Abuse of Power (2 page)

There was blood in his right eye. It swirled the driver’s side in a ruddy haze, but his left eye was clear. That was how he saw the strange object that had been upended and was resting on the roof. It consisted of four … five … six two-liter bottles full of liquid and tied to one another with duct tape. They were anchored to a pair of propane tanks with more tape. Wires were strung from one of the tanks to a cell phone taped to its side.

A bomb. It was a
bomb.

2

“You feel it?” Drabinsky asked. “The rush?”

Freelance TV producer Jack Hatfield barely heard the man. As they blasted toward the crime scene, the former firebrand talk show host—defrocked by a fearful, powerful few—found himself thinking about those long-ago days in Baghdad, days that were little more than a distant wash of sounds and images. All he really had left of the place was the shrapnel in his right thigh and an instinctive reaction, a gut-tensing alertness, to any sign or image that had Arabic or Kurdish writing.

“I feel it,” Jack said in a dry monotone. It reeked of insincerity but Drabinsky didn’t seem to notice. He was in the moment, psyched and impatient. Jack understood; these were the times they’d trained for. For Drabinsky, it was a chance to test himself. For Jack it was part of a larger, frustrating picture of bailing water instead of being able to get to the source and stop the damn flood.

They were barreling along Mission Street in a white Chevy Tahoe, the siren blaring, Officer Tom Drabinsky at the wheel—a lean cowboy with a leathery, sunbaked face.

Drabinsky was commander of the SFPD bomb squad, part of the city’s Homeland Security Tactical Company, and Jack had been profiling the squad for nearly a week now. His time with them had been pretty uneventful so far—mostly interviews, each member of the team recounting past glories and talking him through the “what-if…” white papers they had studied.

“They’re kind of like role-playing games, y’know?”
one man had told him about those scenarios.
“They let you think about problems you might encounter and solve them before you have to.”

Sure,
Jack thought. As long as you don’t factor in the stuff that hits you square in the face when you’re in the field: fear, pressure, the media watching you, and the fact that at the very least your job is on the line, at the most your life.…

Then just before dinner, Jack was putting together footage for the local CBS affiliate, something to help make the public aware of its role in watching and informing, when he got the call telling him it was time to saddle up.

“We’re on,” Drabinsky had said. “Where are you?”

Jack’s heart had kicked up a notch. “At the marina, editing footage.”

“A little out of my way but I don’t want you to miss this. Be at the lot in twenty.”

After he hung up, Jack immediately contacted his photographer Maxine and told her to meet them at the accident scene.

As Drabinsky maneuvered impatiently through traffic, Jack’s mind went back to the first time he had been rushing somewhere, that morning in Baghdad when everything went wrong.

He was remembering Riley’s face.

He saw that face in his sleep sometimes. The slack jaw, the glazed eyes, the dust-caked laugh lines around them. A dust that could neither be tamed nor conquered and had permeated every facet of their lives back then—two hotshot network news monkeys riding shotgun with the Second Marine Division, Riley always complaining that the desert was wreaking havoc on his video equipment.

Not that it mattered much.

Richard Edward Riley had the tragic distinction of being the second journalist killed during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Jack had been right there when it happened. He could just as easily have been the third. One minute they were bumping along a deserted road and the next they were on the ground bleeding, their Humvee in pieces around them, Jack staring into the open, lifeless eyes of his best friend.

The details remained hazy, defensively isolated and contained by his mind, leaving the event with as much clarity as a half-remembered dream. Only the emotional and psychological pain were clear. Maybe that’s why his mind occasionally returned to it for no apparent reason, with no apparent trigger. It was his subconscious trying to remember, trying to hide the hurt among some cold facts. Like putting ice on a swollen eye.

Of course, the company he was keeping could have something to do with it. Drabinsky’s go-get-’em attitude reminded him of the marines who died that day. Tough, dedicated, counterintuitively marching into hell. Only the uniform was different. The SFPD bomb squad was full of that kind of men and women, the ones willing to risk their lives to keep Americans safe. And the people of San Francisco needed to know just how courageous they truly were. Instead, the rabid left wing harassed him endlessly.

