Storm Front

Storm was angry at himself first — he had the end of his mission an arm’s length away and hadn’t realized it. Then his anger turned to Cracker, the man who had inflicted such misery on so many, and intended to cause even more widespread suffering, without any apparent regard for who he hurt. All in the name of the unholy dollar.

Then Storm calmed himself. Anger served no purpose here. And, besides, he could turn his own mistake into an advantage. He could let Cracker continue to believe he was under Storm’s protection. That way Cracker wouldn’t know that Storm was really coming for him.

And there was no doubt: Storm was coming. By himself. There was no going to Jedediah Jones with this. All he had was the say-so of one Chinese agent — a person he wasn’t even cleared to work with. Jones would howl all day long and half the night at the breach of security. And yet Storm didn’t doubt her for a moment. He loved the irony: The only person in the whole scenario he could trust was an enemy agent.

Storm was so distracted he crossed Ninth Street without looking. A Nissan Maxima blared its horn at him. Storm waved apologetically.

“Are you okay?” Xi Bang asked. “What are you doing?”

“Just playing in traffic,” he said. “And thinking.”

“Yeah, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you and I need to pay a visit to Whitely Cracker tomorrow morning,” Storm said.

“And?”

“We confront him with what we know, get him to confess. If he doesn’t confess, we take him in anyway and hold him until we can prove this thing to everyone’s satisfaction. At least that gets him out of circulation and away from MonEx machines. Can you get yourself to New York? There’s a shuttle that leaves Reagan National at six A.M. that will get put you into LaGuardia by seven. I can pick you up there.”

“Why, Agent Storm, are you asking me on a date?”

“No. I’m asking Jenny Chang. She’s a total hottie. I’ve seen pictures of her on the Internet, you know.”

Storm was on foot, headed for one of his favorite hotels — the W in Union Square — when his phone blurped at him, telling him he had a new e-mail.

It was from Click, who had not yet managed to unglue himself from his computer keyboard. The professor had spent the day tweaking his model. There were two long, chunky paragraphs detailing how he had altered some of his assumptions and changed a few of the variables. The computer still considered Cracker its top choice for Volkov’s brutality, but once you told the computer that Cracker was not an option, it came up with a different candidate.

The man’s name was Timothy Demming. He was chief currency trader at NationBank. Click’s updated model pegged the likelihood of the next victim being Demming at 73 percent.

“I met him at a conference and he’s a typical investment banking jerk,” Click wrote. “But there’s no question he would be able to order a trade of the magnitude we’ve discussed. Anecdotally, I’d say he’s a strong possibility.”

Storm didn’t hesitate. He loaded his People Finder app, which told him Demming lived a short distance away, in the financial district. Storm grabbed the first southbound cab he could and only felt a bit ridiculous when he told the driver to step on it.

Second Avenue blurred by outside the window, then Houston Street. New York was the city that never slept, for sure, but it was now after midnight, meaning that those who weren’t sleeping at least had the good sense to be doing something other than clogging the streets.

On the short ride, Storm Googled Demming. He was a star at NationBank, all right. There were blog pieces about him with pictures. He was handsome, no question, but in a sort of sleazy way. He looked like someone who would shatter a child’s piggy bank just to get himself one more nickel.

Storm arrived at Demming’s address to find an upscale co-op, one of those lower West Side high-rises that had started springing up like mushrooms after rain sometime during the nineties. Demming lived on the top floor. Storm paid and tipped the driver and walked through the building’s revolving doors.

“Could you please ring Mr. Demming in fifty-two J?” Storm asked the man at the front desk, a paunchy, middle-aged gentleman in a gold-braided uniform with “CLARK LASTER” written in bold letters on a discreet name tag.

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” said the man.

“Yes, but it’s an emergency.”

Laster sighed and made a big show of opening a large book in front of him. “I’m sorry. But Mr. Demming has left instructions not to be disturbed after ten P.M. It says so right here.” Laster turned the book around so Storm could read it. Storm leaned in as if he intended to inspect the document like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instead, he reached over the desk with his right hand and clamped down at the base of Laster’s neck, right over the collarbone.

The man tried to recoil, but Storm held firm. “Oww! Hey, what are you…”

The end of the sentence did not escape Laster’s mouth. The man was already unconscious.