Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  Apparently, Horton noticed the doubt in his eyes.

  “Besides,” he added, “I still have some friends from the old days. One of them recognized your name. I’ve got some idea how useful you can be.”

  Crane said nothing. Now he was more worried than ever. What did Horton think he knew? His past with the Hurricane Group? Something else?

  But if he wanted to learn what was going on, here was his opportunity. “All right,” he said at last. “I don’t know how much help I can be, but I’ll do what I can.”

  He could see Horton was pleased. Worede sat still and tight-lipped, her dark eyes revealing nothing.

  “One thing,” Crane said. “Do you have a list of what footage was erased? Locations and times?”

  Horton looked confused. “What good would that do?”

  “Do you have it?”

  “The database is indexed,” Worede interjected. “We can flag the erased sectors and dump it to a spreadsheet.”

  “Would you have someone do that, then, Angela?” said Horton.

  The meeting broke up as Josh returned from his interview. Horton spoke with the two constables, and Worede went to prepare Crane’s spreadsheet. Crane walked Josh back out to the lobby, and then headed outside. He walked quickly through the brisk mountain air to the underground parking garage and found the Lamborghini.

  Inside, Crane sat in the sculpted driver’s seat and put the car in neutral with the parking brake on. Then, from memory, he tapped out a complicated pattern on the paddle shifters, followed by two buttons on the center console.

  Underneath the driver’s seat was a shape designed to appear on scanners as a solid box of electronics, but it was not. As Crane hit the final two buttons, a panel slid out from beneath the seat with a soft click. Crane reached down and removed a compact Sig Sauer P 938 pistol and two magazines from their slender foam bed. Along one side of the pistol’s frame was a clip that held it in place on his belt. Crane loaded the weapon and slipped it inside his waistband at the small of his back. Then he closed the compartment and got out. He pushed a button on the key fob, and the car locked itself with a beep as he walked back out of the garage.

  He hadn’t been entirely truthful with Horton’s security people or the RCMP, he admitted to himself. But this was no time for decorum.

  Chapter 10

  Josh was headed into a breakout session on carbon remediation strategies in developing countries, but Crane caught up with him outside. They found a quiet corner of the lobby, and Crane brought Josh up to speed on Horton’s request for help, including the missing security guard and the deleted camera footage.

  “That’s…disturbing,” Josh said at last. “Why’s he asking us for help?”

  “I gather someone told him about my former line of work,” said Crane. He took the flash drive Worede had given him from his pocket and handed it to Josh.

  Josh took the drive. “Is this the list of deleted video files? Why did you want it?”

  “I think I know what happened,” said Crane. “I didn’t tell Horton because I could be wrong. But if I’m right, he’s in even more trouble than he knows.”

  Crane looked around quickly and confirmed they weren’t being overheard. Instinct. The responses Hurricane had drilled into him were still automatic. That was a good thing, he reminded himself.

  “Hurricane had a tool for this,” he said quietly. “Say you need to destroy information on a target system, and you can’t hide what you’ve done. It’s going to be noticed. The next best option is to delete a lot of things so the enemy isn’t sure what you were after.”

  “Why not just wipe everything?” Josh interrupted. “Reformat the whole volume?”

  “Sometimes you do,” said Crane, “but sometimes it’s better to be subtle, make the target think he’s got a technical glitch instead of an intrusion. So one of the tricks in Hurricane’s toolbox was a piece of malware designed to look like corrupted code instead of a brute force attack. You deleted what you were after, and then it went through the system, erasing other data. Not quite at random, but close enough that even if the target wasn’t fooled, they still couldn’t tell what you meant to erase and what was just collateral damage. They called it ‘haystack.’ Because if you need to hide a needle in plain sight…”

  “You throw a whole bunch of hay on top of it,” Josh finished.

  Crane nodded. “And if these people have tools like that on hand, they’re not amateurs.”

  Josh nodded, deep in thought. Then he held up the flash drive between two fingers. “You think we can pull something out of this?”

