Storm Front

CHAPTER 23

NEW YORK, New York

Clara Strike had seemed as surprised to see Derrick Storm as he was to see her, if not more so. After all, he was the one who was supposed to be dead.

But before they could deal with any of that, there was a mess to clean up. There was always a mess to clean up when Clara Strike was around.

He needed to pay off the cabbie. The Maserati needed to be towed — Storm didn’t want to know what the repair bill would be; he was just glad that Whitely Cracker didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would sweat it too much. And, last but not least, New York’s Finest needed to be assuaged.

All the while, Storm was annoyed. Annoyed at being lied to about Strike’s involvement in the case. Annoyed that there were obviously some moving pieces Jones had not told him about, as usual. Annoyed that for all his annoyance, he kept stealing glances at Clara and feeling the familiar longings. Her curly brown hair. Her shining brown eyes. The small whiffs he kept getting of her perfume. Damn, did that perfume have a hold on him.

During the four years he had been officially dead, Storm had not seen her once. He hadn’t even missed her. Or felt bad about leading her to think he was dead. As far as he was concerned, turnabout was fair play. Clara Strike had died on him once, too — died in his arms, even. She hadn’t contacted him, hadn’t found some small way to let him know it was all one of Jedediah Jones’s tricks. She had let him go to her funeral, let him grieve, let him lose a piece of his soul thinking he had lost the woman he loved. He was younger. More naïve. More vulnerable. He still hurt easily back then.

To her, a faked death was just business — an occupational hazard. To him, it had been emotional torture. When he found out she had been alive that whole time and could have spared him all that suffering with one phone call, he swore he would never forgive her. And he hadn’t.

And yet.

Here she was. Again.

And here he was. Again.

And he couldn’t help it. He found himself thinking of all they had done together — of the bad times, yes, but of the good times, too. He thought about Jefferson Grout, the man who had unwittingly given them their introduction. Back in his private eye days, Storm had spent four months tracking down Grout, who he thought was merely a two-timing spouse. Grout was actually a CIA operative gone rogue. Working all by himself, Derrick Storm of Storm Investigations had succeeded in doing what the combined resources of the CIA had failed at doing for a year. Strike recruited him into what she called “the company” the next day. There had been a whole lot of victories since then — many more W’s than L’s, truth be told.

So when the cabbie, the Maserati, and the panel van were all gone, and Strike asked Storm to grab a drink, it was something of a reflex to say yes.

“I’m sorry I keep staring at you,” she said as they settled into a corner booth at a cozy martini bar in the East Village. “It’s like I’m looking at a ghost. I can’t believe…”

“I know the feeling,” Storm cut her off.

“I almost want to ask you how long you’ve been alive again. I keep forgetting you’ve been…”

“Alive this whole time,” Storm said.

“Yeah, it’s just… I mean,” she began, but she was cut off again, this time by a waiter coming to get their order. It gave Storm the opportunity he needed to shift the conversation away from his apparent resurrection.

“I was told you weren’t working this case,” he said.

“I was told you weren’t working this case,” she echoed.

“You expect me to believe that?”

She shrugged. “I guess Prince Hashem is worth every effort from the United States government.”

“Wait, who?”

“Prince Hashem,” Strike said. “Don’t play dumb, Storm. It doesn’t suit you.”

“I’m serious. Who is Prince Hashem?”

Strike paused, studying him. Storm sometimes felt like she could read the fine print on the inside of his skull casing. “You’re not messing with me right now? You’re really not working this case?”

“It depends,” Storm said, feeling that sense of bewilderment that only Clara Strike could engender in him. “What case are you talking about?”

“You first.”

“No, you first,” Storm said. “Let’s start with this: Those bugs I found at Cracker’s place. I should have known the moment I saw them. Those were yours, not Volkov’s.”

“Volkov? As in Gregor Volkov? What the hell does he have to do with this? He’s dead.”

Now it was Storm’s turn to study her. He couldn’t pretend to know all her tells, but he could detect no guile in her. “Okay, what the hell is going on?” Storm said. “You’re really not in on this?”

“I think when we say ‘this’ we’re talking about two different things,” Strike said. “Simply to mitigate the confusion: Yes, we’ve had heavy surveillance on Whitely Cracker for two months now.”

“Two months? But that appropriations rider wasn’t even passed until three weeks ago. That was the trigger for the whole thing.”

“Yeah, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about right now.”

He could see she was telling the truth. “So why have you been watching Cracker?”

