A Time for War (10 page)

Jack's smile told him he was right. The Mossad had also had a long, long chat with him.

“And how many interviews did you do with news media? A dozen?”

“At least. You know what the hell of it was? I spent so much time talking to other people about it, I never actually got to do my own report.”

“Brother, you'd make a terrible merc,” Doc said. “Journalism 101: the news is free. Stories are what you do for pay.”

Jack chuckled. He took a swallow of wine and noticed a pair of women looking at Eddie on their way into Spumante's. Eddie, of course, was mugging for their attention.

“Try the poodle,” Jack told the ladies. “It's the best in the city.”

The women weren't sure whether to laugh and hastily entered the restaurant. Doc and Jack grinned at each other.

*   *   *

Suddenly Jack felt as though a pair of boxing gloves punched him on both sides of his head and stayed there. He heard his jaw pop; heard an intake of air through his mouth. At the same moment something pushed against his back and knocked him forward. The table shook, the wine spilled, and Eddie howled, then scooted out the other side. The poodle was standing, barking, but Jack couldn't hear him. Jack saw Doc, who was across from him, rock backward, catch the edge of the table, then throw himself to the tiled patio. Behind him, the sun seemed to go backward, rising instead of falling, as the restaurant and the buildings and the sky itself turned a murky crimson.

The flash, the noise, the impact, were all over in an instant. But the shock lingered another few moments.

Doc was the first to recover.

“Bomb!” he shouted, looking past Jack.

Jack couldn't hear him but he could read Doc's lips and his expression. He was just realizing on his own what had happened. He turned and looked toward the clinic. It was now a flaming, smoky shell.

Car alarms and shouting began to penetrate the thick hum that filled his ears. He saw wicks of flame moving against the larger inferno—people who had been caught in the explosion, their arms and torsos afire. He threw aside the chair and ran toward the small white building. Doc was a few paces ahead of him. Jack looked back. Eddie had jumped onto one of the chairs and was watching. He knew the poodle wouldn't be moving.

Crowds were converging from all directions. Some were trying to help the injured. Others were breaking car windows in the street, shifting the gears where possible to roll them from the fire. Jack himself went as close as he could to a black car, possibly an Audi, that looked like it had been ground zero for the blast. The heat was fierce, like someone had opened a giant oven. He didn't see anybody inside. It wasn't a suicide attack. The hood of the trunk had been blown into the middle of Stockton and the bottom of the chassis had ceased to exist. That was where the explosives had been, triggered either by a timer or a remote detonator; probably the latter. Rush hour traffic was too risky for a ticking clock.

Fire sirens penetrated the remaining dullness in his ears. Their flashing lights were reassuring, a sense of functioning infrastructure, of capable men at a moment of chaos. Jack lingered near the Audi, wanting to make sure that the crime scene was preserved as much as possible.

His ears had cleared enough so he could now hear sobbing. Family members who had been waiting for patients stood clustered outside, held back by pedestrians who refused to let them rush in.

Chinese families. A Chinese clinic.

Jack did not know why, he did not know how, but his nagging reporter's gut told him that this was not unrelated to what happened on Clay Street that morning. He took out his cell phone and began shooting video of the car—not to have a record for the police but because it was news and because it was research.

He had found his next story.

 

4

New York, New York

It was nearly five
P.M.
when Richard Hawke left the Midtown Manhattan building he owned to get into the stretch limousine that would carry him a dozen blocks to the private helicopter that would shuttle him to his luxury jet, the revolutionary, new Quiet Small Supersonic Transport.

The sixty-two-year-old telecommunications titan did not look the part of a three-time
Forbes
Person of the Year. He was a short, emaciated man who always wore sunglasses but was pale as a domino. He had recently beaten throat cancer and was not quite at the halfway point of being clear for five years. He bought the clinic that treated him in Germany, just in case he needed it again.

