Shock Wave dp-13

by Clive Cussler

  “Enough of this idle talk,” said Perlmutter impatiently. “Let’s open the bottle of champagne and get to work.”

  Pitt provided an ice bucket, and they went through the Dom Perignon before the main entree and finished the meal with the Gruet brut during dessert. Perlmutter was mightily impressed with the sparkling wine from New Mexico. “This is quite good, dry and crisp,” he said slyly. “Where can I buy a case?”

  “If it was only `quite good,’ you wouldn’t be interested in obtaining a case,” said Pitt, grinning. “You’re an old charlatan.”

  Perlmutter shrugged. “I never could fool you.”

  As soon as Pitt cleared the dishes, Perlmutter moved into the living room, opened his briefcase and laid a thick sheaf of papers on the coffee table. When Pitt joined him, he was glancing at the pages, checking his notations.

  Pitt settled in a leather sofa beneath staggered shelves that held a small fleet of ship models, replicas of ships that Pitt had discovered over the years. “So what have you got on the renowned Dorsett family?”

  “Would you believe this represents a shallow scratch on the surface?” Perlmutter replied, holding up the thick volume of over a thousand pages. “From what I’ve researched, the Dorsett history reads like a dynasty out of an epic novel.”

  “What about the current head of the family, Arthur Dorsett?”

  “Extremely reclusive. Rarely surfaces in public. Obstinate, prejudiced and thoroughly unscrupulous. Universally disliked by all who remotely come in contact with him.”

  “But filthy rich,” said Pitt.

  “Disgustingly so,” replied Perlmutter with the expression of a man who just ate a spider. “Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited and the House of Dorsett chain of retail stores are wholly owned by the family. No stockholders, shareholders or partners. They also control a sister company called Pacific Gladiator that concentrates on the mining of colored gemstones.”

  “How did he get his start?”

  “For that story we have to go back 144 years.” Perlmutter held out his glass and Pitt filled it. “We begin with an epic of the sea that was recorded by the captain of a clipper ship and published by his daughter after he died. During a voyage in January of 1856, while he was transporting convicts, a number of them women, to the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay, an inlet south of the present city of Sydney, his ship ran afoul of a violent typhoon while beating north through the Tasman Sea. The ship was called the Gladiator, and she was skippered by one of the most famous clipper captains of the era, Charles `Bully’ Scaggs.”

  “Iron men and wooden ships,” murmured Pitt.

  “They were that,” agreed Perlmutter. “Anyway, Scaggs and his crew must have labored like demons to save the ship from one of the worst storms of the century. But when the winds died and seas calmed, Gladiator was little more than a derelict. Her masts were swept over the side, her superstructure was destroyed and her hull was taking on water. The ship’s boats were gone or smashed, and Captain Scaggs knew his ship had only hours to live, so he issued orders for the crew and any convicts handy as carpenters to dismantle what was left of the ship and build a raft.”

  “Probably the only option open to him,” Pitt commented.

  “Two of the convicts were Arthur Dorsett’s ancestors,” Perlmutter continued. “His great-great grandfather was Jess Dorsett, a convicted highwayman, and his great-great-grandmother was Betsy Fletcher, who was given a twenty-year sentence to the penal colony for stealing a blanket.”

  Pitt contemplated the bubbles in his glass. “Crime certainly didn’t pay in those days.”

  “Most Americans don’t realize that our own colonies were also a dumping ground for England’s criminals until the Revolutionary War. Many families would be surprised to learn their ancestors landed on our shores as convicted criminals.”

  “Were the ship’s survivors rescued from the raft?” asked Pitt.

  Perlmutter shook his head. “The next fifteen days became a saga of horror and death. Storms, thirst and starvation, and a mad slaughter between the sailors, a few soldiers and the convicts decimated the people clinging to the raft. When it finally drifted onto the reef of an uncharted island and went to pieces, legend has it the survivors were saved from a great white shark by a sea serpent while swimming to shore.”

  “Which explains the Dorsett hallmark. It came from the hallucinations of near-dead people.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Only eight of the original 231 poor souls who left the ship staggered onto a beach-six men and two women more dead than alive.”

