Wild Storm (5 page)

CHAPTER 7

PANAMA CITY, Panama

he most striking feature of Eusebio Rivera’s seventieth floor penthouse—something all visitors to it beheld with wonder—was a massive saltwater fish tank.

It occupied an entire wall’s worth of space, and it separated his home office from his bedroom suite, meaning he could see it whether he was at work or at leisure. It was filled with fish in every color of the rainbow: clown fish and angelfish, hawk fish and lionfish, hamlets and grunts, all swimming happily above a plastic reef that had been made to look just like the real thing.

What they didn’t see—unless they looked very carefully—was Rivera’s favorite part of the fish tank, the reason he commissioned it for his home in the first place. Camouflaged in the craggy recesses of the imitation coral, just below all those oblivious fish, was the drawn, menacing, monstrous face of a moray eel, watching, waiting, needing only to decide which part of the smorgasbord he wanted for his lunch before he struck.

Some moray eel owners went out of their way to make sure they stocked fish that the creature wouldn’t eat. Not Rivera. He often kept the eel in a small side section of the tank, separated from the other fish, so it would be plenty hungry when he unleashed it. He loved watching it hunt.

Rivera thought of himself as being just like that moray eel. He was not as pretty as the other inhabitants of the tank. He was, truth be told, overweight and somewhat homely. He certainly wasn’t as beloved as, say, the clown fish. His flesh may well have been toxic, just like the eel.

But he never went hungry. The moray eel could lie in wait for hours or even days, never moving, until it became part of the scenery. And then it snatched what it wanted.

Patience. It was all about patience.

Take, for example, the bottle of Ardbeg whiskey he had pulled from his liquor cabinet on the wet bar that occupied the other side of his home office, the one opposite the fish tank. It was Scottish in origin, naturally, and was already aged more than twenty years when he bought it. Rivera was under the mistaken impression that whiskey continued to age even after it had been bottled, so he waited another ten years to open it. He had been biding his time for just the right occasion.

There just hadn’t been many of them lately. Not until tonight, anyway.

He pressed a button on his desk, paging his personal secretary, who sat outside his office in a small sitting area. It was a space she shared with Hector and Cesar, Rivera’s well-armed and well-paid bodyguards, who kept an eye on a bank of security cameras.

“Is he here yet?” Rivera asked in raspy-sounding Spanish.

“No, sir. But security just called to say his Cadillac has pulled into the parking garage. So I expect him any moment.”

“Excellent,” Rivera said.

He needed a little celebration, given the events of the past year. Rivera was the founder and sole proprietor of the Grupa de 2000, an engineering and construction firm that specialized in dredging, marine construction, and commercial diving. He had been a young man when he founded it in 1977, the year the United States agreed to return the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty by the year 2000.

Back then, in the seventies, Rivera liked to joke that there were three wheelbarrows and two shovels in the entire country. He exaggerated—but only slightly. Panama in 1977 was woefully unprepared for the responsibility of maintaining and operating the most economically and strategically important waterway in the world. Its capital city was an embarrassment, not even third rate.

Things had changed much in Panama since that time and it was because of men like Rivera. He was part of the new breed, one that learned at the knee of U.S. contractors until it had the technological know-how needed to be autonomous. The ascendance of these native-controlled companies brought both pride and prosperity across the tiny isthmus. It spurred a building boom that transformed Panama City into a first-rate metropolis with a skyline that rivaled that of Miami or Boston. The growth had only accelerated after authority for the canal was officially returned to Panama on December 31, 1999.

It was quite a moment for Panama, one that was euphoric but also bittersweet. The country had long fought for leadership of its most important resource. And yet by the time it finally won it, the canal was already slowly starting to become obsolete. Larger container ships, ones that could not fit through the canal’s narrow locks, were bypassing Panama and going around the tip of South America. The ships were called post-Panamax and super post–Panamax, and their very names spoke to the urgency of Panama’s situation. The riches from the most lucrative trading relationship in the entire world, the one between China and the East Coast of the United States, were slowly slipping away.

