Glass House (44 page)

“Here’s a better idea. You leave this one
while you can, and then I leave this place. Because we’re moving,
in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Hanley could feel the plane’s motion, but he
felt something else in it, too. “You might want to take a peek out
a window back there,” he said, smiling. “Because we’re moving all
right, but I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

Hanley watched as Waldoch slid Megan over,
sliding between the seat and table and hugging her up against the
cabin wall. He glanced out the window.

“That’s a circle we’re traveling in,” Hanley
said. “Sort of our own private holding pattern for some reason,
right here on the ground, and we’re just going around and around.
Stuck in place, you might say.”

“Then get us unstuck!” Waldoch jabbed the
pistol under Megan’s chin.

“Kill her,” Hanley told him patiently. He
took another step forward. “You won’t have anything at all once
that’s done, so go ahead and do it.”

“Don’t think I won’t!”

“Oh, I’m sure you would. But then what? Even
if you killed me so I was out of your way, too, where do you think
you’d disappear to at this point?” Hanley was out in the open, and
Waldoch swung the gun toward him.

Hanley didn’t react. “You know what’s
happened out there?” he asked calmly. “Your people didn’t make it.
They didn’t show up for you. Sure, they were coming all right. A
few of them, in any event. But SAPS didn’t let them get here this
time. You didn’t have the chance to buy the Service off, because a
bigger fish came along, and that fish was me. So no one’s even
around to pick you up.”

“There are more where they came from,”
Waldoch replied. Megan was pulling away from him. He tightened his
grip and tugged her back.

“But you haven’t heard the news there,
either,” Hanley said.

Waldoch was about to speak, but he
hesitated. He glanced out the window again before turning to Hanley
once more.

“I had to wait for you a little while,”
Hanley was saying. “I made some calls in my free time. Got some
information you might be interested in.”

“Information on what?”

“Laurentian’s on fire, Jeremy.”

Waldoch’s eyes went wide for a second before
narrowing in suspicion. “It’s true,” Hanley went on. “Apparently
the Dutch Consortium didn’t much appreciate what you did to them.
So they took matters into their own hands for a little retribution.
Seems they wanted an eye for an eye.”

Hanley stepped farther down the aisle. The
pistol still out in front of him, he leaned into the cabin of the
Bombardier, and he whispered to Waldoch, like he was sharing a
secret with a friend.

“Laurentian is on fire. It’s burning to the
ground.”

Hanley could see Waldoch’s shoulders sag.
The man slumped, his gun dropping. It was only an inch or so, a
moment of resignation, but Megan took her chance.

Tight against the cabin wall, she reached
across and back, over her shoulder. She took hold of Waldoch’s
shirt and pulled, leaning forward to get her weight under it.

She had him halfway over her shoulder before
his size stopped her. Waldoch started to straighten, the gun coming
up as Hanley moved toward them.

Megan pulled again, shouting in a rage. She
reached for Waldoch’s face and raked her fingernails across his
burned and blistered skin, feeling the dampness erupt at the touch.
Waldoch screamed and dropped her arm.

Megan had him then. She pulled a final time,
and he spun around her, his own weight carrying him into the
beautiful wooden table. He fell against it, and Megan lifted a
knee. She crushed it into his thigh and pressed her elbow into his
neck.

Hanley was almost there when Waldoch got a
shot off. It went low, lost somewhere in the Bombardier’s floor,
but Megan pulled back at the sound of it.

Waldoch sat up. He shot his arm out toward
Megan, catching her on the sternum and sending her across the
aisle. He rose from the table and stepped out toward her.

Hanley reached him before Waldoch reached
her. He came with the service pistol raised, and he brought it down
across Waldoch’s cheekbone. It struck with a
thok!
sound and
drove him against the seats.

Waldoch was almost to one knee, but he stood
again and started toward Megan. Hanley moved in front of him and
brought him back down with another blow from the pistol. Waldoch
sank to both knees, hands on the floor, blood coming from beneath
his left eye and dripping across his face from his left ear.

