Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller (16 page)

Having tossed out the bait, he waited to see if the guy would bite. Sure enough, he did.

Whitely wrote back quickly.

The man would know he meant 350,000 shares. And he didn’t hesitate.

Whitley was considering if he should try to lure the guy into one more supposedly-too-good-to-be-true deal, but he became aware that Theodore Sniff was lurking in his doorway again. Ordinarily, he would have just ignored the accountant. But since he had given Sniff a specific errand, he might as well get it over with.

Whitely looked up. Sniff was wearing a suit that looked like it had been balled up and stuffed in a trash can for several days before he put it on.

“Teddy, did you sleep in that suit or something?” Whitely asked.

“No, I… It just came from the cleaners,” Sniff said. He was
always at a loss to explain his various deficiencies to his boss. Of course, only so much of it was Sniff’s fault. It was as much Whitely’s incomprehension as anything. Men with perfect hairlines could seldom understand balding.

“Well, tell them to actually press it next time,” Whitely said. “Or maybe switch dry cleaners? I’m just trying to look out for you, buddy.”

“Thank you.”

“By the way, did you get anywhere with that girl from Match dot com?”

“We met for coffee and now she doesn’t answer any of my messages,” Sniff said. “I winked at her three times, but she just ignored me.”

“Well, look on the bright side: It’s better than that girl from quote-unquote ‘Ridgefield, Connecticut’ who turned out to be a Slovenian prostitute,” Whitely said. “Anyhow, what’s up?”

“It’s… it’s the Fulcher margin call.”

“What about it? We ready to deliver? He needs the money by three.”

“Yeah, about that…” Sniff said, and suddenly he couldn’t look at his boss. The carpet in front of him had gotten far more interesting.

“What, Teddy?”

“We don’t have it.”

“So you keep saying. But how is that even possible?”

“Well, that donation you just made didn’t help,” Sniff said.

“Still, I… I just don’t understand: My trades are good. My trades are great. I can count on one hand the ones that go bad in an entire month. I’ve got to have one of the best win-loss records in the business. How is it
possible
we don’t have the money?”

“I’m just telling you what the books are telling me,” Sniff said. “The books don’t lie.”

“Yeah, well…” Whitely said, running his hands through his perfect coiffure, actually mussing it slightly.

“So what do we do about Fulcher?”

Whitely stared into the distance. He tented his hands, brought them to his lips, and held them there for ten seconds.

“His margin call is at First National,” Whitely said at least. “We know some people there. Call them up and convince them to hold off on the margin call for a week or two. We’ll make sure Fulcher knows we did him the favor and tell him to just rest easy, that we’ll have the money when the time comes. And by then, we will.”

Sniff mumbled something that Whitely couldn’t hear. Only the sensitive microphones picked up the words and piped them straight to the eighty-third floor.

And the words were: “I doubt it.”

D
onny Whitmer had been up all night.

Normally, that meant drinking booze and chasing tail—the preferred pastimes of powerful men the world over.

But this time was different. Donny Whitmer had discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that even after all those years in Washington, he still had a conscience. And that conscience was in something of a crisis.

It ate at him, what he had done. Threatening his best donor with exposure like that. It was actually making his stomach hurt—to stoop that low after a lifetime of honorable public service. It was so unbecoming of a senator. He tossed and turned in bed until Sissy made him sleep in the guest room.

Somewhere after midnight, the thought occurred to him: In the morning, he’d call the guy and tell him he didn’t mean it. It was a bluff. It was said out of anger or out of fear. No, better yet, it was a joke. Ha ha, good one, right, buddy? Because ol’ Donny would never do something like that.

The next morning, before Donny even finished his coffee, Jack Porter was back in his office. They had done some more polling. There were more charts and graphs. The Tea Party sumbitch
had much better name recognition than anyone had realized, much lower negatives than seemed possible, and what’s more, there were fewer undecided than there should have been six weeks out.

