Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller

by Richard Castle

  She slid close to him. He wet his lips.

  “Oh, you’re my friend, all right,” he murmured.

  “Why don’t you whisper it to me?” she purred. She leaned her ear so it was right next to his mouth. Her hand rested lightly on his thigh.

  He was pretty much addled in every way a man can be addled. And yet, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, in a place that not even Clyde May could reach, there was a small voice that told him perhaps he shouldn’t say.

  “Now, now,” he said. And then, in a minor victory for self-control, he stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me for one moment, I do believe I need to use the restroom. You’ll be here when I get back… We’ll… We’ll toast the great state of… of Al-BAMA!”

  “That we will,” she said.

  The moment he left the room, she sighed. This was taking too long. And while the Clyde May wasn’t getting her drunk, it still burned her esophagus every time she took a sip. She had also been leered at enough for one night. She was ready to be done with this.

  She had done her best to pry the information out of him directly. She had failed. It was time for her chemically aided backup plan. She removed the small glassine envelope of powder she had been keeping wedged in her shoe, parted its seal, then poured its contents into the senator’s glass.

  Too much pentobarbital would actually kill ol’ Donny. Dosed properly, it would take less than fifteen seconds to put him into a sound slumber for four hours. She swirled the glass’s amber contents until the powder dissolved.

  When he returned, they toasted Al-bama, despite the fact that it had lost a syllable sometime during the night. Then Xi Bang counted backward from ten. By the time she reached two, Donny Whitmer’s chin had hit his chest.

  Just to have a little insurance in case she needed to resort to blackmail—and because she thought it would amuse Storm—she went over to the slumbering Senator, posed with him suggestively, and snapped a few photos.

  She e-mailed them to Storm, then went to work. She had four hours but didn’t feel like testing the limits of the drug’s potency. She quickly laid the senator out on the couch, where he would think he had just drifted off. He would have a Hall of Fame hangover in the morning. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, because she felt sorry that he should make all that effort and not get anything for it.

  Then she began rifling through his files. She started with the ones in his office, trying to be systematic and yet also remaining aware the clock was ticking. The moment she determined a file was not relevant—either to the Alabama Future Fund or the appropriations rider—she moved on to the next.

  An hour down, she still had nothing. She had been through all the donor files and had moved on to others. She kept checking for false fronts to the filing cabinets or for unmarked files. But everything was straightforward. And dull. And, worst of all, legal. It was feeling increasingly fruitless.

  Two hours in, she was starting to panic. She considered calling Storm, but what was he going to tell her? He wasn’t there. He couldn’t see what she could see. He’d be guessing even more than she was.

  She sat down in the great man’s chair, trying to clear her mind, staring at the top of his desk as she did so. That’s when she saw a yellow legal pad with “ROLL TIDE PAC” written atop it—and nothing else. Curious, she started leafing through it. The next four pages were either nonsense or irrelevant.

  Then, on the sixth page in, she hit gold. The words “ALABAMA FUTURE FUND” were prominent at the top of the page. Underneath was “$5 MILLION” and “SPLIT INTO FIVE LLCs.”

  And then, underneath that, was what she and Storm had come halfway across the world to find. It was the name of the man who had funded the PAC, the man who had hired Gregor Volkov, the man whose orders were directly responsible for the deaths of five bankers and their families, the man who planned to inflict financial turmoil on the entire world.

  It was underlined three times, and it was as plain as the senator’s block handwriting:

  “THANK YOU WHITELY CRACKER.”

  CHAPTER 23

  NEW YORK, New York

  Clara Strike had seemed as surprised to see Derrick Storm as he was to see her, if not more so. After all, he was the one who was supposed to be dead.

  But before they could deal with any of that, there was a mess to clean up. There was always a mess to clean up when Clara Strike was around.

  He needed to pay off the cabbie. The Maserati needed to be towed—Storm didn’t want to know what the repair bill would be; he was just glad that Whitely Cracker didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would sweat it too much. And, last but not least, New York’s Finest needed to be assuaged.

