Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  A door opened, and Chris Parikh stepped out. His fellow agent looked rested and relaxed. He looked like someone who’d gotten his man back to the ship according to plan and enjoyed a good meal and a night’s sleep.

  Parikh grinned. “Damn it, Crane. You just can’t help grandstanding, can you?”

  “Once I realized I wasn’t going to beat you back, all that was left was to go for style points.”

  Parikh said nothing for a long moment. They watched the sun on the ocean and the distant towers of clouds over the African coast. The medics carried the stretcher off to a secure sickbay. Package delivered as ordered.

  “I’m going to miss this,” Parikh said with a nod toward the horizon. “Beats Peshawar, doesn’t it?” He was referring to Crane’s first mission. Parikh had been on that mission as well. It had also not gone according to plan.

  Crane laughed. “Five days in a safe house with nothing to pass the time but a DVD of The Princess Bride? Yeah, I’ll take this.”

  “It was a good movie, though.”

  “Not blaming the film at all,” said Crane. “Or the company.”

  “Agent Crane.”

  A navy lieutenant approached and handed Crane an envelope. “New orders, sir. There’s a helicopter en route to pick you up.”

  “What?” That didn’t make any sense. “We’ve still got Stage Two!”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said the lieutenant. “I just know we’ve got orders to get you back to D.C. by fastest available means.”

  He saluted and then turned and walked off the way he’d come. Crane realized he was still holding the envelope out as if it was radioactive.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Parikh unzipped his flight suit and produced his own envelope from an inside pocket. “Well,” he said, “if it’s anything like mine, you’re fired.”

  Chapter 2

  Key West, Florida–Five Months Later

  Crane nursed his beer and looked out across the beach. The Southernmost Beach Café was supposedly, true to its name, the southernmost bar in the United States. It was part of a hotel called the Southernmost Beach Resort. Across the street was Southernmost House, an old mansion that had been converted into a bed and breakfast. And next to that was the old concrete buoy the town had painted up for tourists to take photos with, called the Southernmost Point.

  Key West took its southernmost-ness very seriously.

  But it was a good place to get away, and Crane wanted to get very far away from his old life. Well, not his old life itself so much as the sudden way it had ended.

  They’d rushed him and Parikh from the middle of the Indian Ocean back to the United States, and Crane had reported to the Hurricane Group’s offices in the basement of a nondescript building that, like the Hurricane Group itself, was technically part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the cube farm, everyone was packing family photos and plants into cardboard boxes. Someone was crying in the kitchen. The entire operation was folding up. Everyone was out of work.

  He didn’t know the stern-faced HR drone who met him in a small conference room, gave him the standard exit briefing, and had him sign and initial page after page of security regulations. Crane managed to slip a couple questions of his own in, but the answers were vague at best. Apparently Hurricane’s funding had been pulled, but he couldn’t get a reason.

  “Idiots,” he’d overheard a voice from another little meeting room say, more loudly than was polite. “Think all they need to do is read everyone’s e-mail and send up a drone once in a while.” And that made as much sense as any other reason Crane could think of. Perhaps he’d chosen a career as a field agent just as that career was ceasing to exist. Maybe there was just no place for field agents anymore.

  The waitress brought him his cheeseburger and another beer. Outside, kids played in the sand and tourists slathered themselves in sunblock before lying out on plastic chaise lounges. Crane noted the fingertips of his left hand drumming the tabletop in annoyance. He’d been unceremoniously tossed over the side.

  He couldn’t even take satisfaction in blaming the anonymous accountants for the free fall his life had become. Agents like Crane knew enough to rate golden parachutes, or silver ones at least. The HR drone had explained that a friendly beltway bandit contracting firm had agreed to take them on as mid-level consultants doing what the HR drone called “Enterprise Operations Management.” Crane had no idea what that meant, but he doubted there would be much real work to do, anyway. It was basically free money in exchange for staying hidden away, out of sight someplace where the government could keep an eye on them. The HR drone hadn’t been pleased when Crane turned down the job.

