'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

Amber’s ponytail bobbed as she shook her head in disbelief.

  “In your dreams. Never heard of it.”

  No! This gives Boyko control over KoeffieBloehm Diamond Mining. Where would that end? Where does it leave me and Tony?

  “I knew you did your homework, but you’ve underestimated. In one mine alone right here in the DRC, it has been established that there is an untapped resource base of 262 million carats. And we have ways of getting more.”

  He didn’t tell her how he was dumping his rough stones on the market at ridiculously discounted prices, three thousand pounds of them, seven million carats: equivalent to Angola’s annual output.

  “Why do you need me?”

  “Up to now, it’s been child’s play. We’ve been smuggling cut stones in by the bag. In order to make this work we have to go big, very big. You’re uniquely equipped to deliver the large number of finished diamonds we are planning to prepare. We need Chaim Tolkachevsky, your father’s Antwerp cutter, Antwerp’s biggest, the only one equipped to handle this many stones. Also, we like the way he cuts, and we know of his problem; we can trust him to keep our secret. His cutters never need to know where he’s getting the rough merchandise.”

  He came around the table and stood behind her, running his hands over her shoulders. Her skin crawled as she felt him lean over to peer into her cleavage.

  “I want you to make the final delivery.”

  “I get the picture,” she said with a seductive smile she hoped would mask her insincerity.

  He returned to his seat, reached under the table, and pulled out a crocodile hide folder from which he removed a Belgian passport, a health certificate, an automobile license, and a wallet-sized document that identified Amber as a certified Angolan Gemological Institute gemologist. Her real name was on all the documents. The photo on the passport was hers. There was no need to falsify her identity since she still had a clean slate with the government. Neither she nor her Chinese spy father had ever been caught smuggling diamonds out of Angola or the Congos.

  “So what’s new that you now need me now?”

  A large grin broke out over Boyko’s face.

  “I thought you made your money running guns, servicing dictators.”

  “A pittance. The money involved in our new diamond-merchandising plan will stagger your imagination. And we have the channels that have made it successful already. And now we are ready for you to help us take it to a new level.”

  “I’ve heard about those channels. Coercion. Murder. Torture.”

  Amber’s voice cracked as she struggled to veil her disdain. “I don’t figure. You own the biggest mine in the DRC. You’re already flooding the market,” she added. “Diamond prices are down all over the world.”

  “Amber, dear. A conscience? The cartel has controlled diamond prices for a century. Now it’s our turn, the new KoeffieBloehm.”

  She ignored his brag.

  “I’ve known Chaim Tolkachevsky since I was a child. What does he get?”

  “He’ll get a fair shake.”

  “What about me?”

  “What did you make last year?”

  “I’m sure you know.”

  “When I discovered you, it was the luckiest day in your life. You and Tolky will be partners. Split one-percent any way you want. If money is not that important to you, we know what is. And we have him.”

  She shuddered. Her face blank.

  “One percent?”

  “We’re talking billions in total sales.”

  AMBER ENTERED HIS BEDROOM at the back of the first floor. The walls were covered with deep red, silk-and-gold ornaments. Gold-framed mirrors lined the ceiling at angles that made it impossible to avoid seeing yourself no matter where you stood. Convention meant nothing to Boyko. Weirdly out of season, a small Christmas tree filled a corner of the room, at its foot, a profusion of opened gift packages left over from a party to which she hadn’t been invited. She knew some of the gifts were for Tony. An aroma of patchouli stirred the hate in her.

  He was sitting in a lounge chair looking out the window at the hills beyond the pastures where his prized Arabian horses grazed. Patches of sunlight flickered through purple-flowered wisteria that crept over the arbor. A sleeping snake was draped across a branch of a jacaranda tree.

  “Is it poisonous?” Amber asked

  “Viper. Defanged. Like you. Like all my pets.”

  “Asshole,” she thought.

  Raised to be an athlete, Amber had always been confident of her ability to compete with men. Now, confronted with the Animal, she wasn’t so sure. She pondered the irony. In front of her the warm wind rippled through the saw grass; gladioli swayed in the wind like dancers in a mystical ballet; his horses grazed in the meadow that flowed up to the hills.