  All the while, Storm was annoyed. Annoyed at being lied to about Strike’s involvement in the case. Annoyed that there were obviously some moving pieces Jones had not told him about, as usual. Annoyed that for all his annoyance, he kept stealing glances at Clara and feeling the familiar longings. Her curly brown hair. Her shining brown eyes. The small whiffs he kept getting of her perfume. Damn, did that perfume have a hold on him.

  During the four years he had been officially dead, Storm had not seen her once. He hadn’t even missed her. Or felt bad about leading her to think he was dead. As far as he was concerned, turnabout was fair play. Clara Strike had died on him once, too—died in his arms, even. She hadn’t contacted him, hadn’t found some small way to let him know it was all one of Jedediah Jones’s tricks. She had let him go to her funeral, let him grieve, let him lose a piece of his soul thinking he had lost the woman he loved. He was younger. More naïve. More vulnerable. He still hurt easily back then.

  To her, a faked death was just business—an occupational hazard. To him, it had been emotional torture. When he found out she had been alive that whole time and could have spared him all that suffering with one phone call, he swore he would never forgive her. And he hadn’t.

  And yet.

  Here she was. Again.

  And here he was. Again.

  And he couldn’t help it. He found himself thinking of all they had done together—of the bad times, yes, but of the good times, too. He thought about Jefferson Grout, the man who had unwittingly given them their introduction. Back in his private eye days, Storm had spent four months tracking down Grout, who he thought was merely a two-timing spouse. Grout was actually a CIA operative gone rogue. Working all by himself, Derrick Storm of Storm Investigations had succeeded in doing what the combined resources of the CIA had failed at doing for a year. Strike recruited him into what she called “the company” the next day. There had been a whole lot of victories since then—many more W’s than L’s, truth be told.

  So when the cabbie, the Maserati, and the panel van were all gone, and Strike asked Storm to grab a drink, it was something of a reflex to say yes.

  “I’m sorry I keep staring at you,” she said as they settled into a corner booth at a cozy martini bar in the East Village. “It’s like I’m looking at a ghost. I can’t believe…”

  “I know the feeling,” Storm cut her off.

  “I almost want to ask you how long you’ve been alive again. I keep forgetting you’ve been…”

  “Alive this whole time,” Storm said.

  “Yeah, it’s just… I mean,” she began, but she was cut off again, this time by a waiter coming to get their order. It gave Storm the opportunity he needed to shift the conversation away from his apparent resurrection.

  “I was told you weren’t working this case,” he said.

  “I was told you weren’t working this case,” she echoed.

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  She shrugged. “I guess Prince Hashem is worth every effort from the United States government.”

  “Wait, who?”

  “Prince Hashem,” Strike said. “Don’t play dumb, Storm. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I’m serious. Who is Prince Hashem?”

  Strike paused, studying him. Storm sometimes felt like she could read the fine p
rint on the inside of his skull casing. “You’re not messing with me right now? You’re really not working this case?”

  “It depends,” Storm said, feeling that sense of bewilderment that only Clara Strike could engender in him. “What case are you talking about?”

  “You first.”

  “No, you first,” Storm said. “Let’s start with this: Those bugs I found at Cracker’s place. I should have known the moment I saw them. Those were yours, not Volkov’s.”

  “Volkov? As in Gregor Volkov? What the hell does he have to do with this? He’s dead.”

  Now it was Storm’s turn to study her. He couldn’t pretend to know all her tells, but he could detect no guile in her. “Okay, what the hell is going on?” Storm said. “You’re really not in on this?”

  “I think when we say ‘this’ we’re talking about two different things,” Strike said. “Simply to mitigate the confusion: Yes, we’ve had heavy surveillance on Whitely Cracker for two months now.”

  “Two months? But that appropriations rider wasn’t even passed until three weeks ago. That was the trigger for the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about right now.”

