Glass Tiger

24

Within hours, the headlines would shout it: WALLBERG SAFE CHIEF OF STAFF KURT JAEGER KILLED WOULD-BE PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN SHOOTS WRONG MAN

Gustave Wallberg and First Lady Edith Wallberg sat side-by-side in their luxurious aisle seats on Air Force One, unabashedly holding hands. For security reasons, there were no accompanying newsmen, thus no one to make public their private closeness.

For Edith, it was easy. Gus had cheated on her with Nisa Corwin, but she had stifled her anger and hurt and jealousy and had never spoken out, and the affair had ended. Now he was for her alone, alive, to become one of America’s great Presidents.

For Wallberg, not so easy. He had been terrified and was still shaky. It was only because some mountain wind had blown a tiny hurtling bit of lead a couple of feet off course that the shot meant for his chest had exploded another man’s head.

Beyond any normal survival guilt was the fact he was relieved that Kurt was dead. He had been forced to make Jaeger his Chief of Staff, and next term would have had to make him Secretary of State. Because on election night...

He could see the two of them vividly, knee-to-knee in straight-back chairs in the disused ballroom on the roof of the Beverly Hills Marquis. Like that famous photo of Jack and Bobby in a similar pose. Kurt was talking, using his hands.

‘Corwin must already be on his way to the Delta.’

How had Corwin even found them? Wallberg wondered.

‘What if we do nothing? That might solve—’

‘True, they wouldn’t be around to talk to the media, Governor. But Corwin would be.’ He leaned closer. ‘I know a man here in LA who can make all of this... go away.’

There it was: his bargain with the devil that had put him in Kurt Jaeger’s ambitious hands. But what else could he have done? Sometimes individual deaths had to serve the greater good.

‘Mr. President? I have that preliminary report.’

Shayne O’Hara was sliding into the seat across the aisle from him. Just as quickly, Edith slipped by her husband’s knees.

‘I’ll just leave you men to it.’

When she was out of earshot, O’Hara said, ‘The FBI and my Secret Service agents have initiated a security sweep of the survivalists and ranchers on the list of those vocally opposed to the release of grizzlies into the Bitterroot Wilderness Area.’

Wallberg had to remember that the conventional FBI and the Secret Service were paddling around over there in the lilypads, chasing terrorists domestic and foreign, not knowing that it was no terrorist, but Hal Corwin, who had tried and failed.

‘Our other main focus is of course Al-Qaeda. They could have used a mercenary from some former Iron Curtain country as their assassin. If they did, we’ll quickly vector in on him.’

‘Ahh... Who’s handling the on-site investigation?’

O’Hara leaned back; for the first time, his heavy red features were almost relaxed. The buck was about to get passed.

‘We know the shot came from up on the eastern rock face. Hatfield insisted that he and his Hostage/Rescue lads cover it. It makes sense. They are highly trained, and they were already up on the mountain.’

Out of shape from all of those Washington months, Hatfield hauled himself up, panting, to an open rocky V that was shielded from below by scrub pines. Just another possible site, this one impossibly far out. He jerked his Glock from its holster before realizing that the man squatting with his back against the smooth rock wall was Thorne, not Corwin. Thorne looked exhausted, drained. His hair was wet, as was his shirt down to mid-chest. A Winchester Model 70 rifle rested butt-down on the ground between his knees, the muzzle pointing up past his left ear.

Hatfield’s voice was squeaky with adrenaline.

‘What in the fuck are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been on site since I left D.C., but what difference does it make? Wallberg is still alive, no thanks to you.’

‘My men were in place seven hundred-fifty yards out—’

‘Facing the wrong way. You assholes maybe, just maybe, if any of you can shoot for shit, could have killed the bears from there. You sure as hell couldn’t have killed Corwin. I did.’

‘Where’s the body?’

‘In the stream.’

Hatfield was enraged. He wanted to smash Thorne over the head with a gunbutt, but refrained. Refrained from calling in the rest of his team, too. At the moment, only Thorne — and soon, he — would know what had really gone down here. He wanted to keep it that way if he could.

So he went looking, prowling the little V-shaped ravine, noting the rifle on its tripod, the laborious blood trail back to the noisy torrent rushing by. A lot of blood. It looked arterial to him. But still...

He returned to Thorne. ‘Again. Where’s his fucking body?’

‘I told you, in the stream. He looked dead, but when I started to check his vitals, he rolled into the water.’

‘So you don’t know he’s dead, you just think he’s dead.’

For the first time, Thorne showed emotion. ‘He’s dead, dead, fucking dead, Hatfield. And I killed him. Another five years of lousy dreams.’

‘We’ll bring in the bloodhounds—’

‘Bring in whoever you want. Maybe they’ll find him. Or maybe’ — he gave a grim chuckle — ‘those bears they just released will find him first. I took him in the chest cavity — what the Rangers call a target-rich environment. There’s so much in there to mess up. Heart, kidneys, arteries — hit any of them, the target suffers an immediate and catastrophic loss of blood. Same with the liver if my shot took him lower down. Unconscious in ten seconds, dead in fifteen.’

Hatfield was stubborn. ‘He got to the stream and went in.’

‘So, a lung shot. It would incapacitate him but might not kill him right away.’

Hatfield wanted to show his own expertise. ‘Sometimes they survive a lung shot even without treatment.’

‘Maybe so, but hypothermia would kill him before the stream took him a hundred yards.’ Thorne repeated, ‘He’s fucking dead, Hatfield, and I wish he wasn’t.’ He made a weary gesture. ‘Fuck it. Wallberg’s alive, so I’m getting out of here and—’

‘You’re going into federal custody to face a board of inquiry into why you didn’t fire a warning shot when you realized Corwin was here on this mountain.’

‘You sure that’s what you want, Hatfield? Right now, nobody knows I was here except you. If I keep my mouth shut, who is to say who took out the man who tried to kill the president?’

Hatfield hid his elation. The damn fool was going to hand it all to him. He asked casually, ‘Where have you been staying?’

‘The Super 8 in Hamilton. Under my own name.’

‘You’ve got some balls, I’ll give you that.’

Thorne pushed himself erect against the rock face. ‘I’ve still got to hike up over this mountain and down the other side before dark. I left my rental car there.’

He started away, but Hatfield caught his forearm.

‘You weren’t here today, get it? You aren’t in Montana. You’re in Fort Benning. Just go to your motel in Hamilton and stay there.’ He let go of Thorne’s arm. ‘I’ll make my report to the President at Camp David. If there are no leaks of your presence here in the meantime, I’ll send you a one-way ticket, coach, to Nairobi. Do we have a deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Leave the rifle.’

He wanted it to match up with any slug they might find in the ravine, but Thorne said, indifferent, ‘Sure, except how do you explain Corwin’s having two Model 70s on site?’

He left with the rifle. Hatfield called his team to come up and join him.

When they arrived, panting, Baror asked, ‘Where’s Corwin?’

‘Dead. I shot him just as he shot at the President. He crawled to the stream and rolled in just as I got here.’

‘Should we bring in the bloodhounds?’ asked Perry.

‘You bet. We want that body. Now let’s secure the scene.’ He took Franklin and Greene aside. ‘I just got word that Thorne flew into Montana this afternoon. He’s staying at the Super 8 Motel in Hamilton.’

Walt Greene squawked, ‘I thought he was at Fort Benning.’

Hatfield looked quickly around. Nobody else had heard.

‘Go to a motel close to his where you can monitor the shit out of him. Where he goes, what he does, who he talks to. He’s driving a rental car, I don’t know what kind. Ray, I want a GPS transmitter on that vehicle soonest. Walt, I want his phone bugged and miniaturized transmitters in everything he’s not wearing — his luggage, his clothes — everything.’

Franklin asked, inevitably, ‘Personal surveillance?’

‘Electronic only, for now. We don’t want him to have any idea we’re monitoring him. Don’t go cowboy on me, guys.’

‘Shit,’ said Franklin. ‘He walks away free and clear?’

‘Flies away.’ Hatfield couldn’t help grinning at them. ‘But not free and clear, believe me.’

25

Did I?

The voice whispering in Thorne’s memory brought him up from a light and troubled sleep. The covers were swirled around his waist, he was pouring sweat. Christ, the dead Corwin couldn’t come crowding into his nightmares along with the dead Alison and the dead Eden. Just couldn’t.

He sat up against the headboard, squinted at the green digital numerals of the bedside clock. Four-thirty a.m. For the first time he regretted registering at the motel under his own name. But still, if there were no leaks that he was here in Montana, he could be on a flight to Kenya within a few days.

Hatfield would have his glory, Thorne would have his bad dreams. A lousy exchange, but back in Tsavo, with time, the dreams would cease. He’d have his small life back. He had killed yet again, and Jaeger was also dead. But the president was still alive. Mission accomplished. Sort of. Except...

Did I?

Thorne pulled a chair over to the window, sat staring out.

Did Corwin mean that literally? Or, dying, just did not want to believe that he had missed, that Wallberg was still alive? It made no sense that Corwin would want to kill Jaeger.

A bulky man carrying a small valise was silhouetted by the street light as he crossed the parking lot toward a Ford sedan by the office. A mongrel with an ear flopped down over one eye like a beret crossed in front of him. The man aimed a boot at it. Yipping, the dog avoided the kick, a matador avoiding the horn.

Thorne let his thoughts slip into the void, as Myamoto Musashi, the great Samurai swordsman, had called it. Could Corwin conceivably have survived as Hatfield had feared? It had been a steel-jacketed bullet, not a hollow-point, it might have passed right through his body, missing all the vital organs...

No. The man was dead. Thorne’s own bad dreams told him that. Hatfield would come through with the airplane ticket, and official confirmation that Thorne was free to go back to Kenya. He told himself that’s what he wanted: to be well out of it.

Hatfield was driving his golf cart from the Camp David heliport to the President’s cabin when his pager vibrated. He pulled over, punched the number into his cellphone.

‘Hatfield.’

Doug Greene’s voice said, ‘The phone bug is in place, and the transmitters are in Thorne’s clothes and luggage.’

‘What about the GPS?’

‘Ray put it under Thorne’s rented Cherokee before dawn this morning. At eleven a.m., the vehicle became stationary at a family-style restaurant on highway 93 five miles north of town.’

‘Okay. Good work, both of you. Keep it up.’

Getting out of the Cherokee, Thorne stopped dead. The motel parking lot, 4:30 that morning, the asshole who tried to kick the dog on his way to a Ford Crown Victoria sedan. And the Crown Vic’s interior light had not gone on, an old security trick to keep anyone from seeing the driver’s face.

Thorne had not parked beside the blank back wall of the Bounding Elk Restaurant because he wanted to hide his presence there, but because tradecraft died hard. If Hatfield had bugged his car, he had to know, without Hatfield knowing he knew. Just in case something deeper than Hatfield’s paranoia was going on.

Thorne got his flashlight out of the glovebox, found a flattened cardboard box in the dumpster, and laid it on the ground beside the Cherokee as a makeshift mechanic’s Rollerboy. Using his heels, he slid himself under the car.

His flashlight found two small, square devices, lashed together with duct tape, attached by a magnet to the car’s frame below the driver’s seat: a satellite receiver, and a CelluLink transmitter with a snub antenna for the monitoring station’s connection. Strung along the under-carriage to the back of the vehicle, a power wire for the GPS antenna. Thorne had studied a similar device ten years ago while training at the Farm.

He slid back out. He had been under for less than two minutes. It took him another minute to spot the miniature wafer-thin GPS disk antenna set behind the rear bumper. It would be in a direct line with a communications satellite above.

A bug on his car meant a bug on his motel room phone, too.

The usual suspects were seated around the table in the spacious front room of the presidential cabin at Camp David. Hatfield, there to report, Wallberg, his yes-men Quarles and Crandall, and, hovering in the background, Johnny Doyle.

Wallberg said, ‘Let’s all bow our heads for a minute of silent prayer for Kurt Jaeger, a brave man who gave his life for his country.’ He soon raised his head and intoned, ‘Amen.’

Hatfield stood up, thankful for the prayer. He wanted to subtly invoke Jaeger’s specter: He is dead, Mr. President, and you are alive, because of one man: me, Terrill Hatfield.

He began his report.

‘Halden Corwin took his shot at twelve-hundred yards out from an improvised sniper’s nest on the eastern slope overlooking the meadow.’ He did not remind them that Thorne had originally proposed this scenario. ‘I killed him before he could kill you.’

Wallberg had dropped ten years. ‘The details, man!’

‘I caught a glint of metal at the narrow mouth of a V-shaped ravine, so I worked my way up within a hundred yards of it. And there was Corwin, just about to shoot. He got off his round, Mr. President, but my simultaneous body-mass hit knocked his aim off. He had just enough life left in him to roll into a mountain stream rushing down the hillside behind his sniper nest and be swept away.’

‘Enough life left to roll into the stream!’ There was a rising note of rage, perhaps mixed with panic, in the president’s voice. ‘Without a body, you don’t know a damned thing!’

‘Mr... President... he... is... dead. I made the standard take-out shot, under the arm and into the chest cavity. The crawl trail to the creek showed heavy blood-loss. Preliminary FBI Lab DNA tests confirm that it is Corwin’s blood. Coupled with the wound, the shock of the icy water killed him within minutes, perhaps seconds.’

‘You don’t know that! What’s the usual procedure here? Infra-red fly-overs, a massive sweep... manpower...’

He paused. He was a politician, not a manhunter. Hatfield slid into the silence easily.

‘In this kind of situation, Mr. President, bloodhounds. They miss nothing. And I already have them on site. I’m sorry I wasn’t in time to save Chief of Staff Jaeger, but Hal Corwin is dead. The bloodhounds will find his remains.’

He paused, wanting to dissipate the tension in the room, then took a chance, and stole Thorne’s off-hand remark.

‘Unless Smokey and Winnie the Pooh find him first.’

There were several chuckles around the table; even Wallberg had to crack a smile.

It had worked. He had gotten past the fact he had no body to offer to the president. And he knew that once Gus Wallberg got back behind his desk, the issue of Corwin’s body would soon fade from the man’s memory even if they never found it.

Victory Number Two: Brendan Thorne was not even mentioned.

Thorne took a stroll around Hamilton, killing time until he heard something from Hatfield. When he got back to the motel, he checked at the desk for messages. None. The toothpick he had lodged between the frame and the bottom edge of the room’s door was still there. Since finding the transmitter, he felt as if he were living in a glass house with the interior spotlights turned on. He lay down on the bed. In stasis.

‘Shit,’ said Ray Franklin. The QuikTrak historical data file showed that Thorne’s Jeep Cherokee hadn’t moved since he had gotten back from breakfast. Right now, Thorne was being a good boy: but he had a nasty surprise waiting for him. Hatfield had promised them that.

The phone interrupted his thoughts. It was the front desk. A package had just been delivered by messenger.

The fist Thorne had been awaiting pounded on the door. It could only be Ray Franklin — and was. Behind him was a short, chubby agent with avid killer’s eyes who had to be Franklin’s partner, Walt Greene. It would have taken both of them to bug his car and his phone as quickly as they had. He let none of this show in his eyes.

‘I hope you guys have something for me.’

Greene was darting his own eyes around the room, like maybe he hoped to find Thorne hiding a scantily-clad underage girl there. Franklin thrust a bulky sealed envelope at Thorne.

‘Yeah, Special Agent Hatfield instructed us to give this to you.’ He paused. ‘Meanwhile, from me, fuck you.’

Thorne didn’t answer. Just took the envelope and closed the door. Inside the envelope was his severance paycheck from the FBI, and a one-way ticket, Dulles International to Nairobi International, in four days’ time.

He lay back down on the bed in a totally different mood. Tomorrow he would reserve his D.C. flight; they hadn’t bothered to include a reservation for that. Fine by him. Gave him time to maybe get down to Fort Benning for a quick goodbye meeting with Victor Blackburn. In D.C., he could see Sharon Dorst and tell her how it had all worked out.

Because he wasn’t planning to ever return to the States from Tsavo. Tsavo! The nightmares would gradually slack off as they had done seven years ago, his life would resume as he had wanted it to.

Then why did going back feel like some sort of defeat?

26

At midnight, a yawning Thorne turned into North First. He’d overpoured, as airline stewardesses used to say when they’d had too much to drink. He wished it had been Tusker beer — or better yet, pombe, home-made from maize, that packed a kick like a mule. But Miller had done the job: it had made him realize that even though he had his life back, he didn’t really care.

Did anybody? Hey! Squealer Kemoli, the magistrate who had been so reluctant to sign his deportation papers, he cared. Morengaru, he cared. Thorne checked his watch. Mid-morning in Nairobi. He found a payphone beside a closed gas station, and used the phonecard he had bought when he’d realized his motel room phone was bugged. Squealer Kemoli himself answered his office phone on its second ring.

‘Arthur Kemoli.’

‘Squealer! I’m flying to Nairobi in a few days and—’

‘No. You are not.’ Kemoli switched abruptly to Swahili. ‘They will be at the airport waiting for the rhinohorn poacher.’

Thorne went into his room without bothering to check for intruders. In a way, they were already inside. It was over. He was out of options. He stripped, took a long hot shower, ended with cold, as cold as he could stand it, then sat down to stare out at the parking lot.

Then he got it. Hatfield had put out the word. They were just waiting for him to go back to Nairobi, where he would be arrested, convicted, and jailed on the phony charges Hatfield had set up. In an African jail, he’d have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. He would never get a chance to change his mind and tell anyone he had killed Corwin and saved the president. Neat and nasty.

What if he didn’t go back? Then they would gather him up and fold him away in some terrorist-detention cell of Hatfield’s choosing in the sacred name of National Security. Or worse yet, stick him in some mental institution.

He got into bed, still maybe a little drunk. His eyes drifted shut. Against their lids, Tsavo’s old bull elephants browsed and trumpeted. Morengaru squatted by a trail, grinning as he pointed out a shifta’s footprint in the dust.

A cammo-clad drug dealer lay face-down on a jungle path in Panama, blood pooling around her. He turned her over. She was Alison. Dead. Underneath her was Eden. Dead.

He looked down at the dying man and said, ‘You missed.’

Corwin’s teeth were a warlock’s, outlined in blood. He asked, ‘Did I?’

Thorne came bursting up from sleep yelling, ‘DID YOU?’

He sat on the edge of the bed, panting, shivering even though sweat was pouring off him. His only defense was to find out what Corwin’s last words had meant. Who had Corwin been? Not what some file said, but who had he been? Why had he done what he did, why had the president’s men from the git-go so desperately wanted him dead?

Where to start? Easy. Find the motel where Corwin had been staying. There were just a few little towns in the semi-wilderness country on the Idaho side of Trapper’s Peak. Corwin would have written down his vehicle description and license for the clerk. A vehicle he would have hidden for a quick getaway somewhere within, say, a five-mile radius of the valley up which he had gone to kill Wallberg. The car would still be there. If Thorne could find it, maybe something in it would point to the truth about who Corwin really had been.

Some knowledge that might give Thorne a razor-thin edge.

Lemhu. Tendoy. Baker. Salmon. Shoup. North Fork. Gibbonsville. Tiny Idaho towns within striking distance for Corwin. But only Salmon had any accommodations listed with Triple-A. Of Salmon’s three choices, the Motel Deluxe, the cheapest of them, was downtown, with access to cafes and shops.

If Thorne’s motel-room phone was bugged, anything not currently on his person by now would have miniaturized transmitters planted in it also. The Cherokee was transmitting its location constantly. If Thorne removed the equipment they would know it. But during his stroll downtown yesterday, he had noted an old clapboard house with its garage converted into a one-man auto-repair shop. Just the kind of place he needed.

Today, he took half an hour to wander those few blocks, using store windows to check his backtrail. Nobody behind him. Parked in the driveway was a new Chevy Silverado with a pair of deer rifles on the rear-window rack. Inside the garage, a husky blond kid in his mid-twenties pulled a grease-smeared face out from under the open hood of an ’02 Ford F-150 pickup.

‘I need transportation,’ said Thorne. ‘Something four-wheel and off-road.’

‘They got a Hertz and an Avis here in town.’

‘I don’t like car rental outfits. I don’t like credit cards. I like cash.’ Thorne took out his roll. ‘Like this.’

Up close, the kid smelled of sweat and motor oil and cigarette smoke. He kept wiping his hands on a greasy red rag he took from the back pocket of his coveralls, over and over again, staring at Thorne’s roll as if mesmerized by it.

‘I’ve got a ’94 Dodge Dakota four-wheel out back. Thirty-a-day, $500 security deposit, pay for your own gas.’

‘Five hundred? A ninety-four?’

The blond kid grinned. ‘Three-fifty.’ He paused. ‘Back country. Off-road. It ain’t hunting season, and some terrorist fuck took a shot at the President of the United States down by the Bitterroot ridge a couple of days ago. Wouldn’t be that you’re some sort of journalist, would it?’

‘Wouldn’t be.’

The kid stuck out a hand. ‘Andy Farrell.’

‘Brendan Thorne. I’ll tell you tonight whether I’ll need your Dakota tomorrow too.’

‘I usually eat dinner at The Spice of Life on Second Street. You can get me there. They close up at nine o’clock.’

Thorne turned in at the Motel Deluxe on Salmon’s Church Street. He flashed his badge and commission card with the FBI seal on it at the dark chunky woman behind the desk. Although they now were outlawed, his ‘creds’ worked like a dream. He asked the woman about any man who had stayed there for a week or so, maybe left before dawn two days ago.

She already had the old-fashioned sign-in register open flat on the desk and was turning pages. ‘You got a name?’

‘Hal Corwin?’

‘No Corwin. We did have a guy reserved for two weeks, then checked out early.’ She turned the register, pointed to an entry. ‘Hal Fletcher. As in arrow-maker. My people know about fletching arrows. He the loony tried to shoot the President?’

‘A person of interest,’ said Thorne.

‘He sure wasn’t any sort of an Ay-rab. He seemed a nice guy, too. In his fifties, lean, sorta tall, looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. Had a limp.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘He played catch with our son in the parking lot every evening.’

