Glass Tiger

Prologue

NEW YEAR’S EVE

Tsavo Game Park, Kenya

The black rhino stopped browsing to throw back its massive head and snort. His scimitar horns, the front one five feet long, gleamed like dull carbon under the gibbous moon. He was big as a boulder, a ton-and-a-half of living fossil plunked down on the wet-season savanna. Since the devastating horn and ivory raids by Somali shifta poachers in the 1970s and ’80s, only this lone bull survived outside the game park’s pitifully small rhino recovery reserve.

The compact man three feet from the rhino’s left flank froze with one foot raised above the calf-high grass, one arm still outstretched. He was downwind, but his scent must have been carried by a vagrant night breeze. Rhinos’ keen sense of smell, coupled with dim eyesight, made them unpredictable and even deadly if you couldn’t get out of their way in time. The rhino snorted again, satisfied that all was well, and returned to stripping tender twigs and new leaves off the acacia bush with his delicate, beak-like mouth.

The man lowered his foot, put weight on it gradually so no twig would crackle. He laid his palm on the rhino’s rounded back as gently as a falling leaf. It was his fifth New Year’s Eve to do this, but he was always surprised by the softness and warmth of the hide. Explorers’ tales from previous centuries made rhinos out to be great armored beasts with skin three inches thick, but they were surprisingly vulnerable to ticks and black flies and disease.

The rhino stopped munching to begin moving his back slightly under the human hand. After five minutes, the man moved silently away, out of the brush and out of danger and into the open veldt.

As he did each year he whispered, ‘Happy New Year, Bwana Kifaru’ — Swahili for Big Boss Rhinocerous. Getting away unscathed from petting Bwana Kifaru was his New Year’s Eve ritual. Only Morengaru, the other guard at Sikuzuri Safari Camp, understood it as a stab at needed danger. The man started the four-mile trot back to the Galana River’s south bank. Almost forty, five-ten and built like an Olympic gymnast, hard of body, with coal-black hair and bitter-chocolate eyes, he was the only white camp guard in the country. And since big game hunting had been banned in Kenya, the closest to a white hunter the wealthy guests at the luxury resort would ever get. So he was obliged to attend Sikuzuri’s official New Year’s Eve party, even though he only wanted to return to his thatch-roof banda and reread one of the halfdozen paperback mysteries left behind by departing guests.

When he got to the ford across the Galana, he stopped abruptly, remembering the New Year’s Eve seven years ago, after which everything had gone dead in him. Tonight he felt like a bear coming out of hibernation. What was going on? As he crossed the Galana, he could feel numbness disappearing, feel a return of something like that fierce adrenaline rush he once had lived for as the junkie lives for the needle.

Not killing. No, never again killing. A quest. A vital, necessary trackdown of... what? Or of whom? For whom?

Minnetonka, Minnesota

Sleeves rolled up and tie pulled awry, the former governor of Minnesota stood at his thermopaned study window, drink in hand, looking out over frozen Lake Minnetonka with glacial blue eyes. At fifty-five, he had a strong jaw and good cheekbones and the thick, slightly unruly hair Jack Kennedy had made de rigueur for serious national contenders.

‘Thinking of how far you’ve come, darling?’ He turned. After their return from the big New Year’s Eve blast at Olaf Gavle’s multi-million-dollar house, Edith had gone up to bed. Yet here she was back down again, wearing her shapeless flannel nightgown and green chenille robe.

‘Thinking of how far I have to go. Can’t sleep?’

‘I get lonely when you’re not next to me.’

Edith was forty-nine, the only wife he’d ever had, short, slightly plump, with the bright inquisitive eyes of a chickadee. He had been unfaithful to her with only one woman, who was now gone, and had never been able to decide whether Edith had known or not.

Looking down, he told her, not for the first time, ‘If chickadees weighed a pound apiece, they’d rule the world.’ She bumped him with a well-upholstered hip. He added, ‘Twenty days, love. How often have I doubted this time would ever come?’

‘I never doubted,’ she said, suddenly fierce. ‘Never for an instant. You’re a man of destiny. Nothing can stop you now.’

The Great North Woods

Outside, it was thirty-six degrees below zero. Winter’s icy hand gripped this northern land by the balls. Inside, the 56-year-old man started up from his sleep with a muffled ‘Whompf!’ The embers of the hearth fire dug harsh shadows into his lean face, seamed and nut-brown from exposure to a lifetime of bad weather.

He loved it all. Or once had. Now, he leaned against the wall behind his bunk in the one-room log cabin, deep-set hazel eyes staring through the moonlight from the window and into the familiar, already fading image:

Nisa, pounded back up against the bulkhead beside the houseboat’s couch by the heavy .357 Magnum slugs...

Two months ago. He had dropped the gun like it was red hot. He had been shot the year before, turning it all sour. And tonight, along with Nisa, was an image from that earlier night:

Two yards away was a gaunt timberwolf, tongue lolling, ears pricked. Real? Or hallucination? The man had been shot three times from ambush and had to crawl a thousand feet to the cabin and a telephone before he went into shock.

His racing heart began to slow. The nightsweat of terror began drying on his face. Anger replaced it. Once he had been a trapper and a hunter: now he ate out of cans. Now he had a limp and a damaged lung and missing fingers, and couldn’t even bring himself to bow-hunt whitetails for food.

And now, a visitation of the Nisa nightmare again, a month since the last one. His nightmares after his wife Terry’s death, of her fleeing him, had prevented him from tracking down the drunken fool who had killed her. The Nisa dreams were different, guilt-filled — what had he done? With tonight, the wolf and a strange, palette-knife swirl of other images. Some stalking beast, dark and lithe and lean and tireless. Stalking him...

His bitterness became rage: having been made prey, he could no longer be predator. But because of what he had done, the nightmares of his daughter’s death left him no choice. He had to atone, even while telling himself he never really would.

Never could. But now...

The gray wolf was easy. Himself, being urged to hunt again. But who — or what — would be hunting him? Easy surface analysis: if he hunted, he would be hunted by his own guilt.

Deeper analysis: literally hunted?

‘Are you good enough?’ he demanded of the faded image.

Unfairly, he would have to call Janet after convincing himself he would never put her in danger again. Ask her to meet him somewhere, tell her he needed her help, remind her that two months ago she had been urging him to be a predator...

As he slid back down under the covers, he wondered if she still had old Charlie’s bearskin.

The Sierra Foothills, Northern California

The 26-year-old woman stood looking out the open door of her cabin three miles from the Casa Loma general store. Her eyes were a startling blue in a tawny face with a strong nose and high cheekbones; utterly straight raven hair flowed down to the middle of her back. This had been her parents’ cabin under her father’s long-since discarded name of Roanhorse: now it was hers. Pale blue moonlight showed her a muledeer doe and a yearling fawn browsing at the edge of the snow-clad clearing. She raised a steaming cup of coffee to salute them.

‘Happy New Year, guys,’ she said aloud. They ignored her, as was right between old and trusted friends.

Her bare feet were frigid on the pine planks, but she stood there a moment longer, feeling the night. A New Year, a year of change. She would write the letter, first step toward building a new life. After all, there had been nothing from Hal since he had left her hospital room on the eve of the elections. What had he done since? What might he still do?

She shivered, stepped back, shut the cabin door, and crawled into her bunkbed under the bearskin he had given her.

Rockville, Maryland

A cigar smouldered in an ashtray on the bedside table. The motel had a king-size bed and a dirty movie channel on the TV for nine bucks a night. Pale moonlight filtering through gauzy curtains showed a burly bear of a man in his late thirties, sitting on the edge of the bed with his pants off. Dense black hair covered his head, back, chest, belly, groin.

The platinum-haired black whore crouched between his thighs had long limbs, dangly breasts and very full lips and white teeth. She drew back her head momentarily to speak.

‘It’s starting to get there, baby,’ she crooned. ‘Oooh, baby, it’s gonna be sooo good!’

But it wasn’t. He had thought, after that night two months ago, that this would never happen again. One thing he knew for sure: it was all this ugly black bitch’s fault.

‘Aw hell, lady, this ain’t working.’

He stood. His big fisted right hand struck her in the face, breaking her nose and mashing the suddenly hateful lying red lips flat against her teeth. She scrambled backwards away across the threadbare rug like a frightened spider, platinum wig down over one eye. But he followed, relentless, kicking her in face, belly, breasts.

Panting, spent, he stared down at the sobbing woman. There would be no repercussions: just in case, he had prepaid Sharkey out in LA enough to assure her silence here in D.C. In just twenty more days he would start to savor the power he had worked so hard to get. Then he wouldn’t need bitches like this one any more.

He wiped himself with a handful of Kleenex, put on his pants and left.

Happy New Year.

Arlington, Virginia

Happy New Year? The upscale tract house occupied a half-acre of prime real estate on a twisty, winding blacktop road off the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The tall, very fit African-American saw the last of their party guests out into the winter night. When he turned back to ruefully survey the damage, Cora was giving him her patented dissatisfied look.

‘We’ll clean this mess up in the morning,’ he told her.

Cora’s gleaming hair was artfully styled; in her heels, she was just three inches shorter than his six-one. She had cool eyes and the haughty, brown, fine-boned face of that Ethiopian fashion model who had married the rock star a dozen years before.

‘We’ll get the cleaning service to do it in the morning.’

At double or triple rates, of course. He stifled his irritated response. His crack FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper team had been out in the boondocks on special assignment for all of November and December. He seriously needed to get laid. He put an arm around his wife’s waist to guide her toward the stairs.

‘Sure thing, baby. But tonight we got some lovin’ to do.’

She went with him, but might not have heard him.

‘Now you’re going to be home more, I think we should start looking for a bigger house, further out.’

Translation: an acre of land where they could keep a horse and pretend to be landed gentry. Was that any different from ten acres and a mule? Cora didn’t want kids to ruin her figure; she was all about appearances, as ambitious for money and social position as he was for power and political access. Now if something would just happen in the next twenty days to keep him and his team on that same detached duty to the Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future, that would make it a Happy New Year for sure.

Something did.

1

January nineteenth. Hal Corwin crossed the Truckee Post Office parking lot with the slightest of limps, gingerly, as if not sure of his footing on the just-plowed surface. Here, at nearly 6,000 feet of elevation on the Cal-Nev border, the frigid air bit hard at his bullet-damaged lung.

Janet Kestrel stepped down from the driver’s side of her old dark-green 4-Runner facing out from a far corner of the lot. Its motor was running as if for a quick getaway. Her tawny face was as brown as his, but from genetics, not weather. Today her ebony hair was piled on top of her head under a furlined cap.

Hal put his left hand on her arm, tenderly. The hand was missing two fingers. ‘Delivery tomorrow morning, guaranteed.’

‘Know why that doesn’t make me happy? Tomorrow afternoon he’ll have all of the world’s resources at his command.’

‘Doesn’t matter. He has to feel it coming.’

Before that night last November she had been avid, urging him on. She knew little about the deaths and was afraid to ask. Afraid to know what she might have helped drive him to.

They hugged. He was a rangy six feet, the top of her head fit just under his chin. Her blue eyes were tight shut. During four months last year, he had become the father she had lost, she had become the daughter he had... oh God, what had he done?

She had driven up here as he had asked, would go home and wait for his call. But she had written the letter. She stepped back from his embrace, schooling all emotion from her voice.

‘Page my cellphone when you need the 4-Runner.’

‘I will. Just bring it back here and catch the first bus down the mountain. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.’ He laid a gentle palm on her cheek. ‘I’ll call you afterwards.’

She climbed into the 4-Runner. He bowed slightly and swept a courtly arm to usher her away. Any chance of seeing her again was probably nil, but setting it up now meant there could be no possible danger to her later.

Gustave Wallberg didn’t have George W.’s little-boy smiley-eyes, nor Clinton’s testosterone-drenched good-old-boy appeal. Instead, he had the rugged good looks of, say, a retired pro quarterback, just right for this 300-channel sound-bite era.

Protocol demanded that he wear a diplomat’s gray cutaway, but he had wanted a snap-on bowtie. Emily had insisted on hand-tied. Once in a lifetime, after all.

He pulled the offending tie apart yet again and said, ‘Dammit anyway,’ without turning from the mirror. Emily appeared behind him in her Bill Blass original.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said gaily. ‘Turn around.’

The anteroom door banged open and Kurt Jaeger surged in like a charging bear, bigger than life. He had an unlit cigar in one hand, a flat blue and white Post Office EXPRESS MAIL envelope in the other. Seeing Emily, he slowed, found a grin.

‘So, Emily. Ready for the big moment?’

‘Yes, if this man would only stand still long enough for me to’ — she gave her husband’s tie a final jerk — ‘get this right...’

Wallberg was slanting a look at the envelope. ‘Something?’

‘The usual suspects — their undying love and devotion so they can be riding the gravy train as it leaves the station.’

Wallberg knew his man too well to believe this. It was in Jaeger’s heavy voice, in the small, hard eyes that dominated the meaty face. He waited patiently until the door to the suite’s bedroom closed behind his wife, then snatched the envelope from the hand of his Chief of Staff.

‘Now let’s see what’s so damned important you had to...’

He ran down. One line, laser-printed on standard letter-size paper so it had no identifying characteristics the FBI lab could analyze. Mailed yesterday from Truckee, California.

‘Who has seen this?’

‘Me. As one of the new boys in town, I was being shown how the White House mailroom guys X-ray all incoming for poisons and explosives and biohazards and all that crap. I saw his name on it and snagged it unopened after they ran it through.’

‘What’s the temperature going to be for the ceremony?’

‘Twenty above. With wind-chill, five above.’

‘Tell Shayne O’Hara I agree with his Secret Service lads. At five above, it is more prudent to go with the closed limo.’

An hour later, Wallberg was standing before Chief Justice Alvin Carruthers, his right hand raised, his left hand flat on an open Bible. He was hatless, the icy wind ruffled his hair as he recited the oath of office after the aged jurist.

‘I, Gustave Wallberg... Do solemnly swear... That I will faithfully execute... The Office of President of the United States... And will to the best of my ability... Preserve, protect and defend... The Constitution of the United States...’

As he repeated the sacred words, that mad message burned in his brain: CONGRATULATIONS TO A DEAD PRESIDENT. CORWIN. Dear God. Would he have to shift priorities for his first weeks — months? — in office to accomodate the nearly unthinkable fact that Hal Corwin might still be alive?

The late March air was icy. Hal Corwin shivered as he crawled out of his sleeping bag to restart his fire. His campsite was a calculated quarter-mile off the ridge trail above California’s King’s Canyon National Park, at the edge of the sub-alpine zone where ponderosa pines crept up to mingle with old-growth Douglas firs and Engelmann spruce.

He sat on the hollow fir log that dominated the clearing as he waited for snow-melt to heat for instant coffee. The log was six feet in circumference and twenty-five feet long. It had been rotting there for four hundred years. The scattered droppings of countless generations of tiny deer mice, shrews and voles living in its depths had nourished the root fungi that laced its open end.

As he breathed the icy air as deep as his damaged lung would allow, he massaged his bad leg.

He stepped away from the tree and was struck a terrific blow below the left knee...

The stalking beast of his dreams didn’t exist, but he knew in his gut that tomorrow the searchers, lesser men, would come.

At two minutes after midnight, a red Chevy Tracker turned off California 180 to stop in the puddle of pale light by the antique gas pumps fronting Parker’s Resort. Two men got out to walk toward the rustic bar-cafe. One was six feet and hard-bitten, the other short, round, red of face. Both wore insulated coats and hunting caps with the earflaps down.

Seth Parker had just finished scraping the grease into the trap underneath the grill. He was a tall, stooped, skinny man, with wary brown eyes and a drooping ginger mustache. The rolled-up sleeves of his long-johns showed tattooed forearms. He stepped into the open doorway, his shadow cast long before him. His 12-gauge leaned against the wall two feet away.

‘No gas tonight, guys,’ he called. ‘Sorry.’

Except for the cafe, he and Mae weren’t really open for the season until the weekend, yet here were these two showing up at midnight on this lonely stretch of highway.

Big Guy stopped, said disarmingly, ‘How about a cabin?’

‘That we might be able to do. Depends on—’

‘How about something to eat?’ said Short and Round.

‘Just closed down the grill.’ But Seth’s wariness was gone. Obviously, for Short and Round, munchies were more important than mayhem. ‘Toasted cheese sandwiches?’

‘With bacon in ’em? And fries?’

‘Bacon we got. No fries tonight. Potato chips, pickles.’

While Seth grilled the sandwiches, they wandered around the old chinked-log building, drinking Miller Lite and looking at the deer and elk heads over the bar, the Chinook salmon mounted above the wide stone fireplace with its still-glowing hardwood embers.

Seth joined them at the table to have a beer himself. He never could get to sleep much before two a.m. anyway.

Short and Round, washing down his sandwich with his beer, said primly, ‘No private facilities are allowed in national parks, but this place sure as hell looks private to me.’

‘Run down, you mean?’ Seth chuckled. ‘My grand-daddy built it before the park went in. Sure you guys wouldn’t be happier at Grant Grove Center? It’s official, open all year. New cabins, a lodge, gift shop, grocery store — and you can get gas there.’

Big Guy shoved his plate aside, shook out a Marlboro, slightly raised it and his eyebrows. Seth nodded. He lit up.

‘Walter and I were trying to hook up with an old friend back at Cedarbrook, somehow we missed connections.’ He took a photo out of his shirt pocket. ‘Maybe he stopped by here?’

Seth studied the proffered picture, said reluctantly, ‘Feller come by ten, twelve days ago. I ain’t sure, but it could be him.’ He felt them tense up while trying to hide it. He returned the photo. ‘He come back three days ago.’

‘What for?’

‘Stock up. Instant coffee, Granola bars, Cup of Noodles, like that. And beef jerky. Lots of beef jerky.’

Big Guy asked, ‘Where’s he camped?’

‘Said he’s been bivouacked up off the ridge trail.’

‘Sounds like we’d better get an early start to catch him in case he’s thinking of moving on.’

Seth stood up to pull on his wool shirt and anorak. In the mountains in late March, the outside nighttime temperature was still in the ’teens, with snow still deep under the ponderosas.

‘Breakfast’s seven to nine, but Mae’ll open up at six.’

As he crossed the dimly-lit gravel drive to fire up the propane heater in cabin six, he thought, Friend my ass. Heat, most likely Feds. He could smell a cop like a bean fart at a girls’-school social.

Another dawn. Corwin sat beside his final fragrant spruce fire, drinking coffee. The searchers would be coming up the ridge trail from Parker’s place, moving slowly, silently. They’d be good. He knew that he was better.

A winter wren gave a sleepy cheep in the juniper thicket at one edge of the clearing. A pygmy nuthatch made tiny scraping sounds on its first upside-down journey of the day down one of the ponderosas. High above, in the tree’s crown, the band of resident crows was waking up with muted, grumpy squawks.

Soon they would head out to the lower-elevation meadows to forage, drift back up here to their roost at dusk. He would miss them. His name, Corwin, meant ‘friend of crows’ in Old English.

He kicked the fire to embers, got out the last of the beef jerky. As he had done every morning since coming here, he scattered pieces of it over the log. Several choice morsels he squashed with a thumb down into the deepest furrows of the bark.

When three quick, light caws identified him as Crow Three, eight sooty birds floated silently down through the branches. The breeding male, big as Poe’s raven and shiny as a stovepipe, landed on the log itself. In high school, Corwin had ended up as Bird Crow, and had passed the name on to the breeding male.

He had begun by scattering the jerky on the log. Had worked his way closer until he could sit on the end of the log while they ate. He knew he didn’t look like another crow to them, but he always furnished them with beef jerky. Crow Three.

Bird Crow began digging at the choice bits of jerky buried deep in the bark. His cohort hopped up to gobble the easy ones. No jostling, no shoving. A clan. A family.

Seven minutes later, the sentinel left in the top of the ponderosa sounded the alarm. The searchers had arrived.

‘Shit,’ said Ray in a low voice. His FBI i.d. was strung on a lanyard around his neck and his Sig Sauer was in his right hand, held low at his side. ‘Crows. They’ll alert him. C’mon!’

The crows barely had time to flap up from the log. One, huge and shiny as a raven, stayed to rip out bits of bark and throw them in all directions with savage sideways flings of its head, somehow always keeping one beady eye on the intruders. Then it was gone with a final fat morsel in its beak.

Walt sat down on the log, winded by his sprint to the clearing. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground.

‘I get it, Ray. Since the crows are here, he can’t be.’

‘Smart fella, Walt.’

Ray held an ungloved hand above the embers of the fire before letting himself sit down and light up. The harsh smell of burning tobacco drifted through the clearing.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Maybe thirty. That close. That’s the bad news.’ He feathered out smoke. ‘The good news is that he can’t be more than forty minutes ahead of us.’ He smeared out his just-lit Marlboro against the log. ‘Let’s move. Let’s show those Secret Service fucks how to take down a suspect — we’ll have this guy’s ass in custody before noon.’

‘Unless he resists,’ said Walter piously. He was an asshole, but he loved mortal shooting and was good at it.

‘Unless he resists,’ Ray agreed.

The crows were back at the beef jerky when Corwin crawled out of the log dragging his pack and sleeping bag behind him.

FBI. He even recognized their voices: they had smoked a cigarette above his hiding place back in the Delta in November. As expected, they had been told that he was armed and dangerous. Well, he once had been. He’d lost track of the men he’d killed over the years. These two were no threat.

He trotted unevenly away down his backtrail, leaving Bird Crow’s gang of ruffians to savage the last of the jerky. He’d call Janet from Cedarbrook, she’d leave the 4-Runner for him at Truckee as planned, he’d pick it up with no contact between them. She would be safe, he would have a clean vehicle to drive now that he was clear of the searchers. In two or three weeks their masters would surely find someone better to send after him — the shadowy tireless tracker of his nightmares?

By then he would be hidden away. In plain sight.

2

On an early April dawn two weeks later, an unmarked G400 Gulfstream jet circled Nairobi International Airport preparatory to landing. Terrill Hatfield stared almost gloomily down at the flat brown earth rushing up to meet them. He had his New Year’s Eve wish: he and his FBI Hostage/Rescue Team were on detached duty to the President’s Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future. But they had failed to catch Corwin at King’s Canyon, as they had failed to catch him in the Delta in November. And now this.

