Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

Crane and Horton waited for an elevator in the hotel’s south wing. Crane had met Josh for breakfast and gotten an explanation of what the team at Myria had done with the database of missing camera footage. Josh had had to explain it twice, and now Crane was trying to get the idea across to Horton.

  “Sure,” said Horton, sounding somewhat dubious.

  “Same idea,” said Crane. “The system played on a map of the hotel. They gave it your list of what cameras were blind and when. We can place your missing man in the loading dock at a particular time, so that was the starting point. The object of the game was to start at that point and see how many different places it could get to without being seen.”

  The elevator doors slid open, and they got on. Crane punched for the third floor.

  “And you think it found him?” said Horton.

  “Most of the paths dead-ended nowhere,” said Crane. “Some corridor where another camera would have picked him up. But there were two possibilities. One was the temporary storage room beside west entrance two. But people are in and out of there all the time. The other one, south wing, third floor.”

  The elevator dinged, and they stepped out into a foyer. A table on the far wall held a cut-glass vase of flowers. Above it was an abstract painting with colors that matched tones in the carpeting. On either side, hallways turned away at angles designed to cut down on sound. Signs indicated which room numbers were in which direction.

  “This way,” Crane said, turning left. “The footage from the other hall’s still intact. This way got wiped.”

  They turned a corner, and the hallway stretched away in front of them. There was something vaguely ominous about it. The beige walls seemed to converge, and the doorways seemed to grow smaller in the distance, as if the hallway stretched on forever, inescapable. It was the sort of place someone might run through in a nightmare, pursued by some formless horror.

  “Not that many guests on this floor,” said Horton. The south wing lacked the grandiose views of the other wings. It was the less expensive wing, for travelers on a budget. And no one at the Amersfoort Conference was on a budget. Some assistants had been relegated here, but the floor was mostly empty. Nobody else was in the hall. There was a stillness that also bothered Crane.

  “Housekeeping would have been in any occupied rooms,” said Horton. “We can check the others, I guess.”

  He pulled his radio handset from his belt and selected a channel. “This is Horton. I’m on the third floor of the south wing. Can you tell me what rooms are unoccupied, please? There anything unusual on this floor?”

  “Hang on, Chief,” came a woman’s voice. There was a pause, and then, “Five rooms occupied on that floor. Everything else is…Oh, no, it isn’t. One room’s locked out.”

  “Why?”

  “Facilities hold on Three Three Two. Let me see…looks like the lights aren’t working. There’s a note to send up an electrician, but it doesn’t look like they’ve done it yet. Whoa, this is three weeks old! They should have had someone on that by now.”

  “Three Three Two, roger,” said Horton. “Thank you.”

  The door to Room 332 looked like any other. Horton slotted a keycard into the lock. The lock beeped and blinked a green LED, and Horton pulled the door open.

  “Hotel security,” he called out. “Anybody here?”

  There was no answer, so they stepped inside and Horton let the door close behind them. They were in a small foyer with the open bathroom door on one side and a niche for luggage on the other. Crane found a light switch and flipped it. The room lit up just as it should have.

  Crane and Horton traded a look.

  “Someone in facilities too,” said Horton. “What the hell’s going on with my hotel, Mr. Crane?”

  Horton walked slowly into the room without waiting for an answer. Crane turned and went into the bathroom. He quickly scanned the room and saw a hair dryer, towels folded in geometric patterns, small bottles of toiletries lined neatly near the sink. The shower stall was empty. Everything looked normal.

  Back in the main room, Horton had opened the closet. Here, too, everything seemed normal. The safe on the top shelf was open and empty. An ironing board leaned against the wall, the iron hanging in a bracket beside it.

  Crane knelt and checked under the bed. Nothing.

  As he stood up, his eye fell on the sofa against the far wall beside the windows. It was pulled out at an angle. Horton had seen it too. Together, they walked around so they could see behind it. There, piled against the baseboard, was the body of a young man in hotel uniform. His head lay against his chest at an unnatural angle that made it obvious his neck had been broken.

