Slythe returned to Sheremetyevo II airport, Churchman and Witsrand in tow, without uttering a single word. The others were too afraid to make a sound. The white Waterboer Boeing Business Jet waited patiently on the frozen tarmac, engines already hissing. Slythe fell into a leather chair in the cabin, puppy Kimberley cradled in his arms, and snorted cocaine from a small platinum receptacle. He stared upward and sniffed. Smiled.
Poor Orlov. So convinced he’d beaten the Slythe family and Waterboer. In truth, everything had gone in Waterboer’s favor. Maybe not the final price. But everything else.
First, Waterboer had a new contract for all of the Russian diamond production and retained its monopoly. There wasn’t really a true secondary diamond market, as Orlov knew. Waterboer generally controlled that market, as well. It was, however, good politics to let the world think there was some part of the diamond business Waterboer did not control.
Second, it was apparent from Orlov’s statements and his reasoning that he was unaware only part of the Russian diamond stockpile had been transferred to Waterboer before the counterrevolution of 1991. This left Molotok free to search for it without government competition.
Third, and perhaps best of all, not only did Slythe avoid a nasty public relations fiasco with the incriminating photographs—he still didn’t believe that he could have been arrested—but the whore Lena had given him excellent news. He pulled out the matchbook she had left in his coat pocket. Inside the cover was scrawled a handwritten message in Russian Cyrillic, which Slythe could read passably:
GRU Colonel Kovanetz investigating Pyashinev, also looking for diamond stockpile for Molotok
Not only was Molotok searching for the diamond stockpile, he was being helped in his search by members of the Russian security organs themselves, Orlov’s own people.
For the first time since his orgasmic infliction of pain the previous night, Slythe erupted with laugher.
30 WARNING
Washington, D.C.
2:35 P.M.
“Hello.”
“Erika. It’s Pat.” Carlton pushed the tiny cellular telephone hard against his ear to hear her soft voice over the Cadillac’s throaty engine.
“Where have you been? I checked your office and—”
“Listen to me.”
“—and I—”
“Erika!” he shouted. “Please listen.”
“What?”
“I want you to catch the first flight back home.”
“What?”
“They know about you.” He stopped short of telling her they had threatened to kill her.
“They who? What are—?”
“I’ll explain later. Just do what I tell you. Don’t pack anything. Don’t call anyone. Just grab a cab and go to Reagan National Airport. Take your cell phone with you. I’ll call you later. Do you understand?”
“But I—”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do it now. Quiet. Fast. I’ll call you later.” He punched the END key.
31 DDI
CIA Headquarters
4:31 P.M.
Pink was about to knock on the carved mahogany door when it unlatched from within with a heavy metallic click. He had never met CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence (DDI) Randall Forbes, the man CIA staff referred to as Malcolm. Everyone in the Agency was afraid of Forbes—even the director, it was rumored—and Pink was no exception. He was sweating profusely. His throat and mouth were dry. He pulled the thick brass door handle forward.
“Come in, Pink,” a voice announced from a wheelchair behind a carved oak desk.
Pink gazed at the opulent office, wondering how a civil servant, even a DDI, could afford such an office before remembering Forbes’ wealth. He probably paid for it out of his own pocket. In his exhausted state, especially after Forbes had pushed their meeting back nearly eight hours, the thought had haunting echoes. Maybe Fress and Forbes are working together. If anyone could help Fress in the international arena, it was Forbes. Maybe Forbes’ money really comes from Waterboer and isn’t family money after all.
The office was spacious, with a large window and view on the green inner courtyard of the New Headquarters Building (NHB). Beyond the armored glass, the late afternoon sun shot rays of sunlight through clouds as in a Turner painting. The floor was covered with a deep pile navy blue carpet that contrasted with the dark red painted walls. Small autographed photographs of the DDI with a constellation of presidents, members of Congress, and high-ranking military figures surrounded two gargantuan nineteenth-century American landscapes by Bierstadt, illuminated by halogen lights. Near the entrance of the office sat three heavy brown leather button chairs opposite a similarly upholstered sofa. In the center, a glossy oak coffee table reflected the flames from a white-painted brick hearth. Light emanated from brass candleholders on the wall and bankers’ lamps on the desk.
