Authors: Joe Gores
He stood holding the two dead birds for a full minute, motionless except for almost minuscule movements of his eyes. The owl was big – four-foot wingspan, weight about five pounds, grey-brown banding in her feathers. A female. In Alaska he had seen a female hit a man who threatened her nest so hard she had knocked him right off his feet. So what could have killed this one? Not the fox: snowies often hunted foxes for food.
He looked up. Directly overhead was a high-tension electric line strung through openings cut in the branches by the power company. The duck waddling around on the driftwood, the owl’s sudden swoop – snowies hunted both day and night. Wings beating, she rose through the trees – and hit the power line rubbed bare of insulation. Instant electrocution for them both.
Corwin laid the dead birds back on the driftwood for the fox to feed on. He was ready. Ready to seek, rend, destroy…
A giant fist shattered his chest. He felt bone and muscle and meat give inward, snap, tear…
Once predator, now only prey… Shot from ambush. Then, Nisa’s betrayal…
Nisa, wet with blood and semen, him standing over her, all passion spent, looking at her with dazed, horrified eyes…
Goddammit, he would continue to search the Internet
for the president’s travel plans. Couldn’t quit anyway. By now, he was sure, someone would be working out the puzzle of his carefully obliterated backtrail.
‘Come and get me, you bastard,’ Corwin said aloud.
Thorne knew, when he saw the clearing a quarter-mile off the ridge trail in King’s Canyon, that this was where Corwin had been bivouacked. The perfect place to melt into the trees and be gone if pursuers appeared. But Corwin had wanted them out in front of him, so he could double back and be free of them. Hide in plain sight. It was what Thorne would have done.
Ray and Johnny. The same members of Hatfield’s Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team who had sat on the muskrat house in the Delta smoking cigarettes while Corwin hid right below them. He wondered if either of them had been aboard the Gulfstream jet that had taken him from Nairobi to Washington and the White House.
Corwin’s campfire had been banked against a huge old hollow fir log, its open end laced with root fungi. The bark on the upper side had been pecked or literally torn away.
A flock of crows. Way too much beef jerky.
Thorne sat down with his back against the sun-warmed curve of the log. He let himself melt into the forest sights and sounds and smells. At dusk, the far-off calling of the crows coming up from the meadows where they had been feeding roused him from a reverie close to sleep. He ripped off pieces of beef jerky and thumbed them down into the bark of the ancient log as yelling crows swept unseen into the top of a ponderosa.
Thorne gave a single rusty caw. He hadn’t mimicked a crow’s call in a lot of years. The noises above stopped abruptly. He tried two caws. Nothing. But three caws brought a huge black shape sweeping down to circle the
clearing and settle on the nearest tree. Big as a raven, black and shiny as the phony lead Maltese falcon Gutman had hacked at with his pocketknife. The breeding male. The dominant bird of the flock.
As Thorne knelt and backed into the open end of the log, the big crow gave the feeding call: a dozen more black silent shadows drifted down to the log.
After ten minutes, Thorne crawled back out of the log through the veil of root fungi. The crows were gone. The jerky was gone. In the morning, he would leave them the rest of it.
Thorne slept well that night, in the log. No nightmare.
Gelson Hennings was a big, balding man with cold eyes and a hook nose, a retired four-star Army general who had been teaching military strategy at the Command and General Staff College when tapped by Wallberg for National Security Advisor.
‘How about you come up with a new set of options for the President on our current Iran strategy?’ demanded Jaeger. At these daily security meetings, his job was to keep the confrontations between Hennings and the President to a minimum.
‘How can I come up with options when I’m still not sure just what our present Iran strategy is?’ Hennings said bluntly.
‘The American people are sick of terrorist plots and nuclear scare tactics,’ Wallberg snapped. ‘Iran is not America’s problem. Iran is the world’s problem. Let the UN—’
‘Keep sucking its collective thumb, as usual?’ Hennings leaned across the table. ‘I have to tell you, Mr. President, that if we don’t act, the Israelis will. Unilaterally. They’ve done it before. The Entebbe Raid in the eighties, their strike on the Iraqi nuclear facility a few years later. The UN says Iran will have a nuke within four to ten years. The Israelis are giving it a year. We need to elucidate our policy now.’
