Glass House (35 page)

The door was open. Hanley was standing at
the top step. He pocketed the diamond and turned to her briefly. “I
hope you’ll help,” was all he said. He went out the door, down the
steps, and to the walk.

Megan watched him until he disappeared
toward town, leaving her with the things he’d told her.

The
Right Motivation

Krelis Hoopmans was furious. The
barely-healed leg was throbbing, but he was pacing on it in his
office as he stared at the phone and cursed Peter Rupert, sometimes
silently but more frequently in shouts that at one point were loud
enough to make his secretary knock and ask if he was okay.

The conversation with Rupert had lasted just
a minute or two, and it ended half an hour ago, but Krelis was only
getting angrier. He’d already called his security team and told
them to step up measures at the gates, and he’d contacted the mine
administrators and placed a call to the Consortium’s offices in
Amsterdam. None of it truly satisfied him, though, because what he
really wanted was Rupert’s head mounted on the wall.

Krelis worked to calm himself. He needed a
plan. He needed to lay out a schedule and think through some
response steps. He’d set up meetings to discuss a formal Consortium
answer to Laurentian – something forceful, pointed, and
affirmative, a salvo to fire back at Rupert. And then they all
would identify every step they could take, every favor they could
call in, every political string they could pull.

He reached to the knob of his office door
and had it in his hand when he heard the sound. It was a sharp roar
and a low rumble, then two more just like it. The knob started
shaking in his grip, the windows in the building rattling in their
frames.

Krelis didn’t need to wonder at what that
was. He pulled the door open, and he headed for the mine, limping
on the leg but moving as fast as it could carry him.

_______________

Historically, pit mines were dug by
excavating small, side-by-side stakes that eventually honeycombed
the surface. With stakeholder miners working so closely to one
another, the mines early on became paper-punched ground. The
individual digs dropped straight down to varying depths, creating a
network of columns of different heights, all of them supported by
nothing but the soil under them and whatever easements were
protected from digging to shore up the whole works.

Through consolidation and collapse,
assemblies of mined stakes grew into carved-out pits, with tendrils
going deeper as some stakes were run farther and diamond pipes were
located and chased out. Most mines pitted out the top, yellow layer
of kimberlite more than a century ago, and the digs excavated more
selectively into the richer, blue layer only after that.

It makes for fragile ground – a pit at
the top, with propped-up sides, and a lacing of channels spreading
out underneath. They’re prone to flooding, and they’re prone to
collapse.

The first blast Krelis heard brought down
the roof in the main pipe of Dutch Consortium Number 2. The second
and third tore out the walls of the old pit itself, dropping the
sides and bringing the tons of earth down on the newer shafts.

Men were scrambling by the time the
superintendent reached the pit. A haze floated above the scene,
yellow dust hanging in a choking cloud of thrown-up dirt mixed with
a threatening taint of smoke. The people scuttled through it,
working their way over the mine’s collapsed walls, their faces and
necks and shoulders powdered with dust, hands waving the air in
front of them as though they could clear the cloud away.

Shouts shot back and forth, coming from and
going to people Krelis couldn’t see. He recognized a voice here and
again, and he shouted back, but no answer came directly to him. It
was as if every person there suddenly was alone and yelling for
help, in a world where no one could hear.

He could smell the fire, but he couldn’t see
it. Under the dirt that had fallen into the pit, something was
smoldering somewhere. Equipment most likely. Something with gears
and oil and rubber that would produce the kind of acrid blackness
that was starting to seep from a location he couldn’t pin down.

There’d be heat, and if flames weren’t
burning already, they would be soon. Either by their own build-up,
or when someone tried to crack the top of this new tomb, flooding
it with fresh air that would perk the fire up.

The siren blared. The fire crew would be
reporting, collecting jackets and lining out hoses. Like everything
else at the Consortium mines, they’d be ill-equipped, but they were
all he had for the moment.

