Death is Forever (5 page)

Then he thought of what Wing had said about a girl and a woman manqué.

“Manqué? I don’t think so,” Cole said. “This is quite a woman. Look at the subtle tension in her expression, a kind of elemental animal wariness watching from the depths of her eyes. There is innocence, too, an untouched quality, a gut honesty left over from a time before language came with its structure of truths and lies.”

Wing’s eyebrows rose. “It’s a good portrait, but not that good.”

“I know her,” Cole said simply.

“What? How?”

“I’ve never met her, but I know her work. I recognize her from the jacket photo on her book,
Arctic Odyssey
. On the book, her last name is given as Shane, not Windsor.”

“Erin Shane Windsor,” Wing said. “She is the great-niece of Abelard Windsor.”

For a moment Cole was very still, remembering some of the woman’s photos and at the same time hearing in his mind the eerie harmonics of wolves on the frozen tundra. The voices of wolves sang a truth known only to wild animals and restless men. And to a few women. Very few. Erin Shane Windsor was one of them. He’d sensed it in her photographs. It had caught him, held him, shaken him.

Discovering
Arctic Odyssey
had been one of the few pleasures in Cole’s recent life. Even in memory, the intense sensuality revealed in the photographs remained vivid, textures of ice and sunlight and velvet shades of color that cried out to be touched. He’d been struck by something else in the photos, as well. The photographer had an unflinching appreciation of the balance of death and life, darkness and sun, ice and heat. The photographs had been powerful rather than sentimental, intelligent rather than pleasant. They had spoken to him on a level that bypassed civilization and language and lies.

“Don’t bet ten million bucks that I’ll be able to seduce Erin Shane Windsor,” Cole said. “Her photos suggest that she’s neither stupid nor naïve, and a woman this attractive isn’t likely to be bored.”

“Whether you seduce her or not is your choice. Your job will be to keep her from getting killed while she unravels Crazy Abe’s secret or until you find the mine yourself. After that, Miss Windsor no longer matters. Only the mine itself is important. That must be protected at all costs.”

“Even at the cost of Erin Windsor’s life?”

“Her life. Yours. My own. Next to that mine, nothing else is important. Nothing.”

Cole gave Wing a measuring look. Those words sounded less like the owlish graduate of Harvard than like Chen Li-tsao, Wing’s uncle. Chen the Elder was a breathtaking pragmatist who used, rather than valued, human life. But Wing hadn’t been like that. He’d always seemed more gentle, softened by his Western education—as Cole had heard Uncle Li complain more than once.

Wing had changed in the past five years.

“The Chen family has been working on this a long time, haven’t you?” Cole asked slowly.

“Ever since we became certain the Brits were going to abandon Hong Kong to mainland ideologues. One of my uncles has been living with Abelard Windsor for longer than you have known him.”

Cole rummaged through his visual memories. “The cook. The one Abe always called ‘the bloody ugly chink.’ The cook was there the night we got drunk. That’s how you found out about the gambling debt.”

Wing didn’t say a word.

Silently Cole let new understanding crystallize around the new facts.

“I’ll be damned,” he said softly, looking at Wing with new appreciation. “You’re going to buck the diamond cartel. I knew the Chen family was ambitious, but I didn’t think they were ready to take on the world.”

“Not the world. Simply Consolidated Minerals, Inc.”

“No difference, Wing. A cartel that can hold Uncle Sam and the Soviets by the same short hairs can squeeze the nuts off a Hong Kong clan.”

“And the reason the cartel has such power is diamonds,” Wing said coolly. “In their implication for the balance of international power, diamonds are 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.”

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 Pacific.

One by one he began rolling up the maps that he’d spread on the broad hardwood table. Carefully he returned each map to its own cardboard tube and placed them in the storage rack. The maps belonged to BlackWing’s L.A. headquarters. He’d spent most of the last two hours poring over the best Western Australia maps BlackWing could offer, looking for some hint of a suggestion, searching for the faintest of clues to point the way to the source of Crazy Abe Windsor’s diamond mine.

Cole might as well have taken a nap. BlackWing’s maps were designed to locate metallic ore claims—iron or nickel, uranium or gold. They didn’t give him many of the fine geological details that he needed to find diamonds.

He glanced at his watch, but what caught his eye was the copy of
Arctic Odyssey
that lay open on the desk. He’d turned to the book repeatedly in the past twenty-four hours, as though it would somehow help him under stand the woman he was about to meet. The photograph that most haunted him covered two pages. It showed dawn and tundra, ice and nesting geese. “Uncertain Spring” could have been a trite portrayal of seasonal regeneration, but it wasn’t. Instead, the photo showed an arctic dawn where life hung on by a bloody fingernail.

