I swam up to the surface of a tepid sea to find myself lying flat on my back on a bed. A room came into focus. Through a window in the opposite wall I could see the branches of a tree, fringed with tiny leaves that shivered in the breeze. Then a thick mist floated in and concealed the tree. When the mist blew past, as if a magician had snapped his cape to complete a magic trick, a lilac-breasted bird with an iridescent turquoise belly sat on the highest branch. It tilted back its head and opened a jet-black beak and delivered a harsh noise—raak raak raak—into the wooly air. Then the magician passed his cape across the window again, and when it snapped away the bird had gone.
Now I heard the distant boom of surf. Then, much closer, the sound of a machine that made a steady whir-thunk, whir-thunk. I turned my head to see an IV bag on a shiny metal stand release a drop of red liquid into a tube that led somewhere out of sight behind my head. I tried to reach for the tube but my hands wouldn’t move. Something was holding my wrists against the bed. By curling my fingers, I could feel the leather manacles. They were lined with a soft material. Identical restraints held my ankles in place.
I struggled. My limbs felt leaden. Sounds drifted into the room—the cries of seabirds and, somewhere closer, a closing door. Human voices exchanged muffled sentences. When I tried to shout, an animal whimpered in my ear, as if it were being tortured by the same fingers that were rummaging inside my head. They could not find what they wanted and began to scratch more fitfully, in bursts of panic. The animal whimpered on my pillow.
A door opened and I heard the sound of rubber flip-flops slapping on the floor. Lily came into the room with a young black man who bent over me. He took out a pencil light and shone it in my eyes, then checked my pulse.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Can you hear me?” He had a strong accent that was familiar but which I couldn’t place.
“Head,” I said.
“You have pain in your head?” He touched my forehead with his fingers. They were long and delicate and cool.
“Scratching,” I said.
He nodded.
“You went through a week’s fentanyl supply in two days, so you’re having withdrawal symptoms. I’ll give you something. It won’t be an opioid but it will help you sleep.”
He sat on the edge of the bed.
“We had to restrain you because you were violent and we needed to get started right away on filtering your blood. You had thallium poisoning. Those cuts you received, the blade that made them must have been dipped in the poison. Are you following me?”
I opened my mouth and made a croaking sound.
“I’m cleaning your blood by means of a process called hemoperfusion. There’s a pump behind you. It contains a filter made of artificial cells that are filled with activated carbon. Thallium is a metal, and the thallium molecules get trapped in the carbon.”
Suddenly he gave me a radiant smile, and I could see how young he was. He patted my hand.
“Got all that?”
I recognized the accent. South African.
He gave me the shot. Before I drifted off, Lily took his place on the bed. She studied me with her grave eyes. An errant breeze came in the window and stirred the black coils around the tips of her ears.
She twitched a corner of the blanket into place and left.
I woke to sunlight beating on my face and the lilac-breasted bird with the turquoise belly practicing his lyrics in the tree. A thorn tree. I recognized it now—acacia. I moved a hand to shield my eyes and the bird flew off with a harsh cry—raak raak raak.
They had taken off the restraints while I slept. The pump was gone. My body felt as if everything in it had been taken out and scrubbed with a brush, put back roughly, and stapled into place. Pain nibbled here and there like tiny mice. I felt drenched in chemicals.
Clothes hung neatly over a chair. I crawled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. At a sink in the corner I splashed water on my face. It failed to improve the puffy, patched-up mug that stared back from the mirror—dark bags under my eyes and a three-day beard.
A pot of cold coffee sat on the stove in the kitchen down the hall. I poured a cup and walked outside, sat on the sagging porch, and watched the Atlantic Ocean roll onto the beach. Judging by the sun it was midmorning. I thought I knew where Lily might be. We both knew this place well.
Port Nolloth is a biscuit-colored town in Namaqualand, the slab of desert that forms the northwestern corner of South Africa. The frigid Benguela Current scrapes along the coast. Every morning the cold sea rolls a dense band of fog onto the land. It had burned off by the time I set out along the seafront.
The diamond fleet tugged and jingled at its moorings in the anchorage. Fierce riptides battled at the harbor entrance. The ocean boiled in a fury around the offshore reefs. Every now and then a towering sheet of spray exploded from the breakwater as a huge Atlantic comber smashed itself to bits.
