Storm Front

by John Sandford

  “That sounds about right,” Davenport said. “Good job, Virgil. I’ve been watching all that bullshit on TV, and it was giving me an ice-cream headache. See you tomorrow.”

  Virgil was in the process of rereading all the George MacDonald Fraser “Flashman” novels, and the spy novels of Alan Furst. He was halfway through Furst’s Red Gold, and picked up the book from the living room couch and carried it back to the bedroom.

  Long day. Fistfights, a naked woman, an ancient relic . . . a relic that could reshape the way people thought about a couple of world religions.

  He read Furst for a couple hours, realized he wouldn’t be able to finish it, and reluctantly put it aside. He spent a short time thinking about God and one of His creations, Ma Nobles. He was beginning to see her as a bit more than a redneck woman, although she played that role.

  And maybe even was one. She certainly wasn’t uninteresting, though he recognized that he certainly wasn’t exactly a disinterested observer in making that judgment . . . given the evidence at hand that day.

  Virgil had been married and divorced three times, and wasn’t eager to get back on the marriage market. But what he’d told Ma that day, about having a redneck kid running around the house, wasn’t exactly true. He’d like to have kids. Maybe one of each. And if he was going to do that, he had to get busy. Ma might be a little much, but . . .

  Jesus, what are you thinking? he asked himself. Get a goddamn dog.

  Then he went to sleep. But not for long.

  —

  THE BIG PROBLEM with Bart Kohl, in Tal Zahavi’s estimation, wasn’t that he was a coward, it was that he was a whiner. She could handle the cowardice with blackmail; but the guy was a nudnik, pestering her with complaints and warnings, visualizing disaster at every turn, and worse, with all his visions of tragedy, his voice was like a band saw, high-pitched and nasal. Even worse than all of that . . . he was boring.

  Like when Tal had called him and asked him to provide her with a pistol. “A pistol? Where am I supposed to get a pistol? I don’t even know how to do that. When people asked me to help out, they said they’d just want me to drive people around. They never said anything about weapons. I’m against weapons. I signed the anti-handgun pledge.”

  So Tal, operating from Tel Aviv, had had to go online and find a gun show where he could buy a firearm. Even after he had the pistol, he bitched about having to drive it across state lines. “Now I’m committing a federal crime, delivering it across state lines without a permit.”

  Blahblahblah . . .

  When she told him that they were going to grab Ellen Case, and use her to extort the stone out of her father, he’d nearly laid an egg.

  “Kidnapping? Are you kidding me? No way. I’m out of this.”

  She had to remind him that he’d already committed a number of crimes, both state and federal, to get him to go along. “It’s this way, Bart. Your name could be called to the police, and then what would you do? I will be back in Tel Aviv, but you will still be in Des Moines.”

  She’d had to plan the whole thing by herself, spotting and tagging Case, while Kohl sat next to her in the passenger seat of his van, twisting his hands and drilling into her head like a woodpecker.

  —

  ZAHAVI HAD CASE’S ADDRESS, which turned out to be a small house on the south side of Minneapolis, near a creek or small river. When they spotted it, the house was dark. Zahavi told Kohl to pull into the driveway, and she walked up to the front door and knocked . . . and saw the lights of a security system.

  Not too large a problem, she thought—especially if Case never got to it.

  “Now, we have to be very careful,” she told Kohl. “There may be cameras, there may be security patrols. We must keep moving.”

  Kohl said, “This is the end. The end of everything I’ve worked for. The end of all my dreams. My father said, ‘You’re an American, you’re not an Israeli. Stop pretending.’ Did I listen to him? Oh, no. I had to go to Israel. I had to sign up with the Interest Group. Interest Group? I thought I’d be giving lectures in Omaha, on Masada and Yad Vashem. Maybe I’d meet some nice young girls with small noses and low morals. But no—I have to go around and buy guns.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up . . .”

