Heat Storm E-Book

Richard Castle

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Castle
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 514

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Nikki Heat and Derrick Storm, New York Times bestselling author Richard Castle's most enduring and beloved characters, team up for the first time to save Nikki's mother, Cynthia, who has been in hiding (and presumed dead) for 17 years. Standing in their way is a nefarious group of Chinese businessmen known as the Shanghai Seven, who have the resources-and ruthlessness-to stop them.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Available From Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty - One

Twenty - Two

Twenty - Three

Twenty - Four

Twenty - Five

Twenty - Six

Twenty - Seven

Twenty - Eight

Twenty - Nine

Thirty

Thirty - One

Thirty - Two

Thirty - Three

Thirty - Four

Thirty - Five

Also Available From Titan Books

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Heat Wave

Naked Heat

Heat Rises

Frozen Heat

Deadly Heat

Raging Heat

Driving Heat

High Heat

Storm Front

Wild Storm

Ultimate Storm

A Brewing Storm (eBook)

A Raging Storm (eBook)

A Bloody Storm (eBook)

TITAN BOOKS

HEAT STORM

Print edition ISBN: 9781785654916E-book edition ISBN: 9781785654923

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2017

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Castle © ABC Studios. All Rights Reserved.

This edition published by arrangement with Kingswell, an imprint of Disney Book Group.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Every writer needs an inspiration.

And I found mine.

Always.

ONE

STORM

OCTOBER 2016

The foreigner’s chest was broad and powerful, and the arms that hung on either side had a solid, useful look about them. His torso tapered to his trim waist, underneath which his thighs bulged back out again. Crowning this impressive example of the human male was a square-shaped head, atop which sat a thick thatch of wavy, dark hair.

In truth, it all might have been too much, too action adventure–hero clichéd: this stunning physique with the square jaw and the perfect teeth, this man who seemed to have been ripped from the cover of a Victoria St. Clair romance novel.

Except of course there were the eyes. They were eyes that teased and danced and loved even when the rest of the foreigner’s demeanor was serious. They were eyes that had seen much. They were eyes that missed little.

So, yes, he was handsome. Some would say ruggedly so.

The foreigner was dressed in black tactical gear, a bulletproof vest providing a comforting embrace. Standing next to him, a head shorter and half his weight, was a man wearing the squared-off green uniform of the People’s Armed Police, the largest branch of China’s Ministry of Public Security. His shirt was tucked neatly into his belt in a way that suggested a perfectly flat stomach. His insignia marked him as a colonel. His name strip contained Chinese characters that are commonly translated into the Roman alphabet as “Feng.”

He smoked an unfiltered cigarette, its lit end glowing orange in the predawn dark. When he exhaled, the smell of cloves filled the air.

The men stood side by side on a small bluff. The foreigner’s binoculars were trained on a warehouse below them, a two-story painted steel structure with a flat roof and no windows. The only points of egress were the front door and a small hatch in the roof.

The building was almost conspicuously spare, like its owners had worked so hard to make it seem unremarkable that it actually stood out. There was no signage, no attempt at landscaping in the weed-choked lot that surrounded it. The parking area, which was covered in crumbling asphalt, contained a smattering of vehicles, mostly older. It was illuminated by a single floodlight on a pole. There was no sign of movement outside. Most days, very little happened there.

But every once in a while, something did. And on those days, the activity in that spare little building had come to the attention of the highest reaches of the United States government, half a planet away.

“Amazing, an operation like this being able to establish itself and yet going completely undetected,” the foreigner said, barely bothering to hide his irony. He spoke in smooth Mandarin, one of the nine languages he had mastered.

“Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight,” Colonel Feng said, his voice raspy. A wry grin barely formed on his thin lips before he stanched it.

“You would have thought someone would have noticed and started asking questions,” the foreigner said.

“You are assuming there is something worth noticing,” Colonel Feng said, then switched to English. “I believe there is an American saying about those who assume.”

“Yeah, I think it’s, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ ” the foreigner said.

Colonel Feng narrowed his eyes and took another drag on his cigarette. Beyond the warehouse, the Huangpu River rolled silently by. Beyond that—and all around them—was the city of Shanghai.

The foreigner did not need to be told that what is today the world’s second largest economy—number two with a bullet, some would say—really started in this historic city in east central China. Long ago, it was the first Chinese port opened to trade with the West after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars. More recently, it was where the Chinese Communist Party decided to begin loosening the reins on its economy, allowing the tight strictures of Marxism to slough away and be supplanted by the ruthless efficiencies of capitalism.

American financial success had a lot to do with that decision. So did China’s long-standing and ingrained sense of exceptionalism.

What has developed since that time is a complicated, delicate relationship between what are essentially the world’s only two superpowers. Each country is the other’s largest trading partner. Each country is heavily invested in the other. Each country’s economy would collapse if the other were to vanish. And yet each country perpetually thinks the other is trying to screw it over.

So there was symbolism there: a Chinese man and an American, standing side by side, at once inextricably aligned and yet at cross-purposes.

“Should be any time now, wouldn’t you say?” the foreigner said.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Colonel Feng replied. “May I remind you that I am merely here in an oversight capacity, and that this unusual . . . collaboration, shall we call it? . . . is only occurring because of your government’s continued insistence about the nature of this operation. But my government categorically denies any knowledge of what you allege is transpiring here.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the foreigner said. His face was impassive. But his expressive eyes had sparked. “And that’s why you’re here completely and totally alone, with no backup whatsoever. To provide oversight.”

“It seems we understand each other perfectly,” Colonel Feng said.

The clove cigarette glowed again. For a short while, neither man spoke.

What was about to occur had been set in motion two weeks earlier, with a single phone call between two powerful people.

The initiator of that phone call was a mystery to the foreigner. The receiver of it was a man named Jedediah Jones. He worked for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, where his title was head of internal division enforcement. Sometimes he just used the acronym. Spy humor.