After he deplaned, a government car took Hatfield from a far corner of the field to the far side of Kenya passport control and customs check. He had read the file of the man he had been sent here to bring back. Impressive. Too impressive. He and his men could get the job done without the help of this outsider. But Hatfield had been told to bring him: bring him he would. He would wait for an enabling incident, grab his man, and fly him back to D.C. In custody. It would exceed his authority, yes, but the stakes were high and he had Kurt Jaeger behind him.

What if the man succeeded where Hatfield had failed? There was a way around that. Use him, then step in to seize the power and glory of success for himself alone. Step on the son of a bitch hard, right away. Keep stepping on him. Control him, use him, obstruct him if necessary, then find a way to discard him.

Brendan Thorne began bucking hard under Ellie, the 23-year-old blonde straddling him at Sikuzuri Safari Camp in Tsavo East. Eleanor’s groom, 59-year-old Squire Pierpont III, was paying eight hundred bucks a night, not the usual $600, because his new trophy wife, after glimpsing Thorne on their arrival, had insisted on an extra-spacious banda with two private bedrooms.

Hemingway’s randy white hunters with their double-wide sleeping bags were no more, so two or three times a year Thorne, lowly camp guard, got seduced by women like Ellie: bored wives dragged to darkest Africa by wealthy husbands. It was the only social life he got, and as much as he could handle.

Ellie started panting, open-mouthed. Her eyes rolled up. Thorne flipped her onto her back and pumped hard. She came again in synch with him. Vocally. He was glad she had put all that Halcyon in her husband’s final whiskey-soda last night; his job was the only thing that held Thorne together. Since New Year’s Eve, no worthy stalk had yet appeared to rouse him from the somnolence of his narrow days. But he kept hoping.

Thorne emerged into cool pre-dawn darkness to find the other camp guard, a Wanderobo-Masai named Morengaru, squatting beneath an African toothbrush tree. The shotgun that he used for everything from buck to buff rested buttdown on the ground between his knees, the muzzle pointing up past his left ear.

‘Na kwenda wapi?’ Thorne asked. Morengaru stood, swung an arm to the east. Down river. ‘Kwa nini?’ Why?

Gathering dawnlight picked out the high cheekbones on the African’s deadpan ebony face. ‘Lori,’ he said.

Morengaru was going downriver because he had heard a lorry. It must have come from Somalia, three hundred miles to the north. In the 1970s and ’80s, Somali ivory and horn poachers had been the reason Sikuzuri Camp needed armed guards. They had wiped out Tsavo’s rhinos and had reduced its six thousand elephants to a few hundred, then had started killing tourists until Richard Leakey’s Kenyan Wildlife Service rangers started shooting them on sight.

Now Thorne and Morengaru mostly protected the resort’s guests against Tsavo’s notoriously uncivil lions. Tsavo’s males were sparsely maned and much bigger than Africa’s other lions — four feet at the shoulder, five hundred pounds in weight, a feline ‘missing link’ between Africa’s modern lions and the hulking extinct unmaned cave lions of the Pleistocene. Occasionally they ate careless people, even well-heeled wazungu on photo safari.

‘Na piga minge sana,’ said Morengaru.

He had heard the sound of many ‘blows’ — which Thorne knew meant in context the pounding of automatic rifles.

‘Namna mbali?’ How far away?

Morengaru held up five fingers: five kilometers. Since he could hear a car engine starting up twenty kilometers off, on a moonless night could see the moons of Jupiter with his naked eyes, Morengaru’s five clicks absolutely meant five clicks.

A superb starling with a metallic-blue back and chestnut belly swooped down on green-tinged blue wings to the rim of the water pan left out for Yankee, the camp watchdog. He checked right, then left, then plunged his whole jet-crowned head underwater and shook it violently. Came up, sent spray in every direction, repeated, again, yet again, then flew off. As always, the two men watched this morning ritual with great respect.

A kilometer downriver a leopard bitched about his empty gut with a frustrated, rasping, two-note cry. Morengaru said with a sly look and in passable English, ‘Since we two landless rogues, maybe we go hunting now.’

‘You cheeky bastard,’ said Thorne. They both laughed.

Could the leopard kill himself a shifta? A gratifying thought, but unlikely. The shifta’s specialty was spraying their prey with AK47 assault rifles from a safe distance away.

So why was Thorne leaving the camp Uzi at home, starting on his first manhunt in seven years with only his Randall Survivor and his 9mm Beretta? Was it his pathetic bow to a time when he had been a fighting man instead of a glorified babysitter? Or because his killing days were gone forever?

Sikuzuri Safari Camp was strung out along a quarter-mile of the Galana River’s south bank. Bar and lounge, dining hall as big as a posh restaurant, good china, chairs and tables of native hardwoods, buffalo horns and animal skulls on the walls.

The two men trotted down one of the resort’s well-marked paths. Golden pipits hurled themselves from bush to bush like tiny gold coins. The watumishi boys were stirring: strong coffee wooed their nostrils, but they had no time for a mug of it. An agama lizard popped up from behind an exposed acacia root to eye them icily, then ducked down again, like an infantryman checking out enemy troops from his foxhole.

They went silently down river on game paths twisting through saltbrush and doum palm, wary of ambush. Saltbrush, thick and bushy like dense groves of cedar, could conceal the leopard they had heard, a pride of lions, even a herd of elephant. All could kill the unwary, and often did.

The long rains were gone. Northeast across the Galana, thickets of spiked wait-a-bit comiphora shrubs — ngoja kidoga locally — blanketed the plains with nasty curved thorns that could claw the skin off a man’s back as neatly as an attacking leopard. Seven Grant’s zebras foraging the dried grasses looked car-wash fresh. Their kick could break a lion’s jaw.

Beyond was the flat-topped Yatta Escarpment, the longest lava ridge in the world, black and forbidding in the early morning light. Tsavo was the size of Massachusetts, still untamed and essentially untouristed.

A six-foot russet-necked Goliath heron, Africa’s largest bird, fished the sedges along the shore beside a shady grove of tamarind trees loaded with rattly brown seedpods. The tree trunks were polished red by mud-covered elephants rubbing against them. Morengaru stopped abruptly.

‘One click more.’

Ten minutes further on, across the river and below a small ridge, three maneless male lions were feeding on the massive body of a bull buffalo. A fresh kill, an hour old, not ripe yet.

The old bull, alone on a ridge above one of the small dry stream beds called luggas, fearless because he weighed as much as a VW Beetle, hadn’t had a chance. The three lions, each the size of a small grizzly bear, had been lying in wait. Each lion would eat seventy-five pounds of the buff’s meat before midday, then would not feed again for several days.

Another two hundred yards brought the dull telltale glint of metal in the saltbrush, also on the far side of the river. A decrepit British lorry of incredible vintage, camouflaged with branches.

Morengaru jerked his head downstream, whispered, ‘Kiboko.’

The hippos’ telltale protruding eyes showed above the water. They killed more Africans each year in panic than any other animal did on purpose. But they posed no real threat as long as the men didn’t try to cross near them.

Back upriver, the way they’d come, a fish eagle swooped low over a large eddy of russet water where half a dozen fifteen-foot logs drifted in slow, aimless circles.

Thorne chuckled and said in English, ‘Hippos and crocs.’

Crocodiles were Africa’s second deadliest animal. On purpose. A sudden lunge, a three thousand-pound snap of massive jaws, and a tribal woman washing clothes in the river, facing the shore as always, would be dragged backwards screaming from the bank. Then she would be stuck in the mud at the bottom of the river until ripe enough to be torn into bite-size pieces and eaten.

The two men could cross in only gut-deep water right where they were, but the crocs made such a crossing a race with death. Lose their footing, lose the race. Don’t try, and the shifta would be free to do whatever bloody work they were about.

Thorne trotted down the bank, went in, churning ahead, bent forward, straining against the weight of water, looking neither back nor to the sides. Morengaru would be behind him. The stolid hippos would be watching. The crocs would be coming; coming like half-ton cigarette boats, heads up, jaws gaping, casting spreading wakes behind them. The men splashed up the far bank with six feet to spare, the crocs lunging halfway out of the water before sliding back with frustrated jaw-clacks.

A brace of startled waterbucks bounded off across the savanna like outsized jackrabbits. Dense clouds of flies rose from the truck bed. Thorne approached with massive foreboding.

‘Cocksuckers!’ he exclaimed involuntarily.

Tossed carelessly into the back of the lorry was a pair of black rhino horns, matted hair use-polished into the hardness of bone, the curved front one five feet long. Hacked off with pangas after the nearly extinct animal had been killed by the burst of automatic weapon fire Morengaru had heard. Bits of skin and flesh still clung to them, pink but darkening rapidly.

Just over three months ago, Thorne had laid his hand on Bwana Kifaru’s back. He had considered the ugly, endearing, grumpy, near-sighted beast a friend: now he was dead and left to rot, slaughtered for hacked-off horns that would be carved into status-symbol handles for the decorative daggers of petro-rich Yemeni Arab youngbloods. Left-over bits would be ground into aphrodisiac powder for Asians who didn’t trust Viagra.

Just a bonus for the shifta. In 1989, the Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species had imposed a worldwide ban on the sale of elephant tusks. But now Zimbabwe and Botswana, overpopulated with elephant, were lobbying to lift the ban, again sparking demand for ivory in Japan and China.

So the shifta were after the last two of the Galana’s old bull elephants who carried 175 kilos of ivory that would sell for $6,000 a kilo. The tusks would be worth a million dollars to a black market buyer: the raiders had not come hunting on spec.

‘Not today, you fuckers,’ Thorne whispered to himself.

Nobody had been left to guard the lorry. Keys in the ignition. Thorne dropped them into his pocket. Morengaru moved slowly forward, bent at the waist. He put gentle fingertips into several shallow, barely-discernable depressions in the dust. Came erect displaying three splayed fingers.

‘Tatu.’

Three shifta. Catch the bastards, hand them over to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, rough fuckers who would work them over until they gave up their buyer. A very good day’s work indeed.

Thorne swung an arm, breathed, ‘Sisi endelea. Upesi.’

Let us go quickly. They trotted along the edge of the savanna for silent movement, detouring through the salt-brush only to avoid the scavengers squabbling over Bwana Kifaru.

It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Snapping jackals, snarling spotted hyenas, spindly-legged marabout storks with bald heads already red from being thrust into the rhino’s guts. Leaping, yelling, fighting. Overhead circled a pair of tawny, muscular bataleur eagles, disdainful of the scene below.

A kilometer on, they passed a score of elephant skulls as big as boulders, left by the poachers of fifteen years ago. Every gaping eyesocket held a nest of spur-winged plovers.

Half a click, and they came upon still slightly-steaming cannonball-size piles of fresh elephant dung. Getting close. A Hemprich’s hornbill foraging the strawy brown mounds for seeds and grasses flapped away, indignantly clacking his dusky red downturned beak. Later his own droppings would spread the seeds over the savanna to complete the cycle of death and rebirth.

Silent as ghosts, the two men moved downriver and upwind. Stopped. Ten yards ahead, facing away from them, were the shifta, three scruffy men in kepis and cast-off military uniforms with sandals made of truck tires.

Thirty yards further on in a small clearing were the two old bull elephants. The larger was thirteen feet at the shoulder and weighed seven tons. Thorne had named him Tantor after Tarzan’s elephant friend. Tantor had just curled his sinuous trunk around a bunch of browse like a cook’s hand around a pound of uncooked spaghetti, was shoving it into his curiously delicate mouth and chewing, rumbling with pleasure. His massive forehead was braced against a doum palm to temporarily ease the weight of ten-foot tusks that almost touched the ground.

The younger bull, Dumbo, with only slightly smaller ivory, was shielded by Tantor’s bulk. The shifta were waiting until they could kill both animals with one sustained magazine-emptying burst of rifle fire. If only wounded, they would disappear into the saltbrush in seconds, taking their ivory with them.

A drab little bulbul, unconcerned with the drama below, sang its beguiling song in the foliage overhead. Thorne slid to his right, knowing Morengaru would go left. No twig crackled underfoot, no branch rustled.

The man in front of Thorne raised his AK47 to shoot Tantor in the spine. Thorne tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said in English.

The Somali whirled, bringing around his automatic weapon. Thorne had been thinking capture, but everything became liquid quicksilver as training and temperament overcame resolve. His left hand whipped his knife across the man’s jugular with a powerful backhand slash. Bright arterial blood gushed.

The one in the center got off an errant burst into the sky as Morengaru’s 12-gauge dissolved the top of his head in a spray of brain and bone. He fell, a sack of bloody flour.

The third tried to fire from the hip, but Thorne’s Beretta slammed four glazer rounds into his chest in a silver-dollar cluster. His gaunt, aristocratic face went gray with death.

Five seconds.

The elephants had whirled to face them, huge as houses, ears flaring, trumpeting. Then they were gone with that lovely gliding silent stride that always took Thorne’s breath away.

On his thirtieth birthday, Thorne was killing men in Panama as a sometime assassin for a CIA front. On his thirty-fifth, he became a Tsavo camp guard because belatedly he had sworn to his dead Alison’s memory that he would never again kill another human being.

Today, on his fortieth birthday, he had killed two of them. He had betrayed Alison’s memory because he had been betrayed by his New Year’s Eve feeling that a worthy stalk of worthy prey would appear. No killing, just the stalk. But two men were dead by his hand. Killing them, he had again felt that wondrous cleansing adrenaline rush. But also nausea.

The bulbul resumed its beguiling song as Thorne threw up into the saltbush.

3

They left the shifta’s lorry a mile downwind so the stink of death would not accompany them across the shallow ford to the camp. Sikuzuri, after all, was strictly for the diamonds-and-Ferrari set. You paid big money to sit on your veranda facing the Galana and listen to real lions roar and real elephants trumpet with no bars between you and them. And, because of Thorne and Morengaru, with no real danger to yourself.

A pale goshawk chanted at them from a phone pole. A black-shouldered kite kweee-e-e-ed at them from the wire. Thorne sometimes made photo ops for the tourists by putting a cube of raw meat on his palm so a kite could swoop down and snatch it.

Eight black-headed sacred ibises pecked with curved beaks in the mud beside the ford. To the ancient Egyptians these birds symbolized Thoth, who totted up your good and evil deeds in the Book of the Dead. Today Thorne, betraying himself and Alison’s memory, had killed two men to save two elephants and avenge a dead rhino. Where did that fall in Thoth’s scales of justice?

Morengaru went off to clean his shotgun, Thorne went into the office. Steven Livingston, manager of Sikuzuri for three years, looked up from his computer. He was a ruddy-faced Brit with round glasses and a bristling ginger mustache and a degree in hotel management. Inevitably, he was called Stanley Livingston instead of Steve. He held out an envelope to Thorne.

‘Eleanor Pierpont left this for you before they went off, Brendan. It will be a bloody nice tip, I daresay.’

Thorne laid the envelope unopened on the desk.

‘Give it to Morengaru for his 401K.’

He dialled the Kenyan Wildlife Service at Voi to get Jehovah Muthengi, a Kamba under whom he had served as a tracker and guide for two years before moving on to Sikuzuri. At odd times they had drunk a good bit of Tusker beer together.

‘Jehovah, we ran across three shifta this morning, trying to poach those bull elephants. We stopped ’em, but Bwana Kifa—, but that old lone bull rhino’s horns are in the back of their lorry a mile below camp.’ He listened, frowning at Muthengi’s words, then shrugged. ‘Sure, call Nairobi. I suppose the Kenya National Police will want to see what’s left of ’em in situ.’

When he hung up, Stanley Livingston was drawing up his well-fed body and staring at him with goggle-eyed outrage.

‘Now see here, Thorne, this bloody well isn’t on, killing Somalis. These high-handed tactics—’

Thorne shut the screen door behind him with exaggerated care, went down to the modest banda he had built himself in the thorn-fence-enclosed boma where the workers lived. He cleaned the Beretta with a toothbrush and Hoppe’s No. 9, ran cleaning disks down the barrel to clear away the powder residue. Sitting in his canvas safari chair outside his hut, he read a book left behind by a guest, Dante in Love, Harriet Rubin’s contemplation on the writing of The Divine Comedy. Two men dead by his hand. In which ring of the Inferno would Dante place him for that?

Three hours later a cloud of red dust chased the Wildlife Service Land Rover into camp. Muthengi was behind the wheel, Sergeant Hassim and Corporal Abdulla were with him. Livingston had the wind up, was jittering around as if trying to dodge an angry wasp. Looking on, fascinated, were guests waiting to go on photo safari when a lowering sun made the animals active.

Thorne advanced with a smile. ‘Jehovah.’

‘Mr. Thorne, sah.’ Whoops. No Brendan. Way too formal.

Muthengi was a short, square, very black man, so black the inside of his mouth was purple. He wore a safari jacket, khaki shorts, knee socks, desert boots, and a ripoff U.S. Army .45 in a hip-holster like a Western gunslinger. He couldn’t hit anything with it, but it had seemed an innocent affectation. Until today.

The rangers were Cushite Borani tribesmen from the Northern Frontier District where it bordered Ethiopia. They were over six feet tall, wiry, with beautiful, disdainful faces. They wore the green camise and beret of the Kenyan Wildlife Service.

Thorne greeted them cheerily in Swahili; they answered with distant nods. He tensed up even more. Livingston’s jitters. Muthengi’s formal greeting. The rangers’ embarrassment. Damn. He hadn’t even been to the capitol in six months, but any non-citizen working in Kenya for local pay was on shaky ground.

‘What did Nairobi have to say about my little shauri?’

My little affair. Responding, Muthengi did not meet his eyes. ‘They said you must be, ah, placed under arrest, sah.’

In an obviously rehearsed move, Hassan and Abdulla brought up their rifles to point at Thorne’s chest. He stood very still. Rangers were notoriously nervy behind the gun, and these were serious weapons, G3 semiautomatics in 7.62mm NATO caliber.

‘What’s the charge, Jehovah?’

‘Ah... poaching rhinocerous horn, sah.’

‘I see.’ He almost did. Someone in Nairobi must have been waiting for any excuse. ‘Shauri ya Mungu, Jehovah?’

‘Ndio.’ Muthengi, embarrassed by his own betrayal, nodded solemnly. ‘Yes. It is indeed God’s affair, sah.’

Morengaru had drifted up silently through the tourists, unnoticed by anyone save Thorne, carrying his shotgun. To Morengaru, killing men was nothing. Thorne pecked two hooked fingers toward his own eyes, then turned his hand to peck the same fingers toward Morengaru’s eyes.

‘Tatuona tena,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘Uso kwa uso.’

We shall see each other again. Face to face.

Morengaru nodded solemnly and faded away, still unseen. But Muthengi, thinking Thorne was speaking to him, took it as a challenge. His moment of embarrassment turned to anger.

‘Cuff him,’ he said brusquely to his rangers.

Thorne put his hands behind his back to feel the cold bite of steel around his wrists, not for the first time.

‘We will go to Manyani to meet the plane,’ Muthengi said.

‘Thirty miles of bad road,’ said Thorne. When he looked over at Stanley Livingston, he realized the camp manager had been privy to the bust, but had told him nothing. So Thorne added to him, ‘Keep my Land-Rover here until I come back. Give the keys to Morengaru — and send my things home to Mum.’

Livingston colored and went quickly into the office and slammed the door. Thorne could read his mind: bloody Africa.

In Nairobi hours later, Muthengi and the other two stooges delivered Thorne to the dark and deserted-looking sandstone-block Department of Justice building on Jomo Kenyatta Boulevard. They climbed three flights of stairs past uniformed guards to an open door spilling light across the hallway.

A lone black man, light-skinned for a Kenyan, was sitting on one of the hard benches outside the enclosed receptionist’s area. He did not turn his head to look at them as they passed. The hairs on the nape of Thorne’s neck rose. Muthengi knocked on the door to the magistrate’s inner office.

‘Come.’

Arthur Kemoli, a Luhya from up around Kakamega way, had a single official-looking document squared upon his desk. The lamp laddered harsh shadows up his underlit features. He was Thorne’s age, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, his tight-curled black hair cropped close against his skull.

During Thorne’s brief stint as a Kenya Wildlife Service ranger, he had caught Kemoli’s son trying to smuggle out protected bushbabies. Instead of busting him, Thorne cuffed him around the ears and kicked him loose. Kemoli, not satisfied with such banal punishment, took a club to the bare soles of his son’s feet. The boy had been unable to walk for three weeks.

‘Why is this man cuffed?’ Kemoli demanded.

‘He is a dangerous prisoner, sah,’ said Muthengi piously.

Kemoli gestured. The cuffs were unlocked. Thorne rubbed his wrists. Kemoli’s hand made a shooing motion.

‘Outside, the three of you. And shut the door behind you.’

The three stooges departed, hesitantly. When they were gone, Kemoli came around the desk for an embrace, solemn-faced.

Thorne paraphrased, ‘“All animals are equal. Some are just more equal than others”.’

‘You remembered!’ Kemoli exclaimed with real pleasure.

As a student at Kakamega Boys Secondary School, Kemoli had read Orwell’s Animal Farm and had loved Squealer, the pig who ran the place. He took the name as his own, and until entering politics was known as Squealer Kemoli.

Thorne sat down across from him. His wrists were raw from the shackles. Kemoli shoved the document around with his ballpoint pen. There was regret on his face.

‘Do you know the Swahili proverb about the elephants?’

‘When two elephants fight, it is the grass that is hurt.’

‘Just so. This is an order for your immediate deportation. You are the grass. One elephant is our quite new Kenyan government after four decades of corrupt rule by KANU under Arap Moi, which was preceded by another decade of corrupt rule by KANU under Jomo Kenyatta. The other elephant—’

‘Is the American in your anteroom. He’s too light-skinned for an African and he is used to waiting. A U.S. cop or federal agent. The hairs on the back of my neck tell me he’s no friend.’

Kemoli nodded and sighed. ‘Indeed not. Since all of the embassy bombings and threats of embassy bombings, your country has been a very large bull elephant in East Africa. They request, we agree. They demand, we comply. They demanded.’

‘Sign the bloody thing, Arthur. If they’d wanted me dead, I’d have been persuaded to jump out of the plane on the flight from Manyani. Somebody wants me to do something nasty for them.’

