by K. T. Tomb
“D” IS FOR DIAMOND
An Alpha Adventure
#4
by
K.T. TOMB
Acclaim for K.T. Tomb:
“Epic and awesome!”
—J.T. Cross, bestselling author of Beneath the Deep
“Now this is what I call adventure. The Lost Garden will leave you breathless!”
—Summer Lee, bestselling author of Angel Heart
“The best adventure novel I’ve read in a long time. I can’t wait to read the sequel. Count me a fan. A big fan.”
—P.J. Day, bestselling author of The Sunset Prophecy
“K.T. Tomb is a wonderful new voice in adventure fiction. I was enthralled by The Lost Garden...and you will be, too.”
—Aiden James, bestselling author of Plague of Coins
OTHER BOOKS BY K.T. TOMB
STANDALONE ADVENTURES
The Last Crusade
The Kraken
The Adventurers
The Swashbucklers
The Tempest
Ghosts of the Titanic
The Honeymooners
Curse of the Coins
Drums Along the Hudson
THE CHYNA STONE ADVENTURES
The Minoan Mask
The Mummy Codex
The Phoenician Falcon
The Babylonian Basilisk
The Aquitaine Armor
The Ivory Bow
The Rosary Riddle
THE EVAN KNIGHT ADVENTURES
The Lost Garden
Keepers of the Lost Garden
Destroyers of the Lost Garden
THE PHOENIX QUEST ADVENTURES
The Hammer of Thor
The Spear of Destiny
The Lair of Beowulf
The Fountain of Youth
The Ark of the Covenant
THE CASH CASSIDY ADVENTURES
The Holy Grail
The Lost Continent
The Lost City of Gold
The Falcon Cloak
THE ALPHA ADVENTURES
“A” is for Amethyst
“B” is for Bullion
“C” is for Crystal
“D” is for Diamond
SASQUATCH SERIES
Sasquatch
Sasquatch Found
THE ISLANDS THAT TIME FORGOT
Dinosaur Island
Ape Island
Snake Island
“D” is for Diamond
Published by K.T. Tomb
Copyright © 2015 by K.T. Tomb
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
The author wishes to dedicate this book to the late
Wayne Dyer.
“D” is for Diamond
Chapter One
Damn it. Of all the places on earth, after all this time. It was impossible, under the sweating skies and among the multicultural throng, that it was true. Nevertheless, Travis had to recognize the evidence with his own eyes. He had been looking for leads in Colombo for three weeks, investigating a connection between several accountants; practically just chasing paper. The case had run into so many dead ends and flat out stonewalling that he had started to believe that the Sri Lankan people had either developed a thorough distaste for his face in particular, or had decided that Americans in general were persona non-grata. The squall that rushed in off the Indian Ocean had sent the denizens of this metropolis scurrying for the awnings of shops or the cover of tea houses, and Travis had allowed himself to be swept along with the tide of humanity, bustled along, feeling like a lanky outsider among the mostly diminutive Sri Lankans—which of course, he was. Colombo was a city of many peoples, and in most countries that would have meant that his passage would have gone relatively unnoticed, despite his height and pale skin. But the city held no such anonymity—not that there weren’t European expats dotted around and clumped together in their affluent enclaves, but there in downtown, where Travis was searching, and failing, the population was Sinhalese, Tamil, and Moor. It was for this reason that Travis had been glad that he had worn his black baseball cap and high collared jacket on the day Monica Chen once again appeared in his life.
Three weeks in this sweating mixture of cultures, glass and concrete and street markets had brought nothing but frustration, and now fear. His hand rubbed unconsciously at the scar tissue, now long healed, where Chen had shot him, two years previously. His mind began to race to match his elevated pulse, as more people shoved past him. The street seemed to be filled with humanity; unbidden, his knees locked, and Travis turned his feet. He could not run. Not this time. If Chen was in Sri Lanka, then that could not be a coincidence. The odds on her appearing here while he was investigating were surely astronomical. It could mean anything, but what he knew right there was that he had been made. His inquiries had been noticed by someone with powerful connections; or, worse, that Chen had been tailing him for weeks and he had only now noticed. That possibility made him nauseous and his mind ran through what he had done, where he had been, searching for where he had made the screw up that would probably, finally, be the death of him.
One month before, Alpha Adventures had been approached by a loose consortium of diamond traders operating in Colombo. While Sri Lanka did not mine diamonds within the country, Travis learned that there was a healthy trade in cutting, polishing and trading in precious gems. The group of traders had complained for months to the local authorities that the business had been compromised by multiple cases of diamonds being stolen and replaced with cubic zirconia as well as financial irregularities with the importers and exporters to whom their businesses were dependent on. The police conducted a half-hearted investigation, and turned up nothing. It had been no small coup for the Alphas that the consortium had immediately turned to them for help. Apparently the news of their escapade in Russia tracking down missing gold bullion had spread even as far as Sri Lanka. It had all seemed so easy; simply find the leaking money and catch the criminal switching out the stones, get paid, and go home. Yet, when Savannah and Travis had arrived, the consortium seemed unable, or unwilling, to provide the information they would need to conduct any kind of paper chase. Broker after broker, dealer after dealer, all had lost important records, accidentally erased surveillance tapes, or gone out of business completely. The insurance firm that had been contracted, and who had commissioned the services of the Alphas in the first place, assured Thyri that there was no problem, and payment would be made on production of evidence of wrongdoing with or without the complicity of the local diamond merchants.
