Glass Tiger (19 page)

Did I?

Thorne’s world had just been turned upside down.

It is no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.

Ovid,
Metamorphoses

Within hours, the headlines would shout it: WALLBERG SAFE CHIEF OF STAFF KURT JAEGER KILLED WOULD-BE PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN SHOOTS WRONG MAN

Gustave Wallberg and First Lady Edith Wallberg sat side-by-side in their luxurious aisle seats on Air Force One, unabashedly holding hands. For security reasons, there were no accompanying newsmen, thus no one to make public their private closeness.

For Edith, it was easy. Gus had cheated on her with Nisa Corwin, but she had stifled her anger and hurt and jealousy and had never spoken out, and the affair had ended. Now he was for her alone, alive, to become one of America’s great Presidents.

For Wallberg, not so easy. He had been terrified and was still shaky. It was only because some mountain wind had blown a tiny hurtling bit of lead a couple of feet off course that the shot meant for his chest had exploded another man’s head.

Beyond any normal survival guilt was the fact he was relieved that Kurt was dead. He had been forced to make Jaeger his Chief of Staff, and next term would have had to make him Secretary of State. Because on election night…

He could see the two of them vividly, knee-to-knee in straight-back chairs in the disused ballroom on the roof
of the Beverly Hills Marquis. Like that famous photo of Jack and Bobby in a similar pose. Kurt was talking, using his hands.

‘Corwin must already be on his way to the Delta.’

How had Corwin even found them? Wallberg wondered.

‘What if we do nothing? That might solve—’

‘True, they wouldn’t be around to talk to the media, Governor. But Corwin would be.’ He leaned closer. ‘I know a man here in LA who can make all of this… go away.’

There it was: his bargain with the devil that had put him in Kurt Jaeger’s ambitious hands. But what else could he have done? Sometimes individual deaths had to serve the greater good.

‘Mr. President? I have that preliminary report.’

Shayne O’Hara was sliding into the seat across the aisle from him. Just as quickly, Edith slipped by her husband’s knees.

‘I’ll just leave you men to it.’

When she was out of earshot, O’Hara said, ‘The FBI and my Secret Service agents have initiated a security sweep of the survivalists and ranchers on the list of those vocally opposed to the release of grizzlies into the Bitterroot Wilderness Area.’

Wallberg had to remember that the conventional FBI and the Secret Service were paddling around over there in the lilypads, chasing terrorists domestic and foreign, not knowing that it was no terrorist, but Hal Corwin, who had tried and failed.

‘Our other main focus is of course Al-Qaeda. They could have used a mercenary from some former Iron Curtain country as their assassin. If they did, we’ll quickly vector in on him.’

‘Ahh… Who’s handling the on-site investigation?’

O’Hara leaned back; for the first time, his heavy red features were almost relaxed. The buck was about to get passed.

‘We know the shot came from up on the eastern rock face. Hatfield insisted that he and his Hostage/Rescue lads cover it. It makes sense. They are highly trained, and they were already up on the mountain.’

Out of shape from all of those Washington months, Hatfield hauled himself up, panting, to an open rocky V that was shielded from below by scrub pines. Just another possible site, this one impossibly far out. He jerked his Glock from its holster before realizing that the man squatting with his back against the smooth rock wall was Thorne, not Corwin. Thorne looked exhausted, drained. His hair was wet, as was his shirt down to mid-chest. A Winchester Model 70 rifle rested butt-down on the ground between his knees, the muzzle pointing up past his left ear.

Hatfield’s voice was squeaky with adrenaline.

‘What in the fuck are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been on site since I left D.C., but what difference does it make? Wallberg is still alive, no thanks to you.’

‘My men were in place seven hundred-fifty yards out—’

‘Facing the wrong way. You assholes maybe, just maybe, if any of you can shoot for shit, could have killed the bears from there. You sure as hell couldn’t have killed Corwin. I did.’

‘Where’s the body?’

‘In the stream.’

Hatfield was enraged. He wanted to smash Thorne over the head with a gunbutt, but refrained. Refrained from calling in the rest of his team, too. At the moment, only Thorne – and soon, he – would know what had
really gone down here. He wanted to keep it that way if he could.

So he went looking, prowling the little V-shaped ravine, noting the rifle on its tripod, the laborious blood trail back to the noisy torrent rushing by. A lot of blood. It looked arterial to him. But still…

He returned to Thorne. ‘Again. Where’s his fucking body?’

‘I told you, in the stream. He looked dead, but when I started to check his vitals, he rolled into the water.’

