Storm Rising

by Steven Becker

  He opened his eyes, ready to trade places with the girl, when he saw the gun pointed at his head.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Sorry ’bout this, Vinny,” the waiter said, the barrel of the gun shaking, but still pointed at Mako’s head.

  “Shit, man. What the hell?” Vinny asked, his thick accent a stark contrast to the waiter’s local dialect.

  The gun swung momentarily in toward the bar. Vinny ducked, and the waiter turned it back to Mako. He looked at Mei Lan, who dropped her eyes, and he knew he had been set up.

  “Okay, now,” the waiter said and turned to the bar. “Everybody chill.” He looked at Vinny. “Toss me the keys to the jeep.”

  Mako watched the exchange, looking for a way out.

  From behind the bar he heard Vinny. “Not the company truck, man.”

  The waiter reached over the bar and extended his free hand. “Do as I say. I gotta do this for my family. You know my mom’s sick. You’ve been good to me. I’ll bring it back.”

  Vinny reached into his pocket and handed him a set of keys. “Do the right thing. It’s not too late,” he pleaded.

  “Okay. Please be a good man and don’t give me no trouble,” the waiter said, turning back to the fighting chair and pointing the gun back at Mako. With the barrel, he motioned through the open bar to the beach across the street, where an old truck that looked like a cross between an army jeep and a pickup was parked.

  Mako knew he was out of time. This was not the waiter’s game, and he took advantage of his nervousness. Slowly he pushed his body up, leaning out of the chair, but instead of rising, he lunged forward and head-butted the waiter. Both men went down immediately, crashing against a table and knocking its contents onto the floor. Before he could recover, a foot landed in the small of his back. The gun was several feet away, and he swept his legs around in a low sweep kick, trying to stop Mei Lan. She reached for the gun, but the kick landed and knocked her to the floor. The waiter was moving now, and Mako knew he would have to act quickly. He looked up and saw another kick coming toward his head and ducked. The blow landed near his temple, and his head bounced off of the concrete floor. Another kick hit his kidney, and he rolled into a fetal position to protect himself. With his head ringing, he looked around for a way out and saw the marker on the floor.

  In that instant, Mako remembered what Hillary had said. It may have been a joke then, but now it might be the only way to save himself. He extended a hand and reached for the marker.

  “Get the truck,” Mei Lan called out.

  Mako knew this was his only chance and turned to the wall as if to use it for protection. He looked back at Mei Lan, but she was watching the waiter back the truck up. In the seconds he had before she turned back, he scrawled Mako’s on Shahansha. Right before she grabbed him, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and slid it under a fallen menu. And then he felt the cold steel of the gun’s barrel touch his forehead.

  “Slowly, now. Get in,” she said.

  Mako climbed into the bed of the truck and felt the old shocks complain as the waiter crawled in beside him. Someone got in the cab and he heard the engine start. The gears ground as the driver, who he suspected was Mei Lan, fumbled with the manual transmission. Finally she found reverse and the truck lurched backwards, almost stalling before he felt the clutch engage and then heard a metal-on-metal sound as she searched for first gear. With a jolt, they were underway, his body slamming against the hard bed of the truck with every pothole in the sandy road. After a few minutes, the road turned to asphalt and their speed increased. They wound up a hill, made a hard left and started descending. Minutes later, they came to a stop with a squeal of the brakes.

  Two crewmen stood there waiting. They approached and unceremoniously dragged him from the bed of the truck and onto the yacht. The customs office was closed until the morning, and there was no one around,. No one to hear if he screamed or help him if he ran. All the action of the small town was focused on the bars. With enough resistance to let them know he was not a pushover, he was pulled up the ramp to midship, where they let him fall onto the deck.

  “Well. We have Mako Storm as our guest,” Mei Li said, laughing as if she had told a joke only she understood. “Lock him up. I’ll deal with him later.”

