Published by Rellihan Satterlee
3400 Harbor Avenue, Suite 418
Seattle, Washington 98126
U.S.A.
eBook design by BlueHead Publishing
Front cover Brilliant Diamond photo © George B. Diebold/CORBIS
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, groups, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Diamond Conspiracy, copyright © 2002 Pat Carlton Enterprises, LLC. The Diamond Conspiracy ebook edition, copyright © 2011 Nicolas M. Kublicki. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior permission of the author.
Published: December 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9849352-1-5
To my parents
Tadeusz and Marie
who taught me right from wrong.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAP (WEST)
MAP (EAST)
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART 1 COLOR
1 ASSIGNMENT
2 RAID
3 BILLIONAIRE
4 CASE
5 THREATS
6 DEFENDANT
7 HELICOPTER
8 KREMLIN
9 SETTLEMENT
10 DEALER
11 HISTORY
12 COMPANY
13 LINK
14 JEWELER
15 MONOPOLY
16 NATIONALIST
17 FRAME
18 APARTMENT
19 AIDE
20 FROG
21 TAKING
22 SPY
23 MEETING
PART II CLARITY
24 REVELATION
25 IMAGERY
26 LENA
27 MESSENGER
28 ALLIANCE
29 CONTRACT
30 WARNING
31 DDI
32 PATRIA
33 ESCAPE
34 TRAITOR
35 LOGIC
36 FLIGHT
37 SANCTUARY
38 VENDETTA
39 YACHT
40 CRACKDOWN
41 CRUISE
42 EXECUTIONER
43 FRIEND
44 TRANSFER
45 ORDER
46 PREPARATIONS
47 GENERAL
48 TRAINING
49 DON
50 OPERATION
PART III CUT
51 PRESIDENT
52 SEAWOLF
53 CONTACT
54 DECEPTION
55 LIFEBOAT
56 UNTOUCHABLE
57 HUNT
58 SEARCH
59 CAPTURE
60 CARDINAL
61 CARRIERS
62 HORNETS
63 INTERCEPTION
64 CONTACT
65 DESTRUCTION
PART IV CARATS
66 HOMECOMING
67 BANKER
68 YALE
69 TRUST
70 ELIMINATION
71 RESEARCH
72 DINNER
73 CONFESSION
74 EXPLANATION
75 BETRAYAL
76 ALLY
77 PONTIFEX
78 WITHDRAWAL
79 CORRUPTION
80 PROSECUTION
81 OUTRAGE
82 JUDGE
83 JUSTICE
84 ARREST
85 EVIDENCE
86 TRIAL
87 VERDICT
EPILOGUE
OTHER WORKS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal . . . Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890
15 United States Code
Sections 1 and 2, as amended
PROLOGUE
Arkansas, 1920
The United States Geological Survey team set out in August. Unrelenting heat, suffocating humidity, and deafening choruses of crickets ruled the Arkansas countryside. They traveled in a convoy of Model T Fords weighed down by camping equipment, delicate surveying tools, crates of canned food, pickaxes, shovels, and dynamite. Despite their hardy construction, the Model Ts became bogged in mosquito-infested swamps created by the torrential summer downpours. Veteran geological surveyors, they had experienced conditions far worse. Besides, they had been sent by Washington on an official mission, and Washington paid well. They pressed on.
Their efforts yielded utter disappointment. Explode and dig and sift through mounds of dirt as they might, the geologists could not locate their quarry. Hours stretched into days, days into weeks. After a month's toil under the beating summer sun, supplies dwindled to a few meager boxes. The hired hands were exhausted, covered with chigger bites, on the verge of walking off the job. The rickety cars could barely move. Morale was at a low point, the contract nearly expired. Exhausted and dejected, team leader Samuel Osage called off the expedition.
On the swampy road back to Murfreesboro, one of the Model Ts again overheated in a deep pool of mud. The team decided to let the engine cool off and broke out the last few cans of beans and chipped beef for lunch. As Osage negotiated his way through the sticky substance around the car, he misjudged the depth of the mud and lost his balance. He thrust an arm out to break his fall, but it plunged deep into the ooze. Osage fell face forward into the muck. He fought to prop himself up amid the roaring laughter of the men. After several failed attempts, he managed to stand. He shook dollops of heavy mud from his body, scooped handfuls of dark slime from his face and arms. The clay stuck to his arms and hands. But it wasn't smooth. He could feel rocks embedded in the mud scrape his fingers. He cleaned himself as best he could and looked at his filthy hands.
Suddenly, Osage went rigid.
A rough pebble was stuck between two fingers of his left hand. Still partially caked with mud, it stood out to Osage's trained eye. He picked it from his fingers, carefully wiped it on the only remaining clean part of his shirt, and lifted it to the burning sun between two grimy fingers. The translucent pebble glowed in the sun. Osage's dirty face creased into a wide grin. In his fingers was the object of their quest.
