by Alex Archer
The pharma camp came into view and she stopped, her thoughts redirected to Moons and Edgar. Had they pushed Dillon too far? Had he done something to them? She had a feeling in her gut that there was a good chance the pair had been killed. The rain was coming steady now. There were two sentries both outside the barrier, one definitely familiar—Hammond. He sneered when she brazenly approached him.
“You should be dead,” he said. “I’d left you for dead.”
A snappy reply hung on the end of her tongue. She ignored it and said, “I want to see Arthur Dillon.”
“I suppose you do.”
Her skin crawled the way he studied her. It felt like insects scampering over every inch of her. “It’s about Becca Mooney and—”
“The troublemakers? They’re with Mr. Dillon.”
So they were alive.
“Hammond, I said I want to see Arthur—”
Hammond had his finger on the trigger; the gun was still tucked in his waistband. Annja saw his eyes change, the pupils shrinking as the gun came up. She didn’t know if he was going to shoot her or simply threaten her. The sword was instantly in her hand and she brought it around at waist level.
“Where the hell did that—”
She struck the gun the moment it went off, his shot going wild and then the gun flying. She’d sliced his hand in the process, showing him less concern than she had the jaguar.
“Mitch!” Hammond shouted. “Mitch!”
The other sentry was already running toward her, firing as he came, striking her in the hip. Annja slipped behind Hammond, putting him between her and the gunman.
Hammond hollered and jumped aside. “Mitch! Watch where you’re aiming!”
Despite the threat of Annja’s sword Hammond came at her with a roundhouse kick, the steel toe of his boot connecting with her wrist and loosening her grip. The sword came out of her hand.
“Hands up! High!” This came from the other sentry. “Now or I’ll blow your brains out!”
Annja held her hands up.
Hammond backed up a few steps, clearly wary of her. He looked at the ground. “Where’s the sword?”
“What sword?” Annja’s hip was coated with blood, the bullet evidently hitting a big vein. She felt blood flowing down her leg. Maybe it was a worse hit than she’d first thought. “I don’t see a—”
Her knees buckled and Hammond retrieved his gun before scooping her up. “Mitch, she had a sword. You find it, and you get a hold of Mr. Dillon. Then you meet me inside.”
Annja could have fought him—she told herself she could have, but her muscles protested too much. This was her fault, coming here already spent, not taking the best tactical approach and blatantly strolling up to the camp so sure of herself. Arrogant, she’d been foolishly arrogant. If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have been sharper, and she wouldn’t be carried into a tent and laid on a cot.
“Mitch!” Hammond bellowed.
She took stock of her surroundings. She was in the second of the medium-sized tents, the one she hadn’t looked in the other night. There were two cots, an assortment of crates, two-way radio, boxes of cartridges and a case of chocolate bars. She couldn’t see beyond that; Hammond’s broad frame blocked her view. She struggled to sit up, but his beefy hands held her shoulders down.
“Mitch!” he bellowed again. A shadow loomed in the doorway.
“No machete. Couldn’t find it.”
“It wasn’t a machete. It was a big ass sword,” Hammond reminded him.
“Fine. No sword. I think you were imagining things. Too much whiskey last night? Dillon’s on the radio. He’s staying down in the mine. Says to patch her up if you can. He wants to talk to her. And if you can’t patch her up—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Drop her down the hole or feed her to the caimans.”
The image of the monstrous caiman from Annja’s dream swam through her memory.
“Listen, Mitch. Get that first aid kit, the big one, and find me...uh, the scope goggles. There’s some tweezers and razor blades. Bring me those, too.” Hammond looked at her. “I’d rather you just die and I dump you in the river. Some satisfaction in feeding caiman, but the boss says otherwise, for now.”
Mitch returned.
“You hold her.” Hammond patted her front pockets and looked inside. “Batteries? A crap load of batteries. What do you need those for?” He dumped them and pulled down her jeans. “Oh, that don’t look good. You’re watching me, right, Mitch? I’ll give this a go, but I’m thinking she’s caiman bait. Looks like you nicked her superficial femoral. She dies, I’m telling the boss on you.”
So he had some medical training to throw out a term like superficial femoral. Annja ground her teeth together as she felt him slice into her with a razor blade. Then he poked around with tweezers. It hurt worse than getting shot. He’d not done anything to first clean the wound.
“Tough cookie,” Mitch muttered under his breath. “She hasn’t hollered yet.”
Hammond fumbled for something in the first aid kit, all the while keeping pressure on her wound. Agony. Annja settled on that word. She was in agony. Then she felt a needle. He was suturing her vein, applying more pressure.
“It’s holding.” Hammond waited and then eased up on the pressure. “Had to do this outside of Kabul a couple of times.” Next he was stitching her up. “This could work. Might hold, might not.”
He poured something on her that stung. A few seconds later, he patted it dry and put a bandage on her, tugged her jeans back up. “I always cleaned the wounds there first, though. She might have some infection in there.” He stood. “Done. She probably ought to lie there awhile before we take her to Dillon. Don’t need to rip my stitches.”
