A Bloody Storm: A Derrick Storm Short (3 page)

“My father was an FBI agent,” he’d said.

If that was true, it was start. She would begin investigating as soon as got back to Washington. It wasn’t much, but it was an opening. Jedidiah Jones had forced Steve Mason into her life. Judging from her loose tongue while under sedation, he had invaded her subconscious, too.

It was time for her to find out who this mystery man really was.

Clara Strike was smiling. They were eating breakfast at an outdoor café in New York City on a beautiful summer morning. Storm was a down-on-his-luck private eye trying to stay one step ahead of bill collectors. The night before he’d nearly been killed. He’d been peeking through a window in a seedy trailer park, secretly recording a cheating husband in a compromising position. It had taken Storm four months to track down Jefferson Grout, but Storm was tenacious, although he didn’t take much satisfaction in it. He’d longed for a better class of clientele—and better paying ones than cuckolded spouses. Two redneck neighbors in the trailer park had spotted him and emerged with guns blasting. An angry Grout had fired two rounds, too. But Storm had escaped. Clara Strike had entered his life the next morning, appearing in his office with a sexy smile and a seductive invitation. Over breakfast, she’d explained that Grout was actually a CIA operative gone rogue. The agency had been searching for him for a year. The fact that Storm had found Grout when the agency couldn’t impressed her. Grout had been trained, as she put it, to “dance between raindrops.” She’d asked for Storm’s help and slipped him an unmarked envelope filled with hundreds. He’d been naïve that morning. He’d taken her money and jokingly asked her for a poison pill, a spy camera, a pen that was a gun, and an invisible jet. She’d laughed. It was her smile that still haunted him. He could still smell her perfume. He was looking into her face right now. A morning breeze tousled her hair. She was blushing. He rose from the café table and walked to her. He bent down and kissed her hard. When he looked up, he looked into her eyes—only it wasn’t Clara Strike looking back. It was Agent April Showers.

The military transport’s tires struck the runway, jarring Storm awake. He’d been dreaming.
Clara Strike. April Showers.

He rubbed his tired eyes and felt the stubble on his chin.

It was Clara Strike who had introduced him to Jedidiah Jones, and it was Jones who had made him more than a private eye. Jones had recruited him as a contract operative. A tracker of men. It was Jones who’d sent him to Tangiers, where he’d ended up wounded, lying on a cold tile floor in his own blood. Tangiers had been a trap. Someone inside the agency had betrayed the operation.

A black Lincoln Town Car waiting on the tarmac whisked him to CIA headquarters.

“You look like shit.” Jones said when Storm plopped into a familiar seat across from the spymaster’s desk.

“Nice to see you, too,” Storm said.

Jones closed a bright red file with the title “PROJECT
MIDAS
” emblazoned on it. “Things got a bit ugly in London, but you accomplished your assignment. You found the gold.”

“Actually, it was April Showers who got you those coordinates,” Storm reminded him. “And it almost cost her her life.”

“It’s all part of the game,” Jones said. “She’s a big girl.”

“Easy to say when your butt is safe behind a desk.”

Jones snickered. “You think I got this pretty face working as a desk jockey?”

It was true. Jones’s nose had been broken so many times that even the best plastic surgeon couldn’t have fixed it.

“Let’s get to it,” Jones said. “Before you left for London, I told you there were others like you who were living off the grid. The agency helped a few of them ‘die.” Others simply disappeared into our version of a witness protection program.”

Jones tapped his finger against the “PROJECT
MIDAS
” file. “I’ve found it useful periodically to call on our ‘D or D’ operatives to perform missions that must be completely untraceable to this agency and our government.”

“D or D?”

“Disappeared or Dead.”

“Who comes up with this stuff?” Storm asked.

Ignoring him, Jones said, “Trying to recover sixty billion in gold bullion and other precious commodities that once belonged to the Communist Party is definitely not something we want traced back to the agency or to the White House.”