The sea was too rough for the tubby little diamond boats that locals call tupperwares. Usually they put to sea at dawn, trailing their suction hoses behind them. When they reached the inshore diamond ground the divers would go over the side. They vacuumed the diamond gravels for hours at a time in the freezing water. Today the wind was up. The surge would turn the shallow seabed where the divers worked into a storm of rocks and sand. The fleet stayed bottled up in port while the crews languished in the bars or headed north for a few days to steal diamonds in Namibia.
I found Lily in the front pew of the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Morning Mass had just finished. Other than Lily only a few elderly parishioners remained behind, gossiping in whispers in the pews. An old woman with a bright length of calico wrapped around her head and her nylons rolled around her ankles padded up to the altar and began to rearrange a vase of gladioli. I slipped in behind Lily. She knelt with her hands joined in front of her and her eyes closed, her head bent forward so it rested on her hands. I breathed in the faint scent of incense. Under the pale blue vault of the ceiling, a deep silence reigned. The boom of surf crashing on the beach only made the church more peaceful.
We knew each other the way lovers do. Through our skin. That searing, electric surge of information, that animal exchange of scent and sweat. And later, the murmured confidences in the soft parts of the night. When the urge to be known wrings out the past in fragments.
She was the only child of an elderly musician and a teacher. Her father played first violin in Mirny’s tiny orchestra, padding his meagre salary giving lessons at home. Her mother taught English at the Polytechnic and ran the gun club.
Every year in July the family packed supplies, loaded their old, tarred boat, and went putting up a muddy river into the endless forest Russians call the taiga. They would spend a month at their cabin. Lily’s mother showed her how to make ammunition—carefully measuring out gunpowder at the kitchen table and reloading cartridges.
“Economy,” her mother would enunciate, making Lily repeat the English word. “Thrift.”
Mother and daughter would smear their faces joyfully with mud and stalk off into the forest after deer. Her father stayed behind to play Tchaikovsky to the weasels.
She loved the winter too. On Christmas Eve they would leave the apartment before midnight and walk through the snowy streets to the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, ablaze with candles and shimmering with the golden images of saints. The massed choir, the vaulted ceiling spattered with stars, and the priests in gorgeous robes. And just inside the church, a nativity scene with the infant Jesus lying in the manger, warmed by the breath of animals and adored, as Lily herself was adored, by rapt adults.
That world came to a cruel end when the plane carrying her parents on a visit to the regional capital crashed in the taiga. Lily was sixteen. The criminals who ran the town took one look at her and ate her up.
Her parents’ savings evaporated in a sudden tax claim. Men from the local government came one day to the apartment and shouted at her to get out. They waved a paper in her face. Lily discovered she had no legal right to the only home she’d known.
A friend of her mother’s at the Polytechnic got her a job at the Mir diamond mine. A menial position. In the sorting room. Lily brought to the task a shattered heart and ice-cold hatred. The heart healed. The hatred remained. Only the diamonds soothed it.
In church, I think she brushed all that away. In church it was always Christmas Eve, and she was the girl she’d been. In church she reached back into that lost world where devoted parents cradled and protected her. As I watched her pray, her head bowed and her hands joined, I felt a powerful urge to reach forward and touch her. But I didn’t.
Before we left, Lily folded five hundred-dollar bills into a neat wad and shoved it through the slot beneath the votive candles. She lit a large candle near the top. It flamed into life behind the ruby-colored glass. She made the sign of the cross and genuflected to the Virgin. We walked down the side aisle and out the door.
The sea had started to settle. Crews were moving around on some of the diamond boats. I doubted they’d put to sea. The swell would last for another day. Not far from the harbor entrance, the ocean ground its teeth on the reefs. We sat on a bench above the harbor while Lily brought me up to date.
While I was meeting Davy, Lily had sold the pink to Dilip Gupta, whose Bombay family ran the biggest diamond polishing company in the world. Dilip paid her $1.5 million on the spot—a steal for the Guptas, but they knew she was in a hurry. While they were in his office waiting for the wire to clear into Lily’s Zurich bank account, Dilip’s nephew, who handled security, came in to report that hard men were in Antwerp looking for us. Lily got hold of Meier Lapa. It was Meier who’d come to collect me from the hotel.
