The Morgenstern Project Read online

  He could already hear the commotion inside. Michael Dritch smiled as he gazed at the storefront window, behind which lived hoards of novels, comic books, and miscellaneous pieces of merchandise, including superhero figurines and Star Wars T-shirts.

  He pushed open the door to the small indie bookstore, his favorite hangout whenever he had a free afternoon. He looked forward to breathing in the vanilla aroma tinged with must. It meant that he would soon be transported to another world.

  Lining the walls of the narrow shop were shelves tightly packed with works of science fiction. Rare comics filled a set of racks running down the middle of the store. The precious collector’s items were in airtight and light-resistant cases.

  The steady influx of new stock conveniently justified Michael’s frequent visits to this place, which he kept secret from his coworkers. They didn’t know that behind the hard-nosed face, which put off more than a few people, there was an introvert who dreamed of pirates, outer space, and caped superheroes.

  But Michael found so much more in this wonderful shop called Morg’s Universe. It provided him with a community of fellow enthusiasts who were like family to him. And as was true for most biological families, differences of opinion often led to heated arguments.

  Seconds earlier, in fact, someone had thrown down the gauntlet.

  “Hey guys,” Michael called out, greeting his fellow patrons.

  He was rewarded with a couple of distracted heys before the argument picked up again. The insults were flying so fast, he could barely tell who was saying what. Watching the verbal joust between the two geeks hyped on Red Bull made him feel like he was attending a WrestleMania match at Caesars Palace. In his head, he could hear Michael Buffer introducing the two contestants.

  “On one side of the register, in baggy black jeans and Iron Maiden sweatshirt, we have the brainy computer engineer with the celebrated bulging belly and buzz cut: Greg Nadjar! And behind the register, in gray trousers and blue button-down shirt, we have the undefeated owner of this bookshop. The angelic baby face, blond hair, and blindingly bright smile could only belong to the one and only Jeremy Corbin!”

  Michael weighed in.

  “Gentlemen, far be it from me to intervene, but try not to lapse into any petty name-calling.”

  “This numbskull doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Greg fired.

  “Well, don’t waste a minute of your time listening to that numbskull over there,” Jeremy shot back. “He’s making an ass of himself.”

  Michael could tell that Jeremy wasn’t about to back down. “Could one of you explain why you’re quarreling?” he asked.

  “I made the mistake of giving His Highness an opinion that he didn’t like,” Jeremy said.

  “You can keep your ignorant opinions to yourself,” Greg answered.

  “We’re not getting anywhere,” Michael sighed as he noticed the Captain America figurine behind the cash register.

  “All I said was that I thought the first hundred pages of Lord of the Rings were a little boring. There’s no reason to throw a hissy fit,” Jeremy explained.

  Uh oh, Michael thought. Any criticism of Lord of the Rings was sure to get a rise out of Greg. The stubborn programmer was a ringer. He owned several editions of Tolkien’s trilogy. He had Peter Jackson’s movie adaption on DVD and Blu-ray, along with The Hobbit. Greg also had an array of books and essays on Tolkien. Michael even suspected that the devotee was fluent in Elvish.

  Diplomacy would be necessary to defuse the situation.

  “Greg, we both know that Mr. Corbin is trying to fill in the gaps in his cultural knowledge. Wouldn’t you agree?” he asked as he nodded at the owner of the store.

  “I guess,” Greg conceded. “But hey, you’re not a good liar—what do you think about Lord of the Rings?”

  Yikes.

  “All things being equal...”

  Michael stopped himself. The two combatants were watching him with impatient eyes. He gave them an embarrassed smile and glanced at his watch.

  “Oh jeez, look at the time! I’ve gotta run.”

  “Answer the question,” Greg insisted.

  “Yeah, I want to hear your thoughts too,” Jeremy chimed in.

  These guys were such a pain. He had to say something. There was no getting out of it.

  He mumbled an inaudible response.

  “Huh?” the bookstore owner asked.

