by Joe Gores
‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ asked Thorne.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Hatfield explained. ‘You’re getting a free ride in a thirty-eight-million-buck plane. Be grateful.’
With no book to read, he feigned sleep during the flight from Nairobi west across Africa. Wondered why the guy who had grabbed him was so hostile. It seemed a lot more than just keeping Thorne down, but he couldn’t worry about that now.
After the fueling stop in Dakar, he sat upright during the crossing of the Atlantic to D.C. He had just killed two men; he knew from bitter experience that if he slept his nightmare of seven years before would return. Just as well. Something truly rotten was brewing. He had to prepare his refusals for it.
It was sometime in the wee hours when the jet landed on a secluded corner of Reagan National across the Potomac from D.C. An icy rain was falling as they left the jet for the waiting unmarked government van. Where were the cherry blossoms?
Thorne was dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt of fabric as thin as his blood after his years in the tropics. But as they crossed the Key Bridge, he was damned if he would shiver, or let his teeth chatter, or ask for a coat.
—
At the northeast guard booth, he caught just a glimpse of spot-lit lawns and the unmistakable white, pillared building just beyond. The uniformed officer inside the booth activated a switch to raise the car-blocking iron beams in front of the van, and lower them behind. Around behind the White House, they went down a narrow ramp with high concrete walls on either side. The van stopped, they got out into the drizzle.
A steel-armored door opened, a guard in uniform, one of the fifty-man detachment of Secret Service agents who worked three eight-hour shifts 24/7, checked their credentials. He kept his light in Thorne’s eyes the whole time because Thorne didn’t have any credentials.
Hatfield and yet another uniform took Thorne down a long basement corridor to a chamber with another steel door. They went in, Hatfield shut the door in the Secret Service agent’s face. It was a carpeted, windowless room with doors in all four walls, a conference table and eight chairs and a portable sideboard. There was the low hum of hidden air-conditioners.
Three men were staring at Thorne as if he were a bug on a pin. Two of them were young – twenty-five, twenty-six, one darkly good-looking, like Montgomery Clift before the bad times, the second chubby, friendly-looking, nondescript. The third man was burly, chomping an expensive cigar, exuding power. Small hard eyes dominated a meaty face Thorne recognized from BBC telecasts in Kenya.
‘Any trouble, Terrill?’ the cigar-chomper asked.
Hatfield sneered at Thorne. ‘From this hunk of shit?’
‘Okay, okay, we all know you’re a tough guy.’ Without offering to shake hands he said to Thorne, ‘My name is—’
‘Kurt Jaeger. President Wallberg’s Chief of Staff.’
Jaeger shot a quick, hard, angry look at Hatfield, who put his hands up in the universal palms out not-me gesture.
‘We can cut across, then.’ Jaeger gestured at the handsome one. ‘Hastings Crandall, Presidential Press Secretary.’ At the chubby blond one. ‘Peter Quarles, Presidential Aide.’ At Thorne’s captor, ‘Terrill Hatfield is—’
‘A Feeb,’ said Thorne.
Jaeger chuckled. ‘He’s good, Terrill. Yes, Mr. Hatfield’s FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper Team is on special assignment to me.’
So the suits on the Gulfstream would be part of Hatfield’s hand-picked team of ball-busters, thinking of themselves as the saviors of the non-Muslim world.
‘Okay, that tells me who. Now one of you tell me why.’
Nondescript, round-faced Peter Quarles spoke up.
‘Chief-of-Staff Jaeger tasked us with a computer search. The computer picked you from several hundred possibles.’
‘Picked me to do what?’
Jaeger said smoothly, almost soothingly, ‘To figure out a foolproof way to assassinate Gustave Wallberg, the President of the United States.’
4
‘Fuck you and the whore you rode in on,’ snapped Thorne, shaken. He’d known it would be bad; just not this bad. ‘I’m nobody’s fucking assassin.’ Hatfield said, ‘At Tsavo—’
‘Kill or be killed, Jack. Not like this.’ He wouldn’t do it, no matter what. ‘I believe Wallberg will be a hell of a president. I even voted absentee for him, the first time since 1988. I won’t figure out a way to kill him for you assholes.’
‘I really do hope you’ll reconsider.’ Thorne turned. Advancing with outstretched hand from the door in the far wall was President Gustave Wallberg, heavyweight charisma in his grin. ‘Out of curiosity, who did you vote for in eighty-eight?’
‘Bush. The first one. He and Nixon are the only statesmen we’ve had in my lifetime. And maybe Gorbachev.’
‘Not of my party, but a wise choice,’ said Wallberg.
Brendan Thorne sat on the President’s right, Jaeger on his left, Hatfield across from him. The two kids were just there. A third mid-twenties man, redheaded and with shrewd blue eyes in a round ruddy drinker’s face, came in from the far wall door. The shrewd eyes took them in with a single bitter sweep.
‘Could you bring us some coffee, Johnny?’
