Heat Storm (Castle)

by Richard Castle

  But the foreigner was not there to sightsee. As his men subdued the printing press operators, who were dutifully raising their hands and then allowing themselves to be zip-tied, the foreigner moved quickly to a small hutchlike office that had been built in the back corner of the rectangular building.

  Covering his fist with his sleeve, he punched one of the windows. Its single pane shattered immediately, allowing him to reach around and unlock the door.

  He threw open the door, but when he took his first step in, he heard a loud hiss, then felt a stinging somewhere below his waist. He looked down to see a dart sticking ominously out of the side of his buttock. Three more darts had just missed and buried themselves in the far wall.

  Booby-trapped. The office had been booby-trapped. Their intelligence had not indicated any such threat. And, really, who used a dart? A dart wouldn’t hurt anyone, unless it was . . .

  Poisonous. The foreigner grabbed the dart and yanked, hoping he had extracted it before the toxins could enter his bloodstream. He examined the tip quickly and found, to his surprise, only his own blood. There did not appear to be any other substance.

  Which explained everything. It must have been meant merely as a nonlethal deterrent to prevent lower-level employees from snooping where they didn’t belong—and punish them if they tried.

  The foreigner put those thoughts aside and entered the office. This was the real focus of his raid. It was not enough to merely destroy the printing plates and disable the presses. Jedediah Jones had been quite explicit that the foreigner also needed to find evidence of who was behind it.

  The belief, as widespread as it was unsubstantiated, was that this was one of the many offshoots of a group of Chinese businessmen known as the Shanghai Seven. If the story of modern Chinese economic might starts in Shanghai, the story of Shanghai itself cannot be told without the seven members of the Chinese Communist Party who were given the seed money, freedom, and directive to begin assembling a massive corporate conglomerate. The Shanghai Seven were supposed to propel China in its drive to overtake the United States and to show other Chinese how Western business was done.

  The first part was a work in progress. The second part had not gone quite as well. Other Chinese entrepreneurs, the ones who had been self-selected and had succeeded because of their good ideas and hard work, turned out to be far more profitable. The Shanghai Seven, forever fat and lazy, turned out to be middling moguls, with more failed ventures than successful ones. They also had a certain penchant for criminality. Raised in the rampantly corrupt culture of the CCP, they slipped rather easily between legitimate enterprises and the underworld.

  But knowing that and proving it were two very different things. And they had been too slippery—with the blessing and backing of the CCP—to have ever been caught at anything big enough that the Chinese authorities would have been pressured, by force of embarrassment or complaints from legitimate businessmen, to act.

  Until now.

  Perhaps.

  The foreigner was moving quickly, knowing his time was short and getting shorter. The office was nicely—though not extravagantly— furnished and had a well-inhabited feel to it. This was an office that got frequent use, though the foreigner could guess it was not the base of operations for one of the Shanghai Seven. They would never allow themselves to get so close to an operation of this sort.

  No, this was the workplace of a high-level lieutenant, someone trusted enough to run this operation and yet be deemed ultimately expendable should a scapegoat be needed.

  The foreigner went to the desk in the middle of the room first. The side drawers contained a teapot, a liquor flask, and a variety of snacks. The lieutenant apparently liked to be well provisioned. The top drawer was a mess of pens, pencils, paper clips, and sticky notes—criminals needed office supplies too, it seemed. The foreigner was about to move on when a rainbowlike glint caught his eye.

  It was a compact disc, nestled in a transparent jewel case. The foreigner grabbed it and stuffed it inside his bulletproof vest.

  Then he moved on to a filing cabinet against the far wall. The first file folder contained not papers but cassette tapes. He pocketed those, too. Then he moved to the next file folder, which contained documents that the foreigner began photographing.

  He was clicking as fast as he could, not bothering to look before he shot. There would be time later to determine whether any of this was useful or whether he was copying a criminal enterprise’s equivalent of a grocery list.

