He kept dialing, getting almost feverish in his haste to complete the number. It was one he knew by heart, one he had dialed countless thousands of times, one that led him to a voice that was, to him, the sweetest in all the world.
The line went silent as faraway computers started making their efforts to connect two phone lines that were even more distant. After what felt like an infinite stretching of time, he heard a ringing.
“Hello?” said that dulcet voice. It was Alida. He was so choked with emotion, he could barely make himself reply.
“Honey, it’s me.”
“Billy?!?” she said, her volume rising. “Billy?!? Is that you? Oh my God, oh my God!”
She was crying. He was, too. They had, during their forty-five years of marriage, never gone a day without talking. Now, after a month of not communicating, neither could push out a single syllable.
Finally, William overcame the lump with a torrent of words: “I love you. I’ve missed you so much and no matter what happens, I want you to know you were the most wonderful part of my life. Being married to you has been the best thing I’ve ever done. And if I don’t make it back, I want you to know that I loved you right until the very last breath I took. And if there is something after that, the first thing I’ll do when I get there is to start loving you all over again, you hear? Do you hear me Alida May McRae? I love you.”
She was sobbing now. Whatever effort she was making at a reply wasn’t coming out as words.
“Also, I want you to remarry. I don’t want you to be some sad widow who lives the rest of her life alone. Keep my picture somewhere and look at it every now and then. But not on your nightstand, you hear? I don’t want you to be pining away for ol’ Billy McRae. I’ve had a great life with you, and that’s enough. But even if mine ends, yours has to go on. You’ve got a lot of good years left. I want you to find a new guy who treats you really well and takes care of you the way I should have. I’m so sorry, Alida May. I’m so sorry this happened. I miss you so much. And the thought that I’ll never get to see you again is—”
“Billy, stop with that talk,” Alida said, now that she had finally been able to control her breathing. “Where are you? We’re going to get you out of there.”
“I don’t know. I’m on a boat somewhere. It’s a very large boat, like a cruise ship but without other passengers. Listen, that doesn’t matter. I’ve got something else to say that’s very important. You have to get out of the house. These men who have kidnapped me, they’re watching you all the time. They’re taking pictures of you. They say they’re going to hurt you if I don’t do exactly as they say. So you have to run. Go to the police station or the FBI or whatever. Just make sure you’ve gone somewhere safe and that no one is following you, you hear?”
“I will, Billy, I will. But now you listen to me. A man came asking about you. His name was Derrick Storm. He called himself a contractor for the government, but I got the sense he was…something more than that. He promised me he’d find you. Just tell me where you are and I’ll let him know. He’ll rescue you.”
“You don’t understand,” William said. “They snatched me while I was jogging and then they drugged me and took me somewhere. They’ve been keeping me in rooms without windows. I managed to escape my room, but…I didn’t even know I was on a boat until just now. So I’m on a boat in a body of water, but I can’t even tell you what body of water.”
“Please, Billy. You have to try. Can you see land? Is there a city with a skyline you recognize or maybe some kind of landmark or something?”
William looked out the window, his eyes scanning the distant shoreline. It was so far away, he couldn’t really see any of the structures. There were some cliffs. Some other spots were treelined. He more just had a sense that land was there. But it could be California or England or…
“Wait!” he said, having to suppress the urge to shout. “Yes, yes I see something, it’s…My God, I think that’s the Rock of Gibraltar. Yes, yes, it is. I swear, that’s it. We’re in the Mediterranean, in the Strait of Gibraltar, maybe ten miles from the coast. South of the Rock of Gibraltar. Does that help?”
“Yes, it does. Oh, Billy, we’re going to get you home. And when we do, I’m going to hold you forever and never let you—”
“Someone’s coming,” he cut her off. “I love you.”
And then he hung up. He ran through the bedroom, into the bathroom. But he could already hear the bedroom door opening. Out of the scores of rooms on this boat, how did they know he was in this one?
The cameras. They must have seen him on one of the monitors in the hallway and known exactly where to look. He just hoped that they didn’t know he had used his time in the room to call Alida. He didn’t want to put her in any more jeopardy than she was already in.
He slid back the shower curtain and quickly dove into the bathtub. It was the only place to hide. He quieted his breathing, hoping against hope that maybe they’d overlook him.
But no. The light came on in the bathroom. The shower curtain was being peeled back. McRae closed his eyes, almost like a child who thought that if he couldn’t see the bad guys, the bad guys couldn’t see him.
“There you are.”
It was Alpha. McRae opened his eyes. The Viking-like man loomed large over him.
“Let’s go, Dr. McRae. You’ve been a bad boy and there will be a punishment.”
Alpha slapped one enormous hand on McRae’s back, bunched up a huge handful of pajama, and used it as a handle to lift McRae out of the tub. McRae allowed himself to be shoved/led back to his quarters. For as devastated as he was that his brief escape had come to an end, for as much as he feared whatever reprisal he was about to face, it had been worth it.
For one thing, he didn’t see any hiding places for cameras on his way out of the bedroom. So his captors didn’t know about the phone call he had made.
