Storm Front

“Professor Click tweaked his model to predict who the sixth banker might be. It reported there was an eighty-seven percent chance it would be you.”

“I see.” Cracker spoke as if his mind was churning through its own predictive modeling. “Well, in that case, it’s a good thing my company has a security force. My chief of security is a man named Barry. He’s excellent. I’ll alert him to this threat and see to it he treats it with the utmost seriousness. Thank you, Mr. Storm. Thank you so much for coming out and telling me about this.”

“You don’t believe me,” Storm said, flatly. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

“No, no. I mean, yes. Of course I believe you. It’s just that Barry can watch out for me.”

“Barry is really that good, huh?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So good that he was fully aware that your house — and probably your car and your office as well — have been bugged.”

“You make a fair point,” Cracker offered. “So what are you proposing I do?”

Storm had already been pondering his options. Volkov had been in South Africa that morning. It was possible he could be in the New York area by now. And if he had enough of a team in place to bug Cracker’s house so thoroughly, it meant he had enough of a team in place to move in. Storm considered having Jones pull some levers and get the Chappaqua Police to park a patrol car outside the Cracker residence as a deterrent, but then he thought better of it. There was nothing one municipal cop was going to be able to do to stop a man like Volkov. Storm would just be putting one more person in harm’s way.

Besides, Storm could play defense later. First, he wanted to play some offense.

“First, here’s my number,” Storm said, handing him a Storm Investigations business card. “If you become fearful for your life, call me. Remember that if you call me from your cell phone, your home phone, your office phone, or from anywhere other than a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, someone is probably going to be listening.”

“Okay,” Cracker said, accepting the card and programming the number into his phone.

“Now our plan: We’re going to flush them out of hiding,” Storm said. “See who ‘them’ really is. Hit them before they hit us.”

“How do we do that?”

“Mr. Cracker, how fast do you usually drive?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten or fifteen miles over the speed limit. I’m no speed demon, but if you don’t go at least that fast around here, you’ll get run over.”

“What route do you drive to work?”

Cracker told him, finishing with “Why are you asking all this?”

“Because,” Storm said, “I need to borrow your car.”

Fifteen minutes later, wearing Whitely Cracker’s driving cap, Derrick Storm settled in the front seat of Cracker’s Maserati and rolled out the Cracker front gate. He hunched down to appear a few inches shorter than he was. He was counting on darkness to hide the other dissimilarities between his and Whitely Cracker’s appearance.

He had instructed Cracker to head back into the house and tell Melissa that he needed to return to the office. This, of course, had two purposes. It would alert Volkov’s team that “Cracker” was about to be on the move; it would also safeguard Cracker and his family, since Volkov’s men would think that their target was in the Maserati, not back at his house.

If it meant putting himself in danger, so be it. Better him than a hedge fund manager, a house wife, and two children.

He did not bother sweeping the car for bugs; he just assumed there would be at least one and assumed, further, that someone would be listening. He needed to make everything sound normal. He punched the radio on, ready to suffer with whatever auditory assault came next. Cracker struck Storm as the kind of guy who might listen to some truly awful world music, filled with flutes and bongos and crap like that. Thankfully, Bloomberg Business News filled the car’s speakers.

As Storm had suspected, there was no one waiting for him at the end of the driveway. There was no good place to hide there, and besides, there was only one way out of Cracker’s neighborhood. They could afford to tuck themselves somewhere out on the main road and wait there. Storm drove the twisty part of the route by himself.

He picked up the tail once he reached King Street. It was a white panel van, likely one stuffed full of monitoring devices in the back. Storm smiled. This would be easy. White panel vans were good for a lot of things. Tailing someone surreptitiously was not one of them. The van would be easy to spot the whole drive.

Storm merged onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, an ancient and thoroughly outmoded roadway that predated the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system. It was cramped and winding, filled with blind curves, and yet some cars bombed down it at eighty-five miles an hour like it was a broad, flat stretch of the Autobahn. Yes, Derrick Storm was an international spy who was regularly hunted by assassins and had narrowly cheated death dozens of times, but the Saw Mill River Parkway? Man, that road was dangerous.