  Horton gasped. “Ah, Jesus. Come on, come on. He was a good kid.”

  Crane felt bad for the dead man, but they had more immediate concerns. He led Horton back toward the door to keep him clear of any evidence. “If we hadn’t found it, how long would that body have stayed hidden here?”

  “Rooms are cleaned daily, whether they’re occupied or not. A facilities hold is the only thing that would keep housekeeping out. But as soon as a room comes off a hold, it’s cleaned and returned to usable condition.”

  So the body could have been discovered any time, Crane realized. All it would take was for someone to notice a hold that had been in place too long and check it out. Just like the bags left in the room for a guest who never arrived. Whoever killed Wexler simply didn’t care that he would be found. Something was going to happen here, and after it happened, nothing else would matter.

  “I need to get someone up here,” Horton said.

  “You need police,” said Crane, “as many as you can get up here, fast. Not just a coroner.”

  “Right,” said Horton as they stepped back into the hall. “Right.” He took out his radio and put in a call to the security desk.

  Crane left him there and headed back to the elevator. He needed to get Josh out of the hotel. Gathering intelligence was no longer a priority. Something was going very wrong here, and Crane was convinced the real trouble hadn’t started yet.

  The conference morning session would be underway in the main presentation hall. That was where he would find Josh. He took the elevator down to the main floor and pulled his phone from his pocket. He was preparing to dial Josh’s ridiculous smart watch when, instead, his phone lit up with an incoming call. Crane checked the screen and saw “Chris Parikh.”

  A chill swept over him. He’d just learned yesterday that there was something wrong with the end of the Hurricane Group, something suspicious about the new organization that had picked up Parikh and the others. And now Parikh was calling him. Too many coincidences. Crane didn’t like or trust coincidence.

  He accepted the call. “Chris? Chris, we’ve got to talk about Hurricane.”

  “Okay, fine,” Parikh interrupted. “But that can wait. I don’t have long here. What’s going on at the Cambie?”

  He stopped and stepped over to the wall beside a polished brass light fixture. “You know I’m here?”

  “Of course we do! It’s the Amersfoort, for God’s sake. Every intelligence service on the planet has eyes on it. Your name came up. Don’t worry, higher-ups assume you’re just working freelance personal security. But you need to know something’s going down.”

  “I know that. What do you know?”

  “There’s chatter about an outfit called ACM Surety. You know them?”

  “No,” said Crane. “They sound like an insurance company.”

  “They’re a mercenary group. They’ve got a pretty heavy presence up there. It looks like they’ve been infiltrating the hotel for months, getting people on staff. It’s got to be about the conference.”

  “What can you tell me about them?”

  “I’m sending you what I’ve got. Hang on.”

  Crane’s phone buzzed and told him someone was trying to send him files. He pressed “accept” to download them.

  “I appreciate the heads-up, Chris,” he said, “but this new group you’re w
orking for, we need to get together and share notes. Something’s not right. Where can you meet?”

  There was just dead air.

  “Chris?”

  Crane checked his phone. The network icon had a slash through it and a “no signal” warning. The hotel was blanketed in repeaters that provided excellent coverage throughout the building. It wouldn’t have simply gone down. Someone was jamming the phones. It was starting.

  The download app notified him that one image had successfully downloaded before his call dropped. Crane pulled it up. The photo was identified as “Shani Abera, Commander, ACM Surety.” The image itself was grainy, shot in low light with the subject facing off at an angle. But there was no mistaking the face.

  It was Angela Worede.

  Crane was already sprinting down the hallway past startled guests when he heard the first gunshots.

  Chapter 14

  Josh arrived at the main conference hall a bit later than he’d intended. He’d met Crane for breakfast to explain the findings from the war room team, and boiling them down to a level Crane found useful had taken longer than expected. It had turned out to be a fairly trivial application of his work, certainly nothing compared to predicting the movements of the stock market. But still, he’d never been good at explaining to laymen what he’d done.