  At some point he would need to find work. And at that point, he realized, he might start to regret the little flush of pleasure that came from rejecting the one they offered him. His résumé was mostly classified. But he had an unusual combination of skills. He could probably find something here if he decided to stay. He could fly the seaplanes that ferried tourists out to Fort Jefferson. He was dive-rated, so he could work the excursion boats. He could translate Russian intelligence briefings in case there was a market for that here. He’d find something. In the meantime, he was having a fine time feeling sorry for himself, and Key West was a great place to do it.

  After lunch, Crane walked back up Duval Street to his little B&B and stretched out with a book in the shadow of some palm fronds beside the fountain. The fountain’s soft gurgling took the edge off the bass beat from the gay bar down the block. Crane would spend his afternoon reading. Later he would take a run around the southwestern tip of the island, past the Naval Air Station and old Fort Zachary Taylor, and end up at Mallory Square to watch the sunset with everyone else. Then it would be back to Garbo’s for tacos. And tomorrow would be more of the same. He realized he was falling into a predictable routine. Already his tradecraft was going to hell.

  “Mr. Crane?”

  Crane looked up to see a man of about fifty wearing a dark gray suit that was very out of place in Key West, and probably just as uncomfortable.

  Crane sat up. “Good afternoon. Yes, I’m John Crane.”

  “Oh, good,” said the man. “Good. They said at the desk I’d find you back here.”

  Crane noticed the man’s cuff links were gold, and his watch looked like a Rolex. He stood there sweating into his expensive suit and didn’t seem to know where to begin.

  “My name’s Gough,” he said at last. “I'm CEO of a company in Miami called Spencer-Tate Capital Strategies. We mainly do financial planning for high-net-worth clients.”

  “Okay.” Crane gestured to another lounge chair. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  Gough perched on the edge of the cushion and studied Crane intently. Crane looked back, and they examined each other for a long moment. Crane wasn’t sure which of them was more confused as to why their paths had crossed.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Gough?” he prompted at last.

  Gough swallowed. “Well, apparently I’m here to offer you a job.”

  What was it with people offering him jobs he was obviously unqualified for? “I’m flattered,” he said, “but I don’t know the first thing about financial planning.”

  “No…not with Spencer-Tate. We’re part of a multinational conglomerate called the Myria Group. Are you familiar with it?”

  Crane shook his head. “It doesn't ring any bells.”

  “It’s owned by Joshua Sulenski?” Gough looked expectantly at him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, Mr. Sulenski has certainly heard of you. I’m here because apparently, out of Myria’s many global holdings, Spencer-Tate is the one closest to Key West. We started getting urgent calls and e-mails very early this morning, followed by a call from Mr. Sulenski himself. That never happens. He was very specific. Client meetings didn’t matter. Quarterly filing deadlines didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that I get down here as soon as possible and locate you. There are a lot of littl
e hotels and inns in Key West, Mr. Crane. My staff has been calling them all morning while I drove down.”

  “Because this Sulenski wants to offer me a job. Okay, what kind of job?”

  “He didn’t specify. He wants to talk to you himself. Since you don’t know who he is, let me emphasize this. That. Never. Happens. Not ever. To my knowledge, he’s literally never taken a direct role in company operations.”

  “What does he expect me to do, then?”

  “He’s on his yacht, the Normandy, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. He told me he expects to arrive in Key West tonight. He’d like to invite you to lunch tomorrow. He’ll have a boat waiting for you at twelve thirty, at the ferry docks near the cruise ship pier, wherever that is.”

  “I know it.”

  “You don’t have any idea what this is about, do you?”

  “Not a clue,” said Crane.

  Gough shook his head. "Will you meet with him?”

  Crane considered it. The only thing that made him interesting was his previous job. He gathered Gough didn’t know what that was, but Sulenski must know about his work for Hurricane. And wanted him for something.

  Why did this Sulenski need a former spy?

  “I don’t know,” Crane answered. “I guess he’ll have to wait and see if I show up at the pier tomorrow.”

