Glass House by Patrick Reinken Page A

fancies that tended toward pink, the first major source
outside Australia. Sullivan had bills and partners to pay, and he
set about doing that with the same speed he’d used to protect the
investment, digging into the pipe with the fervor of a man already
smelling and tasting the wealth.
    Laurentian – the new Laurentian –
rebuilt the old facilities, bigger and better than before. They
constructed the dormitories to replace blockhouses where the miners
had slept. They brought in new crushers and conveyors, and they
installed the latest in sorting equipment. They wrote up new
procedures and hired experts to streamline their recovery of
diamonds into the most efficient and profitable manner they could
develop.
    Like most modern diamond mines, Laurentian
was all mechanical process. Raw ore was methodically recovered from
the pipe with earth movers, the largest boulders removed from it
and set aside and the rest crushed to a manageable level. The
lighter materials, mainly loose sand and soils, were separated out
by progressive sifting and screening.
    That left only any heavy minerals, including
the garnets that had given the pipe away in the first place, but
also including the diamonds themselves. That concentrate of
minerals was sent to final recovery in the main facility, where it
slid down chutes for transport on conveyors that led to X-ray
bombardment.
    The same quality that gave diamonds away in
searches of miners’ clothing gave them away in searches of the ore
concentrate – when the stones are subjected to short-waved
light, like ultraviolet beams or X-rays, they fluoresce. They
glow.
    As the concentrate fell off the conveyors,
the ore was exposed to X-rays, and any diamonds in it flared. A
photomultiplier picked up even the smallest of those darts of
reactive light, triggering targeted bursts of air. The diamonds
were knocked out of the falling stream of concentrate, and they
were collected in a bin.
    It was a process of narrowing. With each
step, with each stage of the movement of the original ore, more and
more was removed from the base material to reach the prize. In many
ways, diamond mining is a CrackerJack industry, filled with people
trying to do nothing more than separate out a prize from all the
material surrounding it.
    The remaining work that occurred at the site
in Africa was straightforward. The separated diamonds went to the
cleaning plant, and they were washed in acid. Any soils or other
coatings on the rough were dissolved away, removing anything that
would dull their appearance.
    What’s left looks like a peculiar kind of
ice. The rough gems are smooth and shining but irregular on their
surfaces. They’re not cubes, as one might expect, and they aren’t
much like the playing card symbol of a diamond, either.
    They also assuredly aren’t anything
resembling a cut and polish job found in a ring. Most rough
diamonds are more or less eight-sided, like two pyramids lifted
from the earth and attached at their square bases.
    And colors? Looking into a collection of
washed rough reveals the range they can have. Some are tinted
softly, in colors that people rarely imagine for the stones –
blues, pinks, oranges, greens. The rest, the “white” ones, extend
from clear to yellowed, with any number of nearby shades on the
side.
    In its first year, almost $250 million in
diamond rough was taken from the pipe at Laurentian this way. In
its fourth, which came after Sullivan was removed by the forces
he’d put in place to make him safe, the figure was more like $500
million, and the only direction was up.
    Just one of those stones was the good and
solid pink that Laurentian superintendent Peter Rupert had been
given after its recovery from Dikembé’s theft. Rupert had shown it
to Anthony to try to push the man to tell what he knew, to get him
to realize it was futile to maintain he wasn’t involved in anything
when the very presence of the pink showed he was.
    Dikembé hadn’t listened.
    When the