Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller Page 6

  It had seemed like a luxurious road-eating machine back then. Now it looked like a rolling box, maybe two generations removed from the aircraft carrier–sized Buicks of the sixties and seventies. The last time Derrick had looked at the odometer, it read 57,332—but that was misleading, since it had flipped at least three times. That Carl had kept it on the road all this time was a testament to his gift for mechanics, his parsimony, and, mostly, his stubbornness.

  “The damn blower on the AC only works at one speed,” Carl grumbled. “Blows on low the whole time.”

  Derrick went over to have a look. One of the more unusual features of this par tic u lar Buick was that its hood hinged in front and opened away from the windshield, the opposite of nearly every other passenger car that ever rolled off the line in Detroit. It made the car an enormous pain to work on, which only made Carl that much more devoted to it.

  “I replaced the fan and the relay and the dang thing still won’t run right,” Carl added. “I can run electric to it through an outside toggle switch and get it to work. But as soon as I assemble it right, it doesn’t run on different speeds. Just low.”

  “You check the fuses?” Derrick asked.

  “What, do I look like I got hit with a moron stick last night?”

  “Yeah but I decided to be polite and not mention it.”

  Carl grunted. Derrick studied the offending unit and the various wires leading from it, marveling at the relative simplicity of the Buick’s innards. As Carl had carped many times, modern-day cars were largely regulated by their various computer systems. Unless you had your own computer to run diagnostics on them, they could be virtually impossible for an at-home mechanic to fix. It’s why Carl refused to get rid of the Buick: Its problems, while sometimes legion, were at least repairable without digital assistance. Neither man needed to say what plea sure they both got from this.

  On the radio, the Orioles had pushed three runs across in the bottom of the seventh to take a 6–5 lead over the Angels.

  “It’s good to have Markakis back,” Carl said. “We would have beat the Yankees last October if we’d had Markakis in the lineup.”

  The Orioles had long been “we” in the Storm house hold. With a few exceptions, this had been an act of shared suffering by the Storm men.

  “We would have beat the Yankees if Jimmy Johnson had been Jimmy Johnson,” Derrick said.

  “Didn’t realize you still paid that close attention.”

  “Some things are in the blood, whether you want them there or not, old man.”

  “Hey, it was only fifteen years between postseason appearances,” Carl said, then added in a lower voice: “It better not be another fifteen or I might not make it.”

  Derrick let the macabre comment pass.

  “I see the old Westing house still works,” he said.

  “Yeah. Why? You want to take it apart again?”

  Derrick laughed. As a boy, his father had insisted his son know how to take apart and reassemble a radio—and understand the functions of all the parts he saw along the way—as if this were some basic survival skill every young man needed.

  “Let’s just worry about the car, Dad.”

  The younger Storm probed the Buick with his eyes first, then his hands. Soon, he zeroed in on a bundle of wires near the windshield-washer fluid reservoir.

  “Here’s the problem,” he said. “Check out the fusible link wire.”

  Carl frowned, cursed, and grabbed some drugstore glasses off his workbench. Once the glasses were perched on the end of his nose, he shined a flashlight at the offending area. “I’ll be damned,” he said, looking at a wire that had been Southern fried into a melted mess. “I can’t believe I missed that.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s your culprit,” Derrick said.

  Carl took a glance at his wristwatch, a Casio that was at least as old as the car. “Auto parts store is closing up. I can tackle this in the morning. Let’s get a beer.”

  Derrick followed his father into the time warp that was his boyhood home. Little had changed about the house in well over thirty years. The house cried out for a woman’s touch, but Storm’s mother had died in a car accident when he was five. Derrick had only vague memories of her and knew little about her. The sum total of what his father ever said about her was “She was a heck of a woman, your mother.” Then he’d make an excuse to leave the room.

