A Time for War

by Michael Savage

  “Are there any Chinese nationals registered at the hotel?”

  “Sir, you’d have to ask the manager—”

  “Never mind,” Fitzpatrick said. If someone had requested the car, he probably hadn’t registered using a Chinese passport for exactly this reason. Perhaps he hadn’t registered at all. There might be no one here. For all Fitzpatrick knew, the hotel manager might have been bribed. Or perhaps the chain was Chinese-owned. He would have to check. “Back doors?”

  “Only one and it leads to the pool and parking lot,” the clerk said. “They’re fenced in.”

  “Security cameras?”

  The young man nodded.

  Agent Fitzpatrick considered whether to ask to see the footage. The playbook said yes but he decided against it. An enemy operative might be waiting for him to do just that—to create a window of several minutes, a blind spot, to leave the building without his knowing and tie up another FBI resource. This entire exercise, triggered by an innocent tail from the airport, might be nothing more than an attempt to stretch FBI resources for some reason, or to challenge them to see their response.

  Fitzpatrick told the clerk he was going to wait in the lobby, and the clerk was to simply ignore him and say nothing to any of the other staff. The young man agreed. The agent went to a yellow vinyl, cushioned seat facing the elevators. He texted Division, told them he was on Level Four Stakeout, which meant it was a low-priority watch that could not, however, be avoided. He told them where he was.

  And then he brought up Angry Birds on his cell phone and waited.

  ~ * ~

  San Francisco, California

  Jack made arrangements with Max to watch Eddie until his return. The poodle didn’t mind the camera operator, though she was often running out for freelance assignments and didn’t give Eddie quite the attention he obviously thought he deserved.

  I know how you feel, Jack thought after dropping the dog at her apartment on Howard Street. There hadn’t been a woman in his life who gave him her full attention, either. Not since his sainted mother. It wasn’t a case of being a mama’s boy and it might not be politically correct, but Jack believed it was OK for women to dote on a man once in a while. He once had that debate with a feminist on his show. She had written a memoir called The S & M Society: She Must Be Mute. Jack had disagreed with her thesis.

  “No one’s telling you to be quiet,” Jack said.

  “Men are,” she had replied. “It’s what men do.”

  “Some men,” Jack corrected.

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing to me?” she asked. “Telling me to be quiet?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m disagreeing with you. That isn’t the same thing. I’m also telling you that you really shouldn’t be complaining when men ask for attention. It shows that we need you.”

  “What you need,” she replied hotly, “is to get away from the teat, to stop breast-feeding.”

  “You,” Jack replied, “obviously have one kinky private life.”

  She walked off the show.

  Before heading to the airport, Jack stopped at his apartment on Union Street. None of his friends knew about the place, which was located on the twentieth floor of a twenty-two-story, Sixties-era complex right off the Embarcadero. It was his secret haven just a block from the Bay, a touchstone with sanity in an insane world. It wasn’t the most beautiful building in San Francisco, but it held a singular appeal for Jack: there were four or five entrances and exits on various floors. Back in the day when he was an incendiary talk show host, it would have been difficult for any of the nutjobs or corporate powers who had threatened him over the years to stalk him.

  Jack steered Wilhelm into one of his two underground parking spaces. His Mercedes, dented and dirty from the explosion at the clinic, looked even worse next to the pristine Mercedes SLR McLaren in the other parking space. The McLaren belonged to Rachel, the former model who had been married to Jack for ten years and divorced from him for two. Her boyfriend, a tax attorney, had a twelve-car garage to keep the McLaren in, yet Rachel parked it at Jack’s place. She said it was for convenience but she hadn’t touched the car since she drove it here, and just sent Jack a check occasionally for the parking space fee. She’d even left her keys, which Jack had taken up to the apartment and tossed in a drawer. He suspected that she wanted to force him to look at the car, to be reminded of her. She didn’t want him, but she didn’t want him to forget her.

  No question, it was a beautiful car—all black, even custom black rims and black glass. The “Batmobile” was how Jack thought of it each time he checked that its trickle charger was plugged in and charging. He wondered if the tax attorney had bought the whole car for her or if they’d gone halvsies.

  The last time he had gone back to his house, before Rachel had sold it so she could move in with the attorney, Jack had been picking up some of his stuff. He’d noticed that Rachel was uncharacteristically light of spirit, nothing like the depressed, angry Rachel Jack had lived with for years. The tax attorney was there—very tall, very fat. Jack hadn’t known how serious the relationship was. He took Rachel aside and said, “Either get him out of here or I will physically remove him myself. He’s only after your—our— property, our money.”

  Rachel stared back at him coolly. “First, I doubt you could physically do it yourself. Second, he doesn’t need anything of ours, believe me. And Jack, you and I were in a graveyard together. I’m getting older. I can’t control my aging body. What I want, what I need, I have a right to find and keep.”

