'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  “They say you’re the man to see in Boston when it comes to diamonds. I’m working on an article for The Retail Diamond World Magazine.”

  It wasn’t a lie. Maran had obtained the assignment under his assumed name. He showed Mantville the press pass he got from Retail Diamonds World Magazine, the diamond trade’s magazine of record. He’d learned early in his covert career how effective a press pass was in opening doors otherwise inaccessible. Getting the assignment, with its requisite press pass, was a no-brainer: an e-mail followed by a quick phone call. Maran simply proposed to research and write a feature story profiling the leaders of the world diamond industry, something the editor of the periodical snapped up, having had the idea on his agenda for too long already. Maran’s proposal opened with the offer to submit the story on speculation.

  “Oh!” Mantville said mockingly. “The press! I’ve never spoken to such an important person before. What can I do for you, Mr. Davis?” Mantville had a nervous tick that made him keep blinking his eyes and squinching his face, damp with sweat.

  “I need some information. Hoping you can help,” Maran answered, ignoring the crack.

  “What kind of information, Mr. Davis?”

  Maran cut to the chase. “Large diamonds. D-perfect. How do they appeal? Who buys them? Who sells them? Where do they get them?”

  “Large diamonds?” Mantville’s voice was guarded.

  “That’s right. Diamonds used by renegade forces in West Africa to buy weapons. Blood diamonds.”

  Mantville’s voice rose. “What would I know? Why ask me? Who sent you?”

  “I’m told you’re the go-to guy in diamonds here in Boston.” Maran had learned long ago that flattery often opened some otherwise cautious doors.

  “I can’t help you. You’re trouble!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m particularly interested in one stone that you sold.”

  Mantville’s lips trembled.

  “Who? Who did I sell a stone to?”

  His voice was shrill now.

  “Get out! Leave me alone! I don’t know anything‌—‌nothing‌—‌nothing to tell you. Get out of my store!”

  A noise. Mantville’s head turned to the rear of the store. A man stepped out of the back room. He smiled, flashing the grills that covered his teeth. Maran was looking into the nose of a 9mm automatic. He recognized it as a Makarov, the pistol used in the Cold War by East German assassins from STASI’s secret police.

  “Rodney Davis?” the assailant snarled. “Down on the floor.”

  He had a near British or Dutch accent.

  Afrikaner?

  “Hee Yeah!” Maran’s voice expelled the guttural sound from his stomach. It came out like something inhuman. It took all the will power he had in him, but he balanced on his injured leg, bent his stronger right knee and power-pitched his foot in a vicious slash that audibly snapped the arm that held the gun.

  A shot reverberated through the small office.

  My face! Again!

  Maran grabbed at the wound that sliced his cheek. He felt his fingers slip, drenched with blood. The gun lay midway between them on the floor. Before he could make another move, the foreigner ran down the hall and exited through an open window, landing three stories below on the rain canopy in the front of the diamond building.

  Experience kicked in.

  Maran attacked Mantville like a hunger-maddened beast of prey that had just sprung on dinner after stalking it for hours. He seized the jeweler by the throat. Mantville’s head hit the plaster in a loud crack as Maran lifted him off his feet, pinned him against the wall on his tiptoes. Maran’s fingers plunged into the softness of the exposed notch just under Mantville’s windpipe. He pressed his stiffened, now rod-like fingers, down to he point where any more pressure would have killed the man. He gripped the collarbone. Their grimaces matched.

  “What’s going on here?” Maran growled. “Answers! Now! Lie to me and I’ll choke the life out of you. You’re a fool if you doubt my ability to crush you like the filthy rodent you are.” Maran’s green eyes shot into Mantville’s like steel-cutting lasers. In that moment, he had transformed. No longer a thinking human being but a trained animal focused on an enemy that represented nothing more than a life-threat, something, not someone, to be extinguished if necessary. Maran was ready to do whatever it took.

  Mantville was unhinged. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know,” he pleaded. “Don’t hurt me. Please!”

  Maran jerked his hand off Mantville’s throat. He ripped his shirt open, swinging his body in a complete half circle and smashing it against the wall again.

  “I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!” Mantville pleaded.

  “Who is he?” Maran’s voice rumbled off the old marble walls.