Hanley took Waldoch’s gun. He stepped back,
positioning himself between Megan and the man he’d just beaten
down.

“This is done,” he said quietly. “All of it.
Everything’s up in flames.”

Waldoch fully collapsed only then. He fell
to the floor. They couldn’t see his face anymore. They could only
hear the sound of him sobbing.

Diamonds

The
Sand

The window in the front bedroom looked out
on the black walnut tree. Packing a suitcase full, Megan found
herself staring through the glass, her hands working without
thought, her gaze coming again and again to the gash in the tree’s
trunk, not quite three feet off the ground.

The freezer had hit there, almost a month
ago now. When the Chrysler exploded, the chest was blown away from
it by the force, tearing through the wall of the garage and
steamrolling its way across the lawn. One end struck the walnut
tree, the freezer jolted slightly in a sideways spin, and it
stopped there. That was the last thing Megan remembered until
waking up on Waldoch’s plane.

She set the suitcase aside and lifted a
second one to her bed. She opened it and began to fill it as well,
taking things from a small mound of clothes beside her. She would
fold and pack and pick up something else, working the pile down
diligently and with little attention to what she actually was
doing.

Megan finished the packing. She flattened
out a rumple in the bedcovers, then dragged the suitcase off the
bed, set it down for a moment, and lifted it again.

It was heavy, but she knew it would be,
since it held half the worldly possessions she was taking with her.
She lifted the second case in her other hand, moving slowly out the
bedroom door and into the living room.

In the time since returning from Africa,
Megan got used to the bloodstains that were permanent marks on the
living room floor. The dents in the walls. The replacement doors at
the front and up to the attic.

She’d gotten used to all those things mainly
by ignoring them, just like she did now as she walked past them.
She set the two cases down for a moment in the dining room, flexing
her hands to work the kinks out of them, then started moving
again.

Megan made her way into the kitchen, which
was empty and still. She hadn’t eaten in the house since the trial
and the night that followed. There was a McDonald’s a couple blocks
down, and a taco joint next to it. Whenever she felt hungry, she
went one of those places, got something, and ate in silence, a
newspaper or book or whatever else she could find to open up in
front of her and keep any potential chatters away.

She’d slept well enough, and she wasn’t sure
quite why that was. Exhaustion, perhaps. Mental overload maybe,
too. Certainly neither of those would be surprising.

It wasn’t the Johnnie Walker Blue, though.
Heading through the kitchen and onto the back porch, she didn’t
give a second thought to the Scotch, still tucked away in a cabinet
there, forgotten entirely.

She moved carefully down the steps, the
cases lifted as high as she could manage, her feet feeling for each
stair.

She had a new car. It was a two-seater that
seemed remarkably irresponsible, utterly impractical, and therefore
absolutely perfect. The car was parked where the garage used to be.
The concrete floor had survived the blast, black but no worse for
it. The detonation of the Imperial’s gas tank had destroyed that
car, sending it through the garage’s roof. The same blast that had
scorched Waldoch’s face blew out the garage walls as well, shooting
chunks of boards and siding and shingles in every direction. She’d
had to hire a crew to clean that up.

Megan lifted the cases one at a time into
the slim trunk. She climbed behind the wheel and backed off the
blackened concrete pad, angling toward the alley. She looked a
final time at the house, her head twisting over her shoulder. She
could just see the walnut tree. Could just see the cut in its
trunk.

Megan headed into the alley, and she turned
north. Her first stop was a post office box. Pulling into the half
circle that brought her around to the drop slot, she took an
envelope from the seat next to her.

A single sheet was sealed inside, a
To
Whom It May Concern…
recommendation letter, with Finn Garber’s
address printed neatly on the envelope. She’d already called
everyone she knew. Everyone who could help Finn. This was the just
the catchall for him to use, in whatever way he thought best.

“Deal’s a deal,” Megan whispered to herself.
She dropped the envelope in the box, and she pulled away.

