Glass Tiger

by Joe Gores

  Wallberg voiced his fears aloud, mostly to himself, just once. But Damon Mather, with his ambitions, was there to hear it. The wheel started to turn. Mather tried to kill Corwin.

  Now they all were dead. Gus Wallberg was safe. He was President of the United States. If Thorne went to the media, the administration’s spin doctors would get going. It’s all lies. It didn’t really happen that way. Where is your proof?

  His proof was cremated in Rochester. His proof was dead on a mountain in Montana. Thorne couldn’t touch Wallberg.

  But Terrill Hatfield didn’t know that, and Hatfield was Thorne’s real target. He could be manipulated through his own ambitions. It would be enough. It would have to be enough.

  One more debt to pay. Thorne called Whitby Hernild’s clinic in Portage. Hernild himself answered the phone.

  ‘Clinic.’

  ‘This is Thorne. Hal Corwin is dead.’

  There was a long, unexpected pause, then Hernild blurted, ‘My God! That’s terrible! When? How?’

  ‘When he killed Kurt Jaeger.’

  Still strangely subdued, almost detached, Hernild said, ‘I was… afraid it might be Hal behind the gun.’

  ‘I shot him just as he took his own shot. But even so he hit who he aimed at. He wanted to avenge his daughter’s murder. He was no psycho. But he should have been after Wallberg, too.’

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to say. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Because I’ve pieced together what Wallberg did to Hal on New Year’s Eve forty years ago.’

  ‘Hal had amnesia. He could never remember that night…’

  Thorne told him. All of it. Hernild was almost wistful.

  ‘Is there anything you can do about it?’

  ‘No. Even if Hal was still alive, he couldn’t do anything. There’s no proof for any of it. So Wallberg gets away with it.’

  Thorne hung up feeling, not purged as he had expected, but oddly unsettled. But he had done what he considered his duty to the man he had been manipulated into killing. He had cleared Corwin’s name with those who mattered – his best friend, and the woman who had thought of him as a surrogate father.

  Except that Janet was still a prisoner.

  Jennifer Maplewood was fifty-eight years old and lived in a gated community with armed guards. But she was sure she was going to be murdered in her bed by rapists. After one of Jennifer’s thrice-weekly sessions, Sharon Dorst always badly needed her twenty-minutes downtime before her next patient.

  She wasn’t going to get it this day. She had just closed the outer door behind Jennifer when it opened again to admit someone else. She turned, irritated.

  ‘I see patients only by appointment…’ She ran down. It was Thorne. She grabbed him and hugged him, then stepped back, red-faced. ‘I was… ever since you…’

  ‘Me too.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘I know you felt you let me down when Hatfield got hold of your session notes. You didn’t. We’re square. But I need a favor from you.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Hatfield is doing to another woman what he threatened to do to you. I need his home address. You have FBI connections. Can you help me?’

  ‘Give me two hours,’ Sharon said. Her face tightened. ‘And call me when… when you’ve made her safe.’

  Because she knew that then she would make more phone calls to her FBI contacts. Calls she should have made weeks ago.

  Driving home to his temporarily empty house well after dark, Terrill Hatfield was a happy man. His imminent accession to power had turned his wife on in ways he hadn’t dreamed possible. Yesterday Cora had read coy remarks in a Washington Post column to the effect that Terrill Hatfield would be announced as the new Director of the FBI in the President’s Fourth of July speech. Last night she had given him the best sex of his life. This morning she had packed her bags and had flown down to Atlanta to lord it over her mother and two sisters.

  The best of both worlds. Great sex, and now she wasn’t here to start nagging at him as usual. Life was sweet.

  He parked his Crown Vic in the driveway, went in the front door, deactivated the alarm, and turned on the single dim light over the wet bar in one corner of the living room. It was soothing after the fluorescent glare of his office. He poured three fingers of Wild Turkey into a squat heavy cut-glass tumbler and added a single ice cube.

