Wild Storm

CHAPTER 33

BALTIMORE, Maryland

The first Major League Baseball game Derrick Storm ever attended was at the old Memorial Stadium, deep in a crumbling, blue-collar neighborhood of this town, far from the gentrification that was beginning to take place down at the harbor.

If Storm ever started to lose his mind to Alzheimer’s disease or any of the other maladies of old age, he knew for sure this would be the last memory to go: him as a seven-year-old, walking up the ramp at Memorial Stadium, seeing the field stretched out before him like an impossibly perfect emerald blanket, gripping his father’s hand tightly the whole time.

This particular Orioles game, which Storm attended with his father about two weeks later, was a close second. He didn’t hold Carl Storm’s hand this time. But he did put his arm around the old man before they walked down to their seats. By that point, Carl had heard all he wanted and more about his son’s most recent adventure.

“It’s great to be here with you,” Derrick said. “Sorry we had to delay it a little bit.”

“Come on,” Carl Storm said. “We don’t want to miss the first pitch.”

The last two weeks had been hectic, a nonstop stream of investigators and lawyers and judges, all asking for the story “from the beginning.”

Eventually, Storm had left Ingrid Karlsson in the custody of the International Court of Justice, where she, her assistant Tilda, and more than a dozen of the people she had hired to carry out her orders on two continents would face more than a thousand counts of murder in the first degree. Among the coconspirators was Nico Serrano, the director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama, who was currently being extradited from Panama for his role in the plot.

William McRae had been found, safe and sound, by a team of CIA agents, who were being called a hostage rescue team as a result of Jones’s relentless spin operation. Before he was reunited with his loving wife, Alida, McRae happily sold his designs for the laser to the U.S. government. Without the promethium to fuel it, the designs were nothing more than drawings on paper. Still, it funded an ambitious garden expansion for the McRaes, to say nothing of their grandchildren’s college educations.

The day McRae was rescued, another arrest was made: the Hercules police moved in on a man with a wine-stained face and slapped him with a variety of charges; among them were breaking and entering, possession of an unlicensed firearm, trespassing, and invasion of privacy — the result of a camera found to be filled with pictures of an elderly woman gardening.

Storm, meanwhile, had received no less than four banana cream cakes from a local bakery during his time in The Hague. All of them also contained thank-you notes from Alida, each note growing in length until Storm finally had time to acknowledge her, thank her, and ask her to stop.

Storm had returned home in time to catch the image of Katie Comely being splashed across the front page of the Washington Post — and scores of other newspapers around the country — for what was being hailed as one of the most significant Egyptian finds of the last two decades. Her mummy turned out to be Narmer, the ancient pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom. She was currently deciding between tenure-track positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College, though she was thought to be leaning toward Dartmouth.

As they walked down the stairs toward their seats at the game, Storm’s phone rang. Recognizing the number as coming from the Pentagon, Storm answered it.

“Yes?” he said.

He listened for a moment, then said, “So it’s done, then? Good. Thank you very much for letting me know. I appreciate it.”

“Who was that?” Carl Storm asked as his son ended the call.

“That was the former Lieutenant Marlowe. He’s now General Marlowe, third in line at the air force. He was just calling to tell me about the terrible error the air force just made. They mistakenly dropped a thirty-thousand-pound bunker-buster bomb not far from Luxor, Egypt. You may or may not know it, but bunker busters like that get incredibly hot when they detonate — many, many thousands of degrees. Good thing they dropped on an empty piece of the Sahara Desert with no significance whatsoever.”

“Good thing,” Carl said, grinning.

They reached Row B.

“You want the aisle?” Carl asked.

“No, that’s okay, you take it,” Derrick Storm said. “Seat 2B has been pretty good to me.”