Meier’s crew got me to the airport, where Lily had a Gulfstream ready to go. Sofia, Cape Verde, Port Nolloth—that was the route, never mind what the flight plan said.
While I was lying lashed to the bed, Lily had tracked down Piet Louw, the South African who’d found the big pink and brought it to Barry Stern. Not surprisingly, Piet was no longer working in Angola, having neglected to share the news of his discovery with the government.
“When will he get in?” I said.
“Tonight.”
“He may not come in this rough sea.”
“It’s calmer at night.”
“And he’s coming from the offshore fleet?”
“He bought a small ship with the proceeds of the pink,” Lily said. “Now he buys from the crews of the Namibian diamond fleet. He brings in his rough tonight.”
“What time?”
“Any time. We should be ready from sunset.”
She sounded low. The onshore breeze ruffled her hair. The tips of her ears peeped through the curls. The bruise was a livid yellow shading into purple.
“I’m sorry, Lily.”
She took a deep breath. The smell of seaweed saturated the air. An old man with a stick and a mangy dog made his way along the beach. A cloth bag hung from his shoulder. His sparse white hair blew around his head. When an object caught his eye he stopped to poke it with the stick, prying it out of the sand for a better look, then walking on. Lily leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and watched him scan the beach.
“Really, Alex, sorry for what? That I’m caught up with you again? That your hold over me is so profound that I charter a jet to fly you to the diamond coast? Poor Lily, forced into a helpless life.”
The beachcomber stopped and dug his stick into the sand. Then he crouched and wrestled with something until he freed it from the sand. He held the object up to his eye and examined it. He waded into the shallows and swished it back and forth to remove the sand. When he held it up again it glowed dully in the sun. He tossed it back in the water, returned to the beach and plodded off along the shore.
“You’re not responsible for me. I chose my life. I waited for you that night at the airport. I knew what you were.”
My body felt empty. Hollow. The sun beat down and the breeze came off the ocean and I tried to take in both the warmth and the freshness of the air. A pair of kelp gulls flashed their black backs in the sun as they hung on the wind, calling back and forth.
Suddenly she sat up and locked her arm around my neck and pulled my face in close and kissed me. Her lips tasted of salt. “You’re a mess, aren’t you, darling.” She put her hand against my cheek. She smiled tenderly and got up. There were tears in her eyes.
We walked past the boatyards and along a crooked street to a garage I knew, where we rented a pickup with four-wheel drive. It had seen better days. So had the guy who ran the garage, but he took cash and didn’t ask for paperwork.
Half a mile out of town we turned off into a small, dusty subdivision carved out of the desert. I followed a rutted lane that skirted the houses. It ended at a compound surrounded by a wall of concrete blocks topped with a coil of razor wire. A peeling sign identified the premises as XHALI SECURITY SYSTEMS. A slot in the steel gate slid open and a pair of dark brown eyes examined us. The slot slammed shut and a moment later came the screech of a metal bar as two young black men pushed open the heavy gates. Each had a Chinese AK slung from his shoulder.
We parked beside a black Range Rover and entered the dim interior. A thin, elderly man with a scarred face and aviator glasses stood behind the counter watching us come in. He had a clipped gray moustache and neatly combed gray hair and wore a spotless white shirt buttoned at the cuffs. The wall behind him was covered with a display of electronic sensors, surveillance cameras, and examples of the kind of steel-mesh fencing that snips your fingers off if you try to climb it. He also had a rack with throwing knives and the short stabbing spears that Zulu warriors taught their enemies to fear. The main stock in trade was out of sight.
The powerful smell of steel and gun oil filled the room. The aviator glasses panned back and forth between us.
“I’m looking for one of your security systems,” I said. “One that can provide maximum coverage.”
“A portable system?” he said.
“That’s right.”
He pursed his lips. “For a situation where a dispute might arise?”
“Well, that can happen in any interaction, can’t it.”
