Glass Tiger

by Joe Gores

  ‘When he was drunk he beat on my mom. He was drunk a lot. My sister Edie got out quick and married a Mexican.’

  ‘You reject your name, now you want to be recognized as a member of the Hopland tribe. And share in our gaming revenues.’

  ‘Recognized, yes. Revenues, no. But I’m hoping to get a job in the casino. I’ve dealt blackjack in Reno.’

  The old man pushed back his chair. ‘We will take up your petition at the next tribal council.’

  He stood up, leaving his coffee behind. Janet spooned her chili. Almost cold, but still with some bite to it. Hal had her 4-Runner and was out doing whatever it was he felt he had to do. And she had made her first move to build a real life for herself.

  At exactly three-thirty, a cute blonde receptionist with a short nose and big round blue eyes stuck a head full of tight ringlets out of the left-hand door. She was petite and shapely and a dead ringer for randy young bride Ellie in far-off Tsavo.

  ‘Brendan Thorne?’ she asked with bland neutrality.

  He nodded, followed her into a small orderly office, watching her hips work under her tight skirt. She turned and fixed him with an icy stare. Her voice was cold, professional.

  ‘I am Doctor Sharon Dorst.’

  ‘I am Mister Brendan Thorne.’

  Two leather loungers and a leather couch formed a casual grouping off to one side, but Dorst strode to her desk and sat in the swivel chair behind it. This left him with the straight-backed chair facing her across this bastion. No psychiatrist’s couch for the likes of Brendan Thorne.

  He let the silence build. It was her office. She finally asked, ‘What do you see as our main issue here, Mr. Thorne?’

  ‘That I don’t get to have the shit scared out of me in the waiting room like poor old Mr. Hedges.’

  She couldn’t quite hide her smile.

  ‘That’s because you drew me instead of Dr. Benson.’

  ‘Benson? And Hedges? You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘Actually, he’s Doctor Martin.’ She checked the wall clock. ‘You have already wasted five of your session minutes, Mr. Thorne. As you have been told, I am a contract therapist for the FBI who will administer certain tests and make certain evaluations of you for the Bureau. They will get my written and verbal reports. No one will ever see my session notes.’

  Thorne scrubbed his hands. ‘Then let the healing begin! Word games to probe my vocabulary. Photos of faces and later a whole bunch of new photos to see how many I recognize from the first batch. Identifying the logic of series of symbols. Remembering and repeating lists of things that don’t go together, like clown and broccoli. How many details I can recall from the four quadrants of a scene you show me or from a story you read to me. How fast I can click a key with my forefinger.’

  ‘You tell me, Mr. Thorne, what should we do with our hour?’

  ‘Look at ink blots that remind me of naked women?’ Then he held up his hands in surrender. ‘Okay, it’s in the file, but – background. I was an Army Ranger stationed in Panama. Until we handed over the Canal to the locals in 1999, SOUTHCOM – that’s the U.S. Army’s Southern Command – was in charge of security for the Canal. Panama borders on Colombia, and the Colombian government gave control of an area the size of Switzerland to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC. They were really rebels running drug-manufacturing plants in the area. They supplied seventy percent of the cocaine entering the States.’

  ‘Your job was… what? To stop them?’

  ‘Impede would be a better word. We’d go into the jungle for weeks at a time to destroy the manufacturing plants. After the Rangers, I couldn’t settle down into civilian life, so—’

  ‘Were you using cocaine yourself?’ He answered with a surprised but stony silence. She quickly asked, ‘Why did you resign from the Rangers?’

  ‘Because killing didn’t bother me, and I felt that it should. But I missed the action in the field. When a CIA front asked me to go back to Panama clandestinely for the same sort of work, their shrinks told me I was in the two percent of military men who can kill repeatedly, without hesitation and without bad dreams afterwards. So I accepted that maybe that’s who I was.’

  ‘You said to yourself, Okay, I’m an adrenaline freak, an apostle of the gun, seeking the perfect kill-shot, da-dah, da-dah. And shooting at people for the CIA doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘Right. Only when I missed. I imagine Corwin, the guy I’m supposed to find, was the same way – until his wife died.’

  ‘So why quit to bury yourself in Kenya?’

