Glass House (17 page)

As she was giving Waldoch a congratulatory
handshake and quick, back-patting hug, Megan spotted Claire in the
second row of the gallery. She looked sad as well, but her
expression was wistful, with the kind of wisdom that only comes
from long years that make you realize every now and then that
things go ways you can’t predict or control. More than all that,
though, Lora Alexander’s mother looked proud of her daughter, even
in loss.

“I remember her,” Megan said, the image of
the woman clear in her mind.

“Lora’s dead,” McCallum told her then.
“Killed in a car accident the very same day her name happened to
come up in our case. The second case involving the man she sued
before. That’s kind of a surprising happenstance, don’t you
think?”

Megan couldn’t speak. The phone seemed
heavy, like it was sinking away from her.

McCallum met her silence by going on. “I
know you didn’t have anything to do with this. Just the same, I
also know you need to understand what is fucking happening
here.”

“What I need is to go,” Megan said in a soft
voice. It was all she managed.

Megan hung up. She went out to the porch,
where she stared at the legal pad, still on the floor. She bent and
picked it up, stacking it neatly on top of the others.

Before she realized she was doing it, she’d
gotten herself a drink of the Johnnie Walker Blue, saw it was after
ten now, and retreated back to the porch anyway. She sat and drank
a slow sip of the whiskey, letting it wet her lips and tongue and
warm her throat. She replayed the short conversation with McCallum
a dozen times, every one of the few words between them coming over
and over again, her anger still undefined but growing each
time.

The policeman had made an appearance down
the street after all. His cruiser sat in its usual spot, waiting
for speeders, but he was there only a few minutes before driving
off.

“No traps tonight,” Megan said softly into
the tumbler of whiskey when the cruiser pulled into traffic and
drove away. She smelled the Scotch and watched the car until it was
gone. She lifted the glass and studied the booze inside it. “No
more traps,” she muttered.

In the police car’s absence, Megan’s gaze
shifted to the black walnut tree, the one that was planted on
Benjamin’s birthday. She thought of her dead husband. She thought
of the time he’d been gone, her own time away, and the months since
she came back, all of it leading seemingly inexorably to Paul
McCallum calling her tonight with news of the death of Lora
Alexander.

With Benjamin and the whiskey, McCallum and
Lora blending in her mind, the tree was a kind of link between her
old life and her new. A bridge that connected Ben and her past by
reaching, over the year she’d been gone, to the phone call on this
night.

Megan sipped her drink, and she stared at
that tree, suddenly wanting it gone.

She stood, and she emptied the glass through
the screen. She turned and went inside.

Out
From Laurentian

Four pick-up trucks. All small and old. All
Toyotas. The paint on them, white on one and beige on the other
three, was faded and dirty. Any shine in their finish was long
baked away by the searing African sun and air. The pressed-metal
fenders and sides were dented and scraped and puttied, the tires
mismatched and balding. The treads were thinned to an alarming
smoothness at the edges.

Three men rode in front of each truck, with
another four or five in the open beds in back. All of them wore
brown, green, and sand-colored cammies, with matching camouflage
boots and brown berets. All very official looking, which was
unsurprising, since the uniforms matched those worn in the South
African National Defence Force. But the men weren’t actually from
any army. They were professional soldiers hired by Laurentian,
which paid them frequently and well.

The sole exception was Allen Saifee, who
rode in the second Toyota. He’d made it back from his call with
Hanley in time to receive a uniform, hear a Laurentian briefing,
and take a seat in the front. He didn’t complain or suggest another
course of action. Not once.

The men were jostled and tossed as the
trucks made their way over the inconsistent highways, hitting a
rough hole and then leveling off for a few hundred yards before
finding another one. The men held tightly to the walls of the old
pick-up trucks, pinning down their freshly out-of-box,
shoulder-slung South African automatic rifles with free arms.

