Dance Of Death

'That's right. I've heard a lot about what the FBI's going to do, but nothing about the cooperation with the NYPD you mentioned earlier.'

'Lieutenant Hayward, our latest information, if you've been listening, has Pendergast in Suffolk County. There's not a great deal you can do for us out there.'

'True. But we've got dozens of detectives here in Manhattan who are familiar with the case, we've developed virtually all the evidence-'

'Lieutenant,' Coffey interrupted, 'no one is more grateful for the NYPD's assistance in furthering this investigation than I am.' But he didn't look grateful-if anything, he looked more pissed-off than before. 'At the moment, however, the matter is outside your jurisdiction.'

'Our immediate jurisdiction, yes. But he could always return to the city. And given that Agent Pendergast is wanted in two murders I'm in charge of investigating, I want to make sure that, once he's apprehended, we've got access for interrogation-'

'Let's not get ahead of ourselves,' Coffey snapped. 'The man's still at large. Any other questions?'

The room was silent.

'Good. There's just one last thing.' Coffey's voice went down a few notches. 'I don't want anybody taking any chances. Pendergast is armed, desperate, and extremely dangerous. In the event of a confrontation, a maximal armed response will be appropriate. In other words, shoot the son of a bitch. Shoot to kill.'

SIXTY-TWO

George Kaplan exited his Gramercy Park brownstone, paused for a moment at the top of the steps to check his cashmere coat, flicked off a speck of dust, pinched his perfectly knotted cravat, patted his pockets, inhaled the crisp January air, and descended. His was a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, his brownstone facing the park itself, and even in the cold winter weather there were mothers with their children walking the winding lanes, their cheerful voices rising among the bare branches.

Kaplan fairly tingled with anticipation. The call he had received was as unexpected as it was welcome. Most gemologists lived their entire lives without ever having the opportunity to gaze into the depths of a gemstone one-millionth as rare or famous as Lucifer's Heart. He had, of course, seen it at the museum behind a thick piece of glass, under execrable lighting, but until now he hadn't known just why the lighting was so bad: had it been lit properly, at least a few gemologists-himself included-would have recognized it as a fake. A very good fake, to be sure: a real diamond, irradiated to give it that incredible cinnamon color, no doubt enhanced by colored fiber-optic light skillfully delivered from beneath the gem. Kaplan had seen it all in his forty years as a gemologist, every rip- off, cheat, and con game in the business. He chided himself for not realizingthat a diamond like Lucifer's Heart couldn't be put on display. No company would insure a stone which was always in full public view, its location known to the world.

Lucifer's Heart. And what was it worth? The last red diamond of any quality that had come up for sale was the Red Dragon, a five-carat stone that had gone for sixteen million dollars. And this one was nine times as large, a better grade and color, without a doubt the finest fancy color diamond in existence.

Value? Name your price.

After receiving the call, Kaplan had spent a few moments in his library, refreshing himself on the history of the diamond. With diamonds, it was usually the case that the less color the better, but that was true only up to a point. When a diamond had a deep, intense color, it suddenly leaped in value; it became the rarest of the rare- and of all the colors a diamond could possess, red was by far the rarest. He knew that, in all the crude production from all the De Beers mines, a red diamond of quality surfaced only about once every two years. Lucifer's Heart made the word unique sound hackneyed. At forty-five carats, it was huge, a heart-cut stone with a GIA grade of VVS1 Fancy Vivid. No other stone in the world even came close. And then there was the color: it wasn't ruby red or garnet-colored, either of which was exceedingly rare in its own right. Rather, it was an intensely rich reddish orange, a color so unusual that it defied naming. Some called it cinnamon, and while Kaplan thought it more reddish than true cinnamon, he himself could not find a better word to describe it. The closest analogy he could think of was blood in bright sunlight, but if anything, it was even richer than blood. No other object in the wide world possessed its color-nothing. Its color was a scientific mystery. To find out what gave Lucifer's Heart its unique color, scientists would have to destroy a piece of the diamond-and that, of course, would never happen.

The diamond had a short, bloody history. The raw stone, a monster of some 104 carats, had been found by an alluvial digger in the Congo in the early 1930s. Not realizing, because of its color, that it was even a diamond, he used it to pay a long-running bar tab. When the man later learned what it was, he tried to get it back from the barman, only to be rebuffed. So one night he broke into the barman's home, killed the man, his wife, and their three children, and then spent the rest of the night trying to hide his crime by cutting up the corpses and throwing them off the back porch to the crocodiles in the Buyimai River. He was caught, and during the gathering of evidence for the murder trial, part of which involved killing and examining the stomach contents of a dozen river crocodiles, a police inspector was killed by an enraged reptile and a second drowned trying to save him.

The gemstone, still uncut, made its way through the black market (and several other rumored killings) before it resurfaced in Belgium as the property of a notorious black market dealer. The man badly botched the cleaving of the stone, leaving a nasty crack in it, and subsequently committed suicide. The now damaged rough stone bounced around the diamond demimonde for a while, ultimately ending up in the hands of an Israeli diamond cutter named Arens, one of the best in the world. In what was later called the most brilliant cutting ever done, Arens was able to produce a heart-shaped gem from the cracked rock in just such a way as to remove the flaw without fracturing the stone or losing too much material. It took Arens eight years to complete the cut. The process had since passed into legend. He spent three years looking at the stone; then another three practicing the cutting and polishing on no fewer than two hundred plastic models of the original, experimenting in ways to optimize the size, cut, and design while removing the exceedingly dangerous flaw. He succeeded, in much the same way Michelangelo was able to sculpt the David out of a badly cracked block of marble other sculptors had rejected as unworkable.

When Arens was done, he had produced an extraordinary, heart-cut stone along with another dozen or so smaller stones, all from the same rough. He named the biggest stone Lucifer's Heart after its grim history, commenting to the press that it was 'the very devil to cut.'

And then, in an act of extraordinary generosity, Arens willed the stone to the New York Museum of Natural History, which he had visited as a child and whose Hall of Diamonds had determined whathis life's work would be. He sold the dozen or so much smaller stones cut from the same rough for what was rumored to be an astonishing sum, but, strangely enough, none of the stones had ever resurfaced on the market. Kaplan assumed they had been made into a single, spectacular piece of jewelry, which remained with the original owner, who wished to keep her identity secret.

Kaplan swung around the corner of Gramercy Park and walked west, toward Park Avenue, where he had the best shot of catching a cab headed uptown. He had half an hour, but you could never predict midtown traffic at lunchtime, and this was one appointment he did not want to be late to.

As he stopped at the corner of Lex to wait for the light to change, he was startled to see a black car roll up beside him, window down. Inside sat a man in a green sports jacket.

'Mr. George Kaplan?'

'Yes?'

The man leaned over, presented the badge of a New York City police lieutenant, and opened the door. 'Get in, please.'

'I have an important appointment, Officer. What's this all about?'

'I know. Affiliated Transglobal Insurance. I'm your escort.'

Kaplan peered closely at the badge: Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta. It was a genuine shield-Kaplan was well versed in such things- and the man behind the wheel really couldn't be anything other than a cop, despite the unusual choice of apparel. Who else would know about his appointment?