Slowly Cole ran his fingertips over the picture, as though he could feel as well as see it. The photo captured a freezing summer dawn. In the background, seen through low streamers of windblown snow, more ghostly shapes than living flesh, adult geese put their heads to the screaming wind as they flattened themselves protectively over their nests.

In the foreground of the picture, beneath a transparent shroud of ice, lay a gosling that would never feel the warmth of the rising sun. The small creature’s death was agonizing, as was the beauty of the new day and the determination of the adult geese to save their remaining offspring.

Looking at “Uncertain Spring,” Cole knew that Erin Windsor had discovered the frailty, even the absurdity, of life.

He only hoped she had learned something about the value of life as well, her own included. If she had, she would be happy to take BlackWing’s offer—three million dollars for her interest in an Australian diamond mine that might not even exist.

Brooding over the photo, he wondered if Erin Windsor would recognize the danger of being owner of a unique diamond mine whose output ConMin couldn’t control or bury with the contents of their huge London vault. Certainly Matthew Windsor would know the danger to his daughter. Any professional intelligence analyst would be able to calculate the danger down to the last bit of money, adrenaline, and blood.

Cole hoped that, at twenty-seven, Erin would still listen to her father’s advice. If she did, she’d be satisfied with BlackWing’s offer. If not, there would be hell to pay.

And Erin would be the one paying it.

He glanced again at his Rolex, then at the battered tin box with its burden of priceless gems and worthless poetry. He slipped the tin box into a briefcase secured with a combination lock and fitted with a steel handcuff. With a wry smile he clicked the cuff into place around his left wrist, knowing that he was more the briefcase’s prisoner than vice versa. Then he went out of the office, locking the door behind him.

The thirty-eighth floor of the BlackWing Building contained the executive suites. The building was expensive and discreet, like BlackWing itself. Cole took the elevator down to street level and reentered the push and pull of the everyday world in downtown Los Angeles. The other offices in the building were vomiting their nightly portion of commuters. Clerks and craftsmen and brokers crowded the lobby.

Cole and the chained briefcase didn’t attract any attention. Besides BlackWing, the building housed dozens of gemstone wholesalers and jewelry dealers. Men of a dozen nationalities and all races came and went frequently, carrying similar briefcases. It was another sign of the care Chen Li-tsao had exercised positioning BlackWing for its assault on the diamond tiger.

A black Mercedes limousine waited at the curb. Its driver leaned against the gleaming front fender, waiting with a look of professional indifference on his face. When Cole emerged from the building, the driver straightened and moved to open the rear door of the limo.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Blackburn. Still going to Beverly Hills?”

“Yes.”

The driver was young, athletic, Chinese, and had hands calloused by martial arts. He spoke with a relaxed southern California accent. Cole knew without looking at the driver’s license that one of the man’s names would be Chen. A branch of the Chen family had been established in America since 1847.

The driver ignored the Santa Monica Freeway, where afternoon traffic was already starting to congeal. Keeping to the surface streets, the limousine reached Beverly Hills in twenty minutes. The lights were just starting to come up in the high-rises along Wilshire Boulevard and the boutiques of Rodeo Drive when the limousine pulled under the awning of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and stopped. A uniformed bellman opened the back door.

“I could be awhile,” Cole said to the driver.

“I’m yours for the duration. I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”

Cole didn’t doubt it. The Chens would keep an eye on their ten-million-dollar gamble.

At one corner of the Beverly Wilshire’s crowded lobby, Erin Windsor lounged unhappily in a brocaded armchair, watching the jet-setters and the Hollywood groupies pouring into the stately hotel. She would have preferred some place less grand than the Beverly Wilshire, and some location less ostentatious than Beverly Hills, but the law firm had booked the suite. Apparently they hoped to impress her.

What a waste of time,
she thought.

Even though she’d decided to leave the arctic, she still found civilized pretensions more boring than amusing and more irritating than either.

To help the time pass, she tried to imagine herself as the owner of a remote ranch in Australia. Although she was fascinated by the Pacific Rim, she’d never visited Australia. Now James Rosen, the family lawyer who owned a lucrative practice in Century City, had informed her that she was the owner of a “station” and a set of mineral claims. All this a gift from a man named Abelard Windsor, a great-uncle she hadn’t even known existed.

Rosen had been able to show her the location of the Windsor holdings on maps and had even managed to dredge up some travel-guide photos of the state of Western Australia. The photos made it clear that the Kimberley Plateau wasn’t a lush, friendly kind of place. It was home to a rack-of-bones breed of beef cattle called Kimberley shorthorns, and to exotic animals that included kangaroos, long-tailed birds of prey called kites, and highly poisonous snakes called mulgas.

Erin had been fascinated. The primitive landscape appealed to her, especially because she was on the edge of condemning herself to an indeterminate sentence in very civilized Europe.

