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

by Michael Yudov

  “Yes! Sir. I mean, yes, sir.”

  “That includes lies of omission. There have been a full dozen people killed so far in this affair, that we know about, and there’s been a lot of money changing hands. A lot. Most of it involuntarily. You’re the only one we know of so far who’s been given any of that money. You had to have something more than a data analysis that showed Kimberlite Pipes. Even if they looked good on paper, we both know that Kimberlite Pipes are found in several sections of the world, and very few of them actually have been proven to have gem quality diamonds. Some don’t contain true diamonds at all. Why the frantic race to acquire your data and to keep it secret? There had to be more to it than that. There had to be.

  So I’m going to ask you this one time, and one time only, just as when I issue an order. Bear that in mind. Brazil has been a supplier of industrial diamonds for a couple of centuries. In fact, it was only the second place in the world where diamonds had ever been discovered. In the Minas Gerais region, during the 1700’s. All industrial quality. That’s a long way from where you were flying. Almost as far away as you can get from Minas Gerais and still be in Brazil. So.

  What did you do, or have, or find, that made these particular Pipes so important? What was it that proved conclusively that these Pipes were worth the trouble that’s been gone to in order to keep them under wraps and away from the prying eyes of the Brazilian government as well as anybody else who wasn’t in on the conspiracy? Especially the Ministry of Natural Resources. What made Don Miguel want to cover up the discovery?”

  Ted looked at me for a good full minute before answering. I could see that he was struggling with himself over the issue on an internal level. It was time to back up the commitment that he had just recently made.

  I kept my eyes on the road, never once looking at him. We were doing about a hundred & fifty KPH. The Audi was keeping up, but I think they were pushing the car a bit to do it. They were trailing behind by a few hundred yards.

  Finally, he turned back to the road as we entered one of the many tunnels on the roads of Switzerland. It was obvious that he had made up his mind. I would just have to wait until he spoke, to determine whether it was the right decision or not.

  “I crashed my plane on that last flight. Right into one of the shallow lakes that cover the pipes. I was saved by a ‘medicine man’ from an unknown tribe. It turned out that he was more of a religious leader than a medicine man. He had a lot of power within the tribe. I’d taken a fair bashing when the plane had hit the water. Nothing life-threatening, if you were in New York, or Toronto, or any other civilized city for that matter, but I wasn’t, I was in the rain forest.

  Being taken into the homes and hearts of the whole tribe the way I was saved my life. After about a week or so, when I was recovered, I underwent a ceremony that lasted for three days, intended to purge any prior allegiances, and transform me into one of the ‘People of The Pipes’. I was given my choice of a wife from the eligible women in the tribe. They were all underage for our culture, but just ripe for a husband among themselves. I was given some sort of mind-altering drug, and put through various tests and rituals designed to verify my intentions towards the tribe and its religion. I don’t remember much of it now. The drugs were pretty potent. The bottom line was that I had appeared from under the water of one of the five sacred lakes. That meant that I was sent to them as a sign that their God was pleased with them, to send a representative to live among them. Or that I was a dark messenger, and therefore should be killed.

  The lake I landed on was the central one in the series of five. It’s pretty shallow there, fortunately for me, because the plane sank fast. I struggled out of the cockpit and headed for air, and when I broke the surface of the water, there was the medicine man. No one had seen the plane go down, only heard the noise of the engine. So, when I came up out of the water in the sacred lake—it was taken as a sign.

  Apparently, I passed the initiation rituals, as evidenced by the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you today. They granted me some sort of title, related to their religion somehow. I had great stature within the tribe. When I finally was able to get around on my own again, I started trying to explain that I needed to make a journey. When that was established, I was outfitted with a few provisions, a guide, and three leather pouches. One held the drug I had taken, one held some small bones, very much like the toe bones of a primate, but the monkeys in the rain forest don’t have toes that big. I believe that those were for divinations. The last pouch held the answer to your question.”

  I silently mulled over this fantastic tale of crash and survival in the most inhospitable area of the world, for those who weren’t born there, and honestly, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. He was confident that the contents of his pouch would answer my question, of that I was sure. He sounded as sincere as they come when he had stated that.

  There was more to it than he had told me so far though. I could feel it. I kept my silence and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

  “The lake was only flooded because of the season. The entire bottom was covered in dense shrubbery, the kind that’s all over the area. Not water plants, land plants, and not one tree in sight. That meant that the lake was water-filled most of the time, but had dry periods where the bushes could grow. Everything in that forest grows fast.

  A rope ladder led from the shore to the bottom, where there were sinkholes in the Kimberlite Pipe. These people had worked the pipe, even though they couldn’t have known about diamonds, or especially, how to cut them once they’d found them, but they did. That one is as much a mystery to me as the surface of Saturn. I have no idea how or when they learned, but they learned, and based their religion on it.”

  Just then we came out of the tunnel into the sunshine. The sky was clearing well, and it looked like it was going to be a nice afternoon.

