay him an extra-large bonus if he were able to come up with a data set from a survey pass on the far north-eastern side of his mapped territory. The trick was that he was supposed to run that pass only for his new employers, and rig a false pass of data for the contract people. Ted explained that he was contracted to the Brazilian Government, and what Enrico was asking for was dangerous as well as tricky to pull off.

  Enrico had put an envelope with fifty large on the table right there and then, and said he’d be in touch. When Ted had looked in the envelope, he’d realized that he was working for this guy whether he wanted or not. P
eople killed for food in Brazil sometimes. Nobody got fifty thousand dollars for nothing.

  About three months later he was over in Recife, grabbing a four-day weekend, and who should sit down beside him in the sidewalk café, but our pal Enrico. Ted had taken the money on their previous meeting. There was nothing he could do about that, because if he’d left it on the table, he’d owe it anyway, right? So he’d also done as he’d been asked. He’d made the flight for Enrico, and redone the flight for the Brazilians, but that stretch of rain forest that had been the object of interest, was offset by a kilometer or two. Each pass captured the data as well as constantly fixing position via the Global Positioning Satellite System.

  The GPS was originally set up by and for the U.S. Armed Forces. As the years went by, more and more satellites were added to the system, and the accuracy of the GPS in the hands of the military boys was down to one meter. That’s ground zero, plus or minus one half meter. Now that the Cold War was over, and there were no real threats to the power of the U.S. of A., the military began releasing the codes required to access the GPS system. Not to the pinpoint accuracy that they could get, naturally, but close enough for Geophysical Surveys. The ones sanctioned by American interests, anyway.

  Now-a-days you could buy a laptop with a GPS attachment. The equipment had become so miniaturized that it could be held in the palm of one hand, and most of the satellite access codes were becoming public knowledge. Not all of them, though. There was a level that remained in military hands and wasn’t likely to be handed out any time real soon. That meant that there were some spots that couldn’t be accessed. Mostly they had to with pin-point accuracy codes for military sites that were outside the States. In other words, the old enemies.

  But the Geophysical Engineers had what they needed to get their job done. Ted had the good fortune to be a well-educated geophysical engineer as well as a pilot.

  He’d run a full analysis on the data that he’d collected for Enrico. He’d run it seven times, seven different ways, and had come up with the answer on the last run. Kimberlite Pipes. Diamond bearing? Probably. Dangerous information? Certainly. He knew that the moment he figured it out.

  The big iron ore find was real, and most likely would turn out to be one of the biggest strikes in the world, if not the biggest. That was what made it viable for the Brazilians. The immensity of the strike. Getting the money to finance the kind of processing plant that the plans called for was a job for an international finance broker, hence the involvement of Crassberg AG.

  The catch was that aside from Ted, who had gotten a firsthand experience of the area when he’d crashed his number one plane there, nobody else knew about the diamond pipes. Certainly not the Brazilians, or they would have had their financing in place in about a week. If the pipes were diamond bearing.

  According to Ted Dawson, he said he’d eat his hat if there weren’t gemstone quality diamonds in there to rival the South African mines. He’d found five pipes grouped in one spot along the flight path at the edge of the iron ore field, and had indications that several more existed as well, but just to the north of the ore field. This data was also analyzed by him in his capacity as a Geophysical Engineer, seven ways from Sunday—if he could be believed.

  Ronnie was quick to take that and run with it.

  “Groupings of three or more within a specific radius indicates a main underground tube, with high enough pressure when it was live to break several vents to the surface simultaneously. Those ‘types of pipes’ have usually been the best at yielding gemstone quality diamonds in the past. With the Northern Amazon involved, we have something very different than what the South Africans have. In the first place, almost half of the Amazon flood-basin is under water for a good part of the year, so mining them would be costly, or would it? If the mining was all an offshoot of the iron ore mine setup, it could be fairly easy to extend one of the galleries, and come at it from below. No jungle.

  That would keep the environmentalists away, that and the remoteness and wildness of the site.”

  Ted finally thought that he had an ally, and became enthusiastic for the first time.

  “Exactly! That’s what I thought. They could keep the diamonds quiet while they reaped the benefits of a two-fold strike.”

  “I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade here, but as far as I know, DeBeers operates the world diamond market. There may be a consortium, and a board of directors for it, but if you piss off DeBeers, you can get ‘disappeared’ pretty damn quick. Have they been consulted? I think not. Stop me any time you think I’m straying from reality here, Ted.”

