Glass House (33 page)

“My day’s my own business,” Megan said, her
voice suspicious and her patience not nearly full enough to deal
with a stranger appearing at her house at this hour. “And yours
isn’t of interest to me at all.”

The man said, “You’re Megan Davis.”

And she answered before she could stop
herself. “That’s right.”

He smiled at her. She could see it in the
light from the porch, which reached just far enough to reveal him
standing there. A foot farther forward, and she could have
described him minutely, from his head to his toes. A foot back, and
he’d have disappeared into the night.

“I’m obviously at a disadvantage,” she said.
“You know me, but I don’t know you. Care to enlighten me on that
subject?”

“I’m someone who knows Jeremy Waldoch,” the
man replied. “Not personally. Not that closely. But pretty well
anyway.”

The man on the sidewalk didn’t move as he
waited for a word from her. He was keeping a distance and the
screen door between them, and she now recognized that for what it
was. It was a friendly space for a total stranger to talk to her.
Something that might keep her more at ease when someone she didn’t
recognize showed up in her yard, knowing her name and her
client.

“I knocked at the back,” the man said in
Megan’s silence. “Came up the gravel alley. Checked at the door on
that side.” He was pointing past her, toward the rear of the house.
“No one answered, so I came –”

“A lot of people know Jeremy Waldoch.”

The man’s hand went back in the jacket
pocket. “I understand that, Ms. Davis,” he said softly. “But I know
him in a way that those people don’t. A way that might interest
you.”

Megan stared at the stranger. On the porch
and behind the screen door from him, she was centered between the
house’s oversized front windows, which hung behind her like great
and shining glass eyes. She stood there, perfectly still, weighing
his words and his appearance.

“What could you possibly know about Jeremy
Waldoch that I’d need to hear, and what could it possibly be that
would make you show up at this time, in this place, to tell
it?”

At her questions, the man pulled his other
hand from the jacket. A wallet was in it, and he unfolded it. He
held it toward her and slowly stepped farther up the sidewalk and
closer to the light, moving nearer so she would be able to read
it.

“My name is Jackson Hanley. I’m a special
agent with the FBI. And I think we should talk.”

_______________

Hanley seemed a fidgeter. Megan took a seat,
watching as he positioned himself by the screen door. He half-sat
on the porch rail at the door’s near side, looking unbalanced and
uncomfortable, and he began working something he held in his hand
but didn’t show. Something small, swallowed in his fist and rolling
there as he moved it with his fingers.

The two of them were silent for a few
moments, an amount of time that was awkwardly long in the
circumstances. Megan found herself listening to the cars driving by
on the busy road down the slight slope of hill at her corner. In
Hanley’s silence, she started watching them more than him, her eyes
tracking their headlight and taillights.

Over Hanley’s left shoulder and between the
house and the road, she could also make out the black walnut tree,
looming over the porch. Seeing it, she thought of Ben, in a
fleeting image that died when the words started.

“Showing up the way I did, I probably owe
you a better explanation of who I am,” Hanley said. “Some idea of
where I’m coming from and how it relates to you.”

“That’d be promising.”

“I started domestic in the Bureau but ended
up international. Most people don’t know this, but the FBI serves
abroad, too, performing –”

“I know how the FBI works, Agent
Hanley.”

Hanley nodded, then went on. “I did
intelligence and support. Some field investigation in Bosnia, some
miscellaneous matters in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“Miscellaneous matters?”

“Crime investigations relating to terrorism
and smuggling, for the most part. Good training for Israel, which
is the posting I requested and got. That was in Tel Aviv.”

An ambulance screamed past. They stopped
talking, listening to it approach. The lights dashed behind Hanley
and the walnut tree, which were side-by-side in Megan’s view. They
cut silhouette outlines before the van and the blue flashes blurred
by.

“Intelligence assignments in the Middle East
are for shit,” Hanley said when the sound of the ambulance siren
was a far-off wail, somewhere to the east. “They’re dangerous, and
they’re stressful, and they never change from that. Every single
day brings something that needs attention or a follow-up or
response.”