Terrill Hatfield drove the Kenyan government Land-Rover himself, the two rangers in the back with the muzzles of their rifles screwed into Thorne’s neck. Thorne got a last look at Nairobi Game Park by moonlight. Leopards and hyenas from the park sometimes wandered adjacent housing developments at night.

Hatfield searched him totally before shoving him up the stairway into the interior of the Gulfstream. In three of the nine leather club chairs were armed men dressed in suits. Not Secret Service. Not Marines. They almost stunk of Agency, but not quite. Most likely FBI, operating illegally overseas.

‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ asked Thorne.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Hatfield explained. ‘You’re getting a free ride in a thirty-eight-million-buck plane. Be grateful.’

With no book to read, he feigned sleep during the flight from Nairobi west across Africa. Wondered why the guy who had grabbed him was so hostile. It seemed a lot more than just keeping Thorne down, but he couldn’t worry about that now.

After the fueling stop in Dakar, he sat upright during the crossing of the Atlantic to D.C. He had just killed two men; he knew from bitter experience that if he slept his nightmare of seven years before would return. Just as well. Something truly rotten was brewing. He had to prepare his refusals for it.

It was sometime in the wee hours when the jet landed on a secluded corner of Reagan National across the Potomac from D.C. An icy rain was falling as they left the jet for the waiting unmarked government van. Where were the cherry blossoms?

Thorne was dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt of fabric as thin as his blood after his years in the tropics. But as they crossed the Key Bridge, he was damned if he would shiver, or let his teeth chatter, or ask for a coat.

At the northeast guard booth, he caught just a glimpse of spot-lit lawns and the unmistakable white, pillared building just beyond. The uniformed officer inside the booth activated a switch to raise the car-blocking iron beams in front of the van, and lower them behind. Around behind the White House, they went down a narrow ramp with high concrete walls on either side. The van stopped, they got out into the drizzle.

A steel-armored door opened, a guard in uniform, one of the fifty-man detachment of Secret Service agents who worked three eight-hour shifts 24/7, checked their credentials. He kept his light in Thorne’s eyes the whole time because Thorne didn’t have any credentials.

Hatfield and yet another uniform took Thorne down a long basement corridor to a chamber with another steel door. They went in, Hatfield shut the door in the Secret Service agent’s face. It was a carpeted, windowless room with doors in all four walls, a conference table and eight chairs and a portable sideboard. There was the low hum of hidden air-conditioners.

Three men were staring at Thorne as if he were a bug on a pin. Two of them were young — twenty-five, twenty-six, one darkly good-looking, like Montgomery Clift before the bad times, the second chubby, friendly-looking, nondescript. The third man was burly, chomping an expensive cigar, exuding power. Small hard eyes dominated a meaty face Thorne recognized from BBC telecasts in Kenya.

‘Any trouble, Terrill?’ the cigar-chomper asked.

Hatfield sneered at Thorne. ‘From this hunk of shit?’

‘Okay, okay, we all know you’re a tough guy.’ Without offering to shake hands he said to Thorne, ‘My name is—’

‘Kurt Jaeger. President Wallberg’s Chief of Staff.’

Jaeger shot a quick, hard, angry look at Hatfield, who put his hands up in the universal palms out not-me gesture.

‘We can cut across, then.’ Jaeger gestured at the handsome one. ‘Hastings Crandall, Presidential Press Secretary.’ At the chubby blond one. ‘Peter Quarles, Presidential Aide.’ At Thorne’s captor, ‘Terrill Hatfield is—’

‘A Feeb,’ said Thorne.

Jaeger chuckled. ‘He’s good, Terrill. Yes, Mr. Hatfield’s FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper Team is on special assignment to me.’

So the suits on the Gulfstream would be part of Hatfield’s hand-picked team of ball-busters, thinking of themselves as the saviors of the non-Muslim world.

‘Okay, that tells me who. Now one of you tell me why.’

Nondescript, round-faced Peter Quarles spoke up.

‘Chief-of-Staff Jaeger tasked us with a computer search. The computer picked you from several hundred possibles.’

‘Picked me to do what?’

Jaeger said smoothly, almost soothingly, ‘To figure out a foolproof way to assassinate Gustave Wallberg, the President of the United States.’

4

‘Fuck you and the whore you rode in on,’ snapped Thorne, shaken. He’d known it would be bad; just not this bad. ‘I’m nobody’s fucking assassin.’ Hatfield said, ‘At Tsavo—’

‘Kill or be killed, Jack. Not like this.’ He wouldn’t do it, no matter what. ‘I believe Wallberg will be a hell of a president. I even voted absentee for him, the first time since 1988. I won’t figure out a way to kill him for you assholes.’

‘I really do hope you’ll reconsider.’ Thorne turned. Advancing with outstretched hand from the door in the far wall was President Gustave Wallberg, heavyweight charisma in his grin. ‘Out of curiosity, who did you vote for in eighty-eight?’

‘Bush. The first one. He and Nixon are the only statesmen we’ve had in my lifetime. And maybe Gorbachev.’

‘Not of my party, but a wise choice,’ said Wallberg.

Brendan Thorne sat on the President’s right, Jaeger on his left, Hatfield across from him. The two kids were just there. A third mid-twenties man, redheaded and with shrewd blue eyes in a round ruddy drinker’s face, came in from the far wall door. The shrewd eyes took them in with a single bitter sweep.

‘Could you bring us some coffee, Johnny?’

‘Coming right up, Mr. President,’ Johnny said moodily.

Obviously part of the original team along with Hastings and Crandall, reduced to a gofer, and not liking it. Had he gotten aced out by them? Or by Jaeger? Or by the booze?

Wallberg said, ‘When I was in high school in Rochester, Minnesota, my best friend was a kid named Hal Corwin. We played football and hockey together. After graduation I went to the U of Minnesota, he went to Rochester JC. After four months, Hal quit college to join the army. I have not seen him since. Just last year I learned he had been a sniper behind enemy lines in ’Nam. An assassin. Apparently, on his return, like many Vietnam vets, he had a hard time adjusting to civilian life.’

Jaeger took over. ‘He reputedly became a foreign mercenary — this gun for hire. His wife was killed by a drunk driver when he was out of the country. In some roundabout way his daughter, Nisa, blamed him for the death of her mother. I guess he accepted that guilt; in any event, he became a recluse in the forests of northern Minnesota.’

Thorne felt as if all the air had been driven out of his body by the parallel with himself. Did they know about Alison and Eden? No. They couldn’t. No one in government knew.

Hatfield said, ‘A year ago last November, Corwin was wounded in a hunting accident. In retrospect, we believe that while recovering he developed some sort of bizarre paranoid fantasy that his son-in-law had shot him. Deliberately.’

Jaeger cleared his throat, his heavy face solemn.

‘At the time, President Wallberg was Governor of Minnesota and was developing... what should I say?’

‘Presidential ambitions,’ said Wallberg. He added with a grin, ‘God, Brendan, did I have presidential ambitions!’

‘The Governor was assembling a campaign evaluation team. Myself, Hastings, Peter...’ Jaeger gestured at the redhead just returning with a carafe of hot coffee and accessories, ‘Johnny Doyle here. Nisa, Corwin’s daughter. When we committed to the campaign, she said she was worn out and resigned. Her husband, Damon Mather, stayed on.’

‘She volunteered for my first gubernatorial campaign when she was in college,’ explained Wallberg, ‘and worked on my second campaign as an adult. She came back aboard when I won the Democratic party nomination. She had a fine political mind. But in the last weeks of the campaign, both she and her husband resigned from my staff without telling us why.’

Jaeger said, ‘We believe now that Corwin had started stalking them, and they went to hide out on a houseboat in the California Delta. Nisa called on election day in a panic. Somehow Corwin had learned where they were. I grabbed a couple of private guards at campaign headquarters, but we had to drive up from LA because the tule fog had grounded air traffic in the valley. A seven-car crash on 1–5 north of Stockton tied traffic up all the way back to Manteca. We didn’t get to the Delta until two a.m. By then Corwin had already murdered them both.’

Murdered his own daughter? God, if Eden was still alive...

‘There was gunfire,’ said Hatfield. ‘The local cops went in, but he was gone. Since they had resigned from the campaign, the Secret Service couldn’t investigate. Mr. Jaeger asked my FBI team to look for Corwin’s body in the Delta. After six days, we decided that he had either drowned or died of his wounds.’

‘So why am I here?’ demanded Thorne. ‘Get the charges against me dropped and fly me back to Kenya with no hard fee—’

‘Charges?’ demanded Wallberg, suddenly icy.

Hatfield looked uneasy. ‘Thorne has been, ah, deported from Kenya on a poaching charge.’

‘I told you to ask him if he would come. Ask him.’

Jaeger scaled a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve across the table.

‘It came the morning of the President’s swearing-in.’

Thorne read: CONGRATULATIONS TO A DEAD PRESIDENT. CORWIN.

He objected mildly, ‘Anybody could have sent this.’

‘Nobody outside this room knows it was Corwin at the Delta. Not even the Secret Service.’

‘My men traced someone we think is Corwin to King’s Canyon National Park in California,’ said Hatfield. ‘Two of my Hostage Rescue/Sniper team members, Ray Franklin and Walt Greene, showed his picture around, got a maybe identification. They got to his campsite up on the ridge trail just twenty minutes too late.’

Wallberg blurted, ‘It’s all crazy! I haven’t thought about Hal in years, but apparently he thinks I put Damon up to shooting him. He murdered Damon. He murdered Nisa.’ His voice rose. ‘Now he wants to murder me. He has to be stopped.’

Hastings Crandall, the Press Secretary, said, ‘I had Pete run a computer search to evaluate hundreds of ex-servicemen. You’re a generation behind Corwin, but you were a close match. The parallels are amazing. He grew up in Minnesota, you in Alaska, you both hunted all your lives. He was Special Forces in ’Nam, then a mercenary. You were a Ranger in Panama, then did classified stuff for a CIA front. After some unknown trauma in your life, you became a recluse in Kenya as he did in Minnesota.’

‘I did some killing in Panama, yeah, but I don’t do that any more. I resigned because I shot a couple of innocents by mistake.’

‘I’m not asking you to kill,’ said Wallberg. ‘I just want you to come up with scenarios of how you might kill me. The FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper team will do the rest. Right, Terrill?’

‘Right. He won’t have to get his lily-white hands dirty.’

‘I’m not going to force you to accept.’ Wallberg glared balefully around the table. ‘I am ordering your full exoneration in Kenya if you take the job or not. But — I need you.’

They wanted him to play a chess game where you never saw your opponent’s board, he never saw yours. Neither of you could be sure the other existed. The greatest stalk a hunter could have, of the most dangerous game on earth, and he wasn’t expected to kill anyone. All he had to do was find an ex-sniper who had become a foreign mercenary and had murdered his own daughter. Hatfield and his goons would do the rest. A worthy stalk of a worthy opponent, without personally facing that dreadful enticing moment of kill or not kill.

‘Let’s do it, Mr. President.’

Watching Wallberg, Thorne saw a not-so-subtle release of tension. The squared shoulders relaxed, the hard knots of muscle at the corners of the mouth softened.

‘I feel in my heart that you’re going to stop this man.’

Jaeger said, ‘A major’s pay and perks. In the morning, go to the Mayflower Hotel shops and pick up a wardrobe more suited to the climate. Hastings and Peter will be logistical support.’

Hatfield said, ‘I’ll schedule your psychiatric interview and psy tests. You’ve been through it before with the CIA, but your records are ten years old.’

The Mayflower Hotel. First cabin. And he could ace the psychological tests — he always had.

The general exodus left Jaeger and Hatfield alone. Hatfield said, ‘He’s more of a liability than an asset.’

‘What’s your problem with this man, Terrill? That’s what psy tests are for. I know you regard your team highly, but they didn’t do shit in the Delta or at King’s Canyon. What we need are results.’ He added, with a shrug that came out almost as a shiver, ‘Maybe Thorne can stop that psychotic son of a bitch.’

That psychotic son of a bitch wound his way through the raspberry and prickly ash that had replaced the white pine and balsam destroyed by a lightning fire years before. He went quickly past the fire-blasted spruce a thousand feet down the burn before pausing to strip off the glove that kept his maimed hand from aching on this chilly April day.

His left hand was jerked sideways by a hurtling slug. A spray of salty blood splattered across his lips...

At the cabin, he added a log to the embers in the stone fireplace, started cleaning his rifle. Post 9/11 there were many new hi-tec sniper rifles, laser sights and all the rest, but for him, the Winchester Model 70 he had carried ever since ’Nam.

An hour later, he poured coffee from the tin pot on the hearth, booted up his computer, and used Google to confirm that, as usual, the President’s Press Secretary was not making a lot of announcements about Wallberg’s movements outside Washington. His inaugural-day letter? Good. Let those bastards sweat a little.

‘Should I be doing a little sweating myself?’ he asked the sometime pursuer in his dreaming mind. No answer. He never got any response from Nisa when he spoke aloud to her, either.

At 1:45 p.m. he remembered breakfast and heated up a can of the spicy chili that Janet Kestrel had gotten him addicted to.

5

Thorne walked out Connecticut Ave from the Mayflower for his 3:30 appointment in Georgetown. He needed the time to think things through.

His first problem was Hatfield’s hostility. Where did it come from? What did it mean? It was like the man really didn’t want him to find Corwin, which made no sense. When the CIA had run their tests on him ten years ago, they had choppered him to Langley. But instead of sending him to the FBI’s pros at Quantico, Hatfield was farming him out to some supposedly independent psychiatrist who might be in Hatfield’s pocket.

If he misread Hatfield, could he end up rotting in a Kenyan jail on the phony poaching charge despite the president’s assurances of immunity?

Second problem. What if he actually found Corwin? He knew from Tsavo that he still could be seduced by violence, by the adrenaline rush. Could he break his vow again to save the president’s life, and again face his nightmare, maybe forever? Would it be better to just slip back into the easy, morally safe life at Sikuzuri, and let Hatfield find Corwin — if he could?

No. He might end up in jail instead of Tsavo. He had to get a read on Hatfield’s motivations from the shrink while the shrink was trying to get a read on his.

Three names, all MDs, were etched into the discreet brass plaque beside the front door of the mellow weathered brick house just off Wisconsin Avenue. There was a security camera above the door. The airy waiting room would have once been a living room, probably wall-to-wall then. Now, gleaming hardwood, a tube-aluminum and nubble-fabric couch and half a dozen chairs along the side walls, tables with lamps and magazines between, framed hunting prints above, flowery freshener on the air. Three identical doors set into the far wall. A den of shrinks.

On the couch, a frosty-haired woman looked straight ahead with a combat veteran’s thousand-yard stare. In one of the chairs, a middle-aged man with dense eyebrows and hairy ears and a big nose was almost surreptitiously reading a magazine.

The middle door opened. A white-coated, worried-looking man with a Sigmund Freud beard peered out. ‘Mr. Hedges?’

Hairy-Ears jerked so violently that the New Yorker shot off his lap onto the floor like a tossed frisbee.

‘Yes, I, um, here, ah... present...’

He went through the door. The shrink closed it behind both of them. Thorne went over to pick up the magazine and put it on a table. The frosty-haired woman winked at him. Three minutes went by. The right hand door opened, she entered, it closed.

Out in Hopland, on northern California’s Redwood Highway, Janet Kestrel turned from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino cafeteria’s pick-up counter with her order of chili and coffee. From beyond the plain partition walls came the ringing of bells, the whirr of slotmachine wheels, the cries of winners, groans of losers, the calls of blackjack dealers, amplified announcements of jackpots.

She took an empty table. The reply to her letter had said she should be here for a twelve-thirty interview with Charlie Quickfox, president of the tribal council. She was deliberately early, uneasy because she had denied this half of her heritage for the past decade and felt like a fraud by coming here now.

At 12:15, a stocky, elderly man sat down across from her with a mug of steaming black coffee. He had a seamed lived-in face as brown as hers, but his eyes were a piercing black to her blue. Grey hair made a long pony-tail down his back. His cowboy boots were muddy, his jeans pale with washing. His tie was a leather string held in place by a beaten silver clasp in the stylized shape of a perching hawk.

He pointed at her water glass with its Sho-Ka-Wah logo that included the same stylized perching hawk, this one pink and gold.

‘The kestrel. Our tribe’s symbol. There is no Hopland clan name of Kestrel, yet that’s what you’re calling yourself.’

‘Better than my mother’s name — Jones. She was white. She’s dead. My father’s name was Roanhorse. He’s dead too.’

Quickfox’s stern face softened. ‘Roanhorse. We played football together at Santa Rosa High School.’

‘He drowned in a pool of his own vomit.’

‘You reject his name because he was a drunk? Many of our people despair and become drunkards.’ His swung arm encompassed the casino. ‘Fighting that despair is what this is all about.’

‘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 for 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.’

‘I’m surprised you’re even talking to me.’

‘You’re not like those regular FBI fucks. You and me, we can do a trade: what I know for what you know.’

‘Okay,’ said Thorne instantly, ‘what do you know?’

Escobar grinned, stuck with it. ‘Yeah. Well, me and my partner got the call-out at two-thirty a.m. Lots of fog. Jaeger had two plainclothes black security guys with him, said the suspect started shooting as they approached the houseboat. His guys returned fire — Jaeger didn’t have a weapon. No shots were fired at us. We worked the bullhorn, no response, so we put in teargas, went in. Two dead vics. White male, mid-thirties. White female, late twenties. Multiple gunshots. A Python .357 Magnum was on the floor near the bodies. Empty. I presume it was the murder weapon. I was afraid the civilians might corrupt my crime scene, so I took blood and fluid and tissue samples before I went back up on the levee to call it in.’

‘Presume? What about ballistics?’

‘Before I could call SIU, two carloads of feds showed up. I told them the perp must have slithered off the stern of the houseboat while Jaeger’s guys were shooting the shit out of the front of it. Told ’em he’d be bottled up in the slough — his car was half a mile away at the levee gate.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘That’s when the Big G. dropped the hammer on us.’

‘Do you think the perp was wounded?’

‘There was a blood trail to the stern, but was it his blood? We never even got a courtesy call afterwards. Never got any DNA, never saw the results of the autopsies or tox screens, never were given any possible i.d. of the suspect, never learned the names of the vics. Never learned why a guy like Jaeger was out there. Never learned if the Magnum was the murder weapon or who it was registered to. All we got was a big load of national security bullshit. I’ve got the blood and fluid samples I didn’t tell the Feebs about, and nothing to compare ’em with.’

‘Victims, Nisa and Damon Mather,’ said Thorne. ‘Husband and wife. They’d been staffers on Wallberg’s election campaign until they quit and hid out here in the Delta because they were being stalked by someone. Wallberg’s people didn’t know anything about it until Jaeger got a phone call from Nisa on election evening. That’s why the FBI is on it instead of the Secret Service — the vics were no longer on Wallberg’s staff.’ Thorne told his lie smoothly. ‘The perp’s name died with the victims.’

Escobar nodded. ‘Thanks for telling me. I’ll drive you to the scene and bring you back afterwards.’ At his Crown Vic, he paused, then handed Thorne a three-ring binder from the back seat. ‘I always keep a personal Murder Book. Better read it on the way. Whoever the perp is, he’s one sick son of a bitch.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Thorne, surprised.

‘Just read the Murder Book.’

As they went east on gun-barrel Cal 12, Thorne read. Damon Mather was found lying on his back in the middle of the room in the classic death pose, arms and legs splayed. Loosened bowels and bladder. A single shot to the chest with a heavy-caliber slug consistent with the .357 Magnum on the scene.

Escobar slowed the Crown Vic, put on his right blinker.

‘It’s a half-mile walk from the White Slough Wildlife Area gate on Guard Road to where their houseboat was moored on Disappointment Slough. We can climb over the gate.’ Nisa had been pounded up against the bulkhead by the other five rounds. Unlike Damon, she had fought for her life: broken nails, dermis under two of them, head at an angle, eyes open and glazing, tongue out one corner of her mouth. Blouse ripped down.

Contact wounds, powder burns around each of them. One in the stomach, one into each breast, the final two rounds into her mons veneris. Her clothing was soaked in blood and urine. And something else. Corwin had masturbated on her body after he had killed her. The first, heaviest spurt into her face, the rest onto her bared breasts like some obscene pornographic film.

His own daughter. Thorne felt a wave of nausea. Nisa was long dead, but he still wanted to protect her from Corwin.

‘One sick son of a bitch,’ he agreed.

They walked along the raised levee road. Grass grew between the ruts. To their left was Disappointment Slough. To their right, sunken stubble fields waited for spring planting. A jackrabbit hopped up on the levee in front of them, afternoon sunshine turning his long erect ears red, almost translucent.

‘When you see a rabbit with light shining through his ears, you’ve entered the land of enchantment,’ said Thorne.

‘I could use a little enchantment.’

A cold breeze had risen, rustling the thistles flanking the track.

Herring-bone clouds stretched across the sky. A brace of mallard whistled by overhead. Across the channel was a brushy oval uninhabited land mass called King Island. Escobar stopped beside a knee-high thick-stemmed bush with a single white four-petal flower.

‘I used this bush as a landmark to come back after the feds left.’ He gave an embarrassed chuckle. ‘I was really pissed.’

‘You find anything?’

‘No place to hide with searchers just minutes behind you.’

Across the channel a two-trunked dead tree lifted stark, naked arms to the sky as if in prayer. For the souls of the dead Nisa and Damon?

‘I see what you mean,’ said Thorne. ‘Nothing to find. I’m through here.’

7

Sharon Dorst entered the Department of Commerce building from 15th Street. An American flag hung over the entrance. She was wearing her black power suit with a string of pearls around her neck and a small gold American flag pinned to her lapel. Without government i.d. she was meat for the scanner, her purse and briefcase meat for the x-ray machine. Nothing beeped.

In the echoing, nearly-deserted basement cafeteria, she doctored decaf with Equal and milk, paid the cashier, and carried her coffee out to the south-side courtyard. She sat down at a wrought-iron table near the big stone fountain. Right on time. Hatfield wasn’t, but she was glad of the time alone.

