Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  Crane pulled a field dressing from a side pocket, tore away the soggy wrapper, and peeled away the backing.

  He moved Acevedo’s hand away and pressed the bandage into place.

  “That won’t save you,” he said. “Another hour maybe. You can die here with your friends or I can call for help. If you make it, you’ll spend a long time in prison. It’s your call. What do you want me to do?”

  Acevedo looked at him blankly for a moment, and then he started to laugh. Crane raised an eyebrow.

  “I know who you are,” said Acevedo. “Who else could do all this? You’re the one they’re all so scared of. Team Kilo.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” he said. He patted Acevedo down, found his cell phone. “You want me to make the call or not? Think it over. Might be a tough decision.”

  “No, no,” said Acevedo. “Make the call. When death himself saves your life…”—he coughed and winced at the pain—“he must have a reason.”

  “I do. You want me to call help, you tell me what you know.”

  “We take the drugs to the airport,” Acevedo began.

  “I know that. This is the delivery, you get them into the airport, you’ve got people there to get them onto the planes. That’s not what I’m after. I want to know about the gene bank in Benitez. What the hell was that about?”

  “I don’t know,” said Acevedo. “That was bullshit. They weren’t doing anything. Orders from the Little Russian and his asshole boss.”

  Crane sighed. Of course the cops had no idea why they’d been turned loose on a harmless research project. They were just following orders.

  “The boss have a name?”

  Acevedo coughed again and winced. He was silent for a long moment. “Just the boss.”

  “The Little Russian. Is his name Emil?”

  “Zajic. He lives on a boat over in the bay.”

  That explained why he’d come in a dinghy instead of driving like everyone else.

  “But you killed him, didn’t you?” Acevedo said around a wet cough.

  “What’s the boat called?”

  “Lucky something. Lucky Break?”

  Maybe there would be something on Zajic’s boat that would point to his boss. And maybe not, but Crane had all that Acevedo could give him.

  He powered up the phone and made the call. He told the dispatcher how to find the narrow road between the lagoon and the sea, and gave them Acevedo’s name. They assured him they’d have help there within minutes.

  Crane slipped Acevedo’s phone back into his shirt pocket.

  “Help’s coming,” he said. “It’s going to take them twenty minutes, anyway. That’s what I can do for you.”

  Acevedo nodded.

  As Crane turned away, Acevedo said, “You going after the boss?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You find that son of a bitch, shoot him for me.”

  “Get in back of the line,” said Crane. He bent down to pick up a discarded Glock and checked the magazine. Then he walked back to the lagoon, pulled the dinghy out into the water, and set off into a nebula of luminescence.

  Chapter 25

  The name of the boat turned out to be the Lucky Strike II. Close enough, Crane thought. He steered up to the stern, climbed aboard, and tied the dinghy to the rail. Lucky Strike II was a thirty-six-footer, all white, the sails secured against the mast in a navy blue cover. The boat was dark and silent. Crane heard only faint voices across the water from one of the other boats anchored all around. The sea slapped gently against the hull.

  Crane kept the Glock down alongside his thigh in his left hand as he opened the door that led below the deck. He stepped down into darkness and stooped so his head would clear the ceiling.

  “Emil? Is that you?”

  A light came on, enough to see by. There was a small galley to his right, a seating area to the left. Clothes and various belongings were scattered on the floor. The voice came from behind a curtain ahead of him. Then it was pulled aside, and a woman looked out from a V-berth in the bow.

  She gasped and ducked back behind the bulkhead. “Don’t hurt me!”

  “I won’t,” said Crane. “You’re Emil’s girlfriend?”

  She said nothing. Crane opened a cabinet, found only dishes and some supplies.

  “I’m afraid Emil won’t be coming back.”

  He turned to the small seating area, found a few scraps of paper on the table, but nothing that caught his interest.

  “You should also know that the cops are going to be swarming this boat in a few minutes.”

