Wild Storm

by Richard Castle

  Jones had traded one of them to get Derrick Storm a seat on a military cargo plane that had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base at first light.

  The mood aboard had been tense. The speculation in the media was that terrorists were responsible for the flights that had gone down, even if no one could guess how they were doing it. The crew had decided that with commercial flights grounded, there was at least a 50 percent chance the terrorists would target military planes next.

  “Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere near Pennsylvania,” the captain had assured Storm.

  Storm had nodded, not wanting to tell the man that the weapon was most likely mobile, and that it could probably be wheeled anywhere. Nothing in the sky was safe until Storm could figure out who was doing this and why.

  Jones had been typically taciturn when Storm had shared his thoughts about the laser beam and the missing scientist who might be behind it. “Sounds like we need to get you out to California,” was all Jones had said.

  The flight chased the sun across the country, making good time in empty airspace. It landed just as the Bay Area was purging itself of morning traffic. In an unmarked vehicle borrowed from the air force—another underpowered Chevrolet, unfortunately—Storm drove out to Hercules, a small town just north of Berkeley.

  William McRae’s onetime home was a large brown ranch with tan shutters set on a pretty piece of land near the top of a hill. Storm could see a deck on the back of the house that provided a commanding view of the valley spread below. On a clear day, he bet some of the tall buildings of San Francisco were visible. It was what realtors would call a million-dollar view. While Storm was no professional appraiser, he would not be surprised if the house would fetch something in that neighborhood if it was ever put on the market.

  The lawn was immaculately maintained. The gardens were likewise spotless. There was an orderliness to the layout that suggested a logical mind was behind its creation.

  An American flag hung by the front door. On an oak tree next to the driveway, someone had tied a yellow ribbon.

  Storm parked on the street and walked up the driveway, hoping he might find some answers inside the house at the top of it.

  He climbed the five slate steps that led to a small patio in front of what appeared to be the main door to the house. He pressed the doorbell button. It responded with an arpeggio-like chime. No one came to the door. He rang again. Nothing.

  It wasn’t like he had an appointment. Then again, he also didn’t have time to wait for one. He descended the steps and looked around. No sign of anyone. He walked back toward a garage he had passed on his way up. One of the garage doors was open. There were two cars inside.

  He kept going, rounding the corner of the house and into the backyard. There, he found a white-haired woman hunched on her knees, digging in a well-mulched flower bed with a small trowel. She wore floral-patterned gloves with matching gardening clogs.

  “Alida McRae?” Storm said.

  “Yes.” She looked up at him with steady blue eyes.

  “My name is Derrick Storm. I’d like to ask some questions about your husband. Do you mind talking with me?”

  “Are you with the state police?”

  Storm wore a blazer and button-down shirt with jeans underneath. She was mistaking him for a plainclothes cop.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “The FBI?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She jammed the trowel in the ground. “Then who are you, exactly?”

  “I’m a contractor for the government. It’s best I don’t say which part.”

  “And what is your interest, exactly?”

  “Same as yours. I want to find your husband and see that he is returned home safely.”

  She stood, pulled off her gardening gloves, and let them drop to the grass. She drew a cell phone out of her pocket and began punching numbers.

  “Ma’am?” Storm asked.

  She didn’t answer. She took a few steps farther away but spoke loudly enough that Storm had no trouble hearing. “Yes, Chief, this is Alida McRae. A strange man claiming to be from the government has shown up at my house and wants to ask me questions about my husband. Could you please send an officer out to the house immediately?” She waited for a reply. “Yes, I suppose you can send two if you’d like. The more the merrier. Thank you.”

  She hung up and faced him. Storm knotted his fingers in front of his body, thought about whistling. Jones had protocols in place to handle this sort of thing—numbers that could be called, cover stories at the ready, people who would vouch for Storm. He just wished he didn’t have to waste the time right now.

  “The police are coming right out,” she said. “I’m going to have them check you out before I say a word.”

  “Okay.”

  She stood there, staring at him sternly, her fists jammed on her hips. “I’m sure they’re going to ask for ID.”

  “Okay,” Storm said again, rocking back on his heels.

  “Their response times are quite good. They’ll probably be here in three minutes.”

  “Good,” Storm said.

  “Good?”

  “Yes, good. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can get on to finding your husband.”

  She stared at him just a bit longer. “And you said your name was Storm?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why don’t you come up on the back deck. I’ll make us some iced tea. We can talk there.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to wait for the police?”

  She scooped up her gloves and gardening trowel. “I didn’t really call the police. They’ve been no damn use to me anyway. I just wanted to see how you’d respond. I figured if you were legitimate you’d stay and if you were a con man you’d run.”

  Storm smiled. He liked Alida McRae already. “I’m legitimate enough,” he said.

  “To be honest, I don’t really care who you are or which part of the government you work for. If you’re trying to bring Billy home, you’ve got my full cooperation.”

