A Time for War (18 page)

As Sammo had expected, officials had responded to his unexpected attack by following all the cars that came from the Chinese consulate, sometimes with regulation vehicles and sometimes with others more nondescript.

Minus one,
he thought with a private grin. The car he had hit would not be going anywhere for days. Not until all its electrical systems were replaced.

Sammo did not fault them this response. Until now, the bulk of Chinese activity had been to meet and bribe government employees or sabotage the Internet. Without a precedent to follow—like Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups with known patterns and member-types—it was virtually impossible to prepare for a man like himself and what he had done to the car. The task of quickly ferreting out cells or contacts was especially difficult in a region like this with a vast and geographically diversified Asian population. It wasn't the same as looking for a single, surly, swarthy man in a crowd of shoppers or commuters.

Sammo went to his room and waited. At exactly two
P.M.
, the house phone rang. It was one of the men from the car, calling as ordered. Sammo had wanted any observers to see a man get out and a man get back in, unable to ascertain whether it was the same man. The tail would have to follow the car. He also did not want the American authorities to have surveillance access to his own cell phone.

The communication would consist of one word, in the event that anyone had followed the man in and was listening through the switchboard.
Y
Ä«
—one—meant that Sammo would be joining them.
Èr
—two—meant they were to get back on the highway and travel north without him.

“
Èr,
” he told them.

“
Èr,
” the man in the car repeated, then hung up.

Sammo went back to the lobby. The sedan was gone. He strolled to the pool. The other car had left as well. Pleased at having lost the FBI tail, he selected a local map from the rack in the lobby and returned to his room. He would not be able to use any online map service for the same reason he did not call the car on his cell phone. He could not be sure of the security of any wireless activity.

Somewhere in the distance the sound of an airplane rumbled, like the challenge of a distant animal. He looked at the map. Central Place paralleled Highway 12. Following it, he would have no problem reaching the site of the Mother Hen Toy Company facility.

He felt like he did when he was in Afghanistan. He had expected he would be able to blend in here but that was clearly not an option. He was back in undercover mode. It was not what he had expected to be doing here, and he had to make sure that he had an exit plan from the site. But he was ready for it just the same.

Sammo set his phone alarm to ring at 5:30, then removed his shoes and lay down on the bed. During training, he had learned to fall asleep quickly by reciting poems he had committed to memory. In the field, it was necessary to take whatever rest one could. Especially when he needed to be alert on both fronts.

Offensively and defensively, it was going to be a taxing and very busy night.

*   *   *

Agent Al Fitzpatrick was not dressed like a G-man. He wore the lunchtime sweats that he used to work out in the bureau gym. When Field Director Forsyth gave them their assignments, he told them to disguise themselves as best as possible in case it was necessary to track anyone on foot.

Watching the front of the hotel, it seemed as if the same man had gotten back into the Chinese consulate car as had left. But Fitzpatrick and his partner, Agent Meadow Wood, could not be sure. They agreed that he should get out and watch the hotel while she followed the car. He slid from the driver's side, which couldn't be seen from the hotel side, and waited behind an oak tree. When both cars were gone, he jogged up the street to the main road. He entered the hotel, went to the registration area, showed the clerk his credentials.

“The man who came in from the black sedan,” he said. “Did the same man leave?”

“Yes, sir,” the young clerk told him.

“What did he do?”

“He went to the house phone around the corner.”

“Do you have a record of who he called?”

“No, sir,” the young man said. “It does not go through the switchboard.”

“Just circuits.”

“I guess so, sir.”

“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 the 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 pocketwatch 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.