Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  “That’s right,” said Crane. “I think the robbery was a coincidence. The police certainly didn’t seem very surprised. Part of the act was flashing my status symbols around. Someone was staking out the hotel when I got here. I think we’re looking at thieves who got more than they bargained for.”

  “Oh God, yeah, what did they get?”

  “The surveillance gear mainly. The weapons and most of the really incriminating stuff was in the car. But they were probably very surprised when they opened those suitcases. In fact,” he added, “that might be what triggered the attack. Our opponent obviously has criminal connections. If the thieves sent up a red flag about my gear, that might be what tipped him off.”

  “So what’s your next move?” Josh asked.

  “I need some guidance. I think Novak’s a pawn,” said Crane. “I don’t think he has any idea what’s going on. So the next question is, who could use his company like that without the CEO having a clue?”

  There was a moment of line tone, then, “You said they get their office space from an incubator, right? That would be my guess. They provide seed capital, office space. If they’re providing shared back-office support, that means they’re probably doing the books for every startup on the campus.”

  “Internet too?”

  “Internet backbone would be part of the turnkey office package. All the companies would be working off their servers.”

  “So they could set up their people with a Deštnik cover that would pass muster.”

  Josh laughed. “They could do a lot more than that. Most of these startup guys are tech bros. Bio bros in this case, I guess. They know their stuff, but they don’t know squat about business. That’s why they turn to these incubators in the first place. So they work around the clock on their research and take the rest of it for granted. They’d have no idea what’s really going on.”

  Crane let out a low whistle as the pieces started to fall into place. This could go well beyond just providing fake jobs for smugglers operating overseas. They could be laundering money through Deštnik and the other startups, using them to ship things into or out of the country. The possibilities were endless.

  “I’m sold,” said Crane. “The incubator’s called Jižni Morova BioKapital. Can your people run some checks?”

  “I’ll get somebody on it right away.”

  “I’ll call you in a couple days. I’m going to try and plant the sniffer you sent me. So watch for data packets from .cz addresses.”

  “We’ll be watching,” said Josh. “Be careful, John.”

  “Always.”

  Then Crane hung up and slipped the phone in his pocket as a young couple came in speaking German, nodded to him, and dumped their packs on a pair of bunks.

  He was always careful. That was what had gotten him this far. The question, as always, was where was that line between too careful and not careful enough?

  Chapter 32

  Jižni Morova BioKapital occupied a four-story building in a downtown neighborhood that was shifting from residential to commercial. The building had a gray metal façade with the company name in machined letters over its glass doors. It perched on a street full of white houses with steep, red-tiled roofs like an alien invader.

  Crane walked around the block to a narrow street lined with small businesses—book shops, a hair salon—and went into a coffee shop to wait. He’d spent most of the last two days casing the building and getting a feel for the surrounding neighborhood. He was as ready as he was going to be.

  Crane watched the movement of people and cars outside as the evening rush hour passed and the streets gradually emptied. He left the coffee shop before he became conspicuous there and wandered the streets for another hour.

  It was dark when he was ready to move. He stepped into the shadowy murk of an alley and removed his gear from his pack. He still had a set of lockpicks, the flash drive with Josh’s mysterious spyware, and Emil Zajic’s pistol. He’d spent a couple hours yesterday modifying his beaten up jacket to hold the pistol with its long silencer so it would be readily accessible.

  The flash drive went into the watch pocket of his Levi’s. Josh had promised that all he had to do was find an active computer connected to the network and plug in the drive. The software would do the rest, digging through the company’s files and sending what it found home to Josh’s people over the Net.

  The building was on a slight grade, and at the lowest corner was a small loading bay that should lead into the basement. Beside it was a small access door, long unused from the looks of it. The company didn’t deal in truckloads of cargo. Crane guessed the bay itself was used rarely, and when they did use it, they simply used the rolling garage door itself for access. The hinges and lock were rusted, but Crane had prepared for that. Crane was betting the building’s security system didn’t cover it.

  But there was only one way to be sure. He oiled the hinges and lock from a small bottle he’d picked up earlier that day from a sewing machine repair shop around the corner. Then he took a small flashlight from his pack and held it in his teeth as he picked the lock. It gave way reluctantly, with a small shriek that Crane actually found reassuring under the circumstances. No one had used the door in years.

  The door still creaked despite the fresh lubrication. Crane slowly edged it open with a series of tiny metallic groans, just far enough for him to squeeze through. His flashlight revealed only stained concrete, electrical junction boxes, and dust.

  He now had two objectives: get a keycard so he could move around the building, and find the server room. The doors and elevators all had black plastic card readers set in the walls at waist level. Crane had watched people coming and going with ID cards clipped to their belts or on lanyards around their necks. They would wave the cards at the boxes, which would beep in confirmation and then let them open the doors. It was a corporate ritual, like genuflecting at church. There were ways around the system, but Crane didn’t have the equipment anymore. Even if he did, it would be easier to just get a card.

  He pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt he wore under his jacket and made his way to the stairs.