Wallberg covertly glanced at Hastings Crandall, who said immediately, ‘Ah, I’m sorry, Mr. President, but the delegation of school children from Chicago…’
‘Damn!’ said Wallberg. ‘I forgot.’ He stood up. ‘Sorry, gentlemen, but that’s all the time we have for this right now.’
Jaeger stayed behind. Wallberg sat down again, heavily. There was no meeting with school children from Chicago, but he had been having trouble keeping focussed.
‘I’m coming to feel Hennings was a mistake. Too abrasive. No rounded edges. Not a team player. He doesn’t get what this administration is all about.’
‘He’s the best we’re going to get for the job.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said petulantly. He leaned forward suddenly in the big executive chair he had brought to Washington from his governor’s mansion in Minneapolis. ‘The polls show I need to get out of D.C., let the people see their President…’
‘That’s dangerous until we have a fix on Corwin.’
‘I thought you were going to end the Corwin problem,’ he said shrilly. He softened his tone. ‘What is Thorne doing?’
‘He’s in California, where Corwin eluded Hatfield’s people. Twice. He says he’s trying to find out how Corwin thinks.’
‘That sounds like B.S. to me, but maybe not. Have him report directly to me here immediately he gets back.’
Thorne made Jaeger uneasy: no give in him. Thorne closeted with the President made him even more uneasy. As long as Hatfield kept Thorne away from the President, Jaeger would help Hatfield with his as-yet unstated but obvious ambitions.
‘You got it, Chief,’ Jaeger said.
Thorne phoned ahead to set a meeting with Wallberg’s aides for seven-thirty in the morning, then caught the redeye out of Oakland. Hastings Crandall, Peter Quarles,
and Johnny Doyle had all been with Wallberg since his days as Minnesota governor: they had to know a lot that Thorne needed to know.
As usual, he stayed awake during the flight, fearing public nightmares, so he was first off the plane at Reagan National. In the same basement conference room where he had been recruited to look for Corwin, Crandall and Quarles shook hands with him, then took places at the conference table. Doyle wasn’t there. Aced out again? Or too hungover to make it?
But then Doyle’s ruddy drinker’s face appeared over a tray with two coffee carafes, regular and decaf, milk, sugar, pink, blue and yellow sugar substitutes, croissants.
‘A few too many at the Hard Times Cafe last night?’ sniggered Crandall.
‘I live in Old Town, so that’s where I drink,’ said Doyle.
‘Just pour our coffee, we’ll buzz you if we need anything.’
But Thorne said, ‘Mr. Doyle, why don’t you join us?’
Whichever way the other two jumped, Doyle might just be Thorne’s go-to guy. Crandall made a show of checking his watch.
‘I have a briefing with the President in twenty minutes.’
‘This won’t take long. First, I need everything the White House has on Corwin, from the day he was born up to the present.’
‘No problem there,’ said Quarles.
‘Second, I need the phone records from the Terminous Market in Terminous, California, for the day of the killings, and the… oh, say, the two weeks before that.’
‘I can do that,’ said Doyle.
‘Third, the sheriff’s deputy first at the crime-scene found a .357 Magnum handgun in close proximity to the
bodies. Was it the murder weapon, and who was it registered to?’
‘The cop didn’t know?’ asked Doyle, surprised.
But Crandall was on his feet, checking his watch again.
‘I have to tell you, Mr. Thorne, that this is very sensitive National Security material you are asking for here. You should have checked with Agent Hatfield before talking with any local hayseed law enforcement.’
Inside, Thorne was amused. Hayseed? Escobar had a subtlety of mind that Crandall, who had just unwittingly confirmed the .357 as the murder weapon, could only wish for.
‘I’ll check with Agent Hatfield and get back to you with anything he clears for your eyes,’ Crandall said.
He nodded and left, Quarles scrambling to his feet behind him to leave also, with no mention of the promised Corwin background material. Doyle was still in his chair, looking hungover. Thorne went to the sideboard, refilled their cups.
‘They’re gonna give you jack-shit, you know,’ Doyle said.
‘I know.’ Then Thorne added, ‘I’m at the Mayflower.’
It was a nice day, so Hatfield walked the half-dozen long downtown blocks to the White House. He would shape his report so it seemed he had suggested Thorne go to California, because the bastard actually had figured out how Corwin had eluded his men in the Delta and in King’s Canyon.
