by Mark Parragh
“Give me a year and a hundred of my kin and I would make this a place that armies would break upon like water,” Josh said, mostly to himself.
“What?”
Josh smiled. “Nothing.”
Despite the classic facade, the lobby had been redone in more modern dress. Here, everything was white marble, wood, and brass. Thin sheets of water ran down angular stone planes, and downtempo house music drifted through the conversations of guests.
Josh and Crane found the front desk and checked in. They had adjacent rooms in the west wing, fifth floor, with a view of the lake and Mount Robson, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. The clerk confirmed that their luggage would be brought to their rooms when it arrived on the shuttle van.
“Let’s get the lay of the land,” said Crane, and they set off to explore the conference spaces, restaurants, and other facilities on the ground floor.
They were here to people watch as much as anything else. Crane quickly spotted Scott Dauman, a former White House national security advisor, talking with a man Crane didn’t recognize near the entrance to the hotel’s spa. He took out his phone and pretended to study the screen while he snapped a couple photos.
“Got to catch ’em all,” Josh murmured.
Crane let that one go. Josh was in rare form today. But Pokémon isn’t the worst metaphor for this, he thought. The Amersfoort Conference brought together the most influential people in the world. If the Illuminati were running the world, then this would qualify as a meeting of their steering committee.
And they had indeed come here to tag as many of those power players as they could. Some time ago, Crane had come into possession of an archive of notes compiled by a gangster named Branislav Skala. Skala had described a world of factions struggling for dominance behind the curtains of the more public stage where global issues were supposedly settled. Skala listed names, traced organizational structures, described alliances and rivalries. Ever since then, Josh and Crane had struggled to decipher the dead gangster’s shorthand and identify his cryptic code names.
More recently, they’d been making headway. The faction that had most deeply frightened Skala was one he’d called Team Kilo. Some time later, Crane had met a member of Team Kilo, a woman who called herself Swift. Swift seemed to have her own agenda, one that was somehow advanced by trickling bits of information to Crane. She had identified several names in Skala’s archive, and Crane and Josh had been able to add some pieces of their own to the puzzle. They were beginning to make sense of it, and now they were here to confirm what they’d learned and watch what the players in this new game did when they thought no one was watching. Crane was expecting a busy couple days.
“There’s Viking,” Josh whispered suddenly. Crane turned and then looked away again. “Viking” was Skala’s name for the leader of a small mercenary army based in Sweden. He walked past them with a beautiful brunette on his Brioni-clad arm. She murmured something to him, and Viking laughed.
“Why’s he here?” Josh murmured after they’d moved on.
“He’s in the archive.”
In Skala’s notes, Viking’s private army had been running a secret war in the Central African Republic on behalf of a reclusive family of French aristocrats.
“But this doesn’t seem like his kind of party. He’s a thug.”
“A thug in a forty-thousand-dollar suit,” Crane observed.
Josh shot back, “Well, he’s still just a…” Then he paused. “Wait. Really?”
“That was a Brioni Vanquish II,” said Crane. “It’s a blend of rare fabrics. One comes from an arctic musk ox. They don’t even shear the ox. Someone has to follow it around and collect the fibers it sheds. Forty thousand is actually kind of the low end.”
Crane could see Josh trying to decide if he was serious. “Obviously I’m not spending enough on my clothes,” he said at last.
They headed out a set of glass doors to a stone plaza with a view of the lake. The color was a milky turquoise unlike any water Crane had seen before. The hotel’s literature had told him the color was caused by sunlight refracting through crystals of “rock flour” suspended in the water. Glacial action over centuries had ground the rock into an exceedingly fine dust that was eventually carried down by the streams that fed the lake.
Across the lake, mountains crowded around the shore, steep and crusted with snow and ice. It was late spring, and the hotel was sheltered enough that the temperatures were cool but comfortable. But higher up, bare granite soon gave way to snow and ice. A glacier thrust between two peaks, an enormous ice field stretching back into the distance. The hotel had a funicular railway on the far side of the lake that climbed a steep tunnel bored into the mountainside. A stop partway up gave access to the glacier. Then the funicular continued to the top of the higher peak where there was a ski lodge and slopes.
They continued across the terrace onto a path that circled the lakeshore. Crane spotted other guests wandering the grounds. Some of them he recognized from his research and from photos Swift had sent him.
“Hanna Swanepoel,” he murmured to Josh, nodding toward a lean blonde woman in a bell-sleeved Fendi dress and high black boots. She was the CEO of a British pharmaceutical research firm, and the man she was angrily whispering to was Youseff Arafa, the head of a Cairo crime family. Skala’s notes suggested some connection between the two, though they couldn’t say exactly what it was. If Swift knew, she wasn’t saying.
There were many familiar faces, but seeing so many in one place felt odd. Crane imagined that every intelligence service in the world must be here, just as he and Josh were, to see who showed up and what they were up to.
Their luggage still hadn’t arrived by the time they returned to the hotel, so they decided to grab an early dinner. There were half a dozen different restaurants, but Josh homed in on the hotel’s chophouse.
