Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘No place to hide with searchers just minutes behind you.’

Across the channel a two-trunked dead tree lifted stark, naked arms to the sky as if in prayer. For the souls of the dead Nisa and Damon?

‘I see what you mean,’ said Thorne. ‘Nothing to find. I’m through here.’

Sharon Dorst entered the Department of Commerce building from 15th Street. An American flag hung over the entrance. She was wearing her black power suit with a string of pearls around her neck and a small gold American flag pinned to her lapel. Without government i.d. she was meat for the scanner, her purse and briefcase meat for the x-ray machine. Nothing beeped.

In the echoing, nearly-deserted basement cafeteria, she doctored decaf with Equal and milk, paid the cashier, and carried her coffee out to the south-side courtyard. She sat down at a wrought-iron table near the big stone fountain. Right on time. Hatfield wasn’t, but she was glad of the time alone.

She had done three evaluations for him before Thorne’s, but when he had said he wanted to meet her here, all her alarm bells had gone off. Why here? She could give him her evaluation, all that he was entitled to by law, in her office. Did he want her out of the way so he could send in a black-bag team to rifle her files for her private session notes on Thorne? She knew the FBI sometimes did things like that. So, at the last minute, she stuck the sessions notes in her briefcase. She was being irrational, but she felt better having them safely out of the office.

When a scowling Hatfield finally arrived, twenty minutes late, he plunked down across the little table from her. He wore the standard FBI uniform: white shirt, Brooks Brothers suit, dull tie. He slammed his cup of coffee down in front of him, slopping some into the saucer. She tried to read his face. Had he searched her office or not?

‘Okay, let’s have it.’ She stared at him in astonishment. He snapped his fingers. ‘Your evaluation. Of Thorne. Let’s have it. I’m on a tight schedule here and I’m running late.’

She ostentatiously checked her watch. ‘I noticed.’

‘Don’t give me any crap, lady.’ He took a gulp of coffee. ‘Okay, we’ll play it your way. What did the tests suggest about Thorne’s mental and emotional states?’

‘I didn’t run any tests. We just talked.’

‘Talked? Jesus H. Christ, get serious.’

She took a sip of coffee, trying to mask her dismay. She hadn’t run the standard neurological and psychological tests on Thorne because they had been run several times before, by the Army and then by the CIA, and the results had been consistent every time. She didn’t need a battery of tests to tell her who Thorne was, psychologically.

But she couldn’t say that to Hatfield. She had been commissioned to run the tests, and she hadn’t run them. She had made herself vulnerable.

‘I felt the standard battery of tests would be counterproductive with this subject. He’s been down that road before.’

‘Is he a burned-out case or what?’

She groped for something that would not betray confidentiality, and remembered Thorne talking about tigers with hearts of glass. And her calling them glass tigers.

‘It’s not that easy. He used an analogy. In captivity, tigers often have hearts of glass. Under pressure, they can shatter. The deaths of the innocent woman and child in Panama put such pressure on him that I think of him as a glass tiger.’

Hatfield was staring at her, rage suffusing his features.

‘A glass tiger? Are you nuts? He’s a fucking assassin, the sort of bastard our Hostage Rescue/Sniper teams are supposed to put down. Now, goddammit, what made him run off to Africa?’

This was a disaster. But she found a calm, steady voice to say, ‘I’ve told you as much as I’m at liberty to discuss.’

‘Fuck that, lady! I need your session notes on him.’

Her heart was pounding, but her face was icy and aloof.

‘By contract, I’m not required to show you anything.’

‘Shit, lady, you broke the contract when you didn’t run the tests. Under the Patriot Act I can have you stuck in a mental institution for a couple of months as a possible security risk — and justify it with paperwork.’

She stared at him, loathing him, fearing him, knowing he could make good on his illegal National Security threat. But she said, ‘The client — doctor privilege protects therapists and their patients from people like you.’

He might not have heard her.

‘Your notes weren’t at your office, my people looked. So give them to me now or suffer the consequences.’

Her hand automatically went to the briefcase beside her chair. How had she been so stupid as to bring the folder with her? But if she’d left it at her office...

Her gesture was enough for him. His hand shot out, grabbed the briefcase. She tried to jerk it back, but he fended her off with an elbow while rifling through it. She grabbed again, her nails scored long red lines down the back of his hand.

He half-raised the hand as if to strike her, but then, a triumphant look on his face, held up her session notes on Thorne with his other hand.

‘You’ll have these back first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m going to report you to—’

But he was already gone, crossing the courtyard with long strides. She stared after him, numb, on the edge of tears. All she could do was leave a cryptic warning message for Thorne at the Mayflower Hotel, and hope he called in to get it. And that he would understand it.

The little general store was white clapboard, two-story, raised six feet above the ground on pillars against the Delta’s winter floods. Out behind, two house trailers were settled down comfortably on their blocks like regulars on their barstools. A battered white TERMINOUS MARKET sign creaked on guy-wires from the store’s old-fashioned false front.

Thorne sat in his car next to a new red Beetle convertible, rereading the FBI file. The investigation had been incredibly sloppy, or else Hatfield had deleted anything useful. But Nisa’s phone call had been traced to the payphone here at this run-down market he had barely noted when he had passed it on his way to Tower Park Marina.

Inside it was cluttered and comfortable, with fishing lures and candy bars and postcards and cold beer and sodas and bottled water. It smelled of live bait and microwaved burritos. The proprietor was in his late sixties, with a lot of white tousled hair and a tobacco-stained gunfighter’s mustache. He nodded twice to himself when Thorne showed his FBI credentials, like a robin checking out worm-sounds.

‘Wondered when you guys would be around again.’

‘Well, the phone company records show the woman who was killed made a call from your payphone here that afternoon.’

‘Yep. Reco’nized her right off from the pichurs they showed me.’ He looked as if he wanted to spit the juice from his chaw of tobacco into the spitoon, but instead just worked his jaw around. ‘Her and her husband bought supplies here, said they was on vacation in a rented houseboat. Damn shame, I say. She was a mighty nice lady. Pretty, too. Got to know her, her coming in to get them calls every Tuesday an’ Thursday, two ’clock, straight up, reg’lar as clockwork.’

Nothing in the file about her receiving a series of calls.

‘Ah... know who they were from?’

‘Nope. But they was all of ’em long-distance calls.’ He chuckled. ‘Now I think of it, most anywhere you’d call from here would be long-distance, wouldn’t it?’

‘Sure would. Could you hear her end of things?’

He winked at Thorne. ‘Little place like this, couldn’t help hearing, could I?’ His face fell. ‘All she ever said was something like, “Everything’s fine” and “Thanks” and she’d hang up.’ Then he brightened again. ‘Got one two hours early on ’lection day, ’bout noon, thereabouts, an’ it shook her up real good. Soon’s she heard the voice, she yelled, “You!” an slammed down the receiver. Then she made a buncha calls of her own.’