Abuse of Power (15 page)

Jack gave him the rundown on the trip to Sunnydale, Jamal’s overdose, and the men in the black Escalade. “The kid’s brother got one of them on his cell camera and Maxine’s gonna see if she can identify the parking sticker on the car.”

“Jesus,” Tony muttered. “Sounds like we got this thing right. You and Eddie better not sleep on that boat tonight.”

“This was just a warning, Tony. If somebody wanted me dead, they would’ve stuck around instead of playing games.”

“Okay, but humor me. Get the hell out of there. Go to a hotel or hit up Maxine. Or your ex. She’s got plenty of room in that big house you left her.”

“I don’t think the tax guy she’s been dating would approve,” Jack said.

“Do you care?”

Tony was right. About all of it.

“Okay. I’ll make sure we get to safer ground. When are you due back?”

“Sometime tomorrow night.”

“Good,” Jack said. “See you then. Now get back to sleep.”

“Keep your powder dry.”

Jack nodded. “I always do.”

13

Jack thought of his apartment on Union Street as his Fortress of Solitude. The only people who knew he owned it were his real estate broker, the bank, and his former wife—and he wanted to keep it that way.

He hadn’t even told Tony. Jack kept it separate from his everyday life, a place where he could seek refuge, to reflect and reminisce.

A twenty-two-story sixties-era complex right off the Embarcadero, it was just a block from the bay. The beauty of the building was that there were four or five entrances and exits on various floors, and he sometimes marveled at how difficult it would be for any of the “progressives” who had threatened him over the years to stalk him here.

You could elude a rampaging army in this place.

He inwardly thought of the complex as a mini-UN. It was populated by a variety of people of various nationalities, and riding the elevator to the twentieth floor was often an education in cultural diversity. One day he’d be smiling and winking at a Norwegian child in a stroller and the next he’d be chatting with a businessman from Tokyo.

The view from his window was spectacular. Facing north, it looked out across the bay. And just beyond the Richmond Bridge, you could see the East Brother Light Station, a small island lighthouse that had been in operation for over a hundred and thirty-three years.

Jack had spent part of his honeymoon on that island, staying at the bed-and-breakfast there. And while he had found the place charming, Rachel had complained that they were too isolated to have any fun—beyond the bedroom, that is. Jack loved and could enjoy the birds, the bay, even the winds. That contrast in their attitudes was one of the many reasons they were no longer married.

As with many marriages, Jack and Rachel stopped sleeping together years before the sex stopped. They had side-by-side separate beds, and later they slept in separate bedrooms.

He liked to watch movies on TV, she liked to read. He went to bed early, she read until after midnight. He got up at first light, she slept until eleven. He was obsessed with politics and TV news, she found this too predictable. “What’s the point of getting excited,” she used to say to him, “they’re all liars and you can’t change a damn thing.”

The sex between them had been great for years, endless and heated. But Jack wasn’t made for marriage. It was a strain on his nature. He couldn’t conform to another person’s needs and wants.

The only interest he really had was his own ego. He believed he could make the world a better place. She was cynical about “the good guys winning.”

But she was loyal and faithful. That kept them together. Nothing entered her life that she did not want to be there. She had an iron will.

Jack both admired her for that and was repelled by it. Being married to a Margaret Thatcher was no picnic, he would say, while admiring the iron lady’s strength. Her love for him blinded her to what she considered his egotism and his other flaws and quirks.

His father had warned him, “Two rules, Jackie boy, never, ever agree with a friend who leaves his girlfriend and puts her down. They’ll get back together and blame you. And one other thing: never touch another guy’s girlfriend. Ever.” He never cheated on her and he never put her down. Even after the divorce.

But Rachel ignored Jack’s work. She rarely commented on any of his broadcasts or even his columns. This was her way of hurting him. When at first she did not leave him because of his habit of withdrawing into himself she left him in a more fundamental way, abandoning him where it hurt the most. Ignoring the things he was proudest of.

Eventually, they both wanted more than a memory of how things were.

