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?
Where would they start looking?
Then it struck Jack. What if there was more to this than a night of simple overindulgence? After what he’d found hanging in his shower, he had to wonder if it was possible that this was some kind of a cry for help.
Could Copeland be in a different kind of trouble?
But when Jack thought it through, that didn’t make much sense. If Bob Copeland were in danger, why would he be calling in a drunken stupor? And there were plenty of people he could call besides Jack. The guy had once worked for the Pentagon, for God’s sake.
This was a simple case of drunk dialing, is all. And there’s nothing worse than a drunk dialer.
Maybe Jack wasn’t the only one who had demons to contend with. He just hoped the guy got home safely and was sober enough to make their meeting tomorrow.
They had a lot to talk about.
14
Jack went back to the Sea Wrighter the next morning. When he stepped onto the deck, he discovered he’d had another visitor in the night. He found a package about the size of a shirt box, wrapped in brown paper and tucked against the starboard pilothouse door. There was no name, no address, no writing of any kind.
Odd, he thought. What the hell was this all about?
He raised it slightly, feeling with his fingers for a minelike depression plate underneath. Nothing. He kept it level as he raised it. There was no lopsided weight to indicate packed explosives, no faint chemical smell, no ticking, no wires that he could see under the wrapping. Snatching it up, he let himself in, then moved into the galley and laid it on the table. He tore away the brown paper. All he found inside was a briefcase containing a swath of papers. Government authorization forms, from the looks of them, generated by the Department of Defense.
Jack paused when he saw them.
Was this something he should be looking at?
The authorization involved a special transport mission. On August 20 of this year, a shipment of highly classified experimental hydrazine-based rocket fuel was to be carried from a facility Jack wasn’t even aware of, designated by number only. For security reasons, the fuel would be traveling by tanker truck rather than the usual rail transportation.
According to the timetable, part of that journey would involve passing over the Golden Gate Bridge at approximately 2200 hours that night, and Jack got the impression that the Bridge Authority had not been notified of this shipment. The truck itself would be marked as a milk tanker.
In other words, this was a so-called black shipment. Okay; Jack had no doubt that happened all the time.
The question was, why had this package been left on his deck, and who had left it?
Searching through the package again, Jack found a business card for a Linda Hodgkins of the Department of Defense. After mulling it over, Jack flipped open his cell phone and called the number.
It was picked up after three rings. “Yes?”
“Is this Linda Hodgkins with the Department of Defense?”
A hesitation. “Yes, who is this?”
“Ms. Hodgkins, my name is Jack Hatfield and it seems a package of yours has been left on my boat. Would you know anything about that?”
A longer hesitation. “Copeland said you can be trusted.”
“You know Bob Copeland?”
“Yes, I wanted him to take the briefcase but he told me to leave it on your boat.”
“Maybe you’d better back up a bit and tell me what this is about.”
She hesitated again, as if trying to gather her courage, then she said, “Yesterday afternoon my colleagues and I went to lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf and we left some sensitive materials in the back of our van. Somebody broke in and took everything except that briefcase, including a classified laptop computer.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “So what does this have to do with Copeland?”
“We’ve already been burned and are looking at some serious disciplinary action. I went to Bob for help and he suggested I stash the briefcase and documents in case I ever need to use them for leverage.”
“And he told you to give them to me?”
“Yes. He said he was too hot to be hanging on to them for now and that you’re the most trustworthy person he knows. But when I went to your boat you weren’t there, so I left them by the door.”
“Something that sensitive,” he said. “You just leave it like a UPS package.”
“That’s exactly right,” she replied. “It’s called a Poe Drop, after Edgar Allan. From ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Hide what people are looking for in plain sight and they’ll never see it.”
“If you say so. What are you expecting me to do with them?”
“Just keep them safe until Bob can take possession of them. That’s all I ask.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I think I can manage that.”
“Thank you. Now, I really have to go. I don’t want to be on this line any longer than necessary.”
Then she abruptly hung up.
Jack stared at the phone for a moment, wondering how this played into everything that had happened so far, but couldn’t for the life of him make a connection.
Just another typical
bit of Bob Copeland cloak and dagger, he supposed.
Taking the papers from the briefcase, he stuffed them into a manila envelope and put them in the safe in his cabin.
Yet another question to ask Copeland when he saw him this afternoon.
* * *
At ten past four, Hatfield stood in the central atrium of the Museum of Modern Art wondering if Copeland would ever show.
After the events of this morning and that bizarre phone call last night, he was concerned about the guy. Shortly after the second call, he’d remembered that Copeland had a house in San Mateo, and before going to bed, he’d called every number listed in the book. But all he’d succeeded in doing was pissing off a bunch of half-asleep strangers.
Jack sent his friend several text messages during the day, using their usual contact number, but so far there had been no response. Not that this was all that unusual. It often took Copeland a while to get back to him. And based on the guy’s behavior this morning, Jack wouldn’t be surprised if he was still passed out somewhere, in an alcohol-induced coma.
But none of this made him feel any better. He liked Copeland and hated to think of him that way. There were, of course, other matters to consider. Copeland wouldn’t have requested this meeting if he didn’t have information, and Jack was curious to know what that information was.
Like the building itself, the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art was a thing of beauty. Jack had always had a soft spot for great architecture, even if his knowledge about what was stored inside this place was limited. Fine art was more Rachel’s territory, and in their ten years of marriage they’d come here several times to see various exhibits.
The place had been a San Francisco icon for nearly two decades, and still had that edgy, modernistic look that made it stand out in a crowded urban environment. The atrium was cavernous, boasting a huge, tubular skylight, and you couldn’t help having a feeling of awe every time you entered the place.
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