  Pitt looked at Perlmutter. “That’s 223 lost. A staggering figure.”

  “Of the eight,” Perlmutter went on, “a seaman and a convict were later killed after fighting over the women.”

  “A replay of the mutiny on the Bounty.”

  “Not quite. Two years later, Captain Scaggs and his remaining seaman, luckily for him the Gladiator’s carpenter, built a boat out of the remains of a French naval sloop that was driven on the rocks by a storm with the loss of all hands. Leaving the convicts behind on the island, they sailed across the Tasman Sea to Australia.”

  “Scaggs deserted Dorsett and Fletcher?”

  “For a very good reason. The enchantment of living on a beautiful island was preferred to the hell of the prison camps at Botany Bay. And because Scaggs felt he owed his life to Dorsett, he told the penal colony authorities that all the convicts had died on the raft so the survivors could be left in peace.”

  “So they built a new life and multiplied.”

  “Exactly,” said Perlmutter. “Jess and Betsy were married by Scaggs and had two boys, while the other two convicts produced a girl. In time they built a little family community and began trading food supplies to whaling ships that began making Gladiator Island, as it later became known, a regular stopover during their long voyages.”

  “What became of Scaggs?” asked Pitt.

  “He returned to the sea as master of a new clipper ship owned by a shipping company called Carlisle & Dunhill. After several more voyages to the Pacific, he retired and eventually died, twenty years later, in 1876.”

  “Where do diamonds enter the picture?”

  “Patience,” said Perlmutter like a schoolteacher. “A little background to better understand the story. To begin with, diamonds, though instigating more crime, corruption and romance than any other of the earth’s minerals, are merely crystallised carbon. Chemically, they’re sister to graphite and coal. Diamonds are thought to have been formed as long ago as three billion years, anywhere from 120 to 200 kilometers deep in the earth’s upper mantle. Under incredible heat and pressure, pure carbon along with gases and liquid rock forced their way toward the surface through volcanic shafts commonly referred to as pipes. As this blend exploded upward, the carbon cooled and crystallized into extremely hard and transparent stones. Diamonds are one of the few materials to touch the earth’s surface from remote depths.”

  Pitt stared at the floor, trying to picture nature’s diamond-making process in his mind. “I assume a cross section of the ground would show a trail of diamonds swirling upward to surface in a circular shaft that widens at the surface like a raised’ funnel.”

  “Or a carrot,” said Perlmutter. “Unlike pure lava, which raised high, peaked volcanoes when it reached the surface, the mix of diamonds and liquid rock, known as kimberlite pipes after the South African city of Kimberly, cooled rapidly and hardened into large mounds. Some were worn down by natural erosion, spreading the diamonds into what are known as alluvial deposits. Some eroded pipes even formed lakes. The largest mass of crystallized stones, however, remained in the underground pipes or chutes.”

  “Let me guess. The Dorsetts found one of these diamond-laden pipes on their island.”

  “You keep getting ahead of me,” Perlmutter muttered irritably.

  “Sorry,” Pitt said placatingly.

  “The shipwrecked convicts unknowingly found not one, but two phenomenally rich pipes in volc
anic mounds on opposite ends of Gladiator Island. The stones they found, which were freed from the rock by centuries of rain and wind, simply appeared to be `pretty things,’ as Betsy Fletcher referred to them in a letter to Scaggs. Actually, uncut and unpolished diamonds are dull-looking stones with almost no sparkle. They often feel and look like an oddly shaped bar of soap. It was not until 1866, after the American Civil War, that a U.S. Navy vessel on an exploratory voyage to find possible sites for deepwater ports throughout the South Pacific stopped at the island to take on water. On board was a geologist. He happened to see the Dorsett children playing a game with stones on the beach and became curious. He examined one of the stones and was amazed as he identified it as a diamond of at least twenty carats. When the geologist questioned Jess Dorsett as to where the stone came from, the cagey old highwayman told him he brought it with him from England.”

  “And that timely little event launched Dorsett Consolidated Mining.”