  Thankfully, fire codes were universal, Crane thought as the stairwell door opened for him. The doors would let anyone into the stairwell, even without a card, to avoid trapping someone in the building in an emergency. Of course, to get out of the stairwell anywhere other than on the main floor, he’d need a badge. So Crane made his way upstairs, found a nice-looking spot between the second and third floors, and sat down to wait.

  He was already familiar with the first floor. Beyond the glass doors was an expansive marble and aluminum lobby with reception and security desks at the back and walls lined with colorful educational displays, as if the place spent half its time hosting groups of schoolchildren. The second floor was a mezzanine, open to the lobby to create a large, airy space. A huge mobile of a DNA molecule hung overhead. Two spirals of multicolored balls and rods ran almost the whole length of the lobby. Below it was a pushcart with racks of pamphlets and magazines, presumably touting the region’s research infrastructure and industrial prowess.

  The security office was on the main floor, and it was possible the servers were down there too, but Crane doubted it. The IT workers would be housed near the servers, and there was no office space for them on the ground floor. The second floor was unlikely too. The architects wouldn’t want to waste the view into that huge open space on windowless storage closets. That floor would be offices and conference rooms. That left three and four, with four being executive country. So Crane was betting on three. But it didn’t really matter until someone brought him a keycard.

  So Crane waited, staring at the institutional beige walls and doing dips on the handrails until he heard a sudden electronic beep from below. An instant later, there was the click of the magnetic latch on the door to the second floor releasing.

  Crane stood facing the door and put both hands on the stair rails.

  The door opened and a guard entered.
The door closed behind him before he looked up and saw Crane smiling down at him.

  “Hi there,” said Crane. Then he put his weight on the handrails, raised both legs off the step, and kicked the guard hard in the chest. He pushed off the rails and dropped to the landing as the guard slammed hard against the wall and staggered. Another punch put him down. Crane gently lowered his unconscious body to the floor and took his radio and keycard.

  The third floor hallways were quiet and dimly lit. Crane made his way down the corridor, pointing his phone’s camera at the signs beside the closed doors. A translator app replaced the Czech words with English on the screen. Most were the names and titles of the people who worked behind them. All of them had panels of frosted glass beside them to let some light through. But eventually Crane found a door that lacked the glass panel but did have a keycard reader nearby. He pointed his phone at it: “Computer Apartment,” the translator app decided. Close enough.

  Crane swept the card over the reader and let himself in. The lights came on as he entered, revealing racks of servers trailing bundles of Ethernet cable. Bingo.

  On a table was a PC with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The screen ran a continually updating series of line and bar charts labeled in Czech. Crane assumed it was displaying the network’s status, metrics like server loads, volumes of data moving through the connections, and memory utilization. Crane found an open USB port on the side and plugged in Josh’s flash drive.

  He was expecting a beep from the machine, so he was startled to hear a voice speaking Czech, and then realized it was from the guard’s radio. A quick interrogative, followed by a few seconds of silence, and then another query. It sounded like the man he’d knocked out had been missed. Time was short.

  The screen displayed an upload bar crawling toward completion. A different voice crackled on the radio. The voices were growing more concerned. Other voices started checking in on what Crane took to be a roll call. Then the radio suddenly went silent. Someone had found the downed guard, and they’d realized their communications were compromised and switched frequencies.

  The upload bar finished filling its box and vanished. The screen went back to displaying the same real-time network metrics it had been showing before. Crane hoped that meant all was well. He pulled the drive and stuck it back into his pocket.

  The hall was still empty and quiet as he slipped out. He was closer to the far end of the building from where he’d left the guard, so he went that way. He came upon a set of elevators and had an idea. Maybe he could send them out of his way. He called a car, reached around the open door, and sent it up to the top floor. Then he hurried back the way he’d come and entered the stairwell.

  Noise echoed off the concrete here. Crane tried to be quiet, but the door had made some noise, and his footsteps could still be heard. Then someone shouted in Czech, and Crane heard footsteps hurrying up from below. He almost made it to the second-floor landing when a uniformed figure burst around the corner. Crane drew the CZ-80 from his jacket and fired a flurry of shots over the guard’s head. Even silenced, the gun echoed like a thunderclap in the confined space. The guard fell back, and Crane dove for the door to two.

  But the door refused to open. The damn keycard. He ducked as the guard reappeared around the bend in the stairs and snapped off a shot. Now Crane heard shouting from above and more footsteps descending. They would box him in in seconds.

  There was no more time to play softball.

  The guard popped around the stairs again, leading with his pistol. Crane shot him in the upper chest, watched him fall back, and heard the gun clatter down the stairs.

  Then he stopped thinking about him and swept his stolen keycard across the reader to open the door.

  He emerged into a long hallway with offices and conference space on one side, and the yawning open space of the lobby on the other. Two guards stood in the middle of the lobby. As soon as the door opened, one saw him and shouted. Then they both opened fire. There was a metal safety railing and Lucite panels meant to keep dropped objects from falling to the floor below. Crane dove for the floor, and bullets started to splinter the Lucite all around him.

