Glass Tiger (8 page)

‘Talked? Jesus H. Christ, get serious.’

She took a sip of coffee, trying to mask her dismay. She hadn’t run the standard neurological and psychological tests on Thorne because they had been run several times before, by the Army and then by the CIA, and the results had been consistent every time. She didn’t need a battery of tests to tell her who Thorne was, psychologically.

But she couldn’t say that to Hatfield. She had been commissioned to run the tests, and she hadn’t run them. She had made herself vulnerable.

‘I felt the standard battery of tests would be counterproductive with this subject. He’s been down that road before.’

‘Is he a burned-out case or what?’

She groped for something that would not betray confidentiality, and remembered Thorne talking about tigers with hearts of glass. And her calling them glass tigers.

‘It’s not that easy. He used an analogy. In captivity, tigers often have hearts of glass. Under pressure, they can shatter. The deaths of the innocent woman and child in
Panama put such pressure on him that I think of him as a glass tiger.’

Hatfield was staring at her, rage suffusing his features.

‘A glass tiger? Are you nuts? He’s a fucking assassin, the sort of bastard our Hostage Rescue/Sniper teams are supposed to put down. Now, goddammit, what made him run off to Africa?’

This was a disaster. But she found a calm, steady voice to say, ‘I’ve told you as much as I’m at liberty to discuss.’

‘Fuck that, lady! I need your session notes on him.’

Her heart was pounding, but her face was icy and aloof.

‘By contract, I’m not required to show you anything.’

‘Shit, lady, you broke the contract when you didn’t run the tests. Under the Patriot Act I can have you stuck in a mental institution for a couple of months as a possible security risk – and justify it with paperwork.’

She stared at him, loathing him, fearing him, knowing he could make good on his illegal National Security threat. But she said, ‘The client–doctor privilege protects therapists and their patients from people like you.’

He might not have heard her.

‘Your notes weren’t at your office, my people looked. So give them to me now or suffer the consequences.’

Her hand automatically went to the briefcase beside her chair. How had she been so stupid as to bring the folder with her? But if she’d left it at her office…

Her gesture was enough for him. His hand shot out, grabbed the briefcase. She tried to jerk it back, but he fended her off with an elbow while rifling through it. She grabbed again, her nails scored long red lines down the back of his hand.

He half-raised the hand as if to strike her, but then, a triumphant look on his face, held up her session notes on Thorne with his other hand.

‘You’ll have these back first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m going to report you to—’

But he was already gone, crossing the courtyard with long strides. She stared after him, numb, on the edge of tears. All she could do was leave a cryptic warning message for Thorne at the Mayflower Hotel, and hope he called in to get it. And that he would understand it.

The little general store was white clapboard, two-story, raised six feet above the ground on pillars against the Delta’s winter floods. Out behind, two house trailers were settled down comfortably on their blocks like regulars on their barstools. A battered white TERMINOUS MARKET sign creaked on guy-wires from the store’s old-fashioned false front.

Thorne sat in his car next to a new red Beetle convertible, rereading the FBI file. The investigation had been incredibly sloppy, or else Hatfield had deleted anything useful. But Nisa’s phone call had been traced to the payphone here at this run-down market he had barely noted when he had passed it on his way to Tower Park Marina.

Inside it was cluttered and comfortable, with fishing lures and candy bars and postcards and cold beer and sodas and bottled water. It smelled of live bait and microwaved burritos. The proprietor was in his late sixties, with a lot of white tousled hair and a tobacco-stained gunfighter’s mustache. He nodded twice to himself when Thorne showed his FBI credentials, like a robin checking out worm-sounds.

‘Wondered when you guys would be around again.’

‘Well, the phone company records show the woman who was killed made a call from your payphone here that afternoon.’

‘Yep. Reco’nized her right off from the pichurs they
showed me.’ He looked as if he wanted to spit the juice from his chaw of tobacco into the spitoon, but instead just worked his jaw around. ‘Her and her husband bought supplies here, said they was on vacation in a rented houseboat. Damn shame, I say. She was a mighty nice lady. Pretty, too. Got to know her, her coming in to get them calls every Tuesday an’ Thursday, two ’clock, straight up, reg’lar as clockwork.’

Nothing in the file about her receiving a series of calls.

‘Ah… know who they were from?’