  Michael cleared his throat, took a breath, and braced himself for the rebuttal.

  “I said that I also thought it was a little...”

  “Ah ha!” Jeremy gloated, clapping his hands.

  “Jesus, what backwards universe am I living in!” Greg huffed.

  And with that the two disputants hopped back on their verbal merry-go-round, which was spinning so fast, Michael was getting dizzy. So much for his valiant attempt to restore order. Maybe he was stuck in the middle of a crazy amusement park, but he had to admit he loved it.

  “Hey boys! How’s it going?” The melodious voice of the beautiful blonde in the tight sheriff’s uniform silenced the men.

  “Hey Jackie,” Michael replied with a friendly wave.

  Jeremy walked over to her, slipped an arm around her waist, and kissed her gently on the lips.

  Even though Michael had grown close to the couple, their past was still a mystery to him. They were always dodging questions by making jokes that might have fooled their other friends but didn’t fool him. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he had a hunch that Jeremy and Jackie had come to this quiet little town to start a new life.

  “Hi Jackie,” Greg said as he threw his black backpack over his shoulder. He carried that thing everywhere, and no one knew what was in it. “You really married a jackass.”

  “I know that better than anyone else,” she joked as she gave her husband a big smile. “But I love him anyway. Are you still coming over tonight to take a look at my laptop? I’d like to figure out why it’s so slow.”

  Greg gave Michael a pat on the back and opened the door to leave.

  “Yeah, around eight. First I have to finish up a website.” Still standing in the doorway, he took out his phone and read the screen. He put it back in his pocket with a worried look on his face. “You’re lucky you’ve got those muscles,” he shot at Jeremy. “All right, fools, I’m outta here. You all need to brush up on the classics.”

  “If you want guns like mine, try lifting boxes of books or even spending a little time in the gym instead of sitting behind your computer and stuffing your fat face with chips, psycho,” the bookseller fired back.

  Greg’s response was a classy flip of the middle finger.

  With Greg gone and Jeremy preoccupied with his wife, Michael could finally explore the sci-fi displays. He had his heart set on a recent book called Battle of the Beggars by Thomas Gota, a Star Wars parody that all the geek blogs were raving about. It promised to be a fun read that would cheer up an otherwise dreary late-autumn evening.

  “It’s on the house if you watch the store for me Saturday morning,” Jeremy said, still glued to Jackie.

  “Planning a hot Friday-night date? Don’t think you’ll be up in time?”

  “No, not really. Jackie is working, and the little one has a doctor’s appointment at ten. And since there’s always a huge wait, I need someone to cover the store. But if you’re not free, I can ask Greg when he comes by the house tonight.”

  Michael didn’t hesitate. “No, don’t bother him. I’ll do it.” The offer was a huge honor. Plus the idea of being in charge of this nerd paradise during its busiest hours was the adult equivalent of spending an entire night locked in a toy store.

  “How old is Annie now?”

  “Exactly six months. It’ll be our first Christmas together,” Jackie said, smiling.

  The woman was almost always in a good mood, except on the rare occasion when some jerk committed a serious crime. Almost all of the infractions in their small New Jersey town involved a teenager shoplifting a lipstick or a distr
acted office worker running a stop sign.

  But one time, when he and Jeremy were having a friendly argument over a cup of coffee, Michael did see the deputy sheriff in action. He was schooling his friend on art house films when the sound of a crash interrupted his lecture. A car had rammed into a telephone pole across the street from the bookstore, and the driver had dragged himself out of the smoking vehicle.

  The man, who was wearing a Stetson and waving a revolver, was clearly hammered. He stumbled into the middle of the street and started singing Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

  Michael panicked. His hands over his ears, he ducked behind the cash register.

  “Get down!” he yelled. “It’s the twenty-fucking-first century, and a cowboy is about to shoot us dead. A fucking cowboy who doesn’t even have a fucking horse! Fuck Willie Nelson, and fuck ‘On the Road Again.’”

  Jeremy was watching the whole thing from the doorway of his shop.

