Death is Forever

as pivotal right now as the atomic device that was exploded at Alamogordo almost a half century ago. But unlike a bomb, diamonds are subtle. Leverage rather than annihilation.”
    Cole smiled thinly. “The waterhole theory of power. It’s not what you own but what you control.”
    Surprised, Wing said, “Exactly. Diplomacy rather than war. Indirection rather than attack. Diamonds give control without causing national enmity, for who can hate the emperor that is neither heard nor seen nor named?”
    “I can name it—the diamond tiger. Be careful, Wing. You could fall off and get eaten.”
    “Or I could ride and be ruler.”
    “That’s always the lure, isn’t it?”
    “You should know. You have ridden before.”
    “Not really,” Cole said, shrugging. “Not the way you mean. I don’t give a damn for international power games.”
    “But you have played them in the past, and you have played very, very well.”
    “Only until I figured out how to get people to leave me alone,” Cole said.
    Wing smiled faintly. “Only Americans believe they are free. It gives them a certain, ah, piquancy.”
    Ignoring the other man, Cole looked at the photo of Erin Shane Windsor. Before he’d been asked to choose, Cole would have said without hesitation that Crazy Abe’s placer diamond mine was worth whatever it took to own it. But now Cole was being asked to make the choice, and the answer was as unexpected as the green diamond had been.
    The life of a woman who was able to create Arctic Odyssey was worth more than God’s own jewel box.
    But only to Cole. If Erin Shane Windsor was to survive being Crazy Abe’s heir, she would need all the help she could get.
    Cole knew the Chen family. If he turned down Uncle Li’s offer, the clan would forge a new IOU, using it as bait for the next prospector on their list, a prospector who probably wouldn’t appreciate wilderness photographs of the sort that could put a man in touch with his own soul.
    Without a word Cole took the IOU and the picture of Erin from the desk. He put the two pieces of paper in his pocket, careful not to look at the photo again. He didn’t want to sense the innocence that lay as deeply within Erin Shane Windsor as her wariness. Whether she knew it or not, a place had been reserved for her aboard the diamond tiger, where there was only one rule: Don’t fall off, or you’ll be eaten bones and all.
    And the innocent were always the first to fall.
    “All right, Wing. Tell Uncle Li he has his man.”

5
Los Angeles A day later
    Cole’s Qantas flight had been forced to land from the west because the Santa Ana wind was sweeping over the Los Angeles basin. Now, four hours later, the wind finally was dying. The San Gabriel Mountains at the east edge of the basin were still clear and stark, but the smog that had been pushed out to sea was beginning to filter back into the high-rise canyons of the city center. Pollution turned the late-afternoon sky an unappetizing shade of orange.
    He tried to rub the fatigue of two trans-Pacific airplane flights from his neck as he studied the central city from his thirty-eighth-floor window. The queen city of the Pacific Rim was spread around him like an architect’s drawing. Close by were the international headquarters of half the money-center banks of the Southwest, plus buildings wearing the logos of the most powerful of the Seven Sisters. Unlike the diamond cartel, the rulers of the world oil trade were welcome to operate in the United States.
    That had always amused Cole. The two cartels operated the same illegal way. The only difference between them was that oil was an essential and diamonds were a luxury.
    Just beyond the tall buildings, in a four-block stretch along Hill Street, the Jewelry Mart lay, a mixture of aging business buildings and gleaming new high-rises. The Jewelry Mart was second only to Manhattan in importance in the gold and gemstone trade.
    The handful of diamonds in Cole’s briefcase would be like a grenade thrown into the midst of these diamantaires.
    Smiling at that prospect, he closed the long metal window blinds to shut out the distractions of the city. He reached for the coffee mug he’d kept filling from the BlackWing office’s bottomless electric coffeepot. Ignoring the heat and bitterness of the liquid, he swallowed a mouthful and then another one, hoping that caffeine would help him focus. He felt faintly disoriented, as though he’d left part of his mind somewhere over the empty