‘What was he driving?’

She checked the register again. ‘Nineteen-ninety 4-Runner. California license 5-C-W-D-0-4-6. I ’member it as dark green.’

Andy Farrell was having a beer at a table by the window when Thorne got to The Spice of Life. The blond hair had been washed, he’d switched to slacks and a sport shirt and a windbreaker and was having a cheeseburger and fries and a Caesar salad. A skinny twenty-year-old waitress with hair dyed bright scarlet and a ring through her lower lip was flirting with him. Thorne slid into the chair across the table from him.

‘They only got beer and wine here,’ said Andy almost apologetically, as if he were the host and Thorne was a guest.

‘All I need is a cup of coffee.’

Andy waved at the waitress. ‘I eat here because they use organic greens and veggies, and their burgers are damn good.’

Thorne grinned and jerked his head toward the waitress.

‘And here I thought maybe she had something to do with it.’

Andy’s face flamed almost as scarlet as the girl’s hair. When she came with Thorne’s coffee, Andy asked for apple pie à-la-mode for dessert. Thorne did too. After the table had been cleared, Andy leaned across it to speak in a low voice.

‘I been thinking, you ain’t no newsman.’

‘Said I wasn’t. Maybe I’m one of those alphabet-soup guys from the government. You’re a hunter, right?’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘The gunrack in your Silverado. Since you hunt, you must know the back country around here pretty well.’

‘Try me.’

‘Okay. Below the western side of the ridge above the meadow where the President gave his speech, there’s a sub-alpine valley. Do you know it? I need to find a—’

Andy exclaimed, ‘Jesus Christ! The bastard went up that valley to the massif, didn’t he? He wasn’t any Muslim, he had to be a local who knew the terrain.’

‘Knew the terrain, yeah. Local, no. Now, if he needed to stash a four-wheel SUV within a five-mile radius of that valley so he could get out of Dodge quick, where would he put it?’

Andy stood up, said, ‘Be right back,’ and left the cafe. He came back with a topo map from his truck. He opened it out on the tabletop, tapped a finger on one of its squiggles.

‘See that minor national-park road right there? I’d look up any one of those little dirt tracks going off of it.’

‘You should have my job.’ Thorne stood up. ‘If I’m not back with the truck within a couple of days, you’ll find it hidden under that stand of fir trees at the mouth of the valley. The keys will be on the left front tire. Will the security deposit cover going over there and getting your truck back?’

‘Christ yes, more than. But...’ He paused. ‘I’d sure like to be in on whatever it is you’re doing, Mr. Thorne.’

Thorne shrugged and grimaced. ‘I wish you could, Andy. I’d feel comfortable with you covering my back. But...’

‘I know,’ said Andy, crestfallen. ‘National Security.’

Thorne scattered too much money on the table. ‘My treat.’ He stuck out his hand. They shook. Before he knew he was going to say it, he added, ‘I kill people for the government, Andy.’

‘I figured maybe you did,’ said Andy solemnly.

Walking out of the place, Thorne thought, Maybe that’ll be my epitaph: he killed people for the government. Maybe, in this case, the wrong person?

Corwin’s 4-Runner was the key to everything. If Thorne couldn’t find it, he’d painted himself into a corner and would just have to flat-out go on the run. He had to believe that if he found it, he would find something to point toward something he could use as leverage against Hatfield’s scheming.

In the morning he walked up the street for breakfast, came back, and used the room phone to make a reservation to fly Northwest from Missoula to Minneapolis the next night, then on to D.C. Give the Feebs something to chew on.

For the same reason, he drove the Cherokee and Franklin’s GPS transmitter to the Ravalli County Museum in the old county courthouse on Bedford Street. If they bothered to track him there, they would figure he was just killing time.

He let a collection of American Indian artifacts fascinate him for an hour, then went out the ground-floor men’s room window, leaving it unlocked, and went shopping. To buy more time, he needed to give Hatfield something tough to explain away.

In a variety of stores, he bought underwear, shirts, socks, a waterproof pouch to use as a wallet, two pairs of pants and one warm jacket, shaving gear, a pair of shoes and a pair of ankle-length boots, a belt. He also bought a wood rasp, Providene-Iodine 10 % topical antiseptic microbicide, gauze bandages and adhesive tape, and thin opaque medical gloves. At the last minute, he bought two more $10 phone cards. They could be traced but it took time. He paid cash for everything. At the bank, he cashed the FBI’s severance check, and drew out his day’s limit of cash on his ATM card. After today, his money belt would have to see him through.

Everything fit into two grocery shopping bags he left under the men’s room window at the museum while he hauled himself back up inside. He walked sedately out the front door, drove around to pick up his purchases, and went back to the motel. No messages on the phone. No intrusions into the room. He hadn’t expected any. They were so damn sure of him, like his FBI taggers in D.C., that he felt only contempt for them. And anger.

He paid through the next day, telling the room clerk not to bother making up the room in the morning, and put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign before going to bed.

27

Thorne rolled out at four a.m., silently tore up the bed, laid a lamp on its side, and tipped over a chair. His cash was in his money belt, his money clip was on the dresser with a few bucks in it, along with his keys and watch, the FBI badge, and the wallet that held his i.d. and driver’s license. His passport was hidden in his suitcase where they were sure to find it.

He left the clothes he had worn the day before tossed over the room’s still-upright chair, left his shoes with yesterday’s socks stuffed in them under it. He also left all his old clothes in the dresser right where they were, and left his suitcase in the closet. He would carry no miniature bugs away with him.

He put on new socks and the new boots, then dropped the shopping bag with his new shaving kit and his extra new clothes on the grass below the rear window. With gloved hands, he quietly broke the glass inward and artistically scattered shards of it around on the floor.

Only then did he draw the wood rasp across his forehead and let blood splatter around the room and on the window sill. After he disinfected and bandaged the cut, he put on his money belt and dressed from the skin out in his new clothes.

A two-step run, and he dove through the glassless window, tucking and rolling as he hit the grassy slope behind his room. He waited. No window opened, no lights went on, no pale blob of face looked out at him. When they came to clean the room the following morning, they would find what looked like a murder scene, and call the cops, who would be all over the crime-scene before Hatfield could close things down.

Thorne went through the woods to Andy’s Dakota four-by-four parked two blocks away. In his waterproof pouch was his new i.d.: driver’s license, social security card, library card (expired), and three unemployment benefit payment stubs. All of them legal and valid, all identifying him as one Benjamin Schutz: Benny the Boozer’s full and real name. Also in the pouch was his FBI commission card. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. Not because someone would challenge it — how many civilians knew what FBI credentials looked like? — but because eventually it would get back to Hatfield that the card was in play. Once that happened, the noose would tighten.

The wood rasp, bandaids, disinfectant, and surgeon’s gloves went into three different dumpsters on his way out of town.

An hour later, he ran Andy’s Dodge Dakota in under the firs at the mouth of the valley, and left the keys on the tire. Carrying his shopping bag, he walked northwest on the national park service road Andy had pointed out, checking out the dirt tracks going off on either side. No vehicle passed him, not one.

Four miles north of the valley, he followed a barely-visible abandoned logging trace. A quarter-mile in, he found a single truck tire track in a patch of hardened mud. No more tracks, but a heavy vehicle’s passage was marked by broken twigs and matted-down grass for another quarter-mile.

In the thick underbrush under the pines, where it would be well-hidden from the road and invisible from the air, was a dark green 4-Runner. He pulled away the fragrant fir boughs and checked the license number: California 5 CWD 046. A current registration-month sticker on the license plate, a previous year’s sticker under that. It was Corwin’s car.

The keys were stashed in front of the left rear tire. It had a full tank of gas and fired up immediately. He rifled the glove box. Maps and a flashlight, the manual, paper napkins. Then he remembered that in California, a vehicle’s registration and insurance papers were usually stowed behind the sun visor on the driver’s side. They were there, and they were electrifying.

The truck was registered to a Janet Kestrel, c/o Mrs. Edie Melendez at an address in an LA suburb. A woman could explain the months when Corwin dropped out of sight. A lover, travelling with him? An assassin who helped him plan the Delta murders?

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

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

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

‘When did this happen?’

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

‘Set up a meeting with Hatfield, ASAP.’

‘Talk to me,’ snapped the President.

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

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

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

‘I sent the ticket to the Mayflower myself.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallberg was staring at him. ‘Which is?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Full National Security powers, Mr. President?’

‘Whatever it takes, Agent Hatfield.’

28

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

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

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

‘Glad to meet you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She paused and sighed, very expressively.

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

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

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

‘I promise,’ said Thorne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Badly.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Up yours,’ said Hatfield.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They locked eyes. Houghton looked away first.

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

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

‘Nothing. I never saw him again. He left a cash deposit here when I was at the hospital that more than paid for her medical and doctor expenses. He’s even got a refund coming.’

‘Did Janet leave an address with you?’

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

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

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

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

29

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

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

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

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

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

Corwin? Asking why she betrayed him? Maybe threatening to kill her husband? So she screamed for security, then said he’d tried to snatch her purse. In a way, gave him enough time to escape, with Janet Kestrel driving the get-away vehicle?

Back in the Post’s coverage, he found an even more provocative item. Two weeks before election night, Wallberg was relaxing for a day at the posh Desert Palms Resort and Spa in California’s Mojave Desert. While taking a midnight dip alone in the spa’s natural hot springs pool, he was accosted by a naked man. Secret Service agents fired shots, the assailant fled.

The man being naked, far from branding him as a nut in Thorne’s eyes, suggested that the intruder had been Corwin. At night in unknown terrain, you could move much more quietly naked.

He Googled the Desert Palms Resort and Spa, then used one of his phone cards to make a one-night reservation for Benjamin Schutz. Yes, mid-week, they had a single available.

Uniformed guards checked his i.d. at the resort’s front gate before letting him through the high enclosing adobe wall into the compound. Supposedly the place had been built by Al Capone; there was even a Capone suite hewn out of the native rock, all antique furniture and art deco, where Wallberg had stayed when he had been there.

Thorne’s room was in a tamarisk grove down by the picnic area. There was a tennis court surrounded by rare California clump grass; there was an exercise pool flanked by ornate teaberry bushes; there were ‘sun bins’ designed for solo nude sunbathing. The gambling casino of Capone’s day had been converted into the Casino Restaurant, with plush draperies, a huge fireplace, and a chunky refectory table that should have been gracing a medieval monastery. Perhaps it once had.

He bought swim trunks at the gift shop, draped a big woolly bath towel over his shoulders, and padded up the walk past the mud baths and sauna and massage rooms to the hot pool. It was a blue, smooth-bottomed concrete cup, going from one foot to five feet in depth, shielded by decorative rocks and shrubs. At one end, the hot natural mineral water boiled up at regular intervals to spill down a man-made cliff into the pool. The closer to this overflow, the hotter the water.

Thorne drifted in the hundred-degree velvet half-darkness, waiting for just the right security guard to stroll by. Had him! In his fifties, with a lined, leathery face, hard eyes, thinning sandy hair, a flawless uniform, and a military bearing. Perfect.

‘Vietnam?’ asked Thorne, dog-paddling to the side of the pool. ‘You can always tell a guy who’s seen action.’

‘Twenty-five years as an MP, stateside and overseas.’

‘Ex-Ranger myself. Panama. Desert Storm.’ He shook water out of his eyes and hauled himself up on the side of the pool. ‘They were telling me about that crazy nut jumped the president last fall. Were you working here then?’

The guard glanced around, then sat down on a lounge chair.

‘I gotta tell you, there was something screwy about that whole thing. Hell, this naked guy, he was just talking with Wallberg, and then the feds showed up. He shoved Wallberg underwater and took off. They started shooting. They found blood but didn’t find him.’ His thin, hard lips curved in contempt. As Thorne had hoped, this ex-MP had no respect for civilian security forces. ‘They couldn’t find him, so they claimed he crawled off into the desert and died.’

‘Did they even hit him?’

‘Hell no. That guy took off like a scalded-ass ape. No way did he take a round. I think he scraped his head on the rock deliberately to give ’em the blood. I didn’t see his face, but he was about the President’s age. Rangy and quick even though he had a limp. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was ex-military.’

At seven a.m. the next day, Sammy Spaulding met Hatfield at the unobtrusive corner of LAX where the FBI landed its jets. He whistled softly when he saw the Gulfstream.

‘And you thought I was blowing smoke,’ grinned Hatfield.

‘I thought you were covering your ass on some screw-up.’

‘Never happen, my man.’

Sammy was one of the few people outside his own team whom he actually trusted, but Hatfield drove alone to keep his appointment with Marlena Werfel at Cedar’s-Sinai. She met him behind her bastion desk in the admin office.

‘First,’ he told her, ‘I want to apologize for any inconvenience or distress our man might have caused you.’

‘He was extremely rude.’

‘He has that reputation.’ Hatfield focussed on her. ‘You see, he’s supposed to be undercover in Chihuahua, Mexico. That’s why I flew out here from D.C. to talk to you in person.’

‘I knew it! He was asking inappropriate questions about a patient we had here last November. Janet Amore.’

Who the hell was Janet Amore? But if Thorne wanted her, Hatfield wanted her. ‘What was Amore being treated for?’

‘She was mugged and beaten badly in an alley.’

‘And you couldn’t give Thorne an address for her?’

‘Could have. Didn’t. Her sister’s. But she’s long gone from there. He also wanted to know what sort of financial arrangements she made with the hospital, and her doctor’s name.’ A satisfied sniff. ‘I wouldn’t give him either one.’ She lowered her voice. ‘But he might have gotten the doctor’s name from one of our nurses who’s a talker and a trouble-maker.’

‘You’re a true patriot, Mrs. Werfel,’ said Hatfield.

He phoned Houghton’s office and ordered the receptionist to have the doctor awaiting his arrival. In Houghton’s crowded cubicle office, Hatfield flopped his FBI credentials on the desk.

‘Special Agent Terrill Hatfield. I have just come from an interview with Marlena Werfel at Cedar’s-Sinai—’

‘I know Mrs. Werfel. She is an... efficient lady.’

‘More than efficient. A patriot.’

‘Spare me,’ said Houghton.

He was just the sort of black man Hatfield despised: smooth, suave, polished, self-assured, with manicured nails.

‘Last November you treated a mugging victim named Janet Amore. Everything you have on her, including current address.’

‘If I ever treated such a patient—’

‘Oh, you treated her, all right.’

‘If I ever treated such a patient, her medical records are protected by law, Agent Hatfield.’

‘Not from me. How would you like a handcuffed ride to the Federal Building?’

Houghton stood up so as to be eye to eye with him.

‘I came up from South Central, Hatfield, the first one in my family to finish high school, let alone go to medical school. I make a lot of money and I have a lot of clout — my bedside manner with this town’s movers and shakers is impeccable. So take your best shot — boy.’

Hatfield was quivering with rage, but it was he who looked away first. Unlike Dorst, Houghton was unfazed by threats. The President would not want a public squabble over Hatfield’s right to see the patient records of a woman whose name he had just heard for the first time an hour before. He switched tacks.

‘Has a man named Thorne, maybe posing as an FBI agent, been to see you? Since he’s not one of your patients, you can’t hide behind doctor privilege on him.’

‘I never hide behind anything, Agent Hatfield. Since you won’t believe whatever I say anyway, I have no information.’

Getting into his car, Hatfield thought, Fuck him, I’ll get to Janet Amore from other sources. Or maybe Thorne was there, and Houghton’s covering his ass for some unknown reason.

He’d better put a bug on Houghton’s phone. If necessary, hack into his computer, burgle his files, intimidate his staff. One way or another, Hatfield would get what he wanted. He had the President of the United States in his pocket.

30

‘You missed.’

‘Did I?’

The exchange had added weight and meaning now. Driving back to LA with the easy noontime traffic, Thorne mulled over what he had learned at the Desert Palms Resort. Corwin had confronted Wallberg face-to-face, had even talked with him — about what? Could have killed him, and hadn’t. Just ducked Wallberg under the surface of the water so he could escape. Did this mean he really had meant to shoot Jaeger after all?

Thorne left the Hollywood Freeway at Vine, went west on Sunset, then south toward Houghton’s office. By now, the FBI surely would have interviewed the doctor and would have a tap on his phone whether he had been cooperative or not.

Doubtful they’d have a tap on Houghton’s fax machine. Thorne found a Kinko’s, parked beyond it, walked back, sent an unsigned message to Houghton’s fax number: Your day is up. From a coffee shop across the street from Kinko’s, he watched and waited for half an hour. Nobody resembling a Feeb appeared. He went in, asked if there was a reply to his fax. There was. The Taco Bell a mile from my office. 2:30 p.m.

Thorne got there at two to monitor the fast-food outlet from the adjacent gas station’s mini-mart. No Feebs. When Houghton arrived at 2:25 in a silver BMW-7 luxury sedan, Thorne opened the rider’s-side door and slid in.

‘Let’s just ride around.’

Houghton wore dark glasses that gave his strong-boned face an actorish cast. ‘I’m glad you faxed instead of phoned.’

‘So someone came around.’

‘A most unpleasant specimen, Special Agent Terrill Hatfield.’ Houghton chuckled. ‘Accusatory. Bullying. Threatening me with all sorts of dire things. I don’t like bullies. I don’t threaten easily.’

‘I was counting on that.’

‘I was on the knife-edge about helping you or not, but Hatfield took care of that. As soon as he left, before he could get a warrant for a tap on my phone, I called your psychiatrist friend Sharon Dorst back in Washington and left her the number of my health club.’

‘Friend?’ said Thorne, mildly surprised.

‘Oh yes. Definitely a friend. She was cagey at first, but then she opened up, a lot. I think I understand a great deal more now.’ He stopped at a red light, looked over at Thorne. ‘The man who paid Janet’s medical expenses, someone named Halden Corwin, is the man you’re trying to track down.’

‘With good reason.’ Now Thorne chuckled. ‘I think.’

‘What I didn’t tell you yesterday is that Janet checked out in the middle of the night and had to leave behind a beautifully tanned bearskin. One of the nurses hid it in a hospital locker for her and gave her the key.’

‘Corwin’s. He must have given it to her.’

The light changed, the BMW glided down the street. ‘Janet sent my nurse the key at the end of January and asked if we could get the bearskin to her without the hospital knowing. We did.’

He pulled the BMW into the gas station next to the Taco Bell and stopped. Full circle. He took a folded memo sheet from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to Thorne.

Thorne unfolded it and read: JANET ROANHORSE General Delivery Groveland CA 95321.

I’ll cover as long as I can,’ said Houghton, ‘but Hatfield will find out about that bearskin from someone on staff at Cedar’s-Sinai and then bring a lot of pressure on my nursing staff. I can’t ask them to sacrifice their careers for this.’

‘I wouldn’t want them to.’ Thorne shook Houghton’s hand and opened his door. ‘Many thanks, doctor.’

‘He pissed me off,’ said Houghton, and drove off laughing.

Hatfield was fuming. There had been no calls from Thorne on Houghton’s phone, there was nothing to indicate he had ever gone to Houghton’s office.

So he called Quantico. He couldn’t really use the FBI full-bore, because nobody except his team knew about Corwin, or about Thorne. But the President was behind him, so he could have his Hostage/Rescue team flown out to LA with their equipment. Special training exercise, some bullshit like that. Several trained men looking for Thorne was better than one trained man. He knew he could count on his team to get the job done and, within reason, keep its collective mouth shut.

Waiting for them to arrive, he put the name Janet Amore out on CLETS and the National Crime Index, e-mailed the DMVs of all fifty states, Googled her, all without any results at all. No credit history, no driver’s license in that name. As if she didn’t exist. He planned to go interview the sister, Edie Melendez, but by her name she was probably a stupid beaner without a thought in her head.

First he would take his ally, Marlena Werfel, out to lunch. A modest meal at a fancy place with a reputation, like Spago’s in Beverly Hills, would impress her. She could maybe even see a star or two and dine out on the experience for years.

He didn’t mention business until they were on dessert and coffee. It turned out she had something worth a $125 lunch for him. Potentially, something big.

He started out, ‘I spoke with Houghton. If Thorne went to see him, the doctor is stone walling. Patient confidentiality and all that. He’s doing the same thing on this Janet Amore. Is there anything you can think of that might help me find her?’

She started to shake her head, then paused. Her eyes widened, she exclaimed triumpantly, ‘The locker!’

‘What locker?’ he almost snapped.

‘That nurse I told you was a troublemaker was seen sneaking something into one of the hospital lockers and giving the key to Amore. The nurse who saw her mentioned it to me. None of my business, of course. But then Amore sneaked out in the middle of the night and had to leave everything behind. I just bet whatever it was is still in that locker.’

If Amore had left something behind — clothing, letters, photos, personal belongings — it was sure to give Hatfield some sort of clue to who she was and where she might have gone, and why Thorne was looking for her.

‘Let’s go take a look at that locker, Marlena.’

But when they opened the locker with a master key, it was empty. Hatfield’s always volatile temper was bubbling up.

‘You mean someone just took it? How could they do that without the key?’

‘Amore must have given the key to someone,’ said Werfel. ‘They could have sneaked in, opened the locker, and emptied it.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘But my troublemaker will be on shift tonight. She’ll know who took it, and why. I’ll get it out of her.’

‘You sure it wasn’t Amore herself?’ demanded Hatfield.

‘If she’d been around, I would have known about it. I’ll have the answer by morning.’

Probably it was the sister, Edie Melendez, who had taken it. If it was, she would have an address on Amore. And she would be easy to break down, her being a beaner with a green card that was probably bogus. Hatfield wouldn’t wait for morning.

Dusk was approaching when he fought his way through the rush-hour exodus from LA to Grace Avenue in Carson. No one was home. A half-hour later a yard man’s beat-up old truck pulled into the driveway and a handsome Latino with liquid eyes and black hair in a ’50s pompadour got out. Obviously the hoosban. Hatfield intercepted him between truck and house.

‘We want to talk with your wife, Melendez. Right now.’

The man turned quickly, warily, retreating to the safety of the racial barrier. He whined, ‘Wha’ you want with her, man?’

