Wild Storm (22 page)

“But, on the positive side, you get to keep your life and all that promethium in the back of that truck. That was, what, about three hundred pounds back there? Four hundred? You can’t get top dollar for it dealing on the black market, but I’m betting you’re still able to command at least a thousand dollars an ounce. So that’s something in the neighborhood of five or six million dollars I’m giving you as a retirement plan. You should be able to live quite comfortably on that for the rest of your miserable life.”

“How do I know if I let her go you won’t just come after me again?”

“Because she and I are going to walk away. You’ve got the truck. We can’t catch you on foot.”

“Balderdash. You can just get on that speed-demon camel of yours anytime you want.”

Storm laughed. “Do you see my speed-demon camel back there in the distance?”

“I do.”

“Then you’ll see he’s sitting down. If you know anything about camels in general, or mine in particular, you’ll know they only sit down when they’re horny or when they’ve decided they’re just not going anywhere for a while. Either way, you should have plenty of time to escape.”

“And if I refuse your deal?”

Storm crept forward slightly on the roof of the truck, enough that Raynes could see Dirty Harry and little else. “Then we remain at an impasse. I will be holding you at gunpoint. And you will be holding Dr. Comely at gunpoint. But time is on my side, professor. It won’t take long for my colleague, Ms. Sullivan, to get back to civilization and form a major search operation for us. We are not with the International Art Protection League, because there’s no such thing. But we are with an organization that has all the resources needed to track down this truck in a desert and apprehend it.”

“Okay, deal,” Raynes said. “I’m getting back in the truck now, but I’m keeping Katie close. When I’m back behind the wheel, I want you to throw your gun as far as you can. When you do, I’ll release Dr. Comely.”

“Very well,” Storm said.

He hopped down off the truck, on the opposite side from where Raynes was. Quickly, making sure the professor didn’t see him do it, Storm jammed his satellite phone in one of the cargo truck’s wheel wells.

“Okay, here goes my gun,” Storm said, heaving the weapon into the distance.

Moments after it landed, Storm heard the truck revving. As it started moving, Katie leapt from it. She fell and rolled on the ground.

Storm didn’t think Raynes would attempt a parting shot, but he kept in the truck’s blind spot just in case. Then he walked over to Katie, who was already up and dusting sand off her pants.

“I don’t suppose ‘thank you’ suffices?” she said.

“It’ll do just fine,” Storm said.

“I can probably do better a little later,” she said.

Storm just smiled.

TRUE TO FORM,
Antony the camel had spent his energy on his mad dash and could not be persuaded to carry passengers without trying to bite them first.

So it was Dr. Comely and Storm made the roughly three-mile walk back toward the others with the camel in tow.

Katie was quiet during the first part of the journey. Storm let her have her thoughts.

Finally, she said, “I should have known.”

“No, you really shouldn’t. If you lived suspecting everyone in the world was capable of that kind of evil, you’d be a paranoid, unhappy person.”

“But there were clues,” she said. “First of all, he did seem to have too much money. Most digs you go on, you subsist on ramen noodles and Pop-Tarts. You almost pride yourself on how rough you have it. But with Raynes, there was all this fresh food brought in. And the air conditioners. And the generators. And the wood floors on the tents. And all you had to do if you needed something was ask.”

“I still don’t think you should be blaming yourself,” Storm said.

“No, but there’s more. Every other day, he would just wander off in the late afternoon, just when it was starting to cool off a little. He would walk due east with a backpack on. And then he would come back two hours later, like nothing had happened. I asked him about it, and he said he was just getting some exercise, enjoying a walk. But, seriously, who just walks through the desert for two hours for no reason?”

“Yes, but as a wise man once said, ‘Hindsight is fifty-fifty.
’
”

“You mean, ‘hindsight is twenty-twenty,
’
” she corrected.

“No. That’s what makes it wise. Hindsight is fifty-fifty. There’s no greater expression of the arbitrary, random nature of the universe than saying something is fifty-fifty. It means you have an equal chance of being wrong and being right, of winning or of losing. There’s no way to game fifty-fifty. You also can’t second-guess it, because how were you supposed to know which way to go? That’s the wisdom of ‘hindsight is fifty-fifty.’ It means you can’t go back and beat yourself up over an outcome that only seems preordained after it happened.”

“Are you sure you haven’t been in the sun too long?” Katie asked.

Storm laughed. They were within sight of the disabled cargo trucks.

“So there’s really no such thing as the International Art Protection League?” Katie asked.

