Glass House (20 page)

“Oil,” Thomas answered, and they both knew
that much was true. Although he hadn’t offered that information to
his schoolmates himself, Jonathan realized perfectly well that his
father was in the oil business. He just didn’t know how.

“What’s he do in it?” the younger boy asked,
and here he lost Thomas. There wasn’t an answer, just a shrug of
shoulders that was barely visible in the fading glow of a
flashlight that had been on too long.

Thomas suggested they should raise the
matter with Maria, the morning maid, and the subject was dropped at
that. If the older one didn’t know, the topic must have been beyond
their understanding, and so they reached a common stage among
children, who, failing to grasp something, push it off to later and
move right along.

It never occurred to them even in passing
that Christophe himself, and not the maid, probably was the person
to ask. Regardless, they didn’t take it up with Maria, either. By
morning, they’d forgotten the conversation and the issue
altogether. It never came up between them again.

The boys’ father Christophe was more than
just a businessman, however. A few years after his sons’ quick
discussion in the tent, Christophe’s name was mentioned for a
vacant congressional seat, a startling prospect for an
Arab-American in Texas.

He was wealthy and well known enough to
merit serious consideration. He knew and had met the right people,
and more meetings followed, more trips coming with them. Christophe
spent more time in Dallas and Houston, San Antonio and Austin, than
he did at home or at work. He was with his family one night and
gone for ten.

But he still spent time in the fields, too.
On a summer day only two weeks short of his party’s nominating
convention, Christophe was at a new site. He was long past the time
when he was interested or actively involved in the day-to-day work
of the oil fields, but this moment caught him there, stopping to
see their latest drilling location.

They’d had trouble with it all along. It was
a diagonal drill, angling in under a lake. The environmentalists
had screamed about drilling through the lake waters themselves,
lawsuits followed, and Hanlee and his company reconfigured the
drill approach to win the lifting of an injunction three and a half
years after the suit was started.

They were hurrying to get the drill in
place. Appeals were being worked on, but no restrictions were in
place during their pendency, so time was of the essence. Wait two
weeks, and an appellate court might just stop you from doing
anything while they sat on papers and mulled the issues some
more.

The drilling started four times in as many
days. There were two breakdowns and quick repairs and restarts.
Time was lost.

The variability of mixed soils and concerns
for oversight also dragged the process out, but Hanlee was bent on
doing it right. Any failure here would certainly mean losing the
larger legal battle, and he wasn’t ready for that.

Late on the fourth day, when Hanlee was
catching up on the progress and the crew was preparing to switch
over, a deeply reverberating, plucked tone rang out from the drill
unit. It was followed by the
whoosh
sound of a whip snapping
forward. Heads turned, some already ducking, but it was too late by
then.

The glancing blow of a snapped, inch-thick
cable grazed Christophe on his left temple, just forward of his
ear. It knocked him a half dozen feet off the ground, and he landed
twenty feet away, but it didn’t break the skin. He didn’t bleed. He
barely even showed a bruise, probably because he died so
quickly.

The coroner talked about brain trauma and
subdural injuries. He offered an opinion that Christophe would have
been saved if he’d been six inches farther away but decapitated
completely if he’d been standing a foot closer to the cable when it
broke.

The write-up in the Dallas
Morning
News
was monumental. The victim’s prominence and the freakish
nature of the accident landed the story above the fold on the first
page, and three more updates followed in the next week. Fourteen
people wrote letters to the editor, most in praise and a few in
condemnation because of Christophe’s oil business.

At the convention, the delegates observed a
minute of silence in memory of the man who would have run under
their banner. The keynote speaker devoted two full minutes of her
speech to Christophe’s achievements and a discussion of what a
great Congressman he’d have been.

The center was packed by people with their
hats in hands or their arms wrapped around each other in
consolation. Many of them sobbed together, in the political way
that’s possible only when people have worked long enough in support
of one person that a loss of any kind seems like a personal
tragedy.

They went on to the task of nominating
someone else then. That man got the stamp of approval, ran a fine
race, and was sitting in Washington three months later, taking the
oath of office as a Congressman in the United States House of
Representatives.

Very few people remembered Christophe Hanlee
after that. Control of the oil company fell to its managers. The
accountants and corporate officers and lawyers stepped in, made
deals that no one in the family was privy to, and folded Hanlee’s
interests neatly into an international conglomerate.

It took two years to run through a
once-large amount of money. The family didn’t do that themselves,
either, of course. They had plenty of help.

The same people who’d sold the company off
managed to turn a net worth of $150 million into a few hundred
thousand in that time period. Bad investments, bad advice, and more
than a little graft and theft took their toll on whatever
Christophe had left behind for his wife and kids.

True, the family kept their house. There
were cars and food and clothes and all of that, and no one ever
would have said they were poor.

But they also weren’t the same.

Jackson Hanley was still Jonathan Hanlee by
the time the money ran out, but the name didn’t last long. The
attention he experienced when his father was running for Congress,
and then when the man was killed, was a recent but not quite fresh
memory. Reporters didn’t call the house. Stories didn’t show up in
the Washington
Post
and
Wall Street Journal
and
Forbes.
Nobody took pictures of Jonathan and Thomas outside
the gates to their school anymore.

But he wanted the notoriety pushed farther
back. He Americanized his last name to Hanley and picked Jackson
from the list of Presidents. He completed the paperwork and paid a
$169 court filing fee from a small trust fund that remained from
his father’s estate.

He got himself a new name.

He was almost twenty-one when that happened,
but he was probably more boy than man even at that age. The loss of
his father, first by missed time and later by death, contributed to
a lack of maturity that eventually meant he was growing up looking
for some sort of authority to replace the one he never really
had.

