Glass House (30 page)

Smith wanted to know that because it was his
job. But he also wanted to know it because he was told to know it.
He was waiting to hear from someone, and when the cell phone in his
pocket began to ring, he pulled it out and started to talk.

_______________

The expanses to the left and right, front
and back, seemed limitless. Hanley could see in every direction
over an unbroken scene to a distant horizon. The only things in the
view, besides scrub and dirt, were five people and the two cars
that had brought them here.

Strangely enough, he wasn’t thinking of the
oil barrel being pried open in front of him. Neria was standing at
his elbow, and the two of them already had seen the barrel’s
contents. One of the other men had shone a flashlight in when the
top was still only cracked open, the two of them had flinched at
the same time, and Hanley hadn’t needed to see more.

They’d found Allen Saifee. His body was in
the barrel, which had been tightly sealed and buried in a shallow
hole outside Calvinia, north of Cape Town.

That they found him at all was surprising.
The South African countryside was full of places that no one steps
on for years, and this was one of those. The only reason they came
to it at all was a tip, anonymous, that rang in the middle of the
night, from a payphone.

Which meant the Bureau only knew because
someone didn’t care if they knew. Somebody killed Allen Saifee, and
they were so confident they could get away with it they felt they
could taunt a little.

Hanley only dimly registered Neria muttering
beside him. She was angry, her tone sharp but her volume low. She
was swearing, he thought. In a language he didn’t recognize.

“It’s all right,” he told her. He knew it
was a lie as much as he knew it was the
right
lie. “We
agreed on what should be done, and we ran the risk we knew was
there.”

“It cost him his life,” Neria said in hush.
“I picked the wrong person –”

Hanley cut her off with a raised, silencing
hand. “I’m sure you picked the right person. And just as you
predicted, the information got too far beyond that person. We can’t
change that, and we can’t bring anybody back.”

Neria stared at him, weighing the words. “It
cost him his life,” she repeated, turning back to the barrel. They
had the top off now, and one of the men was stretching out a sheet.
“How can you be so calm at that?”

Hanley turned instantly to her. “Calm?” His
voice was low but tense. “I’m not calm at all. I put this man in
that barrel, just like I put the others where they were. I get what
that means, Detective Motaung. But me being angry isn’t the fucking
issue now, is it.”

He’d pulled a phone from his pocket and was
dialing it, punching at the keys.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“The only person I have to call right
now.”

_______________

Smith figured they had the worst connection
in the world. Every other word was a garble of static.

An agent came up behind him. “Mr.
Smith?”

Smith waved him away and plugged a finger on
his free hand into his uncovered ear. “Repeat that?” he asked.

“Go. Back.” Hanley over-enunciated to make
it clear.

Smith read up the list on his lap,
deciphering the scrawled index while Hanley waited.

“Back how far?”

“Up the list. Midway … so. There was … thing
there.”

Smith found the rough middle of the index.
“Files regarding potential Canadian contract.”

“After that,” Hanley said. “A … farther
down. A –”

“A what?” Smith asked when the word didn’t
fill in.

“Case. A
case
.”

Smith sat back. He laid the list on his lap.
He leaned into the phone as he spoke, almost willing the line clear
so Hanley could hear him.

“We aren’t going to seize files from a
private civil suit,” he said. “You understand that, Agent Hanley?
We aren’t taking anything like that.”

And then the line was clear. The static and
crackle dropped away, and Hanley’s words came through
perfectly.

“I don’t care if you seize them,” he said.
“I don’t care what happens to them. I just want to know a few
things about it. That’s all. And I’m leaving for the States in two
hours, so I want to know them as soon as possible.”

Smith listened as the agent, apparently
somewhere in southern Africa, told him what he wanted. When it was
finished, the attorney turned to the man still waiting behind him.
He waved him closer, and he pointed at the entry on the index.

“Find me this.”

