EIGHT
Seated alone at a table in the St. Francis hotel’s bustling, high ceilinged, lobby breakfast bar, Ben Shepard turned the complimentary San Francisco Chronicle’s pages.
The article was all the way back on page three, headlined: SFPD, DHS to Seek Deranged Veteran’s Victim.
“Deranged?” Ben slapped the paper shut without reading the article, then tucked it into his rollaboard’s front pocket before he day-checked it.
Ben’s C-phone, resting on the granite table top, trilled and the caller ID lit. Petrie. The secretary had arrived back in Washington the prior afternoon.
“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.”
“Did they send you the draft regulation on Canadian border security?”
“I got the email early this morning, sir.”
“How long will it take you to boil it down to a four-page memo?”
“It’s a very large file, sir.”
“Large? It’s four hundred goddam pages large. Why do you think I forwarded it to you? I need the summary in my inbox by noon tomorrow.”
Ben stared up at the ceiling. So much for seeing the sights.
Petrie asked, “What’s the print coverage like out there?”
“The story’s already dropped to the inside pages. The Chronicle article was biased.”
“Bastards.”
“Not about DHS. About veterans.”
“Oh. I meant about the candidacy rumors.”
Ben wrinkled his forehead. Candidacy?
Petrie said, “Veterans are the VA’s problem. And the media out there are Queen Maureen’s problem anyway. Remember, we’re putting on this dog and pony show to give Mayor Dunn an exit strategy. Let her decide where she wants the spotlight to shine. Just don’t let her eat my lunch on the way to the exit.”
“I know why I’m here, sir.” And it’s not to ungarble your metaphors. You think I’m here to be your dog or your pony or both. I’m beginning to think I’m here because veterans shouldn’t be just the VA’s problem. “Actually, I’m on my way now to meet the person in charge of the marine search. He works for the mayor.”
“’Til he fucks up. Then he’ll say you were in charge and that makes it my fault. They all will. So watch your ass with them.”
Petrie cut the call.
Ben stared up at the lobby ceiling again.
Petrie thought the world had stuck an IED up his ass and everybody had a detonator but him. Some days the difference between working for the federal government in Iraq and working for the federal government in California seemed to be only the price of breakfast.
Ben peeked inside the leather check folder that the counter attendant had brought with his pastry, and swore.
With tip, he had already burned through too much of his Government Services Agency per diem on coffee, a warmed danish, and a newspaper that suddenly seemed less complimentary.
Ben returned his attention to his own exit strategy. He couldn’t charge breakfast to his room, because he’d already checked out. Petrie had tasked his aide to remain in San Francisco to “liaise with local authorities indefinitely” so Ben was no longer part of a cabinet officer’s traveling circus. Ben needed to find GSA-approved cheaper lodging, preferably with breakfast included, or go broke.
Ben slid his last three tens from his wallet into the check folder, made a mental note to find an ATM, and stepped to the register.
The counter attendant who had brought over the warm danish and the check was pretty, and had smiled more like a woman interested in him than like a server interested in maximizing her tip. Long journeys began with first steps. Just because so far they had ended in stumbles didn’t excuse him from trying.
The silver tag on her vest read: CASSANDRA.
Grand hotels like the St. Francis justified their rates with perquisites like free newspapers and chatty, attractive staff who wore built-in conversation starters.
He matched her smile, handed the check folder to her, and opened his mouth to ask how she got such a pretty name.
Her fingertips brushed his hand, her smile froze, and she recoiled. She looked up at an invisible point beyond his shoulder, said, “Have a nice day, sir.” Then she turned to the next customer.
Ben splayed the index, middle, and ring fingers that remained on his right hand on the counter while he balled his left hand into a fist.
Compared to the legs and lives his comrades had lost, the stump of his missing little finger was an unworthy dismemberment and he was an unworthy survivor. Maybe veterans were the VA’s problem, like Petrie said, but the VA didn’t even count a lost finger or toe as a major amputation. Not that Ben disagreed.
He couldn’t complain that it really handicapped him. The lack of a small finger discouraged only occupations that weren’t on most people’s short lists anyway. Neurosurgeon. Violinist. Quarterback.
But a hand couldn’t be covered by a pant leg, or hidden beneath a table napkin for the duration of a first date. And he couldn’t blame women who opted out of a second date with Captain Hook. It wasn’t just eligible women who cringed. The right hand was the only part of another human being that people deliberately touched on a routine basis.
Suck it up, Shepard. Do your job. If you had… He shook it off, the way he had been taught to, the way he should have learned to long before he did.
