Storm Front

CHAPTER 7

FAIRFAX, Virginia

Derrick Storm crept through the late-afternoon shadows, approaching downwind from the southwest. His flight to Paris didn’t leave until that evening. He had time for one quick mission.

The target house was a split-level ranch, built in the height of the Ugly Seventies and nestled in the heart of a typical East Coast suburban neighborhood. Other houses nearby had become teardowns or candidates for additions. Not this one. It was essentially the same house it had been on the day the first owners moved in. It had been well maintained, but there was only so much nice landscaping could do to save the thing from its own basic dowdiness.

Storm moved with measured confidence. He was armed, one pistol strapped to his chest and another attached to his ankle. His intelligence on the interior of the target house was exhaustive. He knew its every crevice, from its three shag-carpeted bedrooms to its cramped kitchen to its four-shade aqua-and-white bathroom tile. He knew its vulnerabilities, its accesses and egresses, its partially obscured trapdoor. He knew how to shimmy up the storm drain and vault into one of the bedrooms on the second floor. The floor plan was practically implanted in his brain.

He stayed in what he recognized would be blind spots, invisible to any of the house’s occupants. This was what Derrick Storm had long trained himself to do: to see without being seen, to slink without notice. He was stealth personified. He was like the wind, there but forever unseen. There would be no detecting him, not even as he circled to within striking distance of the house, moving from tree to tree, ever closer to the target.

The final twenty feet from his last hiding spot to the house was open terrain. This was the most perilous part of the job. He studied the house for signs of alarm and, seeing none, paused to gather himself. Then he performed a perfect cheetah sprint to the side of the house nearest the garage.

He stopped again, listening intently for even the smallest hint that anyone inside had become aware of his presence. There was none. The rhythms of the late afternoon in this neighborhood were unchanged.

Storm allowed himself a small glimpse around the corner. The garage was of the two-car variety, the kind with a single broad door covering both bays. There was a man inside, working on a car. An Orioles game crackled on an ancient Westing house radio, the soothing voice of Fred Manfra managing to overcome some seriously worn transistors.

Storm stayed pressed against the side of the house, waiting for his heartbeat to return to an acceptable range. There could be no mistakes in this operation. He needed total surprise, and he was sure he had achieved it. With one final…

“Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, if you’re going to sneak up on an old FBI agent, try not wearing those faggy Italian shoes, huh?” a voice from inside boomed. “How many times I gotta tell you, boy: rubber soles. You’ll never go wrong with rubber soles.”

Derrick Storm frowned, leaving his hiding spot and rounding the corner. “Hey, Dad,” he said.

Carl Storm dropped the grease-stained rag he had been wielding and came around the car to grab his son in a bear hug. Like his son, Carl was solidly built. He was a shade under six feet, and even though Derrick had his old man beat by at least three inches — at six-foot-two and a solid 230 pounds — he still felt small in his father’s embrace. He hoped he always would, but he knew otherwise. There was no hiding that Carl had lost some of his vitality in the last few years. His skin was getting that papery, old man feel to it. His limp, which used to only show itself on rainy days, was getting more noticeable.

Still, even in his late sixties, you wouldn’t want to bet against the old man in an arm-wrestling contest.

“How’s my boy?” he said, giving Derrick a solid thump on the back.

“I’m good, Dad,” Derrick replied.

“What brings you here?”

“You’re the only dad I got. I figured I owed you a visit.”

“How many times I gotta tell you, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter. You’re here for a job.”

“That’s classified, Agent Storm. I’m quite sure the CIA wouldn’t want its secrets shared with the FBI,” Derrick replied.

“Even an old retired hack like me?”

Derrick changed subjects: “What’s up with the Buick?”

Carl thumped the side of his ’86 Buick Electra, of which he was the original owner. Though he had been a small boy at the time, Derrick could still remember the day his father brought the car home, bursting with pride. He gave his son a long talking-to about the importance of buying American — a lecture that had apparently stuck, given Derrick’s Ford fetish — and they took the Electra on a drive that day. Derrick sat in the back, on velvety cloth seats so nappy he could write his name in them. He could still hear his father extolling the car’s “pickup,” when he mashed the gas pedal and the 3.8-liter V6 sent the car hurtling down a little-used country road.

