Death is Forever

when Cole had sold his half to the Chen family. Since then, the value of the company had at least doubled.
    Beneath all the legal bells and whistles, Cole was being offered $10 million in equity for the investment of a dollar, plus mining claims and patents he didn’t hold. The contract itself was fully executed except for his own signature. Everything was clear except the reason for the offer.
    That was why Cole had spent the past nineteen minutes reading between the contract’s lines. Granted, circumstances surrounding the dissolution of his partnership with Wing had been unusual. The family of Chen had paid Cole $5 million partly to soothe him for the loss of a lover who was their daughter, Wing’s sister. But now the shrewd clan that controlled a sizeable portion of Hong Kong and Macao seemed to be offering him twice that much for no reason he could see.
    It made him nervous.
    He was no lawyer, but he was sophisticated enough to see that there were no loopholes, no tricks built into the partnership agreement, no obvious or subtle way for the Chen family to recoup from Cole Blackburn the missing $9,999,999.
    Without signing, he dropped the document back on the desk. “It’s too early for Christmas.”
    Wing shrugged. “It’s not a gift. The present geologists at BlackWing are either too inexperienced or too corrupt to find what we want.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “Diamond mines,” Wing said succinctly.
    “Why do you want them? You’ve got a half-dozen Pacific Basin holdings that pay better returns than the average diamond mine.”
    Wing rubbed his palms together thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Have you looked at oil prices lately? At gold? At copper? Iron? Uranium? They are, as you Americans say, in the toilet.” He smiled slightly. It had been a long time since he had used American slang.
    “Diamonds have had their own problems,” Cole said. “What cost sixty-two thousand dollars American per carat in 1980 costs about twenty thousand at the moment.”
    “Yes, but take a slightly longer view and you’ll find that in 1974 the same diamond cost only forty-three hundred dollars per carat. Trust me, my friend. I have done my research carefully. Diamonds are the only commodity to have increased in real value over the last fifty years.”
    “Thanks to the cartel.”
    Wing sighed. “They’re bloody geniuses, aren’t they? At meetings of the UN, countries argue and do nothing. At meetings of Consolidated Minerals, Inc., countries agree and make money. ConMin is the only monopoly in history that has channeled rather than set free the inherent greediness of man. Prices rise, but slowly. Long-term stability, not short-term profits. ConMin has an almost Chinese appreciation of time.”
    “And power.”
    “That too,” Wing agreed softly. “That most of all.”
    “So the Chen family wants a diamond prospector who owes nothing to the diamond cartel.”
    Wing was momentarily startled. He’d seen Cole only infrequently in the five years since his sister Lai had broken her engagement to the American. In that time, Wing had forgotten that Cole’s mind was as quick as his well-conditioned body.
    “Yes, that is precisely what we want,” Wing admitted.
    Cole leaned back in the sleek leather chair and listened to his own instincts. He was used to operating on them at times and in places where more than money was at stake. His instincts had urged him to come to Darwin on the strength of Wing’s cryptic phone call.
    Instincts…or sheer restlessness.
    Whichever was speaking, Cole was ready to listen. He still didn’t know precisely what Wing wanted. More accurately, Cole didn’t know what the Chen family wanted. But he did know that touching the luminous green diamond had made him feel more alive than he’d felt in years.
    Listening carefully to his inner silence, waiting to hear the whisper of instincts telling him to avoid an unseen trap, Cole waited for another minute. He heard nothing but the quickened beating of his own heart. He’d found diamonds and diamond mines all over the world. He had made and lost small fortunes, and large ones as well, but he’d never found the equal of Wing’s green diamond.
    Now he was being offered the chance to find a whole mine full of them, God’s own jewel box.
    Cole pulled a pen from his pocket and signed his name on the contract and its copies with quick, slashing strokes. Saying nothing, he folded one contract and put it in his breast pocket. Then he