Heat Storm (Castle)

by Richard Castle

  The Dumpster. No one would disturb the gun if she hid it there. She asked George to get her a towel from the kitchen. When he returned with it, she wrapped her 9mm and hid it out of sight of anyone in the alley, save for the rats.

  Then, finally, George escorted her inside. He had to turn on lights as he went, going through the tiny warren of hallways that only the staff ever really used. Heat felt like she was getting a behind-the-scenes tour at Walt Disney World, seeing all the unfamiliar parts of an otherwise familiar place.

  George stopped briefly in the cramped quarters shared by the maintenance staff and rummaged around in a toolbox for a moment, pulling out a straightedge razor and a long flathead screwdriver that would have made for a decent weapon if wielded properly. Then he led her to the polished mahogany bar that was his realm.

  “Here?” she asked. “All this time, you kept it here?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “You’ll see. Come on.”

  He had an enigmatic glint in his eye as he bent low to grab something—Heat couldn’t see what—from behind the bar. When he came back up, a piece of his white hair had come loose, giving him a kind of mad professor look.

  Then, without a second glance at Heat, he went back to where the members’ liquor lockers were. The room was dark. It didn’t seem possible George could see anything.

  “Aren’t you going to turn on a light?” Heat asked.

  “The bulb blew out last night and we haven’t been able to replace it yet,” he said. “It’s apparently some kind of specialty item. Doesn’t matter to me. I’ve always said I could navigate this place blindfolded. This is my chance to prove it.”

  He had walked to one of the cabinets, seemingly at random. Heat fumbled with her phone until she found the flashlight feature. She switched it on just as George whirled to face her. He gestured at her with the screwdriver, gripping the plastic end and flashing the metal end dangerously close to her face.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  “I really shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “You’re doing the best thing for everyone involved,” Heat assured him.

  He fixed her with one long, strange glance. Then he inserted a key into a locker whose brass plate had CLEMENS etched on it.

  “Clemens?” Heat said. “As in Samuel Langhorne Clemens?”

  “Well, it’s certainly not Roger Clemens.”

  “All these years, you’ve been hiding the bills in Mark Twain’s old liquor locker?”

  “No one is supposed to touch this,” George said. “It’s the first rule all the new bartenders are taught: ‘Don’t mess with Mr. Clemens’s cabinet.’ It seemed like the safest place.”

  George turned back to the cabinet. He took the straightedge out of his pocket, then plunged his hand in. Heat could hear him scraping away at wood.

  “It took a few tries to get the cherry stain on this to match the surroundings exactly,” he said. “But then it was pretty simple. This is just a piece of lauan that I glued into place.”

  “So you created a false back to the cabinet?” Heat asked.

  “Defacing Mark Twain’s old stashing place in the process. It helped that the envelope was so thin. Made it easier than if I had to hide something with a lot of heft to it.”

  He took a few more swipes with the straightedge. “There,” he said. “That ought to do it.”

  Now it was time for the screwdriver. Before long, Heat heard the sound of dry, old wood separating from another piece of even drier, older wood.

  “If anyone on the board knew I was doing this, they’d have me crucified,” George said.

  He removed a shard of wood from the back. After one more percussive crack, he brought out an envelope. He clutched it for a few extra seconds, giving the moment a small amount of added drama.

  “Here,” he said finally, handing it to Heat.

  She brought it out to the bar area, which the morning sun was just starting to illuminate. It gave her enough light to see it was a number ten envelope made of the thick linen stationery paper Cynthia Heat preferred.

  For as tempted as she was to rip the envelope open, Nikki knew she needed to exercise caution.

  “George, do you have any plastic gloves?”

  “Hang on,” he said, going behind the bar. He came up with a pair of black rubber gloves. “Will these do?”

  “Thank you,” Heat said, delicately placing the envelope on the shiny, meticulously clean bar top as she put on the gloves.

  “Now that straightedge, please,” she said, feeling almost like a surgeon asking for a scalpel.

  George handed her the razor, which she used to slice a line at the top of the envelope, taking great care not to let the blade touch anything inside.

  She peered into the opening she had created. There were five twenty-dollar bills, straight and crisp and perfect. Heat pulled out the first one and studied it, smiling immediately.

  There was a fine layer of powder clinging to it, and it made Nikki instantly feel the kind of intrinsic connection to her mother that had so often been absent over the last seventeen years. The combined writing muscle of every Hallmark card writer in existence could scarcely have concocted a better greeting from the mother in question to this particular daughter.

  Cynthia Heat had already dusted it for prints. And there were several that stood out quite vividly. Not exactly a full set, but certainly more than enough to make an identification.

  Forgetting what time it was, even forgetting where she was, Nikki Heat had already hauled out her phone.

  She pulled up a number and pressed the call button.

  As she listened to the ring tone, she studied the thumbprint on the first bill. It was smack in the middle of Andrew Jackson’s face, with all its arches, whorls, and loops standing out very clearly. Heat could have gotten a better image with an old-fashioned ink pad and print papers down at the precinct. But this was almost as good.

  After four rings, she heard a groggy voice answer: “Hello?”