  That’s when Jackie zoomed onto the scene in her patrol car. After executing a controlled slide, the tiny law-enforcement officer sprang out of the vehicle and lunged at the man with lightning-fast speed and an impressive show of aggression.

  “She’s crazy! We have to call for help!” Michael shouted after summoning the courage to get up and look out the window.

  “She’s not the one I’m worried about,” Jeremy replied, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

  A minute later, the drunkard’s wrists were bound in handcuffs, and his nose was gushing blood. The woman’s reputation was established in Michael’s mind.

  Michael brought himself back to the present. “Annie’s six months old already? It seems like she was born just yesterday. All right, I’m out of here. I’ll be back tomorrow for the keys. Have a good night. Oh, and in the future, try to avoid discussing Tolkien with Greg, unless you want to reawaken his inner demons.”

  “Lesson learned.”

  Michael gave a Japanese-style bow before leaving the store. He was eager for the arrival of Saturday morning, which was forty-eight hours away.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Alone at last,” Jackie said. She gave Jeremy a pat on the butt.

  “Hey, you think just because you’re a sheriff’s deputy you have the right to harass innocent citizens?”

  “Do you expect me to believe that an ex-sex addict such as yourself doesn’t enjoy some mild discipline administered by a woman in uniform?” She batted her eyes.

  Jeremy smiled and whispered, “What do you mean ‘ex’?”

  “And he doesn’t even hide it,” she sighed as she disengaged herself from her husband’s hold.

  Jeremy walked to his computer behind the register, and after quickly checking his e-mails, he gave her a disappointed look.

  “Are you still hoping to hear from him?” Jackie asked.

  “It’s almost Christmas,” Jeremy said.

  “It’s highly unlikely that...”

  “I know,” Jeremy interrupted. His tone was sharper than he meant it to be. “Sorry, honey, but you know how much I miss him. Shit, I feel like... Anyway, I owe him everything. You, our little girl, this store. He gave me—he gave both of us—a second chance. I can’t just snap my fingers and forget him.”

  Jeremy certainly wasn’t the man she had met almost two years earlier—an arrogant and thoroughly unlikeable stock trader who hated himself and was drowning in booze. Even though she never talked about Eytan, Jackie also missed him. The courageous and generous Mossad agent hadn’t merely protected them during their crazy adventure in Europe. By way of example, he had helped them grow up. And, in fact, he had brought them together.

  Jackie felt a lump in her throat and thought it best to change the subject.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” she said.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Could you pick up Annie from the babysitter’s tonight, after you close the shop? I have a mountain of paperwork to finish.”

  “Um, let me get this straight. I screw around with my friends all day. My banging-hot wife pays me a surprise visit at work. Then my banging-hot wife says she has to work overtime and asks me to rescue our little girl. Pretty much your average day.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Jackie parked her cruiser in the lot and entered the colonial-style building that housed the sheriff’s department and courthouse. Those with business in the building were straggling out, as the offices and courts would soon close for the day. The young woman smiled politely at a guard manning the information desk and headed toward the department.

  She entered the perfectly organized space and gave it a satisfied look. When she joined the sheriff’s department, the offices were a pigsty. Official statements and sandwich remnants were strewn all over the desks. A search for a simple stapler could turn into an hour-long treasure hunt. But Jackie, trained by the CIA, followed the place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place maxim. And the new recruit eventually succeeded in creating a haven of tidiness.

  She hunkered down at her desk and got to work on her reports. While only a few thousand people lived in her small town, the department’s jurisdiction encompassed a much wider area of one hundred thousand residents. And even though Jackie didn’t see many felonies, she always had paperwork to do. The former field agent considered it a huge pain and did it as quickly and professionally as possible. In the end, she realized that this task was her job’s only downside, compared with what she had faced during her years in the intelligence agency.

  She had had her fill of adventure on her last assignment, when she was charged with protecting Jeremy. They had fallen in love during the mission and had almost died. After that, Jackie was more than happy to end the CIA chapter of her life. These days, she took pleasure in the simple things and her family.