  ‘I killed a woman and her infant by mistake.’

  ‘I know that’s what the file says, but I don’t buy it.’ She wasn’t a dead ringer for randy young Ellie in Tsavo after all: too damned smart. She added, ‘Collateral damage is always part of warfare.’

  ‘Not of my kind of warfare. They died, I quit. Finis.’

  ‘But you just recently killed two men in Kenya.’

  ‘Somali shifta raiders. Poaching rhino and elephant.’

  ‘Yet you were deported by the Kenya government for poaching protected animals yourself.’

  He said defensively, knowing it sounded lame even as he did, ‘Hatfield set me up as a poacher so Kenya would deport me.’

  She said almost derisively, ‘And then asked me to evaluate you as a manhunter for his own Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team?’

  ‘Yeah! Exactly. After Wallberg took office in January, Jaeger, his Chief of Staff, tasked Hatfield with finding a psycho who is gunning for the president. A computer chose me to do it. The president wants me on board. Hatfield doesn’t.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he?’

  ‘You tell me. You work for the FBI. His guys came up short a couple of times, sure, but if I find the stalker, Hatfield’s the guy who’ll nail him. You know him, he’s obviously used your professional services before.’ He waggled his fingers at her. ‘C’mon – what do you think his agenda is?’

  ‘Asking me that is so far outside the box—’

  ‘That you’re aching to do it?’

  Again, that quick smile she couldn’t quite hide.

  ‘All right. Just a personal assessment, not professional. Hatfield is ambitious. From your file, killing without hesitation was once easy for you. You were the sort of man he wishes he was. So he’s worried that you’ll find Corwin and just take him out on your own to get the credit for saving Wallberg.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain the hostility. He can have the glory, believe me.’

  ‘Maybe I do. But he doesn’t. Which is enough about Hatfield. This is your hour, not his. I can help you, but not if you hold things back. You have to tell me everything.’

  He liked her, and she was asking him to trust her. But what if he was wrong? Or what if Hatfield came after her and she caved? Thorne would have to take the hit. Could he? Yeah.

  ‘I made up the woman and child who got killed in Panama because there was a woman and child who got killed here in the States. Alison and Eden. Nobody knew about them. We weren’t married and Alison hated what I did, but she loved me. She had Eden just after I went back to Panama for the CIA. I wasn’t even around for the birth. I had my fucking mission.’

  He stopped for a moment, cleared his throat. It was much harder to talk about it than he had expected.

  ‘Seven years ago, when Eden was two, we planned to take her to a children’s afternoon New Year’s Eve party. But I got a call to go back to Panama. Alison begged me not to go. We had a big blowup, I stalked out and just – left. Alison took Eden to the party anyway. Driving home at five in the afternoon, her car was hit by a drunk driver and they both were killed. I didn’t hear about it from her folks until a month later. They blamed me for it. Even today her mother won’t tell me where they’re buried.’

  She said, frowning, ‘Corwin’s wife gets killed by a drunk driver while he’s away being a mercenary and he runs off to the great north woods. Your woman and infant daughter get killed by a drunk driver while you’re away in Panama fo
r the CIA, and you run off to Kenya. Have I got this right?’

  ‘Yeah. After they died I told myself that was that, and just went back to Panama like nothing had happened. Then I started having the nightmare. Every night.’

  ‘The nightmare? Always the same one?’

  ‘Yeah. My assignment is to take out a drug dealer who will pass through a certain tract of forest with a briefcase full of papers vital to the CIA. It is dawn, wet, misty. Visibility is bad. The target appears, dressed in cammo. I fire, a spine shot, high up, between the shoulder blades. At the moment I fire, I realize the target is a woman. I feel bad, I’ve never killed a woman before – but we need those documents.’

  He stopped, shivered. It was real, absolute, immediate.

  ‘She is lying face down on the path. I turn her over. She is Alison. Dead. Underneath her is Eden. Dead. She was carrying our daughter, not papers. My shot killed them both.’

  ‘You got so desperate that you quit your contract—’

  ‘And swore to Alison’s memory I would never kill again.’

  She said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘And after a few weeks, the nightmare stopped. And you went to Kenya and ended up in Tsavo as a camp guard, protecting people, not shooting them.’

