Glass Tiger (20 page)

‘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.

He lay back down on the bed in a totally different mood. Tomorrow he would reserve his D.C. flight; they hadn’t bothered to include a reservation for that. Fine by him. Gave him time to maybe get down to Fort Benning for a quick goodbye meeting with Victor Blackburn. In D.C., he could see Sharon Dorst and tell her how it had all worked out.

Because he wasn’t planning to ever return to the States from Tsavo. Tsavo! The nightmares would gradually slack off as they had done seven years ago, his life would resume as he had wanted it to.

Then why did going back feel like some sort of defeat?

At midnight, a yawning Thorne turned into North First. He’d overpoured, as airline stewardesses used to say when they’d had too much to drink. He wished it had been Tusker beer – or better yet, pombe, home-made from maize, that packed a kick like a mule. But Miller had done the job: it had made him realize that even though he had his life back, he didn’t really care.

Did anybody? Hey! Squealer Kemoli, the magistrate who had been so reluctant to sign his deportation papers, he cared. Morengaru, he cared. Thorne checked his watch. Mid-morning in Nairobi. He found a payphone beside a closed gas station, and used the phonecard he had bought when he’d realized his motel room phone was bugged. Squealer Kemoli himself answered his office phone on its second ring.

‘Arthur Kemoli.’

‘Squealer! I’m flying to Nairobi in a few days and—’

‘No. You are not.’ Kemoli switched abruptly to Swahili. ‘They will be at the airport waiting for the rhinohorn poacher.’

Thorne went into his room without bothering to check for intruders. In a way, they were already inside. It was over. He was out of options. He stripped, took a long hot shower, ended with cold, as cold as he could stand it, then sat down to stare out at the parking lot.

Then he got it. Hatfield had put out the word. They were just waiting for him to go back to Nairobi, where
he would be arrested, convicted, and jailed on the phony charges Hatfield had set up. In an African jail, he’d have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. He would never get a chance to change his mind and tell anyone he had killed Corwin and saved the president. Neat and nasty.

What if he didn’t go back? Then they would gather him up and fold him away in some terrorist-detention cell of Hatfield’s choosing in the sacred name of National Security. Or worse yet, stick him in some mental institution.

He got into bed, still maybe a little drunk. His eyes drifted shut. Against their lids, Tsavo’s old bull elephants browsed and trumpeted. Morengaru squatted by a trail, grinning as he pointed out a shifta’s footprint in the dust.

A cammo-clad drug dealer lay face-down on a jungle path in Panama, blood pooling around her. He turned her over. She was Alison. Dead. Underneath her was Eden. Dead.

He looked down at the dying man and said, ‘You missed.’

Corwin’s teeth were a warlock’s, outlined in blood. He asked, ‘Did I?’

Thorne came bursting up from sleep yelling, ‘DID YOU?’

He sat on the edge of the bed, panting, shivering even though sweat was pouring off him. His only defense was to find out what Corwin’s last words had meant. Who had Corwin been? Not what some file said, but who had he been? Why had he done what he did, why had the president’s men from the git-go so desperately wanted him dead?

Where to start? Easy. Find the motel where Corwin had been staying. There were just a few little towns in the semi-wilderness country on the Idaho side of Trapper’s Peak. Corwin would have written down his vehicle
description and license for the clerk. A vehicle he would have hidden for a quick getaway somewhere within, say, a five-mile radius of the valley up which he had gone to kill Wallberg. The car would still be there. If Thorne could find it, maybe something in it would point to the truth about who Corwin really had been.

Some knowledge that might give Thorne a razor-thin edge.

Lemhu. Tendoy. Baker. Salmon. Shoup. North Fork. Gibbonsville. Tiny Idaho towns within striking distance for Corwin. But only Salmon had any accommodations listed with Triple-A. Of Salmon’s three choices, the Motel Deluxe, the cheapest of them, was downtown, with access to cafes and shops.

If Thorne’s motel-room phone was bugged, anything not currently on his person by now would have miniaturized transmitters planted in it also. The Cherokee was transmitting its location constantly. If Thorne removed the equipment they would know it. But during his stroll downtown yesterday, he had noted an old clapboard house with its garage converted into a one-man auto-repair shop. Just the kind of place he needed.

Today, he took half an hour to wander those few blocks, using store windows to check his backtrail. Nobody behind him. Parked in the driveway was a new Chevy Silverado with a pair of deer rifles on the rear-window rack. Inside the garage, a husky blond kid in his mid-twenties pulled a grease-smeared face out from under the open hood of an ’02 Ford
F
-150 pickup.

‘I need transportation,’ said Thorne. ‘Something four-wheel and offroad.’

‘They got a Hertz and an Avis here in town.’

‘I don’t like car rental outfits. I don’t like credit cards. I like cash.’ Thorne took out his roll. ‘Like this.’

Up close, the kid smelled of sweat and motor oil and cigarette smoke. He kept wiping his hands on a greasy red rag he took from the back pocket of his coveralls, over and over again, staring at Thorne’s roll as if mesmerized by it.

‘I’ve got a ’94 Dodge Dakota four-wheel out back. Thirty-a-day, $500 security deposit, pay for your own gas.’