“Yes, it can,” he said sadly, shaking his head, as if the contemplation of the human condition had caused him many disappointments in his life, and he didn’t think it was a situation likely to change. “Would the dispute be with one person, or more than one?”
“Impossible to say.”
He spread his wrinkled hands on the table and examined them. The tip of a tattoo poked out from a snowy cuff. It looked like the point of a dagger. He drummed his fingers on the counter, shot me a quick glance from behind the dark lenses, then reached down and brought out a narrow wooden crate. He removed the top and placed it carefully to one side. He took out a brand new Chinese Type 56 assault rifle, removed the plastic sleeve, and placed it before us. Same model as the guards on the gate were carrying, so I guess he’d bought a large shipment.
“Special this week,” he said.
You can tell the Chinese version of the classic Russian machine gun at a glance. It comes with a short bayonet folded back against the barrel, which the Russian guns don’t have. Anyway, I didn’t want a gun that was a yard long and weighed ten pounds fully loaded.
“Something smaller,” I told him.
The aviator glasses stayed aimed at me until he said, “I think we’ve met before.”
“It’s possible.”
He nodded and fished out a ring of keys and unlocked a cabinet behind him. The gun he put on the counter was just what I was looking for. Czech, four-point-five-inch barrel. A sweet little gun with a beautiful, light-wood pistol grip.
“I’ll take it.”
“Ten-round or twenty-round magazine?”
“Two mags of the twenty.”
Lily needed ammunition for her Glock. He shook his head when she asked for Fiocchi Extrema, her favorite bullets, and slid a box of a cheaper make across the counter. Lily glared at him. She snorted in disgust, snatched the box from the counter and stuffed it savagely in her purse. When we were through she paid in cash.
“Christ, Alex,” she said as we drove out through the gates. “How many people are we going to have to deal with?”
“I don’t know. Piet will have some kind of back-up. He won’t hesitate to kill us. He’s tough. He fought in Angola when the South African army was trying to push the Cubans out. He was in the 32nd Battalion.”
“The Buffalo Battalion.” Like all diamond traders, Lily knew the stories of Angola’s diamond wars, and those who’d fought them.
“The Angolans called them Os Terríveis,” I said. “The Terrible Ones.”
“I get it,” she snapped. “What other kind of person could run a diamond barge on the Chicapa? I know he’s a savage bastard.” Her eyes blazed at me. “After all, I know the type.”
Lily was a whirlpool I had fallen into long ago. After I’d turned her, we had torn a year to shreds, flying off to places like the north coast of Iceland. Think about it: private geothermal pool plus frenzied Russian girl plus zero chance of surveillance. But she could flash from affection into anger in a blink. You bought the whole package with Lily, and there was often a surprise inside.
We stopped at a grocery on the highway. It was after noon by the time we got back to the house.
A wooden picnic table stood on the brick patio out back. A tall fig tree with smooth, pale bark and tortured limbs shaded the table. Lily found plates in the kitchen and a faded tablecloth and we unpacked the lunch—packaged ham, pickles, and a hunk of something identified as cheddar. I unwrapped the stale baguette, cut it in half and sliced it open lengthwise. Lily found a jar of mustard in the fridge, and two ice-cold bottles of Castle beer.
“This is the kind of food I detest, Alex,” she said, regarding the table with revulsion.
“Yes.” I fit three slices of ham into my half of the baguette, slathered it with mustard and added cheese and pickles. “It was thoughtless of me to pick out this instead of the fresh imported Black Sea caviar so abundant in Port Nolloth.”
The pain still came and went. My limbs felt like cement. But as we sat there in the sun and I ate the sandwich and drank the beer, I felt strength seeping into me. Lily tasted the mustard on the tip of her tongue, then shoved her plate away and stuck to the beer.
The breeze from the ocean stirred the leaves. Jigsaw-puzzle shapes of light and shadow shivered on the tablecloth. A pair of small gray birds made piercing cries as they rummaged in the fig for bugs. Their calls reinforced the heavy silence of the afternoon. Neither of us spoke for a while. I suppose Lily was thinking about the night ahead. I was thinking about Lily.
