Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  “Very good,” said Skala. “You see? Now we can be good friends.”

  Kucera wasn’t sure of that. But he clinked his glass against Skala’s and drank. He could wait to see how things shook out. For now.

  Chapter 5

  San Juan, Puerto Rico

  The Gulfstream’s wheels screamed for a moment as it touched down, and then they were in San Juan. Crane checked his watch. Sulenski had been true to his word. It was dinner time.

  Dr. Simon sat opposite Crane, reading something on a tablet. The bikini had been replaced by khaki slacks and a blue linen shirt, but no matter how she dressed, she was a very beautiful woman. It was too bad she didn’t like him, Crane thought.

  “Here we are,” he said, realizing how stupid he sounded.

  She folded the cover over her tablet and slipped it into her shoulder bag.

  “Here we are.”

  The Gulfstream taxied to a ground handling terminal outside the main traffic flow, and the engines wound down.

  “I guess we may as well make the most of it,” said Crane.

  She smiled politely. “I guess so. There’s no point in going out to Benitez tonight. It’ll be dark and the lab will be closed by the time we get there. I’ve got a place I stay in town. Can you get a room?”

  Josh had provided Crane with a company credit card and told him not to worry about expenses. Coming from Josh, Crane figured that meant something.

  “Won’t be a problem.”

  “Great,” she said as the copilot opened the door. “I know a good place for dinner!”

  The ground crew unloaded their baggage. There wasn’t much. Melissa had just brought an overnight bag for a short trip and Crane traveled light by habit. He slung his battered duffel over his shoulder, took Melissa’s bag, and they walked through the terminal to the taxi stand.

  Melissa guided the taxi to a guest house in the Ocean Park district, near the beach. She quickly dropped off her bag, and they were off again.

  “Condado Vanderbilt,” Crane told the driver.

  Melissa raised an eyebrow but said nothing. They’d passed through the Condado district on the way, and Crane had noted the Vanderbilt. It was the most expensive-looking of the row of hotels along the beach. That suggested it was more likely to have a room available for someone without a reservation. And, he thought, he might as well put Josh’s credit card to the test.

  Twenty minutes later, Crane had a luxury suite on the hotel’s ocean side. The card was approved without a second thought. He looked briefly out from his balcony, over the beach into the setting sun. Apparently working for Josh had its advantages. Then he dropped his duffel bag onto the bed and went down to rejoin Melissa.

  The next stop was Columbus Square at the edge of Old San Juan. Melissa explained they’d walk from there, both to enjoy the sights and because it was probably faster than taking the cab. Old San Juan was a maze of narrow streets designed when the city had been crowded into high stone walls, part of a Spanish fort complex. They passed restaurants and shops, and Crane reacquainted himself with the rhythms of spoken Spanish. Thanks to the Defense Language Institute, he was rated ILR 4+ in Spanish, as well as a half dozen other languages, but he hadn’t used it in a while.

  Melissa led the way to a little restaurant called Rosa de Triana on a narrow, tree-lined side street across from the Hotel El Convento. They sat in a small courtyard out back with high cement walls and lights strung in the trees overhead.

  “How did you end up running a gene bank in the rainforest?” Crane asked over sliced manchego and a bottle of Rioja.

  She shrugged. “I grew up in the country. I liked science. I was always off on my own in the woods, digging around in stream beds. One thing led to another, I guess. I got my bachelor’s in biology and specialized in grad school. From there your course is pretty much set.”

  “But why this specific project?”

  “Because there’s so much left to find out there! Rainforests really are almost unexplored. The medical applications of undiscovered plant species alone are ridiculous. And we’re losing the biome. We’re losing all of it before we even know what’s there. I wanted to do something about that.”

  “How’d Josh get involved?”

  “He has a grant foundation. He’s not the only one on the board. There are half a dozen other big donors, plus some foundations with a hand in. But Josh was the most interested. I submitted a grant proposal and he actually called me. I think he had to talk the rest of the board into funding us.”

