Glass House (5 page)

“They’ve been deposed.” He said it
matter-of-factly, as though Megan would know that despite having
learned of the case only within the past half hour.

“Testimony’s been taken?” she asked. “How
far along are you here?”

“Seven months,” Waldoch said, considering
it. “Somewhat longer.”

“You’re already represented.”

“For now,” he said. “Her name is Natalie
Quinlan.”

“I know Natalie. She’s a good attorney, and
you could do worse.”

“I don’t need good, and I could do better,”
Waldoch said. “I needed you when this started, but you weren’t
around. Now you are.”

“Why are you changing lawyers?”

“How should I say this?” Waldoch eyed the
ceiling, studying it as the words came out. “She was encouraging me
down a path I didn’t want to take.”

“She wanted you to settle?”

“She recommended that, yes. And I strongly
opposed it.”

“Because you think you didn’t do anything
wrong?”

“I didn’t do something wrong,” Waldoch
replied. “That’s not what I
think
. It’s simply a fact.”

Megan sat back, staring at the man across
the desk. He didn’t blink at her examination. He returned it,
waiting for anything she had to say.

“How much time?” she asked.

“Before what?”

“You’re already seven months in,” Megan
said. “How much time is left for whatever still needs to
happen?”

“The next thing scheduled is my deposition.
That’s set for a week from today.”

“A week.” Megan said it bluntly, her
distaste clear.

“I apologize, of course.”

“But you don’t apologize enough to excuse
it. Why a week?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand. They
scheduled it –”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then I can’t –”

“Why do you fire your attorney one week
before you’re supposed to be deposed?”

“I told you, she wanted me to settle, and I
didn’t wish to.”

“Yeah? Well I’m telling you that’s bullshit.
Why did you fire her?”

Waldoch didn’t hesitate at that, either. “I
lost faith in her.” He shrugged his shoulders. “She recommended
something I didn’t agree with. I told her no, and she recommended
it again. I told her no, and she wrote me a long letter, telling me
why I was wrong.”

“So you’re firing her.”

“I don’t work with people I don’t have faith
in.”

The coffee had grown cooler. Megan drank it
anyway, taking a sip to give her time to let the little information
she knew, hardly enough to make a call on this, sink in.

The question came to her plainly, a blunt
re-asking of something Waldoch already answered without being
asked: “Did you do it?”

“You didn’t ask me that the first time we
worked together.”

“Things change. Did you do it?”

“No. Do you believe me?”

“I started in law as a county prosecutor,”
Megan said as an answer. “I’ve had a lot of people ask if I
believed them. That question, or some other one just like it. And
I’ve practiced employment litigation for a while, too, which has
piled up a good number more people, asking me essentially that same
thing. All of which means I know by now that believing isn’t my
job, Jeremy. Proving is.”

“Believing and proving aren’t the same
thing?”

“You know better.” Megan closed the notepad.
She’d hardly written in it, but that didn’t matter. She’d heard
enough.

“I’ll do this,” she said. “You agree that
you don’t screw with me. No BS. No shorting of facts. We do it my
way, the way I say, and you smile and be helpful all along the
way.”

“You have my word.”

“I’ll need the file materials, along with an
executed request for substitution of counsel. I can work with
Natalie on the substitution, but I’ll need your approval in
writing, to provide to her and the court.”

“You’ll have it.”

“And a retainer,” Megan added. “A very big
one.”

“You’ll get a check this afternoon,” Waldoch
told her. “Is seventy-five thousand enough?”

Megan swallowed hard and hoped it didn’t
show. DMW never had seventy-five thousand dollars that it could
scrape together for her before. They’d been doing okay at that
time, no doubt about it. But pulling together that much money in a
few hours? Not back then.

“Make it a hundred,” she said. She watched
Waldoch. He didn’t hesitate.

“Done,” he said. He couldn’t have been more
confident and agreeable if he’d had the money stacked neatly in a
briefcase, ready to be displayed to anyone who asked.

