Wild Storm

by Richard Castle

  The man got out of the guard shack, opened the gate, and waved Raynes to a spot just off the driveway, not far from the main house, under the long shadow of a tall eucalyptus tree.

  “Wait in the truck. Someone will come for you,” the man said, then returned to the guard shack, closing the gate behind him.

  Raynes did as instructed, cutting the truck’s engine. He gazed at the inside of the compound. All around him, heaping piles of scrap metal sat, slowly oxidizing. He recognized a mound that was strictly junk cars. Another was primarily refrigerators and other abandoned household goods. Yet another was tangles of wire of varying gauges.

  Raynes had never given much thought to who Ahmed was or what he did with the promethium. He had assumed, quite simply, that Ahmed was nothing more than the proprietor of a business called Ahmed Trades Metal. Was he really a terrorist, as Talbot suggested? Or was that something Talbot was just saying to throw Raynes off?

  At this point, Raynes didn’t particularly care. He had worked too hard throughout his life to end up penniless and imprisoned. He’d sell to the devil himself. And if he already had? Well, so be it.

  After five minutes or so, a man appeared. It was one of the men from the botched promethium exchange earlier in the day. He had a bandage on his bicep with a dapple of blood soaking through. He winced as he walked, glaring at Raynes the whole time. There was no question who he blamed for his discomfort.

  “Come on,” he said. “This way.”

  The man led Raynes to the main house and into Ahmed’s office, where he and Ahmed had conducted business before. Ahmed was not there yet.

  “Sit,” the bandaged man said, as he then departed the room.

  Raynes selected one of the two chairs in front of Ahmed’s desk. In the corner, there was a flat screen television playing Al Jazeera with the sound off. The professor’s gaze shifted to the large painting that covered most of the east wall of the room. It was a man—a fisherman, by the looks of him—wading into a river to retrieve an ornate trunk. It was obviously a scene from a fable or piece of Middle Eastern mythology, but Raynes wasn’t immediately familiar with it.

  Two minutes later, Ahmed himself walked into the room. He had a bandage on his shoulder. He did not sit down, but stood where he could tower over Raynes.

  “You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” Ahmed said.

  “That wasn’t my man shooting at you, and I’m sorry he did,” Raynes replied. “I told him specifically not to. He was acting on his own.”

  Ahmed narrowed his eyes. “Why should I believe that you didn’t set us up? Why should I believe that your plan wasn’t to kill us all and take my money?”

  “Because, believe me, if that man wanted to kill you, you would be dead right now. And, besides, I’m here now.”

  “That’s only because your plan failed. I should have one of my men come in and shoot you in the head right now.”

  “Slow down, slow down,” Raynes said, his voice calm. “Think it through. Why would I want to harm you or your men? We have a very profitable business relationship. You pay me good money for my promethium. To my knowledge, you are the only man who has cultivated a large market for promethium here in Egypt. But, at the same time, I’m your only source for that promethium. We need each other.”

  Ahmed glowered down at Raynes for a moment more, then walked over and sat behind his desk. “So, yes, you are here. Why?”

  “Because I want to complete the transaction,” Raynes said.

  “Very well. I’ll have my men remove the promethium from the truck and replace it with the money. The bills are unmarked, as you requested.”

  With his left hand, the only one that was working very well at the moment, Ahmed reached for a two-way radio.

  “Not so fast,” Raynes said. “It has to be more.”

  “More? More what?”

  “More money.”

  Ahmed furrowed his brow. “That’s not our deal. You have the nerve to shoot my men and then demand more money?”

  “Promethium sells for three thousand dollars an ounce.”

  “On open channels,” Ahmed said. “We both know the private market is a different matter.”

  “Still, I’ve been giving it to you for nine hundred. I want a bigger cut.”

  “How much bigger.”

  “Eighteen hundred.”

  “That’s outrageous!”

  “That’s now the price,” Raynes said, leaning back in the chair, keeping his gaze steady.

  Ahmed returned it. He no longer had his hand on his radio. He was now stroking his beard. It made him look thoughtful.

  “You are doubling the price because this is your last shipment,” Ahmed declared.

  “No, no. That’s not it. I’m just…I think it’s fair I get a bigger slice of the action. You’re still getting the promethium you want.”

  Raynes could hear his own voice faltering and hated the sound of it.

  “My father taught me long ago how to spot a liar sitting in that chair, and you are lying,” Ahmed said, growing more sure of himself. “That man who shot at us is now in control of your encampment. And if he is in control of your encampment, he is in control of your promethium.”

  “That’s…that’s not true. I mean, yes, the dig site is…it is lost to me. But the promethium, I can get back to it. The man who shot you doesn’t know where it is. It is well hidden.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Ahmed said. “In any event, I’m changing the deal. I am not buying promethium from you today. You are giving me this shipment, as a sign of good faith and as compensation for the wounds my men and I have suffered. When you return with a new shipment—as you say you are capable of doing—we can negotiate a fair price. Perhaps even a small increase. But this one is, as you Americans say, ‘on the house.’”

