Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘He went to the computer room and logged on to the internet,’ said Hornrims. ‘When he went to the men’s room, I was able to ascertain that he was accessing presidential campaign coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post .’

Trying to find a pattern of movement that Corwin might also find, thought Hatfield, hoping to get to the intersection of President and assassin before the assassin did. Correct, conventional stuff. Good. Thorne was being predictable.

Jock Number One said, ‘He went back to the Mayflower, ordered room service.’

Jock Number Two said eagerly, ‘Should we access his room to make copies of the articles he abstracted from the newspapers?’

‘Too risky. We have the tap on his phone.’ Hatfield leaned back, feeling smug. ‘Good work, people. Stay on him. Remember, if he takes a crap...’

‘We’re there to hand him the toilet paper,’ said Gary.

When panic struck, Nisa had called Jaeger for help. All of the Tuesday/Thursday calls had originated in cities where Wallberg’s campaign was on that day. So the calls had to be reassurance calls from Jaeger. Who had lied when he said no one knew where they had gone. Acting on his own, helping them hide? Or...

What if Wallberg had come to believe that Mather had tried to murder Corwin? He would have had to drop Nisa and Damon from the campaign and its safety net of Secret Service agents: an assassination attempt stemming from his campaign team, rather than directed at it, would have been disastrous. In that case, Jaeger’s help would have been damage control, keeping Nisa and Damon from the media.

Thorne wished he had a photo of Nisa. He wished he knew whose .357 Magnum it was. He wished he could reconstruct the sequence of events aboard the houseboat that night. He wished, he wished... But none of it was going to happen easily, not with Hatfield’s people following him around like ducklings that had imprinted on him.

He bedded down at 2:30 a.m. and tossed and turned for an hour, almost afraid to seek sleep. But when it did come, no nightmare rode it. His subconscious must have thought he was doing something right.

Gustave Wallberg stood at a window in the Oval Office as if watching, through the lace curtains, the small army of gardeners making the wide expanse of White House grounds bright with spring flower borders. Actually, he was seeing last night.

Edith, his chickadee-quick wife, sitting on the edge of the bed in one of her usual shapeless nightgowns, watching him remove the fancy brocaded robe she had given him for Christmas.

‘What’s bothering you, darling?’

He said, ‘Politics and polls, sweetheart, inspired by our friends across the aisle, hinting that I’m staying inside the Beltway because of terrorist threats, implying that I’m afraid.’

‘Polls! Politics!’ She put her arms around him. ‘You aren’t afraid of anything on earth! You are my fearless lion.’

That’s when he made his decision.

‘I’m meeting with Kurt and the staff tomorrow to announce that we will be making a swing through the top red states with a major domestic or foreign policy announcement at each stop. Shake ’em up a bit.’

He turned from the window: suddenly he had seen, reflected there, not Edith, but Nisa. Nisa, waiting for him in the little motel out by the Minneapolis airport with the grotesque faded pink fake-flock wallpaper, naked in the bed that brayed and banged the wall in delight at their passion...

But Nisa was gone. Dead and gone. And he was alive.

Doing laps in the hotel pool, Thorne decided he’d ditch the Feebs following him. Their surveillance was almost insulting, it was so slipshod. He hit the shower, stood under pounding water that was first boiling, then icy, towelled off, dressed.

Yes, ditch them, but in such a way that they couldn’t be sure it had been deliberate. Then what? A movie? A bar? Until Wallberg ventured beyond his iron ring of security inside the Beltway, he could only wait. As he was sure Corwin also waited.

Then he had it. Ditch his minders, meet Johnny Doyle as if by chance, hint about his need for the murder-scene forensics.

Wallberg met his people at noon in the basement conference room. Jaeger, Hatfield, Crandall, and Quarles, with Johnny Doyle bringing people things they wanted. No official record of the meeting: the audio and visual recorders were turned off.

It had been put out to staff that it was a housekeeping, not a security, briefing. These were done every morning by the National Security Council: National Security Advisor Gelson Hennings, head of the White House Secret Service detail Shayne O’Hara, and the heads of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, and NSA.

‘You have two weeks,’ Wallberg told the people assembled in the room. This had been his style as governor. People did their best work under pressure. ‘Then we make a major swing through the top red states. I need input from all of you on where to go and what to say when we get there. At the end of it, I want the themes of this administration’s first term in office succinctly spelled out for all to see.’

‘Two weeks! That doesn’t give us time to—’

‘That is all the time you have, Kurt. Inform the cabinet and the Secret Service. Keep the speech-writers busy. Get out the front-men to set up the press arrangements. Have O’Hara coordinate with local police, Homeland Security, and the FBI.’ He grinned his famous grin at Hatfield. ‘The rest of the FBI.’

‘This is about Corwin,’ Hatfield exclaimed.

‘Yes. Corwin. I need your assessment. Is it safe for us to make public appearances outside the Beltline?’

Now was not the time to hesitate. ‘I and my men now know how he escaped in the California Delta in November, Mr. President, and how he eluded us in California’s King’s Canyon in March.’ Hatfield did not say that it was Thorne who had worked out Corwin’s methods. ‘With what we now know, he will be unable to mount any viable assassination attempt.’

Doyle was behind the wet bar, unnoticed by anyone, a ghost of times past. When the President ordered them to get front men out, he felt his own surge of emotion. He would get his old job back! As of this instant, Thorne was gone from his radar.

Jaeger was intense. ‘You are saying, Terrill, that Hal Corwin is still alive and active in his desire to assassinate the President. So the danger from him is still very real.’

‘Real, but assessable, like that posed by foreign terrorists and white supremacists and anti-abortion activists and other right-wing kooks. Once we know the sites, Mr. President, I and my men will evaluate the potential danger at each stop.’

‘Get to it, people,’ said Wallberg. ‘I want twice daily briefings from everyone involved, starting this afternoon.’

He lingered after the others had left. He hadn’t consulted Jaeger beforehand, though the bond between them went back to that shared decision on election day. A decision that gave Kurt a lot of power. But not even Jaeger knew everything. No one did.

‘Ah... Mr. President...’ He turned quickly. It was Johnny Doyle. ‘You said, sir, that you would be needing front men to go out before your trip. I thought maybe...’

‘Out of the question,’ Wallberg snapped. Crandall and Quarles had keyed him in on Doyle’s drinking problem. He strode out, stopping just short of adding, ‘You fool.’

Halden Corwin drank black coffee as bitter as his thoughts, and clicked the president’s official website on his laptop to make his daily check on any travel plans by Wallberg, and rubbed his aching knee. Who was he fooling? He was half-crippled. Despite daily practice, he might miss his shot even if he got it. Maybe he should just fold his hand, rot here in this one-room cabin where he lived his narrowed life...