Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [72]
Jack suddenly felt uneasy. It was strange how psychological triggers worked. The need for order flared up inside him, and he realized he had been so focused on his mission, so alert, that he had neglected to maintain balance. He should have grabbed some sleep on the train. He should have given himself some downtime. Being so deep in something made you question the instincts you were trusting, made you second-guess your actions, made you wonder if you’d thought the whole thing through enough.
He had been so thoroughly guided by Bob Copeland’s sensible one-line mantra that he never thought that the trip to London might be too impulsive.
Listening to the hum of the engine, he closed his eyes and imagined the perfect mechanism of the watch on his wrist, or the Berliner on the wall in his apartment, letting the tick-tick-tick in his mind center him. It had been a long and stressful day and his first order of business had to be to get some rest.
The Beresford Hotel was an old redbrick monstrosity that had once been a school dormitory and looked it. Jack knew he wouldn’t be spending much time here, but he needed a base of operations that would take cash for a couple nights and ask no questions.
The room he rented wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet, with a lumpy twin bed and a rattling radiator, and the only plumbing available in the room itself was a dingy sink with rusty fixtures.
Throwing his suitcase on the bed, he peeled off his clothes, wrapped a large but rather gray-looking towel around his waist, then went down the hall to the communal bath and took a scalding hot shower to wash away the day.
Fifteen minutes later, he climbed onto the bed and slid between the sheets, letting the last of the tension drain from his body, the tick-tick-tick still in his mind as he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
It was dark outside when Jack hired another cab to take him across the Thames to East London. According to Abdal al-Fida’s personnel file, he lived in the Forest Gate section of the borough of Newham, an area known for its ethnic diversity and high concentration of Muslims.
Isaiah once again came to mind: “They come from a far country, from the end of Heaven … to destroy the whole Earth.…”
Jack had no way of knowing if al-Fida still lived there, or was even alive at this point. This entire enterprise was a huge gamble. But he had to try, for the sake of Bob Copeland. And Tom Drabinsky. And Jamal Thomas.
But most of all, he was here for his own sake. For that burning need-to-know that had consumed him ever since Drabinsky went up in that blast.
Jack hadn’t called his show Truth Tellers simply because it sounded good. Truth was the fire that fueled him. He’d spent his entire career cutting through the layers of horse manure that people often used to hide or deflect responsibility for their actions, always searching for the truth they were trying to hide. His interviewing style was direct and sometimes confrontational, but never without empathy, and he often thought of himself as “good cop/bad cop” rolled up into one. He believed truth was liberty’s Siamese twin, not her cousin. When truth was absent, liberty followed.
Jack suspected that Adam Swain’s cover story about al-Fida being an MI6 mole was yet another layer he had to cut through. And the only way he knew to do that was to confront al-Fida himself.
He had the cab driver drop him off in front of a small pub on St. George Road, which was sandwiched between a Laundromat and a Classic Kitchens store. He went inside and ordered a pale lager, taking a few minutes to again center himself and weigh his options.
According to Google Maps, al-Fida’s flat was located about