  Raynes could feel his panic rising. He couldn’t give away his retirement plan. Without it, he’d have nothing. His credit card was already frozen. His bank accounts probably had been, too.

  “No. Absolutely not. Fine, I’ll…I’ll stick with nine hundred. A deal is a deal.”

  Ahmed was smiling. “I’m sorry. The deal has already changed.”

  Raynes stared hard at Ahmed. Then he reached into his thobe and pulled out the Pocket Police. Ahmed didn’t know Raynes was down to one bullet. He aimed it in the direction of Ahmed’s turban-wrapped head.

  “I’m not here to be pushed around,” Raynes said.

  “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Ahmed said. “That’s not good business.”

  “Yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” Raynes demanded.

  Ahmed held up two fingers. “This,” he said.

  From the chamber behind the painting of the fisherman, from within Ahmed’s beloved aman—his safe place—came a single bullet. It entered the left side of Raynes’s skull and exited the right, followed by a thick spray of blood and brain matter.

  Ahmed clapped and two men appeared. “Clean this up,” Ahmed said. “And take the body to the smelter. We’ll burn it in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 27

  ASYŪT, Egypt

  N

  ot for the first time in his life, Derrick Storm was grateful he had installed the Find My Phone app.

  Often, it led him no further than his couch cushions. This time, he was hoping it would direct him to a place substantially more foreign and infinitely more dangerous: what was either a cell of—or the world headquarters of—the Medina Society.

  His task, once he got there, was to disable the cell’s capacity and gather what information he could about the rest of the network, so he could disable that, too.

  He had little inkling of how he would accomplish this.

  First he had to get himself outfitted, which took him the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have me
rely bumbled his way out of the desert and into the arms of the nearest CIA station agent, dropped the name Jedediah Jones, and known that within fifteen minutes he would have one new car, two new weapons, and three new gadgets, at least one of which would be showing him satellite imagery that would allow him to count the hair follicles on his target’s head.

  This time, he had to do it like a civilian, without Jones’s resources. The alternative—appealing to Jones for help—was too likely to lead to at least one shipment of promethium falling into Jones’s hands. And that wasn’t a possibility Storm could allow.

  So he was roughing it. He ditched Antony—donating him to a family who promised not to turn him into camel stew—and changed his mode of transportation. This time, he left the ungulate order in favor of something manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. He found a Sixt rental car company that outfitted him in a Ford Mondeo—the closest he could get to a Taurus. Even roughing it, there were limits to what a man could withstand, and an underpowered foreign car was not among them.

  His next stop was a clothing store, where he ditched his thobe and keffiyeh in favor of Western clothing. He went with black cargo pants, black boots, and a tight black T-shirt—not because he was particularly keen to show off his physique, but because an Egyptian men’s extra large, the largest size he could find, was the equivalent of a medium in America.

  With the transportation and clothing taken care of, he set about improving on his digital capabilities. He drove to an electronics retailer of perhaps dubious repute and purchased himself an iPad with a data plan. Compared to the technology he was used to, it was like being perhaps one step more evolved than the first primate who picked up a rock and used it to bash off a piece of tree bark.

  Still, it allowed him to tap into the Find My Phone app and harness its detection skills. He plugged the coordinates it gave him into his newly installed Google Maps app. He then checked out the address on Google Earth. Again, compared to the toys Jones gave him, it was like being an ancient sailor following nautical charts that had been roughed out on papyrus.

  But Storm at least now knew his phone was inside what appeared to be a walled compound. Several buildings—a main house and other structures—were visible in the closest view on Google Earth.

  That was good news. It meant his biggest worry—that his phone had fallen out of the truck’s wheel well at some point during the journey, and that therefore Find My Phone would lead him to a roadside ditch somewhere—had not come to pass.

  He set out from Luxor, following both the Nile River and the pulsing blue dot on Google Maps. As he drove, he tuned into news radio. Now that he was cut off from Jones—especially once Strike ratted him out—Storm was now relying on the media for information about the laser attacks. There was nothing new. The radio was mostly filled with talk about how a rare tropical cyclone was brewing in the eastern Mediterranean. The medicane—as meteorologists called a Mediterranean hurricane—was already threatening Italy with eighty-mile-an-hour winds and huge seas.

  Storm turned off the radio as he arrived in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Asyūt, a medium-sized city along the banks of the Nile River in the middle of Egypt. He negotiated a warren of haphazardly laid out streets until he arrived at a fifteen-foot-high wall with razor wire topping it.

  The razor wire was actually an encouraging sign. People didn’t put up razor wire unless they were trying to keep others out. Or, sometimes, in. Either way, it suggested something nefarious was going on. And nefarious was what Storm wanted. He wasn’t hunting bunny rabbits, after all. He was hunting terrorists.

  He parked his Ford on a side street and walked the perimeter of the wall on foot. His suspicion that he had found the right place was confirmed when he spied the sign outside the main gate. AHMED TRADES METAL it read in Arabic.

  Storm felt his resolve steeling. This was it. He had found the terrorists’ den. Perhaps this was the Medina Society’s nerve center. Perhaps it was just one cell among many.

  Either way, he was confident the cargo truck was inside those walls, hopefully still laden with its precious promethium load.

