Heat Storm (Castle)

  “I’m a little bit technologically challenged at the moment. And this is . . . not something I want to get on your boss’s radar.”

  “Are you two girls fighting again?” Bryan said. “Let me guess: You went to the prom in the same dress and now you’re fighting over who looks prettier.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Seriously, what’s going on?” Bryan asked.

  “At the moment, I’d say we have conflicting motivations,” Derrick said.

  “With you two? That’s every moment.”

  “You have a point.”

  “So, let me get this straight: You break into my apartment, vandalizing it in the process,” Bryan said. “And now I’m not only supposed to overlook that and help you, I’m supposed to help you even though this is another one of those times when doing so will greatly increase the chances that Jones decides to order an air strike on my head and then hide what’s left of my corpse in a cave in Afghanistan, where it will be feasted on by scorpions until it is nothing more than a scattered skeleton.”

  “The birds and vermin will pick you clean before the scorpions,” Derrick pointed out. “And the cave might technically be in Pakistan. Jones gets that special thrill in violating their sovereignty without their knowledge. He does it whenever he needs a pick-me-up.”

  “Fantastic. Either way, I don’t care. I know you’re going to pout and go on about how Jones is up to something underhanded that only Derrick Storm can prevent from turning into a full-blown diabolical plot, and how the very future of freedom, justice, and democracy is at stake.”

  “Freedom, justice, democracy, and my pale white ass,” Derrick said.

  “I still don’t care. And, in case I haven’t made it clear, you can forget it. I’m not helping you,” Bryan said. “I’d rather take my chances with the pouting than with the cave. I hate scorpions. And birds. And vermin.”

  “You’re going to force me to make this ugly, aren’t you,” Derrick said.

  “It wouldn’t matter even if you did. Even if I wanted to help you, I couldn’t. I don’t have access to the database from here.”

  “Except you do,” Derrick said. “You have a work-around that gets you in.”

  “No, I don’t,” Bryan said.

  “You do too. You told me about it in Antigua.”

  Bryan’s eyes narrowed. “I did not. You’re making that up. When was I—”

  “Buff,” Derrick said.

  “What?”

  “Buff. That’s when I learned that ‘buff’ is actually another way of saying yellow. This was Antigua, after the Whitaker Holdings job. We were celebrating. Maybe a little too much. You ended up dancing a jig for the Alpha Gams from the University of Alabama. They made you an honorary sister and even dressed you up like one. And their colors are red, buff, and green. As I think about it, I’m pretty sure I still have the photos saved in the cloud . . .”

  Bryan crossed his arms. His lips were pursed. “Oh, this gets better. So first you vandalize my apartment and now you threaten me with blackmail. You’re a real charmer, you know that, Storm?”

  “It’s because I’m so ruggedly handsome.”

  “You know what? I don’t care. You go ahead and do whatever you want with those photos. Publish them in the Washington Post for all I care. Heck, that would probably make me un-fireable. Transgender is totally in right now. I bet the women’s bathroom in the Cubby is a lot nicer than the men’s anyway. And, in any event, that work-around doesn’t work anymore. Jones found out about it and shut it down.”

  “Oh, come on, you know you can.”

  “I can’t. And I won’t. That’s final.”

  “All right. I didn’t want to bring this up, but—”

  Suddenly, Carl Storm rose from the couch and, with a growl in his throat, brought a halt to the bickering: “All right, knock it off and sit down. Both of you.”

  Agent Bryan and the younger Storm exchanged curious glances.

  “Sit. Now,” Carl reiterated.

  The two men complied.

  “Look,” Carl said, once they were settled. “When I was your age, I used to enjoy this crap, too. The chest-thumping. The macho bullshit. The posturing. The horse-trading. And it’s all fine for you, because you’re young and you have the energy. But I’m an old man. I’m tired. My prostate is the size of a watermelon, so I have to pee every twelve seconds; I’m cranky because I haven’t had dinner; and I’ve had more bullets fired in my direction today than is really good for a man. So I’m going to cut to the chase a little bit here.