Just as the relationship between the United States and China was complex, so was the dance between the foreigner and Jones. The foreigner worked for Jones on a temporary, ad hoc, totally unconfirmed basis. If you were to look at only certain small sample sizes of the men’s interactions, you’d draw the conclusion that Jones valued the foreigner like a disposable coffee cup, and, likewise, that the foreigner trusted Jones about as much as a savvy consumer trusted the claims of late night infomercials.

Yet the truth was that they needed each other as much as their nation needed their service. And each had come to rely on the other for his unique set of skills, traits, and resources, many of which had already been called on to arrange this raid.

His cigarette now extinguished, Colonel Feng coughed twice. They were loud, barking coughs, and the foreigner briefly wondered if they were meant as a signal of some sort.

“You know, it’s very strange,” Feng said when his throat was clear. “You look a great deal like an American intelligence operative by the name of Derrick Storm, a man who freelances for a part of the CIA that supposedly doesn’t exist.”

“He must be a very good-looking man,” the foreigner said.

“We have a full complement of pictures of him, many of them quite explicit, owing to his romantic involvement with an agent of ours a few years back. Perhaps you’d like to accompany me back to my precinct and have a look at them?”

“Who doesn’t love looking at someone else’s explicit photos?” the foreigner said. “I’ll absolutely have a look. As soon as we’re done here.”

“It would, of course, be illegal for him to be in this country without having properly notified the authorities,” Feng said. “He would spend a long time in prison if he was caught.”

“Which is why I’m sure he’s not here,” the foreigner said. “I’m sure a man that attractive and intelligent wouldn’t risk a—”

Any further conversation was cut off when, from within the building, there came a low rumbling. It could be both heard in the air and felt in the ground below, which now shook gently.

“Excuse me. That’s my cue,” the foreigner said. Then he pressed a button to activate an open channel on his communication system and said one word into the microphone attached to his earpiece:

“Go.”

* * *

The first bullet sprang out of a muzzle that had an Alpha Dog 9 silencer affixed to the end of it, lowering the sound output by more than fifty decibels. What should have been a loud crack was reduced to more of a thump.

The target—the bulb in that single floodlight—stood no chance. Its shattering could not possibly be heard by any of the men inside. Not over the roar of the machines.

With the parking lot now plunged into darkness, the foreigner moved out, sprinting along the bluff then cutting down a path that had been carved into its side. He approached from the south.

Two other men, including the one that had put the lightbulb out of business, were coming from the east. Two more came from the north, where they had been hiding by the banks of the river.

These four were also foreigners, in China on tourist visas, officially unofficial. It was illegal for them to possess firearms. Everything they were about to do was probably illegal.

If anything went wrong, every single bureaucrat at the US Embassy would be able to claim ignorance without a trace of deceit. The ambassador himself was similarly in the dark. At that point, with no diplomatic protection, the men would be left to fend for themselves in the Chinese legal system.

Which was why nothing could go wrong.

And nothing would. The foreigner’s intelligence was solid. There was no sign the facility was guarded. He had been training his men for two weeks, so they knew its layout perfectly, having set up a mock version of it during their repeated dry runs. They would have it secured before the men inside were even aware what was happening.

Or at least that’s what the foreigner hoped.

Then a gunshot—this one loud, without a silencer to soften it— echoed off the bluff.

“Man down,” the foreigner heard in his earpiece. The voice was not panicked. More matter-of-fact. These were professionals.

The foreigner rolled before coming up into a low crouch, pausing midway down the path. They had decided to eschew night-vision goggles, which were bulky and had been deemed unnecessary to achieve their objective. The foreigner now cursed that decision.

Another shot. It had the distinct sound of a rifle. The velocity of its projectile was unmistakable.

“Fall back, fall back, find cover,” the foreigner heard one of his men saying. “Where the hell is this coming from?”

The foreigner held his position. He was brutally exposed against the side of the bluff. Only his dark clothing kept him hidden in the night.

The rifle went off again. This time, the foreigner was able to locate the muzzle flash. The prone form behind it was a dark smudge.

“Sniper on the roof,” the foreigner said into his watch. “Just hold tight for a second. I’ve got him.”

The foreigner quickly centered the crosshairs of his Swarovski Z6 scope on the part of the smudge that was shaped like the gunman’s head. It wasn’t much of a target, but it was the only one the foreigner really had.

The night was windless. And he was fifty yards away, roughly at the same elevation as the height of the roof. In daylight, the foreigner could have decided which eye socket he wanted to shoot out. In darkness, it was still an easy enough shot.

The foreigner squeezed the trigger. Through the scope, he could see the prone body go lifeless.

“Got him,” the foreigner said into his watch. “What’s our medical report?”

“Hit in the vest,” came a wheezing voice. “Hurts like hell”—large gasp—“and I can’t goddamn breathe”—large gasp—“but I’ll be fine.”

“Can you still do your job?” the foreigner asked.

“Hell yes, sir.”

“Good,” the foreigner said. “We’re running out of what little time we had to begin with. Let’s move in.”

“What if there’s another sniper up there?” one of the men asked.

“Pray he has lousy aim,” the foreigner replied.

Without further delay, he descended the bluff, arriving at the lone door to the warehouse at the same time as the men from the north, one of whom was carrying a two-man battering ram.

Only one man came from the east. The other, the one who had been shot, was still out there somewhere.

Wordlessly, two of them gripped the handles of the battering ram.

“One, two,” the foreigner said.

The “three” came out as a grunt. The men strained at the handles. The steel door dented, but did not give.

“Again,” the foreigner said. “Aim a little closer to the handle.”

He resumed the count. This time, the word three was followed shortly thereafter by the sound of metal breaking.

“One more time,” the foreigner said.

What little further resistance the door could offer was almost gone. The foreigner gave it one final kick, and it gave way.