Ben checked his bag, app’d a car, then stared out its window at thousands of ten-fingered people surging through Union Square, and wondered why he worked for Petrie.
It wasn’t the money, although, GI Bill or not, this year off to accumulate savings would ease Ben’s last two years of law school. It wasn’t the workload, which was unreasonable even for a cabinet staffer. And Petrie treated Ben like a pony only when he ran out of ways to treat him like a dog. But then, Petrie treated people like dogs no matter how many fingers they had. On balance, being pitied or avoided was worse than being treated just like everybody else.
* * *
The car climbed, then descended, through the city, and deposited Ben in the small parking lot of a low brick government office whose windows looked out on the Hyde Street Pier and San Francisco Bay beyond.
An SFPD Marine Unit cop led Ben out of the building, let him through a locked gate, then pointed him down a sloping, railed walkway. The walkway ended at the beginning of a concrete sidewalk on stilts that held it a foot above San Francisco Bay’s wave crests. A hundred zig-zag yards along the pier Ben’s objective bobbed in its slip, among dozens of other boats.
Water. Why did the damn car have to fall in the water?
Low lead clouds scudded across the morning sky driven by a wind that smelled of creosote, fish, and diesel.
Against its chill, Ben zipped his jacket, turned up his collar, then slid one foot out onto the pier as though it were mined. Raised a Kansan, he had never set foot in saltwater, a life experience deficiency he had no desire to fix. Although the student in him had spent two hours the night before Googling nautical vocabulary.
By the time he reached the boat it had become clear that piers were less deadly than they looked, and he walked normally, albeit near neither edge.
San Francisco Police Marine 1 was nearly fifty feet long, gleaming white-painted metal, and the bow that pointed at him was painted with a diagonal swath of police blue that extended from the deck to the waterline, overprinted with a blue and gold San Francisco Police shield.
The boat’s foredeck stood six feet above the water, four feet above the pier, and its antennaed, canopied superstructure rose like a stepped pyramid another ten feet above the deck.
A boat was, really, little different from a combine or an armored personnel carrier. All three were heavy-gauge metal folded and welded around a diesel that deafened you when it ran right, spit oil on you when it didn’t, and that would maim or kill you if you disrespected it.
But this machine bobbed and wove even when shut down. And if you fell off it could drown you.
The only person visible stood on the boat’s heaving deck near the bow. His back was turned to Ben while he clung with one hand to the bow’s waist-high rail and polished it with a rag gripped in the other. Balding and gray, the man wore black rubber boots with the tops turned down, and blue coveralls.
Ben walked until he stood on the pier opposite the man, then shouted over the waves’ slap and boom and the screeches of gulls that wheeled overhead. “I’m looking for the officer in charge of the San Francisco Police Underwater Recovery Unit!”
The man glanced over his shoulder. “You Shepard?” He waved Ben forward, then turned away and shouted, “Come aboard!”
Crap. Ben’s heart thumped. Can’t I just wait here until you come back to land?
The boat’s forward deck was a moving target, its handrail set back perhaps a foot from the hull’s edge. The wave-churned gap between the pier and the deck constantly shrank, then grew, fluctuating between a foot and two feet wide. The water’s translucent depths and the perils within them were unknowable.
Ben took two steps back, gauged the boat’s movement cycle, then gathered himself to run, then leap.
The gray-haired man turned his head. “Holy Jeez!” He spun toward Ben and rushed forward, arms extended and fingers splayed. “Whoa!”
The man pointed twenty feet farther down the boat’s hull, where a cutout in the vessel’s flank brought the bobbing deck level with the pier. Boat and pier were held apart by inflated, floating fenders so that the shifting gap between them was only a foot or two. “Step aboard down there at the recovery well.”
The man led him from the deck through a hatch and two steps down to a compartment in the boat’s gut that reminded Ben of an armored personnel carrier: fold-down metal seats in a cramped metal box, in constant, unpredictable motion. One thing that this boat offered that no APC did was a built-in coffeemaker.
The man poured two mugs, sat down across from Ben at a bare metal table that extended out from the hull’s inner surface, and handed him one. “Mick Shay. I suppose you could call me the officer in charge of the Underwater Recovery Unit. But these days my title’s Marine Unit Maintenance Officer.”
Shay’s eyes twinkled behind wire-rimmed glasses, and above a brushy moustache. When the two of them shook hands, if Shay noticed Ben’s missing finger, he gave no sign.
Shay had peeled off rubber gloves, and his thick, bare left forearm was tattooed “USN” across an anchor design.
Ben pointed. “Navy man?”
“Destroyer man. Much better class of people than the rest of the outfit. Master Chief Petty Officer, retired. Based on the way you board a vessel, I’d say you’re not navy.”
