by Cap Daniels
“These are our ovens,” Sascha began. “Inside each oven, there are six small compartments with plates securely clamped inside each one. On each of those plates is a micro-thin layer of carbon. In a process we have perfected beyond any other facility in the world, we bombard each plate with plasma formed by combining hydrogen and methane at immense pressure and temperature. Under these conditions, carbon is stripped from the plasma and deposited on the base layer on each plate. Over time, as the carbon collects, diamonds are formed in exactly the same way nature created them eons ago. We’ve simply discovered, harnessed, and exponentially sped up the process. These are real, natural, authentic diamonds. The only difference is Mother Nature took her time forming her precious stones deep beneath the Earth’s crust over centuries and allowed volcanic activity to bring them near the surface in certain parts of the world like Africa, and even the former Soviet Union. We grow ours in these ovens in a matter of weeks instead of eons.”
Anya memorized every word as the scientist spoke, and she suddenly understood the operation. It was merely a high-tech version of exactly what Volkov had done by creating replicas of the jewelry worn by Russia’s elite and exchanging his reproductions for the real thing.
Sascha ran his hand across the ovens as he slowly walked along the front of each one, peering lovingly inside through the treated glass fronts that must have been two inches thick. When he came to the end of the bank of ovens, he opened a blue metal box and pulled an object from inside. The object was roughly the shape of a cube, but the edges were far from uniform. In fact, they were jagged and malformed. The cube was a dingy brown color with streaks of darker colors randomly coursing around the surface. He held out the object for Anya to inspect.
She lifted it from his grasp and examined it from every angle with both eyes. When she’d memorized every surface of the object, she handed it back to Sascha. “What is it?”
His eyes lit up. “I’m glad you asked. It’s my baby. Well, one of my many babies.” He held up the rough cube. “This, as hideous as it may look to the untrained eye, is a three-and-a-half-carat diamond of unimaginable quality. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
Through a pair of glass-paneled doors, he led them to a work area that resembled the small back room of Levi’s jewelry store, where he mounted the diamond into Anya’s setting. A man of indeterminate advanced age sat hunched over a spinning wheel resembling a small record player with a heavy arm where the needle should be.
“This is Sheldon. He prefers to be called Shel, and he is, in my humble opinion, the greatest diamond cutter who has ever lived. Here you go, Shel. Show Ms. Anya why we never judge a book by its cover.”
The old man didn’t look up. He clamped the brown, jagged cube into another heavy arm and applied the lab-grown blob to the spinning wheel. Soon, the unsightly dark surface vanished, revealing the clear, beautiful stone beneath.
Anya watched in fascination as the master craftsman continued to shape and polish the stone. When he was finished, he washed the diamond, rubbed it between the folds of a white cloth, and deposited it into Anya’s waiting palm.
She reached for the loupe that had become part of her wardrobe but found only an empty pocket. Shel smiled and offered his loupe.
Anya inspected the stone from every imaginable angle and found herself lost in its utter brilliance and perfection. Reluctantly, she surrendered the flawless gem back to Shel. “I am without words. Why does the whole world not know about this?”
Sascha took the diamond from the old man and handed it to Volkov. “The world will know soon enough. Other labs are creating stones less than a fourth of the size of this one, but they lack the technology to push the limits as far as us. We are, perhaps, a quarter century ahead of our nearest competitor. As technology advances, this facility will cease to be an oddity and will sink into Melbourne Lake. Shel will be well over a hundred years old or dead by the time the others catch up.”
The old man groaned. “Oy vey, I pray for being dead in these twenty-five years.”
Volkov pressed the stone back into Shel’s wrinkled, stained hand and motioned toward Anya.
The old man looked up. “Yeah? You sure?”
Volkov nodded, and Shel extended the diamond toward Anya for a second time. He closed her hand around the stone. “Young lady, you will someday have a beautiful daughter. Give this to her on the day she becomes a woman, and remind her that her mother was once also a beautiful, priceless gem in a world of worthless rocks . . . like these guys.” He motioned toward Sascha and Viktor as Anya stared down at the breathtaking beauty lying in the palm of her hand.
She spun to face Volkov. “Viktor, I cannot accept such a gift. It is too much.”
Viktor placed one hand on Sascha’s shoulder and one on Shel’s. “My dear, it is not a gift from me. It a gift from its creators, and you cannot rob them of the joy of sharing their creation with you.”
She leaned down and kissed each of the old man’s cheeks, and he blushed at the attention. “You must stop,” he said. “You’ll give an old man a heart attack. But oh, what a way to go.”
She hugged Sascha and kissed his cheeks as well, but his heart was in no danger of stopping.
Back aboard the Hawker, Anya could not take her eyes from the enormous diamond from the lab.
Veronica leaned forward. “Are you ready to learn more of the real stuff?” Anya nodded, still transfixed on the stone, and Veronica held out her hand. “Let me have the stone.”
Anya recoiled. No. I will not let you make it disappear.”
“Fine,” she said. “Give me the black-and-white glass fakes you were practicing with.”
