Glass Tiger

by Joe Gores

  Whoever she was, she was the real, solid lead Thorne had been hoping for. If he could find her. He got back to Highway 93, then drove north toward 1-20 to get out of Idaho as soon as possible. At Spokane, Washington, he would get another interstate that would take him south toward California.

  Crandall laid the Hamilton Daily News on Wallberg’s desk in the Oval Office, folded so the pertinent below-the-fold headline was prominent: MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE FROM LOCAL HOTEL

  Wallberg read the article as if the newspaper were a poisonous viper writhing toward him across his desk.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Two days ago, Mr. President. It cycled routinely to Shayne O’Hara because of the town’s proximity to the attempted assassination site, then routinely from his office to us.’

  ‘Set up a meeting with Hatfield, ASAP.’

  —

  ‘Talk to me,’ snapped the President.

  Hatfield was literally on the carpet, standing at attention in front of the President’s massive hardwood desk in the Oval Office. He had not been asked to sit down.

  ‘Mr. President, as you know, when we dismissed Thorne at Camp David he was to await further orders at the Mayflower Hotel. Instead, he left word that he was going to Fort Benning, Georgia, to spend a couple of days with an old Ranger buddy.’

  ‘Did he know his return to Kenya was all arranged?’

  ‘I sent the ticket to the Mayflower myself.’

  ‘You checked on the Fort Benning angle, of course.’

  ‘A room had been reserved in the BOQ by his buddy, but Thorne never showed. Victor Blackburn is career Army, he would not jeopardize his pension by covering for Thorne. They haven’t seen each other for ten years. In fact, he’s just pissed off.’

  Wallberg frowned. ‘What have we learned in Montana?’

  ‘Franklin and Greene have taken over the investigation from the locals. Everything of Thorne’s was left behind. Everything. Rental car, keys, his FBI badge, his money clip with cash in it, his wallet, shaving gear, i.d., clothes, luggage. We found his passport hidden behind the lining of his suitcase. The room’s rear window was broken inward, and a great deal of blood was splattered around. Our lab is rushing the DNA testing, but it almost certainly is Thorne’s blood.’

  ‘Could it have been… Corwin?’ It was a half-whisper.

  ‘Mr. President, Corwin is dead.’ Hatfield leaned across the desk, ebony features intense. He had practiced this move in the mirror. ‘But Thorne is alive. It was a non-lethal amount of blood spattered around. Non-lethal, Mr. President. And one vital piece of identification was not recovered from that room.’

  Wallberg was staring at him. ‘Which is?’

  ‘His commission card with the FBI seal on it. Don’t you see, sir? He left his badge behind but took the card.’ Hatfield let the tension build, then sat down abruptly, unbidden. Franklin’s quick work had given him time to force his tame psychiatrist, Sharon Dorst, to give him the ammunition he needed. ‘The psychiatrist who did Thorne’s initial fitness evaluation noted a strong identification with Corwin. They are a generation apart, but as you know, their profiles are extremely similar.’

  Wallberg was shaken. ‘Meaning that the identification is so strong that Thorne is going to start stalking—’

  ‘No chance, Mr. President. His aversion to killing is too deep, based on a devastating personal loss for which he feels responsible. But he feels a need to understand Corwin. He couldn’t do that from Kenya, so he went to Montana instead.’

  Thorne tunnelling back into Corwin’s life might be almost as dangerous for Wallberg and his ambitions as another sniper stalk. He slapped his hand on the desk in time with his words.

  ‘Find him. Corral him. Rein him in. Shut him down.’

  Hatfield had gambled on there being something real between Corwin and the President, something that Wallberg didn’t want to come out. What could it be? Was there any way he could uncover it? Meanwhile, feeding on it, using it, whatever it was, he had turned what looked like a disastrous setback into a victory!

  He could hunt Thorne down and take him out with impunity. The man would just disappear, and the secret of who actually had saved the President’s life would disappear with him. Forever.

  ‘Full National Security powers, Mr. President?’

  ‘Whatever it takes, Agent Hatfield.’