Krelis started working his way into what was
left of the pit. The stairs at the south lip were intact, and he
picked his way down them, favoring the leg. A face he knew, an
assistant director of personnel, stepped around him, moving faster.
Krelis grabbed the man’s shirt, stopping him and shouting a
question in his ear.

The man ignored it. “You’re in no condition,
sir!” he shouted back. He pointed at Krelis’s leg, then up the
stairs. “You should go up!” he added, before turning and heading
farther down.

They both knew Krelis wouldn’t do that. Mine
emergencies don’t result in miners moving away. They always move
forward, lending whatever hand is needed until the people they work
with are out.

He went on. His hand held the wooden rail.
He stepped carefully but quickly as he could manage, shuffling
along the switchbacks and coughing at the choking dust and smoke
that filled the air.

He was almost at the bottom, so near he
could see the ragged piles of pit wall that had fallen in, when a
final explosion cut the pit’s south wall open. Krelis spun, his
foot and ankle and leg protesting with pain. He looked up, caught
the first spray of expanding and collapsing earth, and lost
everything in the new cloud that came.

Two
Calls

She was thinking of the tango. Still sitting
on the porch, the darkness around her now a total black and not the
bluish ink of earlier evening, Megan was hearing Hanley’s words in
her head, she was fighting against the image of Lora and Chilcott
and the necklace and the car, and she was thinking of once learning
the tango with her husband. It was a mixture of all things, the
present and the future and the past, and it sat heavily on her,
pushing her to find some way out of all of it.

She’d brought a phone out with her. She held
the handset, her fingers tracing the buttons as she studied the two
slips of paper she held. She read them both, considered both, and
dialed the first one.

Finn sounded groggy when he answered. She
checked her watch. Midnight. Nine hours to the start of the
trial.

“I need something,” she said.

“Who –” he started, but he recognized
the voice and stopped. “Something like what?”

“A couple things, actually.” She told him
about her conversation with Hanley, and he listened without
interruption.

“What are you gonna do?” he asked when she
was done.

“Tango a little.”

“And that means?”

“That I need favors, and one of them is
something you might not be willing to do.”

“Tell me.”

And she did. When she finished, Megan heard
only silence from Finn’s end of the line. “That’s what I need,” she
said into it. Her words seemed to echo. “It’s the only way I really
think –”

Finn cut her off. “I get it.” He didn’t
sound tired anymore. He sounded very much awake, but very weary at
the same time. “You said you’d help clean me up,” he told her.
“You’d clean my papers up. That was my payoff for helping.”

“You’ll still get that.”

“I told you I don’t do things like this
anymore.”

“Doing this doesn’t mean there’s something
wrong about it.”

“You’re prepared to make that judgment? A
former prosecutor who once put me away?”

“Yes,” Megan replied without hesitating.
“Right here? Right now? I’m prepared to do exactly that. You and I
both saw her, Finn. We sat in that house together, those
houses
together, and we listened to Claire Alexander and we
listened to your friend Sam Chilcott, and we knew right then how
this came down.”

Silence again from Finn.

“It’s a chance,” she said.

“A chance to do what?”

“To do what’s right. I didn’t just talk
about cleaning up your papers. I talked about showing you’d
reformed,
truly
reformed, by helping me figure out if
Waldoch was involved in murder.”

Megan found a silence of her own. It was
late enough that the cars on the street were scarce, and she sat
quietly in the dark, the heaviness of the world around her. “It’s …
mixed up, I know,” she said finally. “Doing this somehow is doing
the right thing. But –”

“That’s what it is,” Finn finished for her.
“The right thing.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“All right.” A pause. “All right. I need to
know anything that’ll help me.”

_______________

Megan read the number on the other slip of
paper. She dialed it three times before letting it ring through,
then listened as it rang only once before Hanley answered.

“Waldoch’s trial starts tomorrow morning,”
she said before he could say anything but hello. She realized how
late it was and amended that. “This morning actually.”

“I know.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “I need
something from you. Just one thing.”

Hanley listened. When she was done, he said
only, “Okay.”