Hatfield flopped his credentials open before Melendez’s startled eyes. ‘Special Agent Terrill Hatfield, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now start talking.’

The change was remarkable. The diffidence was gone. ‘Day after your other man was here, I come home, Edie, she gone. Nobody cook me no meals, nobody wash my clo’es. Took off with all the dinero in the house.’ He stepped close. He reeked of beer. ‘You gotta get her back for me, man!’

‘This other agent? He have a name?’

‘She never even tell me he was here.’ He jerked a thumb at the house next door. ‘Neighbor, he tell me after she gone. A gringo, he say, with black hair. Thass all he know.’

Thorne. Looking for Amore in all the wrong places.

‘We actually want your wife’s sister,’ said Hatfield. ‘Janet Amore. We know she’s been staying here with you and we know she had her sister pick up a package at the hospital after she was discharged.’

‘Package? I don’ know nothin’ ’bout no package.’

But the resistance had disappeared at mention of Amore.

‘She was here, si, but she gone,’ he said eagerly. ‘Is always trouble, tha’ one. She’s nothin’ but a puta, man. Look for her where the whores walk the streets. She got beat up cause she did bad things. Of that I am sure.’

A whore. ‘Gone where?’

‘Doan know, doan care. Maybe Edie, she know. But Edie, she gone too.’ His belligerence returned. Obviously his green card was in order. ‘She lef’ cause of FBI, now wha’ the FBI gonna do to get her back for me?’

‘We’re not going to do anything,’ said Hatfield. He handed Melendez a card. ‘But if your wife gets in touch with you, or her sister does, you call this number, pronto. Or you’ll be back in Mexico so fast your fucking huaraches will be smoking.’

31

There were twelve of them waiting for the bus at Groveland, an old goldrush town in the Sierra foothills on the way to Yosemite National Park. It was their first river raft trip, and they were charged up. The bus pulled up. They filed aboard. The driver stood in the front, counting noses.

‘It’s about a fifteen-twenty minute ride to Casa Loma,’ he said. ‘Then five miles of really bad road to the Put-In Spot on the Tuolemne River. I’m glad to see you’re wearing warm clothes. This early in May, the river is still pretty darn cold.’

A slender woman with streaked blond hair and smile lines at the sides of her mouth gestured at the equally slender fifteen-year-old boy beside her.

‘Can Jimmy sit up front behind you?’

The boy looked embarrassed. The bus driver chuckled.

‘Sure can. He’ll like that ride down the hill. By the way, in case any of you are worried, the rafts almost never get tipped over. Even if one of ’em got holed by a sharp rock, there’s no life-threatening danger. But just to be on the safe side, AQUA River Tours furnishes wet suits, life jackets and helmets to all our clients.’

He didn’t add that anyone going into the river would get bruised and scraped, maybe get a cracked rib or two, because that’s not what the clients were paying to hear. Instead, he fired up the bus. Snorting diesel fumes, it lurched forward.

At just eleven a.m., they were at the water’s edge, where four guides were holding three rubber rafts in place against the steep earth bank. The clients crawled enthusiastically to their places, and were pushed out into the swirling current.

Thorne had driven hard well into the night, had checked into the Groveland Hotel, an 1849 adobe wedded to a 1914 Queen Anne Victorian. Two story, white with red-brown trim, with pillars all the way around. While he was checking out in the morning, he asked where the post office was. The clerk, a middle-aged man with silvery hair, faraway blue eyes, and turtle-wrinkles in his thin neck, smelled faintly of mothballs.

He nodded with little jerks of his head. ‘Street behind the hotel, up the hill. Along there a ways.’

Groveland had a population of 1,500, which doubled on the weekends during the summer months. The AAA Tour Book said the town’s main recreational activity was white-water rafting on the Tuolemne River a few miles distant.

Thorne found the post office easily, an ugly modern brown building with what looked like a corrugated iron roof and inset doorways and a somehow incongruous blue mailbox at the foot of the gleaming concrete front steps. Inside, behind the counter, was a round, rosy-faced woman in a blue uniform with a nametag, ROSIE, pinned to the front of her shirt.

‘A few months back I sent a package from LA to a Janet Roanhorse at General Delivery,’ Thorne beamed. ‘I was wondering if you have any record that she ever received it?’

Rosie didn’t have to look anything up. ‘Sure did. Roanhorse, that was her daddy’s name. Her folks had a little cabin in the woods a few miles out of town. They died a few years back. She came back to take the place over, and calls herself Janet Kestrel now.’

‘I’m just in town for the day, and I was really hoping I’d get a chance to see her...’

Rosie shook her head, making her curls dance, and beamed confidentially at him. ‘We can’t give out folk’s home addresses. But you can catch her at work, AQUA River Tours, at a little spot called Casa Loma. Right on highway 120 north, you can’t miss it. The only building there is called the River Store. It’s set back on a little knoll. There’s a cutout of a big blue coffee cup on top of it.’

He thanked her and left. It was just nine a.m.

Janet loved it on the river, narrow, twisting, fast, here dark and deep and swirling, there white and shallow and boisterous, throwing up spume and leaping over sharp half-submerged rocks with joyful exuberance. It took great skill to keep the rafts from hitting anything.

But the letter had come from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino. Today was her last ride down the river as a guide. Tomorrow, she would catch a bus to Hopland and find a place to live and start work at the casino as a blackjack dealer. She felt a sadness at leaving the river-rafting she knew and loved for an indoor casino job dealing blackjack, something she also knew but had never loved. But it paid better than rafting, and she had to start building a new life. At least this would be at a casino run by her own people. And she might never get that call on her cellphone from Hal to go retrieve her 4-Runner.

They stopped for lunch at one p.m. at a pre-arranged spot that in another month would be sun-washed and toasty. No more snow lingered in the steep mixed oak and pine forests flanking the river, but in here under the trees it was still chilly. They lit fires and ate their sandwiches around them.

Jimmy, the fifteen-year-old boy who couldn’t get enough river lore, attached himself to Janet. As they ate, he kept plying her with questions about rafting and about what seemed to him the wilderness they were passing through. He ate quickly, so after they finished, she walked him around, naming the various trees and bushes. He reached out for a red-leafed vine curled around one of the oak trees, and she grabbed his arm.

‘That’s not sumac, Jimmy. It’s poison oak.’

He jerked his hand back. ‘That stuff gives you a rash.’

‘I’ll tell you a secret.’ She picked one of the leaves. ‘There’s a way you can develop immunity for it.’ She ate the leaf. ‘You do that for a while, carefully, and pretty soon—’

‘Oh wow! That’s way cool.’

‘But don’t you try it,’ she cautioned. She suddenly giggled, in the boy’s world. ‘Your mom would hunt me down and kill me dead if you did.’

Thorne parked the 4-Runner on the blacktop in front of the River Store and checked out the other vehicles: a white van with a big metal luggage rack on the roof, and a pale green camper with a dark green plywood box on top to hold belongings. There was also a three-year-old Suzuki and a ’94 Chevy Astrovan. Inside, he was greeted by the rich smell of espresso and a big old man with a grey handlebar mustache and a long grey ponytail.

‘Sam Arness,’ said the man. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘A cup of coffee for starters. Is Janet Kestrel working today?’

‘Yep, and nope. She’s working, but she ain’t here.’ Arness gestured down the store to a door in the back wall. ‘AQUA Tours. She’s a damn good white-water rafting river guide for them, one of the best. AQUA does class four trips — toughest is class five. They’re off down the river on a one day trip and’ll be back after dark.’ He squinted at the store’s electric clock. ‘Might catch ’em at the Put-In Spot down on the river, but I doubt it, they’re usually on the water by eleven.’

‘I’ll drive on down. I’m just waiting for Janet anyway.’

‘Hope you got four-wheel, road’s mean as a damn snake.’

Sam Arness was right. Thorne needed the four-wheel all right on the incredible five-mile dirt track to the river thousands of feet below, a narrow slanting cut down the steep side of an immense brown tree-covered slope. The hillside rose on one side, fell away into infinity on the other. Roll your vehicle here, and you’d still be rolling at sundown.

Around the next turn he braked sharply. A golden eagle was in the road, a jackrabbit clutched in its talons. It flapped away in wide-winged, indifferent dignity. As he neared the valley floor, the air got cooler. He could hear the distant rush of the river. The road levelled out and there it was, the Tuolemne, its banks overarched with pines and angled hardwoods.

He found a tiny park area with a gently-sloping earth ramp down to the river. The Put-In Spot. As Sam had warned, the rafters were long gone. Just rustic restrooms and a signboard posted with pet-leashing and fishing regulation notices, and a stern red-edged warning about hazardous, turbulent waters and sharp edged rocks beneath the surface and WEAR YOUR LIFE JACKET.

A quarter mile downstream he sat down on the grass between the road and a leaky old boat, minus oars, hidden in the bushes, leaned back against a tree with his eyes shut, and listened to the rushing water.

Just how much jeopardy might he have put Janet Kestrel in by trying to track her down? Hatfield would ferret out her address in Groveland from Houghton’s office staff, would know Thorne was ahead of him, and would come rushing down Thorne’s backtrail trying to find her — probably with his ball-breaker Hostage Rescue/Sniper Team in tow.

Marlena Werfel was bursting with news and enthusiasm.

‘The package was taken from the locker by one of Dr. Houghton’s nurses. Mary Coggins.’

That lying bastard! Hatfield had just known Houghton was holding out on him. But it was easy to go around him.

‘Outstanding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just one more question, and I’ll let you get back to work. Does Dr. Houghton have afternoon rounds here at the hospital today?’

Werfel checked the schedule. ‘He does. At three o’clock.’

‘Oustanding,’ Hatfield said again, this time softly.

It was 3:15. There were two patients in Houghton’s waiting room, and two nurses behind the glassed-in check-in desk.

‘Mary Coggins?’ Hatfield demanded.

The petite brownette he remembered from last time looked up. He pushed through the door beside their cubicle and as it closed behind him to shut them off from view of the waiting patients, he grabbed her arm, half-dragged her down the hall to an empty examination room and shoved her inside.

She started to protest, but he slammed the door and snapped, ‘You’re in a lot of trouble, lady. Federal trouble. Aiding and abetting a possible terrorist fugitive fleeing to avoid prosecution.’

‘I did no such thing!’

‘You unlawfully removed a package from a Cedar’s-Sinai locker and sent it to Janet Amore. She’s a federal fugitive, so your action is aiding and abetting. You’ll be detained at the Federal Building in Westwood, in the morning you’ll be arraigned in federal court...’

‘I’ve got a five-year-old daughter at home!’

‘Leaving a child alone is a criminal offense—’

‘She’s not alone. My mother’s with her. You can’t—’

‘Can and will if you don’t tell me everything.’

She was frightened now, crying. ‘We... I didn’t know anything about a fugitive warrant. So when she called and asked if we... I... could get her bearskin and send it to her—’

‘A bearskin?’

There were tears on Mary Coggins’ face, but he could see her deciding to go all noble and protect the doctor and the rest of the staff. He didn’t care what she did, as long as he got what he wanted.

‘Yes, a bearskin,’ said Coggins. ‘Janet said on the phone that she needed it for some sort of ceremony. That is not a federal offense, not in the United States of America.’

A ceremony, he thought? What the hell did she mean? He said, without much force, ‘I can make it one.’

She raised her head proudly.

‘Go ahead, then! I did it. Alone. Nobody else helped me, not the doctor, not the other nurses. They didn’t know anything about it.’

If anybody called his bluff, Hatfield knew he couldn’t make anything stick. Not against her, not against anyone else. Better to get what he had come for and get out, before Houghton returned from his hospital rounds and made an official complaint.

‘All right. Just give me the address, and I won’t have to file a written report on this.’

She took the offered way out. ‘Janet Roanhorse, General Delivery, Groveland, California.’

Janet Roanhorse? A red Indian instead of a Mex?

‘I thought her name was Amore.’

‘She wanted it sent to Roanhorse.’

32

They got to Ferry Bridge just at four p.m., as scheduled. The guides splashed into the knee-deep eddying water to pull the rafts up onto the earth bank so the passengers could get out. Using supplies from the guide house tucked up under the bridge, the guides turned into cooks. The clients sat around eating crackers and oysters and veggie dips while the guides worked to turn out a surprisingly complete dinner.

Jimmy’s mother abandoned the appetizers to approach Janet where she was using stainless steel tongs to expertly turn the chicken breasts grilling on the propane stove. The woman had a quizzical expression on her face.

‘Jimmy said you eat poison oak leaves. Do you? Really?’

Janet gave her an almost sheepish grin, and nodded.

‘Yeah, from time to time, to keep up my own immunity on these trips. It does work, but I don’t usually tell any of our passengers about it. But Jimmy was so curious, I just showed him. He’s a great kid. He’s so observant and interested that he got the other passengers really seeing what was around them. It was great having him in the group today.’

Jimmy’s mother leaned close. ‘I think he’s in love.’

After dinner, they brought out the guitars and more wine. Everyone felt fine and mellow, but for Janet it was bitter-sweet. A high point, but of what was her final trip as a guide down the river that she loved.

Hatfield was on his cellphone with AIC Sammy Spaulding.

‘I’m on my way to the Burbank Airport to meet the other members of my team. I need a smaller plane that can carry all six of us and our weapons up to a little town called Groveland, not too far from Yosemite.’

‘Christ, I can’t do that, Terrill. The red tape—’

‘This afternoon, Sammy. I don’t want to pull rank, but this is a National Security issue and I’m under direct orders from the President. How about in your report, you just say it’s a Hostage/Rescue deep-cover training exercise?’

There was a long, stunned silence. ‘That might do it.’

‘Two more things. Lean on the Groveland postmaster to get the address of a woman named Janet Roanhorse. They’ll sure as hell have it, a hick town like that. And have a couple of rental cars waiting for us wherever the pilot sets us down.’

He could hear the muted clicking of Sammy’s computer keys.

‘That’ll be the Pine Mountain Lake Airport a few miles out of Groveland. The cars’ll be there waiting.’ He added, trying to get back a modicum of control, ‘You owe me bigtime, you bastard,’ and hung up.

It was nearly dark when the party finally broke up. The bus was waiting to take the clients back to Groveland. There was a lot of loud talk and laughter; it was cold enough so their breaths sent puffs of vapor into the air. As they were filing aboard, Jimmy turned back to shake Janet’s hand, very formally.

‘I want to come back every week this summer,’ he said.

She didn’t say anything about this being her last trip. But as Jimmy boarded the bus, she gave him a little hug and a peck on the cheek. His mother embraced her; then they were gone.

For the next hour, the guides were busy deflating the rafts and lugging them and all the rest of the gear up to the edge of the road. When the truck arrived, they stowed everything aboard and climbed aboard themselves for the trip back to Casa Loma. Everything Janet did had an end-of-summer flavor to it. An ending. But she reminded herself it was also a beginning.

On the flight to Groveland, Hatfield planned his strategy.

He needed that girl, whatever her name was, because he needed to know why Thorne was looking for her. And he wanted her before Thorne found her. When Thorne did, Hatfield wanted to be there frst. If she was an American Indian, native-born, he couldn’t play the greencard game with her, but he could pressure her as he had pressured Mary Coggins: by using the threat of arrest as a security risk.

Franklin came up the aisle and leaned over him.

‘When do we get briefed on what’s up, boss?’

Hatfield slid over so Franklin could sit down beside him. It was always good to give his team the feeling that they were all in this together.

‘We’re trying to track down a woman named Janet Amore or Janet Roanhorse, take your pick. From the Roanhorse I think she’s at least part Indian, but I’m not sure. We want her because someone else does. And we want her first.’

‘Who wants her? Why?’

‘I don’t know why. That’s what I want find out. As to who...’ He paused, savoring what Franklin’s reaction would be. ‘Brendan Thorne.’

‘That prick!’ exclaimed Franklin. ‘I’m gonna enjoy this.’ He slid out of the seat. ‘I’ll give the guys a heads-up.’

Hatfield thought about what he’d told Franklin. Yeah. He was sure he was right. Thorne had crossed the woman’s tracks somewhere and was looking for answers just as they were. But answers to what? There was still too much he didn’t know. Did it all go back to the California Delta? He had been there himself, but he still didn’t know what really had happened there on election night.

Jaeger had been there, and Jaeger was dead. Corwin had been there, had killed them, and Corwin was dead. Thorne was trying to find out some of the same things Hatfield was, but Thorne would soon be dead, too. Did it really matter that much what had gone down before he had arived at the scene?

What did matter was finding Janet Amore before Thorne did.

Under one of the Casa Loma store’s night lights, Thorne leaned against the big spare tire mounted on the back of the 4-Runner, his arms crossed, deliberately obscuring the vehicle with his body. He watched the guides unload the rafts and equipment.

He instantly identified Janet Kestrel. She was a tawny-skinned mid-twenties, full-bosomed and lithe, her warrior blood unmistakable: it was there in the strong nose, the high cheekbones, the deep-set liquid eyes with their predator’s fierce gaze. No physical effects seemed to remain from the savage beating she had sustained five months before. A fit companion for the much older Corwin, whatever their relationship had been.

As she talked animatedly with the other guides, Thorne could see that her eyes were the only jarring note in that Indain warrior look: they were the clearest, most crystalline blue Thorne had ever seen, glacier-deep.

After the four guides had shut and locked the shed, the other three crowded around Janet, hugging her in turn, as if she were going away and these were their goodbyes. He was glad he had pushed so hard and fast to find her.

Finally she and the other woman broke away from the men and started for the camper with the plywood box on top. As they walked by, Kestrel’s glance passed casually over Thorne, then did a double-take at the 4-Runner. She paused.

‘Why don’t you just go on, Flo? I think I know this guy, I can get a ride home with him.’

They embraced again, briefly, then Flo went on to her camper as Janet strode over to Thorne, her face set with anger.

‘Okay, Jack, start talking. How did you get my car?’

‘We don’t have time for that now,’ Thorne said, a rough, urgent edge on his voice. He needed to get her out of there, quick. ‘My name is Brendan Thorne. A really nasty FBI agent named Terrill Hatfield is on his way here right now, and he’s coming after you.’

Astonishment momentarily froze her anger.

‘After me? Why? How?’

‘He wants to ask you a lot of questions about the attempted assassination of President Gus Wallberg in Montana.’

‘That’s ludicrous! I’ve never been to Montana in—’

‘It was Hal Corwin behind the gun. Hatfield has connected you with both the man and the event.’ He didn’t say that his own search for her had triggered Hatfield’s interest. Time enough for that later, when he had her safely out of there.

His words had struck her in the chest like flung rocks. Oh God! Hal had tried to kill the president! But how had some FBI agent connected her with Hal? And how had this Brendan Thorne ended up with the 4-Runner?

‘Hatfield probably doesn’t know you’re going under the name Kestrel, but by now he’ll have connected up Janet Amore and Janet Roanhorse through that hospital administrator — Werfel — and Doctor Houghton’s office staff. He’ll have pressured Houghton’s people to find out where they sent the bearskin, and he’ll get your address from the post office in Groveland — that’s how I got it. If you want to talk to him instead of me, fine. But you don’t have any other choices.’

‘I can run. I’m good at running.’

‘Not from Hatfield and his men. Not alone.’

She had been hit with a series of stunning blows, but she recovered quickly. She just put out her hand. ‘Gimme the keys.’

‘They’re in the 4-Runner.’

She ran around to the driver’s side and he got in beside her. As she fired up the engine, all she said was, ‘I need some things from the cabin.’

Thorne was filled with admiration. If she had been riding shotgun for him, it was no wonder that Corwin had kept ahead of everybody for so long.

33

Hatfield huddled with his crew near the rent-a-cars at the Pine Mountain Lake Airport. Their breath went up in plumes on the cold, high-country air, so different from LA’s smog-laden offering. Their faces were pinched from pumping adrenaline: they wanted action. It was what they lived for.

‘Okay, guys, listen up. Roanhorse is in her twenties, black and blue, maybe part American Indian. She’s living in a shack off one-twenty. I don’t think she’s armed and dangerous, but I’m not sure. We either take her tonight or stake out her place until she shows. Only I will interrogate her, because only I have been given the guidelines.’

‘We got you, Chief,’ said Eisler.

‘I’ve got directions, I’ll drive the lead car with Franklin and Greene. Perry, you drive the second car. Any questions?’

Baror asked, ‘If she resists, how hard do we push?’

‘No shooting. It’s vital that I get a chance to talk to her. If she’s packing, it’s going to be a woman’s gun. A .380, something like that. Stopping power of a mosquito. You’ve got your flack jackets. And hell, you’re big tough guys.’

He couldn’t tell them Thorne was the real target here, that he wanted Thorne isolated so he could shoot him down. They were loyal to him, but they still were federal agents: they wouldn’t stand still for a flat-out execution. He doubted Thorne could have beaten them to Roanhorse, but he had to brief them on the possibility, however remote.

‘I doubt we’ll get so lucky, but she might be accompanied by the guy we brought back from Kenya, Brendan Thorne. Turns out we might be talking a major terrorist here.’ Franklin and Greene knew Thorne was no terrorist, but not even they knew he had killed Corwin, not Hatfield. ‘If it comes to grabbing Roanhorse or taking down Thorne, take down Thorne.’ He paused. ‘Anybody have anything?’ No one spoke. ‘Then let’s saddle up.’

Baror exclaimed, ‘Hi ho Silver, and away-y-y-y!’

It was their usual battle cry. Grinning, they headed for the cars. The prospect of action, as always, had them hyped.

As she drove, Janet kept casting covert glances over toward Thorne. He reminded her of Hal: much younger, but the same self-containment, the air of physical capability, the hawk eyes.

He asked, ‘Is there a back way to your cabin?’

‘Aren’t you being paranoid? He can’t be here already.’

‘You don’t know Hatfield. I do.’

‘How do you know him?’

‘Later.’

‘How did you get my truck?’

‘Later.’

A mile from the cabin, she swung the vehicle into what looked like a hiking path through the pines. They bounced over roots and rocks, branches banging against the sides of the car.