  “Shit,” he heard her say. “Oh shit, shit, shit.” Then the sound of her scrambling across the bed, opening a locker. Crane put the Glock away and then pulled the curtain back. She froze in the act of stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. She was young, dark haired, wearing lacy shorts and a baby doll tee. Crane tried to look reassuring. After a moment, she went back to furiously cramming her things into the bag.

  Crane sank to his knees and looked under the berth. There was a safe tucked in beneath it, with a combination keypad.

  “You know the combination to this?”

  The girl swallowed, shook her head. Then she said, “I know where he keeps it,” in a voice that was barely above a whisper. She pointed to a drawer in a wooden desk forward of the galley.

  The drawer was locked, so Crane found a carving knife in the galley and forced it. Inside were some keys, a notepad, the usual loose junk, and a business card with what had to be the safe combination in pencil on the back.

  The card was from a company called Deštnik Biologicka, with an address in Brno in the Czech Republic. It identified Emil Zajic, in both Czech and English, as “Director, Mergers and Acquisitions.”

  Crane had a hard time imagining Zajic as a business executive.

  He pocketed the card and returned to the safe. The girl had finished packing everything she could reach and had pulled on a pair of jeans and a more substantial shirt. Now she sat on the bed, pressed as far back into the bow as she could get with the bag in front of her.

  She watched Crane kneel at the foot of the bed and punch numbers into the safe’s keypad.

  “What happened to Emil?” she finally said.

  “He tried to kill me.”

  She accepted that in silence.

  The safe’s locking bolts snapped back with a solid, metallic sound, and Crane opened the door. Inside were several bundles of hundred dollar bills, a CZ-75 pistol with a suppressor, a watch that proved to be a Breitling Navitimer, and a black Moleskine notebook. Crane flipped through the notebook, but it was in Czech, which he didn’t read.

  He tossed the cash to the girl, and it quickly vanished into her bag. He pocketed the notebook; Josh would be able to find someone to translate it. The watch was far too nice to be abandoned to some evidence locker. Crane put it on his wrist. The silenced pistol might come in handy as well, he decided.

  A quick search of the boat didn’t reveal anything else, and Crane didn’t know how far behind him the authorities might be if Acevedo had lived to tell them where he’d gone.

  He held his hand out to the girl. “Come on, I’ll take you to shore.”

  She didn’t take his hand, but she did follow him up onto the deck and let him help her over the rail into the dinghy. She sat in silence as he steered them to land and pulled up near where the kayaks had been beached earlier in the night.

  They stood at the waterline for a moment, looking out at the boats, lit by the strings of lights in the trees behind them.

  “He was good to me,” the girl said at last.

  “I’m sure he was,” said Crane.

  Then she shouldered the duffel bag and walked away into the night, and Crane made the call to Agent Arias of the SIB.

  ###

  It was mid-afternoon the next day when Crane pulled up outside the little guest house in Ocean Park. Melissa’s Jeep was parked down the street.

  A middle-aged man in shorts and flip flops opened
the door and called Melissa down. Then he disappeared into the backyard and left them in the living room. Melissa seemed unable to settle herself. She offered Crane a drink. When he declined, she went into the kitchen, anyway, and Crane heard her rattling around in the cabinets and drawing water. He wandered the room, looking at the owners’ personal photos and the decorations.

  Melissa eventually came back with a pitcher of ice tea and a couple glasses. Crane took one, since she’d gone to the trouble.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “I guess that’s what I’m supposed to ask you,” she said. “You kind of went dark for a while, and now you’re here. Has something happened?”

  “I wanted to let you know I think it’s safe to start rebuilding your facility. Getting in new equipment and so on.”

  “That’s going to take a while.”

  “I know. This isn’t over. I still don’t know who was behind it or why they went after you. But they’ve got bigger things to worry about now. I’ll talk to Josh.”

