Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  Someone was sitting on the front stoop, he realized as he walked up. A girl, with long, bare legs and electric blue hair. She wore a micro skirt and a tight top that barely contained her breasts. She stood up as he climbed the concrete steps, and looked at him shyly through her blue bangs.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked with a smile.

  She smiled back. “Mr. Novotny sent me.” She gestured through the outer door to where Jozef sat stone-faced at the security post. “But he made me wait out here in the cold,” she added, her voice soft and flirtatious.

  “Well, that’s his job,” Kucera said. It occurred to him that there were some advantages to Novotny needing his help. And that perhaps he wasn’t as tired as he’d thought. “But why don’t you come inside now, and we’ll see if we can’t warm you up.”

  He waved to Jozef, who buzzed him through and then raised an eyebrow at the girl as they passed. Kucera winked and slapped her ass to make her giggle.

  “What’s your name, then?” he asked as they went up the stairs.

  “Tonight, I’m whoever you want me to be.”

  ###

  Later, Kucera lay spent in the tangled mess of his bed, the blue-haired girl lying naked at his side, breathing softly against his bare skin.

  Novotny had been holding out on him, he decided. He was going to keep this one instead of sending her back. There was a mix of doe-eyed submission and voracious appetite in her that drove him farther than he’d thought possible.

  “Anton,” she said quietly, “do you mind if I call you Anton?”

  He laughed. “I don’t even know your name. Sure, you can call me Anton. It’s my name.”

  He twisted and stretched over to the nightstand for the glass of vodka he’d left there. He couldn’t quite reach it with her on his other arm. She sat up to let him reach.

  Then something hit him. His hand swept the glass off onto the floor, and then suddenly he was on his stomach with the girl straddling flat. She twisted his right arm behind his back.

  “Good. We need to talk, Anton.”

  He tried to grab her with his left arm but she yanked hard on his right, and he gasped with the sudden wrenching pain.

  “I have a confession to make,” said the girl. “Novotny didn’t really send me.”

  “No matter what you do to me,” he gasped through clenched teeth, “there’s no way you can get out of this place alive.”

  “Calm down,” she said. “Don’t worry, Anton. Nobody’s getting hurt. You liked the first part, didn’t you? You’ll like this part too. We’re going to talk about your friend, Mr. Skala.”

  Kucera groaned. “Ah, Christ. Enough.”

  “I agree,” she said with a smile. “Enough is enough. The man’s got all the subtlety of a mob of drunken soccer hooligans. He’s blundering into situations he doesn’t understand. Stirring things up. Far more trouble than he’s worth, all in all. I take it he’s something of a thorn in your side too.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Kucera asked.

  “I told you,” she said. “Tonight, I’m whoever you want me to be.”

  Then she flipped him over, caught his free arm, and fell forward so that she was holding both his arms down on the pillows over his head. She smiled and started to move against him.

  “The real question is, what are we going to do about Skala?”

  Chapter 30

  Crane wasn’t sure what saved his life. A voice in the hallway outside. Some subtle change in the light from the window. A rustle of fabric. Perhaps the faint medicinal smell of hospitals and death.

  But he awoke in the dark as a plastic mask fell over his face with a sudden hiss of gas. He jerked his head to the side and felt the hard plastic scrape down his temple. Then he slapped the arm away and instinctively kicked up with one leg, but the bed covers blunted his energy and he accomplished nothing. A fist slammed into his gut, and he gasped and sat up fast. His head slammed into something hard.

  Crane rolled away to his right, kicking away the bed covers, and fell off the edge of the bed. He sprang to his feet as a dark shape launched itself across the bed at him. He stepped back and nearly tripped over the nightstand. At least the movement helped. The figure missed him, tried to correct with a wild swing that glanced harmlessly off Crane’s shoulder.

  Crane stumbled toward the windows, instinctively seeking what little light there was. He registered something unnatural on the attacker’s head. Then he was caught up in the long fabric curtains. He clenched one to himself and fell to the floor, yanking the curtain down with him in a rain of metal and plastic clips.

  The suddenly uncovered window let in reflections from the streetlights below. The room grew brighter, but only barely. Crane realized the shape on the man’s head was a set of night vision goggles, not unlike his own.

  Then the man launched a vicious kick into his ribs, and Crane rolled away, struggling to get out of the downed curtain and regain his feet. But the figure followed and kicked him again. This time Crane was able to blunt the impact with a forearm, but it still sent a painful shock through his body. He needed to regain the initiative. Now. He settled onto his back, and the figure closed in to stomp his face. Crane caught the man’s boot and twisted hard, throwing him off balance.

  The man staggered away, fighting to regain his footing, and Crane used the brief respite to get to his feet. He threw a wild swing that connected and did little damage but did knock the other man off balance once more. Crane dove at his midsection, and they went down together—the other man hitting the bedframe hard on the way down. Then they rolled on the floor, punching, gouging, and grappling. Crane managed to slam the man’s head against the bedframe again and this time dislodged the goggles so they sat half on and half off his face, effectively blinding him. He flailed and managed to connect with a kick to Crane’s side. But now Crane had the advantage. He deflected a wild punch and fell across the man’s chest, weighing him down, and pressed a forearm hard against his throat. He held it there, feeling the man’s struggles slowly grow weaker, his ragged breaths fading. Then he was still.