They entered a large space with their guns raised. It was brilliantly lit from above by rows of fluorescent lights protected by cages. But the light was less impressive than the sound: When operating at full speed, Heidelberg offset printing presses make a hell of a racket.

It was loud enough that the half dozen men inside, who had ear-muffs to protect them from the roar, had not heard the melee outside. They were too focused on the paper running through the press in a speedy blur, staying hyper-attuned to any miniscule adjustments they needed to make in ink levels or paper alignment.

They were not, in fact, aware anything was amiss until the foreigner located one of the red emergency cutoff switches on the far wall and yanked it up, immediately severing power to the press.

As it rolled to a stop, its output came into better focus. It was sheet after sheet of US twenty-dollar bills faked to absolute perfection, with the signature 75/25 cotton-linen blended paper, the raised feeling of the green ink, the security ribbon threaded inside, the tinting that only appeared at an angle. These were no slipshod knockoffs sliding out of some hack’s Hewlett Packard. These were totally indistinguishable from the genuine item, created in almost precisely the same way the US Mint printed legal tender, with metal plates created by a forger of exceptional skill.

Arrayed around the side of the warehouse were other tools of the counterfeiter’s trade: a platen press for embossing, an industrial paper cutter, a counting and banding machine.

It was an extraordinary operation, the largest of its kind in the world. Once the press was calibrated properly and running at top capacity, it could spew out fifty million dollars an hour. There were shrink-wrapped stacks of faux greenbacks sitting on a pallet in one corner. In another, massive rolls of blank paper awaited ink. The only real logistical issue for the crooks behind it was finding ways to spend the money.

The foreigner would have been forgiven for stopping and gawking. It’s not very often you see a fortune in cash being created in front of you.

But the foreigner was not there to sightsee. As his men subdued the printing press operators, who were dutifully raising their hands and then allowing themselves to be zip-tied, the foreigner moved quickly to a small hutchlike office that had been built in the back corner of the rectangular building.

Covering his fist with his sleeve, he punched one of the windows. Its single pane shattered immediately, allowing him to reach around and unlock the door.

He threw open the door, but when he took his first step in, he heard a loud hiss, then felt a stinging somewhere below his waist. He looked down to see a dart sticking ominously out of the side of his buttock. Three more darts had just missed and buried themselves in the far wall.

Booby-trapped. The office had been booby-trapped. Their intelligence had not indicated any such threat. And, really, who used a dart? A dart wouldn’t hurt anyone, unless it was . . .

Poisonous. The foreigner grabbed the dart and yanked, hoping he had extracted it before the toxins could enter his bloodstream. He examined the tip quickly and found, to his surprise, only his own blood. There did not appear to be any other substance.

Which explained everything. It must have been meant merely as a nonlethal deterrent to prevent lower-level employees from snooping where they didn’t belong—and punish them if they tried.

The foreigner put those thoughts aside and entered the office. This was the real focus of his raid. It was not enough to merely destroy the printing plates and disable the presses. Jedediah Jones had been quite explicit that the foreigner also needed to find evidence of who was behind it.

The belief, as widespread as it was unsubstantiated, was that this was one of the many offshoots of a group of Chinese businessmen known as the Shanghai Seven. If the story of modern Chinese economic might starts in Shanghai, the story of Shanghai itself cannot be told without the seven members of the Chinese Communist Party who were given the seed money, freedom, and directive to begin assembling a massive corporate conglomerate. The Shanghai Seven were supposed to propel China in its drive to overtake the United States and to show other Chinese how Western business was done.

The first part was a work in progress. The second part had not gone quite as well. Other Chinese entrepreneurs, the ones who had been self-selected and had succeeded because of their good ideas and hard work, turned out to be far more profitable. The Shanghai Seven, forever fat and lazy, turned out to be middling moguls, with more failed ventures than successful ones. They also had a certain penchant for criminality. Raised in the rampantly corrupt culture of the CCP, they slipped rather easily between legitimate enterprises and the underworld.

But knowing that and proving it were two very different things. And they had been too slippery—with the blessing and backing of the CCP—to have ever been caught at anything big enough that the Chinese authorities would have been pressured, by force of embarrassment or complaints from legitimate businessmen, to act.

Until now.

Perhaps.

The foreigner was moving quickly, knowing his time was short and getting shorter. The office was nicely—though not extravagantly— furnished and had a well-inhabited feel to it. This was an office that got frequent use, though the foreigner could guess it was not the base of operations for one of the Shanghai Seven. They would never allow themselves to get so close to an operation of this sort.

No, this was the workplace of a high-level lieutenant, someone trusted enough to run this operation and yet be deemed ultimately expendable should a scapegoat be needed.

The foreigner went to the desk in the middle of the room first. The side drawers contained a teapot, a liquor flask, and a variety of snacks. The lieutenant apparently liked to be well provisioned. The top drawer was a mess of pens, pencils, paper clips, and sticky notes—criminals needed office supplies too, it seemed. The foreigner was about to move on when a rainbowlike glint caught his eye.

It was a compact disc, nestled in a transparent jewel case. The foreigner grabbed it and stuffed it inside his bulletproof vest.

Then he moved on to a filing cabinet against the far wall. The first file folder contained not papers but cassette tapes. He pocketed those, too. Then he moved to the next file folder, which contained documents that the foreigner began photographing.

He was clicking as fast as he could, not bothering to look before he shot. There would be time later to determine whether any of this was useful or whether he was copying a criminal enterprise’s equivalent of a grocery list.

Then, suddenly, his time was up.

From outside, there was a new round of shouting. Through the office windows he could see a swarm of People’s Armed Police, in their green uniforms, pouring into the facility. They were yelling, though their agitation did not seem to be directed at the six pressmen who were sitting mutely in a row on the floor by their idle machinery; no, the orders were being shouted at the four men in bulletproof vests who were in the midst of destroying as much of the counterfeiting apparatus as they could.

The foreigner came out of the office just as Colonel Feng entered the warehouse, his lit cigarette leading the way. He was grinning broadly, deeply satisfied with himself, as he approached the foreigner.

