Death is Forever

diamond sight-holders always made their needs known to the DSD through formal channels, but what happened in this room today would determine how—or whether—those needs would be met. To an extent startling to outsiders, DSD enhanced or diminished the economic health of nations.
    Van Luik checked his own watch. Given a choice, he would have put this meeting off for five weeks, until the next sight. By then the monsoon season would have started in Western Australia and the matter of Abelard Windsor’s dangerous bequest would be moot for another six months. But putting off the meeting wasn’t possible.
    Abruptly he turned to the majordomo who was hovering by the half-open door.
    “Send them in.”
    The representative from Israel strode in first. Moshe Aram was lean, wiry, and fit. He was a member of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. The diamond trade was too crucial to Israel’s economy to be left in the hands of diamantaires or politicians. That was how the troubles had begun back in the 1970s.
    The United States representative, Nan Faulkner, followed on Aram’s heels. Faulkner sat down, poured herself a glass of ice water, drank it, and poured another. Then she lit a cigarillo and balanced it on the lip of a heavy crystal ashtray that had been put at her place.
    Van Luik nodded at the woman but said nothing. Although Faulkner was an old hand at DSD meetings, van Luik always maintained his distance from her, believing her to be a political token rather than a real player in the game of international power.
    He went to his own chair at the head of the table and watched calmly while the others took their places. There was little polite talk. Each person was there to ensure that his country’s interests in the diamond trade were presented to the diamond cartel.
    The Soviet representative, Boris Yarakov, looked un-usually surly. Attar Singh, India’s representative to the cartel, was as politic as Yarakov was boorish. Singh had no choice but to be accommodating. India no longer produced diamonds, so it no longer commanded the attention it once had. What India brought to ConMin and DSD was a bottomless well of cheap labor willing to spend its hours and its eyesight on the task of shaping and polishing diamonds so tiny they would once have been sold for industrial use at a quarter the price of polished goods.
    The Continental diamond trade was represented by Nathaniel Feinberg. As with India, the Continental interests were cutters and polishers rather than producers of rough diamonds. They had less power in the diamond cartel than the owners of the gem-producing diamond mines themselves. Those mines were the treasure and bane of the diamond cartel’s existence: There were more than enough mines to fill the world demand for gems.
    Australia had used its own geologists, rather than ConMin’s, to explore the vast Kimberley Plateau. The Argyle diamond mine had been the result. Because the remote Argyle strike was monstrously expensive to develop, Australia sought outside capital. Once the banks learned that Australia wasn’t a member of the diamond cartel and thus had no guaranteed market for the Argyle’s output, development money dried up.
    The power games hadn’t stopped there. India, unhappy with the cartel, had offered to guarantee a market for Argyle’s melee diamonds. The banks were approached again, guaranteed market in hand. Before the loan went through, the Indian government was privately informed that DSD would undercut India’s markets by flooding them with below-cost stones of the same size, quality, and cut as India would produce from the Australian mine. DSD and ConMin were rich enough to absorb the losses indefinitely.
    India wasn’t.
    No single diamond-producing country could survive a pissing contest with the contents of DSD’s London vaults. India withdrew its offer to finance the development of the Argyle mine, and Australia did what every other individual or nation with a diamond mine had done.
    Australia cut a deal with ConMin.
    Ian McLaren was Australia’s representative to DSD. He watched van Luik warily, and with good reason. ConMin had a long memory.
    Van Luik opened the Moroccan leather folder in front of him, signaling that the session was open. Immediately everyone began passing single sheets of paper to the head of the table. Each month the mining countries put forth a projected production figure, and each month the cutters and polishers stated their expected needs for raw