Storm Front

by John Sandford

  Virgil pushed the door open with his fingertips and flipped on the light. He didn’t immediately see anyone, but then saw the cowboy boots sticking out past the end of the bed, toes down. The moment he saw them, the boots lifted off the floor and landed with the thump they’d heard from outside. Virgil walked around the bed and looked down at Sewickey, who was largely wrapped in duct tape, looking something like a joint in a Cheech & Chong movie.

  He was lying on his stomach, his hands taped behind his back, with more loops around his arms, his knees, his ankles, and his mouth.

  Virgil said, “We need a knife,” but nobody had one, so he jogged down to his truck and got a knife and jogged back, flicked it open, and started by cutting the tape behind Sewickey’s head, gently unwrapping his mouth, and then his hands and his body.

  Sewickey, breathing hard, finally pushed himself up and fell on the bed and groaned, “Finally. I was afraid I’d vomit and choke to death.”

  “What happened?” Virgil asked.

  —

  YAEL-1 HAD CALLED HIM, he said, and asked to meet—she thought they might be able to work out an alliance. When he opened the door, she stuck a gun in his face, taped him up, and then tore his room apart.

  “She got all the photographs of the stone, my camera and my cell phone—Jones has that number, it’s the only way he can reach me.”

  “So you have nothing that would prove the existence of the stone?” Virgil asked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.” He glanced at his watch and frowned.

  “Then what?” Yael-2 asked. She glanced at Virgil and said, “Sorry.”

  “Then nothing,” Sewickey said. “I just kept trying to breathe through my nose. I thought I might be lying there until the maid came in the morning. I was afraid that she might have put the Do Not Disturb card on the door.”

  They all looked at the door, but she hadn’t done that. “Still a crime. Another one, a felony this time,” Virgil said. “When I find her, I’m going to put her in jail, and let the Mossad get her out.”

  “I can tell you one thing,” Sewickey said, pulling at the sticky tape residue in his hair. “She’s working with somebody. She called him and told him that she’d drive my car down to her motel, and for him to meet her there.”

  “Sure it was a him?” Virgil asked.

  “Well, no. But she was going to meet somebody.” Sewickey got shakily to his feet, rubbed some sticky stuff off the side of his mouth, and asked, “It’s almost ten o’clock?”

  Virgil: “Yeah?”

  “My interview. It’ll be leading the news at ten.”

  Virgil said, “Ah, man, did you really have to do that?”

  Sewickey said, “Hey. You think I’m here for my health?”

  10

  The interview actually led the news, and from the tenor of it—and from the lack of actual news later in the broadcast—Virgil realized that the trouble had only begun: the real storm would arrive the next day, when every reporter south of the Canadian line would be in town.

  Because it was just too good. Even worse, it’d been a slow news day, and the stone was definitely something to talk about.

  The report started with the portentous, hard-fat anchorman pivoting to face the TV audience in a raking light, and saying, in his best serious-news voice, “A famed archaeological explorer and specialist in ancient relics, often compared to a real-life Indiana Jones, has come to Minnesota in search of a stone that he says could quite literally rewrite the Bible and perhaps damage claims that the Jewish people have to the land of Israel. Reporter Jayden Noah Ethan has the story exclusively from Mankato.”

  The taped story featured the reporter, whose questions appeared to have been written by Sewickey, interviewing Sewickey as he stood in front of his Cadillac. Virgil noticed for the first time that it had auxiliary lights and a winch on the front end, to emphasize the explorer motif.

  Sewickey told the story of Jones’s discovery and flight from Israel, about the stone, and about Siamun/Solomon. When the report was done, Virgil took his phone from his pocket and turned it off: Davenport would be calling.

  Sewickey said to an astonished Yael-2, “It’s this kind of reporting that has made the American media what it is.”

  She nodded. “You are correct,” she said.

