A Raging Storm

Matthew Dull, the stepson of Senator Windslow, had been abducted while he and his fiancée, Samantha Toppers, were walking near the Georgetown University campus. Four hooded men overpowered him, forced him into a van, and sped away, leaving a hysterical Toppers on the sidewalk.

When the FBI failed to find Dull, Windslow had asked Jones to bring in a “fixer” — someone who knew how to track missing persons and didn’t mind coloring outside the lines. Jones had reached out to Storm and had cashed in a favor. A big favor.

Storm had been fly-fishing in Montana when the helicopter arrived. He was a man seemingly without any cares. This was because he was dead — at least to the world. He had successfully faked his own death four years earlier and gone off the grid. He’d done it to escape from Jones and a clandestine world that had tried to kill him, not once, but several times.

There had been a time in his life — before he’d met Jones — when Storm had been just another down-on-his-luck private detective with too many bills and not enough clients. He’d spent his days and nights peeping through windows at no-tell motels photographing cheating spouses and spying on able-bodied men who’d filed false workman’s compensation claims citing “bad backs.” Storm had scraped by. Barely.

But then Clara Strike had entered his world and turned it upside down. The CIA field officer had enlisted Storm’s help in a covert operation being run on American soil. Technically, the CIA was forbidden to operate inside the U.S., so she’d needed Storm as a front man. She’d taken advantage of his expert tracking skills, his patriotic spirit, and his then-trusting nature. She’d introduced him to Jones, and it had been Jones who’d drawn him further and further into the CIA’s web. One of his assignments had gone terribly wrong. Tangiers! It had ended with Storm lying severely wounded on a cold floor in his own blood.

Jones had rescued him. Storm had survived, but Tangiers had changed him. After that, he’d decided that he wanted out. And the only way for him to quit was for Derrick Storm — the roguish private eye and conscripted CIA operative — to die. In poetic fashion, he’d gone out in much the same way that he’d come into Jones’s world. Storm had perished in the arms of Clara Strike. She’d watched in stunned disbelief as the light in his eyes dimmed. He’d reached out for her, and she had taken his hand, squeezing it for the very last time. His death had seemed legitimate because it had been as close to a real death as possible — thanks to the wizards inside the CIA’s Chief Directorate of Science and Technology. The CIA scientists had used their magic to stop his heart and show no discernible brain waves. Storm didn’t know how they’d done this. He hadn’t cared. Death had freed him.

Or so he’d thought.

Jones had brought him back by cashing in Tangiers. Storm owed his life to Jones, and so he’d returned, supposedly for one final mission.

He had now come full circle. He was sitting across from Jones in his Langley office the day after Senator Windslow’s assassination.

“I warned you this might get complicated,” Jones said.

“Yes, but you somehow forgot to mention the Russian element when we first talked,” Storm said.

Jones smiled slyly. “Must have slipped my mind.”

Storm knew better. Nothing slipped Jones’s mind.

“Since you seem to have overlooked that part,” Storm said, “why don’t you tell me about the Russians now?”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Jones said. “You tell me what you’ve learned about the kidnapping and the Russians.”

This is how Jones played the game. Ask him a question and he answered with two questions of his own. Ask him two questions and he responded with a dozen more.

“There were actually two groups of kidnappers,” Storm said. “The kidnappers who really abducted Matthew Dull were ex–KBG officers.”

“And the second ones?”

“They turned out to be Samantha Toppers and her brother.”

“She’s the short blonde with the big—” Jones started to say.

Storm interrupted. “Yes, Toppers is rather well endowed. She and her brother tried to profit from the kidnapping by sending Senator Windslow and his wife ransom notes even though they didn’t have Dull. It was a pretty clever scam.”

“That you figured out,” Jones said.

It was as close to a compliment as Jones ever gave.

Continuing, Jones said, “Sadly, you weren’t able to save Dull. The real kidnappers killed him and now someone has assassinated a U.S. senator.”

“Hey, I didn’t pull those triggers,” Storm protested.

“True, but you also don’t know why they were pulled.”

“The men who did the actual murders were professionals. My guess is they are hired guns. The real question is who paid them? There are two likely candidates: Ivan Petrov and Oleg Barkovsky.”