  Mako was hauled across the fiberglass deck, through a door and down several flights of stairs before being deposited in an empty cabin adjacent to what he guessed was the engine room. The rumble of the generators next door precluded any attempt at yelling for help. The door slammed, and he heard the lock engage.

  ***

  John Storm watched the entire incident from his hiding spot behind the restaurant, but without a firearm he was helpless. The fool of a boy and his penchant for women had gotten him in trouble again, he thought. Although he couldn’t follow the truck on foot, he had watched its headlights, unsure whether he was concerned or relieved when he saw the jeep turn down the hill and descend toward the yacht. But a known, no matter how bad, was always better than an unknown. Now he needed to figure out how to handle this new development.

  He was across the street from Corsair’s when he saw the headlights of the truck return, its wide wheel base and loud engine making it easy to spot from a distance. As it approached, he ran across to the beach and ducked down behind a small boat pulled up onto the sand. The driver got out, and Storm could tell by his body language that he was nervous. Slowly, he walked across the street to the restaurant with his head down and his hands in his pockets. He looked unarmed. Storm rose and followed.

  “Easy, Vinny. Man, I had no choice,” the waiter pleaded.

  “Okay, kid, calm down. But goddamn,” Vinny’s accented voice came from behind the bar.

  Storm walked into the empty restaurant and saw the two men, the bar the only barrier between them.

  “You the man, Vinny. Best boss on the island. I would never hurt you. You gotta know that,” the waiter sobbed. “I just did it for my mom.”

  Storm watched Vinny as he poured a shot and downed it. He paused for a second and poured another for himself, then reached for another glass and filled it, sliding it across the bar to the waiter. “Let it go. We all got crosses to bear.”

  While the two men drank, Storm looked around the room. “Looks like you had some action here. Cruisers and alcohol, huh?” Storm said and righted the overturned table.

  “If you only knew, man,” Vinny said. “You don’t need to do that.”

  “No trouble,” Storm said. He picked up the menus and noticed the cell phone. With his back turned to the bar, he bent over and picked it up, holding it as if it were his own.

  “Best of luck to you. Guess they shut you down for the night,” Storm said. “Think I’ll go over to Foxy’s.”

  “Gotta think outside the Fox, man,” Vinny said.

  He had no intention of going to Foxy’s. Instead, Storm walked the beach road acting like a drunken tourist, pausing every few feet to look at a store or gaze out to sea. In reality, he was checking for a tail. He continued past Foxy’s for a quarter mile on the deserted street and decided he was alone. Backtracking, he took to the water, and waded around the piles beneath the bar’s deck. He made his way to the far side of the dinghy dock and slid over the side of the inflatable. Peering over the low gunwales, he watched for another few minutes before starting the engine and heading back to the sailboat. With the other boats as cover, the mooring was the best place to keep an eye on the yacht.

  Once on deck, he secured the dinghy and sat in the cockpit watching the water. Other dinghies shuttled people from ship to shore and back, while kids swam off the sterns of a few catamarans. Several minutes later, he went below and turned a light on. He pulled Mako’s phone from his pocket and set it on the table in front of him. Without the skills to analyze it, he did what he could, checking the email, text messages, and voicemail. The boy was careless, he thought as he read the emails and texts from Alicia.

  After absorbing everything he could, he thought about what to do n
ext. He knew from the messages that Mako had told her of their partnership, so he saw no harm in checking in. Back in the phone screen, he hit her contact information and pressed the phone symbol next to her mobile number. A thousand miles away, the phone rang and he waited.

  ***

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “I’m not the boy,” a strange voice said.

  She closed her eyes and thought for a second as the voice ran through the database in her head. “Storm? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. They’ve got Mako.”

  She suspected something bad had happened after not hearing from him. “Explain,” she said, and listened carefully as Storm recounted the abduction. She was about to ask how he could let that happen when she realized that if he had interfered, they might both be dead. “You know the Agency’s not paying for this,” she said.

  “So I heard, but there won’t be an Agency if we don’t stop them.”