  OVER THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES, Storm sat on the McRae family deck, iced tea in front of him, the Alhambra Valley laid out beneath him, and made Alida go through her version of her husband’s disappearance.

  There were no surprises. Her husband was gone. She didn’t know why. None of his routines had changed in the days or weeks prior to it. Nothing in his behavior suggested he was going anywhere.

  Storm asked some questions but didn’t sense he was extracting any new insight out of her. Most of what she said had already been reported in the paper.

  When he was satisfied she had nothing more to tell him about the mysterious vanishing of William McRae, Storm changed subjects. He told her about his suspicion, now twice-confirmed, that a high-energy laser beam had been responsible for knocking planes from flight over Pennsylvania, and his belief that the people responsible might have been forcing her husband to do their bidding.

  Alida’s face became graver the more he spoke. “He had done a lot of work on high-energy lasers,” she said quietly.

  “I know. I saw his name splashed across the literature. Would he know how to make one?”

  She just nodded.

  “The only paper Bill published in the last three years was about the feasibility of a promethium laser beam,” Storm said. “Do you know anything about that?”

  “I guess you could say so. I helped him write it.”

  Storm must have looked curious, because Alida answered the question he didn’t even ask. “I helped him write all his papers. Billy is a scientist, through and through. Even with all the papers he’s published, words have never been his strong point. I was an English major. I’ve been ghostwriting for him since graduate school.”

  “No shame in having a ghostwriter,” Storm said. “Some of the best books published every year are penn
ed by talented writers whose identity the public will never know.”

  “I enjoyed it. Bill’s research is everything to him. If I wasn’t conversant on it, there would have been whole decades of our marriage when we wouldn’t have had much to talk about. Some of the other wives at the laboratory just throw their hands up and say they can’t understand any of what their husbands do. I feel like they’re giving up on a big chunk of their partners’ lives. It’s really not that incomprehensible once you get into it.”

  “Do you think you could explain it to me, Mrs. McRae?”

  “First of all, call me Alida. When you call me Mrs. McRae it makes me feel like an old lady. Second of all: of course I can explain it to you. I wasn’t asleep when I was writing all those papers, you know.”

  “Okay, Alida,” Storm said, smiling. “Let’s start with: why promethium?”

  For the first time since they met, Alida smiled. “Do you like science fiction, Mr. Storm?”

  “What red-blooded American boy raised on Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling doesn’t?”

  “In that case, I think you and Billy are kindred spirits. One of the reasons he wanted to pursue it was simply for the name. I mean, a promethium laser beam. It just sounds cool.”

  “It does.”

  “But there’s also a scientific utility to it as well. How much do you know about solid-state lasers?”

  “Perhaps I should have also mentioned Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry? But that’s about as far as it goes.”

  She smiled again. “Okay. I’ll give you the non–science fiction primer. I’ll try not to bore you with the details, but one of the big distinctions in the laser world is three-stage versus four-stage. There are only a small handful of elements that make four-stage lasers.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Four-stage is a hundred times more powerful than three-stage.”

  “Big difference,” Storm said.

  “Probably ninety percent of the solid-state lasers out there are made with neodymium, which happens to be next to promethium on the periodic table. They’re both elements that are known as lanthanides, which are…I’m losing you, aren’t I?”

  “A little. I slept a lot in Mr. Menousek’s chemistry class, which I regret. Most of the chemistry I know about deals with how to make and defuse bombs.”

  She let that pass without comment. “Lanthanides are better known as rare earth metals. They have all kinds of practical uses, especially in high-tech gadgetry. They’re mined all over the world, from Sweden to South Africa to Australia to China. Anyhow, where was I?”

  “Neodymium.”

  “Right. Most of the lasers are made with neodymium. But Bill had always had his eye on promethium. Every element has a different wavelength when you make a laser out of it. Remember ROY G BIV from science class? That’s the color spectrum as it appears in nature. The lower wavelengths are red. The higher wavelengths are violet. Still with me?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay, so promethium checks in at nine-hundred-thirty-three nanometers, which is not in the visible spectrum. But when you put a cesium filter on it, it radiates at four-hundred-fifty-nine nanometers, which is a very pure blue, the best blue you can get from a four-stage element.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t the lead researcher on that paper?” Storm teased. “Your recall of those numbers is amazing.”

  “Have you ever published a scientific paper? You end up writing it and rewriting it and editing it so many times to please some idiotic review committee, you feel like you have the thing memorized by the end. Anyhow, four-hundred-fifty-nine nanometers is significant, because it turns out to be the perfect wavelength for slicing through the Earth’s atmosphere, which is also very blue in the middle of the day. There’s almost no loss of power.”

  “So if you were designing a high-energy laser beam that you wanted to use to, say, shoot down airplanes, this would be the stuff?”

  “Bill always said that a high-energy promethium laser beam would be an incredible weapon,” she confirmed.