  “Right now, you’re young. You’re powerful. You’re at the peak of your lives, and so the government needs you. And you think it’s always going to be that way. But eventually the government is going to move on, like it always does. It’ll be relying on younger men who are themselves in the prime of their lives. Jones will be dead, and you two will be kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage, and you know the only thing you’ll have then?”

  Bryan and Storm exchanged glances, like schoolboys who had missed a reading assignment and were now being stumped by the teacher.

  “Each other,” Carl finished. “That’s it: your former colleagues, the guys who were in the trenches with you, the ones who saved the world at your side, the ones who will remember what you could do back when you were young and will still appreciate that you did it even though you can’t do it anymore. And you probably don’t believe me now, but that’s going to mean more to you than you can possibly know. You’ll even come to recognize you love each other. You won’t say it, because who does that? And you’ll probably still give each other a hard time. But deep down, you’ll come to understand those bonds you have with your former colleagues are some of the most meaningful relationships in your lives, and you’ll come to realize you were blessed enough in this crappy world to be given two families: the one you were born with and the one you found on the job. So you!”

  Carl was pointing at his son. “You’re not going to threaten him or find some way to get leverage on him or any of that other macho crap guys do. You’re going to tell him how much you value him, how much you appreciate his skills, and how much you really need him right now, because you’re in a world of trouble if he doesn’t help you.”

  Derrick looked down at the hardwood floor and began mumbling, “So, Kevin, I—”

  “To his face!” Carl ordered.

  Derrick lifted his gaze. “I, uh . . . Look, you really are one of the best in the world at hacking into computer networks and cracking the seemingly uncrackable. And Dad is right. I’m kind of screwed if you don’t help me.”

  Bryan was grinning, perhaps a bit uncomfortably, but Carl pointed at him next.

  “And you! Wipe that silly smile off your face. You’re going to tell him it’s your pleasure to help him, because you know he’d do the same for you. Because you know if Jones ever did turn on you, he’s the one guy who would go to the ends of the earth to save your sorry ass, because that’s what brothers do for each other.”

  Bryan eyed Derrick. “Yeah, what he said. And I guess I could add that you’re one of the best in the world, too.”

  “Good,” Carl said. “Now shake hands, you two.”

  Derrick stuck out his hand first. Bryan accepted it with a firm grasp.

  “So this is naturally something I wouldn’t share with Jones,” Bryan said. “But I might just have a work-around I’ve been wanting to try out.”

  “Because you’re the man,” Derrick said.

  “No,” Bryan said, pointing at Carl. “He’s the man. You’re just lucky to have him as a dad.”

  * * *

  Bryan had set up his laptop on the kitchen island.

  Derrick was plating grilled cheese sandwiches and bacon, because that was all he could scrounge out of Bryan’s typical bachelor’s refrigerator.

  And Carl was peeing. For the second time.

  “Okay, I think I’m in,” Bryan said.

  “Attaboy,” Derrick said. “I knew you coul
d do it.”

  “Just make sure you give me a beautiful eulogy after Jones has me killed,” Bryan said. “I don’t want there to be a dry eye in the house.”

  “I’ll get choked up myself midway through, just to encourage any of the holdouts.”

  Carl had rejoined them in the kitchen. “Two buttons but no handle,” he was grumbling. “It’s a goddamn toilet, not the space shuttle.”

  “Hand me those pictures,” Bryan said. When Derrick complied, Bryan fed the first through a small scanner he had hooked up.

  “Shouldn’t take long now,” he said.

  A small bar on his screen filled, then it was replaced by a window featuring a man’s mug shot.

  “Okay, meet Alexi Hawley,” Bryan said. “Age thirty-three. American by birth. His mother is German, so he has dual citizenship and the passport to go with it. Grew up in Minnesota, where he was your basic juvenile delinquent: shoplifting and, oh, look at this, vandalism. He’s a man after your own heart, Storm.”

  Derrick smiled.

