Death is Forever

that handful of bright diamond markers in the coming international shoving match.
    “Kimberley, Australia,” Cole said, pinning Wing with gray eyes that were as clear as glacier ice. “Is that where the stones were found?”
    For the first time Wing hesitated. “They came to me from there, but as to where they were originally found…” He turned his narrow hands palm up.
    “Are there more?”
    “This is all that came to me,” Wing said carefully.
    Cole walked to the window and looked out over the palms that framed the front lawn of the government casino in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, fifteen hundred miles from the Kimberley Plateau. The hard tropical sun and humidity-hazed sky made the Timor Sea look like spun aluminum.
    The sun’s heat radiated through the double panes of glass in the window close to Cole. In the background came the vague hum of machinery as the casino’s air conditioning filtered out tobacco smoke from the gaming rooms below and at the same time cooled the steamy, overbearing heat of tropical October. It was high spring down under. The buildup had already begun.
    Buildup, the season when animals died and men went crazy.
    Tropical Australia in October was one of the few places on earth Cole found unlivable. For some reason the heat and humidity in the eucalyptus and acacia scrublands affected him more than the same conditions in Venezuela or Brazil.
    But inside the Darwin casino, man’s machinery kept the tropics at bay, delivering high-tech air that had neither the savor nor the character of any climate or country. If not for the Aboriginal drawings on the wall, the room could have been located anywhere from Hong Kong to Johannesburg, London to Los Angeles, Tel Aviv to Bombay. The furnishings were a fusion of Western woods and Eastern artistic traditions. The clothes combined Eastern fabrics with Italian design flair.
    “Were these diamonds mined in the Kimberley?” Cole asked, being blunt because there was no longer anything to gain from circumspection.
    “I hoped you could tell me.”
    Cole’s eyes narrowed beneath black eyebrows. Wing wasn’t usually evasive, not when he wanted something.
    But then Wing didn’t usually walk around with a major fortune in uncut diamonds in his pocket. He and his family were too pragmatic to dabble in a commodity whose market price was controlled by a well-entrenched cartel. The Chens usually stuck to mining and refining metallic ores whose names were familiar only to space scientists and weapons makers.
    “I can’t tell you positively where the diamonds came from,” Cole said, “but I can tell you they didn’t come from the Argyle.”
    “The stones speak to you?” Wing asked skeptically.
    Cole simply looked at the other man.
    “How can you be so certain?” Wing demanded. “Argyle has pink diamonds.”
    “The Argyle mine is a bort hole filled almost entirely with industrial diamonds. Sure, there are pinks in the place, but these pinks are darker, cleaner, and a hell of a lot bigger than anything the Australians have admitted to finding. It takes the patience of an Indian stone polisher to make jewelry out of Argyle’s junk.”
    Wing stirred the diamonds with his fingertip. Light pooled and gleamed as though the stones were wet. “Are you saying these aren’t Australian diamonds?”
    “No. Just that they’re not from the Argyle itself. Hell, Wing, there are seventy different companies working the Kimberley Plateau. Nobody has found much but industrial-grade goods.” Cole paused before adding, “At least that’s what ConMin has been putting out.”
    Wing grunted, his skepticism matching Cole’s. Con-Min told the world what it wanted the world to hear about diamonds, period. Real intelligence was hard to come by, which was why Wing had called in Cole. “What else do the stones tell you?”
    “They’re alluvial.”
    “Explain, please.”
    “They’ve been out of the mother pipe a long, long time, washed out by erosion.”
    “Is that bad?”
    Cole shook his head. “Jesus, you still don’t know shit from schist, do you?”
    “You didn’t disparage my questions when we were partners.”
    “When we were partners you didn’t bait me with a handful of fantastic rough,” Cole shot back. “These diamonds are the cream of some old, eroded diamond pipe. The flawed goods and small stuff have been destroyed by time. The stones that survived all had the corners rounded off their natural crystalline