  ~ * ~

  Jack opened the door to his apartment and walked straight to the window. He needed to clear Rachel and her boyfriend out of his thoughts. The spectacular view did just that. Facing north, the window looked out across the Bay. Just beyond the Richmond Bridge he could see the East Brother Light Station, a small island lighthouse that—earthquakes and fires be damned—had been in that spot for over 133 years.

  Jack walked over to his favorite clock, the walnut German Berliner with a winged angel embossed on its brass face. It had been weeks— far too long—since he rewound it. He listened to the rings as he wound, taking care not to overwind, and a little order was restored to the world, as it always was when he came here. This apartment was one antidote to Jack’s mild case of Asperger’s. The other, when he was on the Sea Wrighter, was video editing. His boat was full of the tools of his trade, his mission, so the rest of his life was here, stored in objects and books, photographs and mementoes that had meaning only to him. He jokingly thought of it as the Museum of Jack Hatfield, not as a repository of some inflated sense of self-worth but as a place of understanding and reflection.

  There were some of his childhood toys: his favorites were a vintage 1940s Indy 500 racing car and a gas-powered model airplane that still had the same wooden propeller he had watched spin when he was seven years old. There was an old red-and-white fireboat that he used to play with in the bathtub. The hoses still fired an impressive stream of water. Now and then he tried it in the kitchen sink with a smile as big as he could remember. Here and there were the track and football trophies he’d earned in high school. A bowling ball he’d once rolled down Filbert between Leavenworth and Hyde—a teenage prank that had mercifully not struck any cars but had earned him one hundred hours of community service.

  On the walls were his journalism and broadcasting awards, scattered among paint-by-number art pieces his mother had done with him and portraits of deer and fishermen. Country landscapes bumped frames with his small collection of nautical scenes by nineteenth-century painters that he had inherited from his father. He paused by the marine paintings, entranced by the clear pale sunlights, the blushing clouds and taut white sails, the sheens on the sides of the tall ships. His gaze was drawn to his prize, a William Coulter of a three-masted ship trying to veer away from the rocks of the Farallon Islands. Judging by the strength of the waves, the torn sails, and the broken rigging, the ship wasn’t going to make it. Next to th
e Coulter was another unknown masterpiece, by Gideon Denny, an American who was born in 1830, died 1886. Steam Sailer off the Golden Gate presented an orange sky and a ship nobly plowing through storm waves, and this ship was going to survive the journey. “Even man’s greatest works pale in comparison with the immensity of God’s creation,“ had stated the brochure that convinced Jack to buy the painting.

  Jack knew that he was going to see luxury beyond belief when he was in Hawke’s territory, but he doubted he would see an ounce of the careful beauty that these painters had added to the world, and the respect they had paid to the work of God.

  On a shelf below the Coulter was the helmet Jack had worn in Iraq, with shrapnel rents that reminded him of how close he had come to dying there.

  Sometimes Jack came to the apartment to hide. There was no computer, no phone, no television. He turned off his cell phone and sat at the small desk and repaired watches. That—and sex— were the only things that cleared his mind of all other concerns. He sat down now with a Hamilton Model #3 two-tone pocket-watch that he had pulled out a few weeks before to repair. A rare part had come in but he hadn’t even opened the mailing package. Now Jack brought out his father’s repair tools but he wasn’t at work half an hour before he felt a kind of inner pressure. Working on the watch would not calm him if he was avoiding something vitally important—if he was hiding from himself. He needed to face the near future and get centered.

  He rose from the desk and sat in an old armchair, looking out the window. Philippians 4:8 came to his mind: Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

  He did think about them. He thought about them because, for some reason, there was something about this trip to Hawke he found unsettling. Part of it was the fact that he had no idea where he was going. Jack didn’t mind flying blind, as he had often done in Iraq or pursuing a story in some remote spot of the globe or even in a dangerous alley in West Oakland. But at those times he was on the ground and able to change course or duck. There was an exit strategy. Not here. Another part of the equation—a larger part, now that he thought of it—was the sense that he was about to put himself in the hands of someone he’d practically accused of treason. If Hawke couldn’t convince him of his innocence, the billionaire might well cause Jack to disappear. He needed to shake the feeling of dread before he got on board. Confinement would only make it worse.

  How do you do that? he asked himself.

  There was a copy of the Bible on a rickety wooden stool beside the chair. Jack used to sit on that stool, in a corner, as punishment, when he was a kid. He once had a distinguished child psychiatrist on Truth Tellers who had written a book called Cruel and Unusual Punishment. The Harvard-educated $400-an-hour New York-based highbrow thirty-something childless woman maintained that forceful discipline of any “person of youth” was wrong.

  “Were you punished as a child?” Jack had asked her.

  “Never,” she said. “I was spoken to as an adult.”

  “Did you understand what was said to you?”