“Colonel Feng,” the foreigner said. “I see you had company after all.”

“The sound of gunfire must have alerted this squadron,” he replied. “Aren’t we fortunate they happened to be in the area on a training mission?”

“Quite,” the foreigner said. He was moving closer to his men, who had formed into a small clump.

“But now that they are here, they are certainly capable of assuming jurisdiction over what turns out to be, much to our surprise, a crime scene,” Feng said. “On behalf of my government, I thank you for discovering this illicit enterprise.”

“Oh, you’re very welcome.”

“Now, I believe your work here is done. You will now turn over any evidence you have collected, including the phone you have been using to take pictures. We will make sure it is handled by the proper authorities and that the wrongdoers are prosecuted.”

“I’m sure you will,” the foreigner said.

He was, by now, next to his men. One of them had reached under his bulletproof vest to produce an object roughly the size of a shoe. Or at least it was until the man pressed two buttons and it instantly expanded to form a six-foot-by-four-foot barrier. The men crouched behind it, with their fingers jammed in their ears and their eyes screwed shut, as Feng looked on, more curious than threatened.

Then the foreigner said, “Deploy.”

Three things happened in quick succession.

First the lights went out.

Next there was a tremendous explosion, one with enough force to tear a large jagged hole in the side of the warehouse.

Finally, the blast wave reached Feng, knocking him off his feet and extinguishing his cigarette in the process.

By the time the dust cleared, the foreigners were long gone—and they had taken the evidence with them.

TWO

HEAT

ONE WEEK LATER

We need to talk about your mother,” Derrick Storm said.

New York Police Department captain Nikki Heat holstered her 9mm and studied the man whom, moments earlier, she had mistaken for an intruder.

It was Thursday evening at the end of a very long day, which was itself at the end of several other very long days in Nikki Heat’s life.

But she had a sense, from the deep circles under her visitor’s eyes, that he had also been getting a lot of recent experience with sleep deprivation.

“How did you get in?” she asked, stalling while she tried to make sense of the intrusion.

“Your doorman is not very good,” he said.

“Which doorman? Bob Aaronson?”

“Is he built like a bowling pin, with a face full of childlike freckles that go very poorly with male-pattern baldness?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should inform your co-op board that Bob Aaronson is completely incompetent.”

Storm was sitting in a chair that had once been a favorite of Heat’s mother’s, in the corner of a Manhattan apartment that had once belonged to her mother. And now he wanted to talk about her mother.

Did he know? Did he know that after seventeen years of being presumed dead, Cynthia Heat had surfaced in a bus shelter two days earlier—dressed as a homeless woman—and then vanished so quickly Nikki was left doubting what she had seen? Did he know that the ashes Nikki had venerated for seventeen years as being her mother’s remains turned out, upon laboratory testing, to be nothing more than cremated roadkill? Did he understand the circumstances that led to Cynthia’s disappearance and then sudden reappearance, a set of facts Nikki herself didn’t begin to understand?

“So, my mother,” Heat said, still standing at the ready. “What do we need to talk about?”

Storm appeared troubled. “Look, you should know, I almost didn’t come here. It’s selfish of me to even bring this to you. But you’re the only person alive who might be able to help me decipher some potentially important evidence I’ve found. It’s a recording of your mother. Would it be too painful for you to listen to it?”

“I’m beyond feeling pain about my mother,” Heat said.

That was a lie. And Heat suspected Derrick Storm could tell. But he let it pass.

“This is all classified, of course, so I’d appreciate your discretion, Captain Heat.”

“And of course you’ll have it.”

“Thank you,” he said. “So, first, some background. I think you know from our little jam-up involving that dead currency trader a few years back that I work for a part of the government that likes to operate on the hush-hush.”

“I remember a CIA station agent calling me in the middle of the night, insisting that if I didn’t let you go, not only would he be fired, but the world as we knew it would come to an end.”

“That is a testament to the power of the man I work for. His name is Jedediah Jones. He operates a strictly off-the-books unit deep within the CIA. He has solved enough problems for enough important people that he has an essentially unlimited budget. And he works with limited oversight, because people in Washington understand it’s in their best interests not to ask too many questions about his methods. I think he last corresponded with his morality in the third grade, though he certainly gets things done.”

“I can think of a few people at the NYPD who would love to meet him,” Heat said.

“I’m sure. Anyhow, the latest insect to capture the attention of Jones’s flyswatter is a group of Chinese businessmen known as the Shanghai Seven. Are you familiar with them?”

“Not really.”

Storm told Heat about the Shanghai Seven, the counterfeiting operation he believed them to be behind, his raid, and how his evidence collection ran into interference from the corrupt Colonel Feng.

“And he just stood there the whole time, smoking cloves, denying that anything was happening . . . until suddenly he showed up with a squadron of troops,” Storm finished.

“Which means he was working for the Shanghai Seven, yes?”

“Well, yes. Except we can’t really prove his ties to them, any more than we can prove the Shanghai Seven is really behind the counterfeiting. And until we can—and more or less shame the Chinese into doing something about it—we fear the Shanghai Seven will just start it up somewhere else,” Storm said. “They have the supply lines and technical know-how, and we would have very little ability to stop them. Beyond counterfeiting, they’ve also been tied to human trafficking, drug smuggling, and a whole host of other nasty businesses over the years. Suffice to say, you should not confuse the Shanghai Seven with the seven dwarfs.”

“Understood.”

“Most of the evidence I found during the raid was disappointingly inconclusive. But there were two items that may be able to help us. The first is a compact disc that seems to contain some kind of data.”

“A CD? Who still uses those things?”

“I have no idea. It’s very possible this was made in 1999.”

That was the year Heat’s mother had been murdered. Or, rather, the year Cynthia Heat had faked her own death, taking a drug that plunged her heartbeat to almost nothing, then hiring actors to pose as EMTs and take her body away.

