Stone Junction

it’s the same. She’ll smile at me very sweetly and say, ‘No, I’m sorry, you couldn’t be my daughter because you haven’t been born yet.’

And I beg her to imagine me, please, imagine me. But she can’t.

At a roadside flea market near the New Mexico border, Daniel handed out a whole box of God Shots magazines and impulsively purchased a dark green bowling-ball bag, bowling shoes, and a bowling shirt. The shirt was the same verdant green as the bag. On the back, in yellow letters, it read ‘Thrice Construction.’ Small script above the front pocket spelled out ‘Herman.’

He stopped to rest several hours later. He pulled off on a dirt side road and slipped the Diamond out of the false differential into the bowling bag. He climbed in the camper. He stared into the center of the jewel for nearly ten minutes, concentrating, but couldn’t see the spiral thread of flame. He vanished. The diamond vanished with him. The spiral flame was immediately visible. He emptied his mind and focused on the Diamond-center flame. He felt himself filling with light, becoming light, and he used the light to fuel his concentration. When he reappeared, he felt amazingly refreshed. Not until he put the Diamond back in the bowling bag to ride up front with him and stepped from the camper did he realize the moon had risen. He’d vanished for at least three hours. ‘No limits,’ he shouted to the moon. ‘Hang on, honey, I’m coming to see you.’

Volta hung between trance and sleep. He could sense Daniel but not strongly enough to locate him. The only way Daniel could have taken the Diamond was to make it vanish with him, and he would have had to do it quickly. Perhaps he’d imagined it vanished with him. Perhaps the Diamond had been amenable. Or hungry. He couldn’t imagine Daniel looking into the Diamond. He wasn’t sure if the whisper of sense he felt emanated from Daniel or from some ghost-echo of his own fears that Daniel had been, at best, deranged, or, at worst, claimed by the Diamond. Daniel had powers. Indisputably had powers. But he was not as powerful as the Diamond.

Melvin Keyes, CIA Southwest Supervisor and a sharp-tongued man himself, would have enjoyed the sledgehammer wit of the director’s dressing-down if he hadn’t been its recipient. The director’s rage dwindled at last, and now, as they stood in the looted vault, the director was reduced to repeating the list of Keyes’s offences, less in anger than disbelief. ‘And you had the entire security forces of every intelligence office in this country at your inept disposal, on an unlimited budget, and they, or he, or she, or goddamn it – excuse me if I sputter – stroll right in and steal the diamond and walk right out. Pardon me, Mr Keyes, if I just can’t fucking believe it!’

Keyes, eyes averted, waited till he was sure the director had finished. ‘Sir, I share your distress, but consider the evidence: four checkpoints, cameras, laser detection grid, five-pound trip pressure alarm on the floor, double- key and coded lock untouched – it simply was not humanly possible to steal that diamond undetected. Therefore, I’m forced to conclude we’re dealing with an alien species, one whose technology far surpasses ours. Consider, too, that our scientists have never seen anything like this diamond. Geologists, physicists, they all agree the probability of its occurring naturally is incalculably small. I think it was an information-gathering device of some kind, and they simply took it back.’

‘They?’ the director curled his lip.

Keyes wasn’t anxious to say it again. He looked at the vault floor. ‘I think we’re dealing with alien beings, sir. Nonhumans.’

The director said icily, ‘I don’t believe in little green men. Nor does the president.’

Keyes gave up. ‘Well, if it was taken by humans,’ he said crisply, ‘they’ll be caught. We have two hundred agents in the field as of this moment, another fifty on their way, and a number of specialists working on forensics and interviewing the guards.’

‘Wonderful!’ the director said, his sarcasm so massive a D-8 Cat couldn’t have budged it. ‘The agents will remain under your questionable command for the time being. However, after my humiliating conference with the president and the NSC this morning, Dredneau has been called in to take charge of the investigation.’

Keyes was incredulous. ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau? Sir, the Diamond is classified as a Zero-Access Red-Line Secret! Dredneau is a Canadian –a French Canadian at that. Not to mention he’s crazy, a schemer, a fraud, a notoriously––’

‘As the president ordered,’ the director cut him cold, ‘Dredneau is in charge of the investigation. If you’d done your job, the president and NSC wouldn’t have required his services.’

‘With all due respect, sir, in my estimation the man is a show-boating fool, untrustworthy, and utterly incompetent.’

It was Dredneau himself, standing at the open vault door, who murmured, ‘Your estimations, Mr Keyes, have already proven their considerable poverty.’

Dredneau was dressed in early Alfred Noyes: a long claret duster, a spotless white shirt with a ruffle of lace at the chin, doeskin trousers, calf-length boots of Spanish leather, and silk gloves – also spotlessly white – that he ordered by the dozen from Paris. Barely an inch over five feet and slightly bow-legged, he looked less like a nineteenth-century highwayman than a jockey turned fop.

The director, momentarily taken aback, offered his hand in greeting. ‘Dredneau. I’ve looked forward to meeting you.’

Dredneau, ignoring the director’s extended hand, bowed. ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau at your service, sir. I understand’ – he glanced pointedly at Keyes – ‘that your security has failed, resulting in the regrettable loss of a most valuable gem.’

‘It was stolen sometime between noon of the thirty-first and 1 a.m. on April second. As you may have already been briefed, it was seemingly stolen from a locked vault without tripping or bypassing five separate and quite sophisticated alarm systems.’

‘How perplexing,’ Dredneau simpered. ‘Fortunately, I was in New York concluding a nasty case involving a planned terrorist attack on the city’s Easter Parade – now foiled, thank goodness – and I was able to respond with alacrity to your president’s urgent summons. But before I bring my faculties to bear on the case at hand, allow me to introduce Roshi Igor, my assistant, bodyguard, and valet.’

Neither the director nor Keyes had noticed Igor standing outside the vault door, a surprising oversight. On hearing his name, Igor entered. Four hundred pounds of dense muscle, he had wrists like mahogany four-by-fours protruding from his frayed coatsleeves and a neck like a redwood stump. Igor’s eyes, though, were more imposing than his bulk. Set close beneath the Neanderthal slope of his brow, they looked like the bore end of a sawed-off double-barreled twelve-gauge.