“No. And yet we protected you anyway. That’s called irony, in case you’re wondering.”

“So who are you?”

Any potential answer was interrupted when Strike became aware of their approach. She walked out to meet them.

“Where’s the promethium?” she demanded.

Storm made note of the question. It was not
where’s the professor?
Not
how are you?
Not
how did you get her free?
It was
where’s the promethium?
At least he knew, once again, what Jones’s—and, therefore Strike’s—priorities were.

“It’s in the back of the truck, as far as I know,” Storm said.

“Fine. Where’s the truck?”

Storm looked at his watch. “By now? It’s probably on the highway.”

“What? You let it go?”

“It was the only way to get him to free Dr. Comely.”

Storm had enough history with Clara Strike to know her tells. Outwardly, there were few signs of activity—perhaps a slight
fl
aring of the nostrils and a barely perceptible widening of the eyes. Inside, within her wiring, there were circuit breakers tripping.

Very evenly, Strike said, “You let the promethium go just to save a piece of ass?”

Katie’s jaw dropped. Storm didn’t back down. “I don’t know if you noticed, but that ass actually has a human being attached to it.”

“Our orders were to stop the terrorists and secure the promethium.”

“No,
your
orders involved getting the promethium. I want no part of that scavenger hunt, even if it’s abundantly clear that’s all Jones really cares about.”

“Don’t be absurd. He wants those terrorists’ heads on a platter. You should have heard him talk after the Pennsylvania Three.”

“Really? You think I’m being that absurd? Seriously, if it came down to imprisoning terrorists or adding to the U.S. military’s arsenal, which do you think Jones would choose?”

“It’s not that simple,” Strike said. “This is not a case of either or. We do our job right, we accomplish both.”

“I’ll bet you, right here and now, that Jones would let the terrorists skate free in exchange for a truckload of promethium.”

“I’m not getting into theoretical debates with you, Storm.”

“There might come a time when it’s not theoretical. What’s it going to be? Justice for all or weapons for generals?”

“It…it doesn’t matter. We’ve got orders to follow.”

“Orders,” Storm scoffed. “You’re going to hide behind orders?”

“It’s not hiding. It’s called doing my job,” she shot back. “But I guess you’re going to choose this moment to remind me that you don’t really work for the CIA.”

It was not their first go-around with this particular argument. And yet Storm felt himself sinking into his usual role. “Well, now that you mention it—”

“And then, after that, you’re going to make it clear that what I want and what you want are, as usual, not fully compatible.”

“This isn’t about us. Stop making it about us. It’s about mission objectives.”

“To you it’s not about us,” Strike said. “To me, it’s always about us. That’s the part you never seem to get. So let me be clear: it’s about us. Are you going to help me or not?”

Was it about them? Or was it just her way of manipulating him, like she had done so many times in the past? Storm held her glare, said nothing.

Strike turned and stalked off. The anger wasn’t faked. Storm couldn’t help but wonder if the reason for it was.

CHAPTER 24

HERCULES, California

he man with the wine stain was loving this job, mostly because he was charging by the hour.

It was going on four weeks now. Four weeks of 24-7 surveillance, billing out at a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour, and his employer hadn’t even blinked at the money. It was being deposited in his account weekly, without hesitation and without a sign of cessation.

And, yeah, it was a little boring, watching this old lady, Alida McWhatshername, shuffle around. But for that kind of money, who cared? He hoped the job never ended. As long as no realtors decided to show the empty house he was using, he could stay here forever.

He had his Buck knife out and was using it to dig some dirt out from under his fingernails. It was the most work the knife had gotten.

Whenever it ended—and all good things did, right?—he was going to go out and buy himself a new truck. His truck now was fine. But it was a little wimpy. He wanted something big. Something nice. A half ton, for sure. Maybe three-quarter ton. With leather seats. And a bitchin’ stereo system.

Hell, if this job kept up, he could have whatever truck he wanted. He could even jack up the suspension and…

His phone was ringing in his pocket. He took it out and looked down. It was his employer, the man William McRae called Alpha.

“Hey,” the man with the wine stain said.

“Anything to report?”

“Not really. She’s just doing her thing. She goes to bed at the same time, wakes up at the same time, goes out in her garden. The usual. Most exciting thing she’s done is go to the grocery store.”

“Have you seen the large visitor again?”

“Naw. He ain’t been back.”

“Good. What about any other signs of law enforcement?”

“Nothing. She ain’t gone to the sheriff in a few days now.”

