Death is Forever

single, comprehensive, expressionless glance.
    The woman in the picture had long, shiny, mahogany hair. Where the sun struck it, deep auburn fire burned. Her skin was neither brown nor pale, having instead a golden cast that suggested time spent outdoors in active movement rather than lying oiled and passive on a beach. Her mouth was well defined, full, and smiling. Her eyes were a luminous shade of green that made Cole think of the diamond.
    Then he thought of what Wing had said about a girl and a woman manqué.
    “Manqué? I don’t think so,” Cole said. “This is quite a woman. Look at the subtle tension in her expression, a kind of elemental animal wariness watching from the depths of her eyes. There is innocence, too, an untouched quality, a gut honesty left over from a time before language came with its structure of truths and lies.”
    Wing’s eyebrows rose. “It’s a good portrait, but not that good.”
    “I know her,” Cole said simply.
    “What? How?”
    “I’ve never met her, but I know her work. I recognize her from the jacket photo on her book, Arctic Odyssey . On the book, her last name is given as Shane, not Windsor.”
    “Erin Shane Windsor,” Wing said. “She is the great-niece of Abelard Windsor.”
    For a moment Cole was very still, remembering some of the woman’s photos and at the same time hearing in his mind the eerie harmonics of wolves on the frozen tundra. The voices of wolves sang a truth known only to wild animals and restless men. And to a few women. Very few. Erin Shane Windsor was one of them. He’d sensed it in her photographs. It had caught him, held him, shaken him.
    Discovering Arctic Odyssey had been one of the few pleasures in Cole’s recent life. Even in memory, the intense sensuality revealed in the photographs remained vivid, textures of ice and sunlight and velvet shades of color that cried out to be touched. He’d been struck by something else in the photos, as well. The photographer had an unflinching appreciation of the balance of death and life, darkness and sun, ice and heat. The photographs had been powerful rather than sentimental, intelligent rather than pleasant. They had spoken to him on a level that bypassed civilization and language and lies.
    “Don’t bet ten million bucks that I’ll be able to seduce Erin Shane Windsor,” Cole said. “Her photos suggest that she’s neither stupid nor naïve, and a woman this attractive isn’t likely to be bored.”
    “Whether you seduce her or not is your choice. Your job will be to keep her from getting killed while she unravels Crazy Abe’s secret or until you find the mine yourself. After that, Miss Windsor no longer matters. Only the mine itself is important. That must be protected at all costs.”
    “Even at the cost of Erin Windsor’s life?”
    “Her life. Yours. My own. Next to that mine, nothing else is important. Nothing.”
    Cole gave Wing a measuring look. Those words sounded less like the owlish graduate of Harvard than like Chen Li-tsao, Wing’s uncle. Chen the Elder was a breathtaking pragmatist who used, rather than valued, human life. But Wing hadn’t been like that. He’d always seemed more gentle, softened by his Western education—as Cole had heard Uncle Li complain more than once.
    Wing had changed in the past five years.
    “The Chen family has been working on this a long time, haven’t you?” Cole asked slowly.
    “Ever since we became certain the Brits were going to abandon Hong Kong to mainland ideologues. One of my uncles has been living with Abelard Windsor for longer than you have known him.”
    Cole rummaged through his visual memories. “The cook. The one Abe always called ‘the bloody ugly chink.’ The cook was there the night we got drunk. That’s how you found out about the gambling debt.”
    Wing didn’t say a word.
    Silently Cole let new understanding crystallize around the new facts.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, looking at Wing with new appreciation. “You’re going to buck the diamond cartel. I knew the Chen family was ambitious, but I didn’t think they were ready to take on the world.”
    “Not the world. Simply Consolidated Minerals, Inc.”
    “No difference, Wing. A cartel that can hold Uncle Sam and the Soviets by the same short hairs can squeeze the nuts off a Hong Kong clan.”
    “And the reason the cartel has such power is diamonds,” Wing said coolly. “In their implication for the balance of international power, diamonds are