Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  “With his people in charge.”

  “They are in charge. You just don’t get that. Well, he’s been waiting all his life. Turnstone’s not so patient. He figures why wait? If the goal is to minimize the damage and speed up the rebuilding, what better way to do that than by bringing it down yourself? More of a controlled demolition. Implode it all from inside. Save the parts you want to keep. Get rid of what you don’t.”

  Good God, these people are all maniacs. Maybe it’s best if they do kill each other off.

  Josh nodded toward Redpoll. “So he figures the world’s coming apart on its own. Turnstone wants to just go ahead and tear it down now?”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Can he do it?”

  “If he’s in charge, with all of Team Kilo’s resources, the other Sector Leads lined up behind him? Yes, he can. Bring down a government here, start a war there, destabilize a currency over there. Sure, he can do it. Even with us just sitting back and watching, it’s all you people can do to keep it on the rails now.”

  Is that why she’s been trying to bring him down all this time? Is she more on the side of the angels than I’ve given her credit for?

  Oh, I wouldn’t credit her with heroism for anything that’s adequately explained by self-interest.

  “So he wants to take over and mold the organization to his own vision,” Josh said finally. “And you said Redpoll’s here to pick a successor. I take it Turnstone isn’t on his short list, and that’s why all this?”

  Swift laughed and shook her head. “No, that would make sense. But he’s got a huge blind spot about Turnstone. Always has. You heard him. I always figured it was fifty-fifty he’d pick Turnstone, anyway. I guess Turnstone just didn’t like those odds.”

  “So what happens if he dies here? Without naming anybody?”

  “Chaos,” she said. “I assume Turnstone has a plan to step in in a moment of crisis, calm the situation down, take over leadership. He’s probably been laying the groundwork for this for years.”

  “But if Redpoll makes it?”

  “Then Turnstone’s finished,” she said with satisfaction. Again, she nodded toward Redpoll. “He might not want to think Turnstone would betray him, but he’s not stupid. When his head’s clear, he’ll know what this is. Turnstone’s dead. But not fast. Not easy. Anybody else waiting to throw their support to him had better watch their backs too.”

  As she spoke, Swift had been edging toward the bedroom doors. Now she suddenly yanked them open. Hanna Swanepoel was standing there. She looked pale. Swanepoel stepped back, her eyes focused not on Swift but on the unconscious figure on the bed.

  “Is that…Redpoll?” she asked, incredulous. “He’s real? That’s him dying in there?”

  There was a tense silence. For a moment, Josh was afraid Swift would kill Swanepoel where she stood.

  Then there was a knock at the door. Josh jumped but quickly felt relief flood through him as three more knocks followed in quick succession.

  Crane was back.

  Chapter 22

  As soon as Crane was inside, Swift took charge of the trauma kit. He and Josh rebuilt the furniture barricade while she quickly disappeared into the bedroom. Swanepoel sat on the floor in a corner and ignored them, staring at the floor between her feet.

  “Everything okay?” Crane whispered to Josh as they upended a loveseat and slid it against the door.

  “Well, your girlfriend’s pretty intense,” Josh whispered back. “But we’ve avoided bloodshed so far.”

  “What’s with her?” Crane asked, nodding toward Swanepoel.

  “She figured out that’s Redpoll in there, and she’s scared to death,” said Josh. “It’s not exactly the wrong reaction.”

  “John,” Swift called from the bedroom, “some help in here?”

  He went into the bedroom, Josh a few steps behind. Swift had the kit spread out on the floor.

  “Help me with him,” she said. “We need to strip the bed.”

  Redpoll was awake, and he tried to sit up. “No,” Swift scolded him, “you lay still.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

  She snorted at him. “Right.”

  They pulled up the sheets and mattress cover on the other side of the king-sized bed, down to the plastic sheet that wrapped the mattress. Swift wiped it down with an antiseptic cloth. Then she climbed onto the bed by Redpoll’s shoulders and motioned for Crane to get his legs.

