Wild Storm

by Richard Castle

  But in that moment, Captain Estes was only thinking of one man, a man who had already slipped away.

  “I never even got his name,” he said to the flight attendant when all the passengers were gone.

  “He was seated in 2B,” Peggy told him. “Why don’t you check the manifest?”

  The captain returned to his cockpit and scanned down the list of the passengers.

  The man from seat 2B was named Derrick Storm.

  CHAPTER 2

  WEST OF LUXOR, Egypt

  F

  lat and featureless, hot and barren, the expanse of the Sahara Desert that stretched for some three thousand miles west of the Nile River was a great place to hide. But only if you were a grain of sand.

  Everything else stuck out. And so Katie Comely had no problem distinguishing the dust cloud rising several miles in the distance.

  She trained the viewfinder of her Zeiss Conquest HD binoculars on the front of the plume and saw the glinting of windshields. There were vehicles, at least four of them, traveling along in a lopsided V formation, closing in at between forty and fifty miles an hour.

  It was not, in any way, a covert approach. But the men that Katie worried about were not the type to bother with subtlety.

  Bandits. Again. They were always a problem in the desert, but even more so since the revolution of 2011 and the April 6 uprising. It was all the authorities could do to keep order in the towns and cities. The outlying areas had become as lawless as they had been in the days that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. In the two months since Katie had been on the dig, the expedition had been raided three times by outlaws who had helped themselves to everything they could carry. One or two of the items were later recovered by Egyptian authorities. The rest disappeared, sold on the black market for a fraction of what they were actually worth.

  The expedition had hired a security force—really, just two aging locals with even older weapons and without the heart to use them—but it had been outnumbered and outgunned all three times. The force had since been doubled in number to four. She hoped that would be enough.

  Katie adjusted the binoculars, trying to get a better view. She was twenty-nine, only a few months removed from defending her dissertation. Her PhD sheepskin still had a new-car smell to it. The University of Kansas had instructed her on how to pry open the secrets of antiquity. It had not taught her how to deal with armed thieves.

  She adjusted the hijab on her head. The garment served at least two purposes. It shielded her fair face from the sun. But it also made her at least slightly less conspicuous. In her native Kansas, her yellow hair and blue eyes made her just another corn-fed local girl on the cheerleading squad. Out here, amid all these swarthy, dark-haired Arabs, they made her something of a freak.

  If only she could have found a way to hide her gender. While Egypt was more progressive than many other Muslim nations when it came to its attitudes toward women, Katie still felt men leering at her everywhere she went.

  She lowered the glasses, feeling her brow crease. “Do you want to take a look?” she asked the man next to her.

  Professor Stanford Raynes—“Stan” to the guys back at the Faculty Club at Princeton—was tall and lean, with a pointy chin and a few too many years on him to harbor the crush on Katie that he did.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” he said.

  Katie tolerated the crush, even encouraged it, partly because it was so benign—he never laid a finger on her, never acted inappropriately around her—and partly because he could make or break her career. A world-famous Egyptologist, he had doctorates in both archaeology and geology. He had revolutionized the field by using seismograms to locate many heretofore hidden sites, finding lost pyramids that generations of Indiana Jones wannabes had only heard rumors about. He was also the source of her funding for this, her first dig as a true professional in one of the most hypercompetitive fields in all of academia.

  “I’m worried,” she said. “Aren’t you worried?”

  “Just some youngsters racing cars in the desert, I’m sure. And if not, that’s why we’ve got those gentlemen,” he said, gesturing toward the four men with guns.

  The vehicles were still closing in, now roughly a mile away, driving in a straight line toward the dig site with a determination that, to Katie, seemed to signify malignant intent.

  “They’re probably just merchants trying to sell us something,” the professor suggested. “Fruit or vegetables or trinkets. Anyhow, I’m going into the tent to get some water, and I suggest you do the same. I keep telling you, it’s very easy to get dehydrated out here.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I just…I can’t lose Khufu.”

  The professor disappeared. Katie, however, continued walking in the direction of the dust cloud, toward the tented staging area where the valuables they brought up from under the sand were being carefully wrapped and readied for transport. There were crates of varying sizes, some small enough for a few tiny figurines, others carrying huge slabs of carved granite that weighed a thousand pounds or more.

  Among the artifacts she had personally discovered was a life-sized bust of Khufu. One of the early pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, a god-man who ruled Egypt some 4,500 years ago, he was generally accepted as being the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid of Giza. Little else was known about him. If verified, the pink granite statue would be just the second known depiction of the ancient king.

  It would also be the kind of find that would propel Dr. Comely into the first rank of young archaeologists. Perhaps it would even lead to a rare tenure-track professorship at a leading research university. But only if she could get it back to the lab.

  The dust cloud now appeared to be at least three stories high, and the vehicles—they were pickup trucks, with men riding in their flatbeds—were just a few hundred yards away.

  Close enough that Katie could see their guns without the aid of her binoculars.

  “Professor!” she shouted. “It’s them. They’re back.”

