Glass House (10 page)

Things started moving faster when she came
to the meat of the issues. She’d written the questions out
long-hand, as she usually did for her own depositions, and she read
through them in a hurry. She seemed impatient about giving him
time, rattling the questions off and jotting notes along the way.
She sprinkled in only occasional bits of information or tips for
him to digest.

They covered DMW’s original hiring of
Kathleen Landry, the troublesome ex-vice president, in a
fifteen-minute blur that seemed more interrogation than helpful
assistance from Waldoch’s own counsel.

“Did you select Ms. Landry for her initial
interview?”

“I did not. Human Resources did.”

“
I did not
is enough. That answers
the question, and you don’t need to offer more. Remember that.”

Waldoch nodded without a word.

“Again, did you select Ms. Landry for her
initial interview?”

“I did not.”

“Who did?”

“Human Resources.”

“Who, specifically, in Human Resources?”

“I’m uncertain of that.”

“Is that person still there?”

“How can I answer that if I don’t recall who
it was?”

“Try
I’ve no idea
if that’s
appropriate. It sounds and reads nicer.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Was she qualified for her position?”

“I thought so.”

“You wouldn’t have hired her if she
wasn’t?”

“I didn’t hire her. The Board did.”

“Thank you for listening to the question and
not jumping at an answer.”

“I apparently can be taught after all.”

“You were on the Board at that time, is that
correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did you support hiring Ms. Landry?”

“I voted in favor of hiring her, yes.”

“You had no concerns about how she would
perform her job responsibilities?”

“Not until she started stealing from
us.”

Megan couldn’t hide a smile, and she didn’t
correct his reconstruction of the question in his answer.

“At that time, you had no concerns about how
she would perform those responsibilities?” she said.

“No.”

They covered Landry’s first months, then
years, at DMW. Any failures on her part, any particular
commendations that were due or given. Depositions tend to expose
both sides, the good and bad, the points to be raised and scored by
plaintiffs as well as defendants, and the prep session was no
different.

They were another hour and fifteen in when
Megan hit the crucial, excruciatingly pointed and embarrassing
questions. Even though Waldoch would be able to ask for a break
when he wanted, and even though she herself would insist on it, she
hadn’t allowed him any break yet.

He still sat, remarkably placid, across from
her. He alternated between sitting forward, arms lightly resting on
the table’s edge, and sitting back, one leg crossed over the other.
His eyes rarely left her. He took a sip of water every ten minutes
or so, always neatly wiping his mouth with a small paper napkin
afterward. Through the questions that followed, his voice didn’t
vary from its level, accommodating tone.

“Mr. Waldoch, you’ve had sexual relations
with Kathleen Landry, isn’t that correct?”

“No. That’s not correct.”

“She has performed oral sex on you,
correct?”

“No.”

“And you on her, correct?”

“No.”

“Do you recall my questions about sexual
relations you had with Ms. Landry in the DMW offices on –”

Waldoch cut her off. “I didn’t have sexual
relations with Ms. Landry.”

“So you’ve said.”

Depositions can have flip points in them.
When a lawyer asks questions that seek to support her case in a
straightforward way but gets only denials, sometimes she’ll switch
to questions that seem to be looking only to confirm those
denials.

That’s a setup. She knows she’s going to get
a parade of
nos – No, I didn’t do that
and
No, I
didn’t do this
. She also knows the witness in front of her is
going to offer much of the same if the case ever gets in front of a
jury.

So she’ll start going out of her way to get
those
no
answers. She’ll work to get the witness’s
confirmation that bad things didn’t happen. The lawyer can look
better. Nicer and more agreeable, more of a friendly face who’s
simply trying to find the truth for everyone. But if the witness is
then proven wrong, or if he changes his story because he’s cornered
later, he looks worse.

“You haven’t had sex with Ms. Landry?” A
note of doubt was in Megan’s tone, just as it would be in Paul
McCallum’s during the actual deposition.

“That’s correct.”