  He crawled down the hallway on his knees and elbows, and the guards stopped firing. The Lucite panels were enough to protect him, but they kept their guns trained on him. One was shouting into his radio.

  A moment later, the door behind him beeped and flew open. Crane rolled onto his back and fired two shots, center mass, into the figure emerging from the stairwell. Another bullet from below smashed into the panel next to him with a slapping noise, and the clear Lucite went opaque white.

  One of the guards had left, Crane realized. They had him pinned down here so one would stay to report Crane’s movements and take a shot if he got one. The other would join the rest of the detachment and take him here. He assumed they had people in both stairwells coordinating their attacks on him by radio.

  If he was going to escape, he needed to get the initiative on the one below him. He whirled toward the far stairwell and fired a shot into the closed door. As he hoped, the guard below was thrown off, assuming Crane must be firing at his companions. Perhaps someone had moved too soon and ruined the plan. He spun in that direction to see what was happening.

  The instant’s distraction was all Crane needed. He popped up over the railing and took the man out with a single shot.

  Then, just as both stairwell doors beeped, Crane vaulted onto the railing and pushed off hard with both legs. For a moment, he soared through the air, feeling the sickening lurch in his stomach as gravity clawed at him, tried to smash him against the marble floor below.

  Instead, Crane slammed hard into the enormous DNA molecule that hung in the middle of the space. He managed to hook an arm around a rod that linked a yellow atom to a green one a few feet away. But the model was made of wire and thin plastic, not meant to bear weight. He heard cables snapping as the whole thing began to pull loose from the ceiling.

  Then the guards opened fire from the mezzanine. Bullets whistled past him, punching holes in what remained of the blueprint for all life. Crane was going down fast, anyway. He swung toward the only thing he could see that looked likely to break his fall—the pushcart full of pamphlets—and let go.

  He hit the fabric cover hard, and the cart disintegrated under the impact, throwing out a blizzard of informative marketing material. The remains of the mobile followed, crashing down and scattering plastic and wire across the lobby. The guards lost him for a moment in the chaos.

  Crane shook off the impact and was getting ready to sprint for the front doors when he saw the bright red and blue glow of police lights approaching down the street. This just kept getting better, he thought.

  He looked for another way out and decided his best choice was the door behind the receptionist’s counter. He took a deep breath and sprinted for it as a hail of bullets slammed into the marble around him.

  He vaulted the counter, scattering flat-screen monitors and telephones. He was directly beneath the mezzanine hallway now, and the guards no longer could see him. He heard shouting from above as he whipped the keycard across the reader and opened the door. Beyond was a straight, dark corridor. Crane sprinted down it, past side doors to the emergency exit. Again he practically threw the keycard at the reader and let his shoulder knock the door open.

  Crane emerged in the alley behind the building, breathing hard. He took a moment to recover in the cool night air. But he could hear sirens on the main avenue and knew he wasn’t out of this yet.

  Across the alley and three doors down was a locked door that Crane was reasonably sure was the back door of a café on the next block. He quickly picked the lock and let himself in. He found himself in a cramped space lined with shelves crammed with cardboard boxes. There was just enough light to see his way through a beaded curtain to the front of the house.

  Then Crane noticed a small blinking light at his side. An alarm panel. He shook his head. This was not his night.

 
Crane dashed to the front door and flipped the lock. He managed to get out to the sidewalk moments before the alarm started loudly whooping in time with the police sirens. They were now two blocks away. But the police would take notice before long and realize which way he’d gone. He needed to get off the street, or they’d eventually run him down.

  He hurried around the corner and nearly collided with a shapely brunette in a revealing micro-dress. He backed up a step and said, “Sorry,” in English.

  “No problem,” she replied in accented English. “So where are you off to in such a hurry? Maybe you are looking for a party?”

  He was in no position to reject an opportunity to get off the street, Crane thought. He grinned. “I love a good party.”

  She smiled through brightly painted lips. “Well, all right. I know a place. Let’s go party!”

  Crane offered her his arm, and they strolled off down the street together.

  Chapter 33

  The girl’s name was Natalya. She took Crane to her small apartment and had the grace to feign disappointment when he said he didn’t want to sleep with her. Instead, he paid her for her time, and they talked about life in Brno while Crane searched her kitchen and came up with enough to put together a passable meal for them.

  She was Ukrainian but had been working her way west since leaving home two years ago. She’d been in Brno for a little less than six months, but she was well versed in the local criminal scene.

  “Start at the top,” Crane said as he added a bit of green pepper to the sausage and onions frying in a pan on her small gas stove. “Who’s the big man on campus?”

  “Kucera,” she said. She sat at a small kitchen table of aluminum and Formica. “Anton Kucera. He came from the street gangs. I think he just pushed out the old boss not too long ago. Everyone is scared of him. I saw him once. He scared me too.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Not much older than me. He doesn’t look Slavic. They say his mother was Italian. Blond hair, not tall. Dark eyes. He had a scar over one eye, I remember. He’s handsome, I guess, but very intense. I didn’t want to be around him.”