Wild Storm (25 page)

All was again quiet. The only thing that had changed about the house from the first time was that the Tin Man was now lying forlornly on his side. Storm crept up the steps, across the porch. He opened the screen door, then turned the handle on the main door.

But this time, he didn’t shove. He slowly nudged it partway open, then held it there with one hand. He bit off a hunk of eucalyptus gum and with his other hand, wedged a lump of it over the top sensor. It held nicely.

He repeated the maneuver with the lower sensor. Gingerly, he opened the door just a little further, so that now the entire doorjamb was exposed. He used the remaining gum in his mouth to completely cover both sensors, packing them tightly so there would be no chance their springs would extend as the gum dried.

He opened the door the entire way. The alarm did not go off. Storm exhaled. He took one step into the house and closed the door behind him.

His eyes were already well accustomed to the dark, but they had not yet focused on the dim recesses of the foyer when he heard one of the more unmistakable noises in the modern world. It resonated straight from its source to some deep, reptilian part of Storm’s brain. It was an authoritative
chuck
followed by an even more convincing
chick
.

It was the sound of a shotgun slide being racked from about fifteen feet away.

THE SAWED-OFF SHOTGUN
is the most effective short-range antipersonnel weapon ever devised by man. In addition to the massive force of fire, its multitude of projectiles spread upon exiting the muzzle, meaning it only needs to be aimed in a very general sense. There is no such thing as surviving a shotgun blast from point-blank range without significant—and, most likely, terminal—injuries.

The only thing that saved Derrick Storm’s life was that pumping a shotgun requires two fully functioning arms. And Ahmed, with only one, had to brace the shotgun stock against the floor in order to rack the slide before bringing the muzzle back up.

That small delay, no more than two seconds in duration, was all Storm needed. As Ahmed brought the gun back up and fired, Storm was diving to his right. The deadly blast of pellets sailed over his head and to his left, hitting only the air where Storm had once been standing and then the door behind him.

Storm rolled and came up with Dirty Harry drawn, as he had trained himself to do. From the light of the quarter moon that leaked in the small windows, he could make out Ahmed pumping the shotgun, ejecting one cartridge and loading the next one. He again was bracing it against the floor as he performed this maneuver. Storm didn’t give him the chance to fire it again. He aimed for the man’s left shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

The impact from the bullet spun Ahmed in a counterclockwise direction. He fell back and to his left, slamming into the wall before ending up on the floor. The shotgun was still within his grasp, but Ahmed didn’t have a working arm with which to reach for it.

Storm covered the ground between them in three strides. He kicked the shotgun across the room, then went for a light switch.

The room was bathed in a sallow glow. Storm went over to Ahmed, who was desperately struggling to get into a sitting position. But it was difficult without either arm to prop himself up. The pain from the wound had to be excruciating, yet the man did not make a sound.

Blood was already soaking his nightgown. If only to speed things up, Storm reached under the man’s armpits and propped him against the wall. He yelped in agony.

Storm pointed the gun at his large nose.

“Please, please don’t,” Ahmed whimpered, then got his first good look at Storm. “You’re…you’re the man from the desert today. You’re the one who shot all my men.”

Storm did not reply. He reached down and tore away Ahmed’s sleeve, exposing his badly mangled left shoulder. Dirty Harry had made a neat mess of it.

“Please, sir, please,” Ahmed was rambling from somewhere above his two ruined arms. “What is it you want? Do you want the promethium? You can have it. It’s still in the truck. Please, sir, whatever harm I have done to you, I beg your forgiveness. Perhaps we can make an arrangement of some kind? I have a lot of money. It is yours for the asking. Just, please, let me live.”

Storm ripped the sleeve into two long strips. “Your ulnar artery is severed,” he said calmly. “You’re already in shock. If I don’t stop the bleeding, in ten minutes your blood pressure will start to fall rapidly. In twenty, you’ll probably be dead. I’m making a tourniquet right now, but I’m only using it if you tell me exactly what I want to hear.”

Ahmed greeted this news by bursting into tears. “Oh, Allah, it hurts so bad. I will tell you anything.”

“Very good,” Storm said. “Tell me about the Medina Society.”

Pain was no longer the dominant emotion on Ahmed’s face. Confusion was. Confusion with, perhaps, a dash of desperation.