  Carl went over to the mostly barren refrigerator—current inhabitants: mayonnaise, Kraft American singles, yellowing lettuce, hamburger rolls stale enough to be brittle to the touch—and grabbed two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from a half-full twenty-four-pack. In his years away from his father, Derrick had developed a palate for crafted microbrews of varying sorts. He was currently indulging an IPA phase. But in the house of his father, he honored the local custom: an American macrobrew.

  They settled into seats in the living room—Carl in his favorite Barcalounger, Derrick on the paisley patterned sofa—and cracked open the beers. This was a kind of unofficial ritual between the Storm boys. Derrick shared most all of his cases with his father. It was partly because he valued his father’s insights. It was mostly because Carl Storm was his insurance policy. Jedediah Jones would leave Derrick Storm to rot in that Tibetan prison if it was politically expedient. Carl Storm would never rest until his son came back safely.

  And so, as they drank, Derrick told his father about the trail of dead bankers, the certainty of Volkov’s nefarious hand at work, and the possibility of Chinese involvement. Carl Storm listened with the practiced ear of a seasoned investigator. Carl had been career FBI, joining the Bureau in an era when it wasn’t quite as polished as it had since become. Back then, it was more of a blue collar crime-solving unit. Their suits were cheaper and so were their educations. The Hollywood influence had yet to transform them into self-styled supercops. They were more like regular cops, albeit very good ones. You still didn’t want to get Carl Storm going on how J. Edgar Hoover had really gotten a bad rap from the media.

  Of all the things Carl had taught Derrick through the years, the ability to think like a detective was chief among them. In many ways, the son’s abilities now outstripped the father’s. But the old man could still surprise him. It took two beers’ worth of time for Derrick to lay out everything.

  “It sounds like your spook buddies are too focused on finding a link between the suspects that’s either a person or a business deal,” Carl said when Derrick had finished. “What if the link is what they did separately? You said Kornblum and Motoshige had their hands in a lot of things, but Sorenson only did those fancy money swaps, is that right?”

  Derrick nodded. Carl continued: “Then this is just a theory to kick around until something better comes along, but money-swapping might be your common element. It’s the only thing all three shared that we know of for sure.”

  “Good point,” Derrick said.

  “Hell yeah, it’s a good point. Look, son, I know you think your dad doesn’t know his ass from first base, but if I learned nothing else in my years at the Bureau, it’s that stuff like this always comes down to one thing: money. You follow the money, you’ll find your bad guy.”

  “So how do I do that in this case?”

  “You’re asking me? Fer chrissakes, I can barely make change at the grocery store. I’ll tell you one thing, though, and that’s that I don’t like the sound of any of this. How many times I gotta tell you, you can’t trust those CIA spooks. They’re setting you up for something and you don’t even know what. That Clara Strike woman is trouble. Is she involved in this?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Yeah, but that goddamn Jedediah Jones is, I’m sure. That man is a snake in the grass.”

  Derrick didn’t need to be reminded. To use a baseball analogy, Derrick was like a pinch hitter being brought in to face a pitcher he had never seen before. The guy might be throwing sliders low and outside. Or his first pitch might be a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball aimed at Derrick’s ear.


  As Derrick’s brain whirred, Carl’s eyes involuntary drifted toward the picture of Derrick’s mother that still adorned the mantel. She had been a beautiful woman—her son’s strong features came straight from her—and now she was frozen in time. The picture, like everything else in the house, grew ever-so-slightly more dated with each passing year.

  “I’ll be careful,” Derrick said, then looked up at the picture.

  “Hard not to miss her, isn’t it?”

  “She was a heck of a woman, your mother,” Carl Storm said. Then he crushed his beer can between his hands and vaulted himself with surprising agility from the Barcalounger. “Anyhow, if you’re staying for dinner, we might want to pick up a pizza or something. I don’t really have any food in the house. I’m gonna go wash up.”

