The Patriots' Club

46

Jenny set her purse on the bar and climbed onto a stool. “It began last night,” she said. “Two men mugged me and my boyfriend downtown, near Wall Street.”

“Been quite a day,” said Simon Bonny.

Jenny nodded and went on to recount the events of the past fifteen hours. She left nothing out-not Thomas being questioned by Guilfoyle about Crown and Bobby Stillman, her abduction from school that morning, and being grazed by an assassin’s bullet in Union Square Park-right up to the point where a man impersonating her brother had tried to bypass hospital security. “I don’t think he wanted to bring me a get-well card.”

“Indeed,” said Simon Bonny. “Yes, then… you’re in some trouble, aren’t you?”

“If you’d like to leave now, I understand. I don’t want to involve you in something you don’t-”

“No, no. Can’t leave. You’re the real thing, aren’t you? A victim with a capital V. So, Scientia est potentia. This Stillman woman told you that was their motto, did she? That’s the key, you know. It’s what Hamilton said, too. One of his favorites. But why, Jennifer? Why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff? Why are they after your boyfriend? What does he do?”

“He’s an investment banker. He works at Harrington Weiss handling the big private equity firms like Atlantic, Whitestone, and Jefferson. He pals around with billionaires, flies on private jets to Aspen, tries to convince them to buy a company and let HW do the deal.”

“Ever screw any of ’em over?”

“Thomas? Never. He’s the last honest man. He says the whole thing is a mistake.”

Bonny pursed his lips and shook his head, letting her know it was no mistake. “Any of the firms associated with the government? Tied in with the CIA, maybe?”

“God no. They’re strictly private sector. Major profit motive. Scotch Nat’s the greediest man on the planet, Tom says. And the best businessman.”

“Scotch Nat?”

“James Jacklin, the chairman of Jefferson Partners. It’s his nickname.”

“I know who he is. Former secretary of defense. Stalwart of capitalism. But back up a second. What did you say he goes by?”

“ ‘Scotch Nat,’ ” said Jenny. “It’s what his friends call him. Not Thomas, of course, but you know… his buddies. I guess Jacklin’s Scottish or something. Does it mean something to you?”

Bonny was blinking madly again. “ ‘Scotch Nat’ was Pendleton’s nickname,” he said, his voice jumping half an octave. “Nathaniel Pendleton, Hamilton’s bosom buddy. An original member of the club.”

“Must be a coincidence,” said Jenny, though she didn’t quite believe it herself.

“You ever heard that nickname before?” Bonny demanded.

“No,” she admitted. “But come on, we’re talking two hundred years ago. More even. They’re not still around.”

“Why not? In the eight years that Hamilton wrote to Talleyrand, they’d already begun to rotate their members. Washington left, then died. John Adams took his place. Gallatin, the Swiss-born Treasury secretary, was recruited. Why shouldn’t they still be around? Masons have a thousand years under their belt. Two hundred’s just the beginning.”

“But you said Washington was involved? He was the President.”

“According to Hamilton, he came to every one of their meetings. Jefferson, too. After that we have to guess, don’t we? But that was the whole point of the club. To help the President get things accomplished when Congress was too pigheaded to act. And they shot you, poor child. Goodness, this changes things.”

“I don’t believe it. It’s too far back.”

“Your friend, Stillman, said it herself. A club. Actually, they called themselves a committee, but who cares? The scale. There’s the key.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just look at the scale of the operation that’s been mounted to track down and eliminate you and your boyfriend. And make no mistake, they want to kill you. It’s the country at stake. Oh, yes, scale, darling. Think of the manpower, the surveillance work, the tapping into phone networks, using your GPS signals to track you. Government has to be involved. Christ, they went all out, didn’t they?”

“That’s jumping to conclusions.” Talk of the government frightened her. It all sounded so crazy, so far-fetched. “You can’t hang all of that on a nickname. Maybe there are dozens of ‘Scotch Nats.’ ”

“Take it from me, lady, there aren’t. I’m a bloody Scot myself. Just forgot to wear the kilt, didn’t I?” Bonny crossed his arms and began pacing back and forth, talking half to himself, half to Jenny. “I knew it. I knew they were still around. I’ve seen their tracks, but no one believed me. Everyone said, ‘Bonny, you’re a loon.’ ‘Bonny’s round the bend.’ But no…”

“You’ve been keeping track of them?”

“You joking? Their tracks are all over the country’s history. Who do you think bombed the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor?”

“It was an explosion in the coal room,” Jenny said. “Spontaneous combustion or something. I just saw an article in National Geographic about it.”