  ‘Until seven years later, when I killed two shifta. The nightmare came back. That’s what I don’t want Hatfield to know about. The nightmare.’

  ‘The nightmare makes you too vulnerable.’

  ‘Not just vulnerable. At risk.’ He paused, thought for a moment. ‘How can I explain it to you?’ He leaned forward intently. ‘Okay, many years ago I read a book by a man who trained big cats. Lions, tigers, like that. He said that tigers in captivity, unlike lions, have hearts of glass. They are prone to depression, can get discouraged, can… shatter. As if they themselves were made of glass.’

  ‘You’re afraid that facing Corwin you’d be a glass tiger?’

  ‘Good way to put it. But I’m afraid I wouldn’t be one. Most of what you call glass tigers give up, die. But some go rogue, like the one that tried to kill that guy, Roy, in Las Vegas. All it had left was instinct. And by instinct, a tiger kills. By instinct, what does an assassin do?’

  Her hands on the desk were restless, moving. They stopped.

  ‘Two dead shifta.’

  He nodded, stood. ‘What do you guys say? Our time is up?’

  She might not have heard him.

  ‘You can’t just walk away here, Thorne. You need to find Corwin, need to act, one way or the other. That’s the only way you can face down your demons.’ She realized she was almost panting as she said, ‘I’m passing you for this assignment.’

  He was caught off-guard. She was tough. He said bitterly, ‘You’ve been ordered to pass me. I’ll survive – or I’ll shatter like… like that glass tiger of yours. While you and asshole Hatfield play Russian roulette with my life.’

  After he left, she sat in her big chair behind her big desk and stared at the wall. She had another client to prepare for, but she just sat there. She knew, deep down, that she was expected to pass Thorne for the assignment. If not by Hatfield, by Kurt Jaeger, maybe even by the President himself.

  What if she was wrong in her analysis? Then she was indeed playing Russian roulette with Thorne’s life. But what could she do about it now?

  6

  Thorne wandered, ended up on the Georgetown Dock at 31st and K Streets. A Coast Guard patrol boat slapped bow-wash against the sides of expensive anchored private yachts. A military helicopter whup-whupwhupped by overhead.

  Set back from the walkway behind several levels of outdoor tables was a sparkling glass-clad restaurant three stories high. He got a beer in a plastic glass from the awning-covered drinks kiosk at street level, sat down, sipped it, stared out over the Potomac toward the Pentagon.

  He wanted to be pissed off at Dorst, but couldn’t be. She had her job, as he had his. And she was very good at it, very tough-minded, willing to roll the dice – he grinned sourly – with his life. On New Year’s he’d wished for a quest, a hunt, a vital, necessary trackdown. Now he had it. Could it be that she was right? Could finding Corwin be his salvation?

  He finished his beer and wandered, restless. Behind the kitchen entrance to the restaurant a cook in a white apron was smoking a cigarette. An echoing, not-yet completed galleria brought Thorne out above a bowl-shaped mall area. He stood watching the massive fountain spout water high into the air.

  According to Dorst, Hatfield could never have access to what he had told her about his nightmare; forget about Hatfield.

  —

  Hatfield’s coat hung over the back of his chair, his tie was loosened, his coffee mug squatted on the right front corner of his blotter. He could smell his armpits. His floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building was after-hours silent. He tossed aside Dorst’s written report and rubbed his eyes. He sighed.

  He and his team had been trained to use the gun to rescue hostages. Thorne had been trained to use the gun to kill people. He had not only the sniper’s eye, he had the assassin’s mind. So was killing a woman and child in Panama by mistake enough to make him disintegrate the way he had? Or was he faking it? Angling for the chance to take Corwin out himself, beat Hatfield to the power and the glory? Nothing in fucking Dorst’s report answered that vital question about Thorne’s emotional state. She’d blown it. Jaeger wanted Thorne aboard, Hatfield didn’t. Dorst should have found him unfit because he’d run off to Kenya.

  Right now, without consultation, Thorne was flying off to California to ‘get into Corwin’s mind’ before coming up with a scenario. Or was he really serving notice that he was one independent son of a bitch with balls the size of grapefruit? When Thorne came back to D.C., Hatfield would put men on the fucker to monitor his movements and contacts.

