Glass Tiger (27 page)

‘How far is it from Casa Loma to Kestrel’s cabin?’

‘Couple of miles.’

‘Shit! Did you get out a stolen vehicle report?’

‘Didn’t have to. We found the car abandoned by the
Tuolemne River, down five miles of the damnedest road you’ve ever seen. That’s the spot where AQUA River Tours puts in their river-rafting rubber boats.’

Hatfield demanded sharply, ‘Why is that significant?’

‘Janet Kestrel is a river-rafting guide with AQUA. Arness says Thorne came around yesterday morning looking for her.’

A major screw-up. In their rush to get Kestrel’s home address, they hadn’t asked the Groveland postmaster where she worked. Thorne had. That’s how he could have beaten them to Kestrel – if he had. He could have waited for her at AQUA Tours, alerted her to the fact that the FBI was looking for her.

‘We took Arness down to the river to look around. He said that a half-stove-in rowboat was buried in the weeds there for a couple of years, and now it’s gone. No oars, but even so…’

‘Okay,’ snapped Hatfield. ‘First light we start searching down both sides of the river. We’ll have to use the other river guides, and the local police and sheriffs, too. If they find Thorne alive, we push the National Security button to keep them from starting any interrogations of their own.’ He paused. ‘Meanwhile, I’m authorizing an affirmative on Compromise Authority for Thorne for everyone involved.’

Compromise Authority: shoot on sight. Shoot to kill.

It was mid-afternoon when Thorne was awakened by the chill. The sun was low in the sky so its rays no longer warmed him. He moved his arms and legs, checking to make sure everything was working before staggering to his feet. His side ached abominably, but ribs eventually healed themselves. Just don’t breathe deep.

For the moment, his fever had disappeared. But his meds and food also had disappeared, with the boat. So his fever might return. He started working his way downriver toward Ferry Bridge, walking on stone or gravel that would take no footprint, resting often against a tree, sitting on a rock. He ripped his stolen life jacket with his knife, draped it off a dead, half-submerged aspen, then plodded the sun down the sky to dusk.

Hatfield would discover the abandoned car. Tomorrow they would search the riverbanks, with luck find pieces of the missing boat and the life jacket. The river emptied into Don Pedro Lake, where a body could easily disappear for weeks. He could only hope that’s what they would think happened to him.

Janet might have driven straight for Canada or Mexico before they had time to get out a BOLO on the 4-Runner. But he had to assume she would be in Oakdale, waiting.

Shadow fell across him. He looked up. He was under the bridge. He waited until full dark and beyond, when there would be no traffic on Ferry Road. Scuffing out his
tracks as he went, he used the bridge supports to haul himself up the steep earth slope. Get to Big Oak Flat five miles away, crawl unseen into the back of a truck at the gas station, and get taken away.

At first light, Hatfield was in a raft on the Tuolemne, wearing the wet suit, life jacket, and helmet given him by the guides. The sheriff’s men conducting the search of the river banks had found a part of the rowboat, a curved piece of wood they said was a strake, part of the boat’s keel outside the gunnel. But it wasn’t enough for Hatfield. He needed Thorne’s body, or some semi-kind of proof that he was dead.

‘Tag it and bag it and leave it for the recovery team.’

Then they found the life jacket impaled on an aspen branch.

Adrenaline surged. ‘Don’t touch it!’

They were two miles from Ferry Bridge. The ripped life jacket swirled back and forth in the foaming white water like someone waving for help. No body was found, but there was no indication that he had climbed up from under the bridge to the road. Hatfield looked up at the ring of solemn faces.

‘This man is a major National Security risk. We have to be sure he doesn’t get away. Does anyone believe he is alive?’

They looked at one another, then away. Then shook their heads. That was enough for Hatfield. They were the river search experts. But even so, he told them, ‘Search the river banks for another ten miles tomorrow, just to be sure.’

Later, he told his Hostage/Rescue team that they could abandon the search.

‘Thorne is dead. Close the book on him. Make Kestrel our priority now.’

They did. But several hours later, Perry could only report, ‘No sighting of her anywhere. Indian casinos are under a lot of scrutiny in California these days, so the Sho-Ka-Wah will notify us if she shows up. They want to cooperate.’

‘Don’t hold your breath on that one,’ said Hatfield. ‘No reports of border crossings into Mexico or Canada?’

‘None,’ said Baror, ‘but she could have walked across.’