  The waitress came by, and Melissa ordered a set of small plates. “Trust me,” she said with a grin.

  “Absolutely.”

  She took the last slice of the manchego and finished her wine.

  “My background’s pretty standard for a scientist. I get it.”

  Crane emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass and nodded to the waitress for another.

  “But you, I don’t get,” Melissa went on. “Who are you? What exactly do you do? And how does it help me with my problem?”

  Crane laughed. “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

  Then he stopped and covered the silence by finishing his glass of wine. What was he going to tell her? The truth was out of the question. If nothing else, he’d be violating several national security regulations. He’d known since before he joined the Hurricane Group that this part of his life would become complicated. But nobody had actually asked him about it before.

  “I just always wanted to make the world better,” he said at last. “But I didn’t know what that meant, really. By the time I got to college, I had no idea what to do with my life. So I majored in philosophy.”

  Melissa’s laugh mid-swallow almost choked her.

  “Honestly?”

  “Eh, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Big questions, no answers, you know.”

  “And did it work?”

  “Not really. When I graduated, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, except now I had student loans to pay off and no obvious career skills. I ended up joining the Coast Guard. I figured they helped people. And that turned out okay. I rescued people from sinking ships and stopped drug traffickers. From there, I just sort of drifted into security work.”

  And that, Crane thought, was where he had to stop telling the truth. In fact, Hurricane had recruited him out of the Coast Guard. They were looking for people with elite level physical skills, but they were reluctant to recruit from the usual branches of the military. They wanted agents, not soldiers. Crane had the athleticism and the initiative, but he was more effective operating solo than as part of a unit. Apparently his performance ratings and his scores on a battery of psychological tests had rung some bells somewhere, and before long, he was detached from the Coast Guard and in field-agent training. Crane had taken to it, and he thought he’d found his path, until it all fell apart.

  Melissa was looking at him thoughtfully. The waitress brought another bottle of the Rioja.

  “Things like setting access policies, determining what went wrong after a breach,” he added. “I really do know what I’m doing.”

  She gave him a conciliatory smile. “I’m sure you do. I’m not questioning that. I’m just not sure this is the right approach.”

  “No, I get it,” Crane said. “Josh said you want to hire some locals. You want to build bridges. It’s not a bad idea.”

  “Of course it’s not!” she said, warming to her subject. “Hiring locals will buy us double the impact! We can put people in the woods to keep an eye on the machinery. And these are poor people! There’s not a lot of jobs out in the back country where we are. If we inject some money into the local economy, we’ll buy a lot of goodwill. That might solve our problem right there.”

  “If it really is just area kids causing trouble, it could help. But there could be more to it than that.” In fact, Crane was convinced there was more to it than that, even before Josh had mentioned the hackers probing the project from Eastern Europe. But there was little
to be gained by explaining all that to Melissa.

  “Look, I’ll make a deal with you,” Crane said. “Take me to your facility. Show me where you’ve been losing equipment. Answer my questions. Let me do my job. After that, if I think your plan makes sense, then I’ll talk to Josh.”

  “You’ll back me up?”

  “I’ll do what I think is best for your project. If I agree that’s the right way to handle this, I’ll tell him so.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess that’s fair.”

  Crane lifted his glass. Melissa followed suit, and they clinked them together.

  “I’ll take you out in the morning and show you around,” she said. “Dress for a hike in the rainforest.”

  Chapter 6

  Branislav Skala left the office early. He’d accomplished enough for one day. And besides, the building staff needed to replace the carpet in his office.

  Out front, he got into the back of his armored Mercedes.

  “The estate,” he told his driver.

  As the car made its way out of the city and sped through the Czech countryside, Skala smiled. The boy he’d been, the boy who had made his money rolling drunks and running errands for old Domenek, couldn’t have even imagined the life he led now.

  Deep in the countryside, the car turned off the highway onto an unmarked side road, and now Skala rode through land that he owned. That in itself would have been impossible when he was a boy; the estate had been the personal retreat of some high party official. Even after the communists fell, there was no way he could have bought something so grand. He’d started at the very bottom of the ladder and had been clawing his way up all his life.

