Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  “Why are we doing this in the middle of a crowded ballroom?” Jorge asked, and she saw Paul and Bako nodding in agreement.

  “Because that’s the mission design,” she said.

  “Come on, Captain,” said Bako. “Half the people here are bodyguards for the other half. We smuggled in enough weapons to overthrow a banana republic. You know a bunch of them have to be carrying. There’s too much that can go wrong.”

  Abera wanted to let him say his piece, but in the end, none of this mattered. “That’s not—” she began.

  “He’s right,” Paul said, speaking over her. She was going to have to have a word with him about that. “There’s too much that can go wrong. Especially now that they’re tipped off. We have to rethink the plan.”

  They all looked at her, waiting for her response. She could see in their faces that they understood how fragile the team dynamic had suddenly become. This had gone from a simple status briefing to a critical moment for her command.

  “Do you know how long it’s been since Redpoll even set foot on dry land?” she said softly into their silent anticipation. “What do you think Turnstone’s been doing all that time?”

  Paul started to speak, but she quickly cut him off. “Planning for this. He couldn’t know when or how, but he knew something would make Redpoll step outside his cordon, and he knew how he’d have to work it. There’s an audience for something like this. When the word goes out that Redpoll’s dead, people are going to dig to figure out who’s behind it. Other people are going to start to move. He’s spent too long trying to sort that all out for us to decide twenty-four hours out that we know more than he does. Any of you want to be the one who tells him we decided to ignore his orders and wing it because we lost a couple guns?”

  She looked each of them in the eye, one by one, and made sure they got it. There was too much at stake for her team to go off the rails now, and she knew they wouldn’t. She’d chosen the best of the best. They were just used to jobs where the tactical plans could adapt to the situation as it unfolded. This wasn’t one of those jobs. This had to play just right. If it did, Turnstone would rule the world, as much as one person could, anyway. And she and her team would be on a rocket headed straight into the sky with no limit to where they ended up. But if it didn’t…even she was afraid of Turnstone’s wrath. She’d been its instrument enough times to know she didn’t want to face it herself.

  “We’re sticking to the plan,” she said at last. “As provided.”

  “All right,” they murmured.

  “Okay.”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  “All right,” she said, “let’s say no more about it. Back to business. Where are my drones?”

  They had one drone airborne now. The controls were in the room, and Paul had been running it. But it was a simple quadcopter cruising above the approach road with telephoto lenses and radio gear. They were using it to track guests as they arrived at the Cambie. Tomorrow, when it all went down, she would have two Chinese Rainbow series drones overhead, fully armed and operated by pilots stationed in the ski lodge atop the mountain.

  “In position,” said Bako. “Flatcar dropped on the siding this morning.”

  “What about the pilots, Sandra?”

  “On their way,” Sandra replied. Abera could tell she was still exasperated over the discovery of the guns. “They’ll check in tonight. We’ll stage them to the ski lodge as soon as the first assault team clears it out.”

  “Good,” she said. If everything went to plan, it would be over quickly and she wouldn’t need the drones at all. But this was the culmination of years of work, and Turnstone wasn’t taking chances.

  Next, she turned to Paul, who was responsible for getting the various communications and drone operating gear up to the ski lodge. “Is their equipment in place?”

  “No,” said Paul, looking a little sheepish. That was the wrong thing to say. She needed to rein him in a bit, anyway, and now he’d handed her the perfect opportunity.

  “Why the hell not?” she asked without raising her voice a bit.

  “They’re running all kinds of shit up there,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to move the boxes unobserved.”

  It was the off season for skiing, so the Cambie was taking the opportunity to redecorate the lodge. She’d factored it into the schedule. He should have been able to get the equipment up the mountain by now.

  “I don’t need to hear excuses on this,” she snapped. “I need those consoles ready when the pilots get here.”

  Paul grinned. “Damn, baby,” he said. “Patience. I’ll get them there.”

  She felt the almost audible current pass through the others just as it struck her. What a damn fool he was being, and this was no time for it.

  “Bako,” she snapped, “you’re in charge of getting those consoles onsite and prepped.”

  Bako looked uncomfortable, but snapped off a quick, “Yes, Captain.”

  She turned her glare back to Paul. “Lieutenant, provide any assistance he needs. I want it done by tonight. Can you do that for me?”

  Paul glared back at her. The room was quiet.

  “We can do it,” Bako said into the silence.

  “All right,” she said. “Everybody, back to your jobs.” She was still glaring at Paul, pinning him back against the wall with sheer force of will. “Except you,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  “All right, all right,” Paul murmured. The others quietly filed out. As the door closed, she let out a breath and said, “What the hell was that?”

  “There’s a lot going on,” Paul said, and she could hear his irritation. She’d humiliated him by reassigning the job to Bako. Well, good. “I would have gotten them up there by tonight.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said. He was in the process of stepping toward her, his arms out to embrace her, but the harsh tone of her voice stopped him cold.

  “You don’t do that,” she said, “not in front of them. You don’t use us against me.”