Maybe they’d find out tonight. It was just too bad that a journalist’s dream was often indistinguishable from the stuff that nightmares were made of.

“You alive over there?”

Jack smiled. “Sorry, Tom. I was off in the woods.”

“Hunter or stag?”

“Hah. Good question.”

“Well, come back home, Jack. We’ve gotta stay focused, top of our game. If something goes wrong, you need to know right away.”

“Why? You ever see anyone outrun an explosion?”

“Of course not,” Drabinsky said. “The survivors are the ones who smell things
before
they go bad. Any dope can run when it’s too late.”

Jack nodded. The commander wasn’t talking out of his ass. In his nearly forty years, he had known soldiers, cops, pilots who had the Spidey sense he was talking about, an instinct for things that were slightly off center. During a visit to southern China, Jack had seen a demonstration in which a blindfolded Shaolin kung fu master defeated two much younger men because he
felt
what they were about to do. When Jack asked the sensei, through an interpreter, how he did that, the man replied with a smile, “The gray hair.”

Experience. There was nothing like it.

*   *   *

As Drabinsky pulled up to the nearest barricade, Jack raised the Steiner Marine Binoculars he’d brought. It was an ugly, surreal, yet strangely tranquil sight.

Big flatbed-mounted spotlights towered twenty feet on either end of the street and illuminated the scene. The bread truck lay angled toward the sidewalk. It rested against a streetlight, half of one of its panels caved in. Bisecting it was an overturned Land Rover, its roof crumpled under its weight.

The street was empty, the cops maintaining a by-the-book two-block radius from the site. All the buildings and stores in a one-block radius had been evacuated, though most were empty already due to the hour.

Twenty-seven-year-old Maxine Cole showed up while her boss was still studying the scene. Her press pass was swung onto her back—where the camera wouldn’t hide it—and her video camera was already hoisted onto a shoulder, floodlight on. Of Somali descent, she was a tall, city-born triathlete and one of the best hose-n-go shooters Jack had ever known. She wet-kissed everything with her camera, missed nothing, and made editing a breeze.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Cops at the outside barrier didn’t want to let me through. I tried calling you but couldn’t get a signal.”

Jack lowered the field glasses. “They’ve activated a cell phone jammer. Standard precaution.”

“Oh. Right. Duh,” she said as she shot.

Jack gestured toward the overturned vehicles nearly a block away. “The money shot is at the rear of that Land Rover. Can you manage it?”

“Not from this angle.”

He turned to Drabinsky. “Can we go closer?”

“Only if you’re suicidal. We’re sending in the BDR.”

As if on cue, the rear doors of a newly arrived van flew open and one of Drabinsky’s men climbed out, put down a ramp, and started playing with the joystick in his hands. Jack saw a bright white light, heard a soft electronic whir as the bomb disposal robot glided out of the van and down the ramp toward the blacktop, looking like a RoboCop prototype on steroids.

Max got some footage of it making its descent. “So what’s the story here? Somebody said something about a carjacking.”

“Carjacking that went a little south,” Jack told her.

“The perp?”

“Some fool EMTs went in and got him,” Drabinsky said. He had been pacing back and forth, eyeballing the crash. “They’ve got him at General. I don’t know anything else. One of the medics also tried to pull the tag number off the Rover, but it was buried in the bread truck.”

“They get anything at all from the car?” Max asked. Her questions weren’t just for her own information; she was running sound and the bites were often invaluable.

“You mean about the owner?” Drabinsky asked.

“That—or anything else.”

He shrugged. “If they have, no one’s told me. We’re just the garbage collectors. Last to know unless it blows, as we say.”

“Charming,” Max said.

Drabinsky gestured to a portable computer stand where a laptop had been set up. They walked over, Max following everything through the eye of her camera. The screen showed the view from a small video camera mounted on the robot.

“We use the robot to tell us what we’re up against. If it’s the real deal, we either blow it or I go in with the suit to disarm the thing.”

“What’s the deciding factor?”

