Patrick Carlton 01 - The Diamond Conspiracy

by Nicolas Kublicki

  Only a few more hours remained until he had to brief Forbes, and he had yet to make heads or tails of the data. The problem was clear: the data didn’t make sense. He had combed through both official Russian government diamond production figures and the unofficial figures supplied by operatives inside the Russian Komdragmet agency, the SVR/FSB, and the mines themselves. No matter how he chopped up the figures, they didn’t match.

  “Again.” He sighed, wondering what he was missing. He forced himself to churn through the facts yet another time. The only piece of information he hadn’t analyzed was the satellite imagery of the fire at Mirny. But Jerry Delpin in DST had already reviewed the imagery. The senior analyst’s report concluded the fire had been caused by a natural gas explosion. Not unusual in a region so cold that frozen pipes often burst like brittle glass. Delpin was an old hand at satellite imagery. If he said it was a natural gas fire, it was. Still, the satellite imagery was the only piece of data he hadn’t reviewed. Might as well take a peek.

  His back cracked loudly as he rose, stretched, then walked down several hallways to a brushed aluminum elevator. The sterile fluorescent lights overhead stung his bloodshot eyes. The elevator opened on the second floor. A thin security guard stood at attention next to an armored glass door.

  “Evening, Tom.”

  “Evening, Roger.” Another yawn as he inserted his digitally imprinted identification card into a slot next to the armored glass double doors that read IMAGERY in white letters. A light on the door shifted from red to green.

  “Go ahead.”

  Pink waited for the first glass door to close, punched his personal security code onto a small keypad. The second door whirred open. The technology at the Agency never ceased to amaze him. He thought of his law school classmates. They might get bigger paychecks, but their offices weren’t this cool. Polished mahogany conference rooms were their world. Digitally encoded armored offices were his. For the most part, their patriotism and interest in the real world ended where high salaries and perks lavished by real estate development, securities trading, or tort litigation began.

  He continued down the hall to an unmarked door and knocked.

  A portly, raven-haired woman in her late thirties opened the door. She stared at Pink, smacked her lips, chewed a wad of gum loudly. In contrast to Pink, she was very awake, on that strange high that comes from working the night shift.

  “Hi, Elaine.”

  Elaine smiled for the first time that night. “Well, hello there, Mr. Bond.”

  Elaine Franklin’s reputation was legendary in the DI and DST. Throughout the entire Agency, truth be told. People called her the Witch. Physically, Elaine was homely. Her hair was greasy, unkempt. She bore a permanent scowl, wore a white lab smock complete with pocket protector and food stains. Walked around in little squeaks of rubber-soled shoes. In contrast to her relationship with other members of the Analysis staff, Elaine got along with Tom swimmingly. Whereas others treated her with condescension, Pink treated her like the consummate professional she was. In turn, Elaine respected Pink. This, in addition to their mutual veneration of ’60s spy movies, had led them to become friends.

  Pink rubbed his eyes. They burned with dehydration. He would have given his right arm for a drop of Visine. “Listen, Elaine,” he raised his hand, palm forward. “I know Jerry Delpin already ran the imagery on the Mirny fire, but I need to do it all over again.”

  “Delpin screwed the pooch?” Her dislike of Delpin was no secret.

  “That’s what I need to find out.”

  For anyone but Pink, Elaine would have been angered by having to perform the same job twice. “Let’s try it again, then.”

  “You’re a Godsend, Elaine.” He gave her a wide grin.

  “One of my many charms.” She locked her office door and led the way down the hail to a room aglow with a Christmas tree of red and green LED lights, red digital numerical readouts, and green liquid crystal displays. The collection of electronic equipment in the room had always fascinated Pink. Millions of dollars of the most sophisticated video equipment crammed into a room the size of a large elevator. Ventilators whirred silently in their continuous efforts to cool the massive machines, each one years ahead of the retail market, each one classified.

  “If only we could market this stuff,” said Pink. “Bye, bye Sony.”