She had done three evaluations for him before Thorne’s, but when he had said he wanted to meet her here, all her alarm bells had gone off. Why here? She could give him her evaluation, all that he was entitled to by law, in her office. Did he want her out of the way so he could send in a black-bag team to rifle her files for her private session notes on Thorne? She knew the FBI sometimes did things like that. So, at the last minute, she stuck the sessions notes in her briefcase. She was being irrational, but she felt better having them safely out of the office.

When a scowling Hatfield finally arrived, twenty minutes late, he plunked down across the little table from her. He wore the standard FBI uniform: white shirt, Brooks Brothers suit, dull tie. He slammed his cup of coffee down in front of him, slopping some into the saucer. She tried to read his face. Had he searched her office or not?

‘Okay, let’s have it.’ She stared at him in astonishment. He snapped his fingers. ‘Your evaluation. Of Thorne. Let’s have it. I’m on a tight schedule here and I’m running late.’

She ostentatiously checked her watch. ‘I noticed.’

‘Don’t give me any crap, lady.’ He took a gulp of coffee. ‘Okay, we’ll play it your way. What did the tests suggest about Thorne’s mental and emotional states?’

‘I didn’t run any tests. We just talked.’

‘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.

8

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.

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.

9

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.

10

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.

He couldn’t use his room phone to tap his intelligence sources outside official channels. Cellphone? Not unless he got a one-use he threw away afterwards, or stole someone else’s, or bought a phonecard. Anyway, all of those could eventually be traced, and the act of procuring them would alert Hatfield to the fact that Thorne knew he was under surveillance.

He wandered around the sprawling Georgetown campus until he found the library, old and almost spooky, and went around behind to go inside. In the computer room, he logged onto the internet. Called up the New York Times and the Washington Post coverage of the president’s recent successful campaign, starting with the Democratic Convention. Paused at the frontpage picture of Wallberg with his wife Edith and their grown children after he accepted the nomination. Their son, 30, a lawyer in St. Paul; their daughter, 27, finishing a psych PhD from University of Chicago. The nuclear family intact. Hiding what secrets?

Thorne chose an array of stories to make it look convincing, and started printing. Getting more background on Corwin would make sense to Hatfield. As they printed, he quickly and surreptitiously sent an e-mail to an old Ranger buddy named Victor Blackburn who had lost part of one hand in Panama and until retirement was riding out his career behind a desk. His job gave him access to many of the Army’s most sensitive files.

He and Victor had seen — and done — some shit in Panama that had welded iron bonds of friendship between them. They had been half crazed from weeks under the pressure-cooker canopy. Sitting back to back, getting eaten alive by whatever insects were flying around or mooching over them from the leaf-litter in which they squatted, the rain coming in bursts like rifle fire. And Thorne once had arrived while Victor was being tortured for intel and had ended the torturers before they could end Victor.

His e-mail to Victor was short and to the point:

He sent it, deleted it, then left the work station for the men’s room so a studious-looking woman with big hornrim glasses could stroll by his table and note the printouts.

He carried them back to his hotel in the gathering dusk, stopping in the lounge for a drink and surreptitiously watched the Feebs drop visual on him for mobile surveillance outside the hotel in case he went out again. Which told him that his room phone was bugged by this time, also.

Only then, unobserved as far as he could tell, did he go to the desk to ask for any other mail. There was another manila envelope, this one hand-delivered. No sender’s name on it.

Was it from Johnny Doyle? In his room he tore open the envelope with an urgency that surprised him. He realized that he just had to know whether his go-to guy had come through or not.

11

It was from Doyle: photocopies of the Terminous Market phone records for the day of the murders and the two weeks preceding. Obviously conned out of a phone-company employee so there would be no telltale paperwork. Probably a drinking buddy. Social engineering.

Several local calls either to or from the Tower Park Marina, the attached Sunset Bar and Grill, and the adjoining trailer park. Three outgoing long-distance calls to suppliers, four incoming from them. Paydirt was calls from various cities in the western states each Tuesday and Thursday at two p.m., the last three from the same LA phone booth. The calls to Nisa.

At noon on November third, election day, a call had come from an unknown number in LA two hours early. The instant Nisa heard the voice, according to the Terminous Market proprietor, she had cried, ‘You!’ and slammed down the receiver. Corwin, telling his daughter he had found them?

Had to be. She ‘real quick’ made several calls of her own — starting at 12:04 p.m. — trying to track down someone, who was hard to reach, at the elegant Marquis Hotel in Beverly Hills. Obviously Jaeger, who had said that when she got him, he grabbed two private security guards and tried to get to her. Because of bad weather, they arrived too late to save her and her husband.

How had Corwin known where to find them? And once he knew, why call her? He was maybe psychotic, but not demented and not dismissable. He had withdrawn when he had suffered the loss of his wife, had brooded, alone, in the great north woods until someone shot him. Deliberately, he came to believe. Finally, that it was his son-in-law. So he went looking.

Revenge. Revenge within Corwin’s own moral code. Totally understandable to Thorne. A moral code that could explain the phone call he never got a chance to complete. Almost chivalric.

But then why murder Nisa with such sadistic rage? And why, if the man he thought was his attacker was now dead, was he threatening Wallberg? Going back further, why would Mather try to kill Corwin? How could Corwin’s death advance his career?

More likely, as everyone believed, it had been just a random hunting accident, not Damon Mather at all. Corwin had acted on a paranoid obsession devoid of any basis in fact. His stalk of the president was just more delusional behavior.

Stymied, Thorne went back to those calls every Tuesday and Thursday. From Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, finally California. Reassurance calls from someone on Wallberg’s staff? But until Nisa’s panicked calls, nobody had known why they resigned from the campaign, let alone where they were.

Maybe a way to check on that? Thorne huddled over the news reports from the Georgetown library’s computer, laboriously checking the whereabouts of Wallberg’s campaign party against the city of origin of each of those Tuesday and Thursday phone calls.

Huddled around a table in an isolated corner of the Hoover Building’s cafeteria were Hatfield, the bogus homeless man, the two jocks who had been discussing yachts on the Georgetown dock, and the dark-haired woman with studious hornrims who had checked out what Thorne was doing at the library. The rest of the crew, including the bogus hiker with the splendid thighs, was patrolling the streets around the Mayflower. None of them was from Hatfield’s crack Hostage/Rescue team; but these were eager, competent agents or trainees unaware that their surveillance of Thorne was unsanctioned, arguably illegal.

Hatfield pointed across the table at the homeless man.

‘Gary. Has he burned you people?’

‘No way, Boss.’ Gary, really into his dumpster-diving persona, smelled bad. ‘He’s clueless.’

‘He might be hot stuff out in the boonies,’ smirked Jock Number One, who had a rather patrician nose. ‘But in an urban environment he doesn’t know where to look or who to look for.’

Hatfield pointed at blond Jock Number Two, who looked something like a very young Jack Nicklaus. ‘Nutshell his day.’

‘Breakfast at the Mayflower. Up to the fitness facility, worked out, swam. Checked at the desk, got the file on Corwin.’

Back to Jock Number One. ‘Michael?’

‘Walked down to the Georgetown dock, had iced tea and read Corwin’s file. Thought for a while, then left.’

Gary, the homeless man, took it up. ‘Wandered around the Georgetown campus. As soon as he headed for the library, I alerted Charlene so she could be inside ahead of him.’

‘He went to the computer room and logged on to the internet,’ said Hornrims. ‘When he went to the men’s room, I was able to ascertain that he was accessing presidential campaign coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post.’

Trying to find a pattern of movement that Corwin might also find, thought Hatfield, hoping to get to the intersection of President and assassin before the assassin did. Correct, conventional stuff. Good. Thorne was being predictable.

Jock Number One said, ‘He went back to the Mayflower, ordered room service.’

Jock Number Two said eagerly, ‘Should we access his room to make copies of the articles he abstracted from the newspapers?’

‘Too risky. We have the tap on his phone.’ Hatfield leaned back, feeling smug. ‘Good work, people. Stay on him. Remember, if he takes a crap...’

‘We’re there to hand him the toilet paper,’ said Gary.

When panic struck, Nisa had called Jaeger for help. All of the Tuesday/Thursday calls had originated in cities where Wallberg’s campaign was on that day. So the calls had to be reassurance calls from Jaeger. Who had lied when he said no one knew where they had gone. Acting on his own, helping them hide? Or...

What if Wallberg had come to believe that Mather had tried to murder Corwin? He would have had to drop Nisa and Damon from the campaign and its safety net of Secret Service agents: an assassination attempt stemming from his campaign team, rather than directed at it, would have been disastrous. In that case, Jaeger’s help would have been damage control, keeping Nisa and Damon from the media.

Thorne wished he had a photo of Nisa. He wished he knew whose .357 Magnum it was. He wished he could reconstruct the sequence of events aboard the houseboat that night. He wished, he wished... But none of it was going to happen easily, not with Hatfield’s people following him around like ducklings that had imprinted on him.

He bedded down at 2:30 a.m. and tossed and turned for an hour, almost afraid to seek sleep. But when it did come, no nightmare rode it. His subconscious must have thought he was doing something right.

Gustave Wallberg stood at a window in the Oval Office as if watching, through the lace curtains, the small army of gardeners making the wide expanse of White House grounds bright with spring flower borders. Actually, he was seeing last night.

Edith, his chickadee-quick wife, sitting on the edge of the bed in one of her usual shapeless nightgowns, watching him remove the fancy brocaded robe she had given him for Christmas.

‘What’s bothering you, darling?’

He said, ‘Politics and polls, sweetheart, inspired by our friends across the aisle, hinting that I’m staying inside the Beltway because of terrorist threats, implying that I’m afraid.’

‘Polls! Politics!’ She put her arms around him. ‘You aren’t afraid of anything on earth! You are my fearless lion.’

That’s when he made his decision.

‘I’m meeting with Kurt and the staff tomorrow to announce that we will be making a swing through the top red states with a major domestic or foreign policy announcement at each stop. Shake ’em up a bit.’

He turned from the window: suddenly he had seen, reflected there, not Edith, but Nisa. Nisa, waiting for him in the little motel out by the Minneapolis airport with the grotesque faded pink fake-flock wallpaper, naked in the bed that brayed and banged the wall in delight at their passion...

But Nisa was gone. Dead and gone. And he was alive.

12

Doing laps in the hotel pool, Thorne decided he’d ditch the Feebs following him. Their surveillance was almost insulting, it was so slipshod. He hit the shower, stood under pounding water that was first boiling, then icy, towelled off, dressed.

Yes, ditch them, but in such a way that they couldn’t be sure it had been deliberate. Then what? A movie? A bar? Until Wallberg ventured beyond his iron ring of security inside the Beltway, he could only wait. As he was sure Corwin also waited.

Then he had it. Ditch his minders, meet Johnny Doyle as if by chance, hint about his need for the murder-scene forensics.

Wallberg met his people at noon in the basement conference room. Jaeger, Hatfield, Crandall, and Quarles, with Johnny Doyle bringing people things they wanted. No official record of the meeting: the audio and visual recorders were turned off.

It had been put out to staff that it was a housekeeping, not a security, briefing. These were done every morning by the National Security Council: National Security Advisor Gelson Hennings, head of the White House Secret Service detail Shayne O’Hara, and the heads of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, and NSA.

‘You have two weeks,’ Wallberg told the people assembled in the room. This had been his style as governor. People did their best work under pressure. ‘Then we make a major swing through the top red states. I need input from all of you on where to go and what to say when we get there. At the end of it, I want the themes of this administration’s first term in office succinctly spelled out for all to see.’

‘Two weeks! That doesn’t give us time to—’

‘That is all the time you have, Kurt. Inform the cabinet and the Secret Service. Keep the speech-writers busy. Get out the front-men to set up the press arrangements. Have O’Hara coordinate with local police, Homeland Security, and the FBI.’ He grinned his famous grin at Hatfield. ‘The rest of the FBI.’

‘This is about Corwin,’ Hatfield exclaimed.

‘Yes. Corwin. I need your assessment. Is it safe for us to make public appearances outside the Beltline?’

Now was not the time to hesitate. ‘I and my men now know how he escaped in the California Delta in November, Mr. President, and how he eluded us in California’s King’s Canyon in March.’ Hatfield did not say that it was Thorne who had worked out Corwin’s methods. ‘With what we now know, he will be unable to mount any viable assassination attempt.’

Doyle was behind the wet bar, unnoticed by anyone, a ghost of times past. When the President ordered them to get front men out, he felt his own surge of emotion. He would get his old job back! As of this instant, Thorne was gone from his radar.

Jaeger was intense. ‘You are saying, Terrill, that Hal Corwin is still alive and active in his desire to assassinate the President. So the danger from him is still very real.’

‘Real, but assessable, like that posed by foreign terrorists and white supremacists and anti-abortion activists and other right-wing kooks. Once we know the sites, Mr. President, I and my men will evaluate the potential danger at each stop.’

‘Get to it, people,’ said Wallberg. ‘I want twice daily briefings from everyone involved, starting this afternoon.’

He lingered after the others had left. He hadn’t consulted Jaeger beforehand, though the bond between them went back to that shared decision on election day. A decision that gave Kurt a lot of power. But not even Jaeger knew everything. No one did.

‘Ah... Mr. President...’ He turned quickly. It was Johnny Doyle. ‘You said, sir, that you would be needing front men to go out before your trip. I thought maybe...’

‘Out of the question,’ Wallberg snapped. Crandall and Quarles had keyed him in on Doyle’s drinking problem. He strode out, stopping just short of adding, ‘You fool.’

Halden Corwin drank black coffee as bitter as his thoughts, and clicked the president’s official website on his laptop to make his daily check on any travel plans by Wallberg, and rubbed his aching knee. Who was he fooling? He was half-crippled. Despite daily practice, he might miss his shot even if he got it. Maybe he should just fold his hand, rot here in this one-room cabin where he lived his narrowed life...

He came erect with a jerk, self-loathing forgotten. A travel itinerary! Ten stops in five states in six days, starting two weeks from today. One site leaped out at him from all the towns and cities and rural areas listed. Years ago, unwinding between overseas jobs, he’d gone on a hiking trip near that spot.

Leaving Terry home to mind baby. Memory wrenched an unexpected sob from him. After Terry’s death, he had gone to the site of the hit-and-run on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. Terry was crossing with the green light when a Mercury Cougar knocked her catty-corner across the intersection and smashed her against the second-story window of an office building sixty feet away.

They caught up with the hit-and-run driver a week later. He lost his license for a year. Corwin took a vow to stalk him and take him from his wife as the man had taken Terry from him.

That same night the nightmare started. The THUD of impact, he was running hard across the intersection to catch Terry before she hit the sidewalk. He was too late. As he knelt beside her broken body, she floated to her feet and began to glide away.

He ran after her, calling her name, pursuing her through the hot, devastated landscapes of his mercenary assignments, dead bodies strewn about. She paused to look back at him with great sadness, then disappeared into a grove of mortar-shredded palm trees and was gone. That was when he awoke. Every time.

The nightmare continued during two more years of mercenary jobs before he finally understood what Terry was telling him: No more killing. No more dealing out death in hot countries. No more thoughts of killing the man who had killed her.

He deeded their house to Nisa, went into the north woods to become a trapper and a hunter of animals, not men. The nightmare stopped. The years went by. Then he was shot himself, his attacker’s slugs taking him down, ripping his flesh, leaving him half-crippled, distorted of mind and emotion. He couldn’t hunt even animals any more. His life was over.

But Nisa began driving up to visit him at Whitby Hernild’s little clinic in Portage. As he healed, she invited him down to St. Paul for Christmas. When he tried to find out who had shot him, and why, she had helped him look...

Back to the site of Wallberg’s speech. It would work. He would make it work. Energized, he limped across the little cabin to get his fleece-lined jacket from its peg on the wall beside the fireplace. He went to the wardrobe he had built to hold his clothes and meager possessions, and got out his gun case.

The rifle, the scope, the ammo that he would use on that day. There was so much newer, better sniper hardware now. The M-40A3 rifle, and the newest night scope, the AN/PVS-10. But it wasn’t the hardware that counted: it was the software, the wiring inside the brain and body that made the great sniper.

From now until he left for the Bitterroot Wilderness Area, all of his practice shots would be made at a thousand yards out, out beyond any imaginable security perimeter, out where even now only a few shooters could go. If he really existed, was the dangerous tracking beast of his dreams one of them? Anyway, no way could he divine where and when Hal Corwin would strike.

Corwin took his rifle out into the cold northern spring day. A vivid flash of memory: going deer-hunting for the first time with his dad so many years before. The thud of hunters’ shots, thirteen of them, and his father saying, there’ll be blood on the snow tonight...

The president and all of the president’s men were going to western Montana. Waiting there for them, rifle in hand, would be Halden Corwin. There’d be blood on the snow that night, too.

Brendan Thorne sauntered across the opulent Mayflower lobby, a man at loose ends. Jock Number One yawned, folded his newspaper while standing up from his lobby chair. Outside the revolving door to Connecticut Avenue, Thorne set off toward the Georgetown Dock, knowing the invisible net surrounded him.

He strolled through the gathering dusk to the three-story, glass-clad restaurant. No awning-covered drinks kiosk at street level for him tonight, no beer in a plastic glass. He chose a table on the second outside level, set for dinner.

Hornrims from the library and the lady hiker with the thighs — tonight demurely covered by a mid-calf dress — took a nearby table to chat animatedly about their non-existent jobs at Georgetown University. When the waitress brought water and a menu, he spoke loudly enough for the Feebs to overhear.

‘I’d like a glass of the house chardonnay and an appetiser of fried clams to start. And a slice of lemon in my water.’

She wrote on her pad. ‘Very good, sir.’

She detoured by the Feebs’ table to leave menus. Thorne watched the brightly-lit parkway traffic on the Virginia side of the Potomac. As she returned with his wine, he saw the white tour boat line up to begin its transverse under Key Bridge.

‘Your clams will be right up, sir.’ She had a Georgia accent and mahogany skin and an elaborate corn-row hairdo.

‘Thank you. And, oh, miss, where are the rest rooms?’

‘Inside, sir, on the third floor.’

He slipped two twenties under his water glass where the two Feebs couldn’t see them, then went up the stairs to the sparkling ornate indoor restaurant. Neither stood to follow him. Past the stairs, through the kitchen to the narrow garbage-pail-lined alley behind, through the deserted not-yet completed galleria behind the bowl-shaped mall enclosing the massive fountain.

Tourists were still disembarking from the tour boat to the dock beyond the little park beyond the mall. Thorne stepped aboard four minutes after leaving his table at the restaurant.

13

Inside the enclosed cabin were a dozen rows of unoccupied benches and a steep narrow stairway leading up to the bridge. Aft, between the doors to the rear observation deck, an acned teenager in the tall paper hat was pouring hot fresh corn from the popper. The aroma filled the cabin.

Thorne chose a bench well forward where he could see the stubby gangplank. No more riders came aboard after him. The pilot climbed the stairs to the bridge. He was not over twenty years old, with a great shock of unruly blond hair.

They cast off to slide away from the dock, then turned down river toward Alexandria. A canned commentary pointed out the sights on either side of the river, but in the dark, little could be seen except moving headlights on the flanking parkways.

A mother and her ten-year-old son chose the bench ahead of Thorne’s. The boy got up on his knees to shoot through the window glass with a palmsize video camera, then sat down and pushed buttons to review his footage.

Two teenage girls sat down on the far side of the cabin, giggling and gossiping. Four more teens joined them. All wore leather jackets and jeans. One girl held up her hand and made baby-bird-opening-its-beak gestures with it. A boy bought popcorn, and shoved a handful of it into her mouth while the others laughed. They all were speaking Russian. Only in D.C.

The tour boat slid into its berth at the Cameron and Union Street Dock in Old Town Alexandria at seven-thirty. A Dixieland band was playing with large enthusiasm and small talent in front of the Torpedo Factory, left over from World War II and converted into an Art Center. The smell of broiling steaks from a fancy restaurant on the dock made Thorne’s mouth water. He hadn’t gotten to eat his fried clams.

Way up at the very far end of King Street glittered the George Washington Masonic Memorial. Thorne walked up toward it past Market Square and the Apothecary Museum. There were cobbles underfoot, and the old houses and office buildings of weathered and painted brick were lovingly cared for.

The foot traffic was mostly local folks out for an evening stroll. He stopped to pet a black and white springer spaniel.

‘His name is Tuxie,’ said the zaftig blonde with the dog. ‘Because his white chest is like a tuxedo.’

‘Nice name,’ said Thorne. ‘Nice dog.’

She nodded, making golden curls jump. ‘Dogs are the best people there are,’ she said seriously.

The Hard Times Cafe was halfway up King Street from the dock. Inside, booths flanked the heavy door along the front wall, none of them occupied. Behind a deserted reception desk was a bar half-filled with drinkers on this weekday evening.

Thorne took a booth and asked for a draft beer, a bacon cheeseburger, and fries. If Johnny Doyle didn’t show, at least he’d get a chance to eat. He’d just leaned back on his bench with a sigh of repletion when a shadow loomed over him. Doyle, red-faced and disheveled, with a slight slurring of his words.

‘Thorne! What the hell are you doing here?’

Thorne got to his feet and stuck out his hand. Johnny took it. His palm was moist.

‘I was at the Georgetown Dock and saw the Old Town tour boat and jumped aboard. Let my buy you a drink.’

‘Let me get mine from the bar. I was in the can.’

He came back, half-empty glass in hand, sat down across from Thorne, and leaned confidentially across the table.

‘No crap now, Thorne, how’d you end up at the Hard Times?’

Even high, he was no fool.

‘I wanted to thank you for those phone logs.’

‘What phone logs?’ Doyle dead-panned. He motioned with his empty glass. ‘I’m shelebrating the end of my career.’

Thorne caught the waiter’s eye, made a circular gesture for refills. ‘I guess I’m not following.’

‘You heard about the president’sh barnstorming tour?’

‘It was on Fox News Channel.’

‘Full-court press. Front men out an’ everything.’

‘Hey, that’s great! Since you were a front man during—’

‘No, it’s shitty. I pissed the Old Man off just suggesting I be one of them.’ He downed half his new drink, lifted his eyes to meet Thorne’s gaze. ‘I know I drink too much, but it’sh never interfered with my work. It’sh those two pricks, Crandall and Quarles. They’re ass-lickers an’ they’re probably queer for each other an’ they’re always tellin’ the Prez I’m unreliable.’

