Death is Forever

deprivation, it also leveled off the psychic highs of survival.
    Fisher hadn’t understood. Her preferred world of stark Pacific Rim landscapes and remote cultures was simply too distant from Manhattan, and too different in ways both obvious and subtle, for him to understand. The East Coast looked east, toward Europe and the past. The West Coast looked west, toward the undeveloped Pacific Rim and the future.
    Unfortunately she’d run out of internal and external excuses for not accepting the European assignments, for not shooting farmhouses and wine cellars and sterling silver by candlelight. She’d made herself clear her schedule so that no one would be left hanging if she was gone for several months or even a year. She’d done everything but work up enthusiasm for shooting European set pieces when she would rather shoot almost anything else.
    She’d been to the Continent many times. She’d been more depressed than impressed. Part of it was simply that her former fiancé had been European, or at least had claimed to be.
    Family emergency stop
    Part of it was that she associated Europe with her father’s work, diplomacy and secrets and treachery, the kind of betrayal that scarred its survivors for life.
    Assuming there were any survivors to scar.
    Instructions to follow stop
    Instructions, but no truth. Man had invented civilization in order to escape natural truth and had invented time in order to more carefully package human lies.
    Family emergency
    Motionless, Erin stood surrounded by brilliant silver light and radiant natural silence, eternity condensed into a shimmering unity that had a sweeping disregard for human concepts such as truth and lies, life and death, fair and unfair.
    You must return
    Life wasn’t fair or unfair; it was simply unexpected. Sometimes life’s surprises were breathtakingly beautiful, like the arctic. Sometimes they were breathtakingly cruel, like Hans. But surprises were always the raw material of life, and she had chosen to live.
    Erin silenced her wristwatch alarm for the last time and began packing up her equipment for the long trip to Los Angeles.

3
Antwerp
    “How long ago did the two Chinese assassins die?”
    The voice, slightly distorted by the satellite link and the scrambler, had a dry Etonian disdain. Hugo van Luik was a stocky Dutchman with a full head of white hair, but he sounded like a whingeing Pom to an Australian ear.
    There was the sound of a bottle gurgling at the other end of the line. Van Luik could imagine Jason Street swilling beer from an oversized can.
    “Twelve hours,” Street said, “maybe a bit more.”
    “Why was your report delayed?”
    “You want me spilling our business on open phone lines, do you?” Street shot back. “This is bloody Australia, remember. Anybody with a receiver can listen in on two-way radios. I buried the chokies, took the place apart, and then got back here to Perth before I called.”
    Van Luik was grateful to be ten thousand miles away from the country and the man he detested yet was never free of. Van Luik’s office on the fifth floor of the gray, anonymous office building on Pelikanstraat, the main street of Antwerp’s diamond trade, might as well have been in hell for all the comfort it gave him.
    He closed his eyes against the blinding pain of a growing headache. At the moment he was alone in his office, so he allowed himself the luxury of slumping. He felt like he was impaled on a giant fishhook. Nausea twisted in his stomach, then slowly subsided. He drew a deep, grateful breath. He was a powerful man, both physically and in his profession, but he paid the price of power. Lately that price seemed to grow every day.
    “Very well,” van Luik said. “To summarize, the holographic will, the velvet sack, and the tin box were gone by the time you arrived. A decade’s work—wasted.”
    “Too bloody right. You should have let me open Abe Windsor up my own way. He’d have spilled his secret soon enough.”
    “Perhaps. But more probably a man his age would have died under torture and left the secret to his heir. At the time, the risks seemed too great.”
    “Not now, mate. Now they look bloody small.”
    “Your hindsight is superlative.”
    No reply came from the other end of the line, unless another gurgle of beer could be called a comment. Street loathed the precise Dutchman whose power was hidden behind the bland, meaningless title of Director of Special Operations, Diamond Sales Division. But even while