by Mark Parragh
He found Swift behind a heavy pillar just outside the lobby, her tiny pistol held up beside her face as she peered around the pillar’s edge. The lobby was scattered with overturned furniture and fallen bodies. This is madness, Crane thought. It was as if civilization had collapsed in an instant. Those still fighting were under cover, but Crane swept the space and tried to work out who was fighting whom. He saw glimpses of black uniforms behind tables and clustered behind the fountain. Crane couldn’t see it from here, but the other side probably held the front desk. He guessed the loyal element of Horton’s security team was still holding the desk and the corridors behind it.
Swift gave him an angry look as he fell into place beside her. “Where are they?”
“By the elevators,” he said. “They can’t make it through here.”
As if to underline his point, someone from the front desk side shouted an obscenity and opened up with a shotgun. The blasts echoed through the elevator music, and shots spattered off the abstract brass and marble artworks. The soldiers returned fire in short bursts.
“That’s hotel security,” she snapped. “They’re pinned down. We rescue them, and they’ll help us get a van.”
They were outnumbered and outgunned, but it might have been a viable plan if it was just the two of them.
“We have to find another way,” he said, insistent. “You’re not helping him like this!”
Crane heard a door open somewhere, and new voices. A moment later, the shooting started in earnest, from the lobby toward the desk. It was sustained now, and he saw someone dart from behind the fountain to a closer position behind an abstract sculpture. The enemy had gotten reinforcements. There were enough of them to start advancing under suppressive fire.
Then he heard the distinctive whump of a grenade launcher. He pulled Swift down to the floor as the front desk exploded into a storm of fragments and wood splinters. Black-clad figures were running across the lobby now. It was too late.
Even Swift realized it now. She looked at Crane with desperation in her eyes, and then let him pull her back from the pillar. They fell back, but someone saw them and fired a burst in their direction. Swift aimed her pistol and took him down with two shots to the head, but someone else saw him fall.
Crane heard someone shout, “Bandits left!” and then they were running back toward the elevators as bullets flew around them.
“Hit the button!” Crane shouted, but as they rounded the corner, he saw that Josh was a step ahead. He’d called a car, gotten Redpoll into it, and now was blocking the door as it tried to close against his arm and slid open again.
They flew inside, Swift leaping over Redpoll’s outstretched legs and slamming into the far side of the car. Crane whirled and fired a long burst out into the hallway to discourage pursuit. Still, he saw a figure round the corner as the door was closing and heard bullets slamming into the metal of the outer doors.
The car started up immediately. Crane glanced at the panel and saw no lit buttons. Someone had called the elevator from an upper floor. He looked to Swift and saw she’d reached the same conclusion.
“What do we do?” she asked. “Pick a floor?”
They passed the second floor without stopping. They could hit a button and take their chances, or let the car take them wherever it was going. All Crane knew was that there was someone alive up there. Maybe they needed help. Maybe they knew what was going on.
“You two stay down,” he said. Josh lay Redpoll down on the floor and crouched beside him. Swift took up a position beside Crane, and they leveled their weapons at the door.
They felt the car slow to a stop, and Swift nervously licked her lips. Then they arrived at the fourth floor, and the doors slid open. Crane found himself pointing his weapon into the terrified face of Hanna Swanepoel. The pharmaceutical CEO had changed into jeans, sneakers, and a heavy knit sweater. She had a leather duffel bag over one shoulder, and in her hands, she clutched a wooden table leg, cocked back and ready to swing.
“Jesus!” she shouted as she saw the guns pointed in her face. She fell back and shouted, “No, don’t shoot!”
Crane stepped out and checked the hallway. He saw no other threats, so he lowered the weapon. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s okay. We’re not them.”
Swift and Josh were helping Redpoll out of the elevator. “What are you doing?” Swift asked.
“I’m getting the hell out of here!” said Swanepoel.