  Then, suddenly, his time was up.

  From outside, there was a new round of shouting. Through the office windows he could see a swarm of People’s Armed Police, in their green uniforms, pouring into the facility. They were yelling, though their agitation did not seem to be directed at the six pressmen who were sitting mutely in a row on the floor by their idle machinery; no, the orders were being shouted at the four men in bulletproof vests who were in the midst of destroying as much of the counterfeiting apparatus as they could.

  The foreigner came out of the office just as Colonel Feng entered the warehouse, his lit cigarette leading the way. He was grinning broadly, deeply satisfied with himself, as he approached the foreigner.

  “Colonel Feng,” the foreigner said. “I see you had company after all.”

  “The sound of gunfire must have alerted this squadron,” he replied. “Aren’t we fortunate they happened to be in the area on a training mission?”

  “Quite,” the foreigner said. He was moving closer to his men, who had formed into a small clump.

  “But now that they are here, they are certainly capable of assuming jurisdiction over what turns out to be, much to our surprise, a crime scene,” Feng said. “On behalf of my government, I thank you for discovering this illicit enterprise.”

  “Oh, you’re very welcome.”

  “Now, I believe your work here is done. You will now turn over any evidence you have collected, including the phone you have been using to take pictures. We will make sure it is handled by the proper authorities and that the wrongdoers are prosecuted.”

  “I’m sure you will,” the foreigner said.

  He was, by now, next to his men. One of them had reached under his bulletproof vest to produce an object roughly the size of a shoe. Or at least it was until the man pressed two buttons and it instantly expanded to form a six-foot-by-four-foot barrier. The men crouched behind it, with their fingers jammed in their ears and their eyes screwed shut, as Feng looked on, more curious than threatened.

  Then the foreigner said, “Deploy.”

  Three things happened in quick succession.

  First the lights went out.

  Next there was a tremendous explosion, one with enough force to tear a large jagged hole in the side of the warehouse.

  Finally, the blast wave reached Feng, knocking him off his feet and extinguishing his cigarette in the process.

  By the time the dust cleared, the foreigners were long gone—and they had taken the evidence with them.

  TWO

  HEAT

  ONE WEEK LATER

  We need to talk about your mother,” Derrick Storm said.

  New York Police Department captain Nikki Heat holstered her 9mm and studied the man whom, moments earlier, she had mistaken for an intruder.

  It was Thursday evening at the end of a very long day, which was itself at the end of several other very long days in Nikki Heat’s life.

  But she had a sense, from the deep circles under her visitor’s eyes, that he had also been getting a lot of recent experience with sleep deprivation.

  “How did you get in?” she asked, stalling while she tried to make sense of the intrusion.

  “Your doorman is not very good,” he said.

  “Which doorman? Bob Aaronson?”

  “Is he built like a bowling pin, with a face full of childlike freckles that go very poorly with male-pattern baldness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should inform your co-op board that Bob
Aaronson is completely incompetent.”

  Storm was sitting in a chair that had once been a favorite of Heat’s mother’s, in the corner of a Manhattan apartment that had once belonged to her mother. And now he wanted to talk about her mother.

  Did he know? Did he know that after seventeen years of being presumed dead, Cynthia Heat had surfaced in a bus shelter two days earlier—dressed as a homeless woman—and then vanished so quickly Nikki was left doubting what she had seen? Did he know that the ashes Nikki had venerated for seventeen years as being her mother’s remains turned out, upon laboratory testing, to be nothing more than cremated roadkill? Did he understand the circumstances that led to Cynthia’s disappearance and then sudden reappearance, a set of facts Nikki herself didn’t begin to understand?

  “So, my mother,” Heat said, still standing at the ready. “What do we need to talk about?”

  Storm appeared troubled. “Look, you should know, I almost didn’t come here. It’s selfish of me to even bring this to you. But you’re the only person alive who might be able to help me decipher some potentially important evidence I’ve found. It’s a recording of your mother. Would it be too painful for you to listen to it?”

