Death is Forever

mouth with her fingertips. “It’s too late to make me afraid of you. I’m going to Australia, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”
    Cole told himself that he was sorry he couldn’t intimidate Erin, sorry that she stood so trustingly in his arms, leaning against him, her breath a warmth rushing over his skin.
    He told himself, but he didn’t believe any of it.
    For a long time he simply held her, listening to the surf and wishing he’d exaggerated the difficulty of living and working in the Kimberley.
    But he hadn’t exaggerated. The buildup was a corrosive time, fraying men’s tempers to the point of violence and beyond. The wet wasn’t much better. When the wet arrived, it would wash the land right back into the Stone Age, where the most simple things were difficult. Even survival.
    Especially survival.

14
Los Angeles Late at night
    “I’ve been attending funerals.” Chen Wing’s voice was thinned by more than the satellite relay joining him to Cole. “They have an unsettling effect.”
    Cole smiled grimly. “You didn’t expect to make war on ConMin without suffering a few casualties, did you?”
    Wing didn’t reply for a moment. Then he changed the subject. “Have you made any progress?”
    “Directly, none.”
    Wing muttered a quiet curse in Cantonese.
    “Relax,” Cole said. “At this stage, that’s the best news you could hope for. I’ve spent most of the last three days examining maps from the BlackWing files.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing. That’s good news. If I could find Windsor’s jewel box in a few hours using existing maps, so could any other geologist, including the ones on your staff. You told me they reported finding nothing, correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “They probably weren’t lying, because the maps told them nothing. The other possibility is that the maps told the story but your geologists withheld it to sell it to someone else. If so, I didn’t find what they were selling.”
    “If you haven’t found it, they didn’t. You’re the best. You always have been. Lucky in mines, unlucky in love.”
    “Number one, that isn’t how the saying goes,” Cole said. “Number two, my love life is none of your damned business.”
    There was a brief silence, followed by a sigh. “I’m sorry,” Wing said, his tone soft, almost whispering. “Funerals have an unfortunate effect on my common sense. One of those funerals was that of my second cousin and brother-in-law, Chen Zeong-Li.”
    Images flooded through Cole’s memory, images of the passionate black-eyed woman who was Wing’s sister, the woman who in the end had loved her family and power more than she had loved any man, including Cole Blackburn.
    “Zeong was a decent man,” Cole said finally. “I’m sorry to hear he’s dead.”
    “Are you? There was a time when you would have killed Zeong and danced on his grave.”
    Cole didn’t say anything.
    “If you choose to resume the relationship with Chen Lai,” Wing continued, “this time the Chen family would not intervene.”
    This time.
    The words echoed in Cole’s mind, reminding him of things he would rather have forgotten. Shortly after he’d signed the original BlackWing agreement, Lai had dumped him because the family of Chen disapproved of a non-Chinese husband. A secret lover was tolerated while Cole advanced the Chen family’s mineral business, but when it came to marriage and children it was more important to consolidate blood and business ties in Kowloon.
    Now Zeong-Li was dead, Lai was widowed, and the family of Chen was offering Cole the very woman they once had forbidden him.
    “No, thanks,” Cole said calmly. “A smart man only wipes his ass with poison ivy once.”
    From the other end of the line came a charged silence, followed by the sound of harsh, humorless laughter. “You haven’t changed.”
    “Hard to harder, half smart to half smarter. That’s a change, Wing. It’s the only change that matters. I’ve survived.”
    “What will you need at Abe’s station?”
    Without a pause Cole accepted the change of subject. “I’ll need a helicopter to do photo, radar, magnetic, and scintillometric studies of Abe’s claims. Ideally the information from the last two should be recorded on separate transparencies, laid over the first two, and then integrated with information that I’m putting on the topo and geological maps, but I won’t have time to handle all the integration and programming myself.”
    “We have a