“But why . . . why don’t you know for sure?” Heat asked.

“The data is encrypted at such a level that you can’t even copy it to another computer without running into more encryption. And I haven’t been able to crack it yet.”

“I thought your boss has people who can do that,” Heat said.

“He does. But, frankly, I don’t trust him. I’ve known him for too long. The way he’s been acting around this entire assignment has been strange, even for him. There’s something he’s not telling me, something else at play, something big. And until I better understand what the game is, I’m not going to hand him a baseball bat he might use to bash me over the head. He doesn’t even know about the CD. I’m guessing a person in your position understands the importance of being able to manage up.”

“I do,” Heat said, offering him a knowing smile.

She sat down, choosing the chair closest to his. For reasons she didn’t entirely understand, she felt instantly comfortable with him. Anyone looking at the two of them without the benefit of being able to hear the topic of their conversation might have even thought this rendezvous could soon turn into romance. They certainly would make an amazing couple. She was a striking brunette, long-legged and dark-eyed, with cheekbones that modeling agencies scoured the globe to find. He was the kind of handsome that writers felt compelled to begin a book with. Their children would not only be beautiful but also cunning, brilliant, and strong.

Yet that was not the dynamic at play here. For as hunky as he was, for as gorgeous as she was, there was not a whiff of attraction between them. It was almost like a long-lost brother and sister meeting for the first time.

Storm continued: “The other evidence I found is this recording of your mother, and that’s where I need you. Are you . . . are you sure you really want to listen to it?”

“I’m sure,” Heat said. She had spent years of her life dredging up every morsel she could about her mother’s life. It was ingrained in Nikki—both as a daughter and as a detective—to want to know more. Her heart was already hammering from some combination of anxiety and anticipation.

Storm reached down to a small bag that was resting by his chair. He pulled out a circa 1984 cassette player, then the tape itself, which he held out for Heat to look at.

“Can you read simplified Chinese?” Storm asked.

“Not a bit.”

“If you could, you’d know that this is an approximation of your mother’s name, spelled phonetically. Mandarin lacks the ess sound, so they did the best they could. And it’s dated November 1999.”

Storm hit the eject button on the cassette player to open its small door, then gently slid the tape inside. For a pair of thirtysomethings like Heat and Storm, it was rather nostalgic to be operating such outdated technology.

“Whoever produced this recording had tapped your mother’s home phone. Most of the conversations were ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff. You’re even on there a couple of times, calling in from college.”

Heat shook her head. “My dorm had a bank of pay phones in the basement,” she said. “A few people were starting to get cell phones, but they were still considered a luxury item. I used a phone card every time I called her. Remember those?”

Storm grinned. “I’ll leave the cassette and player with you, in case you’d like to listen to all of it later. I’ve already made a copy of the important parts for myself. But I’ve got it cued up to the pertinent part right now. You ready?”

Heat bobbed her head. Storm depressed the plastic play button and, for the first time in seventeen years, the voice of Cynthia Heat filled the Gramercy Park apartment she had once called home.

“Hello?” Cynthia Heat said.

“Hey, it’s Nicole,” a female voice said.

Nikki reached over and jabbed the pause button. “That’s Nicole Bernardin, my mother’s best friend and fellow operative. They were part of a network of domestic workers and high-end tutors who spied on the rich and connected—”

“The Nanny Network,” Storm said. “I know all about them. They’re legendary.”

“Anyway, Nicole . . . she . . . she died a few years ago. She was killed by some people who tossed her in a suitcase and then put her in a deep freeze. It was the same people who killed my mother. Or at least I used to think it was the same people who killed my mother. . . .”

Heat realized she didn’t know what she thought anymore. As a way of stopping Storm from asking questions, she hit the play button again.

“Thanks for calling back,” Cynthia said. “I just wanted you to know I’ve dealt with those phony bills. I found a place to hide them.”

“Where?” Bernardin asked.

“You don’t want to know. It’s for your own good.”

“Right.”

“They definitely have fingerprints on them. I dusted them. They’re faint, but they’re there.”

“So . . . I guess that makes those bills your insurance policy? As long as they’re out there, somewhere, you’ve got some leverage.”

“Exactly,” Cynthia said.

This time it was Storm pressing the pause button. “It’s my belief that the fingerprints on the fake money belong to one of the Shanghai Seven,” he said. “That would make the bills powerful evidence against them.”

He resumed playing the tape.

“And you’re sure they’re in a safe place?” Bernardin asked.

“Let me put it this way: I’d not only trust this spot with my life, I’d trust it with my best Scotch.”

Storm pressed the pause button again. “Does this apartment have a liquor cabinet by any chance?”

“Yeah, and you’re welcome to take it apart. But, believe me, I’ve been over, around, under, and through every nook and cranny of this apartment a hundred times looking for hiding spots, false fronts, concealed compartments. There’s nothing here. Besides, she wouldn’t have hidden them here. My mother was incredibly careful about not bringing her work—and by that, I mean her real work, not her cover job as a piano teacher—home with her.”

Heat pressed PLAY.

“But I don’t understand,” Nicole said. “If the bills have those prints on them, why don’t you just come forward with them?”

“Because the fingerprints by themselves don’t prove anything,” Cynthia said. “If it’s in a court of law, a good lawyer could come up with a million reasons how those prints got there. I need to really nail this thing down. I can’t go halfway with something like this. I’d get buried. Besides, they’re—”

Cynthia’s voice trailed off, like she was suddenly overcome with emotion.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” Bernardin asked.

“It’s . . . They’re not even bothering to threaten me. It’s like they know they can’t get to me. They’re saying they’ll go after Nikki.”

“Oh, Cyn . . . I’m so sorry. Do you want me to go up to school and get her? I’ll keep her safe. You know I will.”