“Because of Prince Hashem,” she said.

It was again Storm’s turn to wear a blank look. He shook his head to emphasize his ignorance.

Strike lectured: “Prince Hashem. Crown prince of Jordan. Next in line to the throne of one of the most strategically important countries in the Middle East. A man the United States of America seriously cannot afford to piss off if it wants to continue happy relations with Jordan. Any of this ringing any bells?”

“Not one.”

Strike sighed, then laid it out for Storm: “Prince Hashem is one of Whitely Cracker’s biggest investors. He’s got seven hundred million dollars plowed into Prime Resource Investment Group. Even for the prince of Jordan, that’s real money. Most of his fortune, actually. Surely by now you’ve figured out that Prime Resource Investment Group is in serious danger of going bankrupt.”

“Actually, that’s news to me. Whitely Cracker didn’t get on my radar screen until earlier today,” he said. What he didn’t add was that he hadn’t wanted to breathe a word about Cracker to Jones, and therefore Storm hadn’t asked the nerds to do the usual financial workup that would have revealed Cracker’s apparent distress.

“Yeah, well, trust me. Whitely has it bad. We’re talking Bernie Madoff stuff here. He is in a huge, huge hole. Like billions. With a capital ‘B.’ He keeps borrowing, and of course everyone gives it to him because he’s Whitely Cracker. But it’s only getting him deeper in trouble. We’re trying to figure out a way to move in and save the prince’s money, but of course the CIA can’t make a move against an American citizen. We have to wait for him to do something illegal and then send in the appropriate domestic authority. Unfortunately for us, losing billions of dollars isn’t illegal. So all we can do is watch and wait and hope.”

“And then you swoop in, save the day, and make sure Prince Hashem knows Uncle Sam had his back the whole way, gently reminding him that Iran or Hamas wouldn’t be able to do the same.”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” Strike said.

“Now, what does Volkov have to do with this?”

Storm told her as much as he dared without over-sharing, reminding himself she still worked for Jones. Storm trusted Clara Strike more than he did Jedediah Jones, but that was like saying he trusted a three-card monte dealer more than a snake-oil salesman. Still, he gave her a basic outline of the Click Theory and how Cracker played into it. He could tell from her reactions that it was genuinely news to her. For once, it seemed Clara Strike wasn’t playing a shell game on him.

“If it helps you, we haven’t seen any sign of Volkov or his men,” she said. “And, believe me, we’ve been watching. You know Volkov’s patterns better than anyone. He’s a look-before-you-leap type. He’d never go after Cracker without having done his homework. So I’d say he hasn’t gotten here yet.”

“More likely, Click’s model is just wrong,” Storm said. “The sixth banker isn’t Cracker. You still have people on his house?”

Strike nodded.

“Good. If Volkov does come slinking around, we’ll know. But I’m starting to think that I need to ask Dr. Click to go back to the drawing board. It doesn’t look like Cracker will be victim number six.”

Storm felt some sense of ease knowing Cracker and his family were safe. But, at the same time, it meant there was some other banker — perhaps with some other spouse and some other children — who was still in danger. And Storm didn’t have any idea who it was. The powerlessness was frustrating.

“Well, I’m glad fate has thrown us together again,” Strike said when he was through. “It really is great to see you, Storm. I thought you were… I mean, it’s Jones, so who the hell knows? But there were moments when I really thought you were dead. I’d go back and forth. Sometimes I’d think, Nah, he couldn’t be dead. It’d take a nuclear weapon to kill that son of a bitch. But then other times I’d think back on the times I almost lost you and think, well, maybe they got you this time….”

“Yeah, well…,” Storm said quietly. “Sorry I didn’t reach out.”

“I’d have done the same thing.”

Storm couldn’t resist the jab: “You did do the same thing.”

“I know, but… I mean, really, are you fishing for an apology or something? You know how the game is played. I don’t like it any more than you do sometimes. But I also accept it’s a part of this world we have chosen to live in. Or maybe it’s part of the world that has chosen us. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter. You can gripe and pout all you want, but you and I both know we wouldn’t walk away even if we had the chance to. This is who we are.”

“Yeah” was all Storm said. Sometimes, it was best not to give Clara Strike any more than that.

She had placed her hand over his. The lighting was low. The martinis were finally taking the edge off the adrenaline rush that Storm had been living on.

“You remember when we found this place?” Strike asked.