  —

  VIRGIL DROPPED YAEL at the Holiday Inn Express with her own suitcase and Yael-1’s two enormous empty bags, told her that he’d pick her up at seven o’clock the next morning, and that he had a few more leads they could chase down.

  Then he had to think about it. Ellen, he believed, was back in the Cities. The Turks were available, and right there, but they’d had a falling-out with Jones, and Jones might be done with them. Eventually, he drove over to Awad’s apartment, located his car, unpacked the magnet-mounted GPS tracker, fixed it to the Toyota’s frame, and made it doubly secure with a few turns of black duct tape.

  Then he went home.

  Unable to help himself, he checked his phone, and found that Davenport had called at 10:14, and had left a message. He turned the phone back off. His best response to Davenport would be to call him in the morning, at about seven o’clock. Davenport never got up before nine, but Virgil did.

  Virgil got in bed, and thought about the day: and thought, uneasily, that he should have checked out the campsites mentioned by Sugarman, the lawn-mowing guy. If he could only get hold of Jones and the stone, then everybody else, with all their motives, money, and impulses, became irrelevant. They’d go home, and leave him alone to investigate Ma.

  He considered getting up and going out, but then he thought about driving down a dirt track at midnight, coming up on somebody about whom he knew only one thing for sure: he was willing to shoot people.

  He thought, Screw it, and went to sleep.

  —

  VIRGIL WOKE the next morning at six-thirty, did his usual twenty-minute shave and cleanup, microwaved some instant coffee and poured it into one of several stolen paper cups from Starbucks, and called Yael-2. “I am awake,” she announced.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. We’ll find a place to get breakfast, and plan the day. I have a couple of places we need to check.”

  “I will wait,” she said.

  Virgil got his bag and carried it out to the truck and fired everything up. He sat in the driveway and checked the GPS tracker tablet, which showed Awad’s car still at the apartment complex. Virgil backed out of his driveway and headed east toward the Holiday Inn Express, checked the time—6:59—and called Davenport.

  Davenport answered on the fifth ring, groaning, “This better be important.”

  “Hey, you called me in the middle of the night,” Virgil said, as brightly as he could manage. “I didn’t get it, but I figured it must be critical.”

  “Fuck you,” Davenport said, and hung up.

  As Virgil had expected, Davenport had called to rag on him about the TV interview. The whole episode cheered him up, and he was whistling when he pulled in at the Holiday Inn Express.

  Yael was ready to go. Virgil asked, “Are you carrying a gun?”

  “Good God no,” she said. “Why would I do that?”

  “Atta girl,” Virgil said. “Let’s go get some bacon ’n’ eggs.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “I prefer not to burn in Jewish hell. I would like a nice morning salad, with some olives.”

  “That’ll be a Mankato first,” Virgil said.

  —

  THEY HAD just ordered breakfast at a downtown café—Virgil told her about the GPS tacking unit on Awad’s car, and about the two places that Jones could possibly be hiding—when Awad called. He said, “This is Raj. I need to speak with you on the telephone.”

  “Well, you are,” Virgil said.

  “Yes, good. I now drive to the airport,” Awad said.

  “You need some fl
ying advice?”

  A moment of silence. “No, no, I wish to speak to you confidentially.”

  “That’s my middle name,” Virgil said. “Confidential.”

  Another moment of silence, then Raj said, “I doubt this. For many people, this would be an unusual name. For you, it would be ridiculous.”

  “So what do you want to talk about?” Virgil asked.

  “I have a big problem which I have considered all night, and I finally have decided to put my life into your hands.”

  “Hang on a second, my pancakes just got here,” Virgil said. Raj hung on, and when the food was delivered, Virgil started soaking it in maple syrup with one hand, and went back to the phone with the other.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “You know where Jones is?”

  “No. But I tell you this with great confidentiality, that an important figure in Hezbollah will arrive this afternoon in Minneapolis, and will take a car, and will come here to stay in my apartment, and then I am supposed to meet him with Jones. This frightens me, and I have decided that the only way I may survive this is to become an informant. So, this is what I do.”