His cancer was the result of a profligate youth spent in this very neighborhood, when he stole from food vendors on Ninth Avenue for breakfast and lunch, helping to stretch the small income his parents earned in the Garment District—his mother as a seamstress for a nonunion shop, his father as the operator of a label-cutting machine.

Their apartment on West 45th Street no longer existed. That was the site of the Hawke Building, a fifty-three-story tower made of dark glass and shaped like a geometric rocket, flat and tapering. There were many who said that, standing among the lower-lying structures, it looked like a large, extended middle finger. If so, not even his critics begrudged him bragging rights. Richard Hawke was the definition of “self-made.” When, bored and restless, he barely graduated from high school in 1969, a friend got him a job working the spotlights at one of the few surviving burlesque houses on 42nd Street and Tenth Avenue. Watching the strippers and naked contortionists night after night, it occurred to Richard that there was money to be made by filming the acts. He arranged a royalty payment for the artists; those women taught him the art of hardball negotiation. When you had something that someone else absolutely needed, you charged a premium. Of course, when you had all five performers on board you learned the value of counter-negotiation: you threatened to cut each one out individually until, without the others knowing it, everyone had reduced their fee.

The deals made, he bought a used 16mm camera, set it up beside his lights, and then arranged private showings for underage kids in the backroom of a soda shop down the street from his apartment. He cut the owner in on the profits. When home video started making noise with the introduction of Betamax in 1975, Richard released his library—with a musical accompaniment—on his own label, Hawke-Eye Cinema. That earned him his first million dollars, which he used to buy his parents a big waterfront place in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, now a favorite neighborhood for Russians. Producing all-new, hardcore narrative films for Hawke-Eye earned Richard his second and third million. His next big purchase was the lot where his apartment and the adjoining apartments sat.

Upon the advice of his attorney, Hawke diversified into more legitimate businesses. In the early 1980s, he had been fascinated with the early adoption of mobile phone technology by pimps to warn hookers on 44th and Broadway when the cops were headed their way. He bought the company that made the phones, infamously renaming it PMT—Pimp Mobile Technologies—and expanded by purchasing small microwave networks and nascent fiber optics companies and merging them into a communications empire. In the ensuing three decades, there was not a month when any company in any part of the world had more cutting-edge technology available for the marketplace. If they did, Hawke bought them. That was something he learned from Bernie Michaels, who owned the burlesque house: it was ultimately more economical to buy your competitor's talent than to try and grow your own.

Richard had always had more energy than any two men around him. When the cancer was diagnosed after a long, lingering sore throat—squamous cell carcinoma of the tonsil—it was the first setback Hawke had ever encountered. He took some small solace from the fact that it had been caused by the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus. He had either gotten it from the showgirls or streetwalkers he hung out with as a young man, or the $2,000-an-hour escorts he hired as soon as he could afford them.

However it had happened, it wasn't recent. Richard hired escorts now to play different games. His favorite was an enactment: two prostitutes, one woman, one very well-hung man, having sex with each other while Richard pretended that the woman was a friend who had rejected him because of the size of his penis. He was only ever her friend, never a lover, and the two of them had agreed to this bargain, he imagined. Somehow this reverse fantasy, this sexualized double business arrangement, could bring Richard to orgasm. His constant anxieties about his penis size had only increased with age and every other approach to satisfaction usually failed. Business was his vitality; financial conquest, his virility.

As a bonus, this particular need of his meant relationships were out of the question. Richard didn't like relationships. He didn't like to share anything; he liked to own, even if it was just for an hour or two. As for children, he had been known to comment, “Either you pay for it by the hour, by the day, by the week, or for the rest of your life.…” But mostly he just wanted to avoid the question of an inheritance. He would leave behind billions, surely, but he wouldn't be obliged to. Obligations were for cowards.