“Excellent,” Alpha said. “And is she aware of your presence?”

“Nuh-uh. I don’t have to leave the house. Most of the time, she don’t know whether to wind her ass or scratch her watch.”

“Ah, you southerners and your colloquialisms. They are so amusing. But what I am dealing with is not. Dr. McRae is getting a little testy. He’s showing the first signs of balking at his work, giving us a little trouble.”

“Oh, yeah?” the man with the wine stain said, sitting up a little. This was the most interesting thing that had happened since the big guy had left. “You want me to, I don’t know, rough her up a bit? Put a little scare into her?”

He looked over at the Bushmaster propped against the wall. The .45 was in its holster. Not that he’d need that kind of firepower to scare an old lady. He could knock her around a little bit, hold the knife under her nose, make a big show out of it.

“No, we don’t want you making contact until it’s necessary. She might try to run if she knows she’s being watched. Or she might attract more law enforcement attention.”

“Okay.”

“At this point, we just need some more pictures,” Alpha said. “In case Dr. McRae gets more ideas.”

“You sure that’s all?” he asked. “I could mark her up a bit and
then
take pictures. You know, two birds with one stone and all that.”

Alpha paused like he was considering this. “No,” he said, eventually. “Just pictures for now.”

“All right,” the man with the wine stain said. “I’ll upload some more in a bit. She don’t lower her blinds at night. I can shoot some of her eating supper. When I get the angle right, there’s this calendar in the background that shows the date.”

“Perfect. Talk to you soon.”

The man with the wine stain put his phone back in his pocket, lifted the 300-millimeter lens, and went to work.

CHAPTER 25

WEST OF LUXOR, Egypt

he helicopter came to get Strike an hour later. Its pilot was thoughtful enough to land just outside camp, so the sand stirred up by the rotors didn’t lash into everyone. There was nothing he or anyone else could do to save Storm from the emotional whipping he felt as he watched Strike go.

This was how it went for them, he knew. For as close as they seemed that night at the hotel in Luxor, for as much as he yearned to be with her, for as strong as his feelings for her were, there was always another cataclysm waiting to ruin it all.

Someday there would be a reunion. Perhaps. And Storm would always be wondering whether it was fueled by personal feelings or professional necessity.

Storm watched the helicopter lift away. As it grew small in the distance, he was aware that Katie Comely was approaching behind him. Lightly, she put a hand on his back.

“You okay?” she asked.

He turned to face her. The heat of the day was upon them—it was at least 120 degrees—but her blue eyes had a coolness about them he found inviting. There was a hesitant smile on her freckled cheeks.

“Yeah. Perfect,” he said.

All around them, parts of the camp were breaking up. Word had gone out that the professor had taken off. The workers had done the math and figured out they were no longer going to get paid. They were departing with due haste. The academics were mostly just moping around, gossiping in small groups, bemoaning their fate, worrying about what would happen now that their funding was gone.

“This is none of my business, of course, but are you two together?” she asked, shifting her eyes in the direction of the helicopter. “I thought you were just colleagues when you first arrived, but then the way she responded to me earlier was, well, I think it’s safe to say there were some feelings there. A woman doesn’t usually call another woman a ‘piece of ass’ unless, you know.”

“Yeah, that was just…actually, I don’t know exactly how to describe that. And I’m not sure how to answer your question, either. We have been together in the past. I guess that’s obvious. We are also pretty obviously not together right now.”

“And the future?”

“Got me,” Storm said quite honestly.

“Well, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. It doesn’t look like anyone is going to be using Professor Raynes’s tent. And we could certainly use someone like you around.”

“We?” Storm said.

She took a step closer and said, “Well, maybe just me.”

Storm inhaled deeply, then expelled the breath slowly. “That is a wonderful, wonderful offer, Dr. Comely. And under different circumstances, I would be happy to take you up on it.”

“But?” she said, the freckled smile dimming just a little.

“But I came here to do a job, and it’s not done yet.”

“I understand. I really do, but…” she looked down at the sand for a second, then looked back up at him and blurted, “Would you like to come back to my tent with me right now?”

She seemed so surprised the words had come out of her mouth, she hastened to add: “I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m a…This isn’t something I normally do. I just…Having that gun point at my head and…I don’t know.”

Storm leaned down and kissed her. On the cheek. “That is also a wonderful offer,” he said.

“But?” she said shyly.

“Yeah. But.”

“Okay. I understand.”