At the lowest levels in the diamond trade,
in and near the mines themselves, the bottom line was that the
product had to get out somehow. Out of the ground, out of the
tailings, out of the mining facilities. It had to get to a market
somewhere, and it had to get there securely.

For the mine companies, shipment of the
diamonds is fraught with danger. There are a variety of ways to do
it, all depending only on resources and time.

The largest of the mines, those in De Beers
Consolidated, handle all the steps themselves. The De Beers mines
pack their rough in tin boxes at the sites, where it’s washed but
not sorted. The company’s vertical control in its operations allows
them a luxury that most don’t have – they can pack the rough
and ship it as securely as possible to defined local or
international Diamond Trading Companies controlled by De Beers.
There, the rough is washed again, sorted, and then valued, avoiding
any extra pairs of hands that don’t belong in some way to De
Beers.

Along the way, the De Beers shipments are
arranged with maximum unpredictability. Because of that, the
methods are varied in their means but common in their stringent
safeguards. De Beers’ tin boxes leave the mines by armored car or
rail, heading to controlled air distribution points. They travel
under schedules that are never the same two times in a row and,
where possible, on routes that are never determined more than an
hour in advance.

However the rough reaches the planes, the
transfer is made under excruciating examination, with multiple
security teams in place to check each other as much as they watch
the shipments. Any given team’s members never serve together more
than six months. Whether the De Beers men are driving the cars or
ensuring the hand-offs at the air facilities or providing security
on the planes or trains themselves, the company’s goal is to
minimize the opportunities for collusion among its workers.
Familiarity breeds friendliness, and friendliness breeds deceit
that encourages people’s greed.

But not all mines are in De Beers.

By far the most common method of transport
among the rest of the pack was armored car. All along the Diamond
Coast from Namibia to the Cape, and deep into the continent to
Botswana and the industry’s historic heart near Kimberley, the
armored cars could be seen moving in small caravans of two or five
or seven, destined for the nearest small landing strip for air
transport of the rough to the cities. Some of the cars slipped out
of the mines at night, hoping for the cover of darkness and the
secrecy it provided. But most traveled in the day, hoping that
sunlight and the collective security of multiple cars would keep
any thieves away long enough for the cargo to reach a plane.

The smaller mines didn’t have De Beers’
resources either, though. They couldn’t charter their planes, and
they didn’t pay for standing security forces. They hired drivers
for specific, never-changing shifts. Staggered and random drive
times weren’t possible.

At the right times, a person in the right
place on the roads could pick out the chains of cars. You could sit
beside the highway and wait for them, glance at your watch, and
point at the road at the moment they’d drive by.

Which was the problem here.

The four Toyota trucks caught a paved
roadway at the ordained time. Traveling in their own chain, they
drove south and east, shooting at an angle for a precisely-timed
cutoff of a shipment from Ariacht, a moderate-sized diamond
mine.

The dispute between Laurentian and Ariacht
was heated, but it hadn’t developed into any actual fighting. Not
yet. So far, it was all argument and accusation about stake
infringement, with barristers always involved and with each side
complaining that the other had encroached or would encroach on
their claims.

That was about to change. The trucks were
passing from the spring-flowered landscape of the country’s
northwest fringe, into the more arid plains of the interior, and
their timing was perfect. According to the lead driver’s
calculations, Ariacht’s weekly shipment of two trucks was four
kilometers ahead of them and three kilometers away from a fifth and
a sixth truck full of Laurentian soldiers, waited in ambush ahead.
The mass of people and weapons and diamonds was about two and a
half minutes apart.

_______________

The Ariacht group also contained four
vehicles. Two armored cars and two South African NDF escorts, one
in the lead and the other at the tail. The army vehicles were
soft-topped Land Rovers. They were small and agile, but not enough
so.