Milvian Bridge

Megan Davis was in Waldoch’s home, sitting
in a chair in an office. She was shown there by the same man who
appeared with Waldoch at the firm, starting this whole thing
off.

Haas
, she remembered after the first
five minutes of waiting. His name was Russell Haas, he was
Waldoch’s “driver” and “bodyguard,” and if her memory of the
introduction Waldoch offered that day was good on this point, too,
then Haas was another assaulter and prison convict.

For the next five minutes after remembering
Russell’s name, Megan sat quietly and not especially patiently,
feeling trapped and out of place. She hadn’t particularly wanted to
meet at Waldoch’s home. It was too personal, and it put her too
much out of her element. But Waldoch insisted, the trial was
forty-eight hours away, and she didn’t have much of a choice
because of that.

The room didn’t put her any more at ease.
Waldoch’s office was large and oppressively well decorated. The
walls were bird’s eye maple, shining and marked with the peculiar
water-rippling pattern of that wood. Dark golden above, and light
honey in a one-foot border that ran along the floor. The desk
matched. Bookcases, too – three of them spaced in the room at
regular, exactly placed locations that framed black-and-white
photographs of a coast somewhere.

She stood and moved to study the photos, the
map from Claire Alexander making her almost fearful of what she
might be able to make out in them. There were eight in all,
staggered, different-sized, and offset in ragged rhombuses, tucked
among the three bookshelves. She looked at each set in turn,
examining the pictures for anything discernible to her and coming
up short.

Finn said the map from Claire’s was of South
Africa, but Megan couldn’t possibly tell if that was the shoreline
she was seeing. The first set of pictures were landscapes, taken
from the ground and showing the froth of waves hitting land. The
other set was from the air, high enough that the ocean was a slate,
the water’s edge a jagged and electric line, and the land a rough
collection of shadows, textures, and a sprinkling of only a few
real shapes.

Leaning close, she could pick out industrial
buildings on the coast, with deserts stretching inland beyond them.
But she didn’t know the area well enough, and there were no words
on the photos, Afrikaans or otherwise, to give their subject
away.

She started to turn from them but stopped
almost immediately. On the far wall by the door, behind where she’d
been sitting, were three other pictures. All were of diamonds,
their colors ranging from white to pink to red, in a left to right
progression.

Megan thought of Claire, standing on her
steps and passing the hastily-collected documents and map and
picture – a picture of pink diamonds – to her. The office
seemed too rich and deeply warm then, almost suffocatingly so, with
the color of the wood everywhere around her. The austere
touches – stainless steel table lamps, a clock, a pen cup,
accents on a chair and on the picture frames – broke it up,
but only with colder dashes. And then there were the pictures
themselves. It all made her feel tight in the chest.

Megan lightly rubbed her hand on the desk in
front of her, feeling the weight of it in the surface touch alone.
Curious, she thought, weighing the possibility of finding a desk
like this one in the home of any other small businessman who ran a
local security company.

She sat in Waldoch’s chair, and she eyed the
front of the desk. She scanned the shelves and tables, looking for
family photos, something personal that would confirm that a real
person with a real life worked here. She didn’t find anything like
that.

When she’d come into her own office and seen
Waldoch sitting there, he’d been holding the picture of Ben and her
in South Carolina. There weren’t any family pictures that Megan
could have held in this room. The only things she saw were the
black-and-whites on the wall.

And the pinks
, she amended. They were
there, too.

Just the oceans, in images of enormous waves
hitting the shores of what she now was certain was a south African
coast, with a mine somewhere near it. And photos of diamonds that,
she was just as sure, would have come from that mine.

Megan opened the top desk drawer. Everything
inside it was in place. Pads in a stack, extra pens in a row.
Stapler next to a box of staples, tape and Post-It notes and paper
clips, all at the ready. Everything in its place, looking like it
was never disturbed even one time. It was a desk that wasn’t used,
she realized.

She tugged open a file cabinet door, running
a finger over two dozen or so folders that were racked inside like
empty hangers in a closet. Closed that one, then found the same
thing in another one.

