Except everything in the apartment seemed still. She was the only one moving. At least for the moment.
Heat took one more step, bringing her more fully into the living room, at which point she became aware of just how total the destruction was. From her current vantage point, it appeared every inch of the apartment had been violated in one way or another.
She was trying to stay vigilant, mindful the intruder might still be in there. But there were certain physiological responses, all involuntary, that were making it difficult. Her pulse had quickened. She had broken into a sweat. Her hands were shaking.
Having your home thoroughly ransacked will trigger those kinds of responses.
It’s just stuff, Heat tried to tell herself. It’s either replaceable or it’s not. Focus on what’s coming at you around the next corner. Stay vigilant and—
Then Heat saw the window to the fire escape was still open. The Serpent—and this just felt like the work of The Serpent, who had threatened mayhem and destruction and seemed to be carrying through with it—had apparently already made his exit.
On the chance that it was a decoy, Heat performed a sweep of the remaining rooms, closets, and bathrooms, with the 9mm still up and her finger on the trigger. But that pass only confirmed what she knew the moment she saw that open window: She was alone in the apartment, after all.
She returned to the living room, holstered her gun, and allowed herself to more thoroughly assess the damage.
It was something beyond substantial. It seemed there was no piece of furniture that hadn’t been attacked, no pillow left unripped, no table that remained upright, no chair that hadn’t been overturned. Heat’s shoes crunched on glass from broken picture frames no matter where she tried to walk. Knickknacks and mementos of varying levels of sentimental importance—many of them either owned by, gifted to, or gifted from her mother—were haphazardly strewn about the room.
Heat blocked out every thought about where those trinkets and talismans had originated from and the stories behind them. That would only distract her from what mattered at the moment, which was figuring out if anything was missing.
So far, the only thing that she noticed for sure was the tape player Storm had given her. She had left it on the coffee table, which was still there, albeit on its side. But there was no sign of the tape player next to it, or under the torn-up couch, or anywhere else, for that matter. The intruder appeared to have made off with it.
But that meant he didn’t just get the device itself. The player still had the cassette inside it. Heat had been listening to it just that morning.
Heat continued her tour of the wreckage. Back in the bedroom, which had her home office shoved in one corner, the filing cabinet seemed to have been a target that received The Serpent’s particular attention. Files had been opened and emptied onto the floor, then tossed aside. Sealed envelopes had been jaggedly torn open. It was everything from credit card statements to old insurance policies to product handbooks to health records to who-knows-what, all littering the floor in a pile several inches thick and several feet wide, in a haphazard pattern surrounding the now-empty filing cabinet.
The intruder had obviously been looking for something in there.
The bills, right? It had to be the bills. If The Serpent was working for the Shanghai Seven—and it made sense that he was—and the bills were of utmost importance to them, then it logically followed that recovering the bills had been the real objective there.
Killing Bob Aaronson had just been a kind of shot across Heat’s bow, a demonstration of The Serpent’s ferocity and the Shanghai Seven’s brutality. And he had died for essentially no reason. Nikki’s mother never would have hid the bills in her own apartment. That’s why she entrusted them with George The Bartender, who wouldn’t have hid them in Cynthia’s place, either.
But The Serpent obviously didn’t know that. Because The Serpent hadn’t listened to the cassette tape yet.
Except . . . the Shanghai Seven clearly knew about the recording— that’s who Storm had stolen it from in the first place. So was it possible The Serpent didn’t really work for the Shanghai Seven? Or had the Shanghai Seven simply not told The Serpent about the recording?
Or was this not really the work of The Serpent? Was this some other actor?
So many question marks. So few periods.
Heat continued farther into the bedroom. What few clothes she still kept in the apartment had been strewn about. The drawers had been yanked out of the dresser bureau and turned upside down. The mattress was torn open and leaning against the side of the wall. The box spring had lines where a knife had slashed through it. The books on her nightstand—including a riveting thriller by Brad Parks, one of her new favorite authors—had been toppled.
She moved on to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was open and barren, half its contents lying at the bottom of the bathtub, the other half in the sink. The contents of the vanity had been pulled out and strewn on the floor. The lid on the back of the toilet had been lifted off and was now only half in place.
Back through the disarray of the bedroom, she went next to the kitchen, which had not been spared. Pots and pans had been pulled out of cabinets and left where they had been thrown. The utensils had been treated the same. Things that had once been tidy and cool in the refrigerator were now messy and warm on the tile below.
As with most of the rest of the apartment, nothing was missing. It had all just been violently pushed, pulled, and torn askew. Every surface, be it vertical or horizontal, had been explored in some manner.
That included the liquor cabinet above the fridge. Bottles had been tossed out. Some had shattered, making the kitchen smell like a bar fight. But it didn’t seem to have been the subject of any greater—or lesser—attention than anything else, which was another sign that made Heat think this burglar had been unaware of Cynthia’s long-ago words. I’d not only trust this spot with my life, I’d trust it with my best Scotch.
Heat checked the last bathroom—a little half bath off the living room that had been largely unscathed, mostly because it had so little in it—then returned to the living room.
