Death is Forever

the worn, irregular stones from Wing’s bag.
    Cole spaced the diamonds across the surface of the paper. One of the stones changed color subtly, becoming more coral than pink. The other pinks deepened to a lovely clear rose. Most of the white stones took on a blue sheen that exactly matched Cole’s diamond. One or two showed a very faint yellow cast to their white, a color shift that only an expert eye would have detected or cared about.
    And the green stone burned more vividly still, an emerald flame against snow.
    Cole lowered the loupe and studied the green diamond with both eyes again. It still glimmered with an internal fire that was both hot and cold.
    Years before, in Tunisia, he’d seen a stone that was nearly the equal of this one. The smuggler who owned the rough claimed it had come from Venezuela. Cole didn’t believe it. But before he could raise enough cash to buy the truth, someone had sealed the smuggler’s lips by cutting his throat. The smuggler’s death hadn’t shocked Cole. When it came to diamonds, a man’s life was valuable only to himself, and his death could easily profit any number of people.
    What did surprise Cole was that these diamonds had cost only two lives. He’d never seen a handful of diamonds to equal the ones resting on the white paper, drawing their color from the peculiar circumstances of their birth rather than reflecting their surroundings.
    Cole picked up his own exemplar diamond, put it away, and examined the dark velvet bag that lay collapsed across the desk’s ebony surface. The velvet was old, so old that the passage of time and the hard surfaces of the diamonds inside had worn the cloth to near-transparency in places. The velvet didn’t care. It was dead.
    But the stones weren’t dead, not in the same way. They shimmered with light and time and man’s insatiable hunger for the rare and valuable.
    “What do you want from me?” Cole asked, watching the diamonds with brooding gray eyes.
    For a moment Wing thought the question was directed at the stones. Though he’d known Cole for many years, the Hong Kong businessman didn’t claim to understand or predict the American prospector’s complex mind.
    “Are they diamonds?” Wing asked.
    “Yes.”
    “No chance of deception?”
    Cole shrugged. The motion made light move over him. Raw black silk gleamed in his sport coat. His hair was the exact color and luster of the silk. His skin had been weathered in the wild places of the world. Fine lines radiated out from his eyes, legacy of a life spent squinting into the light of a desert sun or the flare of a miner’s lamp. Above his left temple a scattering of silver showed in his thick hair. He looked older than his thirty-four years. By every measure that mattered, he was.
    “There’s always a chance of deception,” Cole said. “But if these were made by a man, he’ll be the ruin of every miner and diamond mine in the world.”
    Wing smiled.
    “If you’re worried,” Cole said, “I can find someone in Darwin with a thermal inertia tester. Nobody’s beat that test, not yet.”
    This time it was Wing who shrugged. “Unless you brought an instrument with you, there’s no time. These stones must be on their way in a few hours.”
    “Where are they going?”
    “America.”
    “Where did they come from?”
    “Kimberley.”
    Cole was silent. When he spoke, his voice was neutral. “South Africa’s deposits are pretty well played out.”
    “Not Kimberley, Africa. The Kimberley Plateau, here in Australia.”
    Wing smiled as though enjoying the chance to show that he understood the difference between the two Kimberleys. It was a common enough mistake. People automatically linked diamonds with Africa, despite the fact that the biggest diamond mine in the world, the Argyle, was in the remote tropical deserts of the state of Western Australia.
    Cole smiled in return, but there was little humor in the hard curve of his mouth. “Did the Chen family invest in the Argyle mine on the basis of these stones?”
    “I didn’t say Argyle, only Kimberley.”
    Swiftly Cole thought through the possible implications. If those stones came from the Argyle, the cartel that controlled the world’s supply of diamonds had made a major new discovery and had become a little richer in the process.
    But if the stones were from some new source, the diamond game had a new player and all hell was about to break loose.
    Either way, life would become very interesting for the man holding