The long-range jet she’d chartered in Antwerp. Those planes start at $10,000 an hour. Lily would have had to pay a premium on top of that because she’d wanted it right away, needed the pilot to file a false flight plan, and the destination was a strip on a cutthroat coast. I doubted she’d paid less than $12,000 an hour. Say thirty-hour round-trip before the crew gets the jet back to Antwerp. Tab comes to $360,000. On the other hand, she had cash from selling the pink, so she probably got a discount for that—straight into the owner’s offshore bank account when he had a moment to fly out. Call it an even $300,000.
Lily didn’t get rich by throwing money away. Why had she agreed to such an expense? Because she loved me? That’s not the way it worked. Our love was framed by calculation. Maybe all love is. I’m no expert. What I know is that Lily would not have considered herself bound to grant the wish of the plainly half-demented, feverish man in the hotel in Antwerp when I told her I had to see Piet Louw. I’m not saying she would have abandoned me. But there were lots of places she could have taken me to hide from my pursuers that did not involve a flight down the length of Africa to certain danger. Why had she done it? Only one possible answer. She had her own reason for being here.
Fear of Lime was one explanation. If that’s what it was, staying close to me might be her best option. She’d stolen the small pink from him. That might have damaged the plans of people she feared even more—the diamond oligarchs. If I discovered something important about the Russian Pink from Piet, Lily could trade that information back to the Russians in exchange for her safety. I wouldn’t blame her. I’m the one who’d put her in the danger in the first place.
How long had we been sitting silently? Lily watched me speculatively.
“You’re working through your dark suspicions, aren’t you, darling. I can see the black clouds swirling in your head.” She stood up and took my hand. “You’d better come inside. You need to rest.”
The setting sun was splashing the surface of the sea with molten copper when we left Port Nolloth and drove north along the diamond coast. Just before the Orange River, a range of dark hills between the highway and the sea marked the last of the South African beach mines, a government-run operation that chewed dispiritedly through the depleted sands. Once the sun set, the desert would come alive with the figures of thieves streaming like an army of shadows across the highway and through the porous fence.
At the village of Alexander Bay we left the highway and dropped down into the delta of the Orange River. We bumped along a potholed gravel road that wound its way through tall marsh grass and clumps of shrubbery. As we rounded a bend, a dense cloud of flamingoes erupted from the surface of a pond, rending the night with their panicked cries.
The road ended at a small parking lot where a jetty poked into the sluggish current. Just west of where we stood, the Orange River ended its 1,400-mile journey from the Drakensberg and flowed into the ocean. Seals barked on the sandbars at the river mouth. Only a small channel pierced the barrier. Piet Louw would come through that.
On the north side of the river the low, black shape of a bluff showed where Namibia began. You can cross at a bridge upriver, but unless you have a special permit you won’t get further than the border post. Inland and along the coast lies a 10,000-square-mile control zone called Diamond Area 1. When Namibia was still a German colony, the area was called the Sperrgebiet—the Forbidden Territory. The beach mines of South Africa are all tapped out, but in Namibia, towering bucketwheel excavators the size of Ferris wheels strip the richest coast in the world. Far offshore, much further out than the little tupperwares of Port Nolloth venture, the red ships of the Namibian diamond fleet smash up the seabed with drills and suck the diamond-bearing gravels up into shipboard recovery plants.
Like schooling fish, thieves and smugglers swarm this rich feeding ground. Every night a stream of stolen diamonds makes its way across the Orange River and down the old pathways of the diamond coast to Port Nolloth, where middlemen supply it with the paperwork for the onward journey to the diamond bourse in Johannesburg.
We heard the sound of tires crunching on gravel. Piet’s flunkeys. We’d been expecting them. I slipped into the tall marsh grass. A white Ford F-150 with its headlights off came into view and stopped. There were two of them. They kept the engine idling, and can’t have been happy to find an unexpected complication waiting at the rendezvous in the form of a parked SUV and a woman walking toward them. The driver rolled his window down and stared at Lily.
“I seem to be lost,” said Lily in her throaty accent.
