Glass House (23 page)

One by one, the man with the dead guard at
his feet interrupted and looped the video feeds. Where once each
screen had run through fresh views from six cameras over
twenty-four seconds, the images were repeated now. Anyone looking
closely enough would see the pictures repeat each half minute or
so. The estate, to anyone actually watching, was freezing in
time.

When it was done, the man gave a nod toward
the car just outside the gatehouse. The lift arm came up, and the
car passed through, with two more behind it.

_______________

The plan was straightforward. One man was
left behind at the front, and eleven others entered the Ariacht
estate. They would address the security personnel at the guesthouse
first, then they would move toward the main house.

They weren’t concerned about being found
out. A perimeter alarm encircled the grounds, and razor wire lined
the walls, but those were no longer issues, since they had access
through the front at the gatehouse. And there were any number of
box alarms – hidden or visible points at which someone could
trigger a signal – but they didn’t expect anyone would get a
chance, with their arrival unknown and the security cameras
handled.

The death of the gate guard left six more
security personnel who lived at the estate, with the potential for
one or two more of the part-timers hanging around. Against that
total maximum of eight, three were found in the guesthouse.

They were playing kaluki, a rummy game. None
of them noticed the five men silently entering at a crouch from the
far end of the room.

A single light was on. It hung low over the
table. The stock pile, the discard pile, the men’s individual
hands, and the splayed-out combinations of melded cards would all
be brightly lit. The dense smoke that hung around them glowed like
fog under a flashlight. The table where they played, a decrepit
thing covered with worn felt where it hadn’t rubbed through, shone
bright like freshly mown grass, despite its faded age.

The men talked softly and smoked. Broke the
conversation with a sometime louder comment or laugh. Drank and
played the cards.

One of them hummed. He was the biggest one,
his back nearest the door, and he was keeping a broken tune that
tracked a song playing on a small transistor radio while sounding
nothing like it. He would hum, blurt out a word or two of the song
if he thought he recognized it, and then rejoin the other two men
in whatever particular remark they happened to be making at the
moment.

The unnoticed men slipped around them in a
circle. They formed an invisible orbit a dozen feet out from the
table in every direction, and by the time that outer circle had
decreased by a fourth in radius, each of the closing men had drawn
a weapon.

Two of them held semi-automatic pistols. The
other three pulled out garrotes.

Another foot in, and a different song came
on the radio, the big man with his back to the door tipping his
head to the ceiling to sing it. For a passing second it looked as
though he might come to his feet in a makeshift dance.

That would require shooting him, of course.
Which wasn’t an insurmountable problem. Dead by bullet or dead by
strangulation, it made no difference. But the noise, even
suppressed, was undesirable.

The card player at his right prevented that.
He reached to the larger man and clapped at his shoulder with a
cheerful and more than slightly drunk swat.

“
Play
,” he said.

That almost brought a much more forceful
blow from the singer. He did stop, but it came with an upraised,
looming hand that lifted toward his companion.

Neither of them backed away. The meaty,
balled fist, ready for a swing, hung in the air between them as the
other man leaned forward, more into the light. His eyes, flat and
casual, were unimpressed by the threat.

“Play,” he said again.

Boredom was in his tone, showing he’d seen
this before and wasn’t cowed by it now, and the big man laughed.
The hand fell to his chest, resting against his heart as though he
were feeling an attack coming on.

The pack around them tightened again.
Another couple feet in, and a pause. Then a little farther, and a
pause.

At four feet, the armed men stood. They
looked, strangely enough, like columns of rock rising steadily from
the earth. Black-clad, obsidian monoliths who essentially appeared
where no one was before.

The movements did catch eyes then. The
players looked up at that moment, the game forgotten.

There wasn’t time for any reaction.

The men with the garrotes closed on them in
a stride, like lions that had crept close enough to spring from the
brush. The wire loops descended around the necks quickly enough
that the men reached to protect themselves with kaluki hands still
intact.

The cards scattered as the wires were
tightened. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades jumped away, their
black and red colors visible only as blurred images before they
spilled outside the light’s reach.

Two of the men were unconscious within
thirty seconds and on their way to death in a minute. The third,
the singer, was harder.

The man who held his throat in a wire was
struggling with him. The cut on his neck was deep and bleeding, the
red of it spitting out onto the table’s green felt.

The big man was rocking back and forth,
grunting a noise that seemed to come from his chest more than his
throat. His hands, the fingers fat and strong, were digging into
the flesh of his own neck, pushing to find a way to slip under the
wire.

His companions were already sliding to the
floor when one of the other five stepped up with a pistol. He
raised it without hesitation, and the man with the garrote loosed
the handles.

The big man rocked forward at the release.
He gave a great, heaving gasp, his fingers finally reaching under
wire and digging it out, and he coughed, once, onto the table.
Speckles of blood sprayed out as he started to stand.

The shot caught him in the right eye and sat
him back down. He landed and tipped, the chair coming up on its
hind legs and hanging there,
clinging
there, as the men
around him waited.

The chair creaked under the weight and its
wavering position. Then it tilted inexorably backward, angling in a
slow, ax-falling arc to a crash on the floor.

The guesthouse was clear.

_______________

The pool looked cool and inviting. The water
was transparent, like liquid glass, and the lights at the bottom
glowed inside it. The face of the estate’s main house was shining
on the water’s surface, the image broken only by the lolling
interruption of a breeze-pushed ripple and by the reflections of
two more of the security men, chatting beside the pool.

That was a violation of the protocols the
security service had outlined in great detail when employing these
men. You didn’t bunch your people up when covering a place as large
as the Ariacht estate. You shifted them around. You ran routes that
varied at least every three days, and the routes overlapped but
didn’t intersect so that security personnel were always in
different places. You covered the entire area immediately around
the main house in periods of no more than ten minutes. You reported
regularly.