She stood there, hands on her hips, taking stock of the catastrophe. She could feel her heart tearing. It wasn’t just that it would take weeks to clean it. It wasn’t just the money it would cost, regardless of whatever insurance would or wouldn’t cover. It wasn’t just that some of what had been broken was irreplaceable.
It was that while this was her place, it was also—in a more essential way—her mother’s place. And that made it feel like some part of her mother had been attacked and now could never be put back together—again.
Heat walked over to the front door and shut it. What good that would do, she couldn’t even guess. Maybe she wanted to restore some shred of a sense of security.
She knew there were two detectives downstairs who would want to know that the murder of Bob Aaronson had only been a prelude to another crime, and that the pillaging of the apartment had been the killer’s real purpose.
But Heat couldn’t bring herself to alert them. She didn’t want those detectives working this. She wanted her own people on it. And there was one person in particular she needed: the man known in the Twentieth Precinct as the King of All Surveillance Media.
She pulled out her phone and punched one of the speed-dial settings. Two rings later she heard:
“Raley.”
“Hey, Rales. Is the king feeling lordship over his kingdom today?”
“The king is, indeed, sitting on his throne.”
“Lovely image. Anyhow, I need a favor. You up for doing one?”
“Go.”
She told him about the apartment and about what had happened to Bob Aaronson sometime between 4:35 and 4:52 that afternoon.
“I’m sure the Thirteenth Precinct is going to have someone going through the neighborhood, looking for surveillance footage,” Heat finished. “But that someone won’t be the king. Do you think you could take a run at it???
?
“I can,” he said. “What are the rules of engagement?”
“For the One-Three, the Fourth Amendment is fully in force. For you?”
She could practically feel Raley leaning forward, then said, “Don’t worry your head about it. You get what you can get by any means necessary.”
“Any means?”
“Whoever did this is never going to let himself wind up in a courtroom,” she said. “So, yes, have at it.”
“Absolutely, Captain. Consider it done.”
Heat ended the call, then once again surveyed the disaster scene that was her apartment. Where did she even begin?
She bent down and picked up one of the shattered picture frames. It was a picture she knew well, having walked by it thousands of times over the years. But it had been some time since she had actually studied it. Through the pieces of jagged glass, she saw two people.
One was practically a stranger. It was a much-younger version of herself, on her high school graduation day. She was wearing the ridiculous mortarboard hat foisted on graduates the world over, and a purple— had her class color really been purple?—polyester gown. Her face was rounder, still with residual pockets of baby fat clinging to it. She looked both happy and optimistic, in the way that perhaps only a naive eighteen-year-old who thinks she’s about to take over the world can be.
The other person was Cynthia Heat. She was wearing a classic A-line dress with a sash across the waistline that accented her still-trim figure, a dress that was much like the woman who wore it: simple but elegant, a latter-day Jackie O, a modern-day Princess Kate. Her mother would have been, what, about two years shy of fifty at that point? Back when that photo was snapped, Nikki probably thought of her mother as being just, well, old. It struck thirty-six-year-old Nikki that she now was closer in age to the woman in the photo than to the girl.
Yet whereas she had been able to track her own aging in such minute detail—watching each day as her features sharpened, as she lost her wide-eyed innocence, as fine lines appeared around her mouth—she had no idea what the years had done to her mother. In Nikki’s imagination, Cynthia Heat was still frozen in time.
But she had been out there, somewhere, maturing and changing, day by day, year by year, just like everyone else. And if Nikki felt anything as she looked at that picture, it was mostly a sense of sadness that she had been deprived of all those days and all those years.
There was nothing she could do to get them back. The best she could do was make sure that she didn’t allow any more of them to slip away.
TWELVE
STORM
There are those who might have denigrated Carl Storm’s 1986 Buick Electra.
Its design was boxy—nothing but straight lines, almost as if it had been drawn by a fourth grader who was just learning to use a ruler as a straightedge. Its hood hinged at the front, so that it opened away from the passenger compartment, a feature so universally scorned that Buick discarded it, along with the entire Electra line, just a few years later. It was so impossible to get parts for it anymore, it had actually driven Carl Storm to the Internet, because eBay was one of the only places where you could find, say, a fuse box or a headlight or a bearing that actually fit.
Beyond that, Carl’s vehicle had its own unique peccadilloes. The column shifter had gotten so finicky, you needed to bang it down with your palm and just hope it ended up on drive. The fan sometimes blew hot air straight from the engine no matter how low you turned the AC setting, and then magically fixed itself the next time you drove it. The windows rolled down slowly, or sometimes not at all, depending on what kind of mood the motors powering them were in. Parts of its undercarriage creaked no matter how often Carl lubed them, making even a drive through a parking lot a somewhat noisy experience.
But when it came to slipping past wary law enforcement, it turned out a 1986 Buick Electra driven by a man in his late sixties was a pretty good bet.
As the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office descended upon the Storm residence, where there had been multiple reports of gunshots flooding the switchboard, the deputies did not pay the slightest attention to the boxy old car being driven by the cranky old man heading in the opposite direction, out of the neighborhood.
