Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘I did some killing in Panama, yeah, but I don’t do that any more. I resigned because I shot a couple of innocents by mistake.’

‘I’m not asking you to kill,’ said Wallberg. ‘I just want you to come up with scenarios of how you might kill me. The FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper team will do the rest. Right, Terrill?’

‘Right. He won’t have to get his lily-white hands dirty.’

‘I’m not going to force you to accept.’ Wallberg glared balefully around the table. ‘I am ordering your full exoneration in Kenya if you take the job or not. But — I need you.’

They wanted him to play a chess game where you never saw your opponent’s board, he never saw yours. Neither of you could be sure the other existed. The greatest stalk a hunter could have, of the most dangerous game on earth, and he wasn’t expected to kill anyone. All he had to do was find an ex-sniper who had become a foreign mercenary and had murdered his own daughter. Hatfield and his goons would do the rest. A worthy stalk of a worthy opponent, without personally facing that dreadful enticing moment of kill or not kill.

‘Let’s do it, Mr. President.’

Watching Wallberg, Thorne saw a not-so-subtle release of tension. The squared shoulders relaxed, the hard knots of muscle at the corners of the mouth softened.

‘I feel in my heart that you’re going to stop this man.’

Jaeger said, ‘A major’s pay and perks. In the morning, go to the Mayflower Hotel shops and pick up a wardrobe more suited to the climate. Hastings and Peter will be logistical support.’

Hatfield said, ‘I’ll schedule your psychiatric interview and psy tests. You’ve been through it before with the CIA, but your records are ten years old.’

The Mayflower Hotel. First cabin. And he could ace the psychological tests — he always had.

The general exodus left Jaeger and Hatfield alone. Hatfield said, ‘He’s more of a liability than an asset.’

‘What’s your problem with this man, Terrill? That’s what psy tests are for. I know you regard your team highly, but they didn’t do shit in the Delta or at King’s Canyon. What we need are results.’ He added, with a shrug that came out almost as a shiver, ‘Maybe Thorne can stop that psychotic son of a bitch.’

That psychotic son of a bitch wound his way through the raspberry and prickly ash that had replaced the white pine and balsam destroyed by a lightning fire years before. He went quickly past the fire-blasted spruce a thousand feet down the burn before pausing to strip off the glove that kept his maimed hand from aching on this chilly April day.

His left hand was jerked sideways by a hurtling slug. A spray of salty blood splattered across his lips...

At the cabin, he added a log to the embers in the stone fireplace, started cleaning his rifle. Post 9/11 there were many new hi-tec sniper rifles, laser sights and all the rest, but for him, the Winchester Model 70 he had carried ever since ’Nam.

An hour later, he poured coffee from the tin pot on the hearth, booted up his computer, and used Google to confirm that, as usual, the President’s Press Secretary was not making a lot of announcements about Wallberg’s movements outside Washington. His inaugural-day letter? Good. Let those bastards sweat a little.

‘Should I be doing a little sweating myself?’ he asked the sometime pursuer in his dreaming mind. No answer. He never got any response from Nisa when he spoke aloud to her, either.

At 1:45 p.m. he remembered breakfast and heated up a can of the spicy chili that Janet Kestrel had gotten him addicted to.

Thorne walked out Connecticut Ave from the Mayflower for his 3:30 appointment in Georgetown. He needed the time to think things through.

His first problem was Hatfield’s hostility. Where did it come from? What did it mean? It was like the man really didn’t want him to find Corwin, which made no sense. When the CIA had run their tests on him ten years ago, they had choppered him to Langley. But instead of sending him to the FBI’s pros at Quantico, Hatfield was farming him out to some supposedly independent psychiatrist who might be in Hatfield’s pocket.

If he misread Hatfield, could he end up rotting in a Kenyan jail on the phony poaching charge despite the president’s assurances of immunity?

Second problem. What if he actually found Corwin? He knew from Tsavo that he still could be seduced by violence, by the adrenaline rush. Could he break his vow again to save the president’s life, and again face his nightmare, maybe forever? Would it be better to just slip back into the easy, morally safe life at Sikuzuri, and let Hatfield find Corwin — if he could?

No. He might end up in jail instead of Tsavo. He had to get a read on Hatfield’s motivations from the shrink while the shrink was trying to get a read on his.

Three names, all MDs, were etched into the discreet brass plaque beside the front door of the mellow weathered brick house just off Wisconsin Avenue. There was a security camera above the door. The airy waiting room would have once been a living room, probably wall-to-wall then. Now, gleaming hardwood, a tube-aluminum and nubble-fabric couch and half a dozen chairs along the side walls, tables with lamps and magazines between, framed hunting prints above, flowery freshener on the air. Three identical doors set into the far wall. A den of shrinks.

On the couch, a frosty-haired woman looked straight ahead with a combat veteran’s thousand-yard stare. In one of the chairs, a middle-aged man with dense eyebrows and hairy ears and a big nose was almost surreptitiously reading a magazine.

The middle door opened. A white-coated, worried-looking man with a Sigmund Freud beard peered out. ‘Mr. Hedges?’

Hairy-Ears jerked so violently that the New Yorker shot off his lap onto the floor like a tossed frisbee.

‘Yes, I, um, here, ah... present...’

He went through the door. The shrink closed it behind both of them. Thorne went over to pick up the magazine and put it on a table. The frosty-haired woman winked at him. Three minutes went by. The right hand door opened, she entered, it closed.

Out in Hopland, on northern California’s Redwood Highway, Janet Kestrel turned from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino cafeteria’s pick-up counter with her order of chili and coffee. From beyond the plain partition walls came the ringing of bells, the whirr of slotmachine wheels, the cries of winners, groans of losers, the calls of blackjack dealers, amplified announcements of jackpots.

She took an empty table. The reply to her letter had said she should be here for a twelve-thirty interview with Charlie Quickfox, president of the tribal council. She was deliberately early, uneasy because she had denied this half of her heritage for the past decade and felt like a fraud by coming here now.

At 12:15, a stocky, elderly man sat down across from her with a mug of steaming black coffee. He had a seamed lived-in face as brown as hers, but his eyes were a piercing black to her blue. Grey hair made a long pony-tail down his back. His cowboy boots were muddy, his jeans pale with washing. His tie was a leather string held in place by a beaten silver clasp in the stylized shape of a perching hawk.

He pointed at her water glass with its Sho-Ka-Wah logo that included the same stylized perching hawk, this one pink and gold.

‘The kestrel. Our tribe’s symbol. There is no Hopland clan name of Kestrel, yet that’s what you’re calling yourself.’

‘Better than my mother’s name — Jones. She was white. She’s dead. My father’s name was Roanhorse. He’s dead too.’

Quickfox’s stern face softened. ‘Roanhorse. We played football together at Santa Rosa High School.’

‘He drowned in a pool of his own vomit.’