Much of Jack’s past was here in this apartment. After the divorce, boxes that had been stored in his garage in Tiburon had been dragged out and sifted through, yielding a collection of mementos he had gathered over the years:

Some of his childhood toys made of metal, his favorite a vintage 1940s Indie 500 racing car, number 54. It had a real gas engine that he still liked to inspect, marveling at how his country had gone from leading the world in technology to becoming a nation of Web designers and welfare recipients—all in his own lifetime. Another toy was a model airplane gas engine. “The drone” still had the same wooden propeller he had cranked as a small boy. Sometimes he wound it just to hear the sucking sound of the piston gasping for air.

Then there was the set of encyclopedias that his mother had scrimped and saved to purchase for him when he was ten years old. The track and football trophies from high school. His college diplomas. His journalism and broadcasting awards.

And, of course, the battered helmet he’d worn on assignment in Iraq, reminding him just how close he had come to dying there.

He kept them all neatly on display, for
his
eyes only. Because when it came down to it, who else really cared? Rachel hadn’t. His parents were no longer alive. And while Tony and Maxine had turned out to be great friends, Jack wasn’t yet ready to share this part of his life with them.

The truth was, Jack Hatfield was something of a loner. He missed some of the friends he’d made at GNT—friends who had largely abandoned him out of concern for their own careers—but he had never had much trouble spending time with himself.

Just as Tony Antiniori hid his limp, for fear it might signify weakness, Jack did his best to disguise what really amounted to a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome—an aversion to social interaction. He craved order in the world. Anyone with a keen eye would notice this.

When he was a child he would line his shoes up under his bed, only to become upset if he ever found them out of place. He kept weekly journals of his activities, developing skills that served him well in his older years as a reporter. And taking on a career as a war correspondent was his own personal version of therapy, plunging him into a world of chaos in hopes that he might somehow make sense of it and find a way to rid himself of this demon.

Over the years this desire for order had dissipated somewhat, but every so often it flared up again, as it had tonight when he thought Eddie was missing, or a week ago when Tom Drabinsky met his fate, or two years ago when the life he’d built came crashing down around him. Jack’s orderly world had been disturbed, and Tony had been right when he’d suggested that he get away from the boat for the night.

Because here, in his Fortress of Solitude, surrounded by the comforts of his past, he could shut out the noise and finally breathe free. He had often felt Isaiah applied to his life as it did to so much else:
“He was despised, and forsaken of men, a man of pains, and acquainted with disease, and as one from whom men hide their face; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

*   *   *

Across from Jack’s bedroom was the room in which he kept his gun collection. He locked them in a huge gun safe that had taken four men to muscle into his apartment.

He preferred weapons that were precise and reliable, like the Colt Combat Commander .45 automatic, with its sheer stopping power and deadly accuracy at short range; the SIG-Sauer .380, a precisely machined German pistol known for its smoothness of operation; and, as a final back-up “shoe gun,” he relied on his Kel-Tec Crimson Trace, which was the size of a pack of cigarettes and weighed only a few ounces. This little tiger held a six-round clip and fired a .380 round. Big enough to save your life, small enough to slip into a shirt pocket.

Then there were the rifles and shotguns. A 12-gauge Model 870 Remington Express Magnum; a Colt AR-15, which shot the .223 rounds first deployed in Vietnam as a fully automatic; and a Ruger Mini 14, .223.

Next to the display case was his father’s old worktable. His old man had been an horologist who made a living fixing rich men’s watches, and had passed much of his knowledge on to Jack. The hours spent learning about winding wheels and barrel bridges and balance screws and regulators had been some of the best of his childhood. There is nothing like watching a master at work, and nothing like the pride from knowing that master is your dad.

Over the years, Jack’s interests had expanded from watches to clocks. His father said he’d moved backward, because clocks were larger and easier to repair, but Jack loved the sound of the bells when they struck on the half and on the hour.