  28

  It was a warm day of smoggy sunshine in the LA suburb of Carson. Through the open windows of the 4-Runner came the faint stink of petroleum from the world’s largest oil refinery a few miles away, huge as a nuclear disaster site. Grace Avenue, running off Carson Boulevard, was a racial layer cake, black and brown with white frosting. Much of the street was projects, rabbit warrens set back behind narrow strips of lawn.

  The address given on the 4-Runner’s registration for Edie Melendez was a small, not-quite-run-down bungalow. The door was opened by a woman of about thirty, obviously not Latina, with the square body and strong face and piercing eyes of an American Indian. But she brought with her to the door the mingled aromas of refried beans, tortillas, tacos, frijoles, salsa, hot peppers.

  ‘Mrs. Melendez?’ He had decided against using the FBI credentials. He held out his hand. ‘My name is Brendan Thorne.’

  ‘Glad to meet you.’

  ‘Um… do you know a Janet Kestrel? She used this—’

  ‘You are a friend of hers? You know where she is?’

  Dead end. Thorne said, regretfully, ‘I’m sorry. I’m trying to get in touch with her myself.’

  ‘She is my little sister. I hoped…’ She made a flustered gesture. ‘But please, come in, por favor.’

  They sat on a sagging sofa in the small living room. All the furnishings were old, worn, but everything was scrupulously clean. She said her sister Janet was muy guapa.

  ‘Our birth name is Roanhorse, we are of the Hopland Indian clan up by Santa Rosa. When she became a blackjack dealer in Reno, she started calling herself Janet Amore.’

  And after Reno, she started calling herself Janet Kestrel. Why, when her birth name was Roanhorse?

  ‘She just drove up here one day last fall, and said she was gonna live with us while she looked for work. But she was only here two days, then she saw something in the newspaper and got real excited. She said she had something she had to do. My husband, Carlos, he was glad when she left. He didn’t like her because he said she didn’t know her place.’

  She put her hand on Thorne’s forearm, as if he was an old friend she had known for years. Her face was sad.

  ‘After we got married, I found out real quick that Carlos, he didn’t want me, he just wanted his green card.’ A sudden spark animated those big, dark eyes, made her momentarily vivacious. ‘Before she left, Janet told me I should leave him, and we’d go to Reno and she’d teach me how to deal blackjack.’

  ‘Sounds like good advice to me,’ said Thorne.

  ‘You think?’ she asked seriously. Then she shook her head, as if at an impossible dream. Her face became sad again.

  ‘The night she left, she got beat up, real bad. The cops found her in an alley behind some fancy hotel in Beverly Hills.’

  What had Janet Kestrel seen in the newspaper? What did she feel she had to do? Who had beaten her up? Corwin? Why?

  ‘The hospital, they called me. My husband says, Wha she doin, guy had to beat her up?’ She was a good mimic. ‘He wouldn’t drive me, so I rode the bus up to see her. The hospital was real fancy, up by Beverly Hills. Cedar’s-Sinai? She looked awful. She couldn’t remember anything about what happened to her.’

  ‘Did the cops talk to you? Or to her?’

  ‘Not to me. And I only saw Janet the once. She was asleep from all the pain medication they had her on, but she woke up all of a sudden and told me where she’d parked the 4-Runner. She asked me to get her duffle bag from the truck and give it to a certain nurse. I did, a hefty black lady who was real nice. She said she would smuggle it into one of the hospital lockers for Janet, and pu
t the key in Janet’s clothing.’

  She paused and sighed, very expressively.

  ‘Carlos wouldn’t let me go back up there for three days. When I finally could, Janet was gone.’

  Dead end indeed. ‘Ah… when did all of this happen?’

  ‘It was in November, early – like around election day.’ She put out her hand again, like a trusting child. ‘If you find her, you tell her Edie is ready to go to Reno with her and learn how to deal blackjack. Promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Thorne.

  If he found her. But wait a minute. The hospital wouldn’t let her check out without making financial arrangements.

  Cedar’s-Sinai was a hulking state-of-the art medical facility on Beverly Boulevard between Robertson and Doheny, across the street from the Beverly Center. Thorne went in after visiting hours: they would be settling into their nighttime routine, maybe they would cut him a little slack.

  But he ran up against an iron-faced, iron-haired night supervisor named Marlena Werfel, who took no prisoners.

