His hand was just beginning to stroke her jawline when she pushed him away.
“I have a boyfriend,” she said, quickly.
“Is it me?” Storm asked. “Well, this is a bit sudden, but, yes, I would be delighted to be your boyfriend.”
“No, no,” she said, flustered. “I mean, I’m seeing someone.”
Storm made a show of looking around. “And yet I see no one. Is he a man blessed with the power of invisibility?”
“No. He was supposed to meet me here, but that was two hours ago.”
“I see,” Storm said. “Is this the first time he’s been late?”
She shook her head.
“Is it the second time?”
She shook her head again.
“Do you have a reason to believe he is desperate to be here but is currently lying in a ditch, incapacitated and unable to signal you or anyone else his distress?”
Another headshake.
“He stands you up a lot, doesn’t he?”
This time, a nod.
“Then he is a fool,” Storm said. “And I don’t say that simply because you’re a beautiful woman and he’s a fool to leave you alone. I say that because the love of a woman—any woman, no matter how beautiful or homely—is the most exceptional thing that can happen to a man, and he is a fool to treat that most precious commodity as if it were disposable.”
Another nod.
“Can I tell you a quick story about love? I think you’ll like it.”
He intertwined his left hand with her right, and moved his right hand to the small of her back. It was a dancing position, though he was not yet dancing properly. Just swaying.
“I never really got to see my parents’ relationship, because my mother died when I was young,” he began. “But I got to see quite a bit of my grandparents’. My grandpa Storm was an old-fashioned gentleman. He escorted my grandmother by the arm everywhere they went, even if they were just walking into the grocery store. And he always held the door for her. Didn’t matter what kind of door—a car door, a barn door, a bathroom door. If there was a door, Grandpa Storm was going to hold it for her. He loved my grandmother, and that was one of the small ways he showed how much he appreciated her.
“Anyhow, they were going into a restaurant one day when Grandpa was hit by a massive heart attack. It should have killed him on the spot. But there was a door to be opened. I don’t know if he worried my grandmother didn’t know how to open one or what. Somehow Grandpa managed to stumble to the door and hold it for my grandmother. It was literally his dying act. When the paramedics came, they had to drag him away from the doorway. At the funeral, I told everyone that I don’t know whether or not there’s a heaven. But if there is, Grandpa is there, holding the door for Grandma.”
He had turned his swaying into dancing. Not ambitious dancing. Not yet. But dancing all the same.
“So that’s what love is,” he concluded. “Or at least that’s what love is to me. Now, as for this supposed boyfriend of yours,” Storm said, nodding in the direction of the small jeweled purse where she kept her phone, “how is he supposed to hold the door for you if he doesn’t even show up?”
He gave her a quick twirl, expertly rejoining her at the end in perfect step.
“I think maybe he shouldn’t be my boyfriend anymore,” she said.
“I think that’s wise.”
“You’re a very good dancer.”
“Oh, we haven’t even started dancing yet,” he said, and then began in earnest.
They spun around the marble balcony, Storm confident in his lead, the woman sufficiently tutored by her finishing school or boarding school or debutante lessons—or wherever it was modern young women of a certain class learned such things—that she was a more-than-proficient follower. It took perhaps a song or two for them to learn to anticipate one another’s movements, but then they settled into a marvelous synchronicity, to the point where he barely had to signify his intent and she barely felt her feet touching the floor.
Lost in the music and the movement, they did not speak for a while. When she finally opened her mouth to say something, it was not what Storm was expecting.
It was, “Jacque!”
A young man, his face bloated, his eyes glassy and red, his nose running, had stumbled out on the balcony. He had on what was easily a five-thousand-dollar tuxedo, but he wore it sloppily, with disregard for its splendor. The bow tie was askew. The shirt was loosely bloused over his midsection, which was also sloppy. The young man had a slender build but was already working on the beginnings of what would someday become a champion beer gut.
Fair or unfair, Storm immediately had the young man pegged. He was a common species here in Monaco and other places where the idle rich tended to congregate: he had been given a world-class education and every opportunity to succeed but was not availing himself of it; rather, he contented himself with spending money for which his great grandfather had worked very hard, making much of it disappear up his nose or down his throat.
“There you are, you whore,” Jacque said in slurring French.
Storm started to reply in his own French. “Ease off on the name-calling my—”
“I’ll handle this,” Storm’s dancing partner said quietly before squaring to face her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. “Jacque, you were supposed to be here more than two hours ago. I got tired of waiting for you here, just like I’ve gotten tired of waiting for you to grow up. We’re through, Jacque.”
“What, because of this dumb piece of meat?” Jacque said, not even looking at Storm. “How much did he cost you?”
Storm moved closer, ready to signify his displeasure with some pointed commentary, when the woman replied: “No, not because of this extraordinary gentleman. You want to know why? Because the only time you’re ever nice to me is when you want to have sex or you want me to pick up the check. Because you talk about all these big ideas that you’re going to accomplish but you never make a single move to do any of them. And because the only place you ever seem to be in a hurry is in bed.”