  He could see she was telling the truth. “So why have you been watching Cracker?”

  “Because of Prince Hashem,” she said.

  It was again Storm’s turn to wear a blank look. He shook his head to emphasize his ignorance.

  Strike lectured: “Prince Hashem. Crown prince of Jordan. Next in line to the throne of one of the most strategically important countries in the Middle East. A man the United States of America seriously cannot afford to piss off if it wants to continue happy relations with Jordan. Any of this ringing any bells?”

  “Not one.”

  Strike sighed, then laid it out for Storm: “Prince Hashem is one of Whitely Cracker’s biggest investors. He’s got seven hundred million dollars plowed into Prime Resource Investment Group. Even for the prince of Jordan, that’s real money. Most of his fortune, actually. Surely by now you’ve figured out that Prime Resource Investment Group is in serious danger of going bankrupt.”

  “Actually, that’s news to me. Whitely Cracker didn’t get on my radar screen until earlier today,” he said. What he didn’t add was that he hadn’t wanted to breathe a word about Cracker to Jones, and therefore Storm hadn’t asked the nerds to do the usual financial workup that would have revealed Cracker’s apparent distress.

  “Yeah, well, trust me. Whitely has it bad. We’re talking Bernie Madoff stuff here. He is in a huge, huge hole. Like billions. With a capital ‘B.’ He keeps borrowing, and of course everyone gives it to him because he’s Whitely Cracker. But it’s only getting him deeper in trouble. We’re trying to figure out a way to move in and save the prince’s money, but of course the CIA can’t make a move against an American citizen. We have to wait for him to do something illegal and then send in the appropriate domestic authority. Unfortunately for us, losing billions of dollars isn’t illegal. So all we can do is watch and wait and hope.”

  “And then you swoop in, save the day, and make sure Prince Hashem knows Uncle Sam had his back the whole way, gently reminding him that Iran or Hamas wouldn’t be able to do the same.”

  “Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” Strike said.

  “Now, what does Volkov have to do with this?”

  Storm told her as much as he dared without over-sharing, reminding himself she still worked for Jones. Storm trusted Clara Strike more than he did Jedediah Jones, but that was like saying he trusted a three-card monte dealer more than a snake-oil salesman. Still, he gave her a basic outline of the Click Theory and how Cracker played into it. He could tell from her reactions that it was genuinely news to her. For once, it seemed Clara Strike wasn’t playing a shell game on him.

  “If it helps you, we haven’t seen any sign of Volkov or his men,” she said. “And, believe me, we’ve been watching. You know Volkov’s patterns better than anyone. He’s a look-before-you-leap type. He’d never go after Cracker without having done his homework. So I’d say he hasn’t gotten here yet.”

  “More likely, Click’s model is just wrong,” Storm said. “The sixth banker isn’t Cracker. You still have people on his house?”

  Strike nodded.

  “Good. If Volkov does come slinking around, we’ll know. But I’m starting to think that I need to ask Dr. Click to go back to the drawing board. It doesn’t look like Cracker will be victim number six.”

  Storm felt some sense of ease knowing Cracker and his family were safe. But, at the same time, it meant there was some other banker—perhaps with some other spouse and some other children—who was still in danger. And Storm didn’t have any idea who it was. The powerlessness was frustrating.

  “Well, I’m glad fate has thrown us together again,” Strike said when he was through. “It really is great to see you, Storm. I thought you were… I mean, it’s Jones, so who the hell knows? But there were moments when I really thought you were dead. I’d go back and forth. Sometimes I’d think, Nah, he couldn’t be dead. It’d take a nuclear weapon to kill that son of a bitch. But then other times I’d think back on the times I almost lost you and think, well, maybe they got you this time….”

  “Yeah, well…,” Storm said quietly. “Sorry I didn’t reach out.”

  “I’d have done the same thing.”

  Storm couldn’t resist the jab: “You did do the same thing.”

