Shot Clock Read online

  Shot Clock

  A John Crane Adventure

  Mark Parragh

  Contents

  Also by Mark Parragh

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Afterword

  John Crane Will Return

  Rope on Fire

  Wrecker

  Bird Dogs

  A Waterhaven Media Publication

  First Edition – February 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Waterhaven Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Kerry Hynds, Aero Gallerie

  Edited by Courtney Umphress

  Production Coordination by Nina Sullivan

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Also by Mark Parragh

  There are more John Crane adventures waiting for you! Check out the series here!

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  For my mother,

  Who reads all the Crane books, even though they really aren’t her sort of thing. If I ever find a way to get John Crane into a Highland Scottish romance, I promise I’ll dedicate that one to you too.

  Chapter 1

  British Columbia, Canada

  The road twisted through the high Canadian Rockies, a narrow arc of asphalt carved into a mountainside between sheer stone cliffs shrouded in wire against rockslides on one side and yawning emptiness beyond the guardrail on the other.

  Then the whine of a high-performance V-12 engine echoed through the mountains, and a lone car shot down the highway. The Lamborghini Aventador Superveloce was a single flash of color, a bolt of bright red with black trim, poised between slate-gray clouds, gray stone, and white snow-capped peaks.

  Behind the wheel, John Crane slapped the paddle shifters, and the engine protested as he downshifted and whipped the Lamborghini through a curve. In the passenger seat, Josh Sulenski looked out over the mountains. Josh grinned like a ten-year-old on his birthday.

  “Is this awesome or what?” Josh said as Crane shifted again to accelerate out of the curve. “Look at this scenery! Come on, John, I want to drive.”

  Crane glanced over at the chasm beyond the guardrail. “Yeah, that’s not happening.”

  “Oh, come on! I’m not going to plunge us to our deaths. I know how to drive. I have a license and everything.”

  “You know how to drive a normal car,” said Crane as they shot into a tunnel. “This thing was built from the ground up to kill rich people. I seriously think it was designed by Italian communists.”

  “Damn it,” Josh protested, but then the Lamborghini left the tunnel and Crane downshifted and braked hard into another sudden curve. Josh fell silent and gripped the armrest.

  “Get used to it,” Crane said as they came out of the curve. “There is no way in hell I’m letting you drive this car, on this road, with me in the passenger seat. Just not happening.”

  Josh looked at him in dismay.

  “You know, you could have rented a normal car,” said Crane. “That was an option. But you had to have this ridiculous...You do remember we had to ship the luggage because this thing doesn’t have any trunk space, right?”

  “Well, sure, we could have pulled up in a Subaru Forester. We could have bungie-corded the bags to the roof and everything.” Josh snorted in derision. “It’s the Amersfoort Conference, John. You know who’s coming. Heads of state. Multinational CEOs. People no one’s ever heard of who hide behind the curtains and run the whole train set. A car like this is table stakes.”

  Crane didn’t answer. He braked as the Lamborghini came up fast behind a battered pickup with a camper on the back. He checked the other lane and then whipped around it.

  “Look, we’re coming down into the valley,” said Josh. “It’s an easy road from here.”

  “Pass one of those performance-driving courses I sent you, and you can drive. Did you do that?”

  “You know how busy I’ve been.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Damn it, John, pull over and let me drive or you’re fired!”

  “No,” Crane said calmly. “And no, I’m not.”

  Josh sighed. “Could you at least act like I’m your boss from time to time?”

  Crane pretended to consider it for a moment. “No good,” he said finally. “About as close as I can get is mouthy kid brother.”

  Josh whirled in the form-fitting seat and then suddenly stopped. “That’s…that’s actually kind of sweet, John. You warm the cockles of my heart.”

  “Cockles?”

  “Extra bits for your heart that make it work better. They’re very expensive. Only really rich people can afford them.”

  “Well, I guess you’re lucky, then,” said Crane.

  “Insanely,” Josh answered. “Whoa, look at that!”

  A high mountain valley lay spread out before them. A side road turned off the highway and wound its way down to a deep turquoise lake nestled between the steep slopes at the valley’s end. The Cambie Hotel was perched at one end of the lake. It was a sprawling fantasy castle of rough gray stone encrusted with wings, gables, and high-pitched roofs. It was, Crane admitted to himself, magnificent. Just the sort of place for a quiet gathering of the world’s movers and shakers.

  “Wow,” said Josh. “This is going to be something. And I still want to drive the car.”