  How could such an evil bastard have such taste?

  But she was certain of one thing: Whatever humiliation she was forced to endure, whatever intimate favors he demanded, nothing would keep her from escaping with Tony. She willed herself to a higher plane, one far above common human experience, beyond pain. Nevertheless, fury percolated deep in her being.

  Earlier they had dined on his favorite delicacies, fried crocodile bites and spicy monkey brains. He could smell the hint of musk in her skin. He recognized it as Serge Lutens Clair de Musc. He might have been an expert in weapons, but he kept up with all things important to his kind of woman. Amber was that and more.

  As she advanced towards him, the light behind her accentuated the contours of her body beneath the translucent gown. Boyko grinned as the flimsy fabric played over her burnished legs. His eyes drank in her seductiveness. She felt his mind stalking her like a tiger.

  Hah! You fool.

  She had tweaked her nipples in advance. They had popped to attention, detonators. She knew precisely the extent to which her body intoxicated men. Her breasts quivered as she approached, careful to take the heavy steps needed to trigger the theatrical show. Her dark ocher eyes narrowed, catlike, accentuated by lavender eye shadow and thick liner. He failed to notice her pupils. They were honed to a pinpoint by rage. He responded as she wished.

  You may enter me, you animal. But you can never touch me.

  “A drink?” he offered. “You know I can give you anything you want: wealth, freedom, your son.”

  “This isn’t the time to talk business,” she purred. She leaned towards him, took the drink from his hand, and rose, lifting herself to his face. Her eyes vied with the sway of her body to capture his attention. He was naked now. Rampant. She took a swallow of her drink, put her glass down on the antique side table and catered to his demands. Her motions were slow, deliberate. She threw her head back, shaking her mane of hair, and feigned passionate deliberation. With one hand she pulled his head against her breasts; with the other, she took him over the edge.

  Disgust was a luxury she could not afford. She had made her oath.

  Vermin. I will end your days.

  She pushed him back on the bed.

  He sighed, contented.

  Asshole.

  SIXTEEN

  New York City

  With The Bird on board, Maran’s team of hackers didn’t take long to plow through the Pentagon’s entire file of ex-operators and identify a contact for Maran. Coincidentally it was an old colleague, Mini Eitan.

  They knew one another from Eitan’s old days with Israel’s Yamam, its elite counter-terrorism unit. The dual military-police detachment ran “K or A,” Kill or Arrest, counterterrorism ops against Gaza’s Palestinian Hamas killers who were launching rockets from mosques and kindergartens into Israel’s border towns like Sderot where hundreds of innocent civilians were being killed. It was on a joint secret Yamam-SAWC mission that Maran and Mini Eitan had become friends.

  Now Mini counted the New York Diamond Dealers Club as one of his clients and Jacques Levine, executive director at the Club, needed help. The Club, the largest diamond bourse in the U.S., had a problem, one that had wide-ranging consequences that were spreading o
ut everywhere. The price of diamond gemstones was plummeting all around the world and it was bringing the financial markets with it.

  The problem was tailor-made for Maran’s needs.

  HEADED FOR NEW YORK, he left Boston’s Logan Airport on the first flight just days after Sergei set up shop. The pain was still killing him inside and out; his head, legs, and back ached. Worse, the pain was still lodged deep in his soul. But he was grateful for whatever hope he had left. Outside LaGuardia Airport, he waved down one of the unregistered black Town Cars referred to as “hustlers” by the regular cabbies. He didn’t have time for the taxi waiting line. A large Sikh wearing a white cotton turban and a full black beard sat behind the wheel. Maran slid in. The Lincoln had hardly left the curb when the driver identified himself as a Punjabi Sikh and started railing against Muslims‌—‌all Muslims.

