Richard Castle: Wild Storm

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.”

LANGLEY, Virginia

In 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.