Maeve leaned over the side and peered at the long gray shapes moving under the surface. “A new group of followers,” she said. “These are makos.”
“The species with the jagged and uneven teeth only an orthodontist could love?”
“The same.”
“Why do they plague me?” Giordino moaned. “I’ve never ordered shark in a restaurant.”
Half an hour later, Pitt gave the order. “Okay, let’s try the sails and see what kind of a boat we’ve concocted.”
Giordino unfolded the woven-mat sails, which Maeve had carefully reefed in accordion pleats, and hoisted the mainsail successfully while Maeve raised the mizzen. The sails filled, and Pitt eased over the tiller, skidding the boat on a tack, heading northwest against a brisk west wind.
Any yachtsman would have rolled on his deck in laughter if he had seen the Marvelous Maeve bucking the seas. A boat designer of professional standing would have whistled the Mickey Mouse Club anthem. But the peculiar looking sailboat had the last laugh. The outriggers dug into the water and maintained her stability. She responded to her helm amazingly well and kept her bow on course without being swept sideways. To be sure, there were problems to be ironed out with her rigging. But remarkably, she took to the sea as if she had been born there.
Pitt took a final look at the Miseries. Then he looked at the packet wrapped in a piece of Dacron sail that held Rodney York’s logbook and letters. He vowed that if he somehow lived through the next several days he would get York’s final testament to his living relatives, trusting that they would mount an expedition to bring him home again to be buried beside Falmouth Bay in his beloved Cornwall.
On the tenth floor of a modernistic all-glass structure built in the shape of a pyramid on the outskirts of Paris, a group of fourteen men sat around a very long ebony conference table. Impeccably dressed, wielding enormous power, immensely wealthy and unsmiling, the directors of the Multilateral Council of Trade, known simply to insiders as the Foundation, an institution dedicated to the development of a single global economic government, shook hands and engaged in small talk before sitting down to business. Normally, they met three times a year, but this day they met in an emergency session to discuss the latest unexpected threat to their widespread operations.
The men in the room represented vast international corporations and high levels of government. Only one top-ranking member from the South African cartel was entirely involved with the selling of quality diamonds. A Belgian industrialist from Antwerp and a real-estate developer from New Delhi, India, acted as the Foundation’s middlemen for the huge illicit flow of industrial diamonds to the Islamic Fundamentalist Bloc, which was struggling to create its own nuclear destruction systems. Millions of these smaller industrial diamonds were sold underground to the bloc to make the precision instruments and equipment necessary to construct such systems. The larger, more exotic quality diamonds were used to finance unrest in Turkey, Western Europe, Latin America and several of the South Asian countries, or an other hot spot where subversive political organization could play into the hands of the Foundation’s many other interests, including the sale of arms.
All these men were known by the news media, all were celebrities in their chosen fields, but none were identified with membership in the Foundation. That was a sec known only to the men in the room and their close associates. They flew across oceans and continents, weaving their webs in all sorts of strange places, takings toll while amassing unheard-of profits.
They listened with close attention in silence as the’ chosen chairman, the billionaire head of a German banking firm, reported on the current crisis facing the diamond market. A regal man with a bald head, he spoke slowly in fluent English, a language every national around the to understood.
“Gentlemen, because of Arthur Dorsett we are facing a profound crisis in a vital area of our operations. Appraisal of his conduct by our intelligence network points to a diamond market headed into dark waters Make no mistake about it, if Dorsett dumps over a hundred metric tons of diamonds on the retail market street-beggar prices, as he is reported ready to do, this sector of the Foundation will totally collapse.”
“How soon will this take place?” asked the sheik an oil-rich country on the Red Sea.
“I have it on good authority that eighty percent Dorsett’s inventory will be on sale in his chain of recd stores in less than a week,” answered the chairman.
“What do we stand to lose?” asked the Japanese head of a vast electronics empire.
“Thirteen billion Swiss francs for starters.”
“Good God!” The French leader of one of the world’s largest women’s fashion houses rapped his fist on the table. “This Australian Neanderthal has the power to do such a thing?”
The chairman nodded. “From all accounts, he has the inventory to back him.”
“Dorsett should never have been allowed to operate outside the cartel,” said the American former secretary of state.
“The damage is done,” agreed the diamond cartel member. “The world of gems as we know it may never quite be the same again.”
“Is there no way we can cut him off before his stones are distributed to his stores?” asked the Japanese businessman.
“I sent an emissary to make him a generous offer to buy his stock in order to keep it out of circulation.”
“Have you heard back?”
“Not yet.”
“Who did you send?” inquired the chairman.
“Gabe Strouser of Strouser & Sons, a respected international diamond merchant.”
“A good man and a hard bargainer,” said the Belgian from Antwerp. “We’ve had many dealings together. If anyone can bung Dorsett to heel, it’s Gabe Strouser.”
An Italian who owned a fleet of container ships shrugged unemotionally. “As I recall, diamond sales dropped drastically in the early eighties. America and Japan suffered severe recessions and demand dropped, kindling a glut in supply. When the economy turned around in the nineties, prices shot up again. Is it not possible for history to repeat itself?”
“I understand your point,” acknowledged the chairman, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms. “But this time a chill wind is blowing, and anyone who depends on diamonds for a living will be frozen out. We’ve discovered that Dorsett has budgeted over $100 million in advertising and promotion in all the major diamond buying countries. If, as we have come to believe he will, he sells for pennies on the dollar, high diamond values will be a thing of the past, because the public is about to be brainwashed into thinking they are worth little more than glass.”
The Frenchman sighed heavily. “I know my models would certainly look at other luxurious baubles as an eternal investment. If not diamond jewelry, I would have to buy them expensive sports cars.”
“What is behind Dorsett’s odd strategy?” asked the CEO of a major Southeast Asian airline. “Surely, the man isn’t stupid.”
“Stupid like a hyena waiting for a lion to fall asleep after eating only half its kill,” replied the German chairman. “My paid agents throughout the world banking network have learned that Dorsett has bought up seventy, perhaps as high as eighty percent of the major colored gemstone producing mines.”
There was a collective murmur of awareness as the latest information sank in. Every man at the table immediately recognized and assimilated Arthur Dorsett’s grand plan.
“Diabolically simple,” muttered the Japanese electronics magnate. “He pulls the rug from under diamonds before driving the price of rubies and emeralds through the roof.”
A Russian entrepreneur, who ran up a vast fortune by buying shutdown aluminum and copper mines in Siberia for next to nothing and then reopening them using Western technology, looked doubtful. “It sounds to me like— what is that saying in the West?— Dorsett is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Does he really expect to make enough on colored gemstones to make up for his losses on diamonds?”
The chairman nodded to the Japanese, who replied, “At the request of our chairman, I asked my financial analysts to run the figures through our data systems, Astounding as it seems, Arthur Dorsett, the House d Dorsett chain of retail stores and Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited stand to make a minimum of $20 billion American Perhaps as high as $24 billion, depending on a predicted rising economy.”
“Good Lord,” exclaimed a British subject who owned a publishing empire. “I can’t begin to imagine what I would do with a profit of $24 billion.”
The German laughed. “I would use it to buy out your holdings.”