  “And no, it’s not just an Interest Group, it’s a Mossad Interest Group. No young girls with small noses for you, Bart Kohl. No, it’s some meshugenah bitch with a nine-millimeter.”

  Enough to drive her out of her goddamn mind, and she considered the possibility of standing him on the shoulder of a highway and unloading that 9mm into him.

  Not really. She needed him.

  They watched the house for six hours, almost until midnight. Zahavi was thinking of calling it off—the neighborhood was very quiet, but they’d seen a couple of police patrol cars, moving slowly, looking for trouble.

  Then Case showed up; and they were right behind her.

  “Pull over,” Zahavi said. She got a gunnysack out of the back, purchased that afternoon at a Home Depot.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Kohl said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  “And give me the tape.”

  “Please God, help me.” But he handed her the role of duct tape, with the end pulled free and folded back on itself, to make a handy tab.

  Case pulled up to the garage door, which was automatic. A light came on inside, and the door began to go up. Kohl pulled to the side of the road, at the front of the house, as they’d planned, and Zahavi got out in the dark, with the bag. Case pulled into the garage. Zahavi took another look around, and moved.

  Case parked, and the garage door started down. Zahavi slipped into the garage with the bag, heard Case get out of the car, humming a little tune. Zahavi was at the Jeep’s fender when Case, still humming, thumbed through her keys for the door—

  Zahavi stepped up behind her and threw the bag over her head and dragged her to the floor, straddled her. Case was trying to scream, but instead made choking sounds, just as Zahavi had seen in a training film, and before she could actually scream, Zahavi hit her twice, in the head, with an open palm, stunning blows, and then Zahavi pulled the tape loose and began looping it around Case’s head. Case began to fight, but it was too late, and too confusing, with the tape going on. Zahavi taped her up like a slow calf at the local rodeo, all the way down to her ankles.

  The overhead light went out, and she started, listening, but couldn’t hear anything but the muffled groans from Case.

  She checked the tape, as best she could in the dark, then opened the garage’s access door and waved Kohl into the driveway. He pulled in, and together they wrestled the struggling woman into the back of their van. She looked, Kohl thought, like a giant joint in a stoner film.

  “You didn’t have to hurt her?” Kohl asked, a pleading note in his voice.

  “I might have had to slap her a couple of times,” Zahavi said, with evident satisfaction.

  “Another felony,” Kohl said. He began to weep. “Oh, Jesus . . .”

  “Pick another God,” Zahavi said. “And slow down. Slow down. We do not hurry.”

  Case struggled and cried and begged, and was echoed by Kohl, but they made it out of town and south on I-35. They’d rented a hotel room, but it was two hours away, and they needed to drive circumspectly. A police stop would really have been the end. An hour south, they got off the interstate and turned east, cruising comfortably across the countryside in the dark. Case had gone quiet.

  They arrived at the hotel, on the outskirts of the City of Rochester, after two o’clock. They had the two end units, and smuggled Case into the room at the far end.

  “I’m going home,” Kohl announced.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no, no . . .”

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Case begged, from inside the bag.

  “No going home now,” Zahavi said to Kohl. “Too late for that.�
��

  She sounded pleased with herself.

  —

  VIRGIL WAS ASLEEP before midnight. With the unconscious sleep-time clock that ran in the back of his head, he knew he’d been down for quite a while when he started dreaming that he was feeding automobile scrap into a hammer mill, and that garbage cans were falling down a stairway, that a Caribbean steel drum band was playing in his backyard. . . .

  Then his eyes cracked open and he heard all of that, plus somebody screaming, “Virgil! Virgil! Get up, Virgil.”

  Virgil rolled out of bed, grabbed his jeans, started pulling them on as he stumbled to the front door. Somebody was pounding on the aluminum screen door, and they were panic-stricken. He got to the door, flicked on the porch light, and saw the bald head of his across-the-street neighbor, Robbie. He pulled his jeans up the last two inches and popped the door.

  Robbie shouted at him, “Your garage is on fire.”