  Her email icon popped up with a new message. “Gotta go. Hold on to the phone and I’ll call you back.”

  She opened the email screen and saw the address as coming from Lloyd’s of London. Wondering if she had overreacted and it was just an ad, she looked at the message. When she saw the attached picture of Mako dropping from the air-conditioning duct, her heart caught in her throat. Switching off the communications with Cody to run the dive charter had caused her to make a rookie mistake—she had never shut off the security cameras. Hoping this was not as bad as it looked, she scanned the message. There was only a name and phone number that said to call anytime.

  It was almost midnight Eastern time, and though it was five a.m. in London, she opened her encrypted voice over Internet program and entered the number. Seconds later it was answered.

  “Thank you for calling so quickly,” a woman’s voice said.

  Alicia was silent for a moment, and she continued, “My name is Valerie, and I am head of security here at Lloyd’s. It seems that someone reporting to you had an incident here last Saturday.”

  The woman knew enough. “Is this line encrypted on your end?” Alicia asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Your agent took some data off our system.”

  There was no point in denying it. “Yes. It is a matter of national security.”

  “For us as well. Does your government think we are so greedy that we would help the Iranians?”

  “Well, no,” she stuttered. This was way over her pay grade. “We were working on a contract. I do not make the decisions as to what the missions are and why. We only execute them,” Alicia said.

  “Maybe we can agree that both our intelligence agencies are not very intelligent,” Valerie said.

  Alicia was getting anxious about Mako and had no idea where this was leading. “What can I do for you?”

  “Lloyd’s is willing to triple your contract for retrieval of the encryption code.”

  Alicia sat up in her chair. This was a lot of money. “Go on.”

  “Do you have the data?”

  She hesitated. “It was lost in the Thames.”

  After a long pregnant pause, the woman continued. “The encryption code on that drive held the key to Nitro Zeus. Have you heard of the operation?”

  Before she answered, she opened a secure window and typed in the name. The screen, linked to a back door in the Agency’s database, showed the program. “Of course,” she answered, while reading as fast as she could. The summary said enough, and she knew how valuable the data was. In the event that Iran continued to enrich uranium in the pursuit of a nuclear weapon, the operation would go into effect. The country would be shut down: air traffic, radar, power grid. They would be helpless. What she didn’t tell the agent on the other end of the line was that if her theory was correct, with the two cases of enriched uranium brought by the Chinese, the operation wouldn’t be launched until after a nuclear attack had happened.

  “Somehow Cyrus got the encryption code and contracted us to place it on our computers for safekeeping.”

  “But why…?”

  “Because we didn’t know. It was to be simply an encryption code. We pride ourselves on having the most secure network on earth. The Swiss bank of data, if you will. Which was why you had to place an agent in our building to manually transfer it instead of hacking in from a distance. We have to give you credit for getting that far—no one else, not even our best in-house hackers, has been able to do what you did.”

  “Then if the code is missing, aren’t the Iranians powerless?” Alicia asked.

  “If only things were so easy.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Storm stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring or whatever it did. After a few minutes of silence, he grabbed the field glasses from the chart table and took the phone on deck with him. The harbor had quieted down, not for the night, but the kids had gone to bed and most of the boats were dark now. Foxy’s was still going strong, the bass beat audible throughout the mooring field, and there was a trickle of dinghy traffic to and from the club. That would go on for a while, he thought, and trained the glasses on the yacht.

  A few lights were still on, mostly around the bridge area, and he suspected most of the activity would be going on below. He watched patiently until he had identified the guards and memorized their movements. There were two men patrolling the deck. From this distance, he could not see any visible weapons, but he had no doubt the men were well armed. Extrapolating a watch schedule, he guessed that there would be six guards aboard. Whether they did double duty as crewmen, he didn’t know.

  ***

  Alicia thought about what she had just heard and texted Cody, even though he was only two doors away. He came in bleary-eyed, obviously having just woken up. He stood behind her, and she gave him a few minutes to get his bearings and absorb what was on the screen.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll triple it, which is what Lloyd’s just offered to do to our contract if we can retrieve the information.”