This news provided no succor for Savannah and Travis as they turned down more and more wrong turns and slowly broiled in the oppressive temperature and humidity of the Sri Lankan summer. And now, Monica Chen was on the island. Monica Chen, the contract kidnapper, ruthless criminal mastermind… and if he believed in such childish terms, his nemesis. It didn’t make any sense. Could it be that it was she who was behind the Sri Lankan diamond job? It was surely within her skill set, but after the escapade at the Sea of Okhotsk, Travis thought that this was a distinct step down. He could see her now, high cheek boned and beautiful, stepping through the monsoon as if it wasn’t there. Travis felt his sneakers begin to fill with water as his mouth hung open. The rain drummed a patina; hip hop beat on the brim of his cap, and ran in little rivers to drip down into his graying sideburns. He didn’t notice.
Chen crossed the street and entered through the door of a glass-fronted building, with a concierge standing at the
front under an umbrella. Travis didn’t think as he made his way through the crowd, staying on his side of the street as if the cracked tarmac between him and his mortal enemy was an impenetrable barrier. His feet splashed, flinging water up and soaking his jeans up to the knee. Through the glass doors of the modern high rise building, he saw Chen take a left turn, and into what appeared to be a well-lit hotel bar. Through the broad high windows, Travis saw her shake out her hair and take a white towel from a red liveried bellhop. Never pausing her step, Chen dried the worst of the rain off her hair and face, and casually deposited the towel on the other end of the polished bar that ran fully three quarters of the length of the room. Travis kept pace with her, stalking her, observing with incredulity. What was she doing here? Was she here to finish what she started, put another round in him, maybe the head this time instead of the guts? Calm down, Travis. Calm down. It could be coincidence. Yeah right, and 9/11 wasn’t an inside job. There had to be a connection; the lack of police investigation, the cottonmouth traders, mysterious disappearing records. Chen. He didn’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude, they just couldn’t happen.
Chen moved to a table where a pair of white skinned men sat, drinking tall glasses of beer. Two brown bottles stood next to the glasses, which were half empty. The two men stood, but there were no handshakes or smiles between them as Chen stood by the table. Both men took their seats again, leaving Monica Chen standing there like a naughty schoolgirl before her headmaster. The older of the two men was speaking, but he was at most forty. Like Travis, black haired and speckled with grays. The man wore the demeanor of a young Clint Eastwood, though they did not share any other similarities. It was more in the way the sternness of his mouth wrought a scowl upon his face that was carved in basalt. His companion was in his late twenties, chisel jawed and sporting a buzz cut. He looked more like a marine than a... whatever the hell these guys were supposed to be. Chen spoke, with no hand gestures. Travis backed up against the wall of a branch of the Commercial Bank of Ceylon, and was rewarded with a fresh deluge of water from the high guttering. The rain, however, appeared to be blowing away to the west. The traffic began to move more easily as the storm abated, leaving behind the taste of ozone and cheap fuel. When Travis had brushed the worst of the water off his face, he saw the older man stand again. Something Chen had said had angered him, but his hatchet-wound mouth barely moved. His temper was expressed in his hands. The universal gesture for ‘forget about it’ was shown, and a couple of hard chops with his right hand into his left. Whatever Monica had said was definitely not what the man had wanted to hear. No shock there for Travis. Monica had shown herself in the past to be equally adept at pouring honey in your ears as for filling your veins with ice water. She had clearly chosen the latter path in her brief statement to the two men, and summarily turned on her heel and headed for the exit of the hotel. The older man sat back down. Travis, for his part still stood watching, still dumbstruck by Chen’s appearance, halfway round the world from where their paths had crossed before. Suddenly the realization hit him that he was standing in the open almost directly opposite the entrance to the hotel. He couldn’t back up with the bank behind him, so he slipped along the front of the building and stepped a few paces into the alleyway between it and the next property. Overhead there rang out the tang-ting ringing of the last rain on the steel fire escapes snaking up the side of the building, and the parting clouds allowed the first sun of the day to begin working on evaporating the slick from the streets, to form more rain, to begin again hampered all the way by the choking smoke of a place where half a million souls took residence.
The alleyway stank of urine—human and canine—and feces, hopefully only canine. Travis had a fist-sized space either side of his shoulders as he backed in a little further, feeling his shoes squelch with rainwater and what he hoped wasn’t diluted animal waste. Chen walked out of the open door, held open for her by the same hotel employee who’d greeted her on arrival. The Sri Lankan had put away his black umbrella now. Chen stepped three paces to the curbside and got in the back of a red painted tuk-tuk taxi. The little three wheeler bounced as the driver engaged the clutch, and the vehicle zipped off into traffic in a haze of blue smoke. Travis stood in his alleyway looking up the street at the disappearing tuk-tuk, and when he finally answered his phone, he noticed that he had missed three calls already.