“Not that way, you’re not,” Swift replied with a bitter laugh. She reached in and hit the elevator’s red emergency hold button. Now it would stay there until released. Then she turned to Crane. “All right, we went your way. Now what?”
Crane tried to remember the layout of the guest room floors. “Fire stairs, maybe. If we can get outside…”
“I don’t know if we can get him down four flights of stairs,” said Josh.
Redpoll shook his head. “I’m sorry to be so much trouble. You should leave me in one of these rooms, perhaps, and save yourselves.”
“Shut up!” Swift snapped. “We’re not doing that!”
“We do have to stabilize him,” Crane said. “He needs rest. He can’t keep moving like this. I’ll see what I can find.”
He turned and jogged toward the nearest corner, but Swanepoel shouted, “No! Not that way!”
Crane stopped and turned to her.
“Youseff Arafa’s people are holed up back there,” she said. Crane recalled that he’d seen her in intense conversation with the Cairene crime lord not long after they’d arrived. “They’ve got orders to kill anyone who comes around that corner. They wouldn’t even let me in.”
“All right, what’s the other way, then?”
Swanepoel sighed. “My suite. Come on.”
Chapter 17
Shani Abera stepped over the wreckage of an abstract sculpture that had graced the lobby’s entryway. The place was a wreck. Smoke still drifted from small fires, burning armchairs and shards of oak paneling blasted from the walls. At least her team had put out the bigger fires that might have spread. She wasn’t here to burn the Cambie to the ground.
The smells of blood and gunpowder blended in an acrid tang that in some perverse way made her feel at home. Instinctively, she clutched the grip of her weapon a bit tighter. This was a battlefield now, and she was a soldier once again. It had been too long, this pretending to be someone who worked in a hotel. She’d played the part well enough, but it was always just that, a role. At last, she was herself again. It felt good.
She saw the other side of that as she stepped through the ruins of the lobby. Bodies lay strewn among the wreckage. They were the bodies of men and women who had known her as Angela Worede. They’d worked with Angela, liked her, looked to her for guidance and leadership. They’d trusted Angela. That didn’t feel so good.
But she had known that would be part of the job when she’d taken it. She’d spent nearly two years worming her way into this place, getting members of her team into key roles on the Cambie’s staff, making this place ready to become a killing ground in a moment’s notice at her employer’s order. She’d known all along that this was never going to be clean.
Paul saw her picking her way around the battle-scarred fountain and hurried to her side.
“We’re secure here,” he said. “One dead—Compton—three minor injuries. No more resistance from security.”
Shani nodded acknowledgement, but that wasn’t what she was interested in. They needed to suppress the hotel’s security team, but the officers loyal to Horton had proved the least of their concerns. She’d gone to great lengths to smuggle her team’s weapons into the Cambie, but now it seemed that every damn bodyguard in the place was packing a weapon, and half the guests themselves, from the sound of things. This part had gone mostly to plan, but nothing else was.
“Sweep the back offices,” she told him. “Then a small squad to hold the lobby, and everyone else goes to bulk up the search team.”
Paul’s expre
ssion wavered for a moment before he spoke. “We don’t have him?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she took a smart device from a clip on her belt and tapped a push-to-transmit button on its touchscreen.
“This is Oracle,” she snapped. “Who’s got eyes on Redpoll?”
There was only static for a moment, and then one of the team leads answered, “He’s hit. I saw him go down.”
“But you don’t have him?”
“No,” the man admitted. “Someone got him out. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, but I don’t have a body.”
“Who?” she snapped. “How many people are we looking for? Tell me something I can use!”
“The woman with him, and two others,” the man answered. “Couldn’t identify them. They were armed. They took down two of my men between them.”
She’d lost more people than she’d expected, but that happened in battle. If they didn’t take down Redpoll, they’d lose a lot more. Turnstone wouldn’t let any of them live if she failed him.
“Search team,” she said. “Sitrep. Where are you?”