For another, he now knew Alida would be safe.
He was just glad he had gotten to hear her sweet voice one last time.
CHAPTER 29
CAIRO, Egypt
T
he 6 October Bridge had been called “the spinal cord of Cairo,” snaking as it did from the west bank of the Nile, through Gezira Island, over the river itself, and then on to the airport.
Its main span was 423 feet long, and Derrick Storm waited until he was nearly in the middle to slowly apply his breaks and bring the cargo truck to a stop, ignoring the angry beeps from the driver behind him.
This was the spot he had been looking for. The river was deep. The current was swift.
Just right.
He had sped through the night to get here. Having departed shortly before an ambulance arrived to care for Ahmed—and untied the guard in the shack on his way out—he had taken the cargo truck and the promethium, which he and Ahmed agreed was the best course of action. Well, it was more Storm’s idea than Ahmed’s. But Ahmed wasn’t exactly in a position to argue. Nor did he quibble when Storm asked him to have someone return his rental car. Men on the brink of bleeding to death tended to be quite suggestible.
The long drive north had given Storm time to work out a lot of things relating to Ingrid Karlsson, allowing him to untangle the twisted mix of ideology and ambition that fueled her madness. She was a woman who shunned the beliefs that fueled much of humanity’s violence toward itself. She was the citizen of the world, the one who rejected the concept of national boundaries or government intervention in markets or any of the people who would impose their way on others.
But that was, of course, its own kind of rigid doctrine. It turned out she was just as aggressive about promoting it as the religious zealots or the jingoistic nationalists. And in the promethium laser beam, she had found a weapon that helped her enforce her agenda.
He had been foolish in trusting her. The only person who had told him that Ahmed Trades Metal had any connection to th
e Medina Society was Ingrid. Ordinarily, he was scrupulous about being more suspicious toward information that came from only one source. And yet because Eusebio Rivera told him about seeing Ahmed Trades Metal on the promethium shipment going through the Panama Canal, it had felt to Storm like he had a second source.
And, of course, he had never checked it against existing CIA intelligence because, one, the CIA didn’t have much intelligence on the Medina Society; and, two, he had been forced to play it so close to the vest with Jones.
So that was his main mistake. But now that he had Karlsson in his sights, other seemingly unconnected strands began tying together. The victims of the airline crashes, for example, started making a lot more sense.
Start with Erik Vaughn. The man was a sworn enemy of the Panama Canal expansion. Storm called and quizzed Carlos Villante, catching the purported deputy director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama just as he was going to bed. Villante had confirmed that Karlsson Logistics had more canal-related shipping routes than any other company, and therefore had the most to gain from the canal’s expansion.
Furthermore, Villante had said, Karlsson Logistics’s own explosion from a small Swedish shipping company into a global behemoth had left it highly leveraged. It was likely that without the canal’s expansion, the company would struggle to maintain the revenue growth that allowed it to meet an aggressive and rapidly increasing series of debt payments.
Jared Stack, who had unexpectedly taken Vaughn’s place as an impediment to funding for the canal expansion, had also become an enemy to Ingrid Karlsson. And he was also now dead—the victim of what was supposed to look like a tawdry death for a misbehaving congressman and would have been investigated as such had no one been the wiser.
Sometime midway through the trip north, Storm’s phone started ringing. When he checked the caller ID, it came up as restricted. The cubby. He ignored it and kept flipping through a mental Rolodex of other plane crash victims and finding others, both in Pennsylvania and the Emirates, who would have raised Ingrid Karlsson’s ire.
One was Viktor Schultz. As the head of Tariffs and Trade for the European Union, he had pushed relentlessly for higher excises on goods coming into the EU. In doing so, he had made himself an anathema to Karlsson, who was a free trade fanatic.
Another was Gunther Neubauer. The legislator had been called the Ted Cruz of Germany for his uncompromising stances on issues of great importance to him. His agenda was similarly reactionary: he was the leading voice calling for Germany to completely withdraw from the European Union. Many believed that if he succeeded, the EU itself would fold. That would have been a crushing blow to Karlsson’s vision of a world without borders.
There were others with no real connection to Ingrid Karlsson—like Pi, the fruitarian cult leader. Not that anyone would miss him.
But that was part of what made Karlsson’s attack so cunning. It was nearly impossible to separate the real targets from the collateral damage.
How she had known what planes they would be on—and where those planes would be—was no special mystery. The world’s aviation authorities had some of the more easily hacked computer systems. And the airlines weren’t much better. Meshing passenger manifests and flight plans was not especially difficult, especially when both were in their respective databases well ahead of time. It was possible Ingrid Karlsson had a vast enemies list and that she had picked off the few who happened to be in the air on the days she decided to use the laser. This may have merely been the start of a massive cleansing.
At the top of that list, it now seemed clear, was Brigitte Bildt, the woman who knew about her boss’s plan, the woman who had been traveling to the United States to expose everything. Storm wondered how much Jones really knew about her visit and what she was going to say when she arrived. Probably a lot more than he let on, as usual. Probably everything.
