Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Did I?

Thorne pulled a chair over to the window, sat staring out.

Did Corwin mean that literally? Or, dying, just did not want to believe that he had missed, that Wallberg was still alive? It made no sense that Corwin would want to kill Jaeger.

A bulky man carrying a small valise was silhouetted by the street light as he crossed the parking lot toward a Ford sedan by the office. A mongrel with an ear flopped down over one eye like a beret crossed in front of him. The man aimed a boot at it. Yipping, the dog avoided the kick, a matador avoiding the horn.

Thorne let his thoughts slip into the void, as Myamoto Musashi, the great Samurai swordsman, had called it. Could Corwin conceivably have survived as Hatfield had feared? It had been a steel-jacketed bullet, not a hollow-point, it might have passed right through his body, missing all the vital organs...

No. The man was dead. Thorne’s own bad dreams told him that. Hatfield would come through with the airplane ticket, and official confirmation that Thorne was free to go back to Kenya. He told himself that’s what he wanted: to be well out of it.

Hatfield was driving his golf cart from the Camp David heliport to the President’s cabin when his pager vibrated. He pulled over, punched the number into his cellphone.

‘Hatfield.’

Doug Greene’s voice said, ‘The phone bug is in place, and the transmitters are in Thorne’s clothes and luggage.’

‘What about the GPS?’

‘Ray put it under Thorne’s rented Cherokee before dawn this morning. At eleven a.m., the vehicle became stationary at a family-style restaurant on highway 93 five miles north of town.’

‘Okay. Good work, both of you. Keep it up.’

Getting out of the Cherokee, Thorne stopped dead. The motel parking lot, 4:30 that morning, the asshole who tried to kick the dog on his way to a Ford Crown Victoria sedan. And the Crown Vic’s interior light had not gone on, an old security trick to keep anyone from seeing the driver’s face.

Thorne had not parked beside the blank back wall of the Bounding Elk Restaurant because he wanted to hide his presence there, but because tradecraft died hard. If Hatfield had bugged his car, he had to know, without Hatfield knowing he knew. Just in case something deeper than Hatfield’s paranoia was going on.

Thorne got his flashlight out of the glovebox, found a flattened cardboard box in the dumpster, and laid it on the ground beside the Cherokee as a makeshift mechanic’s Rollerboy. Using his heels, he slid himself under the car.

His flashlight found two small, square devices, lashed together with duct tape, attached by a magnet to the car’s frame below the driver’s seat: a satellite receiver, and a CelluLink transmitter with a snub antenna for the monitoring station’s connection. Strung along the under-carriage to the back of the vehicle, a power wire for the GPS antenna. Thorne had studied a similar device ten years ago while training at the Farm.

He slid back out. He had been under for less than two minutes. It took him another minute to spot the miniature wafer-thin GPS disk antenna set behind the rear bumper. It would be in a direct line with a communications satellite above.

A bug on his car meant a bug on his motel room phone, too.

The usual suspects were seated around the table in the spacious front room of the presidential cabin at Camp David. Hatfield, there to report, Wallberg, his yes-men Quarles and Crandall, and, hovering in the background, Johnny Doyle.

Wallberg said, ‘Let’s all bow our heads for a minute of silent prayer for Kurt Jaeger, a brave man who gave his life for his country.’ He soon raised his head and intoned, ‘Amen.’

Hatfield stood up, thankful for the prayer. He wanted to subtly invoke Jaeger’s specter: He is dead, Mr. President, and you are alive, because of one man: me, Terrill Hatfield.

He began his report.

‘Halden Corwin took his shot at twelve-hundred yards out from an improvised sniper’s nest on the eastern slope overlooking the meadow.’ He did not remind them that Thorne had originally proposed this scenario. ‘I killed him before he could kill you.’

Wallberg had dropped ten years. ‘The details, man!’

‘I caught a glint of metal at the narrow mouth of a V-shaped ravine, so I worked my way up within a hundred yards of it. And there was Corwin, just about to shoot. He got off his round, Mr. President, but my simultaneous body-mass hit knocked his aim off. He had just enough life left in him to roll into a mountain stream rushing down the hillside behind his sniper nest and be swept away.’

‘Enough life left to roll into the stream!’ There was a rising note of rage, perhaps mixed with panic, in the president’s voice. ‘Without a body, you don’t know a damned thing!’

‘Mr... President... he... is... dead. I made the standard take-out shot, under the arm and into the chest cavity. The crawl trail to the creek showed heavy blood-loss. Preliminary FBI Lab DNA tests confirm that it is Corwin’s blood. Coupled with the wound, the shock of the icy water killed him within minutes, perhaps seconds.’

‘You don’t know that! What’s the usual procedure here? Infra-red fly-overs, a massive sweep... manpower...’

He paused. He was a politician, not a manhunter. Hatfield slid into the silence easily.

‘In this kind of situation, Mr. President, bloodhounds. They miss nothing. And I already have them on site. I’m sorry I wasn’t in time to save Chief of Staff Jaeger, but Hal Corwin is dead. The bloodhounds will find his remains.’

He paused, wanting to dissipate the tension in the room, then took a chance, and stole Thorne’s off-hand remark.

‘Unless Smokey and Winnie the Pooh find him first.’

There were several chuckles around the table; even Wallberg had to crack a smile.

It had worked. He had gotten past the fact he had no body to offer to the president. And he knew that once Gus Wallberg got back behind his desk, the issue of Corwin’s body would soon fade from the man’s memory even if they never found it.

Victory Number Two: Brendan Thorne was not even mentioned.

Thorne took a stroll around Hamilton, killing time until he heard something from Hatfield. When he got back to the motel, he checked at the desk for messages. None. The toothpick he had lodged between the frame and the bottom edge of the room’s door was still there. Since finding the transmitter, he felt as if he were living in a glass house with the interior spotlights turned on. He lay down on the bed. In stasis.

‘Shit,’ said Ray Franklin. The QuikTrak historical data file showed that Thorne’s Jeep Cherokee hadn’t moved since he had gotten back from breakfast. Right now, Thorne was being a good boy: but he had a nasty surprise waiting for him. Hatfield had promised them that.

The phone interrupted his thoughts. It was the front desk. A package had just been delivered by messenger.

The fist Thorne had been awaiting pounded on the door. It could only be Ray Franklin — and was. Behind him was a short, chubby agent with avid killer’s eyes who had to be Franklin’s partner, Walt Greene. It would have taken both of them to bug his car and his phone as quickly as they had. He let none of this show in his eyes.

‘I hope you guys have something for me.’

Greene was darting his own eyes around the room, like maybe he hoped to find Thorne hiding a scantily-clad underage girl there. Franklin thrust a bulky sealed envelope at Thorne.

‘Yeah, Special Agent Hatfield instructed us to give this to you.’ He paused. ‘Meanwhile, from me, fuck you.’

Thorne didn’t answer. Just took the envelope and closed the door. Inside the envelope was his severance paycheck from the FBI, and a one-way ticket, Dulles International to Nairobi International, in four days’ time.