by Mark Parragh
He stopped short, sloshed a bit of the whiskey onto the bar. Then he set the bottle down and looked back across the photos of his son. Josh Sulenski could get screwed. If the bastards had killed his son, he wouldn’t be playing around with secret messages and planning surgical rescues. He would take every dollar he had, every favor he could call in, every resource he had, and he would soak them all in napalm and burn the whole fucking country to the ground.
CHAPTER 28
Crane met Josh for lunch at the Myria building’s rooftop restaurant. He wore a navy Brunello Cucinelli sweater over a white V-neck, and gray cotton trousers. After so many days in cargo pants and boots, eating dust in Bahia Tortugas, he found he was ready for something more refined.
“You trying to impress me, John?” Josh asked as Crane joined him at his table. Josh was at least not wearing the cargo shorts and graphic tees he favored away from the office. But looking around at the crowd of young Silicon Valley tech workers, Crane decided he was actually slightly overdressed.
“Just want you to think you’re getting your money’s worth,” he said.
Josh laughed and passed Crane a menu.
“Well, that’s one good thing, anyway. I’m having a lousy day—week, really.”
A waiter came to the table, and Crane ordered a grilled avocado, followed by reginetti with savoy cabbage and pancetta—the food at La Playa had been good but, here too, Crane was ready for something a little more sophisticated.
“So what’s the problem?” Crane asked over drinks while they waited.
Josh told him how both his avenues of investigation into whoever had taken over Alexander Tate’s life and businesses had run aground.
“We’re at a dead end,” Josh said as their food arrived. “We need to change the rules somehow. And I think I know how.”
Crane began to recognize the shape of the conversation. This was how mission briefings began. Josh’s idea for shaking his investigation loose would involve him doing something. Probably something dangerous.
“Do you remember I told you that Jason disappeared a couple steps ahead of some nasty rumors about a sexual assault indictment?”
Crane nodded. “Date that ended badly? Powerful family?”
“That’s right. I’ve been on the phone with them. Turns out there was a grand jury investigation, and Jason was supposed to be subpoenaed to testify. But by then, he was gone, and he was never served. The investigation went nowhere. But if we can bring him back here …”
“They arrest him as a material witness, and an indictment soon follows,” said Crane. “But how does that solve your problem?”
“Jason’s a beneficiary of several of his father’s trusts. My legal and financial people say it would be very hard to do what they’ve done without his involvement.”
“You think he did that to his own father?” Crane was horrified. He knew some of the things Jason Tate was capable of, but this was a whole new dimension. More than ever, he was convinced Tate needed to be taken down hard.
“If he is involved, then some legal pressure might get him talking. If nothing else, seeing him handed over to the district attorney’s office should scare the hell out of his accomplices.”
“So you want to add a new mission objective. While we’re in there, you want me to extract him.”
“Can you do it?”
“Probably,” said Crane. “Jessie and I are still working out details. I’ll see what we can come up with.”
“I wouldn’t mention this to Jessie,” Josh said. Crane raised an eyebrow, and he went on. “I don’t want it getting back to Cottrell. He’s already on edge, worried we’re taking over his operation. He’ll see this as putting his son at risk.”
“We’re all on the same side here,” said Crane.
Josh nodded. “I spent some time with Sawyer. He’s a good guy. He’s just been at this for a long time now. He’s getting nowhere, and every day makes it a little less likely he ever gets his son back alive. It’s taken a toll. Let’s just handle him gently.”
Crane nodded. “Okay, that’s your legal front. As it happens, I may have something for you on the medical front.”
Josh looked surprised. “Really?”
Crane slid a small cardboard box from his pocket and handed it to Josh.
“I told you I had a friend who used to do very unusual medical work for Hurricane? I asked her if it was possible to artificially induce the kind of symptoms you were talking about. When I got back last night, this was waiting for me.”
Josh opened the box and slid out a gray plastic cylinder, like a thick, stubby ballpoint pen. The cap flipped open with a thumbnail. It was a medical autoinjector.
“If you wanted to do to someone what you described, you’d want something similar to a barbiturate coma,” Crane said. “Though my friend said there are some highly modified special purpose benzodiazepines that could more precisely target the areas of the brain you’d need to impair.”
“But you mean it’s really possible?” Josh asked. “That’s … scary as hell. What’s this?”
“Receptor antagonist,” said Crane. “Apparently it started out as something called flumazenil, which is used to treat benzo overdoses. It targets the receptors in the brain and inhibits uptake of the drug. But this is now a long way from stock flumazenil.”
“You got this from someone who works for the government?” Josh asked.
“Well, not anymore.”
“Who does she work for now?”
“I don’t ask,” said Crane. “And she doesn’t ask me. It works better that way.”
“Okay,” said Josh, “point taken. So if I can get in to see Alexander again, I should inject him with this?”
“Thigh muscle would be the best place,” said Crane. “If—let me emphasize if—someone is dosing Tate the elder with something to reduce his level of consciousness, this should start to bring him out of it. For a while, at least.”
“What if he’s not drugged? What if it’s really organic brain damage?”
