by Matt Rogers
Together they floated toward the bar. She seemed to sense what his gesture indicated, and gave up trying to work out what had happened. Some things were better left unsaid.
‘Don’t you think I should know what really happened?’ she said. ‘Just in case?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because my life is already a mess, and there’s no point dragging you four down to my level. So stay blissfully oblivious, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘You seem quieter than before.’
‘I think I’m in shock. Did you…?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I did.’
‘It kind of does.’
‘No, it really doesn’t. Where’s Jake? Where’s Harvey and Whitney?’
‘Inside. At the table. Where you told them to wait.’
‘Harvey and Whitney weren’t there when I said that.’
‘They came back.’
‘From the bar?’
‘Yes, of course. What difference does that make?’
‘Just making sure,’ Slater said.
They pulled up out the front of the long, low building, and all the raucous sounds of inebriation and the low vibration of bass-heavy speakers flowed out the open entranceway and rolled over them, encompassing them in its warm cocoon. Slater pulled to a halt in the dirt, and Casey stopped alongside him. A strange kind of purgatory settled over them. He could see the disbelief in her face, wondering if any of it had actually happened.
He put a hand on her shoulder.
‘You’re the toughest of the four. Mentally. I can see that.’
‘I don’t feel it.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re the best of a bad bunch then.’
She cast him a scornful look.
He smiled. ‘Kidding. You’ve got your head screwed on straight. You worked out what I was before the others. I don’t think any of them have quite figured out what I just prevented. Hopefully they never do.’
‘Okay. So I know. What do I do?’
‘Round them up. Go to the hostel. Pack your shit. And move on.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. Doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. You don’t stop to talk to anyone and you hurry out of here. Get on a bus, catch a flight, pay a driver, whatever. Just get away from the territory.’
‘I thought you said you handled it.’
‘I never said that.’
‘But you just took care of those three. I figured that much.’
‘Yeah. And they’re one speck of a larger cartel. You get me?’
She paled, and nodded. ‘I get you.’
‘Get moving.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘No, I mean it. We’d all be fucking dead if you weren’t there. Jake would have given them those bills and…’
‘Don’t think about that.’
‘It’s the only thing I can think about.’
Slater shrugged. ‘That’s life.’
‘You seem resigned to it.’
‘I am.’
‘You don’t have to be.’
Despite everything he smirked. ‘That’s a conversation for another time, Casey.’
‘Another time?’ She almost looked hopeful.
‘Metaphorical,’ he said, somewhat regrettably. ‘It’s best for your physical and mental health if you never see me again.’
‘If I’m never going to see you again, then can you tell me what exactly you are?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because that’s testing your luck.’
‘Maybe I want to.’
‘Maybe you don’t,’ Slater said, and started to walk away.
‘Hey,’ she called out. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Away.’
‘Away to where?’
‘I live nearby.’
‘Can we stay with you?’
He stopped in his tracks to prevent moving too far away. ‘Did you not hear a word I just said?’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I don’t feel safe anymore.’
‘You shouldn’t. You never should have. Not around here.’
‘We’re young and dumb.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sure you were the same.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-two.’
Slater bit his tongue. At twenty-two, he’d been thrust into the secretive government programme that had altered the fabric of his reality. Life had shifted from boring monotonous routine to the very limits of the human spectrum. Endless pain and extreme experiences, compounding over time, creating something he couldn’t really reflect on without falling into a pit inside his own mind.
No, he hadn’t gone through the young and dumb phase.
For as long as he could remember he’d shouldered the responsibility of an entire country. All because of a genetic predisposition. All because he reacted faster than almost every single person on the planet. His brain fired at a rate his superiors hadn’t seen before. Only a handful of supremely gifted individuals possessed the trait. And it meant they could get the jump on anyone standing across from them in a hostile environment. Which proved awfully useful in live combat situations. It meant he was thrust into war zones with nothing but the clothes on his back and a couple of weapons and forced to fend for himself in encounters that should have killed him a thousand times over.
But they didn’t.
They never did.
And he might have become so used to it that death seemed a foreign concept. Even though he’d come close to it nearly every single day.
Strange.
A dichotomy.
So close, yet so far.
‘Well?’ Casey said. ‘Is this it?’
‘Of course this is it. It was never anything. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time and I was in the right place at the right time. And it all worked out. Get your friends and get the hell out of here.’
‘Thank you, again.’
‘Don’t worry about it, again.’
And then he was gone.
14
He made it to the outskirts of the populated village centre, and then kicked the jeep’s engine into overdrive, accelerating down the rural trails.
The sweat flowed from his pores as the alcohol he’d consumed that afternoon settled into a monotonous pounding in the back of his skull. Amidst all the madness he’d almost forgotten he was inebriated. It hadn’t seemed to affect him in the fight — he’d kept all his fine motor skills intact — but he chalked that up to compartmentalisation.
