by Matthew Hart
“And that numbered company,” I said. “Tell me how that fits in.”
“It’s registered in British Columbia. FinCEN’s computers flagged it when there was an exchange of wires between the numbered company and a private bank in Singapore that we were watching. The Singapore bank has only one client. That’s what set the alarm bells ringing. The client is a private fund called China Hard Asset.”
“Oh boy,” I said.
We made our way back up the range.
“You know about it, then?”
“What do you think I did for a living before you joined the department? Yes, I know about it. It’s the foreign investment arm for top officers of the People’s Liberation Army. It’s where the Xi twins get their money.”
We reached the tee line.
“Jimmy Angel’s a smart guy,” I said. “In his own field, he’s brilliant. But that’s one of the richest diamond fields on the planet. If the Chinese brass and that pair are targeting it, and they think Jimmy’s in their way, it’s very bad news that you haven’t heard from him.”
Tommy took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. He jammed his hands into his pockets and kicked a ball that was lying beside a tee. It rose in a surprisingly graceful arc and dropped back onto the range twenty-five yards away. We watched it roll to a stop.
“You’ll have to go up there, Alex,” he said.
“What do the Canadians know about this?”
“Beats me,” Tommy said. He glanced at his watch and yanked open the door to the stairs. When we reached the parking lot, Minnie was waiting in the Bentley, windows rolled up against the noise of the traffic on the West Side Highway. She was swiping through pages on a computer mounted on the dash and talking nonstop into the tiny mike attached to her headset.
“China Hard Asset is there to provide a retirement for men who expect a comfortable lifestyle,” I said. “Xi Fan and his sister have built some of the biggest companies in China using their money. Their holdings include iDragon, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. I’m assuming you know that, since our government is trying to destroy it. Our latest move was those phony fraud charges we cooked up against Fan’s twin sister, Mei. Then we convinced the Canadians to arrest her on an extradition warrant when she was changing planes in Vancouver. She’s still under arrest, and Fan and his high-ranking friends in the Chinese government are breathing fire.”
“Let me tell you how this works,” Tommy said. “We didn’t convince the Canadians to lock her up.” He scratched in air quotes. “We tipped them off that she was coming through Vancouver and made a formal extradition request. It’s called a treaty obligation.”
“Tell it to the Chinese. They’ve been waging all-out war on Canada since then—locking up Canadian businessmen in China and charging them with spying. They’re in a rage, demanding her release. Fan was dangerous before; now he’s a blood enemy of the United States.”
Tommy stopped with his hand on the door handle. “Is that so? Listen, champ. We’ve got his sister. Let’s see how much fire he breathes when the penny drops and he understands how long we could put her away for.”
He opened the door and got in. “There’s a plane waiting for you at Teterboro. Go tonight. Try not to rely too heavily on your wide network of criminal friends.”
He slammed the door. Minnie shot out through the gate, still talking. I paced around in the lot for a minute, then faced the music and called Lily. She heard me out, and let an icy silence settle in my ear.
“If that’s how it has to be, darling,” she said at last, “I’m coming.” And she hung up.
2
I looked out the window of the little jet. Below the wings spread a thick, unbroken layer of cloud, pale white in the moonlight. The flight tracker at the front of the cabin showed our position: north of Saskatchewan, heading west.
I told the steward we were fine on our own, and he went to sit in the cockpit with the pilots.
Government executive jet: not my usual ride. This was the one normally used by the secretary of the treasury. Leather sofa and a pair of easy chairs. Huge desk. Of course I looked through it. Some habits you never shake.
The steward’s log was in the left-hand bottom drawer. My flight was the most recent entry. Mostly it was just a list of hops between Washington and New York, where the secretary’s family lived. Couple of flights to London. An overnight to Montreal caught my eye because I’d been spending time there. Not really thinking much of it, I snapped a picture of the entry with my phone. Other than that, nothing more scandalous than a few winter weekends in the Bahamas. I tossed the log back in the drawer.