  There was a brief silence, so I continued.

  “Nations can be very rich. Some nations are wealthy beyond imagining. DeBeers is richer. They have people everywhere, and the incentive program is a good one. If you want to be a player in the diamond trade, you take your orders from the DeBeers consortium. If you don’t, you soon will. Those guys have ties in every major military organization in the world, and some of the lessor players as well, usually through their elite fight teams. Like the SAS in Britain, the RDF in the States, the Mossad in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the…”

  Ronnie interrupted me before I could drone on about all of the operations that had connections to DeBeers.

  “Fine, then we have to expect that they will get wind of this pretty damn soon if they haven’t already.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “Then the Brazilians would have to play by the rules, like it or lump it.”

  Ted rose to the challenge.

  “Yeah, but if everyone who knows is killed, or is party to it, then the mining of the diamond area could proceed at a pace set by the Brazilians, and nobody else. Who’s left to prove them wrong? We’re talking about the most dangerous and inhospitable strip of land on the planet, here. Nobody is going to drop by for a casual look, I can assure you.”

  Ronnie had been taking notes the whole time we talked, and she kept it up.

  “DeBeers is the most uncasual company in the world. They have finances that meet and exceed most nations on the planet. Including the big ones. You can do a lot with that kind of money. The trick is not to let anyone in on it that isn’t part of the solution. They could have been responsible for the R&D gear going missing, for example, where anyone else would not only have found that virtually impossible to accomplish, but they would have left a trail. Well, there is no trail. I think DeBeers is already involved. That would mean that someone inside the Brazilian Government sold out. The President and his cabinet would have to know nothing about it, or DeBeers wouldn’t be involved, and it would be splashy international new, which it isn’t.

  So, the man we want is the man in Brazil that turned on his own nation in favour of personal greed. This is the man who also runs Enrico. He has to be in a position of power, and you must know who he is, even if you can’t connect him to all of this in your head, Ted. So, think. Who’s the boss of the region the ore field is in?”

  Ted never hesitated.

  “The whole thing is a joint effort between the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Ministry of the Interior, Montobali Castouli, and Bernardo Don Miguero.”

  Miguero is the one to watch. He runs the Ministry of the Interior like his own little empire, except that it’s not so little. He has people everywhere, including contacts inside the rich farming regions of the Andes, but he reaches into Peru, Venezuela, Colombia. I mean, this guy is connected. Get me?”

  “You mean to say that he’s got connections inside the Cocaine Cartels?”

  “I mean to say that he helps run the bloody things. He supplies protected routes for the mule trains bringing the stuff out of the mountains, that’s common knowledge. He also has people working for him that don’t show up on any payroll list. They’re everywhere, so you have to take care of what you say, and to whom you say it. He’s one of the people who has the ability to make you a Disparu. You know, the ‘disappeared ones’.”

  “Swell. A Cabinet Mi
nister, and a right hand man for the President. That gives us our suspect, but what the hell can we do with a suspect that has that much power? Ronnie, how much pull do we have with the current Brazilian government?”

  “Not that much. Brazil counts its friends in cold hard cash. They have the most potential of any country in South America, yet they’re in a spiraling debt cycle that won’t last another two years without major overhauls to the economic plans put forward by President D’Caro. He has no idea what he let himself in for when he ran, and won, with over sixty-five percent of the seats in the House. The popular vote was estimated at eighty percent plus.

  That gives him plenty of power to put new legislation in place when he wants to, but if he doesn’t understand the result of his actions, then he’s nothing more than a figure-head.

  The people put their trust in him, and now they want to see the answers to their problems in their own lifetime. Voters, eh? He was a popular sports figure when he was young, then a successful business owner in his middle age. He’s older than the usual candidate for presidency in Brazil, but he seemed to overcome that. Now he’s in trouble because the economic changes implemented three years ago haven’t produced the results that were promised. It was all pie-in-the-sky anyway, but if he had something he could hold up in front of the people to show them that he didn’t let them down, he’d be a mighty happy camper.”

  “Okay, then this could be the leverage we need to get Government Sanction to follow this across the border of Brazil, and into the Amazon itself. We nail the perpetrator to a big ol’ door, and stand him up in front of D’Caro to do with what he will.

  The final steps of the financing for the iron ore project then go full steam ahead, with the added glory of a diamond production facility to go with it as well as an exposure of corruption. That should keep him his majority government for at least the next two elections.”