The door bolted shut behind Pink automatically, giving him the sense of being imprisoned.
“Sit down.” Forbes motioned to the sofa.
“Thank you, sir.”
Forbes wheeled himself to the coffee table next to Pink, who sat stiffly on the deceptively hard leather couch next to a velvet pillow that bore the pale blue and white shield of the DDI’s alma mater. Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth. Yale.
Forbes was the tenth-generation descendant of a wealthy Episcopalian Connecticut family. But he was far more interested in affairs of state than in the daily buy-low, sell-high grind for which many of his fellow Yalies had opted. Those matters he relegated to the bourgeois bankers, as he termed them. Forbes suffered a paralyzing leg injury during his very young infantry service in the Korean War and had been in a wheelchair ever since. A graduate of Yale Law School, Forbes practiced law in Boston after his service in military intelligence. In the early 1960s, he was appointed ambassador to South Africa. There and then began his fascination with diamonds.
Unlike many East Coast WASPs at the time, Forbes loathed apartheid. The violent racism and intransigence of the former South African government pushed him to leave the diplomatic service. He returned to the United States and was elected to the House of Representatives from his native Connecticut district. An honorable politician, he served only two terms before leaving his seat to another. Another chief executive, not so coincidentally also a fellow member of Yale’s undergraduate Skull and Bones Society, appointed him Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Several years later, Forbes opted for a return to a dull and uneventful life as the eminence grise of his former law firm as an ”of counsel.” This too was short-lived.
He was soon dragged back into the fray of intelligence affairs by his appointment as Assistant DDI of Central Intelligence. The appointment surprised him. He had no background or ties to the Company. But Forbes was a keen analyst and accepted the appointment out of duty, not desire. He grew to tolerate the position, then to enjoy it. He was then promoted to DDI. Never married, now he relished his job more than life itself. He had been awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom that remained secret for his neutralization of coordinated terrorist activities on January 1, 2000, in the world’s ten largest cities.
Forbes’ attire was a credit to his East Coast patrician heritage. His lean frame was clothed in a conservative white shirt, yellow Hermes tie, and bespoke blue pinstripe suit tailored by his longtime sartorial supplier on Savile Row.
Forbes assessed his subordinate with gunmetal gray eyes focused through gold framed eyeglasses under thinning silver hair that women found attractive. The artificially thin lenses corrected a myopia inflicted by endless hours of study. Although the man rarely smiled, he was sufficiently at ease with himself that his gaze came off as professional rather than cold.
Pink fidgeted in his seat, clasped his manila file folder.
Forbes pointed to the file folder. ”Careful. You don’t want to tear that.” His accent was pure New England elite. “Listen here, Pink. I know you spent a god-awful time analyzing this. It’s you
r first assignment for me personally. You’re nervous, exhausted, sweaty, hungry. You’re no longer thinking straight. You are uncomfortable speaking with me in the absence of Debbie Gold and because I’m in a wheelchair.” He paused. “Stow all of that. All I want is solid analysis. Give me that, and I’ll be happy.”
“Yes, sir.” Strangely, Pink felt more nervous.
“Good. Smoke if you got ’em.” Forbes busied himself with a burl walnut pipe and a pouch of aromatic cherry tobacco. “You’ve analyzed the Mirny incident and the most recent trip to Moscow of everyone’s favorite saint Piet Slythe.” He lit the pipe with a cedar match and puffed until his head was enveloped in a cloud of fragrant blue smoke. He held the pipe between straight white teeth clenched firmly on the black stem, peered at Pink through the haze. “Tell me about it.”