Interstate 70 runs all the way across
Kansas, marking off the top third of the state and, near its
eastern end, cutting through the north edge of Lawrence. There’s a
dramatic choice, in other words.

Up through town and to the left, and it’s
Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Ocean. Through town and
to the right, and it’s Missouri, the Appalachians. The
Atlantic.

Megan’s car held only her and her suitcases
now. With the letter dropped off, there was nothing left to do
behind her.

She read the road signs, already knowing the
way, already knowing the choices. She wanted to see the beach, a
particular
beach, and she flicked on a signal at the entry
ramp, her hand resting on the case on the seat beside her.

She turned right.

The
Pink

The southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and
West 57
^th
Street. The building has a squat,
fortress-like façade, and it is the color of desert sand. A main
door is center-punched on the side that faces Fifth, and, like
every other access point, it is shielded with steel at each closing
time. A statue of Atlas stands above that door, wooden and carved
by a figurehead artist, then covered in bronze. He is almost nine
feet tall, and he holds a clock on his shoulders.

The first floor is all jewelry, with
diamonds taking up the most prominent space at the northwest
corner. Millions of dollars of the stones glitter in the glass
cases, with patient and knowledgeable clerks on the business side
of the counters, buyers mingled with tourists on the customer side,
and cameras and watchers above it all.

The diamonds run the range of colors.
Unavoidably, most are white, because the market dictates that. But
there are blue, too. A light purple and two orange-reds. A pretty
green yellow, alongside a number of truer yellows. And then a
somewhat larger number of pinks.

One set of the pinks is particularly
notable. For a week it’s been displayed in the corner of the
diamond cases nearest the center of the jewelry floor, a place
where it can’t be missed. For the most part, it has rested there,
being seen and rarely taken out, because most people looking at the
set understand immediately that it lies beyond their means.

The pink diamonds, Fancy Vivid in color
grade, are lighted specially, with small spots inside the case
focused on them, illuminating their centers against a drape of
white velvet. The pear is on a necklace, two matching rounds are
set as earrings, and they are all dramatic and breathtaking, so
beautiful is their color.

A young couple, married three years, is
studying them closely. A guard is positioned nearby, not for fear
that they will steal them, but in the expectation that this
couple – she is from a publishing family, he from owners of a
hotel chain – might actually
purchase
the set.

If the couple nod and agree, the staff will
smile all around and tell them about their excellent choice, then
remove the beautifully pink pear and two rounds from the case. They
will package them carefully, and they will ship the set by secure
courier to the address the couple provides. The store will not
simply drop the jewelry in a pretty bag and hand it across the
glass countertop, watching the young and attractive man and woman
walk out the door with their purchase.

And with good reason. No price tag is found
on the set of pink diamonds because, if you have to ask the price,
you cannot possibly afford them. But if you nod, and the couple
with a mutual smile does nod at that moment, you will have
purchased an exquisite set of diamonds for just under two million
dollars.

The staff at the store smile in return. They
take the diamonds back and secure them under the case. They collect
the paperwork and suggest everyone might be more comfortable in a
private office while the transaction is completed.

The good and solid pink that Anthony Dikembé
first hid in a tucked-away carrier under a truck’s wheel well, and
that more lately was run through Liberia by Binyon and bought and
cut and polished in Amsterdam by Robbe Lefevre and Julien Dumont
and Raf Martin, fell into absolute legitimacy at that moment.
Passing from hand to hand, it came eventually to the right place,
moving out from under any cloud that might otherwise have tainted
it until finally it found its way to Fifth Avenue. Until it found
its way to the young couple and their real world of wealth, where
everyone was oblivious to the fact that it had any past at all.

My grandfather on my father’s side was born
in the Territory of New Mexico in 1903, but he ended up in
Lawrence, Kansas. Looking back on all the summer vacations my
sister, brother, and I spent there, I remember being scared of him.
He was kindly, but in the gruff and absolutist way you might expect
from someone who was born only a couple shakes away from nineteenth
century, unsettled America, as the son of first-generation German
immigrants.