‘I thought all three of you were with the president in Minnesota during his years as governor.’

‘Yeah. Good times. Me an’ Jaeger an’ Crandall an’ Quarles an’ Nisa...’

He shook his head. ‘Beau’ful, shmart p’litically. She an’ me usta be buds. Tol’ each other things.’

‘Why didn’t she join Wallberg’s presidential campaign?’

‘He was bangin her while he was gov’nor, ’fore an’ after she married Mather. Was Wallberg broke it off, when he shtarted his run for president. Y’know, knight errant, sittin’ up over ’is armor, regain his purity, all that shit. She was cryin’ an’ let it shlip when I asked her wha’ was wrong...’

Regaining his purity might have been what he told Nisa, but the truth would have been different: fear that the affair might be discovered under the intense, minute scrutiny any presidential candidate was subjected to by the media. Thorne realized he hadn’t been listening; Doyle was staring at him, blear-eyed.

‘Was ’nother reason, too. Our wunnerful Chief of Staff, Kurt fuckin’ Jaeger, had th’ hotsh for her. She turn’d ’m down cold, he started goin’ af’er campaign workers, lottsa complaints. Sho...’ Doyle chortled. ‘Early days o’ th’ campaign, black pimp in LA named Sharkey shtarted findin ’im black local hookersh anywhere, any time, din’t mind gettin’ beat on.’

Nothing in any of that for Thorne. He asked, ‘Why’d Nisa rejoin the campaign after Wallberg got the nomination?’

‘Couldn’ shtay ’way. Pol’tics in her blood. Draf’ed his speeshes, worked out th’ campaign shtrategy...’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Ol’ Wallberg, he foun’ out Corwin was after ’em, he dumped ’em both. Cold. C’n you b’lieve ’at? An’ they got dead. ‘Coursh mosta Wallberg’s big idealsh jus’ bullshit. While he was shtill th’ Guv he tol’ us he was shcared some guy knew somethin’ could do him outta the pres’dental nomination...’

Couldn’t have been Corwin. He and Wallberg, kids in high school together, sure. But Wallberg’s father was the mayor of Rochester — those early years were an open book. Still, if Mather heard Wallberg’s remark and thought Corwin was that threat, he might have thought Wallberg would owe him if he...

‘Was Damon Mather there the day he said that?’

‘Can’t ’member. Whatta fuck differensh it make now?’ He lurched to his feet, staggered unsteadily toward the men’s room.

Was there anything useful in all these drunken character assassinations? Yeah. Something was hidden in Wallberg’s past.

When Doyle shambled back, Thorne said, ‘Y’know, Johnny, that FBI guy, Hatfield, is sure making my job a lot harder by denying me access to the documents I need.’

‘Yeah. I ’member you ashkin’ bout th’ forensicsh an’ provenance on the murder weapon. Crime schene. Gun.’ Doyle put a finger alongside his nose. ‘Jush leave it to ol’ Johnny.’

Thorne walked him home to his apartment on Cameron Street two blocks from the Hard Times Cafe, caught the last tour boat to Georgetown at ten o’clock. He walked back to his hotel.

The watchers were on duty outside. He could almost hear their collective sigh of relief when he showed up. They hadn’t tossed his room and they probably wouldn’t tell Hatfield he’d been in the wind for almost six hours.

14

The next morning, Thorne got an e-mail message from Victor Blackburn on one of the hotel computers maintained for guests.

So Corwin’s wife, Terry, had been his girlfriend when he and Wallberg were playing hockey together. Wallberg knew the wife, years later had an affair with the daughter. Creepy, but that’s all: Corwin never saw Wallberg again after he went to Vietnam.

Hide in plain sight. Thorne felt a tingle. He wouldn’t wait for Doyle to come through. He’d tell Hatfield he was going into the field again, and fly out the next day.

Janet Kestrel waved her thanks to the grizzled rancher who had given her the ten-mile lift on California 120 from Groveland to the River Store at Casa Loma. The River Store was a brown rustic wooden one-story building with a steepled shingled roof covering the store, a deli, and the AQUA River Trips office and store room in back.

Above the roofed and railed porch was a wooden coffee cup and saucer painted light blue, and a big blue sign with ESPRESSO DELI — River Store in blue and gold lettering. An American flag was angled out from one of the porch’s support pillars. The only vehicle in the parking area was a three-year-old Suzuki SUV that belonged to the store’s proprietor, Sam Arness.

‘Hey, Janet.’ Arness was a bulky man with a gray handlebar mustache, long hair in a ponytail, jeans and boots and a faded mackinaw. ‘Jessie’s at the Pine Mountain Lake Campgrounds, Flo’s on her way in. She’ll give you a lift to the Put-In Spot.’

She missed her 4-Runner’s four-wheel drive that could take her down five miles of incredible dirt track to the Tuolemne River thousands of feet below. Riding sedately down with Flo just wasn’t the same.

‘So I’ve got time for a cup of coffee.’

‘And a Danish,’ grinned Arness.

Janet had missed last year’s stint as a white-water guide on the Tuolemne, and she was glad to be back. She loved going down the narrow, fast, twisting river in a rubber raft. It was a level four ride, which took great skill to keep from coming to grief on submerged rocks. But she would abandon the river for good if she heard from Charlie Quickfox at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino.

What they would be talking about skirted the illegal, and since Hatfield could never quite escape the paranoid suspicion that the Justice Department’s internal security bugged their own agents’ offices, he arranged to meet Ray Franklin at the Lincoln Memorial. Beltliners wouldn’t be found dead there unless they were squiring around out-of-town visitors. It was crowded with shrieking, running school kids from shit-kicker towns like East Jesus, Nebraska, and Dismal Seepage, Arkansas. Small chance of anyone seeing or overhearing them anywhere near there.

They stood side-by-side overlooking the long skinny Reflecting Pool that fronted the Memorial: two random strangers contemplating the placid water. Roy Franklin was a field man, plain and simple, six-foot, hard-bitten, in his element behind the sights in a hostage situation, almost ill-at-ease in a suit and tie. Hatfield spoke without looking at him.

‘Your buddy Thorne is flying to Minneapolis tomorrow, then driving north to Portage where Corwin had his cabin.’

Ray shook out a Marlboro, lit it, sucked smoke greedily into his lungs. He didn’t appreciate Hatfield’s ironic comment about buddies. Without ever having met him, he hated Thorne’s guts. The bastard had made him and Walt Greene look bad by finding the way Corwin had eluded them in the Delta and in King’s Canyon. By making them look bad, he had made their whole Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team look bad.

‘That asshole. He’s not going to find anything there. In November we were all over that place like flies on shit. Even checked for hollowed-out logs and loose stones in the fireplace. Talked to that hick doctor with his one-man clinic who patched Corwin up, talked to the bank manager, the Catholic priest, the protestant minister... Nobody knew anything, except the bank manager. He said that when Corwin left, the doctor bought the cabin to fix up and rent out this spring. End of story.’

‘Even so, go to Minneapolis and put a GPS transmitter on the car the AIC Minneapolis will give Thorne to drive.’

‘Why don’t I try to get audio on his interviews as well?’

‘We don’t want to alert him to the surveillance, Ray. I just want to know where he goes. Anyway, what’s he going to learn? You’ve already talked to the same people he’ll see.’

Corwin never tried to anticipate his shot, it had to just sort of... happen. Through the scope he could see, a thousand yards away, the white cambium where his round had hit the oak tree. If it had been a man, it would have been dead.

He maneuvered himself to his feet, worked his left leg for the three-mile walk back to the cabin. Tonight he would e-mail Whitby Hernild that he would be leaving. Driving the seven miles into town was a needless risk. Around here, people knew him.

Within ten days, Gustave Wallberg would be standing at a podium on a platform in a mountain meadow, his minions about him, beginning his speech. What odds that he would finish it?

The clerk gave Thorne a nine-by-twelve envelope when he stopped at the Mayflower’s massive front desk to say he’d be away for a few days. He stuck it into a topcoat pocket so the watchers outside wouldn’t see it, opened it in the taxi on the way across the Potomac to Reagan National. From Doyle, obviously.

The Delta crime scene data. The .357 Magnum had been purchased by Damon Mather in a St. Paul gunstore in mid-March of the previous year, probably for self-defense when Corwin turned up alive. Which greatly increased the odds that Corwin had been right, Mather had shot him. So why hadn’t Damon shot when Corwin stormed the houseboat? The only fingerprints on the weapon were Corwin’s. The ultimate irony: Mather and Nisa had been murdered with their own firearm. How had Corwin gotten it away from them?

Thorne put the report away. From the doctor at Portage, he hoped to learn how debilitating Corwin’s injuries had been. In ’Nam Corwin had been a thousand-yard assassin. Would those injuries prevent him from going for the sniper’s shot against Wallberg?

15

Since Hatfield couldn’t resist peering over his shoulder, Brendan Thorne didn’t check the vehicle awaiting him at the Minneapolis airport — a Crown Vic, of course — for the GPS transmitter he knew would be hidden on the car’s underbody. Without visual surveillance the GPS tracker was useless anyway. He would just be going exactly where they expected him to go. He just hoped to learn things they didn’t expect him to learn. Things they hadn’t learned in their own interviews.

On the drive north, Minnesota 169 reminded him of the Alcan Highway with its flanking muskegs on the way to Fairbanks. A flat landscape broken by dark green evergreens growing thicker with every passing mile. To his right lay the vast expanse of Lake Mille Lacs. It was a clear day: blue water and bright sun, fishermen in motor-boats trolling for walleyes, or plug-casting along the lake’s weedy edges for northern pike and pickerel.

During the winter, the frozen lake would be dotted with ice-fishermen’s shacks on runners, smoke coming from their stovepipes. Kids, as he and his buddies had done in Alaska, would be making ice rinks by shovelling away the snow, piling up backpacks at either end to make impromptu goals for afterschool hockey games.

Portage. Three bars. Two churches. Cafe, Italian restaurant, pizza joint, shops, supermarket, drug store, hardware store, bank, three-story granite City Hall and sheriff’s office on the town square. Wilmot’s General Store with handmade crepe-paper Easter cutouts fading in the windows. The Chateau Theater with FOR RENT FOR PARTIES OR MEETINGS on the marquee in black capital letters that once had spelled out current movie titles.

Thorne drove through on Main Street to the Bide-A-Wee, one of the town’s two motels, asked for the furthest corner room from habit, said he’d be one night, maybe two. The wide-hipped woman checking him in had faded blue eyes and a stingy chin and the midwest twang most Minnesotans didn’t even know they had.

‘You’ve got your pick right now, but there’s good walleye fishing all summer long, so from Memorial Day on we’ll be full as a tick right on through Labor Day. During deer season, full up on weekends. The bucks run big up in these parts.’

‘I’ll remember,’ promised Thorne. ‘Where’s good to eat?’

‘Breakfast, the Good Eats Cafe. Alfred’s, that’s a nice steakhouse a couple of miles out of town near the airport. And there’s the Pizza Palace and Dominic’s Italian.’

He dumped his overnighter on the bed and walked into town. The local branch office of Marquette Bank had the ground floor of a two-story red brick building on Oak and Main.

Arlie Carlson, the bank manager, was in his forties, a stocky man with graying blond air. False front teeth and faint scars beside his shrewd blue eyes suggested he had played hockey in the days before protective masks. Thorne flashed his temporary FBI credentials, and was led into an inner office. Carlson closed the door. They could see the tellers and customers through the interior window. Carlson’s high tenor voice didn’t go with his build or his hockey scars.

‘Special agents were up here from Minneapolis last November, asking some pretty pointed questions about Halden Corwin. Never did say what it was all about...’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t involved in the original investigation.’

Carlson’s blue eyes said he didn’t believe a word of it. Thorne took out a notebook and consulted a page that from across the desk Carlson couldn’t see was blank.

‘I understand that Corwin sold his cabin before he left.’

‘To his best friend, Whitby Hernild, the local doctor in these parts. I guess you can demand to know the selling price and I guess I’d have to tell you, but...’ His eyes hardened. ‘It’s confidential bank information and we always protect our customers.’

Thorne winked. ‘Need-to-know — just like the Bureau. But can you confirm that Corwin left town right after the sale?’

‘Sure can. Next day.’

Thorne made a check-mark on his blank notebook page.

‘Is there anything else that you might have learned since we were here in November?’

Carlson started to shake his head, then frowned. ‘Wait a minute. When we sent out the tax documents in mid-February, we found that Doc Hernild had never transferred title.’

‘Doesn’t sound too important.’ Thorne stood up. Carlson was on his feet, hand out, affable now that Thorne was leaving.

The April afternoon sun was hot; on impulse, Thorne turned in at Dutch’s Tavern. He needed to think about what Carlson had let drop at the very end of the interview. Only two drinkers at the bar, heavy, hard farmers in bib overalls, holding glasses of draft Hamms in calloused hands. They turned in unison when Thorne entered, then turned back to their conversation.

He took a stool near a fishbowl full of hard-boiled eggs with a hand-lettered sign, ‘Toofer a buck.’ The thick-bodied bartender was sprinkling salt in draft beer glasses, sloshing them in hot soapy water, then setting them upside down on a rubber mat to drain. He had bright blue eyes and a heavy jaw; his thinning blond hair was going silver and was parted down the very center of his square Teutonic head. Obviously Dutch himself. He came down toward Thorne automatically drying his hands on a wet-grayed apron.

‘What’ll it be there, mister?’

‘Draft beer. And...’ He picked a hard-boiled egg out of the bowl, tapped it on the stick hard enough to crack the shell.

‘You betcha.’

Hernild had bought the cabin off Corwin and Corwin had left town the next day. Okay, getting shot had ended his life as a recluse in the big woods, he needed traveling money, so the quick sale to his best friend made sense. But why had Hernild never registered the transfer of title? He was paying property taxes on a cabin that on the books still belonged to Corwin.

Down the bar, Dutch had drawn the beer, was slushing away the head with a wooden tongue-depressor, then topping it again from the spigot. He returned to set down the wet-beaded glass. Thorne raised it in salute.

‘You cut the clouds off ’em, my friend.’

‘Two other bars here in town, local folks wouldn’t let me get away with a short fill.’ He leaned heavy forearms on the mahogany. ‘Just passing through?’

‘Looking for a cabin I could maybe rent for the summer.’ Thorne took a bite of egg, sipped beer. ‘The bank said the local doctor had one for rent.’

‘Doc Hernild. But I heard he rented it out a month back.’

A month. March. Just about the time Corwin had disappeared after ditching Franklin and Greene in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. Thorne feigned disappointment, then brightened his face.

‘Hey, maybe it’s short term.’

‘Maybe. You can find the doc down at the river end of Hemlock, can’t miss his place. Real old-timey private practice, even does house calls. He’s got a little clinic where he treats patients right there at the house, flies his own plane. A couple of times he flew into the deep woods and landed on country roads to pick up injured hunters.’

Hernild’s clinic was a one-story wood frame add-on in front of a two-story white frame house with green shutters. The house overlooked the river through a stand of just-leafing willows. On the clinic door was a brass plaque:

WHITBY HERNILD, MD. Underneath in smaller letters was, Nine — Five, Monday — Friday and beneath that in smaller letters still, Ring Bell for Emergencies.

Just-budding, not yet fragrant lilac bushes flanked the walk. The reception room was deserted, but a tall handsome blonde with her hair done up in a bun at the back of her head came through the door behind the desk.

‘Hi. I’m Ingrid, Dr. Hernild’s nurse-receptionist.’ She was very Nordic, strong-bodied and large-boned, with big white teeth. A grin lit up her face. ‘His wife, too. Unless this is an emergency I’d like to take a little history first...’

‘No emergency. Not even a patient.’ He opened his FBI credentials, showed badge and commission card. She made a little face when she saw them.

‘You guys again? You know everything we know about Hal.’

Whitby Hernild was a lanky-legged heron of a man, also Scandinavian, six-foot-six and skinny, as pleasantly ugly as his wife was pleasantly attractive. Together they made a striking pair. He was wearing a white doctor’s smock over street clothes.

Ingrid went away, they faced one another in a room with a chair, a stool, a counter with a sink, cabinets, and a table covered with fresh white tucked-in sheets.

‘What can I tell you that Arlie Carlson couldn’t?’

‘Arlie sent up a smoke signal, huh?’ Thorne took out his notebook. ‘Carlson couldn’t give me details of Corwin’s injuries in that hunting accident.’

‘Extensive. Varied.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Thorne good-naturedly.

Hernild stared at him with glacial blue eyes.

‘Nowdays you probably could force me to tell you anyway, so okay, he was hit three times. Left knee, left hand, chest. The knee shot carried away the inferior genicular branch of the popliteal artery and vein, the biceps femoris tendon, part of the gastrocnemius muscle, and part of the head of the fibula. That the sort of thing you need, Agent Thorne?’

‘Why the hard-on? I’m just doing my job here.’

‘And I’m just a doctor doing his. I hate to invade any patient’s privacy no matter who’s asking.’

‘And here I thought it was maybe because he was shot three times. That’s a deer-hunter very persistent in his mistake.’

Hernild shrugged. ‘He was semaphoring his arms to show the hunter that he was a man, not a whitetail buck. It didn’t work.’ He pointed to the little finger and ring finger of his own left hand. ‘The second shot carried away the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand, counting from the thumb.’

‘Okay. In English this time, how bad was the knee wound?’

‘Bad enough. It was a long process. We put a drain in Hal’s leg, and removed it gradually as the tissue knit and the possibility of infection lessened. Because the head of the fibula was fractured, we had to insert the tendon just below the damaged area. Which means Hal now walks with a limp — his left leg is slightly shorter.’

Ingrid thrust in her blonde head.

‘Whit, you’ve got patients waiting...’

‘Just one little minute more,’ said Thorne quickly. She made a face at him and withdrew. ‘And the chest wound?’

‘Ah, the chest wound.’ Hernild didn’t seem worried about waiting patients. ‘The bullet fragmented the seventh rib, but glanced off rather than penetrated. Before the cold stopped it, couple of hundred cc’s of bleeding, mostly internal. He had an open fracture, with splintered ends of rib bone driven out through the skin and also into the chest cavity.’

‘But not into the lungs themselves?’

Hernild gave him a sharp, appraising look.

‘No, but Hal was afraid that a cough, even a deep breath, could collapse his lungs by compressing them with outside air being drawn in through the open chest wound.’

Thorne mused, ‘He needed a compress, a bandage, something to make the chest reasonably airtight...’

‘One of his mittens, fastened with his belt.’ Thorne realized he had gotten Hernild’s attention with his informed musings. ‘Crawled a thousand feet to his cabin, crawled inside, used his bow — he’d been bow-hunting a big whitetail buck when he was hit — to knock the phone to the floor. He dialled 911.’

‘He saved his own life,’ said Thorne, almost in admiration.

Again, that look. Hernild said, ‘It healed clean, without infection, but it left him with what we call “splinting.” The inability to take a really deep breath because of pain in the chest wall.’

‘How do I get to Corwin’s cabin and why didn’t you—’

‘I’ve got patients waiting. If you have some more questions, come back at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’

16

Corwin hiked back toward his cabin, his rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm, muzzle angled up and away from him. He was ready. He paused, went into an awkward half-crouch over a dug-up meat cache beside the trail. A fox, for sure.

He had a sudden vivid memory of the first time Nisa had visited him at the cabin after Hernild had released him from the clinic. He had taken her tramping through the still snowy woods to show her the first fox she had ever seen in the wild. The memory of that moment was filled with incredible sweetness, like biting into a honeycomb.

Then, too, he had squatted beside the path, pointing out the tracks. A gray: thicker tail, smaller pads but bigger toes than a red. Then he took her to the fox’s den in the base of a dead oak tree, showed her the tuft of reddish-gray fox fur caught on a bit of protruding bark at the mouth of the hole. Pointed out scattered bits of bone, a patch of down-soft rabbit fur, three bright wood duck feathers.

Then he put his lips against the back of his hand and sucked sharply to mimic the thin squeaking of a mouse. A sharp nose was suddenly raised against the leafless hardwood boles on a small rise at the far end of the burn. The fox, lying up on his backtrail, gray brush over paws, all senses alert.

And Nisa, eyes shining, hair sleek and shiny as the fox’s pelt, exclaimed in sheer delight, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’

Nisa. Dead. The thought thumped his chest like a heart attack. What had he done? He tried to cling to the fox memory. Couldn’t. He virtually fled back up the burn to the cabin, cleaned his rifle, added a log to the embers of the fire, and fired up his laptop to send Hernild the message that he would be leaving in two days. But waiting was an e-mail from Hernild:

It just hurried Corwin’s departure by a day. He sent:

He ate, then stowed everything he would need in Janet’s 1990 4-Runner, hid it three miles away in a thick stand of spruce on the other side of the creek. He would leave before dawn.

A fingernail crescent of new moon gave scant light, but he knew every tree, every bush, every turn in the trail on the way back. This cabin, before he was shot, had been his home since Terry’s senseless death. He had come back to it after King’s Canyon because they had already searched for him here. Walking softly through the dark-shadowed woods, hearing the questing whoo, whoo, whoo-whoo of a great horned owl, he found himself intensely curious about the new FBI man.

Different from the others. This one is good.

Who was he? How old? What did he look like? How did he move? How clever in the woods? How observant of sign? No man could match Corwin here on his home ground, no matter how good he was, but still... was this the questing beast of his nightmares?

At 7:45 in the morning, even fortified with eggs and bacon and hashbrowns and toast, Thorne yawned as he pushed the buzzer on the door of Hernild’s clinic. He had been in his car a half mile down the road until three a.m. Hernild had gone nowhere. Thorne hadn’t really expected him to, but he had learned to be methodical and cover all contingencies when on the hunt.

Hernild opened the door himself, crisp in his doctor’s whites, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand. Ingrid was not in evidence. Hernild raised the cup in a question.

‘No thanks. I just had breakfast.’

Hernild nodded and leaned his butt against the edge of the reception desk. He extended a sheet of paper.

‘I drew you a map of the way to Hal’s cabin. In winter you’d need four-wheel, but this time of year you can make it.’

Thorne studied the sketch. Corwin’s cabin, deep in the woods, was a simple rectangle. A dotted line marked the logging-trace in to it from the quarter-section gravel road.