  “Why doesn’t your President realize? Wrong as it may be, burning a book? Pissing on a corpse? What is that compared with millions cheering the taped videos when Muslims murder Westerners: Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheik beheading the Jewish Daniel Pearl, your own Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan massacring 13 U.S. servicemen, your American Naveed Haq attacking the Seattle Jewish Federation and murdering a young woman, the Muslim gang led by Youssouf Fofana torturing, what was his name‌—‌Ilan …”

  “Halimi,” Maran reminded.

  “Right. And that guy at the Jewish day school in Toulouse, killed the rabbi, his two little sons and an eight-year old girl?”

  “Mohammed Merah,” Maran said, getting sick.

  They zipped through Queens, over the East River on the 59th Street Bridge.

  “Anytime, any place in the world people are getting blown up, it’s always the Muslims,” the Sikh ranted

  Maran recalled the history between these two groups. The Sikhs and Muslims in the Punjab, which straddles the border between India and Pakistan, had been at each other’s throats since at least 326 B.C. That was the year Alexander the Great invaded from the north through the Hindu Kush. Maran knew the history. Filled with incidents of terrorism. The Sikhs and Muslims hated one another. He normally disapproved of such blanket discrimination, but in this case, he felt that the guy, at the least, had a point to make.

  “The western world better soon remember that Israel, derided by the Left as “Zionists,” is the only democracy in the Middle East and the entire Arab world united to attack that country’s independence as soon as it was birthed in 1947,” the driver added.

  Maran thought about that, particularly the reference to the “Left.” It was his firm conviction that the idea of the political spectrum as a straight line from Left to Right was another example of political propaganda designed to mask the fact that both ends were extremes and anti-democratic. The truth, he knew, was that both were statist, subverting individualism to the state, and that the line was not horizontal but a circle, with U.S. democracy on one pole and the extremes of the Left and the Right joined together in communist and fascist totalitarianism at the opposite.

  Maran patted his jacket under his left arm to feel his .45 caliber H&K USP Compact Tactical Pistol. As always, it was loaded with eight jacketed hollow-point bullets that would stop a raging water buffalo in its tracks. He had shown the airline agent his phony U.S. ATF agent’s documentation and packed it in his stored luggage. He knew he was on his way to take an assignment that would subject him to exactly the kind of pressure his doctors had warned him to avoid at all cost. He also knew that avoidance could not include the clearing of his honor.

  He pulled out his Droid smartphone, punched in its encryption code, and brought up his e-mail. Sergei’s report leaped out of the screen.

  Impossible!

  Familiar alarms fired in his head. Memories of the Animal rose like deformed phantoms. Nerves ignited signals, made him squirm. His skin crawled with ants; he scratched until it was raw. His demons were back. He could scream.

  No! Not now.

  He clenched his fists until the nails bled his palms. He had to force back those memories yet again sending shockwaves through his brain. Hand-to-hand combat in the midst of gunfire, grenades, and rockets had taught him to conquer fear but never to deny it. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes tightly, and tightened his fist around the Droid.

  Kill the Animal. Kill the Animal. Kill the AnimaI, the voice in his mind screamed.

  Maran had to remind himself he was in a limo going to a business meeting in Manhattan’s diamond center, the first step in his plan to deliver ultimate, final, and draconian justice to the psychos behind Cabinda.

  Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate.

  Finally, his will power kicked into place. It grounded him.

  He read the report Sergei had prepared as background for his meeting. It had taken Bird only a day to gather the needed information once he implemented the PHALANX system that allowed him access to universal data. Sergei’s analysis stunned him. Even without a military component, the implications of this case were grave. The report analyzed and summarized facts that went right to the heart of the mission, including details of diamond exports out of Antwerp for the preceding year.

  Curiously, the number of stones itemized on manifests for import into New York City matched the sudden deluge of exports from Antwerp. Did that mean that one-hundred percent of Antwerp’s finished diamonds were going through the New York Club? Or were large numbers of diamonds being shipped around official channels unreported? More striking still, all the stones shared a few notable characteristics. They were all not only large but graded D-perfect, flawless. In addition, the stones all had a blue tint, rarest of the rare; such beauty was said to be found once in every ten million gem-quality stones, suitable for the Maharaja of Jaipur.