She was getting edgy. ‘We can circle around and leave the 4-Runner a quarter of a mile from the cabin.’

‘Good. This was your folks’ place, right?’

How did he know that? She said, ‘Yes. My place now,’ then felt compelled to add, ‘The old man got drunk a lot and beat on my mom and my sister and me. Then mom died and it was just Edie and him and me. Edie sneaked away to LA and married a Mexican. Soon as I was eighteen, I took off. Anywhere was gonna be better than here, with him. When he died, the cabin came to me. So I came back. Wood stove, no electricity, but it suits me fine during the warm summer months when I’m a river guide.’

‘How about during the cold winter months?’

She wrenched over the wheel to avoid crushing a fender against a rough-barked Ponderosa.

‘Then I spend most of my time in Reno, dealing blackjack.’

‘Is that where you met Corwin? Reno?’

‘Later,’ she said, aping him.

‘Fair enough.’

She thought, Why did I tell him all that? She had to get away from him as much as she did from Hatfield. It sounded to her like the FBI was after him, too, so after she found out from him where Hal was, she could use him to ditch the feds.

She drove the 4-Runner in a tight circle to face back the way they had come, then cut the engine and lights. They sat in silence until the high country silence that was no silence at all had again closed in around them. A nighthawk gave his cooing chuckle somewhere in the middle distance, throwing its voice, as always, so she couldn’t be sure just where it really was.

Thorne surprised her by quietly opening his door and getting out. He stood beside the 4-Runner and gestured toward the cabin, speaking softly through the open window.

‘It’s too silent over there. No wildlife sounds. Hatfield and his crew have the place staked out, waiting for you or me or maybe both of us. We’ll split up here, I’ll create a diversion. Where do we meet up if things go wrong?’

‘Meet up? Uh — Whiskey River.’ She said it before she thought it through, then knew it was the right thing. At Whiskey River she would be among friends. She wanted to lose Thorne, but she had to find out from him about Hal first. ‘It’s a biker bar in Oakdale, down the hill a ways.’

‘Since the Feebs are here, they’ll have your real name from the Groveland post office.’

‘You’re saying I should lose the 4-Runner?’

‘Yeah. It might lead them to you.’ He tapped a hand lightly on the window frame. ‘Give me five minutes.’

He melted into the undergrowth, as silently as she had ever seen anyone move, even the reservation Indians of her childhood.

Hatfield put his team in place in the woods between the highway and the cabin, took the driveway himself. If the woman was alone, his men would hold her while he waited for Thorne to show. If Thorne didn’t appear, he’d interrogate her alone. Why was Thorne looking for her? How did she fit into things?

If Thorne was with her, he’d let his team take her, then tell Thorne they had to talk. Kill him, make it look to his men like self-defense. He went into a comfortable crouch in a grove of western hemlock beside the track into her cabin, his .40 Glock semiauto resting on his right knee with his forefinger very lightly touching the trigger.

He tensed. Someone was walking cautiously up the gravel drive behind him. How in hell...

Thorne’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

‘Hatfield? Has she shown yet? Do you have her?’

Hatfield came slowly erect, the gun still out of sight beside his thigh, sure that he would be able to see Thorne on the open driveway by the light of the gibbous moon.

‘We’re waiting for her,’ he said in soft tones that wouldn’t carry to his men. ‘I sent you the tickets to Kenya, why in hell did you fake your own death?’

‘Because I’ve seen the inside of a Kenyan prison.’ Thorne gave a low laugh. ‘No thanks. But why did you plan to set me up? I told you I didn’t want credit for Corwin. Told you all I wanted was out. Why didn’t you just let me go my way?’

Hatfield peered through pale moonglow at the figure just visible on the far edge of the drive.

‘I was under orders to make sure you stayed out of the country for a few months.’ He was slowly raising his Glock, keeping it where no vagrant ray of moonlight could touch it. ‘Then you’ll be released and you can go back to Tsavo...’

He pumped round after round at the shadowy figure. It was blown sideways, spinning into the thicket of heavy juniper bushes beside the road with a long, loud, strangled cry. A moment of thrashing, then silence. He’d got the fucker! Now, just seconds to cover himself with his men.

With a gloved hand, he pulled out the old Colt he’d pushed the rounds through at the firing range in D.C. The perfect throw-down piece, untraceable, exactly the sort of illegal weapon Thorne would carry. He fired three times into the air and threw the gun into the bushes where Thorne had fallen.

‘Over here!’ he yelled. ‘I need lights! I need guns! I need men! Now!’

Like her father before her, Janet had wrapped her money stash in waterproof plastic that she had buried near the rear corner of the cabin only eighteen inches down in dry soil. She dug it up with her pocketknife, then moved silently up the side of the cabin toward the door. At the flurry of gunfire from the driveway, she jumped two feet in the air.

‘Over here!’ an unknown voice shouted. ‘I need lights! I need guns! I need men! Now!’

Hatfield’s men sounded like a cattle stampede as they abandoned their posts to rush to the aid of the shouting man. Hatfield? Had he shot Thorne? Killed him?

She ran to the door, slipped in, grabbed up her cellphone, jerked the bearskin off her bunk-bed, threw a couple of armloads of clothing into a backpack, was out again within ninety seconds. Her Reno wardrobe in the closet might hold them there, making them think she just hadn’t gotten home yet.

She drove slowly, cautiously away, without lights and without even thinking of waiting for Thorne. He would make it or he wouldn’t. She would wait for him at Whiskey River for... three days. Longer than that, he wouldn’t be coming.

Hatfield was waiting impatiently by the heavy thicket of juniper bushes where Thorne had gone down. He said to his men, ‘Thorne! He came up behind me and started firing. No warning, no words, nothing. He’s in that thicket. I don’t have a flashlight...’

They went in, Franklin in the lead. ‘Here’s his piece!’ He took a knee, and, without touching it in any way, sniffed the barrel of the throw-down .45 that Hatfield had planted there. ‘Yeah, this baby’s been working all right.’

They worked their way through the thicket and congregated on the far side. They had found the gun. They had found heavy blood splotches. But they hadn’t found Thorne.

Hatfield had a sinking feeling in his gut. But, hit like that, bleeding like that, Thorne couldn’t get far.

‘Listen up.’ They stood in an exhausted circle around him, adrenaline leaching from their bodies. ‘He’s hit, and he’s hit hard. Throw a perimeter around this wooded area until first light, then beat the bushes until we find the bastard’s body.’

‘Cops?’ asked Eisler.

‘We don’t invite the cops in, ever. You know that. If you spot him, shoot first and shoot to kill. Treat him like a Texas rattlesnake. By sunup, I want him in a bodybag.’

34

Thorne saw Hatfield coming up with the Glock and threw himself sideways into the cover as he had done with Corwin up on the mountain, yelling to make Hatfield think he was hit. But Christ, he was hit. The bullet smashed his side like a wrecking ball, accelerating the twist of his body so he went down hard on his side in the undergrowth, stunned.

He was bleeding heavily. Good: give them something to puzzle over. Bad: lose too much blood, the body would go into a defensive mode, pull blood in from the extremities, shut down everything not needed for sheer animal survival, and he’d go into shock. If the shock didn’t finish him off, Hatfield would find him and finish him off. Move. Now.

Things were going in and out. Essential to stop the bleeding now, so they would have no blood trail to follow. He ripped his sodden t-shirt apart and stuffed a long strip of it right through the wound, closing off both entry and exit.

That was when the pain started. Good. Pain meant he might not go into shock. But he had at least one broken rib, maybe two. Did he have bone splinters driven into his lungs? In his head, he heard Hernild’s voice:

The bullet entered and exited at an angle... fragmented the seventh rib... glanced off rather than penetrated... rib bone driven into the chest cavity but not into the lungs themselves... crawled a thousand feet to his cabin... saved his own life...

Hit as Corwin had been hit. Now he was going to have to save his own life, also as Corwin had done. Using all his woodcraft, he managed a silent crawl to the side of the thicket away from the searchers. Somehow found his feet, his balance, staggered away. Hatfield must have planned to kill him all along. So why the ticket to Kenya, why the elaborate charade? None of it made any sense...

He fell down. Had let his mind wander. Forget Hatfield for now. Just keep ahead of him. He struggled to his feet, went on. From lodgepole pine to lodgepole pine, from subalpine fir to subalpine fir, from white spruce to white spruce. Finally into a stand of poplars where the going was faster. Plenty of tree trunks to hang on to as he lurched along, and they grew thickly, almost like bamboo, so it would be harder for anyone to see him moving through the grove.

Just before moonset, he looked back the way he had come. No blood trail. He was going to make it! He was going to beat that bastard Hatfield at his own game. Whatever that game was.

His whole life had been fight or flight. Usually fight, but now, flight. Flight where? And just like that it came to him, the whole thing. The Loma Vista store. Call it two miles. Food. Clean water. AQUA River Tours. Medical supplies. Antibiotics. Hope someone on an overnight camping trip had left a vehicle parked there. Surely he could jump the ignition and get it going. He was a Ranger wasn’t he? Well, ex-Ranger...

He jerked his mind back. He had wandered out onto Highway 120. He got back onto the shoulder. Bent to pick up a fallen branch for a walking stick, and fell down again. Idiot! Keep the head higher than the heart or he’d end up as dead as Corwin.

Corwin! That was it! Hatfield wanted him dead because he, not Hatfield, had killed Corwin and thus had saved Wallberg’s life. If Thorne was alive, even in a Kenya jailhouse, he could keep telling people all about it. Eventually, someone might listen. And talk. Talk to important people who might believe, and talk also, and Wallberg might hear about it... Far better for Hatfield if Thorne were dead.

Ahead, in the just beginning pre-dawn, he saw the Casa Loma store. And the ’94 Chev Astro minivan that had been parked there yesterday morning. Detach the wires under the dash to bypass the ignition switch... And what? Drive as far and fast as he could? Hope he got to Oakdale and Whiskey River and Janet Kestrel before Hatfield caught up with him?

To his wandering mind, Janet seemed to have all the answers he needed. She’d give him two or three days before she moved on. He would have to get to Whiskey River before then. He’d have to tell her that Corwin was dead — and that Thorne was the one who had killed him. Then somehow, despite all that, get her to work with him on finding the answers he sought.

But first things first. He needed food, water, antibiotics to stave off incipient infection. Already he was getting feverish. If he went goofy, he was lost indeed.

He threw a rock through the store window.

As the sun began to shine through the notch of the Tioga Pass beyond Yosemite, Hatfield had to admit that Thorne was gone. Or that his men had missed the body. They should be expanding the perimeter of the search, but they didn’t have the manpower for it. He was operating outside the FBI action structure, and at this point, he couldn’t call in the cops or the sheriffs. Because if Thorne was found alive, he knew Thorne would talk.

The girl hadn’t shown, either. His search engines had been useless: he’d been looking for Amore or Roanhorse, not Kestrel.

He ransacked her cabin. What looked like all her clothes were there, and her personal papers. Missing were her i.d. and purse and money and car keys, but she would have needed those...

Car keys!

He checked his watch. Eight a.m. He didn’t remember Sammy as a workaholic, but he called the LA FO and asked for AIC Spaulding. Sammy was in!

‘Terrill! I couldn’t sleep all night. How much trouble am I in with the big boys back in Washington because of you?’

‘None. We missed our man. But I need you to run a Janet Kestrel, that’s K-E-S-T-R-E-L, for a California driver’s license, any vehicles registered to her, any wants and warrants.’

‘That sound you hear is my sigh of relief. Okay, Kestrel. I’m feeding her into the computer right now. Anything else?’

Hatfield paused, could see no downside to going ahead.

‘Yeah. Put out a Seeking Information Alert on her.’

‘An SIA? That’s terrorist shit, Terrill.’

‘I keep telling you this is coming from far up the food chain. I need to ask her about a possible associate.’

‘Got you. Ah hah! Janet Kestrel. Valid California driver’s license and a valid Nevada driver’s license. She holds legal title to a 1990 Toyota 4-Runner, dark green, Calif Five, C-W-D, Zero-Four-Six. Registration and insurance are current, no wants or warrants. I’ll keep digging, but—’

‘Put out a BOLO on the 4-Runner as well.’

He hung up, elated. They didn’t have Thorne — yet. But he’d soon have the girl. Had she and Thorne ever hooked up? Did she connect with Corwin in any way? Was that why Thorne was looking for her? He’d wring her dry, then decide whether he had to keep her on ice, probably in the FBI’s secret detention cells at the Federal Building in Westwood. The post-9/11 anti-terrorist laws gave him plenty of authority to do that.

With the BOLO out on her 4-Runner, and the SIA out on her, it was just a matter of hours until he had her in custody.

Janet was already in Oakdale with the 4-Runner stashed in Kate Wayne’s garage before Hatfield got out his BOLO. Kate had been a fellow blackjack dealer with her in Reno, but three years before had married a biker who was part-owner of Whiskey River. They had a daughter, now aged two, and a good marriage until he was killed in a motorcycle crash. Kate took over his share of Whiskey River, and now worked there as night bartender.

Janet got Kate’s spare key from the fake rock beside the front door, looked in on Lindy, Kate’s two-year-old sleeping daughter, and fell into bed in the made-up spare room of her modest California bungalow two blocks from Whiskey River. She went to sleep, hard, without even remembering to wonder whether Thorne was dead or alive.

35

Alive. Sort of.

A half-feverish Thorne drank water and ate trailmix, then treated his gunshot wound with antibiotics taken from one of the AQUA Tours first-aid kits. He bandaged it and wrapped the bandage in plastic bags for waterproofing, and stole a life jacket. Before staggering out to hotwire the Chevy Astro, he left a hundred-dollar bill on the counter by the cash register.

This night drive down the tortuous dirt road to the Tuolemne River — the track Arness had called mean as a snake — seemed much more dire than his drive down the morning before. It was just a blur of never-ending twists and turns ahead of his high-beams, no barriers to a precipitous tumble to the valley floor and the ribbon of river, more daunting because imagined rather than seen in the obscurity of night.

When the track finally leveled out by the Tuolemne, he stopped the car and rolled down his window to hear the rushing water. It was not a soothing sound. Even through his medicated haze, he shivered slightly.

He put on the life jacket, and half-slid down the grassy bank to the leaky old boat hidden in the bushes. With his last strength, he wrested it from its bed of weeds, shoved it into the water and crawled in. Bent over and clutching the gunnels, he worked his way forward to the bow of the boat. The stern lifted, slowly swung around.

Facing forward, he watched the water seep up between the boat’s dried-out planks, chills running through him even as sweat stood on his face. He let the river take him.

Kate Wayne looked more like a cowgirl than she did a biker. She rolled her own cigarettes and wore plaid shirts with leather loop ties, tight faded jeans and embossed high-heeled cowboy boots, and a Stetson hat over her streaked-blond hair.

Right now she was pouring coffee, her shrewd brown eyes, set in a lean fox face, examining Janet seated across the kitchen table from her.

‘Don’t try to bullshit me, lollypop. You only act this way when you’re scared shitless. Remember, I knew you when.’

Janet chuckled and bit into her third toasted English muffin slathered in butter.

‘You’re right, I’m in trouble. Because of Arnie. You remember I worked in Reno last summer to pay for a new roof for the cabin. Anyway, mid-July, Arnie and I were in the Golden Horseshoe after my shift. I was trying to watch Wallberg accept the Democratic Presidential nomination on TV, Arnie as usual was trying to turn me out, with him to protect me — and I got pissed off. So I started flirting with this old dude on the next stool. Then Arnie got pissed and slapped my face, really hard.’

‘Arnie was always good at that. Why you let that turd—’

‘Next thing I know, he and the old guy are taking the place apart. Arnie had a knife, the old guy a bottle. The cops came in the front while I was dragging the old guy out the back. I got him into the 4-Runner and started driving. I figured Reno’d had enough of me for a while. His name was Hal. We traveled together ’til November. The best four months of my life.’

‘That’s the goddamndest story I’ve ever heard.’

‘He got me away from Arnie. He... valued me. Made me value myself. We never made love. I tried, at first, but he couldn’t do it. His wife had been killed by a drunk driver years before, and he still felt guilty about it.’

Kate asked, ‘It’s because of him that you’re in trouble?’

‘Yeah. Him and Arnie. The FBI is looking for me.’

‘What the fuck did you do?’

‘Nothing. I lent Hal the 4-Runner in January and haven’t seen him since. A man named Thorne showed up at AQUA Tours last night, driving it. Said the federales were after me.’

‘How did he get it?’

‘I don’t know. But he was right — the FBI was waiting at my cabin. Thorne held them up so I could get away. I told him to meet me here, but then I heard shooting at the cabin. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I have to know.’ She smiled wanly. ‘And I have to ditch the 4-Runner. So you’ve got a built-in babysitter for the next few days.’

‘What I’ve got is a lot of trouble right here in River City.’ Kate was on her feet, a glint in her eye. ‘You can trade Fat-Arms LeDoux pink-slips, even-up, your 4-Runner for one of those Harley clones he always has around.’

Still no sign of Kestrel or the 4-Runner. Ray Franklin had gone through her place again, and had torn it apart looking for a paper trail. He found one item: a letter from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino north of Santa Rosa, offering her a job dealing blackjack.

‘You think that’s where she went?’ Ray demanded eagerly.

‘We’ll check with them, but I doubt it. I think she heard the gunfire by her cabin, and drove hard all night to get away. She could have been in Mexico before we got out the BOLO. Easy for an Indian to hide in Mexico. I’ll ask Spaulding to see if her 4-Runner was logged through the border near Tijuana.’

‘Why is she so important?’

‘Because she was important to Thorne.’

An hour later, the Seeking Information Alert for Kestrel under any of her names came up with something. Kestrel — under the name Amore — had, for the past three years during the winter months, been a licensed dealer at one of the casinos in Reno. No negatives on her from the casino or the cheap rooming house on South Virginia Street where she lived.

She had also worked in Reno for part of the previous summer, and in July was ‘present’ at a bar brawl in a joint called The Golden Horseshoe. A hardnose named Arnie McCue had been beating her up and some old guy rescued her. Both she and the old guy had disappeared, presumably in tandem, just as the cops arrived, and hadn’t been seen since.

On the surface, nothing. But McCue’s interview was provocative: ‘He was just an old fart, drunk at the bar. Had a limp, but he sure could move quick. Quicker than me.’

Old guy. A limp. Moved quick. Corwin. Had to be.

Hatfield had his connection. Amore had been running with Corwin from July until the Delta murders in November. No wonder she had changed her name to Kestrel. Somehow Thorne had found out about her, and had gone looking.

None of it helped much. He didn’t know where Kestrel was. He didn’t know where Thorne was. Or even IF Thorne was.

Thorne was. Barely. He had never been so cold and wet as he was right then, shooting the Tuolemne in a disintegrating rowboat without any oars. Not even as a kid when he and his best friend Wally would shoot the Chino River in a rubber raft when the ice went out in the spring and took all of the Fairbanks bridges with it.

The rowboat kept riding lower and lower in the water, until just the gunnels were out, but it was keeping afloat. Then the sodden craft hit a jagged rock broadside and flipped over. Thorne got ten minutes out of clinging to the largest piece of wreckage before he was knocked loose. It was like getting caught in the surf in Panama; he didn’t know which way was up, tried to grab breaths when his face broke water, kept curled up like a shrimp to avoid shattering his limbs on the rocks.

One foot struck gravel. He tried to bury his fingers in the shifting bottom, but was ripped away again. More rocks. More foaming white water. Pebbles! He bellyflopped into foot-deep water on a sloping stony bottom. Crawled up a few feet onto the beach where the eddy had thrust him. There, the rushing river couldn’t catch his legs and drag him back again.

The sunlight through pine boughs felt warm on his back. His clothes started to steam. He shut his eyes. He slept.

Walt Greene burst in. ‘Old guy runs the Casa Loma store had a break-in last night. Also at the AQUA River Tours facility in the same building. The perp stole dried food and water and first-aid stuff. He also stole a car an overnight camper had left parked by the store.’

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

‘Couple of miles.’

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

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

Hatfield demanded sharply, ‘Why is that significant?’

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

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

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

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

Compromise Authority: shoot on sight. Shoot to kill.

36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adrenaline surged. ‘Don’t touch it!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Stupid, fucking, stuck-up bitch.’

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

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

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

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

‘What’ll it be?’ asked Kate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hi.’

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

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

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

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

Thorne steeled himself. ‘We have to talk.’

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

37

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Closure you will get, Mr. President.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said.

After a full minute, she sighed and got to her feet and went around him to her chair and sat down. She poured herself a drink, held up the bottle. He nodded. They drank, set the glasses down. He resumed as if she hadn’t tried to kill him.

Their stalk of each other down the mountain. Firing at the same time Corwin fired. Corwin’s crawl to the stream. She didn’t interrupt, just kept her eyes on his face.

‘I told Corwin, “You missed.” He said, “Did I?” and rolled over into the water and was dead and gone forever.’

To his surprise, the story seemed to calm rather than incense her further. She just said, ‘I repeat: he must have meant to shoot Jaeger instead of President Wallberg.’

‘I thought of that. But he had a history with Wallberg, none with Jaeger. It just doesn’t make sense, unless you know things I don’t. You can see why I had to find you, why I hope we can work together to find out the truth. What were you to Hal? Lover? Co-conspirator? How did you two meet? What did he tell you about him and Jaeger? Him and Wallberg?’

‘If I said he told me nothing about anything, then what?’

‘If that’s the truth, then we’re both screwed. Hatfield isn’t going to stop. I thought he just wanted me in a Kenya jail. Instead he tried to kill me. If I was dead, I couldn’t tell Wallberg that it was I who saved him, not Hatfield. So now he has to kill me. It’s not urgent with you, but he thinks you might have some knowledge he wants. He’ll get you, then he’ll stick you away somewhere until he has your story.’

She poured them each one more shot, as if needing the time to make her decision. They sipped, then she sighed and said, ‘First, you have to tell me about that night in the Delta.’

‘Everything? You won’t like it.’