The announcement, a few years later, of the Panama Canal expansion project—an ambitious widening of the locks that would allow larger ships (and more of them) to begin routing themselves through Panama—looked like it would solve all that. As long as the expansion happened, the boom would continue.

Then the construction delays hit. And the world credit crunch occurred. And the project surged wildly over budget.

The Autoridad del Canal de Panama, the authority that oversaw all aspects of the canal, continued to insist publicly that all was well. Meanwhile, it had begun a series of desperate appeals: first to the Panamanian government, which pleaded poverty, then to the United States, which had, so far, refused all entreaties.

Construction had ground to a virtual halt. Panama kept pretending all was well. But Rivera, who had leveraged himself under the belief the expansion project would continue unabated, knew better. The Autoridad del Canal de Panama had paid his company for two days of work in the last thirty. He had more than a thousand workers who depended on him for their livelihoods, leases that were past due, and loans that were in danger of slipping into default. He was on the brink of a crisis, of losing all that he had worked for over the last four decades.

The phone on Rivera’s desk bleeped twice.

“Sir, Mr. Villante is here,” he heard.

Rivera went to the fish tank and raised the partition that separated the eel from the other fish. The creature darted to the other side. The other fish gave it a broad swath, but it was no danger to them. Not then. The eel always preferred an ambush. Rivera would enjoy watching it later.

“Send him in, send him in,” Rivera said.

Carlos Villante was a deputy director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama, a dashing sort blessed with good looks and style. As the man who oversaw the expansion project and had a heavy hand in awarding the contracts for it, he was Rivera’s most important contact within the authority—the moray eel’s cash cow, as it were.

Rivera had opened the door to his office before Villante could even reach it to knock.

“Come in, Carlos, come in,” he said.

“It is nice to see you, Eusebio.”

Rivera shook with his right hand, while displaying his prized Scotch in his left. “This is the bottle I have been telling you about, the one I have been saving for happy news,” Rivera said. “I am glad you will be able to enjoy this with me. Come, come.”

Villante allowed himself to be escorted to a sectional couch that overlooked the canal and the skyscrapers that lined it, most of them built with the money made by the canal, either directly or indirectly. As a deputy director of the authority that ran the canal, Villante was considered important, influential. Rivera knew he was not the only man to court Villante’s attention.

Yet Rivera did so cautiously. In a region of the world where graft flowed freely, Villante made it known to Rivera and others he would not accept a bribe.

However, he did drive a Cadillac, so it stood to reason he was accepting money from somewhere. Rivera and others had gone to great lengths to figure it out, with no success. To be sure, he was in
someone’s
pocket. And once Rivera figured out who, he would have it as a bargaining chip to use with the deputy director. In the meantime, Rivera employed the lower level of inducement that was perfectly aged Scotch.

“What are we celebrating?” Villante asked, lowering himself into a suede-covered captain’s chair.

Rivera handed him a glass of amber-colored liquid. “You have heard about the airplanes that crashed in the United States, have you not?”

Villante looked at him sharply, then set the glass down. “That is not something to celebrate. That is something to mourn.”

“Ordinarily, I would agree with you. And when I am in church on Sunday, I will light a candle in the memory of all those who perished, then go to confessional to wash myself of the sin of feeling so much joy. But for now, we must drink: Erik Vaughn was among the lost.”

“Vaughn?” Villante said. “I had not heard that. I was listening to the news on the way over and they said they had not released the names of any of the passengers yet. Are you sure?”

“Beyond a doubt,” Rivera said without elaborating. “The only shame of it is that the U.S. has grounded all air travel for the time being, which means I will have to wait to travel to his grave to spit on it.”

Villante did not need Rivera to explain his animosity for Congressman Erik Vaughn. The Autoridad del Canal de Panama had sent its director, Nico Serrano, to the United States to lobby for the three billion dollars needed to get the expansion project going again. It was a pittance to a government whose budget was nearing five trillion. And yet the congressman made it his personal mission to see that no aid was extended. A matter like that could be choked in committee, and Vaughn had squeezed the life out of it.