  Derrick listened as the shower in the upstairs master bathroom turned on. In a few hours, he would have to head to the airport and catch a red-eye heading east. He had time for dinner. He consulted a menu, picked up the phone, and ordered a large sausage pie that he knew would be eaten with no mention of the woman who watched over them from her place on the mantel.

  CHAPTER 8

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Roughly twenty miles away from the Storm ancestral home, just a short trip down Interstate 66 and across Constitution Avenue, Senator Donald Whitmer (R-Alabama) was pacing around his corner office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. And he was fuming.

  Ordinarily, there was only one thing that would get Donny Whitmer this mad, and that was if the Alabama Crimson Tide football team somehow lost.

  Jack Porter had unwittingly stumbled on a second.

  “You’re wrong,” Whitmer roared at Porter. “Goddamnit, that’s impossible.”

  Porter was a pollster. The best. A pro’s pro, he had been around for twenty years and had developed statistical methodologies that would be the envy of Gallup, Quinnipiac, and every other public pollster out there—if only they knew them. He had advised the election efforts of sitting presidents—and future presidents—congressmen, senators, pretty much anyone who could afford to pay his rates.

  This was the third campaign Porter had worked for the Alabama senator. In the first two his information had been dead-on. Months out, he had identified areas of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses with voters that allowed Whitmer’s campaign to tailor its message and target its delivery. In the closing weeks, he told Whitmer exactly where to put his resources. His final polling had always turned out to be accurate within one percentage point of the actual election results.

  He was a good man. A smart man. An honorable man. And he was never wrong.

  “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Senator Whitmer yelled.

  “I’m sorry, Senator,” Porter said. “But the numbers are what they are.”

  Thirteen points down. That’s what Porter was trying to tell him. But there was just no way he was thirteen points down. He was Donny Whitmer, damn it. As chairman of the all-powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Whitmer was the kind of man who could turn a cabinet member into a fawning sycophant, have a governor crawling on his hands and knees, or make a lobbyist jump through a flaming hoop.

  During twenty-four years in Washington, Whitmer had become known as a legislator who could untie the purse strings of government and sprinkle gold on just about anything. He had delivered for his constituency countless times, the undisputed king of the pork barrel project. There were not only bridges to nowhere in some parts of Alabama, there were bridges from no-where, an even more impressive feat. There wasn’t a pet project he couldn’t get funded, even if it was just relatively small potatoes. Two hundred grand for a children’s museum. Four hundred for some small city park. Eight hundred to preserve some historical landmark.

  It didn’t take much, relatively speaking, to make people feel like they owed you forever. And Donny had been doing it for years. Now silver-haired and seventy, he still considered himself at the peak of his powers. He was listed at number nine in Washington Magazine’s “Hundred Most Powerful People in D.C.” He hadn’t been out of the top twenty in years.

  So there was no way, just no goddamn way, that he was thirteen points down—in a primary no less—to some Bible-thumpin’ Tea Party asshole.

  “But that’s… What in the hee-haw hell is going on down in that state of mine?”

  Porter lifted a thick white binder off his lap and turned the pages in chunks until he arrived at the section he needed. “These are your numbers among nondenominational Christians. You’re green. He’s red.”

  Porter held up a page in which the red bar stretched conspicuously farther than the green bar.

  “Holy Mother of God,” Whitmer said.

  “Here are the Baptists,” Porter said, turning one sheet over to reveal a page that looked identical to the last.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  “The Methodists look like this,” Porter said. The bars were slightly closer in length, but red still easily outdistanced green.

  “And here are the Episcopalians,” Porter finished, holding up another page that was nothing but bad news for the senator.

  “Since when the hell do Episcopalians give a crap about religion?” Whitmer demanded. “Oh, Jesus Christ, what about the atheists?”

  “Ah… they’re all Demo crats, sir.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sick of talking about the damn Jesus freaks,” Whitmer said. “They’re going with that Tea Party sumbitch. I get it. Let’s talk geography. There’s got to be somewhere in the state I’m doing well. Maybe we can build on that.”