  “The deletions aren’t random,” said Crane. “They deliberately wiped anything that would point to the missing man, Wexler. My guess is they’ve been deleting other things as well. It’s just that nobody needed to look up the footage before. But Worede can place Wexler in the loading dock at a particular time last night, so there’s no point in wiping anything showing him before that. But once he leaves there, they wiped any camera showing where he went and what happened to him. So there’s a pattern to that. It’s buried in noise, but I know someone who’s pretty good at pulling patterns out of noise, don’t I?”

  Josh grinned. He’d launched his fortune by building a supercomputing algorithm that watched the movement of the stock market over time and learned to predict it several seconds in advance. Compared to that, Crane thought this didn’t sound all that difficult.

  “I’ll copy this down to the skunkworks,” Josh said after a minute. “We’ll see what they can do with it.”

  “Tell them to keep it on an isolated machine,” said Crane. “We know someone’s slipping malware into the hotel systems.”

  “No kidding,” said Josh. “All right, I’m going to catch the rest of my session. You?”

  Crane checked his watch. “I’ve got about enough time to change, and then lunch with Redpoll.”

  Josh laughed. “Right. Good luck with that.”

  “I’ll bring you some leftovers,” said Crane.

  “In one of those fancy foil swans?”

  “Only the best for you, Josh.”

  Redpoll stayed in a penthouse suite on the hotel’s top floor. Crane needed a special key to summon the private elevator. Even here, among the very top layer of the world’s elite, some people still got the best rooms. And apparently Redpoll was one of them.

  The elevator opened to a large foyer where Swift met him. She quickly kissed him, and then took his hand and led him toward the main living area. Crane suddenly felt like he was meeting his prom date’s parents. It was ridiculous.

  The suite was magnificent, pale white and gray to reflect the glacier visible through the huge sweep of glass at the far side of the room. The furniture was steel and white leather, and a heavy teak dining table and chairs had been set up near the windows. The stark, abstract mountain landscape on one wall was a Lawren Harris—value approximately two million dollars, Crane calculated.

  He had a few moments to take the room in, and then a side door opened, and a man emerged. Redpoll was tall and lean, with close-cropped black hair and aristocratic features. Crane would have placed him in his middle fifties, though Swift had said some things that suggested he was considerably older. He dressed with the kind of simplicity that could only be achieved at great expense, in faded black linen pants tied with a drawstring at the waist, and a cream-colored shirt. He was barefoot.

  “Darling!” he said, striding toward them with his arms outstretched. “And Mr. Crane, of course. Welcome. What a pleasure to meet you.”

  They shook hands, but otherwise, Redpoll made no effort to introduce himself. His real name was irrelevant.

  “Some tea before we eat,” said Redpoll. “I want to get to know you, Mr. Crane.”

  They sat around a low coffee table, Crane and Swift on a sofa and Redpoll in a chair across from them. Swift sat with her legs beneath her and leaned against Crane’s shoulder. The servant brought a tray with small glass cups and a brass pot of tea.

 
“My daughter speaks quite fondly of you,” Redpoll said warmly as the servant poured steaming black tea and heavily sweetened it, “but I know so little. Tell me about yourself, Mr. Crane. Your family, your career, your plans for the future.”

  “Well, I grew up in California…”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “No, only child, I’m afraid.”

  “As was I,” said Redpoll. “That’s too bad. A child needs playmates.” He nodded toward Swift. “I’ve often wondered what might have happened if I’d adopted a second time. And your parents?”

  Crane paused for another sip of tea. He didn’t enjoy talking about his parents. “My mother died when I was young,” he said. “A traffic accident.”

  Redpoll’s expression flashed concern, but Crane wasn’t entirely convinced. “I’m sorry to hear it. Your father wasn’t driving at the time, I hope?”

  Crane’s breath caught. He felt Swift tense beside him, caught her giving Redpoll a look as he raised his glass of tea.

  “He was, actually,” Crane said at last.