‘I have to know. Tell me anyway, even if some of it’s... awful.’ He did. She blanched fish-belly white at the state of Nisa’s body, but didn’t stop him. When he was finished, she said, ‘I spurred Hal on. I said that if I was his daughter, I’d kill my husband for trying to kill him.’

‘So you knew his story. How did—’

‘We met in Reno. He saved me from a beating by a guy who wanted to turn me out with him as my pimp. Hal and I left that night and traveled the west together. There was never anything sexual between us. He became the father I wished I’d had, I became the daughter he wished he’d had. When we heard on the TV that Wallberg would be at the Grand Canyon, I told Hal he had to talk with Nisa because I knew it was chewing at him, what she did. She told him that Damon shot him for Wallberg. He didn’t believe it, because Wallberg had once been his best friend.’

‘So why did Nisa yell for security?’

‘What she said made him so angry that he said he was going after Damon. She panicked. But then she just said he had tried to snatch her purse, to give him time to get away.’

‘Were you there, too?’

‘Outside. I was dressed up like a squaw girl to be inconspicuous. But Jaeger saw me and came on to me. He told me they’d be at the Desert Palms Resort in California later that month, and wanted me to meet him there. Said he’d show me a good time. Instead, I told Hal about the Desert Palms, and talked him into going over the wall to find Damon Mather. I waited for Hal in the 4-Runner. But neither Damon nor Nisa was there. Hal saw Wallberg alone in the mineral pool and tried to get the truth out of him. He got nothing except shot at.’

‘So he didn’t go there to kill Wallberg.’

‘He didn’t even go there to kill Damon Mather, though I thought he did. He just was going to get the truth out of him. That night the two of us ended up in a little desert motel halfway back to LA, drunk. I was in a rage at what all of those people had done to him, and that’s when he said it was Mather who pulled the trigger and that he didn’t care any more, he was going to quit, get on with his life.’ Her eyes were miserable. ‘I left while he was asleep. I abandoned him.’

‘Not much else you could do at that point,’ said Thorne.

‘I should have stuck with him. When I read in the LA newspapers that Wallberg would be at a Beverly Hills hotel for the election, I saw a way to make up for it. I conned my way into Jaeger’s room as the stupid little squaw girl from El Tovar, and saw Nisa’s name and a phone number and ‘Terminous’ on the pad by his phone. I pretended I hadn’t.’

‘Something’s missing here. You ended up in the hospital.’

‘I just remember bits and pieces about that. I was in a maid’s cart... two black guys were dumping me in an alley... When I woke up in the hospital, Hal was there. I told him about Terminous and the phone number. Seeing me all beat up must have made him change his mind about Mather, made him decide to go kill both him and Nisa. If I hadn’t told him where they were—’

‘Did you ever think that maybe Jaeger wanted you to get that phone number? Two black guys dumped you in the alley. Two black guys were with Jaeger in the Delta. Maybe he wanted Hal to go there so that he and his men could kill him.’

‘They were there to kill Hal?’ Her eyes were wide with surprise. ‘Not to save Nisa and Damon?’

‘That’s one of the things I need to find out.’

‘Hal is dead. Nisa is dead. Damon is dead. Even Jaeger is dead. There’s nobody left to ask.’

‘There’s the two black guys. I think they’re from LA. If I could get down there without Hatfield spotting me...’

For the first time, she smiled. ‘I can do that for you.’

38

On Friday morning, five bikes drove south through the pre-dawn darkness from their rendezvous at Whiskey River. All of that wild-and-free-on-your-chopper stuff was, well, just stuff. Motorcycles at best have five-gallon tanks. You might stretch it to two hundred miles with a tailwind, but you’d be bone dry. Then there were breakfast and lunch stops, bathroom and coffee breaks.

Leading them was burly, bearded Worf the Klingon, riding a 1998 Harley Dyna Wide Glide with a customized paint job, ape-hanger handlebars and lots of chrome. With his bandanna under his neo-Nazi pot, and a bunch of decals sewn onto his leather vest, he was the sort of outlaw who was a magnet for law enforcement. Just what Janet needed to avoid, but she hadn’t said that to Worf. Because the others, despite wrap-around shades, leathers, and American flags on their backs, were nine-to-fivers. The black-leathered mamas up behind them on their bikes were their wives. None of their bikes smacked of the outlaw chopper: two customs, a standard, and Janet’s thumper. Multipurpose bikes, good for a round-trip to the high Sierra or to commute to work on Monday. Law-enforcement wouldn’t waste time on them.

With his uncut, unkempt hair, and a good start on a beard, Thorne, up behind Janet on the Suzuki, fit right in. Their first chance to talk, besides shouted comments over the thunder of the engines, came as they ate hot dogs and guzzled non-alcoholic beer at a rest-stop south of Fresno.

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Janet around a big bite of hot dog. ‘We’re after an LA pimp named Sharkey who used to supply Jaeger with whores. Just how do we go about finding him?’

‘We don’t. We let him find us.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We make him tell us what really happened in the Delta.’

That’s when Worf bellowed, ‘Let’s saddle up.’

Ninety-nine cut over to 1–5, which took them up over the Grapevine and down into the LA basin. At Santa Clarita the others cut off west on Cal 126 toward the Los Padres National Forest for their weekend encampment. Janet and Thorne kept on toward LA. They would rendezvous with the others on Sunday for the ride back up to Oakdale.

The Gaylord Arms was a shabby hot-sheet motel on Santa Ana near the Watts Towers. Thorne took two rooms on the first floor with separate entrances and separate room numbers but with a connecting door in between, giving the check-in clerk too much money and hinting at a weekend drug buy or a bootleg porn shoot. Janet didn’t register.

‘What makes you think Sharkey will show?’

‘Putting out Jaeger’s name with the low-life element will make him come to us. Maybe tomorrow.’

She almost hoped Sharkey wouldn’t come. What might a man like Thorne do to make him talk?

‘Mind if I take the bike while you’re spreading the word?’

‘It’s all yours.’

Thorne hit three pick-up bars and two strip-joints, leaving the same message everywhere: ‘A man named Jaeger told me to see a man named Sharkey to get me some girls for a beat-up-your-ho video I’m making. My name is Thompson and I’m in room 121 at the Gaylord Arms.’

Bread upon the waters. But finally it was too much for him, and he returned to the motel. Janet was not back yet. An hour later, someone playing rap music on his cellphone paused outside the door. Thorne stood on a chair to peer down through the slats of the window blind without being seen himself. The man was black, 30, shaven-headed, wearing a yellow FUBU shirt with a pimp’s gold rings on his fingers and in his ears, and a pimp’s gold chains around his neck. Sharkey? This soon?

Seemed like it was. He called softly through the door. ‘Yo, I be Sharkey. Lookin fo a man calls hisself Thompson.’

Thorne returned the chair to its place, opened the door, and stepped back so the man and his rap music could come in. Something struck him very hard on the back of his head. Going down into the twilight zone, he thought in disgust:

rap music coming through the door to cover Sharkey himself coming in from the connecting room... thought Sharkey’d want to talk first... stupid... stupid... stu-p-i-d...

A voice said, as through gauze, ‘Me’n Horace gonna hurt you bad, sucker. I likes to hurt ’em, mos surely do. Dudes or bitches, don’t make no mind...’

Thorne was gone from there.

Janet rode north, then west on Century Boulevard to the vast sprawl of LAX, twice around oval World Way past the endless array of passenger terminals, then back east to Century again. Approach avoidance. She finally stopped at an all-night cafe for a bowl of chili and countless cups of coffee.

She couldn’t be part of this. Because of Thorne, the Feds were looking for her. Thorne had killed Hal, now planned to torture Sharkey to find out what the man knew. She stopped with her cup halfway to her lips. She had lousy taste in men.

Arnie McCue, her one-time boyfriend in Reno, had wanted to make her into a prostitute. To get away from him, she had gone off with Hal Corwin, a man old enough to be her father. Who had Hal been, really? A mercenary. A man who murdered his own daughter and desecrated her body. At her urging, at least the killing part of it. Now she had gone off with Thorne — after trying to kill him because he had killed Hal.

This was not who she was, urging a man to kill people, trying to kill someone herself. Hal and Thorne had infected her, the pair of them, with their own madness. She had to let go of both of them.

The time had come for her to build a real life for herself. Start by embracing the racial heritage she had always rejected because her father had been an abusive drunk, and go deal blackjack at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino. Build on that. Yes! She smiled to herself. For once she was making the right decision.

But when she turned the bike back into the Gaylord Arms parking lot, her light swept across two black men supporting a stumbling, head-lolling Thorne. Without thought or hesitation, she goosed the bike. The man in front, a deer in the headlights, skittered. Bad choice. The bike hit him in the chest. He flew backwards into a parked car.

The roar of the bike got through the haze in Thorne’s head. Then the sound of impact. Janet! Saving his ass! Even as he thought it, he was falling backwards and flailing his legs. Woozily, not with his usual snap, but doing it just the same. His foot whapped the gun out of Sharkey’s hand, his leg took out Sharkey’s knees. He rolled over, gave Sharkey an elbow to the throat that had just enough on it.

‘The street,’ he croaked to Janet, tossing her the car keys Horace had dropped.

He leaned against a car for a moment. He couldn’t have done it alone, but he was coming out of it fast, now. He dragged Sharkey into the room and dumped him on the floor. No door opened, no head was thrust out. Three rooms that were lit went dark. A $50,000 black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Janet sprung the trunk. Together, they dumped Horace in and slammed the lid.

Sharkey was tied with wet towels to a chair in the middle of the room. Sweat gleamed on his shaven head, there was drool at the corner of his mouth. Thorne sat in front of him, monotonously slapping his face with a wet wash cloth. Then Thorne took out his Randall Survivor. The blade gleamed.

‘C’mon, Sharkey. Wake up. Pain time.’ He tipped Janet a quick wink that she didn’t catch. ‘Turn on the TV and wait in the other room, honey. I know you don’t like to see blood.’

Leaving, she hit the remote. It was an old movie. The Dirty Dozen. Before she could get the connecting door shut, she heard Thorne say, ‘First a finger, then an ear...’

As the door closed behind Janet, a memory from the Rangers overwhelmed Thorne’s mind. Victor had been ambushed by a rebel patrol in Colombia. They’d cut off his pinkie finger before Thorne could get there. Victor hadn’t even groaned. Thorne had killed three rebels with his Randall Survivor, the others had fled. He’d carried Victor over his shoulder five miles through the nighttime jungle back to base. Later they got very drunk and laughed about it.

He had known then that he could never be a torturer. But Sharkey didn’t know that.

Thorne snapped him contemptuously under the nose with his middle finger, very hard.

‘I think I’ll start with the nose,’ he said.

Sharkey wet himself.

‘Okay, Sharkey, Horace is already dead,’ said Thorne, ‘but you’ve still got a chance — just one. Why did Jaeger take you and Horace to the Delta on election night?’

Sharkey wanted to lie, but this sucker would off him in a second like he had Horace. It was in his eyes. A life-taker.

‘To take out some dude,’ Sharkey said. ‘Me an Horace, we stayed up on the levee, couple hundred yards off from this houseboat. Jaeger had balls, he went down there alone to check things out, wasn’t even packin’ no heat. It was real foggy, we couldn’t see shit, couldn’t hear shit. After a while, Jaeger, he come back up, say the dude ain’t there yet. Say, when the dude come, you wait an whack him after he goes inside. Not before.’

‘So you waited.’

‘Yeah. After a while, dude show up, tall, kinda old, had a gimp. We move in.’

A gimp. Corwin’s limp.

‘Dude goes aboard, Jaeger yells, ‘Now!’ We start poppin caps at the houseboat, old Jaeger he breaks out his mufuckin cellphone! Starts yellin fo the heat, says we takin fire.’

‘Were you?’

‘Dunno, man. The fuckin fog, we couldn’t see nothin, couldn’t hear nothin, so we was shootin at nothin. The heat comes, Jaeger tells us to cut out. That’s it, man.’

‘Did Jaeger do any shooting himself?’

‘Tole you, man, cat hadn’t got no gun. Anyway, he was a executive type. Never got his mufuckin hands dirty, not that way, anyhow. Now, with some bitch...’

Thorne wasn’t listening, was thinking. Jaeger had gone aboard, had found Nisa and Damon dead. For some reason, maybe something he saw on the houseboat, he figured Corwin would come back. When he did, Sharkey and Horace would kill him just before the sheriff’s men arrived. The lawmen would find just what Jaeger wanted them to find: Corwin and his victims. Three dead bodies. Pretty much as Thorne had thought it must have been.

He groaned his way to his feet. Now all of his ribs were sore, not just the cracked one. His jaw was swollen, one eye was almost shut. His kidneys were a new agony. The best that he could hope for was just to piss blood for a few days.

He threw Sharkey’s car keys on the bed. At the moment, he didn’t know if he was more disgusted with Sharkey or with himself. Sharkey, for who he was. Himself, for who he was in danger of becoming. He said, ‘Horace is in the trunk of your car. Alive. He’ll need patching up.’

39

Janet was sitting on the side of the bed with her hands knotted in her lap. She had heard nothing from the other room except The Dirty Dozen, Telly Savalas going psycho and getting his. She started to her feet when Thorne came through the connecting door in an agonized shuffle.

‘Is he...’ she began breathlessly. ‘Did you...’

‘Is he what?’ Thorne collapsed into the hard-back chair by the writing table. Then he got it. ‘Is he dead? Christ no. Guy like him, you give him a little nudge, he knows what he’d do to you if he had you tied up. His imagination does the rest.’

‘What does a little nudge mean, exactly?’

‘I snapped him under the nose. Once.’ He demonstrated. ‘Go look. Right now he’s trying to get those towels unknotted. He’ll square it with the night-clerk, get Horace to a doctor — don’t worry about him. He’s a pimp and he kills people.’

‘So do you kill people.’

‘Not for money. And not any more. But maybe I should have messed him up a little. He sure messed me up.’ He groaned his way to his feet. ‘Let’s get out of here. You’re driving.’

She did, Thorne clinging to the back of the Suzuki like a damaged limpet. It was a long ride, north on the 405 to La Cienega and all the way to Sunset. She stopped at an all-night convenience store for a bottle of Ibuprofen, then Thorne checked them into a twin-bedded room under his Benny Schutz identity. It was the same run-down motel below the Strip where he had stayed before he saw Walter Houghton, MD, for the first time.

He ate six pain pills, lay down on one of the beds, fully clothed, to stare at the ceiling. It was after two a.m., so the bar next door was closed. It would open again at four, but for now there was relative silence.

‘We gotta talk while I still can,’ he said. ‘You know, you saved my butt back there. They were going to kill me and dump me off the edge of Mulholland Drive.’

Janet sat on the other bed as she had sat on the bed in Watts, her hands white-knuckled in her lap. She said nothing. Thorne sighed. She wasn’t giving an inch.

‘Okay. It’s just what we thought. Jaeger wanted Hal to kill them both so Sharkey and Horace could shoot him just before the police got there. It would have been a perfect frame, the murderer and his victims, dead together. But Hal got away.’

‘Until you came along,’ she snapped. Then she added, in a softer voice, ‘I’m going to get some coffee. You want any?’ He just shook his head wearily. She nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign when I leave. G’bye, Thorne.’

‘See you in a little while, Janet.’

‘Sure.’

But when he woke in the morning, Janet was gone. She’d left Thorne flat, just as she’d left Corwin. How could he have expected anything else?

She’d also left a note beside his head on the pillow, written on the back of an all-night coffee shop menu.

Saved his life, then dumped him. He’d thought his capacity for emotion had died with Alison, but reading Janet’s message he’d realized what a given she’d become in his life. He’d started to feel things he hadn’t felt in seven years. How stupid could he be? How could he expect that she could ever forgive him for Hal’s death?

When he woke in the morning, Fat-Arms LeDoux didn’t know where he was. He felt dead. He squinted, realized the stripes down the wall were bars. He was in jail.

He sat hunched up on the edge of the bunk, his head in his hands, trying to remember. He’d finished stripping out Kestrel’s 4-Runner, had ridden up 1–5 to to celebrate and to drink his fill at Chopper’s Roadhouse near Lodi, a biker-friendly and colors-welcome saloon where outlaws of every stripe could hang out.

Which made this the Lodi jail. A line from the old CCR song came back to him: Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.

He’d dropped a lot of crystal meth, so when Dangerous Dan spilled beer on his new Tony Lama ostrich-skin cowboy boots, Fat-Arms called him a peckerwood. Dan went for him. They flailed around on the filthy floor until Dan jumped up and laid a size 12 Timberland against the side of Fat-Arms’ head.

Yeah, he remembered now. Bouncing up himself, jerking his Buck knife from a pocket of his vest, sticking the serrated blade into Dangerous Dan’s gut. Then somebody cold-cocked him.

And here he was, in a cell. Was Dangerous Dan alive or dead? Not that he gave a rat’s ass, but if he was dead, Fat-Arms was looking at a world of hard time. If Dan made it, Fat-Arms maybe had himself some wiggle room. If he could think of anyone he could sell to the D.A. in return for a plea-bargain.

Then he remembered Janet. Somebody heavy looking for her, not for her 4-Runner. Not cops. Not crooks. Which left...

He went to the front of the cell and yelled for the trustee, Mitch, a skinny con with close-set eyes and a wispy mustache. Fat-Arms was an outlaw biker of the meanest sort, which made him a local jail-house celebrity.

‘Hey, Mitch, how’s Dangerous Dan?’

‘Word is, he’s hangin on. Prolly gonna make it.’

‘Good. Then tell the D.A. I wanna talk to the Feds about a broad owns a dark green 1990 4-Runner.’

When Thorne tried to get up to go to the bathroom, he ended up kneeling on the floor with his upper body on the bed, like a kid saying his nighttime prayers. Slid further, down onto all fours. Tried to pull himself up. Couldn’t.

His bladder let go. Bloody urine all over the floor. He grovelled around in it, finally was able to drag himself back up onto the bed. He lay there on his side, panting. Thank God for DO NOT DISTURB signs. This was the lowest moment of his life, worse than the worst moments in Panama. There, he’d still been in control of his own body. Here, all he could do was wait until his strength came back. Wait. Rest. Maybe pass out again.

At noon on Sunday, a tall, hard-faced, very fit-looking black guy in a white shirt and a Brooks Brothers suit and a dull tie walked into Fat-Arms’ cell in Lodi like he owned the place. Fat-Arms was unfazed: he’d stomped plenty of niggers like him.

Hatfield looked at the disgusting blob of suet on the bunk. He’d put away plenty of redneck peckerwood bikers like him.

‘Hatfield, FBI.’

Fat-Arms’ guts churned. The nigger was The Man! He held all the aces with the joker as his hole card. A tremendous belch burst from Fat-Arms. The Fed laughed in his face.

‘You’ve got three minutes, LeDoux. Then I’m out of here and you’re in here — twenty-to-life, no parole.’

Fat-Arms talked so fast that spittle flew from his lips.

When he was finished, Hatfield went outside to lean against his Crown Vic and call Ray Franklin on his cellphone.

‘Get a flatbed and a warrant for LeDoux’s garage in Manteca. Kestrel traded the 4-Runner for a Suzuki thumper, even up. Gather up all the parts of the 4-Runner and haul them out of there. Impound them. Kestrel doesn’t know it yet, but LeDoux traded her a stolen bike for her vehicle.’

Franklin was gleeful. ‘We got her for receiving stolen property! Any idea where she is now?’

‘Stake out a biker bar called Whiskey River in Oakdale, east of Manteca on highway 120. Also stake out the house of a Kate Wayne. Kestrel went with a bunch of bikers to LA for the weekend, and should show up at one or the other place tonight.’

‘Search warrants for the house and bar, arrest warrant for the Wayne woman?’

‘Search warrants, yeah. But don’t execute ’em yet. Don’t get spotted by anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Arrest warrant for Wayne, no. She’s a single mother, we don’t need the grief. When Kestrel shows, notify me and get her on a plane to LA soonest. I’ll meet you at the Federal Building in Westwood.’

‘Thorne?’

‘LeDoux never heard of him. Thorne is off the board.’

Janet waved goodbye to the other bikers and cut off toward Kate’s house. She wanted to take a long hot shower, eat a big bowl of chili, and play with Lindy and Jigger. When Kate got home, Janet would recount her weekend and then hit the sack.

Getting off the bike under the sycamore tree beside Kate’s house, she groaned aloud. Over a thousand miles on that snarly little beast in the last three days. She ached all over.

Whenever she thought of Thorne, tears came to her eyes. For a while she’d started to think they could have some sort of relationship when all of this was finished. But dammit, she’d had to leave when she did. She’d get over it.

She wheeled the bike into the garage next to Kate’s little Toyota Echo. Edged her way back out again, closed and locked the door, turned — and was surrounded by four men in street clothes.

‘We have a warrant for your arrest,’ said one in a cold voice.

Hatfield’s men! How...

Two of them twisted her arms up behind her back, cuffs were going on even as they were herding her around the garage toward the street behind Kate’s where they’d parked their car. She tried to protest.

‘There’s a little girl in there I have to take care of—’

‘We’ve already talked with Mommy,’ said the hardbitten muscular one in a sly, almost insinuating voice. ‘Mommy’s not going to go to work tonight after all.’

40

On Wednesday morning, Thorne was able to get off the bed like a normal human being. His ribs were every color of the rainbow, but finally he looked worse than he felt. He stood under the shower for 45 minutes, hot as his bruised body could take. He hadn’t had anything to eat since Saturday, but he hadn’t been hungry. Had just crawled to and from the bathroom to drink water from the faucet and piss it out again. This morning, for the first time, his urine was clear of blood.

He dressed in his last clean clothes, opened the windows to let out the stench of blood and urine, and left three $20 bills for the maid. After tossing his soiled clothes into the motel dumpster, he went to the coffee shop down the street to order eggs and bacon and sausages and hashbrowns and sourdough toast and orange juice. He planned to drink a gallon of coffee, too.

On the mend, definitely on the mend. But for what? His quest was finished. Sharkey’s story had nailed it all down...

