Lincoln Child - Dance Of Death

Hayward shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Singleton stared straight ahead.

"We have teams searching Pendergast's 72nd Street apartment and his New Orleans town house as we speak. Any information we discover that might shed light on his future movements will be passed down the line to you. We're setting up a command-and-control structure that will allow for quick dissemination of new information. This is going to be a very fluid situation, and we have to be ready to revise our strategy accordingly."

Coffey nodded to his retainers, and they stood up and began walking around the table, passing out the red folders. Hayward noticed that neither she nor Singleton received one. She'd assumed this was to be a working meeting, but it appeared that Special Agent inCharge Coffey already had his own ideas about how to handle the case and neither needed nor wanted input from anybody else.

"You'll find your initial instructions and assignments in these folders. You will be working in teams, and each team will be assigned six field agents. Our immediate priority is to determine Pendergast's movements over the last twenty-four hours, look for patterns, set up checkpoints, and draw in the net until we have him. We don't know why he's running around Long Island, stopping at convenience stores and gas stations: those we've interviewed indicate he's been looking for someone. I'll be expecting hourly verbal reports from each team, made either to me directly or to Special Agents Brooks and Rabiner."

Coffey stood up heavily, sweeping the table with his angry gaze. "I'm not going to sugarcoat this. Pendergast is one of our own. He knows all the tricks of the trade. Even though it seems we've got him pinned down on eastern Long Island, he could still elude us. That's why we're throwing the entire resources of the Bureau into this. We need to nail this bastard, and quickly. The reputation of the Bureau's at stake."

He surveyed the table again. "Any questions?"

"Yes," Hayward said.

All eyes turned toward her. She hadn't intended to speak, but the word had just tumbled out involuntarily.

Coffey glanced at her, small eyes narrowing to pinpricks of white. "Captain, ah, Hayward, isn't it?"

She nodded.

"Go ahead, please."

"You haven't mentioned the role of the NYPD in the search."

Coffey's eyebrows shot up. "Role?"

"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."

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.