Wild Storm (29 page)

A hesitation. Then a nod.

“That was a laser beam, made by a very rare substance called promethium. She kidnapped a scientist and forced him to make it for her, then used it to shoot down those airplanes you’ve probably heard about.”

She spoke into his hand. It was too muffled for Storm to make out. Storm lifted his hand so she could repeat herself. “Say that again?” he said.

“I said, ‘That was Ingrid?
’
”

“Yes, I’m afraid it was.”

“But that’s not…all she ever talks about is how humankind ought to live peacefully.”

“And she’s willing to use force to make it happen, strange as that sounds. She thinks what she’s doing is right for humanity, whether humanity wants it or not. I have no doubt she feels justified in her actions.”

“But how do you know Ingrid is behind this?”

“Because I found the man who sold her the promethium. And it turned out the person I’m working for knew it all along. Brigitte Bildt was coming to the United States to warn my government about Ingrid. She just never got there. The Karlsson Logistics plane was one of the first ones shot down.”

“She did that to Brigitte on purpose?”

“Yes.”

She hitched the towel up under her arms. He felt her body relaxing in his grip. “I’m sorry, I just…I mean, part of me wants to say that it’s not possible, that Ingrid would never do that—especially not to Brigitte of all people. But…I mean, I’ve heard some things I wasn’t supposed to hear. Just little pieces. I kept telling myself it wasn’t possible, that I must have just misheard or misunderstood.”

“What have you heard?”

“Enough,” is all she said.

“Enough that you know it’s true.”

She nodded. “So what do you want with me?”

He released her. She turned around.

“I need your help,” he said. “I need you to be one of the good guys.”

AS TILDA GOT DRESSED,
Storm averted his eyes and explained the rest of what she needed to know. They agreed they would free William McRae first, then confront Ingrid Karlsson.

Eight minutes later, they were heading for the door of her stateroom when she stopped him.

“Wait. Your clothes.”

“What about them?”

“If anyone sees you on camera, they’ll know you don’t belong here. I can improve on them.”

She went quickly to her closet and emerged with white pants and a blue shirt—the preferred regalia of the
Warrior Princess
. They were clearly not her size. They were made for a man even larger than Storm.

“A little big for you, aren’t they?” Storm asked.

“A, uh, friend of mine left these here.”

Storm eyed them then cracked a smile. “Must be a good friend.”

“More like a convenient friend. It gets lonely in the middle of the ocean.”

She tossed him the clothes. Storm ducked into the bathroom, shucked off his black clothes, and donned the Karlsson colors. His new outfit fairly swam on him. Especially the pants. He cinched the belt to keep them from slipping off his hips, then he bent over to roll up the hem.

“I could always use another friend, you know,” she said from the other room. “Especially one who dances and kisses well.”

“Have you ever been to Seychelles?” Storm asked.

“No.”

“We’ll have to fix that,” Storm said.

He emerged back into the bedroom to see Tilda gripping his Sig Sauer by the muzzle, having retrieved it from the dry bag. She had retreated to the far side of the stateroom, by the door.

“What’s this?” she said, with measured disrespect. She was holding it like it was the most offensive refuse imaginable.

“Well, it’s a gun, darling,” Storm said.

“I can see that. Do you really need it?”

“Unless I can surprise everyone else on this boat while they’re in the shower? Yes.”

She was shaking her head. “You’re with me now. You’re not shooting up everyone on board this boat. They’re good people. I’ll tell them you’re on the side of the angels. They’ll listen to me, especially if they see you’re not armed. No one needs to get hurt.”

Storm paused, thought about his alternatives. He had assumed he would need to take the boat by coercion, that Tilda could be converted but that the rest of Ingrid’s employees would be loyal to their boss. He felt naked without a gun. But Tilda had a point. Winning the people’s hearts and minds might be easier than shooting them. It was certainly more humane.