“I didn’t finish with the answer to your
question, though,” he added then.

“Which question?”

“The question of what’s left in the
case.”

They were at that point again, with Waldoch
floating a topic out there and waiting for her to bite. She
outlasted him this time, too.

“The trial,” he said finally. “It’s in a
month.”

Megan didn’t give him the satisfaction of a
reaction to that. He wanted one, she was certain. He knew she was
going to take on the representation, and he knew she’d bust her ass
to get it done right. So he was comfortable enough that he could
hold out a little bomb, then drop it on her to see its impact.

She didn’t give him that.

“What’s the demand in the case?” she asked.
The question came out sharper than Megan intended, but she was okay
with that.

“Three million dollars.”

“For a VP making one fifty at a security
firm in Lawrence, Kansas?”

“I knew you’d see the injustice in it.”

“I see something,” Megan agreed. “Whether
it’s injustice or not, I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Her claim’s worthless.”

“Then what does she have? That’s a damn high
number, and it comes from somewhere. Something’s given her a bit
more courage than most people have. So what is it?”

Waldoch smiled. He stood. “She doesn’t have
anything,” he said. “I am certain of that.”

He began collecting his things.

“She’s disgruntled,” he went on. “She found
a lawyer, and together they picked a pie-in-the-sky number to set
off alarms and make people worry.”

“And are you worried?” Megan asked
calmly.

“Why would I be? I have you, don’t I? And
you, Megan? You keep your wits about you, and you work mercilessly,
so I do have faith in you.”

When Waldoch stood up fully, he towered over
her, his tall frame dwarfing Megan as she sat. His face, with its
brown-green eyes, its mountain cliff nose and ragged hair, seemed
miles away. He ran a hand through the hair, and Megan felt like she
was craning as she watched.

“Alexander the Great tamed the wildest horse
in Macedonia with his wits and work, you know,” he said. The
rhetorical man once more. Megan waited.

“Alexander’s father Philip owned Bucephalus,
a horse so bullheaded no one could ride it. When he was only
twelve –
twelve
 – Alexander realized the horse was
scared of shadows. Other people tried to ride it, but it’d see the
shadows of the approaching rider each time and wouldn’t be
touched.

“Alexander paid attention, and he discovered
that secret. He turned the horse’s face to the sun, and he rode it.
He tamed Bucephalus. When Philip found out, he told Alexander the
boy should find another kingdom to rule, because Macedonia was too
small for him.

“Wits and work and knowing the secrets,”
Waldoch concluded. “That’s what it’s all about. What counts in the
end. Those are the things that beat bull-headedness.”

“That’s a nice story,” Megan said. “But it’s
still just a story, not a tactic for multimillion dollar
litigation.”

Waldoch turned to the door. “Perhaps,” he
said. Then again, “Perhaps. But it’s a grand story
nonetheless.”

He opened the door. “You’ll have the
retainer today, and we’ll talk after that. In the meantime, I’ll
tell you again how sorry I am.”

“Sorry…?” For a moment Megan thought he was
apologizing for the timing. For his sudden appearance, at a point
where she had just days to get ready for the first task he was
handing her.

She realized what he meant only as the
explanation came.

“About Benjamin,” Waldoch said.

Megan felt a lump in her throat, and she
couldn’t manage to get it back down. She almost turned to the
picture that Waldoch had held, but she did catch that. She only
started to twist her head to the side to find Ben’s face in the
photo.

Her newly returned client was gone when she
looked back.

Anthony

Depending on your viewpoint, the grounds of
Laurentian Mines were laid out like a college, or like a
prison – nothing more than large central buildings, smaller
surrounding ones, and some living space for the people who had to
be there.

The mining operations themselves were the
main facilities. All the operational buildings necessary for
recovery, sorting, and cleaning of diamond rough, from the ore
machinery to the acid baths, were at the edge of the pit. Spreading
out from those was a variety of administrative locations: the
superintendent’s offices and the management building, the lockers
and screening areas for the workers, the laboratory and quality
analysis facilities. All of it had been set down in a haphazard
array as the mine expanded.

