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:
‘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.’