“Size. We’d just as soon not take out half a city block if we can help it. If that thing is too big to blow, I have to break out my suit and get all
Hurt Locker
on it.”

Jack watched the bot—the remote-controlled robot—as it arced around and headed down the street, Max videotaping its progress. It moved at a leisurely pace, traveling about a block and a half before it came to a stop two feet away from the rear of the Land Rover. Jack glanced at the computer screen as the joystick operator adjusted the angle and focus, zeroing in on the two-liter bottles—which, it was quickly determined, were only the detonator. Under the upended dashboard were several bricks of plastic explosives, neatly bound together by det cord and at least half a dozen detonators.

Jack’s heart started to thump. This wasn’t one of the rusted-out IEDs the Explosive Ordnance Disposal units back in Iraq were tasked to deal with—the kind that had derailed Jack’s Humvee. This was military-grade C4 that looked as if it had come fresh out of the box.

Drabinsky said to his crew, “We got an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, boys. No avoiding it. Time to break out the demon.”

“You’re going in?” Max asked.

“No choice. Whoever was driving that car meant business.”

Jack’s heart kicked up another notch, but for an entirely different reason this time. It occurred to him that what had started out as a routine profile for a single night’s airing and then online archiving had blossomed into something much bigger. He was working freelance on this, paying Max out of his own pocket, and what he had here was a story that might be important enough to put him back on the national map. A potential terrorist attack in a major American city. And he and Max were the only news personnel who had been allowed inside the circle because Tom Drabinsky and he had hit it off, and that was the way the boss man wanted it.

But there was a downside. Because they’d hit it off, it was a friend who was walking into the hair-trigger kill zone, not some anonymous hero.

Jack watched as Drabinsky crossed to the Tahoe and threw the rear gate open. Two of his crew members joined him there and brought out a helmet and what Drabinsky had referred to as the “demon”—a personal armor suit made of thick padding, designed to withstand the force of an explosion.
“In theory, at least,”
Drabinsky had told him. They called it the demon because of the number of men who had died wearing one.

As Drabinsky suited up, Jack glanced to his right, toward a cluster of squad cars in the distance.

They had a person of interest in back of one of those cars. Not the bomber but someone who apparently knew the carjacker, had been trying to get to him immediately after the accident.

Jack turned to Max. He didn’t have to tell her to keep the camera on Drabinsky. “Be back in ten,” he said.

Max was surprised. “Where you going?”

“I want to try and find out who they’ve got in the car back there.”

“You sure you don’t want me there with you?”

Jack shook his head. “I want Tom to know he’s got a lady in the lists.”

“Sorry?”

“Jousts. Knights. Helped them focus. You didn’t want to be unhorsed if a pretty eye was on you.”

“Ah. Hey, do I get hazard pay for this?”

Jack smiled. “You’re a newsperson covering news. Be grateful for the privilege.”

*   *   *

Jack got lucky. There was a rookie uniform watching the SFPD’s
guest,
as they called him. There’s a myth that rookies tend to follow regulations. What they follow is experience and authority. They don’t just give it up, though; most have to be wooed by guys who have been-there, seen-that.

Jack walked up, read the rookie’s name tag, showed his credentials.

“Sorry, Mr. Hatfield, but we’re not supposed to allow press near—”

“I’m not press, Officer Beckman, I’m a friend of Tom’s,” he said. Then he added pointedly, “Tom Drabinsky. The guy in the demon.”

“Yes, sir. I know who that is.”

Jack waved a hand toward the kid in the patrol car. “He give you any trouble when you took him into custody?”

“Nah. There were already a couple citizens keeping him in check.”

“You find the owner?”

Beckman started to speak, then hesitated.

“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’re off the record. I just want to know what’s going on.”

Beckman thought about it a moment then said, “Nothing on the owner.”

“Who’s this guy?” He indicated the kid in the car.

“Name’s Leon Thomas. His younger brother Jamal was the jacker. He told us this was just an initiation, no one was supposed to get hurt, and his brother was going to abandon the car after a joyride.”

“You believe him?”