This, admittedly, was more of an ethical problem. Perhaps even a stylistic problem. But still, a man had to have a code of operations, and Storm took his seriously.
Storm thought it through for a moment and decided on his plan. He replayed in his mind the sound of Rivera’s voice on the wiretap recordings. Spanish was one of the eight languages Storm spoke. And owing to the influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants currently redefining American demographics, he had more of an opportunity to use it than he did, say, his Romanian.
He positioned himself on the right side of the door, the side away from the hinges. Trying to summon the feeling of gravel in his vocal cords, he called out, “Hector…Hector come in here, please,” in his best imitation of the raspy voice he’d heard on the wiretaps.
Storm stood with his back against the wall. He transferred his gun from his right hand to his left. He heard footsteps coming his way. They were soft on the carpet, but the man who made them was heavy. Storm listened intently as they got closer.
Timing was essential. And Storm’s was perfect. The moment the man’s foot crossed the threshold, Storm swung his right elbow with all his force, bringing to bear not only his own momentum, moving backward, but also that of the bodyguard, who was walking forward. The man was shorter than Storm thought he would be. But Storm was able to adjust his aim at the last second such that the hardest part of his elbow still connected with the softest part of the man’s nose.
Storm heard the crunch of cartilage. The man dropped heavily. Storm quickly hopped on him, smothering his face with the chloroform-dampened handkerchief. He dragged the man’s body into the darkness of the bedroom.
One down.
Now, of course, Storm had another dilemma. He did not know where the other guard was. He eased out into the sitting area, Dirty Harry leading the way.
It was empty, save for its furnishings—two easy chairs; a love seat; and a low-slung, five-foot-long, brown coffee table that somehow reminded Storm of a dachshund. The flat-screen television was bolted to the wall.
Storm kept in his mind a loose floor plan of the apartment, one based on Villante’s description. Beyond the sitting room, there was a great room that opened into a kitchen, a formal dining room next to the kitchen, a foyer leading to two spare bedrooms, a media room, a small library…and the other bodyguard, Cesar, who could be anywhere.
Then Storm heard a toilet flush. It came from just off the foyer.
Storm crossed the sitting room and passed quickly into the great room, knowing Cesar would have to pass through to get back to the television and the fútbol game. Improvising now, Storm crouched behind an easy chair, ducking so his six-foot-two body was hidden by its suede-covered shape.
If Cesar the bodyguard had any inkling as to Storm’s presence, it would have been a terrible move, going prone in a way that made him vulnerable to attack; and if the penthouse had hardwood floors, Storm wouldn’t have been able to attempt the move that came next.
But all was in Storm’s favor. Cesar walked through the great room with the easy stride of a man comfortable in familiar surroundings. And he didn’t hear anything as Storm burst from his hiding spot and jumped on the bodyguard while simultaneously toeing the backs of his knees.
It was a tackle that would have made a Washington Redskins linebacker proud. Storm finished the move straddled on top of the man. Cesar let out a grunt, but his vision was soon filled by the muzzle of Storm’s Dirty Harry gun.
“I would be very, very quiet if I were you,” Storm said, in Spanish. “I wouldn’t even say a word right now.”
The guard lay on the ground, face down, either resigned to his defeat or uncertain of any other options he had. Storm again reached for his chloroform handkerchief.
But the moment his hand touched the cloth, he knew it wasn’t going to work. The fabric was already dry. Once again, he cursed sleeping in Mr. Menousek’s chemistry class. He should have remembered: chloroform was chemically similar to alcohol and shared its volatility, which meant it evaporated quickly.
“And now we have a situation,” Storm said in hushed Spanish. “I don’t want to kill you. Really, I don’t. But I also can’t have you bothering me. Your boss has done some bad things, and I need to be able to question him about them without your getting in my way and without your alerting all the neighbors. I can’t think of how we’re going to accomplish that unless I shoot you. But I’m guessing you don’t want to be shot, do you?”
Storm had the gun barrel against Cesar’s head, which shook slightly. Storm realized that due to his previous instruction—the part about staying quiet—the man was saying nothing.
So Storm said, “You can give me some input if you want to. I’m really at something of an impasse here.”
Cesar cleared his throat and said softly, “You could tie me up. Bind me. Gag me.”
“Yes!” Storm said. “Yes, that’s an excellent idea. And it’s one I might have come up with myself. Except I didn’t bring any materials to do that and I’ve never been to this apartment before, so I don’t even know if there’s any rope or—”
“There’s some duct tape in the utility room.”
“There’s a utility room? Vil…uh, I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Yes, yes,” Cesar said, his voice growing excited. “You could keep your gun on me, make me keep my hands in the air. And I could walk to the utility room, get the duct tape. You could make me bind Hector first, then bind myself. This would be the intelligent thing for you to do, as otherwise I might be able to take advantage of a momentary lapse in your attention and disarm you.”
Storm was nodding before he even realized he agreed with the man. “You make an excellent point. Okay. Let’s do that.”
Storm let Cesar up.
“Thank you,” he said, putting his hands up.
“You are most welcome,” Storm said, relieved that civility was not dead, after all.
