Glass House
Authors: Patrick Reinken
Tags: #fbi, #thriller, #murder, #action, #sex, #legal, #trial, #lawsuit, #heroine, #africa, #diamond, #lawyer, #kansas, #judgment day, #harassment, #female hero, #lawrence, #bureau, #woman hero
Patrick Reinken
Copyright 2011 Patrick Reinken
Smashwords Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents either are products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Copyright 2011 by Patrick Reinken (Smashwords
edition)
All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover design by Patrick Reinken.
Cover photograph of the Mir diamond mine by Vladimir
Artukhov. Cover photograph is licensed under and used pursuant to
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.
At the time of use, the human-readable summary of the full legal
license could be found at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en; the full legal
license, including disclaimers of warranties, could be found at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. The image was
originally posted at Picasa Web Albums
(http://picasaweb.google.com/knave2000/XpCCB#5257662700913048066)
and was reviewed there on July 21, 2011, by Patrick Reinken, who
confirmed that it was available under the above license on that
date. As of the same date, the image additionally was posted on
Wikimedia Commons, with identification and description of the same
license
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mir_mine_in_Yakutia.JPG).
Use of the photograph does not and is not intended to implicitly or
explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship of, or
endorsement by the Original Author and Licensor.
The original work has been modified.
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Contents
Chapter 3 – Talking to Anthony
Chapter 7 – On the Shore of the Diamond
Coast
Chapter 8 – The Structure of Glass and the Body
Behind It
Chapter 10 – Deposition
Preparation
Chapter 11 – The Pipes and the
Rough
Chapter 21 – Out From Laurentian
Chapter 24 – Hanley at the Cape
Chapter 28 – A Little Independent
Investigation
Chapter 29 – The Fate of Arthur
Ariacht
Chapter 31 – At the Home of Samuel
Chilcott
Chapter 38 – The Right Motivation
Chapter 43 – Riding Bucephalus
Chapter 49 – The Chrysler with the Pushbutton
Shift
You could smell the ocean. To the
south – past Vredendal and Lambert’s Bay and Saldanha –
the gray-blue waters were mixing. The cold Benguela Current on the
continent’s west and the Agulhas on its east churned together at
the spot the Portuguese first called the
Cabo das Tormentas
,
the Cape of Storms, and the salt of the seas was being beaten out
into the winds in the process. This near to the Cape the sharp tang
of the salt and the softer, mossy smell of the ocean blew up into
the desert and savannahs on the same trade winds that blew the
Benguela north.
Anthony Dikembé had known the smells of this
place for most of his thirty-six years. There were days when they
were lighter, more of a hint. And there were days when they were
heavier, with a presence that could fill him. But they were always
there. Even far up and onto the
karoo
plateaus where he was,
he could catch the smells of the ocean in the air.
Anthony breathed deeply. The surf was two
miles to the west and hundreds of feet down in elevation, but the
sea was strong that evening. He could almost taste it. His eyes
drifted past the heights of the sorting rooms, conveyors and
crushers, and the mine’s other facilities and machinery. He
squinted and stared beyond the lights that decorated the buildings’
corners and tops, trying to search out some glimmer against the
expanse of water in the distance, as if to prove the water was
there.
He couldn’t find it. Fog on the coast was
common, and a heavy bank was drifting in and hiding any reflected
light from the just-vanished sun.
Anthony breathed in again, smiling faintly
before returning to the papers on the clipboard in his hand. He was
a supervisor at Laurentian Mines, overseeing operations on the
middle shift that ran from eleven in the morning to seven at night,
and he was reading over the recovery reports and making checkmarks
based on staffing points that were sent in a memo the previous
day.
Laurentian’s management wanted to add three
dozen miners across all crews, but they wanted ten others cut
before they did. Anthony’s extra notations were on worker
performance – a simple mark next to someone’s name likely
meant that man would be dropped from the shift and replaced.
