“I see you have a lot of scars, Derrick Storm,” Xi Bang said, tracing a network of forever-puckered skin on his abdomen. If only she knew how deep some of them went.
“What about you?” he asked. “Ever been in love?”
“I’ve dated,” she said.
“I didn’t ask about dated. I asked about love. Real love. The kind of person who’s always with you, even if your lives take you in very opposite directions.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
Her response was to close her eyes and hum “The Vienna Waltz.” “We should dance some more,” she said.
“You can…,” Storm began, then was interrupted by his satellite phone ringing.
“You have to take that,” she said.
“No. I can ignore it.”
“Either you answer it or I will. And then you’ll have a lot of questions to answer from whoever is on the other line.”
“You’re tough, Ling Xi Bang.”
“You have no idea.”
Storm rolled over, groped around until he found his pants on the floor, and fished the phone out of his pocket. The caller ID came in as restricted. Hello, Langley, Virginia.
“This had better be good,” Storm said.
“It is,” the pebble-riddled voice of Jedediah Jones informed him.
“Well, talk then,” Storm said, shifting so Xi Bang could hear it.
“Is someone else there?” Jones asked. Storm sometimes swore his phone had a camera hidden on it, but he had yet to find it.
“No. Just me.”
“That question you asked me about looking for someone at the Federal Reserve who is capable of playing with the Fed’s government bond sales?”
“Yeah?”
“Turns out you were on the right track. You just had the wrong institution.”
“Oh?”
“Are you familiar with Senator Donald Whitmer of Alabama?”
“Donny Whitmer? Yeah. Sure. What about him?”
“Three weeks ago, he snuck a rider into an appropriations bill that puts limits on the Federal Reserve’s ability to sell bonds.”
“In other words, he wiped out the last possible buttress to preventing the currency destabilization predicted in the Click Theory.”
“Exactly. We have no idea why he’s done this or who he might have done it for. But it feels like too big a coincidence to be dismissed. Whitmer usually uses his pull to lavish pork on his constituents, not pass obscure-sounding policy changes.”
“What’s your theory?” Storm asked.
“Well, here’s an interesting little fact: The word is that Senator Whitmer has a big primary battle on his hands and that it isn’t going well. Donors have been jumping off his ship like they know it’s sinking. And then suddenly, right when he needed it most, someone formed a Political Action Committee to support Senator Whitmer. It’s called the ‘Alabama Future Fund’ and it already has five million bucks in it.”
“Think it’s some form of bribery?” Storm asked. “Whitmer adds the rider in exchange for five million bucks?”
“Either that, or Whitmer called a chip in when he realized he was in trouble.”
“Either way, it’s something we need to look at. And hard. Whoever put all that money into that PAC is probably the person who hired Volkov,” Storm said.
“Or maybe it’s a group of people, but yes. The only problem is we don’t know who it is.”
“Doesn’t a PAC have to list its donors?”
“Eventually, yes. But a PAC can choose to report its donors on a quarterly basis, and the quarter isn’t over yet.”
“Well, okay, so can’t the nerds figure it out?”
“Yes, but it won’t get us far. If someone wants to obscure the source of PAC funding, it’s as easy as creating a limited liability corporation. I’ll bet you a case of Scotch that the PAC’s donor will turn out to be an LLC with a post office box in Delaware.”
“No bet,” Storm said, knowing Jones was right. “So what are you proposing?”
“I’m going to make myself an appointment with Senator Whitmer and find a subtle way to inquire who his sugar daddy is,” Jones said.
“But I have to set it up right, go through channels, talk to some lawyers. It might take some time.”
“We don’t have time,” Storm said.
“That’s the only way, Storm.”
“We’ve got four dead bankers already. Who knows when the fifth and sixth are going to fall? These are men with families. We can’t just sacrifice them because you have to be polite. If you don’t have the guts to do it, I will. I’ll go to Washington and ask him myself.”
“Storm, under no circumstance are you to engage the senator, do you understand? That’s a direct order.”
“Why are you stalling?” Storm barked.
And then Storm answered his own question. Donny Whitmer was the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, a powerful man who controlled the lid of the cookie jar that was government spending. Jones didn’t want to risk having his hand slapped away from the cookie jar. This was all about Jones’s budget, his preservation of the chunk of bureaucratic turf he had carved out for himself.
“Just stay the hell away from the senator,” Jones said. “I’ll handle this.”
“Fine,” Storm said, then ended the call.
“What’s going on?” Xi Bang asked.
He filled her in on the half of the conversation she had missed.
“So what’s our next move?” Xi Bang asked.
“Jones said I couldn’t engage the senator,” Storm said. “He didn’t say anything about you doing it. And it turns out Senator Whitmer has a certain reputation as being… fond of the ladies. Think you can go to Washington and, uhh, talk with Senator Whitmer? Maybe figure out who this donor is?”
Xi Bang rolled her eyes. “Washington and Beijing are supposed to be so different. Capitalists versus Communists. Two-party versus one-party. Americans versus Hans. But underneath it, they’re all just a bunch of dirty old men.”
“Dirty old men are a universal constant across cultures,” Storm confirmed. “So will you do it?”
A knowing grin spread across Ling Xi Bang’s face. Then she immediately snapped into character, and a perfect accent from somewhere deep within the American South poured out of her. “Why, shoot, sugar britches, I’d just looove to have a little chat with the senator,” she said.
“That’s the spirit.”
“The only question I have is how I get into his office,” she said.
“You can’t just stroll into those buildings.”
“You can when you know the people I do,” Storm said. “Just get yourself on the ground in D.C. I’ll take care of you from there.”
CHAPTER 17
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
t was all going wrong. Just awful, dead, horribly wrong.
Volkov had entered the operation a man down as it was. Not that Yuri had been much help when it came time to doing the wet work, but he’d been a warm body who knew how to pull a trigger. He’d had his uses. Nevertheless, Volkov had opted against hiring local help to augment his numbers. He never trusted locals, and besides, five men — five of his men, anyway — would be enough to do this job.
Naturally, there were security forces to contend with. Volkov had counted on that — every white person with more than two rands to rub together in South Africa had armed security forces, and a wealthy banker like Jeff Diamant had enough to afford a good one. As a result, Volkov and his men had spent a day doing their usual surveillance, locating the weak points in the ten-acre compound where Diamant resided, assessing security patrol patterns, figuring out where the cameras were located, finding the threats that needed to be disabled, making their plan.
Everyone’s role had been quite clear. They would each approach the main house through the trees that surrounded it, each coming from a different direction, quietly deactivating the various security apparatus he met along the way. They would surprise and kill each one of the seven guards who were stationed at various points throughout the compound. They would silently raid the main house and find Diamant and his wife asleep in bed. They would do what they came to do, what they always did.