“Derrick Storm,” a man’s voice said.
Derrick didn’t reply.
“Storm, we know you’re in there. We just want the CD.”
Carl looked at his son curiously.
“I confiscated a CD from a Shanghai Seven counterfeiting operation last week,” Derrick whispered.
“What’s on it?” Carl asked.
“Not sure. I couldn’t crack the encryption.”
“Must be something important if they’ve sent five guys after you to get it.”
“Must be.”
From outside, the voice continued: “Come on, Storm. We’ve got all the ammo we need. And we’ve got some other surprises for you, too. You won’t stand a chance in that cabin. We’ll kill you for it if we have to. Or you can just turn it over. What’s it going to be, Storm? Is that CD worth dying for?”
Thugs who wanted to negotiate. The world really was becoming more civilized. What was this “other surprise,” anyway?
But forget it. Derrick wasn’t giving up the CD, especially now that he knew how valuable it was. Just let the thugs try to come after him. He had the advantage of the high ground in the cabin’s loft. And the logs would protect them from machine-gun fire. They were untouchable in there.
“Storm, I know you can hear me,” the man said. “What’s it going to be? You want to turn over the CD or die trying to keep it?”
Replying would only give the thugs an idea of where to aim their guns, so Derrick stayed quiet.
Then he heard the back hatch of the SUV open. He couldn’t really see what was happening until a bright flash emanated from behind the SUV. It traced a high arc toward them, and Derrick looked at it with a kind of detached interest until it finally occurred to him: An RPG. These goons actually have an RPG.
Carl had just reached the same conclusion, because he shouted “grenade” just as it bounced off the roof and landed beside the cabin.
The Storms huddled down as the explosion went off. The percussion rocked the cabin. So that was the “other surprise” they had promised. The only thing that kept it from doing serious damage was that it was easier for the blast’s energy to head into the open air next to the cabin than to tear into the cabin itself.
If they managed to get a grenade through a window . . .
“We got more where that came from, Storm!” the voice, now exultant, hollered. “We’ll keep lobbing them at you until you’re bleeding out your eyes. Is that how you want to go, Storm? All because you wouldn’t hand over a CD?”
For all their bluster, Derrick understood why the thugs wanted him to surrender the CD without a fight. They were down to two men, one of whom was cringing through a face full of shrapnel. They were tired and demoralized. Sifting through the rubble of a cabin, hoping to find a CD that may have been damaged in the melee . . . It wasn’t their idea of a nice nightcap.
At the same time, Derrick began reconsidering his own options, which had been substantially altered by his enemy’s additional fire-power. Running was pointless. Even if the Storms did manage to get away from this particular predicament, it was pretty clear Jones had found a way to track them anywhere they went. It was like he had the whole planet bugged.
But the alternative—staying put—was suicide. If they stayed in the cabin, it would be reduced to toothpicks, one grenade at a time, leaving them ever more concussed and shell-shocked until the cabin fell on top of them. But if they left the cabin and took the battle out in the open, it exposed them to savage machine-gun fire.
It was a bit like choosing between being drowned or being hanged. One death was slow. The other was quick. They both ended in the same place.
“Okay, okay,” Storm shouted. “You win. How do you want to do the exchange?”
“There are some picnic tables just to our left,” the voice replied. “We’re going to back down the driveway until we’re just out of range. You can come out and place the CD on one of the tables. In five minutes, we’ll come back and get it. Do we have a deal?”
“Absolutely,” Derrick hollered.
Carl looked at him, stunned. “You realize you just signed our death certificates. They’re going to start lobbing grenades in here the moment they have the CD. You’re really going to just hand it over?”
Derrick grinned. “Absolutely not.”
The SUV was soon backing out of the clearing. Derrick set a timer in his head: five minutes. He had five minutes to figure something out.
He only had one gun. Taking down one man with superior weaponry was hard enough. Taking down both—and doing it so quickly the second man couldn’t launch a deadly counterattack—was nearly impossible.