“Of course. It was after Marco Juarez,” Storm said, feeling the warmth of the memory. Juarez was a Panamanian drug lord. Emphasis on the “was.” Storm and Strike had celebrated Juarez’s death in Manhattan, reveling in their unlikely survival with a week of sex, food, and booze, in roughly that order. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Storm would never say it out loud, but if he had to live just one week of his life over and over again in a loop, that would be the one.

“I thought I’d lost you that time, too,” she said.

“Oh that? That was just a flesh wound.”

She interlaced her fingers in his. Her eyes were somehow moist and blazing at the same time. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “Sometimes I think about, you know, us, and…”

She stopped herself. Storm had turned his head in the other direction.

“I’m not sure I can talk about this,” he said.

“Right now?” she asked. “Or forever?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly, she was the one turning her head in the other direction. She stood and dabbed at her face with a Kleenex. Her last words before leaving the bar were:

“Well, just be careful. Right now has a nasty way of turning into forever while you’re not watching.”

As he watched her walk out the door, he couldn’t help but wonder whether the tears had been real.

Storm settled the check and departed. Nothing about drinking a martini with Clara Strike had felt right anyway. There were doors he couldn’t afford to open, and that was one of them. Certainly not now. Maybe it was because of his feelings for Ling Xi Bang. Maybe it was because there was a man he didn’t know whose life he felt he had to save.

Storm dove into an all-night deli, grabbed a black coffee to help clear away the martini fuzz, and typed a quick e-mail to Rodney Click. He told him that Whitely Cracker was an apparent dead end and asked if he had any other leads.

Storm had just hit the send button when his phone rang.

“Storm Investigations.”

“Derrick, it’s Ling. Can you talk?”

“Go ahead,” he said, already enjoying the sound of her voice.

“I’ve just gotten myself clear of Senator Whitmer’s office. The donor is a man named Whitely Cracker.”

“What?” Storm said, and not because he had a hard time hearing.

“I got Whitmer drunk and managed to steer the conversation around to the appropriations rider. He admitted he did it at the behest of what he called ‘a very generous friend.’ I couldn’t get him to say who the friend was, but then later, when he was passed out, I found a pad on Whitmer’s desk that more or less laid it out. The five million is going to be split into five LLCs, but it looks like all the money is coming from this Cracker fellow. Do you know him or something?”

“Yeah, I was just at his house, as a matter of fact,” Storm said. “Rodney Click’s model predicted Cracker would be the sixth banker. I guess the model got a little confused. It thought we were looking for a victim and instead it found our perpetrator.”

Storm seethed as he thought back to his interaction with Cracker. The banker had let Storm into his house like he was the pigeon, not the hawk. He had pretended nothing in the world was amiss and had acted so guileless when Storm brought up the name Volkov, even asking him how to pronounce it and double-checking that it was Russian. All the while, the man was in Cracker’s employ.

Storm was angry at himself first — he had the end of his mission an arm’s length away and hadn’t realized it. Then his anger turned to Cracker, the man who had inflicted such misery on so many, and intended to cause even more widespread suffering, without any apparent regard for who he hurt. All in the name of the unholy dollar.

Then Storm calmed himself. Anger served no purpose here. And, besides, he could turn his own mistake into an advantage. He could let Cracker continue to believe he was under Storm’s protection. That way Cracker wouldn’t know that Storm was really coming for him.

And there was no doubt: Storm was coming. By himself. There was no going to Jedediah Jones with this. All he had was the say-so of one Chinese agent — a person he wasn’t even cleared to work with. Jones would howl all day long and half the night at the breach of security. And yet Storm didn’t doubt her for a moment. He loved the irony: The only person in the whole scenario he could trust was an enemy agent.

Storm was so distracted he crossed Ninth Street without looking. A Nissan Maxima blared its horn at him. Storm waved apologetically.

“Are you okay?” Xi Bang asked. “What are you doing?”

“Just playing in traffic,” he said. “And thinking.”

“Yeah, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you and I need to pay a visit to Whitely Cracker tomorrow morning,” Storm said.

“And?”

“We confront him with what we know, get him to confess. If he doesn’t confess, we take him in anyway and hold him until we can prove this thing to everyone’s satisfaction. At least that gets him out of circulation and away from MonEx machines. Can you get yourself to New York? There’s a shuttle that leaves Reagan National at six A.M. that will get put you into LaGuardia by seven. I can pick you up there.”

“Why, Agent Storm, are you asking me on a date?”

“No. I’m asking Jenny Chang. She’s a total hottie. I’ve seen pictures of her on the Internet, you know.”