“With Vaughn out of the way, we’ll get our money,” Rivera continued. “I have already made phone calls to friends in the U.S. capital. The new Ways and Means committee chairman will be a man named Jared Stack. He bears us no animosity that I know of. The urgency of our situation must be impressed on him. You must tell Mr. Serrano to go back to the United States the moment the planes start flying again. My equipment has sat idle for too long.”

“You seem very confident of the outcome.”

“There is no doubt,” Rivera assured him.

Villante tilted his head. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you sabotaged that plane yourself.”

“Now, now,” Rivera said, smiling. “What would give you that idea?”

He raised his glass. “Let us drink: to the death of Erik Vaughn, and the inherent reasonable nature of Jared Stack.”

At the moment they tilted back their glasses, the moray eel darted out of the crevice where it had been hiding, snapped its jaws around an unsuspecting fish, and then retreated back to its den.

CHAPTER 8

FAIRFAX, Virginia

he image of a piece of a laser-incised sheet metal had chased Storm all the way back to Virginia.

Actually, it was two pieces of metal. There was the one he had seen on the ground in Pennsylvania. And there was the one he had seen in mid-flight as he clung to the wing of the airplane. He was, naturally, too busy to notice it at the time. But in his mind’s eye, he could look back and see that the aileron also had a straight line singed into it.

Not for the first time in his life, Derrick Storm was only alive because someone’s aim was just off. In the case of Flight 76, the laser had struck the underside of the cockpit, which had been catastrophic. On Flight 312, it had lopped off the wing. On Flight 494, it was the tail. All were parts that a plane could not fly without. Storm had been nothing more or less than lucky.

The idea of a weapon that powerful—in the hands of someone unafraid to use it to its ultimate and deadly capability—had Storm pushing the Chevy well past the speed limit. If he got a ticket, George Faytok would just have to deal with the points on his license.

He did not share his conclusions with the National Transportation Safety Board about what had happened to Flight 76. He did not feel like wasting the energy or, more importantly, the time. The NTSB would eventually put it together. Or not. A crash investigation like that was an exercise in closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, something that did not interest Storm. As long as flights remained grounded, the laser could not hurt anyone else. That was all that mattered for the moment.

Likewise, he had not yet briefed Jones, albeit for different reasons. With Jones, there was always the question of what he would do with the information he had been provided.

Storm wasn’t sure if he wanted Jones knowing about the laser. Or, at the very least, he wanted the opportunity to think through the ramifications of giving him such knowledge. And Storm was going to the one place where he did his clearest thinking.

It was not, perhaps, the place people might have expected for a world traveler like Storm to find solace. Storm spoke eight languages. He owned a secret retreat in the Seychelles. He had once undergone rituals that signified his lifelong bond to an aboriginal tribe in the Australian outback. An orphanage in Bacău, Romania, bore his name. A man in Tangier, Morocco, considered him a brother and would welcome him to his Moorish castle at a moment’s notice. Th
e chief clerk at the International Court of Justice in
Th
e Hague owed him a thousand favors. A remote village above the Arctic Circle in Finland still thought of him as a conquering hero.
Th
ere were those and dozens of other locations around the world where Derrick Storm could have gone and been welcomed, accepted, and treated like family.

Yet his preference was still a dowdy, split-level ranch in Fairfax County, Virginia. And that was the front door he was pushing through shortly after ten o’clock.

“Hey, Dad, it’s me,” Storm called out.

“In here,” Carl Storm responded from the living room.

Derrick walked in to see his father emerging from his Barcalounger. Carl had a full head of hair that had gone white. His eyebrows remained stubbornly black. His forehead was deeply lined, but it somehow made him look rugged instead of old. People often told Carl Storm he looked like the actor James Brolin.
Th
ere was no question where Derrick had gotten his good looks.

Th
e room was dark.
Th
e only light came from the television.
Th
e baseball game—the one the Storm boys were supposed to have attended—had been played under
fl
ags lowered to half-sta
ff
after Major League Baseball decided it was not going to be cowed by terrorists.
Th
e Orioles were putting the
fi
nishing touches on a 13–1 drubbing of the Yankees.

“Sorry we weren’t there to see it in person,” Derrick said, nodding at the game.