But that’s exactly what Derrick Storm had made a living out of doing for a long time now.
* * *
Five minutes later, the CD, safely ensconced in its clear jewel case, had been set atop the picnic table. Its shiny multihued surface was barely able to find any light to reflect until the mist-filtered headlights of the SUV bounced back into the clearing.
The vehicle crept slowly up the path until it reached the fire pit, then came to a stop.
The passenger side window rolled down.
“Derrick Storm,” the passenger yelled. “Have you done as we asked?”
The words sped out to the trees that formed a wall around the edge of the clearing, then bounced back at the man. Derrick didn’t reply.
“Derrick Storm,” the passenger yelled again.
But again, all the man heard was the faint echo of his own voice.
The passenger swore. “If that sonofabitch tried to run, I swear I’m going to tear off his balls and stuff them down his throat.”
He unleashed one more “DERRICK . . . STORM!”
“Stop yelling,” the driver said. “The CD is on the table. I can see it from here. I’m just going to grab it and then let’s get the hell out of here.”
“You sure you don’t want to pump a few grenades at them? I bet that sonofabitch is in that cabin right now, lining you up, waiting to put one in your ear as soon as you pop out.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” the driver said, subconsciously bringing his hand to his throbbing face. At least his wounds had stopped oozing. “Give him hell. You can tell the bosses we did it for Terence Paul Winter.”
The passenger went to the back of the SUV through the seats—less exposure that way. He grabbed the RPG, which still had five grenades loaded in it.
Then he popped the hatchback and scrambled out, using the SUV as a shield from any small arms fire that might come from the cabin, exactly as he had done before. He tilted the RPG at roughly a sixty-degree angle, then pulled the trigger.
A bright line flashed through the night. The grenade landed just short of the cabin, then rolled under the front porch. Three seconds later, the explosion took off the entire front part of the house.
“Ha! Take that, Storm!” the passenger yelled.
He fired off three more grenades in quick succession, tilting his angle a little closer to fifty so that the grenades all landed inside the gaping hole in the cabin created by the first grenade.
By the time the last of the grenades detonated, there was very little left beyond a pile of splintered logs, which were now on fire. Adding to the conflagration, the Buick had also been set ablaze. The last explosion was when the flames reached its fuel tank. No one—not even Derrick Storm—could still be alive inside.
“All right,” the passenger said as he climbed back into the front seat. “We don’t have to worry about that asshole anymore. Let’s get the CD and get out of here.”
“You got it,” the driver said.
Moving confidently now that the threat had been eliminated, the driver opened the door, swung his legs out, and took six purposeful strides toward the nearby picnic bench, where the CD beckoned him. His right hand held the pistol grip of an AR-15, the weapon that had so thoroughly obliterated the Buick.
His left hand was perhaps a foot away from grabbing the CD when two things
happened in rapid succession.
First, from about twenty-five feet away, Carl Storm popped up from the small hollow where he had been hiding in a prone position. He quickly brought Dirty Harry up to shoulder height and pumped two rounds through the open passenger side window of the SUV. The passenger’s skull exploded, sending a glob of red against the tan leather seats and a finer red spray for many feet beyond that. The driver’s head whipped back toward the SUV. He was bringing up his AR-15, his trigger finger mere moments away from putting down a blanket of fire that would cut Carl in half.
And then the second thing happened. Derrick Storm, his face and hands blackened by charcoal from the fire pit—perfectly camouflaging him against the night—emerged from the other side of the picnic bench like a wraith from the shadows. The driver, whose attention had been refocused toward the gunfire, never saw him coming until Derrick was on top of him, crushing him to the ground with his full weight, plunging the entirety of the three-inch blade into the man’s ribs.
