“Tell me about these,” Shango asked Mama Diamond, although he already knew the answer.
Mama Diamond remembered this group of orders because of the cryptic letters and the extravagant offers they had contained.
The first one-she found it for Shango-had been innocuous enough, an order form printed from her website requesting a number of fine garnets and inquiring about volume orders and discounts.
“Signed by Anthony St. Rivers,” Shango observed, as if this were significant.
Mama Diamond filled the order and wrote to Mr. St. Rivers advising him that she didn’t ordinarily fill high-volume orders-she was a retailer, not a distributor; her stock was carefully assembled to meet the average needs of her typical customers, and she was reluctant to draw down too much inventory for fear of disappointing her regulars. (She could, of course, have accepted St. Rivers’s orders and simply filled them through a distributor at some extraordinary markup and after a long delay…but that didn’t seem quite honest.)
She had gotten back a nice note from St. Rivers, mentioning he would refer her to his other friends and compatriots across the country. St. Rivers had further ordered a modest selection of raw and cut stones-opals, tourmalines, more garnets-and thanked Mama Diamond in a courteous fashion.
The orders continued to arrive with some regularity from St. Rivers and his well-heeled friends. Mama Diamond was intrigued enough that she’d mentioned St. Rivers to an importer, Bob Skarrow, at a gem-and-mineral trade show in Phoenix.
Skarrow rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. St. Rivers had contacted him, too, and when he couldn’t fill his entire order-“It was frickin’ ridiculous in volume alone”-St. Rivers and company had gone in turn to Skarrow’s sources, and it was skewing the entire market in semiprecious stones, driving up prices and creating spot shortages.
“What do they do with all these stones?” Mama Diamond had asked.
But Skarrow didn’t know. He’d had a couple of phone conversations with this St. Rivers (always with St. Rivers, not Skarrow, placing the call, the number invariably blocked), but St. Rivers wouldn’t say anything about that.
Skarrow said the man’s voice was papery thin and cultured, an old man’s voice, with the faintest wisp of an accent, Spanish maybe or Mexican or Cuban, as if he’d planted roots here a long time but had hailed once from an alien land.
“Best guess in the trade is, they’re working on some kind of optical device,” Skarrow had concluded. “Like they used to use rubies for lasers. But that’s just speculation.”
Mama Diamond had let it go at that. Shortages, price-gouging, and overblown crises were an unavoidable part of the gem trade. “Apart from regular small orders from St. Rivers,” she told Shango, “that’s the whole story.”
Shango nodded thoughtfully.
“Now,” Mama Diamond said, “suppose you answer me some questions.”
Shango asked Mama Diamond if she would be willing to walk with him to the train depot-if she felt well enough.
Oddly enough, she did feel well enough. She had this hazy, dreamlike memory that Stern had press-ganged her into a great deal of unwilling physical labor alongside the corpse-gray, distorted little men who made up his work crew. The pain was still there, throbbing in every joint. But she felt a peculiar energy, too. All that adrenaline flowing in her veins, she supposed. The giddy aftermath of fear.
And at the very last, amidst the steam hiss of the soul-damned train firing up again, Stern’s words coming distant and watery to Mama Diamond in memory or imagination.
“Home…then Atherton.”
Emerging with Shango from her dinosaur-bone house onto the porch, Mama Diamond spied her bent-birch rocker, the Tom Clancy novel still there under the canteen, pages restless in a dry wind. It can stay where it is, Mama Diamond thought. I’m through with that book.
They walked together slowly on the unshaded side of the street. The wind was brutal again today, bulling down the cross lanes like the propwash from an old DC-3. Mama Diamond wore her old slouch hat to keep her head warm, atop the pageboy she had affected since she was five (hell, one hairstyle should last a lifetime). Shango, God bless him, wore a fedora.
“Suppose you start,” Mama Diamond suggested, “by telling me how you came to be here.”
“That’s a long story.”
“I have time on my hands.”
Shango began with stark simplicity: how he had come out of the navy to work for the Secret Service; his role at the White House before the Change; how President McKay had confided to him the likelihood that the clandestine Source Project was the root and center of the Change; how McKay had sent Shango along with Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Czernas to find the lost agent Jeri Bilmer, who might just have had the key to it all.
Then things got really interesting.
Later, upon reflection, Shango told himself it was because Mama Diamond comported herself like a woman who’d had no company but her own for far too long. Shango understood about that. He’d had more experience with loneliness than most folks.
But he had unburdened himself like a Mafia don at last confession.
Before his return to Washington, Shango told Mama, he had found the pitiful remains of Jeri Bilmer and her even more pitiful list, the roster that told nothing more than the names and former addresses of the scientists at the Source Project-perhaps complete, probably not, certainly not including the support personnel who might or might not have been dead by that time.
Shango had not succeeded on his own in achieving this objective. He had been helped at the end by the odd quartet of travelers from New York whom he had chanced upon when he had helped save the most erratic of the four from murderous attack. Herman Goldman, whom Shango had rescued and who in turn had used his remarkable powers to help Shango locate Bilmer’s remains…and then reveal to him that President McKay was dead.
Was it that knowledge that finally coaxed Shango to violate his oath of office, to reveal what he had sworn only to share with McKay? Or was it rather a growing empathy with the band’s leader, Cal Griffin, on his quixotic mission to save his abducted sister and challenge a force that had only overturned an entire planet?
Fools’ errands were something Shango understood, too.
Whatever the motive, Shango had shared all he knew about the Source Project with them, in the hope-probably equally foolish-that it might turn the tables just enough to save their lives.
Shango knew full well he had come to the crossroads and chosen. To turn his back on what he had been, what he had prided himself on being. To become visible again.
For eight years, Shango had worn a black suit like his personal armor, earpiece wire coiling off into his collar, wrist handcuffed to the briefcase that would fall away to an Uzi at a moment’s notice.
But most of all, he remembered that feeling….
Unseen, unobserved, unremarked upon.
Clouding men’s minds.
One time, when Shango was just a beanpole of a kid in a tumbledown, squalid neighborhood of New Orleans where no Nielsen company or Harris Poll ever asked anyone’s opinion, his father had brought home some beaten-up cassettes he’d scored at a swap meet-odd behavior, to be sure, for the old bastard usually hoarded every penny for beer and escape. But it turned out this was release of a different kind, for when Dad himself had been a kid he had fled not into liquor and a feigned, desperate gaiety but rather the deco dreams issuing from the hand-tooled fine oak cabinet and glowing amber eye of the Atwater Kent. Now he wanted to relive it and-incredibly, uniquely-share it with his children.