“Yes, sir. Where should I begin, sir?”
“Your conclusions first. I appreciate the respect, Pink. But drop the ‘sirs’. They grate.”
“Yes, sir... er, yes. My conclusion is twofold. First, Slythe’s visit to Moscow and the Mirny incident seem unrelated. Second, it seems a Russian diamond stockpile still exists despite the apparent transfer of the entire Russian stockpile to Waterboer in 1990”
He paused. Forbes’ gaze goaded him onward.
“But I believe there may be a third conclusion to be drawn from the data. I realize Jerry Delpin already made conclusions about the satellite imagery. But in my opinion, sir, the imagery from the Mirny fire contains quirks that require further study.”
My opinion. The words struck Forbes. He was used to analysts inventing new ways of coating facts with weasel language to avoid responsibility for rotten conclusions. Finally here was an analyst who wasn’t afraid of putting his ass on the line.
“Interesting. On what do you base your conclusions?” More puffs.
“Well, as you know, in 1990 Waterboer loaned Russia $2 billion to modernize its diamond mining and processing operations. As collateral, Waterboer got Russia’s massive diamond stockpile. The loan was a sham, of course. By getting the stockpile, Waterboer neutralized its potential destabilizing force. For $2 billion, which worked out to a pretty good deal on a per-carat basis.” He paused, sifted through his mental fog for what followed next.
“According to our intelligence reports, the stockpile was transferred from Moscow to London, then shipped to Waterboer vaults around the world. No problem up to this point. The crunch comes in calculating the actual number of carats transferred to Waterboer. According to our sources in Komdragmet, every single carat of the Russian stockpile was transferred to Waterboer in Moscow. About twenty million carats of gem-and industrial-quality stones. But the same sources that indicate the transfer of the twenty million carats give us figures that collectively indicate a total stockpile of thirty million carats.”
“So ten million carats are unaccounted for?” Forbes stared at him through a cloud of smoke.
“That’s what it looks like. Yes.”
“Your conclusion is what certain Agency analysts came up with in 1990.”
He knew? Pink’s heart sank.
“So either the sources are wrong and the stockpile really totaled twenty million carats, or the sources are correct and ten million carats are unaccounted for.”
“Correct. My first instinct was to discredit the sources. But to the best of my knowledge, no source was aware of the others, and each provided the same production and stockpile transfer figures. That leaves only one conclusion: the sources were all telling the truth, and ten million carats of Russian diamonds are unaccounted for. Since the sources were adamant that internal sales records, receipts, transports, warehouse logs, bank records, and so on reflected a total stockpile of only twenty million carats, intentional falsification of Russian governmental records is indicated.”
“Your conclusion?”
“In my mind, sir, the only possibility is that someone at the highest level falsified records and was able to keep ten million carats of diamonds hidden from our sources at Komdragmet.”
“How many dead presidents are we talking about?”
“If leaked on the international market slowly enough not to bloat supply and push the price south, at current prices, the ten million carats would be worth between one and three billion dollars.”
“So it seems Ivan was less than candid.” It was the former diplomat’s way of saying the Russians had lied through their teeth. “Of course, it isn’t a surprise.” More puffs. “After all, many of these official numbers and records date back to the Cold War. Given that industrial diamonds are relied upon heavily in defense and other vital systems, Ivan certainly had no incentive to tell the truth.” He clamped down on the pipe.
“I agree. But there is something strange here. Very strange.” Pink closed his eyes to translate his thought into words. “The sources who provided us with the figures—our people at Komdragmet—they believe the entire stockpile was only twenty million carats. And at the same time, those very people believe the entire stockpile was turned over to Waterboer.”
“So they never bothered to put two and two together?”
Pink shook his head. “No. That would be too simple.”
Forbes shifted the pipe stem to the other side of his mouth. “How do you explain it, then?”