  “Roelf‌—‌Roelf Diederichs. But‌—‌”

  “Shut up. Answers. The accent. Where is he from?”

  “I don’t know that. I never saw him before.”

  “Roelf Diederichs. A black Afrikaner? What is he doing here? Who is he with?”

  “He came in with a reference from Abner Dolitz. I thought he had to be legitimate! Dolitz sold me the diamonds.”

  “Dolitz?” Maran shot back, pleased at the confirmation. Blood streamed down his neck. It ran over his shirtfront.

  He loosened his grip. The jeweler was still pinned to the wall, looking like a prop for a Wes Craven horror movie.

  “Dolitz. Big store. New York,” Mantville gasped. “Forty-seventh Street. Also wholesale. Big-time! Large high-quality diamonds. Very special. A ‘viewer.’ KoeffieBloehm. Cartel.” The diamond cartel held what they called a “viewer sale” about ten times a year. Each sale was worth many millions of dollars. There were only 100 “viewers” in the world, the only parties the cartel would sell to. The stability of diamond prices was dependent on the number of gems the cartel decided to release at its viewer sales.

  “Special?” Maran asked.

  “The cut. Not a regular brilliant. Never saw it before. Unique. The most sought after blue. Perfect stones. D-Perfect, as perfect as perfect can be. Fabulous. Even with the extra facets,” Mantville said.

  “Facets?”

  “All of the stones are cut with additional facets, giving them more fire. Cut that way. Unique style. Dolitz calls it the ‘Chrysanthemum cut.’”

  He denied stocking the Chrysanthemum diamonds. Maran had no time to search. The jeweler reached under the counter and came up with a fresh package of clean polishing cloths. He handed Maran one to staunch the blood on his face and mop his neck. Maran pressed the cloth to the wound. The flow of blood slowed.

  “So the stones are perfect. They’re cheap. Where do they come from?” Maran demanded.

  “I have no idea. I can’t figure it out. They are so beautiful, he’d never have to discount them. Now they’re flooding the market. Selling like hotcakes.”

  “How did the eggplant know I was coming?” Maran snapped sarcastically. He took license with his own race.

  A crowd was gathering outside. He didn’t have time to wait for an answer. The whine of a police siren propelled Maran through the door of the store down the hall to the grimy back stairs. He limped out a rear door into the alley. At the end, he pushed through the crowd gathered outside the front of the building. Blood seeped through the cloth. He pressed it harder against the wound, doing his best to shield it from view. At the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets, he grabbed a taxi.

  MARAN STEPPED INTO THE BANG! office, his face bandaged.

  “So! Rusty razor? Cut yourself?” Sergei quipped.

  “Long story. I need an update‌—‌fast; I have to pack.”

  “Where to?”

  “The Pentagon,” Maran answered. He picked up an unopened pack of hard-biting Gitanes Brunes on the desk and held it up.

  Sergei.

  He shook his head.

  “Bad enough, dose yourself with carcinogens, you have to do it with French cigarettes?” he reprimanded his Russian friend.

  “Paris
is still the most beautiful city in the world,” Sergei reminded him.

  “Too bad it’s full of Frenchmen.”

  “Sexist.”

  “Anyway, Capetown’s prettier,” Maran parried.

  He went upstairs to pack.

  When he finished, he sat at the makeshift desk in the loft and read Sergei’s report on Dolitz. It startled him:

  “Dolitz opened a small coin shop and built the business on fencing stolen jewelry and coins for friends who were lifting them from their parents. The business grew so fast that he began laundering money for the local Mafia family. Because of his underground connections, Dolitz is able to skim 12-percent as a profit margin from the per carat fee he pays to an unknown cutter in Antwerp. He converts the funds to cashier’s checks and launders them through a series of paper companies registered at ATZ Paribas in Paris. Hundreds of millions of dollars have passed through the Paribas bank to Saud Global Roses and from Roses to Celestial International Exchange. The money trail ends there; Celestial turns out to be a wholly owned sub of Roses, headquartered in Mecca. Roses is controlled through direct associates by various Islamist terrorist organizations.”

  Later, Maran recounted the scene at Mantville’s to Sergei. In the past Maran had had no time for false remorse, moral analysis. He did what had to do. And that was it.

