Richard Castle: Storm Front

“Broken?”

“I think so,” she said.

“How many did you take out?”

“Two. You?”

“Six.”

“Show-off,” she whispered.

Eight down. So much for the theory that half would go to the airport while half remained here at base. Of the original eleven, there were either one or two left here — depending on whether they had sent one man or two to the airport to scoop up Whitely Cracker.

Storm guessed there were two. It was the safer guess — better to assume you had more resistance and be pleasantly surprised when there was less. More than likely, it was Volkov and one other man inside with the family. They would know that for whatever was happening outside, two armed men barricaded in a room with a closed door would be hard to overcome.

Storm considered his options and decided quickly on a course of action. The door was the issue. The door needed to be dealt with.

“You got any more C-4 left?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“With you?”

She quickly rooted in her flak jacket and came up with a small, rectangular piece of a substance that looked like modeling clay.

“Blasting caps?” he asked. And before he could even ask her to, she was already in the midst of producing those as well.

“Keep me covered,” Storm said.

He rose and pinched off small chunks of the C-4, molding them around the door hinges as he did so. He was guessing at how much to use, knowing that too little wouldn’t do the job but too much could harm the innocents inside. Just one more thing not to screw up.

He set the blasting caps in the clay, then motioned for Strike to retreat down the hallway with him. There was no sense in either of them taking shrapnel.

He nodded. She pressed two buttons.

The explosion was small, controlled. For a moment, Storm worried he hadn’t used enough. But then there was a crash as the door fell inward.

One of the children loosed a muffled scream. A spray of bullets, fired from an automatic weapon, greeted the demise of the door as either Volkov or his thug fired outward at anyone who might be rushing in behind the falling panel. The rounds buried themselves harmlessly in the wall on the other side of the hallway.

Storm nodded at Strike. They began working their way back toward the door, slowly, silently, guns drawn.

More probing gunfire erupted sporadically from the room. The men inside were smart enough to know an invasion was coming. They were just hoping they were lucky enough to guess when.

Storm crouched when he reached the door frame. Strike stayed up.

He held up a fist, then a finger. He wagged the finger to the right. Then he held up two fingers and wagged them to the left. This was a code he and Strike had established long ago. It meant he’d take the assailant on the right, she’d take the one on the left.

Then Storm did a three-two-one countdown with his fingers. When he dropped the last finger, he rolled into the door frame and assumed a shooting position.

His eyes instantly took in the scene. The family was clumped in the middle of the room, huddled against one another, bound and gagged with duct tape. Hovering over them to the right was a man pointing an AK-47. Storm killed him with one shot.

From above him, Storm heard the report from Strike’s gun. Then he saw she had taken out her man as well.

The last two men were dead. And that might have been a cause for great celebration, except neither of them was wearing an eye patch.

Volkov wasn’t there.

“Fuck,” Storm said.

“What’s wrong?” Strike asked.

“I should have brought cheese after all.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Just something my father once shared with me.”

“I don’t underst—”

“Volkov said he would be at Newark Airport, and he is. For once in his life, he actually told the truth.”

NEWARK, New Jersey

They had taken too long. The caution in the stairwell. The steady elimination of the Russian goons. The wiring of the door. It had all been too slow. The time at which Cracker was to present himself at Newark Airport had come and gone. And now Cracker wasn’t answering repeated calls to his phone.

This had led Storm to conclusion number one: Volkov had him already.

Any thought Storm had of this ending the easy way was now over. Volkov was no idiot. If he went to the airport alone — and there were ten bodies in a factory in Bayonne testifying to the fact that he had — he would be checking in periodically with his team. They would have reported their distress or just stopped reporting altogether. Either way, he would know they had been compromised. And he would not return to the factory.

Conclusion number two: Volkov was now in the wind. From Newark Airport, he could launch himself anywhere.

So even though Cracker’s family was safe, nothing had really been settled. Volkov could go anywhere with Cracker. And, yes, he no longer could hold harm to Cracker’s family over the banker’s head. But Volkov was resourceful and knew more ways to torture a man than Storm cared to think about. The sadistic bastard would find a way to make Cracker do his bidding.

Conclusion number three: For all his effort, Storm really hadn’t done a thing to neutralize the threat.

Volkov was still just as dangerous with those MonEx codes in hand. One way or another, Cracker would do exactly what Volkov told him to do.

Storm had left Strike with the Cracker family. She was in the midst of calling the authorities as he departed. The Bayonne Police would be able to respond within minutes. The FBI would follow shortly thereafter. He no longer worried for their safety. As for the future of Storm and Strike? That would have to sort itself out some other time.

For now, Volkov and Cracker were all that mattered.

As he negotiated the tangle of ramps and roadways that led from the New Jersey Turnpike to Newark Airport, there were two scenarios going through Storm’s head.

In one, Volkov had collected Cracker and was now driving. Somewhere. Storm didn’t like that scenario. There were probably two hundred thousand black SUVs in the tristate area. Good luck finding the one with Volkov in it.

In the other scenario, Volkov and Cracker were boarding a plane to… somewhere. That scenario wasn’t much better. But at least it gave Storm something to grab on to. Volkov would surely be traveling under an alias: The man had more fake IDs than a crowd of college freshmen. But he didn’t have an alias for Cracker. That’s why it had been necessary for the man to bring his passport.

Storm called Bryan.

“What do you want now?” Bryan said in a whisper. “The credit on your Bahrain card is running out, you know.”

“I need one of the nerds to check all the airlines to see if they can find Graham Whitely Cracker V on any flights out of Newark Airport.”

“Hang on.”

While he waited, Storm reached Terminal B. He pulled Strike’s van to the curb outside the international departures area and left it there. Let the authorities sort out why a van full of surveillance gadgets and weapons was abandoned there. Maybe they’d do him a favor and shut down the airport.

As he got out, Bryan returned to the line. “He’s on Air Venezuela flight nineteen to Caracas.”

“When does it depart?”

“It was scheduled to leave Gate 53B two minutes ago. You know Venezuela is out of our—”

Storm knew he didn’t have time to listen to the rest. It wasn’t news to him. The United States had an extradition treaty with Venezuela that dated back to 1922, but it was shot full of exceptions and oddities. More to the point, the Hugo Chavez government seldom cooperated with extradition requests, particularly when the party to be extradited had the means to pay bribes. As soon as Volkov was out of U.S. airspace, he would be beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Not that the U.S. government was trying to detain him anyway, what with the way Jones was playing things. Maybe Storm could get on the phone with his new buddies at the FBI and convince them Cracker was being kidnapped. But that would take time, something he no longer had.