  Especially a layman who knows six different ways to kill a man with one of those little restaurant sugar packets. That’s kind of a big gap to bridge.

  The morning keynote was already underway, and a couple heads turned as Josh slipped in through the large and noisy doors at the rear of the hall. At the podium, a Chinese man was speaking beneath a screen full of PowerPoint graphs. Most of the audience was seated in full rows of chairs near the stage, but Josh didn’t want to draw even more attention. Several round tables filled the back of the room. After a moment of letting his eyes adjust to the darkness at the back of the hall, he spotted Hank David waving to him from one of them. He took a seat beside David, who was accompanied by a large, silent man who scanned him and apparently decided he was harmless.

  Bodyguard. Eh. Crane could take him.

  David nodded to him, and Josh grinned sheepishly. “Overslept,” he murmured.

  “Check those solar projections,” David whispered back with a slightly smug expression. “This isn’t some charity project here. I’ve already got plenty of those. This thing’s going to make a mint.”

  Josh turned his attention to the speaker. His graphs turned out to be charting oil revenues for several major petroleum exporting states against the total expected worldwide value of solar. He was discussing the potential geopolitical disruptions of the transition away from fossil fuels. Some states were adapting, it seemed, but the speaker predicted serious regional instability. Global power was beginning to shift, and the powerful seldom gave up power without a fight.

  He heard the creak of the doors off to one side as someone else came in late.

  Okay, see? You’re not the last one here.

  Then he noticed a current of murmurs sweeping through the room, faces turning. Josh glanced over his shoulder.

  Whoa.

  Swift had come in. She was escorting a tall, dark-haired man who moved with immense dignity to a reserved table.

  Redpoll.

  Beside him, Hank David let out a low whistle, and his silent bodyguard seemed suddenly on edge. Not everybody in the room seemed to know who Redpoll was, but enough did to produce the ripple of surprise.

  “You seeing that?” David whispered. “That’s Redpoll. Has to be, right? Heard a rumor he was coming. He never shows his face in public.”

  “That’s him, all right,” Josh whispered back.

  David looked impressed. “You know him?”

  Josh shook his head. “Met the woman.”

  On stage, the speaker paused to take a drink of water as Redpoll took his seat at the table. It would have seemed natural enough to someone who didn’t know what was going on, but Josh noticed he was more nervous as he resumed his presentation. Redpoll looked on, his expression unreadable. Gradually, the room returned to normal.

  The presentation zeroed in on the impact of declining oil revenues on Russia’s economy and its political influence on former Soviet states. Josh’s mind wandered. It was perhaps a couple minutes later when he again noticed a wave of murmurs and shifting in seats.

  Good God, who outranks Redpoll? Is the Pope here?

  But the problem this time seemed to be mobile devices. People were looking around, tapping their screens, and the speaker’s presentation seemed frozen on a slide. He paused awkwardly and repeated, “Next slide, please?”

  The wireless network crashed.

  Josh checked his watch and saw the screen warning him that he didn’t have network coverage.

  They’ll get it rebooted in a minute.

  Then Josh heard something else onstage, some kind of disruption behind the curtain. The speaker looked to his left, and the mic picked up his gasp of fear. He turned and bolted toward stage right, but only made a couple steps before he was cut down by a burst of gunfire.

  The room erupted in screams as a group of men in tactical gear burst onto the stage and fanned out. Josh heard doors burst open behind him, and then more shooting.

  David’s bodyguard shouted, “Get down!” and knocked David to the floor.

  That jolted Josh into action. He stood up and helped the bodyguard pull the table over to provide at least some cover. Around him, everything was screaming and gunfire. As the table came over, he caught a glimpse of panic and chaos in the tightly packed seats down front. People scrambled for the exits, stumbling over chairs and briefcases, falling over each other. He saw one of the gunmen haul someone off the woman he’d fallen on, throw him to one side, and then shoot the woman beneath him.

  They’re not just spraying the crowd. They’re after specific targets.