  “It’s the thing at Fajardo, isn’t it?” she said. She sipped her tea and put it back down on the tray. “It’s all over the news. Those cops working for the cartels. Something told me it was the same cops. It was them, wasn’t it?”

  Crane nodded. There were nine dead, according to the news, and one in critical condition. So Acevedo had made it. He could see her wanting to just ask him straight out if he’d killed all those men. But she didn’t. Instead she bottled up that fear, layered over it with the good news that she could begin her project again. But the undertone of playful attraction between them was gone. A part of her was afraid of him now.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to get another of those gene sequencer things? The ones that come ten at a time?”

  “The high seek? God only knows. I know some people who wanted to be in the batch last time. Maybe they’re still looking. I don’t know. And that’s just one thing. There’s so much to do.”

  He got her talking about her Christmas list of lab equipment, and her excitement gradually overcame her discomfort.

  “What will you do now?” she asked when he rose to leave.

  “Whoever put all this in motion is still there,” said Crane. “I need to find them and find out why. That’s when it will be finished for good. I’ve got some leads. I’ll be leaving Puerto Rico.”

  She grabbed his arm in the doorway. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not sure if I’ve said that before. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass.”

  “Not at all.”

  “And I know you’ve done a lot to help me,” she continued. “I want you to know how much it matters. If it wasn’t for you, I would have lost everything.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Crane.

  “Do you think you’ll be back this way?”

  There was something in her voice that made Crane pause and meet her gaze. He could sense the ambivalence there. As much as she tried, as much as part of her wanted to, she couldn’t quite forget the blood they’d cleaned off the floor of her lab or all those bodies on the beach at Fajardo.

  Crane smiled. “It could happen.”

  “Well, call me if it does. We’ll go back to Rosa de Triana, have some sangria, and catch up.”

  “I’d like that,” said Crane, knowing it would never happen.

  Then he turned and walked away down the short stone path to the street. Melissa watched him go from the doorway, but when he glanced back from the sidewalk, she had closed the door.

  Chapter 26

  Prague, Czech Republic

  Nine days later, John Crane stepped off a British Airways 777 and into a carefully crafted persona. This Crane wore a navy Brioni suit with a very subtle gray pinstripe and carried a Dunhill grip bag. This was a man who took his importance for granted and expected others to recognize it. After he cleared Czech customs and border control, he followed the flow of people into the arrivals terminal. There he met a woman in a chauffeur’s uniform, holding an iPad that displayed “Mr. Crane” in large type, and followed her to a Mercedes sedan. Crane sat in the back and reset the Breitling he’d taken from Zajic’s boat to Central European time.

  They drove around the perimeter of the airport and parked next to a private aviation hangar. Crane got out and looked around. It was cold here, especially after Puerto Rico, and the solid overcast sky threatened to spit rain. The temperature was somewhere in the fifties. The landscape was flat and industrial, with the distant roar of jets in the background. The driver handed Crane his bag and then unlocked the hangar’s side door.

  “Trouble getting anything into the country?” Crane asked.

  “No, sir,” she answered. “The car’s ready, and your things are in the trunk.” She handed Crane a car key. “Mr. Sulenski sends his regards and wishes you good hunting.”

  Crane watched the Mercedes drive away, leaving him standing alone in a plain of concrete and rust. He breathed in the air and watched tractor trailers with faded paint roll steadily past on the highway in the distance. He stood there for perhaps a minute, just soaking in the reality of this new place. Then he walked into the hangar and locked the door behind himself.

  Parked in the middle of the hangar, looking simultaneously ominous and very expensive, was a black Audi R8, the Anderson Germany Hyper-Black edition, its V-10 tuned for even greater horsepower and its weight reduced with judicious use of carbon fiber. Crane allowed himself a moment to be awed by it, and then reminded himself that his character would take this car for granted. More than that, it wasn’t here for Crane’s enjoyment. It was a tool, meant for dangerous work, something to be taken seriously.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself along the way, he told himself.

