Richard Castle "Storm Front" a Derek Storm Novel - Chapter two

CHAPTER 2

ZÜRICH, Switzerland

The robber was in the kitchen. Wilhelm Sorenson was sure
of it. With his heart racing, he closed in on the swinging
door that led to the room and paused, listening for the
smallest sound.
Yes, he heard it. There was a faint rattling from one of the copper
pots that hung from the ceiling. It was the robber, for sure.
The chase would be over soon. The robber would be captured and
brought to justice. His version of justice.
Sorenson moved like an Arctic fox crossing tundra until his
hand rested against the door. Another noise. This time, it was a
giggle.
He did so love their version of cops and robbers.
“Oh Vögelein!” he called. Little Bird. His pet name for the
robber.
She giggled again. He burst through the door, jowls fl opping,
breathing heavily from the exertion. This was the most exercise
he ever got.
She was already gone. He felt moisture pooling on his brow,
watched as the droplets rolled off his face and splattered on the
fl oor. He had taken a triple dose of his erectile dysfunction medicine
a half hour earlier, and the pills had dilated just about every
blood vessel in his body. Now the blood was roaring throughhim,
fl ushing his otherwise pale face to near purple and cranking
his internal thermostat so the sweat was pouring from him as if
he were an abattoir- bound hog.
It was a good thing none of the board members could see him
right now, to say nothing of the press: Wilhelm Sorenson, one of
the richest men in Switzerland and one of the most powerful
bankers in the world, dressed only in socks, boxers, and suspenders,
with a costume shop gendarme’s hat perched atop his head.
He had dispatched his wife to their chalet in the Loire Valley
for a weekend of wine tasting with a group of lady friends, just
what the old booze hound wanted. He had their mansion on the
shores of Lake Greifen to himself.
Or, rather, to himself and Brigitte, the nineteen- year- old
Swedish ingenue who had become the latest in a long line of Wilhelm’s
barely legal obsessions.
Their little tête-à- têtes were not, under the strictest interpretation
of law, illegal; just immoral, adulterous, and intrinsically
revolting. Truly, there were few things more abhorrent to nature
than the sight of Wilhelm, a married man pushing seventy, with a
mass of lumpy, fl accid fl esh overhanging his underwear, chasing
after this sleek, blond, gorgeous young thing.
Nevertheless, this was their little game. She donned what ever
absurdly priced lingerie he had bought for her most recently—
this time, a four- hundred- dollar shred of feather- trimmed pink
silk acquired on a trip to New York— and raced around the house.
She drank directly from a 450- euro bottle of Bollinger Vieilles
Vignes Françaises the whole time. Five long pulls was enough to
get her pretending to be drunk; ten would actually do the job,
making her sure she could tolerate the feeling of him, grunting
and sweating on top of her. Then she allowed herself to be caught,
mostly so she could get it over with. It usually didn’t take him
more than about fi ve minutes.
“Oh, Schnucki!” she sang out. Her pet name for him. It
roughly translated to “Cutey”— making it perhaps the least accurate
nickname in the history of spoken language.

She was nowhere in the kitchen. He followed the mellifl uous
sound of her voice into the living room, the one with the soaring
cathedral ceiling and the commanding view of the lake. Not that
its placid waters had his attention at the moment.
“I’m coming to get you, Vögelein!” he said.
He stubbed his toe on the couch, swearing softly. He had not
been drinking. He could barely perform sober. Drunk he would
never be able to rise to the occasion, even with all those little blue
pills he had consumed.
The giggling now seemed to be coming from the hallway that
led to the foyer, so he followed the sound. Yes, this would be over
soon. The foyer had a sitting room off it, but otherwise it was a
dead end. She would soon be his.
Then he heard her scream.
Sorenson frowned. She wasn’t supposed to make it this easy.
That wasn’t part of the game.
No matter. He would get what he wanted, then send her down
into the city with his credit card for a night in the clubs. That way
he could get some sleep.
“I’ve got you now, Vögelein,” he called out.
He rounded the corner into the darkened foyer and stopped.
There were six heavily armed men dressed in black tactical gear.
Their facial features were shrouded by night- vision goggles.
One of the men, the biggest of the bunch, had grabbed Brigitte
by one of her blond pigtails and was pressing a knife against
her throat. Her eyes had gone wide.
“What is this?” Sorenson demanded, in German.
The shortest man, a ball of muscle no more than fi ve- footfour,
peeled off his goggles, revealing an eye patch and a face halfcovered
in the waxy, scarred skin left behind by severe burns. He
brought a Ruger .45- caliber semiautomatic handgun level with
Sorenson’s gut.
“Shut up,” said the man— Sorenson was already thinking of
him as “Patch” in his mind— then pointed to the sitting room. “Go
in there.”