  “Why don’t you just buy yourself one?” asked Crane. “It’s lunch money for you, and then you could wrap it around trees to your heart’s content.”

  Josh snorted. “I’m not going to buy one of these. Look at it—it’s ridiculous!”

  Crane grinned. Then he downshifted, braked, and slewed the Lamborghini onto the side road that led to the hotel.

  High above, a quad-rotor drone fell into place behind the car. Its camera zoomed in to capture the plate number, and its radios pinged the car’s GPS tracker. It relayed this information back to a ground-based computer that traced the Lamborghini to a specialty leasing agency in Vancouver. The agency’s records gave the name of a holding company that belonged to another holding company. Eventually the chain came to an end, and in a su
ite in the sprawling hotel by the lake, a laptop pinged for attention.

  The screen displayed the drone’s shot of the car and the license plate, as well as file photos of Josh.

  Beneath them, a message flashed. It read, “JOSHUA SULENSKI—CEO, MYRIA GROUP. KILL LIST: NEGATIVE. PROTECTED LIST: NEGATIVE. ACCEPTABLE COLLATERAL DAMAGE/DIVERSIONARY TARGET.”

  The man in the suite noted this and filed it away in his mental catalog of the hotel’s guests. Then he went back to work on the grenades. He was young and lean, with windblown sun-bleached hair the color of wheat. In his board shorts and Iron & Resin T-shirt, he looked like nothing so much as a southern California surfer dude, which only made him seem more incongruous as he screwed fuse assemblies onto forty-millimeter grenades in the middle of a luxury hotel suite.

  Across the room, a woman paced near the wet bar, a satellite phone pressed to her ear. The man looked up and gave her a quick smile. Her dark skin, hair, and features were East African, but her accented English was pure Israeli, full of dropped “h’s” and precisely pronounced vowels. She was talking to the suit, the client, the guy with a problem to solve and a whole lot of money.

  “I understand,” she said, and there was a certain submissiveness in her voice that he only heard when she was talking to the men with the money. It was the only time she was the hired help. Otherwise, even when they were in bed, she had to be the one in charge. It rankled him, but it was how things were.

  “So to confirm,” she said, “you’re clearing me to move the clock forward?”

  She paused, nodded, and then, “That’s not an issue, but it will raise our profile. It will be harder to cover our tracks if we bail out before doomsday.”

  The man nestled the last grenade back into its foam bed and snapped the case shut. He had a couple hours to kill before he had to do anything else. He picked up the case and slid it beneath the bed.

  “I understand,” she was saying. “I’m just going by the book.”

  There were a few procedural niceties, and then she hung up.

  “How’s Turnstone doing?” he said as she put away the phone.

  She looked up, all business. Of course she was going by the book. It was always the book with this one. “Set the doomsday clock to three minutes.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. The eagle flies at midnight.”

  “Send it,” she said, her voice commanding again. “Redpoll has left his yacht. He’ll arrive within the next twenty-four hours, and we’re moving the countdown up.”

  “Okay, okay.” He spun his chair back around to the desk and tapped a quick command on the laptop. Prearranged messages went out to a dozen different phones and laptops. Across the hotel and its surrounding resort, a dozen people would be staging weapons, activating malware, generally moving one step closer to the point of no return.

  “Sent,” he said. “We’re really going through with this?”

  “What do you think we’re doing here?”

  He stood up and walked to her, turned her around, and began massaging her shoulders. “I just don’t like the plan. It’s not how we’d do this.”

  She began to relax as his thumbs pressed into her muscles and his fingertips stroked her neck.

  “This isn’t someone you get an easy shot at,” she said, softer now. “Turnstone’s spent a lot of time and money setting this up. It’s his plan. We don’t get to change it.” She turned and folded her arms around his neck, smiling. “Just think about payday. Do you have any idea how much this will raise our profile in the right quarters? If this comes off as he thinks, there’s going to be a lot more work coming. And we’ll be at the top of everybody’s short list.”

  “Oh, good,” he murmured as his lips brushed her ear. “More work.”

  “You like the money.”

  He began to unbutton her shirt as she walked him backward toward the bed. “Yes, but I don’t like you working night shifts like this, sleeping days in your own room. I want you to myself.”

  “That must be why I love you,” she said. “Because of your stubborn insistence on sleeping your way to the top.”

  He laughed and fell back onto the bed, pulling her down on top of him. She kissed him hard, running her hands down his muscled torso.

  “Just two more nights,” she whispered as his hand slipped inside her waistband. “Then this will all be over. It’ll be a whole different world, and we’ll be on top of it.”

