Heat Storm (Castle)

  “Yeah. It’s in my pocket.”

  “Good. So as I was saying, cut away the ice bags, shed the grass, pop the latch on a window, and climb in the house.”

  “Being careful to take countermeasures against whatever security system is in place.”

  “If it’s a window, it’s going to be one of three things: pressure sensitive, magnetic, or motion detecting,” Carl said. “There are ways of defeating all three.”

  “Then we escort ourselves to Jones’s bedroom, stick a gun in his face, and make him start talking.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me this is old school?”

  “No. I believe this is TITS.”

  Derrick shook his head one last time. “This is never going to work.”

  * * *

  The perimeter of Jones’s property was ringed with shrubs and trees meant to make it look like any other in the neighborhood.

  They were, in fact, strategically placed to ensure that no vehicle larger than a scooter would be able to thread through them. Nature was sometimes as effective as anything humankind could design in that respect. Plus, it was prettier.

  The driveway was also fortified in ways hidden from the casual observer. The tasteful brick pillars and the black wrought iron gate were reinforced by steel rods that were anchored in a huge block of underground concrete. The asphalt was embedded with spikes that deployed if the system detected an unauthorized entry attempt.

  An M1A2 Abrams tank probably would be able to get over and through it. Anything short of that would be thwarted.

  There was nothing, however, to prevent a person on foot from entering the property. The CIA’s security people were relying on the cameras to intercept that kind of security breach.

  And so the Storm boys were simply able to stroll onto Jones’s property, carrying their grass blankets on their backs. Contrary to popular belief, thermal cameras can’t see through thick tree or leaf coverage. The vegetation, which adopts the same temperature as the ambient air, acts as a screen.

  The easy part of the journey ended once they reached the edge of the forest. From there, it was several hundred yards of upward-sloping lawn all the way to Jones’s house, which was surrounded by flower beds filled with tasteful but insubstantial landscaping: some low shrubs, some perennials that had begun to wilt as the fall days grew short, some mums that had been planted to give the place a little late-season color.

  In between them and the flower beds, there was nothing—not even a clump of daffodils—to give them cover.

  Derrick had been here before, not as an infiltrator but as a guest. He and Jones had been celebrating the disruption of the sale of enriched Plutonium 239 to an international arms dealer who could have then sold it to the North Koreans, the Iranians, or half a dozen other undesirable buyers. Jones had given Derrick a tour of the property, followed by a meal of roasted pheasant. Then they had retired to the back porch for cigars and brandy. It was during the second brandy that Derrick spied one of the cameras and Jones, flush-faced and uncharacteristically loose-tongued, began bragging.

  Now Derrick was looking at the property again, albeit with a very different objective. His chief concern was navigational. Even if Carl’s ridiculous ice-and-grass suit worked, how would they see to find the house if they were covered in sod? Carl had insisted they could lie down, then lift up the grass for a moment when they needed to make sure they were still on the right course.

  Derrick immediately saw a better solution.

  “The mow lines,” he said, pointing at the striped pattern that the landscapers had left behind. “We can follow them straight to the house.”

  “Good plan,” Carl said. “Let’s suit up.”

  Derrick gave a resigned sigh, then pulled the grass blanket over his head, supporting the edges of it with his hands so the seams between the square chunks wouldn’t show.

  As soon as he took his first steps out of the forest, he expected to hear the whir of a drone, the shout of an alarm, something that would indicate what a terrific failure Carl’s plan was. To anyone watching during the day, it would have been a most curious sight: two walls of grass that suddenly started walking out from beneath the trees.

  But, of course, there was no one watching at night. Just a camera that, if Carl’s theory was correct, couldn’t see a thing.

  Derrick’s first steps were halting. It was an odd sensation. His body, which was packed in ice, was so numb he could barely feel it. And yet his face was already perspiring from the effort it took to walk from the car, through the forest, and now up the yard, all while carrying the heavy blanket.

  For Derrick, who kept himself in prime shape by eschewing conventional weights and health club contraptions in favor of real-world workouts—flipping huge tires, carrying rocks, hauling weighted sleds up hills—this was a manageable, even familiar type of exercise. But he worried about his father. While still solidly built, Carl Storm wasn’t quite the horse he had once been.

  Derrick could hear the old man grunting and straining from underneath his grass cloak. Carl’s breathing was growing more labored with each step.

  Finally, after about two hundred yards, he stopped.

  “Sorry,” he said softly. “I need a blow.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Derrick said, to make his dad feel better about taking his time. It wouldn’t help anything to have Carl suffer a heart attack on Jedediah Jones’s lawn. Derrick hunkered down and tried to think about not emitting heat.

  After a minute or two, during which time Carl’s breathing went from a strained wheeze to a more manageable heavy pant, he said, “Okay, let’s get going.”

  Derrick’s legs started churning again. He could see only the grass at his feet, and remained cognizant of staying in the same mow line. He corrected his course as soon as he was about to walk into grass that had been mowed in a different direction.

  The water, which began as a trickle down his legs and arms, was really pouring off him now. It was some combination of melted ice and sweat, and it had both soaked his clothes and pooled in his boots.