Farther out still were the dormitories.
They’d replaced the earlier facility’s tents and blockhouse-style
sleeping quarters, where the mine’s original workers once slept
protected from the elements only by canvas roofs or, worse, in
concrete sleeping stalls that looked like the lower decks of a
slave ship. Each space was two feet wide and two feet high. The
quarters were coffins to lie in.

The six dorm buildings that had replaced the
tents and stalls were four stories high and a hundred meters long,
faced with red brick and extruding mortar and boasting narrow
windows so dirty they were opaque. The dormitories were in two
groups of three buildings each, with the groups set around small
central courtyards of crumbling concrete. The dorms were arranged
like crude flowers that had lost most of their petals.

On bad days in spring and fall, sharp and
gusting winds howled across the open spaces. The dirt and dust of
the desert would kick up quickly, flying over the unobstructed
space and stinging the skin of people and animals alike. Men would
be forced to run for cover, arms over eyes and heads tipped down
for self-protection.

There were no trees, not even the brush of
the savannah. The main office always maintained the trees had been
cut for security purposes when the mine buildings were constructed,
and they were never replanted.

By contrast, the wild grass at the
Laurentian living spaces was abundant and uncontrolled except along
an assortment of walking paths that cut through and among the
buildings. Paths from dormitory doors to the bus stop. From the
doors to a combined post office, commissary, and clinic. From the
doors to the south side of the northernmost dorm, where the men
would collect at an impromptu gambling shack to smoke, drink, and
lose what little money they were paid.

One man watched these areas from the cloudy
window in Anthony Dikembé’s room. He paid little attention to the
two men behind him in the room because he was studying the outside
world, looking for people who were where he wouldn’t have expected
them to be.

It was just past five in the afternoon, and
the second set of dormitories at Laurentian was empty. Their
residents were at work in the mines or visiting families that
couldn’t live any closer than the shanty town that had sprung up
outside the patrolled razor-wire fences surrounding Laurentian. The
men could leave with management-approved passes, and the families
could come in on Sundays, but the dorms in the middle of the
afternoon shift were vacant right now.

As far as the lookout could tell, he and the
other two men were the only ones there. They’d seen no one else
coming in. They’d heard nothing while they made quick work of the
door lock and slipped inside Anthony’s apartment.

The lookout was a SAPS constable, a member
of the South African Police Service who was handpicked by the
Service’s liaison to the United States Federal Bureau of
Investigation. The two men working behind him were with the Bureau
itself.

Though few realize it, the FBI serves as the
investigative branch of the American Justice Department, with a
Congressional mandate that extends to transnational crime. Planted
at Laurentian six months before, the Bureau men were, like the
constable, Laurentian workers in title. All three were morning
shift workers – a sorter of rough, a crusher operator, a
kitchen cook – and all three worked their shifts diligently
and without attention. They made no complaints, didn’t
over-perform, didn’t underperform. They demanded nothing but the
chance to do their jobs at the mine. And they collected whatever
information they could about the company.

The Bureau agents came to Anthony’s
apartment because coded messages delivered in routine calls with
their nonexistent families told them to do so. They met the SAPS
lookout outside the dorm at the appointed time, and they went
in.

Tossing the room didn’t take long. They were
there to check for Anthony and to recover, if possible, his code
pad, a small, wireless transmitter that was hidden in a cigarette
package and given to him for Morse communications.

Their failure to find the man or the pad
wasn’t especially surprising. The disappearance of Anthony Dikembé
was enough to tell them what they’d likely find. The sight of the
room itself confirmed it.

Everything was perfectly neat and in place.
The chairs were pushed in, the dishes cleaned. The bed was made.
Clothes were in the closet and the broken-down dresser. One of the
dresser’s legs was missing, its corner propped on stacked
newspapers and magazines, but the clothes themselves looked as
though they’d just been put away that morning.