“Where in the name of hell have you been?” Savannah half-screamed at him. “I’ve been out of my mind trying to get in touch with you. Did you find anything with the Shapiro brothers? I’m coming up dry here.”
Travis waited a long moment after Savannah had stopped speaking, trying to find the words. Across the street, the hatchet-faced man and his associate finished their beers, and after settling their tab, gathered their things. “I’ve just seen Monica Chen, Savannah,” he said, with no emotion in his voice. His throat felt cloying, as if he had not swallowed in a very long time. Savannah let out a sharp breath.
“Are you sure? Of course you’re sure, what in the name of magnolias was I thinking asking you that? Sorry Travis. Well, um... what do you think she wants? Oh my God, did you speak to her?” Her questions were a torrent at which Travis could do nothing but wait until they’d run themselves dry.
“No, of course I didn’t speak to her, and I don’t know why she’s here. I think I have an idea though. Our presence here has not gone unnoticed, of that we can be sure. Either we brought Chen here, or the case did—from the other side.”
“Hmm. Makes sense, Trav,” Savannah said. “If there’s anyone that we know is smart and devious enough to run a scam on the entire diamond trade here, it’s Chen. What do you want to do about her?”
“For now, nothing. She met with someone, I’m going to find out who that is, and hopefully you and I can find out what’s going on here. I have to go, see you.” Travis hung up the phone. ‘Hatchet-Face’ and ‘Buzz-Cut’ left the hotel, turned left out of the door and headed down the street. Travis sloshed through the overrunning gutter spill and hopped across the road, staying forty or fifty feet back from his marks. Something stuck at the back of his throat, like a half formed idea from his lizard-brain. Flight, threat. He shook it off, and turned up the collar of his jacket a little further.
Chapter Two
Savannah stared at her phone for a moment, questions still unspoken over the now dead line. Did that man learn nothing, despite repeated reminders to be cautious? She tossed the phone on the hotel room’s solitary table, rattling the cheap plastic. She had closed the screen door to the balcony when the rain had moved in, so now she pulled on the handle. The door slid open and allowed a trickle of water to run into the hotel room, pooling on the tile floor. Savannah stepped onto the wet balcony in her flip flops, and looked west, away from the beach. Somewhere down there, Travis was getting himself into danger, yet again. The reasonable thing for her to do would be to call Thyri, ostensibly the leader of the Alpha project, as she provided the funds. If Monica Chen was here, the investigation was over.
But what if she wasn’t? Travis had only the day before complained of the lack of progress they had made on the case, the implication being that he was bored. Travis lacked her historian’s well drilled diligence and patience, and was wont to follow hunches and distractions. Perhaps it was a peculiarity of being a male child raised on a diet of stories starring the rogue hero who breaks the rules to get the job done. It was a common problem, Savannah felt, endemic in many people. The mythology of the modern age was entirely geared toward it—the maverick cop, the pirate, the space ship captain who pushes to the limit and beyond. Travis, by any standard of logical reasoning would surely have experienced enough negative reinforcement, sometimes at the point of a gun, to have realized that forward planning and sound methodology were far more likely to yield results than running off after every wild goose. What if Travis was merely bored and jumping at shadows; and Chen was surely halfway across the world, no doubt conducting a heist or pretending to be someone else? Thyri wou
ld surely pull the plug on Travis, probably permanently. For all his myriad and evident faults, impulsiveness being perhaps the most prevalent, he was a good investigator and an even better friend. She couldn’t yank the chain on him yet, not unless she knew for certain he was wrong.
“Damn it,” she said to the city that spread out before her. There was nothing to be done about Travis until he figured things out for himself. Down on the streets the populace were resuming their daily business, shopkeepers whacked their awnings with broom handles to liberate the gathered rainwater before dodging back to avoid a soaking. Tourists appeared more cautiously than the locals, furtively glancing at the sky as if a particularly capricious god lived there, waiting to strike them down with another spell of inclement weather. From the sixth floor balcony of the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel, Savannah could see quite far, both down to the beach to her right, and over into midtown to her left. Somewhere out there was the real reason she and Travis had come to Sri Lanka, a person or group with the wherewithal to conduct a savage burn on the diamond trade and leave almost no trace that any theft had occurred. The case had provided only headaches so far, a mountain of publicly available financial data and registered accounts from the Sri Lankan chamber of commerce, and sympathy for the average lobster dipped into the pot, boiling alive.
No. More like boiling frogs, Savannah thought. Maybe we’re all just sitting in water that’s getting too hot to take, but we’re too dumb to see the danger.
Time itself was the enemy, telescoping in her perception as the rigid tedium of leafing through yet another binder of perfectly above board, no discrepancies financial filings sucked at her motivation with every passing hour. Was it the heat that was making her irritable… even a little judgmental of Travis’ mental state?