  Storm checked the time on his iPad. It was ten minutes after 10 P.M. There was still activity inside the walls: lights on, men talking to each other, vehicles moving around. He tried counting the number of distinct voices he could make out. There were perhaps eight.

  That didn’t count men who were still inside the main house or any of the other buildings he had seen on Google Earth. But it gave him some sketchy idea of the odds facing him: eight to one, at least. Probably more like twelve to one or sixteen to one, thinking that some number of men—including the leaders—were likely to be inside.

  Storm hunkered down behind a tree just outside the wall, down the street from the entrance gate, where he could see but not be seen.

  There was no question in his mind he had to move on the compound before sunrise. Yes, he could plan a better operation if he had a full day to do reconnaissance. But giving the terrorists an extra day—during which time they might attempt to move the promethium, or shoot down more airplanes, or create other unimaginable mayhem—was out of the question.

  He would just have to go on what he had, which was not much. Eight distinct voices. A compound with several buildings. An as-yet-undetermined connection to the larger network of the Medina Society.

  Then, from behind his tree, Storm watched something he did not expect: the odds kept improving. As the hour grew later, men were leaving, one by one. Some of them were men he had shot earlier in the day—they had the telltale bandages on their shoulders. Others were uninjured.

  Either way, they all followed a more-or-less similar pattern. They went to the main gate and announced themselves to the man in the guard shack. The guard came out with a key ring, selected one, and unlocked the gate. There was no automatic gate lift. He held it open for them as they passed through, then closed it behind them.

  Some left on bicycles. Others walked to their cars, which were parked near the walls, in the neighborhood. It was like watching factory workers at the end of a shift, heading back home.

  Maybe this was one of the Medina Society’s tricks: never stay assembled in large numbers for very long.

  Or maybe there was still a horde of men holed up quietly inside, and this was barely more than a slivering of the force Storm would soon have to face.

  At eleven o’clock, there was a changing of the guard. The new man received the AK-47 like a baton in a relay. The man being relieved went to his car and drove off, just like the other men had. There was a routine feeling to what Storm was seeing. This had happened many times before.

  By midnight, the exodus had stopped. All told, eleven men had departed. Storm waited another hour anyway, just to see what might transpire. Nothing did. Silence had settled onto the compound.

  Sometime after one, with a quarter moon struggling up from the horizon, Storm rose from his hiding spot and prepared for his assault.

  It was one man against…well, he was about to find out.

  WHILE THERE WERE ANY NUMBER of vulnerable points along the wall—mostly places where trees had grown tall enough to allow easy scaling and where the razor wire could have been clipped open—Storm decided to go in through the front, past the guard shack.

  It just made sense. He would have to deal with the guard eventually: if not on the way in, then on the way out. There was no sense in procrastinating.

  Dressed in his black clothing, Storm moved in the shadows toward the shack, which was lit by a single, dim bulb in the ceiling. The little building was elevated on concrete blocks and had a window that slid open, allowing the guard to be on eye level with entering trucks. Next to the window, there was a closed door with stairs leading up to it.

  From inside, Storm could hear a small television. The volume was muffled, but it was tuned to what sounded like an infomercial. If that didn’t qualify as a cure for i
nsomnia, he didn’t know what did. And yet the guard appeared to be awake.

  The setup presented problems. Storm couldn’t risk using his gun. The noise would alert the troops inside that something was happening. And while there were quiet ways of dealing with the guard, they all involved physical contact—which was impossible when the man was high up in the shack, protected by a door that was more than likely locked.

  He was now across the narrow street from the shack, still shrouded by trees. Behind him was a new house being framed, which gave him an idea. Retreating quietly into the construction site, he eventually found what he was looking for: a scrap piece of two-by-four, about three feet long, not unlike a Louisville Slugger.

  Storm departed the house from the side, which allowed him to circle in behind the guard shack, where he wouldn’t be seen. He then shuffled silently up to the corner of the shack, sucked in a lungful of air, and pursed his lips.

  What came out was an imitation of a Jameson’s Finch. It was more than just passable. It was, if Storm said so himself, spot on. He paused, took another breath, then unleashed another chorus of the bird’s optimistic, cheery song.

  The television inside the guard shack suddenly went mute. Storm grinned, then whistled again.

  There was a creaking sound as the door to the shack opened. Storm could hear one foot being put on the top tread of the stairs. He tweeted as if he was the happiest Jameson’s Finch that ever lived, then cut it off.

  Now there were footsteps coming down the small flight of steps, and the gritty crunch of feet walking on a sidewalk that was covered in a light layer of sand. The guard was moving as if he was looking high and low, and left and right for the bird.

  Storm chirped one last time, to give the guard a final fix on his location. He gripped the two-by-four in both hands and raised it behind his right shoulder. The guard had now zeroed in and was rounding the corner, sure he was about to see a Jameson’s Finch that would bring him great good fortune.

  Instead, it brought him a headache. The moment the guard appeared, Storm swung the two-by-four with all he had. Its flat side connected just above the man’s ear with a percussive thud. He fell as if every bone in his body had turned to putty.