Storm Front

“Well, I’m glad fate has thrown us together again,” Strike said when he was through. “It really is great to see you, Storm. I thought you were… I mean, it’s Jones, so who the hell knows? But there were moments when I really thought you were dead. I’d go back and forth. Sometimes I’d think, Nah, he couldn’t be dead. It’d take a nuclear weapon to kill that son of a bitch. But then other times I’d think back on the times I almost lost you and think, well, maybe they got you this time….”

“Yeah, well…,” Storm said quietly. “Sorry I didn’t reach out.”

“I’d have done the same thing.”

Storm couldn’t resist the jab: “You did do the same thing.”

“I know, but… I mean, really, are you fishing for an apology or something? You know how the game is played. I don’t like it any more than you do sometimes. But I also accept it’s a part of this world we have chosen to live in. Or maybe it’s part of the world that has chosen us. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter. You can gripe and pout all you want, but you and I both know we wouldn’t walk away even if we had the chance to. This is who we are.”

“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.