Ben smiled. “Army. Infantryman. Much stupider class of people than the rest of the outfit. First lieutenant honorably discharged.”
Shay smiled, bowed his head a notch. “Flattered to make your acquaintance, Lieutenant. Most folks aren’t so anxious to meet me that they’d broad jump the ocean to do it.” He shifted in his seat. “Mr. Shepard, may I ask whether the DHS believes the driver might be alive?”
Ben stuck out his lower lip. “Why does that matter?”
“Turf. Jurisdictions in the Bay area overlap more than a fat man’s love handles. If you think the driver’s alive, or he died accidentally, it’s a rescue. San Francisco Fire Department’s got jurisdiction over aquatic rescue. In which case I go back to polishing boat rails and you continue this discussion with some Fire Department lifeguards who mostly polish their Speedos. If crime evidence underwater needs recovering, SFPD Marine Unit Dive Team’s in charge.”
Ben narrowed his eyes. “Rescue? Are you saying that you believe Colibri could have survived?”
Shay shook his head. “Hell no. Suicides jump off the ’Gate literally every other week. They hit the water at seventy-five miles an hour. Five percent survive the sudden stop, then drown or die of hypothermia. And the papers say the bomb blew Mr. Colibri and his fancy car to bits before he even hit the water, anyway.”
“Actually, maybe not. The only eyewitness said the car went over the side in one piece.”
Shay cocked his head. “New Year’s Eve. Sober witness?”
Ben smiled. “Probably. Turns out he may have been right. This bomb was designed to blowtorch through the floorboard of a conventional car, then spend its energy burning out everything inside. Like an RPG guts a tank. The hulk and the driver’s body should have wound up a smoking pile on the pavement.”
Shay grunted, sipped his coffee. “Why didn’t they?”
“Because a Galvani’s not conventional, Mick. It runs on a tray full of batteries. The tray forms the whole underside of the car. It’s also the car’s backbone. In this prototype, the tray was titanium and the body was carbon fiber. Even stronger, and also way lighter, than the tray and body in a production Galvani. The experts think this bomb was designed to break a conventional car’s back. But the prototype was too rigid and too light. So instead the explosion just pushed the whole car up like champagne bubbles pop a cork.”
“Mr. Shepard, I’m a sailor, not the highway patrol, but I’ve seen tin-foil balls that were perfectly good cars going seventy-five before they hit a wall. Conventional or not. The channel there’s three hundred feet and change deep.”
“Mick!” Ben raised his palm. “You had me at ‘Hell no.’”
“All right then.” Shay pumped his fist, grinned, and inclined his head. “Mr. Shepard, the founding officer of the URU is at your service.”
“Oh. Then when will the URU divers start?”
“They won’t. URU started as a conduit to use civilian volunteer divers to fish murder weapons and dope baggies out of golf course ponds. The only paid employee it ever had was me. Marine Unit’s got its own full-time divers now. URU’s just an excuse to make my real job more fundable, ’cause I’m too old to dive and too stubborn to retire for the second time. I earn my check painting bulkheads when there’s no evidence to recover, and offering grandfatherly advice when there is. Which, by the way, is why they stuck you with me instead of somebody in the unit who has a real job.”
“Oh.”
“Second place, three hundred feet’s for seasoned, saturation-certified specialists with oversized life insurance policies. Which Marine Unit’s divers aren’t.”
“Then—”
“And even for pros the channel bottom under that bridge is a sandstorm in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night.”
“Then how—?”
“Side-scan sonar first. The Marine Unit’s got pole-mounted sonar equipment that might work. But I found an outfit out of Houston that wants to test a prototype towfish designed to operate in high-energy environments like the Golden Gate Channel. They’ll work for free ’cause if their prototype locates the wreckage they’ll brag about it to the paying customers. Marine 1 here can tow the fish, and she needs the hours of sea time to justify her existence.”
“You said first. What’s second?”
“Then we’ll need a saturation dive spread, or if I have my way a remotely operated vehicle, to poke around and take pictures. Or raise the wreck. Not cheap. Could take weeks.”
Ben sighed.
Weeks? If Ben couldn’t find some visible activity that at least looked like progress, Petrie would demand something idiotic to advance his political ambitions. Ben frowned. “Can’t we do something else in the meantime?”
Shay shrugged. “You could hire a recon drone to survey the ocean seaward of the bridge and hope to spot a floater.”
“Sounds also not cheap. What are the odds?”
“Pretty good.”
“Really?”
“Not of your floater. You’d be surprised how many drunks and suicides think they can swim.”