The AR-15 flew from the man’s hand. He landed on his belly, his face mashed into the ground by Derrick’s weight. The gun landed in the grass a few feet from the man’s grasp. He began trying to crawl after it, but he could barely move with two hundred thirty pounds of Storm on top of him.
Correction: two hundred thirty pounds of angry Storm.
Derrick withdrew the knife then drove it into the man’s side, burying it up to the hilt. Then he did it again. And again. The man bellowed, but Derrick was not about to show mercy.
It was Carl, instead, who did that. The elder Storm had run toward the fight and, once he had kicked the AR-15 farther away, took careful aim at the driver’s head and pulled the trigger.
The driver’s body immediately went slack. Derrick, who had been interrupted mid-stab, paused with the knife at the top of its path. Then he brought it slowly down.
“Thanks,” Derrick said. “I didn’t know how many swipes it was going to take with this butter knife.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter now,” Carl said, nodding toward the driver’s lifeless form. “He’s toast anyway.”
* * *
They carried the bodies toward the cabin, which by then was burning hot, and tossed them on top, turning it into an impromptu funeral pyre.
There might have been a few pieces of charred bone left by the time the thing burned out. Or there might not. Either way, it wouldn’t be enough to identify the remains.
Then, as best they could, they wiped down the interior of the SUV. Derrick didn’t kid himself into thinking this would escape the notice of a well-trained Crime Scene Unit with an ultraviolet light. It just had to be good enough to fool a highway patrol officer during a traffic stop.
Upon closer inspection, the SUV—which was now the Storms’ only transportation—turned out to be a Ford Expedition, much to Derrick’s delight.
Derrick drove. Carl counted the money they had taken out of the dead men’s wallets. It totaled $389. Enough for a few tanks of gas and a few meals that just might beat microwave-heated chili on a paper plate.
They also now had a cache of weapons at their disposal and a trunk full of ammo. And even if that felt like a BB gun and some pellets compared to the arsenal Jones and the Shanghai Seven could put together, it was still something.
“So this was really all about that CD you swiped?” Carl said as they rolled out of the forest.
“Yeah, I guess so. My guess is it’s some kind of records or files that definitively tie the Shanghai Seven to the counterfeiting operation. Maybe there’s even dirt against Jones on there. Maybe that’s why he’s been helping them.”
“Instead of the smoking gun, the smoking compact disc?” Carl asked.
“Something like that.”
“Speaking of Jones, you know all we’ve done is bought ourselves a little bit of time, right? Jones is going to keep finding us until we figure out how he’s doing it. And I have to think now that we’ve killed off five of the Shanghai Seven’s guys, they’ll send ten at us next time. Then twenty. I’m sure they’re paying top dollar and don’t particularly care about burning through their inventory of mercenaries.”
“I know,” Derrick said, his tone empty.
“That’s why I keep telling you we need to take the fight to them. We can’t keep running and hoping we keep getting lucky. We have to go on the offensive.”
“Against a conglomeration that size? I wouldn’t know where to start. Besides, they’re on the other side of the world right now.”
“No, no. I’m not talking about taking on the Shanghai Seven. They have way too many tentacles. I’m talking about Jones.”
“Jones?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “He’s the one who keeps selling us out.”
“Well, I know. Which is all the more reason we can’t approach him with the expectation he’ll engage us in a polite chat.”
“I’m not talking about a polite chat. I’m talking sticking a gun in his face and demanding he tell us what the hell is going on. There’s got to be some reason why he’s helping the Shanghai Seven, and there’s got to be some way to convince him to stop.”
“Even if I agree with you, how are we going to do it? I don’t even know where the Cubby is. I mean, it’s somewhere underground at Langley, but where? I wouldn’t know where to start. I’ve been blindfolded every time I’ve been taken there, and the CIA wouldn’t exactly take kindly to someone trying to comb over their property in a search grid pattern.”
Carl’s glance went toward the clock on the dashboard. “It’s 1:52 a.m. I’m sure Jones is at home, asleep.”
