Wild Storm

by Richard Castle

  Ingrid smiled and perched closer to the end of her seat. Her voice grew hushed. “According to my sources, the Medina Society has created an incredibly powerful, futuristic, high-energy laser beam. It is powered by a substance called promethium, which was previously thought to be so rare as to effectively not exist in nature. But they have apparently found a large store of it. It sounds sort of wild to me, but once again it is something we have confirmed through multiple sources.”

  Storm sighed. “Well, fortunately and/or unfortunately, my intelligence lines up with yours on this one. I can confirm they have made a promethium laser beam. I captured one myself. But, obviously, they have at least one other.”

  “From what I understand, they have the capacity and the materials to make more. The weapon that shot down the planes headed for Dubai is potentially just one of several. What I’ve yet to determine is how they have the expertise to make such a sophisticated weapon.”

  “I have,” Storm said, who then told Karlsson about William McRae, the missing scientist.

  “And no one in the United States government was even concerned this man was missing,” she said, shaking her head. “It is so typical of government: once a citizen’s usefulness is perceived to be through, the citizen is treated as disposable.”

  Storm let Karlsson’s political diatribe go. “Let’s focus back on the big picture. How do we stop these lunatics before they zap anything else? Have your informants told us where we can find this Medina Society?”

  “That’s the tricky part, apparently,” she said. “According to what I’ve been told, the Medina Society is very savvy. It has learned not only from its own mistakes but also from the mistakes of others, everyone from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Osama bin Laden himself. It does not use the Internet to communicate, ever. Not even in code. It does not permit its members to use cell phones. Its leaders move around a lot and are hypervigilant about cloaking those movements. They know that the Americans have satellites powerful enough to see the dirt under their fingernails and they act accordingly. These are some of the smartest terrorists anyone has ever seen.”

  Storm realized he had been clenching his lower lip in his teeth. He released it. He was in a position where he had to make a snap judgment about someone he had just met—whether to trust her or not. It was the kind of position in which a spy often found himself, and sometimes it was a life-or-death call. This time, it wasn’t just Storm’s life that was in jeopardy. It was potentially thousands. Maybe millions.

  “Ingrid,” he said deliberately. “I know you and Jedediah Jones are…friends.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call us that,” she said. “I would say we’re people who have used each other for our mutual convenience from time to time. You are familiar with the story of the frog and the scorpion, I assume?”

  “From Aesop’s Fables, yes? The scorpion who cannot swim needs to cross the river and asks a frog to transport him to the other side. The frog says, ‘No, you’ll sting me.’ The scorpion says, ‘No, I won’t, for if I do we’ll both drown,’” Storm said. “The frog relents, but then halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog anyway. As they go down, the frog says, ‘Why would you do this?’ And the scorpion says, ‘I am a scorpion. It is my nature.’”

  “Very good. To me, Jones is the scorpion. But as long as you understand what his nature is, you can handle him accordingly.”

  Storm’s smile was a knowing one. “I understand. Believe me, I understand. So I have to be honest with you: Jones’s interest in this incident may not actually align fully with yours.”

  “Please explain.”

  “He wants the people using this weapon to be stopped. We all want that,” Storm said. “But he also wants this technology and the resources behind it to be recovered for future military use by the United States government. And while I am a proud American citizen, that is not something I want my government to be able to deploy in the field of battle or anywhere else.”

  “I concur with you,” she said. “My allegiance is not to any government but to humankind itself.”

  “Good. Then what I’m about to tell you can’t reach Jones’s ears. Agreed?”

  She nodded.

  “I may have a lead that will help us find the source of this promethium,” he continued. “Have you or anyone in your network of informants ever heard of a company called Ahmed Trades Metal?”

  Her shoulders actually slumped. “Why do you ask?”

  “From what I’ve been able to learn, Ahmed Trades Metal may be the source of the promethium being used to power this laser beam.”

  She was now shaking her head. “Well, you’re right and you’re not right. I’m afraid ‘Ahmed Trades Metal’ is not a company. It’s a rallying call for members of the Medina Society. It’s like when Americans say ‘Remember the Alamo’ or ‘Remember the Maine.’ A man named Ahmed was one of their earliest martyrs. Some of their leaders have actually changed their names to Ahmed or named their children Ahmed, so it’s become quite a common name within the movement. ‘Trades metal’ is one of their slang terms for making a bomb or improvised explosive device, because it’s like trading metal with the enemy. ‘Ahmed Trades Metal’ is sort of their way of saying, ‘Let’s go blow up some stuff in the name of Allah.’”

  Storm felt his own posture failing, too. “So I haven’t really learned anything, have I?”

  “Well, it’s one more concrete indication that the Medina Society is behind this. But other than that? I’m afraid we are lost.”

  And then, in that uncanny way he had, Jedediah Jones inserted himself into the conversation via a buzzing in Storm’s pocket.

  “Well, look who it is,” Storm said.

  “I’ll leave you to take the call,” Ingrid said. “Find me when it’s over and we’ll discuss what to do next.”

