Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

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.

“Whatever you do,” Jack told him, “don’t get behind the wheel. You hear me? Leave your car where it is and call yourself a cab.”

“… What?”

“Call a cab, Bob. I mean it. Promise me you won’t drive.”

“… No driving,” Copeland murmured, his voice sounding distant, as if he’d lowered the phone. “… Can’t find my goddamn shoe…”

Jack was about to insist he let him pick him up, when the line clicked and the phone went dead.

Damn.

Jack sighed. He knew Copeland had a reputation as a hard drinker, but had always thought of him as a man in control. And a drunken phone call at three in the morning was completely out of character.

He tried to think of who he might call to get Copeland some help-family or something-but when it came down to it, Jack really didn’t know all that much about him. Especially after two years of no contact.

As he racked his brain trying to figure out who he might call, the phone rang again.

He clicked it on. “Bob? Is that you?”

No static this time, but no response, either.

“Bob?”

Several seconds ticked by, then the line went dead, and Jack silently cursed again, wishing there was some way to find out where Copeland was. Maybe call the police to make sure he didn’t wind up in a gutter somewhere.

But what would he tell them?

Where would they start looking?

Then it struck Jack. What if there was more to this than a night of simple overindulgence? After what he’d found hanging in his shower, he had to wonder if it was possible that this was some kind of a cry for help.

Could Copeland be in a different kind of trouble?

But when Jack thought it through, that didn’t make much sense. If Bob Copeland were in danger, why would he be calling in a drunken stupor? And there were plenty of people he could call besides Jack. The guy had once worked for the Pentagon, for God’s sake.

This was a simple case of drunk dialing, is all. And there’s nothing worse than a drunk dialer.

Maybe Jack wasn’t the only one who had demons to contend with. He just hoped the guy got home safely and was sober enough to make their meeting tomorrow.

They had a lot to talk about.

Jack went back to the Sea Wrighter the next morning. When he stepped onto the deck, he discovered he’d had another visitor in the night. He found a package about the size of a shirt box, wrapped in brown paper and tucked against the starboard pilothouse door. There was no name, no address, no writing of any kind.

Odd, he thought. What the hell was this all about?

He raised it slightly, feeling with his fingers for a minelike depression plate underneath. Nothing. He kept it level as he raised it. There was no lopsided weight to indicate packed explosives, no faint chemical smell, no ticking, no wires that he could see under the wrapping. Snatching it up, he let himself in, then moved into the galley and laid it on the table. He tore away the brown paper. All he found inside was a briefcase containing a swath of papers. Government authorization forms, from the looks of them, generated by the Department of Defense.

Jack paused when he saw them.

Was this something he should be looking at?

The authorization involved a special transport mission. On August 20 of this year, a shipment of highly classified experimental hydrazine-based rocket fuel was to be carried from a facility Jack wasn’t even aware of, designated by number only. For security reasons, the fuel would be traveling by tanker truck rather than the usual rail transportation.