  Ted undid a button and reached inside of his shirt, pulling out a small leather pouch. I glanced over at it and saw that it was a leather one, like the type he had been talking about. It was about three inches deep, and tied at the top with a thong that ran up and around his neck. He carefully reached inside and pulled out something that was hidden in his hand. He held out his hand for me to take it, so I did.

  I held out my hand, palm up, and felt an object with some weight for its size. It felt about as big as a large grape. And cold, very cold. I kept my eyes on the road and went to bring my hand close enough to see what was in it without running off of a cliff.

  “Be careful when you open your hand, there’s a very high refractive index on this baby.”

  I looked at him briefly, but he was serious, there was no doubt in my mind. I lowered my hand down to my lap and opened my hand.

  At first I thought I was looking at some weird reddish crystal, but as we came around a corner the sun flashed in through the window on his side and splashed down into my lap. The reaction was immediate and almost fatal as I swerved the car back onto the curve, just missing the sideline-rail by a foot or so. I had also closed my fist over the object in my hand, and everything went back to normal. I breathed a whoosh of exhaled air.

  I was stunned, I had to admit it. When the sun had splashed down into my lap and my open hand, something extraordinary had happened. The car had been instantly filled with fire. Beams of it, flashing everywhere at once. It had been like thousands of reddish pink laser beams being turned on simultaneously.

  I raised my hand, and shading it from the sun, I took another look. I’m not an expert in these things, but it sure looked like a diamond to me. It had the faintest hint of rose in the centre. How that had turned into the flashing brilliance of those beams of pink and red light escaped me, but I knew for a fact that I’d never heard of or seen anything like it in my lifetime. It had to be the real thing, and if it was, I was holding one hell of a fortune in the palm of my hand. I studied it for a few moments while I drove, glancing from the stone to the road and back again.

  It wasn’t cut in any pattern t
hat I’d ever seen, which didn’t mean much, because I rarely looked at a diamond. I liked Star Sapphires. One thing was obvious from the instant I laid my eyes on it. It was cut crudely, with very few sides, and it was missing the symmetry a proper cut would have given it. I decided to accept Ted’s story until I had evidence to the contrary.

  I held out my hand and dropped it into his waiting palm. He grabbed it fast and slipped it into the pouch which he then tucked back under his shirt.

  “That thing is a diamond?”

  “Yes, and a very rare one as well.”

  “You mean it’s… I don’t know, what do you call it, it’s fire?”

  “Yes. That and the fact that it appears to be a couple of hundred years old.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “From the cut. It’s a crude cut, it wasn’t done by a master, but you can tell that from one glance. The key is the style of the cut. That style went out with the Moghuls of India. By the late seventeen hundreds to the early eighteen hundreds there were more diamond strikes coming on line. The most famous was the Kimberly mine in South Africa. Nobody knew that gem quality stones were lying in the rain forest of the Amazon basin, and if I hadn’t crashed on top of them, we still wouldn’t know. That’s the secret. The lakes are seasonal, and most people don’t crisscross the Amazon with geo-survey probes at any time of the year, never mind the rainy season. I’ve checked into this as best as I could, but my info is sketchy at best.

  The ‘People’, the only name I could understand that the tribe had for themselves, convinced me that they found the diamonds deep inside the Pipes. When the lakes drained during the off season. Meaning when it wasn’t raining so much that the flood plain shrank down to a manageable size, and they could get access to the Pipes.”

  “Is this area part of the field of iron ore that you were doing the survey on?”

  “Only when I gave them data that showed the iron ore stretching across that section of the map.”

  “Which was doctored by you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you did this for…?”

  “The money, at first, anyway. Then I found the diamond Pipes, and I realized that I had gotten myself in way over my head. These ‘People’ had taken me in and healed me, made me a member of the tribe, given me a wife and a position in the social order, and I was selling them out. It’s a shitty feeling.”

  “Oh, now you have feelings? What about your brother, sport? Any feelings of remorse there?”

  He hung his head, and when he raised it to talk to me there were tears in his eyes.

  “I didn’t know. I just… didn’t know. Now I do, and I have to live with that for the rest of my life, and from the looks of things right now, at least that won’t be too long.”

  “Do you know where this series of Pipes is? Could you find your way back?”

  “Of course I could. That’s what I do for a living, put my plane where it’s wanted. I have the co-ordinates memorized. John had them as well, I uploaded the data directly into his home system. He should have gotten all the info, as well as the orders to hide the data.

  The idea was that he should get us into the Crassberg financing deal with as much cash as he could lay his hands on. Then roll the deal into a non-limited mineral rights return. It would have made a killing. He got three million to put in, from where I don’t know. He said that our share was going to be fifty percent of that three million. An investment of one point five million would have given us fantastic returns the way he was trying to structure the deal. We’d have been set for life. Now it’s a question of whether or not I can hold onto my life, never mind profit from the deal. And my brother’s gone. He was all I had, as far as family goes. I’d give up the whole thing to get him back.”

