Storm Front

“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.