Storm was momentarily frozen. A woman on a large boat that signaled to other boats with something that sounded like a French horn. Ahmed had, in a very short time, taken the suspect pool from 7 billion to 3.5 billion to exactly one.
“Your buyer is a very wealthy Swedish woman named Ingrid Karlsson,” Storm said. “I just…I can barely believe it myself. One of those planes that got shot down was carrying her lover, Brigitte Bildt.”
This seemed to excite Ahmed. “Yes, yes,” he said. “One of the times we spoke, she had to take a call on another line. I think she thought she had muted our call, but I could still hear. She said two things that didn’t make sense to me. But now, maybe they do. The first was something about getting rid of Brigitte. She said she had to get rid of Brigitte because Brigitte was going to the United States to speak to a man named Jedediah, who would expose her. I didn’t know who Brigitte was. I thought maybe it was an employee she had fired. But maybe this was the lover who was on the airplane?”
Storm absorbed this information. Just as there was only one woman who had a French horn for a signal on her boat, there was only one man named Jedediah in the high reaches of the American intelligence community. Was Brigitte Bildt coming to America to reveal to Jones what her boss was about to do with the laser? It made sense.
“Keep going,” Storm said. “What was the other thing?”
“She said that someone named Jared Stack would be dealt with. That is all I heard. At the time, I felt guilty, because it sounded to me like this Jared Stack was in trouble. But I don’t know who Jared Stack is.”
Storm did. Jared Stack was the congressman who had taken over for Erik Vaughn as the head of the Ways and Means committee. As far as Storm knew, Stack was still alive. But maybe — if Ahmed was telling the truth — that was only because whoever Ingrid Karlsson had sent to kill him had failed.
There was one quick way to check. Storm pulled out his phone, and dialed Javier Rodriguez in the cubby.
“What’s up, bro?” Rodriguez said. “You still hangin’ with Strike?”
“No time for gossip,” Storm said. “I was wondering if you’ve heard anything about an attempt being made on Congressman Jared Stack’s life?”
“Hang on, let me check.”
Storm put the phone on speaker, then set it down. He took the strip of cloth he had ripped off Ahmed’s nightgown and tied it as tight as he could around the upper part of the metal dealer’s arm. Storm walked quickly into a nearby bathroom, found some towels that looked clean enough, and returned to Ahmed, using them to further staunch the bleeding.
“Thank you, thank you,” Ahmed was muttering. “May Allah bring blessings to you.”
Storm was finishing his rudimentary first aid job just as Rodriguez returned to the phone.
“This is freaky, bro,” Rodriguez said. “D.C. cops just found Jared Stack strangled to death behind a crack house in Southeast. They haven’t said a word about it to the media yet because it just happened. How the hell did you know about it?”
“Long story,” Storm said. “I’ll tell you later.”
He disconnected the call then thought about what his father said that night they had first stumbled on William McRae and his work on promethium. Carl Storm had warned his son that terrorists came in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, he said, they looked like Osama bin Laden. Sometimes they looked like Ted Kaczynski.
And sometimes they looked like Xena: Warrior Princess.
CHAPTER 28
A SECURED ROOM
illiam McRae flexed his fingers, groaning when they creaked back at him.
There must have been a storm coming. A big one, judging from the pain he was in. He could feel the drop in air pressure in his aching joints, as well as or better than any barometer. He also noted a slight increase in the humidity of the air being pumped into his room, like it was ever-so-slightly more tropical.
He sat up in bed, dreading the day’s toil ahead of him. He kept thinking that the men he was working for would run out of promethium, eventually. They had to. There simply wasn’t this much of the stuff in the world.
But every five to seven days, they’d come in with more of it and McRae would start the process over again, turning the promethium into crystal, setting the crystals in the sequence needed to get enough power to the laser.
The newest shipment hadn’t yet arrived. It was due any day now. He still had enough from the last shipment to keep him busy. Alpha had shown him a new round of Alida pictures the night before, just to keep him motivated.
It was the usual stuff: Alida heading out to the grocery store, Alida checking the mail, Alida doing all the little routine things he suddenly missed being a part of so desperately.
The one that had really broken his heart was of Alida sitting by herself, eating supper. He felt lonely for her just looking at the picture. She was a bright, engaging woman who felt that meals — and especially the evening meal — were a time for conversation and for sharing. He wished she would start inviting friends over. He couldn’t bear the thought of her just sitting there by herself.
Alpha had made it a point to show William that behind Alida in that particular photo was a calendar that showed the date. The calendar had broken William’s heart, too. Not because it proved they still had a man stalking her, but because of the content.
It was her fake daily-inspirations calendar. The sayings in it were just like Alida: smart, sassy, a little irreverent, but full of humor. The one for the day in question was, “Some people say you’re racially intolerant. I just say you’re an a**hole.”
McRae smiled at the thought. It was one of the rare ones that had graced his face over the last month. Now that he was upright, his wakefulness clear to the cameras, it didn’t take long for one of his captors to appear. This time it was the one McRae called Epsilon. McRae assigned him the lowest rank in his imaginary pecking order simply because he wasn’t quite as sharp as the others.
“Good morning, Dr. McRae,” he said officiously. “I’m here to get your breakfast order.”
McRae yawned. Lately, he had taken to asking for more elaborate breakfasts, because he noticed they didn’t put him to work until after he had eaten. It was a pathetic stall tactic, yes, but it felt like a small victory.
“I’d really like some waffles, if your chef can handle that,” McRae said. “And maybe some fruit on the side. Strawberries, perhaps. Oh, and some grapefruit. But make sure he cuts out the sections this time. Unless you fellas want to give me a knife, someone needs to cut my grapefruit for me.”
“Okay,” Epsilon said, then turned and departed.
McRae listened for the click that always accompanied a guard’s departure.
Except — were his ears failing him? — this time it didn’t come. He quickly swung his legs down off the bed and studied the door. It had stuck against the doorframe without closing all the way. The humidity must have swollen the wood a little.
He scrambled over to the chair where he had draped his pants and pulled them on, then jammed his feet into his shoes. He waited another thirty seconds, just to make sure Epsilon was gone, then tentatively opened the door.
The hallway was empty. Every day, he had been led down that hallway to the left, toward his workshop. That and his cell were the only two rooms he had seen during his captivity.
He was glad he had asked for waffles. Mixing the dry ingredients, then the wet ones; separating the egg whites, beating them stiff; combining all of the above ingredients, then cooking them in a waffle maker. It would take at least fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. No one would be looking for him during that time. They would think he was just lingering in the shower. There were no cameras in the bathroom.