“Yeah, but what are you going to say to her? ‘Hey, you know your mom, the one you think is just a kindly piano teacher? Yeah, she’s really a spy and she’s gotten herself in some serious trouble, so you need to come with me.’ ”

“It’s better than them getting to her first,” Nicole said.

“I know, I know. I just . . . I keep thinking there has to be a way to prove what’s really going on with these fake bills.”

“Be careful, Cyn. Be careful. If it’s who you think it is—”

“I know. I know. Look, I’ll call you if I need you. You know that.”

“I know. Love you. Be careful.”

“Okay. You too.”

Storm hit the stop button. “The next call is your mother ringing what I now know is a pay phone in your dorm. She talked to a girl who knew you and asked her to leave a note for you to call.”

“She was trying to convince me to come home from school early for Thanksgiving. I told her no, I couldn’t, because I didn’t want to fall behind in my classes,” Nikki said, so momentarily transfixed by the memory that she sighed without meaning to.

“Sorry,” Storm said. “I know this can’t be easy. But, look, I need to know: what was your mother up to in 1999? What was she doing that she might have been tussling with the Shanghai Seven?”

Nikki Heat was flummoxed. She had been over the final months of her mother’s life backwards and forwards for years. She had come across evidence that her mother was trying to expose her former handler, Nanny Network chief Tyler Wynn, as a traitor who was selling American secrets. For a time, Nikki thought Wynn even killed her mother because of it. Now she thought it more likely that Wynn—who in his own twisted way loved Nikki like a niece—helped Cynthia fake her own death.

But what did any of that have to do with the Shanghai Seven?

“I’m sorry,” Heat said. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d give it to you. I’m tempted to tell you she had nothing to do with the Shanghai Seven. But she . . . Let’s just say the things I’ve learned about her life have surprised me more than once over the years.”

“Still, take me back to 1999. There has to be something that . . .”

Storm began restating the question, doing his investigator’s best to try to extract some bit of thread that would help him put a neat bow on an otherwise untidy package. But Heat wasn’t really listening to him as much as she was assessing him.

Up until now, she had only told one person about her mother’s dramatic reappearance: her husband, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jameson Rook. She knew she could trust Rook, that Rook wouldn’t dismiss her mother’s sighting as some stress-induced delirium. She also knew that Rook wouldn’t have some hidden agenda that would place some other need ahead of her mother.

Could she trust this man the same way? Nikki Heat had spent her professional life reading people, many of whom were criminals who lied whenever their lips moved. And a man in Derrick Storm’s line of work had surely worked his share of deceptions and run his share of cons.

Yet Heat recognized that Storm had a deeply embedded moral compass, that he would never allow it to point him anywhere but true north. He was legitimately trying to turn out the lights on some bad actors who, it seemed, really did have something to do with her mother. Therefore, he needed to know the full truth.

She rejoined the conversation just as Storm was saying “. . . and I think I’ve lost you.”

“I’m sorry,” Heat said. “Look, there’s something you need to know. You’re asking these questions about 1999, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t look there. But it seems my mother’s story didn’t end in 1999.”

“What do you mean?”

Heat told him about the bus shelter and about her mother’s counterfeit ashes.

“So she’s really still alive?” Storm said when she was through.

“I don’t know, really. I mean, it’s still possible I was just mistaken. I saw her for maybe half a second.”

“But in that half a second you were sure?”

Heat nodded. “And there’s more. The man who ordered the hit on her is a crooked former FBI and Department of Homeland Security agent by the name of Bart Callan. He was later connected with a plot to unleash massive quantities of the smallpox virus in New York City.”

“Yeah, he was never going to be able to pull it off, though. I know you guys got to it first, but you weren’t the only ones who figured out the true purpose of that antique fire truck,” Storm said, adding a quick wink.

“Well, then you know that Callan was bought off by Carey Maggs.”

“The brewery magnate who also owned the pharmaceutical company that was going to get rich selling the smallpox vaccine? Yes.”

“But did you know that Maggs was found murdered in his jail cell two days ago? Someone got him with a garotte wire.”

Heat drew a line across her throat. Storm showed no reaction to the death of a man who would have happily murdered thousands in the name of profit.

“And there’s more,” Heat continued. “Callan had been incarcerated at a supermax prison out in Colorado until about three weeks ago. Then he was mysteriously transferred to a medium security facility in Cumberland, Maryland.”

“Medium security? For a former federal agent who killed multiple people and was tied to a mass murder plot?”

“Well, exactly. And then, of course, he escaped while on a work detail. He’s still at large.”

“Let me guess: This happened within the last week,” Storm said.

“Yes. On Tuesday. Also two days ago.”

The skin around Storm’s eyes squeezed as he squinted in concentration, giving him a pensive look.

“I’m not saying this is going to fit perfectly, but let’s try it on for size,” Storm said. “My raid on the Shanghai Seven happened a week ago. My team made a bit of a mess on our way out, so it took them a little while to sort things out. They didn’t think they were going to lose any of the evidence I took. They’ve been scrambling a bit since then. When they did an inventory, they noticed that this cassette tape was among the missing items. They would know your mother is on the tape, talking about her hiding these bills. Where? No one knows.

“But what if the Shanghai Seven knew about Bart Callan’s connection to your mother? I know this may sound odd, but in order to kill someone, especially a pro like your mother, you really do need to learn a lot about them—their patterns, their hideouts, their peccadilloes. There would be no one more qualified to go on a scavenger hunt for those bills than Callan.”

Heat asked, “So they helped him escape from prison with the understanding he would then work for them?”

“The Shanghai Seven was betting he could find the bills before I did.”

“But then why did the transfer happen three weeks ago?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, of course,” Storm said. “But that’s when my team and I started training. That must have also been when the Shanghai Seven were tipped off that the raid was coming. So they began making contingency plans, getting Callan into a place where they could access him if they needed him.”

“Okay. I understand. Now explain Maggs’s death for me.”