‘Isolated.’

‘Hal built it himself. Cut down the trees, peeled the logs — therapy after Terry’s death. He sliced his leg with an axe and drove to my clinic one-handed, holding it closed with the other hand so he wouldn’t bleed to death. That’s how we met.’

‘How did he make a living during his years here?’

‘Trapping, hunting — after the shooting all that stopped.’

‘Why didn’t you transfer the title to yourself after you paid Corwin for the cabin?’

‘He needed money to get away from all of the associations this area evoked after he was wounded.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘Hal Corwin is my best friend. If he ever wants the cabin back, it’s here for him. Meanwhile, I rent it out to cover the taxes. There’s someone living there now, in fact. I hope you won’t bother him unduly.’

Thorne nodded. ‘Sure not. Are you in touch with Corwin?’

Hernild hulked over him, suddenly hostile. ‘What do you idiots think Hal has done?’ It was a good intimidation tactic, just being used on the wrong man: Thorne never backed down from anyone. ‘Why can’t you leave the poor bastard in peace?’

Thorne thought: Because the poor bastard is planning to assassinate the president of the United States. He said: ‘You know Corwin spent several years as a paid mercenary in some of the world’s nastiest civil wars...’

‘Maybe. But whatever Hal did before Terry was killed, he left it all behind when he came up here. After he was shot he couldn’t even kill animals any more.’

‘Still,’ said Thorne, deliberately provocative, ‘there are some questions about the deaths of his daughter and her husband we believe he could help us with.’

‘His daughter? If I read you right, you bastard, and I think I do, he adored his daughter. For Chrissake, after he was shot, she tried to help him find whoever had done it.’

Which was news to Thorne. He felt as if the trail had just become more twisted, more convoluted: she helped him look, but Corwin still blew her away and beat off on her body. At least he now had a chance to ask the question he’d been leading up to.

‘What if Mather was the one who shot him? Deliberately?’

‘That’s crazy. Crazy! After Hal and Nisa patched things up between them, Damon came up here a time or two with her. That was it. Good God, man, he and Mather barely knew each other...’ He stopped, his long, almost ascetic face totally devoid of emotion. ‘I have to go make house-calls.’

It was a real old-timey log cabin like the maple syrup tins that Vermont Country Store still sold out of its nostalgia catalogue. Peaked roof with hand-hewn shingles, peeled log walls. Built to last, perhaps a lifetime. A lot of effort for a man working alone.

No smoke wisped from the chimney of the hand-laid stone fireplace. The April-wet ground showed a variety of sign: birds, rabbits, squirrels, two, no three different whitetail deer, fox galore, a muddle of porcupine tracks, then a track that sent Thorne’s mind backward in time. A wolverine! He hadn’t seen a wolverine’s spoor in over twenty years.

Plenty of game around here for a man bent on making his living from hunting and trapping. Until getting shot ended it for him. According to Hernild.

Thorne walked boldly up to the door, then checked. He had picked up another Randall Survivor in D.C., but his 9mm Beretta had been left behind at Tsavo. Well, too late now.

‘Talk to me,’ he said aloud to the cabin.

I’m empty. Come in and find what you are looking for.

‘I don’t believe you. I can smell coffee.’

Last night’s.

‘This morning’s.’

The door had a simple push-up latch that would stop no one except porcupines in search of the salt they loved. Porkies after salt once had eaten the handle off an axe his dad had left in the woodpile overnight.

Thorne took a deep breath, pushed up the latch, opened the door a foot, called loudly, ‘Anybody home?’ The coffee smell was stronger with the door open, that was all. ‘Coming in.’

He laid a hand on the big speckled blue and white enamel pot on the kerosene stove, jerked it away again. Still hot. And — a nice touch — there was a clean heavy white ceramic mug on the counter beside it.

He poured, sipped. Good coffee, too. It would be.

An obvious challenge. I was here, I made coffee, I even left some for you. Now I am gone. And I won’t be hiding in plain sight next time. After Thorne had left the clinic yesterday, Whitby Hernild must have warned him of Thorne’s arrival. How? Not the phone. Phones, land or cell, left records. But under the table he found a power-surge strip, the kind you plugged a computer into to protect against burn-outs.

Of course. E-mail. Corwin would have it to check the president’s travel itineraries on the White House website.

Thorne relatched the door behind him. Didn’t want the porkies partying in there, even though Corwin would not be back. But he’d been living here for a month. Hiding in plain sight, but he’d also wanted to be on familiar ground. To train for a presidential assault? If so, Thorne was sure the woods would tell him what sort of assault Corwin was planning.

He started down the burn in front of the cabin, then checked himself once again. He was being observed. Birds and small animals were always intensely interested in anyone invading their domain, but maybe something bigger? Something potentially threatening? A bear? Or a man? If a bear, a mother with cubs.

If a man, Corwin. Thorne went on down the burn.

17

The coated lenses of Corwin’s binocs reflected no light. No telltale glint to alert his pursuer.

This was no ordinary Feeb. He wasn’t armed. He’d checked out the animal and bird sign around the cabin, circled it in the bush, then went in boldly. Now, starting down the burn, he seemed to sense observation.

Through the intervening foliage, Corwin tracked him with the binoculars. Totally at home in the woods. A man who had never been a desk jockey. A hunter. Highly trained in the same ways Corwin himself had once been trained, then had further trained himself. As Corwin had.

Who was the hunter here, who the prey?

Thorne’s eye was caught by the gnawed ends of toppled finger-thick saplings. A cottontail’s bite, not the single hatchetlike chop of a snowshoe rabbit. Not twenty minutes old. Under the nearest evergreen, a little bundle of concealed fur.

Then a flash of red on a fire-blasted spruce twenty feet away caught his eye. A black bird, the size of a crow, with a prominent red crest and white flashes on the wings and neck. A pileated woodpecker, arrowing away from the far side of the tree with a ringing cyk cuk-cyk of irritation.

The trunk of the dead spruce bore waist-high gouges. Not bullet scars. Knife scars, but not to gouge initials into the trunk: to dig out... what? Rifle slugs? His pulse elevated, he did a slow 360, eyes probing. To the west, beyond an intervening narrow slough, was the crown of a low hill partially screened by the bushes gradually reclaiming the fire-denuded burn.

If a non-hunter, an amateur, was planning to shoot someone — his wife’s father, for example — who habitually walked up a fire-cleared burn on his way to his cabin, what would he have to do before attempting to commit murder?

Sight in his rifle ahead of time, using that lone dead spruce tree as a marker. Maybe from that low hill to the west?

The dead spruce was visible from the hill’s false crown, maybe 150 yards away as the crow flies, five hundred yards laboring up the way Thorne had come: across the strip of marsh, then up the hill through the ash and hickory saplings gradually replacing the oaks and elms logged off many years before.

He began moving out in a slow, ever-widening gyre. An hour later and maybe fifty yards from where he had started, absorbed and eyes searching the ground, he was startled by a pair of pine siskins tit-titting angrily at him as they flew out of a just-flowering dogwood six feet ahead of him.

His eyes automatically followed their flashing flight, passing over cut brush a few yards up the hillside, registering it as the work of cottontails, then snapping back to it.

Behind the brush, half-hidden in the burgeoning squaw grass, was a form never found in nature: a rough platform, six feet long by three feet wide. He squatted beside it. Ash saplings, six inches in diameter, laid out side-by-side. Another sapling, the same size, laid at a right angle across the uphill end of them, lashed into place with thin nylon cord. A larger log, a foot in diameter, lashed in place across the downhill end. Except for the thick undergrowth on the hillside below it, it looked like an impromptu bench-rest laid out for prone shooting.

Thorne laid down on it, facing downhill as if taking up a prone firing position on a rifle range. Now the cut brush that had first caught his eye was in front of him. It formed a perfect keyhole though which he could stare directly down at that dead, distant, knife-gouged spruce tree.

Corwin had been right, everyone else wrong. He had been a tin bird in a shooting gallery, victim of a deliberate, can’t-miss shot by an amateur killer. But after years as a hermit, living off the land, he just would not have been a man to anger anyone, be in anyone’s way, threaten anyone. Not a man anyone could conceivably want dead.

He would have cast about for anyone who might deliberately want to shoot him. And for some unknown reason of his own, he had fixed upon his son-in-law, Damon Mather. Maybe he was wrong, but probably he was right. But even if right, why, when he had killed her husband, had he killed Nisa in such a savage manner?

During the next six hours, having found the evidence of Corwin’s stalker, Thorne found five different places where a professional shooter had fired at targets of opportunity: rock outcroppings that would scar easily, so the bullet-strikes could be checked out with binoculars. Trees where the pale flesh of the trunk would show the bark had been blown away by direct hits.

Shots taken at ranges of 750 to 1,000 yards, from elevation wherever possible, in every sort of terrain. Hellish long shots that few shooters could make. Oh, misses, too, but shockingly few in relation to the rounds fired. Sniper rounds, high velocity, heavy weight. Sent on their way by a wonderful rifle shot, they would dissolve a man’s head like a dropped watermelon.

He had learned what he had come to learn. Time to head back to his Crown Vic. Down here in the lowlands, the light was fading. Then he realized he was staring at the eight-foot stump of a dead oak hollowed out by the years. Around it the grass had sprung up so vigorously that it was already chest-high.

With two broken-off branches angling out at shoulder-height, it evoked a man giving a speech at a podium. At chest-level it was riddled and ripped by Corwin’s high-velocity rounds.

Here, now, at the end of this day, Thorne knew with certainty what he had only intuited before: Corwin would go for an open-country stalk, not a city stalk, and would try to make a long-range kill from an elevated position. Which narrowed down the sort of presidential stop Thorne had to look for.

Thorne had been stopped by this realization a scant two yards away from the bullet-blasted oak stump, one foot raised for the next step, just as he had stood at Bwana Kifaru’s flank, unnoticed. And at that same moment, he had the overwhelming feeling of being observed. He tensed. Could Corwin possibly have been tracking him all day? Could the man be that good?

Then a big brown blunt-nosed woodchuck came thrusting up out of the opening at the top of the stump. Not Corwin, just the woodchuck, somehow sensing his presence and being made uneasy by it. He chuckled and deliberately shook himself like a dog coming from water. Her worst fears confirmed, the woodchuck scrabbled back down into her hollow stump as if pursued by a lynx.

Thorne thought, with not unjustified pride, that the years of training, the years of Morengaru’s coaching, had not been wasted. All in one day, he had walked up unnoticed on a woodpecker, a rabbit, and a groundhog. His skills were intact. Now he was eager to get back to his motel and check out the president’s trip against what he had learned this day. He knew how: next, he had to figure out where Corwin would strike.

An hour after the tracker had gone, Corwin stirred. It was darkening rapidly now: dusk in another thirty minutes. His various wounds ached. His own fault. He had been following the tracker too closely, too interested in seeing the terrain and his own shooting areas through another man’s eyes, in knowing what the tracker was finding out. He had gotten careless.

He’d just had time to drop silently into the high grass on the far side of the woodchuck’s tree stump and huddle there, motionless, barely breathing, seeking a state of non-existence so the sense of threat would pass. Even so, it was the woodchuck who saved him from discovery. Luckily, the FBI tracker had thought his feelings of being observed had come from her, not a man, and had left without checking behind the stump.

His off-hand challenge with the hot coffee pot had not been such a clever idea after all, Corwin realized. He had been hard-pressed to keep tabs on his pursuer unseen during the long afternoon stalk. And this was his home territory. The man had even picked up on the site from which Corwin had been ambushed.

How had the FBI come up with such a person, almost a shadow figure of Corwin himself? He was a new, disturbing factor in the equation. That he had even thought to check out the cabin and surrounding area meant that time was running out for Corwin.

He almost surely had confirmed for himself that Corwin had been shot from ambush. Probably now was coming to believe that Mather had done it, maybe even that Corwin had been justified in going after Mather.

All of that was irrelevant. What was relevant was that the tracker almost surely now knew how Corwin planned to make his assassination attempt: a long range sniper shot, from elevation. Also, he had almost surely figured out that Corwin would do it sometime in the next ten days, during the presidential barn-storming tour.

The one thing he didn’t know, couldn’t know, was where Corwin would make the attempt. That was Corwin’s edge. Corwin decided to retrieve Janet’s 4-Runner from its hiding place, and tonight drive west non-stop to the Bitterroot Wilderness Area on the Montana-Idaho border. This would buy him the time he needed to establish his base of operations and study the terrain and conditions and find his one perfect place of ambush.

He felt a surge of his old confidence. When he found the right spot, he would know. And when the right moment came, he would take his shot. One shot was all he would need.

He was that good.

18

Thorne spent the night in the Bide-A-Wee in Portage, working his computer for the president’s trip. Too charged to sleep, he left before dawn to drive back down to the Twin Cities. He now knew when, where, and how Corwin would try to kill the president. But he would have to convince all the president’s men that he was right on all counts, because Hatfield would be out to discredit him in subtle ways. Hatfield needed Thorne’s input, but wanted him far away when Corwin was taken down.

Thorne’s Northwest flight from Minneapolis to D.C. was at nine the next morning, so he had time for one final information probe he didn’t want Hatfield to know anything about. If he got a lead the Feebs hadn’t gotten, he could keep it to himself by seeming to do the plodding, the predictable.

Minneapolis/St.Paul International was near the Minnesota River and Fort Snelling, a few miles west and south of downtown. He checked into an airport motel nearby that had frequent shuttle-service to Northwest departures.

He left the Crown Vic in the parking garage under the downtown FBI Field Office, rode the elevator up, went through the security checkpoint, and turned the keys over to the Agent in Charge. He was a stern-faced dark-haired man named Breen who resembled the late Robert Ryan in one of his tough-guy roles.

‘You could keep it, drop it at the airport in the morning.’

‘I want to stroll around town this afternoon. It’s easier to just catch a shuttle to Northwest tomorrow a.m. But thanks.’

The SAC obviously had been briefed. He dropped any pretense of being helpful. ‘Knock yourself out, Thorne.’

When Thorne was on the elevator down, Ray Franklin, whom Thorne knew only by name, not by sight, came out of the field agents’ bullpen where he had been skulking.

‘I’ll get the GPS transmitter off the car.’

‘You want us to put a tag on him?’ asked the AIC.

Franklin knew Hatfield wouldn’t want anyone in Minneapolis in the loop. He just shook his head.

‘Who’s he gonna talk to, what’s he gonna learn during an afternoon in Minneapolis, that we don’t already know?’

Thorne rode inter-city buses out to the old rambling house on Marshall Avenue in St. Paul where Corwin and Terry had lived and Nisa had grown up. The FBI file said that Corwin had deeded it to Nisa when he had gone off to become a hermit. Her best friend, Jewel Bemel, and her husband, Nate, a clinical psychiatrist, had bought the house from the estate.

Thorne didn’t know what — if any — of Nisa’s papers the Feebs might have left behind. But he hoped they might have missed, or considered unimportant, something that might give him a clue, however slight, as to whether Mather had shot Corwin. Or maybe the Bemels themselves might have some ideas. It was better than spending the afternoon at a movie.

The evergreens dotting the well-tended lawn towered over the two-story house. At a guess, planted when the place had been built, probably in the 1920s. He paused before he committed himself, then, feeling almost guilty, took out the temporary FBI credentials he had been given when he was approved for the assignment by Dorst’s report. There was a shiny badge, and a commission card with the red, white and blue FBI seal on it.

He rang the bell. The door was opened without hesitation by a handsome late-thirties blonde with big blue eyes and big hair and a full-lipped mouth that looked ready to smile merrily in the right circumstances.

‘May I help...’ She saw his FBI credentials, and grabbed his arm with surprising strength. ‘Oh my God! Come on in!’

A slightly bewildered Thorne was led into a spacious living room with a hardwood floor partially covered by an ancient Karistan rug that had retained its deep, rich colors. She kept on talking over her shoulder as she led him to a leather couch behind an oak-burl coffee table so polished it gleamed with subdued inner fires.

‘Nate will be home in a few minutes! Do you want some coffee? Of course you do! I’m Jewel.’ By this time, somehow, she had him seated on the couch. ‘I’m just glad that someone is still looking into the terrible tragedy that befell Nisa!’ He noted she had mentioned only Nisa, not Damon. ‘If you would prefer tea...’

‘Coffee is fine.’ He knew he had lucked out here, so he added, ‘And yes, their tragedy is why I am here.’

‘There you are!’ she said, departing for the kitchen.

In the corner a stately grandfather clock as tall as a man leisurely tock-tock-tocked off the seconds. Above the smoke-blackened stone fireplace was an oil painting of a cavalier in a stiff ruffled collar and wearing a swash hat with a long plume in it. His right hand rested on the gleaming pommel of a sheathed sword. He looked half-pugnacious, half-confused.

The top of the baby-grand piano was covered with framed photographs. There were four featuring Nisa, moving her through the years, starting with her wedding day — she blonde and beautiful, intense, Damon young and handsome and virile-looking. Hair-styles changed, but not her face: heart-shaped, sensual, with a short nose and intelligent liquid-blue eyes. Nor her figure: a laughing swim-suit shot showed she was taut-waisted, long-legged, full-busted. Which of her attributes had captivated at least three men — Wallberg, Jaeger, and her husband? Four, if he counted her own father’s obsession with her.

He heard a key in the front door lock and turned just as Jewel came from the rear of the house carrying an ornate silver tray with a plate of shortbread cookies and a silver coffee urn and Meissen cups and saucers on it.

‘Here’s Nate now!’ She talked in exclamation points.

Nate Bemel was a slight gentle-faced man in his sixties, six inches shorter than his wife, wearing an expensive wool suit, conservative tie, and gleaming shoes. Jewel briefly hugged him.

‘Nate, this is Mr...’ She trailed off. ‘Oh dear, I didn’t even get your name!’

‘Brendan Thorne.’

‘Mr. Thorne is from the FBI. They’re finally doing something about Nisa’s death!’ She turned to Thorne. ‘Don’t think I’m callous, we liked Damon. But he just rode her coattails! Rode her coattails.’

Thorne and Nate shook hands. When they were all seated and coffee had been poured, Thorne made an almost placating gesture.

‘I hope my coming here today doesn’t raise false hopes. We are still investigating their deaths, but the case is ongoing so I can’t really...’

‘Can’t talk about it.’ Nate gave little bird-like nods of his head, a sweet smile illuminating his face. ‘Just what I tell the authorities when they come around asking questions about my patients. I don’t keep notes of my sessions, so I tell them, Go get a court order, and we’ll talk again. They never do. Verbal reports without written back-up are hearsay. When you go to a shrink you should get confidentiality.’

Unless the FBI invokes National Security, Thorne thought. Then even the shrink didn’t get confidentiality.

He said, ‘How did you and Nisa meet, Mrs. Bem... Jewel?’

‘She was running Gus Wallberg’s campaign for governor—’

‘Hardly running it, Jewel love.’

‘Well, she was too! In everything except title! I was publicity director for Dayton’s, Minneapolis, and she was looking for contributions to Gus’s campaign. We hit it off right away!’

‘Jewel raised a lot of money for the governor,’ Nate said fondly. ‘She knows how to work public companies for donations.’

Jewel gave a wide-open laugh. ‘I grew up on a ranch in Texas, and got my fill of the outdoors early on! The only wide-open space I like is the main floor at Nieman-Marcus. Hiking is what you do between Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor!’

‘Have you spoken with Nisa’s dad?’ asked Nate, doing Thorne’s work for him. ‘We met him only once, but we liked him a lot and sort of hoped he’d come to see us here after they were murdered. But...’ He shrugged.

‘That’s actually one of the questions I came to ask, where is Mr. Corwin? Also, although I don’t have a court order, I’m hoping you might be willing to let me see any diaries, notebooks, memos, calendars, things like that — anything Nisa kept when she worked on the president’s election campaign. I’m sure the other special agents took most of it away with them, but—’

‘They took nothing! Just asked a few questions and left!’

Even though Johnny Doyle had given him the probable answer, Thorne wanted their take on a final question.

‘Do you know why Nisa didn’t join Wallberg’s campaign at first, then signed on just before he was nominated?’

‘She wanted to get pregnant,’ said Jewel promptly. ‘She felt the clock was ticking! But Damon had a low sperm count, and wouldn’t hear of artificial insemination. So she went back to the campaign. Just couldn’t stay away from politics!’

Nate started to remonstrate, ‘Jewel, that’s just—’

‘That’s what she told me. And what difference does it make now, anyway? They’re both dead.’

‘Did you notice anything in her papers that might—’

‘Oh, we never looked at them!’ said Jewel. ‘Just too sad!’

‘They’re in my workroom in the garage,’ said Nate. ‘I restore antique clocks as a hobby.’ He gestured at the man-high clock in the corner. ‘A work of art, that one. Pine-faced grandfather, roller-pinion, eight-day wooden movement. American, not German. Early American clockworks were made of wood because they couldn’t get iron, and the brass industry hadn’t started yet.’ Again that shy, sweet smile that Thorne had come to find endearing. Nate got carefully out of his chair. ‘Come on, I’ll give you those papers.’ He added almost wistully, ‘You can fix a damaged clock a lot easier than you can a damaged psyche.’

‘Just too sad!’ exclaimed Jewel Bemel.

19

Nisa had not kept a diary as such, but Thorne found her notebook had served much the same function: shopping lists, notes to herself, strategies for Wallberg’s campaign all jumbled together. There was also a manila folder with two pages of hand-written notes confirming that she had helped Corwin look for the shooter. Thorne went there first.

As Thorne had surmised, Corwin had dug slugs out of the spruce from the sighting-in of the shooter’s rifle. Then he had found eight spent cartridge cases at the ambush site up on the hillside that Thorne had uncovered the day before. He took the brass to a hand-loader for analysis and anything distinctive, then canvassed Portage for info on the shooter.

On February 25th, the day after the first Democratic primary in New Hampshire, Corwin learned at the Portage airfield that All-Weather Charter Tours of Robbinsdale had flown in a man on the day he had been shot, had flown him back out after dark.

Corwin talked to the ex-bush pilot who owned All-Weather. The Portage client’s name was Hopkins and he had paid with a credit card from Primary Power, Inc.