  Now he was the ruler of Brno—still in charge when it mattered, as young Kucera would learn soon enough. And he had his own personal kingdom here, a palatial chateau and four hundred hectares of the finest vineyards in the southern wine country. A fine meal was waiting for him, prepared by a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, along with a couple bottles of Cabernet Moravia from his own vineyards.

  The chateau rose up from among the vineyards as the Mercedes sped up the private drive. It was a three-story expanse of seamless white in the Louis XVI style with steep black roofs and high chimneys. Two expansive wings swept out on either side of the main house. It was a palace, originally built by some nobleman from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he bought the place, he imagined he had reached the summit, that there was no higher goal to aspire to. But there was more. There was still so much more. And if there was more ladder left to climb, Skala meant to climb it.

  The Mercedes pulled up on the crushed gravel driveway, and a servant opened the door for him. Skala strode through the front doors into a large entry hall with fluted columns set into the wall, supporting a domed ceiling painted with clouds and angels. His butler appeared to greet him and take his briefcase. Skala walked on, through a large sitting room full of antique furniture. Old paintings lined the walls, hanging three deep from railings near the ceiling. The place smelled of wood polish, and he heard classical music piped softly from hidden speakers. He knew this one…Beethoven. Yes, this was the Moonlight Sonata. The culture lessons were paying off. Soon he would join the rulers of the world, and no one would know he was just a Brno gutter rat.

  For much of his life, there had been powerful men above him, and Skala had succeeded by knowing who to attach himself to, how to get their attention, how to make himself indispensable to them.

  When he was young, the powerful man had been old Domenek, and his problem had been a police lieutenant who didn’t know enough to take his money and go. Skala had solved Domenek’s problem very suddenly one night on a moonlit path along the banks of the Svratka. And that bold move had lifted him out of the gutter and set him on a new trajectory.

  The particulars of the present situation were different, but the idea was the same. A consortium of investors stood to make billions when their biotech concern patented a new drug. Or a “line of therapies,” whatever that was. Skala wasn’t a doctor. He just knew they were keeping their work secret until it was time to claim the patents. But now there was a scientist in Puerto Rico who threatened to put their secret drugs on the Internet for nothing and make their investment worthless.

  He knew how to make that problem go away, just as quickly and as finally as that old policeman.

  Skala’s private suite was a departure from the rest of the chateau. He lived in a bedroom with its own bathroom and walk-in closet, and an office. He’d closed off hallways so his suite was accessible only by one well-secured door. The rest of the palace looked like a museum, but here the furniture was chosen for comfort. There was a big flat screen TV on one wall. Clothes were tossed in the corners. Skala only allowed the maids back here once a week. Here, he felt at ease.

  He took off his shoes and tossed them onto the closet floor. Then he settled back into a plush armchair with a loud, groaning sigh and tapped the button on a nearby table.

  “Sir?” his butler said through the speaker.

  “A glass of wine, Tomas. I have a little more to do. Tell chef, dinner in half an hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He waited until the wine had come and Tomas had left again before he opened a panel in the console beneath the television and took out his laptop. It was still mid-afternoon in Puerto Rico. His man there would be standing by. He powered up the laptop and put his fingertip on the reader, waiting for it to boot. The laptop was perhaps the most precious thing he owned. Skala had discovered a world of wealth and power beyond his dreams. But it was a complicated place, full of secrets: concealed identities, secret alliances, rivalries, and fierce vendettas. If he wanted to navigate that world, Skala needed to understand it. So he gathered intelligence wherever he could and kept careful notes on his laptop. Skala didn’t really like computers. They were too new for an old dog like him. But computers were like guns now. If you couldn’t use one, you’d run into someone who could, and that would be it.

  So Skala had his technical people set it up for him and teach him how to use it. When the machine was done powering up, it read his fingerprint. Then a screen appeared with pictures of all the people Skala had watching, following, reporting back to him.