“How dare you, you slut,” Jacque said.
He brought his hands up. He reared back, fist balled, loading his weight onto his back foot. But he never got the chance to transfer it to his front foot and deliver the blow. Storm hit him with a sweeping kick to the midsection. He felt it compress several ribs, more than likely cracking them, and it sent Jacque reeling backward into the outer wall of the casino. His head slammed against the stone and his body crumpled.
Storm closed in and had to restrain himself from lifting the man up and throwing him over the balcony. It would have been fun, yes; but if the young man really was from a prominent family, it would have caused trouble for Jean-François. And Storm didn’t want that.
So, instead, Storm lifted the man’s arm and checked his pulse.
“Darn it. Still beating,” he said, then let the arm fall back to the man’s side. “Shall we dance?”
“No, no,” she said, still flushed. “We have to go.”
“Why? This set probably has at least two or three more songs in—”
“You don’t understand. Jacque’s family, they keep a large security force. Well, they call it a security force, but they’re really just thugs. When they find out what has happened—”
“I can handle myself.”
“I’m sure you can,” she said, and again slid close to him, filling his nose with her lavender scent. “But I don’t want to waste this evening watching you fight every goon that comes out here. There are better ways to spend our time.”
Storm did his best to keep his smile inward. “Yes, yes I suppose there are. We can retire to my suite at the Hôtel de Paris, if you wish.”
“No. No. They might look for you in the hotel. And we can’t go to my place, either. But my family has a little pied-à-terre not far from here that Jacque does not know a
bout. It is small, but there is room enough for two, if you like.”
“I like,” he confirmed. “I like.”
He was careful to hold every door for her on their way out.
HER FAMILY’S “LITTLE” PIED-À-TERRE turned out to be a magnif-icent early-eighteenth-century baroque town house jutting out over a cliff that plunged into the sea. Its exterior offered an exuberant demonstration of that ornate style, its curvilinear shapes and dramatic forms suggesting both movement and sensuality.
It reminded Storm of one of his favorite bits of architectural advice: if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.
The inside was expensively decorated, though perhaps more rococo than baroque. It had an impersonal air to it and lacked a lived-in feel. This, truly, was just a rich family’s crash pad, exhaustively maintained but seldom used.
The redhead, whose name he still did not know, gave Storm instructions to retire to the rooftop patio while she took care of a few things down below. From his perch, Storm could hear the Mediterranean crashing into the sheer cliff face several hundred feet below. It had a magical, almost hypnotic rhythm to it.
He peered across the sea, turning himself to face Africa and—if his sense of direction was right—the city of Tangier, in Morocco. For a while, that had been the place listed on the death certificate that Jedediah Jones had sent him. The document had been Jones’s idea of a joke. Storm thought of the mission that had led him there and nearly killed him for real. He had gone to capture an operative named the Viper, only to be ambushed, betrayed by one of his own men. He wound up lying in a pool of his own blood on a cold tile floor, his guts riddled with bullets.
He had recuperated in the care of a man named Thami “Tommy” Harif, a salty U.S. Navy veteran who had dual American/Moroccan citizenship. His assistance—and his silence—had been bought by Jones in an exchange, the details of which Storm was glad to be ignorant. Storm had also learned not to ask questions about Tommy’s other income streams, which supported his rather grand lifestyle. There had been one point during his convalescence that Storm had mistakenly stumbled upon a warehouse filled with ordnance. When he inquired its purpose, Tommy had piously said, “Why, it’s for the cause of righteousness, of course.” Storm decided at that moment he didn’t want to know more.
Storm put Tommy out of his mind. He tried to put everything out of his mind. From up here, the worries of the world—terrible men with terrible weapons, airplanes falling from flight, whatever horrible secret Ingrid Karlsson was going to share—felt remote. He wished he could pretend they would stay that way, but he knew come morning he would have to face them again.
The only consolation was that morning was still a few hours off. Which meant he could keep pretending, if only for a little while longer.
After perhaps ten minutes, his date appeared carrying two glasses of red wine. She had discarded her ice-blue dress in favor of a simple spaghetti-strapped camisole and a small pair of men’s boxer shorts from which her thighs emerged and seemed to keep going forever. She was barefoot. Her red hair had been let out of its cage and was now down, framing her face. She had scrubbed off her makeup.
Storm’s original assessment of her—that she was stunning—was in need of an upgrade. She was easily one of the most beautiful women he had ever been near, and she wasn’t even trying.
“Sorry. I just had to get a little more comfortable,” she said, handing Storm one of the glasses.
Now that she was out of her evening wear, she appeared slightly younger than Storm had originally thought. Storm guessed that she was perhaps twenty-seven, the age at which some women are just finally getting around to purging the Jacques of the world out of their system; others, Storm knew, kept at it their whole lives.
