Glass Tiger
- Автор: Горес Джо
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Quercus
- ISBN: 978-1-84724-072-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Glass Tiger». Краткое содержание книги:
Hatfield pointed across the table at the homeless man.
‘Gary. Has he burned you people?’
‘No way, Boss.’ Gary, really into his dumpster-diving persona, smelled bad. ‘He’s clueless.’
‘He might be hot stuff out in the boonies,’ smirked Jock Number One, who had a rather patrician nose. ‘But in an urban environment he doesn’t know where to look or who to look for.’
Hatfield pointed at blond Jock Number Two, who looked something like a very young Jack Nicklaus. ‘Nutshell his day.’
‘Breakfast at the Mayflower. Up to the fitness facility, worked out, swam. Checked at the desk, got the file on Corwin.’
Back to Jock Number One. ‘Michael?’
‘Walked down to the Georgetown dock, had iced tea and read Corwin’s file. Thought for a while, then left.’
Gary, the homeless man, took it up. ‘Wandered around the Georgetown campus. As soon as he headed for the library, I alerted Charlene so she could be inside ahead of him.’
‘He went to the computer room and logged on to the internet,’ said Hornrims. ‘When he went to the men’s room, I was able to ascertain that he was accessing presidential campaign coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post.’
Trying to find a pattern of movement that Corwin might also find, thought Hatfield, hoping to get to the intersection of President and assassin before the assassin did. Correct, conventional stuff. Good. Thorne was being predictable.
Jock Number One said, ‘He went back to the Mayflower, ordered room service.’
Jock Number Two said eagerly, ‘Should we access his room to make copies of the articles he abstracted from the newspapers?’
‘Too risky. We have the tap on his phone.’ Hatfield leaned back, feeling smug. ‘Good work, people. Stay on him. Remember, if he takes a crap...’
‘We’re there to hand him the toilet paper,’ said Gary.
When panic struck, Nisa had called Jaeger for help. All of the Tuesday/Thursday calls had originated in cities where Wallberg’s campaign was on that day. So the calls had to be reassurance calls from Jaeger. Who had lied when he said no one knew where they had gone. Acting on his own, helping them hide? Or...
What if Wallberg had come to believe that Mather had tried to murder Corwin? He would have had to drop Nisa and Damon from the campaign and its safety net of Secret Service agents: an assassination attempt stemming from his campaign team, rather than directed at it, would have been disastrous. In that case, Jaeger’s help would have been damage control, keeping Nisa and Damon from the media.
Thorne wished he had a photo of Nisa. He wished he knew whose .357 Magnum it was. He wished he could reconstruct the sequence of events aboard the houseboat that night. He wished, he wished... But none of it was going to happen easily, not with Hatfield’s people following him around like ducklings that had imprinted on him.
He bedded down at 2:30 a.m. and tossed and turned for an hour, almost afraid to seek sleep. But when it did come, no nightmare rode it. His subconscious must have thought he was doing something right.
Gustave Wallberg stood at a window in the Oval Office as if watching, through the lace curtains, the small army of gardeners making the wide expanse of White House grounds bright with spring flower borders. Actually, he was seeing last night.
Edith, his chickadee-quick wife, sitting on the edge of the bed in one of her usual shapeless nightgowns, watching him remove the fancy brocaded robe she had given him for Christmas.
‘What’s bothering you, darling?’
He said, ‘Politics and polls, sweetheart, inspired by our friends across the aisle, hinting that I’m staying inside the Beltway because of terrorist threats, implying that I’m afraid.’
‘Polls! Politics!’ She put her arms around him. ‘You aren’t afraid of anything on earth! You are my fearless lion.’
That’s when he made his decision.
‘I’m meeting with Kurt and the staff tomorrow to announce that we will be making a swing through the top red states with a major domestic or foreign policy announcement at each stop. Shake ’em up a bit.’
He turned from the window: suddenly he had seen, reflected there, not Edith, but Nisa. Nisa, waiting for him in the little motel out by the Minneapolis airport with the grotesque faded pink fake-flock wallpaper, naked in the bed that brayed and banged the wall in delight at their passion...
But Nisa was gone. Dead and gone. And he was alive.
12
Doing laps in the hotel pool, Thorne decided he’d ditch the Feebs following him. Their surveillance was almost insulting, it was so slipshod. He hit the shower, stood under pounding water that was first boiling, then icy, towelled off, dressed.
Yes, ditch them, but in such a way that they couldn’t be sure it had been deliberate. Then what? A movie? A bar? Until Wallberg ventured beyond his iron ring of security inside the Beltway, he could only wait. As he was sure Corwin also waited.
Then he had it. Ditch his minders, meet Johnny Doyle as if by chance, hint about his need for the murder-scene forensics.
Wallberg met his people at noon in the basement conference room. Jaeger, Hatfield, Crandall, and Quarles, with Johnny Doyle bringing people things they wanted. No official record of the meeting: the audio and visual recorders were turned off.
It had been put out to staff that it was a housekeeping, not a security, briefing. These were done every morning by the National Security Counciclass="underline" National Security Advisor Gelson Hennings, head of the White House Secret Service detail Shayne O’Hara, and the heads of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, and NSA.
‘You have two weeks,’ Wallberg told the people assembled in the room. This had been his style as governor. People did their best work under pressure. ‘Then we make a major swing through the top red states. I need input from all of you on where to go and what to say when we get there. At the end of it, I want the themes of this administration’s first term in office succinctly spelled out for all to see.’
‘Two weeks! That doesn’t give us time to—’
‘That is all the time you have, Kurt. Inform the cabinet and the Secret Service. Keep the speech-writers busy. Get out the front-men to set up the press arrangements. Have O’Hara coordinate with local police, Homeland Security, and the FBI.’ He grinned his famous grin at Hatfield. ‘The rest of the FBI.’
‘This is about Corwin,’ Hatfield exclaimed.
‘Yes. Corwin. I need your assessment. Is it safe for us to make public appearances outside the Beltline?’
Now was not the time to hesitate. ‘I and my men now know how he escaped in the California Delta in November, Mr. President, and how he eluded us in California’s King’s Canyon in March.’ Hatfield did not say that it was Thorne who had worked out Corwin’s methods. ‘With what we now know, he will be unable to mount any viable assassination attempt.’
Doyle was behind the wet bar, unnoticed by anyone, a ghost of times past. When the President ordered them to get front men out, he felt his own surge of emotion. He would get his old job back! As of this instant, Thorne was gone from his radar.
Jaeger was intense. ‘You are saying, Terrill, that Hal Corwin is still alive and active in his desire to assassinate the President. So the danger from him is still very real.’
‘Real, but assessable, like that posed by foreign terrorists and white supremacists and anti-abortion activists and other right-wing kooks. Once we know the sites, Mr. President, I and my men will evaluate the potential danger at each stop.’
‘Get to it, people,’ said Wallberg. ‘I want twice daily briefings from everyone involved, starting this afternoon.’