Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘Any trouble, Terrill?’ the cigar-chomper asked.

Hatfield sneered at Thorne. ‘From this hunk of shit?’

‘Okay, okay, we all know you’re a tough guy.’ Without offering to shake hands he said to Thorne, ‘My name is—’

‘Kurt Jaeger. President Wallberg’s Chief of Staff.’

Jaeger shot a quick, hard, angry look at Hatfield, who put his hands up in the universal palms out not-me gesture.

‘We can cut across, then.’ Jaeger gestured at the handsome one. ‘Hastings Crandall, Presidential Press Secretary.’ At the chubby blond one. ‘Peter Quarles, Presidential Aide.’ At Thorne’s captor, ‘Terrill Hatfield is—’

‘A Feeb,’ said Thorne.

Jaeger chuckled. ‘He’s good, Terrill. Yes, Mr. Hatfield’s FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper Team is on special assignment to me.’

So the suits on the Gulfstream would be part of Hatfield’s hand-picked team of ball-busters, thinking of themselves as the saviors of the non-Muslim world.

‘Okay, that tells me who. Now one of you tell me why.’

Nondescript, round-faced Peter Quarles spoke up.

‘Chief-of-Staff Jaeger tasked us with a computer search. The computer picked you from several hundred possibles.’

‘Picked me to do what?’

Jaeger said smoothly, almost soothingly, ‘To figure out a foolproof way to assassinate Gustave Wallberg, the President of the United States.’

‘Fuck you and the whore you rode in on,’ snapped Thorne, shaken. He’d known it would be bad; just not this bad. ‘I’m nobody’s fucking assassin.’ Hatfield said, ‘At Tsavo—’

‘Kill or be killed, Jack. Not like this.’ He wouldn’t do it, no matter what. ‘I believe Wallberg will be a hell of a president. I even voted absentee for him, the first time since 1988. I won’t figure out a way to kill him for you assholes.’

‘I really do hope you’ll reconsider.’ Thorne turned. Advancing with outstretched hand from the door in the far wall was President Gustave Wallberg, heavyweight charisma in his grin. ‘Out of curiosity, who did you vote for in eighty-eight?’

‘Bush. The first one. He and Nixon are the only statesmen we’ve had in my lifetime. And maybe Gorbachev.’

‘Not of my party, but a wise choice,’ said Wallberg.

Brendan Thorne sat on the President’s right, Jaeger on his left, Hatfield across from him. The two kids were just there. A third mid-twenties man, redheaded and with shrewd blue eyes in a round ruddy drinker’s face, came in from the far wall door. The shrewd eyes took them in with a single bitter sweep.

‘Could you bring us some coffee, Johnny?’

‘Coming right up, Mr. President,’ Johnny said moodily.

Obviously part of the original team along with Hastings and Crandall, reduced to a gofer, and not liking it. Had he gotten aced out by them? Or by Jaeger? Or by the booze?

Wallberg said, ‘When I was in high school in Rochester, Minnesota, my best friend was a kid named Hal Corwin. We played football and hockey together. After graduation I went to the U of Minnesota, he went to Rochester JC. After four months, Hal quit college to join the army. I have not seen him since. Just last year I learned he had been a sniper behind enemy lines in ’Nam. An assassin. Apparently, on his return, like many Vietnam vets, he had a hard time adjusting to civilian life.’

Jaeger took over. ‘He reputedly became a foreign mercenary — this gun for hire. His wife was killed by a drunk driver when he was out of the country. In some roundabout way his daughter, Nisa, blamed him for the death of her mother. I guess he accepted that guilt; in any event, he became a recluse in the forests of northern Minnesota.’

Thorne felt as if all the air had been driven out of his body by the parallel with himself. Did they know about Alison and Eden? No. They couldn’t. No one in government knew.

Hatfield said, ‘A year ago last November, Corwin was wounded in a hunting accident. In retrospect, we believe that while recovering he developed some sort of bizarre paranoid fantasy that his son-in-law had shot him. Deliberately.’

Jaeger cleared his throat, his heavy face solemn.

‘At the time, President Wallberg was Governor of Minnesota and was developing... what should I say?’

‘Presidential ambitions,’ said Wallberg. He added with a grin, ‘God, Brendan, did I have presidential ambitions!’

‘The Governor was assembling a campaign evaluation team. Myself, Hastings, Peter...’ Jaeger gestured at the redhead just returning with a carafe of hot coffee and accessories, ‘Johnny Doyle here. Nisa, Corwin’s daughter. When we committed to the campaign, she said she was worn out and resigned. Her husband, Damon Mather, stayed on.’

‘She volunteered for my first gubernatorial campaign when she was in college,’ explained Wallberg, ‘and worked on my second campaign as an adult. She came back aboard when I won the Democratic party nomination. She had a fine political mind. But in the last weeks of the campaign, both she and her husband resigned from my staff without telling us why.’

Jaeger said, ‘We believe now that Corwin had started stalking them, and they went to hide out on a houseboat in the California Delta. Nisa called on election day in a panic. Somehow Corwin had learned where they were. I grabbed a couple of private guards at campaign headquarters, but we had to drive up from LA because the tule fog had grounded air traffic in the valley. A seven-car crash on 1–5 north of Stockton tied traffic up all the way back to Manteca. We didn’t get to the Delta until two a.m. By then Corwin had already murdered them both.’

Murdered his own daughter? God, if Eden was still alive...

‘There was gunfire,’ said Hatfield. ‘The local cops went in, but he was gone. Since they had resigned from the campaign, the Secret Service couldn’t investigate. Mr. Jaeger asked my FBI team to look for Corwin’s body in the Delta. After six days, we decided that he had either drowned or died of his wounds.’

‘So why am I here?’ demanded Thorne. ‘Get the charges against me dropped and fly me back to Kenya with no hard fee—’

‘Charges?’ demanded Wallberg, suddenly icy.

Hatfield looked uneasy. ‘Thorne has been, ah, deported from Kenya on a poaching charge.’

‘I told you to ask him if he would come. Ask him.’

Jaeger scaled a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve across the table.

‘It came the morning of the President’s swearing-in.’

Thorne read: CONGRATULATIONS TO A DEAD PRESIDENT. CORWIN.

He objected mildly, ‘Anybody could have sent this.’

‘Nobody outside this room knows it was Corwin at the Delta. Not even the Secret Service.’

‘My men traced someone we think is Corwin to King’s Canyon National Park in California,’ said Hatfield. ‘Two of my Hostage Rescue/Sniper team members, Ray Franklin and Walt Greene, showed his picture around, got a maybe identification. They got to his campsite up on the ridge trail just twenty minutes too late.’

Wallberg blurted, ‘It’s all crazy! I haven’t thought about Hal in years, but apparently he thinks I put Damon up to shooting him. He murdered Damon. He murdered Nisa.’ His voice rose. ‘Now he wants to murder me. He has to be stopped.’

Hastings Crandall, the Press Secretary, said, ‘I had Pete run a computer search to evaluate hundreds of ex-servicemen. You’re a generation behind Corwin, but you were a close match. The parallels are amazing. He grew up in Minnesota, you in Alaska, you both hunted all your lives. He was Special Forces in ’Nam, then a mercenary. You were a Ranger in Panama, then did classified stuff for a CIA front. After some unknown trauma in your life, you became a recluse in Kenya as he did in Minnesota.’