In other words, the problem was worse than Donny had thought. Yesterday had been a little dreamlike—nightmare-like—but today the reality was setting in. He might really be done. He found himself ignoring Porter and looking around his office, at the view of the Capitol that he commanded from his corner office, at all the knickknacks and plaques and commendations he had collected over the years, and he just didn’t want to pack them up. He wasn’t ready to be done.

More than that, the
people of Alabama
couldn’t afford to lose him. All those pork barrel projects he shoveled their way meant jobs. And jobs meant everything. This neophyte Tea Party jerk wouldn’t have a clue how to work the levers of government to get that sort of thing. The sumbitch would probably sell his political soul trying to back a long-shot Supreme Court pick who had promised to overturn
Roe v. Wade
. How many paving contracts would that provide to the constituents? None. The thought bothered Donny even more than the thought that he wouldn’t be able to boss around lobbyists anymore.

Eventually, he had booted Porter from his office, closed his door, and told everyone not to bother him. He needed to think.

Five million dollars. And, really, only one place to get it. All his other top donors had Alabama ties. They would have sniffed out that Donny was in trouble and therefore would know he was desperate and therefore wouldn’t give him a dime. The
Birmingham News
had not done any polling yet, but it had written some flattering stories about his challenger and about the grassroots devotion he seemed to be engendering.

Donny had to put more pressure on his best donor. That was his silver bullet. He had threatened exposure of the rider. That was a good start. What if he also…

The phone rang.

It was his donor.

The donor who was the senator’s last chance to change all that red on Jack Porter’s charts to lovely, luscious green.

“Hello there, young man,” Donny said.

He listened.

“No, no, you’re not interrupting anything. And, besides, it’s a plea sure to hear from you. Always a plea sure.”

As if Donny hadn’t just threatened the man the day before. The man was talking, and Donny realized he was holding his breath. Why couldn’t the guy just cut to the chase, say he was giving him the money, and end it there? Or maybe he could just say he wasn’t giving him the money and Donny would accept… Hang on. Did Donny really just hear that right? Yes. Yes, he did.

“Well, that’s mighty generous of you,” Whitmer said. “ ‘The Alabama Future Fund.’ That sounds mighty fine.”

Donny stood from his desk and strolled to the window to admire the Capitol. Maybe he’d get to keep this view after all.

“Well, of course, we could put another name at the head of the PAC. Whoever you wanted. Doesn’t matter to us, as long as…”

Donny listened for a moment.

“Yes, yes. The PAC has to list its donors, but…”

Donny looked for his putter. He needed to do something with his hands.

“Well, there are things you can do on your end to obscure the origin of the money if that’s how you’d like to do it. That’s not hard. Or we can do it on our end. I could have my lawyer do that part if you’d like. It’s the least I can…”

Forget the putter. His hands were shaking too badly. Five million bucks. Alabama was about to get itself a big dose of Donny Whitmer.

“Oh, no. Don’t worry. There is not the slightest chance it could be traced back to you. We can even split it up five ways so it looks like it’s coming from five different places. You can trust ol’ Donny now. You wire that money over and we’ll take care of it.”

Donny was so excited—and so worried he’d forget the
details—that he turned to the next fresh page on his legal pad. He wrote “ALABAMA FUTURE FUND” and “$5 MILLION” and “SPLIT INTO FIVE LLC’S.” Then he wrote “THANK YOU” and the donor’s name, and underlined it three times so he’d remembered to write a nice thank-you card. Manners were manners, after all.

“Well, I have to tell you, I really do appreciate this. And you better believe I’ll remember next time you need anything. You just call ol’ Donny, you hear?”

Right. Maybe it wasn’t extortion after all. It was just another favor being done in a town full of favors.

He ended the call, his hands still shaking. It was all being put in play. With the five million in place, Donny’s people would be able to make a media buy that would start hitting next week.

Then see what goddamned Jack Porter’s charts would look like.

I
f he had been in Florence, Derrick Storm would have known at least three restaurants that would have been just perfect—two with a view of the Ponte Vecchio and one tucked high in the hills near the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte. At his favorite spot in Jakarta, he wouldn’t have needed to look at the menu, just ordered a prawn nasi goreng that would have blown his date’s mind. In San Francisco, he had a hideout where the maître d’ would have escorted him to his preferred table and opened a bottle of Joseph Phelps Insignia without Storm even having to ask.

