Heat Storm (Castle)

  But if the order came from Heat, it was no problem. He tried her cell again. Same result.

  “Something’s not right,” Derrick said.

  “You’re damn straight something’s not right,” Carl said, already breathing heavily. “The bolts on this tire were tightened by goddamn gorilla. Help an old man out, would you?”

  “Sure, why don’t you get the jack underneath so you can be ready when I’m done?”

  Derrick grasped the tire iron and heaved it counterclockwise until, with a squeal of protest, the first bolt gave way. As he repeated the procedure, he thought more about Heat.

  She hadn’t answered that last text, even though he was explicit about the urgent need for her to call. And now she wasn’t answering her phone. There had to be some other way to get ahold of her.

  Of course. Her boyfriend. Or, wait, was he a husband by now? Derrick Storm had had a chance meeting with Jameson Rook a few years earlier—the same evening Storm first met Nikki Heat, over the body of a dead currency trader. Storm and Rook each came away impressed with the other’s intelligence and had complimented each other on their rugged good looks. They just hadn’t swapped contact information.

  But that was an easy enough fix.

  “There,” Derrick said, loosening the last bolt. “That ought to do it. You good from here? I have another phone call to make.”

  As Carl grumbled about the ingratitude of his only child, making his old man do all the work, Derrick dialed into the Cubby.

  “I need a few phone numbers,” he told the first nerd he connected with. “The gentleman’s name is Jameson Rook. Home and cell would be great.”

  Mere seconds later, Derrick was scribbling down a pair of ten-digit numbers. He thanked the nerd, hung up, and dialed the home number first.

  “Jameson Rook,” a smooth voice said.

  “Jameson, it’s Derrick Storm.”

  The two men spent a few moments confirming their mutual admiration, then quickly got down to business.

  “Is Nikki with you?” Storm asked.

  “No. She’s in a meeting.”

  “With whom?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not information I can share.”

  “Well, can you interrupt this meeting? I assure you this matter is of the utmost urgency.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I’ve heard a recording in which the likely next president of the United States negotiated a fifty-million-dollar payout to deliver a vote on behalf of the Shanghai Seven, and now they’re going to use that recording to blackmail her.”

  For only the third time this millennium, Rook was actually speechless.

  “Hello?” Storm asked, looking at his phone to see if the call had disconnected. “You still there? Hello?”

  Rook finally managed to squeeze out: “Lindsy Gardner.”

  “Yeah, what about her?”

  “That’s who Nikki is meeting with right now.”

  * * *

  Derrick drove toward Rook’s loft with haste, alacrity, and a complete disregard for the traffic laws of New York—both the city and state.

  Along the way, Storm and Rook filled each other in on all they knew—or, in Rook’s case, all Heat had told him—about their joint investigation. Rook paced around his loft as he spoke. Thanks to the miracle of Bluetooth, Storm listened to Rook’s mellifluous voice piping through his car’s speakers.

  Rook and Storm’s combined genius—when they put their heads together—was a testament to the brilliance of their creator. It didn’t take long for them to conclude they needed to recover both pieces of evidence: the CD, on which Gardner had agreed to the payment for the votes she was delivering, and the bills, which proved the payment had actually been made.

  Without the bills, Gardner could claim the conversation with one of the Shanghai Seven had been a ruse, some bit of subterfuge she was undertaking to try to make the Communist Party (to which the Shanghai Seven was intimately tied) more eager to sign the deal, in the hopes she could negotiate more favorable terms. She could point out that there was no evidence the exchange had ever taken place.

  And, indeed, there was likely no point in going to the authorities to get a search warrant to look for the remaining bills. Rook and Storm decided Gardner had almost certainly destroyed the notes shortly after learning they were fake. American bills aren’t the most flammable of paper products, on account of the linen. But enough lighter fluid could easily take care of that.