  “Very, very smart,” Virgil said. “What’s this guy’s name?” To Yael, “Pass me the pepper.”

  Awad said, “What? Pepper?”

  “I was talking to somebody else,” Virgil said.

  “I don’t know this name, but I am told he is important, and will call me,” Awad said.

  “All right, I will tell you what,” Virgil said. “You’re now my official informant, and I will do everything I can to protect you. If any of this ever comes to court and you are implicated somehow, I will protect you.”

  “This is good,” Awad said. “How should we proceed?”

  “Whenever you learn anything, call me on the telephone. I will listen for you all day and all night.”

  “I will do this,” he said. “Do not shoot me.”

  “I won’t,” Virgil said.

  “This other figure, you may shoot him.”

  “I’ll try to avoid that, as well,” Virgil said. “He will have to call you to make arrangements to meet. Call me as soon as you hear.”

  “I will. I thank you, and my father would thank you, if he was here to do that.”

  Virgil rang off, pleased with himself, and Yael asked, “What was that?”

  “A man put his life in my hands,” Virgil said. “That’s always good.”

  —

  THE BIGGER of the two Turks, the one with the knife, whose name was Timur Kaya, looked at the face of his cell phone, then pressed the “answer” bar and said, “Mr. Kennedy.”

  Kennedy, a rental car clerk, said, “I have a location for you.”

  “That is excellent. This comes through the hijack mechanism?”

  “LoJack,” Kennedy said. “He shouldn’t be running from the cops in one of our cars, anyway.”

  “You are quite correct,” said Kaya. He thought it was interesting how people who took bribes usually found a way to justify them as the right thing to do.

  The location, which they got from Kennedy and spotted on their iPad, was at a nearby lake. By zooming in on Google Earth, they could see a cabin; by switching to the map view they could get an exact route to the place.

  “This Google, I love this Google,” said the smaller Turk.

  “When we are in the car, I will tell you my famous Google story,” the big Turk said.

  They both had guns, and checked them before they went out to the Benz. “This time, this snake shot will not stop us,” Kaya said.

  “Americans have a lot of very interesting sporting equipment,” the smaller Turk said. “Guns, everywhere.”

  —

  ON THE WAY out to Jones’s location, the smaller Turk said, “So tell me this famous Google story.”

  Kaya said, “In 2008, I was sent to Iraq in coordination with the American Air Force. To Balad Air Force Base to observe operations. While I am there, I find that some of the Americans call this air base ‘Mortar-ita-ville,’ because, you see, the resistance fighters hide in the farm fields around the base, with a mortar dug in the ground, and they drop in a shell and walk away. So, five, ten times a day, a mortar shell lands on the base. Since the Arabs don’t shoot so well, nothing happens, except that the Americans make an announcement of the event on the loudspeaker. I don’t know why, but this is what happens—a woman makes this announcement. The people on the air base call her ‘the Big Voice.’ While I am there, an American sergeant shows me his laptop, with his Google Earth. He calls up Balad. You can see everything—buildings, runways, even individual helicopters parked on the flight lines. He shows me that you can find an intersection outside the base—a canal crossing, a deviation in a road, a group of palm trees. Then, using a Google measuring stick, on the Google Earth, you can get the distance to your target in precise meters, and the precise direction. So this, with a mortar, should be like shooting a paper target. But, the Arabs fail to do this. Why? I don’t know.”

  “Lucky for you, they don’t,” the smaller Turk said.

  “Yes. But I wonder. Does this Google work with the American government, with the CIA, to change distances and directions? Is this why the mortars never hit? Is something to think about.”

  “I don’t have to think about it,” the smaller man said. “Of course they do. The CIA is everywhere.”

