Reardon. When he grasped Sloane’s she pulled him forward slightly and said, “May I speak to you in private?”
“Of course.” Cabrillo looked at Linc. “Take them to thePinguin . I’ll escort Ms. Macintyre myself.”
They took their seats as soon as the group left. Sloane studied him the way a jeweler inspects a diamond that he is about to cut, looking for the tiniest flaw that could ruin the gem. She came to some sort of decision, leaned forward, and rested her elbows on the table.
“I think you’re a fraud.”
Juan had to suppress a guffaw. “Excuse me,” he finally stammered.
“You. This ship. Your crew. None of it is what it appears to be.”
Cabrillo fought to keep his expression neutral and the blood from draining from his face. In the years since he’d founded the Corporation and started traipsing around the globe on a succession of ships all namedOregon , no one had ever thought they were anything but what they appeared to be. They’d had harbor officials, inspectors of every kind, even a canal pilot on their transits of Panama, and no one had shown the slightest suspicion about the ship or its crew.
She doesn’t know,he thought.She’s fishing. He had to admit to himself that they hadn’t pulled out all the tricks they utilized when they were in port and about to be inspected, but there was no way an untrained person who’d been aboard for all of thirty minutes could see through their carefully laid deception. His heart slowed as he came to this realization.
“Care to explain?” he invited casually.
“The little things, for one. Your helmsman was wearing a Rolex exactly like the one my father had.
That’s a two-thousand-dollar watch. A bit too nice if you guys are as poor as you say.”
“It’s a fake,” Juan replied.
“A knock-off wouldn’t last five minutes in the salt air. I know because I had one when I was a teenager and working on my father’s fishing boat after he retired from the merchant marines.”
Okay, Juan said to himself,she’s not completely untrained when it comes to ships. “Maybe it is real but he got it from a fence who stole it. You’d have to ask him.”
“That’s a possibility,” Sloane said. “But what about your steward? I’ve been working in London for the past five years and recognize English tailoring when I see it. Between his Church’s dress shoes, custom suit pants, and handmade shirt, Maurice was sporting about four thousand dollars’ worth of duds. I doubt he bought them off a fence.”
Juan chuckled, imagining Maurice wearing anything secondhand. “He’s actually richer than Croesus but is— how would the English put it—dotty. He’s the black sheep of an old-money family who has been knocking around the globe since he turned eighteen and got his inheritance. He approached me last year when we were in Mombassa, asked to be our steward, and said we wouldn’t have to pay him. Who was I to turn him down?”
“Right,” Sloane said drawing out the word.
“It’s true, honest.”
“I’ll leave that for now. But what about you and Mr. Lincoln? There aren’t a whole lot of Americans working aboard ships because Asians are willing to do the jobs at a fraction of the wage. If the company who owns this vessel is as tight as you claim, the crew would be Pakistanis or Indonesians.” Juan made to reply but she cut him off. “Let me guess, you work for a pittance, too?”
“My mattress isn’t exactly stuffed with cash, Ms. Macintyre.”
“I bet.” She raked her hand through her hair. “Those are the little things I figured you would explain away. How about this? When I first saw your ship there wasn’t any smoke coming from the funnel.”
Uh-oh,Juan thought, recalling how the engineer had forgotten to turn on the smoke generator until after thePinguin was in visible range. At the time Juan hadn’t thought it a big deal, but that oversight was coming back to haunt them.
“I first thought that the ship had been abandoned but then I saw you were making headway. A few minutes later, smoke starts pouring from the stack, a good amount of it, in fact. Interestingly, the exact same amount when you were charging toward us at twenty knots as when I was on the bridge and noticed the telegraph was set to all stop. And speaking of your charge, there is no way a vessel this size could turn that fast unless you have isopod directional thrusters, which is a technology developed long after this ship was built. Care to explain that away?”
“I’m just curious why you even care,” Juan hedged.
“Because someone tried to kill me today and I want to know why and I think you can help.”
“I’m sorry, Sloane, but I’m just the captain of a rust bucket not long for the breakers yard. I can’t help you.”
“So you’re not denying what I saw.”
“I don’t know what you saw but there’s nothing special about theOregon or her crew.”
She stood up and walked unerringly to where the tiny camera had been mounted in the frame of an old picture of an Indian actress who’d been famous fifteen years ago. She pulled the picture from the wall and the camera popped free to dangle by its wire. “Oh, really?”
This time blood did drain from Juan’s face.
“I noticed it when you said ‘that’s obvious’ after getting the note from Maurice. I assume someone is monitoring us right now.” She didn’t wait for Juan to reply. “I’ll make a deal with you, Captain Cabrillo.
You stop lying to me and I’ll stop lying to you. I’ll even go first.” She sat back across from him. “Tony and I didn’t hook up through an Internet chat room. We work together in the security division of DeBeers and we really are looking for a sunken ship that might be loaded with about a billion dollars’
worth of diamonds. Do you know anything about diamonds?”
“Only that they’re rare, expensive, and if you give one to a woman you damned well better mean it.”
That made her smile. “Two out of three.”
“Two out of three, huh? I know they’re expensive and I know they’re rare so you must have men casually giving you diamonds all the time. You’re certainly attractive enough.”
Her smile turned into a little laugh. “Ah, no. They are expensive and you should mean it, but diamonds aren’t rare. They’re not as common as semiprecious stones but they’re not as scarce as you’re led to believe. The price is kept artificially inflated because one company controls about ninety-five percent of the market. They control all the mines so they can set any price they wish. Every time a new diamond field is discovered they are there to buy it up and eliminate any chance of competition. It’s a cartel so tight it makes OPEC look like amateurs. It’s so controlling that several executives would be arrested for antitrust violations if they ever set foot in the United States.
“They dribble out stones from their vaults at a very selective pace in order to keep prices at a constant.
If inventories dwindle they increase production and when there is an excess of stones they hoard them in their London vaults. Bearing all this in mind, what do you think would happen if a billion dollars in diamonds were ever to be dumped in the marketplace?”
“Prices would drop.”
“And we lose our monopoly and the whole system comes crashing down. All those women out there would realize the rocks on their fingers aren’t forever after all. It would also ripple through the world’s economy, destabilizing gold prices and currencies.”
That was something Juan knew a little about since it was only a couple months ago that he and the crew thwarted an attempt to flood the world’s gold market. “I see your point,” he said.
“If such a treasure-laden ship existed, there are two ways our office would prevent this from happening.
Number one is wait to see if someone else finds the diamonds and simply buy them all outright.
Obviously this would be expensive, so we would want to take the second route.”
“Check to see if the rumor of a sunken treasure is true and find it for yourselves.”
Sloane touched the tip of her nose. “Bingo. I was the person who first pieced together the story behind the treasure so I was given the lead on this trip. Tony’s ostensibly my assistant but he’s absolutely worthless. This is a big deal for me and my career. If I could find the stones I would probably be named VP.”
“Where did the diamonds come from?” Juan asked, interested in what she had to say despite himself.
“Fascinating story there. They were originally mined in Kimberley by members of a tribe called the Herero. The Herero king knew there was a battle coming with the German occupiers of his homeland and thought if he had the diamonds he could use them to buy English protection. For a decade or so his men worked in Kimberley and