“Part of the escape. Maggs and Callan were, quite literally, thick as thieves at one point. Callan would know the authorities’ first step would be to go to Maggs to learn where Callan was likely hiding. And at that point, after all those years in prison, Maggs would give it up in exchange for a Big Mac and a new pillow. Maggs had to be silenced.”

Heat felt her head bobbing up and down. She didn’t know if, in fact, Storm had everything lined up right. But there was no denying the timeline. The Shanghai Seven learned their counterfeiting operation had come to the attention of the US government, and they started making plans to eliminate any potential evidence that tied them to it. At the top of that list were the fake bills—with the damning fingerprints—that Cynthia Heat had stashed away long ago.

The bills also explained why she felt she had to vanish. In the Shanghai Seven, Cynthia Heat knew she had made a powerful enemy—an enemy with global reach, an enemy that would have no compunction about killing her daughter. And yet Cynthia didn’t have quite enough substantiation to be able to get the Shanghai Seven shut down for good, especially not with the Chinese legal system stacked against her.

So she faked her own death. It was the only way to make the Shanghai Seven think she was no longer a threat, the only way to save her daughter.

Nikki Heat breathed deeply. Having—perhaps—finally put together the narrative that explained one of the most agonizing chapters in her life did not give her satisfaction.

Not until she could prove it.

And then use what she learned to put the Shanghai Seven in such a deep hole they could smell the middle of the earth.

Which, in turn, would allow her mother to rejoin the living world.

“All right. Then just to restate things, Bart Callan is working for the Shanghai Seven, looking for the counterfeit bills my mother hid,” Heat said.

“Check.”

“In return for which the Shanghai Seven sprung him from prison.”

“Check.”

“And your mission is to put the Shanghai Seven out of business.”

“Check.”

“Then Callan’s escape is our hot lead,” Heat said. “There has to be some kind of paper trail at the Bureau of Prisons that explains how a serial killer got transferred to a medium security prison. Someone signed that order.”

“Probably someone who was either threatened or bribed into doing it,” Storm said.

“Exactly. If we can prove who applied that pressure and/or gave that incentive, maybe we can start building a chain of evidence that ultimately leads us to one of the Shanghai Seven.”

“Agreed.”

“So we’re going to partner on this thing,” Heat said.

“Agreed.”

She stood. He stood. He reached out his hand. She took it in her own with a firm grip and gave it a hearty shake.

Nikki Heat and Derrick Storm as partners.

Something about it just felt right.

THREE

HEAT

Nikki Heat squeezed her phone so hard she was fairly certain she was going to grind its silicon microchips back into sand.

“I’m not going,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, but you are,” the man on the other end informed her. “And you will wear dress blues. And you will smile pretty for the cameras. And you will wave to the crowd and look very, very happy to be there. And that, in turn, will make the commissioner very happy.”

There was perhaps no worse way to start a morning than with a phone call from Zach “The Hammer” Hamner. His official title was senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, but Heat had often thought they should simplify it by changing it to senior vice deputy prick. No, actually, make that chief executive prick. The only thing worse than having to listen to his unctuous voice over the phone would have been having to look at his pallid face, which only left the office and saw the sun for approximately two hours on the Fourth of July every other year.

But the fact was, when he dropped the c-word—commissioner—Heat knew her personal feelings no longer mattered. And when he called, he was seldom expressing his own opinion. He didn’t get the nickname The Hammer because of some fondness for home improvement.

Still, to preserve some sense of self-respect, Heat felt she had to put up the good fight.

“It’s a ridiculous political dog and pony show,” she said. “Look, I did my job and caught the bad guy. That’s what—”

“Yes, except Legs Kline just happened to be a bad guy who was three weeks away from being elected president of the United States until you tied him to that ISIS-wannabe video,” Hamner inserted.

“Right, right. But, as I was saying, that’s what cops are supposed to do. Put bad guys in jail. We don’t need to hold a press conference every time we do it.”

“May I point out that ‘we’ are not holding this press conference,” Hamner said. “This press conference is being held by the senior senator from the state of New York, Lindsy Gardner, who is now, because of your efforts, very likely also three weeks away from being elected president of the United States. There will be a number of other dignitaries from One PP in attendance, including the commissioner—did I mention the commissioner yet?—but in case that’s not enough for you, the mayor will also be there. Even with all that, the Gardner campaign was quite explicit about your attendance. In fact, you were personally invited by her campaign manager and likely future chief of staff John Null. Now, the NYPD can either be on the future president’s good side or the future president’s bad side. Which one do you think the commissioner prefers?”

“She’s a former librarian,” Heat said. “She doesn’t have a bad side.”

“You obviously haven’t known enough librarians. I wouldn’t wish a pissed-off librarian on the worst cretin at Rikers Island.

“Now,” Hamner concluded, “in case I haven’t made it clear enough, this is not a request. This is an order.”

That was what led, two hours later, to Nikki Heat standing on a hastily constructed stage in Central Park, wearing a forced grin as the now seemingly inevitable future president of the United States addressed a collection of New York’s most well-used cameras and microphones, with a large crowd of curiosity seekers assembled behind them.

“Thank you, thank you. Thank you, New York,” Gardner was saying, having just been introduced by the mayor. Her distinctive voice was part of her charm. It was strong and authoritative, yet somehow still quiet. Like a good librarian should be. She had resisted all efforts from political consultants who told her she ought to adopt a more forceful tone when speaking in public. A variety of comediennes had tried to imitate it. None could.

She waited for the crowd to settle down, her mere look the mild rebuke they needed to come to order.

“Thank you again,” she said. “I have to say, I’m very pleased to be here with you on this occasion, because after fifteen months of campaigning, I’m tired of talking about myself. My opponent doesn’t seem to have that problem.”

The crowd chuckled. Her opponent, Caleb Brown, was what Shakespeare had in mind when he coined the phrase “ass hat.”

“But today,” Gardner continued, “I don’t have to talk about myself. I get to talk about a true New York hero, Captain Nikki Heat.”