“And, what, you want to raid his house? Forget it. You know how many foreign agents, terrorists, and domestic ne’er-do-wells have tried and failed over the years? Every inch of the house is wired to a security system that—”
“You think I can’t beat a home security system?”
“I know you can. But my point is that you’ll never even get that far. Jones lives on ten acres with the house square in the middle, set up on this hill like a little fortress. There’s a huge open yard surrounding it on all sides—I’m talking zero natural cover, unless you can hide behind a blade of Bermuda grass. Jones has the nerds monitoring cameras that are conventional during the day and then automatically switch to thermal at night.”
“The cameras are mounted on the house, right?”
“Yes. But don’t go thinking you’ll disable two cameras and be done with the job. There are thirty-six of them: eighteen primary and eighteen duplicate backups. Each camera is assigned to a twenty-degree arc, even though it captures much more than that, so there’s overlap on top of overlap in the coverage. If a primary camera goes down, the backup comes online immediately. If more than one camera malfunctions, the Cubby is immediately notified.
“And don’t go thinking you’ll just catch them napping. They’ve written programs so if anything much larger than a sparrow moves in any one of those camera’s fields of vision, alarms start going off. If Jones is home, he’s notified immediately. He and his wife go into a panic room while the nerds launch a drone hidden on the property that goes from dormant to airborne in about ten seconds. If there’s anything left of the trespasser once the drone is done, a team of agents arrives about five minutes later to finish him off.”
“So you’re saying you doubt me?”
“Aww, come on, Dad. You’re the one who just gave that beautiful speech about how we need to cut out the chest-thumping macho bullshit. Don’t make this about some kind of test of fealty.”
“He lives in Potomac Falls, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Drive north, son. Your old man still has some tricks up his sleeve.”
NINETEEN
HEAT
Nikki Heat was having one of those dreams that was so intense, so vivid, it felt absolutely real.
She was in high school again. It was piano recital time. Cynthia Heat always rented out a small performance space for her students to be able to
put on a show for their parents, relatives, and friends. Everyone dressed up like they were going to the opera or ballet—dark suits for the dads, pearls and high heels for the moms— and made like it was a big deal.
Because, for the students, it was.
Nikki’s dream started with her backstage, just behind a curtain. There were other students around her, nervously buzzing about, though they were on the fringes, indistinct. Nikki couldn’t see their faces.
Her attention was focused on the stage. The girl who preceded her in the program was finishing up her piece. Nikki could feel her nerves rising. Her sweaty palms grasped her sheet music. There was no more anxious time for a performer than when she was just about to walk onstage.
The girl struck her final chord. The audience clapped enthusiastically. The girl stood and bowed. Then from the corner of the stage, in a spot Nikki couldn’t quite see, there came the voice of her mother, who always served as the emcee for the evening.
“Again, that was Elizabeth Flanders playing Rachmaninov’s Prelude in G Minor. That is such a spirited piece, and I think we can all agree Beth brought wonderful energy to it. Thank you, Beth,” Cynthia said.
The audience applauded again. Beth Flanders bowed one last time, then walked offstage.
Cynthia waited until she was gone, then said, “And now, please welcome our next performer, Nikki Heat.”
Polite clapping followed. Nikki knew that was her cue. Everyone in the auditorium knew that was her cue.
There was just one problem: She couldn’t get her legs to move.
“Nikki Heat,” Cynthia said again.
The applause was a little more reserved this time. Nikki was trying desperately to lift her right foot, straining with all her might. But she couldn’t get the thing even one inch off the ground.
“Nikki, it’s time. Come out now, please,” Cynthia called.
The crowd was murmuring now. It knew something wasn’t right. Nikki was trying to move her left leg. It was every bit as unresponsive as the right one had been. She wanted to walk out on that stage. She wanted it more than anything. Her muscles just wouldn’t cooperate.
Heat Storm (Castle) Page 18
