by Cindy Dees
“Has Russia controlled and operated it all this time?” she asked.
“Production was shut down in the late 1980s. It’s only with Mother Russia’s recent economic woes that a deal was made with Kyrgyzstan and the Udarsky plant was reactivated by Russian scientists. That, and a new technology came along that made artificial diamonds extremely valuable again.”
It was Taylor’s turn to interrupt. “Computer chips! In a laboratory, the size, shape and purity of a diamond can be controlled and large diamond wafers can be made.”
The Russian swore softly under his breath. “I could have used you two working for me when I was in the KGB. If you will forgive me for saying so, Amanda, your father was never half so clever as you.”
Amanda gaped, stunned. It felt like the floor had just dropped out from under her feet. She jumped up, pacing the tiny room in agitation. “My father worked for you?”
Subov laughed. “Indirectly. He was much further down the food chain than I. But his reports came across my desk, yes.”
She looked down at the stolen diamonds winking on the table in the firelight. “Is this the Udarsky cache? Was my father innocent of the charges your government made against him? Did he go crazy for nothing?”
“Oh, no,” Subov retorted. “These stones are a drop in the bucket compared to the Udarsky cache. I never saw any proof of it, but some people remain convinced your father stole the entire output of the Udarsky diamond facility for thirteen years of its operation. That is the Udarsky cache.”
She shook her head in denial. “My father never had anything like that. He was perennially broke, in fact. If he’d had the diamonds, he’d have sold them for cash. He was addicted to living expensively.”
Subov shrugged. “The Udarsky cache was not shaped into gemstones as these are. They were made for industrial purposes, and as such only valuable to a few select buyers worldwide. Liquidating them would have been…difficult. Most within the KGB were absolutely convinced Christopher had the stones. Your father’s control officer for one. The shadow of suspicion cast over your father ruined his control officer’s career, as well.”
“Who was that?” Amanda asked, voracious for any scraps of information that might shed light on the enigma that had been her father.
Subov frowned. “It has been a long time. Let me see. The fellow was rather forgettable. Middle-level bureaucrat with no real talent. His code name was Biryuz.”
Taylor jolted. “’Turquoise’ ? Have I translated that correctly?”
Amanda stared. The references in her father’s journal.
Subov nodded. “Yes. Turquoise. When he was in England, he went by another name, Nicky Somerset. Real name was Nikolai. Nikko Something.”
A sick feeling tickled Amanda’s gut. “Nikko Biryayev,” she said with sinking certainty.
“Yes! That was it. He was your father’s control officer. Last I heard he was still in the business. Trains new field officers. Mundane work for a mediocre man.”
“What do you know of his latest protégé?” she asked urgently.
“Nothing. But I could make another phone call.”
“Please do. It’s urgent that I know what Biryayev’s current student looks like.”
Subov pulled out his cell phone. His request took no more than a minute to fulfill. He repeated over the mouth of the receiver. “Name’s Max Ebhardt. Blond hair, blue eyes, one meter eighty centimeters tall, late twenties. Computer specialist. Poses frequently as a—”
“—college student,” Amanda finished for him. She sat down heavily on the bench. That’s why Devereaux gave her father’s journal to her. Because he knew Biryayev might come after her when she kicked this hornet’s nest.
Subov reached into the sack as he spoke and pulled out a stack of yellowed papers. “Udarsky has been turning out artificial diamonds again for several years now. And, in the last few years, Russia has boosted its overall diamond output by upwards of thirty percent.”
Taylor was incredulous. “You’re saying that a third of all of Russia’s diamonds are artificial?”
“Potentially. Check out the major diamond retailers’ reports for the last ten years or so. Even they’re speculating on how Russia’s doing it. Did you know geologists are phenomenally accurate in forecasting the quality and quantity of diamonds a mine will produce throughout its entire life, and that they assay every single diamond mine in the world? A few years back, Russia stopped letting foreign geologists into its mines. And suddenly, Russian diamond output soared.”