  Raynes reappeared from his tent.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Just look!”

  He grabbed the binoculars from her outstretched hand, focused them, then swore.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s…let’s not panic here,” he said.

  Then—in a voice that sounded a lot like panic—he began shouting in excited Arabic at the sleepy-eyed guards. Katie only spoke a few words of the language, enough to be polite on the street and ask where the restroom was. She had been meaning to improve her skills. She was lost as soon as a conversation started.

  The moment the professor’s instructions to the guards were issued, one of the young assailants rapidly closing in pointed his AK-47 in the air and gleefully squeezed the trigger. A rapid burst of ten or twenty rounds flew into the atmosphere. Katie counted at least six other men with guns in the raiding party.

  To Katie’s dismay, the four guards did not return fire. They took one look at what was coming and, as if in practiced unison, reached the simultaneous conclusion that they were not being paid enough to do anything about it. They turned and ran.

  Katie felt a shout escaping from her lungs. The professor was also berating them in Arabic. His admonishment bounced off the guards’ backs as they fled.

  The bandits were now on them. They were mostly young, barely out of their teens, their dark beards still scraggly. The leader—or the man who appeared to be the leader—was older, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, with strands of white in his beard.

  They pulled to a stop near the staging area and hopped off the pickup trucks with the apparent intention of helping themselves to whatever was there. The professor rushed at them—courageously, foolishly, and completely unarmed—and did not stop even as several gun muzzles were trained on him. Katie rushed behind him, yelling at him to stop. He was unbowed.

 
The leader unleashed a stream of words at the professor. Katie tried to pick them up, but to her unschooled ear it sounded like, “Badaladaladagabaha.”

  The professor responded while trying to wrestle a crate away from two bandits, an effort made all the more pathetic by the fact that he lacked the strength to rip it from them. The charade ended when the leader walked up behind Raynes and bludgeoned his head with the butt of his rifle. The professor crumpled to the ground.

  Katie screamed and rushed to his side. The young men were actually laughing.

  “Cowards. You’re all a bunch of thieving cowards!” she yelled. As if they could understand what she was saying, the men laughed harder.

  The leader circled around so he was facing Katie. He pointed his gun at her.

  “Get him out of here,” he snarled, in heavily accented English. “Get him ice for his head. I need him healthy so he can dig up more treasure for me.”

  The leader translated what he said for the benefit of the men, who roared in approval. Katie glared at him defiantly, weighing her options, which she had to admit were few.

  “Take him away,” the leader said, again in English. “Or maybe I take you, his pretty young girlfriend, as hostage, huh? Maybe we have some fun, huh?”

  Again, the leader repeated his words in Arabic. The response was lustier this time. Katie could feel several pairs of lascivious eyes undressing her.

  Beaten and scared, she lifted the half-conscious professor under the arms and began dragging him toward his tent.

  “I’m sorry, Katie,” he murmured. “I tried. I tried.”

  CHAPTER 3

  LANGLEY, Virginia

  I

  n that strange way that only a spy grows accustomed to, Derrick Storm did not know precisely where he was going. Only that he was in a hurry to get there.

  From the moment he retrieved his Ford Taurus from a private garage just off the premises of Dulles airport, he kept the tread of his right hiking boot mashed into the car’s floorboard. He braked only when it was the last means of avoiding collision.

  Storm occasionally took grief from D.C.-area acquaintances over his choice of the vehicle while he was there. To them, it seemed staid for a man of Storm’s panache. Storm just smiled and accepted their ribbing. Much like Storm himself, the car preferred to hide its true capabilities. It had a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter engine with 365 horsepower worth of unruliness under its hood, and a heavy-duty police suspension system that could handle the extreme demands Storm occasionally had to place on it.

  The radio was off. The information reported in the early hours of a mass tragedy was usually wrong. In its haste to be first with the news, the media sometimes seemed to prefer guessing over reporting. Storm didn’t want to muddy his mind with it. He concentrated, instead, on keeping the Taurus’s tires on the pavement. He did not always succeed. At least one Nissan Sentra driver was thankful for that fact.

  And yet, for all his haste, his final destination was a mystery to him.

  Any half-wit troglodyte with Google Earth can get a pretty good gander at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, which rests on a leafy campus just across from Washington, D.C., alongside a sweeping bend in the Potomac River. A slightly more sophisticated operator can figure out which buildings house the National Clandestine Service, one of the CIA’s more shadowy branches.

  But no one—no matter how good a hacker he is, no matter what he thinks he knows—will ever lay eyes on the cubby, the home to an elite spy unit created by a man named Jedediah Jones.

  Not even Storm, who had given the cubby its tongue-in-cheek sobriquet, knew its precise location. He knew of only one way to get there, which he began executing as soon as his Taurus and its smoldering tires came to a rest in the visitors’ parking lot at CIA headquarters.