  Silently, Elaine dialed up the Mirny selection on an ordinary-looking keyboard. It was connected to one of the Company’s seven supercomputer servers, nicknamed the Seven Dwarfs. A mechanical arm in an adjacent sterile room removed an encrypted high-definition digital disk from a series of racks on the wail, inserted it silently into a playback mechanism. She played with the controls of her video equipment, which had about as much in common with a regular DVD player as a Cray supercomputer had with a Nintendo videogame player. She turned on a flat screen video monitor. Its pixels of high definition resolution came to life in a white haze. Pink waited patiently, gazed in wonder at the machinery around him. The video player buzzed with a faint electronic hiss.

  Elaine reached into her mouth, stretched her gum until it sagged. This drove most people nuts.

  Pink found it amusing. “One day you’re going to gum up the works.”

  She snorted. “Maybe then people will notice the importance of my work.”

  “I never questioned it.”

  “I know. Okay. Here it is.” She punched a switch, extinguished the overhead halogen lights with a quick turn of a rheostat, and fiddled with the brightness and contrast sensors. “From the beginning?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Pink replied.

  “I don’t mind. I’ve never seen it.”

  “What do you mean? You didn’t watch it with Delpin?”

  “Negative. He wanted to do it alone.”

  “Strange. But whatever, let’s roll.”

  A digital clock at the bottom of the monitor displayed hours, minutes, seconds, and tenths of seconds. Tenths of seconds flickered forward with incredible speed and gave the impression of fast motion even though the image moved at slow speed. The monitor reproduced images in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. As a result, the screen was not completely black. It glowed in colors that represented various intensities of heat. White was the hottest. Then came yellows, oranges, reds, greens, blues, and purples that finally blended into black. At present, the screen showed a few interspersed red dots encircled with green against an almost black background.

  Pink turned to Elaine. “Barrack lights?”

  “You’re a natural, Tom.”

  “Can you freeze it, please? Turn up the lights a bit? I need to look at this map here.”

  He shuffled through Delpin’s thin report, now crumpled, found a detailed map of the Mirny diamond processing center. He shifted back and forth from the map to the screen until he determined that the blotches of red and green were in fact night illumination lamps in the compound.

  “Thanks. Please continue.”

  The digital clock came back to life. A pair of amoeba-like purple shapes moved across the screen, each preceded by a dark green blob. “What’s that?” Pink exclaimed.

  “Didn’t Delpin mention it in his report?”

  Pink shook his head. “What are they?”

  “There are two of them. They’re moving at the same speed, far too fast to be people. My guess would be airplanes.”

  “But there’s no engine heat signature. Unless...What about those green blobs?” He pointed to the front of each fuzzy purple shape.

  “Not hot enough to be engines. Pilots more likely.”

  “Pilots but no engines?”

  “Gliders.” They said in unison.

  “Gliders? In the middle of the night? In Siberia? Over Russia’s main diamond processing center?”

  “Delpin screwed the pooch.”

  “Killed and buried Lassie is more like it.” Pink scribbled furiously on the pages of Delpin’s report. “Keep going.”

  They watched intently as the
purple blobs moved across the screen directly over and past the Mirny processing center.

  Suddenly, the screen exploded with white light.

  Pink jerked his head back in surprise. “What the heck was that?”

  “Looks like fire.” They watched the screen for several moments before Elaine broke the silence. “But it’s strange, you know.”

  “No kidding, strange.”

  “No. I mean, it doesn’t have a specific geographic locus of origination.”

  “And in the Queen’s English, that would mean...”

  Elaine reversed the DVD, advanced it frame by frame to the point immediately between darkness and the flash of light.

  “See? The area”—she referenced the entire screen with a circular motion of her finger—”goes directly from black to white. Very cold to very hot. There’s no progressive shift. The contrast is almost total.”

  “So?”

  “So. A fire has to start somewhere, right? This,” she pointed at the proto-white image that trembled on the screen, “looks like a simultaneous explosion throughout the entire compound.”