  “I’m beyond feeling pain about my mother,” Heat said.

  That was a lie. And Heat suspected Derrick Storm could tell. But he let it pass.

  “This is all classified, of course, so I’d appreciate your discretion, Captain Heat.”

  “And of course you’ll have it.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “So, first, some background. I think you know from our little jam-up involving that dead currency trader a few years back that I work for a part of the government that likes to operate on the hush-hush.”

  “I remember a CIA station agent calling me in the middle of the night, insisting that if I didn’t let you go, not only would he be fired, but the world as we knew it would come to an end.”

  “That is a testament to the power of the man I work for. His name is Jedediah Jones. He operates a strictly off-the-books unit deep within the CIA. He has solved enough problems for enough important people that he has an essentially unlimited budget. And he works with limited oversight, because people in Washington understand it’s in their best interests not to ask too many questions about his methods. I think he last corresponded with his morality in the third grade, though he certainly gets things done.”

  “I can think of a few people at the NYPD who would love to meet him,” Heat said.

  “I’m sure. Anyhow, the latest insect to capture the attention of Jones’s flyswatter is a group of Chinese businessmen known as the Shanghai Seven. Are you familiar with them?”

  “Not really.”

  Storm told Heat about the Shanghai Seven, the counterfeiting operation he believed them to be behind, his raid, and how his evidence collection ran into interference from the corrupt Colonel Feng.

  “And he just stood there the whole time, smoking cloves, denying that anything was happening . . . until suddenly he showed up with a squadron of troops,” Storm finished.

  “Which means he was working for the Shanghai Seven, yes?”

  “Well, yes. Except we can’t really prove his ties to them, any more than we can prove the Shanghai Seven is really behind the counterfeiting. And until we can—and more or less shame the Chinese into doing something about it—we fear the Shanghai Seven will just start it up somewhere else,” Storm said. “They have the supply lines and technical know-how, and we would have very little ability to stop them. Beyond counterfeiting, they’ve also been tied to human trafficking, drug smuggling, and a whole host of other nasty businesses over the years. Suffice to say, you should not confuse the Shanghai Seven with the seven dwarfs.”

  “Understood.”

  “Most of the evidence I found during the raid was disappointingly inconclusive. But there were two items that may be able to help us. The first is a compact disc that seems to contain some kind of data.”

  “A CD? Who still uses those things?”

  “I have no idea. It’s very possible this was made in 1999.”

  That was the year Heat’s mother had been murdered. Or, rather, the year Cynthia Heat had faked her own death, taking a drug that plunged her heartbeat to almost nothing, then hiring actors to pose as EMTs and take her body away.

  “But why . . . why don’t you know for sure?” Heat asked.

  “The data is encrypted at such a level that you can’t even copy it to another computer without running into more encryption. And I haven’t been able to crack it yet.”

  “I thought your boss has people who can do that,” Heat said.

  “He does. But, frankly, I don’t trust him. I’ve known him for too long. The way he’s been acting around this entire assignment has been strange, even for him. There’s something he’s not telling me, something else at play, something big. And until I better understand what the game is, I’m not going to hand him a baseball bat he might use to bash me over the head. He doesn’t even know about the CD. I’m guessing a person in your position understands the importance of being able to manage up.”

  “I do,” Heat said, offering him a knowing smile.

  She sat down, choosing the chair closest to his. For reasons she didn’t entirely understand, she felt instantly comfortable with him. Anyone looking at the two of them without the benefit of being able to hear the topic of their conversation might have even thought this rendezvous could soon turn into romance. They certainly would make an amazing couple. She was a striking brunette, long-legged and dark-eyed, with cheekbones that modeling agencies scoured the globe to find. He was the kind of handsome that writers felt compelled to begin a book with. Their children would not only be beautiful but also cunning, brilliant, and strong.