  At the same time, in the absence of the phone conversation, Gardner could say she had no idea how she came to possess the counterfeit notes that bore her fingerprints, and that she had passed them to her children’s piano teacher unwittingly.

  The CD and the bills. The case against Gardner would be incomplete without both. And, at the moment, neither Rook nor Storm had any idea where either was.

  They assumed Heat would know where the bills were. As for the recording, they supposed the Shanghai Seven had other copies of the WAV file. Therefore, Feng wouldn’t feel the need to guard the copy of the CD he now had with any special care. He had merely wanted to get it out of Storm’s hands because if the file got out, it would become worthless—you can’t blackmail someone with the release of a recording the whole world has already heard.

  “The good news is, that CD is going to find Lindsy Gardner sooner rather than later,” Rook predicted. “My bet is Feng is on his way there right now.”

  “Which means we need to find Lindsy Gardner before he does,” Storm added.

  “Bonus points to you for that, because if we find Lindsy, chances are we find my wife,” Rook said.

  “Have I mentioned that your intellect is a stunning thing to behold?” Storm asked.

  “You have,” Rook said. “And I hope you’ll permit me to return the compliment by saying—”

  “All right, cut it out, you assholes!” boomed Carl Storm. “If I have to hear any more of this crap I’m gonna get carsick.”

  “Why don’t you just drive,” Rook suggested. “We’ll think of a plan of attack when you get here.”

  It should have taken the Storms at least twenty-eight minutes to reach Rook’s Tribeca loft from Queens.

  With Derrick behind the wheel, they completed it in twenty-two. He alleviated the difficulty of finding parking by wedging the rental car in front of a hydrant. Then he and his father ascended in a freight elevator to Rook’s loft.

  When they entered, they found Rook in front of his computer with the screen split.

  One had the Find My iPhone app up. Rook pointed to the green dot on the map, which was zoomed in as far as it would go. It showed the dot in the southwest corner of a building in downtown Manhattan.

  “She’s been there since I started monitoring her,” Rook said. “That’s been about twenty-five minutes now.”

  “That’s The Marlowe, isn’t it?” Derrick asked.

  “Sure is. Gardner campaign headquarters.”

  “I texted her before I called you, telling her about the recording. If she’s checked her phone at all, she knows about the bribe.”

  “But we don’t know if she knows,” Rook said.

  “That’s right. More importantly, we don’t know if Gardner knows she knows.”

  “So it could still be a normal meeting between the presidential front-runner and a future member of her cabinet.”

  “Or your wife could be a hostage right now,” Derrick said.

  The men cogitated over that for a moment. Carl pointed to the other side of the screen, to a still shot of a video, where a woman was bound to a chair.

  “Who’s that?” Carl asked.

  “That’s Cynthia Heat,” Rook told him. “Nikki’s mother.”

  “This may not be the PC thing to say at the moment, but she’s gorgeous,” Carl observed.

  “Yeah, and she’s in trouble,” Rook said. He turned to Derrick. “Did Nikki mention The Serpent to you?”

  Derrick confirmed she had not. Rook quickly brought the Storms up to speed, then
played the video for them.

  At the end of it, Derrick was the first to speak. “What makes you think she’s in trouble?” he asked.

  Rook did not immediately share his own doubts about Cynthia’s role in the video. Instead, he looked at Derrick curiously. “That’s the general assumption people make when they see a woman tied to a chair and hear her life being threatened, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but that’s a highwayman’s hitch,” Derrick said, pointing to the knot that bound her wrists to the chair.

  “I don’t follow,” Rook said.

  “A highwayman’s hitch. Also known as a bank robber’s knot, a getaway hitch or, more prosaically, a quick-release knot. The legend is that it was developed by outlaws who made their getaway on horseback—and wanted to be able to untie their horses real fast. True knot enthusiasts will debate that history, but there’s no question she could pull as much as she wanted, or she could tug here or here”—he pointed to two points on Cynthia Heat’s wrists—“and it wouldn’t go anywhere.

