ASYŪT, Egypt
Not for the first time in his life, Derrick Storm was grateful he had installed the Find My Phone app.
Often, it led him no further than his couch cushions. This time, he was hoping it would direct him to a place substantially more foreign and infinitely more dangerous: what was either a cell of — or the world headquarters of — the Medina Society.
His task, once he got there, was to disable the cell’s capacity and gather what information he could about the rest of the network, so he could disable that, too.
He had little inkling of how he would accomplish this.
First he had to get himself outfitted, which took him the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have merely bumbled his way out of the desert and into the arms of the nearest CIA station agent, dropped the name Jedediah Jones, and known that within fifteen minutes he would have one new car, two new weapons, and three new gadgets, at least one of which would be showing him satellite imagery that would allow him to count the hair follicles on his target’s head.
This time, he had to do it like a civilian, without Jones’s resources. The alternative — appealing to Jones for help — was too likely to lead to at least one shipment of promethium falling into Jones’s hands. And that wasn’t a possibility Storm could allow.
So he was roughing it. He ditched Antony — donating him to a family who promised not to turn him into camel stew — and changed his mode of transportation. This time, he left the ungulate order in favor of something manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. He found a Sixt rental car company that outfitted him in a Ford Mondeo — the closest he could get to a Taurus. Even roughing it, there were limits to what a man could withstand, and an underpowered foreign car was not among them.
His next stop was a clothing store, where he ditched his thobe and keffiyeh in favor of Western clothing. He went with black cargo pants, black boots, and a tight black T-shirt — not because he was particularly keen to show off his physique, but because an Egyptian men’s extra large, the largest size he could find, was the equivalent of a medium in America.
With the transportation and clothing taken care of, he set about improving on his digital capabilities. He drove to an electronics retailer of perhaps dubious repute and purchased himself an iPad with a data plan. Compared to the technology he was used to, it was like being perhaps one step more evolved than the first primate who picked up a rock and used it to bash off a piece of tree bark.
Still, it allowed him to tap into the Find My Phone app and harness its detection skills. He plugged the coordinates it gave him into his newly installed Google Maps app. He then checked out the address on Google Earth. Again, compared to the toys Jones gave him, it was like being an ancient sailor following nautical charts that had been roughed out on papyrus.
But Storm at least now knew his phone was inside what appeared to be a walled compound. Several buildings — a main house and other structures — were visible in the closest view on Google Earth.
That was good news. It meant his biggest worry — that his phone had fallen out of the truck’s wheel well at some point during the journey, and that therefore Find My Phone would lead him to a roadside ditch somewhere — had not come to pass.
He set out from Luxor, following both the Nile River and the pulsing blue dot on Google Maps. As he drove, he tuned into news radio. Now that he was cut off from Jones — especially once Strike ratted him out — Storm was now relying on the media for information about the laser attacks. There was nothing new. The radio was mostly filled with talk about how a rare tropical cyclone was brewing in the eastern Mediterranean. The medicane — as meteorologists called a Mediterranean hurricane — was already threatening Italy with eighty-mile-an-hour winds and huge seas.
Storm turned off the radio as he arrived in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Asyūt, a medium-sized city along the banks of the Nile River in the middle of Egypt. He negotiated a warren of haphazardly laid out streets until he arrived at a fifteen-foot-high wall with razor wire topping it.
The razor wire was actually an encouraging sign. People didn’t put up razor wire unless they were trying to keep others out. Or, sometimes, in. Either way, it suggested something nefarious was going on. And nefarious was what Storm wanted. He wasn’t hunting bunny rabbits, after all. He was hunting terrorists.
He parked his Ford on a side street and walked the perimeter of the wall on foot. His suspicion that he had found the right place was confirmed when he spied the sign outside the main gate. AHMED TRADES METAL it read in Arabic.
Storm felt his resolve steeling. This was it. He had found the terrorists’ den. Perhaps this was the Medina Society’s nerve center. Perhaps it was just one cell among many.
Either way, he was confident the cargo truck was inside those walls, hopefully still laden with its precious promethium load.
Storm checked the time on his iPad. It was ten minutes after 10 P.M. There was still activity inside the walls: lights on, men talking to each other, vehicles moving around. He tried counting the number of distinct voices he could make out. There were perhaps eight.
That didn’t count men who were still inside the main house or any of the other buildings he had seen on Google Earth. But it gave him some sketchy idea of the odds facing him: eight to one, at least. Probably more like twelve to one or sixteen to one, thinking that some number of men — including the leaders — were likely to be inside.
