Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

She said, frowning, ‘Corwin’s wife gets killed by a drunk driver while he’s away being a mercenary and he runs off to the great north woods. Your woman and infant daughter get killed by a drunk driver while you’re away in Panama for the CIA, and you run off to Kenya. Have I got this right?’

‘Yeah. After they died I told myself that was that, and just went back to Panama like nothing had happened. Then I started having the nightmare. Every night.’

‘The nightmare? Always the same one?’

‘Yeah. My assignment is to take out a drug dealer who will pass through a certain tract of forest with a briefcase full of papers vital to the CIA. It is dawn, wet, misty. Visibility is bad. The target appears, dressed in cammo. I fire, a spine shot, high up, between the shoulder blades. At the moment I fire, I realize the target is a woman. I feel bad, I’ve never killed a woman before — but we need those documents.’

He stopped, shivered. It was real, absolute, immediate.

‘She is lying face down on the path. I turn her over. She is Alison. Dead. Underneath her is Eden. Dead. She was carrying our daughter, not papers. My shot killed them both.’

‘You got so desperate that you quit your contract—’

‘And swore to Alison’s memory I would never kill again.’

She said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘And after a few weeks, the nightmare stopped. And you went to Kenya and ended up in Tsavo as a camp guard, protecting people, not shooting them.’

‘Until seven years later, when I killed two shifta . The nightmare came back. That’s what I don’t want Hatfield to know about. The nightmare.’

‘The nightmare makes you too vulnerable.’

‘Not just vulnerable. At risk.’ He paused, thought for a moment. ‘How can I explain it to you?’ He leaned forward intently. ‘Okay, many years ago I read a book by a man who trained big cats. Lions, tigers, like that. He said that tigers in captivity, unlike lions, have hearts of glass. They are prone to depression, can get discouraged, can... shatter. As if they themselves were made of glass.’

‘You’re afraid that facing Corwin you’d be a glass tiger?’

‘Good way to put it. But I’m afraid I wouldn’t be one. Most of what you call glass tigers give up, die. But some go rogue, like the one that tried to kill that guy, Roy, in Las Vegas. All it had left was instinct. And by instinct, a tiger kills. By instinct, what does an assassin do?’

Her hands on the desk were restless, moving. They stopped.

‘Two dead shifta.’

He nodded, stood. ‘What do you guys say? Our time is up?’

She might not have heard him.

‘You can’t just walk away here, Thorne. You need to find Corwin, need to act, one way or the other. That’s the only way you can face down your demons.’ She realized she was almost panting as she said, ‘I’m passing you for this assignment.’

He was caught off-guard. She was tough. He said bitterly, ‘You’ve been ordered to pass me. I’ll survive — or I’ll shatter like... like that glass tiger of yours. While you and asshole Hatfield play Russian roulette with my life.’

After he left, she sat in her big chair behind her big desk and stared at the wall. She had another client to prepare for, but she just sat there. She knew, deep down, that she was expected to pass Thorne for the assignment. If not by Hatfield, by Kurt Jaeger, maybe even by the President himself.

What if she was wrong in her analysis? Then she was indeed playing Russian roulette with Thorne’s life. But what could she do about it now?

Thorne wandered, ended up on the Georgetown Dock at 31st and K Streets. A Coast Guard patrol boat slapped bow-wash against the sides of expensive anchored private yachts. A military helicopter whup-whupwhupped by overhead.

Set back from the walkway behind several levels of outdoor tables was a sparkling glass-clad restaurant three stories high. He got a beer in a plastic glass from the awning-covered drinks kiosk at street level, sat down, sipped it, stared out over the Potomac toward the Pentagon.

He wanted to be pissed off at Dorst, but couldn’t be. She had her job, as he had his. And she was very good at it, very tough-minded, willing to roll the dice — he grinned sourly — with his life. On New Year’s he’d wished for a quest, a hunt, a vital, necessary trackdown. Now he had it. Could it be that she was right? Could finding Corwin be his salvation?

He finished his beer and wandered, restless. Behind the kitchen entrance to the restaurant a cook in a white apron was smoking a cigarette. An echoing, not-yet completed galleria brought Thorne out above a bowl-shaped mall area. He stood watching the massive fountain spout water high into the air.

According to Dorst, Hatfield could never have access to what he had told her about his nightmare; forget about Hatfield.

Hatfield’s coat hung over the back of his chair, his tie was loosened, his coffee mug squatted on the right front corner of his blotter. He could smell his armpits. His floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building was after-hours silent. He tossed aside Dorst’s written report and rubbed his eyes. He sighed.

He and his team had been trained to use the gun to rescue hostages. Thorne had been trained to use the gun to kill people. He had not only the sniper’s eye, he had the assassin’s mind. So was killing a woman and child in Panama by mistake enough to make him disintegrate the way he had? Or was he faking it? Angling for the chance to take Corwin out himself, beat Hatfield to the power and the glory? Nothing in fucking Dorst’s report answered that vital question about Thorne’s emotional state. She’d blown it. Jaeger wanted Thorne aboard, Hatfield didn’t. Dorst should have found him unfit because he’d run off to Kenya.

Right now, without consultation, Thorne was flying off to California to ‘get into Corwin’s mind’ before coming up with a scenario. Or was he really serving notice that he was one independent son of a bitch with balls the size of grapefruit? When Thorne came back to D.C., Hatfield would put men on the fucker to monitor his movements and contacts.

Meanwhile, he needed a hell of a lot more than Dorst’s official report on Thorne. He needed her session notes. Better schedule an appointment with her out of the office.

He checked the clock. Christ, ten. He speed-dialed.

‘Hatfield residence.’

Cora. Trying to make people think they had a maid. He put all the warmth he could into his voice. ‘Hi, sweetheart. It’s me. We had a meeting that just broke up. I’ll bring takeout. Chinese? Thai? Whatever you—’

‘I’ll be in bed when you get here. Asleep.’ She hung up.

‘Well, shit!’ he snarled at the dead phone. He blamed his troubles with Cora in D.C. on Thorne out in California.

It was dawn when the red-eye dropped Thorne at Oakland International. Long-eared jackrabbits hopped in the grass beside the runway, ignoring the lumbering jetliners. His ‘undercover’ car turned out to be a souped-up Police Interceptor Crown Victoria with the extra-capacity gas tank that Ford made only for law-enforcement agencies. Fucking FBI. The Crown Vic would make him as inconspicuous as a dancing bear at a ballet class.

He threaded his way through East Bay traffic toward the Delta’s sprawling Medusa-head of twisting, intersecting sloughs, its thousand miles of waterways, its hundreds of miles of levees, its islands reachable only by boat.

The Sunset Bar and Grill where he had his appointment with a San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputy was attached to the Tower Park Marina near a place called, appropriately enough, Terminous. Thorne reached it by a blacktop access road across California 12 from the tiny Terminous General Store. There was a tall black water-tower, a trailer park as big as a suburb, and a guard shack with nobody in it.