Wild Storm

by Richard Castle

  Luckily for Storm, such administrative distinctions were lost on a young patrolman who was just trying to get to the end of his shift. The cop waved Storm through and told him to park the car along the side of Kratz Road.

  Storm followed the instructions and was soon walking toward the crash site, which rose above the road on a small hill. He could already see the temporary light stanchions that had been erected over the field so investigators could continue working through the night. Their sodium halide glow cut through the advancing darkness.

  Underneath, a small horde of humanity, moving in no discernible pattern, scurried about. Storm could already make out some of the larger pieces of the plane, strewn in a long line from the point of initial impact to their final resting places. The main fuselage had broken into several parts. He saw an engine here, a wing piece there, a tailpiece somewhere else. There were a lot of other plane parts that were even less identifiable. Confusing matters further was the plane’s cargo, which was scattered over a wide area.

  If Storm had an advantage going into this melee, it was simply that there were so many people—with so many different parts to play—and most of them didn’t know what the others were supposed to be doing. It would allow him a certain amount of anonymity. All he had to do was act like he belonged there and had a job to do.

  He bypassed the large tent that he could guess was serving as a temporary command center. Most of the people who would have known the FAA had no direct role in the initial phases of an investigation—and would have told him to get lost—were likely under that canvas awning.

  Storm made a direct line toward the field. He moved from broken piece to shattered bit, not knowing exactly what he was looking for but, at the same time, not wanting to miss anything. He made brief eye contact with any number of NTSB employees, none of whom seemed to register that he wasn’t one of them.

  He stopped to eavesdrop on a few conversations without being obvious. He heard bits of the jargon that Agent Bryan had hastily tried to teach him. But nothing really popped out. Much of it was just loose talk about colleagues, accommodations, travel, or other things that did not interest Storm.

  He had started at the back of the debris field and was working his way forward, if only because that was the opposite direction that most of the other people were going. That way, he wouldn’t see the same person twice. Eventually, Storm knew he might have to risk making contact with one of the men or women scurrying around him. For now, he wanted to be a fly on the proverbial wall.

  He had just reached a particularly interesting piece of metal and bent over to study it when someone decided to swat at the fly.

  “Excuse me? Who are you?” someone asked.

  “George Faytok,” Storm said, without a moment’s hesitation. “I’m with the FAA.”

  Storm stood. And then, because he had long ago learned the best defense was a good offense, he added, “Who are you?”

  “Tim Farrell. I’m with the Structures Working Group.”

  Storm nodded, knowingly. Bryan had explained this part to him. The NTSB’s “Go Team” consisted of eight working groups, each responsible for investigating certain aspects of a crash—everything from the Systems Working Group (which studied the plane’s hydraulics, pneumatics, and electronics) to the Human Performance Working Group (which studied the crew’s drug, alcohol, and medical problems).

  “Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Storm said.

  Farrell wasn’t distracted. “I’m sorry, Mr. Faytok, but what is the FAA doing out here?”

  “Oh,” Storm said. “We’ve had some changes to 8020.11C. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, 8020.11C. That’s the number for our Aircraft Accident and Incident Notification, Investigation, and Reporting Policy. There have been some changes to Chapter One, Section Nine, Part…oh, jeez, C or D? I can’t even remember anymore. Don’t ask me to quote line and verse. It’s the part that governs our interactions with the NTSB. What it says is I actually have to lay eyeballs on what you guys are doing.”

  Farrell jammed his fists in his side. “I hadn’t heard about that.”

  “It’s still your crash site,” Storm said, raising his hands as if to surrender. “That hasn’t changed, obviously. It’s just one of those typical cover-your-ass things. I guess there was a superlight that went down in Ohio or something and some wires got crossed between you guys and us. Some higher-up who felt the need to justify his job decided we had to tighten up on our monitoring. Hence, policy change.”

  Farrell fingered a cell phone clipped to his belt. “I think I have to call the IIC.”

  Bryan had taught Storm this, too. The IIC was the Investigator-in-Charge, the person responsible for coordinating all the working groups, the highest ranking official at the site. If the IIC got involved, Storm might as well slap handcuffs on himself. Impersonating a federal official to gain access to a secure crash investigation site broke at least four laws he could think of off the top of his head. It would certainly land him in the local jail for a spell. Jones would probably let him rot there as punishment for allowing himself to get caught.

  “I already talked to him,” Storm said, breezily. “But waste his time if you want to. I’m sure he’s got nothing better to do.”

  Storm bent back over the piece of metal he had been studying. Farrell unclipped his cell phone. Storm readied himself to flee.

  Farrell pushed the two-way talk button on the phone and said, “Hey, I’ll be back in a second. I’m just looking at something with this guy from the FAA.”

  “The FAA?” the voice on the other end said.

  “Yeah, I guess they’ve had some kind of policy change.”

  “All right. See you back here in a bit.”

  Storm felt his insides relax. He focused his attention—for real this time—on the piece of metal that had caught his eye previously.

  “Pretty weird, huh?” Farrell said.