“The man who owns those pants is named Laird Nelsson. He’s the chief of security. He’ll do what I tell him,” Tilda continued. “The people on board this boat are my friends. I can’t put them in danger. If you want my help, no gun.”

“Well, it’s hard not to like a guy named Laird,” Storm said. “But what about Ingrid? I’ve got many admirable qualities. Being bulletproof isn’t one of them. This vest is nice, but if she starts shooting at me, I want to be able to shoot back.”

“She abhors guns. I think if she could reverse one human invention—other than the nation-state—it would be gunpowder. She had to be talked into even letting her security force have them. And even then it took Barbary pirates running amok in the Mediterranean to convince her.”

“I’d still feel more comfortable with a firearm.”

Tilda’s answer was to quickly open the door and fling the gun out, end over end, boomerang style. Except, unlike a boomerang, this weapon wasn’t coming back. Storm watched it arc over the side of the boat.

“And I feel more comfortable without one,” she said.

“I wish you hadn’t done that.”

She crossed the room, raised herself on her tiptoes and planted a hard kiss on his lips. “Well, it’s done now. Come on, let’s go.”

Storm sighed and followed. They went around to the boat’s portside and a covered corridor that had nevertheless become very slick from the torrential wind-driven rain. The footing was treacherous and every once in a while they had to stop and simply hang on as the
Warrior Princess
crested a particularly large wave.

She reached a door with a small window set into it, opened it, and turned down a narrow staircase that led below deck. At the bottom, she opened another door, which led to a hallway. Storm continued following. Unlike the rest of the ship, with its lavish decorations, this part of the boat was spare. Crew’s quarters, Storm guessed.

Tilda reached one of the doors and tried the handle. It was locked. She knocked, rapping the door several times until it could be heard over the wind. “Laird, it’s me,” she said.

As she waited for a response, she turned toward Storm and asked, “Do you speak Swedish?”

“Enough to order in a restaurant, maybe,” he said. “But not much more than that.”

“Then you better let me do the talking. Laird speaks fine English, but it’ll be faster in Swedish.”

Finally, the door opened. Storm found himself looking at collarbones. Laird Nelsson was an immense man, at least a half a head taller than Storm, with blond hair, blue eyes, and bulk everywhere Storm looked.

Tilda herded Storm into the room and began talking in rapid Swedish, too rapid for Storm to follow—other than the names. He heard “Ingrid,” “Brigitte,” and his own name. Laird was in off-duty clothing and kept nodding as Tilda spoke. Storm felt like it was going well. Every once in a while, Laird’s eyes would shift to Storm, who tried to look friendly.

When Tilda finished, Laird nodded one final time. “One moment please,” he said, in English, as he reached into his nightstand.

He came up with a Beretta, which looked small in his bearlike paws. He pointed the weapon at Storm.

“Hands up,” Laird said. “Come on.”

Storm experienced a sinking feeling in his stomach as he slowly raised his hands.

“Ingrid Karlsson is a visionary in a way a mercenary like you could never understand,” Tilda spat at him. “Don’t you see? Someday, we’ll all be citizens of the world. Ingrid is leading us there.”

“And the people who don’t want to walk her path get sent to their graves, is that it?”

Tilda ignored him and turned to Laird. “He doesn’t have a gun. I saw to that. But he does have a knife. I saw an ankle sheath bulging from his calf.”

“Very well. You will now remove your knife and set it on the bureau there,” Laird ordered. “Do it slowly, please.”

Storm complied. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tilda smiling savagely.

CHAPTER 32

ABOARD THE
WARRIOR PRINCESS

hile Derrick Storm didn’t know much Swedish, he did know the word
mörda.
It’s a verb. Its English translation is “to kill.”

Storm heard
mörda
at least four times as Tilda and Laird debated what they were going to do with their new captive.

Eventually they decided to wait, for reasons Storm could not quite determine. Perhaps they wanted to let the empress, Ingrid Karlsson, give the ultimate thumbs-up/thumbs-down on his fate. Maybe Storm was to be used as a bargaining chip of some sort. Or maybe they just wanted to wait until the hurricane passed so they could dump his body without worrying about it being blown to land.