“Well, then you’re not going to do him any favors,” said Crane. “Severe agitation, hypersensitivity, seizures. You better be pretty sure before you use that.”
Josh nodded thoughtfully and slipped the autoinjector into his pocket.
“I guess we’ve both got our work cut out for us,” he said.
Sveti Stefan, Montenegro
In the middle ages, the hotel had been a fortress built on a tiny island just off the beach on the Adriatic coast. It was a warren of hand-laid stone and red tile roofs, buildings tumbled together from one end of the island to the other. History had washed over it in waves, one after another, bringing warlords, pirates, royalty, Communist Party officials, and Hollywood stars, each in their turn.
Finally, now connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway, it had become a modern five-star luxury resort overlooking the hilly coast and the gleaming blue sea.
In one of its very expensive suites, the sun shot rays through open French doors and gauzy curtains that billowed in the morning breeze. The light bounced off five hundred-year-old plastered walls and caressed discarded lingerie on the floor. Then a telephone chirped somewhere in the room.
In the bed, a pile of rumpled covers moved. It slid to the side, and a naked woman emerged. She stood with a languorous stretch and made her way around the foot of the king-size bed. She was young, with a taut body and short-cropped hair dyed bright blue. The phone kept up its digital whistling as she stood beside the table where it sat and looked out the open French doors at the suite’s patio and private pool, and the sea beyond.
She stretched once more, her hands clasping over her head and her legs flexing. Then she picked up the phone at last.
“Yes?”
“It’s Mauro Rossi calling.”
She stifled a yawn and ran her free hand through her hair. “Of course, Mauro, how are you?”
“I’m well,” he said. “I’m calling about an incoming request that’s crossed my desk.”
Mauro hadn’t called her in quite some time. He was a minor functionary she’d planted in Turnstone’s organization to keep an eye on him and warn her if he made any moves against her. But she soon discovered that his position was too peripheral. By the time Turnstone’s schemes made it down the chain to Mauro, they had been broken up into a dozen innocuous components that looked like normal business. She’d realized her mistake and placed someone much closer to Turnstone himself. But Mauro was still there, patiently waiting for his chance to earn the rewards she’d promised for useful information. So why was he calling now?
“It came from Jason Tate,” Mauro was saying.
“Do I know him?”
“Doubtful. He’s an informal liaison to the Obregon narco cartel. More trouble than he’s worth from our point of view. But he’s the cartel’s problem to deal with. Suddenly he’s requested any information we have on a man named John Crane.”
Oh, she thought. Oh. How delicious. This was just what she needed.
“You’d mentioned wanting to be notified if that name came up.”
“Indeed,” she said. “You were right to call. Do you know why he’s interested?”
“Not yet. I can make inquiries, but we have few resources there. That’s why we humor Tate.”
She stepped onto the patio and let the sun warm her skin.
“Does Turnstone know about this request?” she asked.
“I can’t be certain,” Mauro replied. “But the request came from Keating. He’s a mid-level deputy, and he’s delegated it with low priority. I doubt this went upstairs.”
Even if Turnstone knew about this, she could guess how he’d handle it. He would assume it was unimportant, so he’d kick the whole matter to the curb. If nothing happened in a day or two to bring it back to his attention, he’d take that as confirmation that he was right and forget about it. Getting Turnstone’s attention usually meant doing something twice, though he’d lately begun to make exceptions in her case.
“Make sure it doesn’t,” she said. “Bury it somewhere, and make sure nothing comes back.”
“Understood.”
“And send me whatever you have on Jason Tate.”
“Already done,” he said. “It’s in your secure folder.”
“Thank you, Mauro,” she said as she walked out onto the grass and luxuriated in the feel of it against her bare feet. “You’ve done well. Do keep me informed.”
“Of course,” he said as she was hanging up.
John Crane, she thought as she walked slowly across the grass, past the pool, and toward the stone and mortar wall overlooking the sea. The man did have a way of turning up at odd times. They’d never properly met, but she’d been putting out feelers since the thing in Buenos Aires, seeking more information about him—who he was, whom he worked for, what he was trying to accomplish. He was a new player, not tied to any of the existing factions, as far as she could tell. And he’d managed to turn up in the middle of her assignment to deal with Branislav Skala, providing a very convenient scapegoat for his death among those few people who were unhappy to see Skala dead. It was as if the two of them were dancing with each other blindfolded, moving in unison by sheer instinct.
She heard a distant voice calling, “Madame, madame!” and turned to see an elderly man in hotel uniform hurrying toward her across the lawn with a white hotel bathrobe held out in front of him as if to hide her.
“Madame, you are in a public area of the hotel!”
“Yes, of course,” she said, and then looked down and pretended to just discover her nudity.
“My word,” she said, “whatever could have happened to my clothes?”
He thrust the robe at her while trying to simultaneously avert his eyes.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s mine,” she said. “I’d definitely remember wearing that.” Then she sidestepped him and headed back across the grass as the man hurried after her, holding the bathrobe like a screen.
John Crane. What was he doing in Mexico?