And below those, she found a heavier drawer.
Alone of the three, this one was locked, and its door had the
weight of reinforced, thick steel, its corners aproned in
reinforcing trim. Megan bent closer and saw it wasn’t a drawer at
all.

A small dial was centered in a door at the
bottom of the file cabinet in Waldoch’s desk. The door covered a
safe that was tucked into the cabinet’s foot, the dial a
combination lock with a face so flush to the door that you wouldn’t
notice it without an examination.

Megan straightened. She stood and turned to
the rest of the room.

By the time she got to an upright cabinet
that hid a television and small stereo, Megan wasn’t simply working
through the furniture out of morbid curiosity about whether Waldoch
actually worked in this room. She was searching it to find
something that might show her further who her client really
was.

When Waldoch entered, Megan didn’t see him.
She was at a bay window, her back to the door. Another desk was
there, smaller than the main one but just as smooth and beautiful,
its top cut to fit the obtuse angles of the bay. It looked out into
a sheltered backyard that was painstakingly laid out with manicured
landscaping, a neat brick walkway, and perfectly pruned trees, but
that was otherwise empty of life.

Megan lifted a pen from a tray at the head
of the desk. Waldoch’s name was on it, printed in gold that shone
against the black lacquer finish.

“You can put that down,” Waldoch told her.
His voice didn’t show anger or emotion, and Megan didn’t start at
the sound of it. She carefully placed the pen back in the tray, and
she turned to face her client.

“You’re late,” she said, no bite in it.

“I’m busy.”

“I’m defending you in a trial that starts in
hours and not days. I think that qualifies as busy, too.” Megan
moved past Waldoch. She returned to the chair she’d taken after
Haas showed her in, in front of Waldoch’s main desk. The pictures
of the pink diamonds loomed over her. “Why are we meeting
here?”

“You asked to come see me.” He pulled his
chair away from the desk and sat down.

“I expected to go to DMW.”

“Not available for the time being, I’m
afraid. Quite taken up by others right now.”

“What kind of others?”

“The government kind.”

“The government,” Megan repeated
uncertainly. “Something I should know about?”

Waldoch leaned forward. His elbows were on
the desk blotter, his fingers knitted together easily. He was
shaking his head. “We’ve had a couple meetings with some
officials,” he said. “The IRS.”

“Sounds like more work for me. What’s
Internal Revenue want with you?”

“It’s not DMW they’re interested in,” he
answered. “It’s one of our clients, apparently. Sources of money
being paid to contractors, something like that.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all. Truly. So what do you and I
need to discuss?”

“The trial’s the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m ready,” Waldoch replied quickly. “Are
you?”

“I am,” Megan lied in response, before
adding an instant, correcting qualifier. “I will be when it comes
anyway.”

Waldoch smiled broadly. “I have the utmost
faith.”

Megan repeated that softly. “The utmost
faith.”

Her gaze went beyond him, over his shoulder
and toward the back of the room, where the second, more angular
desk sat notched into its matching window. Even from where she sat,
she could see the fine tape line that was squared into the window’s
corners, up and down both sides and across the top and bottom.

That would be an alarm. Of course it would.
She was in Waldoch’s inner sanctum. His safe place, where he had
security and control of everything.

And through that window was the partial view
she could still pick out, where the yard was a picture as faultless
as the ocean shores and gems on the walls of this office, and just
as devoid of humanity.

“I need to ask you about something,” Megan
said then, turning to him once more. “Something about Lora
Alexander.”

Waldoch sat back. “I would think you know as
much about her as I do at this point.”

“Possibly. Possibly not.”

“And what would the
possibly not
be?”

“The necklace.”

Waldoch managed to look perplexed for a
moment, as though he couldn’t imagine what the reference meant.
Then the look broke with a dawning realization, perhaps feigned.
“Ah,” he said. “Mr. McCallum’s questions at the deposition,
haunting me again.”