Glass Tiger

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.