Storm hunkered down behind a tree just outside the wall, down the street from the entrance gate, where he could see but not be seen.
There was no question in his mind he had to move on the compound before sunrise. Yes, he could plan a better operation if he had a full day to do reconnaissance. But giving the terrorists an extra day — during which time they might attempt to move the promethium, or shoot down more airplanes, or create other unimaginable mayhem — was out of the question.
He would just have to go on what he had, which was not much. Eight distinct voices. A compound with several buildings. An as-yet-undetermined connection to the larger network of the Medina Society.
Then, from behind his tree, Storm watched something he did not expect: the odds kept improving. As the hour grew later, men were leaving, one by one. Some of them were men he had shot earlier in the day — they had the telltale bandages on their shoulders. Others were uninjured.
Either way, they all followed a more-or-less similar pattern. They went to the main gate and announced themselves to the man in the guard shack. The guard came out with a key ring, selected one, and unlocked the gate. There was no automatic gate lift. He held it open for them as they passed through, then closed it behind them.
Some left on bicycles. Others walked to their cars, which were parked near the walls, in the neighborhood. It was like watching factory workers at the end of a shift, heading back home.
Maybe this was one of the Medina Society’s tricks: never stay assembled in large numbers for very long.
Or maybe there was still a horde of men holed up quietly inside, and this was barely more than a slivering of the force Storm would soon have to face.
At eleven o’clock, there was a changing of the guard. The new man received the AK-47 like a baton in a relay. The man being relieved went to his car and drove off, just like the other men had. There was a routine feeling to what Storm was seeing. This had happened many times before.
By midnight, the exodus had stopped. All told, eleven men had departed. Storm waited another hour anyway, just to see what might transpire. Nothing did. Silence had settled onto the compound.
Sometime after one, with a quarter moon struggling up from the horizon, Storm rose from his hiding spot and prepared for his assault.
It was one man against…well, he was about to find out.
WHILE THERE WERE ANY NUMBER of vulnerable points along the wall — mostly places where trees had grown tall enough to allow easy scaling and where the razor wire could have been clipped open — Storm decided to go in through the front, past the guard shack.
It just made sense. He would have to deal with the guard eventually: if not on the way in, then on the way out. There was no sense in procrastinating.
Dressed in his black clothing, Storm moved in the shadows toward the shack, which was lit by a single, dim bulb in the ceiling. The little building was elevated on concrete blocks and had a window that slid open, allowing the guard to be on eye level with entering trucks. Next to the window, there was a closed door with stairs leading up to it.
From inside, Storm could hear a small television. The volume was muffled, but it was tuned to what sounded like an infomercial. If that didn’t qualify as a cure for insomnia, he didn’t know what did. And yet the guard appeared to be awake.
The setup presented problems. Storm couldn’t risk using his gun. The noise would alert the troops inside that something was happening. And while there were quiet ways of dealing with the guard, they all involved physical contact — which was impossible when the man was high up in the shack, protected by a door that was more than likely locked.
He was now across the narrow street from the shack, still shrouded by trees. Behind him was a new house being framed, which gave him an idea. Retreating quietly into the construction site, he eventually found what he was looking for: a scrap piece of two-by-four, about three feet long, not unlike a Louisville Slugger.
Storm departed the house from the side, which allowed him to circle in behind the guard shack, where he wouldn’t be seen. He then shuffled silently up to the corner of the shack, sucked in a lungful of air, and pursed his lips.
What came out was an imitation of a Jameson’s Finch. It was more than just passable. It was, if Storm said so himself, spot on. He paused, took another breath, then unleashed another chorus of the bird’s optimistic, cheery song.
The television inside the guard shack suddenly went mute. Storm grinned, then whistled again.
There was a creaking sound as the door to the shack opened. Storm could hear one foot being put on the top tread of the stairs. He tweeted as if he was the happiest Jameson’s Finch that ever lived, then cut it off.
Now there were footsteps coming down the small flight of steps, and the gritty crunch of feet walking on a sidewalk that was covered in a light layer of sand. The guard was moving as if he was looking high and low, and left and right for the bird.
Storm chirped one last time, to give the guard a final fix on his location. He gripped the two-by-four in both hands and raised it behind his right shoulder. The guard had now zeroed in and was rounding the corner, sure he was about to see a Jameson’s Finch that would bring him great good fortune.