  “Let’s not get into all of that right now, Okay? Also, as a point of interest, I don’t leave people behind, and I don’t tend to lose team members.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you think I don’t believe you, think again. There had to be something big behind this, and what you’ve just told me is big. What we need to do now is to follow the trail until we reach the top. Then we end the case by bringing the puppet-master to justice. All we have to do is prove it was Don Miguel.”

  Ted slumped back in his seat, seeming to fall in on himself.

  “You don’t know what it’s like out there. It all belongs to him and his people. You can’t get papers to enter Amazonia without his agents reporting it. If they give it to you. It’s his domain, remember.”

  “Do you know for a fact that Enrico works for Don Miguel?”

  “I know it, the way you know something in your bones, but I don’t have any evidence if that’s what you mean.”

  “You got paid an awful lot of money to secretly supply geophysical data to whomever Enrico works for, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And by your own word, the interior was run, is run, by the Minister of the Interior, which makes sense, right?”

  “Yeah…”

  Ted started sitting up a bit straighter in his seat. Maybe he was getting the point now.

  “The agency that hired you to do the original field job wasn’t the Ministry of the Interior though, was it? It was the Ministry of Natural resources, right?”

  “Right.”

  This time the answer snapped back at me. He was pulling out of his despair, slowly, but he’d been down so long now that it probably looked like up to him.

  “So, who is the Minister of Natural Resources?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “The guy who signed your cheques, what was his name?”

  “Oh, uh… damn! I know it, it’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t get it.”

  “Stop thinking about it, it’ll come to you. Let’s talk about Enrico for a minute.”

  “Sure.”

  I gave him a stare, taking my eyes off the road completely. I could drive all day long with my peripheral vision, but Ted didn’t know that. Most people can’t do it, you have to practice, and in the process, a few vehicles get banged up. It’s part of the ‘Introductory Assessment Month’ at the office with no name. Where I used to work. Once upon a lifetime.

  He straightened up some more in his seat.

  “I mean, yes, sir.”

  I turned my eyes to the road again.

  “Okay. You first met him in a bar in…?”

  “Sao Paolo. He was sitting next to me at the bar, we were just watching the girls do their thing, you know, and we started talking about work.”

  “Who started the work talk, you or him?”

  “I think he said something along the lines of ‘What brings you to our country?’, something like that. So, it was him, really. Although I did a lot of the talking. I think. We ended up staying at an apartment of a friend of his after we closed the bar that night.”

  “By that time, he knew you flew geo-survey flights in the north-eastern part of Amazonia, right?”

  “Umm, probably, yeah. A lot of that first night that I met Enrico was a bit foggy. I was hitting the sauce pretty hard, right? I’d been flying solo out over the rain forest for three months straight by then, and I needed a wild night. I sure got what I wanted.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, Enrico knew some of the girls who worked the joint, and we ended up taking three of them back to the apartment with us. Now, I can vaguely remember their names, Dona, Rosetta, and Cathy, I think. I woke up with a blazing headache and these two babes. One on each side of me. I remember the little one better, she was having a good time too, or she was a hell of an actress. The other one was a tall blonde with an attitude, which I didn’t even notice until the next morning. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough, but the little one, Dona, she wouldn’t let me get up without another roll. Man, she was sweet. Maybe five foot three, short dark hair, as black as midnight, and I swear she was a fitness instructor in another life.”

  He shook his head, thinking back on it all.

&nbs
p; “How was Enrico that morning?”

  “Him? Well, when I finally got Dona to let me go, I threw on my pants and headed for the kitchen to check out the coffee situation, and there he was, sitting at the kitchen table reading the morning paper. He was dressed, and as always, immaculately. He was wearing a suit and tie, designer stuff. The suit must have cost him a grand, easy.”

  I tried again.

  “Was he suffering from the same hang-over that you were?”

  “No, come to think of it. He seemed pretty cheery. For Enrico that means a slight smile and minimal conversation. I didn’t know that then, but I learned since. He’s like a machine. He never gets excited about anything. He just goes about his business, and he’s dangerous. Man, he is dangerous. Life doesn’t mean much to him. Other people’s lives, I mean. It was only two months later that he had set up the meeting with his ‘contact’ for us in Amsterdam.”

  “You realized by that time that the whole thing had been a setup though, didn’t you?”

  “I honestly wasn’t sure about what was going on until the day we were going to catch the KLM flight to Amsterdam. We were sitting in a café along the main drag in Rio. On the beach, right? Then he starts talking to me about how his boss was a tough guy, and demanded results when he paid for something, and I had been paid for, with more to come.”

  He was staring out the windshield now, but he wasn’t seeing what I was, he was seeing something else altogether.

  “Then he told me that his boss was a powerful man as well, and told me to watch the road outside the café. Then he checks his watch and says ‘Right about now.’, and I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I look out at the road, and about two seconds later, this car comes screaming down the road and runs right over an American tourist. A woman. Turns out she was on her honeymoon. The new husband was ten feet away when it happened. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and Enrico had set it up just to impress me with the seriousness of the business we’d entered into. That man screamed and cried, holding his dead bride to him with both arms until the cops and paramedics got there. The paramedics had to give him a knockout shot just to get him to let go of her.