It took other opportunities for him to
realize that. The FBI sent Jackson an informational letter near the
end of his five years of college. They were asking to meet with
him, to sit down and talk about a position in the Bureau.

Hanley’s family’s history – either in
terms of its north African roots or its onetime political
potential – didn’t matter to them in any respect that gave
them concern. To the contrary, the FBI found itself needing people
who looked like Jackson looked and talked like he could talk.

Arabic, on both counts.

The Bureau had combed through school
records. They asked quiet questions in the administrative hall. And
they picked him and a few others out on the basis of looks and
language and grades.

Jackson listened to what they had to say,
and he came away thinking for the first time that he might be able
to fill a role. He might have a part he could play, with a little
purpose and guidance in the world to boot. He applied, held his
breath, and was surprised to find he was excited when he got a call
telling him he’d been accepted to the FBI Academy at Quantico.

The day that happened, Jackson Hanley called
his brother and told him what he was planning to do with his life.
The two of them had spent so much of their time together that
Thomas was the only one he considered telling, and they spent hours
talking about it. Thomas was happy for him, genuinely so, and
Jackson was vague in return – he had no idea what he’d be
doing in the Bureau at the time he made that call.

He still talked that way with his brother,
in a regular call on the first of every month. Jackson had been
away long enough, first in college and then in government service,
to put his Texas youth a good distance behind him, but the calls to
his brother always brought it back to him vividly. He remembered
everything at those times.

The look of the place and the sound of the
people. The southern accents. The smell of bluebonnets and
buttercups at home, and of oil fields and dirt on a few trips his
father dragged the boys on. The bustle of moneyed life.

But even brought back, all those things in
his head were more like pictures on a shelf than any reality he’d
lived. They were, he thought, remarkably different from the world
he was looking at.

Hanley’s free hand shielded his eyes against
the bright intensity of the sun. He was a long way from Texas.

He stared at the envelope Saifee had given
him. The white of the paper was startling, his name printed in neat
block letters on its face. He tore open the envelope with a finger
and read the single sheet inside it.

Ariacht shipment to be raided. Tuesday. 1000
hours. Please advise.

Saifee had known about the raid before it
happened but wasn’t able to get the word out. So he’d been
right – the note he was giving Hanley was too late.

Jackson read it only once. An unopened book
of matches rested in an ashtray on a table next to him. He pulled a
match and struck it, held the note and envelope together at the
flame, and dropped them to the ground as the fire caught and ate
the paper. He stamped it to dust when the flames died.

The crushed and scattered ashes of the paper
skittered in the breeze. They were slipping back and forth, some
getting farther away and lifting into the air before disappearing,
others simply drifting and resting, then drifting again.

The sun was still hot, the sea-fed air still
cool on his cheeks. He studied the workers in the vineyard once
more, watching as they moved over the hill. He was thinking about
Anthony Dikembé and a tightly-closed holding cell at
Laurentian.

Hanley stood and headed toward the house. He
needed another way, he thought, and that other way was at home. He
had a call to make.

Finn

Megan hadn’t been back up the Hill to the
law school in three years. Then she was returning to teach, a
single-session overview lecture in a criminal procedure course for
first-year students. It was one of those “real life” touches that
sometimes prompt schools to drag out alums. You go in, have lunch
with professors who still make you uncomfortable, then spend an
hour or two trying to pretend you don’t feel awkward and out of
place standing at the front of the room and talking rather than
sitting in the chairs and listening.

She hadn’t gone back since. And she wouldn’t
be going now if she didn’t have to.

In the middle of the sidewalk leading to the
rigidly squared-off, black-windowed building, Megan stopped. She
pulled the slip of paper from a jacket pocket and read it
again.

Garber’s 2L
, it said.
KU Law!
Admin. said should be at school at W 15
^th
in aft’noon.

Her secretary handed it to her at the
office. Megan had read it, shaken her head and blinked twice to
make sure her vision was working correctly, and read it again.
She’d looked at Linda, who stood smiling before her.

“Hand to God,” Linda said before walking
away.

Megan drove straight to the law school,
headed toward the building, and had hit that point where she
stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to read the note in renewed
disbelief. People drifted around her like she was a rock in a
stream. She tucked the note away.

The administrative offices were on the
second floor. Megan waited, her hands on the counter, feeling like
a grade schooler who’d returned and found everything smaller than
she’d left it, until a receptionist ended a phone call and asked if
she could help.

“I’m looking for Finn Garber,” Megan said.
She gave a professional smile and passed a business card over. Her
name was printed neatly and small, in a Copperplate font under the
firm’s gold-embossed logo. “We had an interview scheduled for later
today, but a conflict came up, and I was hoping to claim some time
with him early, if it works.” Another small smile.

The receptionist took the card but didn’t
bother to read it. “You’re a graduate,” she said pleasantly. “I
recognize your name.”

“Yes.”

“Welcome back.”

“Thanks,” Megan said as the woman turned to
a computer terminal on the desk. She tapped the name in.

“Finn is….” A pause as she read down the
screen. “Looks like he’s between classes,” she finished.
“Ordinarily, I’d say the library, but it’s Finn.” The woman gave a
little wink. “Better bet is the commons downstairs.”

“Thank you so much,” Megan said. She reached
over the counter and shook the woman’s hand. “You’ve been a great
help.”

The commons wasn’t much more than the
building’s first-floor lobby and atrium. A window wall at one side,
with an open staircase in front of it. A broad space of carpet that
was a utilitarian gray shade, broken by round tables and stackable,
steel-frame and plastic-seated chairs. Vending machines in an
alcove, offering coffee, soda, candy, and sandwiches.