'A' for Argonaut by Michael J. Stedman Read Free Book Online Page B

agency.
    It was her current storehouse of knowledge, however, that he found most valuable. She outlined the collusion between major U.S. political and diamond industry figures working behind the scenes with the CIA and Israel’s MOSSAD to tip over pro-Communist government leaders in the region, a relationship that gave rise to the trade of illegal diamonds in what she called “the cauldron of the Cold War.” But it was her tales of the private military companies like Strategic Solutions, inseminated by the secrecy birthed by that older conflict, that really piqued his interest. He knew about SSI.
    What he knew frightened him to death.
    Over a double shot of Absolut 100 neat, her standby, she shifted his attention to her stories about Boyko, the man who headed SSI.
    “A cunt-picker! The Animal of Angola,” she told him.
    She had never met the mastermind behind the organization, although she had seen a picture of him in a newspaper. She didn’t know much about him, but she knew from her father that he came out of the Soviet military espionage apparatus. He had spent time with them in Angola and now ran a massive arms-for-diamonds op. The pursuit earned him more than a billion U.S. dollars a year running his own mined stones from the DRC through Angola to Antwerp and gave birth to the bloodthirsty terror he inflicted on innocents from Kinshasa to Cabinda.
    Now Faisal scooped the stones into a diamond envelope, poured the lot onto Amber’s tiny scale. She picked up several of the uncut stones, her good fingers rolling over the greasy skins. She smiled with the knowledge that diamonds have a magnetic attraction to oil and grease, a factor applied by mine owners who run the dirty stones over a grease table to separate them from rocks and pebbles. From her purse, she pulled out a small vial. It contained gin. She poured a bit onto a linen hankie and rubbed the stones clean. Oily film from the mine’s sorting and cleaning process masked flaws and made grading them more difficult.
    She used a pair of tweezers to add a series of Lilliputian weights in the opposite pan until the scale balanced.
    “High whites,” he assured her. “Thirty-six stones. The smallest is a half.”
    She reached back into the purse. Her hand emerged with a small leather pouch. Three stones tumbled onto the marble table, her masters. She used them to grade the goods and kept a set of thirty of them at the apartment she kept in Antwerp. Except for the rarified fancy blues, greens, and reds, everyone wanted pure whites, colorless diamonds. She pushed a color-corrected 10X loupe into the socket of her right eye, the one she favored to key the quality of stones before she made her bids.
    “How is Tony?” he asked. Her seven-year-old son suffered from what she had learned was diagnosed as Type 1 near fatal brittle asthma, a life-threatening condition.
    “Still on the prednisone,” she answered. Her worry about Tony’s health was constant.
    “Hope he feels better,” the dealer said.
    “Thanks. OK. Forty-point-oh-three carats total,” she said as she resumed her inspection. She tweezed out the smallest stone and poured the rest of the lot back into the envelope. “I can always count on you. But they’ve got a lot of inclusions, pretty dirty, low-grade, they’ll cut at about GIA S-1, S-2.”
    “OK. You’re right. But the smallest’s a half-carat. OK. Ninety dollars a carat. Thirty-six hundred U.S. cash for the lot.”
    “I’ll give you fifty, two thousand, and I’ll throw in this bag of eights.” She threw a small bag on the counter. They were less desirable and they were not worth the money; she knew how to make them go to pink, added value, with just a dab of nail polish on the culet.
    “You’ve got a bargain,” Faisal assured her.
    She would have to get them across two borders, Angola and Belgium, to her Antwerp cutter, the best in the business.
    “No one cares,” he said. He read her mind.
    “Everyone gets a cut,” she admitted.