“First floor, south wing,” came the answer. “We’re getting pockets of resistance here. I’ve got a team watching some Protected List civilians in the elevator alcove. I could use those men back.”
“Roger that,” she said. “I’ll send someone to take the civvies off your hands.”
Then she shook her head and stifled a sigh of annoyance. For God’s sake, they were still on the first floor of the south wing! She got it. Every door might have a bodyguard behind it, protecting his client with a nine-millimeter pistol. It was nothing her men couldn’t handle, but it was slowing them down, and she couldn’t afford to be slowed down. Already the outside world would be realizing that something had gone badly wrong at the Amersfoort Conference. The Cambie was remote and hard to reach, but the authorities would be on their way, in force.
She had no choice, she realized to her dismay. She ran through the math in her head again, but the answer came up the same. She couldn’t complete the mission in the time remaining with the resources she had. She needed more people and more time. So it was time for the fallback plan.
“I’m sending you more men,” she said. “Everyone, listen up. All available men are on search teams now. Two-man teams to escort any Protected List to the safe area. Otherwise, clear and sweep. Redoubt option is activated. Gatehouse, confirm that?”
Another pause. Rainey out at the main checkpoint was probably not expecting to be called up at this point. He wouldn’t question her, but she heard the quaver of doubt in his voice as he said, “You’re ordering Redoubt? All of it?”
“It’s all one plan, Gatehouse. We can’t do half of it.”
“Understood, Oracle. Redoubt is go.”
So much for a quick hit and withdrawal, she thought.
But she was committed now. In the checkpoint along the access road, Rainey would be rubbing the sweat from his palms, flipping open a cover on the radio console, and pressing two switches. That would transmit complex digital codes to two receivers along the main highway to the east and west of the Cambie. She could picture the carefully placed strings of explosives going off in precise order. Right now, to the east of the hotel, a tunnel roof was detaching and falling in a chaos of stone and concrete. To the west, the woven wire securing a heavy rockfall was torn away, and the rock blasted free of the slope. It was tumbling down in a roar of smoke and dust, blocking the highway.
In the Cambie’s lobby, she heard none of this, but she’d supervised the placement of explosives herself, and she knew they’d do the job. They were isolated now. She’d bought the time she needed to finish sweeping the hotel. At the same time, from a concealed camp deep in the mountains, helicopters would be lifting off to bring in her reserve forces. Her backup team at the ski lodge would already be hurrying down to the glacier with battery-operated landing lights on sharp ice spikes. The reserve forces had been kept out of sight, and she’d hoped they wouldn’t be necessary at all. But now they would provide the manpower and heavy weapons she needed.
She’d just greatly increased her chances of mission success, but at a cost. This was looking less and less like the terrorist attack it was meant to look like, and more like the sophisticated military operation it actually was. More eyes would look her way. More money would be spent digging through the rubble to uncover the truth. Turnstone would have to work harder to conceal his role in this. He would not be pleased.
But that was nothing compared to what would happen if they somehow let Redpoll slip through their fingers.
Chapter 18
Hanna Swanepoel’s suite wasn’t as devastated as the areas of the hotel that had seen live firefights, but it didn’t look that far behind. Crane was the last one through the door. He closed it and engaged the security lock as Swift and Josh carried Redpoll through the living areas to the bedroom. Swanepoel stood near the fireplace, waving her phone overhead as she tried fruitlessly to get a signal.
She’d obviously left in a hurry the first time. Clothes were scattered across the floor. An expensive designer chair lay overturned near the window, with an empty Hermes Orion suitcase carelessly discarded on top of it. She’d apparently gone through her extensive baggage in a hurry and stuffed only the most precious things into the duffel bag. Crane smelled smoke and found the curled and smoldering remains of a sheaf of papers in a metal wastebasket in the middle of the bathroom floor. On a sideboard, a large flat screen TV hissed softly and displayed static.