“The Medina…the Medina Society?” he said. “But I don’t…I don’t know anything about—”

“Playing dumb isn’t going to help you, Ahmed. And you may have less than ten minutes before it’s all over. That was just an estimate on my part. But I’m no doctor and you’re losing blood pretty fast. So, again, tell me about the Medina Society.”

He was breathing heavily, hyperventilating slightly and shivering as the shock plunged his body’s temperature. “Okay, okay…The Medina Society…They are a group of extremists who want to set my country back two hundred years…They…They don’t seem to like women very much…They are giving Islam, a very gentle, peace-loving religion, a very bad reputation. I don’t know, is this what you’re looking for?”

“You really don’t have time to play cute with me, Ahmed. I know you think right now that maybe your life isn’t worth saving. But depending on how good your information is and how cooperative you’re willing to be, you could have a very good second career as an informant. I already know most of it. The Medina Society has been using the promethium to make the high-energy laser beam that has been shooting down airplanes. Just tell me how the society is organized and where the headquarters are.”

The tears were coming harder now. “Please, sir. I am not trying to be cute. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t inform on anyone. I am a scrap-metal dealer. I know nothing about these terrorists.”

“Then what’s with the Ahmed Trades Metal signs everywhere? I know what that means.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. My name is Ahmed. I trade metal. My family has traded metal for several generations now. Before that, we were farmers. That is all.”

“Yeah, sure it is. You want to explain that truck full of promethium sitting in your driveway?”

“Yes, yes, happily. The professor, Dr. Raynes, he sells it to me. He has sold me many hundreds of pounds of it. I don’t know where he is getting it from, but he has found a great amount of it.”

“And what do you do with it?”

“I resell it for a nice profit, of course. I did not know anyone was using it to shoot down airplanes. Please, sir, I am telling you the truth. I am a metal dealer, that is all. Please, sir. Please help me.”

Storm looked down at the pathetic figure slumped beneath him. Much as he told himself he shouldn’t believe these lies, there was a part of him that couldn’t help it. It wasn’t so much what Ahmed was saying as it was everything Storm had seen and done over the last few hours.

Taking out the guard had been too easy. Getting in the compound had been too easy. Breaching the house—despite the little hiccup with the security system—had been too easy. Taking out Ahmed had been too easy.

At every turn, he had met far too little resistance. He knew it while it was happening, but he hadn’t been able to quite make sense out of it. Now he could. If the Medina Society really was so savvy that it had successfully resisted penetration by the combined might of the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States military for several decades, there was no way Storm would have been able to waltz in and take over one of its cells using little more than an iPad, a two-by-four, and some foul-tasting chewing gum. If it was that straightforward, a group of Green Berets would have done it a long time ago. The real Medina Society would have protected its assets far more fiercely.

What’s more, there was Ahmed’s behavior. If he was really a terrorist, would he be sniveling and begging for this life? No, he’d be saying his prayers to Allah, preparing to meet twelve and threescore virgins—with an emphasis on the
score
.

“So, if you’re just a metal dealer, then you shouldn’t mind telling me: who is your buyer for all this promethium?”

“I…I don’t know for sure. They always insisted I wear a blindfold.”

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” Storm said.

“I’m trying…I’m trying, please. They…they arranged all the meetings. Always different places. I just followed their instructions. I would talk to them on the phone. I talked to a man if it was a matter of where and when to make a delivery. But if it was a matter of money, I talked to a woman. I got the sense she was the one in charge. The buyer was a woman.”

“A woman. So you’ve narrowed the potential identity of your buyer from seven billion to three point five billion. You really want to bleed out, don’t you, Ahmed?”

Ahmed was shivering more violently. His entire lower half was covered in blood, which was now pooling on the ground beneath him. “No, no, please. Wait. It was a woman, and sometimes she would be outside when she spoke. I got the sense she was on a boat. A very large boat. You could hear the waves and engine. And one time I heard a horn blast of some kind. It was a very distinctive sound. I asked her, ‘Is that a trumpet?’ and she said, no, it was made to sound like a French horn. Then she talked about how much she enjoyed the sound of a French horn.”

Storm was momentarily frozen. A woman on a large boat that signaled to other boats with something that sounded like a French horn. Ahmed had, in a very short time, taken the suspect pool from 7 billion to 3.5 billion to exactly one.

“Your buyer is a very wealthy Swedish woman named Ingrid Karlsson,” Storm said. “I just…I can barely believe it myself. One of those planes that got shot down was carrying her lover, Brigitte Bildt.”