CHAPTER 29
Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains, Mexico
The steady sound of the engines was almost calming after a while, Crane thought. The Short had flown steadily south through the night, down the backbone of the continent. This was very remote country, and there were no lights below. There was only deep darkness and the blazing stars overhead, untouched by the light pollution farther north.
Crane stood in the dark in the boxy cargo hold. Pale red lights let him maneuver without ruining his night vision.
“Almost on point,” Jessie’s voice said in his headphones. “You ready?”
“Ready when you are,” he replied. Then he clipped the safety line on his belt to the rail that ran along one side of the cargo hold.
A few moments later, the cargo ramp began to swing down and let in the chill night air. At the forward end of the hold, a small aircraft sat on tricycle landing gear. The drone’s wingspan very nearly touched both sides of the fuselage—it would barely fit out the cargo door, but they’d gotten it aboard, so Crane knew it would go back out again. He knelt down to unsnap the clamps that held it in place on the deck.
“Say the word,” he said.
“Stand by.”
He had to hold the drone in place as the plane began a gentle climb. Then Jessie said, “Let her go!”
Crane pushed off and ran the drone down the deck. He released it and watched it sail out into the night and vanish into the darkness.
The drone plummeted through the night toward the mountains below in a steep, silent dive. Then its electric pusher propeller came to life and its ailerons twitched back and forth as it stabilized itself. A few moments later, it pulled out of the dive, oriented itself, rechecked its GPS position, and headed off to the southeast.
Aboard the plane, Crane heard the cargo ramp close behind him as he headed back to the cockpit. He let himself in and settled back into the co-pilot’s seat beside Jessie.
“Welcome back,” she said. “Drone’s looking happy.”
Crane checked the displays on his console, which were devoted to the drone instead of the plane itself. Its batteries were fully charged. The night vision and thermal imagers were working. All was well. The drone would maintain course and speed to a waypoint near Jason Tate’s hacienda. There, it would do a flyover of the compound before Crane took manual control and went in for a closer look at anything interesting from that initial pass.
When they had everything they needed, the drone would depart, flying deeper into the mountains until it self-destructed over inhospitable terrain many miles from Tate’s compound. It’s a shame, really, Crane thought. But they had no way to recover it.
“We’re good,” said Crane. “Few minutes.”
“Beautiful tonight, isn’t it?” said Jessie, leaning forward to look up into the starry night. “Stuff like this is why I wanted to fly,” she said. “What about you?”
Crane shrugged. “I never really thought about being a pilot,” he said. “Hurricane taught me a lot of things, and that was one of them.”
“Been meaning to ask you,” she said. “How did you end up working for some super covert spy agency in the first place? Josh said you were a philosophy major?”
Crane laughed. “Well, you don’t need to sound so dubious. It’s an honest profession! Philosophizing, I mean. Steady work wherever there’s … okay, I’ve got nothing there.”
She laughed. “So come on, connect the dots for me. How’d you get from that to being a spy?”
“I was an agent,” Crane said. “No, I went into the Coast Guard after college. Figured I needed to balance all that thinking with some practical experience. Hurricane recruited me out of there. I fit their psych profile, until they got shut down. Then Josh found me, and here we are, aboard this fine airplane, sneaking through Mexican airspace in the dead of night. Which segues nicely into how you got here from a life of anti-government radicalism in the Pacific Northwest.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she laugh
ed. “Gunrunning, pot smuggling, hiding fugitives, dodging the feds—I grew up doing this job. I just never bought into the ideology, so now I do it for money. In fact, I know someone who works for a Fortune 100 multinational. Her title is Senior Mobility Manager, and she gets people where they need to go. Everything from charter flights to visas and customs clearance. When you have one guy who can troubleshoot a forty-thousand-ton tunnel-boring machine somewhere in Central Asia, and you’re losing a few hundred grand in performance penalties every day it’s down, you need that guy onsite fast. She gets him there. That’s what I do. Just less legal. One way or another, I can go pretty much anywhere in the world, and bring pretty much anything or anyone in or out, depending on what you need. Turns out, that’s a very marketable skill.”
Crane could see that. When he was with Hurricane, he had all the resources and clout of the US Government to insert him wherever he needed to go. Now he didn’t, and Jessie had apparently already proven a pretty good substitute.
“Drone’s on station,” she said.
Crane checked the panel and saw that she was right. It had reached its waypoint, and was now orbiting a point half a mile away from the hacienda at an altitude of five hundred feet. Crane told it to power up the sensors and proceed with an overflight.
New windows began to light up with imagery as the drone swooped in over the hacienda. Near-infrared lidar built a precise physical model of the compound, down to individual trees. Thermal cameras scanned for body heat, and ground-penetrating radar probed the insides of structures.
“That’s where we think they’re being held, right?” Jessie said, pointing to a walled building in a far rear corner of the compound. As they watched, traces of body heat began to pop up.
“And there they are,” said Crane. “That’s six hostages, two, maybe three guards.” He fiddled with an adjustment on the radar and said, “They’re in a basement beneath the main level. Ah. It’s looking through a metal roof. That’s why it’s having some trouble resolving them.”