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:
‘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.’