A Raging Storm

Richard Castle A Raging Storm

CHAPTER ONE

Washington, D.C.

Present day, 7:15 P.M.

dead United States senator was in his arms.

Derrick Storm had been the first to reach him and the only one who’d heard his dying words: Midas — Jedidiah knows. Seconds earlier, Senator Thurston Windslow had been alive and angry. He’d leaped from his chair and was about to reveal who had abducted and murdered his stepson when a bullet sent him crashing to the floor. From his crouched position, Storm could see the bullet hole in the large window directly behind the elderly statesman’s desk.

It was dusk outside, and the window had turned into a mirror, making it impossible for Storm to spot the assassin. Along with the three women with him inside the Dirksen Senate Building office, Storm was a sitting duck.

“Get down!” he yelled at Gloria Windslow, the senator’s newly widowed wife. She was standing in the center of the room in shock.

Storm needed to act before the sniper fired again. Springing to his feet, he dashed around the desk in a blur of motion. Like an attacking lion, he lunged at Gloria, throwing his right arm around her waist in mid-flight, pulling her down onto the thick carpet out of harm’s way.

FBI Agent April Showers and Samantha Toppers were already prone on the floor. Showers was clutching her .40-caliber Glock semiautomatic in one hand. The other was gripped around a pair of stainless steel handcuffs that she had snapped onto Toppers’s wrists before the shooting.

As in all Capitol Hill buildings, the senator’s office had been refitted recently with bullet-resistant glass windows that were supposed to prevent the sort of assassination that they’d just witnessed. By composing them of five thick pieces of shatterproof glass, the manufacturer had guaranteed the windows would stop bullets fired from guns as powerful as a .44-caliber magnum revolver — even if they were shot at close range. But the window had offered little real protection from a professional killer using a high-powered sniper’s rifle. The layers of safety glass may have slightly altered the slug’s path, because it hit the senator’s left shoulder rather than what was surely its intended target — his heart. That shift had kept him from dying instantly and given him seconds to whisper his dying words.

Jedidiah knows was clearly a reference to Jedidiah Jones, the cranky director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and the man responsible for dragging Storm into this thorny mess. What the word Midas meant was less clear, but since Jones was involved, Storm suspected it was the name of a covert CIA mission.

“The drapes,” FBI Agent Showers called out.

Storm followed her eyes to a red button on the wall next to the office window. Releasing his hold around Gloria Windslow’s waist, he shot forward, punching the button with his palm and dropping to the carpet just as another bullet pierced the glass — this one aimed at his head. The slug sailed by his left ear and smacked into the senator’s desk, causing splinters of polished mahogany to spray through the air.

That was close.

How many times can a man cheat death?

“You OK?” a concerned Agent Showers hollered.

“Piece of cake,” he replied. “But thanks for caring.”

“If anyone is going to kill you,” she replied with a smile, “it should be me — for you pushing yourself into my case.”

“But we’re having so much fun together, aren’t we?” he called back.

With the heavy drapes now drawn, Agent Showers rose to her feet, pulling Toppers with her up from the floor. “Don’t move!” she ordered Toppers, a twenty-something college student whose entire body was trembling.

Storm started for the office door just as a uniformed U.S. Capitol Police officer burst through it, followed by another. Both had their guns drawn and they instinctively divided their targets. One aimed at Showers, the other at Storm.

“Freeze!” the first cop yelled.

“I’m FBI!” Showers shouted. “Special Agent April Showers. The shot came from outside, not here. The senator is down.”

Not sure how to react, one officer kept his pistol leveled at her while the other rushed over to examine Windslow’s body.

“He’s dead!” the officer confirmed.

“She just told you that,” Storm said.

“Show me identification!” the cop with his gun aimed at Agent Showers commanded.

“Take it easy,” Showers replied as she slowly holstered her pistol and fished out her FBI credentials.

“How about you?” the other officer asked Storm.

“Don’t mind me. I’m a nobody — just ask her.”

“He’s with me,” Showers declared. “He’s a private detective named Steve Mason, hired to help the senator.”

Steve Mason was the pseudonym that Jedidiah Jones had given Storm when he brought him to Washington to help solve a tricky case.

Looking down at Windslow’s limp body and then back at Storm, the cop asked, “Is this the senator you were supposed to help?”