When the time called for it he could lock away all his problems. In the past he’d managed to ignore severe concussions, broken bones, and grotesque bullet and knife wounds until he got the job done. What was a few drinks to impair his senses in comparison to that?
Every part of him knew keeping the narcos alive was a mistake. It went against everything he’d been taught, everything he’d been led to believe over a career in government operations that wouldn’t even seem realistic if it was transferred to the big screen. Maybe that was half the reason he’d been able to fight the demons of his past for as long as he had. Sure, he could blame it on suppressing the memories with drinks and substances, but that only went so far. Many soldiers tried that and failed dismally. In fact, most just made their problems worse by trying to stifle them.
But perhaps Slater’s past was so incredulous, so unbelievable, that he hadn’t even managed to convince his brain that most of the things in his life had actually happened. And that made him float in this strange state of purgatory where nothing seemed genuine. He wasn’t happy, per se, but he wasn’t sad either.
He just was.
It didn’t take him long to make it back to the compound. He parked in a screech of tyres, and he was through his front door less than five minutes after leaving the bar, coated in sweat but otherwise no worse for wear. The fight with the three narcos had taken ski
n off his elbows and nicked a couple of his knuckles, but in the grand scheme of things he was entirely unblemished.
He walked down the concrete hallway, fetched an ice-cold beer from the fridge, planted himself down on an authentic Hans Wegner armchair overlooking the steadily flowing river, and savoured some alone time to digest and process exactly what had happened.
He sipped the beer. Wiped a hand across his forehead. It came away filthy, coated in dirt and sweat and someone else’s blood. With a sigh he heaved himself off the armchair, peeling himself out of comfort, and headed for the bathroom. He showered for an eternity, allowing the familiar sensation of muscle fatigue to creep into his limbs. Back in the deserted lot he’d tapped into the life or death strength stored deep within, and that took a toll on the central nervous system. No-one was a hundred percent after a fight. Slater was tough as nails, but he wasn’t superhuman.
He killed the water, towelled off, changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a simple cotton tee that clung to his muscular frame, and returned to the armchair. The exhale that followed came out wrong, rattling in his throat instead of making a smooth exit. It wasn’t fear. It was something else. Something he really didn’t wish to think about.
But he had to.
Because it was resignation.
He’d never stepped into a situation like that and just walked away. No matter how hard he tried. Sure, he’d returned to the compound in an attempt to distance himself from the four college kids, but something told him their fates were now intertwined.
Because the cartel wouldn’t leave it alone.
Slater had made a fool out of them, and they wouldn’t take that lightly.
They weren’t three men. They were much, much more than that.
Across the river, the jungle seemed to stir. The sun had started its descent hours ago, and now it tinged the canopy of treetops with a toxic orange, drenching everything in sight. Long shadows fell over the opposite riverbank, darkening the space between the trees, exacerbating the fear of the unknown. Slater cradled the beer with hunched shoulders and focused as best he could on recovery. The three Heckler & Koch sidearms rested on the glass coffee table in front of him. He eyed them warily. They might come in handy.
He had a feeling it was going to be a long night.
15
Deep in the Colombian jungle, wrapped in a protective blanket of vegetation, a cluster of concrete bunker-like buildings trickled into darkness as dusk fell. They were skewered into the earth in a tight grid, protected by a chain-link perimeter fence that weaved through the undergrowth in no particular pattern. Whoever constructed the place hadn’t gone to the effort of uprooting the surrounding trees. Instead they’d worked around what already existed. It added a certain level of camouflage to the buildings, aiding their invisibility. Moss grew out of cracks in the concrete, and a couple of the overhanging trees had sunk low over the last few years, drooping their fronds across the bunkers.
Inside one of the buildings, Bautista, Vicente, and Iván stretched out on rudimentary camping mattresses, cradling their wounds. They’d been exiled to this fetid dump of a bunker on the outskirts of the compound as soon as they’d crawled back to the jungle with their tail between their legs.
The boss wasn’t in yet.
But he would be.
Santiago had business to attend to during the daytime. Elsewhere. He ventured out into the wild, scouting nearby towns for signs of resistance, forming new supply routes, negotiating with third parties. Anything to streamline the process. Anything to lower the bottom line, and raise the profits.
Anything to win.
The three narcos had nowhere else to go. If they fled out of shame, it wouldn’t take long to hunt them down. Santiago only had to put out the feelers and employ the services of every rival cartel. They would all sway their allegiances for the right price. Their boss could turn all of Colombia against them. And the surrounding countries, too. They wouldn’t have a chance to make it out alive.
Before it was too late.
The door thundered inward, kicked open by a steel-toed boot. Bautista moved to lurch off the inflatable mattress — already stained with his blood — but a searing pain in his head sent him straight back to the soft material. He sunk into temporary comfort, cradling his injuries. No-one had treated them. No-one had cleaned them up. A couple of hired goons busy packing heroin had pointed them in the direction of the makeshift infirmary and told them in no uncertain terms to wait there or risk slow, painful death for their failure.