Storm stepped back, but Katie walked toward him, rose up on her tiptoes, and kissed him. On the lips.

Psychologists have done double-blind, controlled experiments that have proven, scientifically, that in the immediate aftermath of surviving a traumatic event, feelings of passion are heightened. Storm didn’t need to read any of the research. He was experiencing all the confirmation he needed.

“Thank you,” she said, when it was done.

“Thank
you
,” he said. “And now I’m going to have to go, because it’s getting more difficult to do the right thing with each passing second.”

It took every ounce of his self-control to walk away.

STORM PURPOSEFULLY AVOIDED
any prolonged good-byes on his way out of camp. He simply got Antony fed and watered, loaded him with what he hoped would be a sufficient amount of supplies, and hopped on.

“Wait! Where are you going?” Katie asked when she saw Storm heading out.

“Due east,” he said.

She looked confused for a moment; then Storm saw understanding reach her face. “Good luck,” she said.

“Could you do me two favors?”

“Anything.”

“First, could you please contact the Supreme Council of Antiquities? They need to know what’s been happening so they can take the appropriate steps, put a warrant out for Raynes’s arrest. They might even be able to help you with Bouchard.”

“That’s a good idea. What’s the second favor?”

“Strange question, but: how much does a camel cost?”

She again looked confused. “I don’t know. Maybe, gosh, ten thousand gineih?”

“Okay.” Storm reached into his wallet and took double that amount in American greenbacks, a currency still very much in favor in Egypt. He held it out for Katie. “Could you please see this gets to a local camel renter named Massri? I somehow suspect I won’t be able to return his camels to him and I hate to leave him in the lurch.”

“Will do,” she said, accepting the money and smiling again.

Storm blew her a kiss, then urged Antony forward. He rode on without looking back. He had come to the desert to find the source of the promethium, and he wasn’t going to leave until he did.

In some ways, his task had gotten slightly easier. He at least knew what he was looking for now: some kind of opening into an underground limestone cave.

But in other ways, it was just as daunting. The opening did not need to be any larger than what one man could crawl into. And he was looking for it in a desert that had gotten no less vast.

Storm was missing the air-conditioning—and was getting even more wistful about passing on the offer Katie had made—before he even got out of sight of the camp. The heat was searing, and Storm could feel himself losing water by the liter: anything he sweated out seemed to evaporate instantly.

Still, in a strange way, the sun was his friend. He needed it to have any chance of finding this cave. He would not have the luxury of working at night, like the archaeologists did.

As he rode, he occupied his mind with math. Katie said Professor Raynes would disappear for two hours every other day. That meant he was likely walking for a little less than one hour out to the cave, digging out as much promethium as he could carry—which probably didn’t take too long—then walking back.

Moving at a brisk pace, someone with long legs and in decent shape, like Raynes, could cover four miles in an hour. But that was on asphalt. Sand would slow him down a bit. Climbing up and down dunes would slow him further.

So Storm decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that three miles felt like about the right distance. Walk three miles in fifty minutes. Spend twenty minutes collecting promethium. Walk three miles back. It made sense.

Antony was in no special hurry, but he still covered the three miles in far less time than a human could. When Storm’s GPS told him they had traveled due east three miles, he stopped and looked around.

They were now back within the target zone that the nerds had originally given Storm, but it was looking no less bleak and empty. Sand dunes stretched in every direction. Other than a few scrubby plants, there was no sign of life.

Storm decided to form a mile-square search grid with his current position as the center. In his mind, he cut the grid into two-hundred-foot strips, which meant he would pass within one hundred feet of every inch of this one square mile of desert. He just hoped that would bring him close enough to spot what might be a fairly small entrance.

Really, it was Antony who was doing the hard work. Slicing a 5,280-foot wide grid into 26.4 mile-long lines meant Antony would have to travel 27.4 miles to cover it all. But camels were bred for such things, and Antony was no more or less disagreeable than usual, doing the usual amount of bellowing but plowing onward all the same.

They were ten miles into their back-and-forth journey when Storm hit pay dirt. It was a rocky outcropping that Storm had already passed two or three times. Each time, he had wanted to break off his route to explore it more closely, but he forced himself to stay disciplined.

Finally, on his closest pass, he saw something that didn’t belong. It was a sheet of plywood, attached to the sheer side of the outcropping. The plywood was roughly the same tan color as the rock around it. It was crude but effective camouflage. Certainly, it couldn’t be seen from satellite, owing to the angle as much as anything.