“Should you give her something? You know, for pain?”
Annja saw Hammond’s smile. “Nah. I had a sergeant once who told me pain lets you know you’re still kicking. You sit with her. I’m going back on patrol. And I’m going to find me that damn sword. I’ll find it, and I’m going to keep it.”
Annja intended to wait for an opening, overpower her guard and confront Dillon. Instead, she woke up some hours later when Mitch tugged her to her feet.
“Boss is taking a break. Says he wants to see you now.”
In a way, Annja was getting what she wanted—an audience with Arthur Dillon. She had hoped it would have been under different circumstances.
Chapter 28
At the bottom of the rope ladder, Mitch tied her hands together with a thin cord. She saw fresh wildflowers on the oldest grave, in place of the wilted ones she’d noticed before. Of the three bodies, one had meant something to somebody at the camp. Three buckets were filled to the brim with emerald chunks. No one else was in the chamber, but she heard music and the constant clanking coming from the corridor. Mitch had a gun to her back and pushed her forward. She was still sore, but it wasn’t terrible. She healed quickly, and this time was no exception.
The mine was better lit than on her previous foray. Four large battery-powered lanterns in this chamber, and as she walked by the light made her shadow dance on the opposite wall. More light came from the corridor ahead.
She could take her escort, whirl and grab the gun and turn it on him. She wouldn’t even need the sword. But she decided to play along. She wanted to find Moons and Edgar. Besides, she wanted to talk to Dillon.
As she was prodded along, Annja discovered that Dillon was the source of the music. He was singing as he worked the pick against the wall. Three other miners worked farther down. Dillon had a good voice, but the words sounded haunted in the close confines of the tunnel. The tink-tink-tink oddly syncopated accompaniment.
She’d heard it before, an old Swedish hymn that mentioned the pearl of great price.
He finished and smiled sadly at her. “In a church in Melbourne, there
is a remarkable stained-glass window depicting Jesus and the parable of the pearl.” Dillon’s eyes took on a rheumy look, as if he was lost in a memory. “Nancy and I were vacationing in the city. Nancy was my wife for eighteen years. She was devout and insisted on attending church, that one because of its windows. Incidentally, that day, the pastor included that verse in his sermon. Do you know the one?”
Annja didn’t answer.
The silence seemed to not sit well with Dillon. “I’ve memorized the lines,” he said, and quoted them to her. “In that time, pearls had a much greater value than today, but it means—”
“I know what it means. It illustrates the value of finding your way to the kingdom of heaven, and that the merchant gave up everything to get there, to be closer to God and to be saved.”
“If you believe in God and that sort of thing, Miss Creed. If God and heaven exist, I suspect I’ll see neither, given the things I’ve done in my life, especially recently. No matter, I have found my pearl of great price here in the Amazon. It is right here, and it is an emerald. My deal of a lifetime so to speak.” Dillon tapped the wall with the vein he’d been mining.
“This belongs to Brazil. You’re poaching.”
“Do you know much about gemstones, Miss Creed?” He waited for an answer. “No? I didn’t either initially, but my wife knew a lot, and through our years together she shared her knowledge. I used to call her my magpie because she adored shiny baubles. Every birthday, anniversary, was a reason to add another piece of jewelry to her cabinet. In the lean years, it was small things.” Again Annja saw Dillon become lost in a memory, but the wistfulness left and his eyes took on a bitter shine. “Let me explain then why this is my pearl. The clarity of the stones in this vein is amazing, the color intense. But what makes this find so staggering is the size of the pieces we’re pulling from these walls.”
He reached into the bucket and held one up, shining the light from his helmet so she could get a better look. It was thick, bright and beautiful.
“If a one-carat stone is of such a quality that it sells for six thousand, some would think that a five-carat stone would sell for thirty thousand...five times the initial amount, right? No. The larger stone is far rarer, and it would instead be worth ninety thousand. The stones we are pulling, Miss Creed, a few of them are five carats. Only a few. Ten carats, twenty carats, thirty...most of them fall into that range.”
Annja looked past him and watched the men carefully chipping away, putting emerald chunks in their bucket. There was more clanking coming from where the tunnel narrowed and curved. How many men did he have working down here?
“The largest jeweler-cut emerald that I know of is called the Mogul, at two hundred and seventeen carats. In the Viennese Treasury sits a vase carved from a single emerald, that’s more than two thousand carats. An uncut crystal from Colombia sits at nearly fourteen hundred carats. And most impressive is the Bahia emerald, an eight-hundred-and-forty-pound cluster. There’s more.”
She noticed that his voice grew louder, the words carefully spaced out as if he placed importance on each syllable and wanted her to miss nothing.
“Much more, Miss Creed.”
“I get it,” Annja said flatly. “You’re getting stinking rich.”
“Our first shipment brought us forty million.” Dillon had a smug look on his face. “Forty million.”