She handed over the painted glass and watched intently as the sorceress clamped the white one into a pair of tweezers. Veronica pretended to inspect the worthless piece of white painted glass through her loupe until she faked a sneeze.
“Bless you,” Anya said as Veronica presented her with the tweezers that now contained the black painted piece of glass.
“This is what we do, dear. We find stones of exceptional beauty, replicate them down to the finest detail, and then make the swap. The dealer is none the wiser, and we then have possession of Mother Nature’s creation while the dealer tucks away one of Sascha and Shel’s masterpieces of a quarter the value, but practically indistinguishable from the original.”
Anya spent half an hour perfecting the motions of switching one stone for another while clamped in a pair of tweezers.
The flight attendant materialized at her side with a terrified look on her face. “Ladies, I’m so sorry, but the pilots say we are experiencing a loss of cabin pressure. I need for you to sit one person per row and fasten your seatbelts securely.”
Veronica moved one row forward while Anya stayed in place. She glanced to see Viktor pulling his seatbelt tight across his lap. The flight attendant then produced oxygen masks from compartments beside each seat and assisted each of the three in properly fitting the masks to their faces.
When she’d finished with each passenger, the flight attendant took a seat of her own, fastened the belt, and pulled on the oxygen mask.
Anya focused her attention out the window and watched the frigid water of the North Atlantic grow ever closer as the pilots descended the jet from altitudes where oxygen was essential for survival. She felt the jet slow and watched the flaps deploy from the trailing edge of the wing. The whir of hydraulic pumps followed by a solid thud in the floor of the cabin told her the landing gear had been deployed. She peered out the small window in search of the runway where the pilots obviously intended to land, but recoiled when one of the pilots, a husky, thick-armed man of perhaps thirty years old, emerged through the cockpit door.
They will surely not try to land the airplane with only one pilot in the cockpit, Anya thought as the ocean drew ever nearer to the belly of the jet.
She watched in horror as the pilot released the long red handle securing the door. He let the door open outward as the cabin filled with ice-cold a
ir blowing in at whatever the airspeed of the plane was. The scene was utter chaos as everything that wasn’t tied down in the cabin became airborne on the swirling, frigid wind.
The jet trembled violently as it flew in a condition it was never designed to experience. Suddenly, the muscled pilot drove a powerful fist into Veronica’s face, rendering her immediately unconscious. Before Anya could react, the man yanked the unconscious body from the seat and shoved her feetfirst out the door. Without watching her fall, he reached through the opening and forced the heavy door against the violence of the wind until it was seated back in place, filling the hole in the side of the luxurious jet. With a gentle shove of the mechanism, the door was sealed back in place, and the pilot returned to the cockpit.
The flight attendant rose from her seat and returned the oxygen masks to their bins. “The situation has been remedied, but you may want to keep your seatbelts securely fastened until we land.”
Back in the hangar at Teterboro, Volkov took Anya’s elbow in his grip and spun her around as she moved to slide into the waiting car. “I trust you’ve learned all you need to know to replace our previous partner with whom we’ve, unfortunately, had a falling out.”
27
MEZHDU DVUMYA MIRAMI
(BETWEEN TWO WORLDS)
Gwynn met Anya at the door of the apartment as she was going out and the Russian was coming in. The look on the assassin’s face immediately changed Agent Davis’s plan. “What happened?”
Anya’s non-answer spun Gwynn around and sent her following her partner back inside the apartment.
“Where is Agent White?” Anya asked as she poured half a glass of vodka.
“He’s back in D.C. Why?”
“I made horrible mistake.”
Gwynn took the glass from her. “What did you do, Anya?”
“I tried to be something I am not. I tried to be a normal person like you or Agent White or anyone we see on streets, but this is not what I can ever be.”
Gwynn let Anya reclaim her glass. “What are you talking about?”
Anya stared off into distances Gwynn would never be able to fathom, remembering, in rapid succession, every training iteration, every press of the trigger, and every slice of her blade. Suddenly, every soul she’d torn from every target she’d faced since the lethal skills melded with her body and mind and consciousness flooded back to haunt and bewilder her.
As if speaking to no one and everyone simultaneously, she softly began. “I am killer. Ubiytsa. Assassin. I can never be less or more than this animal hiding inside this body of human.” She turned to Gwynn and swallowed half the vodka. “I am sorry. I have put you in grave danger because I believed a lie of my own creation.”
Gwynn took her hand, but Anya jerked away. “I cannot.”
“Anya, you’re not making any sense. What happened today?”
“Today, I realized I painted picture of Viktor Volkov as loving uncle to innocent, young girl. This picture I created gave to him wall to hide behind.”
She took another swallow of the distilled spirit of the home to which she could never return. “He threw Veronica from airplane over ocean today.”
Gwynn leaned in. “Who’s Veronica?”
“The woman, Veronique, but this is not her name. She was Veronica, and they killed her, and I could not stop them because I was pretending to be normal person.”
Gwynn squinted and held up a hand. “You have to slow down and tell me what happened.”
She drained the glass and traced the rim with her fingertip. “I know everything now. Sascha has laboratory in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. In this laboratory he makes diamonds.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t make a diamond,” Gwynn argued.