‘Nope. But they was all of ’em long-distance calls.’ He chuckled. ‘Now I think of it, most anywhere you’d call from here would be long-distance, wouldn’t it?’

‘Sure would. Could you hear her end of things?’

He winked at Thorne. ‘Little place like this, couldn’t help hearing, could I?’ His face fell. ‘All she ever said was something like, “Everything’s fine” and “Thanks” and she’d hang up.’ Then he brightened again. ‘Got one two hours early on ’lection day, ’bout noon, thereabouts, an’ it shook her up real good. Soon’s she heard the voice, she yelled, “You!” an slammed down the receiver. Then she made a buncha calls of her own.’

Got an unexpected call that panicked her, started trying to reach Jaeger. She finally did, but too late to save them. Had this all been deleted from the file? Or had the FBI just never found out about all of those calls? The old man was going on.

‘Waitin’ for them Tuesday an’ Thursday calls, she’d listen to my tales ’bout the old days when Terminous was the railhead for produce comin’ out of the Delta. A real nice lady.’

The Delta. A synapse fired in Thorne’s brain. Below that dead tree reaching imploring arms to the sky had been a messy waist-high mound of interwoven twigs and branches and reeds some eight feet in diameter. He
checked his watch. He was in a sudden hurry to get out of there. Dusk would soon fall.

‘You got any of that black electrician’s tape for sale?’

The old man cackled. ‘Course I do! It’s a damn general store, ain’t it?’

At the White Slough Wildlife Area gate on Guard Road, Thorne wrapped his flashlight with electrician’s tape and rummaged through his suitcase for a heavy turtleneck sweater. The sun was low, a cold wind had kicked up, swirling dust. The rabbit was gone. No enchantment this time around. Just icy water and a half-assed idea.

Across the channel, a sentry muskrat, its segmented rat-like tail wound around behind it, was sitting on top of the messy mound of interwoven twigs and branches and reeds Thorne belatedly had recognized as a muskrat house. He had also remembered a Michael Gilbert story that mentioned ancient Britons hiding in underground burrows called dene holes to let the Saxon invaders overrun their positions. Hide in plain sight.

He stripped naked, leaving his clothes folded in the track like a suicide going to drown himself. Flashlight in hand, he slid down the steep side of the levee to the water. A lesser grebe popped up in mid-channel, swam for a moment, dove under again. Thorne shivered in the cold wind. He was at least as tough as a helldiver, wasn’t he?

As he dove in himself, the sentry scrambled off the muskrat house. Thorne swam underwater as long as he could, surfaced a few feet from the house, numb with cold. He was used to African waters, warm and sunlit. And full of parasitic bilharzia worms. And hippos. And crocodiles.

Corwin, a generation older and a sicko at that, had been doing this in November. If he could take it, by God
so could Thorne. On his next dive, he used his temporarily waterproofed flashlight to find the underwater entrance. Fighting irrational fears of an icy tomb with his face buried in mud, he rammed and wiggled his way up through glutinous mud and water and rotted reeds to burst into air rank with the smell of rodents.

He rested there inside the house, panting, just his eyes and nose above water. No muskrats. His light died, but not before he had seen the proof he sought: a partially obliterated handprint next to his own in the mud beside the entry hole.

Corwin must have been able to disappear into himself as Morengaru could, so animals no longer sensed his presence. Because according to the FBI file, a sentry muskrat had been sitting on top of the house that morning until scared off by two searchers who sat down to smoke a cigarette.

Was he Corwin’s equal? Thorne remembered laying his hand on Bwana Kifaru’s warm flank in the African moonlight. Damn right he was Corwin’s equal.

He surfaced outside the muskrat house, crossed the channel. Now the water felt warm, but the wind was numbing on the levee. He pulled on the heavy sweater, jogged back to the car carrying his other clothes in one hand, his shoes and socks in the other.

He had passed a motel off the cloverleaf where east-west 12 intersected with north-south 1-5. Microtec Inn and Suites. This time of year they’d have plenty of vacancies. And across the interchange, Rocky’s Restaurant. Check in, grab a hot shower and something to eat, try to sleep, in the morning call the Mayflower just in case they had found Corwin and he could quit looking.

Who was he kidding? He was hooked on the hunt.

Dorst walked the 45-year-old Library of Congress research librarian to the door. Her husband had dumped her for a twenty-something grad student. Dorst’s phone, turned down during sessions, started clicking. She caught Thorne in mid-sentence.