A diamond.
Washington wasted no time. Within two months of the team's report, the USGS constructed a mine. It immediately produced a large number of carats. Washington directed Osage and his fellow geologists to determine the exact extent of the diamondiferous deposits. Their findings surpassed Usage's wildest expectations. What originally had been thought a remote deposit was an underground ocean of diamonds.
Despite the fact Washington kept the operation heavily under wraps, news of the surprising discovery managed to find its way to South Africa, where the domestic discovery of vast diamond deposits had been big news for forty years. News of the Arkansas depo
sits sounded an ominous tone to South Africa's Waterboer Mines Limited.
Since the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in South Africa's Orange Free State in 1871, South African diamond miners had used every conceivable strategy to consolidate the legion ad hoc diamond mines into a single efficient operation. After years of cutthroat tactics, shady deals, and backroom politics, Waterboer Mines Limited had emerged the victor. Waterboer controlled diamond production in South Africa, then on a global scale. The Arkansas discovery spelled disaster for the Waterboer monopoly. An immense diamond deposit outside its control would send prices plummeting. Waterboer had to act. Fast.
Head of the world's largest monopoly, Cecil R. Slythe was a force. The diamond monopoly brought wealth. Wealth brought influence. Influence brought power. In South Africa and Europe. In America as well. Particularly in Arkansas.
Cecil R. Slythe arrived in Washington in the autumn of 1920. Within one hour of his meeting with his clique of financial and political power brokers in the nation's capital, Osage and his team were split up and sent on urgent expeditions in faraway lands. The Murfreesboro diamond mine was fenced in, boarded up, and shut down. The Arkansas diamond miners were transferred to high-paying jobs in different parts of the country. Journalists and politicians were silenced. The USGS report was sealed in a vault in the basement of a nameless edifice in Washington, never again to see the light of day.
Upon his return to his native Arkansas in 1932 from an unusually perilous emerald expedition in Colombia, Osage decided to pay a visit to what he still thought of as his Arkansas mine. Not because of financial interest—he had received no stake in the government mine—but out of professional, nearly paternal interest.
Where hundreds of carats of diamonds had been excavated daily at the time of his departure now stood creaking wooden boards and rusting machinery. Why? He himself had plotted the vast diamond deposits, millions of carats. The mine could not possibly have exhausted the deposits. So why was it closed?
He decided to investigate.
He started in the most logical place, the Washington headquarters of the USGS. The official response astounded him. They were sorry, but they had no records of any diamond deposits in Arkansas. They vaguely remembered a diamond mine in Arkansas, but it had been shut down twelve years ago. He knew it had been shut down, but why? No one would give him a straight answer. Befuddled, Osage traveled to Arkansas and contacted state and local authorities. They, too, evaded his questions and pleaded ignorance. Back in Washington he tried to meet with the members of Congress who oversaw the USGS. None had time to speak with him. Finally, he decided to speak with members of his original geology team, the men who had struggled through the mud with him. He had lost track of them over the years, while each went from dig to dig in often remote locations. They would know.
Not one was alive. Each had perished under mysterious circumstances during faraway expeditions.
Anguished, Osage tried to convince himself his colleagues had died accidentally. He could not. He tried to believe the mine had depleted the diamond deposits, but could not. He tried to forget about the mine altogether, but the diamonds haunted him. There had to be an explanation.
Finally, Osage resigned himself to the only option that remained. He contacted the press. In the midst of the greatest depression the country had ever experienced, news of diamond deposits in Arkansas was bound to constitute front page material. One by one, large, then medium, then small newspapers brushed him off as a senile lunatic. But Osage was a tenacious old bird. His resolve strengthened, he made it his personal mission to contact each newspaper in the country. After several weeks, when it appeared no journalist would speak with him, a young rookie reporter from a low circulation Little Rock rag agreed to listen to his story the very same day. Osage set course for Little Rock, a hundred miles away, in his battered black Model A Ford.
Roads in 1932 Arkansas were far from safe. Potholes, mud, and rocks conspired to destroy automobiles unfortunate enough to attempt the dirt paths that masqueraded as roads. At thirty miles per hour on the rough path, the Model A's rattling frame shook Osage to near numbness. He began to think the car might fall apart.
The sun had begun its dip below the horizon, and Little Rock was still over forty miles away. If he didn't make it before dark, he'd have to cut his speed by half and risk losing his opportunity—his only opportunity, he reminded himself—to tell his story to someone who would actually listen.
