Glass Tiger (11 page)

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…

He came erect with a jerk, self-loathing forgotten. A travel itinerary! Ten stops in five states in six days, starting two weeks from today. One site leaped out at him from all the towns and cities and rural areas listed. Years ago, unwinding between overseas jobs, he’d gone on a hiking trip near that spot.

Leaving Terry home to mind baby. Memory wrenched an unexpected sob from him. After Terry’s death, he had gone to the site of the hit-and-run on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. Terry was crossing with the green light when a Mercury Cougar knocked her catty-corner across the intersection and smashed her against the second-story window of an office building sixty feet away.

They caught up with the hit-and-run driver a week later. He lost his license for a year. Corwin took a vow to stalk him and take him from his wife as the man had taken Terry from him.

That same night the nightmare started. The THUD of impact, he was running hard across the intersection to catch Terry before she hit the sidewalk. He was too late. As he knelt beside her broken body, she floated to her feet and began to glide away.

He ran after her, calling her name, pursuing her through the hot, devastated landscapes of his mercenary assignments, dead bodies strewn about. She paused to look back at him with great sadness, then disappeared into a grove of mortar-shredded palm trees and was gone. That was when he awoke. Every time.

The nightmare continued during two more years of mercenary jobs before he finally understood what Terry was telling him: No more killing. No more dealing out death in hot countries. No more thoughts of killing the man who had killed her.

He deeded their house to Nisa, went into the north woods to become a trapper and a hunter of animals, not men. The nightmare stopped. The years went by. Then he was shot himself, his attacker’s slugs taking him down, ripping his flesh, leaving him half-crippled, distorted of mind and emotion. He couldn’t hunt even animals any more. His life was over.

But Nisa began driving up to visit him at Whitby Hernild’s little clinic in Portage. As he healed, she invited him down to St. Paul for Christmas. When he tried to find out who had shot him, and why, she had helped him look…

Back to the site of Wallberg’s speech. It would work. He would make it work. Energized, he limped aross the little cabin to get his fleece-lined jacket from its peg on
the wall beside the fireplace. He went to the wardrobe he had built to hold his clothes and meager possessions, and got out his gun case.

The rifle, the scope, the ammo that he would use on that day. There was so much newer, better sniper hardware now. The
M
-40
A
3 rifle, and the newest night scope, the
AN/PVS
-10. But it wasn’t the hardware that counted: it was the software, the wiring inside the brain and body that made the great sniper.

From now until he left for the Bitterroot Wilderness Area, all of his practice shots would be made at a thousand yards out, out beyond any imaginable security perimeter, out where even now only a few shooters could go. If he really existed, was the dangerous tracking beast of his dreams one of them? Anyway, no way could he divine where and when Hal Corwin would strike.

Corwin took his rifle out into the cold northern spring day. A vivid flash of memory: going deer-hunting for the first time with his dad so many years before. The thud of hunters’ shots, thirteen of them, and his father saying, there’ll be blood on the snow tonight…

The president and all of the president’s men were going to western Montana. Waiting there for them, rifle in hand, would be Halden Corwin. There’d be blood on the snow that night, too.

Brendan Thorne sauntered across the opulent Mayflower lobby, a man at loose ends. Jock Number One yawned, folded his newspaper while standing up from his lobby chair. Outside the revolving door to Connecticut Avenue, Thorne set off toward the Georgetown Dock, knowing the invisible net surrounded him.

He strolled through the gathering dusk to the three-story, glass-clad restaurant. No awning-covered drinks kiosk at street level for him tonight, no beer in a plastic
glass. He chose a table on the second outside level, set for dinner.

Hornrims from the library and the lady hiker with the thighs – tonight demurely covered by a mid-calf dress – took a nearby table to chat animatedly about their non-existent jobs at Georgetown University. When the waitress brought water and a menu, he spoke loudly enough for the Feebs to overhear.

‘I’d like a glass of the house chardonnay and an appetiser of fried clams to start. And a slice of lemon in my water.’

She wrote on her pad. ‘Very good, sir.’