  ‘If an ex-patient named Janet Amore is missing, it doesn’t concern this hospital. Or you.’

  Regretfully, Thorne shoved his FBI commission card under her nose.

  ‘Yes it does. I need to know when she checked out, what her financial arrangements were, and the name of her physician.’

  She stared at the credentials for a moment, her little pig eyes snapping with indignation.

  ‘Patient information is confidential. You’ll have to come back tomorrow when the administrator’s office is open. And I’ll be reporting your unprofessional behavior to your superiors.’

  If he’d been a real FBI agent, he could have forced her to go into the computer and get him what he wanted. But he didn’t want her to carry out her threat to call the local FBI office. If it got into the system, it would get back to Hatfield.

  ‘Sorry if I seemed rude, Mrs. Werfel. Just doing my job.’

  ‘Badly.’

  As a frustrated Thorne stalked down the corridor toward the elevators, a rotund African-American nurse carrying a tray full of items covered with a towel fell into step beside him. She spoke out of the side of her mouth without looking at him.

  ‘Doctor Walter Houghton. You didn’t hear it here.’

  She turned in at an open doorway and was gone. Thorne kept on walking without any reaction. But he could feel Werfel’s BB eyes drilling into his back down the length of the corridor.

  Hatfield spent the morning at the firing range, focussing on requalifying with the Hostage/Rescue team’s various weapons. He barely qualified because he couldn’t get Thorne out of his head. The man seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Since Corwin couldn’t have come back from the grave to do him in, then just as he’d told the President, it had to be a setup engineered by Thorne himself. But why? Hatfield suddenly cursed aloud in sudden comprehension.

  Someone had leaked to Thorne what would be waiting for him when he got back to Kenya. Not any of his men. Even if they’d known exactly what he was planning, they wouldn’t have said anything about it. They were a close-mouthed lot.

  So, someone in Nairobi. Maybe one of Muthengi’s men. Or maybe that magistrate, Kemoli. Told Thorne his arrest was planned. That’s why he had disappeared! He was going to try to get to the President in person to tell him who really had stopped Hal Corwin.

  Hatfield had to find him first. He went out to his car and from the spare tire well got the throw-down piece he’d taken off a dead bank-robber the year before. It was a World War II Colt .45. Back on the firing range, he fired a clip through it, leaving it uncleaned so ballistics testing would show it had recently been fired. He returned it to the trunk of the car.

  When he walked into his office in the Hoover Building, his phone was ringing. He snapped into it, ‘I told you, no calls!’

  ‘Didn’t tell me,’ said a male voice in a twangy, down-home accent straight out of Maine.

  Sammy Spaulding. They’d been classmates at Quantico. Hatfield had qualified for Hostage/Rescue, Sammy had ended up as AIC of the LA Field Office. Adrenaline shot through Hatfield. An hour after he had left the Oval Office, he had e-mailed a BOLO marked HIGHEST PRIORITY to major FBI FOs around the country:

  Be on the look-out for any use of temporary credentials issued in the name of Brendan Thorne.

  ‘Talk to me, Sammy. Tell me you’ve got something I need.’

  ‘What I’ve got is an irate call this morning from a night administrator at Cedar’s-Sinai Hospital. Seems some guy claiming to be one of our agents interrogated her last night concerning a former patient. She thought the i.d. was fake, so she memorized the number on the commission card. A real pain in the butt.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Hatfield impatiently. ‘Whose credentials were they?’

  ‘Your buddy’s. Brendan fucking Thorne’s. She shined him on to the day people, but he never showed. You want me to—’

  ‘No!’ In a quieter voice, Hatfield said, ‘I’m under orders to handle this one personally. I’ll be out there tomorrow a.m.’

  ‘I’ll lay in some barbecue ribs and grits and water-melon.’

  ‘Up yours,’ said Hatfield.

  Thorne got a room for the night in a run-down motel below the Sunset Strip, next door to a bar that closed at two a.m. and opened again at four. When he did get to sleep, sometime around three a.m., he woke from his already horribly familiar nightmare, drenched in sweat and yelling, ‘You missed,’ with Corwin’s reply, ‘Did I?’ following hard upon it in his memory. He had to stand under a cold shower for twenty minutes before he could face the day.