You didn’t collect in one place, and you did
not chat with each other.

The price they would pay actually had
nothing to do with the breach, though. It only had to do with the
fact that these two men, like the three already dead in the
guesthouse, had the misfortune to work for Arthur Ariacht on a day
when better luck might have put them somewhere else.

They couldn’t be approached close enough for
garrotes. They couldn’t be reached with knives. So the two men who
found them casually standing beside the lighted pool without a care
in the world shot them dead.

There was a splash as one of the men, hand
at his neck, toppled into the pool while his companion fell
straight to the ground with a similar wound. The man in the water
sank steadily to the bottom of the pale blue pool.

The two men with the pistols stepped
forward, their attention trained on the nearby house as much as on
the bodies in front of them. They watched for a moment as the
blossoms of red grew against the pool’s clear water. The blood
stained the water like thin, cherry Kool-Aid, but they were waiting
for movement, not color.

There wasn’t any, and they headed toward the
house.

_______________

Only one security guard was left, and he was
dying as Peter Rupert quietly made his way onto the second floor of
Ariacht’s main house. He was intent on the task at hand, but he
couldn’t help noticing how beautiful the house was as he left the
top of the stairs and stepped over the fresh streak of red that
stained the tile floor of the landing, before it disappeared as a
dotted line that ran down the stairs.

Rupert was not a callous man. Despite his
constant sweating and the stains it left on his clothes, despite
the freckled skin and thick hands that showed manual labor in the
African dirt and sun, despite the cigarettes he chain-smoked,
despite even his treatment of Anthony Dikembé, the Laurentian
superintendent was not a coarse man.

He was a diamond man. He came early in that
industry’s activities, at the first stages where they take the
stones from the ground, and that meant some would think him –
even without knowing anything else about him – a worker. A
commoner.

He’d always hated that.

Rupert knew wines and cars and food. He
could tell real from fake in jewelry and art, money and people. He
knew a Renoir when he saw one, and he stopped in the wide hallway
to study the one there, his eyes slipping over the figures of the
women clad in springtime gowns and bonnets, and of the men in
sturdy dark suits.

He touched the painting’s heavy, gold-tinted
frame and shook his head slowly in disapproval at the choice of
that frame in the first place and the location of the painting in
the second. The hallway was entirely too dark and confined. A
Renoir needs better than that. A good viewing approach, some light
that lets you see the details. The expressions on faces. The
stances.

Rupert retrieved a pack of Rothmans from his
pocket and lit one. He drew the smoke in, contemplating the piece a
final time as the men stepped around him and to the door of the
bedroom at the end of the hall.

The Laurentian superintendent and the four
men placing themselves nearby knew the Ariacht family wasn’t home.
At least most of them weren’t.

There was a social function in Cape Town.
The Ariachts – Mrs. Ariacht, specifically – were
contributors to any number of charities and constant attendees at
events. She’d gone down last night with her twenty-something
daughter.

Rupert glanced at his watch. They were
mingling, he guessed. The cocktail hour was done, and the elder and
younger Ariacht women, in flowing evening gowns and with Ariacht
diamonds dangling in their cleavage, would be wrapping up with
final, charming pats on the forearms of their peers.

Rupert sucked on the cigarette. Its tip
glowed. He blew smoke at the hallway’s ceiling.

But Arthur Ariacht? Arthur had reasons to
stay home. Reasons that weren’t secret to the men from
Laurentian.

Two of the men in the hall leaned back, one
leg of each lifted before them. Rupert thought they looked as if
they were going to piss on the door. He stubbed his cigarette out
in a black smudge on the wall and tucked the extinguished and warm
butt into his pocket.

The men’s legs pistoned, and the bedroom
door shattered off its hinges.

The four men burst into the room before the
door landed. They took up positions, two to each side, pistols
drawn and centered on the room’s bed.

As Rupert came in, he saw Ariacht sitting,
his back against the headboard, his legs straight out, a naked
woman straddling his lap. The woman was Indian. Her skin was
golden, smooth and flawless and shaded like steeped tea. Her hair
was long and blue-black. It fell down her shoulders and into
Ariacht’s hands, which still clenched it like reins. Her nipples
were dark. They looked inked onto her heavy breasts, in precise and
round circles of rich, tattooed chocolate.

Ariacht and the woman had both recoiled as
the broken door and the men all suddenly appeared in the room, but
the woman acted calmly after that. She got up, slipping off Arthur
Ariacht’s suddenly less than vigorous form, and she pulled a
rumpled sheet from the foot of the bed. She wrapped it under her
arms and over her breasts, tucking a corner in to hold it as she
silently collected her clothes from the chair.

Rupert stepped aside as she reached the
bedroom door, and the woman disappeared without a word from or to
her. He tipped his head in the direction of the doorway, and one of
the men followed her, holstering his pistol on the way.

“
Goeienaand, Voorsitter
Ariacht,”
Rupert said.

Good evening, Chairman Ariacht.

“Rupert,” Ariacht replied, disgusted. He was
scrambling as fast as an old man could to drag a blanket from the
floor and cover his lap. “How dare you come in –”

“Watch yourself, Arthur,” Rupert
interrupted. “If daring is to be done, I suspect it more
appropriately might be in your wife’s voice. After all, she might
wonder what you’re doing screwing some big-titted woman your
daughter’s age, and a coloured one no less, while the missus is out
raising money for the poor. She, I suspect, might wish to pronounce
some
how dare yous
, no?”

Ariacht went silent. He picked at the
blanket, tugging it to cover him more closely as he shifted
uncomfortably on the bed.

“The girl’s yours, then?” he asked, the
certainty in it showing he already knew the answer.