  “Some of it.”

  “I see,” Jack replied. “That would explain this conversation.”

  The memory of her angry reaction—effectively, a childlike tantrum—made him smile. He felt some of the tension go away.

  He laid his hand on the Bible as though he were channeling its wisdom, running the words through his brain, searching for something that would put him entirely at ease. The Psalms were about courage and he mentally picked his way through them.

  I observed the prosperity of the wicked ... Arrogance is their necklace, and violence their clothing ... Their prosperity causes them to do wrong; their thoughts are sinful... They speak as if they rule in heaven, and lay claim to the earth ... They say, “How does God know what we do? “

  “He knows,” Jack said. “And he empowers those who would challenge you.”

  Jack wasn’t convinced that God would shield him or welcome him with an embrace if he fell. But he did believe there was a right and there was a wrong. The universe wasn’t ordered to suit Jack Hatfield, and whether he liked it or not he was suddenly one of the gatekeepers of justice. Those words of Benjamin Franklin he had once quoted came back to him: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

  “OK, Jack,” he said, giving the Bible a pat and rising. “Get over yourself and go do the job.”

  Before he left the apartment he went looking through his desk drawers. Then, downstairs in the parking garage, the gullwing doors of the SLR McLaren opened upward for him. He roared into the late afternoon traffic. Somehow the machine felt like camouflage as he prepared to enter Hawke’s field of vision.

  The rush hour drama on the way to the airport barely dented Jack’s consciousness. He was wondering whether he should call Rachel and tell her he was driving her car, which he knew was just shadowboxing before the main event— confronting Hawke. The drive down 280 was therapeutic—the throaty roar, the black glass, the overwhelming sensation of 638 HP He was momentarily aggravated by the bottlenecked traffic at San Francisco International, but he wasn’t going to any of the main terminals in the big, snowflake-like design.

  Jack parked in the ultra-secure parking facility of the private terminal, which was a three-story, pale-gray structure that seemed more window than wall. He grabbed his small overnight bag and walked in. The bag contained his computer and also a change of clothes he did not know if he’d need. He knew damned little, in fact. But there was something exciting about that. If Jack had wanted life to be predictable, he would not have gone into journalism, to Iraq, or into television. In reverse order, those were three of the least routine arenas on the globe.

  Jack did not have to go to the counter. A flight attendant rose from one of the chairs when he walked in. She was dressed in a black suit and black tie. The only thing that gave her away was a silver Hawke logo on her breast pocket.

  “Mr. Hatfield?”

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome. My name is Martina.” The young woman stepped forward and offered her hand. She was about five foot six, blond, and blue eyed. Austrian, Jack guessed from just the trace of accent in her voice.

  “Hi, Martina.”

  Jack looked past her. Through tinted windows he saw three jets on the tarmac. Jack knew at once which belonged to Hawke. It wasn’t just the logo on the tail fin; it was the fact that Jack had never seen an aircraft quite like it.

  “Would you come with me?” Martina asked.

  “Sure. Where are we going, by the way?”

  “The pilot has that information,” she said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I do not,” she replied. “My duties are the same wherever Mr. Hawke sends the aircraft.” She reached for his shoulder bag.

  “It’s OK, I’ve got it,” Jack said.

  “Of course,” she said, backing away instantly with an obedient little nod.

  The woman was deferential to a fault and not nosy. Just like Bahiti. Jack imagined that every employee in Hawke’s personal circle had those qualities right at the top of the job description.

  They walked toward the door that opened onto the tarmac. As they crossed the otherwise empty building Jack felt the anxiety of the trip return. He needed to shake that and noticed a small help-yourself concession counter to the left.

  “Hey, I’d like to grab some popcorn before we go,” he said.

  Martina seemed mildly confused. “We have Almas caviar on board, Mr. Hatfield—”

  “Yeah, but that’s not popcorn.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she agreed.

  “Right, and I’m guessing that must be some damn fine private jet terminal popcorn.” He jerked his head to the stand. “I’m gonna grab a bag. Want some?”

  She smil
ed sweetly. “No, thank you.”

  “OK. Be right back.”

  Jack hurried to the stand. He took a tall, narrow bag from the lamp-heated glass case, shook some of the contents into his mouth, enjoyed the crunch and the taste, but most of all, the momentary respite. He was determined not to slip back into that state of mild anxiety. He stood there, thinking about the one sure place he could visit to get his mental feet under him.

  Jack thought back to his father’s death. He remembered when he was five years old. His father had driven him to a mountaintop where, his arm folded around the boy to keep him warm against the brisk mountain wind, he pointed to a lake below and taught him the word “shimmering.” He had him repeat the word.

  “Shimmering, shimmering, shimmering,“ Jack could still hear himself saying in his little boy voice.

  Later in life as they would hike in the mountains, his father would point to the quaking aspens in the west.