  “What? I wasn’t! You just need to calm down. I know you’ve got this thing about keeping it from the others, but believe me, they might not say anything about it, but they know about us.”

  “Of course they do!” she snapped. “They’re not stupid! That’s not the point. They pretend they don’t see as a courtesy, because it doesn’t affect command discipline. The moment it does, you bet your ass they’ll say something!”

  She turned away and stalked across the room. Outside, the rich and powerful were clustered in little knots on the lawn below, deciding how to run the world. She thought they had bigger problems than hers, but sometimes she doubted it. Paul was American, a former Marine who’d gone from there to private security work for the old Blackwater before drifting into the company. He’d gone private for the money and because he didn’t like dealing with the protocol and bureaucracy. His disciplinary record had been spotty, and had kept him from moving up the ranks, but he seemed quite content with that. He was an excellent battlefield leader, which was why he’d been installed as her second-in-command. But it certainly wasn’t what attracted her to him.

  When she was with him, she could feel herself decompressing, shedding the load of responsibility she carried, like shedding a heavy coat to climb into a warm bath. Her whole life had been defined by one thick, inscrutable rulebook after another, from her religious parents to the IDF, and now to command Turnstone’s personal army. Paul’s casual approach to rules was invigorating, but it came at a price.

  He walked up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not breaking up with me, are you?”

  Was she? No, not that. But she needed to maintain control right now.

  “No,” she said at last. “But we should back off until this is done.”

  She felt him tense.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  She turned and put her arms around his neck. “It’s what we both need. We have to focus. This has to be pinpoint. It’s a hu
ge deal for our future, and it’s got to go right.”

  “What if it doesn’t?” Paul asked softly. “They’re not wrong about those two guns putting everyone on alert around here. The risks just got a lot higher.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him softly. Then, before he got ideas, she made a point of moving him away and breaking the embrace. That was the last of it until this was over.

  “Just be ready to activate Redoubt if we need to,” she said. They had been there for months now, long enough to have all kinds of contingency plans in place and ready to activate. If something went wrong, they could degrade gracefully to the next plan. The drones were part of that. So were things like the explosives in the highway tunnels on either side of the hotel, and the automated landing lights on the glacier.

  “And have the backup team staged and ready to move in.”

  Paul nodded and gave her a smile and a quick salute. “You got it, Captain.”

  Chapter 9

  When Crane returned to his room, he found a message saying the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wanted to speak to him. Josh had gotten the same message, so they headed down together. Josh made nervous wisecracks about Dudley Do-Right until Crane made him stop. At the front desk, they met a security guard who escorted them back into the hotel’s offices.

  The security section was separated from the other administrative offices by two different locked doors. Like an airlock, Crane thought. Beyond them, security occupied a central space surrounded by offices. Horton waited with two RCMP officers he introduced as Constables Hill and Tremblay. They were about Crane’s age, wearing gray uniform shirts and dark-blue pants with yellow striping. Hill was taller and wore glasses. Tremblay had a faint accent that made Crane think he was Quebecois. Apparently they’d driven out from Prince George, about three hours to the west.

  While Josh waited with Horton, the two constables took Crane into a windowless interview room. Tremblay sat across the small table from Crane, while Hill paced in the far corner.

  They asked for the story from his perspective, and he told them all he knew. It didn’t take long.

  “I just want to be clear,” said Tremblay when he’d finished. “You claim the gun doesn’t belong to you.”

  “That’s right,” said Crane.

  “But you do have a gun.”

  “Not with me,” said Crane.

  Tremblay looked dubious, and Hill actually let out a quick, derisive snort.

  “But you’re a bodyguard, correct?” said Tremblay. “It would be natural for you to be armed, right?”

  “I mean, how can you do your job,” Hill interjected, “protect your client, if you don’t have a weapon?”

  “Especially in the States,” said Tremblay. “Anyone could be carrying there, right? Anybody could be a threat.”

  They were trying to get a rise out of him, Crane realized, to throw him off and see if his story would break down. They didn’t really think he was involved in whatever was going on. It was more or less routine.

  “I only need a gun if everyone around me has one,” said Crane, and he let a faint smile cross his lips. “And here, they don’t. The security team did their job.”

  Crane could see Tremblay trying to figure out how much of this he really meant.

  “Here’s the thing,” he went on, “in the States, I might go armed because of what you said, and because I’m licensed to carry a weapon there. Here, I’m not. If I’m violating Canadian law, that’s putting my client at greater risk than going unarmed in a well-guarded facility.”

  The two constables traded a look, and Crane saw Hill make a subtle gesture. He took that to mean that Hill was in charge, and that he’d decided this wasn’t getting them anywhere. They asked him a few more perfunctory questions, confirming specific details of his story. Finally, they thanked him for his cooperation and said the hotel would be able to release his bags.

  Then they walked him out and escorted Josh back to the same room. They seemed even less enthusiastic about interviewing him.

  As the door closed behind them, Horton asked Crane, “Can we talk in my office?”

  Crane followed him in. The office had a window that looked out across the lake at the glacier and the funicular that ran up to the ski lodge. Two chairs sat in front of the desk, and in one was a woman who stood as they came in. She was African, and she wore the hotel security uniform.

