Glass House (19 page)

She did need to find someone. She needed to
talk to Finn Garber.

Hanley at the Cape

Jackson Hanley stood on the balcony of the
Bureau’s white stucco safe house outside Constantia, a wealthy
suburb of Cape Town, just off South Africa’s Atlantic coast. Allen
Saifee and Neria Motaung were on the stone patio behind him. Saifee
was reciting what he’d seen in the attack on the Ariacht shipment.
Motaung stood perfectly still next to him, her eyes watching Hanley
as Saifee unfolded his story.

Hanley listened intently, his gaze running
from low mountains to the grounds that spread out below him. He
studied ranks of tangled grape vines that were staked in orderly
rows. The vines shook gently in a cool breeze that was coming off
the ocean coast and through the low mountain pass they called the
Constantia Nek.

He squinted against the sunlight, watching
workers tend the plants. They lingered at each one, worked for a
few moments, going over it bottom to top, then moved on to the
next. Each of the three people he could see pushed a small, wheeled
cart.

“What’s SAPS saying?” he asked.

“Very little,” Neria told him. “We sent a
team. The team took some pictures and collected the bodies and some
shells. They tidied, and they left.”

“And they’ll never come back, if they’re
true to form.” Hanley turned from the balcony to face her. “No
offense. Can we press it harder?”

Neria considered that. “I can try to run it
up. There’s probably not much likely to happen if I’m the only one
talking about it, however. Maybe with someone else besides. Someone
with a little more information.”

“Someone like Saifee, I gather?” Hanley
tipped his head toward Allen. Neria nodded.

“Present company excluded, SAPS hasn’t
exactly been full of friendlies, Jackson,” Saifee said. “They’re
not what you’d call airtight, either.” He glanced at Neria. “Again,
no offense.”

“And if you report everything about Mr.
Saifee’s involvement to them,” Neria said, “if we go into who and
where he is and what he’s been doing, you’ll be letting SAPS know
the full extent of that for the first time. Then do you know what
happens?”

The men watched her and she them, her steady
look moving from Hanley to Saifee and back as she answered her own
question. “One of two possibilities. First, they do dig deeper.
They listen, they hear, and they go out to Laurentian themselves to
see what they can find that might connect the mine to the Ariacht
raid.”

“Which maybe they manage and maybe they
don’t,” Hanley said.

“Agreed,” Neria replied.

“Second?” Saifee asked.

“The wrong person gets news about you, some
piece of information he shouldn’t have,” she told him. “And instead
of SAPS going out to Laurentian to see what they can find, that
person tells Laurentian to go out and find you.”

“I think I prefer the first option,” Saifee
said dryly.

“I will not lie about this,” Neria said.
“Mr. Saifee’s presence at Laurentian is known only to a very few at
the Service. Passing on his information about the raid to press for
greater investigation will spread word of his role as a source, and
that, in turn, could reveal him to people who cannot know what he
is doing.”

“Allen?” Hanley leaned against the balcony
railing, the sun warming his back. He was listening to Neria, but
his eyes were on Saifee.

“I know the risks,” Saifee replied. “I’ve
always known them. But we also knew we’d hit a point when we
couldn’t avoid them.”

Hanley nodded slowly. “Is this that
point?”

Saifee smiled, but it was bitter. “Who
really knows? You or me? Neria?” He came up beside Hanley.
“Something’s still coming, I think,” he went on. “The raid was just
the first part of it. But in the end? You may as well ask the
people tending their vines down there whether we should wait and
see if that’s true, or if we should go with whatever we have right
now.”

Hanley paced the length of the balcony,
watching the field workers as they made their way through the
vineyard’s rows. “We’ll wait,” he said, turning to Saifee. “We’ll
take another day or so but only that. And if nothing else comes up,
then the two of you will flesh out everything we know about
Laurentian and the Ariacht raid. We’ll get Bureau support if
they’re willing, and we’ll go to SAPS at the same time.”