Pink stretched out his hands to make his case. “They know production is high. But they believe the stockpile is small—well, smaller, anyway. The logical assumption is that something made the people at Komdragmet believe the stockpile was smaller than it really was.”
Forbes puffed. “Or someone.”
“All three sources gave us the same information. They must all have believed the same thing.”
“Colluded and fudged figures?” One of Forbes’s eyebrows cocked skeptically.
“I don’t think so. No,” Pink nodded vigorously. “These people were too highly placed. And again, they had no knowledge of each other. I doubt they would risk exposure to get their stories straight and give false information. But why would someone go to such trouble to make the Agency or anyone else believe the stockpile is smaller than it really is? I mean, it’s nice to know the facts, but why would anyone in Russia give a”—he caught himself before launching an expletive—“give a hoot about whether or not the CIA knows the size of the stockpile?”
“You’re assuming the Agency was the target of the disinformation.” Forbes stressed the last word, staring at the burning tobacco in his pipe.
“Isn’t that logical?”
“It is.” A pause. “Until you learn a fact I withheld.” Forbes pointed the stem of his pipe toward Pink. “One of the Komdragmet sources was also an informant for Waterboer. Leonid Pyashinev.” He puffed. “What of your third conclusion? About Mirny.”
Pink was too accustomed to Russian corruption to be surprised at the revelation. “The imagery reveals three quirks. First, someone seems to have flown over the facility with unpowered aircraft immediately before it exploded. Second, the facility exploded all at once rather than catching fire progressively. Third, someone not part of the garrison escaped from the fire.”
Forbes sat up in his wheelchair, for the first time genuinely surprised. “And your conclusion?”
“Why would someone fly over Mirny with gliders instead of self-propelled aircraft? At night? In those temperatures? Improbable. Not a single soldier escaped the fire, as our people in the Russian General Staff informed us. If these things were not coincidental, they were intentional.”
Forbes nodded silently.
“If they were intentional, someone engineered the explosion.”
“That’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? Why would someone set fire to the Mirny complex and not destroy the processing structure?”
“The neutron bomb,” Pink blurted out.
Forbes removed the pipe stem from his clenched teeth. “I beg your pardon?”
“The neutron bomb, sir. It was designed to kill people and leave structures intact.”
“You lost
me, Pink.”
“The neutron bomb was designed to leave buildings intact so when the radiation disappeared, the physical infrastructure could be used after the war. At Mirny, the fire destroyed the wooden barracks, but left the cement processing center intact.”
“You think whoever caused the explosion at Mirny did it to eliminate the soldiers and leave the center in working order?”
“Something like that.”
“To continue your neutron bomb analogy—not a bad one, by the way—the purpose of the neutron bomb is to allow the victor to use the facilities.”
“Right.”
“So extrapolating your analogy, the purpose of the explosion at the Mirny processing center would be for those who engineered the explosion to continue processing diamonds.”
“Yes.”
“But in our scenario, we know that the new commander of the Eastern Ground Forces, Marshal Aleksakov, who replaced Ogarkov, sent in replacement soldiers, rebuilt the barracks, and is now operating Mirny as before. Why burn down an entire complex to eliminate soldiers when you know they’ll be replaced a few days later?”
“We’re assuming that.”
“We’re assuming what?”
“We’re only assuming Mirny is operating as before. If the fire was intentional, it was to accomplish something. To change something. What has changed? The only thing that changed after the fire was the garrison. The soldiers. The processing center is still there. It’s armored concrete, so it didn’t burn. The wooden barracks are being rebuilt. Whoever started the fire went to a lot of trouble to kill the soldiers and leave the rest intact.”
The conclusion had been right in front of him the entire time, but it was so obvious Pink hadn’t thought of it. “And to make sure that the satellites didn’t detect anything. Of course.”
“So let’s assume someone went to great lengths to kill off the garrison,” Forbes conceded. “Let’s go further. Why change the garrison?”
Patrick Carlton 01 - The Diamond Conspiracy Page 22
