Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller

  FOR MY FATHER

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  About the Author

  Also Available From Hyperion

  Also available from Richard Castle

  Castle on DVD

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  VENICE, Italy

  The gondolier could only be described as ruggedly handsome, with dark hair and eyes, a square jaw, and muscles toned from his daily exertions at the oar. He wore the costume the tourists expected of his profession: a tight-fitting shirt with red-and-white jail house striping, blousy black pants, and a festive red scarf tied off at a jaunty angle. He finished the outfit with a broad-rimmed sunhat, an accessory he kept fixed to his head even though it was nearly midnight. Appearances needed to be maintained.

  With powerful, practiced movements, he propelled the boat under the Calle delle Ostreghe footbridge. When he felt they were sufficiently under way, he opened his mouth and let a booming, mournful baritone pour from his lungs.

  “Arrivederci Roma,” he warbled. “Good-bye, au revoir, mentre…”

  “No singing, please,” said the passenger, a pale, doughy man in a tweed jacket, with a voice that was vintage British Empire boarding school.

  “But it’s-a part-a the service,” the gondolier replied, in heavily accented English. “It’s-a, how you say, romantic-a. Maybe we-a find-a you a nice-a girl, huh? Put you in a better mood-a?”

  “No singing,” the Brit said.

  “But I could lose-a my license,” the gondolier protested.

  He rowed in silence for a moment, cocked his head directly toward the Brit, then resumed his crooning.

  “Assshoooooole-omio,” he crooned. “Ooooo-sodomia…”

  “I said no singing,” the Brit snapped. “My God, man, it’s like someone is squeezing a goat. Look, I’ll pay you double to stop.”

  The gondolier mumbled a curse in Italian under his breath, but the singing ceased. The moon had been blotted by clouds, giving him little light by which to navigate. He focused on his task, pointing the boat’s high, gracefully curved prow toward the middle of the Grand Canal, then out into the open waters of the Laguna Veneta, a strange place for a gondola in the dark of night.

  The currents were stronger here, and the flat-bottomed vessel was not well suited to the chop created by a stiffening breeze blowing in from the west. The gondolier frowned as the Campanile di San Marco’s tower grew faint in the distance behind them.

  “Where are we-a going again?” he asked. “Just keep rowing,” the Brit answered, his eyes surveying the darkness.

  A few minutes later, three quick floodlight flashes split the night from several hundred yards away. They came from the bow of a small fishing boat that was approaching the gondola’s starboard side.

  “There,” the Brit said, pointing to the right. “Go there.”

  “Sì, signore,” the gondolier said, aiming the boat in the direction of the light.

  Soon, they were alongside the fishing boat, a white fiberglass trawler. The gondolier took quick stock of its occupants. There were three, and they weren’t fishermen. One was stationed on the bow with an AK-47 anchored against his shoulder, the muzzle arching in a semicircle as he scanned the horizon. One manned the wheel house, with both hands firmly planted on the helm and a handgun holstered on his right hip. The third, an egg-bald albino, was in the stern, apparently unarmed, and focused entirely on the Brit.

  This would be easy.

  The fishing boat’s engine shifted into neutral and it slowly glided to a stop. Once the boats were stern to stern, a brief conversation between the Brit and the albino ensued. The gondolier waited patiently for the exchange, then it happened: a small, velvet bag passed from the albino to the Brit.

  The gondolier made his move. The man with the AK-47 never saw the long oar leave the water and certainly didn’t realize it was tracking at high speed in his direction—at least not until the blade was three inches from his ear, at which point it was too late. He dropped to the bottom of the boat with a heavy thud.

  One down.

  The man at the helm reacted, but slowly. His first move was to leave the wheel house and inspect the noise. That was his mistake. He should have gone for his gun. By the time his error began to occur to him, the gondolier had already dropped his oar and leaped onto the fishing boat, and was approaching with hands raised. The gondolier had a full range of Far Eastern martial arts moves at his disposal but opted, instead, for a more Western tactic, delivering a left jab to the side of the man’s nose that stunned him, then a right uppercut to his jaw that severed any connection the helmsman had to reality.

  Two down.

  The albino was already reaching down to his ankle, toward a knife that was sheathed there. But he was also far too late and far too slow. The gondolier took one long stride, pivoted, and delivered a devastating back kick to the albino’s skull. His body immediately went slack.

  The gondolier quickly secured all three men with plastic ties he had produced from his pants pocket. The Brit watched in dumbfounded terror. The gondolier didn’t even seem to be breathing heavily.

  “All right, your turn,” he said to the Brit, pulling another restraint from his pocket, all traces of his Italian accent suddenly gone. He was… American?

  “Who… who are you?” the Brit asked. “That’s hardly your biggest problem at the moment,” the gondolier replied, preparing to reboard the gondola. “Being found guilty of treason is a much greater—”

  “Stay back,” the Brit shouted, pulling a snub-nosed Derringer pistol from out of his tweed jacket.

  The gondolier eyed the pistol, more annoyed than frightened. Intelligence had told him the Brit wouldn’t be armed—proving, once again, just how smart Intelligence really was.