  “Mr. Crane, meet Angela Worede,” said Horton as he walked around his desk. “She’s my second-in-command here.”

  She offered Crane her hand. “A pleasure.” Her posture, her crisp enunciation, even the way she shook his hand, all suggested a military background. IDF, he guessed from her accent. She must be Beta Israel, he concluded, the offshoot Jewish community that had taken root in Ethiopia.

  “The same,” he said, and she watched him out of the corner of her eye as they sat back down. Crane quickly scanned the walls. A diploma hung beside Horton’s military decorations and framed photos. Those looked as though they’d been taken in Eastern Europe, in Haiti, and someplace in the Middle East. Crane didn’t know enough to interpret the various Canadian Forces patches and insignia, but the photos suggested Horton had been an officer. He certainly had the experience needed to lead a hotel security operation.

  “I’ve got a pretty uncomfortable situation here,” Horton said after a moment. “Last night, you suggested there must be an inside man. I think so too. I don’t see any other way it could have worked. And that’s bad, because I’ve got no idea who it is. Plus, the situation’s developed since last night.”

  “What’s happened?” Crane asked.

  “Nothing good,” said Worede, shaking her head.

  “One of my men’s gone missing,” said Horton. “A junior officer named Kirk Wexler. He called Angela to the loading dock last night, and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”

  Crane turned to Worede. “What happened at the loading dock?”

  “Your bags were tagged with RFID tags at the airport,” she explained. “But the readers were down the last couple days, so nobody read those tags. They processed everything off the hard copy manifests. But last night, Kirk brought the repaired readers back over from facilities. He checked the tags and found they belonged to a different guest’s bags. That’s when he called me.”

  Now it began to make sense. One person tagged the bags, and that person didn’t even need to be involved. Then, somewhere between the airport and the hotel, a second person—either the driver himself or someone the driver met along the way—planted the guns in the bags based on their RFID tags. When they reached the hotel, the inside man would divert them so they weren’t scanned and then recover the guns.

  But once the tags were accidentally switched, the whole scheme came apart. First, the guns went into the wrong bags. Then, at the hotel, the inside man went by the manifest and diverted the correct bags, never realizing that the tags didn’t match. He must have been dismayed to find that the guns weren’t inside. And right about then, Crane imagined, the bags containing the guns went through the scanners, and the rest was history.

  The only question left was, “What bags were those tags supposed to be on?”

  “They were shipped ahead,” said Worede, “for a guest who hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “And probably won’t,” Horton added. “Looks like that was the plan. Make a phony reservation, ship the guns in advance luggage. Then someone else recovers them, and the guest never shows.”

  “What would happen to the bags, then?” Crane asked.

  “They’d go to the guest’s room,” said Horton. “When the reservation was cancelled, they’d be retrieved and held for pickup. Of course, the guns are long gone now and there’s nothing suspicious about them.”

  Crane didn’t like it. No one just abandoned their suitcases at a hotel when their travel plans changed. Someone would have to show up to retrieve them, or else the hotel staff would start asking questions. It wasn’t how he would have gotten a weapon inside. Of cou
rse, it was possible they didn’t care how much attention the bags drew after the fact. Maybe that just wouldn’t matter by then. He turned back to Worede.

  “So what happened after your man showed you this?”

  “I came back up here to check the guest record,” she replied.

  “And he went where?”

  “We don’t know,” said Horton with a trace of disgust. “It gets worse. Someone’s been erasing security camera footage. Not all of it, just bits and pieces. But there’s missing footage from all over the hotel, some of it going back weeks. Day, night, there’s no pattern to it. But we don’t have anything that shows Kirk after he left the loading dock.”

  Crane knew better than to think that could be coincidence. How many cameras would have seen a security guard patrolling the hotel? A dozen? If everything that showed the missing man was gone, that wasn’t random. Had this Wexler done something last night that he couldn’t let the cameras record?

  “Could he be the inside man?” Crane asked.

  Horton let out a breath. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why would he point out the switched tags?” Worede added.

  “Kirk shares a room in the staff quarters,” Horton continued. “He hasn’t been back to it. And his car’s still in employee parking.”

  Crane could see Worede was uncomfortable sharing this information with him. He didn’t blame her. This was highly unusual.

  “Can I ask why you’re telling me all this?”

  Horton waved one hand to encompass the hotel and its troublesome guests. “Half these people don’t trust the other half,” he said in disgust, “and they’ve all got bodyguards staring each other down. We almost had a fight in a hallway last night, and one of the maids reported someone offered her five thousand dollars to let them into someone else’s room. I don’t want this getting out and setting people off.”

  Horton stopped and shook his head. “But worse than that, I don’t even know who I can trust on my own team anymore. There are rumors, but I’ve clamped down on them as best I can, and we’re keeping the details quiet. There’s damn few people who really know anything about this, and out of them, you’re about the only one I’m pretty sure’s innocent. So, as much as it bothers me, I’m asking for your help.”