Between his concentration on the road and the flurry of thoughts in his mind, Osage had little attention left for the world around him, or behind him. Muted by the roar from Osage's shorn muffler and hidden from view by a missing rearview mirror, a car approached. Also a Model A, it was very different from Osage's. Although the two cars shared body style, even color, the car behind hid a massive Duesenberg eight-cylinder engine that drove its wheels far faster than Osage's Ford engine. So fast, in fact, it was not until the car was twenty or thirty feet from Osage's rear bumper that he noticed its square radiator and round headlights in his side mirror.
Where had this maniac come from? The driver wanted to pass. Disadvantaged in the horsepower department, Osage eased back on the accelerator. As the Model A slowed, he edged toward the right side of the dirt road to let the crazed driver pass.
Instead of unleashing the “Duesie” engine, the driver inched forward, matched speeds with Osage. Thinking the driver lacked sufficient width to pass, yet careful not to fall into the ditch that paralleled the road, Osage stared ahead, gestured for the driver to pass.
The driver continued matching speeds with Osage, inches from his door. Concluding the driver lacked the power to pass, Osage slowed further. Still, the car did not pass.
Genuinely angered, Osage turned to glare at the driver. Before he could discern the man's face, he felt a sharp pain in his head. And everything went black.
Because of the execrable conditions of the country roads, it did not strike local residents or police as strange when Osage's Model A was found burned to the ground on the side of the road, its front end wrapped around a large tree trunk. Sad, perhaps. Certainly not strange. Without even a glance at the body, the local coroner assumed the driver had perished as a result of the accident and so avoided the hassle of an autopsy. Had he performed his duty, the coroner would have discovered that Samuel Osage had been killed by a bullet fired at close range. Further inquiry would have revealed the bullet was manufactured exclusively for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Even further inquiry would have revealed that a rookie reporter had met an identical fate on his way to Little Rock. Assiduous inquiry would have revealed that not all of Osage's Arkansas diamond surveys were locked away in a vault in Washington.
“Important facts to know about buying a diamond are the 4Cs: Cut, Color, Clarity, and Carat-weight. These are the characteristics that determine the quality and value of a diamond.”
-“Shadows of Love,” the diamond engagement ring pamphlet.
Jewelers of America, Inc.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Diamonds are beauty.”
-Waterboer Mines, Ltd. slogan
1 ASSIGNMENT
2003
United States Department of Justice (DO])
Robert F. Kennedy Main Justice Building
Washington, D. C.
10:20 A.M.
Patrick Carlton rushed into Justice Department headquarters through the main entrance of the marble-and-granite federal fortress, beneath an immense American flag that waved ponderously in the cold wind. A late night's work and rush-hour gridlock had conspired to make him late for work. Again. He slid his identification card into the electronic turnstile, waved to the guard pulling morning duty, and hurried past the seal of the fabled agency, the largest law firm in the world.
Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur was its motto.
He who seeks to rule follows justice.
Carlton shunned the slow elevators, bolted up the graceful staircase to the third floor. The tap-tap of
his cowboy boots reverberated through the marble corridors as he strode past the offices that lined interminable hallways. Despite his exhaustion, a smile tugged at the corners of his eyes as he approached his office. United States v. Global Steel was Carlton's first serious assignment after three grueling years of paying dues in the DOJ trenches. It was an important case because of its substance and because it was his case. He was lead counsel. He made the strategic decisions. He called the shots.
One of the new lawyers straight out of law school walked toward him down the hall. He had not formally met her yet. She was very attractive, but to entertain romantic thoughts, far less act upon them, regarding subordinates at DOJ was more than against policy; it was punishable by immediate termination. Carlton was about to wish her a polite good morning when he noticed an expression of anxiety on her face, her green-eyed gaze darting toward his office. He stopped, stared at his office door in confusion as she walked past, trailing a wisp of Calandre perfume.
The reason for her grimace was clear as soon as he opened the door. Harry Jarvik, director of the Antitrust Division's Economic Litigation Section was seated in Carlton's chair, feet propped on the desk.
“Well, well. Good morning, Carlton. Or should I say good afternoon?” He glanced at his pocket watch, nodded theatrically. “How good of you to join us. Is this what they taught you in that white-shoe law firm of yours?”
Jarvik was short in stature and temper, a man who made himself appear taller by cutting others down. The staff of the Antitrust Division referred to him as Stalin. A corpulent man, his thick mustache and piercing gaze gave him a sinister look. He looked over Carlton head to toe with beady eyes, his gaze lingering on Carlton's trademark spit-shined cowboy boots.
“Good morning, sir,” Carlton said. “There is a reason. I worked very late on Global Steel last ni—”
“Of course, of course. Tomorrow another excuse.” He stood, all five-feet-four bristling. “Do I really look that stupid?”
Patrick Carlton 01 - The Diamond Conspiracy Page 1
