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which she had fallen.
    Kornblum was in a different room, one that appeared to be an office. He had been tied to a chair. His head was tilted back at an unnatural angle. Blood and brain matter were splattered on the wall behind him. There was no visible entry wound, but Storm figured it out: The killer had stuck the gun in the banker’s mouth.
    “Awful,” Storm said. “And I assume Kornblum was tortured?”
    “Correct,” Rodriguez said. “All the fingernails on Kornblum’s right hand were missing. So was the back of his skull, for whatever that’s worth.”
    “Do we know what he was being tortured for?”
    “Negative,” Rodriguez said. “There was no sign of any robbery. None of his papers or files were disturbed. The local authorities were quite baffled. A home invasion crew usually at least goes for jewelry, if nothing else. They assumed Kornblum had screwed someone over in a business deal and this was some kind of revenge hit.”
    “What do we know about the assailants?”
    “Crime scene techs found six distinct footprints in and around the house that they believe belonged to the intruders,” Rodriguez said as pictures of boot treads flashed up on the screen. “There were no fingerprints, naturally. No hairs. No fibers. At least not anything useful that’s come back so far. No surveillance cameras. No witnesses. The Kornblums lived in a large house that couldn’t be seen from the road and was separated by some distance from their neighbors.”
    “Didn’t they have any security system?” Storm asked. “Yeah, but Dieter didn’t put any money into it, so it was
Romper Room
stuff. The driveway was gated, but a two-year-old with tweezers could have hot-wired it. There were alarms on the doors and windows, but they were pretty easily defeated, too. The central monitoring was never tripped. It was a clean job.”
    “So nothing from the scene?”
    “Nope.”
    “What about at work?”
    “Kornblum’s bosses weren’t terribly forthcoming with the German authorities. Either that or German authorities weren’t terribly forthcoming with our agents. Our guys were able to sniff out that Dieter did a lot of work in securities of varying sorts, but he also worked in currency, bonds, a bit of everything. It sounded like he had a pretty big job. He was a jack of all trades, if you’ll excuse the pun. But as to something that could get him killed? We haven’t really come up with anything yet.”
    “Is that all we know about Dieter Kornblum?”
    “All that’s worth saying right now, yeah.”
    More like it was all that Jones was willing to say. There was always a hold-back with Jones. Storm had come to accept this as part of working with the man. It was like being the frog who ferried the scorpion across the river. No matter how many times the scorpion promised otherwise, the sting was always coming. It was in his nature. That Storm was still alive was simply because he had grown adept at anticipating when it was going to happen.
    Speaking of things he needed to anticipate…
    “Do you have Clara Strike working this already?” Storm asked.
    “No,” Jones said. “Your girlfriend is otherwise deployed.”
    “She’s
not
my girlfriend,” Storm said, sounding a little too much like a petulant teenager.
    “Fine. Have it your way,” Jones said.
    “Whatever,” Storm spat. “Next.”
    Agent Rodriguez ceremoniously handed the remote control to Agent Bryan, who brought a new image up on the hologram. This one was an Asian man with rounded cheeks and a smooth, boyish face.
    “Joji Motoshige,” Bryan said. “President of global trade at Nippon Financial, one of the Big Four of Japanese banking. Thirty-seven. Unmarried. No kids. Notorious playboy. Pretty much every high-end strip club in Tokyo knew Mr. Motoshige. He’d show up with one girl on his arm and leave with two more. He didn’t seem to bother with Japanese women, but he liked pretty much every other flavor. Argentinian. Ukrainian. Ethiopian. His