  “Gotcha. What would cause the entire compound to explode instantaneously in sub-zero temperature?”

  “I have no idea. But it’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill fire or gas explosion, that’s for sure.”

  He scribbled again on the report. “Better move on.”

  Pink and Elaine stood in the cramped room and watched the satellite images in real time. The edges of the compound flickered as outer buildings burned and crumbled. The intensity of light did not waver. Over several minutes, it spread outward in a narrow strip toward the north. The progression of the strip continued in a straight northern line and ended several minutes later. After approximately one minute, a bright green glow appeared at the end of the strip and traveled east from the blaze, much faster than the strip had moved. Bright green blobs approached the southern end of the compound, stopped at the outer edge of the fire.

  “Emergency vehicles, you think? Fire trucks? Ambulances?” Pink inquired.

  Elaine squinted. “Probably,” she finally agreed, her gaze riveted to the screen. “Except maybe for this one.” She pointed at the blob that moved east, away from the compound.

  “Not an emergency vehicle?”

  “We didn’t see it get there, did we? It just appeared and left. By itself, not a big problem. But all of the other emergency vehicles came from the opposite direction. Here.” She pointed to the tip of the screen.

  Pink screwed his lips tight and gazed at Elaine. “Why would emergency vehicles move away from the compound?”

  “Exactly.”

  “People trying to escape?”

  “Maybe. Maybe they found a jeep or something and took off.”

  “But it can’t be. Company sources say no one escaped. The entire garrison died in the blaze. That’s why they—and we— couldn’t figure out how this thing happened. They didn’t have anyone to interview after the fire.”

  “Well, someone was wrong then,” Elaine said. “Someone did escape.”

  “Or,” Pink said, “someone was right and no member of the garrison was left alive. Why wouldn’t a soldier from the garrison want to tell his superiors about the fire? It doesn’t make sense, right?”

  “Right,” Elaine assented.

  “So that person wasn’t a member of the garrison.”

  “I’d follow up on it for your report to Malcolm.”

  “I will.” He stared at his watch. 3:25 A.M. “If I don’t die of exhaustion first. Thanks for your help, Elaine.”

  26 LENA

  Golden Ring Hotel

  Moscow

  7:01 P.M.

  Piet Slythe sat on the edge of his bed in the ornate Grand Palace suite of the newly completed Golden Ring Hotel. It had been built by the presidential office that oversaw the billions of dollars of government housing for high-ranking civil servants, diplomats, and foreign dignitaries. Not to mention Russian mafiya dons. The last thing Moscow needed was another five-star hotel. But the Kremlin real estate office knew it could steer international delegations there and make a killing. In U.S. dollars.

  He had arrived a day early to adjust to local time so he could perform at his peak during his negotiations with the Russian president the following day.

  Gilded bed posts supported a flowing baldachino. Swaths of white silk and gold brocade covered the walls. Slythe made his way to a marble bathroom with ornate golden faucets and mirrors, turned on the shower, and enjoyed the spray of hot water against his body. He smiled. Tomorrow he would bring Orlov to his knees.

  Almost more so than during the Cold War, Russia was in desperate need of hard currency. Despite Orlov’s reforms, the ruble was still perilously low, the state coffers nearly empty due to Orlov’s assiduous payment of Russia’s foreign debt to boost the country’s credit rating. Orlov needed every imaginable source of hard currency to replenish the government’s coffers if he was to prevent communist and nationalist crazies like Molotok and his Russkost from taking over. Orlov had no leverage. Slythe and Waterboer held all the cards. Waterboer would dictate its price. His smile grew wider. Once again he would prevent outsiders from harming the Slythe family’s diamond empire.

  He stepped out of the shower, examined his svelte muscular body in the gilded mirror. He found himself quite attractive. Except for his gray hair, he could pass for a man fifteen years his junior. He toweled himself dry and walked through the bedroom to the ornate living room. He removed a large glass vial of cocaine from his attaché case.