The driver turned and said something in Afrikaans to his companion. They both had a good laugh. I had moved around through the pampas grass. While they were distracted by Lily, I was supposed to step out of the grass and put the barrel of my Czech machine pistol into the passenger’s ear. And here’s how fast things can go wrong:
The driver grabbed Lily by the arm. He was fast, and very strong. His hand clamped her above the elbow and he yanked her against the door so hard her head banged the frame. At the same time, the passenger opened his door, climbed out and walked around the truck. He yanked up Lily’s shirt. The Glock fell out and clanked on the gravel.
The passenger swore angrily and kicked the gun away. The driver had her tightly held against the door. His accomplice drew a knife and held the blade in front of Lily’s face. Struggling to pull her face away from the knife, she caught sight of me coming out of the grass and approaching the open passenger-side door. I made a sideways gesture with the barrel. With all her strength she managed to lean away from the driver. I stretched across the cab and shot his head away.
The explosion of automatic fire and the bits of the driver’s skull spattering his face made the other man fling himself away in blind terror. He uttered a high-pitched scream and started scrabbling on the ground looking for the Glock. I came around and kicked him in the throat.
Lily’s face was frozen. Her eyes seemed adrift, unable to focus. She shook uncontrollably. An awful, tearing sound came from her chest as she gasped for breath. I put out my hand and she dug her fingers into it.
“It’s OK, Lily.”
I bound the knife guy hand and foot with plastic ties. I handed Lily her Glock. She stared at it.
“Now we have to listen,” I said quietly.
She stood stock-still. The delta was noisy—wind rattling in the reeds, spooked flamingoes, the distant boom of the surf. But the wind was blowing onshore. I doubted anyone approaching from the sea would have heard the gunfire. The man on the ground made gagging noises. I loaded him into the back of the F-150.
A line of black clouds straggled up the coast. There was just enough moonlight to dab a strip of pewter onto the tops of the clouds and add a few highlights to the immense, heaving presence of the ocean. A wild pig snuffled and grunted somewhere in the grass nearby. I heard the buzz of Piet’s outboard before I saw the Zodiac. He came through a narrow slot in the sandbar and slowed to navigate the channel. I stood at the end of the jetty, watching him come. The shred of moon was behind me. He hailed the dock in Afrikaans. I raised an arm and shouted back a garbled string of syllables that I hoped would do the trick, what with the wind and the engine and the swish of water on his boat. Piet came straight in. He cut the engine and nosed the rubber dinghy into the dock. There was an AK-47 on the seat beside him.
“Hey, Piet,” I said. “If you touch the AK, I’ll kill you where you sit.”
Piet sat there staring up at me for a minute while his head churned through the possible courses of action available to him and arrived correctly at the number zero. Even somebody as stupid as Piet could see that he was trapped.
“Ditch it in the water,” I said, “and the .38 in the ankle holster too.”
When the guns splashed into the river I stepped back and told him to get out.
He pretended to have trouble balancing the boat while he tried to push a small canvas bag out of sight with the toe of his shoe.
“Toss the rough to my partner,” I told him as Lily stepped out of the shadows.
I cuffed him, shoved him into the back seat, and climbed in beside him. Lily drove. Piet didn’t say a word as we bumped past the F-150. Even in the feeble light you could see the cloud of mosquitoes around the slumped, headless driver and the figure in the back. If their fate bothered Piet, he kept it to himself.
The airport at Alexander Bay stayed open 24/7 to handle the big helicopters that ferried South African crews back and forth to the offshore diamond fleet. I gave the lone security guard 1,000 rand to find something needing his attention. So we sat in the empty, brightly lit departure lounge like three ordinary people waiting for their flight, except for one wearing handcuffs. Lily had come up with the location.
“He won’t like it there,” she’d said. “It will make him afraid we have a plan to fly him out.”
Piet’s eyes were bloodshot and his dirty hair hung to his shoulders.
“We’re not here to mess with your game,” I said, lifting the bag of rough on the plastic chair beside me and then putting it down again. If I had to guess, about a thousand carats. The average price for those ocean diamonds was running around $250 a carat. A quarter of a million dollars in rough.
“We know you have people stealing for you on the diamond fleet. We don’t care. We want to talk about Angola.”
Piet hadn’t said a word since I’d put him in the back seat and he didn’t say anything now. His face was roadmapped with a network of burst blood vessels. A scar went across his right ear where he’d been hacked with a machete. He looked at me with his hard, blue eyes. Piet expected everyone to be as mean and crooked as he was. Considering his acquaintances, he was usually right.