  Crane kept the pressure on until he was positive the man was dead. Then he rolled off onto his back, breathing hard. He was dimly aware that someone in the next room was pounding on the wall.

  Crane staggered to his feet. He was lightheaded; it was hard to keep his balance. More than just adrenaline and exertion. There was that medicinal smell in the air. Somewhere a hiss of escaping gas. He stumbled to the doorway and switched on the lights. The body lay beside the bed, a shape in blue coveralls, its face covered by the dislodged goggles. Off to one side, where it had rolled almost under the suite’s couch, was a dark green metal bottle with a brass valve and a clear plastic face mask. He staggered to it, almost fell beside it, and frantically turned the brass knob until the hissing stopped. Then he forced himself to his feet, turned on the vents and the air conditioning, and staggered to the bathroom. He closed the door, switched on the fan, and sat down hard on the toilet lid and remained there in his boxer shorts until his vision cleared and the metallic taste was gone from the back of his throat.

  When he could stand and focus his vision again, he walked back out into the room. The clock on the nightstand said it was almost 3:30 in the morning. The pounding on the walls had stopped. Whoever they’d awakened had apparently been satisfied. Crane could make out the blinking red reflection of a traffic light through the window.

  The body was still sprawled on the floor beside the bed. The man had worn blue work coveralls and black gloves. The night vision goggles were built into a rubber mask that covered his head entirely. Crane knelt and peeled them away. The man was perhaps in his forties, with rough skin and salt and pepper hair cut short. He searched his pockets and came out with a set of heroin works in a plastic bag: a length of rubber surgical tubing, a bent and tarnished spoon, a cotton ball, a lighter, and a plastic syringe. In the bottom of the bag were a couple small baggies of black tar heroin.

  So the plan had been t
o knock him out with what Crane assumed was some kind of surgical anesthetic, and then stage a heroin overdose. He sat back and took a long, deep breath. The robbery was one thing, but this was quite another. If whoever he was looking for hadn’t been on to him before, they clearly were now.

  He finished searching the body and found only a master keycard for the hotel’s doors. And he noticed the man wasn’t wearing any shoes, just heavy woolen socks.

  Crane quickly dressed. He went to the door and looked out through the viewer. The hallway looked empty. He opened the door and found a pair of work boots set neatly against the wall outside. He took them back inside and put them on the body. He put the drug kit back into the man’s pocket but kept the keycard. Then he dragged the body to the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  He stood there for a long moment, listening. He heard nothing. At some point the hotel would start to wake up. Early risers, newspaper delivery. But for now the coast looked clear. He lifted the body up and hefted it over his shoulder and then took it down the hall to a maintenance closet. The keycard opened the door, and he dumped the body inside, next to the mop buckets.

  He looked at the body slumped amid the mops and the cleaning supplies and the barrel of rags. He resisted the urge to feel badly for him. Whoever this was, the man had tried to murder him in a particularly unpleasant way. Crane could sense that he was getting close to the source of all this malevolence, and the closer he got, the more violence he’d stir up. It had been this way in his fieldwork for the government. Now was no time for sympathy. Now was the time to go to ground and let his enemies reveal themselves by searching for him.

  He closed the door and went back to his room. The curtain was a mess of ripped fabric and broken plastic rings. There was nothing he could do about that. But otherwise he made sure the room was cleaned up and free of anything damning. He packed what little he would need in a shaving kit bag the thieves had left behind and headed downstairs.

  A few minutes later, the valet brought the Audi up to the front entrance, and Crane disappeared into the night.

  He avoided the main streets and drove carefully through the side streets and alleys of the old town, streets designed for horses and pushcarts. The Audi stood out here like a tiger in a flock of sheep. He needed to get it off the street before the city started to wake up.

  Some exploring eventually turned up a private garage near Zelny Trh square. Once he managed to wake up the owner and hand over enough euros to quell the man’s irritation at the ungodly hour, Crane hid the Audi away in a private bay at the back of the building and hit the streets on foot.

  He still stood out, of course. The next step was to ditch his expensive clothes and take on a new persona, one that could move around Brno unnoticed. That was tricky since he didn’t speak the language. He’d never pass for a local, so he’d become a tourist. Just a considerably less flamboyant one.

  He waited until the shops opened in the morning, and then found a second-hand store in a poorer quarter and emerged in an old pair of jeans, a thick army sweater, and hiking boots. The backpack was the perfect touch. It would hold his weapons and gear, and it was festooned with patches from all over Europe, including flags from half a dozen countries, as many cities, and a peace sign. Best of all, it had an honest-to-God Che Guevara portrait sewn onto the back, the young revolutionary’s thick-browed eyes glaring out from beneath his beret against a bright red field. Crane was delighted—it was perfect. He had become the very stereotype of an earnest, if not slightly annoying, graduate student backpacking around Europe. With his hair ruffled and a day’s worth of beard, he was pretty sure he could pass unnoticed now.