  “But,” he continued, “you see that little stray piece there?”

  “I do,” Rook said.

  “You pull that end, and the knot comes apart instantly. Just as a highwayman would do as he’s making his getaway from a robbery.”

  “So Cynthia could get out of that knot anytime she wanted?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know what’s going on, but that is not a woman being held against her will,” Derrick said. “I can go even further and say that she probably produced that video herself, with no outside help. That’s why she had to use a knot that looked formidable but was, in fact, easy to release. Hence the highwayman’s hitch.”

  It was then Rook’s turn to share his belief that the video had been scripted. With the sound off, he replayed the parts of the video that showed Cynthia leaning forward to anticipate questions.

  “This only adds credence to the theory that the video was a one-woman job,” Rook said. “She prerecorded the other side of that conversation, then timed out the pauses just right, to make it seem like it was a real conversation. But she knew she only had so much time to deliver her lines. Hence the leaning.”

  Carl Storm was shaking his head. “She really is one heck of a woman.”

  The other men ignored him.

  “Forgive me for stating what seems to be obvious,” Derrick said. “But the empty threats . . . the missed potshots . . . the offer of a vacation in exchange for dropping the investigation . . . Add to it that the video is self-produced, and it seems Cynthia Heat is The Serpent, am I right?”

  “I think so,” Rook said. “And there’s one way to find out.”

  He pulled out his phone and added that 646 area code number as a contact. Then he started a new text message to it:

  DEAR MRS. HEAT—THIS MAY BE A STRANGE WAY TO HEAR FROM YOUR SON-IN-LAW FOR THE FIRST TIME, BUT NIKKI IS IN TROUBLE. SHE’S IN A MEETING WITH LINDSY GARDNER, AND MAY BE HELD HOSTAGE THERE. COULD YOU PLEASE STOP BEING THE SERPENT AND HELP US GET HER OUT?

  Rook pressed SEND.

  “Think that’ll work?” Derrick asked.

  “A writer can only form the words. He cannot control the impact they have on the reader,” Rook said.

  They went back to staring at the unmoving green dot on the screen for perhaps five seconds. Then Rook’s phone alerted them to an incoming text.

  Rook read it out loud for the other two:

  I’LL BE RIGHT THERE. —CH

  THIRTY-ONE

  HEAT

  It took time for the buzz from outside to slowly dissipate as the volunteers and staffers were cleared from the building.

  Heat didn’t know what they were being told. Probably that it was a security matter. Or that they were needed to bolster numbers at a rally that would, for some reason, later fail to materialize.

  Lindsy Gardner kept the Walther trained on Heat the whole time. After her initial spurt of outrage—What are you doing? What is this about? What makes you think you’re going to get away with this?— Heat had been ordered to remain silent and seated.

  She spent the time alternating her gaze between Gardner and staring out the window. What would possibly make a presidential candidate pull a gun on an NYPD captain she was trying to hire for a job? And then hold her at gunpoint?

  What was she looking to gain? What was her endgame? And what had Heat done to make herself such a threat to this powerful woman who was soon to be even more powerful?

  It was baffling. Unless this was some kind of strange test—the most intense, high-pressure job interview of all time. Was she being filmed and evaluated to see how she dealt with stress?

  Heat decided all she could do was stay calm and keep her wits about her.

  After roughly twenty minutes—which is a long time to have someone brandishing a gun in your face—Null returned to the inner sanctum.

  “Okay,” he reported. “We’ve evacuated this floor, and the ones below it and above it as well.”

  “Excellent,” Gardner said. “Now on to business, Captain Heat. I’ve been informed you have some counterfeit bills in your possession. Hand them over.”

  As soon as the words “counterfeit bills” came out of Gardner’s mouth, it was like a series of pins and tumblers lined up, unlocking the truth:

  “You gave those bills to my mother,” Heat said, some mix of angry and astonished. “Those were your fingerprints on them. That’s why the results were classified.”

