Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  Josh made his way around the table in a chorus of protests. They retreated to a quieter corner of the bar.

  “How was lunch?” Josh asked.

  “Weird. Maybe not this weird.”

  “Hey, drunk guys talk. I’m learning a lot. Got possible IDs for two names from the archive. I’ll tell you over dinner. Wait, no, I promised Packman dinner.”

  “Packman? You guys are on a nicknames basis already?”

  “The greatest social lubricants in the world,” Josh said with a grin. “Alcohol and way too much money. But yeah, he wants me to come in on this project to revitalize downtowns in the rust belt. Offices, stores, affordable housing, park land. It’s sweet.”

  “Why does he need you for that?”

  Josh snickered. “Because his board’s going to shit when they see how thin the margins are. They’ll be all blah, blah, blah, fiduciary duty to shareholders, rhetoric, rhetoric. So he wants to spread the investment around.”

  “Hey, Josh,” Pack shouted from their table. “We need Ballmer over here!”

  “Sorry, John, got to run,” said Josh. “Brief me in the morning.”

  “Ballmer!” Pack shouted.

  “Packman!” Josh shouted back.

  Crane looked at him in raw amazement.

  “What?” said Josh as he turned back toward the table. “I do a good Steve Ballmer.”

  “Do I need to know who that is?” Crane called after him.

  Josh stopped and looked back, confused. “I…guess not.”

  “Excellent,” said Crane. “Have fun. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Crane returned to his room. If Josh was filling in gaps in their understanding of the Skala archive, that was good. It was what they’d come here to do. But Crane’s focus had shifted during his meeting with Redpoll. He kept running through what he knew about the sudden closing of the Hurricane Group, and what had happened afterward. He needed to dig more deeply, but this wasn’t the time. He would have to tread carefully, and he was in no mood for that right now. He was on edge, burning with adrenaline and nervous energy that he couldn’t put to any good use in the near term.

  He changed into workout shorts and a mesh shirt and began working through a routine of pushups, handstands, and balancing moves. The moves were automatic, and Crane’s mind kept looking for some other explanation—a leak, some kind of post-mortem report Redpoll had gotten his hands on that would have told him what he knew. But he kept coming back to the same conclusion. Redpoll knew what happened at Hurricane because he engineered it.

  And that led to only one conclusion. They’d been played. Chris Parikh and the rest of Hurricane still were, from the sound of it. Redpoll made it sound very much as though the new agency that had picked them up was being controlled behind the scenes by someone who didn’t have the interests of the United States at heart. All that had kept Crane out of the same net was the misplaced pride that had led him to turn down their job, and then the unexpected offer from Josh.

  Crane had little tolerance for being manipulated. He didn’t know what he was going to do yet, but when he had a chance to step back and develop the right plan of attack, he would shake that tree and see what fell out. He would shake it hard.

  He was coming out of a forward arm balance when he heard a soft knock at his door. Crane rolled to his feet and stood up, breathing a little hard, feeling the glow of working muscles. He moved quickly to the door on the balls of his feet and opened it. Swift stood there in white denim pants and a popover shirt. She looked him over, a faint smile crossing her lips.

  “Now a good time?” she asked, and then Crane reached out to grab her jeans at the front of the waistband and pull her into the room.

  “Oh!” she said as the door swung closed behind her. “Okay, this works.”

  “Shut up and kiss me,” Crane said in a low voice.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and wrapped her arms around his neck. Crane felt his hunger rising, sweeping away the dark thoughts that had been running through his mind. The energy he’d been struggling to burn off had finally found an outlet. They stumbled back toward the bed. This wasn’t where it was supposed to go, but it would do for now.

  Afterward, Crane lay back atop the bed, naked, with Swift’s head on his chest. The bed clothes were a wreck, and they’d scattered pillows across the floor. Crane watched her chest slowly rise with her breathing. Of all the women he could have gotten involved with, she had to be nearly the worst choice possible. But here they were. There was no denying that he was involved. There was the sex, of course, a primal connection between them where they turned out to be well matched indeed. But there was an emotional connection, as well. Crane would have to pay attention to that. He couldn’t simply close his eyes and leap off the cliff, not with a woman like her. But the cliff was there, just waiting for him to miss a step.

  “I should take you home to Daddy more often,” she said softly. “You’re fun when someone knocks you off course!”

  “Is that what he does?”

  She laughed gently. “I knew he’d probe you within an inch of your life, but I didn’t know anything about this Hurricane Group business. He doesn’t tell me everything.” She reached up to stroke his cheek. “Of course, neither do you.”

  Crane was silent for a moment. He took her hand from his cheek and kissed her fingertips. “Growing up with him must have been something.”

  “Oh, you have no idea,” she said. “I was his daughter, but I was his experiment too. He’s obsessed with the idea of great men and women, the people who rise out of the crowd and make history. What makes someone one of those people? It’s not inherited. All those kings and captains of industry disappointed by their stupid, wastrel children. So he wondered what that quality was, where it came from. And if he had the opportunity to shape someone from childhood, could he make one? So he started with his blank-slate orphan girl, and he built me into his perfect princess, perfect killer, perfect spy.”

