Hunters

by Matt Rogers

  Garcia stared at him.

  Slater cocked his head to the side. ‘Go on. Keep listing all your atrocities. I’m all ears.’

  Whatever Garcia had been expecting, it wasn’t this.

  The cartel head didn’t say a word as they touched down on U.S. soil.

  The Cessna bumped and jolted, found traction, and coasted to the end of the relatively short runway. There was no terminal awaiting it, only a couple of unlit hangars looming, locked up for the night. Slater took one look at the signage and realised the airfield served as a skydiving dropzone.

  Garcia appeared slightly defeated as he got to his feet.

  You wouldn’t think he was making seven figures of illicit profit from the flight.

  Slater understood. To a man like Garcia, money had lost its value. These days, adding a digit to his bank account meant far less than triumphing over a foe, even if the victory was mental rather than physical.

  But in Will Slater, he’d hit a brick wall.

  Garcia led Slater to the exit door, already opened by one of the sicarios, and they stared out into the balmy night.

  Garcia said, ‘What else do you need from me?’

  ‘Guns,’ Slater said. ‘A ride. And two of your men.’

  The lack of response was eerie.

  Slater raised an eyebrow.

  Garcia said, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘That wasn’t the deal.’

  Slater didn’t verbalise the consequences of a “no.” Instead he took his smartphone out of his pocket and cocked his arm back like he was about to throw a fastball.

  Garcia said, ‘The fuck are you doing?’

  With his other hand, Slater gestured to the dark void that was the unlit runway. ‘I throw this away, there’s no confirmation call. My allies publish everything. You lose it all. All the airfields, and all your ability to export along with it. Think about that.’

  Garcia thought about it.

  Slater didn’t get a response as fast as he wanted. He twitched, like he was making to follow through on the pitch.

  Garcia called his bluff. ‘You throw that phone, you’re dead. You know that.’

  ‘So we’ve got a gun to each other’s heads,’ Slater said. ‘Who’ll yield first?’

  No response.

  Slater made the pitch.

  Put his whole arm into it, which would have destroyed the phone beyond salvation when it finally came down on the tarmac dozens of feet from the plane.

  Garcia shot his hand out and caught Slater’s forearm mid-swing.

  Slater clutched the phone tight, saving it millimetres from release.

  Garcia said, ‘What guns?’

  Slater paused to disguise how hard his heart thrummed in his chest. ‘You must understand your men won’t make it back. For the two you choose, it’s the end of the road.’

  Garcia said, ‘Fine.’

  ‘You can guarantee that?’

  ‘I will tell them if they don’t obey, their families will be killed back home. I know where they live. It’s how I guarantee loyalty.’

  ‘I’ll need one more thing once I’m in Manhattan. You have people there? Heroin mills, street dealers?’

  A slow nod. ‘I know people.’

  Slater told him exactly what he needed.

  Garcia said, ‘I’ll make it happen.’

  Slater nodded. ‘Then it’s done.’

  Garcia offered a hand.

  Slater put his phone away, and shook it.

  78

  Slater could cover the 110 miles from Eagleswood to Manhattan in eighty minutes if he floored it, but he obeyed the speed limit.

  He didn’t want to make it this far only to be thwarted by a highway patrol.

  The two sicarios sat in the back, unusually shaken. Garcia and the rest of his death squad had stayed behind in New Jersey to unload the heroin. The cartel head had selected two of his most devoted troops and informed them in hushed Spanish what was required of them. Slater wanted to feel empathy, but he physically couldn’t. Dozens of his past operations had revolved around cartels. He’d seen up close the sheer savagery they were capable of, and the memories of what he’d seen them do to innocent people who were merely in the way would never leave him. The pair in the back had to have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds, of people just to get into Garcia’s inner circle.

  Their role in this plan was all the justice Slater could dish out to Cártel de Texis under the circumstances.

  Now, as he drove the black Chrysler SUV with its tinted windows into the heart of New York, Slater ruptured the silence that had lasted two whole hours.

  ‘Do either of you speak English?’

  The man directly behind him said, ‘Me little bit. Him no.’