Whatever it was, Storm was soon led to the only room aboard the
Warrior Princess
that was designed to contain prisoners. It was the one just down the hall from Laird and the other guards, the one where Dr. William McRae had been kept for a month now.

Storm walked there with his hands still up and Laird pointing the Beretta at his back. Tilda inserted the key and opened the door.

“Get in there,” Laird said.

Storm did as he was told. The door immediately clicked behind him.

Lying on top of the covers was a man of about seventy. He was trim, with a small amount of gray hair that looked like it was overdue for a buzz cut. He was reading a book by the late, great master of medical thrillers, Michael Palmer.

As Storm let his hands drop to his side, the man asked, “Who are you?”

“Hello, Dr. McRae. My name is Derrick Storm. I’m here to rescue you.”

“You’re the man Alida mentioned,” he said, brightly. Then he considered Storm for another second. “Although, to be honest, she made it seem like you would be a little better at this whole rescue thing.”

“I admit, this is not among my finest efforts so far. But this is just a temporary setback. We’ll get you out of here somehow.”

“Mr. Storm, I don’t want to discourage you, but I’m not sure it’s possible.”

“Really? Why?”

McRae set down the book and sat up. “Because I’ve been in here for a month now and only managed to get out once. And it hasn’t been for lack of effort. The one time I got out was only because a guard slipped up and left the door open. That’s when I called Alida. But the other guards tracked me down pretty quickly. They’ve got cameras everywhere, including in this room. And I don’t know if you noticed, but that door you just came through doesn’t have a handle on the inside. That’s just one of the details that makes the room escape proof. I’ve spent a month trying to figure out something and you’ll notice I’m still here.”

Storm nodded thoughtfully. “Are you familiar with Enrico Fermi, Dr. McRae?”

“Of course I am. What does he matter?”

“Well, he was one of the leading practical physicists of his time, as you know. Good enough that he won the Nobel Prize in 1938. We’re talking about a supersmart guy. And yet when he joined the Manhattan Project, people told him his method of creating an atomic bomb was impossible, because you couldn’t get the neutrons that resulted from the splitting of one atom to then split other atoms. And if you couldn’t do that, there was no way the bomb would work. Fermi kept trying and failing, but with each so-called ‘failure,’ he was really getting closer to the solution. Fast-forward to 1942, and Enrico Fermi was the man who directed the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. How? Because he kept his belief in himself and didn’t let past failure deter him. The point is, if you work hard enough, nothing is impossible.”

“That’s a lovely speech, Mr. Storm, but—”

“Also, I’ve got C-4 strapped to my leg.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you start with that?”

“Because I wanted to give the speech first, so you’d be impressed with my knowledge of physics.”

McRae smiled. “I should have known Alida was right about you. The last time she was wrong about something was 1978, and she swore it wasn’t going to happen again.”

“She’s one of a kind all right,” Storm said. “Now let’s get out of here.”

Storm began surveying the room, assessing it in a clinical manner, going low to high, then high to low. The walls and ceilings were brushed steel, riveted into what were likely girders. He tapped it here and there. It felt thick. Certainly thicker than standard Sheetrock walls.

He pulled up a corner of the carpet to reveal a metallic subfloor. Then he went into the bathroom and gave it the same kind of inspection. The place really was designed to be a cell.

When he returned to the bedroom, he said, “You said there are cameras in here. What about the bathroom?”

“No. None.”

“Excellent. And, tell me, you must have a laboratory or workshop where you’ve been putting the lasers together.”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Just down the hall and across the way.”

“Are there cameras in there?”

“Not that I’m aware of. They always had a man in there with me, to make sure I wasn’t sabotaging any of the equipment or doing anything else they wouldn’t like.”

“Perfect. In that case, I think you’re getting a little seasick, Dr. McRae.”