Megan hung up, and she set the phone on the
porch. She pulled her legs up tightly, her arms around them, her
feet on the front edge of the chair, and she watched the few lonely
cars pass by.

Krelis

They wanted to evacuate him on a stretcher,
but Krelis wouldn’t allow it. Buried to the waist when the
emergency crews found him, he screamed orders as they dug him out,
then assisted the rescues when he was free. He knew he’d pay the
price. His leg, already swollen, would rage for days after the
strain it was suffering, but he didn’t care. The only thing that
mattered was finding out who was alive in the mine collapse and
getting to them.

That and one other thing, he supposed.

The first three men they found were all
alive and, despite injuries, were walking. Krelis watched them
climb up and out, arms around rescue workers, and he turned
immediately to the task of finding more. At that moment, it was all
he could think of.

But the next eleven men they found were all
dead. Then one more survivor, followed by another six bodies. Two
more alive, four more dead.

By the time they’d pulled forty-three dead
Consortium miners from the wreckage of Mine Number 2, Krelis had
identified the contacts he would call. He’d figured out the
financial accounts he could tap and the favors he was owed, and
he’d wrapped up most of the logistics for what he would do to Peter
Rupert and Laurentian Mines.

He was certain of their involvement. Not a
doubt in his mind. The call from Laurentian and Krelis’s rejection
of Rupert’s offer were too conveniently timed to the mine
explosions. It was as if Rupert had hung up the phone, waited only
a few minutes, and pushed a button in his office to set off charges
in the pit mine walls.

And they would pay for doing so, Krelis
knew. Because he was going to buy some power of his own.

Sale

A
Return to Form

In some way, it echoed Jackson Hanley’s
break-in at the morgue in South Africa, though Finn couldn’t
possibly have known that. He was crouched in the backyard of Jeremy
Waldoch’s house – the yard that Megan had seen and studied
during her conversation with Waldoch, in the office beyond the
window Finn was facing.

A bag sat on the ground at his side. In
reality, it was a gym tote he’d pulled from his closet. Finn
usually carried beat-up tennis shoes, some old shorts and a tee
shirt, a two dollar bottle of Suave shampoo, and a jock strap in
it. If he was feeling up to it, maybe a hand-me-down racquetball
racket and a can of balls that should have been thrown away because
they didn’t have enough bounce left, but that he couldn’t afford to
replace. He sometimes worked out at lunch during school, and the
bag was what he used to carry the change of clothes.

Not today. Today, it was an equipment
carryall for CommConn Cable.

Finn himself had stitched those very words
on the bag’s side. The local copy shop could make silk screen
appliqués from whatever a customer brought in. Not much different
from photocopying itself, but the product they gave back could be
steam-pressed onto cloth, and the cloth could be sewn onto whatever
anyone pleased.

Close examination would have shown the job
to be rough in spots. The stitching was meticulous enough for the
most part, but the corners gave him trouble. He didn’t think anyone
would get that close look, though.

A small patch, also CommConn, was sewn above
the breast pocket of the chambray shirt he was wearing, a pen
tucked into the pocket and pointing up at the words. He bought the
shirt at Walmart yesterday, put the cable company’s name on it and
the bag last night, and was set for today.

The bag and shirt weren’t to get him into
the house. Megan said Waldoch lived alone, the only other person
ever with him for any meaningful amount of time being his
bodyguard, and that meant no one was there to let Finn in during
the day today. Or, for that matter, to keep him out.

So the CommConn look was only cover. The bag
contained what Finn presumed might be some typical tools for cable
repair – screwdrivers, strippers, pliers, wrenches. He’d
included a cable plug from Radio Shack, snippets of wire, and a
five-foot length of television cable itself, then found a voltage
meter that certainly looked impressive and relevant and tossed it
into the bag for good measure. In case anyone happened to see him
on this daylight jaunt, they’d think only that a cable guy was
working in Waldoch’s backyard, and he could even pull out some
tools to prove it.