  Standing at the picture window and looking out, he thought, Cora was right. This place is too small for us. We need to be further out, with at least an acre. Room for a horse. Room for two horses. We can ride together on Sunday mornings. After Wallberg’s announcement of my appointment as Director of the FBI on the Fourth of July, we’ll go house-hunting…

  That’s when a hand came over his head from behind, curved fingers hooked into his nostrils and jerked his head back. An icy point of steel touched his throat. He could feel a drop of his own blood running down from the broken skin as he was duck-walked awkwardly backward into the room, away from the window.

  He had been trained for situations like this. He would…

  ‘Reach across your body, nice and slow, take out your Glock with two fingers, and drop it on the floor.’

  Thorne! Alive! All of Hatfield’s training deserted him. He could barely breathe, he felt like he might pass out. He dropped his Glock on the floor as directed.

  The fingers on his face went away. A hand touched his ankles, checking for a backup piece, went away also.

  Hatfield turned, warily. Thorne was leaning against the sideboard Cora had bought last fall during their swing through the New England antique shoppes, his arms crossed so Hatfield’s own Glock pointed up at an angle toward the ceiling. Like the Sean Connery pose in those old James Bond movie posters. The pose was deliberate, Hatfield was sure.

  ‘How…’ His voice came out in a croak. He hated this display of weakness in himself. ‘How did you know where I…’

  ‘Friends in high places,’ said Thorne.

  Hatfield frantically ran the people who knew his unlisted address through his mind. How could Thorne pressure any of them into giving him up? A threat to their children, maybe?

  ‘I know all the secrets. Jaeger’s. Wallberg’s. Yours.’

  Had Thorne somehow discovered whatever it was that Wallberg had kept hidden from everyone? The thing Hatfield ached to know himself, to give him some ironclad hold over the President?

  ‘Jaeger’s dead,’ said Thorne, ‘so his secrets don’t matter. What I know about Wallberg may not be enough to take him down without proof. If I went to the press, I think he’d survive the charges. But you—’

  Hatfield tried bluster. ‘Don’t be so sure I can’t—’

  ‘You lied to him about me being dead, you lied to him about who really shot Corwin and saved his life, you threatened Sharon Dorst with illegal detention, you ran illegal surveillance on Victor Blackburn down at Fort Benning, right now you’re illegally detaining Janet Kestrel. Wallberg obviously knows all of it – except about me. All I have to do is let him know I’m alive and you’ll be gone in the flick of an eyelash.’ He paused, very deliberately. ‘Or…’

  Hatfield couldn’t help it. He burst out, ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or at noon tomorrow, California time, Janet Kestrel walks out of the Federal Building in Westwood a free woman.’

  ‘Noon? Tomorrow? I can’t possibly—’

  ‘If charges were filed against her, expunge them. If any surveillance tapes were made, destroy them. If anyone follows her, if anyone tries to grab her again, I go to Wallberg. Free her, leave her and Dorst and Blackburn alone, countermand the order to arrest me if I go back to Kenya, and I’m gone. Wallberg keeps on being President. You become Director of the FBI.’

  ‘What guarantee do I have that you’ll honor your—’

  ‘None. But it’s the only deal you’re getting. All you have to do is go back to being the sort of FBI Agent you swore to be in the first place.’ He stepped closer, lowered his voice. ‘Are we clear on all of this?’

  ‘We…
we’re clear.’

  ‘Make yourself a new drink. You dropped your last one.’

  Hatfield made his drink. As he did, he saw the room reflected in the picture window. Thorne was gone. He knew with a bitter certainty that even as Director, he would never again cross the man in any way. He didn’t have the stones for it.

  He was Sharon Dorst’s glass tiger.

  Friday night, Whiskey River was jumping. The TV was blaring, in the back room their weekend rock band was warming up its instruments for the night’s work. Kate had even managed to not think about Janet for over an hour. The house phone shrilled. She grabbed the receiver from under the counter with one hand while pouring a shot of vodka with the other.

  ‘Be waiting across the street from the Federal Building in Westwood at noon tomorrow. Jet Blue has morning flights out of Oakland to Burbank that will get you there in time.’

  She recognized Thorne’s voice. Someone was shouting in her face. She stuck a finger in the ear without the receiver to it.