“Actually I feel fine.”

“No, trust me, you’re looking quite peaked.”

“My stomach is iron, I never get motion—”

“The guards answer when you press this button, yes?” Storm said, walking over to the intercom.

“Yes, that’s right.”

Storm hit the button, waited. A voice came promptly to the line. “Yes?”

“Dr. McRae is feeling seasick. He says he’s about to lose it. Is there any Dramamine aboard?”

“We’ll be right there,” the voice said.

Storm turned so his back was to the camera he had spied in the near corner. “When they come in, I expect seasickness. I’m talking Academy Award-worthy, you’ve-just-watched-Kevin-Costner-in-
Waterworld
seasickness. And it had better end with your head in a toilet, making a really nasty retching sound.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER,
the door opened. There were two of them: Laird, who had the Beretta drawn, and one of the underlings, the one McRae called Delta.

McRae had closed his eyes and was on the bed, moaning.

“He’s suffering,” said Storm, summoning his inner Clara Barton. “How long until this storm blows through?”

“The worst of it has already passed,” Laird said. “It’s still going to be bad for a few more hours, but the marine forecast says the seas should be down below twenty feet by morning. That won’t budge this boat much.”

“Uhhhhh. I’m not gonna make it,” McRae moaned and launched himself into the bathroom, where he began making heaving noises.

Laird and Delta looked appropriately grossed out. “Just toss the medicine on the bed,” Storm said. “I’ll make sure he’s okay. Sometimes you just need to get it out of your system. Did he have a big dinner?”

“Two helpings,” Laird said. “Spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Eww. That is
not
going to look good coming back up. All right. This might be a while. I’ll hit the intercom if we need anything.”

McRae chose that moment—a brief lull in conversation—to
begin a new fake assault on the toilet. Delta tossed the Dramamine
on the bed then joined Laird in full retreat.

Storm went straight for the bathroom, where McRae was already reaching for the toilet handle to flush away the vomit that didn’t exist. Storm waited a moment, then returned to the bedroom to grab the medicine.

By then, the door had closed. Laird and Delta were gone. To anyone watching on the camera—if anyone even was—it would look like Storm had simply forgotten the Dramamine and now, having retrieved it, returned to the bathroom to continue his ministrations.

Instead, he shut the bathroom door, then stood up on the sink and lowered his pants. He un-taped the C-4 and studied it for a moment.

“Have you ever worked with explosives?” he asked McRae, who had stopped with the dramatics and was watching Storm.

“Not really. Why?”

“I’m just wondering how much of this stuff to use. I don’t really know the thickness of this ceiling. I want to make sure I use enough to get through it, but I need to save some for later.”

“I suggest a SWAG.”

“SWAG?”

“Yeah,” McRae said. “It stands for Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.”

Storm shrugged, broke off half his hunk of the C-4. He freed several of the blasting caps from where they were taped on his other leg, and then took hold of the wireless detonator. He molded the plastic explosive halfway between rivet lines, figuring there would be a hollow space behind it.

He fixed the blasting caps into the plastic, then climbed down off the sink. He opened the door to the shower, which was similar to the one in Tilda’s bathroom.

“In you go,” Storm said to McRae. “This is as close as we’re going to get to a bomb shelter.”

“Some blast door,” McRae said, tapping the opaque plastic on his way in. “Is this how Enrico Fermi did it?”

“No. But I’m told Robert Oppenheimer did his best thinking in the shower. So we’re probably on to something.”

Storm closed the door behind McRae. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Wait, don’t forget your high-tech ear protection,” Storm said, sticking his fingers in his ear canals. McRae followed suit.

Storm set the wireless detonator on a built-in ledge that was supposed to serve as a soap dish.

“Three, two, one,” Storm mouthed, then hit the two buttons he needed to depress on the detonator with his pinkies.