She detoured by the Feebs’ table to leave menus. Thorne watched the brightly-lit parkway traffic on the Virginia side of the Potomac. As she returned with his wine, he saw the white tour boat line up to begin its transverse under Key Bridge.

‘Your clams will be right up, sir.’ She had a Georgia accent and mahogany skin and an elaborate corn-row hairdo.

‘Thank you. And, oh, miss, where are the rest rooms?’

‘Inside, sir, on the third floor.’

He slipped two twenties under his water glass where the two Feebs couldn’t see them, then went up the stairs to the sparkling ornate indoor restaurant. Neither stood to follow him. Past the stairs, through the kitchen to the narrow garbage-pail-lined alley behind, through the deserted not-yet completed galleria behind the bowl-shaped mall enclosing the massive fountain.

Tourists were still disembarking from the tour boat to the dock beyond the little park beyond the mall. Thorne stepped aboard four minutes after leaving his table at the restaurant.

Inside the enclosed cabin were a dozen rows of unoccupied benches and a steep narrow stairway leading up to the bridge. Aft, between the doors to the rear observation deck, an acned teenager in the tall paper hat was pouring hot fresh corn from the popper. The aroma filled the cabin.

Thorne chose a bench well forward where he could see the stubby gangplank. No more riders came aboard after him. The pilot climbed the stairs to the bridge. He was not over twenty years old, with a great shock of unruly blond hair.

They cast off to slide away from the dock, then turned down river toward Alexandria. A canned commentary pointed out the sights on either side of the river, but in the dark, little could be seen except moving headlights on the flanking parkways.

A mother and her ten-year-old son chose the bench ahead of Thorne’s. The boy got up on his knees to shoot through the window glass with a palmsize video camera, then sat down and pushed buttons to review his footage.

Two teenage girls sat down on the far side of the cabin, giggling and gossiping. Four more teens joined them. All wore leather jackets and jeans. One girl held up her hand and made baby-bird-opening-its-beak gestures with it. A boy bought popcorn, and shoved a handful of it into her mouth while the others laughed. They all were speaking Russian. Only in D.C.

—

The tour boat slid into its berth at the Cameron and Union Street Dock in Old Town Alexandria at seven-thirty. A Dixieland band was playing with large enthusiasm and small talent in front of the Torpedo Factory, left over from World War II and converted into an Art Center. The smell of broiling steaks from a fancy restaurant on the dock made Thorne’s mouth water. He hadn’t gotten to eat his fried clams.

Way up at the very far end of King Street glittered the George Washington Masonic Memorial. Thorne walked up toward it past Market Square and the Apothecary Museum. There were cobbles underfoot, and the old houses and office buildings of weathered and painted brick were lovingly cared for.

The foot traffic was mostly local folks out for an evening stroll. He stopped to pet a black and white springer spaniel.

‘His name is Tuxie,’ said the zaftig blonde with the dog. ‘Because his white chest is like a tuxedo.’

‘Nice name,’ said Thorne. ‘Nice dog.’

She nodded, making golden curls jump. ‘Dogs are the best people there are,’ she said seriously.

The Hard Times Cafe was halfway up King Street from the dock. Inside, booths flanked the heavy door along the front wall, none of them occupied. Behind a deserted reception desk was a bar half-filled with drinkers on this weekday evening.

Thorne took a booth and asked for a draft beer, a bacon cheeseburger, and fries. If Johnny Doyle didn’t show, at least he’d get a chance to eat. He’d just leaned back on his bench with a sigh of repletion when a shadow loomed over him. Doyle, red-faced and disheveled, with a slight slurring of his words.

‘Thorne! What the hell are you doing here?’

Thorne got to his feet and stuck out his hand. Johnny took it. His palm was moist.

‘I was at the Georgetown Dock and saw the Old Town tour boat and jumped aboard. Let my buy you a drink.’

‘Let me get mine from the bar. I was in the can.’

He came back, half-empty glass in hand, sat down across from Thorne, and leaned confidentially across the table.

‘No crap now, Thorne, how’d you end up at the Hard Times?’

Even high, he was no fool.

‘I wanted to thank you for those phone logs.’

‘What phone logs?’ Doyle dead-panned. He motioned with his empty glass. ‘I’m shelebrating the end of my career.’