“An explosion in the coal room?” Bonny shook his head, as if he pitied her. “Spontaneous combustion? That’s Greek for saying they have no bloody idea what happened. Someone put a bomb under that ship, and it propelled the U.S. of A. straight into the fray of the imperialist age. Not six months later, Teddy Roosevelt was charging up Kettle Hill. In a few years, Hawaii, Panama, and the Philippines were all U.S. territories. Cuba and Haiti might as well have been. It was the country’s birth as a world power. A regular coming-out party.”

Jenny shook her head. But her skeptical smile was all Bonny needed to goad him further.

“And the Lusitania?” he said. “Who do you think got on the blower and tipped off the Hun that the boat was loaded to the gills with explosives?”

“A U-boat sunk it. Lots of ships were going down. It was the middle of World War One. Unrestricted submarine warfare and all that.”

“Ah, the young and naÏve,” said Bonny. His eyes hardened. “May the seventh, nineteen hundred and fifteen. Despite repeated warnings of U-boats in the area, Captain Charles Turner takes his boat directly into waters where three boats were sunk in the past weeks. Not only that, the man actually slows the boat down and guides her close to the Irish shore, where everyone knew U-boats loved to lie in wait. Did Captain Turner zig and zag like any God-fearing man with nearly two thousand souls on board? Did he? No. Captain Turner keeps her straight as she goes. Fog, he said, was the reason. Fog? So what? What was he watching out for? A bloody iceberg. It was May, and a warm May at that. One torpedo took the Lusitania down, a four stacker, in eighteen minutes. Four smokestacks! A behemoth she was! One lousy German torpedo with a twenty-pound charge. Come on, dear. It was a setup from the git-go. One thousand one hundred ninety-five souls went to the Lord that night. Captain Turner was not among them. No, he saved himself, didn’t he? Eighteen months later, the doughboys are shouting ‘Yee-ya-yip, over the top!’ Alvin York, Dan Dailey, and the rest of the Yanks are taking Belleau Wood. Come on, you don’t think those things just happened, do you? You can’t, really? Not after today. There are forces at work. And not necessarily dark forces, either. Some might say they’re rather enlightened.”

“Even the Lusitania’s almost a hundred years ago.”

“Nineteen sixty-four. Gulf of Tonkin. You don’t really think the North Vietnamese were stupid enough to have one of their PT boats fire on an American destroyer, do you?”

“Professor, that’s all a bunch of conspiracy gibberish.”

“Really? Well, before you go knocking my conspiracy theories, I suggest you take a look in the mirror. You, darling, are a conspiracy theory waiting to happen.”

“Me?”

Bonny nodded gravely. “Tomorrow or the next day, someone will walk up to you, put a gun in your back, and pull the trigger. Good-bye, Jenny. Good-bye, baby. The police will say robbery. Or just a random murder. All will agree it’s a tragedy. Case closed. Mention the club and see the look you get.”

“But… but…” Jenny felt stranded, violently alone. She reached over and drank the rest of Bonny’s beer. “Jesus,” she said, her breath leaving her.

“Somewhere there’s a record of it all,” said Simon Bonny, whispering now, his eyes gone buggy, his chin bobbing in seven directions at once. “Hamilton was specific about keeping the minutes so that posterity would know of his contributions. The Founding Fathers were such vain twits. All of them so concerned about how history would look back on them. All of ’em scribbling away in their diaries and letters and newspaper articles. Each one trying to outgun the other. Old Scotch Nat knows. He kept the minutes. He had to. Only one of them not in the government’s service. Apparently, they held quite a lot of meetings at his house, too. He lived on Wall Street, next to his best friend, Mr. Hamilton.” He stopped and fixed Jenny with a frightened, quizzical stare. “You’re not carrying one now, are you? A phone?”

“Yes, but it belongs to my doctor. I took it by accident when I left the hospital.”

Bonny took his wallet and began ripping out bills and throwing them on the bar. “Ten? That enough… oh bloody hell, give ’em a twenty.” He scooped his cap off the stool and grabbed his overcoat and scarf. “Get rid of it… might as well have a homing beacon planted on your head.”

“But they don’t know I have it.”

“How can you be so sure? They knew about you shooting your brother with a BB gun. I don’t even want to imagine how they found out that little nugget of information. Someone’s been on the phone with Daddy, haven’t they? Scale, my dear. Scale. Look around you. It’s the biggest government in the whole damned world!”

“But…”

“But nothing!”

With a final anguished sigh, Simon Bonny stormed out the door.