  “What?” He didn’t comprehend that for a split second, and Robbie screamed again and pointed to his left, and Virgil saw the flickering light in the side yard.

  He thought, The boat!

  Virgil turned and bolted back through the house, into the kitchen, yanked open the cabinet under the kitchen sink, pulled out his fire extinguisher, ran through the mudroom, out the back door—barefoot—and around to the side of the garage.

  An oval of flame was licking up the clapboard siding, and Robbie came running around from the front and shouted, “I called the fire department, they’re coming. Where’s your hose?”

  Virgil shouted back, “On the other side of the back steps, it’s already connected,” and Robbie ran toward the steps. Virgil pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and squeezed the handle, and foam began blowing out into the flames.

  He could knock down the flames for a few seconds, but when he moved on to another section, the fire returned to the first, but he continued hosing it down, making some progress, and kept thinking about the boat: the boat was inside, his pride and joy, a like-new Ranger Angler, with a couple of years yet to go on the financing.

  Robbie came running back, and Virgil realized the other man was still in his pajamas, and he was dragging the hose and turned the nozzle and fired it into the flames. The fire extinguisher ran out of foam and Virgil grabbed the hose and moved in close and Robbie shouted, “Watch your feet,” and, “Here’s the fire department.”

  The firemen came at a run, pulling hose, and hammered the fire with a flood of foam that the fire couldn’t compete with: in less than a minute, it was gone, but Virgil shouted, “We gotta look inside.”

  He got the garage door up, but there was no fire inside. He started to step inside and a fireman caught his arm, held him back. “Don’t do that, there might have been some structural weakening.”

  Virgil walked back out, calmer now, and asked, “What the hell happened?”

  “Did you have gasoline out here or something? I can smell gas,” a fireman said.

  “There was no gas out here,” Virgil said. “There’s a can in the garage . . . still there, right by the lawn mower.”

  “Hate to say it,” said another fireman. “It looks like a Molotov cocktail. Like somebody threw one at the side of the garage.” He pointed to the top of the oval. “It broke there. Splattered, ran down the wall.”

  “He’s a cop,” Robbie said.

  The second fireman said, “That could explain—”

  Virgil said, “Yeah but . . .” And the thought struck him. “Ah, shit,” he said, and he turned and ran back into the house, to the study.

  The stone was gone.

  —

  VIRGIL FELT LIKE SCREAMING, but he didn’t. The first thing he did was look around, to make sure he hadn’t simply moved it, and had forgotten about it, but he hadn’t, and he knew that when he looked. Then he went to the tracker pad: no sign of Ellen’s car.

  But it had to be Ellen, one way or the other. Nobody else, other than Davenport and Yael, knew that the stone was in his house. He tried to call her, but after five rings, her phone sent him to the answering service. He left a simple message: “Call me when you get this, and I may not go for a warrant for your arrest on charges of arson, burglary, grand theft, and aggravated assault.”

  He took no satisfaction from the message: he’d warned everyone, several times, that they were playing with fire, and virtually every one of them had ignored him.

  —

  BACK OUTSIDE, the firemen were cleaning up, and the man in charge told him that the damage had been minimal, and confined to the garage siding. There were no structural problems, and the boat was untouched. “Not to say that it wasn’t serious. If your neighbor hadn’t seen it go up, and you guys hadn’t gotten out there, the roof would have caught and then it’d have been Katie-bar-the-door.”

  When the firemen and the rubbernecking neighbors had drifted away, and Virgil had thanked and re-thanked Robbie, the guy who’d seen the fire, called 911, and come to help—he’d send him a couple cases of Leinie’s Summer Shandy at the first chance—he went back inside the house and kicked an unfortunate wastebasket. He was a knot of frustration, four o’clock in the morning and nobody he could really call, or anything he could effectively do.

  But sleep was impossible. Eventually, figuring that if he was up, everybody else should be, too, he cleaned up, and at four-thirty in the morning, drove to the Holiday Inn and woke up Sewickey. Sewickey came to the door looking stunned, and Virgil sensed that it wasn’t an act. “We’re having a meeting at eight o’clock in in the back room at Custard’s. Be there.”