The cabin felt more like a stateroom on a ship than an airplane. Lamps with shades. Real china cups. Lead crystal glasses. Not to mention the food. That network of criminal friends Tommy had mentioned: the main one was perched at a table, devouring a platter of sashimi.
“For God’s sake, Alex,” Lily said through a mouthful of raw fish. “Eat something. Do you have any idea what this costs?” She tapped her chopsticks on a deep-red lump of fish. “Bluefin tuna belly. Excellent protein, plus a rare chance to rip off the government.”
With the tip of her chopsticks she spread wasabi paste onto a jewel-like tuna roll, added a thin, coral-colored slice of ginger, deftly plucked up the roll, and popped it in her mouth. She rested the chopsticks on the little china stand and chewed contentedly, leaning forward to examine a parcel of rough diamonds.
Slav Lily had porcelain skin and dark, lustrous hair cut short. It looked as if a typhoon had just blown through and plastered her head with a mass of jet-black curls. She had pointy, elvish ears that poked through the storm of hair. The shape made her look like a Vulcan, except Lily’s eyebrows weren’t pointed. They curved above her gray eyes as if they’d been painted on by Leonardo.
She stirred a finger through the diamonds. “This is lovely rough,” she said. “Very white. Nice sizes. Very cuttable.” Lily was Russian. She spoke English with a mid-Atlantic accent, too polished to be American but too slick with Russian vowels to be British.
“Where are the stones from?”
“Canada,” she said. “It’s rough from the Ekati mine.” She gave me a playful look. “We’re going to the Arctic, darling. Alex gets sudden urgent assignment,” she said, spreading her hands in mock alarm. “Assignment has to do with missing diamond explorer we both know. A delightful man, but a fraud.” She pinched a few diamonds between her thumb and forefinger and let them drop back into the little pile. “I thought I should familiarize myself with the kind of goods people steal up there, because I’ll probably be offered some.”
She was still a little mad. I didn’t blame her. We were supposed to be living a new life. She’d bought a huge apartment in Montreal, the only city in North America she considered European enough to live in. I prefer a place where people insult me in my own language. But it’s a forty-five-minute flight from LaGuardia, so we sawed it down the middle: I kept my apartment in New York. That gave me a place to spend weekends with my daughter on those rare occasions when she felt like it. The rest of the time I lived with Lily.
Then the call from Tommy. Technically I’d been on what the department called temporary long leave—a vague acknowledgment that they’d screwed up my life and put my family at risk in the business of the Russian Pink. What was not so vague about the agreement was that they could snap their fingers and I had to come. That’s the problem with a new life; it’s still attached to the old one.
I got up, rummaged around in the galley, and checked out the fridge. “Ever heard of a vodka called ‘Spirits of the Tsars’?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars a bottle,” Lily said. “Is it cold?”
“It’s in the freezer.”
“Pour me one too.”
I splashed some into crystal tumblers and put one in front of her. I stretched out on the sofa with the laptop on my chest and scrolled through the background file.
Until the US government cooked up the f
raud charge and engineered Xi Mei’s arrest in Vancouver on an extradition warrant, the twins were always pictured in places like Cannes, sharing the steps of the Carlton Hotel with movie stars, or stepping out for the night in London or Macau. They had an exotic cachet that beautiful and famous people liked to bathe in.
Their father was a “princeling,” the term for the privileged son of a Chinese revolutionary hero. He was the fabulously rich governor of a province until he backed the wrong side in a dirty fight at the top of the ruling clique and found himself impoverished and in jail. He’d lived like a monarch, and his downfall filled the world’s papers with lurid stories of orgies and corruption.
Suddenly pictures of the twins were plastered all over the world’s front pages—the cossetted offspring of the fallen titan, members of a “red aristocracy” enrolled in elite universities in the United States. There were photographs of Fan at Harvard, a pair of stoned, topless girls sprawled across him as he sat in his Ferrari snarling at the camera. In another shot, he gaped drunkenly from a sofa, his shirt unbuttoned and his tie askew, as another pair of girls, or maybe the same ones, brushed makeup on his cheeks. His rosebud mouth blazed with scarlet lipstick.
