A Time for War (33 page)

“I think there was a family taking pictures when he was here,” the waitress said.

“When?”

“Yesterday at lunchtime. I remember because the soldier's folks asked me to take a photo of all of them. He might be in them—they were sitting nearby.”

“Are they still here?” Fitzpatrick asked.

“I don't know,” said the manager. He looked at the waitress. “Astrida, would you remember the bill? They may have signed with their room number.”

She hurried to the adjoining restaurant while Fitzpatrick thought about his next move. Security-wise the city was a large, leaky sieve and they might not be able to catch him here. But surveillance cameras in most of the airports, train stations, and bus terminals were run through law enforcement links that had facial recognition software. If they could get an image of the man into that software—

“The Mihalkos, room 212,” the waitress said as she came running back.

The desk clerk ran the name. “They are supposed to check out today—”

“Ring the room,” Fitzpatrick said.

The woman obliged. When someone answered she put the agent on.

“Mrs. Mihalko, this is Al Fitzpatrick with the FBI. You heard about the attack outside of Travis—”

“We were just watching it on the television! We're trying to reach our son—”

“Ma'am, we have reason to believe you may have dined in the hotel while the terrorist was there. Would you mind coming to the lobby with whatever photographs you took yesterday?”

The woman said she would be right down.

Fitzpatrick began writing on a pad of paper on the counter. “Here's a URL,” he said to the desk clerk. “Please go to this site.”

The clerk did so just as Mrs. Mihalko arrived.

“My husband is upstairs trying to get a call through to the base—” she said.

“It's going to be tough to get through to anyone right now,” Fitzpatrick told her. “What does your son do on the base?”

“He's in the 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs Office,” she said.

“Then he's fine,” Fitzpatrick assured her. “I'm certain they would have sent operations personnel out to deal with this, not airmen from a support unit.”

“That's what my husband said,” she told the agent as he sidled over. “I hope you're right. Oh, the poor people who were out there—”

“Ma'am, may I see the pictures?” Fitzpatrick said.

“Yes, I'm sorry.”

She began scrolling through slowly. He stopped her at the second picture. He couldn't be certain, but that might be his man. It would make sense they'd catch him in an early shot: when he saw the flash he would naturally have turned away.

“Can you zoom in?” he asked.

She fumbled for the function. “I'm sorry, I don't know—”

“Stop,” he ordered. “You may erase it. Can you send it to the desk computer?”

The desk clerk gave her the e-mail address. Mrs. Mihalko typed it in, sent the photo. Fitzpatrick went around the counter. It arrived at the same time he did. The clerk opened the e-mail and displayed the embedded image.

He was there, a three-quarter view. Probably starting to turn.

Fitzpatrick looked at the clerk's name tag. It occurred to him he hadn't bothered to do that until now.

“Allison, would you clip the man's face, save the image, and go to the other website?”

“With pleasure,” she said, smiling. Fitzpatrick tried to imagine the pride she felt being able to help an FBI agent on a matter like this. It was humbling to him—American unity, America's greatest strength at work, right here, right now.

When the Unified Law Enforcement Anti-Terrorism website came up, Fitzpatrick went to the keyboard and typed in his password. He dropped the photograph in a file that some programmer—a former military man with a sense of irony, he suspected—had labeled
INCOMING.

“That's it,” he said as he shut off the website.

He wasn't surprised to find a crowd standing around the counter, watching. His eyes swept across expressions that ranged from frightened to shell-shocked to hopeful.

“We're going to get the man who did this,” he vowed.

“When you do,” said the bellman who had run after him, “don't put him on trial like those 9/11 killers.”

“Put him in Guantanamo and swallow the key,” Mrs. Mihalko said.

“It won't be my call,” Fitzpatrick replied. “But I know how you feel.”

“Agent, I think I know how
you
feel,” Allison said. “I watched you as you made this your post and waited. I watched you this morning, talking to those men. You did everything one man could do. I want you to know that.”