  “I’m not here to discuss ancient history,” Gardner said. “You have no idea how much trouble these have caused for me over the years.”

  “Caused for you,” Heat said. “My mother—”

  More locks gave way. “Wait, Callan was working for you, wasn’t he? That’s why he was hell-bent on getting those bills back. You sicced him on me.”

  “Working for me . . . Threatening me . . . Sleeping with me . . . It was always hard to tell. Bart Callan and I had a complicated relationship,” Gardner said, with a look on her face that was between a smile and a sneer. “Though I can’t say I was sorry to hear about his death. Now that I finally have the bills, having him gone is like being freed forever from recurring migraine headaches. Now.”

  She brought the gun up a little higher. “Are you going to hand those bills over, or am I going to have to search your corpse for them?”

  “Why does it matter? You’re going to kill me anyway,” Heat said.

  “Possibly,” Gardner said, then tilted her head a little and raised the tone of her voice just slightly. “Or, possibly, you can cooperate and become a part of my little circle of trust—along with John here.”

  Null shot Heat the same smile she had first seen before the press conference. She had thought it was sincere back then. Now she recognized the deeper truth. Sociopaths always had the most genuine smiles. Nothing weighed on their conscience because they didn’t truly have consciences the way other people did. They didn’t feel the slightest shred of remorse for any of the horrible things they had done or were planning on doing.

  “I could use a woman of your abilities helping me on the inside,” Gardner continued. “I’m a good boss, really. You can ask John.”

  Null nodded.

  “And beyond that, I’ve . . . I’ve done a lot of good as a senator. And I’ll be able to do even more good as president. You could be a part of that.”

  “If you’re so good, why are you waiving a gun in my face?” Heat asked.

  Gardner actually lowered the gun slightly. “Look, I’m . . . I know you may find this hard to believe, but I’m sorry about this. I’m not . . . I’m not a bad person. I’ve just . . . I’ve made mistakes. I readily admit that. And it seems like in this game your mistakes always compound each other. They start as small little pebbles and the next thing you know, they’re boulders, rolling down the hill at you.”

  “Mistakes? What kind of mistakes?” Heat asked, as much to keep her talking as to hear what she might have to confess. She had no intention of working for the woman or beco
ming a part of any circle she was in.

  Gardner got a faraway look then scoffed. “Starting off as a librarian, for one.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it means I’ve been broke my whole life,” Gardner said. “At least if I had been a lawyer or an investment banker, I would have had a little bit of padding. But, no, I had to be a public servant, right away. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to be a US senator? And I’m not just talking about the costs to run a campaign. That you can at least grovel and beg your wealthy friends to cover for you. I’m talking about the clothes. The travel you can’t get the government to pay for because you’re worried about your opponents using it to launch an ethics investigation. The gifts you have to give people who help you, or the people you want to help you. The charitable donations. The expectations are endless.

  “Most of my colleagues in the Senate are members of the lucky sperm club. They came from money, then made even more money. A few are self-made, but they almost all have gobs of money. Did you know the average net worth of a US senator is something like twelve million dollars? Twelve million dollars! I’ve never been able to compete with that.”

  “So you started counterfeiting bills?” Heat asked incredulously as a door behind her opened.

  “No,” a raspy voice behind Heat said. “We did that. She was just the one gullible enough to accept them as a bribe. She delivered us a trade bill in exchange for fifty million dollars, all of it perfect . . . and perfectly fake.”

  Gardner’s face flushed. Feng was dressed in the same cheap clothes he had been when Heat had seen him earlier that morning, though now he had added a knockoff Ralph Lauren jacket. He had a freshly lit clove cigarette in his mouth. He took a long drag, then blew the smoke into the air.

  “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t realize you had company,” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure to see you, Captain Heat. Though it seems you are not here by your own choosing.”

  “What do you want, Feng?” Gardner said, saying his last name with enough vitriol that it almost sounded like a different kind of F-word.