  She rose and, as she reached the doorway, paused for a moment. “I asked Jones to send me his best man. I’m glad he sent me a good man as well.”

  AS THE WARRIOR PRINCESS DEPARTED the room, Storm pressed the button to receive Jones’s call.

  “Storm Investigations.”

  Jones did not bother with niceties or small talk: “Have you made any headway?”

  Storm relayed the brief version of how he ended up a guest aboard the Warrior Princess and provided some of the details from his conversation with Karlsson Logistics’s CEO.

  “The Medina Society?” Jones said when Storm was through.

  “You don’t think they’re behind it?”

  Jones paused just a little. It was the delay that told Storm his boss was, as usual, hiding something. “No, actually, I’m not surprised,” Jones said. “That explains why we’ve heard so little about this. If it was one of the other extremist groups over there, we would have had ten different agents who would have been able to put schematics of this weapon up on a wall for us. The Medina Society is the nut we can’t seem to crack. We have been completely unable to infiltrate their ranks.”

  “Yeah, not even Ingrid’s money has been able to,” Storm said. “They seem to be pretty careful, but they do have one vulnerability.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The promethium. It seems to be the limiting factor here. It’s incredibly rare, and finding a large supply of it is what has enabled them to make this weapon. Yet because it has such a short half-life and decays so quickly, they’ll constantly need more of it. They’ll want continual access to their source. I say we go full-court press after the promethium. If we do that, it’ll lead us to the Medina Society.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Jones replied. “Because we had reached more or less the same conclusion over here. We brought the weapon you recovered back to the lab and have been crawling through every aspect of it. The weapon itself doesn’t turn out to be that complicated. It’s the promethium that makes it powerful. So we had our chemists study the promethium very closely. It turns out ther
e may be a lead for us embedded within it.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Promethium is a metal, as you are aware. And, like all metals, it has magnetic properties. The way it interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field means that certain information about it is, in essence, recorded within it. If you study it under a powerful enough electron microscope, you can tell from the way the nuclei align themselves where the promethium was at the moment it came into its current form.”

  “Sort of like nature’s version of a GPS,” Storm said.

  “Something like that. In any event, one of the techs is a whiz with this kind of stuff. And she was able to determine the approximate coordinates of where this promethium came into being. The promethium used to make that laser came from 25.77392 north, 31.84365 east. That’s accurate to within plus or minus one point eight miles, within a ninety-nine percent confidence interval.”

  Storm quickly scribbled down the numbers. “And what did you find when you had the satellite look at those coordinates?”

  “Nothing. Sand. That one-point-eight-mile radius means we’re looking at ten square miles. We’ve looked at it as carefully as we could, but we could have missed something. It’s a stretch of the Sahara Desert not far from the Nile River in Egypt. And, of course, that’s just what’s on top of the Earth in that spot. Most rare earths come from inside the Earth.”

  “Which means you need someone who probably looks a lot like me to go there and do some digging,” Storm said.

  “Precisely. I’ve got Clara Strike on her way.”

  Storm felt his brain hiccup on the name. He and Clara Strike had a complicated history, like two quarrelling clans whose members kept intermarrying. Sometimes they made love. Sometimes they made war. The only constant was the passion behind both impulses.

  All he said was, “Strike, huh?”

  “Don’t tell me you two are squabbling again.”

  “I don’t know what we are at the moment,” Storm said. “Anyhow, why don’t you conjure up a helicopter and get me off this boat and on my way to Egypt? I’ll make sure to tell Ingrid’s people not to shoot it down.”

  “Good plan. I told Strike you would meet tonight in Luxor. That’s the nearest big city to those coordinates. She’ll have the rest of the details about the operation for you there.”

  Storm ended the call, then found Ingrid Karlsson, who was out on the foredeck watching the bow of her magnificent ship cut through the blue water of the Mediterranean.

  “Egypt is a good place for you to be,” she said when he was through explaining where he was heading. “It seems that the Medina Society has used the recent political instability there to strengthen its foothold. I will keep the money flowing to my contacts and will be in touch if I learn anything. And if you need anything from me—anything at all—please know all you have to do is ask.”

  “Of course. I appreciate your willingness to help.”

  Karlsson surprised Storm by grabbing both of his hands in hers. She fixed her blue-gray eyes on his, looking at him with the same intensity she used to turn a Swedish shipping company into a multinational conglomerate.

  “I often have railed against human beings pursuing their more savage instincts, and yet I…I do want vengeance,” she said. “I can’t even explain why it will give me comfort. But whoever did this to Brigitte must pay.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  She gripped his hands even tighter. “And be careful of Jones. Please remember his nature.”

  CHAPTER 17

  LUXOR, Egypt

  H

  e smelled her before he saw her.

  Clara Strike had this perfume that, as far as Derrick Storm was concerned, ought to have been regulated by the Food and Drug Administration as a psychotic drug. Storm had once read in Alice Clark’s book Mating Rituals: A Field Guide to Relationships that, much as in the animal kingdom, humans use their noses every bit as much as their eyes to pick a partner.

  It sure worked when it came to Strike. Storm swore he could pick up even one molecule of her perfume, and he caught his first whiff of her even before he knew exactly where it was coming from.

