The Glass House (6 page)

Just past three in the morning he turned the corner at Meeting and Broad Streets and stopped in his tracks—suddenly cold sober.

The plastic cup containing bourbon and shaved ice slipped from his hand and made a gentle squishing sound as it hit the cobblestones—then somehow became glass and split into a hundred shards.

Decker stared at the glass, then saw something reflected in a large piece and looked up.

The boy at the end of the noose dangling from the gaslight across the road was squirming, although he evidently didn't have the energy to reach up to the rope around his neck or call for help.

A clatter of hooves drew his eyes away from the hanging boy. He assumed he'd see one of the hundreds of horse-drawn tourist carriages, but that wasn't what he saw. A dozen or more horses neighed from their hitching rail as eight or nine men in full Confederate army uniforms galloped down the street. Their uniforms were torn and covered in mud and dust. One of the men was missing an arm and had his shirtsleeve pinned up to his shoulder. Another was without a right eye. A third had a jagged cut on his left cheek that seeped blood.

Then Decker heard a new sound, loud but low—moaning—the sound of many, many beings in pain. He looked towards the source of the sound—the slave auction house.

He glanced down and saw his feet on the cobblestones. They were shod in knee-high boots laced with worn leather strips.

He tasted something in his cheek and realized that he had a chaw of tobacco tucked there. He spat a slick of brown onto the cobblestones.

The Confederate soldiers dismounted and strode towards the slave market. Decker followed them. When he crossed beneath the gaslight he lifted his eyes—the boy was now hanging limp. Something about the boy's face was familiar, but he couldn't place it.

Then he noticed the boy's dangling hands—he was missing the baby finger on both hands. The remaining fingers all had blackened nails.

He slid back to the present and stared at the vast desert behind the small reality of Solitaire, now lit to a ghostly sheen by the new moon. Then he heard it. Far off a girl crying—a girl—and he trembled.

He turned and was surprised to see Linwood. Tears were in his eyes. “It's begun. It's too soon, but it's begun.”

“A girl's cry begins something?” Decker asked.

And Linwood nodded slowly and stared at Decker. Finally he said, “Yes, it will begin with the girl, you must be ready.”

“What do I do?”

“You wait.”

“For what?”

“The missing piece.”

“The—”

“The agent of change—who will bring this nasty world to an end and usher in the new one. She's always been there but doesn't know the role she needs to play in this end game.”

“End game?”

“End of time.”

“What?”

“And you have your part to play, but in the meantime you
bake pies—you owe one hundred thousand kowtows. It's your role.”

Decker nodded. Somehow this made sense to him. Then he heard the cry again—a simple, clean sound moving across the Namibian desert like a boundless grief loosed into the world.

EX-PRISONER 271403, NOW JUST PLAIN
ol' Martin Armistaad, didn't understand exactly what had happened that set him free, but he did know that you didn't take your dick out of a gift horse's mouth.

Speaking of mouths, his hurt like hell where they put in that prison tooth.

But he was out! Out! Unleashed and hunting. After six years in Leavenworth Penitentiary he was on his own, breathing air that had not been befouled by hundreds of other men's breath and body odour and fear.

And there were stars. “Stars, stars, stars and one Secony station,” he whispered to himself.

And there indeed was a Sunoco station—“Thanks, Mr. Bruce, I'll take it from here,” he whispered.

Martin took his makeshift garrote from his pocket as he walked into the store behind the gas pumps. He watched the cars come and go. It was just a few degrees above freezing, but he wasn't cold—he didn't get cold. He had been up more than twenty-four hours but he wasn't tired—he never got tired.

“Can I help you, mister?” the acne-afflicted youth behind the counter asked as he looked up from the sheet of paper he was working on with a drafting pencil and compass.

“Got any heroin?”

“Excuse me?”

“No. Excuse me.” He walked over to the young man and asked, “What're you doing?”

“Working out a design problem. I'm going to be an architect.”

“Are you?”

“I sure hope so,” he said, moving the compass a half turn and noting the angle on a sheet of paper.

“How old are you?”

The boy smiled. “I'll be seventeen on Thursday, sir.” His breath smelled of Juicy Fruit.

“A shame.”

“Why's that, sir?”

As Martin Armistaad's garrote bit deeply into the boy's throat, tearing open the carotid artery, he said, “Because statistically speaking most boys get laid in their eighteenth year. Eighteen point eight four to be exact—six times pi.”

The take from the register wasn't much, but the store had good road maps, and the boy's car keys led him to a 2004 Corolla out back—and of course he could pump as much gas as he liked.

He had already charted occurrences backwards from the bombings at Ancaster College, and sure enough they conformed to a factor of pi—
Like everything else in the devil's kingdom,
he thought.

He took out the newspaper clipping that had been mailed to him three days before his surprising release. It related the story of the memorial for the victims of the Ancaster College bombings. It featured a photo of Viola Tripping.

It had shocked him because he recognized the girl/woman.

He'd seen her in the clearing while doing what some called dreaming.

In the newspaper photo she was entering the church for the memorial. It was raining, but she was wearing sunglasses and
holding some man's hand—her tiny frame like a child's beside him.

He'd been in the clearing often enough. But he was never able even to glimpse the glass house except for that one time with her.

He'd first experienced the clearing as a young man, right after he'd figured out the exact date of the beginning of the market crash in 1973. It was in what he later understood was a waking dream. A dream that always had a behind and an ahead. Behind was the dense forest with all those lost voices seeking in vain to find the clearing where he was. Ahead were the very few who had found their way out of the clearing and were on their way to the glass house. Ahead had always been out of his reach, despite his desperate searching for a path out of the clearing.

