Richard Castle - Wild Storm

“Excellent. It is shielded, yes? I don’t want my men getting sick from radiation poisoning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much did it end up being?”

“Three hundred and eighty-two pounds,” he said.

Ahmed’s eyes went wide. “You’re sure? That’s more than I was anticipating.”

“I saw it register on the scale myself.”

“And it is pure, yes? As pure as the other shipments?”

“Absolutely.”

Ahmed smiled and leaned back. “Three hundred and eighty-two pounds of pure promethium. Praise be to Allah. The best yet. This will be good for us all.”

“Praise be to Allah,” the man replied.

“You may go now.”

The young man complied with the order. Ahmed picked up the phone. There was much to be done.

LANGLEY, Virginia

It was a good thing Jedediah Jones’s people could only see his outsides.

Outwardly, he staked his position at the center of the cubby with his usual calm, assured demeanor. His face was a Venetian mask their eyes could not penetrate. His shirt, which he had changed sometime in the middle of the night, did not have a wrinkle on it.

It was his insides that were a rumpled mess.

His power was based on having made himself a go-to guy for other powerful men over the course of years and decades. Presidents. Senators. Cabinet members. Other parts of the CIA. They all came to Jones to fix their problems. They all needed Jones.

This was what drove him. His work ethic was something akin to a lifelong manic phase. His standards, unyielding for all those around him, were even higher where his own behavior was concerned. If an issue could be solved with hard work — and Jones believed more or less everything could be solved with hard work — he was equal to the task. He was the man who never let anyone down when it mattered.

Until now. Facing the most serious threat to national security since that horrible September day in 2001, Jones was foundering. It was now nearing twenty-four hours since planes had started falling from the sky, since the powerful men had turned to him for help, and he had no solutions for them.

What he had was Derrick Storm’s conjecture that some kind of laser beam was causing this. Jones knew not to doubt Storm. If anyone could intuit from looking at one piece of metal what had happened to a whole plane, it was a man like Storm, a man whose intuition seemed to border on clairvoyance.

But Jones had also not taken Storm’s theory to any of the powerful men. Not until Storm had more than just a piece of metal to go on. It was too unformed, too likely to be flawed. Jones had made a career out of not being wrong, and he didn’t want to start now.

In the meantime, Jones had set agents in all corners of the globe to work. He had ordered them to break laws, confidences, bodies — whatever they had to do to get him information. He, himself, had not slept. The powerful men were depending on him, waiting for him to produce. And he was disappointing them.

What was the opposite of power? Impotence. That’s what Jones felt. It was splashed across his face: the sheer misery that he wasn’t doing enough, that he was slipping. It was the most horrible sensation imaginable.

Then it got worse.

Standing in the middle of the cubby, surveying his people at work, he recognized that something was wrong before he even knew what it was. One of the techs was sitting up in his chair, pounding furiously on his keyboard, horror in his countenance. He had headphones clamped over his ears and was perhaps unaware he was suddenly exuding stress from his body.

Jones reminded himself that he was the boss. His people needed his unflappable, steady leadership. They would be rattled if they saw him react in any overly demonstrable way. Making sure he was composed, he walked slowly over to the young man in question, and gently placed a hand on his shoulder.

“What is it, son?”

“Sir, the computers picked up unusual voice patterns from Emirates air traffic control. The number of discrete sounds per second went off the charts, much more than what you’d get for a sandstorm or a near miss. I had to backtrack the algorithm in order to switch from passive to active listening, but as soon as I tapped in I—”

“Spit it out, son.”

“Sir, a plane has gone down.”

“Where?”

“It was on approach to Dubai International Airport. It was approximately seventy nautical miles from the field and it went into a spin. Sir, York, Pennsylvania, is approximately seventy nautical miles from Dulles. Those planes also went into—”

“What are the coordinates of where it crashed?”

The tech pointed to a series of digits on his screen.

“Wallace,” Jones said to another one of the nerds. “Get me eyes on 24.344057 north, 55.559553 east.”

“Yes, sir,” a voice from three desks away said.

“Put it up on the main screen when you have it.”

The other techs were, by now, aware of what was unfolding. Jones could see their heads moving, their attention being ripped from their terminals. The volume in the room had increased threefold.

“What towns or cities are nearby?”

Another voice volunteered: “Sir, that’s just outside Al-Ain, right near the border of Oman. Al-Ain is a city of a little more than a half million that’s known for its—”

“I’m not going on vacation there, damn it!” Jones barked. “Tell me about the highways. If we’re seeing a repeat of the Pennsylvania Three, the weapon will be near a highway.”

“There are several major ones connecting Al-Ain to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. E-16, E-95, and E-66 go north. E-22 and E-30 go west. E-7 heads west into Oman. We’d need more information to narrow in on which one is being used.”

At that moment, the thirty-foot screen at the front of the room blinked onto one image. In the middle of a tan, empty stretch of desert, there was the splintered husk of what had once been a commercial airliner. Several of the plane’s pieces were strewn on the desert around it. Smoke poured from where one of the engines had come to a rest.

“Damn it,” Jones said. “Bryan, who do we have on the ground in Dubai who might already be compromised?”

Kevin Bryan consulted the roster he kept in his head and spat out several names. Jones picked Michael Reed, a man whose bungling had led to his exposure to the Emirates intelligence community a few days earlier. Reed was due to ship out of the country before the Emirates special police force could gather enough evidence to arrest him.

“Tell Reed to alert UAE authorities immediately,” Jones barked. “They have to get all planes off this flight path. If this is like Pennsylvania, any other plane coming in on this approach is in danger.”

“Is it possible this crash is unconnected to the Pennsylvania Three?” Bryan asked.

“We’ll find out in the next few minutes. In the meantime, it won’t hurt to act like we’re seeing the second act of this attack.”

“Yes, sir,” Bryan said.

Jones turned to another one of the techs. “Figure out which flight that is. Download its flight plan. Trace backward over the last fifty nautical miles from where it crashed and set a search grid of two miles along either side of the line. Pay particular attention to areas near highways. If Storm is right, there’s going to be some kind of laser beam stationed somewhere in that grid. I want it found.”

The tech balked. “Sir, that’s…that’s a needle in a haystack.”

Jones glared at him. “Then you better sift through it until one of your fingers gets pricked. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jones swore. All around him, the considerable computing power he had assembled — and the talent he had brought to the cubby to work it — was being strained to its limit. Jones realized his fists were balled. He forced himself to flex his fingers.