  —

  THE RURAL LANDSCAPE in Turkey and the rural landscape in Minnesota differed in one fundamental way: the roads in Turkey followed the contours of the land and connected specific places to each other. The Minnesota roads—the smaller roads, anyway—were built on a grid, with little regard for the movement of the land. The Turks found this disorienting. In Turkey, if you wanted to go somewhere, a road usually led directly to it. In Minnesota, you could often see your objective, but getting there was another matter, and often meant a series of zigzag turns until you found the road that went through that place.

  In the case of Jones’s cabin, they could see where they wanted to go, but couldn’t get there in the car, without giving themselves away. They wound up leaving the car in a roadside pull-off, and after consulting with their iPad, walking through swampy ground around the south end of the lake where Jones was hiding. Their iPad didn’t show the minor vagaries of the route: on the way, they pushed through some stinging plants, which left little white dots on their hands and arms that itched like fire; and they stepped on patches of what looked like solid ground, only to find themselves up to their knees in muck. The smaller Turk momentarily lost an Italian loafer in the stuff, and when he managed to retrieve it, it smelled like rotten eggs.

  And it was hot. Turkey could get hot, but this was hot and humid, and in crossing through the woods, sweating, they stirred up clouds of mosquitoes, which attacked like hawks. Pursued by mosquitoes, stung by nettles, ruining their shoes and slacks, they became annoyed, to the extent of about a nine on a one-to-ten scale, where eight was “murderous.”

  And they were not quiet.

  They didn’t know exactly where they were going, and they kept detouring around fallen timber, and crunching through some kind of heavy reed that grew in swampy areas. Then they were there.

  They knew they were there because Jones shouted, “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  As luck would have it, Jones’s car was parked thirty meters from the front of the small wooden cabin, and they’d emerged halfway between them. They could see Jones standing in the doorway, looking toward the area where they were standing. He had what looked like a pistol in his hand.

  The smaller Turk said, “He has a gun.”

  Kaya said, “A warning shot.” He lifted his pistol and fired a shot over the roof of the cabin.

  Jones threw himself sideways, and Kaya was about to call to him, when glass broke in a window left of the door, and Kaya saw what appeared to be the barrel of
a gun, and BOOM, from the muzzle flash, the blast, and the sound of a falling tree limb, he knew he was no longer dealing with snake shot. He dropped and rolled into the roadside weeds, which he would later discover were called “poison ivy,” and from there scrambled back into the trees.

  “Go away,” Jones shouted.

  The smaller Turk fired two shots into the cabin, and Jones fired back, a shot right through the wall of the cabin, spraying wood splinters up the driveway, but missing the Turks by a good measure.

  Kaya said, “I will move closer to talk to him. You cover—”

  The smaller Turk fired two shots into the cabin roof, moved sideways, fired another one, moved again.

  Kaya was getting closer, and did a peek from behind a tree, saw a fallen log that looked like a good place to negotiate from. He dropped to his knees and crawled toward it, shook a sapling as he passed. That was one sapling too many and Jones fired at it, low, and Kaya felt the stinging impact in his buttocks. He rolled and scrambled deeper in the woods, and reached back, to touch the wound. His hand came back bloody. He called to the smaller Turk, “This donkey’s asshole has shot me.”

  The smaller Turk, well covered by a burr oak, emptied his pistol at the cabin and then ran through the deeper woods, in a semicircular path, until he came back to Kaya. He knelt next to the big man and asked, “How bad?”

  “In the back. Can’t see it . . .”

  “Roll over.”

  The smaller Turk looked at the bigger Turk’s butt and said, “Not bad, but it will hurt.”

  “Did it go through?”

  “It didn’t go in. It’s a trough. A bad cut.”

  “Then a bandage will work. We should go.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before we do that . . .” The big Turk pushed himself up, braced against a tree, and emptied his pistol at the cabin. “God-damn him,” he said. He limped away, through the nettles and poison ivy, through the cattails and alders and prickly gooseberry bushes. They were coming up to the Mercedes, muddy nearly to their knees, the big Turk limping and cursing, bunching his trousers against the wound, staunching the blood, when the smaller Turk said, “Listen.”