“Sounds like a bad choice.”

Hanley laughed, lightly enough that the
sound of the traffic nearly drowned it out. Megan could see him
shaking his head. He’d turned, and he was watching the traffic
himself now, studying it as it flowed past the house.

“People forget something about Israel,” he
said, turning back to her. “For all the troubles, all the bombings
and death and fighting and politics and dissension, for everything
you’d think would make it off limits to anyone sane, the people
still come and go there. All sorts of people. Good and bad. Rich
and poor. Important and not. They all cross there, which meant Tel
Aviv was a perfect place for me to watch.”

“You were a spy.”

“Not exactly. It’s not in the Bureau’s
mandate to spy, and I didn’t do it.”

“But you know people who did.”

“I did, yes. Still do.”

“And I’m sure that’s fascinating to
someone,” Megan said. “I’m just as sure it’d be a great story for
someone who cared. Maybe a movie I’d sit down and watch with
popcorn someday. But so far it’s nothing that relates to Jeremy
Waldoch, and very little that’s turning out to be interesting to me
at all, at a time when I frankly don’t have lots of energy to sort
through what you’re getting at. So we should probably reach some
kind of point in all this.”

“Your client was one of those people.”

Megan almost laughed. “You showed up on my
doorstep tonight to tell me Waldoch was a spy for the Federal
Bureau of Investigation?” She sounded skeptical.

“Would that be so incredible?”

“In a word, yeah.” She tipped her head
toward the street. “See where you are here, Agent Hanley? My client
runs a small security firm in eastern Kansas. He struggled to make
it work, and he’s managed to do it, though only barely sometimes.
If I think it’s a touch implausible that he could be involved in
government intelligence, then I hope you’ll forgive me, because I
simply can’t imagine what he possibly could have offered you.”

“Connections,” Hanley answered. “And
information that comes from those connections.”

“
Whose
connections? Who could this
man be so tied to that he’s a benefit to you?”

“Drug and gun runners. Warlords. Terrorists.
Corrupt business or political leaders who hired and funded those
people. They all deal with money, and money in the Middle East and
Africa means diamonds.”

There was a whisper in Megan’s head at that
word –
diamonds 
– an electric murmur of alarm that
almost made her blink it shot through her so thoroughly, but that
was still soft enough that she knew Hanley didn’t see her react to
what he was saying. And she was glad for that.

“Diamonds are valuable, portable, and
sellable,” he was saying, “and I needed someone who knew people in
that world. Someone who had the ties and saw the faces and heard
the names.”

“And that person was Jeremy Waldoch?”

“The one and only.”

Megan pushed the whisper of alarm away. She
didn’t know Hanley. Had never seen him until minutes ago. But he
might know something about her client after all, and she wanted to
know what that was.

“Excuse my bluntness,” she said. “But I
don’t see how that’s possible. How could he have the kind of ties
you’re talking about?”

“By running security for a glass house. And
now by running the whole thing, all for himself.”

“A glass house?”

“A diamond mine,” Hanley explained. “The
mine and its holding corporation. The collective that digs them up,
washes them off, and ships them into the market.”

Megan’s expression was forcibly blank. She
didn’t look confused or amused. She didn’t look critical or
amazed.

“I’ll need some more persuasion on that one,
I’m afraid,” she said.

Hanley stood. He started to pace the far
distance of the porch, measuring that half-length out in slow
strides, his hand still rolling the unseen object that was buried
in it.

“He was just …
somebody
at first,” he
said hesitantly. “An average contact. Someone who happened to know
a few people I needed to know about. He had this security company
here, and he’d somehow managed to play it out to a nice set of
contacts.

“The first ones were small. The kind of
people who weren’t important themselves but who knew people who
were, in places that counted for my particular interests. Some in
Liberia and Namibia, but mainly in South Africa and Israel.
Especially Tel Aviv. There’s a diamond exchange and polishing
center there.”

Hanley paced. He fidgeted the hand.