“Red meat!” he said. “We must thicken the blood, for tomorrow we face the arena!”
Crane snorted. “We sit in on some panel discussions about investment in developing nations.”
“Don’t be fooled, John,” Josh said as the hostess led them to a table. “These are the most powerful, dangerous people on the planet, and they’re loaded for bear.” He spoke quietly as he nodded toward various tables. “Multinational CEO. Multinational CEO. U.S. Senator. Russian oil billionaire. Former British Foreign Secretary. And those are just the ones I recognize.”
They ordered a bottle of Vérité 2013 La Joie and looked out over the lake as the sun set—early and fast in the mountains. As Crane had expected, nothing could keep Josh from his beloved Wagyu steak. Crane had a bison tenderloin with gnocchi and braised carrots. They went through the agenda of meetings and panel discussions and worked out a strategy.
It was dark when they left the restaurant and finally headed up to their rooms. They were as luxurious as Crane had expected, with a panoramic view across the lake to the mountains. To Crane’s surprise, their luggage still hadn’t arrived.
“Where the hell are our bags?” Josh shouted through the door that connected their rooms.
“They’ll get here,” Crane called back. “Be cool.”
Then he heard a knock at the room’s door.
“Mr. Crane? Mr. Crane, this is hotel security. We need to speak with you.”
Crane crossed the room and looked out the peephole. Two men stood outside, wearing charcoal suits and ties. They were standing off to the side of the door, as if they were worried he might open up with a tommy gun through the door.
A moment later, there was a softer knock on the connecting door, and he heard Josh say, “Hey, we may have an issue here.”
He opened the door, and one of the two men was standing back in the hallway so Crane could see him without him having to stand in front of the door.
“Good evening, sir,” he said. “Mr. Crane, you’re here as part of Mr. Joshua Sulenski’s protective detail; is that correct?”
In truth, Crane was Josh’s protective detail, bu
t that was a small distinction. “That’s right,” he said. “What’s this about?”
“Sir, I have to ask if you are armed right now.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t have a firearm with me.” Then he added for effect, “That would be illegal.”
The Canadian government rarely granted protection of life pistol permits, even to people with considerably greater need than Crane. Of course, not having a pistol was a long way from not being armed, but Crane didn’t feel like debating that at the moment.
“Sir, there’s been an incident with your luggage. I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.” It was not a request.
Crane stalled for time while he tried to figure out what could be going on. “What kind of incident? Where are we going?”
“Sir, I need you to come with me to the hotel receiving dock. That’s where your bags are now, and someone will answer all your questions when you get there.”
Crane stepped into the hallway. Josh was coming out of his own room to meet another pair of waiting security officers.
“You know what this is about, John?” Josh asked.
“No idea,” said Crane. “Let’s go find out.”
Chapter 4
Though they’d redone the public areas of the hotel to a high gloss of ultra-modern luxury, the Cambie was an old building. Crane and Josh followed the security men down to the main floor, and then through a service door and into the hotel’s hidden world.
Here, the corridors were narrow, and the floors were old black and white tile. Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling and flickered their pale light. Crane tried to keep track of where they were going and noted details. The Hurricane Group had trained him to file away anything he could. It was possible this glimpse behind the scenes of the Cambie would prove useful at some point.
They descended a short flight of steps, passed through a pair of beige metal doors, and felt the cool of outside air. They had entered a loading dock, one side lined with rolling metal doors for trucks to back up and unload. One door was open to the night air, and suitcases were arranged into groups on the cement floor. In front of them were two long machines that Crane identified as airport baggage scanners. The nearer one was shut down, but a man was loading bags from a cart onto the farther machine, and the conveyor carried them smoothly through the x-ray scanner.
A group of men stood near the exit belt of the nearer scanner, talking quietly. Some wore the same kind of heavy work pants and jackets as the work crew, while others wore the slacks and blazer Crane had seen on the more public-facing staff. One of them turned as they approached. He was the oldest of the group, in his fifties, Crane guessed, heavyset, his salt and pepper hair in a buzz cut. His jacket fit a little too tight, as if he’d had it too long.
“Which of you gentlemen is Mr. Sulenski?” he asked.
Josh gave a shy wave. “That’s me.”
The other man nodded. “And that makes you Mr. Crane. My name’s Ray Horton. I’m the chief of security here.”
“No relation, I assume?” said Josh.
Crane gave him a look.
“I’m sorry?” said Horton.
“Like Tim Horton,” Josh explained. “Just a… little Canadian joke.”
“This isn’t a laughing matter, sir,” said Horton. “Can you identify this bag?”
He turned to show them a bag on the machine’s conveyor belt, and Crane recognized Josh’s Ghurka Trolley rolling trunk, all brass rivets and flat planes of tan leather with white, black, and yellow stripes. Crane noticed his own bag was on the floor beside the machine.
“Yes, that looks like mine,” said Josh.
“You agree, Mr. Crane?”
Crane nodded.
“Okay,” said Horton. “Step closer please. Can you identify this?”
