“Yeah” was all Storm said. Sometimes, it was best not to give Clara Strike any more than that.
She had placed her hand over his. The lighting was low. The martinis were finally taking the edge off the adrenaline rush that Storm had been living on.
“You remember when we found this place?” Strike asked.
“Of course. It was after Marco Juarez,” Storm said, feeling the warmth of the memory. Juarez was a Panamanian drug lord. Emphasis on the “was.” Storm and Strike had celebrated Juarez’s death in Manhattan, reveling in their unlikely survival with a week of sex, food, and booze, in roughly that order. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Storm would never say it out loud, but if he had to live just one week of his life over and over again in a loop, that would be the one.
“I thought I’d lost you that time, too,” she said.
“Oh that? That was just a flesh wound.”
She interlaced her fingers in his. Her eyes were somehow moist and blazing at the same time. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “Sometimes I think about, you know, us, and…”
She stopped herself. Storm had turned his head in the other direction.
“I’m not sure I can talk about this,” he said.
“Right now?” she asked. “Or forever?”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly, she was the one turning her head in the other direction. She stood and dabbed at her face with a Kleenex. Her last words before leaving the bar were:
“Well, just be careful. Right now has a nasty way of turning into forever while you’re not watching.”
As he watched her walk out the door, he couldn’t help but wonder whether the tears had been real.
Storm settled the check and departed. Nothing about drinking a martini with Clara Strike had felt right anyway. There were doors he couldn’t afford to open, and that was one of them. Certainly not now. Maybe it was because of his feelings for Ling Xi Bang. Maybe it was because there was a man he didn’t know whose life he felt he had to save.
Storm dove into an all-night deli, grabbed a black coffee to help clear away the martini fuzz, and typed a quick e-mail to Rodney Click. He told him that Whitely Cracker was an apparent dead end and asked if he had any other leads.
Storm had just hit the send button when his phone rang.
“Storm Investigations.”
“Derrick, it’s Ling. Can you talk?”
“Go ahead,” he said, already enjoying the sound of her voice.
“I’ve just gotten myself clear of Senator Whitmer’s office. The donor is a man named Whitely Cracker.”
“What?” Storm said, and not because he had a hard time hearing.
“I got Whitmer drunk and managed to steer the conversation around to the appropriations rider. He admitted he did it at the behest of what he called ‘a very generous friend.’ I couldn’t get him to say who the friend was, but then later, when he was passed out, I found a pad on Whitmer’s desk that more or less laid it out. The five million is going to be split into five LLCs, but it looks like all the money is coming from this Cracker fellow. Do you know him or something?”
“Yeah, I was just at his house, as a matter of fact,” Storm said. “Rodney Click’s model predicted Cracker would be the sixth banker. I guess the model got a little confused. It thought we were looking for a victim and instead it found our perpetrator.”
Storm seethed as he thought back to his interaction with Cracker. The banker had let Storm into his house like he was the pigeon, not the hawk. He had pretended nothing in the world was amiss and had acted so guileless when Storm brought up the name Volkov, even asking him how to pronounce it and double-checking that it was Russian. All the while, the man was in Cracker’s employ.
Storm was angry at himself first — he had the end of his mission an arm’s length away and hadn’t realized it. Then his anger turned to Cracker, the man who had inflicted such misery on so many, and intended to cause even more widespread suffering, without any apparent regard for who he hurt. All in the name of the unholy dollar.
Then Storm calmed himself. Anger served no purpose here. And, besides, he could turn his own mistake into an advantage. He could let Cracker continue to believe he was under Storm’s protection. That way Cracker wouldn’t know that Storm was really coming for him.
And there was no doubt: Storm was coming. By himself. There was no going to Jedediah Jones with this. All he had was the say-so of one Chinese agent — a person he wasn’t even cleared to work with. Jones would howl all day long and half the night at the breach of security. And yet Storm didn’t doubt her for a moment. He loved the irony: The only person in the whole scenario he could trust was an enemy agent.
Storm was so distracted he crossed Ninth Street without looking. A Nissan Maxima blared its horn at him. Storm waved apologetically.
“Are you okay?” Xi Bang asked. “What are you doing?”
“Just playing in traffic,” he said. “And thinking.”
“Yeah, what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking you and I need to pay a visit to Whitely Cracker tomorrow morning,” Storm said.
“And?”
“We confront him with what we know, get him to confess. If he doesn’t confess, we take him in anyway and hold him until we can prove this thing to everyone’s satisfaction. At least that gets him out of circulation and away from MonEx machines. Can you get yourself to New York? There’s a shuttle that leaves Reagan National at six A.M. that will get put you into LaGuardia by seven. I can pick you up there.”
“Why, Agent Storm, are you asking me on a date?”
“No. I’m asking Jenny Chang. She’s a total hottie. I’ve seen pictures of her on the Internet, you know.”
Storm was on foot, headed for one of his favorite hotels — the W in Union Square — when his phone blurped at him, telling him he had a new e-mail.
It was from Click, who had not yet managed to unglue himself from his computer keyboard. The professor had spent the day tweaking his model. There were two long, chunky paragraphs detailing how he had altered some of his assumptions and changed a few of the variables. The computer still considered Cracker its top choice for Volkov’s brutality, but once you told the computer that Cracker was not an option, it came up with a different candidate.
The man’s name was Timothy Demming. He was chief currency trader at NationBank. Click’s updated model pegged the likelihood of the next victim being Demming at 73 percent.
“I met him at a conference and he’s a typical investment banking jerk,” Click wrote. “But there’s no question he would be able to order a trade of the magnitude we’ve discussed. Anecdotally, I’d say he’s a strong possibility.”
Storm didn’t hesitate. He loaded his People Finder app, which told him Demming lived a short distance away, in the financial district. Storm grabbed the first southbound cab he could and only felt a bit ridiculous when he told the driver to step on it.
Second Avenue blurred by outside the window, then Houston Street. New York was the city that never slept, for sure, but it was now after midnight, meaning that those who weren’t sleeping at least had the good sense to be doing something other than clogging the streets.
On the short ride, Storm Googled Demming. He was a star at NationBank, all right. There were blog pieces about him with pictures. He was handsome, no question, but in a sort of sleazy way. He looked like someone who would shatter a child’s piggy bank just to get himself one more nickel.
Storm arrived at Demming’s address to find an upscale co-op, one of those lower West Side high-rises that had started springing up like mushrooms after rain sometime during the nineties. Demming lived on the top floor. Storm paid and tipped the driver and walked through the building’s revolving doors.