  A hundred yards or so later, Carl again huffed, “Rest.” They settled down for about three minutes this time. Carl was clearly giving it everything he had. It took longer for his breathing to get down to an acceptable level again. Derrick felt uneasy the whole time, but he knew his father was doing his best.

  “All right,” Carl whispered.

  They were moving again. The slope of the lawn had leveled off some, which told Storm they were getting closer to the house. How close, he couldn’t say—and he didn’t dare lift up the blanket for a look. Despite the ice, he felt like he was creating a lot of heat, which would escape if given the chance. He didn’t know what that would look like on the screen that was piped into the Cubby—like a cloud of red, floating up?—or to the program that monitored the cameras, constantly searching for anything large and mobile.

  This time, they only made it about fifty yards before Carl let out a ragged, “Break.”

  The break itself last even longer. Five minutes? Seven? Trapped underneath a grass blanket, feeling incredibly exposed, still convinced this couldn’t possibly work, it felt like five or seven hours. Derrick was trying not to get impatient with his father. But, at the same time, there was a reason men in their seventies were no longer considered fit for duty. And this was it.

  Derrick was shedding so much water, the grass actually squeaked a little as he stood back up.

  “Come on, Dad. We’ve got to move. I think we’re almost there. One last good push and I think we’ll make it.”

  “Okay. I’ll give it everything I got,” Carl said.

  The yard was almost flat now. Any moment, Derrick expected to see the grass give way to some dirt, then to the mums that had been planted at the flower bed’s edge.

  Ten steps. Twenty. Derrick was trying to keep at his father’s ever-slowing pace, so they were really baby steps. Carl was really struggling, but they were almost there.
Derrick was sure of it.

  “Just a little farther,” he whispered, as much for his own morale as anything.

  He was daring to feel confident. For as hot and wet as he was, for as much as his boots sloshed, for as ridiculous as the whole thing was, the grass shield had stayed cool. Carl’s plan had actually worked.

  Or at least that’s what Derrick thought.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  * * *

  From the perspective of the computer tasked with monitoring the infrared cameras, the questionable data was not the moving walls of grass, because the cameras truly couldn’t see them.

  It was that the walls of grass were occasionally leaving behind slicks of warm water that grew in size as they went up the hill. There were two puddles about two hundred yards up the hill; two more a hundred yards later; then, and this is what tripped the alarm, two fifty yards after that.

  It was the last pair that caused the computer to alert one of the nerds, who studied those blotches of warmth with great interest. To the nerd, it almost looked like a slug was leaving behind a trail of ooze. Except she couldn’t see the slug—just the ooze.

  The nerd ordered the drone, which had its own infrared camera, up into the sky. Unlike the fixed cameras mounted on the house, the drone could move around and study this unusual pattern from a variety of angles. The nerd still wasn’t sure what she was seeing, only that it was happening in front of her boss’s house, and that therefore she’d rather apologize for a false negative than face unemployment (or worse) for an unreported positive.

  Once she determined the blobs were moving, she made the call, dispatching a team of agents with human eyes that could not see infrared, but most surely could see the two walls of walking grass advancing on Jones’s house.

  The Storms, who were underneath their blankets—which blocked heat from getting out but also sound from coming in—were unaware of this. They couldn’t hear the drone when it took flight. They also hadn’t heard the agents who had quietly moved into position around them.

  No, all they could hear was when a very stern voice finally shouted: “CIA security! Freeze!”

  The Storm boys hadn’t discussed what they would do if they were detected. Maybe it was because no conversation was really necessary. As father and son, Carl and Derrick Storm had 50 percent of their genetic material in common: long chains of identical nucleotides twisted into a double helix of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine; the language of life.

  And the word surrender wasn’t written in any of it.

  As Derrick flashed out his razor blade and began furiously slashing at the Saran Wrap, he knew his father was doing the same. The wrapping had been a slow, laborious process. The unwrapping was accomplished with a few quick wrist flicks.

  Then Derrick threw the blanket off his head. The lawn was still mostly dark, though it was now split by flashlight beams that made it difficult for him to know how many agents there were or where they were standing—other than that they seemed to have positioned themselves between him and the house.

  He started running, semi-blinded by the light, in the opposite direction, toward the dark of the forest. It was, perhaps, a long shot he’d make it. But it was the only option. He couldn’t start a gun battle against trained agents who were, on a different day, on the same team he was.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father had also cast off his ice bags and grass blanket and was making a similar mad dash to safety.

  They had three hundred fifty yards to cover. Under optimal conditions, Derrick could run that distance in forty seconds. Weighed down by three layers of sodden clothing and running in boots, he knew he would be substantially slower. But he had to try.

  His numbed thigh muscles flexed. His boots dug into the ground. His arms began to churn. Ten strides and he could reach top speed.

  Instead, he made it all of four steps before he heard a loud rush of air, then felt something sharp plunge into his back, just to the left of his spinal cord.

  His next two steps were unaffected. Then his legs started feeling heavy. Then his arms stopped obeying his commands. The world started to get spinny.