They came closer, and Horton opened the top. Neatly in the center of the bag, on top of Josh’s Norwegian wool sweater, was a stubby MP7 submachine gun with an accessory rail down the barrel and a reflex sight.
“Whoa!” said Josh. He reached forward to touch it, and Horton stopped him.
“Sir, is this your weapon?”
“No,” said Josh. “I’ve never seen it before. John?”
Crane had been running scenarios back and forth. How the gun might have ended up in Josh’s bag. Who might have put it there and why. None of those scenarios ended well.
Horton was looking at him expectantly. He was the bodyguard. It made more sense for it to be his gun than Josh’s. He considered how to play this. The security men and the team who had apparently been checking in the baggage looked on quietly.
“That doesn’t belong to either of us,” he said at last. “I’ve never seen it before, and I know it wasn’t in that bag when we gave over our bags to the custody of the hotel.”
Horton took a moment to size up Crane. Crane took that time to study the gun. The first thing he noticed was that it had no magazine.
“You realize this weapon’s not legal in Canada,” said Horton.
“I do,” Crane answered. “But then, it’s not ours.”
“There are quite a few bodyguards at this event,” said Horton. “A lot of VIPs. I gather they don’t all get along. There’s some tension among the guests. Do you have enemies here?”
Josh chuckled. “We’re the country mice of the global billionaire set,” he said. “Next to the kind of people you’ve got here, nobody’s even going to notice us.”
Crane wasn’t so sure about that.
“So no reason for your bodyguard to bring a gun? Perhaps without telling you?”
“He would have told me,” said Josh.
“Let’s cut to the chase, Mr. Horton,” said Crane. “I’m a bodyguard accompanying my client into a potential threat situation. It’s not unreasonable to think I might want to arm myself. But a couple points. First, if I was going to do that, I’d never put the gun in my client’s bag and expose him to legal risk. Second, I’d bring some bullets.”
Horton had apparently already considered the lack of ammunition. “You might have carried them separately,” he said.
“So if one’s intercepted, at least I’ve got the other? I’d kind of need both. I’d have kept them together. All or nothing. Honestly, I’d be less concerned with us and more with finding whoever’s infiltrated your staff.”
Horton bristled a bit. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, I realize you’ve got no reason to take our word,” Crane admitted, “but that’s really not our gun. So someone else planted it in Josh’s bag. That bag was under our control until we flew into Kamloops and checked it with your team there. The gun had to be planted between Kamloops and here, which means someone who works for the hotel. That someone would have known that incoming bags go through these scanners. And that means they had a plan for getting it through here undetected. That plan didn’t work, for some reason. Someone here call in sick tonight?”
Horton was looking at him with that guarded expression again.
“Either way,” Crane added, “I’d bet whoever drives the bags up doesn’t do the scanning. So at least two people inside.”
One of the crew working the other scanner walked over and murmured something in Horton’s ear. Horton’s expression fell, and he sighed.
“Bring it over,” he said softly.
The worker nodded, and his partner brought over a black and green Valextra Avietta suitcase. They set it on the conveyer beside Josh’s bag, and Horton opened it.
Inside, on top of folded women’s clothing, was another MP7.
This one was just like the first one, Crane noticed. Same rail and reflex sight. No magazine.
“Who’s this one belong to?” Horton asked.
One of the workers checked the label. “Lamarck, J. B.” He punched the name into a handheld device he took from his belt and came up with a room number.
“Seriously?” said Josh. “Jean Baptiste Lamarck?” He looked around, waiting for them to get it, but no one did.
“Eighte
enth-century French naturalist,” Josh explained with a sigh. “Almost hit on evolution, but he thought you passed on acquired traits to your offspring. Kept breeding rats and cutting their tails off because he thought they’d eventually be born with shorter tails.”
Horton and the rest of the hotel staff looked at Josh, unsure what to make of him.
“He does this,” said Crane.
“It could just be a coincidence, I guess,” Josh offered.
Horton turned to his staff. “Get me reservations. Tell them I need to talk to somebody. Anything that hasn’t gone up to the rooms yet, pull it back. I want everything re-scanned. And everything gets double tracked until I say otherwise. This one, and then again over here. I want to know what the hell’s going on.”
Then he turned back to them. “Mr. Sulenski, Mr. Crane, my men will walk you back through. I’ll be involving the police in this. I expect they’ll have some questions for you.”
“If I can be any help…” said Crane.
Horton looked at him again and just nodded.
Two men walked them back through the corridors to the lobby and saw them to the elevators before wishing them goodnight and leaving.
“Okay,” Josh said as the elevator began to rise, “what’s going on?”
Crane shook his head. “They’re not sure about us,” he said. “That means they’ll be watching us until they figure out we’re clean.”
Crane was still trying to work it out. He had far more questions than answers, but someone trying to smuggle two submachine guns into the conference venue couldn’t be a good thing.
Two guns. Where were the bullets?
He was still coming up with questions as Josh closed his door and Crane walked down the hall to his own room.