  The diamond industry was more important than Maran had ever imagined:

  “American bridegrooms alone paid out $5.5 billion this year for solitaires produced and merchandised by the KoeffieBloehm cartel. Diamonds are linked to every vital commodity: gold, platinum, copper, cobalt, zinc, oil. Major money center banks hold hundreds of billions of dollars of loans secured by those entwined markets. Hence, if KoeffieBloehm’s diamond pricing floor collapses, it will throw the world into an economic vortex.”

  Maran read on, wondering if that was already happening. Smugglers were flooding diamonds out of Angola like water over Victoria Falls. Since 1998, the U.N. had banned countries from buying diamonds that were known to be financing civil strife.

  Sergei’s report included a chart from Beurs voor Diamanthandel, the Antwerp Diamond bourse. It showed that a huge increase of large cut diamonds were being shipped into Antwerp from Cabinda, Angola, and on to New York City.

  “All bourse members are obligated to report the origin and destination of the stones cut in their establishments,” the report stated.

  That led to another unexplained wrinkle. Angola’s stones were pebble-sized, called mele’e in the trade. The diamonds concerning the Diamond Board were obviously not from Angola.

  Where are they from? Maran wondered.

  Sergei had merged shipper and receiver records from the U.N.’s International Merchandise Trade Oversight Bureau with those from Belgium’s Hoge Raad voor Diamant, the Diamond High Council.

  Fearful of a boycott like the one provoked earlier by the anti-fur lobby, the industry had responded to the recent anti-diamond campaign. Activists were demonstrating against the industry over profits from blood diamonds that were being used to arm illegal militiamen and terrorists who were committing the worst mass rapes and massacres in Africa. In response, the industry had adopted the Diamond Kimberly Process Certification Scheme to block the illegal diamonds, which still accounted for five percent of the world market. The industry’s goal was to sever the links between the horror produced by the blood diamonds and the legitimate diamond trade. Confronting Maran in this report was a different question. Whoever was smuggling these diamonds into New York had something new and different, much different.

  There had to be a courier.

>   Who?

  The gravity of this mission, went beyond the personal, way beyond. It hit Maran like a hammer.

  THE NEW YORK DIAMOND DEALERS BOARD opened in 1931 in a twenty-story, narrow office building at Eleven 47th Street on the corner of Fifth Avenue. Ninety-percent of the diamonds sold in the U.S. came through this establishment, sold through its 2,600 independent business members.

  It served New York’s Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants as a bourse, a central, secure diamond market. Most of those merchants were descendants of Holocaust survivors. The clannish secrecy of that world had proved indelible and was quickly evident to any outsider making a visit.

  The summer was rapidly coming to an end, but it was broiling in New York. The previous day’s hard rain steamed off the streets. Pulling off his light rain jacket, Maran got out of the Sikh’s limo at Madison Square Garden. He walked several blocks and ducked into the Chrysler Building. At the opposite side of the lobby, he made an abrupt about-face and doubled back. Such precautions were routine. He left through his original entrance and took a roundabout route to his destination.

  Forty-Seventh Street flashed like rap star bling in the sunlight. Thick 18-carat yellow gold chains and gleaming solitaires fought a life-or-death battle with the flickering, multi-hued screens of cell phones, digital cameras, iPads, iPods, iPhones, and video cameras. The diamond dealers there boasted that the street had the largest concentration of diamonds and gold jewelry in the world. Someone must have believed it. The City fathers had dubbed it Diamond Way. A 2X4-foot cubic diamond-shaped sign beckoned at each end of the block.

  A tall, lean, dark-skinned doorman, with high, cut cheekbones, greeted him in the front entrance hall of the New York Diamond Dealers Club building. He announced Maran’s arrival and slipped a plastic card into a receiver. The bronze art deco elevator door opened and Maran stepped inside. He felt his heart rate accelerate. Up, past the second floor, the third, the fourth. Fear dogged him. It was only a matter of time: Possible death loomed ahead. He wondered: Would he still be as ready as he had been so often before? Or would his control vanish?