Zero Hour

Earl looked at his helmeted face. A small mist of breath formed inside the UV shield and was almost immediately dried up by its airflow fan.

“Can we talk free and open?” he said.

Hasul nodded again.

“It is the reason I chose to meet out here rather than at my office,” he said.

Earl stood there smoking. The field around him dimmed and brightened under the patchwork shadows of the windherded clouds.

“My guess is your other missing items aren’t more of those sapphires,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me what they are?”

“It will be necessary if you agree to the mission.”

Earl looked at him, smoking. He seemed to just then realize he was still holding the Bic and dropped it into his coat pocket.

“Mission,” he repeated. “I thought we were talking job.”

“The word was of your choice, not mine,” Hasul said, meeting his gaze from behind the darkly tinted face shield. “In comparison, the whole of what you’ve done for me before amounts to a string of minor errands.”

Earl grunted. “What kind of risk are you talking?”

“High.”

“And the money?”

“Commensurate,” Hasul said. “A hundred thousand dollars, half on acceptance, the remainder upon completion. Payment in full would not be contingent upon a guaranteed outcome, but only the successful execution of your given role.”

Earl looked at him. “My role.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s got the other?”

“You will be assisted by Zaheer.”

A few seconds fell away. Quiet, Earl remembered something Hasul had told him at the conclusion of their last appointment.

“Later’s come up faster than expected,” he said. “But maybe your clock does it different from mine.”

Hasul had continued to regard him through the dark glass panel.

“I am the clock whose hand marks the hour,” he said. “And by my hand it comes as it is meant to.”

Earl was silent, smoking, his eyes ranging out to Hasul’s sideman back over near the trees. These were some crazy people. So crazy part of him wanted to get out of whatever Hasul was talking about before he even got in. But the money… the money was key. With enough of it a man would be able to open any door, get in and out of anything.

Earl stood there another moment as cloud shadows fled beneath the sun. Then he finally snapped away the remnant of his cigarette and gave Hasul a nod.

“Okay,” he said. “Talk to me.”

* * *

It was about half past noon and Avram Hoffman was at the Club, finished with Katari and going over the rest of the day’s appointments in his Palm computer’s date book. Farther down the long cafeteria table where he sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows, three men were bargaining over a parcel of mediocre diamonds — the Nadel brothers, who’d recently closed their retail business and moved into Internet jewelry sales, and an aging Hasidic broker named Taubman who’d come to show them his goods.

Avram could hear their obligatory back-and-forth. One of the brothers, Yussel, complaining about Taubman’s asking price while pointing out deliberately concealed flaws he insisted had become visible under his loupe. Taubman insisting there were no such flaws. Nadel’s exaggerated umbrage at the denial. “This is fracture filled, you should take a look here in the sun.” “Maybe you should look at the lab reports.” “I don’t need to look at the lab reports.” “How can you say I’m supposed to look at my own diamond, if you don’t think you need to look at the reports?” “You want to hear what I say?” “If you’re going be more reasonable than your brother.” “I say my tuchis makes better reports every morning than that Thai grader you use—”

Avram tuned them out with a surpassing disgust that bordered on contempt. The old broker’s reports, whatever artificial processing Yussel Taubman had or hadn’t seen in the dull light of an overcast January day… it all seemed recycled and trifling to him. He was moving up and on, and had heard enough of that sort of thing to last a lifetime.

Avram took his cellular from his pocket. Besides wearing on his tolerance, the negotiations he’d overheard had reminded him of his intention to call the GIA lab and nudge things along there.

The phone rang three times in his ear before Craig Brenner, the gemologist, picked up at the other end.

“Avram,” he said, “I can’t talk right now.”

“Was it clairvoyance or caller ID that told you it would be me?”

“You decide,” Brenner said. “Look, really, I am too backed up to talk.”

“This will only take a moment,” Avram said. “The sapphires…”

“I promised I’d look at them right away, and that’s what I’m doing,” Brenner said. “Pushed you ahead of twenty other clients who are wondering if I’ve looked at their stones, and that’s including Tiffany’s—”

“It was my brother-in-law’s company, not the Tiffany family, who gave your son his sponsorship at Brown University.”

A pause, a sigh.

“The golden rod again,” Brenner said. “You going to hold it over my head forever?”

“Forever and beyond,” Avram said. “I’m in a great hurry.”

“You’re in a hurry, I’m in a hurry, everybody’s in a hurry,” Brenner said. “Listen, Av. Turnaround for an analysis is usually a two-week minimum, and I’ve got an expert doing a Secondary Ion Mass Spec for you in two hours. That’s a quarter-million dollar unit I’ve tied up, plus his time, which isn’t cheap —”

“You’ve already examined the sapphire yourself?”

“I have, yes.”

“And your findings?”

“Obviously inconclusive,” Brenner said. “I’ve tested for specific gravity, run color filter and immersion tests, looked at them under a stereo microscope… the same kind of things you probably did at home. There’s no sign of heat or chemical color enhancement, and the crystallization patterns look natural, but it’s possible a specialized laboratory could make fools of us. Until the SIMS provides meaningful information on trace-element concentrations, we can’t be close to definitive. And even then, Avram, this isn’t an exact science. This tech’s so new, and the stone so rare, there just isn’t the kind of comprehensive database that allows for a hundred percent accurate comparison check.”

“I can settle for something less than a complete grading for now,” Avram said. “Every journey begins with a small step.”

“And the race is not to the swift.”

Avram smiled wanly at that. “Craig… what do your eyes and experience tell you?”

Brenner sighed again.

“Early opinion,” he said. “I mean very early, got it?”

“Yes.”

“This stone looks like a moneymaker to me,” Brenner said. “I don’t know how you managed to raid the Maharajah’s tomb, but it’s either an authentic Kashmir, or the most magnificent fake ever produced.”

Avram fell silent, his heart knocking in his chest, his hand suddenly moist with sweat around the cell phone.

“Now that I’ve lit up your existence,” Brenner said, “is it okay if I get back to my mundane one?”

Avram still didn’t say anything. A moment before he had glanced over at the Nadels, who were still quibbling