Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller by Richard Castle Read Free Book Online

behave like Motoshige did. His bosses only tolerated him because he was brilliant at what he did. Like Kornblum, he had his fingers in a lot of pies. Anything that involved foreign transactions at Nippon was in Motoshige’s domain. The guy spoke five languages.”
    “Ah, a real polyglot,” Storm said.
    “Since when do you know a word like ‘polyglot’?” Jones teased.
    “You’ve had me learn eight languages and you ask me how it is I know the word ‘polyglot’?”
    “Point taken.”
    “Anything else on Motoshige?”
    “Nothing that struck us as relevant,” Jones interjected. And again, Storm thought about Jones’s wandering definition of what relevant actually was.
    “Okay, so when do we get to the Swiss guy?” Storm asked.
    “Right now,” Jones said, taking ownership of the remote control. He clicked, and a picture of a fat, jowly man with a hooked nose appeared in a 3-D hologram.
    “Yikes,” Storm said. “Did someone make him take an ugly pill?”
    “Wilhelm Sorenson,” Jones said, ignoring the commentary.“Chief currency trader for Nationale Banc Suisse, the third-largest bank in the world, asset-wise. Sixty-eight. Married. Two kids, both grown. Most of his assets were, naturally, in Swiss banks, and as you know they aren’t very good about sharing information. But we do know he was a multi-multi-millionaire, and we also know he also had a weakness for women. Young women. The other victim at the scene was a seventeen-year-old runaway with a fake I.D. that said she was nineteen. She was wearing a bitty little piece of lingerie that left scant doubt as to the nature of the relationship.”
    Jones catalogued the details of the scene, ending with the missing fingernails.
    “The Interpol computers didn’t pick up the similarity of the crimes until the third iteration, but Sorenson’s killing finally tripped their alarm bells,” Jones said.
    “The local authorities botched the scene a little. Believe me, they were asking some hard questions of the wife, who was, quote-unquote ‘out of town’ on some kind of girls’ weekend in France. But thankfully Interpol called our people, and they were able to move in. Sorenson had a fairly extensive external security system. So we were able to get these.”
    Several high-definition still photos of a six-man crew popped up on the screen. Five of them were men Storm had never seen before. One was a man he could never forget.
    “Volkov,” Storm said. “What happened to his face?”
    “We assumed that was the remnants of your handiwork in Mogadishu,” Jones said.
    “There’s no way he survived that explosion.”
    “There are three dead bankers who would beg to differ if they could still talk.”
    Storm shook his head slowly. It had been five years since he last tangled with Volkov. Not long enough. Five lifetimes wouldn’t be long enough.
    “Get him off that screen. I’ve seen enough of that face,” Storm said. Jones complied as Storm went on: “So we have three deadbankers from three large banks in three different countries. At least two of them seem to have problems keeping their flies zipped. Are we sure the third wasn’t also into the hanky panky?”
    “We looked into that, but Kornblum was a total Boy Scout,” Jones said.
    “There’s not a single skeleton in his closet. And, believe me, we looked. He ought to run for the chancellorship with a record this clean. Not that he’d like the pay cut.”
    “Okay, what about links between the three men? Some kind of deal Kornblum, Motoshige, and Sorenson were involved in together? A trade they did?”
    “Nothing we’ve been able to find so far,” Jones said. “Kornblum had traded with Sorenson. And Motoshige had once offered a trade to Kornblum that didn’t go through. But those deals were five and three years ago, respectively. It strains credulity to call that any more than a coincidence. These guys were all big players in what is a relatively small world of ultra-high finance. It stands