Storm was on foot, headed for one of his favorite hotels — the W in Union Square — when his phone blurped at him, telling him he had a new e-mail.

It was from Click, who had not yet managed to unglue himself from his computer keyboard. The professor had spent the day tweaking his model. There were two long, chunky paragraphs detailing how he had altered some of his assumptions and changed a few of the variables. The computer still considered Cracker its top choice for Volkov’s brutality, but once you told the computer that Cracker was not an option, it came up with a different candidate.

The man’s name was Timothy Demming. He was chief currency trader at NationBank. Click’s updated model pegged the likelihood of the next victim being Demming at 73 percent.

“I met him at a conference and he’s a typical investment banking jerk,” Click wrote. “But there’s no question he would be able to order a trade of the magnitude we’ve discussed. Anecdotally, I’d say he’s a strong possibility.”

Storm didn’t hesitate. He loaded his People Finder app, which told him Demming lived a short distance away, in the financial district. Storm grabbed the first southbound cab he could and only felt a bit ridiculous when he told the driver to step on it.

Second Avenue blurred by outside the window, then Houston Street. New York was the city that never slept, for sure, but it was now after midnight, meaning that those who weren’t sleeping at least had the good sense to be doing something other than clogging the streets.

On the short ride, Storm Googled Demming. He was a star at NationBank, all right. There were blog pieces about him with pictures. He was handsome, no question, but in a sort of sleazy way. He looked like someone who would shatter a child’s piggy bank just to get himself one more nickel.

Storm arrived at Demming’s address to find an upscale co-op, one of those lower West Side high-rises that had started springing up like mushrooms after rain sometime during the nineties. Demming lived on the top floor. Storm paid and tipped the driver and walked through the building’s revolving doors.

“Could you please ring Mr. Demming in fifty-two J?” Storm asked the man at the front desk, a paunchy, middle-aged gentleman in a gold-braided uniform with “CLARK LASTER” written in bold letters on a discreet name tag.

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” said the man.

“Yes, but it’s an emergency.”

Laster sighed and made a big show of opening a large book in front of him. “I’m sorry. But Mr. Demming has left instructions not to be disturbed after ten P.M. It says so right here.” Laster turned the book around so Storm could read it. Storm leaned in as if he intended to inspect the document like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instead, he reached over the desk with his right hand and clamped down at the base of Laster’s neck, right over the collarbone.

The man tried to recoil, but Storm held firm. “Oww! Hey, what are you…”

The end of the sentence did not escape Laster’s mouth. The man was already unconscious.

“Sorry, friend, but I don’t have time to do things by the book,” Storm said.

Storm hailed an elevator, which took him to the fifty-second floor. It was quiet and hotel-like. Storm walked quickly to Unit J, all the way at the end of the hallway, and rang the buzzer. There was no answer. He rang again. Still no answer.

Demming was likely out. Wall Street types were known to entertain clients until the small hours. Storm decided the most advisable place to wait for Demming was inside his apartment.

He stepped back and looked at the door. It was reinforced steel, the kind that would be very noisy upon breaking. But the lock was operated by an old-fashioned, analog keypad. It took Storm exactly twenty-eight seconds to get it open. There were advantages to growing up with a dad who worked for a time in the FBI’s bank robbery unit. Learning how to crack safes was one of them.

Feeling smug, Storm opened the door and walked over the threshold straight into a bloodbath.

It was everywhere. On the walls. On the floor. On the couch. Even on the artwork. It almost looked like it had been coming out of a hose.

Even though he knew he was too late — a step behind Volkov, once again — Storm drew his gun. He entered cautiously, making sure not to step on any of the blood spatters but also keeping his eyes up, in case Volkov and his men were somehow still in the apartment.

They weren’t. Demming was. His body was behind the couch. What appeared to be a very large pair of dirty women’s under-wear had been stuffed into his mouth and tied there by pantyhose. A tuft of pink frill escaped from one side of the gag.

He was shirtless, revealing a series of bruises that made it obvious he had been badly beaten before his death. Ribs that had suffered compound fractures broke through the skin in several places. There were cigarette burns up and down both his arms. His nipples had singe marks above and below them, suggesting that diodes had been connected to them and current had been run through his body. And, of course, the fingernails on his right hand were missing.

The torture had been extensive. Demming had obviously suffered greatly before his death, much more so than the other victims. Someone had wanted Demming to feel pain. Lots of it.