At a dip in the roadway, where the
shrub-covered plains to either side rose to facing bluffs that
boxed the highway in, the Ariacht caravan had come across the two
parked Laurentian Toyotas. They’d approached cautiously, but the
Ariacht men never had a chance to assess the threat. The first
Rover exploded under rocket fire from the roadside. It was burning
instantly, its occupants trapped inside.

The explosion and burst of flame brought the
group to a stop even as the four trailing pick-ups arrived and
closed from behind them. Saifee could see the armored cars starting
to maneuver in the tight space left to them.

With the bluffs to the sides and the burning
Rover ahead, their best chance of escape lay to the rear. The heavy
cars were working their way around slowly, turning and
shifting.

Saifee could see the small arms fire open up
from the men in the lead Toyotas. Their weapons barked, the shots
thumping harmlessly against armored cars’ windows or pinging into
the reinforced steel bodies. The following Toyotas stopped in a
spread, the drivers parking them to block any retreat by the
Ariacht group.

“Everybody out!” someone cried.

Saifee opened the side door and jumped from
it, the rifle clutched in his hand. He could hear the shots of the
men from inside the armored cars, their weapons slotted through
ten-centimeter firing holes in the cars’ sides. The spray from the
holes alternated between sparks of light and seeping puffs of smoke
as the Ariacht vehicles finally straightened and started to advance
toward him.

As Saifee tucked himself behind the Toyota’s
fender, he heard a soft
punk … punk-punk
. The shots from the
Laurentian men were finding the wheels of the armored cars, and the
reinforced self-sealing tires were bouncing them back or swallowing
them whole.

Saifee heard the men scurry and shout around
him. He smelled diesel and dirt and cordite, mixed together with
the scent of heat in the heavy air.

Then everything was lost in another
explosion. A second rocket destroyed the first Ariacht Rover now
heading at them. Crouched by his Toyota and peering over the line
of its hood, Saifee saw the vehicle breach. Its back was broken,
its body in flames.

The two armored cars ground to a halt. Fiery
hulks burned at either end of their route, blocking the roadway.
The bluffs and the men on them closed off the box.

Saifee hadn’t fired a shot when a demand to
surrender came from the Laurentian men. He could see the man making
it, a bullhorn raised to his mouth.

The call came in English, then Afrikaans. It
followed in Sotho and Setswana.

No response.

Saifee knew the men from Laurentian wouldn’t
wait. They
couldn’t
wait.

Radio signals would be going out to Ariacht.
South African air cover was possible.

There was a soft, popping noise, then a half
dozen more. Thick smoke erupted around the armored cars.

As the fog of it obliterated all sight of
the cars, the men inside them began firing faster. The shots were
random, spilling out in forty-degree arcs, the maximum permitted by
the firing holes in the sides.

Saifee heard more than saw two men move
forward from their positions, one to each of the intact middle
cars. He knew what would happen.

Each man was carrying a cyanide canister.
They slipped up against the cars, ducking under the narrow-view
windows, avoiding the blazing firing holes.

When they came to open slots, they slid
metal nozzles up and into the cars. They opened the valves on the
canisters.

The men gave the gas two minutes. It took
another two to cut and force the armored doors of the Ariacht
vehicles.

Gas masks and protective gloves in place,
the men emptied the cars of the boxed rough from the Ariacht mine.
They left the bodies where they lay.

Laurentian was stealing the Ariacht
diamonds. They were going to seed the rough into their own, and
they were going to sell it into the great and vast,
indistinguishable mass of rough that floats through the
international diamond market. Where it would be lost.

Saifee watched as the boxes came out. He
counted and gross-calculated.

The shipment was small. It could have been
done in one car and probably was broken into two for security
purposes, ironically.

Whatever the total weight, he knew it wasn’t
much. Several thousand carats. Perhaps ten or fifteen, but not
enough to justify the trouble. Or the cost.

The theft wasn’t the point, though, and
Saifee knew that as well.

The point was that Arthur Ariacht was being
given a lesson on a remote roadway in northwestern South Africa. A
lesson and a warning, all at once.