  He opened the trunk and found two matching suitcases, dark blue with brass fittings and black leather straps. The first contained clothes, a shaving kit, the basic travel gear. The second was more interesting. Inside were Emil Zajic’s assault rifle and silenced pistol—chickens coming home to roost, Crane thought to himself—along with several fresh magazines for both. Below those was the rest of the radio and electronic gear Crane had ordered in San Juan, the pick gun and some other specialized burglary tools, and a few new goodies generously provided by Josh. In his previous life, the US government would have gotten these things into the country using back channels with the Czech government. He had no idea how Josh had done it, but apparently being a multi-billionaire opened a lot of doors.

  Crane got into the Audi, a cocoon of black and orange leather and carbon fiber panels. The engine started with a restrained growl. A remote on the passenger seat opened the main sliding doors. Crane tapped the button again to close them and then dropped the remote out the window and drove out through the doors as they slid shut. The Audi accelerated smoothly out onto the road, and Crane steered it onto the E50, headed southeast for Brno.

  Josh’s people had dug up what they could about the company on Zajic’s business card. It wasn’t much. Deštnik Biologicka was a small biotech startup that did something involving protein folding. Josh had promised a more complete briefing, and Crane assumed it was inside a manila envelope he’d found in one of the suitcases. The company was apparently part of a government-funded biotech incubator called Jižni Morova BioKapital—South Moravian BioCapital—that provided seed funding and office and lab space for a dozen similar startups.

  Josh had seized on that angle immediately, especially when he found out that the incubator would be participating in a Czech biotech fair at the end of the month to connect its fledgling companies with investors and industry mentors. “The best way to get inside a startup is to be an angel investor,” he’d said. “You can pluck them out of obscurity and make them instant millionaires. Or not. Who knows what motivates you? What will make you shower them with favor or drop them back into the abyss? They’ll roll out the red carpet, show you the labs, open up their books. Anything. It’s perfect.”

  And so Crane was now a high-rolling principal of The Scorix
Group, an entirely fictional investment fund that specialized in securing enormous returns by betting early on promising startups in biotech and pharmaceuticals. Josh had known exactly what to do to instantly create Internet credibility for the imaginary firm, and that had opened doors as quickly as Josh promised. Tomorrow morning, Crane had an interview with a Klement Novak, who was Deštnik’s CEO. Crane was supposedly in Brno in advance of the fair, like the early bird at a garage sale, to scoop up the bargains before the crowds picked everything over. Josh’s people reported that Novak was almost pathetically eager to meet with a representative of Scorix and had promised him full access.

  As the sun set, Crane sped through the outskirts of Brno, zipping around slow-moving trucks and getting used to the feel of the car. Clearly something was going on at Deštnik besides protein folding. Hopefully tomorrow, he’d get a better idea of just what.

  ###

  A wiry, red-headed man in a battered old army jacket leaned against the wall of a building across the street from the Brno Palace Hotel on Husova, just inside what had been the city wall back in the Middle Ages. He tossed his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk, pulled a pack of Moon Special Blends from his pocket, and lit another. He was very bored, but work was work.

  Then he perked up as a black Audi pulled up in front of the hotel and was rushed by the front reception crew. A tall man with dark hair got out and spoke briefly with the valet. He wore a suit that looked like it cost as much as his car. After a moment, he gave the valet the keys. Two bellboys unloaded a couple suitcases and a carry-on bag from the trunk onto a luggage cart and hurried it inside.

  The redhead pulled out a cheap smartphone with a clip-on zoom lens and grabbed a couple shots of the car and the driver’s face. Then the camera quickly vanished back into his coat. The valet took the car to the parking garage, and the driver looked around the square and then strode into the hotel.

  Maybe the day wasn’t a total loss after all, the redhead thought as he pushed off the wall and walked away, whistling an old tune his mother used to sing when he was a boy.