That one went right to Fitzpatrick's throat. He tried to speak, couldn't, and just thanked her with a tight smile and a grateful little nod.

He turned to the manger and found his voice. “I'll need to set up a little command post with a landline. May I borrow your office”—he looked at the man's tag—“Mr. Devi?”

“It will be an honor,” he said as he showed Fitzpatrick to the small room off the reception area.

The last thing Fitzpatrick heard as he entered was applause from the lobby.

Carmel, California

The estate on the appropriately named Scenic Road was on a piece of land the size of a small landing strip on Carmel's most expensive outcropping. Poised dramatically above the wild sea, otters could be seen in the cove below, lolling and tossing for fish. Great belts of kelp camouflaged the occasional cormorants whose slim, silky, black necks disappeared as they dived for food.

Jack and Dover could see the back of the mansion as they traveled along Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, along the westward projection that ran by Rat Hill.

“Holy crap,” Dover said.”I think I just changed sides.”

“You wouldn't like the rental fee,” Jack said.

“Sex for seafront?”

“No,” Jack said. “Your soul.”

He hadn't meant that to be a buzzkill, but Dover was silent for the remaining ten minutes of the ride. There hadn't been a lot of talking during the three and a half hours they'd already been on the road. Jack hadn't wanted to field a question from Dover about how he owned an SLR McLaren, so they'd taken a cab from the marina to Union Street. Feeling protective of his hideout, Jack went to Wilhelm's parking space alone, then met Dover around the corner. As she climbed into the Mercedes he turned the radio on for updates about the situation in Fairfield. Dover was inquisitive about Jack's plan when they set out, but gave that up in the first twenty minutes.

“I don't see how we can pull this off,” she told him. “And I'm not clear why we're even trying. Is it for information or for round two?”

“Both,” Jack admitted. “I don't know what Hawke's hiding, but if we don't shake the tree we'll never know.”

“And if he decides to shake back?”

“I expect he will,” Jack said. “He'll shake us hard. I saw that kind of thing all the time on my TV show. You lean on some people, they break. You lean on others, like Hawke, and they get tougher. You saw it in Murrieta. But that's when you get your real story, when someone is upset, furious, ready to throw a chair.”

“Sounds to me like that's when you get hurt. I almost got manhandled at HITV and I wasn't pushing Hawke himself, just some flunkies.”

“That's what makes life exciting,” Jack said. “That's what makes this work special, unique—sacred. It's one of the few places where you can't do your job by oiling the status quo.”

“Jesus, I'm a researcher,” Dover said.

“You studied to be a journalist—”

“In theory. In fact, what I do is pick over turkey carcasses. I don't shoot lions.”

“You do when it's open season on civilized human beings,” Jack replied. “And when that happens, you damn well better adapt. What would you be doing right now if we were back on the boat?”

“I should be—I don't know. Trying to find out more about what we're facing. Maybe Forsyth will get information from Fairfield, some additional data to crunch—”

“Forensics on the chopper that will confirm what we already suspect. At best, you get a tiny step forward.” Jack shook his head. “I abhor baby steps. It's time to go to the source. And there's another aspect to this. It's 1 Samuel 17.”

“You lost me. Again.”

“The story of David and Goliath. ‘When the Israelites saw the man, they all retreated before him, very much afraid,'” Jack said. “And what happened? ‘David overcame the Philistine with sling and stone.' Even if we don't learn anything from Hawke, we need to put a rock in his forehead, drop him or send him in retreat. Stop him from doing more damage.”

“Good idea,” she agreed. “But it's not the objective that worries me. It's the plan. You haven't even talked to anyone about this, other than Forsyth. What if Hawke checks?”

“That's why we're going to light a very short fuse at his house—”

“Where he isn't. As far as we know he's still on his yacht.”

“Right, but that's not important.”

She shook her head. “Every tactical white paper I've seen in the course of my duties was the exact opposite of what we're doing. They laid out logical approaches to a situation.”