Corwin was dead. Thorne was dead also. The 4-Runner had not shown up. Kestrel had no paper life, and was probably in Mexico. Maybe it was time to figure out a way to somehow report all of these negatives as positives to the President.

At the outskirts of Manteca, where east-west 120 hit 1-5 running north and south through the great central valley, Janet parked the 4-Runner beside Fat-Arms LeDoux’s no-name gas station. Fat-Arms was 350 pounds, six-eight, hack boots, blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off to show his fat twenty-two inch upper arms, a red bandanna around his head like a pirate of the Caribbean.

He walked around the 4-Runner under the lights, glowering.

‘Somebody heavy looking for it, could get my nuts creamed.’

‘Looking for me,’ said Janet. ‘Not for the 4-Runner.’

‘I got a Suzuki thumper, we trade pink slips even up.’

An entry-level bike, but its single-cylinder, four-stroke engine had a hefty 600cc displacement. After they traded pink slips and Janet had roared away, Fat-Arms chortled aloud. He had stolen the Suzuki in Sacramento the week before, dummied up a pink, and switched plates with a totaled Yamaha V-Max. When she renewed the registration, the VIN would come back hot. Janet would get busted.

‘Stupid, fucking, stuck-up bitch.’

Served her right. She’d turned him down once, hard, when he had come onto her at Whiskey River.

Whiskey River was long and narrow, with an L-shaped bar along the left wall, a couple of tables along the right. In back, it opened out to a small dance floor with a bandstand for Friday and Saturday nights. But this was the usual slow mid-week night, just the way Kate Wayne liked it.

On the juke, Willie Nelson was grating out
Whiskey River
, their virtual theme song. Three wannabes she knew drove Harley clones were drinking draft beer at the bar. At one of the tables a guilty-looking couple, probably up from Modesto in separate cars for illicit sex, were having a drink before heading back to their respective dreary spouses.

A stranger shuffled in, paused to scan the room with deep-set, bitter chocolate eyes sunk deep in his face. Coal-black hair filthy and matted, ripe clothing. A three-day beard on his lean, feverish cheeks. He looked like a train wreck, but managed to climb onto a bar stool.

‘What’ll it be?’ asked Kate.

For answer, he put his head down on the bar and passed out.

Kate punched out her home number on the bar’s phone, whispered to Janet’s cautious voice, ‘He made it.’

Thorne woke to a pair of warm brown expectant eyes staring into his face from a foot away. A shorthair black-and-white mongrel was sitting on his chest, wagging its tail on his belly. His side, bandaged, hurt; his ribs, taped, itched. He had no idea why he was flat on his back with a dog on his chest. The dog lifted a front paw. They shook, solemnly.

‘His name is Jigger,’ piped a voice from beside the bed.

Thorne could just see the top half of a tiny girl’s face beyond the covers. She had big solemn dark eyes and cornsilk hair. Maybe two, about the age of Eden when…

‘I’m Thorne,’ he said, quickly stifling memory.

‘Lindy,’ she said. ‘Me’n Jigger wanted to say “hi”.’

‘Hi.’

She whirled and ran out of the room. She wore a pink frilly dress. Jigger jumped down and trotted busily after her.

When Thorne opened his eyes again, Janet was there. She wore jeans and a blouse and a sheath knife on the outside of her right boot. Her arms were crossed over her breasts in what could almost have been a defensive stance.

He gestured at his wrapped ribs and bandaged wound. ‘You?’

‘Jigger’s vet. He won’t talk. You got to Oakdale night before last and stumbled your way into Whiskey River and passed out. My friend Kate called me, we brought you over here. This is her house. Lindy’s her daughter.’

Thorne steeled himself. ‘We have to talk.’

‘Not here. Not now.’ She gestured after Lindy. ‘After hours at the bar. I’ll leave the back door unlocked.’

They were in the conference room under the White House. Just the two of them. No aides, no notes taken. Hatfield had to use smoke and mirrors to spin his essential lack of results to his utmost advantage.

‘Mr. President, we are concentrating on a blackjack dealer and casual prostitute named Janet Kestrel. She hooked up with Corwin in Reno in July, travelled with him until the election, then disappeared. I have a BOLO and an SIA out on her.’

For Wallberg, somebody new to worry about. With Corwin dead, he’d thought Thorne, snooping around in the past as Hatfield had said, was his only concern. But this Kestrel woman also sounded like trouble. This was dangerous ground; Hal Corwin might have remembered things and told them to her, things no one else could know about. With Kurt Jaeger gone, Wallberg knew he had to find someone new to trust. Probably Hatfield, but not yet. For now, dissemble, act as if Kestrel was of no importance to him.

