Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Thorne paid his check and went back along the dock toward Georgetown University. The tails might become a problem eventually, but for now their presence would unwittingly furnish visual white noise to mask his actions.

He couldn’t use his room phone to tap his intelligence sources outside official channels. Cellphone? Not unless he got a one-use he threw away afterwards, or stole someone else’s, or bought a phonecard. Anyway, all of those could eventually be traced, and the act of procuring them would alert Hatfield to the fact that Thorne knew he was under surveillance.

He wandered around the sprawling Georgetown campus until he found the library, old and almost spooky, and went around behind to go inside. In the computer room, he logged onto the internet. Called up the New York Times and the Washington Post coverage of the president’s recent successful campaign, starting with the Democratic Convention. Paused at the frontpage picture of Wallberg with his wife Edith and their grown children after he accepted the nomination. Their son, 30, a lawyer in St. Paul; their daughter, 27, finishing a psych PhD from University of Chicago. The nuclear family intact. Hiding what secrets?

Thorne chose an array of stories to make it look convincing, and started printing. Getting more background on Corwin would make sense to Hatfield. As they printed, he quickly and surreptitiously sent an e-mail to an old Ranger buddy named Victor Blackburn who had lost part of one hand in Panama and until retirement was riding out his career behind a desk. His job gave him access to many of the Army’s most sensitive files.

He and Victor had seen — and done — some shit in Panama that had welded iron bonds of friendship between them. They had been half crazed from weeks under the pressure-cooker canopy. Sitting back to back, getting eaten alive by whatever insects were flying around or mooching over them from the leaf-litter in which they squatted, the rain coming in bursts like rifle fire. And Thorne once had arrived while Victor was being tortured for intel and had ended the torturers before they could end Victor.

His e-mail to Victor was short and to the point:

Victor: Anything you can dig up on a Halden Corwin (?NMI?) who maybe had a troubled childhood and suddenly quit junior college in 1966 to go into Special Forces and volunteer for a crack sniper team in Vietnam. Why he volunteered for service, how good he was, what he did after he got out. Word is he became a mercenary, but I need confirmation and as many details from as many places as you can find.

He sent it, deleted it, then left the work station for the men’s room so a studious-looking woman with big hornrim glasses could stroll by his table and note the printouts.

He carried them back to his hotel in the gathering dusk, stopping in the lounge for a drink and surreptitiously watched the Feebs drop visual on him for mobile surveillance outside the hotel in case he went out again. Which told him that his room phone was bugged by this time, also.

Only then, unobserved as far as he could tell, did he go to the desk to ask for any other mail. There was another manila envelope, this one hand-delivered. No sender’s name on it.

Was it from Johnny Doyle? In his room he tore open the envelope with an urgency that surprised him. He realized that he just had to know whether his go-to guy had come through or not.

It was from Doyle: photocopies of the Terminous Market phone records for the day of the murders and the two weeks preceding. Obviously conned out of a phone-company employee so there would be no telltale paperwork. Probably a drinking buddy. Social engineering.

Several local calls either to or from the Tower Park Marina, the attached Sunset Bar and Grill, and the adjoining trailer park. Three outgoing long-distance calls to suppliers, four incoming from them. Paydirt was calls from various cities in the western states each Tuesday and Thursday at two p.m., the last three from the same LA phone booth. The calls to Nisa.

At noon on November third, election day, a call had come from an unknown number in LA two hours early. The instant Nisa heard the voice, according to the Terminous Market proprietor, she had cried, ‘You!’ and slammed down the receiver. Corwin, telling his daughter he had found them?

Had to be. She ‘real quick’ made several calls of her own — starting at 12:04 p.m. — trying to track down someone, who was hard to reach, at the elegant Marquis Hotel in Beverly Hills. Obviously Jaeger, who had said that when she got him, he grabbed two private security guards and tried to get to her. Because of bad weather, they arrived too late to save her and her husband.

How had Corwin known where to find them? And once he knew, why call her? He was maybe psychotic, but not demented and not dismissable. He had withdrawn when he had suffered the loss of his wife, had brooded, alone, in the great north woods until someone shot him. Deliberately, he came to believe. Finally, that it was his son-in-law. So he went looking.

Revenge. Revenge within Corwin’s own moral code. Totally understandable to Thorne. A moral code that could explain the phone call he never got a chance to complete. Almost chivalric.

But then why murder Nisa with such sadistic rage? And why, if the man he thought was his attacker was now dead, was he threatening Wallberg? Going back further, why would Mather try to kill Corwin? How could Corwin’s death advance his career?

More likely, as everyone believed, it had been just a random hunting accident, not Damon Mather at all. Corwin had acted on a paranoid obsession devoid of any basis in fact. His stalk of the president was just more delusional behavior.

Stymied, Thorne went back to those calls every Tuesday and Thursday. From Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, finally California. Reassurance calls from someone on Wallberg’s staff? But until Nisa’s panicked calls, nobody had known why they resigned from the campaign, let alone where they were.

Maybe a way to check on that? Thorne huddled over the news reports from the Georgetown library’s computer, laboriously checking the whereabouts of Wallberg’s campaign party against the city of origin of each of those Tuesday and Thursday phone calls.

Huddled around a table in an isolated corner of the Hoover Building’s cafeteria were Hatfield, the bogus homeless man, the two jocks who had been discussing yachts on the Georgetown dock, and the dark-haired woman with studious hornrims who had checked out what Thorne was doing at the library. The rest of the crew, including the bogus hiker with the splendid thighs, was patrolling the streets around the Mayflower. None of them was from Hatfield’s crack Hostage/Rescue team; but these were eager, competent agents or trainees unaware that their surveillance of Thorne was unsanctioned, arguably illegal.

Hatfield pointed across the table at the homeless man.

‘Gary. Has he burned you people?’

‘No way, Boss.’ Gary, really into his dumpster-diving persona, smelled bad. ‘He’s clueless.’

‘He might be hot stuff out in the boonies,’ smirked Jock Number One, who had a rather patrician nose. ‘But in an urban environment he doesn’t know where to look or who to look for.’

Hatfield pointed at blond Jock Number Two, who looked something like a very young Jack Nicklaus. ‘Nutshell his day.’

‘Breakfast at the Mayflower. Up to the fitness facility, worked out, swam. Checked at the desk, got the file on Corwin.’

Back to Jock Number One. ‘Michael?’

‘Walked down to the Georgetown dock, had iced tea and read Corwin’s file. Thought for a while, then left.’

Gary, the homeless man, took it up. ‘Wandered around the Georgetown campus. As soon as he headed for the library, I alerted Charlene so she could be inside ahead of him.’