Wild Storm

  “You seem very confident of the outcome.”

  “There is no doubt,” Rivera assured him.

  Villante tilted his head. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you sabotaged that plane yourself.”

  “Now, now,” Rivera said, smiling. “What would give you that idea?”

  He raised his glass. “Let us drink: to the death of Erik Vaughn, and the inherent reasonable nature of Jared Stack.”

  At the moment they tilted back their glasses, the moray eel darted out of the crevice where it had been hiding, snapped its jaws around an unsuspecting fish, and then retreated back to its den.

  CHAPTER 8

  FAIRFAX, Virginia

  T

  he image of a piece of a laser-incised sheet metal had chased Storm all the way back to Virginia.

  Actually, it was two pieces of metal. There was the one he had seen on the ground in Pennsylvania. And there was the one he had seen in mid-flight as he clung to the wing of the airplane. He was, naturally, too busy to notice it at the time. But in his mind’s eye, he could look back and see that the aileron also had a straight line singed into it.

  Not for the first time in his life, Derrick Storm was only alive because someone’s aim was just off. In the case of Flight 76, the laser had struck the underside of the cockpit, which had been catastrophic. On Flight 312, it had lopped off the wing. On Flight 494, it was the tail. All were parts that a plane could not fly without. Storm had been nothing more or less than lucky.

  The idea of a weapon that powerful—in the hands of someone unafraid to use it to its ultimate and deadly capability—had Storm pushing the Chevy well past the speed limit. If he got a ticket, George Faytok would just have to deal with the points on his license.

  He did not share his conclusions with the National Transportation Safety Board about what had happened to Flight 76. He did not feel like wasting the energy or, more importantly, the time. The NTSB would eventually put it together. Or not. A crash investigation like that was an exercise in closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, something that did not interest Storm. As long as flights remained grounded, the laser could not hurt anyone else. That was all that mattered for the moment.

  Likewise, he had not yet briefed Jones, albeit for different reasons. With Jones, there was always the question of what he would do with the information he had been provided.

  Storm wasn’t sure if he wanted Jones knowing about the laser. Or, at the very least, he wanted the opportunity to think through the ramifications of giving him such knowledge. And Storm was going to the one place where he did his clearest thinking.

  It was not, perhaps, the place people might have expected for a world traveler like Storm to find solace. Storm spoke eight languages. He owned a secret retreat in the Seychelles. He had once undergone rituals that signified his lifelong bond to an aboriginal tribe in the Australian outback. An orphanage in Bacău, Romania, bore his name. A man in Tangier, Morocco, considered him a brother and would welcome him to his Moorish castle at a moment’s notice. The chief clerk at the International Court of Justice in The Hague owed him a thousand favors. A remote village above the Arctic Circle in Finland still thought of him as a conquering hero. There were those and dozens of other locations around the world where Derrick Storm could have gone and been welcomed, accepted, and treated like family.

  Yet his preference was still a dowdy, split-level ranch in Fairfax County, Virginia. And that was the front door he was pushing through shortly after ten o’clock.

  “Hey, Dad, it’s me,” Storm called out.

  “In here,” Carl Storm responded from the living room.

  Derrick walked in to see his father emerging from his Barcalounger. Carl had a full head of hair that had gone white. His eyebrows remained stubbornly black. His forehead was deeply lined, but it somehow made him look rugged instead of old. People often told Carl Storm he looked like the actor James Brolin. There was no question where Derrick had gotten his good looks.

  The room was dark. The only light came from the television. The baseball game—the one the Storm boys were supposed to have attended—had been played under flags lowered to half-staff after Major League Baseball decided it was not going to be cowed by terrorists. The Orioles were putting the finishing touches on a 13–1 drubbing of the Yankees.

  “Sorry we weren’t there to see it in person,” Derrick said, nodding at the game.

  Carl Storm was on his feet. Derrick’s mother had died when he was a young boy. Carl had never remarried. It had been just the two of them for a long time. Carl had been a single dad with a demanding job at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but he had done everything he could to be twice the parent to his motherless son.

  “You think I care about that after what you went through today?” Carl said. “Come here.”

  Derrick met him halfway across the room and Carl wrapped his arms around his son. Even if Derrick had noticed a softening in Carl over the past few years, he remained a powerful man. His hugs still packed a wallop.

  “Still, I’m going to make it up to you,” Derrick said. “Rain check. Just as soon as I get the chance.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I understand. To be honest, I’m a little surprised to see you here. What’s up?”

  “You got some time to talk?”

  “You know you never even have to ask,” Carl said. “You want a beer?”

  “That would be great.”

  Carl returned with two Pabst Blue Ribbons—PBR being the only beer that Carl ever stocked. He muted the television and they sat, Carl in the Barcalounger and Derrick on a paisley patterned sofa. As with the rest of the house, the living room hadn’t changed much since the lady of the house had passed. Whether this was a kind of tribute to her—or just a bachelor’s reluctance to even attempt redecoration—was always a bit unclear to Derrick.