He paused with his first forkful of sausage and egg halfway to his mouth. Sharkey’s story.

Sharkey and Horace started shooting as soon as the mid-fifties limping man went into the houseboat. Jaeger called the cops on his cellphone to say they were taking fire and returning it, so the sheriff’s men would find Corwin dead beside his victims. But had Corwin really returned their fire, or had he just slipped away as Deputy Escobar had speculated?

That’s when Thorne’s forgotten fork spanged off his plate to hit the floor with a metallic clatter.

Returned their fire with what? The Magnum had been emptied into Nisa and Damon, all right. But not by him. He hadn’t been there before. He had just arrived for the first time when Sharkey and Horace opened up at the houseboat. No time to kill and reload, let alone time to befoul Nisa’s body.

Thorne dropped too much money on the table beside his untouched food, gulping half a cup of tepid coffee on his way to the door. He knew what had happened. He just needed to get proof. He owed that to Janet. And much more besides.

Janet remembered the midnight plane flight from Oakdale. She remembered being shoved down a dimly-lit corridor, being stopped in an open doorway while the cuffs were taken off, then being shoved in, hard, before the door slammed shut behind her. She was in a cell. But where was the cell?

It had a head-high window of one-way glass in the door so they could look in but she couldn’t look out. A knee-high bunk was bolted to the floor, with an inch-thick mattress and a single thin gray blanket. A sink and toilet were built into the wall facing it. In one upper corner of the room was a camera lens: they could be taping her even when she went to the bathroom. They fed her at irregular intervals. Bland institutional food.

The interrogations, in a room down the hall with a table and two chairs and the ubiquitous camera behind one-way glass, were always the same. How long had she and Corwin traveled together? What had they done? Where had they gone? She told them only what she was sure they had already learned elsewhere.

Only Hatfield asked what Corwin might have told her. And about Thorne. To him, her replies were unvarying: Corwin had told her nothing. She had never heard of anyone named Thorne.

‘We have recovered your 4-Runner.’

‘I owned it free and clear. I had the right to trade it for a motorcycle if I wanted to.’

‘Not a STOLEN motorcycle,’ Hatfield said in nasty triumph.

And she knew how they had found her. Fat-Arms LeDoux.

Sammy buttonholed Hatfield outside the interrogation room, where he obviously had been waiting. A company man, unlike Terrill. A bureaucrat. Afraid to bend the rules when they needed bending.

‘Ah, Terrill, we’ve gotten whatever we’re going to get from her. What do you want me to do with her?’

‘Let her rot,’ Hatfield said.

‘I read the transcript of LeDoux’s statement. She was driving a hot Suzuki thumper she didn’t know was hot.’

‘Lighten up, Sammy.’ God, what a pussy! Hatfield clapped him on the shoulder. ‘We’re the good guys. Don’t you want to be Assistant Director?’

Sammy sighed. ‘Has the D.A. up in Lodi sprung LeDoux yet?’

‘LeDoux is slime. Let them bury him forever.’

Watching Hatfield strut away down the corridor, Sammy Spaulding saw his old pal in a new light. This wasn’t why he had become an FBI agent. He wanted to catch the bad guys. He didn’t see any bad guy in this scenario. Only a lone, scared woman.

But... Assistant Director. It could be his. With the President behind him, Terrill was going to become Director. He would take Sammy with him up the ladder.

Unless Terrill came up against someone who was even tougher and more driven than he was. Little chance of that.

‘Only Superman can stop a train with his bare hands,’ chuckled Walter Houghton, M.D. ‘Take off your clothes.’

They were in one of the medical examination rooms at Houghton’s office. Thorne said, ‘I’m not that kind of guy. And I didn’t come here for a physical.’

‘You’re getting one. Get naked, my man.’

Thorne stripped. Slowly and carefully. Houghton gave him a routine physical: took his blood pressure and pulse, peered into his eyes with a bright light, hit his knees with a rubber hammer, held a stethoscope to first his back, then his chest, while having Thorne breathe deep. His strong, delicate fingers poked and prodded, getting grunts and one yelp. He re-dressed the gunshot wound, retaped the ribs.

‘Any advice?’ asked Thorne.

‘Eat more.’

‘Thanks for the check-up, but I didn’t come for medical reasons.’

Houghton, watching him get dressed, asked, ‘Then why?’

‘You told me Janet Kestrel was raped, but there was no oral, anal, or vaginal penetration. So what’s the evidence of sexual assault as opposed to just a beating?’

‘Oh, the assault was sexual, believe me. Punching and kicking her gave the assailant an erection, so when he was finished he could manually ejaculate on her face and body.’

Thorne nodded. ‘And if someone sent you a semen sample, could you match its DNA with that of Janet’s attacker?’

‘Of course.’

‘Hold that thought,’ said Thorne.

Houghton sighed theatrically. ‘Enigmatic to the very end.’

Thorne rode a series of city buses way out Sepulveda into the Valley, looking for just the right setup. Finally, in the back of a mall parking lot in Mission Hills, he spotted a beat-up 1998 Isuzu Trooper LS with a FOR SALE, $850 sign in the driver’s window and a phone number written in soluble paint on the door.

The paint was peeling, the trim around the left headlight was gone, the front bumper was mashed down on the left side. But the rubber was good, a like-new spare was mounted on the back, and scrawled on the FOR SALE sign was ‘153,411 mi, runs great, power windows and steering and door locks, full tank of gas’.

He was reminded of his ancient Land-Rover, back in Tsavo. He shook off the memory, and called the number. When he asked about the Trooper, a squeaky-voiced teenage girl exclaimed, ‘Matt’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t go ’way!’

Matt was a community college student, thin and earnest and eager to make a sale. Thorne took the Trooper around the parking lot and out into the hustle-bustle of Sepulveda, with Matt beside him, stopped back in the lot with the motor running.

‘Seven-fifty. Right now. Cash.’

Twenty minutes later, Thorne was on the 405 north to its merger with 1–5 in the Trooper, the signed pink slip over the visor. Whenever he stopped for gas, he bought candy bars and corn chips. Seven hours later he checked into the Microtec Inn and Suites at the cloverleaf where east-west 12 intersected north-south 1–5. He ate everything in sight at Rocky’s across the interchange. Back in his room he left a message for Deputy Escobar at the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department. No name: just a phone number, room number, and two words: CALL ME.

Escobar called back within a half hour. Thorne said:

‘Lunch is on me tomorrow, same time, same place.’

Escobar took just a moment to place the voice. Then he said, ‘Check,’ and hung up.

Thorne went to bed and slept hard, without nightmares.

41

‘Déjà vu all over again,’ said Thorne when Escobar entered the Sunset Bar and Grill at the Tower Park Marina off California 12. The deputy did indeed look exactly the same, right down to the miniature purple heart and mid-East service bar pinned above the ESCOBAR nametag on his impeccable tan Sheriff’s uniform. He chuckled at Thorne across the table.

‘Not you. You look like you need to swear out an ag-assault complaint against somebody.’

The place was crowded with tourists and day-sailors. A blonde waitress came to take their order. Cheeseburgers, fries.

‘You ought to see the other guy,’ said Thorne. ‘That’s not the best part of it. Now the Feebs are looking for me as hard as they were looking for your perp last time around. You can win a promotion by turning me in.’

A grin softened Escobar’s features. ‘I knew that relationship wouldn’t last.’ He turned his coffee cup idly. ‘I saw by the TV that Jaeger ate a bullet for the President up in Montana. You know anything about that?’

‘Yeah, a lot. Listen, you told me you took fluid, blood and tissue samples at the crime scene here in the Delta — including semen samples from Nisa’s body, right?’

‘Right. And the Feebs threw me off my own case and then stonewalled the evidence. No DNA results, no autopsy results, no tox screens. Never told me if the Magnum was the murder weapon, or even who it was registered to. So I forgot to tell them about my samples. I’ve got nothing to compare ’em with anyway.’

‘The Magnum was Damon Mather’s.’ Escobar’s eyebrows went up in surprise. ‘Yeah, intriguing, isn’t it? And here’s something else. Back in November, a doctor down in LA had a rape victim who was connected with this case. Intimately. Her attacker ejaculated on her face and body after beating the shit out of her. And the doc’s got the perp’s semen samples.’

Escobar’s eyes gleamed. Thorne had been right: getting shut out of his own murder investigation had cut deep. Escobar was waggling his fingers before Thorne even finished speaking.

‘Okay, c’mon, give. The doc’s address. I’ll overnight my semen samples to him as soon as I get back to the office.’

For the next two days Thorne marked time, exploring the Delta’s twisting waterways in a rented boat, hiking along its levees and studying its bird life. He wanted to call Janet at Whiskey River, just to hear her voice; but he figured he had nothing to tell her that she would want to hear.

On the third day, unable to contain himself any longer, he sent a three-word fax to Houghton: Yes or No? Twenty minutes later, he got back a oneword reply: Tomorrow. The next afternoon brought another oneworder: Yes.

Thorne drove to Lodi to drink beer and think. Johnny Doyle had laid it all out for him that night at the Hard Times Cafe, he just hadn’t been listening hard enough.

Kurt fuckin’ Jaeger, our wunnerful Chief of Staff, had th’ hots for Nisa... She turn’d ’m down cold...

Not understood by Doyle, but now understood by Thorne: she turned Jaeger down so hard he suddenly found he had trouble getting it up with any woman. That humiliation quickly led to obsession, to beating women for sexual release. Thorne felt as if he had raised a rock and found something slimy underneath it.

So he got a black pimp in LA named Sharkey to fin’ ’im hookers din’t mind gettin’ beat on...

When Janet Kestrel turned up at Jaeger’s hotel in LA, he left Nisa’s name and phone number and ‘Terminous’ on his phone pad for her to see. He had glimpsed a woman driving Corwin’s get away vehicle at the Grand Canyon, and thought Janet was she. But in LA, she played him so skillfully — while he was playing her — that he was deceived into thinking she was just a stupid little squaw girl after all, with no connection to Corwin.

So Jaeger had followed his usual M.O. with any attractive woman at his mercy. He had beaten her to get sexually aroused, then had masturbated on her unconscious body.

But at the hospital she passed on to Corwin what she had seen on Jaeger’s phone pad: Nisa’s name and number and the word Terminous. On election day, Corwin called Nisa, but she hung up on him before he could say they had nothing to fear from him. Then she called Jaeger, terrified, thinking she needed protection because Corwin had found them. Jaeger’s plan for revenge was back on track.

That night at the Delta, Jaeger told Sharkey he was going to ‘scout around’ the houseboat. He went aboard, maybe saw Damon’s gun, said something like, ‘For Chrissake, gimme that thing before it goes off.’ Of course Damon did: Jaeger was there because Nisa had pleaded with him to come rescue them.

Instead, he killed them. Six shots, muffled by the fog, five into Nisa. Then he ejaculated on her body. Murder: the ultimate sexual frenzy and release all in one package. With Corwin to take the rap. But Corwin survived.

No wonder that Jaeger had dragged Thorne out of Kenya when the computer said he was the best man to find Corwin. Jaeger had murdered Corwin’s daughter and had befouled her body, and had blamed it on her father. Who was still alive. Jaeger was terrified, in fear of his life.

But he was also ambitious. And Corwin had been smart enough to know that the best way to get him out in the open was to make all of them think that Wallberg was his target.

Where Wallberg went, Jaeger went. When Wallberg was exposed, Jaeger was exposed.

End of Jaeger. But end of Corwin, too, thanks to Thorne.

Nothing to do now except tell Janet what had really happened on the Delta that night. He used his phone card.

Kate’s voice said, ‘Whiskey River.’

‘This is Thorne. Tell Janet to be proud of Corwin. Tell her that he was not psychotic, just a man bent on vengeance. Tell her that he didn’t do anything ugly or dishonorable.’

‘I can’t. A week ago that fucking Fat-Arms LeDoux rolled over on her for immunity on an ag-assault charge. Hatfield’s men took her away in handcuffs.’ Her voice brightened. ‘At least, Hatfield reneged on their deal. LeDoux’s going down, hard.’

A week. His heart sank. It wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t gone looking for her. Janet didn’t have anything they wanted, but Hatfield would never believe that.

Thorne felt his face grow hot. For a moment he thought it was an adrenaline rush, then he recognized it as rage. The same rage that had so often carried him safely through his Ranger years, suppressed since Alison and Eden had died.

Now he welcomed it. Red, cleansing rage, as he had felt at the Colombian rebels who had cut off Victor’s finger. But this rage was directed at Hatfield.

The fucker had gone too far. Despite what he knew, despite what Hatfield had done to him, Thorne had been planning to creep meekly away, find a way to get back to Africa. But this! The Ranger mantra flashed through his mind: Rangers don’t leave Rangers behind.

For right now, Janet was a fellow Ranger.

And she had saved his life, as he had saved Victor’s.

They had taken her watch, but Janet came awake with a start and knew it was the middle of the night. Her edge was that she had nothing to tell them except that Thorne was alive. And she would never tell them that. She had deserted him, sick, in the middle of the night, but she knew that if he learned where she was, he would try to get her out. He would fail, but he would try.

Thorne had the Benny Schutz identity, so he could move around freely. Hatfield thought he was dead. He had the Trooper, a clean vehicle with no connection to Brendan Thorne in anyone’s data base. He knew what Jaeger had done on the houseboat. No one else living did.

There had been something between Wallberg and Corwin from forty years ago. When Wallberg got that inaugural day message meant to get Jaeger into the open — CONGRATULATIONS TO A DEAD PRESIDENT — he had instantly accepted the idea that Corwin wanted to kill him. Thorne was going to find out why.

For Janet. For the dead Hal Corwin.

He had a lot of driving to do. Tomorrow was Memorial Day.

42

Memorial Day. Gus Wallberg sat in the old easy chair that had been his father’s, staring out of his study window at the blue and sparkling water of Lake Minnetonka. The kids were up for the weekend and had the sailboat out, heeled over with the wind, slicing through the waves. He could almost hear their shouts and laughter through the thermopaned glass. Edith was supervising in the kitchen: in two hours they would have a backyard barbecue under the big oak trees that would go on until well after dark.

Just six months ago, he and Edith had sat here together on New Year’s Eve, looking out over the frozen lake from this very window, discussing his upcoming presidency. What a difference those six months had made! Corwin’s inaugural-day letter had not yet been written. Thorne had not been brought in from Africa at Kurt’s urging to try and find Corwin and stop him. There was no hint that Kurt would die by Corwin’s hand, no hint that Corwin would die by Hatfield’s hand.

No hint at all that Wallberg’s poll numbers would soar as a result. The American people thought their President had almost been assassinated by some Muslim fundamentalist terrorist or some right-wing survivalist fanatic, and had rallied around. What would they think if they knew that countless millions of their tax dollars had been wasted by the Justice Department to find an assassin who didn’t exist? Well, they would never find out.

Only Wallberg and a tiny handful of his most trusted aides knew that it had been someone from the President’s past. Terrill Hatfield had killed the killer, thus freeing their President of the dark burden he had carried for forty years.

Almost freeing him. He sighed. Even here, even for just a weekend, he could not escape the pressures of his job. A hardcopy of the first draft of his Fourth of July speech was lying unedited on his lap. Looking at the clock on the mantel above the huge stone fireplace, he felt a tightening in his chest. In one minute, Hatfield would be calling on the secure scrambler phone with his final report on the search for Thorne and that woman, Janet Kestrel. Depending on what Hatfield had to say, Wallberg might truly be free of that dark burden.

The phone buzzed discreetly. Wallberg lifted the receiver from its cradle with no visible tremor in his hand.

‘Terrill, happy Memorial Day.’

‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ came Hatfield’s unmistakable tones. ‘I hope you are being allowed to relax with your family.’

‘I’m on my way to a backyard barbecue right now. You have news for me?’

‘I have closure for you, Mr. President. Janet Kestrel is in custody. A week of sleep deprivation, no privacy, and interrogations around the clock. We have wrung her dry. I can assure you that Corwin did not pass on to her any dangerous knowledge of any sort.’

‘Outstanding!’ But Wallberg still had concerns. ‘When you release her, Terrill, won’t that leave us with a new problem? If she goes to the media—’

‘I am arranging for her permanent commitment to a mental institution as an incurable psychotic. She will have daily psychiatric counselling sessions that will be taped without the doctor’s knowledge. The more she insists on her story, the more apparent her psychosis will seem. If anything does surface...’

Wallberg’s burden was lifting, lifting.

‘How soon will you be able to get it done, Terrill?’

‘Within the week. Both parents dead, her father was an alcoholic, so I ordered the Los Angeles AIC, Sammy Spaulding, to work up a psychiatric history starting in her pre-teen years, fabricating a pattern of sexual abuse from age two on into her teens. I went through Quantico with Sammy, he’s a solid company man, and I’ve instructed him to make sure that the paperwork is bulletproof.’

Wallberg nodded his unseen approval as he listened to Hatfield giving him his life back. The man was worthy of his trust. But even with any threat from Kestrel neutralized, he still had to ask. Thorne was surely dead, had never met Corwin, but still he had been digging into the past.

‘Did the Kestrel woman have any information about Thorne?’

‘None. We know he was looking for her, but we found her before he could. She had never even heard his name until I questioned her.’

‘Any old Ranger friends he might have contacted? Those elite military types tend to stick together.’

‘His only Stateside contact was Victor Blackburn, that Ranger stationed at Fort Benning. We have been clandestinely monitoring his phone calls, letters, e-mails and faxes, twenty-four/seven. Nothing. Since Thorne disappeared into the Tuolemne River, he has reached out to no one, I mean no one. No contacts, no sightings. Mr. President, Brendan Thorne is dead.’

The final weight fell from Wallberg’s shoulders. All possible vestiges of anything Corwin might have known or recalled was gone from the face of the earth. Anyone he might have passed anything on to was dead. Or incarcerated as insane. He cleared his throat sententiously. He loved this part of being President: the chance to reward the loyal service of his underlings.

‘I know how fervently you want to serve your country, Terrill. Serious lapses by the current Director of the FBI will soon be brought to my attention. I think you will enjoy my Fourth of July speech.’ He paused. ‘Mr. Director.’

‘I...’ There was a catch in Hatfield’s voice. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart, Mr. President.’

‘You have earned the position, Terrill.’

Both men hung up simultaneously, each in his own way elated and transported by the conversation. Dreams really did come true. The good guys really did win out in the end.

It was the first of June, two days after Memorial Day. Brendan Thorne had gotten to Rochester, Minnesota the night before, coming north on 52 after driving east on 1-90 non-stop from Rapid City, South Dakota. Just after midnight he had checked into a modest, anonymous motel called The Highway near the junction overpass of 14 and 52 west of the city.

Tired as he was, he had known it would be a mistake to stay at one of the big downtown hotels like the Kahler. The Feebs checked places like that. The Highway Motel was neat, cheap, and clean, just blocks from St. Mary’s Hospital and about a mile from the Rochester Public Library on Second Street, S.W.

The library was an old-fashioned tan limestone building with a warm and welcoming air. In a glass-fronted display case were artifacts from the massive tornado in the last century that had devastated Rochester and led to the eventual establishment of the Mayo Clinic and St. Mary’s Hospital. One was a piece of wood with a straw driven through it by the force of the wind.

When the silver-haired and bosomy woman behind the counter finished checking out a stack of bright-jacketed kids’ books for a soccer mom, Thorne approached her. She had a severe Irish face but a pleasant smile.

‘That straw through the plank!’ he enthused. ‘Amazing!’

‘Good often comes from ill. The tornado was the making of this city.’

‘Well, it’s a fascinating display.’ He paused. ‘I’m hoping that your library has the Rochester Post-Bulletin newspapers from the Vietnam war era on file.’

‘Have you tried the Post-Bulletin itself?’

‘I’m much more comfortable in a library setting, ma’am.’

She gave him a warm smile. ‘I know exactly what you mean. We don’t have those newspapers on computer yet, not that far back, but we do have them on microfiche.’

Twenty minutes later, Thorne was threading film through one of the three reading machines in a small musty windowless room hidden away behind the library stacks. There was even a photocopy machine that turned out white-on-black thermal copies.

He worked with a great sense of urgency. He had to get the leverage to break Janet out before they drained her dry and stuck her away in some mental facility where he could never find her.

The year he wanted was 1966, the day was January first, New Year’s Day. He started turning the crank of the microfiche reader. When he left two hours later he had a thin sheaf of thermal copies from his research. He paid for them, carried them out to his Trooper, and drove back to his motel.

A warm breeze billowed the lacy curtains out into the room, then sucked them back against the screen. Diesel fumes from the highway mingled with the enticing smell of broiling meat from the steakhouse down the block. Thorne settled down with Chinese takeout and the photocopied news stories.

Thirty-nine years before, a fifteen-year-old girl named Heidi Johanson had been struck and killed by a Buick Skylark sedan driven by an eighteen-year-old boy named Halden Corwin. An anonymous caller reported that there was what looked like the body of a dead girl on a narrow snowy road off Highway 52 north of town, a half-mile from the Rainbow dance hall.

The Sheriff responded, and found the dead girl. Just as a call came in reporting a Buick sedan had been stolen, he found the car, run into a tree two hundred yards further down the road. Corwin was behind the wheel. He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital ER with head lacerations. Heidi Johanson was taken to the morgue.

Heidi was a farm girl who had been two years behind Corwin at Rochester High School. She was seen at the Rainbow earlier that evening, dancing, perhaps intoxicated, perhaps with Corwin. Nobody was sure. Her injuries were devastating, instantly fatal.

Corwin had been arrested at the hospital the following morning. There had been many New Year’s Eve accidents for the ER to deal with; by the time his blood-alcohol level was tested, too many hours had passed for the results to be admissible in court. When he showed up for Heidi Johanson’s memorial service four days later, he was thrown out bodily by the dead girl’s big brother, Sven. All good, tear-jerking, small-town paper stuff.