‘So she traveled with Corwin. Corwin is dead and gone. Thorne is our priority here.’

‘Frankly, Mr. President, we want the Kestrel woman because Thorne was looking for her. Since we can’t ask Thorne himself, it’s vital to catch her and find out what he wanted from her.’

‘Can’t ask Thorne himself,’ snapped Wallberg. ‘Say what you mean, man. That you can’t find Thorne.’

‘Can’t ask him, Mr. President,’ Hatfield persisted. ‘We have every reason to believe that Thorne is dead.’

Wallberg kept his face and voice impassive. ‘Indeed?’

Hatfield spun his tale. Thorne exchanging fire with him, and, wounded, trying to escape down the Tuolemne. Water-logged rowboat, wreckage, life jacket. Absolutely nothing since.

Hope leaped up in Wallberg’s chest. ‘I find it symbolic,’ he intoned sententiously when Hatfield was finished, ‘that both Thorne and Corwin found their quietus in icy, rushing water, as if trying to cleanse themselves of their sins.’ He stood up. ‘Good work, Terrill. But find this Kestrel woman. Confirm that Thorne is dead. I need closure in this matter so I can get on with the business of running this great country of ours.’

‘Closure you will get, Mr. President.’

Alone, Wallberg felt a rising excitement. Corwin was dead, Thorne was probably dead, no longer able to pick at certain forty-year-old knots in the fabric of his life before the presidency. Hatfield would find Kestrel, extract whatever information she had, tell it only to him. The man was proving his dedication to the Presidency – and to Hatfield’s own ambition: to become the Director of the FBI. As Edith had said on New Year’s Eve, no one could stop Gus Wallberg now.

Walking the perimeter of the Whiskey River lot, Thorne felt surprisingly good. The vet had done his job. No real pain. In front of the bar, no vehicles. In the dirt parking lot out behind, no bikes. In the wall he faced, no windows. A good place for a talk. Or a take-down.

He drifted the door open. Smells of beer and booze; this being California, none of cigarettes. Janet was sitting at a small round table across the dance floor, nothing in her hands, a bottle of whiskey and two thick-bottom shot
glasses in front of her. He slid the deadbolt shut, sat down across from her.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘now tell me about Hal.’ Her eyes were hot, intense on his face.

‘I’d better tell you about me, first. It’s relevant. I grew up in Alaska, did a lot of hunting and trapping. I joined the Rangers, when I became an ex-Ranger, the CIA hired me as a contract sniper for a CIA front in Panama. Seven years ago I lost my wife and infant child, about Lindy’s age, to a drunk driver. I vowed to my wife’s memory I would never kill again, and became a camp guard in Kenya at a fancy tourist lodge. Any of this sound familiar? Like a parallel to Hal’s life? Anyway, Hatfield framed me so I would be deported back to the States.’

‘Sure, I see the parallel. But I think I hear violins.’

‘This isn’t a sob story. Hatfield framed me to get me back here to hunt down Corwin for the president.’ He outlined for her the presidential pressure to find Corwin, the way he had done it, the cat-and-mouse with Corwin, blind chess – in Minnesota, in the Bitterroot Mountains.

‘So you’re saying Hal shot at Wallberg and hit Jaeger.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. From twelve-hundred yards out.’

‘That’s what I can’t believe. Hal wouldn’t miss. Not even from twelve-hundred yards.’ Her eyes were chips of blue ice, glacier-cold. ‘I think he meant to hit Jaeger, and that’s enough bullshit about how and why. I want to know where. Goddamn you – where is Hal Corwin?’

Thorne’s own personal Rubicon. ‘Dead. I killed him. I know it’s not worth anything, but I’m sorry he’s—’

She came across the table at Thorne, knocking him backward out of his chair, landing on top of him. Her left hand was a claw that scored his face with long bloody parallel grooves. Her right hand was jerking the knife from her boot. She stabbed downward at his throat. He
knocked the blade aside. The knife buried itself two inches deep in the hardwood floor.

Thorne swung an elbow against the corner of her jaw. She sagged. He threw the knife away. It hit the bandstand with a clang. He got up, panting, righted his chair, retrieved the bottle and unbroken glasses. He sat down heavily, hunched over with pain from his ribs, watching her like a hungry hawk.

Her eyelids fluttered. She moved her head, pressed a hand against the side of her jaw, yelped. Her eyes opened, filled with malice. She measured the distance between them.