  Possession of the drug would earn Slythe ten to twenty years in a drab and merciless Moscow penitentiary—if he was convicted. But Waterboer Mines Limited and Slythe flew in circles far above the Rule of Law. Not for Slythe commercial air travel. Not for him the delays of security desks and baggage handling. Not for him the annoying customs queue. Not for him the taxi queue. Private hangar, customs a mere formality, Mercedes limousine with Moscow Militia escort. Presidential suite. Clearly no risk of criminal prosecution for something as personal as possession.

  Slythe poured some cocaine onto a small glass plate, carved it into two lines with a platinum cutter. He held a matching platinum tube between his manicured fingers, leaned toward the plate, and snorted deeply. He held his head back and sniffed, eyes wide open.

  “Can I have some?” asked a woman with a pronounced Russian accent. She stood in the shadows, invisible.

  Slythe was startled. “Who’s there?” he demanded, searching the room. He saw her. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  “Man with strange eyes opened door.” She spoke softly. “I am Lena. I was sent to room by...friend. To be sure you are happy with room.”

  Slowly, the voice moved into the light. The woman was stunning, not more than twenty. A girl, really. She stared at Slythe, smiling with large doe-like brown eyes, her long lashes fluttering playfully. Her innocent face was accentuated by high cheekbones, giving her the look of a grown-up doll. An angular chin framed a set of full lips painted hot pink, held in a sultry pout.

  Recovering from his shock, Slythe’s stare moved down her body. She was dressed in a jet black bodysuit, seemingly sprayed on by a master airbrush artist, that left nothing to the imagination. Lena was tall, with long, graceful legs. Slythe followed their flowing lines lecherously from her high platform shoes to her small round rump. She stood on one leg, bent the other backward to prop herself up against the marble wall. The black jumpsuit was interrupted only by a gold chain that rested in an inviting diagonal on the soft curves of her hips.

  She reached downward with long fingers and removed the bodysuit in a single movement. Firm breasts bounced and jutted slightly upward, capped with erect nipples. She was as slim as a model, her belly button pierced with a diamond belly button ring. She bit a long pink fingernail playfully. Slythe could barely tell whether she was a natural brunette.

  “You like?” She turned around, tilted her head forward, flipped it backward, a
nd turned only her head toward Slythe, smiling with a mischievous grin. Her long brown hair shimmered down her graceful back and stopped short of a small Imperial Russian double-headed eagle tattooed above her round backside. “Da?”

  “I do. Da.” He sat down on the sofa, held out the platinum tube.

  “Da.”

  Lena had been using coke for two years, a big step up from her earlier days as an impoverished teenager in her depressed native town near Archangelsk in northern Russia. In those days she had sniffed gasoline.

  She snorted deeply, amazed at the purity of the drug. “Ochen harasho.” She grinned, reached into Slythe’s lap, removed his bath towel, and slid to her knees. Rich western businessmen were usually fat and ugly. This one could be a movie star. She looked up at him, smiled, for once not totally repulsed by performing her hired services.

  She soon changed her mind.

  Lester Churchman shifted restlessly under the thick covers of his bed. Not only was he responsible for his master’s legal wranglings—more than a full-time job in itself—but his large body had a very low tolerance for jet lag. After several hours of unsuccessful attempts, he had barely managed to fall asleep when a woman’s scream of terror howled down the hallway. He opened his eyes and sighed. It was 3:04 A.M. He’d never get any sleep if Slythe continued his games.

  Lena regained consciousness around 5:00 A.M. Her body throbbed with pain. She turned, fought the urge to vomit, saw the demon lying naked in bed next to her.

  She shuddered. The things he had done. Solkin sin.

  In all her experience as a prostitute since age fourteen, Lena never imagined that such things were possible. She vomited dryly into the toilet bowl before examining her wounds in the large mirror. The intense pain would go away, she knew. Her pimp had a good doctor to take care of his stable of sex slaves. What terrified her were the large purple bruises and red welts on her legs and face. The long bloody lacerations along the full length of her back she could hide, not the bruises on her face and forearms.