  “Oh, that is unfortunate,” Redpoll said as he set down his glass. It clicked faintly on the table. “That must have been difficult for you growing up.”

  “Yes.” Crane pushed back memories he’d grown accustomed to resisting. The funeral, the arguments, the ways he’d found to hurt his father when he felt the need. For a moment, he hid behind his tea. When he was finished, he set down the empty glass, and the servant materialized from nowhere to refill it, unsweetened this time.

  “And so when you left home for college, you went as far away as you could get, didn’t you?” said Redpoll. “To Virginia. Swift mentioned it. Were you a good student, Mr. Crane? I rather think you were.”

  Crane forced a smile. “I worked hard. I did all right.”

  “And then the Coast Guard,” said Redpoll. He finished his tea, and the servant poured him another. “Were you afflicted with that particularly American form of ennui, I wonder? To be a man with education and opportunities, yet still have no clear idea of your future?”

  He stopped suddenly and looked a bit sheepish. “You must forgive me,” he said with a soft laugh. “I went to school in America myself, and I saw it many times. Of course, my own path had been set long ago, so it struck me as odd.”

  “You promised you’d be nice,” Swift chided him. Crane turned to her, and she smiled at him. “Don’t frighten this one away.”

  Crane couldn’t shake the strange feeling of being a teenager inspected by his girlfriend’s father. It was as if Swift and Redpoll had come to some unspoken agreement to improvise a piece of theater, with him as the audience.

  “Well, let us start over,” said Redpoll. “Lunch is served. Allow me to make up for my rudeness with fine food and wine.”

  They rose, and Swift took Crane’s arm as they crossed to the table near the windows. Three chairs waited in an arc facing the panoramic view of the mountains, and Redpoll’s servant was busily pouring wine and laying out trays of food. Swift guided Crane to the center chair, and they sat, with Swift to his right and Redpoll on his left. Crane watched an eagle ride the currents over the mountains in the distance. It seemed to hover, holding position in the air without moving at all.

  Lunch was quail with bok choy, roasted grapes, and tahini yogurt, accompanied by an artichoke salad with truffles that had been dusted with fennel pollen. Redpoll made small talk about the recipes and the skills of the chef he’d brought with him.

  “There is something I have to ask you, Mr. Crane,” Redpoll said at last. “We have to talk about what happened at the Hurricane Group.”

  Crane froze for a moment, and Swift gasped in delight. “I knew it!” she said. “You were Hurricane Group!” She leaned forward to fix Redpoll with a look. “You could have just told me. I had to guess!”

  Crane sensed danger. He knew about Hurricane. He knew everything there was to know, Crane realized with sudden certainty. His mother’s accident. Everything. Redpoll hadn’t asked him a single question to which he didn’t already know the answer.

  “It’s quite all right, Mr. Crane,” Redpoll said. “It’s here that your tale crosses into my domain. Intelligence is a crucial part of my business. I’m very familiar with the Hurricane Group.”

  “Then you’ll know I can’t talk about the details of my work,” Crane said. He guessed Redpoll already knew any details that mattered. What was his source? Had there been a leak inside the group? A plant?

  “Of course,” said Redpoll, “of course. But I can interpolate well enough. They recruited you out of the Coast Guard. That places your entry. Then the fairly lengthy training period before you were ready for field duty. There wouldn’t have been much time before Hurricane was disbanded. Two missions? Perhaps three?”

  Crane said nothing. It was two, but then, he was confident Redpoll already knew that.

  “And then, just as your career is beginning, the agency folds. That must have been a blow.” Redpoll finished his wine and studied Crane’s face as the servant poured him another glass.

  “These things happen in the business,” Redpoll said after a moment. “Something happens that costs an agency the confidence of its patrons. By happenstance, or sometimes by arrangement. There’s no return to grace after a fall. The agency is finished.”

  It took a supreme effort of will for Crane to keep his reaction from his face, to calmly take a bite of his salad. Redpoll didn’t just know all Crane knew. He knew more. He knew exactly what happened to the Hurricane Group. No, Crane realized, he did it. What had Swift said? Team Kilo infiltrated organizations that got in its way and took them down. That was what happened to Hurricane. He was certain of it now.