This seemed to excite Ahmed. “Yes, yes,” he said. “One of the times we spoke, she had to take a call on another line. I think she thought she had muted our call, but I could still hear. She said two things that didn’t make sense to me. But now, maybe they do. The first was something about getting rid of Brigitte. She said she had to get rid of Brigitte because Brigitte was going to the United States to speak to a man named Jedediah, who would expose her. I didn’t know who Brigitte was. I thought maybe it was an employee she had fired. But maybe this was the lover who was on the airplane?”

Storm absorbed this information. Just as there was only one woman who had a French horn for a signal on her boat, there was only one man named Jedediah in the high reaches of the American intelligence community. Was Brigitte Bildt coming to America to reveal to Jones what her boss was about to do with the laser? It made sense.

“Keep going,” Storm said. “What was the other thing?”

“She said that someone named Jared Stack would be dealt with. That is all I heard. At the time, I felt guilty, because it sounded to me like this Jared Stack was in trouble. But I don’t know who Jared Stack is.”

Storm did. Jared Stack was the congressman who had taken over for Erik Vaughn as the head of the Ways and Means committee. As far as Storm knew, Stack was still alive. But maybe—if Ahmed was telling the truth—that was only because whoever Ingrid Karlsson had sent to kill him had failed.

There was one quick way to check. Storm pulled out his phone, and dialed Javier Rodriguez in the cubby.

“What’s up, bro?” Rodriguez said. “You still hangin’ with Strike?”

“No time for gossip,” Storm said. “I was wondering if you’ve heard anything about an attempt being made on Congressman Jared Stack’s life?”

“Hang on, let me check.”

Storm put the phone on speaker, then set it down. He took the strip of cloth he had ripped off Ahmed’s nightgown and tied it as tight as he could around the upper part of the metal dealer’s arm. Storm walked quickly into a nearby bathroom, found some towels that looked clean enough, and returned to Ahmed, using them to further staunch the bleeding.

“Thank you, thank you,” Ahmed was muttering. “May Allah bring blessings to you.”

Storm was finishing his rudimentary first aid job just as Rodriguez returned to the phone.

“This is freaky, bro,” Rodriguez said. “D.C. cops just found Jared Stack strangled to death behind a crack house in Southeast. They haven’t said a word about it to the media yet because it just happened. How the hell did you know about it?”

“Long story,” Storm said. “I’ll tell you later.”

He disconnected the call then thought about what his father said that night they had
fi
rst stumbled on William McRae and his work on promethium. Carl Storm had warned his son that terrorists came in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, he said, they looked like Osama bin Laden. Sometimes they looked like Ted Kaczynski.

And sometimes they looked like Xena: Warrior Princess.

CHAPTER 28

A SECURED ROOM

illiam McRae flexed his fingers, groaning when they creaked back at him.

There must have been a storm coming. A big one, judging from the pain he was in. He could feel the drop in air pressure in his aching joints, as well as or better than any barometer. He also noted a slight increase in the humidity of the air being pumped into his room, like it was ever-so-slightly more tropical.

He sat up in bed, dreading the day’s toil ahead of him. He kept thinking that the men he was working for would run out of promethium, eventually. They had to. There simply wasn’t this much of the stuff in the world.

But every five to seven days, they’d come in with more of it and McRae would start the process over again, turning the promethium into crystal, setting the crystals in the sequence needed to get enough power to the laser.

The newest shipment hadn’t yet arrived. It was due any day now. He still had enough from the last shipment to keep him busy. Alpha had shown him a new round of Alida pictures the night before, just to keep him motivated.

It was the usual stuff: Alida heading out to the grocery store, Alida checking the mail, Alida doing all the little routine things he suddenly missed being a part of so desperately.

The one that had really broken his heart was of Alida sitting by herself, eating supper. He felt lonely for her just looking at the picture. She was a bright, engaging woman who felt that meals—and especially the evening meal—were a time for conversation and for sharing. He wished she would start inviting friends over. He couldn’t bear the thought of her just sitting there by herself.

Alpha had made it a point to show William that behind Alida in that particular photo was a calendar that showed the date. The calendar had broken William’s heart, too. Not because it proved they still had a man stalking her, but because of the content.

It was her fake daily-inspirations calendar. The sayings in it were just like Alida: smart, sassy, a little irreverent, but full of humor. The one for the day in question was, “Some people say you’re racially intolerant. I just say you’re an a**hole.”