Annja knew he wanted her to acknowledge his prowess. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
“I have three more shipments of equal size ready to go. Packed. Waiting. And I’ll have more and more after that, the good lord willing as they say, and the Amazon doesn’t rise and drown us. Though you have thrown an unfortunate wrinkle into our work. You’ve made things less certain.”
Mitch pushed the gun against her back. “Yeah, now we’re working fast. Real fast, since we don’t know how much longer we’re going to have this place.”
Dillon set his pick down. “Who have you told, Miss Creed?”
Annja mulled her answer. If she said no one, they wouldn’t need her alive, or need Moons or Edgar. He probably intended to kill her anyway, as much as he’d shown her about his illicit operation. “What makes you think I even knew about this mine?”
“You didn’t notice the security cameras, Miss Creed? I trust my men, I really do. But...one can never be sure with all these emeralds. I saw you on the footage, snooping down here, creeping like some spy. I know the lighting isn’t the best, but you’re the only blue woman I’ve seen since setting up my camp. There’s no mistaking it. You were here yesterday.”
She hoped Roux had gotten through to someone on the satellite phone, and that the authorities were indeed sending someone out here. Time to change the subject. “Becca Mooney and her friend Edgar. Are they here?”
Dillon wanted to talk about emeralds. “I have a fellow in Belém, my partner, who is custom-cutting some of the stones for us. We’re using my company to get the emeralds out, his connections to sell everything. He is passionate about his art.”
Annja at least understood that part. She was passionate about staying alive.
“Let me show you one of his finished pieces.”
“Is this one of those before-I-kill-you moments?” Annja had held her tongue long enough. “Because that is what you’re going to do with me.”
He ignored her and reached into the collar of his shirt, tugging up a leather cord. Dangling from it a woman’s gold ring with a large emerald anchored into a simple setting. “I had him make this, a keepsake for me, something I would have given to Nancy. I thought I should have something both of this place and to remind me of her. It will be the only emerald I intend to keep, actually, a ten-carat fancy cut. The rest of this...I am trading for money.” The light played along the ring and set dizzying spots of green reflecting like a prism. “My pearl of great price, Miss Creed, is not just this emerald keepsake, but this entire emerald mine.”
“And what great price are Becca and Edgar paying?”
Dillon pointedly dismissed her. “The emeralds in this vein, in all the veins we’ve mined down here, are special. Their color and clarity certainly, but it goes beyond that. And it took my partner in the city to point it out. Come, let me show you more. Mitch, if you’ll bring her along?”
Dillon turned sideways to squeeze past his men. When he reached the narrowest part he slowly forced his way through.
Annja felt the sword hovering, knew she could use it to cut the cord that tied her wrists. This could be a good place to strike, where it was so narrow that only one man could get to her from either side. Those odds would be in her favor. She could cut down as many as she had to here. Yet she waited, curious. She needed to find Moons and Edgar.
“How did you find this place?” she asked. “I suspect you weren’t looking for it.”
Dillon motioned for Annja to come forward through the narrow passage. “It was an accident. My wife, Nancy, found it, actually. We were clearing some scrub to put up a tent and the ground gave way beneath her.”
“The grave with the flowers.” Annja walked into a large chamber, the floor of which sloped down.
“Yes. We thought she might survive the fall. She lived nearly an entire day afterward. Hammond was a medic, and took good care of her. But there was internal bleeding.”
“You could have called a helicopter, gotten her to a hospital.”
“It wouldn’t have come in time. The cost you pay for working in such a remote place.”
“A high cost for your ‘pearl of great price,’” Annja said. Despite the poor light she saw Dillon’s angry expression.
“This way.”
Mitch nudged her.
The tinking sound was loud now and there was more light ahead, around an outcropping. On the other side, the chamber stretched away into darkness. But the part she could see—illuminated by three more batt
ery-powered lanterns and the helmet lights of the miners—was staggering.
The very large emeralds Dillon had mentioned...the piece they were carefully working their way around well might exceed any he’d described.
“My pearl of a very, very great price,” he said proudly.
Picking at the wall were five of his men in the customary coveralls and with hard hats. Working with them was Moons and Edgar. A sixth henchman had a gun pointed at the couple.
“This pearl is priceless,” he said. “This emerald is like no other in all the world.”
Chapter 29
“Can you possibly imagine what an emerald weighing hundreds of pounds would be worth, Miss Creed?” He let the thought hang for a moment. “My men and I will never want for anything. I will set them up for the rest of their lives. Half divided by them, half for me and my partner. All that money—”
She thought the faraway look in his eye was like a man gazing on his beloved. She shuddered.
“You’ll never get a stone that big out of here.” She’d remembered the size of the shipping crates.
“We just have to get it up top, Miss Creed. Two days ago I took pictures and my partner has sent them on to our bidders, and terms of the sale require the buyer to come get this monster. Men with the money to buy this...they have the resources to come in here, whether they have to grease the government’s sweaty palms or use other means. We’ve teased our bidders with these photos. We’ve had on nibble as high as four billion. So many zeroes.” The faraway look intensified. “Of course, selling this will be the last thing we do before we pull up stakes.”