Anya produced the stone Shel had given her. “Yes, it can be done, but it is terribly difficult without Sascha’s equipment. This is diamond made inside lab.”
Gwynn stared in mesmerized disbelief at the size of the diamond in her hand. “He just gave you this, or did you steal it?”
“He gave to me and said to one day give to my daughter.”
“So, they’re growing diamonds in a lab that are impossible to tell apart from natural ones? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, and then they exchange these diamonds for natural stones inside shops. This is what you saw Veronique do. She taught me how to do this, as well.”
“Then they threw her out of an airplane?”
“Yes, and this is what they plan to do with me when I am no longer valuable to them.”
“Well, you’re a little harder to throw around than most people.”
“Yes, but this is exactly what I am trying to tell you. I wanted to be normal girl, like you, who likes to go shopping and wear diamond ring, but I cannot be this thing and also protect people like Veronica or Veronique. I have to be what I am inside. I have to be killer without conscience.”
Gwynn’s mind flooded with the realization that she was sitting mere inches away from the woman she most admired and who she most wanted to emulate, but surrendering her innocence to become the machine Anastasia Robertovna Burinkova was would leave her dangling between two worlds—never able to truly exist in either.
“We have to brief Agent White. We probably have enough for an arrest warrant.”
Gwynn made the call, and Anya briefed Supervisory Special Agent Ray White on every detail of Volkov’s operation, including Veronica’s murder.
He listened for fifteen minutes without saying a word or asking any questions. When she finished, he asked, “Is there anything else?”
Anya looked to Gwynn as if asking for help. “I gave to you murder. Is this not enough?”
White’s voice echoed through the speakerphone. “Explain it to her, Davis.”
Gwynn said, “Murder is only a federal crime under seven extremely specific conditions: if the victim is a federal judge or federal law enforcement official; an immediate family member of an enforcement official; elected or appointed officials; if committed during a bank robbery; if it takes place on a ship at sea per the Commerce Clause; if it’s intended to influence a court case; or if it takes place on federal property.”
Anya frowned. “Is airplane over ocean not considered a ship at sea?”
Gwynn remained in law professor mode. “Not unless it is engaged in interstate commerce as defined by the Commerce Clause.”
Anya squeezed her temples. “It does not have to be federal crime. We can give Volkov over to the state.”
It was White’s turn to take the podium. “Which state were you over when Volkov threw that woman out of the airplane?”
Anya said, “I told you Volkov did not do this. It was one of the pilots.”
“What was the pilot’s name, age, address, and physical description? Exactly where was the aircraft when the alleged crime occurred? What was the alleged victim’s name, and where is her body? When did Volkov instruct the pilot to kill the woman whose body we do not have and whose real name we don’t know?”
“I do not know any of these things, but I know he threw her out of the airplane. This should be enough to arrest and convict him.”
White said, “I agree. We could probably get one of the New England states to arrest the pilot, but even if he swears Volkov ordered the murder, it’s still not a federal crime, and we have no jurisdiction. Arrest, trial, and sentencing, if convicted, falls to the state, and when was the last time you heard of anyone being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder when there’s no dead body and no one knows the real name of the alleged victim who may or may not exist?”
Anya huffed. “American laws are too soft. In Russia, someone would shoot Volkov in his sleep.”
“Maybe so,” White said, “but we’re the good guys, and that means we have to play by the rules . . . mostly.”
Anya asked, “Does this mean you will not arrest Volkov if he has pilot throw me from airplane?”
White ached to offer any answer other than the truth, but he said, “We need you back inside,
and we need you to actually exchange some fake diamonds for the real thing. And we need Volkov to instruct you to do so. We have to play by the rules if we’re going to get an arrest and conviction in federal court.”
Gwynn spoke up for the first time in several minutes. “What about the tariffs on imported goods intended for sale? How are Volkov and Sascha getting the diamonds into the country without going through customs and declaring the value of the diamonds?”
“That’s an excellent question, and the answer is likely a federal crime. Anya, I need you to figure out how they’re getting those stones into the country.”
Everyone was silent until the silence bordered on uncomfortable.
“How much more?” Anya said.
“How much more what?” White said.
“How much more do I have to give you before you bring Irina and Anya to America? If I give to you Volkov’s head inside box, is this enough?”
“Don’t cut off anyone’s head, Anya. You just keep yourself focused on gathering enough legal evidence on Volkov to get him put away for a long time, and I’ll worry about the dancer and her mother. Got it?”
Gwynn said, “Okay, Agent White. I think we’ve got it under control. Anya goes back in, and we keep gathering evidence.”
Anya held up a finger. “I have one more question. Am I federal law enforcement officer according to your law?”
White said, “No, you’re a cooperating participant in a federal investigation.”
“So, when Volkov tries to kill me, I am same as Veronica from airplane, yes?”
White cleared his throat. “That’s not something we need to worry about right now.”
Anya picked up the phone. “Wait for thirty seconds, and I will be back, Agent White.”
Before he could answer, she pressed the mute button, temporarily blocking him from hearing anything she and Gwynn said. “Does person have to know the victim is a federal officer when he kills them for this to be federal crime?”