Crane recovered the overturned chair and used it to jam the door shut. Then he added another chair and an ottoman for good measure.
“How does something like this happen?” Swanepoel said, not particularly to Crane. She hurried across the room to a landline phone she’d previously knocked off an end table in her haste.
“I can’t raise Kenneth,” she said as she punched numbers into the keypad. “He’s not answering his cell…” She hung up. “His room goes to voicemail.”
“Kenneth’s your bodyguard?”
“Security consult—yes.” She looked up suddenly at Crane in desperation. “He’s dead! God, he’s dead. What am I going to do?”
“You don’t know that,” said Crane. “The cell phones are jammed. He could just be pinned down somewhere.”
“Who are you people, anyway?” she said.
Crane introduced himself. “I’m the ‘security consultant’ for Joshua Sulenski.” He gestured toward the bedroom. “He’s helping in there.”
“Sulenski. The one who broke the stock market a couple years ago?”
Crane grinned. “Well, I think it still works. The other two we found on our way out,” he added, thinking it best not to identify Redpoll if she didn’t already know who he was. “The old man was hit. We were trying to get him to safety.”
“What’s going on out there?” she asked. Crane could see her struggling to get herself under control. He’d just told her he was a bodyguard, and she was the CEO of a major international corporation. She wouldn’t want to appear weak in front of him. Before long, she’d assume she could give him orders.
“We were making for the service garage,” he told her, “but there was a firefight in the lobby. A lot of people with heavy weapons.”
Josh emerged from the bedroom. Crane introduced him to Swanepoel, an introduction that Josh let slide off him.
“He’s as comfortable as we can make him,” Josh said quietly. “She wants to talk to you.”
Swanepoel sat on the sofa with the room phone and started dialing numbers.
“Let me know if you get anyone,” said Crane, knowing she probably wouldn’t. Then he followed Josh into the bedroom. It was the same chaotic ruin as the living area, with more of an emphasis on clothing in the mess. In a corner, Crane spotted the wreckage of the table she’d destroyed to obtain her makeshift club.
Redpoll lay on the bed, his eyes closed, breathing slowly. Swift looked down at him with concern. She looked up as Crane and J
osh came in and crossed the room to join her.
“He’s bleeding internally,” she murmured. That was hardly a surprise. The MP7 round that had penetrated his vest was meant to fragment in the process and cause massive tissue damage. Crane saw the remains of the kitchen first aid kit scattered on the floor beside the bed. Swift knew what she was doing, but Redpoll needed more than they had here.
“We can’t just hole up here and wait for rescue,” she said.
Crane nodded. There was no telling how long that might be. This was no hit-and-run attack. The enemy was digging in. They had an objective, and they had a plan.
“So find a way out,” Swift whispered harshly.
“We need a plan of the hotel,” said Josh. “Maybe there’s a way around the lobby. I thought you had a plan of this place,” he added to Crane.
“Yeah. On the tablet in my room.” Crane steered them out to the suite’s main area. “Let’s let him rest.”
Swanepoel was near the windows, still trying to get her cell phone to work. “Landline’s useless,” she said absently. “Everything goes to a recording. Please hang up and try your call again later. Right.”
Crane gathered Josh and Swift near the suite’s small kitchen. “Okay,” he said to Swift, “okay. Let’s say the two of us go out in front and clear a path. Those two follow with him. What have we got to work with? What’s that thing you’re shooting?”
She showed him the pistol. It was small and square, flat, designed for concealment.
“Taurus Curve,” she said, and Crane noticed that the frame was actually curved to wrap around her leg in its thigh holster. “Three-eighty caliber, six-round magazine. I’ve got two left.”
Crane shook his head and then hefted the MP7 he’d taken from the dead soldier in the auditorium. “Spare mag. Forty rounds.” He removed the magazine in the gun and checked the rounds. “Eight in this one.” He swapped in the full magazine. “And there’s my Sig. Two rounds of nine mil.” It wasn’t much.