  “That sounds like a recipe for misery,” said Crane.

  “It was a nightmare,” she said, “the training, the tests, the loneliness. I never had friends growing up. Fellow students at best, and they were always temporary. And nothing was ever quite good enough. God, I wanted so badly just to please him. It wasn’t like that with your father?”

  Crane snorted. “I didn’t want his approval. I hated him. He killed my mother.”

  “You really thought that? But you were a kid. Surely now…”

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought. He paused and then said, “No. Too much water under the bridge. Maybe someday. But not now.”

  “Having him out of my life,” she said suddenly, “it’s like a dream. It’s all I work for, but it’s hard to even imagine.”

  “I don’t get that,” said Crane. “You’re grown up now. God knows you can take care of yourself.”

  She turned onto her side to look into his eyes, and Crane saw her shake her head slightly. “You have no idea what you’re asking, my dear. There’s nowhere he couldn’t find me. No, it would have to be on terms he can accept. For that, I have to outmaneuver him, carve out my own sphere of influence, fight my way out from under his thumb. The irony is, if I manage to do that, I’ll prove him right. He’ll have formed me into one of his elites. If I can beat him, then he’ll let me live my own life. But not because I beat him. He’ll let me go because I was finally good enough.”

  She sighed and sat up, and then rolled off the bed and walked to the minibar. “You could help me, John,” she said as she removed a small bottle of vodka and a can of cranberry juice. “That’s what I’ve been trying to make you understand. I’m not trying to pull your strings from behind the scenes. That’s what he does.”

  She poured the vodka and juice into a glass and stirred it with her fingertip as she walked back to the bed. “Here.” She handed him the glass, sucked her fingertip clean, and then sat beside him on the bed and reclaimed her drink.

  Crane wanted to believe her, to trust her. Of course, tha
t wasn’t something that would come easily. She layered on personas automatically, by instinct. The wheels were always spinning behind her eyes, and those wheels had more little wheels inside them. She was what Redpoll had made her. Still, there was a real person in there, a vulnerable one trying very hard to put down her weapons and be her true self with him.

  If she could put aside her past with Team Kilo and Redpoll and work alongside him, her skills and knowledge would be enormously valuable. It was a matter of building trust, and that came slowly, piece by piece.

  Swift offered him her drink and then snuggled up against him when he accepted it. “Let’s not think about that right now. I just want to think about us, here and now. What about the guns? What’s going on? Do we need to worry?”

  He took a swallow of Swift’s drink and handed it back to her. “We always need to worry.”

  “I don’t like knowing something’s up while he’s around,” she said. “If he finds out… You don’t want to be in range if he decides there’s a threat.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” said Crane. Then Crane’s phone vibrated, buzzing against the glass top on the nightstand. He leaned over to look at the screen.

  “Josh checking in,” he said.

  She smiled. “Say hi for me.”

  Josh’s text read, “Heard from war room on your deleted footage. They found something.”

  “Okay,” Crane sent back, “tell me over breakfast.”

  “Can come by now,” Josh answered.

  “Kind of busy now.”

  “Ohhh,” Josh sent back, followed by an emoji of a smiley face with bright red hearts for eyes. Crane sighed.

  “What’s Josh up to?” Swift asked.

  “Being Josh,” Crane replied.

  “Well, he doesn’t need you for that,” she said as she reached for his hand and pulled him to her. “Come here.”

  Crane did.

  Chapter 12

  The perimeter trail was a paved asphalt loop that wound through the hotel’s expansive grounds at the upper end of the valley. By day, guests used it as a running trail, but at night, Ashworth had it to himself. He patrolled the trail on an electric cart, stopping every so often to walk out to check areas the trail didn’t reach.

  He whistled tunelessly to himself as he steered the cart along the black ribbon gleaming in the moonlight. On his earpiece, he heard Teehan report back from the checkpoint along the main access road. Everything was routine.

  Ahead of him, an old gravel road crossed the path. He pulled up at the crossroads and stepped out of the cart. The Cambie had been built by the railroad back in the old days. They’d done a great job of making it look like it was nestled away a hundred miles from anywhere. But in truth, the railroad was never far away. The guests had to get there somehow, not to mention the massive amounts of food and other supplies needed to provide a five-star luxury experience deep in the mountains. These days, all that came in by truck. But when the Cambie was built, it was all brought in by rail. They’d run a short spur off the main line to service the hotel, taking care to keep it hidden from the guests. Freight cars had unloaded at a depot concealed behind a low ridge, and then horse-drawn wagons had taken cargo down the gravel road to the hotel.

  The rail spur had long since been closed off, but it provided one of the few accessible paths onto the grounds besides the access road, so it was patrolled. Ashworth took his flashlight from his belt but didn’t turn it on. He could see fine in the moonlight. He tossed the flashlight end for end and caught it as he walked.

  It was a cool night in the mountains. He heard a coyote howling somewhere in the distance. He reached the remains of the old loading platform, timbers slowly rotting away into the ground. Something skittered away into the underbrush at his approach. The rails led from here back out to the switch on the main line, but Ashworth didn’t need to go that far. The spur was gated off a few hundred yards up. He would check the gate and then head back.