“I understand,” Storm said. “We discussed it before I left for London. Technically, the gold belongs to the Commies who are still running around Russia, and anyone who goes hunting for it would be operating as pirates according to international law.”

“That would be a position the international court might take,” Jones said, “but I think a good lawyer could argue that the KGB leadership stole the gold when they had soldiers sneak it out of Moscow in the dead of night just before the entire country imploded. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a legal entity in 1991, so did the Soviet Communist Party, and since the KGB stole the gold, it really belongs to no one at this point.”

“I don’t think the Kremlin believes in finders keepers, losers weepers. Especially when you’re discussing sixty billion.”

“Especially when the country is being run by President Barkovsky,” Jones added. “And he has access to nukes and is itching for a fight. That’s why the U.S. government and this agency are going to walk away from all of this. We are not going to go after the gold, even though Agent Showers has discovered where it is hidden.”

Storm looked at Jones’s eyes and said, “You’re talking officially, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Officially, we’re not interested. But I’m sending you and three other D or D operatives after it.”

“And if I say no?”

“You can do that,” he said. “You can go back to Montana. You can go back to being a faceless nobody who spends his days fly-fishing and remembering past adventures while he’s letting his talents and his life go to waste.”

“You make that sound appealing,” Storm said.

“C’mon, Storm, isn’t it time for you to face reality? To face the fact that you aren’t someone who can live off the grid. You need the action, the excitement, the adrenaline rush. Besides, in your heart, you’re someone who cares—not only about helping people but about your country. You can put on that tough guy mask for the likes of Agent April Showers, but you don’t fool me. Clara Strike saw through it, too. That’s why I had her recruit you to work for us. It’s why I need you now.”

Storm thought about what Jones had said. It was true.

“Can I assume the coordinates that I sent you from Lebedev’s cell phone checked out?” Storm asked.

Jones spread an enlarged satellite photograph across his desk. “We won’t know if the gold is there until we have eyes on the ground,” he said. “But the pieces seem to fit.” He pointed
to a tiny circle that he’d drawn on the photograph. “The longitude and latitude coordinates from Lebedev’s cell phone pinpoint a location here, about fifteen miles from the Valley of Five Caves in Uzbekistan. It’s part of the Molguzar mountain range south of the Jizzakh region.”

“Not a frequent flyer hot spot,” Storm said.

“Uzbekistan caves are famous in Eurasian countries. The Great Silk Route that linked Europe and China used to pass through Uzbekistan, and there’s a legend that Alexander the Great hid huge amounts of gold and treasure in a cave in the mountains.”

“Their version of El Dorado?” Storm said.

“Right. Maybe the KGB decided that if treasure hunters since 323
B.C.
hadn’t been able to find any gold, it was a safe spot for the Soviet Socialist Republic’s treasure.”

Jones pointed to a jagged line on the recognizance map. “This is an old, long-abandoned logging road. We think the soldiers used trucks to bring the gold up into the mountains.”

“And you expect me and a handful of other D or D operatives to carry out sixty billion worth of gold?”

“Don’t be stupid. We have contacts in Kazakhstan with a fleet of Russian-made Halo helicopters, the most powerful in the world, but how we get the gold out is not your concern,” Jones said. “All I need you and your team to do is locate the cave, see if the gold is hidden inside it, and then get out.”

“Mind if we pocket a few kilobars as mementos?” Storm said. “Remember, finders keepers.”

“Ivan Petrov told me the gold was hidden inside cargo containers that were transported out of Moscow. The containers are marked ‘Toxic Waste’ to keep anyone from looking inside.
When you find the cave, you look in the containers and then come back home—with empty pockets. Simple as that.”

Jones removed a men’s wristwatch from his desk drawer and tossed it to Storm. “A present.”

“Let me guess,” Storm said. “It’s a gold detector.”

“No.”

“A laser beam that can cut through locks on the containers when we find the gold.”

“No.”

