Storm Front

CHAPTER 28

FAIRFAX, Virginia

Carl Storm had finally fixed the Buick. The AC blower now ran on low, medium, and high, just as it had when he drove it out of the showroom all those years ago. It had been a problem with the fusible link wire all along. Derrick had been right.

Now Carl was wishing something else would go wrong with the thing, if only because it would give him something to think about other than his son and the trouble he was surely in.

The fact was, Carl Storm didn’t have a lot of hobbies. He wasn’t one of those old guys who golfed. He did yard work, but he didn’t take plea sure in fussing with his garden for hours on end. He worked on his car, but only when it was broken.

About the only thing that could take his mind off things was reading. He was well ensconced in his Barcalounger, in the midst of rereading the collected works of Stephen J. Cannell, God rest his soul, when his home phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Storm,” a crisp voice on the other end of the phone said. “My name is Scott Colston. We don’t know each other. But I’ve been told that because of something that happened many years ago in Tuscon, I’m to call you and brief you on my current investigation. And I’m to trust that you’ll handle that information with due care.”

Carl Storm sat up in the Barcalounger and grabbed a pen and pad from the end table at his side.

“You’re the guy with White Collar, then? This is in regard to Operation Wafer?”

“That’s right,” Colston said.

“Tell me about it.”

Colston started talking. Carl’s pen waved furiously, trying to keep up with the flow of information. There was a time when he would have trusted his memory, when he had this spongy spot in his brain that sucked up the details of a new investigation almost automatically. But he had been out of the game too long. The sponge wasn’t as absorbent as it used to be.

Besides, this wasn’t his ass on the line. It was Derrick’s. And that was a lot more important.

As Colston spoke, Carl peppered him with questions. How did you first get onto this again? When did this activity start? How much did you say has been siphoned off again? Where is he hiding it?

He didn’t know which parts would end up being important and which were superfluous. He wanted to make sure he didn’t miss any details that Derrick needed.

When the man was done, Carl thanked him.

Then he called Derrick.

“Son,” he said. “I need to tell you about a little something called Operation Wafer.”

The call took Derrick all the way from the city to that rest stop upstate. It took that long for Carl to go through his notes and explain everything to him. But it was time well spent.

By the time Derrick left his car, the outlines of his plan — sort of like the first plinkings of what would soon be a thunderous symphony — were beginning to fall into place. At the very least, Storm had figured out how he was going to deal with Whitely Cracker.