  Porter nodded, turning chunks of pages in his binder until he reached the right place.

  “Okay, we’ve done some county-level work. If you want us to go finer than that, we can, but that’s going to add to that estimate I gave you,” Porter said.

  “County is fine,” Whitmer said.

  “Okay. You’re doing better in the southern part of the state. Mobile and Baldwin Counties still remember all you did after the BP spill.”

  “Damn right,” Whitmer boomed. “And well they should. There’s two hundred thousand people in Mobile. Maybe we just got to make sure they get out and vote.”

  “Well, I said you were doing better there. I didn’t say you were winning it. It’s pretty much a dead heat.”

  “Oh,” Whitmer said.

  “I’d still recommend a strong get-out-the-vote effort there,” Porter said.

  “Of course.”

  “Now, those are areas of relative strength. Areas of weakness are, well, here. You can see for yourself. Again, you’re the green shades. He’s the red shades. Statistical ties are gray.”

  Porter held up a page with a map of Alabama. There was a green patch in Marengo, the senator’s home county. There was some gray along the southern coast. Otherwise, the whole map was awash in varying shades of red. The more rural, the more red. Some areas were practically magenta.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Whitmer said again. He reached in his drawer and pulled out a flask of vodka. He had a luncheon to attend and didn’t want to smell like bourbon.

  “Well, it’s interesting you should put it that way, because I have to tell you, some of those Christian voters we polled mentioned your tendency toward blaspheming. You might want to curtail…”

  “Goddamnit, don’t tell me how to talk, boy,” Whitmer said. “Just tell me what to do about those thirteen goddamned points.”

  “A scandal would do nicely, sir,” Porter said, evenly. “Set him up with a whore, leak pictures to the press.”

  Whitmer was already shaking his head. “We tried that before we even knew he was this big a threat. Didn’t work. The sumbitch has too much Jesus in him. He chastised the woman for trying to seduce a married man, lectured her about the sanctity of marriage, then actually got her to pray with him. Last I heard, she was volunteering in his campaign office and going to his damn church.”

  Porter absorbed this for a moment. “Well, then there’s only one thing that’s goin
g to do the trick: money. It’s getting late in the game, but it’s not too late. If you were to launch a major advertising blitz—from Huntsville to Birmingham to Mobile to every small town in between—you’ll be able to take the guy’s legs out from under him. But you’ll have to go negative, real hard and real fast.”

  “Yeah,” Whitmer said. “Yeah, you know, I like the sound of that. Tell people he’s Jewish. Airbrush a yarmulke on him. Better yet, Muslim. Or gay. How much do I need?”

  “How much do you have in your war chest?”

  “A million two.”

  “Not enough,” Porter said. “You’re talking about a double-digit disadvantage. You’ll need at least five million to move the needle.”

  “Jesus,” Whitmer said.

  Forget vodka. Whitmer went over to the highball glasses he kept in the bookcase along the far wall. He opened up a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Clyde May’s Conecuh Ridge Alabama Style Whiskey, poured himself three fingers, and downed it in one gulp.

  “Want some?” he asked.

  “No, thank you, Senator.”

  “You got any good news to tell me?”

  “No, Senator.”

  “Then you best be moving on.”

  As Porter departed, Whitmer paced around his office, unable to believe this turn of events. It was six weeks to go until the primary. Whitmer hadn’t even bothered paying for polling before this, because there seemed to be no point—surely, no one was taking this Tea Party asshole seriously.

  And now it looked like Whitmer’s political life was at stake. Was his constituency really turning on him like this? Was he really going to have to pack up his life in Washington and head back to Alabama in shame and defeat, a four-term senator whipped in a primary by a some small-town deacon? Was he really going to be another in a long line of victims of this Tea Party nonsense?

  No. Not Donny Whitmer.

  He gripped the Clyde May, practically ripped off the cap, and didn’t bother with the formality of a glass this time. He poured a long swallow down his throat.