  “DeJesus. It’s Heat.”

  Benigno DeJesus was the best crime scene tech Heat had—which didn’t necessarily mean he was thrilled to be serving in that role at six in the morning.

  DeJesus sputtered an inventive series of curses in Spanish—a kind of pirouette of profanity—then finished with: “Dios mío, ¿sabes qué hora es?”

  “Sorry, sorry. I know it’s early. It’s kind of a personal emergency.”

  “It had better be,” DeJesus grumbled.

  “I need you to run some prints just as fast as you can. How soon can you get to the precinct?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Can I get my pants on first?”

  “Only if you have to.”

  He concocted another elegy made of expletives, then hung up.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  STORM

  Derrick Storm left the Cubby the way he always did: wearing a hood that obscured his vision, riding in an elevator that lurched and zoomed like it was taking them through the bowels of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

  When he was allowed to take off the hood, he was back out in the main lobby of CIA headquarters. Parked outside was the Ford Expedition he had rightfully stolen, fresh from the impound lot where it had spent the early morning.

  Storm quickly checked out the back. The RPG launcher, the machine guns, the copious supply of ammunition, all of it appeared to be untouched. The CIA apparently interpreted the Second Amendment at its theoretical maximum.

  As he waited for his father to reappear, Storm checked his burner phone and saw the message from Heat about cracking the encryption on the CD. He stiffened when he read Colonel Feng’s name. There was something about the man—his oiliness, his cool, a dispassion that seemed to go beyond anything natural—that Storm found unnerving.

  Furthermore, it signaled just how seriously the Shanghai Seven was taking this matter that they felt it necessary to send their top fixer all the way across the wor
ld just to retrieve a compact disc.

  He texted back that he would get right on it.

  What he didn’t add was that he wasn’t sure how he’d go about it. He had just left a room filled with the most talented cryptologists he knew of. And they had surely tried—and, if Jones was to be believed, failed—to access the CD while Storm was unconscious.

  There was no taking the CD back down to the Cubby. Jones may not have been giving Storm’s location to the Shanghai Seven, but that didn’t fully restore Storm’s faith in the man. It seemed every bit as possible he’d take whatever evidence Storm was able to drum up against the Shanghai Seven and use it for a purpose other than its original lawful intention. The only way Storm could keep Jones from misbehaving was to see this thing through to the end.

  Storm was so lost in thought he only looked up when he realized someone was pulling open the passenger side door.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” Carl Storm said. “Let’s get out of here. This place makes my skin crawl.”

  “You got it,” Derrick said. “I was thinking I’d take you to a hotel. You know it’s not safe for you at home while the Shanghai Seven is still out and about looking for us. Don’t worry, I’ll find you a better place than the Oorah. You can stay there until it’s safe.”

  “What, and make me miss all the fun?”

  “Dad, this isn’t going to be f—”

  “I’m aware,” Carl said. “I was just making a little joke. Sheesh. Loosen up.”

  “That’s the thing, Dad. None of this is a joke right now. You know what my last thought was when that tranquilizer dart hit me? It was that I had let you down.”

  “What are you—”

  “Let me finish. I let you down because I never should have let you get involved in this in the first place, and I should have done a better job protecting you once you got in it. It’s ridiculous that I’ve put you in harm’s way. If anything happened to you because of one of my stupid jobs, I would never forgive myself.”

  Carl absorbed this for a beat. But Derrick could tell from the way his black eyebrows were waggling that he wasn’t agreeing with a word of it.

  “Well, that’s very nice of you, to be looking after your enfeebled old fart of a father,” he said. “But now, because I’m your father, I have the full liberty to tell you that is one hundred percent pure, unadulterated horseshit.”

  “Dad, come on—”

  “No, no. I let you finish. Now you’re going to let me finish. You know what my last thought was when those bastards shot me? It was that if this was how I had to go, there was no better way: with my son at my side, fighting until the last breath. As a matter of fact, if I could sign up for that right now, I would. So you might as well realize I’m in this thing to the bitter end, no matter how it ends. And don’t give me this ‘I let you down’ crap. You could never let me down, Derrick. I’m too damn proud of everything you’ve accomplished and of the man that you’ve become for that to even be possible.”

  He patted his son on the knee, making Derrick feel like he was twelve again. It was, for a moment, a terrific feeling to have.

  Then the moment ended. Carl cleared his throat and said, “Anyhow, before I issue the fatherly command that you shut up and drive, tell me: Why did you look like you were trying to pass a kidney stone when I first got in the car?”

  Derrick told him about Heat’s text and about how the CD seemed to be at the forefront of the Shanghai Seven’s efforts both in DC and in New York.

  “Sounds like we need to find out what’s on that thing,” Carl said.

  “Of course. But how? None of the nerds could do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. That’s what Jones—”

  He was about to finish the sentence with the word said, but never got there.

  Carl was already shaking his head. “How many times do I have to tell you, you can’t trust that snake? If he told you he didn’t crack it, that means the odds are better than fifty percent that he did.”

  Derrick just stared straight ahead through the windshield. He couldn’t disagree with his father.