They’d probably still get that, anyway.
Now Santiago strode into the concrete room, his eyes as harsh and grey as the surroundings. He eyed Bautista, then drifted his gaze to Vicente and Iván. Neither of the other two had reacted. Bautista had been the only one to twitch involuntarily. And Santiago had noticed.
He was six-three, two hundred and thirty pounds. Considerable body fat coated his frame, but it lay draped over a dense slab of powerlifting muscle. It only added to his strength. His head was shaved bald, his eyes squashed and ugly, his pupils swelled with the tinge of a man who induced far too many hallucinogens, and his lips fat and red.
And he was always angry.
Bautista had only tested Santiago’s strength once. He’d lost a brick of heroin on the way to an organised meet, and the boss had thought Bautista lifted the portion for his own personal gain. Santiago threw him through a wall, breaking three of his ribs and nearly rupturing a lung. Then a couple of hired guns had retraced Bautista’s footsteps through the jungle and found the packaged brick lying in a ditch by the side of a trail. It had fallen off the back of the truck. Bautista had been telling the truth.
It had taken him two months to recover, and he’d been cautious to never do anything to displease Santiago again.
Now the big man stared at him with venom in his eyes.
‘You three,’ he said. ‘Start talking.’
‘There was a guy,’ Bautista said, babbling too fast. He’d been preparing what to say for hours. ‘We’ve never seen him before. He lives around here.’
‘Where, exactly?’
‘I can show you on the GPS.’
‘Distance?’
‘About twenty miles from us.’
‘And he beat the shit out of all three of you?’
A trio of nods, in unison.
‘How?’
‘He was good,’ Vicente said.
‘That’s not an explanation.’
‘Better than good,’ Bautista said.
‘I’m still not satisfied.’
‘That’s all we can tell you. We’re just as confused as you are.’
‘I doubt that. Because you were there. And I’m trying to piece this all together from the sidelines. The three of you were armed?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t think of using your guns?’
‘We tried. He stripped us of our weapons.’
‘One by one?’
‘It all happened so quick.’
‘Nothing happens that quick. Three on one, and you didn’t have time to pull a gun? Not one of you?’
‘I guess you had to be there.’
‘I guess so. What’s this I hear about a group of kids?’
‘We sold one of them coke. At the bar Matias owns. The young guy paid us in fake U.S. dollars.’
‘And you realised this after the fact?’
‘Before.’
‘And you did it anyway?’
‘We were going to take them. Bring them back here. Make an example out of them.’
Santiago placed his beefy hands on his hips and twirled on the spot for dramatic effect, looking this way and that.
‘I don’t see them,’ the big man said.
‘We didn’t have time to pick them up. We had to come straight back here and tell you about the newcomer. Because he’s a problem.’
A deadly silence filled the air. Santiago’s piercing glare infiltrated Bautista’s soul, searching it for any sign of weakn
ess.
And he found something.
Santiago surged forward, approaching the fetid air mattress, and squatted low so he was face to face with Bautista.
‘You reek of fear,’ he said. ‘And … you had time.’
‘We didn’t. I swear. These two will back me up.’
‘I don’t care if the Pope backs you up. You could have snatched those four. It wouldn’t have taken any effort. What happened in town?’
‘Nothing. We just got our shit kicked in.’
‘That’s not all.’
‘It is.’
‘No,’ Santiago hissed. ‘It isn’t … did this black man tell you to leave them alone? And did you listen to him?’
‘He didn’t tell us shit.’
‘I think he did.’
Bautista didn’t respond.
Santiago said, ‘In fact, I know he did. Your lip’s quivering. What did he say?’
‘To forget about the college kids.’
‘And you listened to him.’
‘No. Like I said, we weren’t going to in the first place.’
‘They gave you fake currency. And you let them. Why would you do that in the first place?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You planned to snatch them. And this guy scared you off. Made you run back here with your tail between your legs. You bent over backwards for him, and now you’re here. Big mistake, my dumb friends.’
‘You need us.’
Santiago raised an eyebrow. ‘You think I will kill you?’
‘We do your dirty work. We’ve done it for years. Who will you turn to without us?’
‘It seems the three of you have reached your expiration date.’
Vicente and Iván visibly bristled on their mattresses, both discarded across the room. Bautista saw it over Santiago’s shoulder.
The big man didn’t even turn around. ‘If either of you two even think about going for a gun, I’ll make it as slow and painful as I possibly can. And all of you know how slow I can make it.’
‘You’re not going to kill us,’ Bautista said.
‘No,’ Santiago said. ‘But you’ve disgraced us. Matias has footage from the cameras. At the bar. People have seen the tape. You take false bills from the American kid. And those four are still waltzing around town. What kind of message does that send? What does that do to our reputation?’