TRUE TO HIS WORD, Cesar the bodyguard produced a roll of duct tape, which he used to secure Hector to one of the chairs in the living room. He then went to work on himself. Storm assisted him in the final stages until he was satisfied the man wasn’t going anywhere.
As a final act of mercy, Storm turned Cesar toward the fútbol game. The man was bound and gagged, so he signaled his appreciation by blinking his eyes several times.
Storm shifted his attention to Eusebio Rivera, who had returned to sleeping on his back and to the window-shaking snores that emanated as a result. Having been busy with the bodyguards, Storm had yet to work out a precise plan of how he was going to force information out of Rivera when he woke up.
Then Storm’s attention shifted to the twenty-foot-long fish tank that occupied one wall of the bedroom. Next to the tank was a small end table that held two fishnets—one small, the other larger—and a variety of fish food in canisters that ranged in size from a saltshaker to a tennis ball can.
Beside the table, there was a footstool that allowed access to the top of the tank, which came within about two feet of the ceiling. That, Storm reasoned, was for feeding of the piscine critters that were swimming aimlessly about inside.
Curiously, there was also a partition that separated a quarter of the tank from the other three-quarters. On the left side of the partition there were dozens of species of saltwater fish. The right side appeared to be barren. It had the same fake coral, the same underwater vegetation. Just no fish.
Then Storm saw it wasn’t barren, after all. Mostly hidden in one of the rocky crags, Storm saw the ghastly, ghoulish face of a moray eel, the biggest one he had ever seen in captivity.
And that’s when he got his plan.
Storm returned to the sitting room, flipped over the dachshundlike coffee table, and, with four sweeping chops, sheared the legs off. He slid it along the carpet. It moved with relative ease. Storm grabbed the roll of duct tape, feeling Cesar’s eyes on him the whole time. Hect
or remained insentient.
Taking what now resembled a paramedic’s backboard into the bedroom, Storm laid it next to the still-slumbering Rivera. He rolled Rivera onto it, then began securing him to its surface with the duct tape, keeping his arms pinned at his side. As Storm turned him into a duct tape mummy, Rivera resumed his snoring, which had at least one benefit: any strange noises Storm might be making were inaudible next to that racket.
With Rivera properly tamped down—only his head and feet were uncovered—Storm slid his quarry and the impromptu backboard off the bed and onto the floor, then over toward the fish tank. The moray eel side of the fish tank. He removed the tank’s lid and set it aside so it wouldn’t get in the way of what came next.
He lifted the head end of the board so it was leaning against the side of the tank, then went around to the foot of it. With both hands, he lifted it and began shoving the leading edge up toward the top of the tank. Rivera was portly but small-statured. He probably didn’t weigh more than about two hundred pounds. Storm routinely deadlifted far more.
When he got the top of the board aligned with the top of the tank, Storm kept shoving, walking up the footstool as he went, until the backboard was finally where he wanted it: resting on top of the lidless fish tank.
Storm’s next task was to catch himself a fish. He selected the larger of the two nets and, standing on the footstool, dipped it into the fish-occupied side of the tank. The fish were not especially enamored of being caught, but eventually Storm was able to chase down a large, slow angelfish, which he brought out of the water, thrashing and flopping. He removed the fish from the net with his hand and brought it down to the end table, where it wriggled some more.
“Sorry about this, fish,” Storm said, removing a utility knife from his back pocket. He unfolded a blade and stabbed just behind the fish’s eye, putting it out of its misery.
He moved the footstool back over toward the eel side of the tank, where Rivera was still prone. His snoring, however, had finally stopped. Storm climbed the stool and, with the utility knife, began disemboweling the fish, smearing the guts on Rivera’s cheeks, forehead, and chin.
That’s what Rivera was experiencing when he finally came to: the very foreign feeling of being strapped to a table and having his face covered in fish entrails by a perfect stranger, who was dressed in what appeared to be a white leisure suit.
“What the…what is this? Who are you?” Rivera demanded. “Why can’t I—”
“Shhh. No noise, Mr. Rivera.”
The man, perhaps sensing that he was at something of a disadvantage, quieted for a moment as Storm continued his job. But as Storm rubbed what might have been a fish pancreas—did fish have pancreases?—on his nose, Rivera could not help himself.
“What are you doing?”
“Preparing you for the eel,” Storm said calmly. He tossed the pancreas, or whatever it was, aside. He had been careful not to let any of the fish parts fall into the tank. He didn’t want the eel’s appetite to be sated by an easy meal.
“What are you—”
“Eels have lousy eyesight but a tremendous sense of smell,” Storm said. “They’re like the bloodhounds of the sea. They let their noses tell them what to eat. I want to make sure your face smells absolutely wonderful to my friend hiding in the rocks down there. I’m betting if he’s hungry enough, he’d strike at pretty much anything that smells good to him.”
“Are you mad?” Rivera asked, struggling in vain against his duct tape binding.
“Some other eel facts: their teeth are razor-sharp, but what’s really impressive about them are their jaws. Not just the bite force—that’s something for sure. But also their stubbornness. Once a moray eel clamps on something, it doesn’t let go. Even in death. It’s something of a primitive design from an evolutionary standpoint, and I won’t bore you with the mechanics. I’ll just tell you that divers who have been bit by moray eels often have to pry the jaws off with pliers when they get back to land.”