Gerard Hopkins? As in Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet? Thorne thought, reading the notes, an obvious ringer. But Corwin dismissed Hopkins out of hand. Corwin hadn’t seen or spoken with Wallberg for forty years, why would anyone attached to Wallberg’s campaign want to kill him? But Nisa wasn’t giving up. Somebody thought that killing Corwin was the way to money, power and leverage if Wallberg became president. And why had he come disguised, unless he was known in Portage from before the shooting? Corwin finally agreed to try and get the number the man had called from Dutch’s Tavern, but Dutch didn’t have it.

The last entry in her slim folder was made by Nisa on her return from what must have been her final stay at Corwin’s cabin.

The first, the bush pilot, had a check-mark beside it. All-Weather Tours. Been there, done that.

Next, drama costume houses. Try to find where the shooter bought the mustache and goatee. No check mark.

Last, shooting ranges. Someone probably had coached the shooter, not knowing what he was planning. No check mark.

Mather fit on all counts. He was not ex-military, would have been an amateur, would have needed a disguise — no matter what Hernild said, he had to have been known in Portage. But in their search for the shooter, it never occurred to either Nisa or Corwin that the man they sought might be Nisa’s husband.

Frustrated, Thorne put the folder aside and turned to her pocketbook-size notebook. Shopping lists, appointments, ideas for Wallberg’s campaign strategies to give to her husband since she was not with the entourage. The ideas looked extremely sound to Thorne. Then, among voluminous political notes on Wallberg’s Florida win, a note handwritten, underlined, in caps: OH MY GOD! IT’S DAMON!!!

Finally! Two solid FACTS in a morass of speculation.

One. Damon Mather was indeed the shooter.

Two. Until this entry, Nisa had no idea that he was.

The following entries started almost three months later, shortly before the Democratic convention chose Wallberg as their presidential candidate. Once again they were totally political in nature: Nisa had thrown herself into the camapign.

Not a word about Corwin. Not a word about how she reacted to her husband’s guilt, or about how she had discovered it. Obviously, she had let Mather know she had found him out: the day after the OH MY GOD! IT’S DAMON!!! notebook entry he had bought the .357 Magnum. Just as obviously, she had not told Corwin that it was Mather who tried to kill him. If she had, she would not have been killed along with Damon. Maybe. Perhaps.

Which left Thorne out of the loop, reporting his movements to a man who hated his guts for reasons really not clear, and being lied to besides. Well, the first thing you learned as a Ranger scout/sniper was to always give yourself a back door. He got a cab and told the driver to take him downtown.

The Oasis was a no-frills drinkers’ joint, the back-bar mirror clouded, the usual stale beer smell mixed with stale smoke, the varnish worn down to the bare wood along the rolled edge of the bar where drinkers had rested their forearms and elbows. A backwards neon Bud Light sign was in the front window; a faded HAMM’S, THE BEER REFRESHING! banner was scrolled along the top of the backbar. The TV above the bar showed an NBA elimination game with the sound turned down.

From a quick look around, Thorne knew that none of the three drinkers was the kind of man he was looking for. But then the door opened, outside light laying someone’s entering shadow across the front of the bar. This man was a definite prospect. Thorne immediately took a stool and laid down a twenty.

‘Shot and a beer,’ he said to the bartender.

In the mirror he watched the newcomer look around appraisingly. Then he sidled up beside Thorne as the bartender came back with Thorne’s beer and shot.

‘Benny the Boozer,’ the bartender said to Thorne in a flat voice, and left.

Benny eyed Thorne’s shot, licked his lips. Borderline alcoholic but not yet homeless. Fifty-five, maybe, with a too-lined face and a tattered gray cardigan three sizes too big. Vietnam vet, tiny military disability pension, sleeping in the back seat of a beater or in a rented room somewhere.

‘How goes the battle, Benny?’

‘I lost.’

Thorne slid his untouched shot Benny’s way. Benny’s hand shook picking it up. He drank. Thorne gestured for another.

Benny cast him a shrewd eye. ‘Why?’

‘I know a Vietnam vet down on his luck when I see one.’

Benny laid the second shot down. His hand no longer shook.

‘First Combat Infantry Division. We saw some shit.’

‘The Big Red One,’ Thorne agreed. He slid off his stool, leaving his beer and the twenty. ‘I’m hungry. You coming?’

They sat at the high counter in a gleaming, white-tile, glass and chrome White Castle, Thorne drinking coffee and Benny gobbling little yellow-wrapped hamburgers. Finally Benny leaned back and belched with his mouth open. His teeth were bad. His eyes were not so far back in his head.

‘So whadda ya want? My fair white body?’

‘Your wallet.’

‘You think I got the crown jools in there?’ But he took out the worn leather and flopped it almost defiantly on the counter. Thorne fingered through it, took what he wanted, held the items up for Benny’s appraisal, gave the wallet back.

‘You can get replacements.’ He laid two hundred-dollar bills on the counter. ‘This’ll buy you a couple months rent, groceries. Maybe even let you get off the sauce. Who knows?’

He shook Benny’s hand and walked out into the night.

Benny, staring after him, said softly, ‘Who knows indeed?’

Thorne made one more stop, at a bank’s all-night teller machine to start what he had decided would be his daily routine: drawing out his debit card’s maximum daily amount of cash for the moneybelt around his waist. His back door should he need one.

After clearing airport security at 7:15 a.m., he stopped at a bank of payphones before going on to the gate for his flight to D.C. A tinny computer-generated voice gave him the long-distance charges. He shoved coins into the slot. The phone was picked up on the second ring.

‘Doctor’s office.’

‘You’re up bright and early, Ingrid. This is Thorne.’

‘Oh. You.’ Her tone was scolding, but with a hint of amusement. ‘He’s free, but don’t keep him too long. He’s got to go make house calls at eight o’clock.’

After a pause, Hernild’s voice came on. ‘The bad penny.’

‘I know Corwin was living in his cabin until you warned him off the night before I went out there. I need to ask you—’

‘I don’t know where he went.’

‘I know. I need to ask you why he sold the cabin and took off. I know Mather shot him. I know he killed Mather and Nisa. Now he plans to kill the president of the United States. I can’t let that happen. Can you help me out on any of this?’

‘Apart from Ingrid, Hal Corwin is the best friend I’ve ever had.’ A long silence. ‘Okay, he told me he couldn’t get the phone number the shooter called from Dutch’s payphone. But being the old country doctor type, I could. It was an unlisted Minneapolis number. I told Hal. The next day he sold the cabin and left for good.’

‘Why did you think it was for good? He came back.’

‘Because he took his bearskin. Old John, the Indian who trained him to be a hunter and woodsman, gave it to him when he was a kid.’ Corwin’s mentor, as Morengaru was Thorne’s. ‘When I saw it was gone, I called the number.’ Another pause. ‘Nisa answered. I hope I don’t live to regret this.’

‘Nisa didn’t,’ said Thorne, irritated, and hung up.

All the work and time he would have been saved if Hernild had told him this the first time they had talked! Hernild had known all along that Mather was the shooter. Mather had called Nisa after shooting her father, using her as an alibi — ‘Hi, honey, I’ll be home late...’

A betrayal. Despite it, she had sided with him. In June, Corwin got Nisa’s unlisted number from Hernild. He left Portage the next day, obviously thinking it was for good. But then he kept stewing about it. Mather shooting him, Nisa hiding that fact from him. Then five months later, in the Delta, he murdered them both.

Corwin must have done awful things as a merc — they all did. Things he couldn’t forgive himself for. The kind of things Thorne had never had to stew about, because he was still working for the government after he left the Rangers.

Even so, Corwin had been able to live with those things, because Terry and Nisa had always been behind him, his core, his center, his anchor, his Ground Zero.

Then Terry was killed. Nisa blamed him. Guilt, no longer suppressed, washed over him like blood. Bad dreams, too, Thorne was sure, much like his own after Alison and Eden were killed.

After Corwin himself had been shot, and partially crippled, Nisa came back into his life. She even started helping him on his hunt for his attacker. Redemption! A second chance! Then she turned on him again, turned instead to the man who had tried to kill him.

Love and hate were like the tusks of fossil mammoths curving back on themselves so completely that their tips touched. Perhaps love and hate had touched in Corwin. He killed them because together they had taken his last chance at redemption.

It almost explained everything. Except where he was and what he was doing during those five months between his flight from Portage and his reappearance in the California Delta. Except why Mather had tried to kill him in the first place.

And then, the jackpot question: why Corwin, after Nisa and Damon were dead, decided to go after Gustave Wallberg, soon to be President of the United States.

20

Carrying only an old WWII .38 revolver, his survival knife, and his rangefinder for a final check of distance, range, and elevation, Corwin left the Motel Deluxe in Salmon, Idaho. He had rented his room there for two weeks under somebody else’s name. His tripod was hidden up on the mountain, on site. He had zeroed-in on his first day there, so as usual, he left his rifle, ammo and scope in the room. No need to bring them back to the sniper nest until That Day.

A maze of narrow, unimproved roads lay west of 10,757-foot Trapper Peak, still mostly white-clad, framed by shorter peaks that had not retained their winter snow. Some ten miles north of Trapper, Corwin turned on to a minor national-park road, then a dirt road, then turned again into an abandoned logging trace. After half a mile on that, he bounced the 4-Runner off the track, covered it with fir branches cut the first day, and left the ignition key in front of the left rear tire as always.

He hiked with his slightly-limping gait five miles back to a subalpine valley on the near side of a range of granite peaks from the meadow where the president would soon speak. His way led him past a small mountain pond rimmed with ice and up around the northern edge of the massif. That was the only exposed rock he had to cross. He came back south on the far side in the cover of a mixed conifer-hardwood forest to follow a narrow, black, icy, rushing melt water torrent down the slope.

He was totally focussed on his hunt, giving no thought to whoever might be hunting him. He felt he’d covered his backtrail too well for anyone to decipher it.

Camp David, Maryland, was a U.S. Navy facility, maintained solely for presidential recreation and occasional meetings where the press was barred. It was inside a camouflaged electrified fence; thirty remote-operated, 128 all-weather scanning cameras were hidden in the trees. In camouflaged bunkers around the grounds was a platoon of forty highly-trained and attack-alert Marine sentries equipped with night-vision glasses.

Kurt Jaeger had arranged for Terrill Hatfield to drive him from the helipad to the Presidential cabin in a golf cart, the camp’s usual mode of transport. He wanted to have a totally private conversation with the FBI man.

‘I gather you don’t think much of Thorne, Terrill.’

Surprisingly, Hatfield said, ‘If anybody is going to find Corwin, it’ll be Thorne. I want him to do that, but I want to take Corwin down. Myself. I want to be Director of the FBI.’

‘I want to be Secretary of State in Wallberg’s next term.’

After this exchange of confidences, unexpected on both sides, they rode in silence for two minutes. Then Hatfield said, ‘We use Thorne to find him, then we send Thorne back to Kenya to rot in jail as a poacher. Out of sight, out of mind.’

‘Out of the President’s mind at any rate,’ agreed Jaeger. ‘Whom meanwhile we will have saved from a mad stalker.’

Corwin was facing east, the sun at his back, forty-five minutes before the president would be scheduled to arrive on speech-day. They would be in light, he would be in shadow, in a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls that were flanked by stunted pine shrubs. Not like the succession of cramped spider holes he’d worked out of in Vietnam.

He would be firing from the prone, the most stable of positions, with a tripod. The pines would make the opening invisible to scanning binoculars directed up the cliff-face from the meadow far below. The floor was dry packed earth. Where the slot came to a point a dozen yards behind him, the torrent he had followed down the cliff face would be his escape route.

Corwin pointed the Barr & Stroud prismatic optical rangefinder like a camera at the only place in the meadow where they could put a podium. It was 1,210 yards. A hellacious long shot: nobody would be looking up here before he pulled the trigger, and after he fired, it would be an hour of confusion before they scoped out exactly where the shot had come from.

By then he would be long gone, in the stream to confuse the inevitable bloodhounds. And instead of riding it down, he would climb uphill through the icy water to emerge into shielding trees, cut diagonally up across the face of the mountain below the tree line, go back around to the western side. No exposure, not even to choppers. Back to Janet’s 4-Runner by dark, start driving long before they could get their perimeter checkpoint system operational, be hundreds of miles to the west by dawn.

Not even the unknown tracker, even if he somehow got the location right, could know where Corwin was planning his ambush. He would have dozens of square miles of meadow, forest, and precipitous rock face to comb for shooting sites, with nothing to indicate that Corwin had ever been in any of them.

When Thorne stepped off the helicoptor at Camp David, he was picked up by a six-foot, hard-bitten man in a golf cart who said he was Ray Franklin, Hatfield’s hot-shot who had been outfoxed by Corwin not once, but twice. And, concomitantly, embarrassed by Thorne not once, but twice. Franklin was from a crack FBI field unit, and Thorne had made them all look foolish.

Flanking the narrow blacktop was dense forest; beyond were Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Camouflage tarps covered the Secret Service Command Post and the roof of the comm center.

‘Were they already in place before 9/11?’

Franklin sucked hard on a Marlboro. He was just as hostile as his boss. ‘Yeah. Towel-heads aren’t the only ones gunning for the President besides your shit-heel buddy Corwin.’

They didn’t speak again until Franklin swerved into the woods to stop at a one-story 3,000-square-foot rustic cabin with a half-log exterior. Reverence entered his voice.

‘Behind those logs is a solid-concrete inner shell with Kevlar plugs. Bomb and weapon resistant. The basement is stocked with supplies and reinforced to ground-zero specifications in case of a nuclear attack.’

The door opened and Hatfield gestured at them impatiently.

‘Thanks for the ride,’ Thorne said.

‘Fuck you,’ said Franklin.

Dominating the big informal room was a burnished dining table with a halfdozen chairs around it. Framed cowboy art, landscape photographs, and western-motif tapestries covered the walls. Two overstuffed sofas were covered with textured pillows.

The president, Jaeger, Hatfield, and the Bobbsy Twins, Crandall and Quarles, were already at the table. For the moment, no Johnny Doyle. When Thorne began his presentation he realized that he didn’t have many friends in the room. Hatfield’s play obviously was to get Thorne’s input, downgrade it in the president’s eyes, then present it as his own.

Thorne began, ‘Mr. President, in your website announcement of locations where you will be giving speeches on your trip, I noted one in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana.’

‘Yes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is releasing two young grizzly bears back into the wild there. It’s an experiment, not popular with everyone, to show my support for the environmental movement.’

‘Corwin will be there,’ said Thorne.

‘The Secret Service will be there too,’ said Hatfield. ‘In force. The local ranchers claim the grizzlies will attack their livestock, and Montana and Idaho are loaded with anti-government militia and survivalist groups. Security will be very tight. A fucking squirrel won’t be able to get close to the President.’

‘Corwin doesn’t have to get close. He’s a sniper.’

‘Was a sniper — forty years ago. We’re talking about a mountain meadow surrounded by mixed hardwood and conifer stands. In the forest, Corwin has no shooting lanes. The surrounding peaks are too far back for a sniper shot, and he can’t get close enough for a knife or a bomb or a grenade. So it has to be a handgun, and a snap shot at that, from the crowd. Forget it.’

Thorne made his voice incredulous, though it was what he had expected from Hatfield.

‘We’re talking about the life of the president of the United States here! I was brought in because the computer told you that the scenario I worked out would probably be the one Corwin will use. Well, this is where I would strike. A sniper shot from outside the Secret Service security perimeter.’

Hatfield had come prepared. He snapped his fingers; Johnny Doyle appeared with a topographical map to spread out on the table. All carefully choreographed. Had Hatfield’s hostility blinded him to the dangers of this site? If he had considered it in private, he now was rejecting it in public.

‘The closest places from which he could get a clear shot are seven-hundred-fifty yards out.’ Hatfield jabbed his finger at the map. ‘There and there and there. Corwin wouldn’t waste his chance on a shot he’d be sure to miss.’

‘I agree. But he will be using a high-powered rifle with a sniper scope from an elevated rock-face beyond seven-hundred-fifty yards out.’ Thorne was doing his own finger-jabbing. ‘Here, say, or here. It’s what I would do if I had his skills.’

‘What the hell do you know about his skills? After he left Vietnam, we have no hard facts about—’

‘But in Vietnam,’ said Thorne quickly.

When Corwin was in a bodybag he’d file a report with the facts he’d dug out, but not before. They knew nothing about Victor Blackburn’s intel, nothing about Corwin hiding out in his old cabin near Portage, nothing about those thousand-yard practice shooting sites. Thorne wanted to keep it that way.

‘He’s fifty-six fucking years old,’ sneered Hatfield, ‘and half-crippled. His hand and eye coordination have to be going.’

‘Do you want to take that chance? Let the Secret Service handle the upclose and personal. It’s essential that your men set up at seven-hundred-fifty yards, looking out and up, not down and in. I can be on site, monitoring—’

‘Like hell you can! You’re here in an advisory capacity only — your own request. No field work. Well, you’ve advised. Ray Franklin is waiting outside to take you back to the chopper. You will return to D.C. forthwith to await further instructions.’

Thorne looked to Wallberg for support. It was the man’s own life that was at stake here. The president wavered, then looked away. Hatfield had convinced them that he had it under control. None of them understood how formidable Corwin was.

Jaeger said, ‘Thank you for your input, Mr. Thorne.’

Thorne walked out. It was up to him to go to Montana and assess the site in person rather than on paper.

‘I say we ship his sorry ass back to Kenya,’ said Hatfield when he was gone. ‘His usefulness here is ended.’

‘What if, just what if, he’s right?’ asked Wallberg. ‘What if Corwin is there and does try to shoot me when I—’

‘Then my men will tag him before he can fire. This is my game, Mr. President. I know that nobody can make a thousand-yard down-angle shot while dealing with those mountain updrafts.’

‘With the Secret Service and the FBI’s hostage rescue men on site,’ Jaeger added unctuously, ‘we will have security, and containment of the fact that there’s a lone gunman from the President’s past stalking him with murderous intent. That he’s a deluded psycho is irrelevant. If the fact that he’s out there became known, the political fallout would be unthinkable.’

21

Thorne told the Mayflower’s front desk that he could be reached c/o Victor Blackburn at Fort Benning, Georgia, then sent Victor an e-mail.

He back-doored his minders, walked out to the depot on L Street, and caught a through bus to Atlantic City. From there he flew commercial to Missoula, Montana, rented a car, drove to Hamilton, and checked into the Super 8 Motel under his own name. The risk was small: officially, he was at Fort Benning.

The next morning he drove south on 93, turned onto narrow 473 well short of towering white-clad Trapper Peak so he could approach the meadow the way the presidental party would enter. Using his temporary FBI credentials for site access, he spent the day working his way up and down the granite rockface, and through the tumbled massive boulders on the slope overlooking the meadow. Hatfield was right: no ambush sites up to 750 yards out.

The next day, he drove south of Trapper on 93, went west into Idaho on narrow unmarked dirt tracks, then north again seeking a way up to the western side of the Bitterroot ridge whose eastern slope facing the meadow he’d combed the day before. He found a subalpine valley and hiked up it, looking for man sign. None. But this was the way Corwin would have to have come to prep his shot. If he was here at all.

For the next two mornings, Thorne, seeking sniper sites, worked his way up over the ridge and down the far side toward the meadow. The more acute the downward angle, the harder the shot. By the last day he could safely work the mountain before Hatfield’s Feebs arrived, he had three maybes: 950 yards out, 1,095 yards out, and a literal long shot at 1,210 yards out.

The last was a sniper’s dream, a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls camouflaged by stunted pines. The floor was dry packed dirt. Behind, a narrow mountain torrent rushed down slope from the melting snow lingering in shaded areas far above. Good escape route for Corwin after the shot.

But the distance: over 1,200 yards! Twelve football fields laid end to end down the mountain face. Your slug would drop some twenty-five feet while the swirling, unpredictable winds of the 7,500 foot elevation played games with it. Utterly impossible.

Still, this was Corwin...

Day after tomorrow, Thorne was quite sure, both he and Corwin would be working their way over the summit and going down the far side toward the meadow. Two reluctant killers, one bent on murder, the other bent on stopping him. Stopping him how, if it actually came to that? With his Randall Survivor?

Reluctant as he was, Thorne had no choice: Hatfield had mesmerized himself and all the president’s men with the idea that if Corwin showed at all, he would try wet work, up close and personal. He also remembered Sean Connery’s scorn-filled line in The Untouchables about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In a downtown Hamilton gun store, Thorne professed total ignorance so the clerk could sell him a bolt-action Winchester Standard Model 70 in .30–06 caliber with a Weaver K-4 scope. Thousands were sold every year. No waiting period, no papers to sign. Just another guy who liked to go out in the woods and blast away. Nothing to alert Hatfield’s men if they even bothered to check.

At four-thirty a.m. on speech day, Corwin checked out of his motel. He needed time to hide the 4-Runner and walk back. Afterwards, he’d call Janet’s cell to find out where to leave it. He’d be in everybody’s cross-hairs until they figured he had died or disappeared for good, but she would be well and truly out of it. As long as he was in her life, she would never find a man of her own.

For a moment, his resolve flickered. Today, he planned to commit murder. All those countless nights full of grotesque dreams and memories came back to him full-force. Would he have the seeds for any more killing?

Two rangers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were working with two college students from the Wildlife Biology Program of the University Of Montana’s School of Forestry at Missoula to release a young male grizzly named Smokey, and a female, gender-misnamed Winnie the Pooh, into the wild. Not that the bears knew they had names. They were wild, and wanted to be.

‘Just two lousy bears being released,’ groused Laura Givens. She was twenty and earnest.

‘It’s a start,’ objected Ranger Rick mildly — yeah, his name really was Ranger Rick, Rick Tandy. He was twenty-two, and more interested in getting into Laura’s pants than arguing with her.

Sam Jones, the other ranger, was thirty-five and secretly sided with the ranchers on this one, as did many in Fish and Wildlife. More grizzlies they didn’t need to pull down and maul their livestock.

‘Just two-hundred and seventy-eight bears to go,’ he said.

‘It should be six-hundred and twenty-eight bears to go,’ exclaimed Laura, eyes flashing. ‘That’s how many we need for a full recovery of the population.’