By the time Storm arrived in Cairo—at roughly the same time as the rising sun—he felt like he had it figured out. And yet before he went full tilt after the Warrior Princess, he had one last errand to complete.
That was why he had come to the middle of 6 October Bridge. He quickly disembarked from the truck’s cab and went around to the trailer, which he had already unlocked. It turned out the combination was Ahmed’s date of birth: 12-23-74.
Storm shoved the metal box that contained the promethium out of the back of the trailer. He lowered it from the bed of the truck onto the pavement. His actions were being accompanied by what was now a line of drivers honking at him for clogging a lane of traffic. This, Storm knew, was ordinarily how right-of-way was established in many Middle Eastern countries: the car with the loudest horn got to go first.
But he was ignoring their ire. His phone rang again. He ignored that, too. He dragged the metal box up onto a small sidewalk, then hefted its leading edge up to the railing, so it was tilted at a fifty-degree angle. He was already breathing hard from the effort, but he didn’t mind the exertion. It had been a few days since he had gotten to lift weights. This scratched that itch.
He removed the box’s lid, tossing it quickly to the side, then lifted the back up so the container was now parallel to the ground. One end was still perched on the railing. The other was supported by Storm.
Then, slowly, so as to give the mighty Nile plenty of chance to sweep it away, he began pouring the promethium over the side of the bridge.
It took a little while, but Storm did not want to rush this. He took a kind of perverse pleasure in it: watching 382 pounds of pure promethium—with a fair market value of seventeen million dollars and a military value far greater—pouring off the bridge into the fast-rushing current below.
Chaos theory being what it was, some of those promethium molecules would sink at that spot, others a half mile away. Still others would be carried all the way to the sea.
The point was, no one would be able to recover them. They were effectively scattered to oblivion. Which, according to Storm—be it Derrick or Carl—was where they belonged.
AS STORM GOT BACK in the truck and got it under way, his phone rang again. He was going to ignore it once more, but this time the caller ID identified it as coming from MCRAE, WILLIAM.
He answered on the second ring. “Derrick Storm.”
“Mr. Storm, this is Alida McRae, I’m the wife of—”
“Of course I remember you, Alida. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry to trouble you. But I just got a phone call from Billy, and I thought you’d like to—”
“Did he say where he is?” Storm cut her off again.
“He’s on board a boat. He said it was a big boat, the size of a cruise ship.”
Storm was off the bridge now, heading toward the airport. He pressed down the accelerator. “That boat is called the Warrior Princess,” he said. “It’s owned by a woman named Ingrid Karlsson.”
“Ingrid Karlsson…You mean of Karlsson Logistics? That Ingrid Karlsson?”
“That’s right.”
“But why would she want to make laser beams and shoot down airplanes and do all this other crazy stuff?”
“Ideology. She pretends not to have one. But really, she’s driven by it. I’ll explain it to you in detail sometime, if you’re really all that interested.”
“Well, I suppose I don’t care. I just want Billy back. Right before he got cut off, he said the boat was in the Strait of Gibraltar, about ten miles south of that famous rock. I know you said you worked for the government in some capacity and I was wondering if you—”
“I’m on it,” he said.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Can I help?
“Yes. Bake a cake for your husband.”
“A…a cake? What…what kind of a cake?”
“Banana cream.”
“Why banana cream?”
“Because banana cream c
akes are delicious. That doesn’t matter as much as what you’re going to write on it. It should say, ‘Welcome Home, William.’ He’ll be home to eat it in a few days.”
Alida was getting wound up in professing her thankfulness when Storm cut her off one final time. “Mrs. McRae, I appreciate your gratitude. But I have work to do. Just bake that cake. A man always likes a good cake.”
She wished him good luck, and he ended the call. Then he pulled off the highway and into a parking lot. He slid out his iPad, thankful that the airports were now open again and, furthermore, that the crashes had created a world full of jittery travelers. It meant the flight from Cairo to Tangier, Morocco, was only half full. He booked himself a ticket on it.
Tangier was located directly across a narrow strip of water from the Rock of Gibraltar. He had some ghosts there, yes. But he also had at least one friend who would be able to help him.
It just so happened to be a friend who would need some money. Storm typed out a quick e-mail to Jean-François Vidal, asking the chief operating officer of the Société des bains de mer de Monaco to have one hundred thousand euros worth of the recent winnings resting in the Derrick Storm account sent via wire transfer to an account in Morocco—an account owned by one Thami Harif.
He then sent a quick e-mail to his buddy Tommy, informing him that he was about to receive a visitor.
With that task settled, Storm got back under way. His flight left in two hours, but he was only a few miles from the airport. He turned the radio back on. The medicane had torn across Italy and was now regaining strength as it churned over the warm waters of the western Mediterranean.
Storm’s phone blurped at him, telling him he had a call. Storm peeked at the caller ID. RESTRICTED. It was surely the cubby again. But Storm decided it was time to deal with that annoyance.
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