“Remember him?” I said, holding up the laptop so Lily could see the screen.
She stirred a finger in her vodka and tilted her head at the picture. “Should I?”
“Yes. He’s one of the Xi twins, before they got serious. Now they’re trying to bust their way into Canadian diamonds.”
I dragged the photo back into the folder and opened the file on Mei. She was studying business at the Wharton School, a CEO production line that fed a stream of graduates into Wall Street banks and America’s top companies. Unlike her brother, Mei didn’t wear lipstick. She wore blue Converse sneakers and powder-blue chinos and drove a VW Golf. Also blue. She was often pictured with a tiny cat peering from her purse. She wore thick glasses with blue frames. A pair of lapis lazuli clips pulled her hair back from her face.
“Weren’t there rumors she was sleeping with the brother?” Lily said, leaning over my shoulder to gaze at the picture. Her breath smelled of fish and vodka. Suddenly she clamped her teeth on my ear and gave it a tug. “Sinful,” she murmured.
She went to get another drink. I put the pictures away and clicked on the file with the yellow band across it that the FinCEN archivists used when the information inside came partly from outside agencies. Like the FBI and the CIA. Well, not like them. Them.
The twins’ money dried up fast. Two gorillas from the embassy in Washington went up to visit. There were transcripts, so somebody’d got a wire in. The twins sat still for an icy lecture about enemies of the people and the values outlined in the Chinese Constitution. Ferrari back to dealer. Goodbye lipstick. Brother and sister met once a week. For lunch.
Fan hired a tutor and managed to scrape out a C. Mei graduated top of her class. She would have anyway. At the end of the academic year, the twins flew back to Beijing to begin the round of groveling that saved them from following their father into prison.
I clicked back into a bullet-point file of a type that FinCEN called a “scope.” It listed the careful alliances the twins had built with influential people. They bought a small factory that made knockoffs of expensive Western handbags. Then they bought another factory. Then a small gold mine. Then not so small. Soon they had a condo in Chaoyang Park, a leafy central Beijing enclave full of young millionaires. Then they made the move that separated them from mere millionaires and launched them into the stratosphere. Their masterstroke. They went to see the generals.
In China, no one had more power. The FinCEN scope included a list of the companies owned by the military, including the gargantuan state monopolies on railroad construction, shipbuilding, and aircraft manufacture. Salaries and bonuses from these enterprises made the generals rich. Wisely, the twins stayed away from sectors already controlled by the brass. Instead, they pitched them on what amounted to a private hedge fund. The fund would invest not only in China but, more importantly, abroad, gobbling up companies that were both profitable and strategic. Lining the pockets of its investors while at the same time providing them with economic crowbars they could use to influence other countries.
Inside five years, lipstick boy was back in the papers, the master of the rosebud sneer, his hair cut close on the sides and brushed straight back on top. He was the hood ornament of modern China. Mei was always at his side, a pace behind. Sometimes she held her little cat. The file said it was a breed called Singapura. Mei still wore her hair fastened back with the bright blue clips. Sort of dreamy smile. I airdropped a picture onto Lily’s phone, where it landed with a pong. She flicked her eyes from the diamonds.
“He’d better sleep with one eye open,” she said.
“You think?”
She spread her fingers to expand the image. “Pay attention to the cat.”
I looked more closely at the picture. Its ears were flat as it peered at Fan.
I went to the latest pictures. The glittering twins—not so glittering now. Fighting their way through the press that swarmed the Vancouver courthouse where Mei was battling extradition. Fan’s face a mask of fury. One hand was clamped like a vise on Mei’s thin wrist as he dragged her through the crowd. His black eyes burned with hatred.
The Canadian judge had allowed Mei to stay at a house they owned on the ocean while the court decided her fate. She wore an ankle monitor. A court-approved security company kept her under watch 24/7. Paid for by the twins.