‘Five hundred? A ninety-four?’

The blond kid grinned. ‘Three-fifty.’ He paused. ‘Back country. Off-road. It ain’t hunting season, and some terrorist fuck took a shot at the President of the United States down by the Bitterroot ridge a couple of days ago. Wouldn’t be that you’re some sort of journalist, would it?’

‘Wouldn’t be.’

The kid stuck out a hand. ‘Andy Farrell.’

‘Brendan Thorne. I’ll tell you tonight whether I’ll need your Dakota tomorrow too.’

‘I usually eat dinner at The Spice of Life on Second Street. You can get me there. They close up at nine o’clock.’

Thorne turned in at the Motel Deluxe on Salmon’s Church Street. He flashed his badge and commission card with the FBI seal on it at the dark chunky woman behind the desk. Although they now were outlawed, his ‘creds’ worked like a dream. He asked the woman about any man who had stayed there for a week or so, maybe left before dawn two days ago.

She already had the old-fashioned sign-in register open flat on the desk and was turning pages. ‘You got a name?’

‘Hal Corwin?’

‘No Corwin. We did have a guy reserved for two weeks, then checked out early.’ She turned the register,
pointed to an entry. ‘Hal Fletcher. As in arrow-maker. My people know about fletching arrows. He the loony tried to shoot the President?’

‘A person of interest,’ said Thorne.

‘He sure wasn’t any sort of an Ay-rab. He seemed a nice guy, too. In his fifties, lean, sorta tall, looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. Had a limp.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘He played catch with our son in the parking lot every evening.’

‘What was he driving?’

She checked the register again. ‘Nineteen-ninety 4-Runner. California license 5-
C
-
W
-
D
-0-4-6. I ’member it as dark green.’

Andy Farrell was having a beer at a table by the window when Thorne got to The Spice of Life. The blond hair had been washed, he’d switched to slacks and a sport shirt and a windbreaker and was having a cheeseburger and fries and a Caesar salad. A skinny twenty-year-old waitress with hair dyed bright scarlet and a ring through her lower lip was flirting with him. Thorne slid into the chair across the table from him.

‘They only got beer and wine here,’ said Andy almost apologetically, as if he were the host and Thorne was a guest.

‘All I need is a cup of coffee.’

Andy waved at the waitress. ‘I eat here because they use organic greens and veggies, and their burgers are damn good.’

Thorne grinned and jerked his head toward the waitress.

‘And here I thought maybe she had something to do with it.’

Andy’s face flamed almost as scarlet as the girl’s hair. When she came with Thorne’s coffee, Andy asked for
apple pie à-la-mode for dessert. Thorne did too. After the table had been cleared, Andy leaned across it to speak in a low voice.

‘I been thinking, you ain’t no newsman.’

‘Said I wasn’t. Maybe I’m one of those alphabet-soup guys from the government. You’re a hunter, right?’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘The gunrack in your Silverado. Since you hunt, you must know the back country around here pretty well.’

‘Try me.’

‘Okay. Below the western side of the ridge above the meadow where the President gave his speech, there’s a sub-alpine valley. Do you know it? I need to find a—’

Andy exclaimed, ‘Jesus Christ! The bastard went up that valley to the massif, didn’t he? He wasn’t any Muslim, he had to be a local who knew the terrain.’

‘Knew the terrain, yeah. Local, no. Now, if he needed to stash a four-wheel SUV within a five-mile radius of that valley so he could get out of Dodge quick, where would he put it?’

Andy stood up, said, ‘Be right back,’ and left the cafe. He came back with a topo map from his truck. He opened it out on the tabletop, tapped a finger on one of its squiggles.

‘See that minor national-park road right there? I’d look up any one of those little dirt tracks going off of it.’

‘You should have my job.’ Thorne stood up. ‘If I’m not back with the truck within a couple of days, you’ll find it hidden under that stand of fir trees at the mouth of the valley. The keys will be on the left front tire. Will the security deposit cover going over there and getting your truck back?’

‘Christ yes, more than. But…’ He paused. ‘I’d sure like to be in on whatever it is you’re doing, Mr. Thorne.’

Thorne shrugged and grimaced. ‘I wish you could,
Andy. I’d feel comfortable with you covering my back. But…’

‘I know,’ said Andy, crestfallen. ‘National Security.’

Thorne scattered too much money on the table. ‘My treat.’ He stuck out his hand. They shook. Before he knew he was going to say it, he added, ‘I kill people for the government, Andy.’

‘I figured maybe you did,’ said Andy solemnly.

Walking out of the place, Thorne thought, Maybe that’ll be my epitaph: he killed people for the government. Maybe, in this case, the wrong person?

Corwin’s 4-Runner was the key to everything. If Thorne couldn’t find it, he’d painted himself into a corner and would just have to flat-out go on the run. He had to believe that if he found it, he would find something to point toward something he could use as leverage against Hatfield’s scheming.

In the morning he walked up the street for breakfast, came back, and used the room phone to make a reservation to fly Northwest from Missoula to Minneapolis the next night, then on to D.C. Give the Feebs something to chew on.