Instead, it brought him a headache. The moment the guard appeared, Storm swung the two-by-four with all he had. Its flat side connected just above the man’s ear with a percussive thud. He fell as if every bone in his body had turned to putty.
Storm was ready to give him one more shot, but it wasn’t necessary. The man was out. Storm took the guard’s AK-47 and draped its strap over his own torso. Then he grabbed the guard under the arms and dragged him quickly back into the shack. There was no rope or tape inside, so he yanked the cord out of the back of the television, using it to bind the guard’s wrists behind his back.
The guard was wearing a turban, which Storm hastily unwrapped, exposing a matted mess of curly dark hair. Storm tore the garment into three strips, using one part to gag the man, another to secure his legs, and a third to tie the leg restraint to the hands, trussing him up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
It was not, to be sure, the most secure binding Storm had ever devised. But it would take the guard some time to get out when he came to. Storm planned to be long gone before that happened.
Storm’s final act before exiting was to take the key ring off a hook by the door. He approached the gate, which was as tall as the wall on either side of it and made of wrought iron. It was secured by a thick bolt that went deep into the ground.
He was impressed. A tank could have gotten through. But any other vehicle wouldn’t have been able to get enough speed on the narrow street to ram it open, nor would it be able to gain the proper angle to hit it head-on.
That said, the gate was no match for the thin piece of metal now in Storm’s hand. He slid the key into a well-oiled lock, which slid easily. Storm lifted the bolt, squeezed through a narrow opening in the gate, then left it ajar — enough that it wouldn’t impede his exit, if that exit had to be speedy; but, hopefully, not enough that anyone inside would notice.
He was in. As far as he knew, he was the first American ever to penetrate a Medina Society cell. And what worried him more than anything was that, at least so far, it wasn’t that difficult.
Which, in itself, seemed all wrong.
THIS BEING HIS FIRST CHANCE to study the inside of the compound in real life — not on Google Earth — Storm hastily slid to his left and found shelter behind an accumulation of scrap metal.
From that area of relative safety, he assessed his surroundings. There was a large, open area between the wall and what appeared to be the main house. Except to call it “open” was a misstatement. It was a cluttered mess, with heaps of metal everywhere, some several stories high. In the dim light under the quarter moon, it was difficult to say what all of them were. More than anything, Storm could discern the darkened outlines of shapes jutting out from the piles: rectangles at strange angles, circles looming in the sky, triangles heaped atop parallelograms. Storm wondered if the Medina Society had used some of these metal pieces to make the laser that shot down the planes in the Emirates.
Some of the piles had large cranes or dump trucks next to them. His nose told him there was a smelter somewhere nearby. He could smell its faint but sharp odor, its acrid scent still present even though it was not currently in operation.
Storm found himself smiling at the clever, perhaps intentional double entendre of the Ahmed Trades Metal rallying cry. This cell — or training camp, or whatever significance it held within the Medina Society network — was a scrapyard where metal was traded all day long.
Except now, in the dark of night, those mountains of metal were just one aspect of the terrain he could use to his tactical advantage. If the several hundred yards of space between the gate and the main house had been truly open, covering it would have been a suicide mission. Anyone inside who happened to be looking out could have picked him off at leisure.
Instead, Storm was able to slink from one mound to the next in relative safety. He had closed the gap between himself and the house significantly when he reached the smelter, an older brick building topped by a tall chimney.
He was leaving it when he tripped on something in the darkness. In his peripheral vision, he saw that it was a human leg. He whirled and drew Dirty Harry, ready to fire in case what he had tripped on was a sleeping insurgent.
But no. This particular human’s mortality had already been taken. Storm saw the top of the man’s head had a rather large chunk missing.
Then he saw the eyes, the mouth, the pointy chin. He recognized Professor Stanford Raynes. Or, rather, what was left of him after his apparent run-in with Ahmed and his men.
Storm took no great pleasure in Raynes’s death. But it did solve one problem: the secret of the promethium’s location had more than likely died with him. Now Storm was the only holder of that secret, and he did not plan to give it up.
Leaving the body, Storm had worked his way to within about fifty yards of the main house when he saw the cargo truck. It was sitting just off the driveway, under a towering eucalyptus tree, by itself.
Storm sprinted to it, taking the risk of being fully exposed for perhaps three seconds, relying on his black clothing to conceal him. He reached the rear bumper and moved his hand toward the catch that would allow him to lift the trailer door. If he could remove the box with the promethium and hide it somewhere, it might not solve the whole problem, but it would be at least one less load of the stuff that could be used to make a weapon.