  Without hesitation, the gondolier performed an expert back dive, vaulting himself off the fishing trawler and into the choppy waters below. The Brit yanked the Derringer’s trigger, firing off a wild shot. The gondolier had moved too quickly. The Brit would have had a better chance hitting one of the innumerable seagulls in the faraway Piazza San Marco.

  The Brit swiveled his head left, right, then left. He turned around, then back to the front. He kept expecting to see a head surface, and he fully intended to shoot a hole in it when it did. The Derringer was not the most accurate weapon, but the Brit was a deadly shot. Spies often are.

  He waited. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. A minute. Two minutes. The gondolier had disappeared, but how was that possible? Had the Brit’s bullet, in fact, struck its target? That must have been it. The man, whoever he was, was now at the bottom of the lagoon.

  “Well, that’s that,” the Brit said, returning the Derringer to his jacket and gripping the sides of the boat so he could stand and survey
his situation.

  Then he felt the hand. It came out of nowhere, wet and cold, and clamped on his wrist. Then came the agony of that hand twisting his arm until it snapped at the elbow. He bellowed in pain, but his excruciation was short-lived: The gondolier vaulted himself onto the boat and delivered a descending blow to the side of the man’s head. The Brit’s body immediately lost whatever starch it once had, slumping, jelly-like, into the gondola’s seat.

  “You should have let me sing,” the gondolier said to the Brit’s unconscious form. “I thought it sounded lovely.”

  The gondolier snapped restraints on the Brit, found the velvet bag, and inspected its contents. A handful of diamonds, at least two million dollars’ worth, sparkled back at him.

  “Daddy really ought to do a better job protecting the family jewels,” he said to the still-inert Brit.

  The gondolier stood. He lifted his watch close to his face, pressed a button on the side, and spoke into it.

  “Waste Management, this is Vito,” he said. “It’s time to pick up the trash.”

  “Copy that, Vito,” said a voice that sprouted from the watch’s small speakers. “We have a garbage truck inbound. Are you sure you’ve finished your entire route?”

  “Affirmative.” The gondolier surveyed the four incapacitated men before him. “Only found four cans. They’ve all been emptied.”

  A new voice, one that sounded like it was mixed with several shovels of gravel, filled the watch’s speakers. “We knew we could count on you,” it said. “Good work, Derrick Storm.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ZURICH, Switzerland

  The robber was in the kitchen. Wilhelm Sorenson was sure of it. With his heart racing, he closed in on the swinging door that led to the room and paused, listening for the smallest sound.

  Yes, he heard it. There was a faint rattling from one of the copper pots that hung from the ceiling. It was the robber, for sure. The chase would be over soon. The robber would be captured and brought to justice. His version of justice.

  Sorenson moved like an Arctic fox crossing tundra until his hand rested against the door. Another noise. This time, it was a giggle.

  He did so love their version of cops and robbers.

  “Oh Vögelein!” he called. Little Bird. His pet name for the robber.

  She giggled again. He burst through the door, jowls flopping, breathing heavily from the exertion. This was the most exercise he ever got.

  She was already gone. He felt moisture pooling on his brow, watched as the droplets rolled off his face and splattered on the floor. He had taken a triple dose of his erectile dysfunction medicine a half hour earlier, and the pills had dilated just about every blood vessel in his body. Now the blood was roaring through him, flushing his otherwise pale face to near purple and cranking his internal thermostat so the sweat was pouring from him as if he were an abattoir-bound hog.

  It was a good thing none of the board members could see him right now, to say nothing of the press: Wilhelm Sorenson, one of the richest men in Switzerland and one of the most powerful bankers in the world, dressed only in socks, boxers, and suspenders, with a costume shop gendarme’s hat perched atop his head.

  He had dispatched his wife to their chalet in the Loire Valley for a weekend of wine tasting with a group of lady friends, just what the old booze hound wanted. He had their mansion on the shores of Lake Greifen to himself.

  Or, rather, to himself and Brigitte, the nineteen-year-old Swedish ingenue who had become the latest in a long line of Wilhelm’s barely legal obsessions.

  Their little tête-à-têtes were not, under the strictest interpretation of law, illegal; just immoral, adulterous, and intrinsically revolting. Truly, there were few things more abhorrent to nature than the sight of Wilhelm, a married man pushing seventy, with a mass of lumpy, flaccid flesh overhanging his underwear, chasing after this sleek, blond, gorgeous young thing.

  Nevertheless, this was their little game. She donned whatever absurdly priced lingerie he had bought for her most recently—this time, a four-hundred-dollar shred of feather-trimmed pink silk acquired on a trip to New York—and raced around the house. She drank directly from a 450-euro bottle of Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises the whole time. Five long pulls was enough to get her pretending to be drunk; ten would actually do the job, making her sure she could tolerate the feeling of him, grunting and sweating on top of her. Then she allowed herself to be caught, mostly so she could get it over with. It usually didn’t take him more than about five minutes.

  “Oh, Schnucki!” she sang out. Her pet name for him. It roughly translated to “Cutey”—making it perhaps the least accurate nickname in the history of spoken language.