  Storm tapped his finger on the countertop. Sometimes he hated being right. She poured him an iced tea refill from a glass pitcher lightly beaded with sweat. Storm started posing his next question as she topped off his glass.

  “Well, now, let me ask you this: if promethium is such dynamite stuff, why didn’t he do more with it while he was at Lawrence Livermore? Why wasn’t he trying to develop this for the military? Why wait until he retired?”

  “Oh. Right. Promethium was…it was more of a hobby for Bill, I guess. For one thing, it’s mildly radioactive, so it’s a little difficult to deal with. It’s easy enough to shield, so it’s not like I worried much about it. They actually used promethium to power the batteries in some of the first pacemakers. But when lithium batteries came along, they were a lot lighter and smaller, so out goes promethium. But the biggest reason promethium had limitations was, well, remember how I mentioned promethium is a rare earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s probably the rarest of the rare earths. Bill said there was no more than twelve pounds of the stuff spread out over the entire Earth’s crust. No one has ever found a large deposit of promethium. Bill worked with very small amounts of it. I saw it when they shipped it to him, before he put it in crystal form. It was just this white powder in this little clear plastic bag, almost like it was a drug or something. Except it wasn’t as fine. It was more granular.”

  “And someone had, what, found it in a mine somewhere?”

  “Oh, no. It had been fabricated in a nuclear reactor. Promethium isn’t found naturally. At least that’s what Bill said. That’s why all this stuff you’re saying about a high-energy promethium laser is a little out there. High-energy laser beams require very large crystals—the larger the crystal, the more powerful the laser. Billy was the one who did the math, so I couldn’t give you the exact number. But I do know you would need several hundred pounds of promethium to make a crystal big enough for a high-energy laser capable of doing the kind of damage you’ve described.”

  Storm looked at his iced tea, studying a lemon seed floating within the light brown liquid.

  “Could someone with access to a nuclear reactor fabricate that much promethium?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. You make it by splitting plutonium atoms, and it’s not like that’s easy to come by. It’s also a pretty slow process. The promethium Bill used came from the Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee. Even at their peak, when they were making promethium for those batteries, they didn’t make more than about fifteen pounds a year. By the time you made a few hundred pounds’ worth, the older stuff would have decayed. Even the most stable promethium has a half-life of less than three years.”

  “So how would someone get enough promethium to do this?”

  Alida shook her head. “I don’t know. The only good news is that whatever supply they have will only last so long. As the promethium degrades, it causes impurities in the crystal. The one Bill made for that paper he wrote eventually stopped working.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “A few months.”

  “Meaning whoever has this weapon will be able to keep using it with impunity for the immediate future?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “It would stop working after a few months. But then, if they had more promethium, they could make another weapon.”

  “That’s right.”

  Storm took a sip from his tea. “In the most perverse way, that’s good news for you.”

  “How so?”

  “Because it means whoever has grabbed your husband will have to keep him alive. And if he’s alive, I’ll find him.”

  “You…you will? In your capacity as…a contractor for the government?”

  “No. In my capacity as a human being.”

  Alida did not r
eply. She had placed a hand over her mouth. Storm noticed tears were pooling in the corners of her eyes.

  JUST DOWN THE STREET, behind a partially drawn curtain, in an empty house with a FOR SALE sign out front, a man spoke into a Bluetooth device that was planted in his ear.

  “Yeah, he’s still there,” he said in an accent that came from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  The man had short-cropped hair, a nose that had been broken several times, and a jaw that was twice the size it needed to be. A loaded Bushmaster Carbon-15 with a Trijicon ACOG 4X32 scope leaned against the wall next to him. He wore a Colt .45 in a shoulder holster. And he kept a Buck knife in an ankle sheath.

  But his most distinctive feature was a wine-colored stain that started just below his scalp and splashed down the right side of his face.

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” he said in reply to whatever question had just been posed to him. “What do you want me to do, knock on the door and ask him for a dang business card?”

  The voice on the other end spoke. The man with the wine stain picked up the Bushmaster and used the scope like a pair of binoculars to study the Chevy that had taken Storm out to Hercules.

  “Well, it’s definitely a government car, that’s for sure,” the man said. “It’s got the white tags and all that. But it ain’t got no markings that—”

  The man was interrupted. He listened for a moment then said, “No, no. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It ain’t the locals. They’re treating this whole thing like McRae just walked off. They haven’t found nothing because there wasn’t nothing to find. I keep telling you, we did that part real good. Plus, she always goes to them. They ain’t come to her since the first couple days.”

  He lowered the gun. There was more talking on the other end.

  “Beats me,” he replied. “Maybe she called someone who called someone who knows a fed? It don’t look like FBI. They drive them big cars, Caprices and whatnot. I’ve been thinking maybe the car is military, but the guy who got out didn’t look military. He was big like he was in the military—Special Forces big. But no uniform. And the hair was wrong. Hell, maybe he’s from the census or something?”