Amanda’s head whirled with the implications. The pieces had been in front of them all along. The strange conversation between Taylor and Brodin in Mexico. Brodin must have made a deal with the American government to get his hands on a shipment of diamond computer chips in return for protection and a new identity. He thought Taylor was the American government liaison.
It explained the American government’s obsession with keeping her and Taylor away from Brodin. It also explained the Americans’ presence in Caracas. They were there to complete the deal with Brodin and take delivery of the diamond wafers that could be etched into computer chips. That was why the dying American agent had tried to shoot her. He was no doubt under orders to protect the Brodin deal at all costs.
The Russian government’s attempt to stop her and Taylor’s investigation by force abruptly made sense, as well. They were protecting their cash cow in Udarsky, not to mention the hot new computer-chip technology their scientists there had mastered.
No wonder Biryayev shot in her direction in Caracas. He’d probably been under orders to stop Brodin from delivering the diamond chips to the Americans. She wasn’t Biryayev’s target at all. Brodin was. The simultaneous attack on Brodin by the Russians plus the American net to surround and stop her had triggered the firefight in Caracas. Oh, yes. It was all becoming clear. As clear as a flawless white diamond.
Subov shrugged. “I imagine Devereaux suspects the truth, but without proof, he cannot make any accusations.”
Ah, but Devereaux could put his best operative on it and rock the boat to see who fell out. Even if that operative was on the verge of a breakdown. She looked up and saw the same thought pass through Taylor’s harsh gaze.
Subov’s rusty voice went on relentlessly. “How the world has changed. Now, it’s not even a concern that Russia is flooding the market with cheap, plentiful diamonds and ruining the global diamond market. There are not even any more simple arms races. Now we have a technology race.”
“They’re one and the same. Technology is the weapon of the future,” she replied grimly.
The old man stared at her for several long seconds and then nodded slowly.
She waved a hand at the table’s contents. “Why are you telling all of this to us?”
Subov’s words lashed her. “Because I want you to destroy Udarsky.”
“You can’t be serious!” she exclaimed.
“I am.”
She protested, “I don’t even know where the Udarsky facility is, how it’s laid out, how it’s built…I couldn’t possibly go in blind and expect to succeed. The amounts of explosives needed to blow up an entire factory would be prohibitive. How would I, a foreign, private operative, procure any of the equipment or supplies I’d need for the job?”
Subov chopped his hand across the air. “You forget to whom you speak. And where.”
She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“This is free Georgia. Not Russia. This country is engaged in a low-intensity civil war. It’s not readily visible on the surface, but it is there nonetheless. Army units all over Georgia have gone renegade and taken their supplies with them. Explosives will be the least of your problems. As for destroying Udarsky—” Subov pushed several of the yellowed papers across the table “—here is a copy of the factory’s blueprints.”
Subov sorted out the remaining documents into two piles. “This stack is a detailed description of the production process. It has enough of the fine points of making the computer
chips for another laboratory to repeat and refine the process without too much trouble. This pile is the production records for the first thirteen years of the plant’s operation. I don’t have access to updates of these documents since my retirement. But it is, in essence, an inventory of the Udarsky cache.”
“How much is this supposed cache worth?” she asked.
“In today’s dollars, I’d guess around ten billion.”
“Ten billion?” she repeated in shock.
“That would explain why so many people were so hot to find it,” Taylor commented dryly. “Not to mention why a man in a fragile emotional state might lose it completely if he was sitting on something that big that he couldn’t turn into cash.”
Amanda stared at Taylor. Why was it she was only coming to understand her father now, years after his tragic death? If only he’d talked to her about any of this before he passed away!
Taylor commented to Subov, “We saw a Russian Mafia member trading gemstone diamonds for weapons early on in this investigation. Do you know anything about that?”