Other than the fact of the bequest, Rosen’s information had been sketchy. When he’d gotten tired of her questions, he’d told her that Cole Blackburn, the courier who was delivering Abelard Windsor’s will, would answer all her questions.

Idly Erin scanned the crowd again, wondering what Cole would look like. All Rosen knew about Cole was that he was a geologist who represented the law firm involved in the administration of the Windsor estate. The law firm was well known in Australia and in Hong Kong. When pressed, Rosen admitted that the situation was unusual but hardly a cause for alarm. The law firm had excellent credentials.

Even so, Erin had chosen a vantage point screened by the crowds in the lobby so that she might be able to pick Cole out before he spotted her. Her decision wasn’t entirely conscious. She always arranged encounters with male strangers, so that she wasn’t taken by surprise. Part of the reason was her natural reserve. Part was a caution learned at the slicing edge of a knife.

The lobby was full of travelers with luggage and business types with expensive leather briefcases. Many of the men were tanned and appeared wealthy, but none of them stood around looking from face to passing face, hoping to find someone they had never met in the hotel lobby.

For a moment Erin thought the casually dressed, longhaired blond male with the oversized leather rucksack might be Cole. The man had the tanned, outdoorsy look that field geologists in Alaska had. He was handsome, with fine features and a gentle smile, and it all added up to a quiet modern male who understated his masculinity. He was the sort of man Erin found herself with much of the time when she was in the world of NewYork and Europe.

The young man had been standing near the reception desk for a few minutes, scanning the crowd, waiting for someone. Erin was about to leave her blind and introduce herself when a dazzling middle-aged woman in evening clothes threw herself into the young man’s arms. Erin saw little television in Alaska, but she immediately recognized the woman as the bitch star of an enormously popular weekly series. In person, she looked at least a decade older than her escort.

The couple chatted for a moment, then walked arm in arm toward the lobby bar where a party was already under way. Erin thought the actress clung to the young man in a peculiarly possessive way, displaying him like a woman leading a small dog in a show. If the young man disliked it, he kept it under wraps.

Lapdogs aren’t noted for their teeth.

Erin’s wry thought didn’t show on her face. As the couple passed, she realized that the young man’s tan was salon perfect, not a squint line on his whole smooth face. The leather rucksack was also an affectation. No bulges or scuffs marred its expensive lines. He walked like a man used to getting in and out of taxis.

As soon as the couple vanished, Erin’s eye was caught by a striking slash of darkness in the midst of all the glitter and gilt—a black-haired man in a black silk jacket and open-collared white shirt. His skin had been changed by sun and weather rather than by carefully applied artificial light. He walked with the unconscious grace of a healthy animal. A black leather case was handcuffed to his wrist.

He was looking right at her.

For an instant Erin’s pulse accelerated with a purely female response. Then her elemental awareness gave way to an irritation that was close to anger and even closer to fear. This easy-walking man with his knowing eyes and his powerful body was exactly the sort of man she’d learned at such cost not to trust. He was a predator. Like her father. Like her brother.

Like Hans.

Because she knew she was reacting irrationally, Erin fought to cover her response to the tall stranger. The man was nothing more to her than a business appointment, a courier, an errand boy.

He walked to the place where she sat screened by foliage from the bustle of the lobby. Screened, but obviously not hidden. Not from Cole Blackburn.

There was no hesitation in Cole’s stride when Erin came to her feet and stood waiting for him. He’d had no trouble picking her out of the crowd. Her natural auburn hair burned like a campfire amid the pale candles of the rinsed, bleached, and dyed jet-set women. She was dressed in a black cotton blouse and slacks that had the relaxed appearance of clothes just taken from a suitcase. The contrast of black cloth with red hair and pale, smooth skin was arresting, but Cole would have bet good money that the clothes had been chosen for their ability to travel rather than for how they looked.

Erin nodded as though to confirm that she was his appointment. Then she walked toward him and Cole cursed silently, feeling like he’d just walked into an ambush.

The still photo of Erin had told only a tiny portion of the truth. There was a quality to her movements that put Cole’s body on full sexual alert. He’d felt nothing like it since Chen Lai, with her black eyes and golden skin and hidden laughter. Chen Lai, the honeyed snare he’d barely escaped intact, because he’d given Lai more of himself than he should have, mistaking simple lust for the complex emotion of love. It was a mistake he would never make again.

As they approached each other, Cole studied Erin, looking for some sign that she was conscious of the elemental sexuality in her movements. If she was, she didn’t show it. There were no sidelong looks to see how the men around her were reacting. There was no careful polish of the female surface—no artful makeup, no gleaming-red nails, no tousled hair or undone buttons.

