Dance Of Death

FIFTY-TWO

Hugo Menzies inserted his key into the staff elevator and rode it from the second to the fifth floor. Exiting the elevator, he strolled meditatively down the long, polished corridor. The curatorial offices lay on either side: old oaken doors with panels of frosted glass, each bearing the name of a curator in old-fashioned gold-leaf lettering, even those most recently appointed. Menzies smiled, already feeling a nostalgia for the old pile and its quaint traditions.

He paused before his own office door, opened it, and entered just long enough to pick up the canvas satchel that accompanied him almost everywhere. Then he closed and locked the door and continued his stroll to the farthest end of the hall, where there was an unmarked door. He unlocked it, stepped into the stairwell beyond, descended two flights, and exited into a dark, deserted hall-the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. It was one of the oldest halls in the museum, a true gem of late-nineteenth-century museology, and it smelled of old cedar and smoke. Transformation masks, totem poles, slate bowls gleamed in the dark recesses. Menzies paused to inhale the air with delight. Then he walked briskly through the deserted hall and several others, finally arriving at a large metal door bearing the legend The Astor Hall of Diamonds.

His eye dwelled lovingly on the door in all its brushed-steel splendor, taking special note of the two video cameras on either side, staring down at him like beady black eyes-except, as he knew, they were currently not functioning. He smiled again, then removed a large round watch from his vest pocket and gazed at it. Although in shape it resembled a pocket watch, it was, in fact, a modern digital stopwatch. On its face, numbers were counting down with enormous rapidity, at an accuracy to the thousandths of a second.

The watch was reading time signals from the same satellite that the museum's security system used.

He waited until the watch signaled a certain point in time with a soft beep. Menzies immediately put the watch away, stepped rapidly to the door, placed his ear against it, and then quickly swiped a magnetic card through the reader. The door did not open; instead, a small eye-level window shot open, revealing a retinal optical scanner.

Menzies bowed his head, popped two soft contact lenses out from his eyes and into a waiting plastic container, then stepped up to the optical reader. A quick bar of light passed across his face; there was a moment's stillness, and then a soft click announced the disengagement of the lock. He stepped through the door into the hall beyond, the door automatically closing behind him.

With a rapidity of movement marvelous for his advanced age, Menzies knelt, opened his satchel, and got to work. First he reached up and, with a sharp tug, removed his leonine thatch of white hair, shoved the wig into the satchel, then reached into his mouth and pulled out five molded rubber cheek and chin pieces. This act alone caused an astonishing transformation in the shape and apparent age of his face. Another pair of quick tugs took off the bushy eyebrows and a few small blemishes, liver spots, a mole.

Next, still kneeling, the man removed more than a dozen small dental mirrors from the satchel, mounted on bizarre little stands in a variety of odd shapes and sizes, all made of beautifully hand-machined brass. Next came an array of black objects wired together, a stack of thin Mylar sheets, several small cutting tools, exotic-looking metal instruments, and a flat of sticky pads, each the size and shape of a lentil.

When these had been arranged on the floor with military precision, the man waited, still crouching, unmoving, stopwatch again in his hands. He raised his head once to look at the hall in front of him. It was dark-utterly dark-without even the slightest gleam announcing its extraordinary contents. The darkness was part of the security, because the only electromagnetic radiation in the hall after closing was invisible infrared and far-infrared wavelengths. Even the myriad laser beams crisscrossing the hall were infrared, undetectable to the naked eye. But he did not need light: he had rehearsed this many hundreds of times, in an exact duplicate of this room which he had constructed himself.

The watch gave another soft beep, and the man exploded into movement. With the speed of a ferret, he darted about the room, placing the dental mirrors in precisely fixed and calibrated locations, each mirror turned to the precise angle.

In two minutes, he was done and back in his place by the door, breathing slowly and regularly, watch in hand.

Another soft beep indicated the laser beams had gone back on- each one now redirected to a different path, running around the outer walls instead of crisscrossing the hall itself. This rotating series of laser grids was one of the features of the new security system. No doubt the technicians in the basement were congratulating themselves on another successful test.

Again, the man waited, looking at his watch. Another soft beep and he was up again, this time carrying the Mylar sheets, which he stuck over the video camera lenses which had been placed in numerous strategic locations. The Mylar sheets, clear to the naked eye, were actually etched with holographs which responded strongly to infrared light, and which reproduced the precise scene that the infrared video cameras were pointed at-minus, of course, the man. When the video cameras came back on, they would see the same boring scene they had seen before. Only it would not be real.

Again, like a cat, the man retreated to his safe corner. Again, he waited until the stopwatch beeped another soft warning.

This time he scurried around the perimeter of the hall, setting a sleek black box in each corner, connected by wires to a small power pack. These were powerful radar guns of the type used by state police, modified to jam the museum's new infrared Doppler radar system, said to be so sensitive it could detect the motion of a cockroach across the carpeting.

Once the radar jammers were in place and active, the man straightened up, dusted his knees, and gave a low, dry chuckle. Movements now almost languid, he removed a flashlight from the satchel, turned it on, and played the dull green beam about the hall- a precise wavelength of green light chosen because none of the sophisticated electromagnetic sensors in the hall could see it.

The man strolled casually to the center of the hall where a square, four-foot pillar had been constructed, on top of which was set a thick Plexiglas box. He bent down and looked in the box. Resting inside on thick satin was the dark form of a heart-cut diamond of extraordinary, almost incredible size: Lucifer's Heart, the museum's prize gem, which had been called the most valuable diamond in the world. It was certainly the most beautiful.

A fine place to start.

With a small cutting tool, the man opened a hole in the Plexiglas. Then, with a series of slender tools machined precisely for this purpose and some of the tiny, sticky pads, he reached in and removed the diamond, being careful to prevent the trigger pin under the diamond from rising. Another deft movement placed a large glass marble on the same stand, which would keep the pin depressed.

The man held the diamond in his hand, shining the flashlight up through it for a moment. In the green light it looked black and dead, without color, almost like a piece of coal. But the man was not perturbed: he knew that a red diamond under green light always looked black. And this diamond was red-or more precisely, a rich cinnamon, but without a trace of brown. It was the only diamond of its color in the world. Blue diamonds were created by boron or hydrogen trapped in the crystal matrix, green diamonds by natural radiation, yellow and brown diamonds by nitrogen, and pink diamonds by the presence of microscopic lamellae. But this color? Nobody knew.

He held it up and peered through it to the flashlight below. He could see his own eyes reflected and multiplied by the diamond's facets, creating a surreal kaleidoscope of eyes and more eyes, hundreds of them, staring every which way inside the gem. He moved the gem back and forth, from eye to eye, enjoying the spectacle.

And the strangest thing of all was that the eyes were of different colors: one hazel, the other a milky, whitish blue.