“And DMW didn’t terminate Ms. Landry because
you had a sexual relationship with her that went bad?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“You didn’t spend the evening with her in
Kansas City, on the night of March twenty-ninth?” The date showed
up on a document, a photocopy of a hotel receipt that Megan had
shown him earlier.

“I did not.”

“You didn’t fly with Ms. Landry to New York
City in late August?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t spend two nights with her
there, either?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Waldoch was getting into a pattern. Whether
he saw it or not, his answers were coming too quickly. He was
getting used to those
nos
, and he was delivering them
automatically.

“You did go to New York City, however, is
that correct?”

“No, I –” Waldoch caught himself. “Yes, I
did,” he amended quickly. “I flew separately from Ms. Landry. We
stayed in separate rooms.”

“You didn’t have sexual relations of any
kind with Ms. Landry while on the trip to New York City?”

“No.”

Still no pause in it. Even with the hitch,
Waldoch wasn’t giving himself, or Megan in a later deposition,
enough time.

“Ever send Ms. Landry flowers?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Not that you recall? You’d remember sending
a woman flowers, wouldn’t you?”

This had been covered before in the session,
and Megan would object to its repetition in a deposition. She asked
it anyway.

“Precisely my point, counselor – I
suspect I’d recall that, and I don’t recall it here.”

“No candy, no love notes?”

“No. To both.”

“And no jewelry? Nothing like that?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

He was too comfortable. Too quick.

Megan had been switching back and forth
between positive and negative –
you dids
and
you
didn’ts
were mixing together. It was hard to keep straight
whether he was being asked if he did something, or if he didn’t.
Which was the point.

Without even the barest notice, she switched
it again.

“Did you ever even speak with Ms. Landry,
Mr. Waldoch?”

“Of course I did. We –”

Megan cut him off. “
Yes
, Jeremy. The
answer to the question is
yes
. It’s not
yes and here are
all the times I did
. Not
yes and it was a great
conversation.
Just
yes
, and nothing else
.
”

“Yes.”

“How frequently?”

“Daily, I’m sure. With regard to the
business of DMW, I suspect we spoke daily.”

“Did you ever have dinner with Ms.
Landry?”

“I’m sure we –” He caught himself this time.
“Yes.”

“How often?”

“Once every couple months, perhaps. She was
a vice president. I tried to make sure we spoke somewhat
regularly.”

“But you never gave her any gifts?”

A hesitation. He was waiting, finally. She
could see him work the question briefly in his head, running it
back to make sure his answer was right.

“I never gave her gifts,” he said.

Megan stopped at that. She flipped through
her notes, reading the scratchings at the margins, the notes to
herself about how he was doing. She crossed one or two off.

“I want you in this office a half hour
before the deposition,” she said. “We’ll go over a couple reminders
then.”

“Fine.”

“And no conversations,” she added. “That’s
the reminder for right now – don’t get into a conversation
with this guy.”

“No conversations,” Waldoch said. He was at
the door already, opening it. Outside, Russell Haas stood up
immediately, dropping a magazine he’d been reading.

“Ready,” Waldoch said. Haas collected a
briefcase.

“Three days,” Megan said to their backs.
Waldoch turned to her.

“Three days?”

“Your deposition’s in three days. Try to
remember that.”

Waldoch smiled. “Of course,” he said,
already turning away again. “I wouldn’t dare miss it.”

The
Pipes and the Rough

“Boss.” The pilot’s voice over the
intercom.

“What is it?”

“Laurentian.”

The man peered through the Bombardier’s
porthole window. The jet’s wings were swept far back, and the
windows of the Global Express XRS were glazed and angled for the
best viewing possible. Looking down, he could see the shore of the
southern Atlantic coast of Africa, and through the haze on the
coast, he could pick out the equipment and buildings of Laurentian
Mines.

He racked the papers he held and slipped
them into a folder, tucking the folder into a briefcase that was
open on the table in front of him. He snapped that closed and
tossed the case onto the leather seat across the aisle.