  ‘Janet will walk out at noon sharp. Just get her away from there, quick as you can. Take her wherever she wants to go.’

  ‘That Indian casino in Hopland offered her a job dealing blackjack. But she’ll want to see you and talk to you, Thorne.’

  ‘Tell her I’m like… a kestrel. In the wind.’

  Janet was doing pushups on the edge of her bunk when she heard the familiar sound of her cell door being unlocked. It swung wide. Framed in the opening was her chief interrogator. She didn’t know his name. None of them ever gave her a name. He was holding something out to her.

  ‘Here is your watch, Ms. Kestrel.’ It was the first time he had addressed her by name. ‘It’s eleven-forty a.m. on Saturday, June eleventh. You are free to go. All charges against you have been dropped. I’m… I’m very glad it worked out this way.’

  He was gone. Another man stepped in with the clothes she had been wearing when they had grabbed her. All of the items had been freshly washed and ironed.

  Ten minutes later, Janet was squinting against the dazzling noonday sunlight outside the monolithic black tower of the Federal Building, sucking in huge gulps of free air, dazed, totally disoriented. Someone called her name. She looked quickly about, saw a familiar figure far across the weekend-empty parking lot.

  ‘Kate!’ she cried, and was running toward her friend.

  Sammy Spaulding stood at his office window watching Janet Kestrel and the other woman, trying to imagine Janet’s feelings. He was still stunned by the phone call from Hatfield he had received at home the night before, ordering her release. But as he had told her, he was glad she was free.

  In fact, he felt as if he too had been set free. Free from Terrill Hatfield’s insinuating presence, free from the dazzling heights of power Hatfield had implied would be his. He took me up on the mountain, Sammy thought, and showed me what could be mine. Assistant Director of the FBI. Any Agent’s wet dream. But now the spell had been broken. It was so simple when he thought about it. Just be the FBI Agent he had sworn to be when he had graduated from Quantico.

  Just blow the whistle on Terrill Hatfield.

  45

  Fort Snelling National Cemetery, where so many of Minnesota’s dead heroes were buried, lay between the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and Highway 5. It was the Fourth of July, and in the adjacent Fort Snelling State Historical Park, President Gustave Wallberg, Edith at his side, was taking his ease in a picnic area under a stand of elm trees a hundred yards from the Minnesota River. They were surrounded by his entourage, which in turn was encased in a cocoon of Secret Service agents.

  It felt wonderful to be the centerpiece of an old-fashioned birth-of-our-nation VFW picnic. The speech he had been working on a month ago during the Memorial Day weekend was now finished. And damned good it was, hitting all the right patriotic notes.

  He checked his watch. Almost show time.

  Twelve-hundred yards away, Brendan Thorne was literally up a tree. A week earlier, before the unobtrusively elaborate security preparations had begun, he had climbed thirty feet up into this huge old oak to jam a three-foot one-by-twelve board between two branches to form a makeshift sniper’s platform.

  He had also cut a keyhole in the foliage so he could scan the picnic grounds through his spotter scope. He wore shooter’s gloves, and an earphone radio so he could listen in on the speeches.

  Hatfield was honoring their agreement. Janet was free, Dorst and Blackburn were no longer under even clandestine surveillance, and he had talked with Squealer Kemoli in Nairobi. The Kenyan arrest order had been rescinded. So he, too, was honoring their agreement. Distasteful as he found it, he would do nothing directly to hamper Hatfield’s rise to power.

  The veterans and their families were already drawn up around the bunting-bedecked platform to hear their President speak. There was one important amendment to the speech that no one knew about except Wallberg. He would not be announcing Terrill Hatfield’s elevation to Director of the FBI as previously hinted to the press corps. He had received signed e-mails from two high-ranking Bureau officials, each alerting him to, and giving him the details of, separate pending investigations of misconduct by Hatfield.

  He had expressed his thanks and his profound shock at Hatfield’s actions, and had assured each of them that Hatfield’s name would be withdrawn. True, Hatfield had saved his life by shooting Corwin at the critical moment in the Bitterroot Range. True, everything the man had done, including the unlawful detention of Janet Kestrel, had been done on behalf of Wallberg and with his knowledge.