  Sewickey, confused, looked around at the parking lot, and then up in the sky, and finally asked, “What the heck time is it?”

  He got a similar reaction from Bauer, who was at the Downtown Inn. Yael, however, was awake and staring at the television, still jet-lagged.

  “The stone is gone?”

  “Meeting at eight o’clock,” he said.

  “But why would I take the stone? I had the stone.”

  “Eight o’clock,” Virgil said.

  The Turks were gone, but he drove to Awad’s apartment and pounded on the door until Awad opened it. He was wearing what appeared to be black velvet pajamas and yet another stunned expression.

  Virgil said, “Invite me in?”

  Awad looked over his shoulder and said, in a loud voice, “Of course, you are the police.”

  Virgil stepped inside, and saw a sheet and blanket crumpled on the floor next to the couch. He nodded at the bedroom door and raised an eyebrow, and Awad nodded.

  Virgil stepped over to the bedroom door and knocked: “This is the state police. Please come out. Now.”

  A voice from inside: “Why?”

  “We’re having a conversation about the Solomon stone, and you need to be in it.”

  The door opened and an elderly gray-bearded man edged out. He was wearing Jockey briefs that were way too long in the crotch, and a white V-necked T-shirt. “What have I done?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Now: the two of you. You’ve been under surveillance. I know you’re trying to buy the stone. You should know that I had the stone until earlier this evening, when my garage was firebombed and the stone was stolen while I was fighting the fire. So. We are having a meeting at eight o’clock at Custard’s Last Stand.”

  And so on.

  With some sense of righteous revenge—everybody was now awake and either frightened or worried—he headed back toward his house, but then thought, Ma.

  Ellen and Ma had some kind of friendly relationship. Was it possible that Ma had stolen the stone? He continued past his house and out into the countryside, to Ma’s house, pulled into the driveway and pounded on the door until lights went on.

  Ma came to the door, peeked past a curtain, then opened the door. She was holding a Remington autoloading shotgun. “Virgil?”
/>   “At eight o’clock . . .”

  —

  BY THE TIME he’d finished the rounds, it was almost six. He called Ellen again, and again got switched to the answering service—but the phone was ringing a half-dozen times before he was switched, so it wasn’t turned off. She was either not hearing the ring, or was ignoring it. He called her every half hour until he got to Custard’s at five minutes after eight, and never got an answer. Was she on the run?

  —

  CUSTARD’S BACK ROOM was usually reserved for cardplayers, but they never started until ten, so it was clear at eight. The meeting got held up because Sewickey, who arrived early, had ordered pancakes and bacon, and then Awad showed up with his Hezbollah associate, whose name was Adabi al-Lubnani, who ordered pancakes but got French toast by mistake, but was impressed by the name, and so accepted it; and by the time Virgil got there, everybody was fussing over food, and who had the ketchup and was there more syrup, except Ma, who was hunched over Tag Bauer, big-eyed about his television show. And not only big-eyed, Virgil thought sourly, as he tracked Bauer’s eyes down to her cleavage.

  He called the meeting to order by rapping on a water glass, and said, “This is gonna be short. I know you all want this stone, but as I keep telling everybody, if you buy it, you’ll be violating a large number of laws. Do all of you understand this? That you could go to prison? I’d like a show of hands by those who understand this.”

  They all raised their hands.

  Virgil said, “Further. For those with the money—I’m looking at you, Bauer, and you, Mr. al-Lubnani—there are some extremely suspicious circumstances involving the discovery of the stone, and its removal from Israel. If you wanted to bet me, I’d take either side of a fifty-fifty bet that the stone is a fake. Do you really want to spend, what, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for something that turns out to be a fake? I don’t think so.”

  They all nodded into their pancakes, and al-Lubnani muttered something to Awad, who also nodded.