After the initial shock of the diagnosis, he met the throat cancer head-on. The tumor itself was surgically removed, cutting a diagonal scar into his throat. He underwent an aggressive regimen of radiation. As the diseased tissue was eradicated in a daily dose of fire and pain, Richard focused on each step, just as he had done in business. Get through the session. Put on the narcotic patch. Work on producing saliva. Rest. Repeat. Accept that the feeding tube inserted into a cut in his side and strapped to his shoulder was an experience, not a weakness. How many men had poured high-caloric cocktails directly into their stomachs? He focused on the fact that the feeding tube was allowing his throat to heal. Besides, the concurrent chemotherapy made even the thought of solid intake nauseating.

When he had beaten the disease, he found that his taste buds had essentially ceased to function and he wasn't able to put on much of the thirty-odd pounds he had lost. But that was the price of victory. And he
had
won. If necessary, he would win again. That was what Richard Hawke did.

The Agusta A109 twin-engine helicopter was ready to take off when he arrived. It was gleaming white, with the blue silhouette of a hawk in flight on both sides. Hawke climbed into the private passenger cabin. He selected one of the five big, white leather seats on the port side and looked out the large rectangular window as the helicopter rose over the Hudson River. He looked down at the thick traffic on the West Side Highway. He felt good not having to be a part of that madness. He had risen above it literally and figuratively, by the efforts of his mind and will. He looked at Manhattan as he rose to the equal of his tower and then the larger buildings. He had succeeded in one of the toughest markets society had ever birthed, a city that crushed more ambition every minute of every day than any anvil in human history. That was a source of unending pride. And then to beat cancer as well—

It wasn't enough.

He had realized that when he returned from Germany after receiving his last treatment. He flew home, to his triplex apartment on 57th Street, over this city, over
his
city, and knew he needed more. He had always thought like a teenager trying to get out of Hell's Kitchen. He had matched the achievements of the greatest entrepreneurs from Andrew Carnegie to Steve Jobs. But that was like being at the top of the historic “B list.” He had impacted culture but not the course of civilization. During his recuperation, Hawke read biographies of men like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao Zedong. These men were like the treatments he had received in Germany: they cut out every sickness, every impediment to their vision. As with radiation and chemotherapy, that process was not gentle or sentimental.

And it doesn't always work,
he thought. The mortality rate among stage four oral cancer victims was less than forty percent. The mortality rate among despots was even higher. But the theory was sound: big problems require powerful, targeted solutions. Lying in the clinic in Bad Mergentheim, he reasoned that there had to be a better way to impact the course of history, especially for a man with his resources.

He believed he had found that.

The helicopter reached JFK International in under ten minutes. Within a half hour of leaving his office Richard Hawke was on his jet. The sleek white aircraft had a Concorde-like design, improved for speed and silence with two small forward wings and rear diagonal struts that ran from the top of the tail to the rear center of the swept-back wings. He would be on his yacht off Saint Martin in less than two hours. He wanted to be away from the office, away from the United States for a while. He did not want to hear the melodramatic whining of newscasters and colleagues as events expanded and intersected and became something that even the visionaries or the tyrants had never imagined.

Sausalito, California

Jack Hatfield slept poorly.

What clung to his nostrils and ears, eyes and mind, was the carnage he had witnessed at the destruction of the Chinese clinic.

Jack had stayed at the bombsite until well after midnight. He had called Max and she had biked to the site with one of her smaller digital cameras on her back, in case the police were going to block car traffic. Max's footage of the aftermath would bracket the cell phone footage Jack had taken.

After a few hours of sleep, Jack got out of bed shortly before six
A.M.
to look at footage on his computer and mark a few edits for Max. The phone beeped while he was making coffee. Caller ID showed a 240 area code. He had no idea where that was or who “Dover Griffith” might be. He let it go to voice mail and went back to the edits.

Max was one of the new generation of photographers. To her, everything about the medium—
hell, everything about the world,
Jack thought—was digital. Instant, disposable, fixable. He missed the days of watching film and, later, video on a machine built for that purpose. The sense of anticipation, waiting to see if you had captured the experience in a brief bit of footage or a still image, if your eye had found something in a moment that you had missed in the mad flow of events.