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pass off the batteries and retrieve the latest footage from Marie Laure. In the past three weeks since he’d set her up with a pinhole camera hidden in an unremarkable bead pendant, she’d provided him with someamazing footage of life in the diamond mine controlled by Mekembe.
    But it still wasn’t enough to make people care about the horrors of life in this godforsaken part of the world. Not enough to make people care about Martin Fish and what he was doing hiding out in the civil-war-torn DRC, disguised as a caseworker with Population Services United, an NGO with operations all throughout the DRC. He was aiming to be the next Bob Woodward, and he wasn’t going to get that from a few hours of footage showing men slaving in horrific working conditions and women and girls being abused by their captors.
    Heartbreaking though it was, these days it didn’t rate more than a single column buried in the back of the world news section.
    Meanwhile, Bernstein, AKA Charlie Farris, had long since sold out. When he and Martin had met in journalism school a hundred years ago, they were going to revolutionize the media. Bring it back to real news; show the world the truth about what was happening in the world.
    Unfortunately all the world cared about was bimbos like Alyssa Miles and whether they were going to flash a beaver shot as they exited a cab. Charlie had accepted that years ago and left Martin and their self-run hard-news Web site in the dust.
    Now Charlie lived in a house in the Hollywood hills, thanks to an awesome money shot he’d scored three years ago. It was of Alyssa Miles at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, IV in her arm and a tube down her throat as the doctors struggled to save her life after she’d done one too many lines and gone into cardiac arrest. Charlie had had the only pictures of her in the hospital, and every fucking news outlet in the country had wanted them. With one picture, good old Charlie was set for life.
    At the time, Martin had been in Afghanistan, trying toavoid land mines as he sent daily dispatches buried three layers down on Newsweek ’s Web site.
    Over the years, Charlie had kept prodding him to give up the hard news, take the easy way out, but Martin knew he wasn’t cut out for that. Charlie could still turn on the charm, make nice with the brainless contingent that populated the entertainment elite. But after years observing and chronicling the most godforsaken people and places on earth, that kind of life had sunk into Martin’s pores, never releasing its clutches on his consciousness even when he got back to the first world. When he was in some third world hellhole, he couldn’t wait to get back to working sewers, running water, and good whiskey that wouldn’t ruin your guts like the local brew. But when he was home, he couldn’t squelch the disgust he felt with people, their bloated white, ignorant faces. Sitting on their fat Wal-Mart–clad asses watching Alyssa Miles make a fool of herself on TV, with no fucking clue what was really going on in the world.
    They’d have a clue soon enough. Alyssa Miles was about to make his career, just as she’d once made Charlie’s.
    Martin knew that to make his name he had to tie this operation to something—or someone—big. Van Weldt Jeweler was definitely big. And so was Louis Abbassi. While the press went crazy talking about that famous-for-nothing Alyssa Miles and her latest campaign for Van Weldt, they ignored the fact that Van Weldt had entered a supply agreement with Abbassi, a man who had made his fortune in the late nineties and two years ago had purchased a diamond-cutting operation headquartered in South Africa.
    But no one seemed to care where Abbassi’s diamonds came from, including Oscar Van Weldt. Martin had interviewed the CEO of Van Weldt right before he’d left for the DRC, under the guise of doing a fluff piece about marketing fine jewelry to the youth market. When Martin had probed Oscar about the deal with Louis and