  “Well, that,” said Gough as he stood up, “is not my responsibility. My job was to find you and deliver the invitation.”

  “And nobody can say you haven’t done that.”

  “No, they cannot,” said Gough, already walking toward the B&B’s back porch. “I wish you well, Mr. Crane.”

  “Have a safe trip back,” he said to the back of Gough’s suit. “Watch your speed around Big Pine. They’ll pull you over in a heartbeat.”

  The porch door slammed as Gough vanished back into the building.

  Crane sat watching wispy clouds pass by overhead for several minutes, thinking. Then he wandered inside. Mary, who ran the B&B’s front desk in the afternoons, agreed to let Crane use her PC. He fired up a browser and searched for Joshua Sulenski. He wasn’t hard to find, though Crane entered a few different search terms before he believed what he was seeing.

  Joshua Sulenski was twenty-five years old. In the most recent picture Crane could find, he looked like a college freshman who’d accidentally wandered onstage at an insurance convention and was trying to bluff his way through a speech. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had sandy blond hair that he wore long and floppy so it fell over his eyes. In videos, he was endlessly brushing it out of his face.

  And he was very, very rich. Sulenski was in the upper half of the Forbes Billionaire list, and tied as the youngest person on it. He’d started Myria Group within the last two years. Its business, as far as Crane could tell, consisted of simply owning whatever Sulenski wanted to own.

  Crane assumed he must be a trust-fund baby, heir to some huge corporate empire, but he discovered he was mistaken. Sulenski had become insanely rich, seemingly overnight, in his junior year in the math program at Stanford. Crane didn’t understand exactly what he’d created. Some kind of mathematical formula or computer algorithm. But it apparently made it possible to predict the movements of the stock market almost fifteen seconds in advance, with an accuracy of about sixty percent. The articles he read went to some lengths to warn Crane he shouldn’t quit his day job and expect to get rich investing. To take advantage of Sulenski’s technique, he’d need to start with several billion dollars to spread across the market and hedge all his bad bets.

  So Sulenski’s invention created nothing new. It just helped billionaires become somewhat wealthier billionaires. But apparently that was all it took. Wall Street hedge fund managers poured money into the company Sulenski formed, and he’d invested that in a series of Internet startups. He was very good at picking those, too. Several had already sold for more billions. Sulenski was now a couple years out of Stanford and richer than several third-world countries. He wasn’t a celebrity like so many young Internet prodigies. He kept a low profile and went about his business.

  So why did he want to meet with a recently unemployed covert government agent? Why did he need a spy?

  There was one way to find out, Crane decided. And it came with a boat ride and what he suspected would be an excellent lunch.

  Chapter 3

  The next day, Crane wandered the promenade that led to the pier. A Disney cruise ship was docked at the far side of the little square harbor, and tourists were swarming the line of shops. The ferry to Sunset Key pulled away and made its way around the enormous cruise ship’s bow. A few other small boats rode along the docks. And at the top of one of the ramps stood a man holding an iPad displaying “John Crane” in large black letters. Crane wasn’t sure he’d expected him to actually be there.

  The man recognized Crane as he approached, and put down the iPad. “Mr. Crane,” he said. “Good day, sir. I’ll run you out to the Normandy.”

  He led Crane to the only boat on this particular pier, a small tender, all teak and brass fittings. It looked appropriately expensive. They climbed aboard, and Crane settled in the back. The pilot brought the engines roaring to life, a dock tender cast off their line, and they pulled away. He was committing himself to…whatever he was getting himself into, he realized. But he didn’t think he’d passed any point of no return just yet. And this was certainly more interesting than wasting away in a bar somewhere.

  “It’ll be about fifteen minutes, sir,” the pilot called back. Crane nodded, and then he relaxed and watched the scenery slide past. They moved slowly out of the harbor area, rounded the bow of the Disney ship, and then accelerated out into open water, leaving Key West behind.