A phone was racked into the cabin wall above
the table. He pulled the handset out and dialed. As he waited, he
studied the scenery passing below, his hand softly rubbing the
table’s surface. It was bird’s eye maple, flawlessly smooth to the
touch and mottled blond in color.

The conversation was short when the phone
was answered. He announced their arrival and was told someone was
already waiting. He hung up.

The Bombardier was a godsend. In theory, its
range was actually enough to take him directly to Upington, but it
was a stretch, and they usually cut it into two legs. From the
States to Morocco, and from there to South Africa. With the number
of trips he’d had to take lately, he didn’t know if he could’ve
done it any way other than the private jet.

They were over the continent now, descending
toward the airport. He twisted back to catch a last glimpse of the
mines, then studied the ground as it passed below. What he was
interested in, the thing that kept bringing him here, wasn’t
actually at the surface. It was farther down.

_______________

There’s a place inside the earth. It lies in
the mantle, the 2,000-mile thick layer between the planet’s metal
core and its surface crust. The mantle itself isn’t wholly rock,
and it isn’t wholly liquid. It’s both in a sense, an area of a
peculiar sort of plastic stone, of shifting and changing rock and
not
rock that starts anywhere from four to forty miles below
the surface.

In the mantle’s upper portions is a zone
where the temperature is 1,000 degrees Centigrade, over 1,800
degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure is 50 kilobars, which is more than
700,000 pounds per square inch. That’s 500 times the atmospheric
pressure on the surface of Venus, and it’s enough to disintegrate a
human being. That area is the diamond stability field, where carbon
is pressed into layers, and where those layers are pressed together
with more layers until diamonds are formed.

That process doesn’t naturally occur
anywhere else on the planet. Diamonds form only there, at a depth
too far down and too dangerous for people to reach – no direct
examination even of the Mohorovii discontinuity, the mantle’s
uppermost boundary, ever has been made.

Which means, in effect, that diamond miners
don’t truly dig to the original source of diamonds to find them.
The diamonds instead have to be brought to the surface first, where
they can be dug out. That’s the work of volcanoes. More
specifically, of kimberlite volcanoes.

Kimberlite volcanoes start deep in the upper
mantle, farther from the earth’s crust than typical volcanoes. And
when they erupt, they do so slowly at first.

Kimberlite magma, a plasma rock, moves
upward at only around ten miles an hour. It seeks weaknesses in the
rock above it, drilling and forcing a passage to the surface. And
as it moves, it brings surrounding rocks and minerals with it,
including whatever it collects from any diamond stability field
through which it passes.

At the end of a kimberlite eruption, the
process speeds up. Kimberlite volcanoes erupt like typical ones,
sending rock and lava into the air. But they send any carried
diamonds up and out as well.

For the diamond companies, the historic
geological speed of this series of events is essential to their
product. Transported at the right speed, diamonds are carried to
the surface and deposited there. If the kimberlite moves too
slowly, however, any diamonds brought with it change as the lower
pressures and temperatures near the surface have a chance to take
effect. On the way up, the diamonds convert to graphite, the carbon
form found nearer the planet’s crust – the diamonds turn into
pencil lead.

That means the geologic history of
kimberlite volcanoes is more important than the present. Magma
still moves through the volcanoes and works its way to the surface.
But the ones that brought the diamonds to the Diamond Coast at just
the right speeds, starting an industry, came millions of years
ago.

Little evidence visible to the eye remains
of the kimberlite volcanoes that put the diamonds in southern
Africa. Kimberlite is soft – it broke down and washed into the
volcano craters to the point that, today, someone could pass over a
kimberlite volcano’s remains and not even know it’s there.

What’s left is below the surface. The
kimberlite has filled the volcano’s crater and passage. It’s
compacted into a carrot-shaped tube of cooled soils and debris and
minerals, narrow at the lower tip and broad at the top. It’s become
a “pipe.”