  Meanwhile, he needed a hell of a lot more than Dorst’s official report on Thorne. He needed her session notes. Better schedule an appointment with her out of the office.

  He checked the clock. Christ, ten. He speed-dialed.

  ‘Hatfield residence.’

  Cora. Trying to make people think they had a maid. He put all the warmth he could into his voice. ‘Hi, sweetheart. It’s me. We had a meeting that just broke up. I’ll bring takeout. Chinese? Thai? Whatever you—’

  ‘I’ll be in bed when you get here. Asleep.’ She hung up.

  ‘Well, shit!’ he snarled at the dead phone. He blamed his troubles with Cora in D.C. on Thorne out in California.

  It was dawn when the red-eye dropped Thorne at Oakland International. Long-eared jackrabbits hopped in the grass beside the runway, ignoring the lumbering jetliners. His ‘undercover’ car turned out to be a souped-up Police Interceptor Crown Victoria with the extra-capacity gas tank that Ford made only for law-enforcement agencies. Fucking FBI. The Crown Vic would make him as inconspicuous as a dancing bear at a ballet class.

  He threaded his way through East Bay traffic toward the Delta’s sprawling Medusa-head of twisting, intersecting sloughs, its thousand miles of waterways, its hundreds of miles of levees, its islands reachable only by boat.

  The Sunset Bar and Grill where he had his appointment with a San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputy was attached to the Tower Park Marina near a place called, appropriately enough, Terminous. Thorne reached it by a blacktop access road across California 12 from the tiny Terminous General Store. There was a tall black water-tower, a trailer park as big as a suburb, and a guard shack with nobody in it.

  Thorne parked near the foot of the marina’s boat ramp next to a Sheriff’s cruiser with a light bar on top. It was a beautiful California spring day with drifting white puffs of cumulus cloud; even this early in the season there were tourists in shorts and t-shirts, boaters in light wind-breakers they’d need out on the water.

  The cafe was built right on the dock. Inside, dust motes danced in the late-morning sunlight. To his left, a family of four was eating a late breakfast in front of one of the wide windows that overlooked the guest boat-docking slips. Powerboats and
sailboats could be lowered right off the dock into sparkling but cold-looking Little Potato Slough.

  At the round table closest to the door was a husky early-thirties Latino in a tan Sheriff’s uniform. The creases of his sleeves and pantlegs could cut paper. A miniature purple heart and mid-East service bar were pinned above his ESCOBAR nametag.

  He stood. ‘Special Agent Thorne?’ His voice was ice.

  ‘Just Brendan Thorne. Forget the Special Agent tag.’

  ‘Just Escobar.’ After a pause, he grudgingly took Thorne’s hand. They sat down. ‘Okay, so why are the Feebs sucking around now, five months after the fact?’

  ‘Routine. The Bureau likes to see if anything—’

  ‘I wasn’t on it long enough to screw anything up.’ Escobar was an obviously tough, brainy Latino cop with an even more obviously built-in shit detector. ‘The sheriff’s department got the call, me and my partner were in the barrel that night, we got to the crime scene just after the shootout with the suspect. He was long gone, you Feebs showed up, took over. End of story.’

  ‘Please, relax. I’m a day-tripper, not a lifer.’

  After almost thirty seconds, Escobar settled back into his chair. Thorne regarded him thoughtfully.

  ‘Iraq?’ he asked casually.

  Escobar’s sudden change of expression transformed his hard, bony face. ‘Afghanistan. Thirteen months, Army Reserve – I wanted to make a few extra bucks to supplement my cop’s pay and look what it got me. A Purple Heart. I loved it. And unless I miss my guess, you’ve been in the shit somewhere yourself.’

  ‘Rangers, then a contract killer for the CIA in Panama.’

  ‘Okay, no more bullshit. Why are you here? Really?’

  ‘Really? The federales aren’t really sure the guy who did it died that night. They’re afraid he might be a political with a personal hard-on against somebody in the new administration.’

  ‘I can guess who, us getting called in by the guy who’s now Wallberg’s Chief of Staff. Who then slams the door in our face.’