Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Hide in plain sight. Thorne felt a tingle. He wouldn’t wait for Doyle to come through. He’d tell Hatfield he was going into the field again, and fly out the next day.

Janet Kestrel waved her thanks to the grizzled rancher who had given her the ten-mile lift on California 120 from Groveland to the River Store at Casa Loma. The River Store was a brown rustic wooden one-story building with a steepled shingled roof covering the store, a deli, and the AQUA River Trips office and store room in back.

Above the roofed and railed porch was a wooden coffee cup and saucer painted light blue, and a big blue sign with ESPRESSO DELI — River Store in blue and gold lettering. An American flag was angled out from one of the porch’s support pillars. The only vehicle in the parking area was a three-year-old Suzuki SUV that belonged to the store’s proprietor, Sam Arness.

‘Hey, Janet.’ Arness was a bulky man with a gray handlebar mustache, long hair in a ponytail, jeans and boots and a faded mackinaw. ‘Jessie’s at the Pine Mountain Lake Campgrounds, Flo’s on her way in. She’ll give you a lift to the Put-In Spot.’

She missed her 4-Runner’s four-wheel drive that could take her down five miles of incredible dirt track to the Tuolemne River thousands of feet below. Riding sedately down with Flo just wasn’t the same.

‘So I’ve got time for a cup of coffee.’

‘And a Danish,’ grinned Arness.

Janet had missed last year’s stint as a white-water guide on the Tuolemne, and she was glad to be back. She loved going down the narrow, fast, twisting river in a rubber raft. It was a level four ride, which took great skill to keep from coming to grief on submerged rocks. But she would abandon the river for good if she heard from Charlie Quickfox at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino.

What they would be talking about skirted the illegal, and since Hatfield could never quite escape the paranoid suspicion that the Justice Department’s internal security bugged their own agents’ offices, he arranged to meet Ray Franklin at the Lincoln Memorial. Beltliners wouldn’t be found dead there unless they were squiring around out-of-town visitors. It was crowded with shrieking, running school kids from shit-kicker towns like East Jesus, Nebraska, and Dismal Seepage, Arkansas. Small chance of anyone seeing or overhearing them anywhere near there.

They stood side-by-side overlooking the long skinny Reflecting Pool that fronted the Memorial: two random strangers contemplating the placid water. Roy Franklin was a field man, plain and simple, six-foot, hard-bitten, in his element behind the sights in a hostage situation, almost ill-at-ease in a suit and tie. Hatfield spoke without looking at him.

‘Your buddy Thorne is flying to Minneapolis tomorrow, then driving north to Portage where Corwin had his cabin.’

Ray shook out a Marlboro, lit it, sucked smoke greedily into his lungs. He didn’t appreciate Hatfield’s ironic comment about buddies. Without ever having met him, he hated Thorne’s guts. The bastard had made him and Walt Greene look bad by finding the way Corwin had eluded them in the Delta and in King’s Canyon. By making them look bad, he had made their whole Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team look bad.

‘That asshole. He’s not going to find anything there. In November we were all over that place like flies on shit. Even checked for hollowed-out logs and loose stones in the fireplace. Talked to that hick doctor with his one-man clinic who patched Corwin up, talked to the bank manager, the Catholic priest, the protestant minister... Nobody knew anything, except the bank manager. He said that when Corwin left, the doctor bought the cabin to fix up and rent out this spring. End of story.’

‘Even so, go to Minneapolis and put a GPS transmitter on the car the AIC Minneapolis will give Thorne to drive.’

‘Why don’t I try to get audio on his interviews as well?’

‘We don’t want to alert him to the surveillance, Ray. I just want to know where he goes. Anyway, what’s he going to learn? You’ve already talked to the same people he’ll see.’

Corwin never tried to anticipate his shot, it had to just sort of... happen. Through the scope he could see, a thousand yards away, the white cambium where his round had hit the oak tree. If it had been a man, it would have been dead.

He maneuvered himself to his feet, worked his left leg for the three-mile walk back to the cabin. Tonight he would e-mail Whitby Hernild that he would be leaving. Driving the seven miles into town was a needless risk. Around here, people knew him.

Within ten days, Gustave Wallberg would be standing at a podium on a platform in a mountain meadow, his minions about him, beginning his speech. What odds that he would finish it?

The clerk gave Thorne a nine-by-twelve envelope when he stopped at the Mayflower’s massive front desk to say he’d be away for a few days. He stuck it into a topcoat pocket so the watchers outside wouldn’t see it, opened it in the taxi on the way across the Potomac to Reagan National. From Doyle, obviously.

The Delta crime scene data. The .357 Magnum had been purchased by Damon Mather in a St. Paul gunstore in mid-March of the previous year, probably for self-defense when Corwin turned up alive. Which greatly increased the odds that Corwin had been right, Mather had shot him. So why hadn’t Damon shot when Corwin stormed the houseboat? The only fingerprints on the weapon were Corwin’s. The ultimate irony: Mather and Nisa had been murdered with their own firearm. How had Corwin gotten it away from them?

Thorne put the report away. From the doctor at Portage, he hoped to learn how debilitating Corwin’s injuries had been. In ’Nam Corwin had been a thousand-yard assassin. Would those injuries prevent him from going for the sniper’s shot against Wallberg?

Since Hatfield couldn’t resist peering over his shoulder, Brendan Thorne didn’t check the vehicle awaiting him at the Minneapolis airport — a Crown Vic, of course — for the GPS transmitter he knew would be hidden on the car’s underbody. Without visual surveillance the GPS tracker was useless anyway. He would just be going exactly where they expected him to go. He just hoped to learn things they didn’t expect him to learn. Things they hadn’t learned in their own interviews.

On the drive north, Minnesota 169 reminded him of the Alcan Highway with its flanking muskegs on the way to Fairbanks. A flat landscape broken by dark green evergreens growing thicker with every passing mile. To his right lay the vast expanse of Lake Mille Lacs. It was a clear day: blue water and bright sun, fishermen in motor-boats trolling for walleyes, or plug-casting along the lake’s weedy edges for northern pike and pickerel.

During the winter, the frozen lake would be dotted with ice-fishermen’s shacks on runners, smoke coming from their stovepipes. Kids, as he and his buddies had done in Alaska, would be making ice rinks by shovelling away the snow, piling up backpacks at either end to make impromptu goals for afterschool hockey games.

Portage. Three bars. Two churches. Cafe, Italian restaurant, pizza joint, shops, supermarket, drug store, hardware store, bank, three-story granite City Hall and sheriff’s office on the town square. Wilmot’s General Store with handmade crepe-paper Easter cutouts fading in the windows. The Chateau Theater with FOR RENT FOR PARTIES OR MEETINGS on the marquee in black capital letters that once had spelled out current movie titles.

Thorne drove through on Main Street to the Bide-A-Wee, one of the town’s two motels, asked for the furthest corner room from habit, said he’d be one night, maybe two. The wide-hipped woman checking him in had faded blue eyes and a stingy chin and the midwest twang most Minnesotans didn’t even know they had.