Richard Castle - Wild Storm

“Well, I suppose I don’t care. I just want Billy back. Right before he got cut off, he said the boat was in the Strait of Gibraltar, about ten miles south of that famous rock. I know you said you worked for the government in some capacity and I was wondering if you—”

“I’m on it,” he said.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Can I help?

“Yes. Bake a cake for your husband.”

“A…a cake? What…what kind of a cake?”

“Banana cream.”

“Why banana cream?”

“Because banana cream cakes are delicious. That doesn’t matter as much as what you’re going to write on it. It should say, ‘Welcome Home, William.’ He’ll be home to eat it in a few days.”

Alida was getting wound up in professing her thankfulness when Storm cut her off one final time. “Mrs. McRae, I appreciate your gratitude. But I have work to do. Just bake that cake. A man always likes a good cake.”

She wished him good luck, and he ended the call. Then he pulled off the highway and into a parking lot. He slid out his iPad, thankful that the airports were now open again and, furthermore, that the crashes had created a world full of jittery travelers. It meant the flight from Cairo to Tangier, Morocco, was only half full. He booked himself a ticket on it.

Tangier was located directly across a narrow strip of water from the Rock of Gibraltar. He had some ghosts there, yes. But he also had at least one friend who would be able to help him.

It just so happened to be a friend who would need some money. Storm typed out a quick e-mail to Jean-François Vidal, asking the chief operating officer of the Société des bains de mer de Monaco to have one hundred thousand euros worth of the recent winnings resting in the Derrick Storm account sent via wire transfer to an account in Morocco — an account owned by one Thami Harif.

He then sent a quick e-mail to his buddy Tommy, informing him that he was about to receive a visitor.

With that task settled, Storm got back under way. His flight left in two hours, but he was only a few miles from the airport. He turned the radio back on. The medicane had torn across Italy and was now regaining strength as it churned over the warm waters of the western Mediterranean.

Storm’s phone blurped at him, telling him he had a call. Storm peeked at the caller ID. RESTRICTED. It was surely the cubby again. But Storm decided it was time to deal with that annoyance.

“Derrick Storm.”

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Jedediah Jones asked. His voice had its usual tone: calm but insistent.

“Not sure what you’re talking about, sir.”

“Well, let’s start with Jared Stack. How did you know about him?”

“Jared Stack?”

“Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you. Rodriguez tried to cover for you, but I listened to a recording of the call. You’re not going to weasel out of this one.”

“Hmm,” is all Storm said for a moment as he tried to formulate a lie. The last thing he wanted was for Jones to know about Ahmed. Storm doubted very seriously that Ahmed knew precisely where the promethium was coming from. He also doubted the man was harboring any additional product — he would have sold whatever he could to Ingrid Karlsson just as soon as he laid his hands on it. Still, there was the general rule of doling out information to Jones: the less, the better.

“Ah, yes, Jared Stack. Sorry, my mind blanked for a second,” Storm said. “The contact you hooked me up with in Panama, Villante? He picked up some chatter that Jared Stack might be in trouble and he passed it on, knowing my interest in the case. You may be aware Stack had taken Erik Vaughn’s place as the biggest legislative impediment to the funding of the Panama Canal expansion.”

“I see,” Jones said. “Well, moving on, Strike said the two of you were forced to split up and she lost contact with you. Have you made any progress on recovering the promethium that was stolen from the desert?”

Storm smiled. Clara hadn’t ratted Storm out, after all. She was probably still pissed at him. But that wasn’t exactly a first, nor would it be a last. At least she had covered for him with Jones. Or perhaps she was only covering for herself. Either way, it helped.

“No, sir, I’m sorry. I tried, but I failed. I have no idea where it is.”

He could have easily passed a polygraph test on the last part — inasmuch as he was unsure which sections of the river bottom over which the promethium would eventually spread itself once it was done floating on the current.

“Well, to a certain extent it doesn’t matter anymore,” Jones said. “Strike came through for us, big time. She told us about how the promethium was coming from the desert. One of our techs was able to apply a beta version of a rasterized video search algorithm to our archived satellite footage. The computer was able to crunch the data and find one of the previous trucks that had made the shipment. Our tech was able to latch on to that truck and trace it all the way from its source to its destination. It was a helluva piece of work on his part, let me tell you. Really impressive stuff.”

Storm knew from the way Jones was talking that everything being said was fiction. Jones was selling the story too hard, throwing in details that he ordinarily would have skipped, sounding more like a cheerleader than the hardened operative he was.

The fact is, for as good as his satellites were, they did not record every inch of the entire world at all times. The cameras had to be told where to look, and unless they had been focused on the archaeological dig site at the aforementioned times, there would be no archival record created.

“Anyhow,” Jones continued. “We followed that truck’s payload all the way to, of all places, the Warrior Princess . It turns out this was all being done by Ingrid Karlsson. We’re not sure what exactly is in that woman’s head or what she thought she was going to accomplish. But Agent Bryan went through our dossier of plane-crash victims and he was able to confirm there was any number of people who had made themselves inconvenient to Ms. Karlsson. I’m sure this all comes as quite a surprise to you.”

Jones had dangled the last sentence out there as a bizarre kind of peace offering. Both men knew the other was lying. It was Jones’s way of saying, I know this is garbage. But let’s just bury it and move on. And maybe a younger Derrick Storm — the one who had not yet been scalded by Jones’s “killing” of Clara Strike and then letting Storm believe she was actually dead — would have accepted the olive branch with a halfhearted, “Oh, yes, I’m stunned.”

But not this Derrick Storm.

“You knew about Brigitte Bildt, didn’t you,” Storm said, evenly, in a way that was not to be confused with a question. “She told you why she was coming to America. The moment she was shot down, you knew Ingrid Karlsson was behind it. The reason you didn’t tell me or anyone else immediately was because you didn’t care as much about stopping her as you did about recovering the promethium, because you knew it would earn you a big pile of favors from the Joint Chiefs and an even bigger budget to boot.”

“Hmm,” Jones said, followed by his own pause. Eventually, he seemed to reach the conclusion that there was no point in trying to concoct a cover. “Well, look, you can tell yourself whatever bedtime stories you want to, Storm. It’s all above your pay grade anyway. I was just calling to tell you your involvement in this matter is now over. Your orders are to stand down. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“So that plane ticket you just bought to Morocco, the one the techs just alerted me about, you’re not going to use that, are you?”