‘So you don’t know he’s dead, you just think he’s dead.’

For the first time, Thorne showed emotion. ‘He’s dead, dead, fucking dead, Hatfield. And I killed him. Another five years of lousy dreams.’

‘We’ll bring in the bloodhounds—’

‘Bring in whoever you want. Maybe they’ll find him. Or maybe’ – he gave a grim chuckle – ‘those bears they just released will find him first. I took him in the chest cavity – what the Rangers call a target-rich environment. There’s so much in there to mess up. Heart, kidneys, arteries – hit any of them, the target suffers an immediate and catastrophic loss of blood. Same with the liver if my shot took him lower down. Unconscious in ten seconds, dead in fifteen.’

Hatfield was stubborn. ‘He got to the stream and went in.’

‘So, a lung shot. It would incapacitate him but might not kill him right away.’

Hatfield wanted to show his own expertise. ‘Sometimes they survive a lung shot even without treatment.’

‘Maybe so, but hypothermia would kill him before the stream took him a hundred yards.’ Thorne repeated, ‘He’s fucking dead, Hatfield, and I wish he wasn’t.’ He
made a weary gesture. ‘Fuck it. Wallberg’s alive, so I’m getting out of here and—’

‘You’re going into federal custody to face a board of inquiry into why you didn’t fire a warning shot when you realized Corwin was here on this mountain.’

‘You sure that’s what you want, Hatfield? Right now, nobody knows I was here except you. If I keep my mouth shut, who is to say who took out the man who tried to kill the president?’

Hatfield hid his elation. The damn fool was going to hand it all to him. He asked casually, ‘Where have you been staying?’

‘The Super 8 in Hamilton. Under my own name.’

‘You’ve got some balls, I’ll give you that.’

Thorne pushed himself erect against the rock face. ‘I’ve still got to hike up over this mountain and down the other side before dark. I left my rental car there.’

He started away, but Hatfield caught his forearm.

‘You weren’t here today, get it? You aren’t in Montana. You’re in Fort Benning. Just go to your motel in Hamilton and stay there.’ He let go of Thorne’s arm. ‘I’ll make my report to the President at Camp David. If there are no leaks of your presence here in the meantime, I’ll send you a one-way ticket, coach, to Nairobi. Do we have a deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Leave the rifle.’

He wanted it to match up with any slug they might find in the ravine, but Thorne said, indifferent, ‘Sure, except how do you explain Corwin’s having two Model 70s on site?’

He left with the rifle. Hatfield called his team to come up and join him.

When they arrived, panting, Baror asked, ‘Where’s Corwin?’

‘Dead. I shot him just as he shot at the President. He crawled to the stream and rolled in just as I got here.’

‘Should we bring in the bloodhounds?’ asked Perry.

‘You bet. We want that body. Now let’s secure the scene.’ He took Franklin and Greene aside. ‘I just got word that Thorne flew into Montana this afternoon. He’s staying at the Super 8 Motel in Hamilton.’

Walt Greene squawked, ‘I thought he was at Fort Benning.’

Hatfield looked quickly around. Nobody else had heard.

‘Go to a motel close to his where you can monitor the shit out of him. Where he goes, what he does, who he talks to. He’s driving a rental car, I don’t know what kind. Ray, I want a GPS transmitter on that vehicle soonest. Walt, I want his phone bugged and miniaturized transmitters in everything he’s not wearing – his luggage, his clothes – everything.’

Franklin asked, inevitably, ‘Personal surveillance?’

‘Electronic only, for now. We don’t want him to have any idea we’re monitoring him. Don’t go cowboy on me, guys.’

‘Shit,’ said Franklin. ‘He walks away free and clear?’

‘Flies away.’ Hatfield couldn’t help grinning at them. ‘But not free and clear, believe me.’

Did I?

The voice whispering in Thorne’s memory brought him up from a light and troubled sleep. The covers were swirled around his waist, he was pouring sweat. Christ, the dead Corwin couldn’t come crowding into his nightmares along with the dead Alison and the dead Eden. Just couldn’t.

He sat up against the headboard, squinted at the green digital numerals of the bedside clock. Four-thirty a.m. For the first time he regretted registering at the motel under his own name. But still, if there were no leaks that he was here in Montana, he could be on a flight to Kenya within a few days.

Hatfield would have his glory, Thorne would have his bad dreams. A lousy exchange, but back in Tsavo, with time, the dreams would cease. He’d have his small life back. He had killed yet again, and Jaeger was also dead. But the president was still alive. Mission accomplished. Sort of. Except…

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.’