  Chapter 2

  Tim Fischer worked the Cambie Hotel’s luggage depot at Kamloops Airport, some two hundred miles south of the hotel itself. As guests got off incoming flights, Tim processed their bags and stored them in a secure room to wait for the twice-daily shuttle that hauled them up to the hotel. Then he helped the guests find the car rental counters or gave them maps. It wasn’t that hard, it paid well enough, and it left him plenty of time to read the pulpy crime novels he’d bought at the little giftshop down the concourse next to the Bread Garden. All things considered, it was usually a decent job. But today, it completely sucked.

  They’d been talking for months now about some major convention thing coming to the hotel. Tim had kind of let it go in one ear and out the other. He got called up to the hotel itself for all-hands meetings a couple times a year, and otherwise, what went on up there didn’t affect him that much. But this was different. Usually Tim got maybe a half-dozen guests a day off the handful of commercial flights. But suddenly the place was packed with private jets, and these people were loaded down. One of them had—no shit—thirty-seven bags, and they all had to be logged into the system, RFID tags printed and attached, and then taken back to the holding room. And of course, before he could get through them, the porters would show up with another cart stacked to groaning and another rich jackass demanding VIP treatment.

  The afternoon shuttle was there now, the driver impatient to get going. But Tim still had a long row of expensive bags lined up behind his counter. He’d given up on doing each guest’s bags individually. He’d never get done. Instead, he had the intake sheets lined up on one side of his computer, a box of blank RFID tags next to the label printer, and a row of printed tags lined up on the other side. He was keying in the information from the sheets, taking the tags off the printer, and lining them up one by one. When he was done with that, he’d tag all the bags from left to right and then start moving them out to the shuttle.

  “Come on, man, how much longer?”

  The shuttle driver. Tim didn’t know him. They’d added some new people for this thing, but of course, nobody to help him down here. The new driver had already loaded the bags from the holding room, and now he was waiting outside with the back door cracked, smoking a cigarette and complaining.

  “You know I’ve got like a four-hour drive waiting.”

  Tim whirled and snapped, “I’m going as fast as I…shit.”

  His sleeve had swept several tags off the counter, and he watched them waft gently to the floor like falling leaves.

  “What?” said the driver.

  “Nothing,” Tim shot back. “I’m going as fast as I can.”

  He knelt and gathered up the plain white labels with their meaningless code numbers and letters. They were out of sequence now. He glanced at the row of waiting bags and then at the wedge of sunlight coming through the door.

  Screw it.

  There was no way he was going to run each of these tags back through the machine to sort out which bags they went with. They could figure it out at the other end. It was their own damn fault, anyway, ramping up for something like this and still expecting him to handle this workload on his own.

  Tim sighed, shook his head, and started tagging bags.

  Chapter 3

  Crane pulled the Lamborghini up at the Cambie’s main entrance amid a pack of stately luxury cars and sleek exotics. He spotted Bentleys, Ferraris, a Pagani Huayra, even a Bugatti Chiron. Someone who apparently wanted to bring their luggage along instead of having it delivered had shown up in an Bentayga Mulliner SUV. Crane
had to admit Josh had a point about the Lamborghini being table stakes here.

  Still, the scene looked surprisingly low-key for a gathering of the most influential people in the world. He would have expected platoons of security with automatic weapons, bomb-sniffing dogs, and perhaps a camp of protestors and journalists just outside the perimeter.

  But security seemed considerably simpler here. A subtly armed presence had been at the main gate halfway up the hotel’s drive. There, they’d been checked against the guest list and the car quickly swept for contraband by a scanner mounted on a semi-trailer parked beside the road. But beyond that, Crane had seen very little security, and he could see why. The hotel’s isolation made it possible to keep the security cordon farther away, out of sight of the guests.

  They got out, and Crane handed the keys to a valet.

  “You let him drive,” Josh said in mock annoyance as the valet drove away toward the hotel’s underground garage.

  “I’m not riding with him,” said Crane.

  They headed up wide stone steps and into the lobby. The Hotel Cambie was a sprawling complex built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the late nineteenth century and named for the railroad’s chief engineer. It was one of a handful of great hotels they’d built along the rail route that snaked through the high mountains. This one was a massive pile of granite in the Scottish Baronial style, its irregular roofline studded with crow-stepped gables, pinnacles, and turrets. The sheer walls were dotted with long rows of windows, and the roof was steeply pitched slate with iron snow guards.