  Then the bodyguard hauled him down and pushed him to the floor beside David.

  Josh tapped his watch to call Crane before remembering the network was down.

  They killed it. Can’t call for help. Nobody’s coming.

  The bodyguard produced a pistol from an ankle holster and peered around the edge of the table. Josh looked at the sets of double doors, assessing which was closest and which might be safest to run for. Someone else had the same idea, he realized. A man with a briefcase suddenly leaped to his feet and sprinted for a set of doors. He hit them hard, leading with the briefcase against the push bar. But the doors didn’t give, and the man bounced back, stumbling and nearly falling.

  Magnetic lock. It should have released as he approached. They can override the door locks. How the hell can they do that?

  The man at the door looked around in terrified confusion. Josh waved him over, but one of the gunmen saw him before he could react.

  The man raised his briefcase like a shield, and the burst ripped into it, knocking him back. Josh realized the briefcase was meant to be bulletproof, probably with Kevlar inserts. But part of the burst hit low. The man fell as his legs were knocked from beneath him. The gunman turned toward the overturned table. Josh saw a submachine gun, a heavy armored vest over his shirt, and some kind of mobile device on his belt. Their eyes met, and Josh felt a cold fear wash over him, saw the intention to kill in the gunner’s eyes, the muzzle rising toward him.

  Then an arm grabbed Josh and pulled him back behind the table. Hank David’s bodyguard threw Josh to the floor behind him and fired two shots. The first glanced off an armor plate on the gunner’s chest and knocked him off balance as the second shot drilled through the space where he’d been. But then the gunner went down to one knee, stabilized himself, and fired a short burst. Josh saw the bullets rip through the table above him, heard the bodyguard’s grunt at the impact, felt the splash of blood against his cheek as the bodyguard fell heavily to the floor.

  Josh lay behind the table, paralyzed in terror. His mind raced, but nothing seemed to get through the nervous system to his limbs. He he
ard screaming and gunfire, but his body did nothing. His eye fells on his watch. It showed the same time as it had the last time he’d looked at it, just before the gunfire started.

  All this in less than sixty seconds. This is what it means to freeze. Part of the mind slows time to a stop, but the old lizard brain refuses to cooperate. That’s what makes Crane who he is. He doesn’t freeze.

  What are you doing? Do something!

  Breathe. Sit up. Move!

  Finally, his body started to obey him. Josh sat up. Hank David was kneeling beside his fallen bodyguard. As Josh sat up, David snatched up the bodyguard’s dropped pistol. It was a small automatic that nearly vanished in David’s hand. He pulled the guard’s jacket aside to reveal a spare magazine held in a spring clip on his belt. He ripped it free and said, “Get ready!”

  Get ready to what?

  David’s expression was sheer anger as he stood up and turned toward the stage. He leveled the pistol and fired two shots. On the third, the pistol clicked, and he ejected the magazine.

  “Get down!” Josh yelled at him. David was slapping a new magazine into the pistol as Josh reached up to pull him back down. Then the table came apart around him. The air was full of splinters, and blood was everywhere.

  David gave a surprised grunt and fell to the floor.

  Shit!

  Josh leaned over him. His white shirt was soaked with blood, and Josh could see blood spurting from a wound in his neck.

  “Oh God,” he heard himself saying over and over again. “Oh God, oh God.” But now, perversely, his body seemed to respond automatically to the small voice in the back of his mind that kept calm.

  Direct pressure on the wound. Fingertips. Elevation.

  Blood washed over his fingers as he pressed hard against the wound. He struggled to sit David up, but as he did it, he knew it was hopeless. David was losing blood so fast. His face was already pale.

  Then David reached up to take Josh’s hand. He looked into Josh’s eyes and pressed the pistol into his palm.

  “Make them pay,” he said.

  Then he was gone. He slumped down, and Josh laid him on the blood-soaked rug. He had no idea what to do now. He looked at the gun in his hand. It was tiny, useless against the carnage around him. He looked at his watch, and the minutes digit finally ticked over.