Gardner paused and the crowd roared. Heat waved, because she was too embarrassed not to; because that’s what she had been told to do; and because the commissioner and a half dozen of the NYPD’s other top brass were onstage next to her, jostling for position in front of the cameras and evaluating her every move. She tried to distract herself by thinking about things that were more pleasant than this. Like dental surgery.

The candidate went on about Heat for a while, telling how she had exposed that Kline Industries was supplying bullets to ISIS and then prevented Kline and his daughter from escaping to a foreign country that did not have an extradition treaty. Heat kept the tight smile on her face the entire time, dreamed of root canals and Novocain-free extractions, and was trying to stay good, but drifted off until Gardner managed to catch her attention again.

“It’s not very often on the campaign trail that I get to tell personal stories,” Gardner said. “And I’m not sure Captain Heat would even know this. But my children were once among the least distinguished of her mother’s piano students. I’m afraid Louisa and Ben inherited their total lack of musicality from their mother. Still, they tried hard and I think Mrs. Heat tolerated them because of their dedication. So we made it all the way to the end-of-year recital, except my Ben . . . Well, we were going back and forth between New York and Washington quite a bit back then, and Ben left his music in Washington. But who ran out to a local music store and found the last copy of Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise’? It was Mrs. Heat’s teenage daughter, Nikki. So it seems she’s been saving the day for a long time now.”

Heat had no memory of this long-ago event, but she smiled as if she did, if only to keep up the show.

“And now it’s time for me to repay that favor. I don’t mean to put Captain Heat on the spot with what I’m about to say next,” Gardner said, “but it’s very important to me that I enter this plea into the public record. And, Captain Heat, you should know I’ve run it by your very fine commissioner, and he was very graciously enthusiastic about this proposal. I’ve said from the outset of this campaign that my administration will be about bringing in the best possible people from a great variety of backgrounds, many of them from outside of Washington and outside the political realm, and giving them roles where their talents will benefit America. With that in mind, I hope that if I am elected, Captain Heat will accept my invitation to be my director of Homeland Security.”

There was a murmur from the crowd. Heat immediately looked toward the commissioner, who was nodding his approval—probably thinking of all the antiterrorism money that would pour into his budget if a New Yorker were in the job.

“Don’t worry,” Gardner added. “I’m not looking for an answer right now.”

Now the crowd was laughing and Heat mouthed the words “thank you.”

Except, already, her brain was whirring. The director of Homeland Security? Her? The thing she liked least about running the Twentieth Precinct was the bureaucratic nonsense that came with the job. Imagine being in the red tape capital of the country, running what was, at its core, nothing more than a large bureaucracy.

Besides, she wanted her energies to stay focused on her mother, on learning more about the Shanghai Seven, on making the world safe for her return.

But maybe as director of Homeland Security she’d have an easier time accomplishing that. Surely if she had the entire weight of a new president’s administration behind her, she’d have the juice to get the Shanghai Seven decommissioned?

She realized, much to her surprise, she was intrigued. More than she would have admitted.

* * *

Ten minutes later, having provided enough sound bites to feed the cable news networks until dinnertime, Gardner announced her departure to a cheering crowd.

After the Secret Service ushered her away, it was everyone else’s turn to leave the stage. As Heat descended the steps, her head felt like it had been put through a blender without a top on it, and her thoughts had been sprayed all over the place. She had to concentrate on making sure her foot hit every tread on the stairs, so she didn’t become an instant YouTube sensation by falling off the stage.

She was so focused on that task she didn’t pay much attention to the tall dark-haired man who was approaching her until he stuck out a hand in her direction.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m John Null. I’m Lindsy’s campaign manager.”

He was wearing a tailored suit that he filled out nicely. Null was a former army helicopter pilot who had served two overseas tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before going into civilian life. It was a background that played well with veterans’ groups. And he had clearly managed to maintain his physique from his days as a serviceman.

“Nice to meet you,” Heat said.

“Just so you know, Lindsy is really serious about this. This isn’t a presidential candidate just trying to win a news cycle and get some reflected glory from the hero of the day. The campaign is already vetting you, and we’re impressed with what we’ve found. We think you’ve got what it takes to do this job. I know the management side of it might be a bit much at first, but you seem to have a long history of getting things done, even against long odds. You’re exactly the kind of person we want working in this administration.”

“Thank you,” Heat said.

“And I’m sorry if the delivery of the offer caught you a little bit by surprise. I told her I thought she should approach you privately first. But she said if she did it that way, you would just say no. She felt like doing it this way, so the whole world knew the incredible opportunity you’d been offered, and there’d be a better chance your friends and family would pressure you into saying yes.”

“She’s probably right about that,” Heat said, adding a laugh.

“Lindsy Gardner is right about a lot of things. I know she’s my boss, so I’m supposed to say this, but she really does have great instincts about people. We’re not going to push you for an answer right now or anytime soon. I know this has just been sprung on you and it has to be a lot to take in. But is it something you can at least consider for a while?”

“Well, I have to say, I am flattered . . .” Heat began.

“Then stop right there. Stay flattered. That’s a nice feeling,” Null said. “Look, don’t even try to make up your mind yet. Just think about it. Obviously, we wouldn’t even need an answer until after the election. Gotta make sure we actually have a job to offer. Never know what those voters will do.”

He offered a winning smile.

“No, but things are looking pretty good for you guys,” Heat said. Overnight polls showed that, with Legs Kline out of the race, Gardner had picked up most of his voters, surging into the lead in a number of key battleground states. FiveThirtyEight was predicting a landslide.

“Well, we’ll see. It’s my job not to take anything for granted,” he said. “But if I can give you my own sales pitch, it’s that Lindsy is great to work for. I think in some ways she treats everything like she’s still running a small-town library. She likes to really get to know the people who work for her on a personal level. I hope you’ll at least consent to sitting down with her for a little chat?”

“Of course,” Heat said.