  “I know, but… I mean, really, are you fishing for an apology or something? You know how the game is played. I don’t like it any more than you do sometimes. But I also accept it’s a part of this world we have chosen to live in. Or maybe it’s part of the world that has chosen us. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter. You can gripe and pout all you want, but you and I both know we wouldn’t walk away even if we had the chance to. This is who we are.”

  “Yeah” was all Storm said. Sometimes, it was best not to give Clara Strike any more than that.

  She had placed her hand over his. The lighting was low. The martinis were finally taking the edge off the adrenaline rush that Storm had been living on.

  “You remember when we found this place?” Strike asked.

  “Of course. It was after Marco Juarez,” Storm said, feeling the warmth of the memory. Juarez was a Panamanian drug lord. Emphasis on the “was.” Storm and Strike had celebrated Juarez’s death in Manhattan, reveling in their unlikely survival with a week of sex, food, and booze, in roughly that order. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Storm would never say it out loud, but if he had to live just one week of his life over and over again in a loop, that would be the one.

  “I thought I’d lost you that time, too,” she said.

  “Oh that? That was just a flesh wound.”

  She interlaced her fingers in his. Her eyes were somehow moist and blazing at the same time. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “Sometimes I think about, you know, us, and…”

  She stopped herself. Storm had turned his head in the other direction.

  “I’m not sure I can talk about this,” he said.

  “Right now?” she asked. “Or forever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Suddenly, she was the one turning her head in the other direction. She stood and dabbed at her face with a Kleenex. Her last words before leaving the bar were:

  “Well, just be careful. Right now has a nasty way of turning into forever while you’re not watching.”

  As he watched her walk out the door, he couldn’t help but wonder whether the tears had been real.

  Storm settled the check and departed. Nothing about drinking a martini with Clara Strike had felt right anyway. There were doors he couldn’t afford to open, and that was one of them. Certainly not now. Maybe it was because of his feelings for Ling Xi Bang. Maybe it was because there was a man he didn’t know whose life he felt he had to save.

  Storm dove into an all-night deli, grabbed a black coffee to help clear away th
e martini fuzz, and typed a quick e-mail to Rodney Click. He told him that Whitely Cracker was an apparent dead end and asked if he had any other leads.

  Storm had just hit the send button when his phone rang.

  “Storm Investigations.”

  “Derrick, it’s Ling. Can you talk?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, already enjoying the sound of her voice.

  “I’ve just gotten myself clear of Senator Whitmer’s office. The donor is a man named Whitely Cracker.”

  “What?” Storm said, and not because he had a hard time hearing.

  “I got Whitmer drunk and managed to steer the conversation around to the appropriations rider. He admitted he did it at the behest of what he called ‘a very generous friend.’ I couldn’t get him to say who the friend was, but then later, when he was passed out, I found a pad on Whitmer’s desk that more or less laid it out. The five million is going to be split into five LLCs, but it looks like all the money is coming from this Cracker fellow. Do you know him or something?”

  “Yeah, I was just at his house, as a matter of fact,” Storm said. “Rodney Click’s model predicted Cracker would be the sixth banker. I guess the model got a little confused. It thought we were looking for a victim and instead it found our perpetrator.”

  Storm seethed as he thought back to his interaction with Cracker. The banker had let Storm into his house like he was the pigeon, not the hawk. He had pretended nothing in the world was amiss and had acted so guileless when Storm brought up the name Volkov, even asking him how to pronounce it and double-checking that it was Russian. All the while, the man was in Cracker’s employ.

  Storm was angry at himself first—he had the end of his mission an arm’s length away and hadn’t realized it. Then his anger turned to Cracker, the man who had inflicted such misery on so many, and intended to cause even more widespread suffering, without any apparent regard for who he hurt. All in the name of the unholy dollar.

  Then Storm calmed himself. Anger served no purpose here. And, besides, he could turn his own mistake into an advantage. He could let Cracker continue to believe he was under Storm’s protection. That way Cracker wouldn’t know that Storm was really coming for him.