Hanley looked at Neria. “You’ll find someone
you can trust there?”

She shook her head in response. “I’ll find
someone I hope I can trust more than others I know I can’t trust at
all. After that, we can only put our faith in that difference.”

Hanley glanced at Saifee. “These actions you
expect from Laurentian, whatever they are. Will they pan out?”

“Uncertain,” Saifee replied. “We’ve had
better information before and gotten nothing from it. That’s what
put me in deeper in the first place.”

“And even with you in deep, and some piece
of information turning out perfect, there’s no guarantee it’ll make
a difference half a world away from where we should be.”

“No, Jackson, there’s not.”

Hanley stopped pacing. He rested his hands
on the balcony’s low wall. “Like I haven’t in years, I want to find
a way, any way, to get this company and this guy. And more and
more, I’m starting to be afraid that the answer isn’t here.”

Hanley looked at Saifee and saw a small
white envelope the other man was holding out to him. “Do I want to
know?” he asked.

“Nothing you haven’t already heard. Just a
little too late. But what isn’t a little late for us?”

Hanley took the envelope. Saifee turned and
gestured to Neria, and they headed across the patio and into the
house.

Hanley sat in a chair near the balcony, and
he gazed out over the vineyard grounds again. The Constantia Ward
was heavy with chardonnay. When he looked closely, Jackson could
pick out the bunches of green fruit. Harvest was near, and the
grapes looked fat.

It was the same as another world he’d known,
he thought in that moment. The sheer wealth of it made it that rich
kind of place. But different, too. As different as it could be.

_______________

Jackson Hanley’s father grew rich and famous
before dying in America.

He was an oil man. Not at first, but
eventually.

Christophe Hanlee was a French Algerian
businessman, an Arab who was born with Western blood and given a
Western name in a bastardized-Western country. Christophe’s own
father was French, his mother an Algerian Arab, his home a
one-bedroom over the family’s small market, a grocery in Oran that
looked out onto the Mediterranean.

Christophe’s father, Jackson’s grandfather,
worked the store tirelessly and the nights even more so. Christophe
would be asleep when the man rose, and he would be sleeping
again – for hours sometimes – when his father came to bed
in the space above the market. The boy saw him only at brief meals
and heard possible details only when friends at play would whisper
jabs about the elder Hanlee being seen with yet another woman in
town.

He was drinking, Christophe. Absinthe. He
was pouring the green devil over sugar and drinking it at a bar
with a whore from up the coast at Mers El Kébir. I saw him
myself.

No, Christophe, he was with
two
women. Two desert rats who drifted north with a caravan, to Es
Sénia. One had a slit nose. Both had lice.

The reason for the taunts, in effect their
source Christophe used to think, disappeared when the boy was
eighteen. There were rumors of differing kinds, of course. Reports
that the old man had found a French girl in town, and she’d led him
back to her family’s home on the Rue Grange-Dame-Rosé in Paris.
Gossip that he’d instead been caught by a lover’s husband – or
another of her own lovers perhaps, depending on who was doing the
telling – and that Christophe’s father finally paid for his
moral transgressions with a knife to his throat and a weighted-down
toss into the sea.

Christophe listened to it for almost a year,
till he realized the talk wasn’t dying. Then he decided to take his
mother and leave. He would move her to Algiers. Farther if
necessary. Anywhere to find a little peace and, perhaps, some
respect.

He was collecting their belongings,
preparing for a move, when he came across a box in the closet. It
was wooden, two feet by three and another two deep, with iron
braces securing the boards and a clumsy lock that once was strong
but now was disintegrating. He broke the lock with a twist and
opened the box with his breath held tightly in his chest, as though
he were plunging into brisk bathwater.

There were francs inside. More than the
family had ever seen in one place. Thousands of them, neatly
stacked and labeled with slips of paper that had numbers on them,
written in his father’s meticulous accountant’s hand. They were the
types of figures that filled the pages of the separate ledger
Christophe had found on assuming the operation of the store.