  An involuntary yawn reminded him that he was exhausted after a mostly sleepless night. The next step would be to find a youth hostel that kept daytime hours. He’d catch some sleep and stay out of sight until he worked out what to do next.

  Chapter 31

  Klement Novak sat at his desk with his office door closed while the security people stomped back and forth outside, checking cameras and questioning his people.

  He was not having a good morning.

  Everything had seemed so perfect last night at Borgo Agnese. If nothing else, he’d been eating at Borgo Agnese, a place he couldn’t usually afford. It was as if the American, John Crane, had swept into Brno bringing the good life with him, and Novak had been caught up in his wake. The demo had gone very well. He was convinced Crane’s company was going to buy Deštnik, and then he’d be on his way. The sky would be the limit.

  Then, somehow, this morning, it had all vanished like a mirage in the desert. Crane had missed his appointment. Novak and his people had waited in the lobby, growing more and more anxious as the minutes slipped by. He’d tried the cell number Crane had given him, and left a couple urgent messages but got nothing. What he got, after almost an hour of waiting, wasn’t his angel investor but a dozen security men from Jižni Morova BioKapital. They’d invaded the building—Novak could think of no better word for it—and swept every inch of the place. And then the questions had started.

  Who was the American? What was he doing here? What did he say? What was he wearing? During the presentation, which chair did he sit in? What did you talk about at dinner? What did he order?

  It had been the same with his people. Anybody who had so much as seen John Crane was questioned to within an inch of their lives. They were being extremely aggressive for company security men.

  If that’s what they were. They didn’t act like any security Novak had seen before. He’d repeatedly demanded to know what this was about and why he and his staff were being subjected to this treatment. He hadn’t gotten an answer. He was beginning to wonder if they weren’t something else entirely.

  He stood and paced around his office for a minute, and then opened the door and stepped out into the central cubicle area. Eyes followed him, his staff wondering what the hell was going on, what he was going to do about it.

  The security team was moving from desk to desk, inserting flash drives into all the PCs and doing…something.

  “Did the American come to your cube?” one of them was asking poor Nedda, who was so scared she was almost crying.

  “Leave her alone!” Novak called. “She didn’t do anything.”

  The man looked back over his shoulder at him, scoffed, and turned back to Nedda. “Did he touch this computer? Even once?”

  Novak stormed down the hall to the conference room where the main detachment had set up. There was a man there who seemed to be in charge. He would complain to him. If that didn’t help, he’d call his point of contact at the incubator firm itself. There was no excuse for this. They’d done nothing wrong.

  As he turned the corner, two of the men were leaning against the far wall, sharing a cigarette.

  “Why’s the boss so worked up?” one was saying to the other. “It’s one guy.”

  “Why don’t you ask Zajic,” said the other one.

  “That’s the guy that took out Zajic? Shit…”

  Novak stopped short. Both men looked up at him. It wasn’t a friendly look. Novak turned around, and they watched him as he walked slowly back around the corner. He returned to his office and sat down behind his desk, stunned.

  Zajic. Crane had used that name. Emil Zajic. Crane had thought the man was an employee, but Novak had never heard of him. What had Crane said about him? What was his job supposed to be? He tapped a pencil against the edge of his desk until it came to him. Mergers and acquisitions.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. Apparently there really was an Emil Zajic somewhere. And Crane thought he worked for Deštnik.

  Novak got up, walked over to his door, and locked it. Then he sat down at his computer and started to go through the company’s HR files.

  ###

  Crane sat cross-legged on the bottom level of a wooden bunk bed in a dormitory room surrounded by other wooden bunks. It had taken some looking, but he finally found a hostel on a back alley in one of Brno’s older neighborh
oods that would let him check in at midday. The other guests were out during the day, and Crane had the room to himself for now. It was time to check in with Josh. He’d want to know what had happened.

  Crane checked his phone’s clock. It was a little before 8:00 in the morning in California. If Josh was still in bed, Crane would wake him up. He hadn’t had any sleep last night. Let Josh share a bit of the hardship.

  The phone rang several times before Josh picked up. “Just a moment, John,” Josh said in an unusually restrained voice. Then Crane heard voices in the background. Far from waking him up, it sounded like he’d caught Josh in a meeting.

  “Sorry, John,” Josh said finally. “What’s up? How’s Brno?”

  “It’s been better,” said Crane. “Somebody tossed my room last night.”

  “Are you all right? Are you in trouble?”

  “I’m fine. I was at dinner with Novak when it happened. I went through the motions with the police. My cover’s intact with them, at least. But the opposition’s made me.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. How do you know?”

  “Because after the police were gone, somebody else broke into my room while I was sleeping and tried to kill me.”

  Josh was silent for a long moment. “My God,” he said at last. “This is getting bad. I’m starting to think you should scrub and get out of there.”

  “No,” said Crane. “I’m getting closer. That’s why this happened. We’ve poked the bear, Josh. You don’t run now.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. “I agreed we’d do this your way, so okay. Am I clear on the sequence of events? They robbed your room first. Then they came back later and tried to kill you?”