“I don’t do Angola now,” he said, a drool of saliva leaking onto his chin. “You so smart, you already know that.”
“It’s the pink I’m interested in,” I said.
“What pink? No pink. You crazy? Who find pink?”
“You did. You found it just before you bought the big boat you’ve got offshore. That would coincide with when you left Angola, having killed your partner Denny Vorster, explaining why you are the sole owner of the boat and Denny has vanished from the earth.”
“Fucked-up hose kill Denny!” Piet screamed. He could no longer keep his fury in check. It wasn’t being accused of murdering Denny that enraged him. His eyes were on Lily and the bag of rough. A quarter of a million dollars was a lot of money to Piet right now. He had overpaid for that mothership of his. While I was still recovering, Lily had put together a good snapshot of Piet’s financial condition. She had bought rough from every corner of the continent, and she had contacts. That’s how I knew Piet was not getting the amount of rough he had counted on, and sure as hell he was not getting this parcel.
I held up my hand.
“I don’t care what happened to Denny any more than I care about what will happen to you if you don’t answer my questions. But just so we’re clear, I will take you back down to the river and hogtie you and open shallow cuts in your arms and legs and roll you into the grass. The pigs will do the rest.”
The tip of his tongue appeared between his dirty teeth as he thought through his options.
“Start with what the diamond looked like, Piet.”
“It covered in mud and rock. Not like river stone.”
“Where did you take it?”
“Barry Stern.”
“How exactly did Barry pay you?”
Piet snorted. “Long time ago. How you think I remember?”
“And the account numbers too,” I said. “I need your banking details.”
He displayed his brown, crooked teeth in an ugly smile.
“I hear he sell to Russians. You think you make trouble for these guys? They chop you and your Russia pussy into pieces and feed you to the crocodiles.”
There’s always this little to and fro. You have to be patient. I let Piet think about the pigs for a while.
“He pay cash,” he said at last. “You can’t trace it, because he paid cash. That how it work now.”
He watched me with glittering eyes.
“That’s how it’s always worked, Piet. But he didn’t pay you all cash. He paid you part cash and the rest by check. The check amount was his declared value for tax purposes. So take another run at this, and it better add up to the number I already have.”
I didn’t have any number, but I was guessing Barry Stern had screwed Piet, and I was right. Piet wasn’t the brightest guy, and he had to stick his tongue between his teeth a few more times and think very hard to recall the order in which the payments had come, which ones were cash and which were wires. I led him through the deal until I had it right—one million cash as a down payment, and a week later a bank draft for $11 million. I got Piet’s banking details.
Dawn was still an hour away when we heard the powerful thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopter blades as a big Sikorsky came in from the diamond fleet for the crew change.
“Hey,” said Piet. He looked frantic. “You leave me for those guys, they take me out to the fleet and drop me off the side. They bastards.”
“Relax,” I said. I led him outside, shoved him in the back of the SUV and clambered in beside him. The bus from Alexander Bay with the daytime crew was just turning off the highway as we drove out of the airport and headed back down into the delta.
The herd of pigs clustered around the F-150 scattered into the bamboo as we pulled up. Only the massive boar, who’d managed to get his hooves up onto the tailgate, showed a reluctance to move, his attention divided between the bloody, tied-up guy in the back of the truck and us. Not until Lily gave him a bunt with the front bumper did he drop his legs from the truck and trot off into the thicket with an angry grunt.
I dragged Piet out of the SUV and shoved him into the truck bed and cuffed his ankles. Lily took a handful of small rough from the bag and stuffed it in his shirt pocket and gave it a friendly pat. Piet said he would kill her and she was a cunt and blah blah blah. Sure, he was mad. If the pigs didn’t get him first, the cops would take a turn when they found the rough in his pocket. In South Africa it’s a criminal offense to possess rough diamonds without proof of where they came from. The law makes the presumption that anyone with rough who can’t account for it has stolen it. They would put Piet in an overcrowded jail where the other inmates mostly had a different color of skin and personal histories that had not taught them to love Afrikaners. Piet would try to bribe his way out, but guess what: He would discover that there was no money in his bank account.