Carl Storm was on his feet. Derrick’s mother had died when he was a young boy. Carl had never remarried. It had been just the two of them for a long time. Carl had been a single dad with a demanding job at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but he had done everything he could to be twice the parent to his motherless son.

“You think I care about that after what you went through today?” Carl said. “Come here.”

Derrick met him halfway across the room and Carl wrapped his arms around his son. Even if Derrick had noticed a softening in Carl over the past few years, he remained a powerful man. His hugs still packed a wallop.

“Still, I’m going to make it up to you,” Derrick said. “Rain check. Just as soon as I get the chance.”

“Don’t worry about it. I understand. To be honest, I’m a little surprised to see you here. What’s up?”

“You got some time to talk?”

“You know you never even have to ask,” Carl said. “You want a beer?”

“
Th
at would be great.”

Carl returned with two Pabst Blue Ribbons—PBR being the only beer that Carl ever stocked. He muted the television and they sat, Carl in the Barcalounger and Derrick on a paisley patterned sofa. As with the rest of the house, the living room hadn’t changed much since the lady of the house had passed. Whether this was a kind of tribute to her—or just a bachelor’s reluctance to even attempt redecoration—was always a bit unclear to Derrick.

As they drained their drinks, Derrick told him about his experience aboard Flight 937, about what he had seen at the crash site and his certainty about what had caused the damage. Carl was retired now but hadn’t lost any of the skills that had made him one of the FBI’s best. He listened thoughtfully through the whole thing and was shaking his head when it was over.

“Sometimes I wonder when we’ll learn,” Carl said.

“What do you mean?”

He sighed. “Did I ever tell you about Ton Son Nhut?”

Derrick shook his head.

“Ton Son Nhut was an air force base just outside of Saigon,” Carl said. “It was where most grunts arrived when they came in-country. And you have to remember, there were a half million guys in Vietnam at any point in time, so it was a busy place. You’d land and there would be a group of guys eagerly waiting for your plane, because that was their ride home.
Th
ey’d actually shout ‘replacements, replacements’ at the fresh meat that was coming in.”

Carl shook his head at the memory. He had done several tours of duty in Vietnam. As close as he was to his son, he seldom talked about that time in his life. He said it was because nothing very interesting happened to him.
It was mostly just boredom,
Carl had insisted.
You wouldn’t be interested in any of it.
Derrick always wondered if there was more to it, but he respected his father’s boundaries when it came to that long-ago conflict.

“Anyhow, I was coming into Ton Son Nhut for my third tour, so I knew my way around a little bit,” Carl continued. “I was waiting for a Huey to take me into the boonies, but it was delayed for a few days by mechanical trouble or something. I was just wandering around the base when I came across the infirmary. They had—”

Carl stopped himself for a second to look away. The glow from the television, which was soundlessly tuned to the Orioles postgame show, reflected on his face.

“They had just accepted a medical chopper full of wounded civilians. It was the usual thing. A village had been harboring Vietcong and the air force had cooked it down with a load of napalm. It was just—”

Again, Carl had to compose himself.

“The thing about napalm is that it sticks to things. That was part of how it was designed. It sticks to houses, trees, human bodies. Even small bodies. And it burns so hot. Once it gets going, it’s eight times hotter than boiling water. What that does to human flesh is…I mean, look, I had seen people burned with napalm before. But it was always combatants. And I didn’t feel a lot of…I mean, I felt bad for them, I guess, but not too bad. When you got right down to it, it was either us or them, you know?

“But these civilians were something else. And you knew most of them weren’t going to make it. People who burn up that bad linger a few days, but all the while their lungs are filling up with fluid. The body is trying to heal itself of these overwhelming injuries but in doing so it actually begins to drown itself. A few survive, but most of them…”

Carl was shaking his head. His eyes were open, but Derrick got the sense they were now seeing things from long ago. “There was this little girl. From what I understood, she had lost her mother in the attack. And God knows where her father was. Probably in a tunnel somewhere, waiting to kill himself a GI. Anyway, she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. She was the sweetest little thing. One side of her face was perfect—olive eyes, high cheekbones. You could tell she was going to be a beautiful woman someday. Except the other side, it was just…it was ruined. The napalm had hit her on the left side and stuck to her. Her left arm had been completely burned off. Her ribs. Her leg. It had gotten everywhere. She was in so much pain.