In Ames, Iowa, he was stuck driving around aimlessly until he found a Buffalo Wild Wings.

A franchised eatery wedged between a Target and a Pizza Hut was not, perhaps, the first place anyone would think to look for two international operatives in the middle of investigating a plot to cripple the global economy. But after a series of meals that had consisted of whatever the airline put in the box, they were ravenous. And the beer was cold. And there was nothing like a heaping pile of spicy wings to clear the mind, to say nothing of the sinuses.

It had been a productive afternoon and early evening with Dr. Rodney Click. Storm and Xi Bang had rounded out their education on the foreign exchange markets. They had received an introduction
into the workings of the MonEx 4000, for what little good that did. They had tried a variety of scenarios on the Iowa State Sudden Monetary Depreciation Model.

Then Storm had put Click to work: Now that they knew the Click Theory was being put into practice, could he use his model to predict which bankers might be targeted? Which bankers would be most likely to have the influence needed to pull off Armageddon?

Click said he’d work on it through the night and get back to them in a day. Or maybe two. If he was lucky. Then he shooed Storm and Xi Bang out. The Buffalo Wild Wings had been their first stop.

“I have to admit,” Storm said, after they had both knocked the edge off their hunger, “I always feel a little guilty eating Buffalo wings.”

“Why?” Xi Bang asked, wiping sauce from her chin.

“It’s just thinking of all those poor buffalos, wandering around the Great Plains without their wings, grounded forever.”

“Oh, stop.”

“Well, seriously, have you ever
seen
a buffalo with wings?” Storm asked.

She rolled her eyes, swallowed the last quarter of her beer in one gulp, and motioned for the waitress to bring her another.

“Time to catch up, Nurse,” she said, nodding at Storm’s glass, still half-f.

“How do I know you haven’t spiked this with something while my back was turned? Maybe it’s rotten with Rohypnol and you’re going to take me back to a hotel room and take advantage of me.”

“Maybe I am,” she said.

Storm’s response was to tilt back his beer and drink until it, too, was empty. Xi Bang just laughed. She had left her silk dresses and traffic accident–causing skirts back in Europe and donned attire that was less conspicuous: black slacks, a fitted charcoal turtleneck, heels that were a mere four inches. She was still stunning—there was nothing she could wear, short of a king-sized sheet, to
hide that—but at least she wasn’t calling as much attention to herself.

Storm was also dressed comfortably: fashionably cut jeans, open-collar shirt, cashmere blazer. He had gotten his share of flirty smiles from the hostess and the waitress—that whole ruggedly handsome thing—but he had ignored them. There had been some waitresses and hostesses in his past, and there would likely be more in the future. But women like Ling Xi Bang—intelligent, worldly, mysterious—were far more interesting to him.

“Okay, so, seriously, when were you on to me?” she asked.

“Well, I was curious from the start,” Storm said. “I’ve been around a lot of media events, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a press secretary as gorgeous as you.”

She looked down, blushing.

“But what really did it was when I asked you whether you preferred Roma’s or Geno’s.”

“The pizza places. You made them both up,” she said. “I should have known. They threw this backstory at me last-minute, and I just didn’t have time to research it like I usually would. I don’t usually do a lot of undercover work. I’m mostly an analyst. They only put me in the field this time because one of my areas of expertise is finance.”

“So all that poor-little-Ling-from-Qinghai stuff, that was all made up, right?”

“Every word of it,” she said.

“You sold it well. I was ready to believe that part.”

“Thanks.”

“So where did you get your English from? You must have spent some time in America. You have too many American idioms not to have.”

“My parents sent me to a boarding school in Virginia,” she said. “Not in the D.C. area where you grew up. Way down south, in the tidewater part of the state. Most of what I learned about espionage started with sneaking off after lights out and meeting up with boys behind the field house. That and hiding cigarettes.”