Thorne leaned back and stared unseeing into the night. Corwin had turned eighteen just before the new year, so he had been charged with vehicular manslaughter as an adult. There was one small item about an upcoming hearing, but after that, interest in Corwin was as dead as the girl he had killed. The Post-Bulletin didn’t cover the fact that he had been given a choice by the judge to volunteer for Vietnam or face a stiff jail-sentence, and had chosen Vietnam. Yesterday’s news.

Was there any way, after all these years, to get a look at the Olmsted County Sheriff Department’s accident report? Sure. Parade in waving his FBI commission card. He had no doubt he’d get a copy of the report. Even less doubt that he’d have Hatfield’s men dragging him from his bed by dawn the next day.

He made notes from the newspaper clippings on the few facts he could explore, the few people he could try to contact.

The first and best source of information would be Heidi’s father, Oscar Johanson, but if alive he would be at least eighty now. Her brother Sven, probably around sixty, maybe still around.

Harris Spencer was listed as the ER doctor who had treated Corwin on the night of the hit-and-run. Retired? Moved away? Dead?

Time was passing. Tomorrow, hit the library to initiate internet searches for Sven Johanson and Harris Spencer.

43

The farm was on narrow blacktop highway 42 near the tiny town of Elgin. Pastures, green grass, grazing cows, corn fields. Thorne got the number off the mailbox beside the highway, and turned up a gravel road leading to a white house and a red barn with a pond down behind it.

Redwing blackbirds gently bounced on the cattails flanking the pond, their musical calls filling the air. Chickens pecked industriously in the dirt, pigeons studded the barn’s roof-line. A golden retriever came bounding down from the house, tail wagging and tongue lolling, to thrust a wet nose into Thorne’s palm with a golden’s unquenchable optimism.

The only sour note was the strong-looking sixtyish man, who would have been blond when he’d had hair, working on a tractor near the chicken coop. He straightened up and wiped the sleeve of his blue workshirt across his brow, glaring at Thorne from angry eyes. Chronic dissatisfaction calipered his mouth. He spat out a long dark-brown jet of tobacco juice.

‘Whatever you’re sellin’, I ain’t buyin’.’

From six paces away he smelled of sweat and the snoose he was chewing. Probably Copenhagen: a round can distorted the pocket of his shirt under his old-fashioned bib overalls. He looked like a man who would have thrown Corwin out of his sister’s memorial service.

‘I’ve heard you can give me some information on a man named Halden Corwin.’

‘The bastard murdered my sister!’

‘I heard it was an accident.’

‘Yeah, well, you heard wrong.’

But Johanson’s gaze faltered. He wiped his forehead again with his sleeve. Leaned back against the tractor and crossed his arms on his chest as if protecting his ribs.

‘Heidi, she was a sweet thing. Mebbe not too bright, but she was lead cheerleader at the high school.’

Thorne said nothing. Johanson’s face darkened.

‘I told Pappy it was a mistake, lettin’ her cheer-lead like that. She liked the boys, an’ all them big athletes from the football team come snufflin ’round like she was a bitch in heat.’

Thorne prompted, ‘Boys like Corwin.’

‘Yeah, Corwin. Mind, he had a girl in his own class was sweet on him, Terry Prescott, but over that Christmas they’d had a fight and broke up. Corwin musta started chasin’ Heidi. Had her with him in that Buick he stole, didn’t he?’

This was a new idea for Thorne. ‘I thought he hit her by accident.’

‘Mebbe, mebbe. But what would she’ve been doing out there alone on that road in the freezing cold on New Year’s Eve?’

‘Okay, tell me how you see it.’

Johanson recounted his own highly-colored version of the hit-and-run as if it all had happened the day before. It was obvious his sister’s death had consumed his life, but even so, he recited essentially the same facts that Thorne had gotten from the Post-Bulletin’s accounts.

‘The newspapers never said whose car it was Corwin stole.’

‘The mayor’s,’ said Johanson. ‘Justin Wallberg. He insisted on paying for Heidi’s funeral expenses an’ everything.’ Sudden pride flooded Johanson’s face. ‘His son has ended up being the President of these here United States.’

Driving away, Thorne kept turning it over in his mind. Nothing made sense. If Heidi had been in the car with Corwin, how had she ended up in front of it? If Corwin and Terry Prescott had broken up, and he’d been chasing Heidi Johanson, why had Terry married him in mid-February, just before he shipped out for Vietnam?

And that thing about Corwin stealing the Wallberg Buick was also sending prickles up Thorne’s spine. Why hadn’t he just borrowed it? Why weren’t he and Gus Wallberg out catting around together on that New Year’s Eve?

Harris Spencer’s modern but modest Rochester home was on Northern Heights Drive, N.E. The contrast with Johanson’s farm couldn’t have been greater. Walking up the concrete drive from the street, Thorne could hear laughter and splashing from behind the house. Obviously the Spencers had a pool, kids, grandkids.

A pretty dark-haired woman about Thorne’s age came up the side of the house from the back yard in flip-flops and shorts and a faded blouse with ruffles at the sleeves. There were laugh-lines around her eyes. She had a tall cold wet-beaded glass of lemonade in each hand, shoved one at Thorne as she joined him.

‘I saw you drive up. I bet you want Daddy.’ Without waiting for a reply, she turned to the open door of the house and yelled, ‘Daddy, there’s somebody here to see you.’ She turned back to Thorne. ‘He’s in his study, first door on the left.’ Then she was gone again, back to the pool-party.

‘Come in, come in,’ called a voice from down the hall.

Harris Spencer was just standing up from an easy chair near the picture window, shoving reading glasses up on his forehead. A hardback book was tented open on the chair-arm. He looked a vigorous seventy, with dancing blue eyes in a narrow, mild face.

‘I see my daughter as usual has bullied you into taking a glass of her lemonade.’ He held out his hand. ‘Harris Spencer. Glad to meet you.’

‘Brendan Thorne.’ They shook.

Spencer gestured him to the couch across from his easy chair. He sat back down. Thorne sat on the couch.

‘I’m retired from the Clinic, the freezer is full of walleyes and mallards, and you can play only so many rounds of golf. So these days I’m catching up on all the reading I missed over the years. Do you like to read, Mr. Thorne?’

‘Anything I can get my hands on.’

‘Good man. I read a lot of mysteries, all kinds. But especially medical mysteries. I’m addicted. But I’m rambling. How can I help you?’

Thorne opened with, ‘You must have seen dozens of drunk-driving accidents over the years. I’m sort of snooping into one particular one that happened on New Year’s Eve, 1966. A boy named Halden Corwin—’

‘Ran over a girl named Heidi Johanson. Damn!’ Spencer slammed a fist on his chair-arm for emphasis. ‘I’ve been waiting forty years for that other shoe to drop!’

Thorne set his lemonade on the arm of the couch. ‘What other shoe?’

‘I was only twenty-nine at the time, doing my very first tour of night duty at St. Mary’s ER. Life and death. Heady stuff. You remember your first one.’

Thorne could vividly remember his first night patrol in the Panama jungle. He’d been nineteen. Nothing had happened.

‘You probably know the basics. Corwin had always been a sort of wild kid, but not a bad one. He was underage, but that night he’d been drinking at the Rainbow, then went out and stole a car, and ran over the Johanson girl by accident on a nearby country road. He plowed the stolen car into a tree a couple of hundred yards beyond. The sheriff’s men brought him to the ER.’

‘I didn’t know about him drinking at the Rainbow.’

‘He was out cold when they brought him in to us, but after he woke up he told me the only thing he remembered was being at the dance.’ He leaned forward, face intent. ‘His blood alcohol level seemed to me too high for him to be able to drive a car. Somehow he did. That bothered me. Still does.’

‘I thought no alcohol tests were run until too late.’

Spencer gave a little half-laugh. ‘I told you I was young and eager. I ran ’em myself and didn’t tell the police when he was arrested because I hadn’t recorded them so they couldn’t be used in evidence. Besides, I felt he had enough trouble.’

Thorne sipped his lemonade. It was good. The sounds of summer carried from behind the house. Spencer cocked his head.

‘The wife, kids, grandkids. God bless ’em, every one.’

Thorne said slowly, thinking it through, ‘If he was so drunk he was passed out, how did he remember the Rainbow?’

‘He wasn’t passed out — knocked out. His head hit the steering wheel when the car hit the tree. No seatbelt, of course. Twenty-two stitches. Retrograde amnesia, common with severe concussions. Sometimes part or all of the events shortly before the blow comes back, sometimes none of it ever does.’

Amnesia. In Corwin’s case, apparently permanent. Again the prickle up Thorne’s spine that he had felt leaving the Johanson farm.

‘What did he think happened?’

‘He had no idea. Even when he was all patched up and awake, he didn’t remember much beyond the Rainbow. Something about someone helping him into a car...’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe a false memory, maybe Heidi herself. I guess we’ll never know.’

Thorne said, ‘He and Gus Wallberg were teammates in football and hockey, and great buddies off the field. Why would he steal the car of his best friend’s old man? He could have just borrowed it. And since he and Terry Prescott had broken up, why weren’t Corwin and Gus Wallberg out together that night?’

‘Who knows? Maybe Gus had a date of his own.’

‘Good point. But then wouldn’t he have been driving his dad’s car?’

Spencer nodded. ‘It never came out, but some other kids claimed the two of them were drinking together at the Rainbow.’

‘Both of them drunk?’ mused Thorne. ‘Corwin maybe more so? You said he was a wild kid in those days. Maybe he was even already passed out in the car when they left the dancehall.’

Spencer kept it going. ‘And Gus Wallberg is driving—’

‘Hell yes,’ said Thorne eagerly. ‘It’s his father’s car. Wallberg goes roaring down the little country road, Heidi pops up in front of him, he hits the brakes, too late... WHAM!’

Spencer was really into their hypothetical reconstruction. ‘So it’s Gus who’s in a panic and runs into the tree.’

‘He’s the mayor’s son,’ said Thorne. ‘Maybe he’s already planning a life in politics.’

‘Even if no criminal charges are brought, his career ends right there, before it even starts. So...’

‘So his buddy Corwin is out cold on the seat beside him. Comes from a lousy family, indifferent student at Rochester JC, probably’ll flunk out and get drafted for Vietnam anyway. So Gus slides Corwin into the driver’s seat, hikes back to the Rainbow, calls his old man... Good old Dad is a politician...’

Thorne ran down, stopped. Spencer was nodding.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here’s where it always falls apart for me, too. I just can never quite buy it. Gus would have had to run the car into the tree deliberately, so Hal would be blamed — his best friend. Even if Gus would do that, I can’t see Mayor Wallberg saying to him, “I’ll report that my car was stolen, son, and say you were home with your Mom and me all night.”’

‘Not enough heat for the mayor to do it,’ agreed Thorne, remembering that the man who had killed Alison and Eden lost his license for a few months, that was all. ‘Wallberg was mayor, a politician himself. He would have known that a drunk-driving hit-and-run charge wouldn’t stop a young man’s later political career, especially not in those pre-MADD days. Remember Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne? And that was years later.’

Spencer gave a low chuckle.

‘We started sounding like Kennedy-assassination theorists there for a minute, didn’t we? In reality, I can’t see Gus Wallberg letting his best friend take the blame for the accident, and I can’t see his dad letting him get away with it if he tried. Mayor Wallberg felt so terrible that it was his car killed the girl that he paid for Heidi’s funeral, her memorial service, everything. He didn’t have to do that. He even paid the family compensation for their loss. They bought that farm out near Elgin with the money.’

‘An unusual gesture, don’t you think? Like maybe there was some guilt mixed in?’ Which gave Thorne an idea. He asked, ‘Were any blood tests run on Heidi to see whether she had been drinking that night?’

Spencer looked surprised.

‘I’m sure not. She was the victim, after all. And she was only fifteen. And she was already dead.’

‘How extensive were her injuries?’

‘Terrible. Almost like she’d been run over deliberately. Couldn’t have been, of course. Corwin was too drunk to formulate such a plan. I was bothered enough by it that I attended her autopsy, but...’

‘Was there anything to support that idea?’

‘Only thing would be that the poor girl was three months pregnant at the time of her death. So two lives were lost. And there were whispers that it might have been Hal’s child. But three months before, he had been very involved with Terry Prescott, was going steady with her. Plus the fact that Heidi was two grades behind him. That’s a huge age-difference for kids in high school.’

‘And Terry married him before he went off to Vietnam. So obviously she didn’t think he was the father of Heidi’s child.’

Thorne’s tickle wouldn’t go away. If Terry believed Corwin was innocent of getting Heidi pregnant...

‘They didn’t have DNA testing then, but if Heidi’s body was exhumed, even now, could they run tests to determine—’

‘The point is academic,’ said Spencer. ‘She was cremated.’

44

Thorne packed his meager belongings. Sleep tonight, leave first thing in the morning. Again, a lot of driving to do. He felt his rage trying to rise again. He ruthlessly suppressed it. It didn’t serve him here. Not yet, anyhow. He didn’t need it.

Heidi had been carrying Gus Wallberg’s illegitimate child, and would have been demanding marriage — the mayor’s son was a real catch. That New Year’s Eve was just about as Thorne had pictured it — except the hit-andrun wasn’t by Corwin and wasn’t a hit-and-run. It was deliberate murder.

Three months pregnant. Wallberg would be frantic by then. Call Heidi up secretly, tell her to meet him on the country road near the Rainbow at midnight. We’re going to elope, don’t tell anyone. Get his best friend Hal — who he was maybe jealous of? — really drunk. Maybe dope his drinks. Get him into the car, at midnight speed down the country road — wham! Heidi’s gone.

And it worked better than he could ever have hoped. Hal Corwin not only had been passed-out drunk and couldn’t remember anything, he had ended up with retrograde amnesia from a concussion. Or was it just Wallberg’s good luck? Thorne wished he’d asked Spencer if the blow to Corwin’s head could have been deliberate, not just from accidentally striking the windshield. When Hal was arrested for vehicular manslaughter he didn’t fight it. He accepted that he must have killed the girl.

The mayor knew what his son had done. Knew that Heidi was carrying Gus’s baby. He not only paid for Heidi’s funeral and memorial service, he bought her family off with a new, prosperous farm so they would agree to Heidi being cremated, along with the fetus she was carrying. It would have been the mayor, also, who made sure Corwin got a chance to choose Vietnam over jail. They wanted him in a war zone where he would probably get killed.

But Corwin wasn’t killed in Vietnam. He thrived. Became a hero. Later, became a mercenary. But then his wife Terry was killed by a drunk driver — just as he believed that he, drunk and in a stolen car, had killed Heidi. All he could do was retreat to a hermit’s life in the big woods.

Meanwhile, for the Wallbergs, him becoming a mercenary was almost as good as him becoming dead. He would never return to Rochester, would be as absent from Gus Wallberg’s life as Heidi was. Here was where, to Thorne, it got grotesque. After he became governor of Minnesota, Wallberg initiated a long-term affair with Hal Corwin’s daughter. Physical infatuation? Love? Or a subconcious further destruction of Corwin?

Thirty-nine years later, Wallberg got presidential ambitions and broke it off with Nisa. But that wasn’t enough. What if Corwin’s memory returned? What if Corwin realized his buddy Gus had made a girl pregnant, had murdered her in a panic, then had set up his best friend Hal to take the rap for it?

Wallberg voiced his fears aloud, mostly to himself, just once. But Damon Mather, with his ambitions, was there to hear it. The wheel started to turn. Mather tried to kill Corwin.

Now they all were dead. Gus Wallberg was safe. He was President of the United States. If Thorne went to the media, the administration’s spin doctors would get going. It’s all lies. It didn’t really happen that way. Where is your proof?

His proof was cremated in Rochester. His proof was dead on a mountain in Montana. Thorne couldn’t touch Wallberg.

But Terrill Hatfield didn’t know that, and Hatfield was Thorne’s real target. He could be manipulated through his own ambitions. It would be enough. It would have to be enough.

One more debt to pay. Thorne called Whitby Hernild’s clinic in Portage. Hernild himself answered the phone.

‘Clinic.’

‘This is Thorne. Hal Corwin is dead.’

There was a long, unexpected pause, then Hernild blurted, ‘My God! That’s terrible! When? How?’

‘When he killed Kurt Jaeger.’

Still strangely subdued, almost detached, Hernild said, ‘I was... afraid it might be Hal behind the gun.’

‘I shot him just as he took his own shot. But even so he hit who he aimed at. He wanted to avenge his daughter’s murder. He was no psycho. But he should have been after Wallberg, too.’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say. I don’t understand.’

‘Because I’ve pieced together what Wallberg did to Hal on New Year’s Eve forty years ago.’

‘Hal had amnesia. He could never remember that night...’

Thorne told him. All of it. Hernild was almost wistful.

‘Is there anything you can do about it?’

‘No. Even if Hal was still alive, he couldn’t do anything. There’s no proof for any of it. So Wallberg gets away with it.’

Thorne hung up feeling, not purged as he had expected, but oddly unsettled. But he had done what he considered his duty to the man he had been manipulated into killing. He had cleared Corwin’s name with those who mattered — his best friend, and the woman who had thought of him as a surrogate father.

Except that Janet was still a prisoner.

Jennifer Maplewood was fifty-eight years old and lived in a gated community with armed guards. But she was sure she was going to be murdered in her bed by rapists. After one of Jennifer’s thrice-weekly sessions, Sharon Dorst always badly needed her twenty-minutes downtime before her next patient.

She wasn’t going to get it this day. She had just closed the outer door behind Jennifer when it opened again to admit someone else. She turned, irritated.

‘I see patients only by appointment...’ She ran down. It was Thorne. She grabbed him and hugged him, then stepped back, red-faced. ‘I was... ever since you...’

‘Me too.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘I know you felt you let me down when Hatfield got hold of your session notes. You didn’t. We’re square. But I need a favor from you.’

‘Anything.’

‘Hatfield is doing to another woman what he threatened to do to you. I need his home address. You have FBI connections. Can you help me?’

‘Give me two hours,’ Sharon said. Her face tightened. ‘And call me when... when you’ve made her safe.’

Because she knew that then she would make more phone calls to her FBI contacts. Calls she should have made weeks ago.

Driving home to his temporarily empty house well after dark, Terrill Hatfield was a happy man. His imminent accession to power had turned his wife on in ways he hadn’t dreamed possible. Yesterday Cora had read coy remarks in a Washington Post column to the effect that Terrill Hatfield would be announced as the new Director of the FBI in the President’s Fourth of July speech. Last night she had given him the best sex of his life. This morning she had packed her bags and had flown down to Atlanta to lord it over her mother and two sisters.

The best of both worlds. Great sex, and now she wasn’t here to start nagging at him as usual. Life was sweet.

He parked his Crown Vic in the driveway, went in the front door, deactivated the alarm, and turned on the single dim light over the wet bar in one corner of the living room. It was soothing after the fluorescent glare of his office. He poured three fingers of Wild Turkey into a squat heavy cut-glass tumbler and added a single ice cube.

Standing at the picture window and looking out, he thought, Cora was right. This place is too small for us. We need to be further out, with at least an acre. Room for a horse. Room for two horses. We can ride together on Sunday mornings. After Wallberg’s announcement of my appointment as Director of the FBI on the Fourth of July, we’ll go house-hunting...

That’s when a hand came over his head from behind, curved fingers hooked into his nostrils and jerked his head back. An icy point of steel touched his throat. He could feel a drop of his own blood running down from the broken skin as he was duck-walked awkwardly backward into the room, away from the window.

He had been trained for situations like this. He would...

‘Reach across your body, nice and slow, take out your Glock with two fingers, and drop it on the floor.’

Thorne! Alive! All of Hatfield’s training deserted him. He could barely breathe, he felt like he might pass out. He dropped his Glock on the floor as directed.

The fingers on his face went away. A hand touched his ankles, checking for a backup piece, went away also.

Hatfield turned, warily. Thorne was leaning against the sideboard Cora had bought last fall during their swing through the New England antique shoppes, his arms crossed so Hatfield’s own Glock pointed up at an angle toward the ceiling. Like the Sean Connery pose in those old James Bond movie posters. The pose was deliberate, Hatfield was sure.

‘How...’ His voice came out in a croak. He hated this display of weakness in himself. ‘How did you know where I...’

‘Friends in high places,’ said Thorne.

Hatfield frantically ran the people who knew his unlisted address through his mind. How could Thorne pressure any of them into giving him up? A threat to their children, maybe?

‘I know all the secrets. Jaeger’s. Wallberg’s. Yours.’

Had Thorne somehow discovered whatever it was that Wallberg had kept hidden from everyone? The thing Hatfield ached to know himself, to give him some ironclad hold over the President?

‘Jaeger’s dead,’ said Thorne, ‘so his secrets don’t matter. What I know about Wallberg may not be enough to take him down without proof. If I went to the press, I think he’d survive the charges. But you—’

Hatfield tried bluster. ‘Don’t be so sure I can’t—’

‘You lied to him about me being dead, you lied to him about who really shot Corwin and saved his life, you threatened Sharon Dorst with illegal detention, you ran illegal surveillance on Victor Blackburn down at Fort Benning, right now you’re illegally detaining Janet Kestrel. Wallberg obviously knows all of it — except about me. All I have to do is let him know I’m alive and you’ll be gone in the flick of an eyelash.’ He paused, very deliberately. ‘Or...’

Hatfield couldn’t help it. He burst out, ‘Or what?’

‘Or at noon tomorrow, California time, Janet Kestrel walks out of the Federal Building in Westwood a free woman.’

‘Noon? Tomorrow? I can’t possibly—’

‘If charges were filed against her, expunge them. If any surveillance tapes were made, destroy them. If anyone follows her, if anyone tries to grab her again, I go to Wallberg. Free her, leave her and Dorst and Blackburn alone, countermand the order to arrest me if I go back to Kenya, and I’m gone. Wallberg keeps on being President. You become Director of the FBI.’

‘What guarantee do I have that you’ll honor your—’

‘None. But it’s the only deal you’re getting. All you have to do is go back to being the sort of FBI Agent you swore to be in the first place.’ He stepped closer, lowered his voice. ‘Are we clear on all of this?’

‘We... we’re clear.’

