Jack thought of his apartment on Union Street as his Fortress of Solitude. The only people who knew he owned it were his real estate broker, the bank, and his former wife-and he wanted to keep it that way.
He hadn’t even told Tony. Jack kept it separate from his everyday life, a place where he could seek refuge, to reflect and reminisce.
A twenty-two-story sixties-era complex right off the Embarcadero, it was just a block from the bay. The beauty of the building was that there were four or five entrances and exits on various floors, and he sometimes marveled at how difficult it would be for any of the “progressives” who had threatened him over the years to stalk him here.
You could elude a rampaging army in this place.
He inwardly thought of the complex as a mini-UN. It was populated by a variety of people of various nationalities, and riding the elevator to the twentieth floor was often an education in cultural diversity. One day he’d be smiling and winking at a Norwegian child in a stroller and the next he’d be chatting with a businessman from Tokyo.
The view from his window was spectacular. Facing north, it looked out across the bay. And just beyond the Richmond Bridge, you could see the East Brother Light Station, a small island lighthouse that had been in operation for over a hundred and thirty-three years.
Jack had spent part of his honeymoon on that island, staying at the bed-and-breakfast there. And while he had found the place charming, Rachel had complained that they were too isolated to have any fun-beyond the bedroom, that is. Jack loved and could enjoy the birds, the bay, even the winds. That contrast in their attitudes was one of the many reasons they were no longer married.
As with many marriages, Jack and Rachel stopped sleeping together years before the sex stopped. They had side-by-side separate beds, and later they slept in separate bedrooms.
He liked to watch movies on TV, she liked to read. He went to bed early, she read until after midnight. He got up at first light, she slept until eleven. He was obsessed with politics and TV news, she found this too predictable. “What’s the point of getting excited,” she used to say to him, “they’re all liars and you can’t change a damn thing.”
The sex between them had been great for years, endless and heated. But Jack wasn’t made for marriage. It was a strain on his nature. He couldn’t conform to another person’s needs and wants.
The only interest he really had was his own ego. He believed he could make the world a better place. She was cynical about “the good guys winning.”
But she was loyal and faithful. That kept them together. Nothing entered her life that she did not want to be there. She had an iron will.
Jack both admired her for that and was repelled by it. Being married to a Margaret Thatcher was no picnic, he would say, while admiring the iron lady’s strength. Her love for him blinded her to what she considered his egotism and his other flaws and quirks.
His father had warned him, “Two rules, Jackie boy, never, ever agree with a friend who leaves his girlfriend and puts her down. They’ll get back together and blame you. And one other thing: never touch another guy’s girlfriend. Ever.” He never cheated on her and he never put her down. Even after the divorce.
But Rachel ignored Jack’s work. She rarely commented on any of his broadcasts or even his columns. This was her way of hurting him. When at first she did not leave him because of his habit of withdrawing into himself she left him in a more fundamental way, abandoning him where it hurt the most. Ignoring the things he was proudest of.
Eventually, they both wanted more than a memory of how things were.
Much of Jack’s past was here in this apartment. After the divorce, boxes that had been stored in his garage in Tiburon had been dragged out and sifted through, yielding a collection of mementos he had gathered over the years:
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,.