  “Not immediately,” said Per’ mutter. “After Jess died, Betsy sent her two boys, Jess Junior and Charles, no doubt named after Scaggs, and the daughter of the other two convicts, Mary Winkleman, to England to be educated. She wrote Scaggs for his help and included a pouch of uncut diamonds to pay for this undertaking, which the captain turned over to his friend and former employer, Abner Carlisle. Acting on behalf of Scaggs, who was on his deathbed, Carlisle had the diamonds faceted and polished, later selling them on the London exchange for nearly one million pounds, or about seven million dollars, in the currency of the time.”

  “A tidy sum for college tuition for those days,” Pitt said consideringly. “The kids must have had a ball.”

  Perlmutter shook his head. “You’re wrong this time. They lived frugally at Cambridge. Mary attended a proper girl’s school outside of London. She and Charles married soon after he took his degree, and they returned to the island, where they directed the mining operations in the dormant volcanoes. Jess Junior remained in England and opened the House of Dorsett in partnership with a Jewish diamond merchant from Aberdeen by the name of Levi Strouser. The London end of the business, which dealt in the cutting and sale of diamonds, had luxurious showrooms for retail sales, elegant offices on the upper floors for larger wholesale trading and a vast workshop in the basement, where the stones from Gladiator Island were cut and polished. The dynasty prospered, helped in no small measure by the fact that the diamonds that came out of the island pipes were a very rare violet-rose color and of the highest quality.”

  “The mines have never played out?”

  “Not yet. The Dorsetts have been very shrewd in holding back much of their production in cooperation with the cartel to hold up the price.”

  “What about offspring?” asked Pitt.

  “Charles and Mary had one boy, Anson. Jess Junior never married.”

  “Anson was Arthur’s grandfather?” Pitt asked.

  “Yes, he ran the company for over forty years. He was probably the most decent and honest of the lot. Anson was satisfied to run and maintain a profitable little empire. Never driven by greed like his descendants, he gave a great deal of money to charity. Any number of libraries and hospitals throughout Australia and New Zealand were founded by him. When lie died in 1910, he left the company to a son, Henry, and a daughter, Mildred. She died young in a boating accident. She fell overboard during a cruise on the family yacht and was taken by sharks. Rumors circulated that she was murdered by Henry, but no investigations were made. Henry’s money made sure of that. Under Henry, the family launched a reign of greed, jealousy, cruelty and ravenous power that continues to this day.”

  “I recall reading an article about him in the Los Angeles Times,” said Pitt. “They compared Sir Henry Dorsett to Sir Ernest Oppenheimer of De Beers.”

  “Neither was exactly what you’d call a saint. Oppenheimer climbed over a multitude of obstacles to build an empire that reaches out to every continent and has diversified holdings in automobiles, paper and explosives manufacture, breweries, as well as the mining of gold, uranium, platinum and copper. De Beers’ main strength, however, still lies with diamonds and the cartel that regulates the market from London to New York to Tokyo. Dorsett Consolidated Mining, on the other hand, remained totally committed to diamonds. And except for holdings in a number of colored gemstone mines-rubies in Burma, emeralds in Colombia, sapphires from Ceylon—the family never really diversified into other investments. All profits were plowed back into the corporation.”

  “Where did the name De Beers come from?”

  “De Beers was the South African farmer who unknowing sold his diamond-laden land for a few thousand dollars to Cecil Rhodes, who excavated a fortune and launched the cartel.”

  “Did Henry Dorsett join Oppenheimer and the De Beers cartel?” asked Pitt.

  “Although he participated in market price controls, Henry became the only large mine owner to sell independently. While eighty-five percent of the world’s production went through the De Beers-controlled Central Selling Organization to brokers and dealers, Dorsett bypassed the main diamond exchanges in London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv and New York so he could market a limited production of fine stones direct to the public through the House of Dorsett, which now numbers almost five hundred stores.”

  “De Beers did not fight him?”

  Perlmutter shook his head. “Oppenheimer formed the cartel to ensure a stable market and high prices for diamonds. Sir Ernest did not see Dorsett as a threat so long as the Australian didn’t attempt to dump his supply of stones on the market.”