  He tapped the photo of Emil Zajic, and a chat window popped up. Half a world away in Puerto Rico, Zajic’s own laptop would be sounding a tone and he would be scrambling to respond. As always, Zajic was prompt.

  HERE, said the chat window.

  WHAT IS YOUR PROGRESS? He typed in return.

  MORE STUFF SMASHED TWO NIGHTS AGO. NOTHING PUT OUT SINCE THEN.

  That was promising. He had read about these projects. They were always run on a shoestring. If he kept destroying their expensive equipment, they would quickly run out of funding to replace it.

  THE WOMAN, DR. SIMON, LEFT TO ASK RICH BACKER FOR HELP. THEY SAY HE’S SENDING A MAN.

  Skala hissed through his teeth. That could be bad.

  WHO? WHO DID SHE GO TO?

  He’d researched the people funding the project. The money came through a foundation with several wealthy donors on its board. A few of those people were tied to other groups, and those were tied to other groups. They were careful to hide the strings they pulled. A good lesson, one Skala had taken to heart.

  DON’T KNOW. SOMEONE WHO GIVES THEM MONEY.

  Damn it, he knew that much. It might be nothing, but if the woman had gone to the right donor and he’d called in a favor from the right people…

  IS IT TEAM KILO?

  No, Zajic wouldn’t know that.

  He backspaced that out and typed, HAS ANYONE MENTIONED TEAM KILO?

  DON’T KNOW. WHAT IS TEAM KILO? JUST KNOW BACKER IS SENDING SOMEONE. SHOULD GET HERE TONIGHT.

  Damn it. Just when he had everything under control.

  FIND OUT WHO IT IS. BUT STAY IN BACKGROUND. IF THIS MAN IS FROM TEAM KILO, INFORM ME IMMEDIATELY AND THEN BREAK ALL CONTACT WITH LOCALS AND COME BACK.

  A few moments, and then Zajic typed back, HOW DO I KNOW? W
HAT IS TEAM KILO?

  Skala knocked back the last of his wine and slapped the glass down on the table harder than he’d meant to.

  JUST FIND OUT ALL YOU CAN ABOUT NEW PLAYER. AND SHUT PROJECT DOWN FOR GOOD. NO MORE SCREWING AROUND.

  UNDERSTOOD.

  Skala closed the window. Coming up through the underworld, at least he’d always known the score. He knew who was on whose side, what they wanted, what drove them. Now he just knew there were shadowy forces moving around him, groups he didn’t know about, with motives he could only guess at. The man coming to Puerto Rico was probably nothing, but the not knowing unsettled him.

  He folded the laptop closed and went out to his waiting dinner. Of course the meal was excellent, but Skala couldn’t truly enjoy it.

  Chapter 7

  After dinner, Crane and Melissa strolled back through Old San Juan. The mood was lighter than it had been walking these same streets in the other direction, Crane realized. Thanks to his promise, she was warming to him. He doubted he would agree with her plan to hire locals to guard the project’s equipment. There were forces at work that she didn’t know about. But he’d meant what he said. If what he found tomorrow was less serious than Josh feared, if it really was just a local matter of bored vandals, then he would support her plan to Josh.

  In the meantime, he was enjoying her company, and she seemed to be enjoying his.

  “This came up pretty suddenly,” he said as they approached a taxi line on the Calle Tetuan. “If we’re going into the rainforest tomorrow, I’m going to need some gear. Do you know a good outdoor store?”

  She looked at him, and Crane could see her gauging his intent. Was he looking for an excuse for them to stay together? As it happened, he did need some things before they went out to Benitez in the morning. Her company, that was a good thing too.

  “Yeah,” she said at last. “I know a place in Hato Rey. Come on.”

  They caught a cab, and Melissa told the driver where to go. It took them across town to a large store designed to look like a ski lodge, with wooden trestles and canoes hanging from the ceiling. It was a little cheesy, but it did have a large selection of clothes and other gear.