But the door was padlocked. And unlike the cheap, drugstore lock Raynes had used on the cave, this appeared to be of a more substantial variety. The dial went from one to a hundred, not one to forty. Storm brought his ear to it, gave it several turns in both directions, listening intently the whole time. He did not hear anything like a pin falling into place. The better locks were cushioned that way.
Any of the other strategies he might have used to thwart the lock involved making noise. And noise, at this point in his mission, was the enemy. For all Storm knew, one of the buildings he had seen was a barracks, filled with terrorists-in-waiting, any one of whom would love to have an American agent as a trophy, or any one of whom would be willing to martyr himself in the effort, knowing all the while that seventy-two virgins awaited him in heaven.
Storm’s primary defense — explaining to the young men that virgins were vastly overrated as sexual partners — seemed inadequate.
So he decided to keep quiet. He slunk around to the wheel well where he had stuck his phone and retrieved it. Then he went to the driver’s side of the truck and pulled on the door handle. It was locked, too. He would have to deal with it and its payload later. Worst case, he’d break the window, climb in, and hot-wire the thing. Best case, he’d find a way to blow it up.
With the truck out of his mind, he focused on the main house. It was a sprawling, one-story adobe residence that looked like it had once been a farmhouse.
Storm began searching for access points, but saw nothing that thrilled him. Like many houses in that latitude, the windows were small and high. Adding to the difficulty factor, their glass panes appeared to be constructed from crosshatched metal bars that had been anchored into the structure itself.
So the windows were not an option. The roof, which was made of sturdy, terra-cotta tiles, was likewise impenetrable. There was a chimney, but it was capped and, in any event, Storm was not feeling like Santa Claus.
That left the front porch, which faced the driveway. It was something of a novel concept for Storm, actually trying to enter a house through the front door. But at the moment it looked like his best — and only — choice.
There were, broadly speaking, two ways to approach the house: slow or fast. Slow had its benefits, in that it would give him more time to study his target as he slunk slowly along the ground. It would also be far less detectable by anyone inside the house who happened to be looking outside.
But fast had the advantage of being over with quickly. It also would make him a harder target to hit. And since his previous dash did not seem to have been noticed, Storm gambled that past equaled precedent.
It was roughly a hundred feet from the front of the truck to the front of the house. Storm felt the wind against his ears as he sprinted the distance, pulling up to the side of the steps, where he couldn’t be seen from within the house.
There was no response to his mad dash. The house — the whole property, for that matter — remained dark and still. It was getting to be almost eerie, how unguarded everything inside seemed to be and how little opposition he had met.
Storm paused, listened. Nothing. Definitely nothing.
He turned and crept up the steps. The front porch was not especially tidy, littered with a random assortment of stuff that could not unfairly be categorized as junk. There were a few AHMED TRADES METAL signs. There were metal chairs that may or may not have been heading for the smelter. Standing next to the door was a tall sculpture that had been roughly welded together out of scrap metal. To Storm, it looked like the Tin Man, though he wasn’t sure if The Wizard of Oz was central in Egypt’s cultural lexicon.
“There’s no place like home,” Storm whispered to himself as he walked across the porch.
He had Dirty Harry out now, held low at his side. He was ready to raise and fire it at the slightest provocation.
There was just nothing to shoot. He reached for the screen door, then opened it. His hand went to the handle of the main door. It turned easily. Was this really happening? Was he really going to be able to just walk right into the front door of a Medina Society hangout?
The door was wooden and just slightly swollen against its doorframe. Storm had to put a little extra weight behind it, but it budged easily enough.
And then, without warning, it was like the world caught fire.
BEING THAT LIGHT TRAVELS FASTER than sound, Storm first became aware that illumination was suddenly pouring out of every orifice of the house, including some floodlights attached to the roof that he hadn’t seen before.
Nanoseconds later, the noise hit: a wailing, shrieking, ear-splitting alarm.
Storm reacted instinctively. He grabbed the Tin Man and tossed him across the door’s threshold. Then he rocketed himself through the maze of junk to his right and over the side of the porch railing. He flattened himself against some half-broken latticework that kept animals from crawling under the porch, keeping Dirty Harry tight against his chest.