  “Dorsett must have an army of craftsmen to support such an operation.”

  “Over a thousand employees in three diamond-cutting facilities, two cleaving workshops and two polishing departments. They also have an entire thirty-story building in Sydney, Australia, that houses a host of artisans who create the House of Dorsett’s distinctive and creative jewelry. While most of the other brokers hire Jews to cut and facet their stones, Dorsett hires mostly Chinese.”

  “Henry Dorsett died sometime in the late seventies, didn’t he?”

  Perlmutter smiled. “History repeated itself. At the age of sixty-eight, he fell off his yacht while in Monaco and drowned. It was whispered that Arthur got him drunk and shoved him into the bay.”

  “What’s the story on Arthur?”

  Perlmutter checked his file of papers, then peered over the lenses of his reading glasses. “If the diamond-buying public ever had any inkling of the dirty operations Arthur Dorsett has conducted over the past thirty years, they’d never buy another diamond till the day he dies.”

  “Not a nice man, I take it.”

  “Some men are two-faced, Arthur is at least five-faced. Born on Gladiator Island in 1941, the only child of Henry and Charlotte Dorsett. He was educated by his mother, never going to school on the mainland until the age of eighteen, when he entered the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He was a big man, towering half a head above his classmates, yet he took no interest in sports, preferring to probe around the old ghost mines that are scattered throughout the Rocky Mountains. After graduation with a degree as a mining engineer, he worked the De Beers diggings in South Africa for five years before returning home and taking over as superintendent of the family mines on the island. During his frequent trips to the Dorsett headquarters building in Sydney, he met and married a lovely young girl, Irene Calvert, who was the daughter of a professor of biology at the university at Melbourne. She gave him three daughters.”

  “Maeve, Deirdre and ...”

  “Boudicca.”

  “Two Celtic goddesses and a legendary British queen.”

  “A feminine triad.”

  “Maeve and Deirdre are twenty-seven and thirty-one years of age. Boudicca is thirty-eight.”

  “Tell me more of their mother,” said Pitt.

  “Little to tell. Irene died fifteen years ago, again under mysterious circumstances. It wasn’t until a year after she was buried on Gladiator Island that a Sydney newspaper r
eporter ferreted out the fact of her death. He ran an obituary on her before Arthur could bribe the managing editor to kill the piece. Otherwise, nobody would have known she was gone.”

  “Admiral Sandecker knows something of Arthur Dorsett and says he’s impossible to reach,” said Pitt.

  “Very true. He is never seen in public, never socializes, has no friends. His entire life revolves around the business. He even has a secret tunnel for entering and leaving the Sydney headquarters building without being seen. He has cut Gladiator Island off from the outside world completely. To his way of thinking the less known about Dorsett mining operations the better.”

  “What about the company? He can’t hide the dealings of a vast business forever.”

  “I beg to differ,” said Perlmutter. “A privately owned corporation can get away with murder. Even the governments they operate under have an impossible time trying to probe company assets for tax purposes. Arthur Dorsett may be a reincarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge, but he’s never hesitated to spend big money to buy loyalty. If he thinks it’s beneficial to make a government official an instant millionaire in order to gain leverage and power, Dorsett will go for it.”

  “Do his daughters work within the company?”

  “Two of them are said to be employed by dear old Dad, the other one...”

  “Maeve,” Pitt offered.

  “All right, Maeve, cut herself off from the family, put herself through university and came out a marine zoologist. Something of her mother’s father must have come through in her genes.”

  “And Deirdre and Boudicca?”

  “The gossipmongers claim the two are devils incarnate, and worse than the old man. Deirdre is the Machiavelli of the family, a conniving schemer with larceny in her veins. Boudicca is rumored to be quite ruthless and as cold and hard as ice from the bottom of a glacier. Neither seems to have any interest in men or high living.”

  A distant look reflected in Pitt’s eyes. “What is it about diamonds that gives them so much allure? Why do men and women kill for them? Why have nations and governments risen and fallen because of them?”