Lai’s sexuality had been calculated to the last fraction. Erin’s wasn’t, which only increased its allure. And her eyes were the same incredible green of the diamond that men had died for in the past and would doubtless die for in the future.

The idea made Cole smile crookedly. He’d seen men die for much less tangible, much less beautiful things than a diamond that was the color of every summer God ever made. Ideology, theology, philosophy—none of them could be cut and polished and set to shimmering and dreaming in shades of green on a man’s palm.

“Erin Windsor? I’m Cole Blackburn.”

Her eyes widened as she realized how big he was, like an oak taking root in front of her.

Cole was used to the reaction. He kept his hand extended until she recovered enough to take it.

“Mr. Blackburn,” Erin said, releasing his hand immediately. “I was expecting someone—er, different. Mr. Rosen, my lawyer, called you a courier.”

“I’ve been called worse. Is there a place where we can talk privately?”

“Is it necessary to be private?”

He shrugged. “Not to me. I just thought you’d like to be alone when I hand more than a million dollars in rough diamonds to you.”

“You’re joking,” she said, startled.

“Do I look like a stand-up comic?” He lifted the hand that held the briefcase, showing her the chain and handcuff that leashed it to him. “You can see the diamonds right here if you prefer, but I’d advise less witnesses.”

Erin made her decision quickly, on the basis of survival instincts she’d developed in the arctic. Considering who and what Cole Blackburn was, the risk involved in being alone with him in her hotel room was less than taking possession of a fortune in rough diamonds in a very public lobby.

“My room is on the ninth floor,” she said, turning and walking toward the elevators.

Cole followed, telling himself he was past the age to get aroused by something as trivial as the arc of a woman’s hips. His body silently, violently, disagreed.

The elevator doors thumped softly closed, shutting out the hushed seething of the lobby. Erin gave the machine a destination. Instantly it began to rise.

“What did your lawyer tell you?” Cole asked.

“That he’d been contacted by a highly reputable international law firm, which informed him that I was the sole heir of a great-uncle whose name I’d never heard. I was told that a Mr. Cole Blackburn would arrive at five
p.m.
in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire. He would deliver the will and answer all my questions.”

“Your lawyer was half right.”

“Which half?”

“I’ll give you the will. But you’ll have more questions than I’ll have answers.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Any woman who can take a picture like ‘Uncertain Spring’ asks the kind of questions that have no answers.”

Surprise showed clearly in her green eyes. “You called me Windsor. How did you know I’m Erin Shane?”

“The photo on the jacket of
Arctic Odyssey
.”

The elevator stopped and the doors whisked aside. Erin looked warily at Cole, as though changing her mind about taking him to her room.

“Your first instinct was correct,” he said matter-offactly. “I’m not going to touch you unless you extend a platinum invitation.” The elevator door started to close automatically. Cole caught it with his big hand and held it open, looking directly at Erin as he added, “And you’re not in the business of extending invitations, are you?”

“No. Are you always this blunt?”

“It saves time. You have about four seconds before the elevator door starts buzzing. Your room, my limousine, or some neutral third choice?”

Erin looked at the man whose gray eyes were as clear as ice and infinitely more alive. She had the feeling of being pressed to make a decision whose consequences were totally unknown.

A few years ago she would have refused all choices and gone back to the known dangers of the arctic, but a few years ago she hadn’t been restless, feeling as though something vital was missing from her life, from herself.

A year ago she would have been frightened by a man like Cole. Now she wasn’t, not entirely. The realization gave her a heady sensation of being freed from a cage of her own making.

It was like watching dawn after a long arctic night.

“My room,” she said, walking past him.

When they were inside she closed the door, tossed her purse on a nearby chair, and turned toward him. He looked at her for a long moment, then bent and worked over the combination lock on the briefcase until it opened. Using a key that had been left inside the briefcase, he unlocked the heavy steel cuff. A moment later he pulled out a tin box, removed a worn velvet bag, and handed the box over to Erin.

“Abe’s will was holographic,” Cole said, “written in his own hand without benefit of lawyers. It’s pretty simple. It leaves everything he owned to you. Most of the rest of the papers are covered with doggerel.”

Erin blinked. “Poetry?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

She smiled slightly. “Not much good, huh?”

“I don’t want to prejudice you,” he said, returning her almost hidden smile. “You might like it. After all, some people like goanna charred whole in a campfire.”

“Goanna?”

“Lizard.”

Erin’s smile widened. “You’d be amazed at some of the things I ate in the arctic.”

She took the will and began to read it, frowning over the spidery, faded writing.

Erin read the document again, then gave Cole an odd look.

“Questions?” he said.

“ConMin? Is that what I think it is?”

“Consolidated Minerals, Inc.”

“Diamonds,” she said tersely. Her gaze went to Cole’s briefcase for a moment.