Storm dismounted from Antony and looked for something to use as a camel hitch. There was nothing, at least nothing that would stop Antony from doing as he pleased if he got it in his camel brain to run off.

“Stay,” Storm said.

Antony belched at him.

“Good boy,” Storm said.

He approached the plywood slowly. There were three hinges at the top of the sheet that had been bolted into the rock. He pulled at the bottom of the wood. It came up perhaps an inch, then stopped.

Storm frowned at it for a second, then saw the reason: it was secured in place by a bolt that slid into a hole that had been bored into the rock. The bolt had been painted the color of sand, as was the padlock that secured it.

It was a security system that might thwart a desert nomad, but not a man with Storm’s skills. The lock was a cheap, mass-produced brand. Storm considered shooting it off—two bullets would have done it—but opted for the more elegant approach.

He lowered his ear to the lock and slowly turned the dial until he heard the first pin drop into place. On a more expensive lock, the sound is dampened to prevent exactly what Storm was doing. On this brand, it sounded like thunder. After he got the third number, he quickly spun the entire combination.

The lock opened easily. Storm swung the door upward, revealing a hole in the rock.

Storm walked back toward Antony and retrieved a flashlight from his pack. Properly armed, he returned to the plywood and lifted it again. He aimed the flashlight beam into the darkness underneath.

The entrance was only slightly smaller than the sheet of plywood. He could see where footprints—presumably Raynes’s—had been left in the sand.

Storm followed those impressions as the tunnel quickly narrowed down to a diameter that was a fairly tight squeeze for a man of his size. Raynes was tall, like Storm, but a lot thinner. Before long, Storm had to turn sideways.

The tunnel began to slope gradually downward and widen. Storm could tell, simply from the way that the echoes from his footfalls were coming back at him, that there was a large, open space somewhere ahead of him. He shifted his flashlight beam in that direction.

For a while, the beam was reflecting back from the sides of the tunnel. Then, suddenly, it was disappearing into the darkness. Storm quickened his pace and was soon shining the flashlight beam into a large, irregularly shaped cavern, perhaps twenty-five feet at its highest point and eighty feet at its widest.

Storm inspected the limestone walls. Whereas the tunnel had been chiseled by whatever instrument Raynes had used, these walls were different. They were smooth, like they had been carved by water many epochs long ago, when global climate was different and the Sahara received far more rainfall.

A thin layer of dust and sand covered the
fl
atter parts of the
fl
oor. In some places, it was undisturbed. In others, it was a patchwork of scu
ff
s and scrapes. Storm could easily make out the path that Raynes had repeatedly walked and continued following it.

It led him to the far side of the chamber and a wall that was unlike anything Storm had ever seen. It was pure white and stretched fifteen feet at a seventy-five-degree angle until it disappeared into the ceiling above it. Storm had heard miners talk about finding veins or lodes of minerals and how they ran in jagged layers through other types of rock. He realized he was seeing such a vein.

And this one happened to be made of pure promethium. The substance, which was some kind of promethium salt, was almost chalky in consistency. There were flakes of it lying in piles at the base of the wall. Storm realized the promethium he had seen had already been ground up, perhaps because it made it easier for transporting.

He reached out with his finger and touched the wall. It was hard, although if he dug his fingernails into some of the looser parts, he could break pieces off with his hands. Raynes had likely used a small pick. It wouldn’t take very long to break off, say, fifty pounds of the stuff, which was probably about as much as Raynes could comfortably carry in a backpack across three miles of desert.

Still, going on the one-thousand-dollars-an-ounce estimate, that was a roughly eight-hundred-thousand-dollar walk.

And there was a lot more where that came from. Storm could see one spot where Raynes had worked through the entire thickness of the vein. Behind it was a substance with a subtly different consistency. That must have been whatever substance promethium degraded into. Or perhaps it was the substance that was the precursor to promethium.

Whatever the case, the wall was an incredibly rare—perhaps unique—geological oddity: naturally occurring promethium. It was something McRae and other researches thought didn’t exist. Turns out they just hadn’t been patient enough. Or lucky enough. Or perhaps unlucky enough. Nevertheless, there it was, this brief moment in this ore’s life span when it happened to take the form of promethium.

Bearing in mind that the substance was mildly radioactive, Storm stepped away from it. He shined his flashlight on it one last time, then retraced his steps out of the cave.

Once back in the hot sun, which was blinding after having been under the earth, Storm buttoned the door back up. He made sure to note his precise location on his GPS. He imprinted the coordinates in his head.