‘Coming right up, Mr. President,’ Johnny said moodily.
Obviously part of the original team along with Hastings and Crandall, reduced to a gofer, and not liking it. Had he gotten aced out by them? Or by Jaeger? Or by the booze?
Wallberg said, ‘When I was in high school in Rochester, Minnesota, my best friend was a kid named Hal Corwin. We played football and hockey together. After graduation I went to the U of Minnesota, he went to Rochester JC. After four months, Hal quit college to join the army. I have not seen him since. Just last year I learned he had been a sniper behind enemy lines in ’Nam. An assassin. Apparently, on his return, like many Vietnam vets, he had a hard time adjusting to civilian life.’
Jaeger took over. ‘He reputedly became a foreign mercenary – this gun for hire. His wife was killed by a drunk driver when he was out of the country. In some roundabout way his daughter, Nisa, blamed him for the death of her mother. I guess he accepted that guilt; in any event, he became a recluse in the forests of northern Minnesota.’
Thorne felt as if all the air had been driven out of his body by the parallel with himself. Did they know about Alison and Eden? No. They couldn’t. No one in government knew.
Hatfield said, ‘A year ago last November, Corwin was wounded in a hunting accident. In retrospect, we believe that while recovering he developed some sort of bizarre paranoid fantasy that his son-in-law had shot him. Deliberately.’
Jaeger cleared his throat, his heavy face solemn.
‘At the time, President Wallberg was Governor of Minnesota and was developing… what should I say?’
‘Presidential ambitions,’ said Wallberg. He added with a grin, ‘God, Brendan, did I have presidential ambitions!’
‘The Governor was assembling a campaign evaluation team. Myself, Hastings, Peter…’ Jaeger gestured at the redhead just returning with a carafe of hot coffee and accessories, ‘Johnny Doyle here. Nisa, Corwin’s daughter. When we committed to the campaign, she said she was worn out and resigned. Her husband, Damon Mather, stayed on.’
‘She volunteered for my first gubernatorial campaign when she was in college,’ explained Wallberg, ‘and worked on my second campaign as an adult. She came back aboard when I won the Democratic party nomination. She had a fine political mind. But in the last weeks of the campaign, both she and her husband resigned from my staff without telling us why.’
Jaeger said, ‘We believe now that Corwin had started stalking them, and they went to hide out on a houseboat in the California Delta. Nisa called on election day in a panic. Somehow Corwin had learned where they were. I grabbed a couple of private guards at campaign headquarters, but we had to drive up from LA because the tule fog had grounded air traffic in the valley. A seven-car crash on 1-5 north of Stockton tied traffic up all th
e way back to Manteca. We didn’t get to the Delta until two a.m. By then Corwin had already murdered them both.’
Murdered his own daughter? God, if Eden was still alive…
‘There was gunfire,’ said Hatfield. ‘The local cops went in, but he was gone. Since they had resigned from the campaign, the Secret Service couldn’t investigate. Mr. Jaeger asked my FBI team to look for Corwin’s body in the Delta. After six days, we decided that he had either drowned or died of his wounds.’
‘So why am I here?’ demanded Thorne. ‘Get the charges against me dropped and fly me back to Kenya with no hard fee—’
‘Charges?’ demanded Wallberg, suddenly icy.
Hatfield looked uneasy. ‘Thorne has been, ah, deported from Kenya on a poaching charge.’
‘I told you to ask him if he would come. Ask him.’
Jaeger scaled a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve across the table.
‘It came the morning of the President’s swearing-in.’
Thorne read: CONGRATULATIONS TO A DEAD PRESIDENT. CORWIN.
He objected mildly, ‘Anybody could have sent this.’
‘Nobody outside this room knows it was Corwin at the Delta. Not even the Secret Service.’
‘My men traced someone we think is Corwin to King’s Canyon National Park in California,’ said Hatfield. ‘Two of my Hostage Rescue/Sniper team members, Ray Franklin and Walt Greene, showed his picture around, got a maybe identification. They got to his campsite up on the ridge trail just twenty minutes too late.’
Wallberg blurted, ‘It’s all crazy! I haven’t thought about Hal in years, but apparently he thinks I put Damon up to shooting him. He murdered Damon. He murdered Nisa.’ His voice rose. ‘Now he wants to murder me. He has to be stopped.’
Hastings Crandall, the Press Secretary, said, ‘I had Pete run a computer search to evaluate hundreds of ex-servicemen. You’re a generation behind Corwin, but you were a close match. The parallels are amazing. He grew up in Minnesota, you in Alaska, you both hunted all your lives. He was Special Forces in ’Nam, then a mercenary. You were a Ranger in Panama, then did classified stuff for a CIA front. After some unknown trauma in your life, you became a recluse in Kenya as he did in Minnesota.’
‘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.
5
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 th
e 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.’
‘You reject his name because he was a drunk? Many of our people despair and become drunkards.’ His swung arm encompassed the casino. ‘Fighting that despair is what this is all about.’