  “Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. If Jones’s guys—”

  “Jones’s people. Some of those guys are gals, Dad.”

  “Right. As I was saying: If Jones’s people cracked it, I bet that means your buddy Kevin Bryan could do it, too.”

  “You think he’ll help us?”

  “Sure. I’m ‘the man,’ remember?” Carl said, then smiled and patted his son’s knee one more time. “Okay, now you can shut up and drive.”

  * * *

  Morning traffic was just starting to thicken as they made the short trip to Kevin Bryan’s apartment building. Derrick went through the front door this time. If one of the nerds alerted Jones about his visit, so be it.

  They were on the same team, after all.

  A quick elevator ride later, they were on Bryan’s floor. He came to the door freshly showered, dressed in boxers and a T-shirt. He wedged it open only an inch, keeping the chain in place as he glared at Derrick.

  “Just so we’re clear, I’m only answering because I’m afraid you’ll cut another hole in my apartment if I don’t,” he said.

  “That was definitely a possibility, except I don’t like to duplicate the same means of entry twice, and I thought using explosives would get a little messy.”

  “What do you want, Storm?”

  “Your help. Same as last time. Do you need another lecture from Dad or can we skip the touchy-feely stuff this time?”

  “Is your dad even here?”

  “Over here, Kevin,” Carl said from the other side of the door.

  Bryan mulled this over for a moment, then said, “Forget it. No offense, Mr. Storm, but even the Irish have limits on how much guilt they can be made to feel. We have a staff meeting this morning, and you know Jones with his Vince Lombardi routine: ‘If you’re not five minutes early, you’re five minutes late.’ I’m not—”

  He was interrupted by his phone ringing. With the chain still on the door, Bryan snuck the phone out of his pocket, looked at the screen, then answered it immediately.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Voldemort. Again.

  “Yes, sir,” Bryan repeated.

  He listened a little more.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  Another pause.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get right on it.”

  Bryan returned his phone to his pants. “Okay. How did you pull that off?”

  “Pull what off?” Derrick said.

  “That was Jones. He said I’m supposed to help you with whatever it is you want me to do, and he said it’s okay if I don’t tell him what it is. It seems whatever you’ve done, you’ve earned my services as a valet.”

  The Storms exchanged astonished looks. Then Derrick rolled with it. “Great,” he said. “Can you shine my shoes?”

  “Don’t push it,” Bryan said, sliding the chain off the door. “Come on in.”

  Without further delay, Derrick explained the nature of what they needed. Bryan immediately forgot about whatever hurt feelings he was still harboring about the intrusion and listened well. The challenge clearly intrigued him.

  Before long, Carl had fallen into a deep sleep on the couch, and the other men had retreated into Bryan’s home office. Bryan slid the disc into his desktop computer, which connected him to the massive computer power of one of the CIA’s mainframes. He was soon lost in a digital world whose contours were only vaguely familiar to Storm.

  Storm’s job was to fetch coffee and pretend to know what Bryan was talking about as he attempted various assaults on the disc’s security measures.

  As one after another failed, Bryan’s agitation began increasing. So did his rate of coffee consumption. And yet, in his increasing mania to solve the puzzle, he didn’t seem to notice or care as he broke into a caffeine-induced sweat, or when his legs started bouncing up and down like small pale jackhammers.

&nbs
p; After an hour of this, Bryan suddenly looked up from the screen.

  “Holy crap!” he exclaimed.

  “Did you get it?”

  “No. I really need to go to the bathroom,” Bryan yelped, then disappeared into his bedroom.

  When he returned, he looked bewildered.

  “What is it?” Storm asked.

  “I don’t know . . . I just . . . You usually get a pretty good sense of how things are going after a couple of hours, and I’m just not getting anywhere. If cracking this thing was like trying to write a novel, I’d still be on the first sentence.”

  Storm nodded. A novelist he once knew had explained that coming up with that first sentence was like a teenage boy trying to lose his virginity: a long exercise in mounting frustration followed by a payoff that, afterward, seemed altogether too brief.

  “So what do we do?” Storm asked.

  Carl, who had recently awoken from his slumber, wandered into the room and was listening in.

  “I don’t know,” Bryan said. “Find a dinosaur to help you bust through this thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is late nineties encryption. In the computer world, that’s so long ago, it’s not just Stone Age—it’s like the cavemen haven’t even evolved yet. They’re still monkeys trying to figure out how to stand upright. But, in its own way, that makes it a special kind of genius, because it’s so old and so many generations removed from current protocols, I don’t have a clue how to go at it. I can tell the nerds didn’t, either. This thing is locked up tight.”

  “So you’re saying the encryption is old school?” Carl asked.

  “Ancient school,” Bryan confirmed.

  “In that case, I think it’s time we excuse ourselves,” Carl said, then turned to Derrick. “I’ve got another trick up my sleeve.”

  Derrick stiffened. “This isn’t going to end up with me wearing someone’s lawn on my head, is it?”

  “No, no. I know a guy who might be able to help. We should go visit him.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “New York. Queens.”

  “That’s going to be a bit of a hike,” Derrick said. “Can you call him first? Make sure he’s not on vacation or something?”