I closed the file and opened the one on Canadian diamonds. Canada produced more than twenty million carats of rough diamonds a year, mostly from the Arctic mines. In terms of value, it was the third largest diamond producer in the world. The question seemed to be, were there any mines still left to be discovered? Apparently Jimmy Angel had convinced the twins there were.
“Did you pick up any rumors about what Jimmy was finding?” I said.
Lily had folded the diamond parcel away. She was reclining in the black leather executive chair, her gray suede ankle boots resting on the desk while she blew on her fingernails. I didn’t know who the secretary of the treasury took along when he traveled, but Lily had discovered a pullout compartment full of expensive French cosmetics. She’d been engrossed in her nails for the last ten minutes. Lily could vacuum up data by the terabyte. She’d finished the entire report before I’d made it through a dozen pages. She wiggled her fingers at me.
“This one’s called Carnal Red,” she said in her husky voice. “Don’t tell me you’re not struggling to control yourself.”
“Jimmy Angel,” I prompted.
Lily held out her hand at arm’s length, the fingers splayed, tilting her head as she swiveled her wrist to examine the nails.
“I made some calls before I left Montreal,” she said. “He’s been showing around some fantastic garnets.”
“Pyropes?”
“Yes. G10s. Beautiful colors. Deep red, purple. Dazzling.” She wiggled her fingers again.
Pyrope garnets were what diamond prospectors called “indicators.” If you found them, they indicated that diamonds were nearby.
Lily knew Arctic diamonds. She’d grown up in Mirny, a small city in the Siberian diamond fields. She became a top sorter and diamond grader for the Russian state diamond company, Russgem, before she was twenty. Her career hit a snag when the crooked oligarchs who controlled the diamond business discovered she was siphoning 140,000 carats a month out of their pockets and into hers. It was an ingenious system that took advantage of the way Russgem rounded off decimal places when it weighed the rough, leaving fractional amounts uncaptured. Russia produced forty million carats a year, so the fractions added up fast.
The oligarchs almost killed her. They didn’t, because Lily had something they wanted more than revenge: the secret of how she’d laundered the stolen rough into US dollars. The deal she worked out made her even richer than she’d been before. She gave up the details of her laundry, and they put her
in charge of their Antwerp operations.
That’s where she came to my attention. When she started buying African contraband. I laid a trap, and caught her at Brussels airport with a few million dollars’ worth.
I turned Slav Lily on the spot, flipping her against her Russian gangster bosses. It was a triumph for law and order and the forces of good in the world. Except for one thing. It detonated into a love affair. And not the kind where you gaze into each other’s eyes and sigh. The other kind. The kind where you try to outwit, use, and deceive each other until your hearts are black and blue, and shame is the measure of your tenderness. Tell me that’s not love.
“Here’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “Let’s assume Washington really is afraid that Fan and Mei and some Chinese generals might score on a long shot mineral play. They make a diamond strike. Why is that a problem? What could the Chinese be getting that we don’t want them to get?”
I unzipped the bag that operations had packed for me. Military-grade first aid kit, including painkillers; selection of high-tech hiking gear; and at the bottom, under the wick-away socks and thermal gloves, a SIG Sauer MPX Copperhead submachine gun with three extra thirty-round clips. If you were going to pack a submachine gun in your luggage, that’s the one you’d pick. Not much more than four pounds. About fourteen inches long. Still, it’s not like remembering to put in the underwear. Field-grade meds and a SIG with extra mags. Makes you wonder what they know that you don’t.
“The Chinese are diamond crazy,” Lily said, flashing her scarlet fingernails in the light of the desk lamp. “They buy more polished diamonds than any other country in the world. They have no mines, and other countries have managed to keep them out of the rough business. That means they can’t buy directly from mines. They have to pay large markups to those who do. They were always trying to buy direct when I was in Mirny.”
“Did you sell to them?”
Lily put the nail polish back in the case and took out a magnifying mirror. “Once you start with the Chinese, there’s no way out.”