Subov nodded. “The Russian government is too poor to pay in cash, so it pays in diamonds. A middleman, in the form of a mobster, injects the stones into the diamond market in a way where they are not likely to be examined under a microscope. It is possible to tell synthetic diamonds from natural ones under proper magnification or refractive testing. But use the Mafia, and Russia cannot be caught.”
Shifting topic, Taylor asked, “Why should we blow up Udarsky? What’s in it for us?”
Subov didn’t answer. Rather, he reached into the sack one more time and pulled out a dirty yellow ribbon. The wide, grosgrain kind little girls might put in their hair. He fingered the length of ribbon and looked Amanda straight in the eye. “Your father put this in a safe-deposit box for you shortly before he died. We suspected he’d left you directions to the Udarsky cache in that box, so we took the liberty of obtaining its contents. It is only fair to give it to you now.”
He held out the bedraggled ribbon, and Amanda reached for it numbly. “My father left this in a safe-deposit box for me?”
Subov nodded. “His will stated that the contents of the safe-deposit box constituted your primary inheritance.”
“How do you know what my father’s will said?”
Subov merely raised an eyebrow. Well, that explained her father’s crazy last will and testament. The estate lawyer had put down the reference to a safe-deposit box that didn’t exist as yet another incident of Christopher’s madness. Her father was looking more sane by the second.
Subov’s piercing gaze captured her attention once more. The Russian leaned forward and said intensely, “Blow up Udarsky for your father. Complete Christopher McClintock’s legacy.”
Amanda said flatly, “I beg your pardon?”
His words whipped at her. “What do you think the Udarsky cache was? We didn’t mess around with making pretty baubles for rich, capitalist women at that factory. The entire output of the facility for thirteen years, with the exception of these demonstration stones—” he waved at the diamonds on the table “—was crystals for use in computer chips.”
He leaned forward, propping himself on the edge of the table. “Your father single-handedly halted the development of diamond computer chips for twenty years by stealing every last one of those wafers.”
“Why didn’t the Russians just duplicate the work?”
“Your father stole the blueprints to the process, as well, and a couple weeks after the theft, the scientist who invented the process died in an avalanche while skiing. The key knowledge of the process was lost and never could be duplicated.” Subov snorted in disgust. “The price we paid for our paranoia. We thought if only one man knew the secret it would be safe. We didn’t anticipate that he would take it to his grave.”
Subov paused, looking them both in the eye before continuing. “And now you can see to it that everybody in the world has a fair shot at this technology. Don’t let it become a weapon by one country to use in economic war or a technological arms race against another.”
Amanda stared at Subov. His gaze cut through her like a diamond-edged saw. He was telling the truth. She could feel it in her bones. Along with something else. Profound relief. Her father hadn’t been a traitorous madman. He’d been a hero. He sacrificed everything he had and was to keep his secret.
And his journal had been a last-ditch attempt to explain himself to her. So many of his ramblings made perfect sense now. All the talk about robbing the dragon, stopping the clawing beasts, preventing chaos and economic imbalance with his work, the vast riches in his possession.
Taylor leaned forward to face Subov. “What’s in it for you if we blow up the Udarsky diamond factory?”
“Revenge.”
Eighteen
Their white outer garments blended in perfectly with the frozen landscape. They crouched on top of a rise and took turns peering into the distance through a pair of powerful field glasses. The Udarsky industrial production facility came into focus, squat and gray, tucked into a gentle valley.
A huge electrical transformer hovered, spiderlike, just north of the factory, spreading its wire tentacles protectively over the facility. Four giant power lines fed it from the nearby Toktogul Dam, which harnessed the energy of the Naryn River and created the immense Toktogul Reservoir.
A storage yard lay on the south side of the building, stacked high with barrels proclaiming it a chemical production plant. Even thorough examination with the binoculars did not reveal the hidden laboratories housed beneath the fertilizer plant.
