Richard Castle - Wild Storm

But that was, of course, its own kind of rigid doctrine. It turned out she was just as aggressive about promoting it as the religious zealots or the jingoistic nationalists. And in the promethium laser beam, she had found a weapon that helped her enforce her agenda.

He had been foolish in trusting her. The only person who had told him that Ahmed Trades Metal had any connection to the Medina Society was Ingrid. Ordinarily, he was scrupulous about being more suspicious toward information that came from only one source. And yet because Eusebio Rivera told him about seeing Ahmed Trades Metal on the promethium shipment going through the Panama Canal, it had felt to Storm like he had a second source.

And, of course, he had never checked it against existing CIA intelligence because, one, the CIA didn’t have much intelligence on the Medina Society; and, two, he had been forced to play it so close to the vest with Jones.

So that was his main mistake. But now that he had Karlsson in his sights, other seemingly unconnected strands began tying together. The victims of the airline crashes, for example, started making a lot more sense.

Start with Erik Vaughn. The man was a sworn enemy of the Panama Canal expansion. Storm called and quizzed Carlos Villante, catching the purported deputy director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama just as he was going to bed. Villante had confirmed that Karlsson Logistics had more canal-related shipping routes than any other company, and therefore had the most to gain from the canal’s expansion.

Furthermore, Villante had said, Karlsson Logistics’s own explosion from a small Swedish shipping company into a global behemoth had left it highly leveraged. It was likely that without the canal’s expansion, the company would struggle to maintain the revenue growth that allowed it to meet an aggressive and rapidly increasing series of debt payments.

Jared Stack, who had unexpectedly taken Vaughn’s place as an impediment to funding for the canal expansion, had also become an enemy to Ingrid Karlsson. And he was also now dead — the victim of what was supposed to look like a tawdry death for a misbehaving congressman and would have been investigated as such had no one been the wiser.

Sometime midway through the trip north, Storm’s phone started ringing. When he checked the caller ID, it came up as restricted. The cubby. He ignored it and kept flipping through a mental Rolodex of other plane crash victims and finding others, both in Pennsylvania and the Emirates, who would have raised Ingrid Karlsson’s ire.

One was Viktor Schultz. As the head of Tariffs and Trade for the European Union, he had pushed relentlessly for higher excises on goods coming into the EU. In doing so, he had made himself an anathema to Karlsson, who was a free trade fanatic.

Another was Gunther Neubauer. The legislator had been called the Ted Cruz of Germany for his uncompromising stances on issues of great importance to him. His agenda was similarly reactionary: he was the leading voice calling for Germany to completely withdraw from the European Union. Many believed that if he succeeded, the EU itself would fold. That would have been a crushing blow to Karlsson’s vision of a world without borders.

There were others with no real connection to Ingrid Karlsson — like Pi, the fruitarian cult leader. Not that anyone would miss him.

But that was part of what made Karlsson’s attack so cunning. It was nearly impossible to separate the real targets from the collateral damage.

How she had known what planes they would be on — and where those planes would be — was no special mystery. The world’s aviation authorities had some of the more easily hacked computer systems. And the airlines weren’t much better. Meshing passenger manifests and flight plans was not especially difficult, especially when both were in their respective databases well ahead of time. It was possible Ingrid Karlsson had a vast enemies list and that she had picked off the few who happened to be in the air on the days she decided to use the laser. This may have merely been the start of a massive cleansing.

At the top of that list, it now seemed clear, was Brigitte Bildt, the woman who knew about her boss’s plan, the woman who had been traveling to the United States to expose everything. Storm wondered how much Jones really knew about her visit and what she was going to say when she arrived. Probably a lot more than he let on, as usual. Probably everything.

By the time Storm arrived in Cairo — at roughly the same time as the rising sun — he felt like he had it figured out. And yet before he went full tilt after the Warrior Princess, he had one last errand to complete.

That was why he had come to the middle of 6 October Bridge. He quickly disembarked from the truck’s cab and went around to the trailer, which he had already unlocked. It turned out the combination was Ahmed’s date of birth: 12-23-74.

Storm shoved the metal box that contained the promethium out of the back of the trailer. He lowered it from the bed of the truck onto the pavement. His actions were being accompanied by what was now a line of drivers honking at him for clogging a lane of traffic. This, Storm knew, was ordinarily how right-of-way was established in many Middle Eastern countries: the car with the loudest horn got to go first.

But he was ignoring their ire. His phone rang again. He ignored that, too. He dragged the metal box up onto a small sidewalk, then hefted its leading edge up to the railing, so it was tilted at a fifty-degree angle. He was already breathing hard from the effort, but he didn’t mind the exertion. It had been a few days since he had gotten to lift weights. This scratched that itch.

He removed the box’s lid, tossing it quickly to the side, then lifted the back up so the container was now parallel to the ground. One end was still perched on the railing. The other was supported by Storm.

Then, slowly, so as to give the mighty Nile plenty of chance to sweep it away, he began pouring the promethium over the side of the bridge.

It took a little while, but Storm did not want to rush this. He took a kind of perverse pleasure in it: watching 382 pounds of pure promethium — with a fair market value of seventeen million dollars and a military value far greater — pouring off the bridge into the fast-rushing current below.

Chaos theory being what it was, some of those promethium molecules would sink at that spot, others a half mile away. Still others would be carried all the way to the sea.

The point was, no one would be able to recover them. They were effectively scattered to oblivion. Which, according to Storm — be it Derrick or Carl — was where they belonged.

AS STORM GOT BACK in the truck and got it under way, his phone rang again. He was going to ignore it once more, but this time the caller ID identified it as coming from MCRAE, WILLIAM.

He answered on the second ring. “Derrick Storm.”

“Mr. Storm, this is Alida McRae, I’m the wife of—”

“Of course I remember you, Alida. It’s nice to hear from you.”

“I’m sorry to trouble you. But I just got a phone call from Billy, and I thought you’d like to—”

“Did he say where he is?” Storm cut her off again.

“He’s on board a boat. He said it was a big boat, the size of a cruise ship.”

Storm was off the bridge now, heading toward the airport. He pressed down the accelerator. “That boat is called the Warrior Princess ,” he said. “It’s owned by a woman named Ingrid Karlsson.”

“Ingrid Karlsson…You mean of Karlsson Logistics? That Ingrid Karlsson?”

“That’s right.”

“But why would she want to make laser beams and shoot down airplanes and do all this other crazy stuff?”

“Ideology. She pretends not to have one. But really, she’s driven by it. I’ll explain it to you in detail sometime, if you’re really all that interested.”