  But something was different, he saw as he rounded the gentle curve that aligned the spur with the main line. A shape loomed out of the darkness. There was a car on the tracks.

  What the hell was that doing there?

  Ashworth moved closer. It was a flat car holding something large and bulky covered by a tarp that shone dully in the moonlight. He thumbed the mic button on his radio.

  “Teehan, you there?”

  Teehan’s voice came back quickly, as Ashworth expected. Teehan took his job very seriously. Another shift supervisor might slip out of the cramped checkpoint around midnight, when nothing had moved for hours, to grab a smoke or stretch their legs. But Teehan would always be right there, handling the radio and watching his camera feeds.

  “What’ve you got?” Teehan asked.

  “You hear anything about them opening up the old spur line?” he said.

  “Nobody told me,” said Teehan.

  “Well, looks like they dumped a flat car out here.”

  “Seriously?”

  Ashworth shook his head. “If I was bored, I’d come up with something a lot better than that.”

  “There’s nothing on my sheet,” said Teehan.

  “Probably just needed a place to park it until another train picks it up,” Ashworth said. He flicked on his flashlight and swept the beam over the car.

  “Still should have notified us,” said Teehan. “Get the reporting mark off her, and I’ll run it back to the big house and see what’s going on.”

  “All right, stand by.”

  Ashworth approached the car. It was a dull battleship gray with odd streaks of rust. He played the flashlight down its flank, looking for the reporting mark, the car’s unique identification number that would let them check its status with the railroad. He saw none. That wasn’t right. One end or the other, there should be a one- to four-letter code that identified the owner, and then an ID number for the specific car. It was supposed to be clearly legible on both sides. He stepped carefully over the tracks and checked the other side. The car had no markings at all.

  This was definitely not right. Ashworth played his light over the tarp. It covered two large shapes, like machinery, but he couldn’t identify them. The tarp was lashed down to the bed by cords. The railroad wouldn’t like him tampering with them. But then, they damn well should have re-marked their rolling stock when they repainted it, and they should have let the hotel know they were ditching a car overnight on an old line that crossed onto hotel property.

  Ashworth pulled the utility knife off his belt and flipped it open. He hesitated for a moment, and then sliced through one of the cords. He put the knife away and lifted the tarp enough to get his head and one shoulder under it. He played the light up over the cargo. It gleamed off the inside of the tarp, revealing…airplanes?

  That was his first thought. He saw propellers and wings folded back over the fuselages. They were aircraft of some kind, two of them, propped up at angles so they’d both fit on the flat car. But they were too small for pilots, and there didn’t seem to be any cockpits. Drones, he realized. Big military-looking ones. He couldn’t see any markings, just like the car itself.

  He saw what looked like large ventilated gun barrels beneath the wings.

  What the hell were these things doing here?

  Then he heard a footstep on the gravel behind him. He jerked back in surprise and was caught against the tarp.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted as he bent down to extricate himself.

  Then there was a soft thip sound behind him, and the bullet slammed into Ashworth, punching through the tarp and knocking him against the edge of the bed.

  He was dead before his body finished slowly sliding from beneath the tarp and slumping to the ground.

  “Ashworth, what’s going on? You got that reporting mark yet?”

  Teehan wasn’t happy. This was supposed to be a simple, uneventful shift. Nobody was expected to arrive, and nobody would be leaving. His team would man the checkpoint out of simple thoroughness and hand it over to the
day shift in the morning with nothing to report.

  That was no longer the case.

  He wasn’t going to bother calling back to the main security station until he had something to tell them. From there, they’d be able to contact the railroad’s operations center and find out why they’d suddenly dropped a car on a remote spur line that hadn’t been used for almost thirty years. But he wanted a number to pass along before he started making waves.

  The door opened behind him, and a wave of cool air rushed in from outside. That would be Rainey coming back from West Loop. Teehan kept studying his monitor screens as they switched from one camera to the next.

  “West Loop’s clear,” Rainey said, closing the door.

  “You hear anything about the railroad opening up the old spur line?” he asked. “Ashworth says there’s a damn flat car out there.”

  “No shit?” said Rainey. “No, nobody told me anything.”

  “Supposed to be checking the recording mark,” said Teehan. “I swear to God, if he’s screwing with me.”

  Teehan heard Rainey say, “He’s not.” Then he felt a sharp point slide into his ear, puncturing the eardrum and plunging deep into his skull. There was a sharp flash of pain, and then he was gone. Rainey slowly lowered his head to the desk.

  Rainey wiped the pick on Teehan’s shirt and put it back in his pocket. He rolled the chair holding Teehan’s body away from the desk.

  “Nothing personal,” he murmured. He turned to the monitoring console. He shut down the camera feeds, turned off the outside lights, and finally switched the radio system to a new channel.

  “Oracle,” he said quietly. “Gatehouse is secure.”

  Chapter 13

  “You ever play hot lava when you were a kid?” Crane asked.