Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller Read Online Free PDF

of his long days at the office, his body odor tended to overpower whatever deodorant he chose. Even with a salary that should have made himplenty attractive to the opposite sex—or at least a certain opportunistic subset of it—Sniff hadn’t been laid in years.
    His lone gift was for accounting. And there, he was genius, capable of keeping a veritable Domesday Book’s worth of accounts and ledgers at his command. Whitely leaned heavily on this ability because, in truth, he couldn’t really be bothered to oversee these things himself. Whitely took pride in his instincts as a trader, instincts that had built an empire. He could feel changes in the marketplace coming the way the Native Americans of yore could feel the ground trembling from buffalo. But keeping up with the books? Boring. Melissa told him he should make more of an effort. He told her that’s what Sniff was for.
    Cracker was so loath to pay attention to the bottom line, he even tended to overlook when Sniff was in the room. For Whitely, a man ordinarily so attuned to his staff, ignoring Sniff was like a congenital condition. There was seemingly nothing he could do to stop it. The accountant was entering his fourth minute of standing in the doorway before he finally coughed softly into his hand. Whitely did not look up from his screen. Sniff rattled the change in his pocket. Nothing. Sniff cleared his throat, this time louder. Still nothing. Finally, he spoke.
    “Sorry to interrupt,” Sniff said. “But it’s important.”
    “Not now, Teddy,” Whitely said. Whitely always called him Teddy. Whitely used the name affectionately; he thought it brought the men closer. Sniff never had the courage to tell his boss he abhorred it.
    “Sir, I…”
    “Teddy,” Whitely said sharply, without taking his eyes off his screen. “I’m trading.”
    Sniff turned his back and slinked off.
    The camera in the far corner caught his dejected look as he departed.

CHAPTER 5
LANGLEY, Virginia
    D errick Storm was a Ford man.
    Maybe that didn’t seem like a very sexy choice for a secret operative. Maybe, in a nod to the great James Bond, he should have gone with an Aston Martin, or a Lamborghini, or, heck, even just a Beemer.
    But, no. Derrick Storm liked his Fords. He was an American spy, after all. And an American spy ought to have an American ride. Besides, he liked how they handled. He liked the familiarity of the instrument panel. He liked knowing that he had good old Michigan-made muscle at his command. When he was a teenager, his first car had been a non-operating ’87 Thunderbird he bought off a buddy for five hundred dollars of lawn-mowing money and nursed back to glorious health. He drove the car all through high school and college. That had been enough to hook him. He had driven Fords ever since.
    And, in truth, they were a much more practical choice for a man of his profession. Tool around in a Bentley just once and everyone notices you. Drive the exact same route every day in a Ford Focus and you might as well be invisible.
    He kept Fords stashed near airports in many of his favorite cities. In New York, for example, he had recently purchased a new Mustang, a Shelby GT500 with a supercharged aluminum-blockV8—a spirited revival of an American classic. In Miami, he kicked it old school, going with a ’66 T-Bird convertible, with the 390-cubic-inch, 315-horsepower V8. In Denver, he had an Explorer Sport, good for climbing mountain passes on the way to ski slopes.
    In Washington, he kept a blue Ford Taurus. It was a staid choice for a town where ostentatious displays of wealth had been historically frowned on. But this wasn’t just any Ford Taurus: It was the SHO model, the one with the 3.5-liter, 365-horsepower twin-turbo EcoBoost engine, the one capable of throwing 350 pounds of torque down on the pavement. Much like Storm himself, it was a car that looked ordinary on the outside but had a lot going on under the hood.
    It also handled bends well, which made it