CHAPTER FOUR
	The Premier
	Early on Christmas Day, 1954, a BOAC Stratocruiser flying from London to New York in a heavy rain crashed and burst into flames while attempting to make a routine landing at Prestwick Airport, in Scotland. Of the thirty-six people on board, only ten survived. Twenty-one of the twenty-five passen­gers had been intending to disembark at Prestwick, most of them to spend their holidays in Scotland. Even if the tragedy had not been peculiarly poignant because of the date, the size and scope of it would have horrified the public. For a few days the human angle of the accident pushed all other considerations pertaining to it out of mind. But most people who use air mails sooner or later ask themselves, whenever they hear of a crash, if by any chance they have lost letters thereby. In New York, about twenty diamond merchants had more to worry about than mere letters. They began to wonder, after a few days, if they weren't more closely concerned with this disaster than they had at first supposed. They had bought a considerable stock of diamonds from the Diamond Trading Company, the name under which the selling department of De Beers now