  Walter Houghton, MD, had his practice in a medical office building on Doheny a few blocks from Cedar’s-Sinai. Thorne told the receptionist that his name was Brendan Thorne. ‘I don’t have an appointment, but if the doctor could spare me just two or three minutes…’

  But she was already nodding brightly at him through the sliding glass panel separating her from the waiting room.

  ‘Have a seat, Mr. Thorne. Doctor will see you directly.’

  He sat down, alarm bells ringing. Houghton had the sort of upscale practice that usually meant days or weeks before getting an appointment. Had Werfel phoned the doctor an early-morning heads-up? Was the FBI on its way? He had to chance it. He didn’t have anything else.

  Ten minutes later, he was shown into the crowded office of a handsome, lean, erect black man of about his own age. Houghton had beautiful liquid eyes and stern features. His white smock was crisp and he had a stethoscope around his neck.

  As he shook Thorne’s hand, he said, ‘I hear the dragon lady over at Cedar’s worked you over pretty good last night. The nurse who gave you my name put in a good word for you, but I feel protective about Janet. She was brutally beaten with feet and fists. At least no knives, clubs or soda bottles. Ended up with a broken arm and broken collarbone, a cracked shin, a permanent metal pin in one wrist, two cracked ribs, and a bruised but not ruptured spleen. If you’re bringing her more trouble…’

  ‘I just want to ask her about a friend of hers.’

  ‘Can I believe that?’ asked Houghton almost to himself. ‘Well, we’ll see. If your friend was involved in any way…’

  ‘No friend, I’ve never met him. I’m just looking for him.’

  They locked eyes. Houghton looked away first.

  ‘Okay. All the evidence of sexual assault was there, but no oral, anal, or vaginal penetration took place. She was gutsy and stoic at the same time. Never a word of complaint. Not even a groan out of her. She just took it. A couple of days later, a quiet, tough outdoorsman in his fifties talked with me at the hospital. He said he’d like to kill the man who did it. I asked if he was a tough guy, and he said No, just an angry one.’

  ‘Did he give you a name, address, anything?’

  ‘Nothing. I never saw him again. He left a cash deposit here when I was at the hospital that more than paid for her medical and doctor expenses. He’s even got a refund coming.’
r />   ‘Did Janet leave an address with you?’

  He evaded a direct answer by saying, ‘She checked herself out of the hospital before she should have, saw me twice here at the office, then never came back. Thanks for stopping by.’

  Dismissal. Without even thinking, Thorne said, ‘There’s a psychiatrist in D.C. named Sharon Dorst.’ He rattled off her number. ‘Call her. Ask her about Thorne.’

  Houghton hesitated, then handed Thorne a card with his office phone and fax on it.

  ‘Give me a day to think about it,’ he said.

  29

  Thorne knew he should get out of LA as soon as possible. Right now the FBI could be putting an intercept tap on the doctor’s phone. But he couldn’t leave empty-handed. Janet Kestrel was who he was looking for. He had no other possible leads. Maybe Houghton had believed him. Maybe he even would call Sharon Dorst.

  So, a day for Houghton to think, a day for Thorne to kill. He decided to start at the Los Angeles Main Library at Figueroa and Flower, a venerable place with mosaics around the interior of the rotunda depicting the founding of the city by Spanish priests. At the main reference desk on the second floor, he paid five dollars for access to one of their computers, used a key word search to call up the post-nomination press coverage of Wallberg’s campaign that he’d barely glanced through before being forced to abandon it at the Mayflower Hotel.

  He found a filler item he’d missed in D.C. A man had tried to rob one of Wallberg’s media consultants in the gift shop at the El Tovar Hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. The consultant’s name was Nisa Mather.

  Since Flagstaff and Phoenix were the population centers closest to Grand Canyon National Park, Thorne brought up their papers’ coverage of the event. The candidate, Gus Wallberg, was hiking down on the canyon floor when a grey-haired, uniformed man mopping the gift shop floor spoke to Nisa Mather for a minute or so, then tried to grab her purse.

  She screamed for security, the man fled with what one fanciful reporter called a wounded-wolf lope, and jumped into a dark green SUV driven by a woman. Another Wallberg aide, Kurt Jaeger, ran after the 4x4 but couldn’t get the license number.