Piet was a killer. He wasn’t the only murderer on the diamond rivers, but he was the one I had right now. He’d killed his partner, and his accomplices would have raped and killed Lily. If the cops found Piet first, fine. But I was pulling for the pigs.
A saffron dawn walked her fingers up the sky as we drove back down the highway to Port Nolloth. The wind had died in the night. In the strengthening light the ocean blazed like a pane of stained glass, changing color by the moment. The tubby little diamond boats paraded out past the breakwater. They threaded the reef and headed south for the inshore diamond grounds. The suction hoses swam behind the boats like faithful serpents, carving fantastic arabesques on the tangerine surface of the sea.
We drove along the ocean until I found a strong signal. While Lily examined the rough, pulling out the larger stones and holding them to the morning light, I sent a message to Patrick Ho. It detailed what Piet had coughed up on how the early diamond payments were structured. He would pay particular attention to the wire for $11 million. Barry had obviously waited until his buyer paid before making the deposit for Piet. Connected to what we already knew, Patrick could start to tease apart the strands of the money trail.
Then I tapped out another message, to Tabitha. I asked her to see if any strand of payments went to a research facility, and to look for a bank connection on Long Island.
The messages didn’t take long to send, but longer than I liked. The kind of people looking for me probably had access to the supercomputers at Fort Meade. They ransack the world’s message traffic around the clock. If they’re looking for you, you’ll eventually be found. But you can make the search take longer.
A dark net is a place that normal search engines don’t have access to because they don’t have the code to get in. Most people who want to hide use software like Tor, an acronym for The Onion Router. Tor is a network of subscribers who provide their own computers to construct the onion’s layers. Instead of a message going from sender A to receiver B, it will go from A to C and from C to X and from X to Y. It will eventually get to B, but not until it has slipped from layer to layer through the onion long enough to shake off most pursuers.
The system Patrick had set up had no subscribers. It was a private dark net, much harder to access. Even so, if people in Washington were looking hard, we could only slow them down, not elude them altogether.
We went back to the shabby bungalow, made coffee, and took it onto the sagging porch. The sun was higher now and the ocean had turned light green. A pair of giant petrels with black wings and white wingtips wheeled above the beach. We sat side by side in ancient canvas deck chairs and gazed at the Atlantic.
It’s an evil coast. In places they call it the skeleton coast because of the wrecked ships and the desolation. The first diamonds were discovered when Namibia was under German possession. A railway worker found wind-blown diamonds in the Namib desert. The Germans sealed off the entire southwestern corner of the country. It took them years to find that the diamonds were not in the desert but on the beach and in the ocean.
“Didn’t Lime have a diamond ship he kept here?” I said.
“The Benguela Queen. It was an old mining vessel he bought. He established a base at sea and put down the drill and made a mess in the water so the South Africans would think he was mining. Actually, he was buying stolen Namibian rough. He thought he could compete with Fonseca.”
Portuguese colonists, driven from Angola after independence, ran the Port Nolloth trade in stolen rough, and they ran it for João Fonseca.
“Lime thought he could outbid Fonseca,” Lily said, “and still make big profits.”
“What happened?”
“After one month, Fonseca sent boats out at night. They boarded the Queen and took the crew on deck and tied them together, even the cook, a girl of sixteen. Then they sailed the ship close to shore and ran it on the reef, so everyone in town would see what happened next. Then they set the ship on fire and burned the crew alive.”
We could see the reef from where we sat. The screams of the dying would have come clearly to those on shore, their relatives and friends.
The misery coast.
“What time do we meet Fonseca?”
“Seven,” Lily said. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even noon.
As the sun rose, the heat of the desert clamped on the town like an iron lid. Lily wore cotton shorts and a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. In spite of her pale skin the sun didn’t burn her. It brought out a golden blush. The smell of her skin and hair seeped through the heavy air. Her fragrance. She fingered the hem of her shirt and turned her eyes to me.
Consider who we were. Old lovers on the run in a seaside town in Africa. We bore marks of violence. Where else would we turn. In the garden of the knowledge of good and evil, we had eaten the apple long ago.