“I visited her a few times, gave her chocolate bars from the PX to cheer her up, little dolls, that sort of thing. She tried to smile every time she saw me, even if she could only do it with half her face. The docs had her shot up with morphine, which helped some. But you could tell there were times when the morphine was wearing off and she didn’t know how to ask for more. The pain had to be…I mean, you can’t even imagine.”

He brought the beer to his lips only to find it empty. Derrick tried to imagine what his father had looked like back then: his hair dark, his skin unlined. He would have been younger than Derrick was now. Young and powerful. And yet, in that moment, also powerless.

“Anyhow, the last night I was there, I had gone to visit her again. She just couldn’t stop crying, the poor little thing. You could tell it hurt so bad. I ran to get a nurse to up the morphine, but they told me she was already getting the maximum dosage. So I just, I tried…I tried to cradle her. I mean, you could barely touch her, she was so fragile. But I wanted her to know that, damn it, someone still cared about her. Even someone from a country that had done this to her. I held her and she cried, and I held her some more. Eventually, she slipped into a coma, which was probably a blessing. And I kept holding her until…”

He didn’t complete the thought, letting his voice trail off into the darkened living room.

“Anyway, when it was all over, I went straight to the Officer’s Club to get as drunk as I knew how. I ended up sitting next to a young air force lieutenant, a Lieutenant Marlowe. I started talking about what I had just witnessed and it turned out he had been the one who airlifted the civilians there, so he had seen it, too. We started talking about the horrible things people did to each other, about war, and about the terrible irony that mankind was smart enough to be able to design these weapons and still dumb enough to use them on each other. You have to remember, this was the height of the Cold War, when the nuclear threat was still very real. And he said something like,
We just can’t be trusted with certain weapons.
Th
ere ought to be limits.
We promised each other that someday, if either of us ever got in a position of authority within the military, we’d use it to help enforce those limits.”

Derrick nodded, pensively.

“Son, I’m an old man. I can’t really do much to keep that promise anymore. But you can,” Carl finished. “You have to do everything you can to get this weapon out of the hands of whoever has it. But you also have to make sure it doesn’t fall into someone else’s hands. Not even the United States. We can’t be trusted, either.”

“Okay,” Derrick said. “Let’s get to work.”

TEN MINUTES LATER,
Carl had brewed a pot of coffee. They were in the kitchen, which was perhaps the only one in tony Fairfax not to have undergone remodeling in the last thirty-odd years. It had been pulled from a time warp, all linoleum flooring and Formica countertops. The light fixture, which looked like something out of a seventies pizzeria, glowed brightly above them.

Derrick had his tablet laid on the table in front of him. Carl had a laptop computer with a fresh legal pad and a sharpened pencil alongside it.

“At this point, we have to be thinking terrorist, yes?” Derrick said.

“Yes.”

“What type are we focusing on? A group of violent ‘true believers’? A lone wolf?”

“Any of the above. All of the above. The important thing to remember is terrorists come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they look like Osama bin Laden, yes. But Ted Kaczynski was a terrorist and he looked like half the computer science professors in this country. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and he looked like a pizza delivery boy. Sometimes they come in forms you don’t expect.”

“Right. And in this case, we still don’t know what is motivating these terrorists or what they want. All we really know about them is what kind of weapon they used.”

“This fancy laser,” Carl said.

“That’s right. A high-energy laser. That makes these terrorists different from Kaczynski or McVeigh. Those guys used fairly simple weapons, the kind that anyone with an Internet connection and half a brain could learn how to make in a few hours with stuff they could buy from a hardware store. A high-energy laser is a lot trickier. You can’t find those parts at the Home Depot and even if you could, your average wack job wouldn’t know what to do with them. So the question becomes, how did these particular terrorists acquire that kind of expertise?”

“Could be a scientist or engineer who turned,” Carl said.

“Could be. But anyone with those capabilities would be highly valued by society. They would be well paid, well respected. Those people don’t usually feel compelled to turn on the system that is rewarding them so well.”