“Look at it. It has a key in the middle, which means it would have be artificial. I’ve seen a few artificial diamonds, but this one’s ten times as big as the largest I’ve ever heard of.”
Kevin protested. “But you haven’t even tested it.”
“Why bother?”
“I agree, Fred,” Tarnwell said. “There’s no reason to let this go on any longer.”
Kevin looked at the Congressman. “Sir, what harm could it do to test it? It’ll take just a few minutes. If it’s a fake, I’ll let the police take me away peacefully and you’ll never hear from me again.”
Congressman Sutter hesitated, but after a few seconds relented. To Downs he said, “Can you test to see if this is actually a diamond?”
“Sure. But it’s a waste of time.”
“Then go ahead.”
Downs withdrew a jeweler’s loupe and visually inspected the specimen. After about a minute, he removed the loupe from his eye.
“I can’t see any flaws, but the doesn’t mean anything. I’ve been fooled by cubic zirconia before. Fakes are getting better and better. It’s especially difficult to tell without facets.”
“See!” Tarnwell said. “It’s a fake.”
“I didn’t say I was done,” Downs said. He removed a small scale from the bag and then took out a piece of electronic equipment. He placed the specimen on the scale.
A Capitol policeman appeared in the outer office. Sutter motioned for him to wait.
“232 carats. Minus, of course, whatever the key weighs.” The electronic equipment was a 4 inch by 6 inch box with a display. Two wire leads came out of the box’s top and ended in metal-tipped probes.
“What’s that?” said Sutter.
“This measures the electrical resistance of any material. Diamond has a unique resistive signature.” Downs pressed a button to turn the unit on and placed the two probes against the specimen’s surface.
He gasped, then touched the probes twice more against different parts of the surface. “Oh my.”
“What is it?” Kevin said.
“I calibrated this instrument an hour ago.” Downs looked at Kevin. “Where did you get this?”
“I made it.”
“Is it real?” Sutter said.
“You made this?” Downs said, holding the specimen as gently as a robin’s egg.
“Dr. Downs,” Sutter said impatiently.
“It’s incredible,” Downs said. “This is as pure a diamond as I’ve ever seen.”
“But it’s huge,” Sutter said. “It must be worth a fortune.”
“With this clarity and color…If it were cut and polished into gemstones, it would be worth over $10,000 per carat.”
“That’s over $2 million,” Erica said.
“Without the key in it, it would be worth far more. A stone that size hasn’t come on the market in twenty years. It would create a sensation.”
“I guess you were wrong, Clay,” Sutter said. “It looks like he really can make diamonds.”
For a minute, Tarnwell said nothing. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this, Fred. I wanted to keep the process a secret until we had the patent in hand, and I wanted to get this mess resolved without Kevin going to prison. But now it seems like I have no choice. My scientists developed this process over six months ago. Kevin stole it.”
“This is insane!” Kevin yelled. “He is lying.”
“I was trying to settle this some other way, but I see that it just isn’t possible now. Dr. Michael Ward, a professor at South Texas, was working as a consultant for me. In particular, he was providing me with some important information on how to refine the diamond-making process. Although Michael was careful, I guess Kevin got wind of it somehow and wanted it for himself. He’d been having some financial troubles. I know how people can get desperate when they have no money, but I think we can all see how this has gone too far.”
The eyes of everyone in the room were on Kevin, and none of them seemed to be doubting the story Tarnwell was spinning.
“Unfortunately, he’s drawn Erica into this as well. Now she’s going to be responsible for this along with him.”
The situation was quickly turning sour. Kevin had to do something else. But what?
Erica whispered to him. “What about the tape?”
He whispered back. “That won’t prove anything. The Congressman won’t know one experiment from another.” Then he remembered Van Dyke specifically asking about the tape. He’d said Ward had told him something about it, something he might have used against Tarnwell. Maybe there was a chance.
“Do you have a camcorder here?” Kevin said to the Congressman.
“I’ve had about all I can take. The police…”
“Please, sir. There may be something in a tape I have that will convince you that I really did invent this.” He was taking a huge risk, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
Although the color had returned to Tarnwell’s face, the mention of a videotape turned it ash gray.
“All right,” Sutter said, “but this is it. What kind of camcorder do you need?”
“8mm.”
“Marian! Does anyone around here have an 8mm camcorder?”
“I’ll check, sir,” said Marian.
“Fred,” said Tarnwell, “I really think we shouldn’t waste any more of your time.”
“It’s not every day I see a 200-carat artificial diamond. I think we can take a few more minutes out of my time.”
“Thank you,” said Kevin. He turned to Tarnwell. “Lobec didn’t tell you what was on the tape, did he? Just like he didn’t tell you he was a spy working for the South African government.”
“You’re babbling to get yourself out of this mess you’ve created. David Lobec is my head of company security. He is not South African.”
“That’s what he led you to believe after he got out of that Mexican prison. I bet he was in there on purpose, just to make your releasing him more realistic. His real name wasn’t even Lobec. It was Van Dyke. Oh, and his brother in California? Doesn’t exist.”
Tarnwell’s face was a mask of pure shock. “How did you know…”
“After he shot Bern, he told us.”
Tarnwell recovered quickly from Kevin’s revelations. “He did tell me that Dr. Ward was attempting to blackmail me, but that he had fabricated some kind of evidence to do so. That must be what your tape is.”
Marian walked in with a camcorder in hand. “Congressman Weaver had one in his office. He uses it to videotape himself shaking hands with constituents so he can show them like home movies back in Nebraska.” She took it over to the TV.
“Thanks,” Kevin said and began attaching the camcorder to the TV. “I’ll tell you what’s on the video. It’s the lab experiment where Ward and I first accidentally discovered the Adamas process. But Van Dyke seemed to think there was something more on it.”
Kevin put in the tape. As it ran, he narrated the experiment in great detail. As he watched, he looked for anything he and Erica might have missed the first time they’d seen it.
As before when they had watched it in the store, the tape went to static after the Kevin on the screen switched off the camcorder. Kevin couldn’t understand. He stared at it, hoping for a revelation about what he’d just seen. But nothing seemed especially significant.
Tarnwell didn’t think so either.
“Is this all you have to show us?” he said. “Because I can tell you that I don’t know what the fuss is about. For all I know, that could have been anything.”
“If we look closely at the equipment in the tape,” said Kevin, “I think it’s clear that we had the setup described in the notebook.”
“Even if it was the Adamas process,” Tarnwell continued, “how do we know when you made the tape? You could just as easily have stolen the process from me, run the experiment with Ward later, and changed the time