  “I’ll say,” Storm replied.

  “What do you think? It’s a piece of the forward pressure bulkhead, right?”

  “Sure looks that way to me,” Storm said, as if he had personally studied hundreds, if not thousands, of forward pressure bulkheads.

  “What do you think did that?” Farrell asked, pointing to a line that had been cut in the metal.

  In a field full of things that had been twisted and sheared by the force of impact, this line was perfectly straight. Even Storm’s untrained eye could tell the angle was wrong. And yet the cut was incredibly precise.

  “I don’t know,” Storm said.

  Except he did know. Among Storm’s abiding interests were high-tech weaponry and gadgets, which he jokingly called “toys.” He was constantly pressing Jones to give him an inside line on the latest toys—the classified stuff that no one else got to see. Not long ago, Jones had arranged for Storm to make a visit to a military contractor for the demonstration of a new high-energy laser beam.

  You could take down an airplane with this thing, the engineer had told him.

  The words came back to Storm now. The weapon he had seen was still in beta version. It needed to be shrunk down to a more usable size and then made sturdy enough for the battlefield. What it didn’t need was more power. It was already a hundred kilowatts—the equivalent of one thousand 100-watt lightbulbs being focused in one tiny beam, only a few hundred nanometers wide.

  The heat that resulted was incredibly intense. Storm had watched a demonstration of the laser easily slicing through a thick sheet of metal.

  The incision looked exactly like the one that had been cut in the piece of metal in front of him.

  CHAPTER 7

  PANAMA CITY, Panama

  T

  he most striking feature of Eusebio Rivera’s seventieth floor penthouse—something all visitors to it beheld with wonder—was a massi
ve saltwater fish tank.

  It occupied an entire wall’s worth of space, and it separated his home office from his bedroom suite, meaning he could see it whether he was at work or at leisure. It was filled with fish in every color of the rainbow: clown fish and angelfish, hawk fish and lionfish, hamlets and grunts, all swimming happily above a plastic reef that had been made to look just like the real thing.

  What they didn’t see—unless they looked very carefully—was Rivera’s favorite part of the fish tank, the reason he commissioned it for his home in the first place. Camouflaged in the craggy recesses of the imitation coral, just below all those oblivious fish, was the drawn, menacing, monstrous face of a moray eel, watching, waiting, needing only to decide which part of the smorgasbord he wanted for his lunch before he struck.

  Some moray eel owners went out of their way to make sure they stocked fish that the creature wouldn’t eat. Not Rivera. He often kept the eel in a small side section of the tank, separated from the other fish, so it would be plenty hungry when he unleashed it. He loved watching it hunt.

  Rivera thought of himself as being just like that moray eel. He was not as pretty as the other inhabitants of the tank. He was, truth be told, overweight and somewhat homely. He certainly wasn’t as beloved as, say, the clown fish. His flesh may well have been toxic, just like the eel.

  But he never went hungry. The moray eel could lie in wait for hours or even days, never moving, until it became part of the scenery. And then it snatched what it wanted.

  Patience. It was all about patience.

  Take, for example, the bottle of Ardbeg whiskey he had pulled from his liquor cabinet on the wet bar that occupied the other side of his home office, the one opposite the fish tank. It was Scottish in origin, naturally, and was already aged more than twenty years when he bought it. Rivera was under the mistaken impression that whiskey continued to age even after it had been bottled, so he waited another ten years to open it. He had been biding his time for just the right occasion.

  There just hadn’t been many of them lately. Not until tonight, anyway.

  He pressed a button on his desk, paging his personal secretary, who sat outside his office in a small sitting area. It was a space she shared with Hector and Cesar, Rivera’s well-armed and well-paid bodyguards, who kept an eye on a bank of security cameras.

  “Is he here yet?” Rivera asked in raspy-sounding Spanish.

  “No, sir. But security just called to say his Cadillac has pulled into the parking garage. So I expect him any moment.”

  “Excellent,” Rivera said.

  He needed a little celebration, given the events of the past year. Rivera was the founder and sole proprietor of the Grupa de 2000, an engineering and construction firm that specialized in dredging, marine construction, and commercial diving. He had been a young man when he founded it in 1977, the year the United States agreed to return the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty by the year 2000.

  Back then, in the seventies, Rivera liked to joke that there were three wheelbarrows and two shovels in the entire country. He exaggerated—but only slightly. Panama in 1977 was woefully unprepared for the responsibility of maintaining and operating the most economically and strategically important waterway in the world. Its capital city was an embarrassment, not even third rate.

  Things had changed much in Panama since that time and it was because of men like Rivera. He was part of the new breed, one that learned at the knee of U.S. contractors until it had the technological know-how needed to be autonomous. The ascendance of these native-controlled companies brought both pride and prosperity across the tiny isthmus. It spurred a building boom that transformed Panama City into a first-rate metropolis with a skyline that rivaled that of Miami or Boston. The growth had only accelerated after authority for the canal was officially returned to Panama on December 31, 1999.