  “By the time he was eighteen it looks like he had acquired a real taste for crystal meth,” Bryan continued. “By twenty-one, he had run through his second and third chances with law enforcement. He had some serious time hanging over his head and had just gotten picked up again, but he was in luck, because the army was involved in two wars and it was starting to run out of bodies. He enlisted as an alternative to incarceration.”

  “And people say patriotism is dead,” Carl commented.

  “After basic training he shipped out, but it seems— unsurprisingly— he had a bit of a problem with authority. His platoon in Afghanistan had standing orders not to engage the enemy unless the enemy shot first. Apparently he wasn’t real keen to sit around and wait for Tommy Taliban to get an itchy trigger finger, so he’d either find ways to provoke them or just ignore orders and start firing. He wound up with a bad conduct discharge after he shot up a village that was suspected of harboring Taliban fighters.”

  “In other words, the guys in his platoon loved him, but everyone in the command structure couldn’t wait to get rid of him, because he kept making them have to fill out reports,” Derrick said.

  “Yeah, that’s not in the file. All I can tell you is that he went right back to the Middle East, doing private security for anyone who would give him a bulletproof vest and a big gun. Then he started moving farther east and freelancing and . . . let’s see, looks like he popped up with the Tamil Tigers. Lovely. He spent six months in a jail in Laos on suspicion of treason. Bet that was fun. And then he ended up in China, where he—”

  “Started working for the Shanghai Seven,” Carl filled in.

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  Carl wagged his bushy eyebrows in his son’s direction. “Just a hunch,” he said.

  “All right. Well, that’s where the file on Alexi Hawley ends. As for this other one . . . Is that a carpentry nail in his forehead?”

  “That’s actually referred to as a common nail,” Carl said.

  “I don’t want to know,” Bryan said as he fed the photo through his scanner and waited for a result to pop up. When it did, Bryan studied it for a minute or so.

  “Okay, here we go,” he said. “Terence Paul Winter. A real Boy Scout, this guy. And I mean that literally. He was an Eagle Scout with Troop Eighty-Seven out of Davenport, Iowa. Member of the Future Farmers of America. Never in trouble with the law. Went to Iowa State. Double-majored in business and Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese. Got his MBA in international business at Stanford then started consulting in the logistics industry.”

  “How would a guy like that wind up associating with a scumbag tweaker like Alexi Hawley?”

  “I’m getting to that. After he did his time as a consultant, he caught on with OOCL, Oriental Overseas Container Line. They’re one of the real big boys in global shipping, as I’m sure you know. And then . . .”

  Bryan started chuckling. “Oh. Oh, Storm. You have really outdone yourself this time.”

  “What?” Derrick said.

  “Well, it seems OOCL assigned Winter to Shanghai. That’s one of China’s major ports, so his career was obviously doing pretty well. And he started getting to know the movers and shakers there.”

  “Including, let me guess, the Shanghai Seven,” Carl said.

  “Yeah, but not how you think. Imagine this, if you will. He’s this young executive; a big, good-looking kid from Iowa who spoke the language. He’s going to all the right parties. He’s got a good job. And it looks like he caught the eye of one of the Shanghai Seven’s daughters. A whirlwind romance ensued, followed by a high-profile wedding that was reported to cost three million dollars. Congratulations, Storm, you just killed one of the Shanghai Seven’s son-in-laws.”

  Derrick rolled his eyes while Carl clapped him on the back. “I always encouraged you to aim high, son. Nicely done.”

  “It looks like the Shanghai Seven assigned the son-in-law to help run their American operations. So he was over here, along with the daughter. My guess is Big Daddy called him up and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this problem in America right now. I’m going to send some mercenaries over. Have them help you take care of it.’ Or maybe Hawley was the only one with Shanghai Seven connections and the others were more recent hires. Tough to say when I can’t run the other three through the system.”

  “Yeah, they didn’t stick around long enough for us to take nicely lit portraits,” Derrick said.