“A secret gun that—”

“It’s a wristwatch,” said Jones.

Storm raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” said Jones. “It’s also a worldwide tracker. I can find you no matter where you are.”

“I’m not sure I want you keeping track of me twenty-four hours a day,” Storm said.

“If you pull the stem to set the watch, it sets off an emergency rescue signal that means you are in trouble and need help. Immediately.”

“No poison pill?” Storm said. He slipped it on his wrist and asked, “What if I actually need to set the time?”

“You never will. It automatically corrects itself no matter where you are.”

“A watch that works and a tracker. What will they think of next?”

“For you, a poison pill.”

“Who else from your D or D file have you chosen for this operation? And are you giving them watches, too?”

“You’ll meet them later today, and no, you’ve got the only watch,” Jones said. He opened the “PROJECT
MIDAS
” file and removed three photographs, which he handed to Storm.

“The first team member,” Jones said, “will be using the name Dilya. She is a native of Uzbekistan. After it broke free from the old Soviet Union, Islamic jihadists moved in. Dilya worked undercover for us. In return, we helped her vanish. She’ll serve as your guide and interpreter.”

Her photograph showed a stern-looking woman in her thirties with a jagged scar cut across her left cheek.

“She got that scar,” Jones explained, “while being interrogated by government officials. What’s tragic is that she was actually helping her own government at the time but couldn’t tell anyone. She was working on the same side as the people who cut her.”

“And she didn’t break her cover?”

“No. Dilya is a very tough woman.”

Storm glanced at the second photo. It showed a short, round-faced man wearing thick glasses.

“He’ll be introduced to you as Oscar. He’s a Russian geologist.”

“Former Commie?” Storm asked.

“Probably still is one, but he liked U.S. dollars. He supplied us with scientific information before the Soviet Union collapsed. He’s familiar with the gold bullion and can confirm if the kilobars are the ones that were stolen from Moscow.”

The third photograph was of an American. “You know this operative and he’ll know you,” Jones said. “On this mission, he’ll be called Casper.”

Storm did recognize him. They’d worked together before Tangiers. Casper’s specialty was killing people.

“If I work with Casper, he’ll know I’m alive,” Storm said.

“And you’ll know he is, too. I wouldn’t have put you two together if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”

Strong and intimidating, Casper was the type you’d want with you in a bar fight but would never introduce to your parents—or your girlfriend.

“You’ve picked Dilya as a guide,” Storm said. “Oscar is a scientist who can confirm the gold is real. Casper can kill anyone who gets in the way. Why do you need me? I’m a private eye. Tracking down people is what I do.”

“I need you to watch the other three,” Jones replied. “You I trust. With that much gold at stake, I’m not sure about the others.”

“We’ve been driving more than an hour,” Cumerford said. “Let’s stop and grab some coffee.”

“Just make certain it’s someplace where I won’t be recognized,” Showers replied.

They had slipped out of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford shortly after eight that morning. The original plan was for Showers to be discharged as soon as she gave a statement to the local police and Scotland Yard. The FBI wanted to get her out of England immediately. But the doctors treating her objected, saying it wasn’t safe to discharge her on the day after she’d undergone emergency surgery for her shoulder wound. Showers had reluctantly agreed to spend one more night at the hospital but had been eager to leave this morning.

She’d gotten dressed in blue denim jeans and T-shirt, donned a baseball cap, and put on dark glasses. Cumerford had arranged for word to be leaked to the television crews and reporters lurking outside the hospital’s emergency entrance that Showers was about to be released. Hospital officials had hustled a female patient into an ambulance, which had sped toward London. To make the decoy more credible, Thomas Gordon, the CIA operative working undercover as a State Department employee, had followed the ambulance in the U.S. embassy–owned car that he and Cumerford had driven to Oxford. While the media was chasing him and the ambulance, Showers and Cumerford had slipped through a hospital side door into a rental car. They managed to leave Oxford without anyone seeing them.