He closed the box and put it back. It sat
there for a full day before Christophe returned to examine it
again. He’d spent the time wondering where the money came from but
didn’t come up with any answers that mattered.

He considered whether the money was a
product of crime or gambling and rejected that. His father was many
unsavory things, but he wasn’t a thief, and he wasn’t a
gambler.

Then Christophe thought perhaps it came from
scrimping. The cash might just be the result of meticulous savings,
carried out over the years. A few francs a day, 365 days a year,
many years in a life. Who knew?

The matter was pointless, of course. The
source of the money wasn’t a factor in what should be done. Only
the amount was.

So Christophe did count it. Every note of
it, confirming his father’s own calculations for each stack.

The francs went into the bank. Two weeks
later, they were joined by another small lump of cash, this time
from the sale of the grocery. And Christophe rededicated his next
few years to life in Oran after all.

He worked as tirelessly as his father had.
He kept the same hours. The same late nights and early mornings,
but without the booze and girls.

He talked with a few select people, for
short or long periods, and he met many more. He used a former
customer’s ties to find some partners, and he used the partners to
find an investment.

The money from the battered box and the sale
of the market was Hanlee’s contribution. The men together bought a
share of an oil well, and they spent a hungry year collecting
proceeds to dump back into more purchases. And more after that.

It was an oil business after a decade, and
Christophe didn’t look back. He had things to do.

In Algeria, Christophe Hanlee was a
successful man. In America, he figured he would be more.

Starting in the 1960s, the trend was for
Americans to move to the Middle East. For years the Exxons and
Conocos and Amocos shipped their people to the oil-rich land of the
Saudis and Kuwait and Oman. They set up business associations there
and built derricks and pumping stations in the sand. They fed the
international airlines with travel back and forth and filled the
wires with calls and faxes.

Christophe came the other way. He’d picked
up a family in that time, and in a kind of reverse flow, he moved
them – a wife, two boys, and his mother – to Texas oil
country, where he started another small oil company.

He had investment money. Plenty of it.

More important, he had political
money – a list of contacts across North Africa, with dozens of
people from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. He’d met them in his business
dealings, writing down the names of every person he came across,
along with every piece of information he knew about them. He
recorded their addresses and numbers, information about wives and
children, birthdays and likes and dislikes.

He had networked constantly in Africa. There
were breakfasts and lunches and dinners. Parties and meetings.
Handshakes and back slaps.

Christophe had built his list and worked it
religiously. He sent cards and made calls at the right times, and
he protected it all with careful attention to the people he’d met
and with secrecy about the names he knew.

Then he took it with him to Texas.

The younger of his sons was Jonathan. Even
at the boy’s birth, his father knew they would move across the
world to America, and he picked an American name.

That name would be lost eventually. Hanlee
would become Hanley, and Jonathan would change to Jackson. The
names would shift with good reason, since the boy himself was
fundamentally different when he changed them.

As a child, the boy who ultimately became
Jackson Hanley never knew exactly what it was that his father
Christophe did. He knew there were long hours and time on the road,
and he saw that there was money. Beyond those things, he didn’t
know his father’s occupation or the man’s contacts. When he was
asked in grade school one day what his father did, the boy –
still Jonathan at that point – said only that he was a
businessman.

Jonathan’s older brother, who himself had
the American name of Thomas, couldn’t have managed any better. When
Jonathan was twelve and Thomas fourteen, they spent a night in a
tent, as young brothers sometimes do. They called it camping even
though the tent was spiked out within sight of the house and the
food was walked out by the family’s wait staff.

Sometime in the middle of the night –
the exact time was lost, but it must have been somewhere past
midnight and nowhere near dawn – Jonathan had asked his older
brother what their father did.

Thomas gave Jonathan’s own answer, the one
from the class. “He’s in business.”

“What kind of business?”