Storm Front

A few minutes later, Bryan returned: “Okay, I got it. The helicopter took off from and landed at what appears to be the rooftop of an abandoned factory in Bayonne. I’ll send GPS coordinates to your phone.”

Storm chuckled grimly.

“What?” Bryan asked.

“First Paris, now Bayonne.”

“Why is that funny?”

“I’ve just always thought of Bayonne as the Paris of New Jersey.”

CHAPTER 28

FAIRFAX, Virginia

Carl Storm had finally fixed the Buick. The AC blower now ran on low, medium, and high, just as it had when he drove it out of the showroom all those years ago. It had been a problem with the fusible link wire all along. Derrick had been right.

Now Carl was wishing something else would go wrong with the thing, if only because it would give him something to think about other than his son and the trouble he was surely in.

The fact was, Carl Storm didn’t have a lot of hobbies. He wasn’t one of those old guys who golfed. He did yard work, but he didn’t take plea sure in fussing with his garden for hours on end. He worked on his car, but only when it was broken.

About the only thing that could take his mind off things was reading. He was well ensconced in his Barcalounger, in the midst of rereading the collected works of Stephen J. Cannell, God rest his soul, when his home phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Storm,” a crisp voice on the other end of the phone said. “My name is Scott Colston. We don’t know each other. But I’ve been told that because of something that happened many years ago in Tuscon, I’m to call you and brief you on my current investigation. And I’m to trust that you’ll handle that information with due care.”

Carl Storm sat up in the Barcalounger and grabbed a pen and pad from the end table at his side.

“You’re the guy with White Collar, then? This is in regard to Operation Wafer?”

“That’s right,” Colston said.

“Tell me about it.”

Colston started talking. Carl’s pen waved furiously, trying to keep up with the flow of information. There was a time when he would have trusted his memory, when he had this spongy spot in his brain that sucked up the details of a new investigation almost automatically. But he had been out of the game too long. The sponge wasn’t as absorbent as it used to be.

Besides, this wasn’t his ass on the line. It was Derrick’s. And that was a lot more important.

As Colston spoke, Carl peppered him with questions. How did you first get onto this again? When did this activity start? How much did you say has been siphoned off again? Where is he hiding it?

He didn’t know which parts would end up being important and which were superfluous. He wanted to make sure he didn’t miss any details that Derrick needed.

When the man was done, Carl thanked him.

Then he called Derrick.

“Son,” he said. “I need to tell you about a little something called Operation Wafer.”

The call took Derrick all the way from the city to that rest stop upstate. It took that long for Carl to go through his notes and explain everything to him. But it was time well spent.

By the time Derrick left his car, the outlines of his plan — sort of like the first plinkings of what would soon be a thunderous symphony — were beginning to fall into place. At the very least, Storm had figured out how he was going to deal with Whitely Cracker.

CHAPTER 29

SLOATSBURG, New York

In his line of work, Derrick Storm often saw people on the worst day of their life. But there was something extra pathetic about seeing Whitely Cracker on the worst day of his. Maybe it’s because he was so wealthy, so accomplished, had been so protected from the time he was in his crib: When the super-rich fall, they do so from a far greater height; and when they hit bottom, they’ve landed in a place the existence of which they’ve barely ever imagined.

As he entered the New York State Thruway’s Sloatsburg Travel Plaza, Storm saw Whitely Cracker sitting at a table by himself, hunched over a donut, looking scared and bloody and small.

As well he should have been. He was being hunted by a madman who would not hesitate to slaughter him and his family. His net worth was currently somewhere in the negative billions. And when news of his ruin leaked out and his clients realized their investments had vanished, his once-good name would go down alongside Bernie Madoff’s, Michael Milken’s, and the names of all the Wall Street swindlers who had come before. His son, Whit the VI, would be the last of the Graham Whitely Cracker line. The little boy would probably change his name just to distance himself from the shame of it.

The man nibbling on that donut had aged twenty years since Storm had seen him the night before. Storm recognized, in some important way, that Cracker had utterly capitulated to whatever was going to come next.

“Oh, thank God you’re here,” he said when he saw Storm approaching. “Thank you so much for coming.”