  He rubbed his eyes and went to the adjacent desk. “Shit. Does the Agency know?” Cody asked. He cracked his knuckles and started typing.

  “They know what we knew, that Cyrus was storing the encryption data for Nitro Zeus on Lloyd’s drives. We’re private contractors. I don’t see the harm in working both ends.”

  Cody went to his captain’s chair and started working furiously on something. After a few minutes, they both glanced at each other and spoke at the same time. “Go first,” Alicia said.

  “It looks like Cyrus was in China before London. The agreement was that the Iranians remove their weapons-grade uranium from their country. I’m guessing they let the inspectors see it shipped to China, but China has no inspectors, and with a bit of subterfuge and a long route around the world through the BVI—now it’s on the way back. With the code to stop Nitro Zeus and what looks like a hundred pounds of top-shelf uranium, Cyrus can walk into Tehran and ask for the keys to the bus. If they don’t buy it, he leaves the uranium, tells the US what happened and lets them run their operation, effectively putting the country back in the Stone Age.” He sat back, staring at the screen.

  She told him what she had figured out. “Cyrus. Shahansha—King of Kings. He wants to jumpstart the old Persian empire.”

  “I’m not getting Lloyd’s interest,” he said.

  “It took me a while, but this could ruin them. If word gets out that Cyrus was using them to store the data, they would lose face on two fronts. First, though it’s not well known, they are insuring data through what their own chief of security just told me is the safest network in the world. If word gets out about that we were able to penetrate their security, even though we lost the data, their reputation is destroyed. Second, if this comes out that they enabled Cyrus to stop Nitro Zeus from their headquarters in London, then they have compromised world security. There is no happy ending for them unless we get the data back and they turn it in to British intelligence.”

  “And you’re betting that Cyrus has a backup.”


  “Wouldn’t you?” She opened a VOIP screen again and dialed Mako’s number. “We need to bring Storm in as a partner.”

  “Shit,” Cody said.

  ***

  Storm heard the phone vibrate on the table in the galley and stepped down to the cabin, instinctively covering the screen to hide its light in case anyone was watching, but the party around him was still going on and he could have started a disco ball and remained unnoticed.

  “Yeah,” he said and listened as Alicia explained the situation and her theory about the cases and Cyrus’s plan.

  “One-third?” he asked. “That’s the same deal that I have with the Agency.”

  “You think you can do this on your own?”

  He thought about that for a second and realized she was right. He would need help. Knowing her by reputation was one thing, but seeing her operate and piece together both Cyrus’s plot and the deal with Lloyd’s in the half hour since they had last talked was impressive.

  “Okay. I’m in.”

  “And one more thing.” She explained her theory of what the two cases contained. “We need to verify their contents.”

  “And how do you suppose we do that?” he asked.

  “I’m working on it. For now, let’s see what we can do about Mako. Can you get close to the yacht and take some video? I can’t get anything from a satellite until daylight.”

  Storm looked out the small window. There was enough dinghy traffic that he could blend in. “Sure. But you better tell me how to use this thing.”

  Alicia turned him over to Cody, who walked him through the basics, ending with a warning not to get it wet. He laughed. This was almost as good as a CIA operation, and he wished that Q, the quartermaster in the James Bond movies with all the great toys, actually existed. Turning to the galley, he searched the drawers until he found a plastic bag. He placed the phone in it, doing his best to seal it, and stuck it in his pocket. After changing into dark clothes, he thought about reaching into the engine compartment for some oil to soot his face, but decided that would be too obvious in the crowded harbor. One flashlight pointed randomly at him would blow his cover. Before he left, he searched through the kitchen drawers and found the knives, selecting two that might work. He slid the paring knife into his shoe, making sure the sock shielded the blade, and looked around for anything else that might serve as a weapon. The orange emergency case caught his eye, and he removed the flare gun and two extra flares.