It had seemed like a luxurious road-eating machine back then. Now it looked like a rolling box, maybe two generations removed from the aircraft carrier–sized Buicks of the sixties and seventies. The last time Derrick had looked at the odometer, it read 57,332 — but that was misleading, since it had flipped at least three times. That Carl had kept it on the road all this time was a testament to his gift for mechanics, his parsimony, and, mostly, his stubbornness.

“The damn blower on the AC only works at one speed,” Carl grumbled. “Blows on low the whole time.”

Derrick went over to have a look. One of the more unusual features of this particular Buick was that its hood hinged in front and opened away from the windshield, the opposite of nearly every other passenger car that ever rolled off the line in Detroit. It made the car an enormous pain to work on, which only made Carl that much more devoted to it.

“I replaced the fan and the relay and the dang thing still won’t run right,” Carl added. “I can run electric to it through an outside toggle switch and get it to work. But as soon as I assemble it right, it doesn’t run on different speeds. Just low.”

“You check the fuses?” Derrick asked.

“What, do I look like I got hit with a moron stick last night?”

“Yeah but I decided to be polite and not mention it.”

Carl grunted. Derrick studied the offending unit and the various wires leading from it, marveling at the relative simplicity of the Buick’s innards. As Carl had carped many times, modern-day cars were largely regulated by their various computer systems. Unless you had your own computer to run diagnostics on them, they could be virtually impossible for an at-home mechanic to fix. It’s why Carl refused to get rid of the Buick: Its problems, while sometimes legion, were at least repairable without digital assistance. Neither man needed to say what pleasure they both got from this.

On the radio, the Orioles had pushed three runs across in the bottom of the seventh to take a 6–5 lead over the Angels.

“It’s good to have Markakis back,” Carl said. “We would have beat the Yankees last October if we’d had Markakis in the lineup.”

The Orioles had long been “we” in the Storm house hold. With a few exceptions, this had been an act of shared suffering by the Storm men.

“We would have beat the Yankees if Jimmy Johnson had been Jimmy Johnson,” Derrick said.

“Didn’t realize you still paid that close attention.”

“Some things are in the blood, whether you want them there or not, old man.”

“Hey, it was only fifteen years between postseason appearances,” Carl said, then added in a lower voice: “It better not be another fifteen or I might not make it.”

Derrick let the macabre comment pass.

“I see the old Westing house still works,” he said.

“Yeah. Why? You want to take it apart again?”

Derrick laughed. As a boy, his father had insisted his son know how to take apart and reassemble a radio — and understand the functions of all the parts he saw along the way — as if this were some basic survival skill every young man needed.

“Let’s just worry about the car, Dad.”

The younger Storm probed the Buick with his eyes first, then his hands. Soon, he zeroed in on a bundle of wires near the windshield-washer fluid reservoir.

“Here’s the problem,” he said. “Check out the fusible link wire.”

Carl frowned, cursed, and grabbed some drugstore glasses off his workbench. Once the glasses were perched on the end of his nose, he shined a flashlight at the offending area. “I’ll be damned,” he said, looking at a wire that had been Southern fried into a melted mess. “I can’t believe I missed that.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s your culprit,” Derrick said.

Carl took a glance at his wristwatch, a Casio that was at least as old as the car. “Auto parts store is closing up. I can tackle this in the morning. Let’s get a beer.”

Derrick followed his father into the time warp that was his boyhood home. Little had changed about the house in well over thirty years. The house cried out for a woman’s touch, but Storm’s mother had died in a car accident when he was five. Derrick had only vague memories of her and knew little about her. The sum total of what his father ever said about her was “She was a heck of a woman, your mother.” Then he’d make an excuse to leave the room.