  Slater had seen him back in New Jersey, before he’d ducked into the rear seats. He was heavily tattooed, bald, built solidly. He had the eyes of a remorseless killer. On the runway, the sicarios had been informed by Garcia that in New York they would be either killed in action or imprisoned for life. If they weren’t, their families would pay the price. A brutal trade-off, but Slater wouldn’t have survived a day in this world if he didn’t have a capacity for ruthlessness.

  Slater said, ‘Did Garcia explain to you what you must do?’

  ‘Shoot don’t kill,’ the guy said in broken English. ‘Then get killed. Or … arrest.’

  ‘Does your buddy understand?’

  ‘Sí.’

  Slater had nothing else to say to the pair. He despised everything about them. He tried to keep it that way, for the sake of his own conscience.

  The man said, ‘I could kill you now. Shoot through back of neck. Then go back … kill boss. Then my family safe.’

  Slater kept composed. ‘No you couldn’t.’

  A long silence.

  The air was thick.

  At any point he expected to be snapped out of existence. Salvadoran sicarios were the definition of wild cards. Anything could feasibly happen. It was a risk of the job…

  But finally the man said, ‘You are right. I will die for family.’

  Slater thought, How noble. Bet you don’t think of the families you’ve murdered.

  He didn’t vocalise it. He needed them compliant, not standoffish.

  He used the maps application on his phone to navigate into position. First he crawled around the adjacent blocks, cruising, keeping an eye out for any sentries potentially stationed around the black site. But there was nothing. Only the stray club-goers staggering home and the homeless curled up on doorsteps.

  He parked two hundred feet from the block in the Flatiron District that housed the building that was his target.

  He’d never been in. Never heard of its existence. When he and King worked for the government, they were kept at arm’s length from the inner workings of the secret world. But Violetta knew every inch of the skyscraper. She’d worked there for a long time. She’d laid out precisely where “Bay 2” was, the exit Alonzo had mentioned in his digital cry for help.

  From the kerbside, Slater gazed up at the colossal structure. Anywhere else, it would have stood out like a beacon.

  In Manhattan, it was invisible.

  Grey walls, dark windows, no distinguishable external features. No logo of any sort.

  An urban black site, in the heart of the busiest city in America.

  Hiding in plain sight was easier these days.

  Slater checked the time.

  0520. Tuesday morning.

  Forty minutes until they moved Alonzo.

  Or not, he thought, and it rattled him. There was no way to know for sure. But if Alonzo was convinced they’d follow the predetermined routine, then that’s how it was likely to go. There was predictability in routine, but there was also reassurance. Maybe they’d never had a convoy intercepted doing it this way. And there would be a convoy. Maybe four or five SUVs packed with government operatives, which at six in the morning in Manhattan meant nothing. Peak hour began well before then.

  Cars
were already streaming past as dawn broke overhead.

  Slater checked the time again.

  0555.

  The thirty-five minutes had passed like seconds. A result of his constant work toward mastery of his mind. When he emptied it of thought, nothing remained. No fear, no anticipation. Sure, there was the dull pit in his stomach, but that was only a physical sensation.

  Nerves weren’t fear. Nerves were natural.

  Fear was what impaired your decision-making.

  Slater didn’t hesitate.

  He twisted in his seat and found the sicarios fidgeting, unable to control themselves. If their survival mattered to the operation, he’d do everything in his power to steady their hands, calm their spirits.

  But it didn’t, so instead he asked, ‘You ready?’

  Their eyes were hazy, their pupils swollen, and Slater realised while he was centring himself they’d consumed the product their cartel spread across the globe. Chemical enhancement was important. Garcia had probably told them to do it. It’d make them throw themselves into danger without a second thought.

  Slater recalled what Bodhi had done to the disciples of Mother Libertas, back in Wyoming.

  Now the Salvadoran thugs nodded.

  Slater said, ‘Remember what happens if you accidentally kill any bystanders.’

  The one who spoke English said, ‘Our families die.’

  Slater said, ‘Yes.’

  Not what he wanted, but Garcia had hammered the point home, and Slater wasn’t one to get in the way of tradition.

  0556.

  Slater slipped out of the Chrysler the moment there was a lull in traffic. Nothing further needed to be said. The sicarios had their instructions. They’d been over the game plan multiple times at the airfield in New Jersey, hunched over maps beside the looming CessnaJet.