  Redpoll grimaced as they lifted him and slid him from the rumpled bloody sheets onto the plastic. They piled the bed linens in a corner while Swift gently removed the vest and Redpoll’s blood-soaked shirt. He wore something around his neck, Crane saw. It looked like a thin cartouche of black plastic on a silver cable. She moved it around behind his neck.

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, “but this is going to hurt.”

  “It already hurts,” he said with a wry smile.

  She prepped a shot from the kit and injected it into his shoulder. “I’m saying I can’t put you out,” she said. “This will help.”

  She turned to Josh. “Go raid the minibar. We’ll start with the vodka, gin, whatever’s clear.”

  Then she asked Crane, “You took battlefield medicine? You can assist. Look this over, ask if you don’t understand something.”

  Yes, the Hurricane Group had given him some fairly intensive training in first aid and field medical procedures. He might actually be better trained than she was, hard as that was for her to imagine. Still, this was no time to argue. He looked at how she’d laid out the supplies and decided she knew what she was doing.

  When Josh returned with a double handful of small liquor bottles, she lined them up alongside the plastic bottles of alcohol in the kit. Then she looked around the room and settled on Josh again.

  “Talk to him,” she said. “Sit up there and keep him distracted.”

  “Talk to him?” Josh protested. “About what?”

  “I don’t give a damn,” she snapped. “What do you talk about with your friends?”

  “He’s not my friend,” said Josh.

  Redpoll spoke into the tense silence that followed. “Mr. Sulenski,” he said, “perhaps we could continue our debate regarding the proper response to this world’s many challenges.”

  Already withering under Swift’s stare, Josh sank back and sat on the plastic sheet near Redpoll’s head.

  Swift turned back to Crane and spoke softly, for his ears only. “Probes one through four,” she said, pointing out the spread of gleaming steel instruments. “Forceps one through six.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said with a smile he hoped was reassuring. “Just tell me what you need. He’s in good hands. You can do this.”

  She nodded and then suddenly reached out to touch his shoulder. Crane saw the worry in her eyes. Then she took a deep breath, turned around, and got to work.

  Redpoll gasped as the first scalpel sliced into his skin. She whispered, “Sorry,” but he nodded back to her.

  “It’s all right. Go on.”

  It was a slow process. From time to time, Swift would hand Crane a probe to be cleaned in alcohol or request a tool or a sponge. She was doing well, but he worried it wouldn’t be enough. The bullet was meant to fragment in tissue, tiny shards of metal tumbling through his chest, damaging organs and severing blood vessels. It might have gone deep, and they didn’t have any way to locate the small fragments. There would be damage she couldn’t see, wounds she couldn’t get to, blood oozing into the chest cavity.

  But still she worked with a fierce determination, ignoring his gasps of pain. Redpoll was trying to focus on his conversation with Josh, who looked pale and kept his eyes on the abstract painting above the headboard.

  “Things happen,” Redpoll said to Josh, breathing hard through the pain. “We make mistakes. The consequences good and bad. Stirred together.”

  He gritted his teeth then and groaned as Swift probed deep inside his torso with a pair of for
ceps and drew out a tiny metal fragment.

  “Can’t tell one from the next sometimes,” he said quickly. “Good from bad. Matter of perspective.”

  He took a couple deep breaths as the pain seemed to subside. Swift took a break to change her latex gloves and decide where to go next.

  “Consider the Black Death,” he said, and Crane saw Josh turn despite himself. “It killed half of Europe. Was that good or bad?”

  “Fifty million dead,” Josh replied, “and that’s the low estimate. From a disease? They died at random. They died for nothing.”

  “It killed the innocent in their millions,” Redpoll said softly, “but it broke the back of the feudal system. Towns grew. The source of wealth shifted from land to money. It made possible the modern world.”

  Swift wiped Redpoll’s forehead with a damp cloth as Josh watched and said nothing.