  She was nowhere in the kitchen. He followed the mellifluous sound of her voice into the living room, the one with the soaring cathedral ceiling and the commanding view of the lake. Not that its placid waters had his attention at the moment.

  “I’m coming to get you, Vögelein!” he said.

  He stubbed his toe on the couch, swearing softly. He had not been drinking. He could barely perform sober. Drunk he would never be able to rise to the occasion, even with all those little blue pills he had consumed.

  The giggling now seemed to be coming from the hallway that led to the foyer, so he followed the sound. Yes, this would be over soon. The foyer had a sitting room off it, but otherwise it was a dead end. She would soon be his.

  Then he heard her scream.

  Sorenson frowned. She wasn’t supposed to make it this easy. That wasn’t part of the game.

  No matter. He would get what he wanted, then send her down into the city with his credit card for a night in the clubs. That way he could get some sleep.

  “I’ve got you now, Vögelein,” he called out.

  He rounded the corner into the darkened foyer and stopped. There were six heavily armed men dressed in black tactical gear. Their facial features were shrouded by night-vision goggles.

  One of the men, the biggest of the bunch, had grabbed Brigitte by one of her blond pigtails and was pressing a knife against her throat. Her eyes had gone wide.

  “What is this?” Sorenson demanded, in German.

  The shortest man, a ball of muscle no more than five-foot-four, peeled off his goggles, revealing an eye patch and a face half-covered in the waxy, scarred skin left behind by severe burns. He brought a Ruger .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun level with Sorenson’s gut.

  “Shut up,” said the man—Sorenson was already thinking of him as “Patch” in his mind—then pointed to the sitting room. “Go in there.”

  Wilhelm Sorenson was the top currency trader at Nationale Banc Suisse, the largest bank in Switzerland, with assets of just over two trillion in Swiss francs. He moved untold fortunes in euro, dollars, yuan, and rand every day with the push of a button. His bonus alone last year was forty-five million francs, to say nothing of what he made on his private investments. No one ordered him around.

  “This is… this is outrageous,” Sorenson said, switching to English himself. “Who are you?”

  Patch turned to the guy holding Brigitte and nodded. The man jerked his knife hand, cutting a wide gash in the girl’s throat. Her scream sounded like it came from underwater. She fell to her knees. Blood poured from her severed carotid artery. Her hand went to her neck, but it was like trying to stop flood waters with a spaghetti strainer. The blood burst through her fingers.

  “I’m no one to be disobeyed,” Patch said.

  Sorenson watched in horror as the life bled from his plaything. He felt no concern for her, only for himself. The panic spread over him. He had given his security services the weekend off so he and Brigitte could have their tryst in private. He had a gun, an old Walther P38 his Nazi-sympathizer father had willed him, but that was locked upstairs in a safe. His phone was clearly not on his person, and in any event these guys did not look like they were going to let him make phone calls.

  He was at their mercy.

  “Please, let’s be re
asonable here,” Sorenson said, trying to sound calm. “I’m a very wealthy man, I can…”

  “Shut up,” Patch ordered, raising the .45 so it was in Sorenson’s face. “Move. In there.”

  Sorenson felt a gun barrel in his back. One of the other men had circled around him and was using his weapon to shove him toward the sitting room. He slowly allowed himself to be herded there. He assured himself these men were not here to kill him. He needed to keep his wits about him. You don’t just kill a man like Wilhelm Sorenson. The repercussions would be too great. But this was clearly going to cost him a lot of money, to say nothing of a lot of embarrassment.

  Sorenson took one last glance back at Brigitte, now facedown in a spreading pool of blood. How was he going to explain that to his wife? He had always been discreet with his little hobby, or at least discreet enough that he and the cow could pretend they had a normal marriage. Worse, Brigitte’s blood had seeped onto the antique Hereke they had found in Turkey. It was his wife’s favorite rug. Damn it. He was going to be in real trouble now.

  When they reached the sitting room, Patch said, “There,” pointing to a high-backed Windsor chair that had been a gift from the Windsors themselves. Working without wasted movement, two men duct-taped Wilhelm to the chair, unspooling great lengths on his ankles, knees, hips, chest, and back. Only his arms were being left free.

  “Whoever is paying you to do this, I can pay you more,” Sorenson said. “I promise you.”

  “Shut up,” Patch said, backhanding him with casual viciousness.

  “You don’t understand, I—”

  “Do you want me to cut off your lips?” Patch asked. “I’ll happily do it if you keep talking.”

  Sorenson clamped his mouth closed. They wanted to establish dominance over him first? Fine. He would let them do it. When the two men finished securing Sorenson to the chair, Patch unzipped a black duffel bag and pulled out an unusual-looking wooden block. It was the base for manacles of some sort, with oval slots for both wrists and adjustable clamps that allowed it to attach to a flat surface.

  Patch looked around for a suitable table and found what he needed in the corner: a hand-carved ebony table from Senegal that had been inlaid with Moroccan tile. The thing weighed several hundred pounds. It had taken two men and a dolly to get it in place when it had been delivered three years earlier, and it had not been moved since then. Patch lifted it alone, barely straining himself in the process. He positioned it in front of Sorenson, then affixed the manacles.