Carl went over to the mostly barren refrigerator — current inhabitants: mayonnaise, Kraft American singles, yellowing lettuce, hamburger rolls stale enough to be brittle to the touch — and grabbed two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from a half-full twenty-four-pack. In his years away from his father, Derrick had developed a palate for crafted microbrews of varying sorts. He was currently indulging an IPA phase. But in the house of his father, he honored the local custom: an American macrobrew.

They settled into seats in the living room — Carl in his favorite Barcalounger, Derrick on the paisley patterned sofa — and cracked open the beers. This was a kind of unofficial ritual between the Storm boys. Derrick shared most all of his cases with his father. It was partly because he valued his father’s insights. It was mostly because Carl Storm was his insurance policy. Jedediah Jones would leave Derrick Storm to rot in that Tibetan prison if it was politically expedient. Carl Storm would never rest until his son came back safely.

And so, as they drank, Derrick told his father about the trail of dead bankers, the certainty of Volkov’s nefarious hand at work, and the possibility of Chinese involvement. Carl Storm listened with the practiced ear of a seasoned investigator. Carl had been career FBI, joining the Bureau in an era when it wasn’t quite as polished as it had since become. Back then, it was more of a blue collar crime-solving unit. Their suits were cheaper and so were their educations. The Hollywood influence had yet to transform them into self-styled supercops. They were more like regular cops, albeit very good ones. You still didn’t want to get Carl Storm going on how J. Edgar Hoover had really gotten a bad rap from the media.

Of all the things Carl had taught Derrick through the years, the ability to think like a detective was chief among them. In many ways, the son’s abilities now outstripped the father’s. But the old man could still surprise him. It took two beers’ worth of time for Derrick to lay out everything.

“It sounds like your spook buddies are too focused on finding a link between the suspects that’s either a person or a business deal,” Carl said when Derrick had finished. “What if the link is what they did separately? You said Kornblum and Motoshige had their hands in a lot of things, but Sorenson only did those fancy money swaps, is that right?”

Derrick nodded. Carl continued: “Then this is just a theory to kick around until something better comes along, but money-swapping might be your common element. It’s the only thing all three shared that we know of for sure.”

“Good point,” Derrick said.

“Hell yeah, it’s a good point. Look, son, I know you think your dad doesn’t know his ass from first base, but if I learned nothing else in my years at the Bureau, it’s that stuff like this always comes down to one thing: money. You follow the money, you’ll find your bad guy.”

“So how do I do that in this case?”

“You’re asking me? Fer chrissakes, I can barely make change at the grocery store. I’ll tell you one thing, though, and that’s that I don’t like the sound of any of this. How many times I gotta tell you, you can’t trust those CIA spooks. They’re setting you up for something and you don’t even know what. That Clara Strike woman is trouble. Is she involved in this?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Yeah, but that goddamn Jedediah Jones is, I’m sure. That man is a snake in the grass.”

Derrick didn’t need to be reminded. To use a baseball analogy, Derrick was like a pinch hitter being brought in to face a pitcher he had never seen before. The guy might be throwing sliders low and outside. Or his first pitch might be a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball aimed at Derrick’s ear.

As Derrick’s brain whirred, Carl’s eyes involuntary drifted toward the picture of Derrick’s mother that still adorned the mantel. She had been a beautiful woman — her son’s strong features came straight from her — and now she was frozen in time. The picture, like everything else in the house, grew ever-so-slightly more dated with each passing year.

“I’ll be careful,” Derrick said, then looked up at the picture.

“Hard not to miss her, isn’t it?”

“She was a heck of a woman, your mother,” Carl Storm said. Then he crushed his beer can between his hands and vaulted himself with surprising agility from the Barcalounger. “Anyhow, if you’re staying for dinner, we might want to pick up a pizza or something. I don’t really have any food in the house. I’m gonna go wash up.”

Derrick listened as the shower in the upstairs master bathroom turned on. In a few hours, he would have to head to the airport and catch a red-eye heading east. He had time for dinner. He consulted a menu, picked up the phone, and ordered a large sausage pie that he knew would be eaten with no mention of the woman who watched over them from her place on the mantel.