Glass Tiger by Joe Gores Read Free Book Online

CIA, but your records are ten years old.’
    The Mayflower Hotel. First cabin. And he could ace the psychological tests – he always had.
    The general exodus left Jaeger and Hatfield alone. Hatfield said, ‘He’s more of a liability than an asset.’
    ‘What’s your problem with this man, Terrill? That’swhat psy tests are for. I know you regard your team highly, but they didn’t do shit in the Delta or at King’s Canyon. What we need are results.’ He added, with a shrug that came out almost as a shiver, ‘Maybe Thorne can stop that psychotic son of a bitch.’
    That psychotic son of a bitch wound his way through the raspberry and prickly ash that had replaced the white pine and balsam destroyed by a lightning fire years before. He went quickly past the fire-blasted spruce a thousand feet down the burn before pausing to strip off the glove that kept his maimed hand from aching on this chilly April day.
    His left hand was jerked sideways by a hurtling slug. A spray of salty blood splattered across his lips…
    At the cabin, he added a log to the embers in the stone fireplace, started cleaning his rifle. Post 9/11 there were many new hi-tec sniper rifles, laser sights and all the rest, but for him, the Winchester Model 70 he had carried ever since ’Nam.
    An hour later, he poured coffee from the tin pot on the hearth, booted up his computer, and used Google to confirm that, as usual, the President’s Press Secretary was not making a lot of announcements about Wallberg’s movements outside Washington. His inaugural-day letter? Good. Let those bastards sweat a little.
    ‘Should I be doing a little sweating myself?’ he asked the sometime pursuer in his dreaming mind. No answer. He never got any response from Nisa when he spoke aloud to her, either.
    At 1:45 p.m. he remembered breakfast and heated up a can of the spicy chili that Janet Kestrel had gotten him addicted to.

5
    Thorne walked out Connecticut Ave from the Mayflower for his 3:30 appointment in Georgetown. He needed the time to think things through.
    His first problem was Hatfield’s hostility. Where did it come from? What did it mean? It was like the man really didn’t want him to find Corwin, which made no sense. When the CIA had run their tests on him ten years ago, they had choppered him to Langley. But instead of sending him to the FBI’s pros at Quantico, Hatfield was farming him out to some supposedly independent psychiatrist who might be in Hatfield’s pocket.
    If he misread Hatfield, could he end up rotting in a Kenyan jail on the phony poaching charge despite the president’s assurances of immunity?
    Second problem. What if he actually found Corwin? He knew from Tsavo that he still could be seduced by violence, by the adrenaline rush. Could he break his vow again to save the president’s life, and again face his nightmare, maybe forever? Would it be better to just slip back into the easy, morally safe life at Sikuzuri, and let Hatfield find Corwin – if he could?
    No. He might end up in jail instead of Tsavo. He had to get a read on Hatfield’s motivations from the shrink while the shrink was trying to get a read on his.
    Three names, all MDs, were etched into the discreet brass plaque beside the front door of the mellow weathered brick house just off Wisconsin Avenue. There was asecurity camera above the door. The airy waiting room would have once been a living room, probably wall-to-wall then. Now, gleaming hardwood, a tube-aluminum and nubble-fabric couch and half a dozen chairs along the side walls, tables with lamps and magazines between, framed hunting prints above, flowery freshener on the air. Three identical doors set into the far wall. A den of shrinks.
    On the couch, a frosty-haired woman looked straight ahead with a combat veteran’s thousand-yard stare. In one of the chairs, a middle-aged man with dense eyebrows and hairy ears and a big nose was almost surreptitiously reading a magazine.
    The middle door opened. A