  Now? Am I slipping?

  The images of his butchered team came back to the fore. They were always there, occupying space not too far in the back of his mind.

  “I could have killed him like that,” he said snapping his fingers. “I don’t like what I’ve become. In the past, it all seemed worth what I had to give up for duty and country.”

  “And now?” Sergei asked.

  “I have to get into Africa,” he said. “But first‌—‌Luster.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Kinshasa

  Boyko and Pajak were exhausted after surviving the attack at the Grand Tropico Aphrodiziax. The two men sat in SSI’s street floor office off the front lobby at Boyko’s Hotel Costa do Sol on Kinshasa’s Boulevard June 30th, the street name celebrating DRC’s independence from Belgium on June 30th, 1960. Loudspeakers could still be heard through the open window. The men could still smell the smoke from the gunfire and explosives coming from the street. Lights and loudspeakers blended with the excited commands of Boyko’s security force outside. Boyko laughed as he poured two fingers of vodka for Pajak into a delicate, rose-patterned Lalique china cup.

  “Fuckin’ savages,” he roared. “They ruined the show!”

  “Not to mention the girls who died,” Pajak observed.

  “Merchandise.” Boyko said dismissively. “Infinitely replaceable.”

  A Brahms lullaby played on a Dolby Home Theater surround-sound stereo system mounted in a huge, teak electronics center. Boyko handed the cup and saucer to Pajak who sat in a rocker-recliner chair. Behind his island-shaped desk, a 21-inch desktop computer screen flashed a series of pornographic lesbian scenes.

  The centerpiece, however, sat on the desk: a sentimental amber-tinted print of Boyko’s hometown of Tbilisi’s fourth century Anchiskhati Basilica. It was framed with an encrustment of multi-colored diamonds, deep blues to bright yellows. They matched the large stones in the rings on Boyko’s fingers.

  Boyko walked to his desk and picked up an object that sat to the right of the picture, a transparent brownish yellow Buddha carved from what appeared to be a huge diamond.

  “One of ours. Sixty-five carats, indistinguishable from the centerpiece of a sixteenth century diamond pendant necklace stolen from the Louvre in Paris. We sold a thousand of them in the Jade Room at the Mid-Year Emporium in Yangon, Myanmar, for twenty thousand dollars apiece, twenty million dollars U.S. in total.”

  His pricing strategy never ceased to amaze Pajak. He had no idea how he could do it.

  Boyko opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out what appeared to be a cell phone. As Pajak watched, Boyko’s laughter turned to a cackle. He circled the office, held the instrument in the air; ran it over all the electrical outlets, lamps, and furniture in the room; waved it over and across the desk and sighed. It was in fact a sophisticated laser audio surveillance detector. A red light flashed and beeped on the pocket-sized calculator that sat on the desk, Boyko threw his head back; his laughter rose to a near-scream. The signal meant the device had been bugged.

  “They think they can fuck with the Master? Amateurs.” He tipped his head back, roared, picked up the pocket-sized calculator from the desk.

  Pajak reached in his pocket. “Here.” He passed his comrade a small pocketknife.

  Boyko opened the calculator. Inside, he found a tiny audio microphone and transmitter.

  “No one in this fuckin’, stink hole of a country can be trusted,” he snarled. The irony of his statement escaped him.

  “It would, in any case, be an unusual organization if it didn’t self-generate its own spies,” Pajak retorted.

  “We know that routine refractive-index testing will only give a shadowy, over-the-limits refractometer reading. Bright orange-red fluorescence to long and short-wave ultraviolet radiation won’t raise any suspicions.”

  “What about the color? You think they’ve figured that out?”

  “We’re using the cyclotron. It’s secure. They have no access,” Boyko said. He explained that cyclotron treatment hadn’t been used for years to color diamonds. Few remembered the surface treatment process, which made it perfect for his purpose.

  An armored personnel carrier pulled up outside the hotel. Two armed guards stepped out and came into the office. Boyko reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He led the guards down the hallway to a locked steel door into a room that was empty save for one long table. In the middle sat large stacks of blue, apricot, and red notes, outdated, worthless: old Zairean currency bills in denominations of 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 Zaires.