Winding one particular wall clock seemed to reset his mind. It was his favorite, a walnut German Berliner made by Kienzle in 1880. The brass face was embossed with a winged angel, the pendulum driven by an eight-day spring-wound movement that played the Westminster chimes on the half hour. Jack often smiled at the irony of being banned from entering Britain as he listened to the harmonious gongs.

He kept that clock in his living room now, and made sure to rewind it every time he came here. Like a diligent child, he listened attentively, counting the rings each and every time, careful not to overwind or run past the stops.

And every time he reset it, he thought about the internal clocks inside each of us. A clock for the heart. Another for the mind. And the final chime—was it set by fate or by circumstance?

After his father died, Jack had taken custody of the old man’s worktable and tools. The day he moved into this apartment, he’d brought them here as a kind of shrine to his old man.

Nights like this were rare, but when he had them he always found comfort sitting here in this darkened room under the glow of his father’s magnifying lamp, Eddie curled at his feet, as he quietly worked on the Hamilton “Gilbert” he’d inherited.

Like the Berliner, it was an exquisite timepiece, circa 1952, with a rectangular face and a solid fourteen-karat yellow gold case with nineteen jewels. He always kept it serviced, cleaning and replacing parts as necessary, and in all the years he’d owned it, he’d never once let it wind down.

Jack’s relationship with his father had been a difficult one, but he’d loved the man fiercely and this was the only way he knew to keep his spirit alive.

He sat at that worktable for several hours, laboring quietly as he thought about the events of the past week. He was carefully buffing out a small scratch in the watch’s crystal when his cell phone rang.

It was nearly three
A.M.
and the sound startled him.

Who would be calling him at this time of morning?

Setting the watch down, Jack fumbled the phone from his pocket, checked the screen, and saw that the number was blocked. He pressed the receive button, put it on speaker, and placed the phone on the desk. “Hello?”

There was static on the line, followed by a moment of silence, then a slurred but familiar voice said, “… Hatfield? ‘Sat you?”

Bob Copeland. He sounded as if he might be drunk.

“… Hatfield?… You there?”

It was unusual for Copeland to be calling him directly like this. With his penchant for secrecy, their normal mode of communication was a text message—like earlier tonight—and Jack had no doubt that those messages went through half a dozen encryption filters before they reached his phone.

“Yeah, Bob, it’s me. What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“… What?”

The static flared up again and if Copeland said anything more, Jack missed it. “Bob? Did you hear me?”

“… Can’t find my other shoe … Where the hell is my shoe?”

Definitely drunk, or even drugged—although Copeland had never struck Jack as a big fan of pharmaceuticals.

“Listen to me, Bob. Tell me where you are. Are you at home?”

More static.

“Bob?”

“Upstream, Jackie boy … Definitely upstream … Gotta get out of here … Gotta look after the twins…”

Jack had no idea what Copeland was talking about, but if he wasn’t at home, he definitely shouldn’t be driving.

“Whatever you do,” Jack told him, “don’t get behind the wheel. You hear me? Leave your car where it is and call yourself a cab.”

“… What?”

“Call a cab, Bob. I mean it. Promise me you won’t drive.”

“… No driving,” Copeland murmured, his voice sounding distant, as if he’d lowered the phone. “… Can’t find my goddamn shoe…”

Jack was about to insist he let him pick him up, when the line clicked and the phone went dead.

Damn
.

Jack sighed. He knew Copeland had a reputation as a hard drinker, but had always thought of him as a man in control. And a drunken phone call at three in the morning was completely out of character.

He tried to think of who he might call to get Copeland some help—family or something—but when it came down to it, Jack really didn’t know all that much about him. Especially after two years of no contact.

As he racked his brain trying to figure out who he might call, the phone rang again.

He clicked it on. “Bob? Is that you?”

No static this time, but no response, either.

“Bob?”

Several seconds ticked by, then the line went dead, and Jack silently cursed again, wishing there was some way to find out where Copeland was. Maybe call the police to make sure he didn’t wind up in a gutter somewhere.

But what would he tell them?