Wild Storm

by Richard Castle

  Strike uncrossed her arms, grabbed a water bottle, and took a swig. Storm could tell she was softening.

  “Look, if you’ve got a better idea than hanging out here, I’m all for hearing it,” Storm said. “But at the moment, I think this is our best bet. At the very least, I’m sure we can protect them from these bandits that are supposedly roving around out here. Who knows? Maybe the bandits are the ones behind it. Or maybe there are Medina Society members embedded here at the dig site, pretending to be part of the expedition when really they’re secreting out the promethium every time they return to civilization? There are a host of possibilities.”

  Strike fingered the water bottle. “Okay, so what are you proposing?”

  “First off, we maintain the cover of being Talbot and Sullivan from the International Art Protection League. There seems to be a lot going on tonight. You shadow Professor Plumb—”

  “Professor Raynes.”

  “Yeah, whatever. As I was saying, you stick with him, see if you can work your charms on him to figure out what’s really going on. Pay attention to the natives, too. They’re the ones who are doing the heavy lifting, as Katie pointed out. But it still seems like Raynes is the head honcho of this dig site, so he’ll probably know about anything that’s been happening here. Meanwhile, I’ll hang out with Dr. Comely.”

  “Terrible sacrifice for you that it is,” Strike said, narrowing her eyes.

  Storm did his best to look virtuous. “Why, Mrs. Sullivan, I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  THE FEROCIOUS SUN HAD FINALLY BEGUN to settle in the sky, flooding the desert with mysterious reds and complex yellows. The sand released its heat with the same kind of speed it had soaked it up in the morning. And at the dig site, the teams of grad students, postdocs, professors, and local workers had shifted back into an active state.

  “We basically have two work sessions a day,” Katie Comely was explaining to Storm, who was patiently following behind her. “We’re up before first light so we can take advantage of the morning hours. We take a siesta in the middle of the day. And then we work again at night, usually at least a few hours after sunset.”

  “When do the bandits strike?” Storm asked.

  “The morning. It’s almost like they know when we have something really valuable. I think one of the workers is tipping them off, probably getting paid for the information. But I don’t know which one, and my Arabic isn’t very good yet, so it’s hard for me to make any headway in that area.”

  “And when they come, it’s…on camels? In dune buggies? What?”

  “Pickup trucks. They need the trucks to haul off our stuff. You can see them coming from a ways off, but there seems to be nothing we can do to defend ourselves. It’s so disheartening. The professor has hired security, but they turn tail and run without firing a shot.”

  “Who are these bandits? Do you know anything about them?”

  “Well, they cover their faces, of course. They’re just…locals, I guess. Desperate locals. Egypt’s economy has been in a real tailspin with all the political instability. Unemployment has spiked. Sometimes I wish I spoke better Arabic so I could talk to them. There has to be a way to get them to stop what they’re doing. Maybe we could hire them to provide security for us, you know? Pay them protection money. Either that, or maybe I could convince them to, I don’t know, find someone else to rob.”

  Katie had led him to the entrance of the tomb and was about to go underground when she paused.

  “Oh my goodness, do you hear that?” she said.

  Storm stopped behind her and tuned his ears to a sweet chirping sound. It was at once angelic and strangely uplifting, like nothing Storm had ever heard.

  “What is that?” Storm asked, finally focusing on the small, yellow bird making the sound.

  “That,” Katie said, “is a very rare sight, indeed. That’s a Jameson’s Finch.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Egyptians believe it’s extraordinary good luck to see a Jameson’s Finch,” she said. “It’s like the American equivalent of a rabbit’s foot, a horseshoe, and a four-leaf clover, all in one. People who see a Jameson’s Finch are said to be on the brink of something very fortunate happening to them. The bird originally had a number of names. No one could seem to agree what to call it. Pharaohs actually kept the finches at their palaces so they could enjoy the songs. We’ve found mummified finches in the tombs of pharaohs who couldn’t bear the thought of going to the afterlife without their favorite songbird.”

  “Poor bird.”

  “Actually, what made it a poor bird is that they were being hunted to extinction. These finches have a very narrow migratory path, stopping at just a few spots on their journey from the tip of South Africa up to Egypt each year. It made them an easy target for poachers.

  “Then Jameson Rook, the famed magazine journalist, wrote a major story about the bird’s plight and how it was going the way of the carrier pigeon if no one stepped in. Several governments in Africa, which normally couldn’t agree on anything—even what name to give the finches—banned hunting of the finches and also set up some sanctuaries for them. And the finches’ numbers rebounded to the point where they’re now no longer considered endangered, merely threatened. The Egyptians were so thrilled not to lose the bird, they officially renamed it Jameson’s Finch, in Mr. Rook’s honor.”

  Storm listened to the bird’s song, then mimicked it, pursing his lips and tweeting back at it in its own lilting song.

  “Wow, that’s pretty impressive,” Katie said. “Maybe you’re good luck, too?”

  “We’ll just have to hope so,” Storm said.