Then he'd seen this girl/woman in the newspaper photo, Viola Tripping, in the clearing, and a path opened. It was then that he caught his only glimpse of the great glass house. But, in an instant, the path vanished—as did Viola Tripping. He returned over and over again to the clearing, hoping to find the girl/woman, but to no avail. And he knew, like a parched man in the desert knows he must find the oasis, that he had to find the glass house.

Then the day before his release he'd seen the girl/woman shaken and frightened on the ground of the clearing.

“Who are you?” she'd demanded.

“Never mind that. Lead me to the glass house,” he'd said.

“You don't know the way?”

“No, but you do.”

“I don't. I've only seen it once.”

“When you were with me.”

And the two had stared at each other, knowing beyond knowing that only together could they ever reach the great glass house.

• • •

Martin drove the Toyota through the night—west, running from the dawn, farther into the heartland. As the sun rose behind him
he took in the desolation of midwest America. Strip malls and small towns and everywhere a drab uniformity, as if, as Lenny said, “First morning you see the cannon, then there's nothing else to do.”

At high noon he pulled over to the side of the highway and spread out the road map on the passenger seat. Taking out the pimpled boy's compass he placed one of the points on Ancaster College then extended the arm out, marking pi diameters in miles, then in kilometres. The concentric circles got bigger and bigger until they stretched from the mid-Atlantic to the California coast.

Then he put the point of the compass on Leavenworth Penitentiary and marked the same pi-generated arcs in miles and kilometres. He circled the intersections of the two sets of arcs. They marked a straight line to rural Nebraska.

He pulled the compass away from the map and looked at it.
So simple,
he thought—
but useful.
He folded it and put it in his breast pocket. “Never know when a sharp point may come in handy. A shame that it'll never design a building—but then again, once I'm in the glass house, there'll be no need for buildings ever again.”

He didn't notice as he pulled out into traffic that he'd been speaking his thoughts aloud. Nor did he notice the cop in the unmarked police car who was punching his licence plate into his car's computer.

The cop looked at the notation on the computer and obeyed the order to call a number that was fourteen digits long. The call was answered quickly, and a cool voice told him not to pursue the car—that this was a federal investigation.

YSLAN FOLLOWED PROTOCOL AND ENTERED
her password—mydad,whoIneverknew—and waited for a six-tone response. When it came she entered her second password and then added her identifier—Solitaire, the private name she had for herself when she was a little girl. The phone did the digital equivalent of turning itself inside out as it moved to full encryption mode. When the transition was complete it sounded a single tone—then silence.

But only for a three count, then the voice of Hendrick H. Mallory, head of Homeland Security, was cool in her ear.

“Where exactly are you and who's with you, Special Agent Hicks?”

She told him about the safe house, Garreth Senior and her two assistants.

“Are they trustworthy, your assistants?”

Yslan hesitated.

“Okay, I get it,” Mallory said.

“I didn't mean—”

“Of course. But you don't completely trust them, do you?”

She downed the dregs of her cup of bad coffee and instantly longed for a cigarette.
I should be over this already! Why's it coming back now?
but she said, “No. I'm afraid I don't.”

“Then neither do I. Don't tell them about this.”

“About what?”

“When did you last hear from Harrison?”

“Sir?”

“When did you last hear from him?”

A moment of confusion from Yslan, then she said, “I don't recall exactly . . .”

There was a long pause. Finally Mallory spoke. “Harrison's been poisoned, or so we think. He's in a catatonic state and the doctors can't seem to figure out what's caused it. All they know is that it's something he ingested.”

Yslan's mind raced—Leonard Harrison, her boss at the NSA, poisoned and catatonic? But before she could find words, she heard Mallory speaking again. “Make an excuse and leave the safe house. Get back to D.C. Now. You got that, Special Agent Hicks?”

Yslan didn't answer.

“You still there, Hicks?”

“Yes sir.”

“Another thing.”

“Yes?”

“We want you to bring your synaesthetes files. All of them.”

“Who's we?”

“Not your business. Just bring them.”

“All right, but why do you want to see my synaesthetes files?”

Yslan could hear him take a long breath. Finally he said, “Things may be in motion.”

“What things?”

“If we knew we wouldn't be enlisting your help, Ms. Hicks.” Then he asked, “Was Harrison religious?”

“Harrison? I don't know. Why?”

“Did he ever talk about the end of days?”

“I don't know if he did or didn't.”

Ignoring her evasion, he asked, “Are you, Miss Hicks? Religious?” Before she could answer that she understood a lot about religion but she'd be hard-pressed to call herself religious, Mallory moved on. “Do you too believe in the end of days?”

Yslan heard the swell of a strong current beneath his question—something in motion indeed! But before she could ask a question of her own, Mallory repeated his question; “Are you religious, Ms. Hicks?”

“What?”

“It's not a hard question. Are you religious?”

“Why is that important?”

“If you need to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.”

“Excuse me but—”

“Do you know where Decker Roberts is?”

“Southwest Africa.”

“How about his son, Seth?”

“No. I don't, but I don't see—”

There was no reason to continue her question. Hendrick H. Mallory, head of Homeland Security, had hung up on her.

She gathered her wits together, then headed back into the safe house. Mr. T was lounging in the kitchen. He looked up and said, “You okay, boss?”

How do I answer that question?
she thought. But she said, “Yeah, I'm fine.” She hoped she hadn't emphasized the pronoun. She remembered one of Decker's lectures to his acting class stating that spoken English has only two rules—if you lift the end of a sentence it makes it a question; if you emphasize a word it makes it comparative. As in
I'm
fine—but someone else isn't. So she hoped she'd kept her tone level.

Ted Knight entered. He had a curious look on his face.

“I'm on to something else now,” she announced. “Nothing
special, but it's time sensitive.” She hoped the vague excuse she was offering her two assistants would be accepted at face value.