“Chess moves,” Jack said.

“Yeah,” Dover said. “What's wrong with that?”

“Chess takes time to play. We don't have time. Anyway, there are school kids who could beat me at chess. But this game? It's for the few, the proud—”

“The crazy.”

“The
committed,
” Jack corrected her. “Soldiers, astronauts, volcanologists, deep-sea explorers—they all do one thing. A real journalist has to be prepared to do it all. If not, he has no business being in the game.” Jack grinned. “Unfortunately for you, that's me.”

Dover watched the ocean pass through the window beyond Jack. “It's funny. You protected me in Murrieta. Now you're risking me. And both of them make you sexy as hell.”

“It's part of my master plan to confuse women,” Jack said.

She smiled. “When I was a kid, my dad had this big reflector telescope. We'd use it to look at the planets and the moon. It had this little spotter telescope attached, like half a binocular. Before you looked into space, you'd pick a little target like the door of a house down the street. You'd get it in the crosshairs of the small scope and then you'd adjust the big scope until the door was in the center of that one.”

“They used to call that master-slave alignment before the voices of political correctness infiltrated the military,” Jack said.

“Dad called it a different kind of PC: ‘precision calibration.' That way when you looked in space, whatever you saw in the crosshairs of the small guy meant the Martian ice cap or lunar crater would be right in the center of the bigger telescope. Dad's brother, my Uncle Bernard, didn't have the patience to do the alignments. Whenever he'd go out on the patio with me, he just loosened the screws that held the big scope in place and swung it back and forth through the sky until he found something interesting. That's you. You're my Uncle Bernard.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“He was the manager of a local amusement park.”

“And your father?”

“An electrical engineer.”

“Yeah, I'm definitely your uncle,” Jack said. “I'll bet your mother was in the arts.”

“She was a singer. What made you say that?”

“You got your pluck from somewhere,” he said. “It didn't come from a man who had to figure out which lights went on which breakers.”

“It's called ‘phasing,'” she grinned. “That kind of thinking helps with the kind of job I do—or did. There's nothing wrong with being able to open a specifications book and understand it.”

“There's also nothing wrong with hiring electricians when I need work done,” Jack said.

As they neared the house, Jack wasn't sure he had convinced Dover that this was a good idea. Despite the bravado, he wasn't convinced of it himself. He also knew himself well enough to recognize that round two with Hawke had been inevitable and that this, at least, would catch the man off guard.

Having researched Hawke in the past, Jack knew that the Carmel estate was also a veritable fortress. They went past a brass plaque that said
PROPERTY LINE. NO TRESPASSING.

“We've just crossed into the first level of hell,” Dover said.

A few yards beyond was a high iron gate with the expected hawk symbol in the center. Jack turned the car around in case he needed to make a quick getaway. Then he called a number Forsyth had given him, after which he phoned Hawke's office. He put the call on speaker so that Dover could hear. It took just a minute before he was speaking to Phil Webb.

“I'd like to speak to your boss,” Jack said, ignoring the he's-my-coworker cant, of which he'd had enough.

“As you may recall, Mr. Hatfield, Mr. Hawke is out of the country.”

“I saw a couple of Renoirs on the boat,” Jack replied. “I'm guessing he can afford a phone?”

“My point is, he's on vacation,” Webb said. “He does not wish to be—”

“I'm outside the estate in Carmel,” Jack cut in. “I can send you a picture if you want.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Phil, nothing personal but I'm done talking to you,” Jack said. “Get Hawke on the line. There's something he needs to know.”

The phone went silent. Jack was watching the driveway for any sign of guards, armed or otherwise. Hawke and this community had too much class to station armed guards up front, but Jack knew they were out there somewhere. He could feel Dover watching him. It was the longest minute-and-change he could remember in quite some time.

And then he heard the airspace open on the other end. He could almost smell the saltwater.