The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 13

Thirteen hours after I planted the diamonds in the women’s toilets, I reclaimed them, and checked out of the hotel.

The Dubai — Muscat bus was a sleek, air-conditioned cruiser that drove at unchanging, ponderous speed down the middle of the giant, sparse highway for six and a half hours, two of which were spent in a maze of border crossings. Emirati officials glanced at my American passport and weren’t interested. The Indians and Pakistanis heading to Oman were subjected to several hours of speculation.

“It happens every time,” said the woman next to me, chewing busily on sunflower seeds as we sat on our bags outside the customs shed. She spat the kernels to one side, and grinned a broad-toothed grin. “You’re lucky; your country is rich. No one cares what rich people do. Hey, want to hear something funny?”

Sure, why not.

She grinned a dental-disaster of a grin and in heavily accented English intoned, “Do dolphins ever do anything by accident? No! They do it on porpoise!” and laughed until the tears rolled down her face.

The bus zig-zagged through the mountains, a nowhere land of empty roads before the Omani border, where we presented our luggage for search. No one bothered to open the pot of sun lotion in which the diamonds were carefully stashed; the drug dogs found nothing interesting as they snuffled along the line. Omani immigration was housed in a faux-Arabian palace, which owed more of its architecture to Disney than Sinan Pasha.

“You alone?” asked the inspector.

“Yes.”

“Married?”

“No.”

“You got someone to stay with?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not married?”

“No.”

His lips puckered a little in distaste, but though I was a single woman, I was travelling on a public bus and thus, finding no satisfactory diplomatic reason to reject me, he gave me the visa.

On the road everything was yellow.

For a while I counted cars; then I counted shrubs, then there was neither of either to count and I stared at dust and wondered how many grains of sand blew into the sea every year, and whether you could build a pyramid from them. The coast of Oman had been dug and sown with hardy dark green trees and thin, drooping beige fields, but the dust crept across every porch of every nowhere town that hugged the road.

Words, when I think of Muscat:

Street names in Muscat were almost non-existent. The hotel I checked into gave its address as “4th building after the statue of the ship on the left-hand side facing the sea”, before swelling into broader strokes of area and district.

I sat on a balcony looking out across the ocean, and drank Turkish coffee, the heavy grains rubbing against my teeth. It wasn’t my first choice of hotel, but this wasn’t Dubai; not all places would accept an unmarried woman, travelling by herself.

In this bubble of quiet sheltered from the world, I turned on the TV and watched the news. The robbery in Dubai ran only as a background story on a few channels, the police confident of speedy success in their investigations. Details were sparse; even the internet seemed to be hushed on the matter. Only one snippet was of any interest — an interview with a man by the name of Rafe Pereyra-Conroy (Prometheus CEO), who turned direct to camera and said: “We personally feel this assault upon our friends and generous hosts, and will do everything in our power to help bring the perpetrator to justice.”

I studied his face, and saw nothing remarkable in it. Turned the TV off.

In the bathroom sink, I washed sun cream off the diamonds, then laid them out on a white sheet, wrote the date and time on a piece of paper next to them, took a photo of the whole, and went about selling my stolen goods.

In an internet café in Muscat, I plugged my laptop into the Ethernet connection in the wall, loaded the photo of diamonds onto my computer, and posted the image onto an ad run through Tor.

For sale: Chrysalis diamonds, est. value $2.2 million. All offers in excess of $450,000 considered.

I signed myself _why, and this job done, closed my laptop again, slipped it in my bag, and went in search of company.