Still, none of that was directly related to his death, the cause of which was quite clear: His throat had been slashed so viciously he had practically been decapitated. That explained all the blood.

Storm reached down and touched Demming’s exposed shoulder. The body was cold. So was any trail that might lead Storm from this apartment to wherever Volkov was now holed up.

Storm quickly swept through the remainder of the residence. He did this knowing there would likely be nothing left behind of any use. There hadn’t been at any of the other scenes. But he had to check.

Storm worked methodically, going room by room, willing himself to stay focused. Still, his mind wandered: Volkov now had all six MonEx codes. If he knew what to do with them — or had given them to someone who did — a financial tsunami could be heading for Wall Street at any moment. After all, ForEx didn’t close on business days. It was like knowing a huge landslide was coming and having no idea how to escape the base of the hill.

The apartment was, as Storm suspected, devoid of anything useful. He was preparing to make his exit when a pair of uniformed police officers entered the front door.

The first thing Storm said was “Before you overreact, I’m with the CIA and I didn’t do this.”

The lead cop took one look at all the blood, took one look at Storm, then drew his weapon, and aimed it at Storm’s chest.

“NYPD,” the cop shouted. “Let’s see those hands.”

Storm allowed himself to be handcuffed, even as he tried to explain to the officer that this was all just a big misunderstanding. Like the cop hadn’t heard that one before.

He was made to lie facedown in the hallway as backup was radioed in. Soon, what felt like half the officers in the New York Police Department’s Twentieth Precinct poured into Demming’s apartment.

As the next hour unfolded, Storm was allowed to shift to a sitting position, then shunted into the kitchen. Identifying himself as CIA had saved him a ride in a squad car and a trip to the Twentieth Precinct lockup, but it hadn’t exactly endeared him to anyone in a uniform.

From his place in the kitchen, he could hear the cops’ chatter. Clark Laster had awakened from his sleep hold–induced slumber no worse for wear but substantially pissed off. Laster called the police, who were sharp enough to assume that the man who had asked for Demming’s apartment had likely proceeded to… Demming’s apartment.

The early talk had Storm doing twenty-five to life at Attica, CIA or no CIA. Then the medical examiner, an attractive black woman, arrived and ruined the cops’ fun: time of death had been several hours before, meaning this burly stranger who only just showed up had not likely been involved.

Then the medical examiner made things interesting. Demming was actually a hermaphrodite. He appeared to be male, but had both male and female sex organs. Sure enough, the plain-clothes detectives going through the apartment found both men’s and women’s clothing, even though it was clear the apartment only had one inhabitant. This led to the theory that Demming liked be a man during the day, when it was convenient to be a member of the Wall Street boys’ club, but sometimes indulged his feminine side at night. It certainly explained the rather large pair of pan ties in his mouth and the hose that had been used to secure it there.

Storm was a mere spectator to their speculation. It wasn’t until an hour later that a woman flashing a detective’s badge approached him in the kitchen. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and was easily the most beautiful detective Storm had ever seen.

“Hello, Mr. Storm,” she said. “My name is Nikki Heat. I’m with the NYPD.”

“Hello, Nikki Heat,” Storm said amiably. “Didn’t I read about you in a magazine somewhere?”

“Yes. But if you like your head unsmacked, I suggest you don’t remind me.”

“Consider me advised,” Storm said, then jerked his head at a man who had appeared behind Heat, just out of earshot. “Who’s that?”

“This is Jameson Rook. He’s… he’s none of your concern.”

“Jameson Rook, the magazine writer?”

“Yes,” she said, like this annoyed her.

“I never knew he was so handsome,” Storm said.

“You really do want to be smacked,” Heat said.

Storm shrugged as Rook approached. “Excuse me, Detective Heat, but who is this?”

“This is our suspect,” she said.

Rook apprised Storm for a moment. “Not possible. He’s too good-looking to be a suspect.”

Heat threw her hands up in the air. “Before you ladies go off and get a room together, do you mind if I ask him some questions?”

“Sorry, go ahead,” Rook said.

Heat turned to Storm: “Can you please explain to me what you were doing in this apartment with Mr. Demming’s corpse?”

“To your satisfaction?” Storm said. “I very seriously doubt it. But I can tell you who the killer is.”

“Great,” Heat said sarcastically. “Can you also tell me where he is, get a warrant for his arrest, and then collar him so I can go home and get some sleep?”

Storm sighed. “That,” he said, “is where things get a lot more difficult.”