Diamonds Can Be Deadly. Merline Lovelace
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I recognize them, all right. It’s what I do about them that gets me into so much trouble.”
“Why don’t you try an extra half hour of meditation tonight,” Greene suggested. “We’ll explore your feelings in more depth during the group session tomorrow.”
Jordan almost choked on her guava juice. Oh, great! That’s all she needed. An hour listening to another female explore her carnal feelings for Thomas Jackson Scott.
She soon discovered the much-divorced Waller-Winston wasn’t the only woman at the institute with an interest in Scott. Nudging Jordan in the ribs, the blonde directed her attention to the slender Eurasian who stopped TJ at the door.
“That’s the spa director. Liana Wu. The bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, look at her. She’s got that tiny, porcelain-doll thing going. I refuse to stand anywhere close to the woman. She makes me look like a knob-kneed giraffe.”
If Felicity towered over the spa director, Jordan would dwarf her. The possibility didn’t particularly concern her. She’d long ago learned to use her five-nine height to her advantage.
“Rumor is,” Felicity confided, “Liana baby is hot for our boy TJ.”
No surprise there, Jordan thought in disgust. Scott had snagged her interest at their first meeting. Angry all over again at herself for falling for the crooked cop, she turned away.
Dinner was a long, lingering affair. Afterward, Jordan walked back to her bungalow through a scented night, stopping at a scenic overlook to prop her elbows on the trunk of a palm that curved at waist level.
The surveillance cameras she knew were scattered throughout the grounds would capture the image of a mainlander lost to the majesty of the surf foaming white against black cliffs. The ocean’s roar would serve as a natural sound buffer for her report to OMEGA. Folding her arms, Jordan toyed absently with her earring. One flick activated the transmitter.
“This is Diamond.”
Claire came on within a few seconds. “Cyrene here. I read you, Diamond.”
Lightning chimed in as well. “I’m here, too.”
The fact that her boss was still at the control center despite the late hour D.C. time didn’t surprise Jordan. Not with the kind of political pressure OMEGA was facing on this mission. She gave him the names of the guests she’d met at dinner and a rundown of her earlier encounter with Greene and his financial adviser.
“They’re interested. Definitely interested. Myers volunteered to get me in good with his pals in Colombia. He’s going to help me work a deal on an emerald supply.”
“Nice of him.”
“Isn’t it? I suspect he’ll pocket a fat broker’s fee.”
“Or skim more off the top of Greene’s business deals with the Colombians.”
“Speaking of skimming,” she said, scowling at the pinpricks of iridescent green glittering in the dark depths of the sea, “did Cyrene tell you TJ Scott was waiting for me when I arrived?”
“She did.”
Lightning didn’t ask the question, but Jordan answered it anyway.
“Scott still claims he was set up.”
“You were there. What do you think?”
What she thought about Thomas Jackson Scott would blister the airwaves. Reining in her anger, Jordan answered as coolly as she could.
“I’m keeping him in my sights.”
Five thousand miles away, Lightning shared a quick look with Cyrene. Any target Diamond got in her crosshairs was a walking corpse.
“I’m going to do some night work a little later,” she told them. “Pay another visit to Greene’s office. Among other things, I want to see what kind of information he gathered on Scott before hiring him.”
“Keep us posted,” Lightning instructed. “And be careful.”
“Will do.”
Cyrene cut the transmission and added a note in her electronic log, while Nick digested Diamond’s report. He trusted both her skills and her instincts or he wouldn’t have sent her in. As far as he knew, those instincts had failed her only once. Thoughtfully, he met Claire’s glance.
“Pull up everything you can on TJ Scott. I want the names of the officers who busted him. The pimps and dealers he put the squeeze on. The judge who threw out his case. The address of his favorite pizza joint. Where he buys his underwear. Everything.”
Chapter 4
The black thermal suit fit Jordan like a second skin. As thin and supple as Saran, its inner lining was coated with a high-tech polymer that made the body-hugging jumpsuit easy to slither into.
The lining trapped and contained body heat, thus reducing the wearer’s thermal signature and making him or her virtually undetectable by infrared scanners. That was great on missions to Alaska or Antarctica. Not so great in steamy Hawaii. Still, Jordan figured swimming around in her own sweat was a small price to pay for virtual invisibility.
Twisting her hair into a loose knot on top of her head, she dragged up the black hood and worked it around her earrings. The embedded transmitter was so sensitive she could send and receive right through the polymer coating.
Hood in place, she rolled down the attached face mask. The mouth and eye slits were covered with a breathable version of the same heat-containing shield. With every inch of her body encased in skintight black, she felt like a night version of Spider-Man.
She flicked off the bathroom lights and watched herself disappear. The wide mirror above the sink didn’t pick up so much as a shadow when she moved. With the CD player/electronic sweep in hand, she let herself out a side window. She left it open behind her. She’d reenter her bungalow the same way to avoid triggering the iris-recognition system and advertising her late-night expedition.
Velvet darkness surrounded her, ripe with the scent of tropical vegetation and the salty tang of the sea. Avoiding the crushed-lava pathways, Jordan glided across the lush lawns like a silent shadow. The sniffer allowed her to pick her way through the elaborate security grid. The thermal suit deflected TJ’s new Y-beams. Or so she hoped!
She reached the business center a few moments later. From her earlier visit, Jordan knew the location of the intrusion-detection devices at the windows. She zapped one with the sniffer, jimmied the lock, got the window up and was through it in thirty seconds flat. Another zap reset the electronic watchdog. The interruption would appear as a temporary blip on a monitor, if it appeared at all.
All too aware of the cameras mounted at regular intervals, Jordan kept to the shadows as she worked her way to the conference room where she’d met with Greene and Myers. The moonlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling glass window illuminated the map depicting Greene’s far-flung empire. The emerald marking the headquarters here in Hawaii gleamed like a giant eye, following her stealthy progress across the conference room and into the private offices beyond.
Two hours later, Jordan reentered her bungalow through the open window. She’d accessed the computer in Greene’s office, rummaged through the files in Myers’s sleek little laptop and poked into every corner of the headquarters.
To her intense disappointment, she’d uncovered nothing. Nada. Zilch-ola. No evidence of offshore bank accounts. No link to the Colombians except through legitimate purchase orders for emeralds. No hidden treasure room containing the Star of the East. She had, however, sweated off at least five pounds.
Dragging up the thermal suit’s face mask, Jordan stopped only long enough to type a code into her laptop and verify no one had entered the bungalow in her absence before making straight for the bathroom. Every pore in her body screamed with