Glass Tiger by Joe Gores Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t get to have the shit scared out of me in the waiting room like poor old Mr. Hedges.’
    She couldn’t quite hide her smile.
    ‘That’s because you drew me instead of Dr. Benson.’
    ‘Benson? And Hedges? You’ve got to be kidding.’
    ‘Actually, he’s Doctor Martin.’ She checked the wallclock. ‘You have already wasted five of your session minutes, Mr. Thorne. As you have been told, I am a contract therapist for the FBI who will administer certain tests and make certain evaluations of you for the Bureau. They will get my written and verbal reports. No one will ever see my session notes.’
    Thorne scrubbed his hands. ‘Then let the healing begin! Word games to probe my vocabulary. Photos of faces and later a whole bunch of new photos to see how many I recognize from the first batch. Identifying the logic of series of symbols. Remembering and repeating lists of things that don’t go together, like clown and broccoli. How many details I can recall from the four quadrants of a scene you show me or from a story you read to me. How fast I can click a key with my forefinger.’
    ‘You tell me, Mr. Thorne, what should we do with our hour?’
    ‘Look at ink blots that remind me of naked women?’ Then he held up his hands in surrender. ‘Okay, it’s in the file, but – background. I was an Army Ranger stationed in Panama. Until we handed over the Canal to the locals in 1999, SOUTHCOM – that’s the U.S. Army’s Southern Command – was in charge of security for the Canal. Panama borders on Colombia, and the Colombian government gave control of an area the size of Switzerland to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC. They were really rebels running drug-manufacturing plants in the area. They supplied seventy percent of the cocaine entering the States.’
    ‘Your job was… what? To stop them?’
    ‘Impede would be a better word. We’d go into the jungle for weeks at a time to destroy the manufacturing plants. After the Rangers, I couldn’t settle down into civilian life, so—’
    ‘Were you using cocaine yourself?’ He answered with a surprised but stony silence. She quickly asked, ‘Why did you resign from the Rangers?’
    ‘Because killing didn’t bother me, and I felt that it should. But I missed the action in the field. When a CIA front asked me to go back to Panama clandestinely for the same sort of work, their shrinks told me I was in the two percent of military men who can kill repeatedly, without hesitation and without bad dreams afterwards. So I accepted that maybe that’s who I was.’
    ‘You said to yourself, Okay, I’m an adrenaline freak, an apostle of the gun, seeking the perfect kill-shot, da-dah, da-dah. And shooting at people for the CIA doesn’t bother me.’
    ‘Right. Only when I missed. I imagine Corwin, the guy I’m supposed to find, was the same way – until his wife died.’
    ‘So why quit to bury yourself in Kenya?’
    ‘I killed a woman and her infant by mistake.’
    ‘I know that’s what the file says, but I don’t buy it.’ She wasn’t a dead ringer for randy young Ellie in Tsavo after all: too damned smart. She added, ‘Collateral damage is always part of warfare.’
    ‘Not of my kind of warfare. They died, I quit. Finis.’
    ‘But you just recently killed two men in Kenya.’
    ‘Somali shifta raiders. Poaching rhino and elephant.’
    ‘Yet you were deported by the Kenya government for poaching protected animals yourself.’
    He said defensively, knowing it sounded lame even as he did, ‘Hatfield set me up as a poacher so Kenya would deport me.’
    She said almost derisively, ‘And then asked me to evaluate you as a manhunter for his own Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team?’
    ‘Yeah! Exactly. After Wallberg took office in January,Jaeger, his Chief of Staff, tasked Hatfield with finding a psycho who is gunning for the president. A computer chose me to do it. The president wants me on board. Hatfield doesn’t.’
    ‘Why doesn’t