  The last coherent thought to pass through Derrick Storm’s brain was one of the worst a person can have: that he had let his father down.

  Then everything went black.

  TWENTY-ONE

  HEAT

  Bart Callan had shifted his aim from Nikki Heat to George The Bartender, who was cowering in the far corner of the apartment, his hands over his face—as if that could protect him from what was about to come out of Callan’s gun.

  “Five,” Callan said.

  He was standing approximately ten feet from Heat. His back was slightly turned away from her. Did it give her an angle from which to approach him?

  “Four,” he said.

  No. He was too far away for her to even consider some kind of move. Ten feet was three steps before he’d be in range of a kick. And there was no way she could take three steps, then plant, then deliver a strike in the time it would take Callan to respond. Her feet may have been powerful, but Callan’s gun truly had more kick.

  “Three,” he said.

  She had to think of something. Somewhere to take him. Something to say that would stall him. Anything that would give her more time.

  “Two,” he said.

  “Okay, okay, take it easy, Bart,” Heat said. “You win, okay? We’ll take you to where the bills are, won’t we, George?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Ms. Heat.”

  “I thought you’d see it my way,” Callan said. “Now where are they?”

  “They . . . they are,” Heat began and looked imploringly at George.

  But George wasn’t saying anything. He was just glancing from her, to Callan, back to her. After all that time—even with his own life so clearly threatened—George wasn’t going to go back on the promise he had made to Cynthia Heat. Nikki didn’t know whether to be incensed or deeply touched. It was a gesture of loyalty that surely would have secured George’s place in the Bartender Hall of Fame. The only downside was that it appeared he was going to be enshrined posthumously.

  “They’re at my apartment,” Heat blurted, just to have something to say.

  “Yeah? Where?” Callan demanded.

  “They’re . . . they’re in my bureau, in my bedroom.”

  He walked several steps closer to George.

  “No, they’re not. I turned that bureau inside out. I removed every single drawer and checked them all over to make sure there were no hidden compartments, no false bottoms or fronts, nothing taped to the side somewhere.”

  “You missed one,” Heat said. “It was my underwear drawer, okay? You were probably just too distracted to—”

  “I didn’t miss anything. Those bills weren’t there. This is bullshit, and I’m done playing around. The old man gets it,” Callan said, raising the gun just a little higher. “Five, four, three, two—”

  Callan was just beginning to form his lips into an oval to make the W sound that began the word one when the door to the apartment burst open.

  A man with Asian features burst into the room. Heat bent slightly at the knees and brought up her hands, reflexively assuming a fighting stance. Callan was turning toward the man, whipping his gun in that direction.

  Neither Heat nor Callan was fast enough. With his pistol already in a firing position, the Asian man pulled the trigger twice. Heat was so close she could feel the air being expelled from the gun and the powder lacing her skin, but neither bullet was aimed at her.

  Callan’s head snapped backward, his neck going at an angle it was not designed to assume. Then he dropped, bouncing off the far wall on his way down, landing in a crumpled, bloodied heap. On the wall behind him, there was a thick red splotch of plasma, bits of skull, and brain matter.

  Bart Callan—former FBI, former Homeland Security, the man whose designs on Cynthia Heat’s life had forced her into hiding for seventeen years, the man who would have all
owed thousands of New Yorkers to die of smallpox in the name of profit—was no more.

  * * *

  As soon as the echo of gunfire ceased, it was replaced by George’s scream. The bartender had pressed himself as far into the corner as possible, as if he was trying to get even farther away from the dead man.

  Heat had stayed in her defensive crouch but was now frozen with uncertainty, not knowing if the shooter was a friend, a foe, or just some kind of freelance guardian angel. The gunman brushed past her on his way across the room, where he was already inspecting his handiwork.

  Two more Asian men came in immediately behind him with their guns raised. But the first man said something to them—in Mandarin? that was Mandarin Chinese, yes?—that made them immediately relax.

  Then a fourth Asian man came in. But whereas the first three had walked with stern purpose, this one seemed to be on more of a leisurely stroll.

  He was dressed in polyester pants with a ten-thousand-year crease ironed into them. His sandals were inexpensive and plastic. His short-sleeve button-down shirt, also made of a cheap synthetic material—imitation polyester, if such a thing existed—was red with a few yellow stripes.

  A Chinese communist on holiday.

  In his fingers he held a cigarette, which he languidly brought to his mouth. The lit end glowed. Then the air was filled with a peculiar odor. Scent memory being the strong force it is, Heat was immediately transported to her junior year at Northeastern, where she was sitting on the rooftop of an apartment with a theater friend who was smoking . . .

  Clove cigarettes. The man was smoking cloves. Storm had been talking about a man who smoked cloves.

  Colonel Feng. Could this be Colonel Feng, the Shanghai Seven’s bought-and-paid-for policeman? But what was he doing here, thousands of miles from his beat?

  Heat was now officially perplexed. Wasn’t Callan working for the Shanghai Seven? Why would Feng kill one of his own men?