  As they went underground, she began narrating the history of the dig site—how it had been discovered by Professor Raynes, using his advanced seismographic techniques; how a rotating team of archaeologists had been unearthing treasures from it for a year now; and then how she had happened upon the hollow stone and the hidden tunnel underneath.

  Storm listened with half an ear. He was keeping an eye out for anything that seemed out of place or anyone acting strangely. For whatever he had said to Strike, he wasn’t totally convinced the dig site had anything to do with the promethium. But it made sense to act as if it did. There was no downside of being wrong, and potentially great benefits to his investigation if he was right.

  So he studied everything and everyone with great care. Even Katie Comely. If the Medina Society really was as clever as everyone thought, it very well might be using a fresh-scrubbed American girl as an operative.

  Storm kept asking questions, being careful to stay true to his cover. The passageway Katie was leading him down had been widened and reinforced to prevent cave-in. Storm was able to walk—albeit in a crouch—down into the lowest tomb. Once there, Storm could stand. They had set up temporary lights that set the whole place aglow.

  “Up until just a few days ago, it’s very possible no human beings had laid eyes on any of this for five thousand years,” Katie said, pointing out some of the hieroglyphics on the walls.

  “And this,” she finished, “is the mummy I’ve been calling Bouchard. Note the way his arms are crossed. Note how intricately the linen was bound around him and the care that was taken with every detail. We won’t know until we unwrap him, but my guess is we’ll find a very painstaking embalming. There’s no doubt in my mind this was a pharaoh. But we have to be able to get it back to the lab so we can study it adequately.”

  Storm looked at Katie, then at the human-shaped pile of rags in front of him, trying to imagine what this king’s world had been like and what kind of troubles he had faced. What would this king have felt about something like the Medina Society, a group that believed in killing and maiming to achieve its goals? He probably wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Brutality was the norm back then. Power was taken by force. The losers were killed or enslaved. It was only modern humans who were su
pposed to be more evolved.

  Katie was talking about the various scientific processes that would soon be applied to the mummy when Storm interrupted her.

  “You’re pretty geeked on this Egypt stuff, aren’t you?”

  She stopped herself, then smiled. “Yeah, I really am.”

  “How did that happen to a girl from…I’m guessing Missouri?”

  “Kansas, actually. But you’re on the right track. I grew up in this little farming town in Kansas where nothing ever happened and all anyone ever talked about was the weather, how the weather compared to what it had been in the past, and what that might mean for the corn crop. Oh, that and college basketball.”

  She laughed at herself and continued, scanning the walls as she spoke. “When I was seven, my parents took me to this traveling exhibition of Egyptian treasures that had somehow meandered its way to a museum in Kansas City. That was the first time I had ever really been confronted with the idea that there were these people who had lived a very long time ago in a very different place, that they had created this remarkable civilization, and that they had invented so many of the things we now take for granted. It seemed so exotic, so wonderful, so foreign in the best way. And it just fired my imagination.

  “I started studying everything I could about it and never really stopped. Any time I had a project in school, I would find a way to make it about Egypt. I majored in archaeology with a minor in Egyptian Studies as an undergrad, then went on and got my graduate degree, then my doctorate. In some ways, the more I learn just makes me want to know that much more, and I…I’m sorry. This is really boring, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” Storm insisted. “One of the reasons I decided to come work for i-apple was that I loved the passion people like you—artists, archaeologists, museum curators—have for their jobs. I would otherwise be a soldier of fortune, a hired gun who worked for whatever company offered the biggest paycheck. At least this way I work for people who are doing things for a higher cause.”

  Even though Storm said it to maintain his cover, there were pieces of his own truth hidden within the words.

  Katie turned and looked at him with two big, blue eyes. “You’re really going to help us, aren’t you?”

  “I’m certainly going to try,” he said.

  She hugged him with her whole body. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  He hugged her back, feeling the parts that had been made hard by her work and the parts that stayed soft. Her contours seemed to fit nicely into his. He didn’t really think she was a terrorist.

  Which might have made her a perfect one.

  CHAPTER 20

  A SECURED ROOM

  W

  illiam McRae came to slowly, with the same sense of dread he had felt every morning for, what, three weeks now? Four?

  He was starting to lose track. When he was first abducted, snatched by a group headed by a man with a wine stain on his face and a gun on his hip, McRae had assumed his captivity would be brief. He thought he would either be killed, or released, or his ransom would be paid.

  Instead, they had drugged him, keeping him in a narcotized stupor for perhaps several days. He had the sensation of almost constant motion, like he was being moved somewhere. Sometimes the movement would stop and he would think: okay, now the end is coming. Then it would resume. He often heard an engine. He thought, perhaps, it was a generator. Maybe they were somewhere off the grid, and the engine was what supplied them their power. Or maybe this was a large vehicle of some kind. It was all so disorienting.

  Once he recovered from the effects of the sedatives, they put him to work, making it clear to him that they would hurt him badly if he refused. He had not yet tested them on whether they’d carry out this threat.

