Richard Castle: Wild Storm

Storm opened the shower door to see a gaping hole that had been blown up into the ceiling.

“Success,” Storm said.

He climbed up on the sink, stood, and chose a spot where the metal had shorn completely away from the girder — and where, therefore, there was no jagged metal to avoid. He jumped up into the ductwork above the ceiling. He wormed his way around until he was being supported by the girder and could reach down a hand for McRae.

“Come on, Doc,” Storm said.

“Where are we going?”

“To your laboratory. By my count, you’ve got about twenty minutes to make me a laser.”

“A laser? What for?”

“Because otherwise the only way I can beat these guards is by challenging them to an arm wrestling contest, and I figure they’ll just shoot me instead. But if I have a laser, I can shoot them first.”

“But—”

“Don’t say it’s impossible. It wasn’t impossible for Erico Fermi, remember?”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s…Look, the lasers I’ve been making for these people are very powerful. Certainly powerful enough to take out any of those guards. But they’re also very large. They get taken out a bay door on the side of the workshop. They’re not especially portable.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need anything nearly that powerful or that lethal. I’ve read about laser beams being used to blind pilots. Could you make me something powerful enough to cause temporary blindness?”

McRae suddenly was wearing the look of a chef in a fully stocked kitchen who was being asked if he could whip up a little snack. “Yeah, of course I could.”

He got up on the sink and accepted Storm’s assistance up into the ceiling.

“Which way?” Storm said.

McRae pointed to the left. “Right over there would probably be good.”

The men began crawling across girders, in the tight space under the floor above them. When McRae gestured that they had reached the workshop, Storm was relieved to see a normal drop ceiling. No metal here. Storm easily stomped out one of the panels, helped McRae drop down into the workshop, and then followed him down.

“You were making up that thing about Oppenheimer and the shower, weren’t you?” McRae asked.

“Not at all,” Storm lied.

The truth was, he was mostly making up the thing about Fermi, too. But this hardly seemed like the time to mention it.

THE RESULT OF MCRAE’S twenty minutes of furious jury-rigging was not anything that would geek the Star Trek crowd for its design.

It didn’t boast any kind of sleek housing, nor did it have a handle or a trigger. To Storm’s untrained eye, it was basically a sheet of metal supporting some electronic stuff and a piece of cylindrical glass, all of which McRae had hastily soldered or taped into place. It was roughly the size of two toasters, placed end to end.

When it came time to test the device, McRae donned dark, wraparound glasses and had Storm do the same.

He fired it just once, activating it by briefly depressing the rubber tip on a piece of metal, bringing it into contact with another piece of metal. An intense blue beam — less striking than the one Storm had seen demonstrated in Maryland, but still quite vivid — leapt from the device and into the wall behind them.

“Okay,” McRae said. “You’ve got yourself a laser beam.”

“Brilliant,” Storm said, and meant it.

“A couple of things. One, this is just a fraction of the power of the ones that I’ve been making. You’ll see there is only one crystal, as opposed to the sequence of crystals I used on the other ones. And it’s a lot smaller, made from cast-off pieces I used in some of my early testing. But if blindness is what you want, blindness is what you’ll get. This is the aperture the beam will come out of,” he said, pointing to a glass-covered slit at the front of the contraption. “The way I’ve got this set, the laser will actually spread as it propagates. That makes it less powerful, but it also makes it easier to aim. If you can get this going anywhere near a guard’s face and he doesn’t have eye protection? It’ll be like he stared directly into the sun for way, way too long. He’ll be blind for anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

“Terrific.”

“But, look, you have to careful. It’s very fragile. I didn’t exactly have time to make it battle rugged, you know? And it’s also not going to last very long. I’ve got a few batteries here,” McRae said, showing Storm a plastic-covered power pack with wires coming out of it. “But this laser will drain down those batteries very quickly.”

“How quickly?”

“If I had to give it a SWAG, I’d say you’ve got maybe twenty-five or thirty seconds of laser time.”

“Can you give me replacement batteries?”

“This isn’t a kid’s remote control car,” McRae said. “I’m afraid these batteries are the only ones I have. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

“All right, great work,” Storm said, stuffing the safety glasses into one of his pants pockets. “Now, before we head out and face the guards, we’ve got one more thing to take care of.”

“What’s that?”

“The promethium. I assume you still have a supply of it?”

McRae nodded.

“We have to get rid of it,” Storm said. “I’ve seen to it that the supply coming in here is cut off. But I want to make sure no matter what happens to us, there’s not enough left to make another laser beam.”

“Okay. It’s over there,” McRae said, pointing toward a large metal container that looked like a refrigerator.

“How would you recommend disposing of it?”

“Well, extreme heat would do it. If you cook promethium at a high enough temperature — I’d have to look up the exact number, but it’s around a thousand degrees Fahrenheit — it changes the internal structure. Essentially, it turns into a big blob and ruins it for the purpose of turning it into a crystal for a laser beam.”

“Do you have something in here that could generate that kind of heat?”

“No.”

“So…”

“Or we could just pour it into this sink with hot water running,” McRae said, pointing to an industrial-sized slop sink. “This promethium is in salt form. It’ll dissolve easily in water.”

“Why didn’t you start with that?”

“Because I wanted to impress you with my knowledge of chemistry the same way you impressed me with your physics.”

Storm cracked a grin. “I guess that’s fair. Where does the water go after it leaves the sink?”

“I’ve been told it drains into the bilge tank. But right now, in this storm, I’m sure the bilge pumps are operating overtime. Essentially, we’ll be pumping this right into the ocean.”

“All right. Let’s get that tap running.”

It took just a few minutes for Storm and McRae, working in concert, to empty the promethium bin. For the second time in a day, Storm watched as millions of dollars worth of the planet’s rarest rare earth disappeared into a flow of water.

He was relieved to see it go. He was the only person who knew where to find the remaining cache of promethium. And what McRae said about ruining promethium by heating it had given Storm an idea about how he could make sure no one could ever again use that cache.

As the last of the promethium swirled down the drain, Storm said, “Okay, let’s go,” and made for the door to the laboratory. The handle didn’t budge.

“It’s always locked from the inside,” McRae said. “I’m sure a little bit of your C-4 stuck near the hinges would—”

“No,” Storm said. “I want to preserve the element of surprise as long as possible. It’s time for the patient to make an appearance back in his sickbed.”