  “Security payroll,” Boyko said with a grin as the men toted the money out the door into the armored car. “It just doesn’t get better than this. We still pay them in ‘New Zaires.’ Good in our stores. Nowhere else.”

  “What are we going to do about Maran?” Pajak asked, changing the subject to a more critical issue. “We have to stop him.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Pentagon: Arlington, Virginia

  Back from a special session of Treasury’s Financial Operations Group, Brigadier General Bull Luster stared out a window in his new Pentagon office over the Potomac. He watched the constant honor guard going through its vigilant routine at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The web belt around Luster’s waist tugged. He loosened it, careful to avoid smudging the embossed star on the brass clasp. The telephone rang. Embedded in the oak desk next to it, a special issue Glock field knife lent the proper intimidation to Luster’s office visitors. Exclusive to the SAWs, its handle gleamed with polished brass knuckles.

  Luster let the telephone ring.

  “Get that for me, Jake.”

  Sergeant Major Jake Woodruff had just accepted the role as Brigadier General Hank Luster’s special assistant. He answered the phone for his boss.

  It was Baltimore.

  The door opened. Jake looked in.

  “Maran is outside. Says he has an appointment. Nothing on your schedule.”

  “Let him in; then leave us alone. Hold the calls.”

  “You got a call from General Baltimore. Told him you’d call back.”

  When Maran entered, Bull Luster rose. He pressed his hands over his thick chest, straightened the wrinkles in his tunic. He stuck out a hand. His eyes bulged like bulbs. The bushy silver eyebrows supported a series of wrinkles, terraces across his forehead. Though he had expected a visit eventually, he was shocked to see Maran so soon. He wasn’t happy about it.

  “Maran!”

  “We have to talk.” Maran’s voice rumbled. Tension crackled the air like a bundle of Chinese firecrackers. Luster felt the ricochet off his office walls.

  He maneuvered around th
e large desk and took several steps to the bar behind it.

  “Sure. Let’s have a drink. Rannymareade Ancient?”

  Maran composed himself. He felt like murdering Luster after his betrayal at the trial.

  Is he one of the conspirators that want me dead?

  A glimmer of hope flickered that Luster was only following his conscience. Maran had to play his hand cutely if he were to find out.

  “Remember Freetown?” Maran asked.

  “Sierra Leone? Diamonds just there in the riverbeds?”

  “Corpses. Dismembered. Discarded limbs‌—‌hands.”

  Luster’s face puckered.

  “You bailed me out of that attack in‌—‌what was the name of that joint?”

  “Osama’s. Run by a Frenchman. His idea of a joke,” Maran said.

  “We were all pretty hammered.”

  “Right. My last drink.”

  “Oh, hell. Ain’t I the ass? Heard you quit. The Program,” Luster said, apologetic for the oversight.

  “Yeah. AA. Life’s good. I’m going to keep it that way‌—‌Day at a time. I need your help to clear my name.”

  Luster bristled. Maran was crossing a line. An internal probe would not just cut into Luster’s budget; it would lend credence to Maran’s wild charge.

  “Mack, Mack. There’s no way. If there were, my staff would have found it and brought it to my attention. You were in the wrong.” Luster was losing his patience.

  “Someone torpedoed Taxi Home. And it had to be one of us.”

  “You’re beginning to piss me off, trooper!”

  “Second nature. As I’m sure you remember. I’m going to do more than piss off a lot of people before I’m finished.” Maran’s voice was rising.

  “In fact, I plan on killing some, God willing.”

  “Listen here, soldier!” Luster shouted back. “Don’t blame me for your stupidity. You are the one who disobeyed a direct order in the line of duty. You’re not the only maimed op who served under my command. We’re losing people every day and it’s not going to stop until we go after the Islamist fanatics with the kind of resolve that won us WWII and the Cold War. It’s not happening now. And God only knows if it will ever happen again. Those people who attacked you in Cabinda for all we know have a direct connection with the Middle Eastern maniacs. Arms for diamonds. That’s what it’s all about. I know it. You know it. Tell it to Congress. They say that’s not our war. African savages butcher one another? Not our turf. Complete idiots. There you are. The new American way. Fuckin’ heads in the sand. If not up their asses.”