  Storm had been instructed to meet her in the bar at the Winter Palace hotel, the legendary British colonial–era establishment where Agatha Christie was said to have written Death on the Nile.

  Storm felt like he could have used some of Hercule Poirot’s cleverness as he neared the hostess stand and the scent of Strike grew stronger. In addition to their perilous personal past, there were professional complexities as well. Unlike Storm, who worked for himself, Strike was a CIA asset, through and through.

  The last time he had seen her was in an abandoned factory building in Bayonne, New Jersey. They had spoken of fresh starts, without saying exactly what that entailed. They had discussed a future, with no details as to when or how that future would take place. And then, in the midst of the mission, she had taken a bullet, albeit one that was stopped by her vest. It left Storm to chase a villain while Strike got whisked off for medical treatment. Then she had gone her way and he his, as usual. And—also, as usual—nothing had been solved.

  He had gotten delayed in customs—traveling on his own passport was so tedious—and had not had time to check in before their rendezvous time, which had now arrived. The hostess led him through a large room whose furnishings looked like it hadn’t changed much since Queen Victoria’s time and whose chandeliers dripped with crystal. The next room was smaller, though no less opulent, and that was where Strike had selected a private sitting area.

  She was dressed in what was clearly off-duty clothing: a yellow eyelet summer dress that cut off just above the knee, a garment that was both simple and, on Strike, spectacular. Her skin was a few shades darker than it normally would have been, suggesting she had either been on vacation or had just completed an assignment that involved less time than unusual under fluorescent lighting. Her wavy brown hair had acquired a few natural highlights from the sun.

  When she saw Storm, she stood and gave him a smile that nearly stopped his heart. Maybe it was that the rational part of his brain—the part that reminded him how poisonous they sometimes were together—was temporarily disabled, but he forgot how much he missed her.

  “Derrick!” she said.

  She came near and brushed her lips against his cheek, bringing the full effect of her perfume on his olfactory nerves. It was enough to make him light-headed. She drew back to look at him, then laughed. She had left a lipstick smudge on his cheek, which she wiped off with her thumb.

  “God, you look good, Storm,” she said. “It’s great to see you.”

  She sat back in her chair, then crossed her legs. There were no more than a half-dozen other men in the room. With that one movement, she had captivated all of them. Storm selected a seat across from her. There was an antique chessboard between them.

  “I didn’t tell Jones this, but I was thrilled when he told me you were heading out here,” she said. “We never really got the chance to catch up after Bayonne. I had really thought I was going to get some time after that, and maybe we could disappear for a little bit. I’ve been dying to go back to your place in Seychelles. Or another one of those weeks in Manhattan or, hell, anywhere. But then, you know, one thing led to another…”

  He just nodded, unsure of what to say. How did he tell her that a week with her was the thing he most wanted and also the thing he most feared? The greatest love he had known had “Clara Strike” written on it, but so did the greatest heartbreak. She had died in his arms. It had been his fault. And she had let him live with that pain and guilt for years, never telling him that she was really alive and that it was all just Jedediah Jones’s fakery. He could never fully forgive her for letting him go through that. And yet he also understood it as being a kind of bizarre occupational hazard: the emotional collateral damage that seemed to be a part of every big job.

/>   “I heard about that thing with you and the plane over Pennsylvania. Crazy. If you had waited, what, five minutes longer, that death spiral would have been terminal. Those are some lucky passengers. I know Jones had your identity withheld from the press. Still, I feel like someone ought to throw a ticker tape parade for you or something.”

  A waiter appeared with a bottle of Château Carbonnieux Blanc, poured two glasses, then set the bottle in an ice bucket.

  “I hope white is okay,” she said. “It was just so hot and I spent the day…well, in the heat. It felt so good to get back here and have a shower. I swear, I must have knocked off about thirty pounds of dirt and sand. I found this little dress in the bottom of my suitcase, and it was like, yes, something that isn’t either tactical clothing or a pantsuit. Between that and the air-conditioning, I feel like a new person.”

  Storm hadn’t touched his wine. He hadn’t moved. It was all so much: Strike being here, so close. Her looking so good. Him wondering what it was all about. Things were seldom unambiguous with Strike. Even when she seemed like she was coming straight on, that was usually just to hide the part that was coming from an angle. And yet—contradiction alert—that was part of what made her so damn good at her job, which was one of the things he admired about her.

  He realized she was staring at him. “Storm, are you going to say anything, or are you just going to sit there like a big, gorgeous idiot?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Storm said. “I just…I think the only sleep I’ve gotten in the last few days has been aboard something that was moving.”

  “Isn’t it a little early in the evening to start trying to get me in bed with you?” she teased. “Jeez. At least get me a little tipsy first.”

  He reached toward the chessboard in front of them, picked up the white pawn, and studied it. It was intricately carved ivory. An antique. Egypt had banned the ivory trade long ago. He placed it down two spaces ahead of where it had started, then raised an eyebrow at Strike.

  “We haven’t played chess since that time in Istanbul,” she said.