‘Make yourself a new drink. You dropped your last one.’

Hatfield made his drink. As he did, he saw the room reflected in the picture window. Thorne was gone. He knew with a bitter certainty that even as Director, he would never again cross the man in any way. He didn’t have the stones for it.

He was Sharon Dorst’s glass tiger.

Friday night, Whiskey River was jumping. The TV was blaring, in the back room their weekend rock band was warming up its instruments for the night’s work. Kate had even managed to not think about Janet for over an hour. The house phone shrilled. She grabbed the receiver from under the counter with one hand while pouring a shot of vodka with the other.

‘Be waiting across the street from the Federal Building in Westwood at noon tomorrow. Jet Blue has morning flights out of Oakland to Burbank that will get you there in time.’

She recognized Thorne’s voice. Someone was shouting in her face. She stuck a finger in the ear without the receiver to it.

‘Janet will walk out at noon sharp. Just get her away from there, quick as you can. Take her wherever she wants to go.’

‘That Indian casino in Hopland offered her a job dealing blackjack. But she’ll want to see you and talk to you, Thorne.’

‘Tell her I’m like... a kestrel. In the wind.’

Janet was doing pushups on the edge of her bunk when she heard the familiar sound of her cell door being unlocked. It swung wide. Framed in the opening was her chief interrogator. She didn’t know his name. None of them ever gave her a name. He was holding something out to her.

‘Here is your watch, Ms. Kestrel.’ It was the first time he had addressed her by name. ‘It’s eleven-forty a.m. on Saturday, June eleventh. You are free to go. All charges against you have been dropped. I’m... I’m very glad it worked out this way.’

He was gone. Another man stepped in with the clothes she had been wearing when they had grabbed her. All of the items had been freshly washed and ironed.

Ten minutes later, Janet was squinting against the dazzling noonday sunlight outside the monolithic black tower of the Federal Building, sucking in huge gulps of free air, dazed, totally disoriented. Someone called her name. She looked quickly about, saw a familiar figure far across the weekend-empty parking lot.

‘Kate!’ she cried, and was running toward her friend.

Sammy Spaulding stood at his office window watching Janet Kestrel and the other woman, trying to imagine Janet’s feelings. He was still stunned by the phone call from Hatfield he had received at home the night before, ordering her release. But as he had told her, he was glad she was free.

In fact, he felt as if he too had been set free. Free from Terrill Hatfield’s insinuating presence, free from the dazzling heights of power Hatfield had implied would be his. He took me up on the mountain, Sammy thought, and showed me what could be mine. Assistant Director of the FBI. Any Agent’s wet dream. But now the spell had been broken. It was so simple when he thought about it. Just be the FBI Agent he had sworn to be when he had graduated from Quantico.

Just blow the whistle on Terrill Hatfield.

45

Fort Snelling National Cemetery, where so many of Minnesota’s dead heroes were buried, lay between the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and Highway 5. It was the Fourth of July, and in the adjacent Fort Snelling State Historical Park, President Gustave Wallberg, Edith at his side, was taking his ease in a picnic area under a stand of elm trees a hundred yards from the Minnesota River. They were surrounded by his entourage, which in turn was encased in a cocoon of Secret Service agents.

It felt wonderful to be the centerpiece of an old-fashioned birth-of-our-nation VFW picnic. The speech he had been working on a month ago during the Memorial Day weekend was now finished. And damned good it was, hitting all the right patriotic notes.

He checked his watch. Almost show time.

Twelve-hundred yards away, Brendan Thorne was literally up a tree. A week earlier, before the unobtrusively elaborate security preparations had begun, he had climbed thirty feet up into this huge old oak to jam a three-foot one-by-twelve board between two branches to form a makeshift sniper’s platform.

He had also cut a keyhole in the foliage so he could scan the picnic grounds through his spotter scope. He wore shooter’s gloves, and an earphone radio so he could listen in on the speeches.

Hatfield was honoring their agreement. Janet was free, Dorst and Blackburn were no longer under even clandestine surveillance, and he had talked with Squealer Kemoli in Nairobi. The Kenyan arrest order had been rescinded. So he, too, was honoring their agreement. Distasteful as he found it, he would do nothing directly to hamper Hatfield’s rise to power.

The veterans and their families were already drawn up around the bunting-bedecked platform to hear their President speak. There was one important amendment to the speech that no one knew about except Wallberg. He would not be announcing Terrill Hatfield’s elevation to Director of the FBI as previously hinted to the press corps. He had received signed e-mails from two high-ranking Bureau officials, each alerting him to, and giving him the details of, separate pending investigations of misconduct by Hatfield.

He had expressed his thanks and his profound shock at Hatfield’s actions, and had assured each of them that Hatfield’s name would be withdrawn. True, Hatfield had saved his life by shooting Corwin at the critical moment in the Bitterroot Range. True, everything the man had done, including the unlawful detention of Janet Kestrel, had been done on behalf of Wallberg and with his knowledge.

But there was no paperwork to that effect. Wallberg had made sure of that. Whatever wild charges Hatfield might make as he went down, President Wallberg had deniability. And it wouldn’t hurt his ratings that he would be seen as taking an ethical stand: no breaking of the law in the Wallberg administration. But justice would be tempered with compassion. Hatfield would resign from the FBI without jail time.

Just as well. Hatfield was ambitious. In time, he might have become another Jaeger, trying to uncover secrets best left buried, seeking influence with the Oval Office.

Gus Wallberg sighed and put aside his bottle of beer — Leinenkugel Honey Weiss, a good Minnesota brew — and got to his feet. A pity. The national good could demand heavy sacrifices: three people had died on election night, so now it was Hatfield’s turn to pay a heavy price for his country.

‘Time to earn my keep, people,’ he said to his entourage.

There was hearty sycophantic laughter. He blew Edith a kiss and started off, encircled by young, hard-eyed, highly-conditioned men speaking to their wrists or to the collars of their sports shirts. He shook hands, waved, grinned, tossed out greetings as they opened a pathway through the crowd for him to get to the podium. He was in his element. He was the future, Terrill was the past. As was Corwin. And Nisa. And Thorne.

Thorne, in his sniper’s nest, following Wallberg’s progress with his scope. The president’s clothes were carefully casual: a Solumbra sun hat, slacks, and a gaudy short-sleeve sport shirt. In his left hand was a fried chicken leg. A man of the people. He stepped up to the podium where his speech was laid open for him. No one up there to introduce him. He wanted the platform all to himself.

Watching from a distance of twelve-hundred yards, Thorne realized how much he despised this man. Ten years ago, he would have tried the impossible shot and would have lost his own life in the attempt. On this day, Thorne planned no mayhem. He had his sniper’s nest but he had no sniper rifle. He was here to feel just a little of what Corwin must have felt in Montana, sighting in on a hated target a dozen football fields away. This was Thorne’s final bloodless bow to the man he once had been. Soon he would disappear without anyone ever knowing he had been there.

Wallberg looked out over the throng, drawing his power, as always, from their numbers, from their rapt attention, from their devotion to him. And from the dozens of media cameras pointing at him to help bump his ratings ever higher. He had planned to talk about himself a good deal, knock the accomplishments of the previous administration, but Edith had advised him that it might sound petty, self-serving; better to just praise America.

‘My fellow Americans, we are gathered here today to celebrate the birthday of this great nation which has given so many blessings to all of her citizens. Beyond the beer and the potato salad...’ he raised his arm above his head to wave around his chicken leg, ‘...beyond the fried chicken...’ The well-rehearsed but seemingly spontaneous gesture drew wild applause from the crowd. ‘...we honor all of those brave men and women who gave up their lives on foreign battlefields so that we might enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice. From the shores of Tripoli to the trenches of the Ardennes, from the death march of Corregidor to the jungles of Vietnam, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq...’

Dammit, thought Thorne, it isn’t right. This man is a murderer, not a president. Thorne’s finger crooked around the imaginary trigger of the rifle he didn’t have. If it had been real, he would have squeezed off his shot and to hell with nightmares. Instead, he could only extend his arm and point a rigid forefinger...

‘...To Gettysburg, right here at home, where another great American President once said...’

...and whisper, ‘Bang, you’re dead!’ and...

...see Wallberg’s head explode in a bloody froth of brain and bone and flesh, the red mist that every sniper knew marked the perfect head shot. It was almost as if Thorne had fired the fatal round himself.

But he hadn’t. He was already half-climbing, half-sliding down the side of the tree away from the distant speaker’s stand. He dropped to the ground and strolled away along the river bank. In his ear was the familiar pandemonium of death by assassination that had become all too familiar to the modern world.

Thirty minutes later he was driving his Trooper sedately out the Old Shakopee Road, which would lead him to a bridge across the Minnesota River and eventually to 101 West, which would take him... where? No fixed destination. Just away from there.

As he drove, he tried to assess what he had seen. Before speech-day, even though he planned no shot, he had scouted the area as any good sniper should. Apart from his tree, the only site offering a clear shot at the podium was the roof-tower of one of the old stone battalion buildings at Fort Snelling. He had dismissed it out of hand: it was fifteen-hundred yards out. Three-quarters of a mile. There was only one man who could have made such a shot, and that man was dead.

The rather gaunt, mid-fifties man, unarmed except for a sheath knife, slipped silently through the sunlit early morning forest. He looked like someone recuperating from an illness or a dangerous accident. There was a hesitancy in his movements, a hitch in his step. Still, no twig crackled, no grass swished. He passed out of the trees and into the burn by a fire-blasted spruce, walking so silently under a blood-red cardinal on a branch above that the bird was not even aware of his passage. He still was the ultimate woodsman.

A voice froze him in mid-step.

‘A doctor out in LA recently gave me a physical after I had bled out a bit, and his medical advice was, “Eat More.”’

The gaunt woodsman looked at the younger man who had appeared out of nowhere, like morning mist through the trees.

‘I don’t have a lot of appetite. Some bastard shot me.’

‘Guilty,’ said Thorne.

‘How did you know I would be...’ Corwin paused, nodded. ‘Of course.

‘Where else would I be?’

‘Yeah. Still hiding in plain sight.’

‘I’d better change my MO.’ He made a slight gesture. ‘There’s fresh coffee back at the cabin. Do we have time to...’

‘All the time in the world,’ said Thorne.

Half an hour later, they were sitting across from each other at the hand-hewn table, at ease in one another’s company. Corwin was right: the coffee was fresh, and damned good. No food; Corwin’s appetite hadn’t returned yet.

Thorne stood, took a turn around the cabin’s single room.

‘I was up a tree twelve-hundred yards out when you took your shot at Wallberg,’ he said. ‘I was there just to watch the bastard and wish there was something I could do to him. But for me, anything beyond about five-hundred yards is pure fantasy. I’ve always been more assassin than sniper.’

‘You’re talking about that big oak by the riverbank?’

Thorne shook his head. ‘Dammit, Corwin, you’re good.’

‘I considered it myself, but I knew I wasn’t nimble enough these days to climb down and be away before they came looking.’ Corwin’s craggy face was almost serene. ‘Fort Snelling itself was better by far. There, I could have a car waiting.’

‘But — fifteen-hundred yards out.’

Corwin made a gesture. ‘It was that, or forget about it.’

‘A car with a driver,’ said Thorne. Corwin looked at him sharply. Thorne ignored the look. ‘What I want to know is how you survived in the Bitterroot Range. Was it a lung shot?’

‘Yes,’ said Corwin. ‘Anything else I would have gone into shock and bled out.’

Thorne sat down again.

‘I once entertained — and rejected — the idea that if it was a lung shot you might have survived it.’ He waved a hand. ‘I’d already decided that you were just about the toughest goddam guy I’d ever gone up against. If you could avoid hypothermia, maybe the icy water could stop the bleeding like the icy air of the Minnesota winter did after Mathers shot you.’

‘You were right. It could. It did.’

‘But I had to figure, what then? You crawl out of the water, there’s nobody around to help you... So, you die. End of story. So how...’

‘Cellphone,’ said Corwin. ‘In a waterproof case.’

‘A cellphone. Yeah. The missing piece. Of course. You’d need it with you to call Janet as soon as Jaeger was dead, wouldn’t you? So she could tell you where to leave her SUV.’

Astonishment flitted across Corwin’s face before he could quite close it down. ‘How do you know Janet?’

‘I found the 4-Runner, registered to her. So I found her.’ Thorne shrugged. ‘A long story. She can tell it to you herself. At the moment, she’s still mourning you as dead.’

Corwin was silent.

Thorne said, almost musing, ‘But you didn’t call her, you called Hernild. He’s a pilot, he flies out and gets you and flies you back to that private clinic of his without hesitating a second. Then he nurses you back to health again, like he did the last time.’

‘You’ve got that all wrong,’ snapped Corwin, tight-lipped. He half rose. ‘Whitby had nothing to do—’

Thorne waved him back down.

‘Bullshit. He had a mighty strange reaction when I called to tell him that you were dead. Now it makes perfect sense. Hell, he knew that at that very moment, you were right here, safe in your cabin in the woods.’

Corwin settled back down as if exhausted.

‘And here I would have stayed,’ he said, ‘except your phone call laid out exactly what Wallberg did to me all those years ago. It jogged my memory, it all came back. The fucker stole the life of poor sweet romantic little Heidi Johanson, and that of her unborn child — his child, too. To say nothing of what he stole from me.’

‘Your shot at a normal life,’ said Thorne. ‘So you got yourself another rifle, and another scope, and enlisted Hernild as your driver, and...’ Thorne held up a hand. ‘Don’t try to tell me he wasn’t. And then you went hunting.’

‘That’s about it.’ Corwin stood up. ‘I’m through running away and hiding, I’m through killing. I just want to live a hermit’s life. If you’ll let me.’

Thorne was also on his feet. He chuckled.

‘Two burned out cases with all the killing behind them. That’s for younger men...’ and he paraphrased a line he’d read, maybe from Shakespeare, ‘whose consciences have not yet made cowards of them all.’

‘So what happens next?’ asked Corwin.

‘I’d like it if you’d shake my hand,’ said Thorne. ‘Then I’ll be on my way.’ He caught himself using yet another poet’s words. ‘Miles to go before I sleep.’

Corwin stuck out his hand, thought better of it. Instead, he closed his arms around Thorne in a fierce embrace. A warrior’s salute after a long and bitter struggle that had finally come to an end for both of them.

46

Because the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino was on tribal land, the five-member tribal council of the Hopland band of the Como Indians made all decisions concerning how it was run. They had poker, blackjack, slots, Keno, and single-ball roulette that was really just bingo in formal dress. No craps: it didn’t pay off enough.

Janet Kestrel was on her final break of the day in the cafeteria, drinking coffee, when Herb Runningwolf, head of security for the casino, came in and headed her way.

He was a tough, square-faced, thirty-year-old Indian wearing a blue suit and with his hair in a ponytail. His main job was to stop trouble before it started. Little did. Since there was a $200 table limit, card-counters didn’t come. And since the most a player could make in a day was about $800, few high-rollers bothered, either. Mostly, all he had to deal with was drunks.

Herb laid a hand on Janet’s shoulder.

‘I just wanted you to know that your sister started her training and orientation courses this morning. She’s smart and she’s eager, and I think she’s going to work out just fine.’

‘Thanks, Herb. And thank the council for taking her on.’

‘Blood is blood, sister.’

He patted her shoulder again and moved on.

She returned to the casino proper to replace Charlene at Table Four for her final twenty minute stint. At Sho-Ka-Wah, instead of the shoe, they used a shuffler that handled five decks of cards at a time. The decks lasted six to eight hours, then were retired from rotation. During each of her daily eight-hour shifts, Janet spent twenty, forty, or sixty minutes at a blackjack table, got a twenty-minute break, then moved on to a new table. The short stints discouraged connivance between dealers and gamblers.

Janet was popular with the players because, like them, she was just there for the cards. She dealt ’em, they played ’em. Ten minutes into her shift, a new player sat down at the one empty seat at her table. She seldom looked at faces, just at hands. These newcomer hands put down a stack of chips. She dealt two rounds of cards. The hands flipped up their hole card. It was an ace, as was his up-card.

‘Double-down,’ the owner of the hands said.

The voice jerked her eyes from the cards to his face. Brendan Thorne. He winked at her. She dealt the next round, went busted when she took the dealer’s mandatory card at sixteen. Thorne got blackjack on both hands.

‘You beat the house, sir,’ she said gravely.

‘Calls for a celebration,’ he said.

‘I’m off in eight minutes.’

He nodded and picked up his modest winnings and left the table. As her hands automatically flipped out cards, she could see him making his way toward the front door. Looking good! Recovered. Rested. No thanks to her.

She stopped at the ladies’ room to wash her hands and throw water on her face and run her fingers through her long black hair. Butterflies in the stomach: how was she supposed to act? She had abandoned him to save herself, he had refused to abandon her. But she couldn’t feel just simple gratitude toward him. She had to feel either much more — or much less.

When she came out into the cool, deepening dusk, he was leaning back against the side of a beat-up old Isuzu Trooper with his arms crossed and a bemused expression on his face. Exactly as she had first seen him, only then it was her 4-Runner outside the AQUA Tours office a compressed lifetime ago.

She simply said, ‘Thank you for what you did — however you managed it. And thanks for what you told Kate about Hal. It helped me a lot when... while Hatfield had me.’

He took both her hands in his. His hands were as warm as hers were cold. He looked into her face, very serious.

‘Hal is alive,’ he said.

‘Alive?’ Her eyes got huge.

Even as he said it, he knew that he hoped she wouldn’t want to go to Corwin. It was all jumbled up in his mind. What he saw as his duty to a man he had wronged versus emotions he had thought were forever dead.

Janet rescued her hands from his. She lowered her head so he couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. She realized with a thrill that he was as confused as she was.

‘Hal assassinated President Wallberg, didn’t he?’

‘Executed him,’ said Thorne. ‘Wallberg was a murderer.’

She felt something let go, something composed of unshed tears and loss and loneliness and a longing to find out who she really was. And to make that gradual discovery with someone she could maybe love, someone who could maybe love her.

‘So is Hal,’ she said. ‘You aren’t.’

With a sort of astonishment, Thorne realized she was right: he had never killed except in self-defense, or as what was his duty. Corwin had been a true mercenary, no matter what he was now. It made a difference somehow.

They got into the Trooper without speaking further. Neither knew where it was taking them, but they both knew they wanted to go there. To find out. To know.

The long rains had come at last to East Africa’s vast Serengeti plains, almost a month overdue. Just the day before there had been pitiless sun and choking dust over the red land. Then at dawn the heavy, black-bellied clouds began advancing inexorably across the veldt, dropping their hard, straight, unyielding rain.

Morengaru sat on top of an isolated termite mound, his tightly-curled hair uncovered to the pouring rain, his meager clothing plastered to his skin, his shotgun slanted up from between his knees and past the side of his head. Champagne corks rescued from the trash bin at Sikuzuri Safari Camp were stuck in both barrels to keep them from getting scaled with rust inside.

Morengaru walked here every year for the start of the long rains. It was the only miracle he had ever seen and the only one he would ever believe in.

On the flat plain’s furthest horizon a thin line of green appeared, advancing toward him under the blessing of the rain at about the pace of a man very slowly walking. The grasses were racing through the few short weeks of their cycle: renewal, rebirth, replenishment, before the dry season dropped them back into dormancy again. Within days, they would be knee-high, and millions of migratory grazing animals would be spreading out across the green and verdant plains. Behind the grazers would come the inevitable, necessary predators.

Morengaru’s remarkable ears picked up automobile sounds. He stubbornly refused to turn his head from his miracle, but he knew that a four-wheel drive vehicle was approaching across the plains behind him. He listened to it the way a classical music lover listens to a Mozart symphony: with his whole being.

A Land-Rover. He listened even more intently as it drew up behind his anthill. A venerable 1960s Land-Rover, in fact, one of the ancient ones with the canvas top and the short wheelbase. He fought it, but the beginnings of a slow smile made his teeth gleam in his ebony face.

The Land-Rover stopped. When the engine was cut, the rain made a thrumming sound on its stretched canvas top. The engine kachunk-kachunked two or three times before it died. It needed tuning. Had not been driven in a long time. Several months, in fact. In his pocket was a key to it that he had never used.

The doors opened, slammed shut. The sounds of two people getting out, swishing through the wet but still dead grass around the termite mound. Two? He almost turned, but disciplined himself. They climbed up and sat down, one on either side of him. Peripheral vision showed him a man and a woman, wazungu, white people, wearing already-soaking safari jackets and wide-brimmed safari hats tipped back off their heads so the rain could pelt their faces as it did his.

Only then did Morengaru turn from the advancing grasses he had come all this way from Tsavo, afoot, to see. He looked gravely at the woman first. She was in her late twenties, tawny-skinned, shapely, beautiful, with very long gleaming black hair and startling blue eyes. She met his scrutiny unblinking.

He turned to look at the man. He was forty, also black-haired, dark and quick-looking. But also drawn, as if he had been through many things that had seasoned him. The man hooked two bent fingers toward Morengaru’s eyes, then toward his own.

‘Tatuona tena,’ he said solemnly, repeating it from their last meeting. We shall see each other again.

‘Ndio,’ replied Morengaru, equally solemn. Yes. Then he added, ‘Uso kwa uso.’ Face to face.

The woman held out a hand to Morengaru and greeted him. ‘Jambo, bwana.’

Hello, sir. ‘I am Janet Kestrel.’

Morengaru took her hand in both of his and bowed very slightly. ‘Memsa’ab.’ Madam. ‘I am Morengaru.’

Then of one accord, all three of them turned to face the pounding rain and the advancing line of green that they all had come to see. It had deepened, broadened now, from a line on the horizon to cover half the veldt in front of them. For a long time they watched its progress. No one spoke. No one had to.

When the growing grasses had almost reached their termite mound, soon to surround it and pass on, Morengaru stirred and spoke, without turning his head.

‘Since we three landless rogues, maybe we go hunting now.’

They laughed, three people lost in the vastness of the Serengeti plains, drenched by East Africa’s life-giving long rains.