  Yet that was not the dynamic at play here. For as hunky as he was, for as gorgeous as she was, there was not a whiff of attraction between them. It was almost like a long-lost brother and sister meeting for the first time.

  Storm continued: “The other evidence I found is this recording of your mother, and that’s where I need you. Are you . . . are you sure you really want to listen to it?”

  “I’m sure,” Heat said. She had spent years of her life dredging up every morsel she could about her mother’s life. It was ingrained in Nikki—both as a daughter and as a detective—to want to know more. Her heart was already hammering from some combination of anxiety and anticipation.

  Storm reached down to a small bag that was resting by his chair. He pulled out a circa 1984 cassette player, then the tape itself, which he held out for Heat to look at.

  “Can you read simplified Chinese?” Storm asked.

  “Not a bit.”

  “If you could, you’d know that this is an approximation of your mother’s name, spelled phonetically. Mandarin lacks the ess sound, so they did the best they could. And it’s dated November 1999.”

  Storm hit the eject button on the cassette player to open its small door, then gently slid the tape inside. For a pair of thirtysomethings like Heat and Storm, it was rather nostalgic to be operating such outdated technology.

  “Whoever produced this recording had tapped your mother’s home phone. Most of the conversations were ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff. You’re even on there a couple of times, calling in from college.”

  Heat shook her head. “My dorm had a bank of pay phones in the basement,” she said. “A few people were starting to get cell phones, but they were still considered a luxury item. I used a phone card every time I called her. Remember those?”

  Storm grinned. “I’ll leave the cassette and player with you, in case you’d like to listen to all of it later. I’ve already made a copy of the important parts for myself. But I’ve got it cued up to the pertinent part right now. You ready?”

  Heat bobbed her head. Storm depressed the plastic play button and, for the first time in seventeen years, the voice of Cynthia Heat filled the Gramercy Park apartment she had once called home.

  “Hello?” C
ynthia Heat said.

  “Hey, it’s Nicole,” a female voice said.

  Nikki reached over and jabbed the pause button. “That’s Nicole Bernardin, my mother’s best friend and fellow operative. They were part of a network of domestic workers and high-end tutors who spied on the rich and connected—”

  “The Nanny Network,” Storm said. “I know all about them. They’re legendary.”

  “Anyway, Nicole . . . she . . . she died a few years ago. She was killed by some people who tossed her in a suitcase and then put her in a deep freeze. It was the same people who killed my mother. Or at least I used to think it was the same people who killed my mother. . . .”

  Heat realized she didn’t know what she thought anymore. As a way of stopping Storm from asking questions, she hit the play button again.

  “Thanks for calling back,” Cynthia said. “I just wanted you to know I’ve dealt with those phony bills. I found a place to hide them.”

  “Where?” Bernardin asked.

  “You don’t want to know. It’s for your own good.”

  “Right.”

  “They definitely have fingerprints on them. I dusted them. They’re faint, but they’re there.”

  “So . . . I guess that makes those bills your insurance policy? As long as they’re out there, somewhere, you’ve got some leverage.”

  “Exactly,” Cynthia said.

  This time it was Storm pressing the pause button. “It’s my belief that the fingerprints on the fake money belong to one of the Shanghai Seven,” he said. “That would make the bills powerful evidence against them.”

  He resumed playing the tape.

  “And you’re sure they’re in a safe place?” Bernardin asked.

  “Let me put it this way: I’d not only trust this spot with my life, I’d trust it with my best Scotch.”

  Storm pressed the pause button again. “Does this apartment have a liquor cabinet by any chance?”

  “Yeah, and you’re welcome to take it apart. But, believe me, I’ve been over, around, under, and through every nook and cranny of this apartment a hundred times looking for hiding spots, false fronts, concealed compartments. There’s nothing here. Besides, she wouldn’t have hidden them here. My mother was incredibly careful about not bringing her work—and by that, I mean her real work, not her cover job as a piano teacher—home with her.”