Glass Tiger

Out in the jungle, the rainforest, the savanna, tells might be a leaf overturned so its pale side was up; a tuft of grass slowly springing back to its original position; a branch stirring when there was no wind. Here, he looked for inconsistencies of dress or action.

A girl in hiking clothes talking to her collar. Two very tanned mid-twenties jocks standing just below the kiosk, gesturing at the moored yachts — with tiny receivers in their ears. A middle-aged, dispirited, vacant-eyed homeless man with a stolen shopping cart. But the derelict’s unkempt hair down to his shoulders wasn’t quite filthy enough, and his shoes were too new, not run-over enough. Hatfield had strong-armed Dorst’s session notes out of her, but obviously didn’t trust them.

Thorne paid his check and went back along the dock toward Georgetown University. The tails might become a problem eventually, but for now their presence would unwittingly furnish visual white noise to mask his actions.

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

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

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

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