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.
Unless you had other things on your mind.
Jack checked his watch. Four-twenty, still no Copeland.
He stood there wondering if he should stick around a while longer or call it a day. Maybe check in with Maxine, see how the video was coming. Just as he made up his mind, his cell phone rang.
It was Tony.
Jack clicked it on. “Hey, Tony, I can’t really talk right now. I’m in the middle of-”
“You’ll want to talk about this,” Tony said. “Are you near a TV?”
“No, why?”
“Your friend Bob Copeland is all over the news.”
Jack’s gut tightened. “What do you mean? We’re supposed to be meeting right now. I’m standing here waiting for him.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be waiting forever,” Tony said. “Copeland’s dead.”
15
It didn’t take long for the smear job to start.
Bob Copeland himself had said it best: “Nobody spews that kind of venom unless they’ve got something to hide.”
His body was found in a landfill in Oakland, when the driver of a garbage truck dumped his load for the afternoon. Copeland came tumbling out like an oversized rag doll, his three-piece suit stained and askew, one of his shoes missing, and enough bruises on his body to suggest he’d been beaten pretty badly.
The part about the shoe hit Jack hard. He couldn’t purge his friend’s slurred voice from his head, talking about the shoe, and he kept second-guessing himself, wondering what he could have done to prevent this from happening.
“Don’t start the blame game,” Tony told him.
But the truth was, if Jack hadn’t contacted Copeland in the first place the man might still be alive.
The initial reports on Copeland’s death were sketchy, but as the night wore on more and more sordid details came to light, and the more Jack heard, the more he wanted to break his TV.
Those initial reports had told of Copeland’s service in Vietnam, his work with the think tank, the Pentagon, and the two Bush administrations, his dedication to cybersecurity, and his regular appointment to the board of trustees for the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center.
In other words, Bob Copeland was a patriot, through and through. An outstanding human being on just about every level.
But once the news had gotten that part out, they were done with it and quickly moved on to the more salacious details, half of which seemed to have been cooked up by a bad mystery writer.
Every time you changed the channel there was a slightly different version of events. But as far as Jack was concerned they’d all gotten it wrong. This was, the news insisted, the story of a man who had had a mental breakdown, distraught over a lawsuit, a dispute with his neighbor about the building of an addition to the house across the street from his home in San Mateo.
According to police, several incendiary devices-smoke bombs, it turned out-had been set off at the construction site shortly after midnight, and they claimed they’d found Copeland’s cell phone buried under some construction debris.
Early the next morning Copeland was caught on video wandering the aisles of an Oakland convenience store, walking with a limp and missing that shoe. The proprietor said he was so drunk and disoriented he’d taken him for a homeless guy and had kicked him out.
There were conflicting reports on whether or not the police believed Copeland was murdered or his death had merely been an accident.
Some department spokesmouth-who seemed to have come from nowhere, and had no forensics credibility whatsoever-publicly made the claim that Copeland’s bruises were consistent with a fall. But the cops soon realized that nobody believed that a guy Copeland’s size-no matter how drunk he might have been-could accidentally fall into a chest-high Dumpster, and his death was officially ruled a homicide.
The question was, who had done it and why? The police weren’t talking, but according to reports, they were working on the theory that Copeland had gotten drunk and run into a gang of muggers or drug addicts who robbed and killed him before hastily disposing of the body.
The story was ludicrous, of course, but all the news channels seemed to be eating it up. The Big Bad City and all that. Stay in your homes and lock your doors. Derelicts and gangbangers want your wallets. Oh, and don’t forget to stock up on breakfast cereal and toilet paper.
Jack had contacted the Oakland Police about the phone call from Copeland this morning, but their interest in his story was minimal-bordering-on-nonexistent and Jack doubted there would ever be a follow-up.
The only ones making any real noise about the whole thing were the talk radio hosts and their listeners. Many of them were convinced that there was a cover-up afoot, and Jack certainly couldn’t disagree. But all they had were theories, from a mob hit to an SEC investigation conspiracy-and Jack knew the truth.
Bob Copeland had been killed by the very same people who had killed Jamal Thomas. The same people who had broken into his boat and put that noose in his shower stall. The very same people who were behind William Clegg and his ridiculous charge against the Constitutional Defense Brigade.
The way Jack saw it, those smoke bombs had been used as a distraction while Copeland was kidnapped from his home. He’d been drugged and interrogated and somehow managed to escape before he was found again and promptly eliminated.
Now three people were dead, and Jack was convinced it was all because of the message Copeland had left for him in Carolyn Cassady’s autobiography.
All because of Operation Roadshow.
“So here’s what I started with,” Maxine said.
Jack had phoned Tony and asked his friend to meet him at Max’s place. He didn’t tell him why and Tony was hooked. The two were looking over her shoulder as she punched a key on her computer. The large rectangular monitor on the wall came alive with the video that Leon shot with his cell phone. The image seemed less shaky than before, and on the big screen the guy with the sunglasses was easier to distinguish. About forty or so, with a muscular frame and a military bearing. And to Hatfield’s mind, there was something off about the guy. Call him crazy, but the man didn’t strike him as American.
South African, maybe?
“He looks private,” Tony said, confirming Jack’s earlier assessment. “Definitely no amateur.”
They were all sitting in task chairs, surrounding Max’s desk in her video editing booth, which was really nothing more than a spare apartment bedroom jammed full of specialized electronic equipment.
“This is normal HD resolution,” she said. “I applied a stabilizing filter to steady the image and try to cut down on Leon’s crappy camerawork. If he’d been thinking, he would’ve included the Escalade’s license plate and saved us all a lot of trouble.”
“If wishes were horses,” Tony murmured…
Max looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about, then pointed to a corner of the screen.
“That right there is our target,” she told them. “Looks like a standard parking sticker, about half the size of a playing card. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I’d say that that black-and-white blob is probably a logo of some kind. And that’s what I went to work on.”
Jack clucked in disgust. “I still can’t believe how ballsy these guys are. Broad daylight and they don’t give a damn who sees them.”