  It was quite a moment for Panama, one that was euphoric but also bittersweet. The country had long fought for leadership of its most important resource. And yet by the time it finally won it, the canal was already slowly starting to become obsolete. Larger container ships, ones that could not fit through the canal’s narrow locks, were bypassing Panama and going around the tip of South America. The ships were called post-Panamax and super post–Panamax, and their very names spoke to the urgency of Panama’s situation. The riches from the most lucrative trading relationship in the entire world, the one between China and the East Coast of the United States, were slowly slipping away.

  The announcement, a few years later, of the Panama Canal expansion project—an ambitious widening of the locks that would allow larger ships (and more of them) to begin routing themselves through Panama—looked like it would solve all that. As long as the expansion happened, the boom would continue.

  Then the construction delays hit. And the world credit crunch occurred. And the project surged wildly over budget.

  The Autoridad del Canal de Panama, the authority that oversaw all aspects of the canal, continued to insist publicly that all was well. Meanwhile, it had begun a series of desperate appeals: first to the Panamanian government, which pleaded poverty, then to the United States, which had, so far, refused all entreaties.

  Construction had ground to a virtual halt. Panama kept pretending all was well. But Rivera, who had leveraged himself under the belief the expansion project would continue unabated, knew better. The Autoridad del Canal de Panama had paid his company for two days of work in the last thirty. He had more than a thousand workers who depended on him for their livelihoods, leases that were past due, and loans that were in danger of slipping into default. He was on the brink of a crisis, of losing all that he had worked for over the last four decades.

  The phone on Rivera’s desk bleeped twice.

  “Sir, Mr. Villante is here,” he heard.

  Rivera went to the fish tank and raised the partition that separated the eel from the other fish. The creature darted to the other side. The other fish gave it a broad swath, but it was no danger to them. Not then. The eel always preferred an ambush. Rivera would enjoy watching it later.

  “Send him in, send him in,” Rivera said.

  Carlos Villante was a deputy director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama, a dashing sort blessed with good looks and style. As the man who oversaw the expansion project and had a heavy hand in awarding the contracts for it, he was Rivera’s most important contact within the authority—the moray eel’s cash cow, as it were.

  Rivera had opened the door to his office before Villante could even reach it to knock.

  “Come in, Carlos, come in,” he said.

  “It is nice to see you, Eusebio.”

  Rivera shook with his right hand, while displaying his prized Scotch in his left. “This is the bottle I have been telling you about, the one I have been saving for happy news,” Rivera said. “I am glad you will be able to enjoy this with me. Come, come.”

  Villante allowed himself to be escorted to a sectional couch that overlooked the canal and the skyscrapers that lined it, most of them built with the money made by the canal, either directly or indirectly. As a deputy director of the authority that ran the canal, Villante was considered important, influential. Rivera knew he was not the only man to court Villante’s attention.

  Yet Rivera did so cautiously. In a region of the world where graft flowed freely, Villante made it known to Rivera and others he would not accept a bribe.

  However, he did drive a Cadillac, so it stood to reason he was accepting money from somewhere. Rivera and others had gone to great lengths to figure it out, with no success. To be sure, he was in someone’s pocket. And once Rivera figured out who, he would have it as a bargaining chip to use with the deputy director. In the meantime, Rivera employed the lower level of inducement that was perfectly aged Scotch.

  “What are we celebrating?” Villante asked, lowering himself into a suede-covered captain’s chair.

/>   Rivera handed him a glass of amber-colored liquid. “You have heard about the airplanes that crashed in the United States, have you not?”

  Villante looked at him sharply, then set the glass down. “That is not something to celebrate. That is something to mourn.”

  “Ordinarily, I would agree with you. And when I am in church on Sunday, I will light a candle in the memory of all those who perished, then go to confessional to wash myself of the sin of feeling so much joy. But for now, we must drink: Erik Vaughn was among the lost.”

  “Vaughn?” Villante said. “I had not heard that. I was listening to the news on the way over and they said they had not released the names of any of the passengers yet. Are you sure?”

  “Beyond a doubt,” Rivera said without elaborating. “The only shame of it is that the U.S. has grounded all air travel for the time being, which means I will have to wait to travel to his grave to spit on it.”

  Villante did not need Rivera to explain his animosity for Congressman Erik Vaughn. The Autoridad del Canal de Panama had sent its director, Nico Serrano, to the United States to lobby for the three billion dollars needed to get the expansion project going again. It was a pittance to a government whose budget was nearing five trillion. And yet the congressman made it his personal mission to see that no aid was extended. A matter like that could be choked in committee, and Vaughn had squeezed the life out of it.

  “With Vaughn out of the way, we’ll get our money,” Rivera continued. “I have already made phone calls to friends in the U.S. capital. The new Ways and Means committee chairman will be a man named Jared Stack. He bears us no animosity that I know of. The urgency of our situation must be impressed on him. You must tell Mr. Serrano to go back to the United States the moment the planes start flying again. My equipment has sat idle for too long.”