Storm Front: A Derrick Storm Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page B

nicely suited to the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which was where Storm found himself just after noontime on Monday. It was a route Storm traveled often, not only because its tight curves made it one of the more enjoyable roads to drive in the D.C. area, but because it led to CIA headquarters.
    He slowed as he passed the oft-mocked sign that read “George Bush Center for Intelligence Next Right” and took the winding exit ramp. He passed through Security, parked, then stopped at Kryptos, the famed copperplate sculpture containing 1,735 seemingly random letters, representing a code that has never fully been broken.
    “Some other time,” Storm said, moving on to the CIA’s main entryway, an airy, arched, glass structure.
    There, he was met by Agent Kevin Bryan, one of Jedediah Jones’s two trusted lieutenants.
    “The hood?” Storm said by way of greeting.
    “The hood,” Bryan replied, handing him a piece of black cloth.
    “Jones better have some seriously cool toys waiting for me.”
    “Toys?”
    “Gadgets. Devices. Exploding toothpaste. Pens that are actuallytiny rockets. Something. I know you guys have been holding out on me.”
    “We’ll see what we can do. Meantime, the hood.”
    The hood. Always, they made him wear the hood. Even with all his security clearances, even with background check after background check, even with all the times he had proven his loyalty, he still had to wear the hood when he was being escorted to Jedediah Jones’s lair, aka the cubby.
    He understood. At the CIA, there’s classified, there’s highly classified, there’s double-secret we’d-tell-you-but-we’d-have-to-kill-you classified.
    Then there’s the unit Jedediah Jones created.
    It was so classified, it didn’t even have a name. It was a kind of agency within the agency, one whose primary mission was to remain as invisible as possible. Its existence was not explicitly stated in any CIA materials. The allocations that funded it could not be found in any CIA bud get. Its employees did not have files in the personnel office, nor could they be found on the office phone tree, nor did they appear on e-mail listservs, nor were their paychecks drawn from normal CIA accounts. Its organization chart was a running gag—Jones handed his people a takeoff of a famous Escher print, one where there was no beginning and no end. The names on the chart were all cartoon characters.
    The architect of this domain—and the master of it—was Jones. He had created this shadowy cadre many years before and, with a seemingly innate understanding of how to manipulate the sometimes-stubborn controls of a federal bureaucracy, had since built it into the elite unit it was today. He did it with a mix of obeisance and threats. Everyone in the high reaches of the CIA seemed to fall into two groups: either they owed Jones a favor, or he had dirt on them.
    With the hood on, the trip to the cubby always felt a little disorienting. Storm was led down a hallway to an elevator, which felt like it first went up, then down, then over, then up again, thendown some more. It was like being on an elevator in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, only it didn’t smell as good.
    By the time the ride was over, Storm was left with the feeling he was underground somewhere, but it was impossible to know for sure. The cubby had no windows, just an array of computers, wall-mounted monitors, and communications devices. They were run by a group of men and women known collectively as “the nerds,” a term that was spoken with fondness and great respect for their abilities. The nerds had been pulled from a broad spectrum of public and private industry to form a cyber-spying unit that was second to none.
    From the comfort of their high-backed chairs, the nerds could read a newspaper over the shoulder of a terrorist in Kandahar, monitor an insurgent’s attempts to make a bomb in Jakarta, or follow a suspected double agent through the streets of Berlin. They also had