  It never occurred to him that his captivity might stretch this long, that he would start to get confused about the passage of time to the point where he could no longer reliably say what day of the week it was. The things that used to anchor him to time—the busy retiree’s schedule of volunteer activities, the weekly rhythms of the things he and Alida did together, the calendar in his office, and the cell phone in his pocket—had all been taken from him.

  In truth, he had not been badly treated in some ways. His confines were comfortable. His bed had a pillow-top mattress and clean, fine sheets that were changed every few days. His “cell,” such as it was, was a windowless interior room, yes. But it had plush carpeting and its own en suite bathroom with a shower, sink, and toilet. It also had a small sitting area, where he took all his meals.

  He was given clothes that fit him well. If he ever needed something, there was an intercom in his room. He could press the button anytime, tell the guards what he needed, and someone would fulfill the request. When he had discovered a mild allergy to one of his pillows, it had been removed, and he had received prompt medical treatment for his discomfort. He was being well fed, even overfed, by food that was delicious and nutritive.

  The trade-off was that they were working him constantly. Every day after breakfast, they led him from his bedroom, across the hall and to the left, to his workshop. It was also windowless. He was kept under constant guard and made to work all day and into the evening.

  After McRae had made the first laser for them, he thought he was done. He actually had stalled on the work a bit, thinking that when it was through, he was through.

  Then they came back and said: build another one.

  Then another.

  At first, there was a part of him—the scientist in him—that was thrilled by the work. He had always theorized that given enough promethium, he could make the most powerful laser the world had ever seen. But because promethium had always been in such miniscule supply, with no hope of getting more, it remained nothing more than a theory.

  Getting to put it in practice was satisfying, even as he fretted over what they might be doing with the weapons. He kept thinking they would soon run out of promethium—where were they getting so much from, anyhow?—and that when that happened he would get a rest.

  It was just getting to be too much. He was not a young man anymore. They brought people in to help him with some of the more physical tasks, but some of it was still up to him. His hands, which had a tendency toward arthritis as it was, were getting sore. He worked each day well past the point where his fingers literally ached.

  His body was just out of whack. He missed his daily jog, not only for the physical release it gave him, but also for the mental health aspect. The jog centered him, soothed him, made him feel healthy, and released all those wonderful endorphins in his bloodstream.

  The absence of the jog, on the other hand, had been a disruption. He wasn’t sleeping as well at night. He was more irritable. The windowless rooms were getting to him. His body craved the fresh air and the sunlight.

  More than anything, he missed Alida. He missed her companionship, her steady good cheer, her laugh, her smile. He missed the way she smelled when she came in from gardening, like soil and sweat. He missed talking to her about his work, something that had started long ago and had become an ingrained part of their marriage. He found himself pretending to have those conversations with her, almost because he couldn’t process information himself without thinking of how he’d explain it to Alida. She wasn’t just his ghostwriter. She was his muse.

  Some couples take each other for granted, especially after several decades of marriage; or they treat each other shabbily, neglecting to show each other the kindness they’d extend to strangers. William and Alida McRae had never done that. It had made their relationship strong, helped their love grow—rather than wither—through the years.

  Being apart from her was, without question, the worst part of the whole ordeal for him. In their entire married life, forty-five years and counting, they had never been separated for more than maybe two, at most three nights—when he went to a conference
on the East Coast to present a paper. Otherwise, they were inseparable.

  He worried about how she was holding up without him. He worried about the effect her distress might be having on her health. He worried she was worried.

  He begged his captors to let him call her, to tell her he was still alive. They had refused. What about an e-mail, he asked? A letter? No way, they said.

  All the while, they kept working him. And now he was just tired: of toiling for these men, of his aching fingers, of agonizing over what they might be doing with the weapons he was making, of missing Alida.

  He rolled over in bed, much as he wished he didn’t have to. They watched him, he knew. Usually, they came in not long after he first stirred. Lately he’d taken to lying very still in the morning, milking a few extra minutes in bed. It’s just that he was an old man and couldn’t stay in the same position too long.

  So he moved. And shortly thereafter, one of his captors came in. There were five of them. McRae assigned them each a Greek letter, based on where he thought each one ranked. This one was Delta.

  “Good morning,” Delta said gruffly. “What do you want for breakfast?”

  “Nothing,” he said, rolling back over.

  Delta paused. He was younger than some of the other ones, which is why McRae had assigned him somewhat subordinate status. Like the others, he didn’t bother hiding his face, which worried McRae: it meant none of them were concerned about him getting out alive to identify them.

  “Come on, Dr. McRae, you have to eat.”

  “Forget it,” McRae said. “I’m done working for you people.”

  The words just came out. He hadn’t much considered their consequences. The man did not respond, just left the room. He heard the door click, as it always did. His captors did not leave anything to chance. McRae wondered if he’d even know what to do if the door didn’t click. He hoped someday he’d get the chance to find out.

  Three minutes later, another man came in. It was Alpha. McRae had decided he was the leader based on the deference the other men showed him and also because of his immense size. Alpha was at least six foot six and densely built, well north of three hundred pounds, most of it muscle. With blond hair and blue eyes, he looked like a modern day Viking. He was carrying a manila envelope.