Wild Storm Read Free Page B

her unschooled ear it sounded like, “Badaladaladagabaha.”
    The professor responded while trying to wrestle a crate away from two bandits, an effort made all the more pathetic by the fact that he lacked the strength to rip it from them. The charade ended when the leader walked up behind Raynes and bludgeoned his head with the butt of his rifle. The professor crumpled to the ground.
    Katie screamed and rushed to his side. The young men were actually laughing.
    “Cowards. You’re all a bunch of thieving cowards!” she yelled. As if they could understand what she was saying, the men laughed harder.
    The leader circled around so he was facing Katie. He pointed his gun at her.
    “Get him out of here,” he snarled, in heavily accented English. “Get him ice for his head. I need him healthy so he can dig up more treasure for me.”
    The leader translated what he said for the benefit of the men, who roared in approval. Katie glared at him defiantly, weighing her options, which she had to admit were few.
    “Take him away,” the leader said, again in English. “Or maybe I take you, his pretty young girlfriend, as hostage, huh? Maybe we have some fun, huh?”
    Again, the leader repeated his words in Arabic. The response was lustier this time. Katie could feel several pairs of lascivious eyes undressing her.
    Beaten and scared, she lifted the half-conscious professor under the arms and began dragging him toward his tent.
    “I’m sorry, Katie,” he murmured. “I tried. I tried.”
     

CHAPTER 3
    LANGLEY, Virginia
    I
    n that strange way that only a spy grows accustomed to, Derrick Storm did not know precisely where he was going. Only that he was in a hurry to get there.
    From the moment he retrieved his Ford Taurus from a private garage just off the premises of Dulles airport, he kept the tread of his right hiking boot mashed into the car’s floorboard. He braked only when it was the last means of avoiding collision.
    Storm occasionally took grief from D.C.-area acquaintances over his choice of the vehicle while he was there. To them, it seemed staid for a man of Storm’s panache. Storm just smiled and accepted their ribbing. Much like Storm himself, the car preferred to hide its true capabilities. It had a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter engine with 365 horsepower worth of unruliness under its hood, and a heavy-duty police suspension system that could handle the extreme demands Storm occasionally had to place on it.
    The radio was off. The information reported in the early hours of a mass tragedy was usually wrong. In its haste to be first with the news, the media sometimes seemed to prefer guessing over reporting. Storm didn’t want to muddy his mind with it. He concentrated, instead, on keeping the Taurus’s tires on the pavement. He did not always succeed. At least one Nissan Sentra driver was thankful for that fact.
    And yet, for all his haste, his final destination was a mystery to him.
    Any half-wit troglodyte with Google Earth can get a pretty good gander at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, which rests on a leafy campus just across from Washington, D.C., alongside a sweeping bend in the Potomac River. A slightly more sophisticated operator can figure out which buildings house the National Clandestine Service, one of the CIA’s more shadowy branches.
    But no one—no matter how good a hacker he is, no matter what he thinks he knows—will ever lay eyes on the cubby, the home to an elite spy unit created by a man named Jedediah Jones.
    Not even Storm, who had given the cubby its tongue-in-cheek sobriquet, knew its precise location. He knew of only one way to get there, which he began executing as soon as his Taurus and its smoldering tires came to a rest in the visitors’ parking lot at CIA headquarters.
    It involved presenting himself at the main entrance to an agent who responded to Storm with all the excitement of a man receiving patients at a dentist’s office. Normally, this portion of