Double fences surrounded the complex, and guard towers opposed each other in the northwest and southeast corners of the security perimeter. Although they couldn’t see them, Subov’s information indicated that 20 mm machine guns were mounted and manned continuously in those towers by pairs of soldiers. Supposedly, there were no roving guards outside the facility. No surprise, Amanda thought wryly. The temperature today was a balmy five degrees Fahrenheit at midafternoon.
Amanda looked briefly at her watch. Three o’clock. The sun was sinking rapidly behind them in the west. It would set in another hour. They slid back off the top of the ridge so their silhouettes would not be visible against the setting sun.
It was a relief to stand up, to get away from the insidious cold of the frozen tundra soaking through her heavily insulated clothing as she lay on the ground. They had seen enough. It was time to make their move.
“What do you mean you can’t find the car?” roared Nikko Biryayev. “How in the hell do you lose a Mercedes 560 out here? It’s the only one for hundreds of kilometers around!”
The police chief shrugged. “Nonetheless, it has disappeared.”
“So find it!”
“My men did their best.”
“Damn, damn, and double damn.” Biryayev paced the length of the Kyrgyzstani policeman’s dingy office. He spun and growled, “Max, call the army base again. Those troops I ordered should be here by now.”
Ebhardt stepped out of the office. He placed a phone call, but not to the Udarsky army post. He murmured into the receiver, “Look, Devereaux. I can’t control him anymore. He’s demanded five hundred Russian army soldiers from the Udarsky military base be released into his command to conduct a manhunt for the McClintock girl. What are your instructions?”
Ebhardt listened intently. “Yes, sir. I understand. I will do my best to keep him calm, but you’d better hurry up and pull some of those strings you’re so famous for holding. I can’t run interference on him much longer. He’s completely insane.”
Subov slowed the big Mercedes and steered carefully off the frozen track. He drove into a small copse of spruce trees nestled in the lee of a steep rise. The factory was a kilometer away on the other side of that ridge. Subov would wait for them here.
Amanda regretted having to step out of the car’s warmth. She shrugged into overwhites—insulated, waterproof, white nylon pants—and a hooded jacket that zipped over her h
eavy clothing. She and Taylor obliterated the car tracks quickly and moved into position to observe the road.
She looked at her watch—11:30 p.m. The truck bearing the next shift of guards should be along anytime now. Taylor lifted his head abruptly beside her. She held her breath, listening. The faint rumble of a vehicle was growing louder. She released the safety on the Uzi submachine gun cradled in her arms, and Taylor did the same.
Headlights flashed into view. They pressed themselves deeper into the snow. Cold seeped through the insulated jumpsuit to grip her. The truck drew even with them. It slowed slightly, swerving around a large pothole. The headlights swung in their direction. Amanda didn’t breathe. She didn’t even blink. The engine surged, and the driver swung back the other way, continuing down the track. She exhaled slowly. The red taillights receded rapidly.
Taylor handed her a grenade launcher and two gold and two silver canisters. She loaded a gold one and pocketed the remaining three. Taylor did the same and stuffed his three extra canisters into pockets in his white suit. He shouldered the ungainly weapon. “Ready?” he asked.
She nodded resolutely. This one was for her father. “Ready.”
Taylor swept his free arm around Amand’s shoulder, pulling her close. He was a shapeless lump, but she still felt his strength and silent support through the layers of protective clothing. His breath formed a white cloud around them as he said, “One last mission. After tonight you won’t ever have to do anything like this again. I promise.”
Amanda leaned her head briefly against his reassuringly solid chest and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. She mustn’t cry. The tears would freeze on her cheeks. Taylor released her, and she pulled the drawstring of her parka hood closed, creating a narrow fur-lined tunnel in front of her face.
The visibility was awful, but the outside temperature was approaching thirty below zero and still dropping. Besides, if the guards spotted her out on the open tundra, she was a dead duck, anyway. Seeing the guards coming wouldn’t do her any good. Camouflage was her only hope.