Wilhelm Sorenson was the top currency trader at Nationale
Banc Suisse, the largest bank in Switzerland, with assets of just
over two trillion in Swiss francs. He moved untold fortunes in
euro, dollars, yuan, and rand every day with the push of a button.
His bonus alone last year was forty- fi ve million francs, to say
nothing of what he made on his private investments. No one ordered
him around.
“This is . . . this is outrageous,” Sorenson said, switching to
En glish himself. “Who are you?”
Patch turned to the guy holding Brigitte and nodded. The
man jerked his knife hand, cutting a wide gash in the girl’s throat.
Her scream sounded like it came from underwater. She fell to her
knees. Blood poured from her severed carotid artery. Her hand
went to her neck, but it was like trying to stop fl ood waters with
a spaghetti strainer. The blood burst through her fi ngers.
“I’m no one to be disobeyed,” Patch said.
Sorenson watched in horror as the life bled from his plaything.
He felt no concern for her, only for himself. The panic
spread over him. He had given his security ser vices the weekend
off so he and Brigitte could have their tryst in private. He had a
gun, an old Walther P38 his Nazi- sympathizer father had willed
him, but that was locked upstairs in a safe. His phone was clearly
not on his person, and in any event these guys did not look like
they were going to let him make phone calls.
He was at their mercy.
“Please, let’s be reasonable here,” Sorenson said, trying to
sound calm. “I’m a very wealthy man, I can . . .”
“Shut up,” Patch ordered, raising the .45 so it was in Sorenson’s
face. “Move. In there.”
Sorenson felt a gun barrel in his back. One of the other men
had circled around him and was using his weapon to shove him
toward the sitting room. He slowly allowed himself to be herded
there. He assured himself these men were not here to kill him. He
needed to keep his wits about him. You don’t just kill a man like
Wilhelm Sorenson. The repercussions would be too great. But this
was clearly going to cost him a lot of money, to say nothing of a
lot of embarrassment.
Sorenson took one last glance back at Brigitte, now facedown
in a spreading pool of blood. How was he going to explain that to
his wife? He had always been discreet with his little hobby, or at
least discreet enough that he and the cow could pretend they had
a normal marriage. Worse, Brigitte’s blood had seeped onto the
antique Hereke they had found in Turkey. It was his wife’s favorite
rug. Damn it. He was going to be in real trouble now.
When they reached the sitting room, Patch said, “There,”
pointing to a high- backed Windsor chair that had been a gift
from the Windsors themselves. Working without wasted movement,
two men duct- taped Wilhelm to the chair, unspooling great
lengths on his ankles, knees, hips, chest, and back. Only his arms
were being left free.
“Whoever is paying you to do this, I can pay you more,” Sorenson
said. “I promise you.”
“Shut up,” Patch said, backhanding him with casual viciousness.
“You don’t understand, I—”
“Do you want me to cut off your lips?” Patch asked. “I’ll happily
do it if you keep talking.”
Sorenson clamped his mouth closed. They wanted to establish
dominance over him fi rst? Fine. He would let them do it. When
the two men fi nished securing Sorenson to the chair, Patch unzipped
a black duffel bag and pulled out an unusual- looking
wooden block. It was the base for manacles of some sort, with
oval slots for both wrists and adjustable clamps that allowed it to
attach to a fl at surface.
Patch looked around for a suitable table and found what he
needed in the corner: a hand- carved ebony table from Senegal
that had been inlaid with Moroccan tile. The thing weighed several
hundred pounds. It had taken two men and a dolly to get it
in place when it had been delivered three years earlier, and it had
not been moved since then. Patch lifted it alone, barely straining

