The Watches of the Night
In less than a minute, Benjamin Hawken—war hero and Pritzker Prize-winning architect—saw his life, marriage, and reputation destroyed when the Monterey County Planetarium collapsed during its opening ceremonies. Tormented by guilt for the mass-casualty catastrophe, he sentenced himself to exile aboard his sailboat.
Years later, in January 2001, Ben’s wife dies. Her last wish forces him out of seclusion to search for their vanished son, a young physicist who, having uncovered evidence of structural sabotage, is determined to exonerate his father for the disaster.
The labyrinthine trail takes Ben to a Benedictine abbey in California, a meteor crater in Arizona, and an all-out firefight in a Mexican village on the edge of the Sonoran Desert. It leads him overseas to an Israeli Air Force base and the ancient ruins of Tel Megiddo (also known as Armageddon), to Rome and the Vatican, and finally to a pitched sea battle in the Mediterranean. Converging with Arafat's Second Intifada and the soon-to-explode scandals in the Catholic Church, the story reaches its climax amidst the tragedy of September 11.
Numerous eminent authors have grappled with the horrific impact and aftermath of that day: Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Andre Dubus, Claire Messud, Jonathan Foer, Jay McInerney, to name a few. But of the months before? Almost nothing. Nevertheless, we’ve since learned that some knew—alarms were raised, messages sent, intel shared, yet the dots were never connected. The world was hurtling towards a history that would change it forever, and in The Watches of the Night, Ben hears the whispers and warnings, and his course is shadowed by that monstrous wave about to strike.
Influenced by pivotal female characters, including his estranged daughter and a Muslim sniper who kills the terrorist pursuing him, Benjamin Hawken’s trial by fire brings him through unspeakable loss to reconciliations he never could have imagined, and ultimately to that which he never believed possible: the redemption of his own life.
(Manuscript is complete; 99,000 words)