They had left Derrick’s Ford behind at Carl’s insistence. He was sure it had a tracking device on it, as well as listening devices. Derrick agreed, removing Dirty Harry from it on his way out, not worrying about the police connecting him to the car. It was registered to a shell company they would never be able to trace.
“Now, you want to explain to me why you took those pictures of those dead guys?” Carl asked. “Because otherwise I’m starting to worry my son is a fetish-driven serial killer who saves souvenirs of his victims.”
“Cripes, Dad, I took their photos, not their ears.”
“Still.”
“Well, okay. I snapped those pictures so I can figure out who’s after us.”
“Well, it’s that snake Jones, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’d rather know for sure than guess, wouldn’t you?”
“Okay. I hear you. But what can you do with a couple of Polaroids?”
“I can use Jones’s technology again him,” Derrick said.
“Uh, you want to explain that?”
“Jones is, at his core, a hoarder of information. He understands that in today’s world, that’s the ultimate currency. He’s developed an intelligence database over the years that is second to none. People have literally died just so Jones can have a few more megabytes of data. Every foreign operative. Every mercenary. Every freelancer. If anyone has pulled a job anywhere in the world, there’s a pretty good chance he’s in the system. Those guys who were after us were clearly pros. They’ll be in there. Sometimes I think everyone alive is in there.”
Carl grimaced. “Couldn’t the guy just collect stamps or something?”
“Collecting humans is more fun,” Derrick said, then pointed to an on-ramp. “Hop on the Beltway, then get us on 395 North.”
“Got it.”
“Anyway, as I was saying, Jones has everything the rest of the CIA has, plus some stuff he doesn’t share with anyone else outside of his unit. In addition, he employs a cadre of tech savants—I call them ‘the nerds’—who sign nondisclosure agreements that basically ensure Jones can kill the next six generations of their families if they let anything leak. So it’s buttoned up pretty tight. But if we can get into his database, I can take those Polaroids and get an ID faster than you can say ‘facial recognition software.’ ”
“Yeah, yeah, fancy pants, I got you,” Carl said. “I get that Jones has all the beeps, whistles, and bells. But how are we going to get access to his information? You don’t even know where the Cubby is. And even if you did, I’m sure it’s impenetrable.”
“It is. We’re not going there. We’re heading to Kevin Bryan’s apartment in Crystal City.”
“Bryan. He’s that Irish fella who works for Jones, right?”
“That’s him.”
They had merged onto the Capital Beltway. Carl Storm was doing a steady fifty-five, which earned him a long and growing number of cars stacked up behind him, waiting for opportunities to pass. One lane over, cars were ripping past him doing seventy-five. Farther over, in the true passing lane, a pair of dueling Hyundais were tempting Mach one.
Derrick ignored them, along with the temptation to ask his father to speed up. Carl Storm was former FBI. He railed all the time about state troopers tacitly allowing a certain level of speeding. His argument was that if you made the de facto speed limit different from the posted one, you essentially made the law seem arbitrary or somehow negotiable, which ultimately weakened the entire legal system.
When Carl went on that rant, Derrick just nodded and waited until his dad wasn’t in the car to take one of his Fords up to ninety. In theory, he agreed with his father. In practice, Derrick Storm had places to go.
Shortly after they merged onto 395, Carl broke the silence. “A
re you sure you can trust Bryan? Don’t get me wrong, he’s always struck me as a good guy. But if he works for Jones, he’s part of the wolf pack, isn’t he?”
Derrick didn’t know how to explain that within the Cubby, there were varying levels of loyalty to Jones’s tactics and methodologies. At one end—never asking why, just following blindly—was Clara Strike. Storm was the opposite pole. Agent Kevin Bryan and his partner, Agent Javier Rodriguez, were somewhere in the middle. They carried out their orders unless they realized there was a good reason not to.
And every time Derrick had provided that reason, they had come around to his way of thinking. They had gone behind Jones’s back often enough that Derrick knew they’d do it again.
“We can trust him,” Derrick said. “Besides, we don’t really have a choice. At this point, it’s pretty much trust Agent Bryan or stay in the dark.”
“Got it. So, what, we go over there, explain ourselves, and hope he helps us out?”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Derrick explained.
“Nothing is with that human reptile.”
“Yep. I think if he had his way, his agents would just sleep in the Cubby like he often does. He grudgingly recognizes they want to have their own lives. He just doesn’t like it. He considers it a point of weakness. He knows agents are far more vulnerable in their own homes, where they’ll relax and take their guard down, than they are out in the field. So he has the nerds monitor all of the agents’ places of residence.”
“Then we can’t get in after all?”
“No, we can. The nerds can’t cover everything all the time. Even Jones has limits. He relies on the fact that bad guys will think there aren’t security precautions at an agent’s home, and will therefore be more reckless. Depending on the agent’s living setup, the countermeasures in place vary. In Bryan’s case, he lives in one of the high-rises in Crystal City. Jones has the security cameras in the lobby patched into the Cubby. And he has the door to Bryan’s unit wired to alert the nerds in the case of unauthorized entry. But that’s it. So I’ve got an idea of how I can get in.”