Richard Castle - Wild Storm

Storm sprinted to it, taking the risk of being fully exposed for perhaps three seconds, relying on his black clothing to conceal him. He reached the rear bumper and moved his hand toward the catch that would allow him to lift the trailer door. If he could remove the box with the promethium and hide it somewhere, it might not solve the whole problem, but it would be at least one less load of the stuff that could be used to make a weapon.

But the door was padlocked. And unlike the cheap, drugstore lock Raynes had used on the cave, this appeared to be of a more substantial variety. The dial went from one to a hundred, not one to forty. Storm brought his ear to it, gave it several turns in both directions, listening intently the whole time. He did not hear anything like a pin falling into place. The better locks were cushioned that way.

Any of the other strategies he might have used to thwart the lock involved making noise. And noise, at this point in his mission, was the enemy. For all Storm knew, one of the buildings he had seen was a barracks, filled with terrorists-in-waiting, any one of whom would love to have an American agent as a trophy, or any one of whom would be willing to martyr himself in the effort, knowing all the while that seventy-two virgins awaited him in heaven.

Storm’s primary defense — explaining to the young men that virgins were vastly overrated as sexual partners — seemed inadequate.

So he decided to keep quiet. He slunk around to the wheel well where he had stuck his phone and retrieved it. Then he went to the driver’s side of the truck and pulled on the door handle. It was locked, too. He would have to deal with it and its payload later. Worst case, he’d break the window, climb in, and hot-wire the thing. Best case, he’d find a way to blow it up.

With the truck out of his mind, he focused on the main house. It was a sprawling, one-story adobe residence that looked like it had once been a farmhouse.

Storm began searching for access points, but saw nothing that thrilled him. Like many houses in that latitude, the windows were small and high. Adding to the difficulty factor, their glass panes appeared to be constructed from crosshatched metal bars that had been anchored into the structure itself.

So the windows were not an option. The roof, which was made of sturdy, terra-cotta tiles, was likewise impenetrable. There was a chimney, but it was capped and, in any event, Storm was not feeling like Santa Claus.

That left the front porch, which faced the driveway. It was something of a novel concept for Storm, actually trying to enter a house through the front door. But at the moment it looked like his best — and only — choice.

There were, broadly speaking, two ways to approach the house: slow or fast. Slow had its benefits, in that it would give him more time to study his target as he slunk slowly along the ground. It would also be far less detectable by anyone inside the house who happened to be looking outside.

But fast had the advantage of being over with quickly. It also would make him a harder target to hit. And since his previous dash did not seem to have been noticed, Storm gambled that past equaled precedent.

It was roughly a hundred feet from the front of the truck to the front of the house. Storm felt the wind against his ears as he sprinted the distance, pulling up to the side of the steps, where he couldn’t be seen from within the house.

There was no response to his mad dash. The house — the whole property, for that matter — remained dark and still. It was getting to be almost eerie, how unguarded everything inside seemed to be and how little opposition he had met.

Storm paused, listened. Nothing. Definitely nothing.

He turned and crept up the steps. The front porch was not especially tidy, littered with a random assortment of stuff that could not unfairly be categorized as junk. There were a few AHMED TRADES METAL signs. There were metal chairs that may or may not have been heading for the smelter. Standing next to the door was a tall sculpture that had been roughly welded together out of scrap metal. To Storm, it looked like the Tin Man, though he wasn’t sure if The Wizard of Oz was central in Egypt’s cultural lexicon.

“There’s no place like home,” Storm whispered to himself as he walked across the porch.

He had Dirty Harry out now, held low at his side. He was ready to raise and fire it at the slightest provocation.

There was just nothing to shoot. He reached for the screen door, then opened it. His hand went to the handle of the main door. It turned easily. Was this really happening? Was he really going to be able to just walk right into the front door of a Medina Society hangout?

The door was wooden and just slightly swollen against its doorframe. Storm had to put a little extra weight behind it, but it budged easily enough.

And then, without warning, it was like the world caught fire.

BEING THAT LIGHT TRAVELS FASTER than sound, Storm first became aware that illumination was suddenly pouring out of every orifice of the house, including some floodlights attached to the roof that he hadn’t seen before.

Nanoseconds later, the noise hit: a wailing, shrieking, ear-splitting alarm.

Storm reacted instinctively. He grabbed the Tin Man and tossed him across the door’s threshold. Then he rocketed himself through the maze of junk to his right and over the side of the porch railing. He flattened himself against some half-broken latticework that kept animals from crawling under the porch, keeping Dirty Harry tight against his chest.

As the siren continued pulsing at a volume that could have shaken a pharaoh from a four-thousand-year slumber, Storm stayed hidden in the shadow of the porch. He waited for the cavalry to emerge — dozens of future jihadists, swarming to protect their liege’s castle.

No one came. After a minute or so, the alarm stopped. The lights stayed on. Storm heard cursing and the sound of someone tossing the Tin Man aside. Storm dared to turn and peek through the bottom slat of the porch railing.

What he saw, backlit against the bright glow of the house, was one of the men he had shot earlier in the day. It was Ahmed, the leader of what Storm had thought was just a motley gang of desert bandits. When Storm had heard Raynes say the name Ahmed, it hadn’t triggered any bells. Ahmed was a common name in this part of the world. Had Storm known who the man really was, he would have taken care of all of this in the desert.

Yet another example of hindsight being fifty-fifty.

Ahmed took one step out on the porch, but no more. His head was bare, without its usual turban. His long, salt-and-pepper hair was greasy and unkempt. He was dressed in an ankle-length nightgown. He wore nothing on his feet. His right arm was tucked in a sling. His left arm carried a sawed-off shotgun.

He was letting the shotgun lead the way. He swung the muzzle from left to right, back to the middle, again to the right, and then to the left. Storm stayed absolutely still, knowing he was effectively invisible in the shadow of the porch, with all that junk to serve as cover.

Ahmed walked to the edge of the porch, swiveled the gun some more. He was mostly looking in the direction of the guard shack, where there was no activity.

“Wake up, you lazy dog,” he yelled in Arabic, but of course got no response.

“You’re fired,” he added, to no greater impact.

Storm had a perfect shot at that moment. He could have dropped Ahmed easily. But if he killed Ahmed, he would have no more intelligence about the Medina Society’s structure or organization, and certainly no idea of how to stop its current plot.

As a result, Storm maintained his hiding spot. Ahmed muttered a few choice Arabic words that ventured some unkind descriptions of the guard’s mother. Then Ahmed turned and walked back in the house.