  “It doesn’t really matter at this point anyway,” Carl said. “We’ve got the Shanghai Seven on our ass. And now it’s personal. That’s the takeaway.”

  Bryan was nodding. “For what it’s worth, we were hearing a lot of chatter today that the Shanghai Seven were assembling some kind of operation. They’re apparently looking for something. But we didn’t know what—or who is doing all the looking. One of our assets just said they were prepared to pump a quote-unquote ‘small army’ over here until they found it.”

  “An operative. You know who?”

  “Negative. I got that from Jones.”

  “That’s because . . .” Derrick began, then completed the thought in his mind: Jones is the operative, and he’s getting his scoop straight from the Shanghai Seven. He’s leaking out a little bit of information so it seems like he’s on the right side. Really, he’s working both. Classic Jones.

  “Because what?” Bryan asked.

  Derrick studied his friend. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Bryan. It was that he wasn’t sure it was good for Bryan’s health, short- or long-term, to know too much. Sometimes, especially when you were one of Jedediah Jones’s agents, ignorance really was bliss. People who knew too much tended to become targets.

  “Just forget about it,” Derrick said.

  “No, no. Look, you need to come in. The Shanghai Seven was already bringing the pain on you, and that was before you went and killed part of the family. I don’t even want to think about what they’re going to do now. Just come into the Cubby. Jones will protect you.”

  Yeah, right. Jones will hand me over with my head resting on a platter and an apple in my mouth, Derrick thought.

  “I really appreciate your help,” Derrick said. “Dad’s right. All we really have in this big bad world is each other. You know I’ll always have your back. You might . . . You might not see me for a while.”

  “What are you talking about? I swear, I don’t think Jones is up to anything. Or at least not anything more than usual. You can trust him.”

  “Let’s go, Dad,” Derrick said.

  “Jeez, guys,” Bryan whined. “Don’t you at least want the grilled cheese?”

  “Sorry we can’t stick around,” Derrick said, knowing that each minute they spent at Bryan’s apartment increased the risk that Jones might have a way of finding them there. “Don’t worry. We’ll take the elevator this time.”

  And then, Storm thought, we run.

  FIFTEEN

  HEAT

  Nikki Heat hit the concrete and r
olled, then crawled behind a parked car, an older Mercedes station wagon long enough and wide enough to provide effective cover. She hoped.

  The drunk restaurant-goers, in all their fancy clothing, were scattered. Some were screaming. Others were ducking. One had started running up the street in the direction of Columbus Avenue. Heat couldn’t tell if any of them had been hit.

  She leaned into the door panel of the Mercedes, feeling its cold steel against her side like a warm blanket. She had pulled out her 9mm and now just needed to know where to aim it.

  Daring to raise her head just a little, she scanned the buildings on the other side of the street. She was looking for movement on the roof, an open window, a curtain being blown by the breeze, anything to indicate where the shooter was.

  All was still.

  But not for long. Two cops, clutching large, bulletproof shields against their torsos, had emerged from the pockmarked front door of the Twentieth Precinct. If they were armed, they were not pulling their weapons. Their entire focus was on protecting the civilians.

  There were eight of them altogether—seven, if you didn’t count the guy who was still running up the block until he disappeared around the corner, seemingly determined to start his own version of the New York City Marathon. Working steadily, the cops grabbed each one of the remaining seven, hauling them to safety behind the shields.

  Heat kept her gaze across the street, moving her eyes constantly in the hopes she would see something that stood out. Occasionally, she stole glances at the door. Given enough time, the Crime Scene Unit could perform a ballistics analysis and determine the approximate position and angle the bullets had been shot from. Heat was trying to do a quick-and-dirty version of that calculation on her own.

  But each time her glance went back to one of the buildings on the other side of 82nd Street, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  A few times, she thrust her head above the station wagon, then immediately brought it back down, playing peekaboo with a would-be sniper. She varied where she did it, popping up from behind the trunk one time, then the hood the next, then the middle of the vehicle. She was trying to see if she could draw any more fire.