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.