McRae smiled at the thought. It was one of the rare ones that had graced his face over the last month. Now that he was upright, his wakefulness clear to the cameras, it didn’t take long for one of his captors to appear. This time it was the one McRae called Epsilon. McRae assigned him the lowest rank in his imaginary pecking order simply because he wasn’t quite as sharp as the others.

“Good morning, Dr. McRae,” he said officiously. “I’m here to get your breakfast order.”

McRae yawned. Lately, he had taken to asking for more elaborate breakfasts, because he noticed they didn’t put him to work until after he had eaten. It was a pathetic stall tactic, yes, but it felt like a small victory.

“I’d really like some waffles, if your chef can handle that,” McRae said. “And maybe some fruit on the side. Strawberries, perhaps. Oh, and some grapefruit. But make sure he cuts out the sections this time. Unless you fellas want to give me a knife, someone needs to cut my grapefruit for me.”

“Okay,” Epsilon said, then turned and departed.

McRae listened for the click that always accompanied a guard’s departure.

Except—were his ears failing him?—this time it didn’t come. He quickly swung his legs down off the bed and studied the door. It had stuck against the doorframe without closing all the way. The humidity must have swollen the wood a little.

He scrambled over to the chair where he had draped his pants and pulled them on, then jammed his feet into his shoes. He waited another thirty seconds, just to make sure Epsilon was gone, then tentatively opened the door.

The hallway was empty. Every day, he had been led down that hallway to the left, toward his workshop. That and his cell were the only two rooms he had seen during his captivity.

He was glad he had asked for waffles. Mixing the dry ingredients, then the wet ones; separating the egg whites, beating them stiff; combining all of the above ingredients, then cooking them in a waffle maker. It would take at least fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. No one would be looking for him during that time. They would think he was just lingering in the shower. There were no cameras in the bathroom.

This was his chance to make a break for it. Wedging the door barely open with one of his socks—so he could rush back in if he felt the need—he turned right down the hallway. When he reached the end, there was a metal door on the left.

Again with great caution, he shoved it open. It was a narrow staircase that only led up. McRae climbed the stairs to the top, where there was a small landing and another door.

But this one had a window.

It was the first time in a month that McRae had been able to look at the world outside his confines, and he could barely believe the view.

It was water. He was at sea. This was a boat. An enormous boat.

It all suddenly made sense: the motion he sometimes felt was from the waves, but only at the rare times when they got large enough to actually rock a boat that size; the rumble of the engine, which he thought was some kind of generator, had actually been powering the boat on its journey.

He opened the door and stepped out onto a narrow corridor that ran along the outer part of the deck. On one side was the ship’s superstructure. On the other side were the waves, which were getting to be of the size that rocked the ship. He peered over the edge. It was a significant drop into the water, even though this was one of the lowest decks. He had half a thought to simply jump into the water. He was reasonably sure he could survive the fall.

But then what? He didn’t know where they were. Even though the air felt warm, the water could be cold. Even relatively warm ocean water could cause hypothermia within a few hours. He could see land, but only barely. It had to be at least ten miles away. He wasn’t that good a swimmer. Plus, there was that storm coming, the one he felt in his bones. He’d never last.

Maybe he could find a lifeboat. Or a smaller vessel attached to this boat—didn’t super-yachts have stuff like that? Maybe then he’d have a chance.

Or maybe he’d have to recognize he was a prisoner on this boat until someone decided to let him go. Or, more likely, kill him.

McRae scampered along the corridor until he reached another door. He turned in. This hallway was very different from the one he had been in before. His hallway, the one he had seen every day for a month now, was very plain, almost institutional for its lack of decoration. This one was lavishly adorned. There were paintings every few feet, little end tables with jewel-covered lamps, elaborate woodwork, gilded trim.

He turned blindly into one of the doors off the hallway. It was a guest room—one of many, given the size of this boat. He was about to turn out of the room and leave it when he spied an old-fashioned, rotary-style telephone, sitting on one of the desks.

Was it just another decoration or…

One way to find out. He picked it up. Sure enough, it had a dial tone. He stuck his finger in the 0—the first number in the 011 he’d need to start an international call—and cranked it all the way around to the
STOP
. Remarkably, it returned not a series of clicks, like a rotary phone, but a beeping sound. Like a normal, modern touch-tone phone.

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.