Richard Castle - Wild Storm

Ahmed greeted this news by bursting into tears. “Oh, Allah, it hurts so bad. I will tell you anything.”

“Very good,” Storm said. “Tell me about the Medina Society.”

Pain was no longer the dominant emotion on Ahmed’s face. Confusion was. Confusion with, perhaps, a dash of desperation.

“The Medina…the Medina Society?” he said. “But I don’t…I don’t know anything about—”

“Playing dumb isn’t going to help you, Ahmed. And you may have less than ten minutes before it’s all over. That was just an estimate on my part. But I’m no doctor and you’re losing blood pretty fast. So, again, tell me about the Medina Society.”

He was breathing heavily, hyperventilating slightly and shivering as the shock plunged his body’s temperature. “Okay, okay…The Medina Society…They are a group of extremists who want to set my country back two hundred years…They…They don’t seem to like women very much…They are giving Islam, a very gentle, peace-loving religion, a very bad reputation. I don’t know, is this what you’re looking for?”

“You really don’t have time to play cute with me, Ahmed. I know you think right now that maybe your life isn’t worth saving. But depending on how good your information is and how cooperative you’re willing to be, you could have a very good second career as an informant. I already know most of it. The Medina Society has been using the promethium to make the high-energy laser beam that has been shooting down airplanes. Just tell me how the society is organized and where the headquarters are.”

The tears were coming harder now. “Please, sir. I am not trying to be cute. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t inform on anyone. I am a scrap-metal dealer. I know nothing about these terrorists.”

“Then what’s with the Ahmed Trades Metal signs everywhere? I know what that means.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. My name is Ahmed. I trade metal. My family has traded metal for several generations now. Before that, we were farmers. That is all.”

“Yeah, sure it is. You want to explain that truck full of promethium sitting in your driveway?”

“Yes, yes, happily. The professor, Dr. Raynes, he sells it to me. He has sold me many hundreds of pounds of it. I don’t know where he is getting it from, but he has found a great amount of it.”

“And what do you do with it?”

“I resell it for a nice profit, of course. I did not know anyone was using it to shoot down airplanes. Please, sir, I am telling you the truth. I am a metal dealer, that is all. Please, sir. Please help me.”

Storm looked down at the pathetic figure slumped beneath him. Much as he told himself he shouldn’t believe these lies, there was a part of him that couldn’t help it. It wasn’t so much what Ahmed was saying as it was everything Storm had seen and done over the last few hours.

Taking out the guard had been too easy. Getting in the compound had been too easy. Breaching the house — despite the little hiccup with the security system — had been too easy. Taking out Ahmed had been too easy.

At every turn, he had met far too little resistance. He knew it while it was happening, but he hadn’t been able to quite make sense out of it. Now he could. If the Medina Society really was so savvy that it had successfully resisted penetration by the combined might of the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States military for several decades, there was no way Storm would have been able to waltz in and take over one of its cells using little more than an iPad, a two-by-four, and some foul-tasting chewing gum. If it was that straightforward, a group of Green Berets would have done it a long time ago. The real Medina Society would have protected its assets far more fiercely.

What’s more, there was Ahmed’s behavior. If he was really a terrorist, would he be sniveling and begging for this life? No, he’d be saying his prayers to Allah, preparing to meet twelve and threescore virgins — with an emphasis on the score .

“So, if you’re just a metal dealer, then you shouldn’t mind telling me: who is your buyer for all this promethium?”

“I…I don’t know for sure. They always insisted I wear a blindfold.”

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” Storm said.

“I’m trying…I’m trying, please. They…they arranged all the meetings. Always different places. I just followed their instructions. I would talk to them on the phone. I talked to a man if it was a matter of where and when to make a delivery. But if it was a matter of money, I talked to a woman. I got the sense she was the one in charge. The buyer was a woman.”

“A woman. So you’ve narrowed the potential identity of your buyer from seven billion to three point five billion. You really want to bleed out, don’t you, Ahmed?”

Ahmed was shivering more violently. His entire lower half was covered in blood, which was now pooling on the ground beneath him. “No, no, please. Wait. It was a woman, and sometimes she would be outside when she spoke. I got the sense she was on a boat. A very large boat. You could hear the waves and engine. And one time I heard a horn blast of some kind. It was a very distinctive sound. I asked her, ‘Is that a trumpet?’ and she said, no, it was made to sound like a French horn. Then she talked about how much she enjoyed the sound of a French horn.”

Storm was momentarily frozen. A woman on a large boat that signaled to other boats with something that sounded like a French horn. Ahmed had, in a very short time, taken the suspect pool from 7 billion to 3.5 billion to exactly one.

“Your buyer is a very wealthy Swedish woman named Ingrid Karlsson,” Storm said. “I just…I can barely believe it myself. One of those planes that got shot down was carrying her lover, Brigitte Bildt.”

This seemed to excite Ahmed. “Yes, yes,” he said. “One of the times we spoke, she had to take a call on another line. I think she thought she had muted our call, but I could still hear. She said two things that didn’t make sense to me. But now, maybe they do. The first was something about getting rid of Brigitte. She said she had to get rid of Brigitte because Brigitte was going to the United States to speak to a man named Jedediah, who would expose her. I didn’t know who Brigitte was. I thought maybe it was an employee she had fired. But maybe this was the lover who was on the airplane?”

Storm absorbed this information. Just as there was only one woman who had a French horn for a signal on her boat, there was only one man named Jedediah in the high reaches of the American intelligence community. Was Brigitte Bildt coming to America to reveal to Jones what her boss was about to do with the laser? It made sense.

“Keep going,” Storm said. “What was the other thing?”

“She said that someone named Jared Stack would be dealt with. That is all I heard. At the time, I felt guilty, because it sounded to me like this Jared Stack was in trouble. But I don’t know who Jared Stack is.”

Storm did. Jared Stack was the congressman who had taken over for Erik Vaughn as the head of the Ways and Means committee. As far as Storm knew, Stack was still alive. But maybe — if Ahmed was telling the truth — that was only because whoever Ingrid Karlsson had sent to kill him had failed.

There was one quick way to check. Storm pulled out his phone, and dialed Javier Rodriguez in the cubby.

“What’s up, bro?” Rodriguez said. “You still hangin’ with Strike?”

“No time for gossip,” Storm said. “I was wondering if you’ve heard anything about an attempt being made on Congressman Jared Stack’s life?”

“Hang on, let me check.”

Storm put the phone on speaker, then set it down. He took the strip of cloth he had ripped off Ahmed’s nightgown and tied it as tight as he could around the upper part of the metal dealer’s arm. Storm walked quickly into a nearby bathroom, found some towels that looked clean enough, and returned to Ahmed, using them to further staunch the bleeding.