  “But a happy ending for the agents, at least,” said Redpoll. “Before long, they were all part of a new agency. Except for you. You fell through the cracks. You didn’t take the job offer, so you weren’t there when the old Hurricane agents were picked up again. And then you find a patron in Mr. Sulenski and start to cross paths with the one person I send into the world to be my eyes and my hands.”

  Redpoll put down his fork and leaned slightly toward Crane. His dark eyes were intense as he said, “Why is that, Mr. Crane? Why didn’t you take the job? Did someone tell you not to? Are you still on your third mission for the Hurricane Group?”

  He waited for an answer. Crane saw a vein pulse in his temple. The tension was nearly palpable. Crane glanced at Swift and saw that she felt it too. She sat motionless, a forkful of bok choy two inches above her plate, and stared.

  This was why he was here, Crane realized with startling clarity. That was the real question, the one Redpoll didn’t already know the answer to. And he realized some part of him was afraid of this man. He knew Swift was unpredictable and capable of sudden, ruthless violence. But she didn’t frighten him. Redpoll was something else entirely. With one casual comment, he had shaken the foundations of Crane’s world. The fall of the Hurricane Group hadn’t been some bureaucratic turf battle. Had this man somehow brought it down…and taken its resources for himself?

  Crane knew people who had gone over to the new group, the group he would have been recruited to if he hadn’t left. His friend Chris Parikh was one of them. What was Parikh doing now? Was he really serving his country, or was he being deceived and used against it?

  Suddenly things had become deeply personal. Crane needed to find out the truth, and he needed to talk to people who might know more than he did. His old mentor, Malcolm Stoppard, might know something useful, and he needed to talk to Chris Parikh as soon as possible.

  But first, he needed to survive lunch. Redpoll seemed to think Crane was part of some counter move from the old Hurricane Group, perhaps that Crane had been using Swift to get close to him. He found himself wondering if armed men waited in another room for some signal from Redpoll.

  “Why was that?” Redpoll repeated more urgently. “Why didn’t you take the job they offered you?”

  “I didn’t take the job because
I don’t like being put in a box,” he said, struggling to keep his voice firm and level. “And I can’t help where you send your girl. All Josh and I are doing is trying to head off your vision of the future.” He drained his wineglass and set it down on the table. “Would it really upset you that much to be wrong? If the world keeps stumbling from one crisis to the next but never quite falls down?”

  They held each other’s eyes for a moment, and Crane felt Redpoll sizing him up, assessing whether he believed Crane.

  Finally, Redpoll smiled. “No, Mr. Crane, I wouldn’t mind that in the least. Hope is the province of the young, isn’t it?” He gave Swift a quick wink and a nod, and then clapped his hands for the servant. “But enough of dark subjects,” he said with a sudden joviality. “I have an excellent halwa for us.”

  Chapter 11

  Swift stayed behind after lunch, promising to catch up with Crane later, and he headed downstairs in search of Josh. To his surprise, he eventually found him in one of the hotel’s bars, at a crowded and surprisingly rowdy table in the back corner. From the laughter and the broad gestures, Crane guessed they were on about their third or fourth round. Josh was seated next to a man Crane recognized.

  Theodore Pack was an American real estate developer. Major holdings in high-value commercial properties, office towers in Manhattan and Chicago, mixed use developments in smaller downtown centers, some other scattered projects. Single, handsome, and very rich, he had a reputation as a bit of a playboy, but if he was up to anything more nefarious than playing hardball in real estate, nobody seemed to know about it.

  Right now, he was leaning against Josh’s shoulder while they swayed back and forth, chanting the word “developers” over and over again. Around them, a half-dozen titans of industry and finance laughed themselves hoarse. By now, Crane was used to not knowing what the hell Josh was talking about, but this took it to a whole new level. He caught Josh’s eye and gestured him over.