He stopped so abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk that pedestrian traffic had to flow around his immobile form like running water around a boulder.
He would have to authorize Crandall to give Thorne selected information on Corwin’s background. But no on
the phone records. Absolutely no on the .357 Magnum. There was too much about that night that he himself didn’t know, and wished he did.
According to Dorst’s session notes, killing now supposedly was instant aversion therapy for Thorne because of his dead shackrat and their brat. Excellent intelligence to have. But what about those two dead shifta? Under pressure, Dorst would tell him how they fit into the equation. And tell him how best to use Thorne’s recurring nightmare to keep the man in line.
He turned into the recently-opened Pennsylvania Avenue foot-traffic mall in front of the White House.
Whatever Dorst came up with, he definitely would put people on Thorne here in D.C., and monitor him electronically out into the field. Keep him under control.
He lengthened his stride, suddenly eager. He hadn’t told Thorne about today’s meeting, and would tell the President that Thorne had been reluctant to interrupt his work on Corwin for a talk session. Admirable.
But he was sure that subconsciously, Wallberg would be pissed at Thorne for ignoring a presidential summons.
Thorne did a quick circuit of the weight machines in the Mayflower’s fitness facility, showered, took fifty laps in the pool, had another shower because of the luxury of unlimited water.
At the front desk was a sealed manila folder from Crandall, delivered by messenger. Something substantial? Or a brush-off? Suspecting the latter, he walked back to the only quiet place in D.C. he knew, the Georgetown Dock. He chose a table on the second level above the drinks kiosk, and ordered iced tea.
To his left, traffic grumbled and complained on the Key Bridge leading to the Washington Parkway. A white tour boat with brown trim was just ducking under it, cringing as the flat awning over its superstructure barely cleared the bridge’s under-arch.
He opened the folder on Corwin. As he had expected, a stripped file. Grade and high school – indifferent grades – a semester of junior college, Vietnam. Unsubstantiated speculation about a possible career as a merc, his wife’s death while he was gone, his retreat to the great north woods. But they’d forgotten to remove – or hadn’t thought it important – that Corwin’d had a drunken, abusive father, and a submissive mother. It could be assumed he’d be a kid heading for trouble. No phone records. No ballistics report. No crime scene evidence.
The tour boat glided into a mooring spot at the end of the dock far to Thorne’s right, under a sign, ‘See
Alexandria by Water.’ Tourists disembarked and wandered away as the four-person crew began preparing for the return trip.
On his own, Thorne had ferreted out that Corwin had twice eluded pursuers by hiding in plain sight. But he needed to know how good a long-range sniper Corwin had been in ’Nam. During those purported mercenary years afterwards, what had he been doing? Where had he been doing it? In cities? In jungles? In deserts? Long-range kills with long guns, or short-range kills with hand guns? With explosives? The knife? The garrotte? Or up close and dirty, the way he’d done his daughter?
He couldn’t even begin to speculate on where and how Corwin might try for Wallberg – or on how hard he might try – until he had more background, more history. Which he wasn’t going to get sitting here drinking iced tea.
Thorne looked around for the waiter and a sturdy athletic blonde sitting one level above him, wearing hiking shorts that showed a lot of inner thigh, casually lowered her head to talk to the collar of her shirt. Probably just out of training at Quantico, on her first big assignment. Alerting the tail-car that would be a couple of streets over from the dock to advise the other on-foot trackers via two-way miniaturized radios.
Out in the jungle, the rainforest, the savanna, tells might be a leaf overturned so its pale side was up; a tuft of grass slowly springing back to its original position; a branch stirring when there was no wind. Here, he looked for inconsistencies of dress or action.
A girl in hiking clothes talking to her collar. Two very tanned mid-twenties jocks standing just below the kiosk, gesturing at the moored yachts – with tiny receivers in their ears. A middle-aged, dispirited, vacant-eyed homeless man with a stolen shopping cart. But the derelict’s unkempt hair down to his shoulders wasn’t quite filthy
enough, and his shoes were too new, not run-over enough. Hatfield had strong-armed Dorst’s session notes out of her, but obviously didn’t trust them.
Thorne paid his check and went back along the dock toward Georgetown University. The tails might become a problem eventually, but for now their presence would unwittingly furnish visual white noise to mask his actions.