  As they drained their drinks, Derrick told him about his experience aboard Flight 937, about what he had seen at the crash site and his certainty about what had caused the damage. Carl was retired now but hadn’t lost any of the skills that had made him one of the FBI’s best. He listened thoughtfully through the whole thing and was shaking his head when it was over.

  “Sometimes I wonder when we’ll learn,” Carl said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighed. “Did I ever tell you about Ton Son Nhut?”

  Derrick shook his head.

  “Ton Son Nhut was an air force base just outside of Saigon,” Carl said. “It was where most grunts arrived when they came in-country. And you have to remember, there were a half million guys in Vietnam at any point in time, so it was a busy place. You’d land and there would be a group of guys eagerly waiting for your plane, because that was their ride home. They’d actually shout ‘replacements, replacements’ at the fresh meat that was coming in.”

  Carl shook his head at the memory. He had done several tours of duty in Vietnam. As close as he was to his son, he seldom talked about that time in his life. He said it was because nothing very interesting happened to him. It was mostly just boredom, Carl had insisted. You wouldn’t be interested in any of it. Derrick always wondered if there was more to it, but he respected his father’s boundaries when it came to that long-ago conflict.

  “Anyhow, I was coming into Ton Son Nhut for my third tour, so I knew my way around a little bit,” Carl continued. “I was waiting for a Huey to take me into the boonies, but it was delayed for a few days by mechanical trouble or something. I was just wandering around the base when I came across the infirmary. They had—”

  Carl stopped himself for a second to look away. The glow from the television, which was soundlessly tuned to the Orioles postgame show, reflected on his face.

  “They had just accepted a medical chopper full of wounded civilians. It was the usual thing. A village had been harboring Vietcong and the air force had
cooked it down with a load of napalm. It was just—”

  Again, Carl had to compose himself.

  “The thing about napalm is that it sticks to things. That was part of how it was designed. It sticks to houses, trees, human bodies. Even small bodies. And it burns so hot. Once it gets going, it’s eight times hotter than boiling water. What that does to human flesh is…I mean, look, I had seen people burned with napalm before. But it was always combatants. And I didn’t feel a lot of…I mean, I felt bad for them, I guess, but not too bad. When you got right down to it, it was either us or them, you know?

  “But these civilians were something else. And you knew most of them weren’t going to make it. People who burn up that bad linger a few days, but all the while their lungs are filling up with fluid. The body is trying to heal itself of these overwhelming injuries but in doing so it actually begins to drown itself. A few survive, but most of them…”

  Carl was shaking his head. His eyes were open, but Derrick got the sense they were now seeing things from long ago. “There was this little girl. From what I understood, she had lost her mother in the attack. And God knows where her father was. Probably in a tunnel somewhere, waiting to kill himself a GI. Anyway, she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. She was the sweetest little thing. One side of her face was perfect—olive eyes, high cheekbones. You could tell she was going to be a beautiful woman someday. Except the other side, it was just…it was ruined. The napalm had hit her on the left side and stuck to her. Her left arm had been completely burned off. Her ribs. Her leg. It had gotten everywhere. She was in so much pain.

  “I visited her a few times, gave her chocolate bars from the PX to cheer her up, little dolls, that sort of thing. She tried to smile every time she saw me, even if she could only do it with half her face. The docs had her shot up with morphine, which helped some. But you could tell there were times when the morphine was wearing off and she didn’t know how to ask for more. The pain had to be…I mean, you can’t even imagine.”

  He brought the beer to his lips only to find it empty. Derrick tried to imagine what his father had looked like back then: his hair dark, his skin unlined. He would have been younger than Derrick was now. Young and powerful. And yet, in that moment, also powerless.

  “Anyhow, the last night I was there, I had gone to visit her again. She just couldn’t stop crying, the poor little thing. You could tell it hurt so bad. I ran to get a nurse to up the morphine, but they told me she was already getting the maximum dosage. So I just, I tried…I tried to cradle her. I mean, you could barely touch her, she was so fragile. But I wanted her to know that, damn it, someone still cared about her. Even someone from a country that had done this to her. I held her and she cried, and I held her some more. Eventually, she slipped into a coma, which was probably a blessing. And I kept holding her until…”

  He didn’t complete the thought, letting his voice trail off into the darkened living room.

  “Anyway, when it was all over, I went straight to the Officer’s Club to get as drunk as I knew how. I ended up sitting next to a young air force lieutenant, a Lieutenant Marlowe. I started talking about what I had just witnessed and it turned out he had been the one who airlifted the civilians there, so he had seen it, too. We started talking about the horrible things people did to each other, about war, and about the terrible irony that mankind was smart enough to be able to design these weapons and still dumb enough to use them on each other. You have to remember, this was the height of the Cold War, when the nuclear threat was still very real. And he said something like, We just can’t be trusted with certain weapons. There ought to be limits. We promised each other that someday, if either of us ever got in a position of authority within the military, we’d use it to help enforce those limits.”

  Derrick nodded, pensively.