As the siren continued pulsing at a volume that could have shaken a pharaoh from a four-thousand-year slumber, Storm stayed hidden in the shadow of the porch. He waited for the cavalry to emerge — dozens of future jihadists, swarming to protect their liege’s castle.
No one came. After a minute or so, the alarm stopped. The lights stayed on. Storm heard cursing and the sound of someone tossing the Tin Man aside. Storm dared to turn and peek through the bottom slat of the porch railing.
What he saw, backlit against the bright glow of the house, was one of the men he had shot earlier in the day. It was Ahmed, the leader of what Storm had thought was just a motley gang of desert bandits. When Storm had heard Raynes say the name Ahmed, it hadn’t triggered any bells. Ahmed was a common name in this part of the world. Had Storm known who the man really was, he would have taken care of all of this in the desert.
Yet another example of hindsight being fifty-fifty.
Ahmed took one step out on the porch, but no more. His head was bare, without its usual turban. His long, salt-and-pepper hair was greasy and unkempt. He was dressed in an ankle-length nightgown. He wore nothing on his feet. His right arm was tucked in a sling. His left arm carried a sawed-off shotgun.
He was letting the shotgun lead the way. He swung the muzzle from left to right, back to the middle, again to the right, and then to the left. Storm stayed absolutely still, knowing he was effectively invisible in the shadow of the porch, with all that junk to serve as cover.
Ahmed walked to the edge of the porch, swiveled the gun some more. He was mostly looking in the direction of the guard shack, where there was no activity.
“Wake up, you lazy dog,” he yelled in Arabic, but of course got no response.
“You’re fired,” he added, to no greater impact.
Storm had a perfect shot at that moment. He could have dropped Ahmed easily. But if he killed Ahmed, he would have no more intelligence about the Medina Society’s structure or organization, and certainly no idea of how to stop its current plot.
As a result, Storm maintained his hiding spot. Ahmed muttered a few choice Arabic words that ventured some unkind descriptions of the guard’s mother. Then Ahmed turned and walked back in the house.
It was finally dawning on Storm that there was no one else here. There was no cavalry, no bloodthirsty true believers coming to the leader’s aid. It was just the guard — who wasn’t going to be an issue — and Ahmed.
Well, them and the Tin Man. But Storm didn’t think the Tin Man would put up much of a fight. No heart.
Mostly, Storm couldn’t believe his luck: a Medina Society leader, ripe for the taking.
All he needed was some patience.
He leaned back down against the latticework and watched as, one by one, the lights in the house went out. Then the floodlights followed suit. He removed the AK-47 from his back. He would not need to lay down a heavy blanket of fire against just one man.
Storm’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness again and he began formulating his plan. Eventually, the leader — convinced that the Tin Man had been the cause of the false alarm — would fall back asleep. Storm just needed to be able to get into the house without tripping off all that sound and fury.
What kind of system was it? Knowing was the key to defeating it. Back in his days as a private eye — when he was barely scraping out enough business to cover the rent on his tiny strip-mall office — one of the services he offered his clients was consulting on alarm systems. Another one was defeating alarm systems so he could snoop in his target subjects’ homes, not that he advertised that particular offering in his literature.
He was not the world’s foremost expert on the subject. But he knew enough to get by. In his mind, he replayed the scene of himself opening the door. It had happened so fast the first time. But by concentrating on it, he began to slow it down. Each replaying got just a little longer. Details that he had missed the first time began to pop out, almost like a form of self-hypnosis.
Once he got the picture moving slowly enough, Storm caught what he was looking for: there were two pressure sensors in the doorframe, one just above eye level, the other down around his shins. He knew well enough how they worked. They were nothing more than small semicircles of plastic attached to springs. As long as they remained depressed, the alarm system believed the door was still closed. When the springs extended, the system knew the door had opened.
He just needed to keep them down. Back in his private eye days, he used chewing gum, tape, Silly Putty — whatever he had available. He just didn’t happen to have any of those things on him at the moment.
Then he remembered the eucalyptus tree that the cargo truck was parked under. Still moving cautiously, Storm crept around the other side of the porch. Then he made the sprint to the tree, running until he was on the opposite side of the trunk from the house.
He searched for old cuts and scratches in the tree, found several, and began pulling off the gum that had hardened there. He stuffed it in his mouth, where he began working it so it wasn’t quite so stiff. It tasted terrible — Wrigley’s had nothing to fear from untreated eucalyptus gum — but the consistency was right. He waited until he had a decent-sized mouthful of the goo, then moved back toward the house.
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 first 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.