  It involved presenting himself at the main entrance to an agent who responded to Storm with all the excitement of a man receiving patients at a dentist’s office. Normally, this portion of Storm’s journey involved some waiting as another agent was summoned from the cubby. Storm was mildly surprised to see the well-muscled, dark-complexioned shape of Agent Javier Rodriguez already coming down the hallway toward him.

  But only mildly. Rodriguez was one of Jones’s most trusted subordinates. He was usually involved when Jones called for Storm.

  Rodriguez was grinning as he walked up. Storm was not in a joking mood, in light of the seriousness of what was happening in the world around them. And yet, even in the midst of a crisis—or, perhaps, especially in the midst of a crisis—there were rituals to uphold. Gallows humor helped men like Storm and Rodriguez survive their jobs with their sanity intact. A certain bravado, even if it was false, needed to be maintained.

  “Why, Agent Rodriguez, it’s almost like you were watching me drive here and knew exactly when I was going to arrive,” Storm said.

  “You owe that Nissan Sentra driver an apology, bro.”

  “Send me her address. I’ll write a note.”

  Rodriguez’s only response was to hold up a black hood between his thumb and forefinger and give it a brief shake.

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me promise to just close my eyes this time?” Storm asked.

  “Sure. If I drug you with pentobarbital first.”

  “The hood it is,” Storm said, and dipped his head. At six foot two, Storm was a head taller than Rodriguez.

  “The cubby it is,” Rodriguez replied, slipping the hood into place.

  The unit that called the cubby its command post did not exist—at least not as far as anyone connected to it would admit, even under the most creatively cruel torture. It was a detachment within the National Clandestine Service that had no name, no printed organizational chart, no staff assigned to it, and no budget. The CIA bought a whole lot of $852 toilet seats and $6,318 hammers to hide its expenditures.

  Its leader, Jedediah Jones, was a veteran bureaucrat who used his considerable executive talents and cunning to build this agency-within-an-agency-within-an-agency, the CIA’s version of Russian matryoshka dolls. Its missions and achievements were as secretive as everything else associated with it. It had occasionally been credited with saving the world. It had also been accused of trying to destroy it. Either way, it did so quietly.

  Storm had long ago given up trying to guess where he was being led when he was taken to the cubby. He assumed it was underground somewhere, though for all he knew it could have been underwater or even in the clouds. The trip there involved the seemingly random application of g-forces from all directions: up, down, left, and right.

  Technically, Storm did not work for Jones or for the CIA. He was a former private investigator turned independent contractor. While his adventures had taken him across the world, he was often called on to inquire into matters that had domestic ties, which was—again, technically—illegal. The CIA’s jurisdiction was strictly international. As a result, Storm’s missions did not exist. In the same way the cubby did not exist. He might as well have had DERRICK STORM PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY on his business card, because that’s what he provided the powerful men who required his unique skill set. He was paid handsomely for his services, one of which involved accepting the fact that he would be treated as expendable if it became convenient.

  He knew he had reached his destination when he heard the clacking of keyboards. When his hood was finally removed, he was greeted by the usual sight. A cadre of men and women sat in front of a bank of computers, their eyes reflecting the contents of the walls of LCD screens in front of them. Jones called them techs. Storm called them nerds—a term he used with both respect and love, because their digital wizardry had been an invaluable aid to him so many times.

  Several of the nerds’ monitors contained satellite images of the crash sites of what were once airplanes, their broken pieces now spread over whatever field or forest where they had come to rest. One of the nerds wa
s zooming in on a piece of what might have once been an engine. Another nerd was comparing a piece of shredded landing equipment to a picture of what it looked like when it came out of the box.

  Storm, who had yet to see the repeated loops of television footage that were transfixing the rest of America, stopped to gawk at them. While he didn’t doubt Captain Estes, who had called it another 9/11, seeing the detritus that littered the screens made the disaster more real.

  “So it’s that bad,” he said.

  “No, bro,” Rodriguez said. “It’s worse.”

  THE BRIEFING ROOM WAS JUST OFF the main corridor. It had a wall-sized, flat-screen monitor on one end, but its central feature was a polished conference table surrounded by high-backed leather executive chairs.

  Seated in one of the chairs was Agent Kevin Bryan, a small-statured man who appeared to be every bit as Irish as his name. He was also one of Jones’s top lieutenants. He and Rodriguez were often teamed together. If Jones was the bread, Bryan and Rodriguez were the peanut butter and the jelly.

  “All right, talk to me like I don’t know anything,” Storm said. “Because right now I don’t know anything other than the fact that I owe my life to the versatility of speed tape.”

  “Told you that story was true,” Rodriguez spat at Bryan. “That’s what you get for doubting my boy. Twenty bucks.”

  Bryan extracted a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Rodriguez as he began talking. “Okay, we’re looking at four planes, all of which were heading toward Dulles airport and came into difficulty when they were at approximately twenty thousand feet in altitude. The National Transportation Safety Board has yet to recover any of the black boxes, so we don’t have detailed information for any of these yet. But we were able to, ahh, appropriate some initial information from the Federal Aviation Administration.”

  “Go,” Storm said.