There was a
whump
, followed by the sound of pieces of metal crashing against other pieces of metal. It was loud, but nothing compared to the eighty-plus-mile-per-hour winds still raging outside.

Storm opened the shower door to see a gaping hole that had been blown up into the ceiling.

“Success,” Storm said.

He climbed up on the sink, stood, and chose a spot where the metal had shorn completely away from the girder—and where, therefore, there was no jagged metal to avoid. He jumped up into the ductwork above the ceiling. He wormed his way around until he was being supported by the girder and could reach down a hand for McRae.

“Come on, Doc,” Storm said.

“Where are we going?”

“To your laboratory. By my count, you’ve got about twenty minutes to make me a laser.”

“A laser? What for?”

“Because otherwise the only way I can beat these guards is by challenging them to an arm wrestling contest, and I
fi
gure they’ll just shoot me instead. But if I have a laser, I can shoot them
fi
rst.”

“But—”

“Don’t say it’s impossible. It wasn’t impossible for Erico Fermi, remember?”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s…Look, the lasers I’ve been making for these people are very powerful. Certainly powerful enough to take out any of those guards. But they’re also very large. They get taken out a bay door on the side of the workshop. They’re not especially portable.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need anything nearly that powerful or that lethal. I’ve read about laser beams being used to blind pilots. Could you make me something powerful enough to cause temporary blindness?”

McRae suddenly was wearing the look of a chef in a fully stocked kitchen who was being asked if he could whip up a little snack. “Yeah, of course I could.”

He got up on the sink and accepted Storm’s assistance up into the ceiling.

“Which way?” Storm said.

McRae pointed to the left. “Right over there would probably be good.”

The men began crawling across girders, in the tight space under the floor above them. When McRae gestured that they had reached the workshop, Storm was relieved to see a normal drop ceiling. No metal here. Storm easily stomped out one of the panels, helped McRae drop down into the workshop, and then followed him down.

“You were making up that thing about Oppenheimer and the shower, weren’t you?” McRae asked.

“Not at all,” Storm lied.

The truth was, he was mostly making up the thing about Fermi, too. But this hardly seemed like the time to mention it.

THE RESULT OF MCRAE’S
twenty minutes of furious jury-rigging was not anything that would geek the Star Trek crowd for its design.

It didn’t boast any kind of sleek housing, nor did it have a handle or a trigger. To Storm’s untrained eye, it was basically a sheet of metal supporting some electronic stuff and a piece of cylindrical glass, all of which McRae had hastily soldered or taped into place. It was roughly the size of two toasters, placed end to end.

When it came time to test the device, McRae donned dark, wraparound glasses and had Storm do the same.

He fired it just once, activating it by briefly depressing the rubber tip on a piece of metal, bringing it into contact with another piece of metal. An intense blue beam—less striking than the one Storm had seen demonstrated in Maryland, but still quite vivid—leapt from the device and into the wall behind them.

“Okay,” McRae said. “You’ve got yourself a laser beam.”

“Brilliant,” Storm said, and meant it.

“A couple of things. One, this is just a fraction of the power of the ones that I’ve been making. You’ll see there is only one crystal, as opposed to the sequence of crystals I used on the other ones. And it’s a lot smaller, made from cast-off pieces I used in some of my early testing. But if blindness is what you want, blindness is what you’ll get. This is the aperture the beam will come out of,” he said, pointing to a glass-covered slit at the front of the contraption. “The way I’ve got this set, the laser will actually spread as it propagates. That makes it less powerful, but it also makes it easier to aim. If you can get this going anywhere near a guard’s face and he doesn’t have eye protection? It’ll be like he stared directly into the sun for way, way too long. He’ll be blind for anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

“Terrific.”

“But, look, you have to careful. It’s very fragile. I didn’t exactly have time to make it battle rugged, you know? And it’s also not going to last very long. I’ve got a few batteries here,” McRae said, showing Storm a plastic-covered power pack with wires coming out of it. “But this laser will drain down those batteries very quickly.”