  But there was no paperwork to that effect. Wallberg had made sure of that. Whatever wild charges Hatfield might make as he went down, President Wallberg had deniability. And it wouldn’t hurt his ratings that he would be seen as taking an ethical stand: no breaking of the law in the Wallberg administration. But justice would be tempered with compassion. Hatfield would resign from the FBI without jail time.

  Just as well. Hatfield was ambitious. In time, he might have become another Jaeger, trying to uncover secrets best left buried, seeking influence with the Oval Office.

  Gus Wallberg sighed and put aside his bottle of beer – Leinenkugel Honey Weiss, a good Minnesota brew – and got to his feet. A pity. The national good could demand heavy sacrifices: three people had died on election night, so now it was Hatfield’s turn to pay a heavy price for his country.

  ‘Time to earn my keep, people,’ he said to his entourage.

  There was hearty sycophantic laughter. He blew Edith a kiss and started off, encircled by young, hard-eyed, highly-conditioned men speaking to their wrists or to the collars of their sports shirts. He shook hands, waved, grinned, tossed out greetings as they opened a pathway through the crowd for him to get to the podium. He was in his element. He was the future, Terrill was the past. As was Corwin. And Nisa. And Thorne.

  Thorne, in his sniper’s nest, following Wallberg’s progress with his scope. The president’s clothes were carefully casual: a Solumbra sun hat, slacks, and a gaudy short-sleeve sport shirt. In his left hand was a fried chicken leg. A man of the people. He stepped up to the podium where his speech was laid open for him. No one up there to introduce him. He wanted the platform all to himself.

  Watching from a distance of twelve-hundred yards, Thorne realized how much he despised this man. Ten years ago, he would have tried the impossible shot and would have lost his own life in the attempt. On this day, Thorne planned no mayhem. He had his sniper’s nest but he had no sniper rifle. He was here to feel just a little of what Corwin must have felt in Montana, sighting in on a hated target a dozen football fields away. This was Thorne’s final bloodless bow to the man he once had been. Soon he would disappear without anyone ever knowing he had been there.

  Wallberg looked out over the throng, drawing his power, as always, from their numbers, from their rapt attention, from their devotion to him. And from the dozens of media cameras pointing at him to help bump his ratings ever higher. He had planned to talk about h
imself a good deal, knock the accomplishments of the previous administration, but Edith had advised him that it might sound petty, self-serving; better to just praise America.

  ‘My fellow Americans, we are gathered here today to celebrate the birthday of this great nation which has given so many blessings to all of her citizens. Beyond the beer and the potato salad…’ he raised his arm above his head to wave around his chicken leg, ‘…beyond the fried chicken…’ The well-rehearsed but seemingly spontaneous gesture drew wild applause from the crowd. ‘…we honor all of those brave men and women who gave up their lives on foreign battlefields so that we might enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice. From the shores of Tripoli to the trenches of the Ardennes, from the death march of Corregidor to the jungles of Vietnam, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq…’

  Dammit, thought Thorne, it isn’t right. This man is a murderer, not a president. Thorne’s finger crooked around the imaginary trigger of the rifle he didn’t have. If it had been real, he would have squeezed off his shot and to hell with nightmares. Instead, he could only extend his arm and point a rigid forefinger…

  ‘…To Gettysburg, right here at home, where another great American President once said…’

  …and whisper, ‘Bang, you’re dead!’ and…

  …see Wallberg’s head explode in a bloody froth of brain and bone and flesh, the red mist that every sniper knew marked the perfect head shot. It was almost as if Thorne had fired the fatal round himself.

  But he hadn’t. He was already half-climbing, half-sliding down the side of the tree away from the distant speaker’s stand. He dropped to the ground and strolled away along the river bank. In his ear was the familiar pandemonium of death by assassination that had become all too familiar to the modern world.

  Thirty minutes later he was driving his Trooper sedately out the Old Shakopee Road, which would lead him to a bridge across the Minnesota River and eventually to 101 West, which would take him… where? No fixed destination. Just away from there.