He scanned the numbers and names again,
adding an extra check next to a worker listed at the bottom, then
signed a scrawl on a line at the end of the page. He clipped the
pen to the top of the board and moved to a pickup truck that was
idling nearby.
The truck was headed off site, and
approaches by workers were typically forbidden, but Anthony’s
movements brought no reaction. His position entitled him after all.
As shift chief, the sign-off and pass of the log to the
administrative rep were part of the routine.
As expected, the driver wasn’t there. As
always, Anthony had timed it that way.
He reached into the truck’s open window and
dropped the clipboard and log onto the driver’s seat. Before his
arm came back out, he shot it straight, his wrist snapping against
the shirt’s cuff.
The diamond – more specifically a piece
of diamond rough – jumped into his hand.
The stone was a little over a half inch
across, its shape a rough octahedron, an eight-sided figure with
irregular triangle faces. The sides of the stone stepped across one
face like stairs, and its surface was coarse and smooth at the same
time, unfinished but surprisingly soft to the touch.
On the outside, a layer of sandy soil
dirtied portions of it. But the cleaner areas allowed a glimpse of
what was inside. There, visible under the coating of caked-on
grime, the diamond seemed little more than a sizable piece of
off-color, maybe smoked-out glass. But a perception like that was
naïve. Uninformed. Misleading, even.
It wouldn’t look like anything to a casual
observer. A thousand people could pass by and not notice diamond
rough sitting on the ground, and if they saw it, they might think
it no more than a chunk from a broken soda bottle. For someone who
knew, though – for someone with a different eye altogether, a
trained eye – a glimpse would confirm that the stone wasn’t
glass, and it wasn’t simply a stone. Or even simply a diamond.
In actuality it was quite something,
indeed.
The rough diamond that Anthony held was a
little large for stealing, but in the end it had been too hard for
him to resist. Because it was pink.
Even in the low light of the evening,
Dikembé knew the rough was at least a good, solid pink. The color
was uniform and deep, maybe as high as intense. It seemed to extend
throughout the piece.
There was no guarantee of that, of course.
The stone’s depth of color wouldn’t be known fully until a wash,
cut, and polish were completed, and the color could be lost at any
stage in that process. Particularly in the cut. A cutter cleaving
fancy rough might make a cut in a vivid pink or green or blue
diamond, the richest of colors, then pull away and find in horror
that the color had gone faint. Or had changed in shade
altogether.
Fancy colors in diamonds are products of
impurities and contamination at an atomic level, and they change
with every shift in the light that hits them. The wrong cut in
colored rough, and a $250,000 stone might drop to $25,000 in the
blink of an eye. But Anthony hadn’t even needed a window into the
stone to tell this one would cut well, to at least that good and
solid pink.
That assumed anyone would get the chance to
work on it, though. And someone working on it was hardly a
certainty, because the good and solid pink was also a unique pink,
destined for a unique purpose.
In diamond mines, workers don’t get contact
with the mined ore itself. Security concerns and automation have
together achieved a separation between the actual stones and hands
that might be inclined to steal them. Anthony’s position brought
him access, however, and he’d used that access when the opportunity
arose.
The tucked-away pocket tailored into
Anthony’s shirt cuff wasn’t visible in a typical examination. Five
minutes into the crew changeover that started Dikembé’s shift, he
had pulled the stone from where he hid it in the mine the day
before, and he slipped the diamond into the cuff pocket.
Now, beside the truck, he held it again. The
stone was warm, heated by the hours of contact with his body, and
he folded his fingers against his palm to conceal it. He felt its
smooth surfaces and hard shape against his skin.
Anthony bent beside the truck. In the
growing darkness, he ran a hand along the arch of the rear wheel
well on the driver’s side. He reached under, tapping along the
metal of the truck body until he found what he wanted, and then
pressed the good, solid pink rough into a small carrier that was
welded between the well and the truck’s back bumper. He closed the
carrier’s lid.