himself in the pro cess. He positioned it in front of Sorenson, then
affi xed the manacles.
Patch nodded, and the men who had been working the duct
tape each grabbed one of Sorenson’s arms. Sorenson got the feeling
they had done this before. Their every movement seemed
practiced. They guided his arms into the manacles. Patch snapped
the device down, then tightened it until Sorenson’s wrists were
immobilized.
Patch pulled a pair of needle- nose pliers out of the bag and
studied them for a moment. Then, without further comment,
he systematically yanked every fi ngernail out of Sorenson’s right
hand.
Sorenson screamed, cursed, pleaded, cajoled, threatened, whimpered,
cried, and cursed some more. Patch was unmoved. He was
focused on his task, no different than if he were yanking old nails
out of a board. He paused just slightly between each digit to
inspect the bloodied fi ngernail, then dropped it into a pouch on
his belt. He loved fi ngernails. His collection numbered in the
hundreds.
Sorenson’s thumb had been a little bit stubborn. Patch had to
take it in three pieces. He frowned at the sloppiness of his workmanship.
He would not save this one.
He nodded. His men removed Sorenson’s bloodied mess of a
right hand from the manacle. Then Patch turned to the left.
“Now,” Patch said. “Tell me your pass code.”
Sorenson was on the brink of cardiac arrest. His heart was
thundering at close to two hundred beats per minute. The pain
had sent him into shock, so while he was sweating from every
single pore, his body was ice cold.
“What . . . what pass code?” he panted.
Patch’s answer was to yank out the pinky nail on Sorenson’s
left hand. The banker howled again. Patch calmly placed the nail
in his pouch.
“Jesus, man, tell me which pass code,” he implored. “I’ll give it
to you, I just need to know which one.”

“To the MonEx Four Thousand,” Patch said.
The MonEx 4000? What did they want with . . . It didn’t matter
anymore. Only the pain did. And making it stop. Sorenson
rattled off his pass code without hesitation. Patch looked over at a
man whose long, fl aming red hair protruded out from under his
night goggles. The man pulled out a small handheld device and
punched in the combination of letters and numbers Sorenson had
provided. The man’s head bobbed down and up, just once.
Satisfi ed, Patch pulled the .45 out its holster and put two bullets
in Sorenson’s forehead.
WHEN SORENSON’S BODY WAS DISCOVERED BY HIS GARDENER
that next morning and reported to the local authorities, it was approximately
3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
It was around four- thirty when the computers at Interpol, the
international policing agency, fl agged the crime, noting its similarities
to murders that had been committed in Japan and Germany in
the fi ve days preceding this one.
Within the half hour, Interpol agents confi rmed the computer’s
analysis and decided to implement their notifi cation protocol. They
began alerting their contacts across the globe, including American
law enforcement.
The Americans dithered for an hour before deciding how to
best handle it.
An hour later, at exactly 6:03 a.m., Jedediah Jones’s phone rang.
Offi cially, Jones worked for the CIA’s National Clandestine
Ser vice. His job title was head of internal division enforcement.
Unoffi cially, his title’s acronym was suggestive of his true purpose.
His missions, personnel, and bud get did not, in any formal
account of the CIA, exist.
The man calling said he was sorry for phoning him so early
on a Saturday, but the truth was that he need not have bothered
apologizing. Jones had been jogging at four, at work by fi ve- thirty.
He considered that his lazy Saturday schedule.

Jones took his briefi ng, thanked the man, and went to work,
yanking the levers that only he knew how to pull.
It took about an hour for Jones to get his people on the ground
in Switzerland, Japan, and Germany.
Within about two hours, he began receiving their preliminary
reports.
It was when he learned that the killer in Switzerland had worn
an eye patch that Jones realized that his next course was now decided.
There was one man in his contact list whose training, intellect,
and tenaciousness were a match for this par tic u lar killer.
He reached for his phone and called Derrick Storm.


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