  “Son, I’m an old man. I can’t really do much to keep that promise anymore. But you can,” Carl finished. “You have to do everything you can to get this weapon out of the hands of whoever has it. But you also have to make sure it doesn’t fall into someone else’s hands. Not even the United States. We can’t be trusted, either.”

  “Okay,” Derrick said. “Let’s get to work.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Carl had brewed a pot of coffee. They were in the kitchen, which was perhaps the only one in tony Fairfax not to have undergone remodeling in the last thirty-odd years. It had been pulled from a time warp, all linoleum flooring and Formica countertops. The light fixture, which looked like something out of a seventies pizzeria, glowed brightly above them.

  Derrick had his tablet laid on the table in front of him. Carl had a laptop computer with a fresh legal pad and a sharpened pencil alongside it.

  “At this point, we have to be thinking terrorist, yes?” Derrick said.

  “Yes.”

  “What type are we focusing on? A group of violent ‘true believers’? A lone wolf?”

  “Any of the above. All of the above. The important thing to remember is terrorists come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they look like Osama bin Laden, yes. But Ted Kaczynski was a terrorist and he looked like half the computer science professors in this country. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and he looked like a pizza delivery boy. Sometimes they come in forms you don’t expect.”

  “Right. And in this case, we still don’t know what is motivating these terrorists or what they want. All we really know about them is what kind of weapon they used.”

  “This fancy laser,” Carl said.

  “That’s right. A high-energy laser. That makes these terrorists different from Kaczynski or McVeigh. Those guys used fairly simple weapons, the kind that anyone with an Internet connection and half a brain could learn how to make in a few hours with stuff they could buy from a hardware store. A high-energy laser is a lot trickier. You can’t find those parts at the Home Depot and even if you could, your average wack job wouldn’t know what to do with them. So the question becomes, how did these particular terrorists acquire that kind of expertise?”

  “Could be a scientist or engineer who turned,” Carl said.

  “Could be. But anyone with those capabilities would be highly valued by society. They would be well paid, well respected. Those people don’t usually feel compelled to turn on the system that is rewarding them so well.”

  “Unless it’s someone who feels like the system isn’t rewarding them enough,” Carl pointed out.

  “Always a possibility. But I feel like it’s more likely we’re looking at some kind of situation where our expert is being forced against his or her will to help the terrorists. I think we’re looking for a kidnapping.”

  Carl took a sip of his coffee, wincing at the beverage’s temperature. “I don’t know. Anyone who worked on a cutting-edge weapons project would need to have a pretty high security clearance. When I was at the bureau, one of the duties of the local field office was to keep an eye on people like that. If someone with a high clearance went missing, his or her boss would have made a big stink about it.”

  “So maybe it’s not a kidnapping,” Derrick said. “Maybe it’s some form of blackmail. Or a member of the expert’s family has been taken and is being held as collateral.”

  “I like that better as a theory. So how do we find the expert in trouble?”

  Derrick stared into his coffee cup, as if the answer was floating somewhere in the black liquid. “We’re looking at a fairly specialized field of study. There are probably no more than a few dozen people in the country who would have this kind of knowledge, if that. I bet as soon as we start looking, we’ll see the same names, over and over. Let’s dive into the literature, the academic journals and whatnot, and make a list of the possibilities, then start quietly checking in on them.”

  “Sounds good,” Carl said.

  Quietly, diligently, the Storm boys bent their heads over their respective devices. Carl Storm had joined the FBI before it went upscale, before
movies and television made it trendy. He had gone off to work every day in thick-soled shoes and cheap suits. He believed in working a case from the ground up—no shortcuts, no slacking—and had raised Derrick to have the same investigative sensibilities.

  As the hours passed, there were small bits of dialogue between them. Would you check out…? Don’t bother with…Have you bumped across…? I’m e-mailing you a pdf from…

  The sentences didn’t even need to be completed. It was almost as if the men had joined brains, and it had not merely doubled their capacity. It had quadrupled it.

  They worked steadily, without break. Carl was the keeper of the list, which he inscribed in careful block letters on his legal pad. There didn’t turn out to be as many names as Derrick thought there would be. Once they reached twenty, they just kept bumping into scientists they had already identified.

  It was around 2 A.M. when Derrick said, “Okay. I feel like we’ve got a good start here. Let’s divvy this up, start looking into these guys, and see if anything shakes out.”

  They did not have access to the kind of databases that Jedediah Jones’s techs would be able to hack into. But as an ex–private investigator, Derrick knew his way around a public records search. And Carl was not so long-retired that he had lost his acuity.

  Another hour went by. Carl made another pot of coffee, then heated up some frozen sticky buns, typical of the bachelor-inspired gourmet cooking Derrick had grown up with. Even though he had since become something of an epicurean, Derrick still had a certain nostalgia for the frozen/canned/prepackaged gruel of his youth. It was his own odd version of comfort food.

  Neither man made a noise about sleeping, or even being tired. The Storm stamina—willed from father to son—was legendary.

  It was closing in on four o’clock when Derrick announced, “I got something. William McRae.”

  “The guy who had that piece in Applied Physics Letters?” Carl asked, as if he had a subscription to that publication coming to his mailbox for years.