Thorne caught the waiter’s eye, made a circular gesture for refills. ‘I guess I’m not following.’

‘You heard about the president’sh barnstorming tour?’

‘It was on Fox News Channel.’

‘Full-court press. Front men out an’ everything.’

‘Hey, that’s great! Since you were a front man during—’

‘No, it’s shitty. I pissed the Old Man off just suggesting I be one of them.’ He downed half his new drink, lifted his eyes to meet Thorne’s gaze. ‘I know I drink too much, but it’sh never interfered with my work. It’sh those two pricks, Crandall and Quarles. They’re ass-lickers an’ they’re probably queer for each other an’ they’re always tellin’ the Prez I’m unreliable.’

‘I thought all three of you were with the president in Minnesota during his years as governor.’

‘Yeah. Good times. Me an’ Jaeger an’ Crandall an’ Quarles an’ Nisa…’

He shook his head. ‘Beau’ful, shmart p’litically. She an’ me usta be buds. Tol’ each other things.’

‘Why didn’t she join Wallberg’s presidential campaign?’

‘He was bangin her while he was gov’nor, ’fore an’ after she married Mather. Was Wallberg broke it off, when he shtarted his run for president. Y’know, knight errant, sittin’ up over ’is armor, regain his purity, all that shit. She was cryin’ an’ let it shlip when I asked her wha’ was wrong…’

Regaining his purity might have been what he told Nisa, but the truth would have been different: fear that the affair might be discovered under the intense, minute scrutiny any presidential candidate was subjected to by the media. Thorne realized he hadn’t been listening; Doyle was staring at him, blear-eyed.

‘Was ’nother reason, too. Our wunnerful Chief of Staff, Kurt fuckin’ Jaeger, had th’ hotsh for her. She turn’d ’m down cold, he started goin’ af’er campaign workers, lottsa complaints. Sho…’ Doyle chortled. ‘Early days o’ th’ campaign, black pimp in LA named Sharkey shtarted findin ’im black local hookersh anywhere, any time, din’t mind gettin’ beat on.’

Nothing in any of that for Thorne. He asked, ‘Why’d Nisa rejoin the campaign after Wallberg got the nomination?’

‘Couldn’ shtay ’way. Pol’tics in her blood. Draf’ed his speeshes, worked out th’ campaign shtrategy…’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Ol’ Wallberg, he foun’ out Corwin was after ’em, he dumped ’em both. Cold. C’n you b’lieve ’at? An’ they got dead. ‘Coursh mosta Wallberg’s big idealsh jus’ bullshit. While he was shtill th’ Guv he tol’ us he was shcared some guy knew somethin’ could do him outta the pres’dental nomination…’

Couldn’t have been Corwin. He and Wallberg, kids in high school together, sure. But Wallberg’s father was the mayor of Rochester – those early years were an open
book. Still, if Mather heard Wallberg’s remark and thought Corwin was that threat, he might have thought Wallberg would owe him if he…

‘Was Damon Mather there the day he said that?’

‘Can’t ’member. Whatta fuck differensh it make now?’ He lurched to his feet, staggered unsteadily toward the men’s room.

Was there anything useful in all these drunken character assassinations? Yeah. Something was hidden in Wallberg’s past.

When Doyle shambled back, Thorne said, ‘Y’know, Johnny, that FBI guy, Hatfield, is sure making my job a lot harder by denying me access to the documents I need.’

‘Yeah. I ’member you ashkin’ bout th’ forensicsh an’ provenance on the murder weapon. Crime schene. Gun.’ Doyle put a finger alongside his nose. ‘Jush leave it to ol’ Johnny.’

Thorne walked him home to his apartment on Cameron Street two blocks from the Hard Times Cafe, caught the last tour boat to Georgetown at ten o’clock. He walked back to his hotel.

The watchers were on duty outside. He could almost hear their collective sigh of relief when he showed up. They hadn’t tossed his room and they probably wouldn’t tell Hatfield he’d been in the wind for almost six hours.

The next morning, Thorne got an e-mail message from Victor Blackburn on one of the hotel computers maintained for guests.