  After the promised fifteen minutes, they approached a large yacht. There was no mistaking the Normandy. Crane estimated she was about 350 feet long, sleek and dark. The top decks were white, but the lower hull was black. Toward the stern was a wide red band bearing the legend “Normandy SR1” in huge, squarish white letters.

  As they drew close, a port opened in the hull. The pilot cut his engines and carefully steered directly into the ship. They came to rest in a chamber inside the hull. A crewman closed the door behind them from a control panel, and a web of black straps cradled the boat as the water was pumped from the chamber.

  As the pilot was helping Crane up onto the deck, a door opened and a figure burst in.

  “John Crane. Welcome aboard! Josh Sulenski. Great to meet you! What do you think?” His voice was loud and enthusiastic. “This is sweet, huh? I put a boat in my boat! So I can boat! While I boat!”

  He seemed to think that was very funny for some reason. Sulenski looked like he did in the photos Crane had found online. He was about five eight, with the same floppy hair and glasses. He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt with a female cartoon character Crane didn’t recognize saying, “Let’s Mess with Texas!”

  They shook hands, and Sulenski led him up a stairway. “Sorry about sending Gough after you,” said Sulenski. “Sounded like he had a huge stick up his ass. But he was the quickest way to find you. When I found out you were in Key West and we were only a couple days’ sail away, I knew I couldn’t miss the chance.”

  “First question,” said Crane. “How did you know I was in Key West?”

  “I had people looking for you, and they came back with Key West. Credit card probably. You buy anything recently?”

  “Second question. Why were you looking for me?”

  “Hope you’re hungry!” said Sulenski. “We’ve got some killer wagyu rib eyes on the grill!”

  “Okay, fair enough. I know why in the larger sense; there’s only one thing interesting about me.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Sulenski said. At the top of the stairs, he waved his hand at a pair of frosted glass doors, and they slid open to reveal a partially shaded rear deck with a café table and a serving station. Two of the crew waited at attention. A third was operating a grill burning carefully cut wooden planks. Folding screens
separated them from the rest of the stern deck.

  “But maybe you shouldn’t mention that thing to my other guest,” said Sulenski. “Someone I want you to meet. I think she can help explain things.”

  “Mr. Sulenski, I’d really—”

  “Josh. Please.”

  Crane took a breath. “Josh, I’d really like to discuss why you want to talk to a spy before we—”

  “Too late for that!” Josh said, leading Crane past the screens. “We’re here. Melissa! Come here! Someone I want you to meet.”

  On the port side of the deck was a dining table and chairs. On the starboard side, a woman in a pale orange bikini lay on a chaise lounge. She stood up. She was tall and lean with a rich tan and medium-length blonde hair. She took off her sunglasses and lay them down on a table beside her chair. She was stunning, Crane realized.

  “John Crane, Dr. Melissa Simon,” said Josh. “Melissa, John. John, Melissa, Josh, Melissa. John, Josh. There. I think that covers everybody.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Crane. They shook hands.

  “The same,” said Melissa. “I want to thank you for coming. I really hope you can help.”

  Crane was about to ask what she meant when Josh interjected. “I haven’t filled John in on the details yet. I thought you could do that better than I could.” He tapped the screen of his smart watch, and a waiter appeared and served three margaritas from a silver tray.

  The drinks were perfect, of course. They enjoyed them and made small talk for a few minutes while admiring the view from the yacht’s stern. Crane took another look at Dr. Simon and reminded himself to keep things professional.

  “Melissa is a microbiologist,” said Josh after a few minutes, signaling the shift to the matter at hand. “She runs a biodiversity project that I fund in Puerto Rico.”

  “We’re doing a species census in the rainforest at El Yunque,” she explained. “My own specialty is microorganisms living in mud along stream beds or benthic zones at the bottom of lagoons. But we’re sequencing all kinds of things. Bacteria, diatoms, dozens of small invertebrate species, along with the usual plants, birds, frogs, and insects. We’ve published sequences for more than a dozen undiscovered species this year alone.”