Storm Front

The man thrust his shoulders in between the driver and the front passenger seat, so his head was even with the driver’s.

“Should we move in? We could take him right now. End this thing,” the man said.

“Where? When he comes out of the club? Right there on the curb?”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?”

“No. Not yet,” the driver replied. “We’ve been patient for a reason. We’ve got to do this right.”

“But you heard that. Fulcher just demanded his money. All his money. Do you know how much that is?”

“No. But I’m sure it’s not nothing.”

“What’s going to happen when he realizes Cracker doesn’t have it?”

“Who knows?” the driver said. “Maybe our boy is going to be able to come up with it. He’s resourceful.”

The man retreated to the back of the truck. All the coffee he had been drinking to stay awake was pressing at his bladder. He needed to pee. He shook his head and grabbed the Gatorade bottle he had been using for that purpose.

“It feels like we’re just delaying the inevitable,” he called as the urine hit the bottle.

“I know,” the driver said. “Just be patient. It won’t be much longer.”

CHAPTER 11

BLOIS, France

Cleveland Detroit had performed the necessary measures to ensure his departure from Paris was unaccompanied by any prying parties. Once he cleared city limits, Derrick Storm pointed himself toward the designated rendezvous point, a manor house that was only seven hundred years old and therefore not considered very interesting by the French.

The house was on the outskirts of Blois (pronounced “blah”), southwest of Paris. Storm was expecting to be met by an escort from French authorities, as Jedediah Jones had promised — some kind of lights-flashing ride through the Channel Tunnel, at which point he’d be turned over to the British, who would speed him on to London in similar fashion. Storm never knew how Jones arranged such things three thousand miles from home, in foreign jurisdictions. But Jones had never let him down.

Until this time. Storm arrived at the manor grounds, passed through the outer walls, and knocked on the front door of the main house. It was answered by a weathered old caretaker. Storm was quite the sure the man was an operative… for the French resistance during World War II. But, following orders, he said in French: “Jones sent me.”

Usually these three words were enough to make things happen. Instead, the caretaker welcomed him with all the warmth French hospitality is famous for, which is to say he looked at Storm like he was wearing a shirt made of donkey dung.

“Qu’avez-vous dit?” he asked. Approximate translation: “Say what, homey?”

Storm had switched to French and started to explain himself when he heard the distant sound of helicopter rotors chopping the air. If Storm knew Jones, that meant his ride had arrived.

“Never mind,” Storm said, changing back to English. “Wrong house. My sense of direction must be a little… Blois.”

Storm chortled at his own joke as he turned to go.

“Oh, you must be the American,” the caretaker said in English, grabbing Storm’s arm with surprising strength. “Stay right here. I have a few things for you.”

Storm stood at the door of the manor house until the man returned with a change of clothes and a rectangular-shaped package, approximately a foot in length and perhaps half that in width. It was wrapped in plain, brown paper.

“Here,” he said. “He said you might like this.”

“Is this… a toy?” Storm said, feeling the gleam forming in his eye.

The caretaker tilted his head, as if Storm had re-donned his donkey dung shirt. By now, the helicopter was coming in for a landing, flattening the grass in a nearby field with its downdraft.

“Never mind,” Storm said, peeling away the brown paper to reveal a box. Printed on the side in bold, block letters was the name “ACME.”

“It is a toy,” Storm exclaimed. The ACME thing was a running joke between him and Jones, both fans of classic Road Runner cartoons. Storm went into the box and pulled out what appeared to be a sleeve like the one quarterback Robert Griffin III had popularized in the NFL.

“What… what is it?” Storm asked, sliding the sleeve on his arm. At the end near his shoulder, it had two straps that Storm strapped around his torso, keeping the sleeve in place. Over the forearm, there was a nearly flat housing with a small aperture near the wrist.

“It’s a kind of grappling hook,” the old man said. “The line is as thin as dental floss but stronger than steel. The latest in nanotechnology. The line accelerates at ninety-six feet per second squared—”

“That’s three times faster than gravity,” Storm interjected.

“—and the hook forms as the line pays out. Except it’s not really a hook. It’s more like a disk. It is only eight centimeters wide, but it will stick to virtually any material or structure, even a flat wall, and be able to hold five hundred pounds.”

“Yet it couldn’t weigh more than about two pounds itself,” Storm said, hearing himself sounding a little too gee-whizzish.

“Again: nanotechnology.”