They touched glasses and sat next to each other on a padded limestone bench that overlooked the sea.
“It’s lovely up here,” Storm said.
She breathed deeply. “I really ought to use this place more often,” she said.
“If I owned a place like this, I’d probably never leave,” Storm said, taking a small sip of his wine. He let the wine first hit the tip of his tongue, to taste sweetness; then he let it wash over the sides, so he could enjoy the tannins.
Her next words jolted him. “Did you really come up here to lie to me?”
“Excuse me?”
“You, sir, are a man of motion. I heard the stories about your saving the hotel. I saw how you handled Jacque. You would no sooner stay cooped up in a place like this, beautiful as it may be, than you would live underground in a bunker. You are a rover, an explorer. You require movement, action, great deeds. You are the man who saves the world, and you’ll go wherever it needs to be saved at the moment.”
He shrugged, remaining quiet. He knew she was right. But there was no way to respond to such a statement without sounding immodest.
“So why do you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Don’t be coy, Mr. Derrick Storm. Other people would hear that a bomb was going to wipe out a section of this city, and their first response would be to run out onto their yachts and get as far away as possible. I am told you ran toward the bomb and defused it. Why? Why are you the one who saves the world?”
“Because someone has to be?”
“Not good enough,” she said. “You can do better.”
Storm took another small sip of his wine. “You are familiar with Einstein and the theory of relativity, yes?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Well, I have no quarrel with the science of that. I have a quarrel with the people who don’t leave Einstein to the physicists. People want to apply relativity to everything, even morality. They would have you believe that there are no absolutes in this world, that everything can only be defined in relationship to everything else. And that’s well and good for them, but not for me. Because if you take that theory too far, then suddenly you’re left with a world where there is no good, no evil, just different points of view.
“So, take the Nazis,” he continued. “If you take moral relativism to its logical conclusion, suddenly you can’t say the Nazis were bad. They were just a group of people who applied their worldview to the extreme, right? Well, that’s not for me. I believe there is such a thing as absolute bad and absolute good. And, yes, there is a full spectrum of shades in between, which is where most people live. But when I see things that are a lot closer to the bad end of the spectrum, and see that people who are a lot closer to the good end of the spectrum are going to be hurt, I feel I have to act.”
“But again, why you?”
“Because I was the guy who was made bigger and stronger than most other guys. Because I’ve been trained in how to use that strength. Because my father remains one of the most decent men I’ve ever met, and I know he’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t use my skills to protect good, innocent people. And mostly because if I don’t respond to these situations, I’m not sure anyone else will, and I can’t live with the guilt of knowing I could have done something but didn’t. It’s some combination of all that, plus a lot of other stuff I can’t think of right now because this wine is going to my head a little bit.”
She crossed her glorious legs and looked at him earnestly. It made her even more attractive to him, if that was possible. “But how do we judge what’s bad and what’s good?”
“With our basic sense of humanity. It’s there, deep down in all of us. Or at least most of us. We just need to have the courage to listen to it and act accordingly.”
“So what happens when you need to be saved? Who does that?”
“I don’t know,” Storm said. “Luckily, it doesn’t happen all that often.”
“Well, if you ever need someone to save you, I’ll be happy to do it.”
“Really?” Storm said, as much bemused as touched. “You have to be careful making offers like that. You never know
when someone is going take you up on it.”
She nodded thoughtfully, then held up her empty glass. “Drink up, Mr. Einstein. You’re falling behind.”
Storm tilted back his glass and took a Storm-sized swallow of the red wine. Then another, until the glass was done.
She was smiling at him the whole time. It was a pleasant, sweet smile, until it started going slanty.
Then, Storm realized, it wasn’t just her lips that were getting crooked. Her whole face was. No, wait, it was the whole world.
Nausea hit him harder than any of the waves crashing far below. The glass slipped from his hand and he was dimly aware of it shattering on the marble.
He felt himself going over. He tried to yell, to fight it, to battle the gravity that was taking him over. But nothing in his body would respond. He wasn’t even sure if the yell made it out.
The last thing he was cognizant of before it all went black was her reaching for her phone, picking it up, pressing a few buttons.
“He’s down,” she said into it. “You can come get him now.”
CHAPTER 16
SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
T
here was a hand in his face. It was large and hairy. Useful looking, if a bit ugly. Its knuckles bore the marks of too many scrapes, too many punches. The palm had a long scar running along it that looked strangely familiar and…
Yes. That’s because it was his own hand. He made an effort to flex it, and it moved. Not only was it his own hand, it was under his own control. This was a good start.
He was in a bed. It was a nice bed, with high thread-count satin sheets and a down comforter that provided ample protection against a blast of air-conditioning from above.
He blinked twice. Sunlight streamed through a set of windows to his left. When he looked out the windows, he could see only clouds. But the clouds were moving.