‘… got your message, I’ll try again in an hour—’

She picked up quickly. ‘Thanks for calling back.’ She felt like crying. It had been so easy to assure him that his deepest secrets were safe with her. ‘Hatfield… grabbed my session notes right out of my briefcase. He threatened me with National Security if I said anything. I… I caved in.’

‘Don’t sweat it, Doc. You done fine. You called it right. He went after you because he’s afraid to go after me.’ Thorne chuckled. ‘No glass tiger problems. Right now I’m in California, on my way to King’s Canyon. My hunt is starting to feel like German intelligence chess during World War Two. A three-dimensional board, players unknown – and everybody blindfolded.’

Seth Parker ambled over, wiping his hands on his apron. His rolled-up sleeves showed the crude prison tats on his forearms. The deeply tanned, compact man who had taken the Parkers’ last unrented cabin the night before was sitting at the bar under the mounted elk’s head. He moved his own head slightly.

‘Join me?’

Seth’s wary brown eyes reflexively darted around the old chinked-log building that smelled faintly of breakfast even though mid-morning deserted. Third week of April, the tourists were off hiking or driving through the natural wonders of King’s Canyon. He ran a finger along his drooping ginger mustache.

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

Seth got two Miller Lites from the cooler and twisted off the caps. They tinked long-neck bottles, drank. The stranger laid a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. Obviously, no tourist.

‘Guy passed through last month, planned to camp up off the ridge trail. Ten, twelve days later a couple of other gents came looking. Said they were his friends. Remember any of them?’

Seth remembered all of them. Because he was always curious about things, he had been around the corner from three murders during his years in stir. Because he was also always cautious, he was alive today. But because of those prison years, Mae hated him getting involved in anything beyond running the resort. He reluctantly snapped the bill away with his forefinger. It landed in the puddle left by Thorne’s bottle. Thorne shook his head.

‘I’m on expenses, you aren’t. Start at the beginning.’

What the hell, Mae was off doing up the cabins. So he told Thorne about the lanky fiftyish hard-bitten man who had walked into his not-yet-open resort at noon on mid-March day…

‘Walked.’ A statement from Thorne, not a question.

‘With his camping gear. Reckon he come on the Greyhound stops at Cedarbrook, some miles down the canyon, walked from there. Stocked up on camp grub real good. Knew just what he wanted.’ He shut an eye for
a moment, recollecting. ‘A dozen Cup of Noodles for soup, freeze-dried veggies, big block of sharp cheddar, instant coffee, Granola bars, trail mix. Beef jerky.’

‘Anything strike you as odd? Out of proportion?’

‘Way too much beef jerky.’ Contempt entered his voice. ‘Hell, them guys claiming they was his friends never even picked up on that. I think they was Feds, after him. Had his pichur.’

‘This one?’

Seth bent to look at the photo Thorne laid on the bar.

‘Yep. Reco’nized him right off, acted like I wasn’t sure.’

Thorne put the photo away. ‘Tell ’em where he was camped?’

‘Just said up on the ridge trail. Guess they didn’t find ’im – I ain’t heard nothing more about none of them since.’

From the FBI report, Thorne knew Ray and Johnny had missed Corwin by only twenty minutes: they scared up a flock of crows when they burst into the clearing, and the embers of the campfire were still warm. He slid off his stool, leaving the $100-bill.

‘How about you sell me way too much beef jerky?’

Meanwhile, up in Minnesota, Corwin had gone ninety feet in thirty minutes in his totally silent stalk across a wet, crackly surface. Up by his cabin, three miles away, the snow was gone except under the densest stands of pine and there was the constant tinkling of ice-melt. Down here in the silent river bottom, receding floodwaters had laid down a springy foot-deep bed of driftwood under the leafless hardwoods.

Three yards away, oblivious to his presence, a sly-faced red fox nosed at something on the ground. Twenty feet above his head, a brilliantly-colored wood duck sat
on a limb of a leafing oak that until the week before had been standing in flood water.

Corwin crackled driftwood, the duck shot indignantly away, jinking through the branches like a maneuvering jet fighter. The fox fled. Corwin went to see what it had been sniffing. A snowy owl and another wood duck, both dead. He gingerly picked up the owl: still warm. The duck came with it, clutched in the spasmodic death grip of the owl’s curved, needle-sharp talons.