  “If you’re a father,” Redpoll said, “in 1350, watching, helpless, while your children die, then a very bad thing. But for us, those deaths are centuries gone. An abstraction. And here we are in this fine modern world built upon their graves.”

  “One more,” Swift interrupted. “Are you ready?”

  Redpoll took a deep breath and then nodded. “Go ahead.”

  Then he grimaced as Swift’s blade sliced into his flesh again.

  When it was over, Redpoll lay panting and flushed with sweat. Swift had Josh give him water from a bottle with a plastic straw while she cleaned up. She’d removed fragments, sutured damaged blood vessels. But she and Crane both knew she hadn’t been able to get everything. He was still bleeding internally. She’d bought some time, but they still had to get him to a real hospital if he was going to survive.

  “Rest now,” she said softly, leaning over him and stroking his fine hair. “I put something in the water to help you sleep. You need to recover your strength so we can move.”

  “That wasn’t easy,” Redpoll told her. “I trained you well.” He saw the look on her face, and his smile faded. “What is it?”

  “You look old,” she said, and Crane could hear a trace of the little girl she’d once been in her voice.

  He smiled. “I am old.”

  “But you never let it show before.”

  Redpoll was silent for a moment, and then he reached up to the cable around his neck and pulled the black plastic cartouche around.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in alarm. “Don’t do that!”

  Redpoll took the cartouche in both hands and firmly snapped it in two. Swift gasped.

  On the end he’d broken free, Crane saw gleaming metal contacts. Redpoll took Swift’s wrist and pressed the object into her hand.

  “No!” she said. “I’ll get you out of here!” Her voice broke, and Crane was astonished to see tears welling in her eyes. “I’ll get you out.”

  “And when you do,” he said, “you’ll give it back to me. Now, as you said, I need to rest.”

  He settled back to the mattress, dropping the empty plastic shell onto his breastbone. Swift looked at him for a long moment. Then she jammed the broken end into her pocket and herded him and Josh out of the room.

  She closed the doors behind them and then turned to glare at Crane. “Now how do we get out of here? We’re not waiting for someone to come save us. If they aren’t here by now, then they aren’t going to do us any good.”

  As it happened, Crane agreed. Assuming the outside world had realized something was wrong when communications went out, they would have responded from Banff to the east or from Prince George to the west. Both were a long way off, but someone should have gotten here by now. But not only was the enemy still in control of the hotel, they’d flown in additional manpower. They weren’t worried about outside reinforcements, and Crane assumed they had good reason for that. His best guess was that they’d managed to shut down the highway somehow.

  “I found a few things,” he said. He laid out the hotel map he’d taken from security, and then set the master keycard beside it. “This gets us through locked doors.”

  “So where are we going?” Josh asked. “You saw what happened to Pack.”

  “We wait for nightfall,” said Crane. Swift started to object, but Crane said, “He needs the rest, anyway.”

  She nodded and settled back to study the map.

  “Then we need to make our way here,” Crane said, and he pointed to a nexus of lines near the lobby.

  “These are access tunnels,” he said. Crane had read enough of the Cambie’s history to know how the tunnels had come about. Originally, they’d carried steam pipes from the boilers to the outbuildings. Eventually, the Cambie had gone to electric power and the pipes had been removed. But at about the same time, they’d gone to year-round operation. The tunnels made it possible to supply facilities and deliver meals from the kitchens out of sight of guests and out of the weather. The old tunnel network had actually been extended over the years, and now reached nearly anywhere on the grounds.

  “This one,” he explained, tracing a line around the near end of the lake, “takes us to the Summer Pavilion here, and then on to the funicular terminal.”

  Swift frowned. “Why do we want to go there?”

  Crane grinned. “Because while I was out, I watched them land two Chinooks on the glacier.”

  “Chinooks? Two?” Swift’s expression darkened. “They brought in reinforcements. That’s a lot of men.”

  “Well, we were already outnumbered,” Crane said. “What’s a few more? The point is, helicopters. We fly out.”