Sean McLean was twenty-five and completing his PhD. He said in support, ‘There are sixteen-thousand square miles of virgin territory here — just a couple of highways and a few unimproved roads through. Enough land for our bears to reproduce, and eventually bridge the gap between the existing populations. But you Feds are giving us only the area north of U.S. Highway 12 to work with.’

‘So two bears is a great sufficiency,’ said Sam. ‘What do you say to that, everyone?’

Neither Laura or Sean spoke. The bears, stalking their cages, growled in unison.

The press was in the back of Air Force One, the players were in the front. Wallberg distractedly riffled the pages of his speech. He and his entourage would be choppered from the Air Force base near Missoula, to an LZ near the speech site, and then motorcaded in armored limos to the meadow where the grizzlies would be released.

‘The grizzly bear is a keystone species, with stringent habitat requirements. They serve as a natural barometer of ecosystem health for hundreds of other species...’

The pages fell to his lap. Corwin had assumed mythic proportions in his mind. Thorne said Corwin would be here. He believed Thorne. He raised the speech, tried to concentrate.

‘Grizzlies cannot survive if their remaining habitat is broken up into small chunks through reduction and isolation...’

Superimposed on the pages was Corwin’s face from The Desert Palms Resort last fall. If only the Secret Service had been a few seconds quicker, had shot a little straighter...

‘Since the pockets of grizzlies in Yellowstone and the surrounding wilderness areas are not contiguous, they are not enough to maintain the population at a viable level...’

That night in the California desert, Corwin had no idea why Mather had tried to kill him. But before election night he must have found out: Mather was dead, and now he wanted Gus Wallberg.

Looking down at the distracted President, Jaeger felt only contempt. A man fearing for his life would hide that fact.

‘Mr. President.’ Wallberg looked up, startled. ‘Before you mount to the podium, you will shake hands and trade quips with the college kids who worked with the bears. Then you will move over to the cages, talk knowledgeably with the rangers...’

‘Uh... what sort of crowd will we have?’

‘Small, probably vocal, maybe hostile — they don’t see it as an environmental issue, they see it as a land-use issue. But with half the Washington Press Corps and all four networks right there, your speech will be on everybody’s dinner-time news.’

Wallberg rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s what counts.’

‘Hatfield and O’Hara have the site sewn up tight. If Corwin should be there and somehow got a shot, your Kevlar vest would stop the bullet cold. Any danger is minimal—’

‘I don’t care anything about any on-site danger,’ Wallberg blustered. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’

The man didn’t even try to hide his fear. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Wallberg pulled himself together enough to read aloud:

‘By releasing these two symbolic bears, Pooh and Smokey, into the wild, we will provide a biological corridor to link our nation’s last grizzly populations for genetic interchange...’

He lowered the speech. ‘I see the cage doors opening, the bears hesitating, then ambling forth, touching noses, maybe, then, realizing they are free, trotting off into the forest...’

‘It will bring down the house, Mr. President.’

Walking down the aisle, Jaeger remembered his first sexual humiliation after Nisa Mather had turned him down following Wallberg’s exploratory fund-raiser at Olaf Gavle’s house. Jaeger had pulled Nisa into a bedroom, started groping her. She slapped his face, hard, and stalked away with blazing eyes.

How different it all would have been if she had succumbed to his advances! She hadn’t, so, frustrated and vengeful, he had sought out a campaign worker named Kirsten who had milkmaid breasts, rounded hips, strong thighs, and was blonde all the way down. Then he couldn’t get it up, not even with her naked on a motel room bed. It had never happened to him before. After that night, it started happening to him a lot.

LA was their last stop on this trip: maybe give Sharkey a call. Get a blonde who looked a little like Nisa Mather...

He felt himself stiffen slightly at the thought. His mind was miles away from presidential security concerns.

Shayne O’Hara’s mind was filled with presidential security concerns. He was a russet-faced fifty-year-old who looked as if he should be leading the parade on St. Paddy’s Day clad all in green, shillelagh in hand. But under that bluff good-guy exterior was a shrewd, ambitious man who brooked absolutely no fuck-ups.

Terrill Hatfield said, ‘My men are in place, seven-hundred-fifty yards out, ready to do the necessary.’

‘Seven-hundred-and-fifty yards? Jaysus, Terrill, Al-Qaeda has no expertise at long-distance assassination.’

‘But some survivalist who hates the President might,’ said Hatfield. It sounded weak to his ears, but O’Hara nodded.

‘Well, with your men covering distant threats, and my boys covering for close work, we’ll be fine. I’ve kept four-and-a-half Presidents alive, starting with the elder Bush and counting our newly-elected Wallberg, and haven’t lost one yet.’ He checked his watch. ‘Home Plate’s speech starts at three p.m.’

You won’t lose one today, Hatfield thought as he walked away. Not with his own boys 750 yards out, all the hardware and all the jargon of the trade in place. In his ear receiver, he could hear their pre-op adrenaline-charged chatter. To him, they sounded like a pack of coyotes warming up for the hunt.

Franklin’s voice. ‘Ray One to TOC. Request Compromise Authority and permission to move to Code Yellow.’

Yellow: the penultimate position of cover and concealment before Code Green, which meant, in this case, if they got visual on Corwin. Green was the moment of truth. Hatfield, Tactical Operations Commander for this operation, spoke into his bone microphone — called a ‘mic’ by the troops.

‘Copy, Ray One, stand by.’

Walt, ever eager to use his weapon, broke in, ‘Walter Two. Is that an affirmative on Compromise Authority?’

Compromise Authority was a euphemism for permission to open up with their MP5 machine guns, their snipe rifles, their flash bangs, their .40 Glock semiautomatics. All the toys. This was what his boys lived for, and he loved them for it.

‘Copy, Walter Two. Affirmative on Compromise Authority if the situation moves to Code Green.’

They would protect the president, all right. But not from threats by the towel-heads and survivalists O’Hara was worried about. From the Halden Corwin whom Thorne had warned them would be there. Like Wallberg, Hatfield believed Thorne.

But his men were not facing out and up, as Thorne wanted, but in and down. If Corwin was fool enough to show, he wasn’t fool enough to set up beyond five hundred yards out. Hatfield’s men would nail him. Hatfield would rub Thorne’s nose in the take-down — before he had the bastard deported back to Kenya to rot in prison while Jaeger made sure that the President thought Thorne was in Tsavo.

Hal Corwin would be dead. Thorne would be out of the picture. With the man who would be next Secretary of State as his ally, Terrill Hatfield would be the next Director of the FBI.

22

Thorne went in light: his scope-mounted rifle slung across his back, his binocs hung around his neck, a handful of shells in his coat pocket, his knife and canteen on his belt. He also went in slow. Working his way up the valley between flanking stands of blue spruce, he began to feel that maybe Hatfield was right. No vehicle hidden under the trees. No tire tracks, no footprint, no broken branch. If Corwin wasn’t here now, he wasn’t coming.

Maybe Thorne could relax a bit. Hatfield, despite all of his obstructionist bullshit, would have his men 750 yards out, scanning the tall crags behind them.

Thorne briefly checked out the bird and animal sign under the reeds edging the pond. Soft-padded mink tracks, pattering mouse tracks, a dozen long-toed coyote tracks beside the cattails with their brown heads just starting to form. Tiny coins of duckweed floating on the surface with their filaments of root trailing down into the water. Pondweed, punched down into the mud by sharp-edged mule deer hoofs...

He stopped dead.

Among the deer tracks, a single human boot print, water seeping into it. The track pointed north, toward that edge of the massif. The direction he had always thought Corwin would take, the direction he had taken himself when scouting sniper sites on the other side of the ridge.

Thorne came erect, scanning the massif. Movement caught his eye, right at the edge of the open ridge face. He fumbled out his binoculars, raised them, adjusted them.

Too late. Nothing. Had there been? Bighorn? Elk? Man?

He began trotting up the rising terrain toward the northern edge of the ridge.

Corwin had come in an hour before, also light. Binocs around his neck, canteen and old Smith and Wesson .38 revolver on his hip, cased and loaded rifle over his shoulder, in his pockets his cellphone in a waterproof case to call Janet when it was all over, an empty plastic water bottle, and a roll of masking tape.

Above to his right, the sheer rise of granite; below to his left, a sheer thousand feet of freefall. Out of habit, he checked his backtrial before rounding the northern edge of the massif on those few yards of exposed bare rock.

Someone! He slithered behind a plate of stone, jammed his binoculars to his eyes. The figure by the pond sprang into tight focus, just coming erect, staring up at the rock face, raising his own binocs. Scanning. Now moving. Starting up from the valley floor, coming fast. It was the hunter who had uncovered his practice sites, who had ferreted out Mather’s ambush site.

Corwin belly-crawled around to the other side of the ridge, into the cover of the pines, shrubs, and broken expanses of rock, adrenaline pumping. The tracker was at least fifteen years younger than he, hard and fit and fearless. No way to outrun him. He cursed his shortened leg, damaged knee, splinting in his chest.

Corwin took the revolver from his belt, from his anorak pocket took the empty plastic water bottle and the masking tape. He taped the mouth of the bottle over the gun’s muzzle.

An unmuffled shot might just carry too far in this thin mountain air despite the fact that his pistol fired a .38 short, a relatively low-powered round without a lot of punch or noise. The plastic bottle would trap the escaping gases of his shot, muffle the sound without impeding the bullet’s flight in any way. It was a home-made silencer, good for only one shot, up close.

Thorne went around the end of the massif in a rush, dropped to the ground in thick cover. Waited, panting, for his pulse to slow. The worst kind of a stalk, where you weren’t sure the prey was even out there. The movement he had seen from below could have been a deer, a bighorn sheep, a chimera.

But he knew it was Corwin. Dorst had been right. Alison and Eden receded in his interior ladscape, replaced by the need to match himself against this master woodsman, whatever the outcome. He went down through the scattered tree-growth, slowly, silently. Whenever he passed anything that might conceal a man, he scouted the possible ambush from the side before moving on.

Corwin climbed up on a ledge and stood there for two minutes, pistol in hand. Caught a glimpse of distant movement, no shot possible. He had to push it, make it happen. He crossed the stream on a fallen log, deliberately leaving wet footprints on the decaying wood. From the end he leaped into the brush beyond, snapping twigs, rustling leaves, setting up his ambush.

Thorne heard muted snapping and rustling and froze. Moved on downstream. Wet tracks where Corwin had crossed a fallen log to the lower side. Thick growth over there where Corwin would wait for Thorne to cross the log. Still hiding in plain sight.

Thorne crawled away upstream, slowly, silently on splayed elbows and knees. Found a place well out of sight of the log that was narrow enough so he could leap over the rushing water.

He went back downstream on the lower side, moving with the silence of his years in Tsavo, expecting every moment to see some darker shadow in the undergrowth, his Randall Survivor in hand. Bring on the nightmare. But he saw no shadow. No Corwin.

Out-thought again. Anger stifled angst. Boldly he leaped up onto the log to examine the tracks. Yes. They went both ways. Corwin had recrossed to the uphill side, had gotten into the water to wade upstream while Thorne went downstream, the sound of his passage masked by water rattling over pebbles.

Corwin came out of the thigh-deep water in a rush. Rolled into a clump of willows on the down-side bank, crushing them slightly, but not enough, he hoped, to attract notice. He let himself relax, became at one with pale stems and pale leaves. His silenced revolver was ready. A quick shadow flitted by overhead and a Steller’s jay landed on a nodding branch over the water, head cocked, staring at him.

Across the stream, the tracker stepped partway out of cover, eyes searching uphill — in the wrong direction. Didn’t realize Corwin had recrossed the stream. The ambush had worked.

Corwin pulled the trigger as the jay yelled and fled. The tracker’s arms flew wide and his cap flew off as he fell in that unmistakable bag-of-bones way that meant a mortal hit, his rifle clattering on the rocks a dozen feet away.

Corwin had seen it a hundred times: a man couldn’t fake a fall like that. He started to wade into the stream to make sure the man was dead. But there was blood on the waxen face, on the rocks under the head, and he was out of time. He melted into the cover on the downhill side of the noisy torrent.

Thorne came out of it slowly. Shooting pain in his head. He didn’t know where he was, had no memory of anything. But his lizard brain down at the base of his skull knew movement might mean death, so he just opened his eyes without moving his head. Above him, sunlight through hardwood branches, pine boughs. Not Panama. Not Africa. Not the desert. The sound of an endless freight train rolling by was a rushing torrent. The mountains.

It was coming back, in fragments. A muted POP like a breaking twig. Ambushed. A home-made silencer, empty soda bottle, water bottle, one shot only. Corwin! How long had he been out? Fifteen, twenty minutes? Why had he been unconscious?

He sat up, slowly. Abominably aching head. His cap was a yard away, his rifle a dozen feet away. Must have thrown his arms wide as he went down. Blood on the rocks. Carefully probing fingers found a flap of loose skin on his forehead. Hit his head as he fell. He looked across the rushing stream. A crushed clump of willows on the other side.

How had Corwin missed at a range of six yards?

Then he heard again the Squawk! and midnight flash of Steller’s jay and Yes! More pieces slipped into place. Alerted, he had been letting himself go limp and fall like a dead body even as the slug snatched away his cap. His head hit the rocks, knocked him unconscious. Blood flowed, so he really did look dead. And Corwin hadn’t wanted to risk a second, unmuffled shot.

Thorne stood up, dreadfully dizzy, squinched his eyes at his watch. One-eleven. The speech was scheduled for three p.m. Follow the stream down the slope. Hurry!

Corwin dropped awkwardly into his spider hole, unslung the rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against the rock wall still in its carry-case. He rested his butt against the same wall, hands on knees, panting. He was winded but here. Unseen. He reached under the overhang to bring out his tripod and set it up.

He slid his bolt-action model 70 Magnum, made by Winchester in 1951, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, from its worn fleece-lined soft-leather carry case. Its metal was heat-treated to withstand the high temperature of thousand-yard shooting. Already attached was his old tried-and-true Unertl 36-power scope that was nearly as long as the rifle barrel. Already sighted-in.

Finally, he attached the rifle to its tripod. Took out his H & H Magnum shells in .300 caliber with their four-inch-long Sierra 280-grain slugs. He slid a single shell into the chamber. He didn’t plan on needing more than one.

Thorne glassed the meadow far below. There were Hatfield’s FBI Hostage/Rescue boys right where they were supposed to be, 750 yards out from the empty podium — facing the wrong way!

And somewhere among those tumbled boulders and sharded granite and twisted pine shrubs above them, between Thorne and the Feebs, was Corwin, prepping his shot. Thorne’s self-delusions were gone. He had always known, deep inside, that he would be brought to this. Him or me. Or be Sharon’s glass tiger and let the president die.

23

Not quite mugging for the cameras, President Gus Wallberg shook hands with Ranger Rick and Sam Jones beside the steel-barred cages that held Smokey and Pooh. He had already chatted and posed with Laura Givens and Sean McLean for the media.

‘We’ll be opening the cage doors to release the bears when you start your speech, Mr. President,’ Ranger Rick explained.

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ objected Jaeger. ‘At the end of his speech, not the beginning.’

Jaeger could just see a pair of grizzly bears charging the podium in the middle of the President’s speech and being cut down by automatic weapons fire on the six o’clock evening news.

‘We know these two bears really well, sir,’ said Rick. ‘We’ll have to coax them out. The timing will work out.’

Wallberg wasn’t so sure. Vicious black deerflies buzzed around them, and he had forgotten that wild things smelled so... well, wild. He gladly started away, encased by a moving diamond of Secret Service agents.

Jaeger had been right. If Corwin was lurking here, he would die. Nothing bad could happen to Wallberg on this day.

Corwin was in the classic prone, the rifle rock-steady on its tripod. He moved his optic almost leisurely across the assemblage in the meadow below. People filled his scope.

The president had just mounted the viewing platform where the governor of Idaho was stepping toward the podium to introduce him. Jaeger waited to the president’s right in an almost belligerent pose, Crandall beside him in a similar stance. To Wallberg’s left, slightly behind, were his wife and Quarles.

Corwin was in the zone: as he waited for Wallberg to approach the podium, his pulse dropped into the low sixties that he knew from a lifetime of experience gave him his best shots.

This was the shot of that lifetime.

Thorne’s only edge was that the most deadly shot, the head-shot, was also the riskiest. The head was highly mobile and the brain was protected by a great deal of bone. Any slight movement, and a high-velocity round fired at distance could ricochet, even miss altogether. Corwin wouldn’t risk it. He wouldn’t shoot until Wallberg had started his speech, and then it would be a body-mass shot.

But when in the speech? Think, dammit! Of course. Corwin would wait until Wallberg made the gesture any politician on earth made at least once during a speech: turning and raising an arm to shoulder height to gesture. This would expose his underarm. A shot into the underarm vent of the Kevlar protective vest would rake the chest and explode the heart.

And where was Corwin? At 950 yards? At 1,195 yards? At 1,210 yards? Or at some site Thorne had never even considered? As Morengaru had taught him, he closed his eyes to look through the tracks to the animal he was stalking. Here, he was stalking himself. Where would he fire from?

He opened his eyes. If he had Corwin’s genius behind the gun, he would take his shot from 1,210 yards out.

Thorne scrambled down through the rocks, rifle in hand, striving for speed and silence at the same time. He was staking everything on a tumble of boulders about a hundred yards above the 1,200 yard ravine where he now believed Corwin was hidden.

Corwin’s breathing slowed. He moved his scope across the assemblage one more time, then back to his target. Everything fell away. Against all conventional wisdom, he would shoot just as Wallberg started his speech, and it would be a head shot.

The rangers slid up the steel barred cage doors. The bears were suspicious. Yes, over there was the forest, and freedom, but what if this were just another of the humans’ tricks?

Jaeger stared out over the crowd, but saw only Nisa Mather. His sexual obsession hadn’t ended with her death. Sharkey in LA would find him a woman who at least superficially resembled her, a woman he could possess phsyically, repeatedly, could bend to his will as he never could bend Nisa while she was alive.

Gus Wallberg looked out over the meadow, over the bears in their cages at the edge of the forest, over the faces upturned below him. But he saw only the millions of people at their TV screens that night. He felt the same surge of power he had felt when giving his acceptance speech, in his gut and in his groin, felt what sex was supposed to give him but never had. He lusted for their power, they offered it, he took it. Now it was his.

‘My fellow Americans, today we begin a grand journey...’

Thorne dropped to his right knee, brought up his rifle, released the safety, sat back on his right foot and braced his left elbow on his left knee, his upper arm jammed into the kneecap just above the elbow. He began taking controlled breaths to slow his pulse. He looked through the optic. There he was!

But Christ! In the scope, Corwin was taking up trigger slack! He was going for the head shot even as Wallberg started speaking! Thorne’s finger contracted ever so gently against the six ounces of slack in the trigger pull. The rifle bucked in his hands, and even before it steadied again he knew he had made his shot. But in the exact micro-second he had fired, Corwin’s rifle also had recoiled. He had gotten off his shot, too.

As Corwin’s rifle recoiled he was struck a great blow in the side. No pain, not yet: just the dizzying sensation of a giant fist swung against him. He had felt it all before, eighteen months ago. Then, Mather. Now, the tracker, not dead after all, had done him. So what? He had seen the red mist. The halo of blood around the ruined head. Nothing else mattered.

He crawled in a half-circle like a stepped-on landcrab, to face the rear of the V and the life-saving torrent. He was already going into shock, but he would make it. The stream would carry him down, far away from all pursuit forever.

Thorne paused to momentarily scope the scene below. Men shouting, women screaming, Secret Service agents springing to the platform. Smokey and Pooh, terrified by the noise, smashing out of their open cages and charging toward the forest and freedom.

The forest Rangers were making motions as if to draw their sidearms, but by presidential fiat they were unarmed this day. The students were slapping high-fives: the bears were free.

People were milling on the platform around the man lying on the planks with little of his head left.

Corwin was in the burn again on that icy November night, crawling for the cabin a thousand feet away. Blood stained the earth beneath his turtle-slow body at each movement. Dark, rich blood. Arterial blood? If so... No. He would make it. Get into the icy water so it would stop the bleeding...

Dead men. So many great shots. So many dead men.

Terry. Laughing with him in front of the fireplace on Marshall Avenue while Nisa, age ten, lay on the floor swathed in a blanket, watching TV cartoons.

Nisa, an adult, dead herself. No! No...

Crawl. Would the tracker get to him before he could get to the rushing torrent? His vision dimmed. Tired. Drop your head into the dirt. No. Crawl. Arm. Leg. Again. Again. He was trying to float up out of his body. No! Just a few feet now... He had done it all before.

Thorne covered the last twenty yards in one sustained rush and slide to drop down into the sniper’s nest, like running the half-frozen scree on Mount Kenya far above the tree line. Corwin’s gun was still in place. Away from it, going toward the stream, crawl-marks etched in blood. Like the scrabble of just-born turtles in the Seychelles, heading for the sea once they had broken from their shells and crawled up out of the warm sand.

At the very point of the V was Corwin, an arm moving feebly, a knee flexing, pushing. Trying to reach the stream. To escape. Except that he was already dead.

Crunch of boots. The tracker. Corwin found the strength to turn his head. He could see the man looming over him even though the light was dimming. No matter. He would soon be away, free, where they could never touch him.

Thorne knelt down, leaned in so his face was close. Corwin was deathly pale, dirt and blood were smeared across his features. He was trying to speak. A murmur. A whisper.

‘You, me... we are...’ The voice trailed off. Then, another great effort. ‘...the same man...’

Thorne said coldly, ‘I didn’t murder my daughter.’

‘I...’ Corwin stopped, his voice choking off.

Dead? No, Goddammit! Thorne had a sudden cruel need to take everything from Corwin, to send him on his way shorn of any smallest shred of triumph.

‘Corwin!’ he barked. The eyes opened. ‘Here’s something for you to take with you through the wall. You missed.’

Blood dripping from Corwin’s slack mouth outlined his teeth in red like the teeth of a Halloween warlock. Then, he grinned.

And asked, very distinctly, ‘Did I?’

He thrust with a foot, rolled over into the rushing water. Thorne caught a boot heel for a microsecond, then it was jerked from his grasp by the stream, and Corwin was gone. He stood up slowly, exhausted, silently mouthing Corwin’s final words.

Did I?

Thorne’s world had just been turned upside down.