“What is your…? What do you want?”
Storm did not answer. Rivera’s face was now glistening with the slick residue of what had once been the insides of an angelfish. Storm climbed down the step stool and repositioned it so he could grab Rivera’s feet. He lifted and, with the backboard sliding along the thick, beveled edge of the glass, lowered Rivera’s head into the tank.
It was, essentially, waterboarding. Storm style. With a hungry eel to provide a little extra fear factor.
Storm counted to thirty before sliding Rivera out of the water. He emerged, gasping and spitting.
“Jesus, man,” he said, between huge, hungry gulps of air. “What do you want? Money? You want money? I’ll give you mo—”
Storm tilted the head of the board back in the water, submerging Rivera once again. This time, he counted to forty-five.
The eel had not yet made an appearance, a mild disappointment to Storm. If Villante was right, Rivera was responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand people worldwide. Having a moray eel eat his face ought to be the least of his punishment. Storm brought Rivera’s head out again.
“God, please,” he said, his eyes bolted open with fear, his chest heaving as his lungs tried to recover from oxygen deficit.
“God is the least of your worries at the moment,” Storm said, then put the man under again. This time, he counted to sixty. And, perhaps, he did it a little more slowly than the previous two times. Just to give the eel a chance.
When he brought Rivera back to the surface again, no words came out. He was now focused only on survival, not on begging, arguing, or cajoling. Which is exactly what Storm was waiting for.
“Erik Vaughn,” Storm said. “I want you to tell me everything about how you had him killed.”
“Vaughn? What are you…what are you—”
Storm sighed impatiently and jammed Rivera’s head under again. Storm counted to ninety this time.
He worried he had perhaps overdone it. The man’s thrashing slowly stilled. When Storm brought Rivera back up, he did not appear to be breathing anymore. Storm was just beginning to consider giving the man’s diaphragm a quick pump when Rivera wretched out a stomach full of salt water, coughed several times, and resumed respiration.
“Please, please,” he said, weakly. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“I’m talking about the promethium laser beam you used to shoot Congressman Erik Vaughn’s plane out of the sky,” Storm said. “You’re going to tell me everything about it. Not only how you did it, but who you worked with and how you got the promethium. You’re also going to tell me where you’re hiding William McRae, the scientist you kidnapped. You’re going to tell me all of this in an impressive level of detail so I know you’re not just making it up, and you’re going to do it right now.”
Rivera just lay there, fighting pathetically for breath. Storm was sure he had broken the man’s spirit. But perhaps a bit more convincing was required. He tilted the board to again submerge Rivera.
“No! No! Please!” the man howled. “I promise you, I know nothing about this. Nothing at—”
Storm put him under, but counted only to sixty this time, if only because he really, really did not want to have to administer mouth-to-mouth on Rivera. Not at any time. And especially not when his face had been covered in fish entrails.
“You seemed pretty happy Vaughn died,” Storm said when he brought Rivera up again. “From what I understand, you’ve been toasting his death with everyone in Panama City.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Rivera said, panting fiercely. “You are right. I was very happy. Congressman Vaughn has been an impediment to getting funding for the canal expansion project. I said some terrible things about him and I’m very, very sorry. But I didn’t have him killed. I swear to you.”
“Then how did you know he was dead before the media announced it?”
“I have a cousi
n who emigrated to America in the eighties. He is a citizen now. He works for the FAA.”
“Who is he and what’s his date of birth?”
Rivera quickly replied with a name and a date.
“I’m going to have that checked out,” Storm said. “But in the meantime, I’m going to give the eel another chance to find your face.”
Rivera went back under. Pulling out his satellite phone, Storm called the cubby and got one of the nerds to run a quick check on the FAA’s employment records. Sure enough, Rivera’s cousin checked out.
Storm brought Rivera back up. The eel had not yet shown itself. All the movement was probably scaring it, encouraging it to stay hidden. A shame.
“My people say you’re lying,” Storm said.
“No, please, please! I’m telling the truth, I swear it! Listen to me, I had nothing to do with this congressman dying, but I might be able to help you.”
“I’m listening.”
“You said this laser, it was promethium, yes?”
“Yes.”
His voice came fast, and he forced the words out between large breaths. “I was at the locks a little while back, maybe three, four weeks ago, and one of my friends down there was talking. He was saying that a ship had come through that made the sensors go off, the nuclear sensors, what do you call them…?”
“A Geiger counter?”
“Yes, the Geiger counter. This was big news at the locks. Everyone was talking about it. There is always the fear that terrorists will try something at the canal. They pulled the ship aside, searched it, and found the container that was setting off the counter. I don’t know the details, but they tested what was inside and they found out it was promethium.”
“Did they detain it?”
“They couldn’t. That shipment, it was not intended for import into Panama, so there was nothing customs could do. They packed it back up, shielded it so the radiation wouldn’t get any of the sailors sick, and sent it on its way. There are many hazardous substances we are allowed to detain, but promethium isn’t on the list.”