“I knew people at the ends of chains we were
looking at, but I wanted people who could get in the middle, who
could get us something about the transactions. And Waldoch turned
out to be that person. So we took him, and we took his contacts,
and we helped him build them up.”

“You recruited him,” Megan said levelly. “He
fit something you wanted, and you took that and made it
bigger.”

Hanley nodded. “We grew his few contacts
into several, and his several into dozens, all of them radiating
out from Tel Aviv and South Africa, particularly in a region up
near the Namibian border in the northwestern part of the
country.

“And he worked them for us. He organized
security for key personnel we were interested in, he listened in on
transactions, and he made relationships with the people he needed
to. He was ambitious and eager, and frankly he was talented at what
he was doing. People trusted him across the board – he had a
way about him, and he seemed to fit as well with miners as he did
with owners or cutters or bankers. He works to be charming, in his
own peculiar way.”

“That part sounds about right.” Megan didn’t
explain. She shifted in her chair, waiting for Hanley to go on.

“In just under five years,” he said,
“Waldoch had gotten himself connected in some fashion to almost
everyone in the diamond industry. Never at a level that was in the
sunlight, mind you. He’s not exactly an out-front man, but he was
always there in the background.”

Megan smiled slightly.

Hanley saw it in the yellowish light of the
bulb on the porch. He stopped pacing for a moment. “That sound
about right, too?”

“Go on.”

The pacing started again. “For a while, you
couldn’t seem to pass a door in Tel Aviv without his name being
mentioned.”

“How did he manage to avoid becoming too
well known in the circles you were watching?”

“That can be an asset, believe it or not.
His growing stature, having the trust of others around him, that
was a potential blind to what he really was doing.”

“Which was working for you.”

“That would be accurate.”

“Specifically, spying for you.”

Hanley smiled. “Yes, Ms. Davis. Spying for
us.”

“For how long?”

“He would’ve been wasted as a source
eventually,” Hanley said. “We’d have tapped him out, his
connections worn thin and his place and value lost.” The agent
stopped. He breathed deeply, his chest heaving up like he was
tasting the air and its slight taint of exhaust, then settling back
with a sigh.

“He just didn’t get the chance,” he said
then. “Or we didn’t get the chance, more accurately.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning your client came to us with some
connections, and we worked with him to build up some more. We
ultimately helped put him in positions we didn’t intend. And then
Waldoch went bad.”

Megan studied the man who’d finally stopped
moving. No pacing. No fidgeting.

“Agent Hanley,” she said, “I’m not all that
sure Jeremy Waldoch would’ve had far to go.”

_______________

Waldoch turned. In retrospect, it wasn’t
extraordinary. The potential for his doing so probably should have
been known all along. Anyone looking objectively at his file and
history certainly could have stumbled across a set of circumstances
where Jeremy Waldoch would put his own interests ahead of the
Bureau’s.

That was hindsight, though, and hindsight is
a viewpoint of perfection. From it, Hanley saw that Waldoch played
them all along. He could see that the man used everything he knew,
and all the contacts and information and money he collected, to
form a network of his own. He developed his security service more
highly, he recruited and polished with the Bureau’s aid and money,
and he ingratiated or bribed or, eventually, blackmailed himself
into partial control of a diamond mine that was positioned exactly
like he wanted – as a geographic stepping stone. A perch, from
which he could leverage himself out.

From that, it was only a matter of time, and
the analysts probably could have seen that as well, if they’d had
the facts in order and understood the forces driving things along.
But they didn’t.

They didn’t see Waldoch’s manipulation of
Laurentian after he’d gotten in as their security organizer. They
didn’t see his growing influence and ultimate muscle over Dennis
Sullivan and the others who’d brought the mine and the company
back.

Northwestern South Africa is far from Tel
Aviv, and the internal workings of a glass house are farther still,
sheltered away from any eyes that might be watching. No matter how
visible the company, no matter how rigid the scrutiny, the glass
houses operate in secrecy and darkness and security.