  “What about the drones?” Josh asked.

  “We’ll give ourselves clearance to fly,” said Crane. He took out the ATAK he’d recovered from the stairwell. “With this.”

  “Give me that.” She snatched it away and studied it for a moment. Then she tapped the screen and checked the unit’s files. Crane saw her flip through the Kill List and Protected List screens. He noticed that the Kill List had a lot more names crossed off than the last time he’d seen it.

  “This is Turnstone!” she said. “This is his command code structure. His enemies on one list, his allies and his puppets on the other. Anyone in the organization will take one look and know he did this.”

  She quickly fumbled for the power button and held it until the device powered down.

  “Why are you doing that?” Crane asked. “We might be able to eavesdrop on them.”

  She shook her head. “When they realize it’s missing, they can remotely wipe the data. That can’t happen.” She gestured toward the bedroom doors. “Even he won’t be able to argue with this.”

  “Well, I guess this will all be worth it if we can keep Team Kilo out of the hands of a dangerous megalomaniac,” said Josh, shaking his head. “Present company excluded, obviously.”

  She glared at him. “Shut up, Josh. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then she turned to Crane, and he could see the intensity in her eyes. “We have to either get out with this, or else transmit the contents. The Sector Leads have to know what happened here. This has to get out, no matter what.”

  Crane nodded. “I understand.”

  “Can I vote for the ‘we get out with it’ option?” said Josh.

  Crane didn’t reply. That would, of course, be the preferred option, and he planned to do all he could to make that happen. But sometimes the mission was more important than anything, including their lives. If the things he’d put together about Team Kilo’s power and Turnstone’s plans for it were true, he could see how this might be one of those times.

  Chapter 23

  At the end of the lake, near the trail that led to the far shore and the ski area, was a high, narrow spit of land that offered a nice view across the water. Despite the charming view, its shape and relative isolation had presented a challenge to the Cambie’s designers as they developed the facility. Ultimately, they had placed a steel and glass greenhouse on the site that they called the Summer Pavilion. Originally it had been an arboretum where winter guests could enjoy some
warmth and greenery. Over the years, it had been used for serving high teas, as a dance hall, and as a concert space.

  Now it was full of frightened hotel guests who whispered to each other and looked nervously at the armed soldiers watching over them.

  Shani Abera stalked the perimeter, looking back across the water at the hotel she’d turned into such a wreck. The civilians were from Turnstone’s Protected List. They sat clustered in the center of the pavilion on outdoor sofas and chairs brought over from the plaza. They’d been told they were being kept there for their own safety until the operation was finished, but they didn’t seem entirely convinced that they weren’t being held hostage.

  They weren’t having a pleasant stay, but Abera wasn’t particularly sympathetic. Finding them, separating them from the others, getting them safely here, and taking care of them were complications she didn’t need. They might be frightened here, but things would be much worse for them if they were still on the loose.

  Her ATAK beeped, and she checked the screen. On the Kill List, a name went from white to scarlet with a black strikethrough. One more down. They were making progress on that list, which gave her something to placate Turnstone, anyway. But none of it mattered as long as Redpoll remained unaccounted for. The extra search teams were clearing the hotel room by room, floor by floor. But it was a sprawling maze ten stories tall in places. Once Redpoll had made it out of the auditorium, this kind of operation had become unavoidable.

  The ATAK beeped again. “Oracle, Bloodhound Four, come back.”

  Bloodhound Four was Kwon’s team. They’d been assigned to clear the main building’s support areas—administrative offices, kitchens, laundry—and then link up with Hudgins’ team, Bloodhound One, in the main lobby. She assumed he was calling to report that he’d done that.

  “This is Oracle,” she said. “What’s your status, Four?”

  “We’ve got a problem, Captain,” Kwon answered. “Hudgins is down. He was patrolling the back waiting lounge. Looks like he lost a fight. He was strangled. No gunshots. Rest of his team was holding the lobby. They never heard a thing.”