  Jackie yawned. She glanced at her watch and gasped when she realized that she had already been there for two hours. She was resting her eyes when her cell phone started playing the theme from Dora the Explorer. The four deputies who were working on their own reports guffawed, and she shot them an icy stare. Jeremy loved messing with his wife by regularly changing her ringtone to something that was sure to get her teased.

  The jerks were probably paying Jeremy to do it, she thought. Irritated, she answered the call. She didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Mrs. Walls-Corbin?”

  “This is she.”

  “Listen to everything I have to say before hanging up.” The voice was deep and husky. “I strongly suggest that you walk over to one of the windows on the back side of the building. The attack is about to start... Right now.”

  Before Jackie had a chance to respond, her computer went down, along with all the electricity in the building. Only the red exit sign was still lit. With the phone still fixed to her ear, she heard a muffled gunshot in the lobby.

  “Everyone on the ground!” she yelled to her colleagues.

  They turned toward her with confusion and alarm written on their faces. A much louder bang went off. Chips of wood went flying, quickly followed by countless sheets of papers swept up in a storm of bullets—bullets that destroyed everything in their path, including Jackie’s four fellow officers. Unable to escape, they fell one by one.

  Jackie instinctively crouched under her desk. She removed the safety on her weapon and pointed it, ready to fire.

  “They’re coming to get you, Jacqueline,” the anonymous speaker continued calmly amid the uproar. “There’s nothing you can do for the other officers. Get out as fast as you can.”

  “Wait. Why are you telling me this? What’s going on? How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Model 2003, Jackie. Do you remember it?” The call ended.

  “Model 2003? Oh shit!”

  It was like a punch in the gut. Without wasting a second, Jackie shoved the phone into a pocket and, sensing a lull in the gunfire, sprinted to the designated windows. She had just reached one of them when she felt a pinch in her right calf. Shielding her face with her arms, she soared through one of t
he windows. She tumbled to the ground, surrounded by shards of glass.

  She opened her eyes with great effort. The pain radiating through her leg was less worrisome than the strange fatigue that weighed her down. As she fought against the lethargy, she heard what sounded like an explosion and glimpsed a white flash. She couldn’t move. She felt someone grab her by the collar, and as she was being dragged toward the parking lot, she faintly called out, “Annie... Jeremy...” She drifted into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Pour two and a half cups of honey into a bowl. Add the same amount of barbeque sauce, then two crushed cloves of garlic, and top it off with two spoonfuls of soy sauce. Now mix it all together.”

  New York celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito was reeling off the instructions as he prepared the dish before a studio audience.

  With one eye on his state-of-the-art refrigerator with LCD television and the other on the utensils and ingredients on his stainless-steel countertop, Jeremy was imitating the culinary wizard’s every move.

  Even though he wasn’t blessed with the creative skills of a master chef, Jeremy excelled in reproducing Food Network recipes. And so, after returning home from his store every night, the bookseller would tie his favorite apron around his waist and set up shop in front of the oven, ready to concoct tasty little meals for his adoring wife. Today’s main dish: honey-glazed spareribs.

  For Jeremy, cooking was a substitute addiction. After numerous attempts to rid himself of his cigarette dependency, which included the patch, acupuncture, and even hypnosis, Jeremy had taken up food—not so much the eating of it, but the preparation. When he craved a cigarette at the shop, he would jot down recipe ideas or go to the Barefoot Contessa website. His tobacco intake had fallen considerably, and Jackie no longer fretted about his smoking.

  At this stage in the recipe, all he had to do was marinate the meat and wait for his lady love before throwing the dish in the oven. If all went as planned, they’d be feasting at seven thirty. Jackie hadn’t called with any updates, and according to their communication system, that meant she wasn’t running late. After wiping down the countertop and soaking the dishes, Jeremy decided to sneak just one cigarette, which he intended to enjoy on the porch.