  Now his stomach knotted, but he welcomed the familiar sensation.

  The day he didn’t feel nerves was the day he knew he should stop.

  The HK45CT pistol — which stood for “compact tactical” — was already in a concealed holster at his waist, under his jacket. It was all he needed. He wasn’t here to get into a firefight in the streets of Manhattan, where civilians would be mown down by the dozen.

  He understood the odds.

  The only way to succeed was with total aggression and zero hesitation.

  So that’s what he’d do.

  He hoped that back in El Salvador, King was in position to help him.

  Otherwise he was dead.

  79

  Santa Ana was two hours behind New York, so dawn hadn’t yet broken.

  Just before four a.m. the jungle was motionless.

  King moved through the trees, and beautiful pain held him in its grasp.

  The gravity of his arm injury returned as he ghosted through the woods toward Fabio Torres’ mansion, but he was grateful for it. The previous day had been strange, and the fragments of memory reinforced the fact he didn’t like to dull anything.

  Now the afterglow of the oxycodone hung around, making the state of his body bearable, but only just.

  That would do.

  He’d committed Antônia’s written instructions to memory, and all that was left was to execute.

  He came up on the east side of the estate in the deep dark and took a long look at the layout. Torres had a lot of land. His mansion was three storeys, made predominantly of cream coloured stone, with an ochre roof. There were two-storey east and west wings framing a towering central building, all of it surrounded by sloping manicured lawns. The grass was neatly trimmed and shone brilliant green under the exterior lights. There were plenty of them, all facing outward, illuminating the silhouettes of Torres’ security team patrolling the grounds.

  But there were holes.

  There’s always holes.

  King had his bad arm bound tight in a makeshift sling Violetta had fashioned. It was better that way, so the torn muscles didn’t shift under the skin as he swung the limb around. The arm was useless anyway, so there was little point keeping it free. He could do this one-handed.

  He had to.

  He timed the patterns of the two guards on the east side of the property and scaled the fence with a one-armed heave at the exact moment Antônia instructed. She was smaller, so she would have been able to do it easier, but he still got it done.

  Dropped to the lawn, allowed the shadows to envelop him, and waited ten long seconds.

  Then he heard it.

  A distant muffled voice on the south side of the estate. The sound was painfully strange in the quiet of the early morning. The tone was whispered, but the voice was amplified, like someone softly muttering nonsense into a megaphone.

  The guard to his right, closest to the noise, jolted in place, and his head snapped sideways like he’d been shocked. He set off fast toward the back of the house, striding it out.

  Eventually he’d find the burner phone King had buried in the undergrowth on the other side of the south fence. It’d take him longer to find the small portable speaker Violetta had picked up from the electronics store. The two devices were connected by Bluetooth, and they’d play the recording of King’s garbled mutterings until either someone found them or the speaker ran out of battery.

  King set off, making sure he didn’t put a foot out of place. There was a narrow blind spot up the east side of the grounds, missing the field of view of two CCTV cameras that didn’t quite overlap.

  That was the hole.

  He didn’t need to subdue anyone, let alone fire a round. But he still kept the MEU(SOC) tight in his grip as he crouch-walked up the lawn.

  He reached the terrace of the east wing, dropped prone, and belly-crawled over the smooth stone until he came to the glass sliding doors. Torres instructed his guards to keep them unlocked in the early morning — he smoked half a Cuban on the east terrace each day at five-thirty a.m. sharp. He probably enjoyed the pleasant nicotine buzz to kickstart the day.

  King got to his feet, tugged one door open, and stepped inside.

  Too damn easy.

  He went down the corridor, the antique rug muffling his footsteps, and ducked into the chef’s kitchen. He knew exactly where it was. Antônia had told him.

  The chef was tall, hunched over a lobster on the steel bench top. King came up behind him without a sound. He put the barrel of his pistol against the back of the man’s neck.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ he breathed. ‘Don’t die for your owner. He’s scum. He’d give you up without a second thought.’

  The chef was frozen, but he seemed to understand.

  ‘I’m going to take a step back. Don’t turn around. I’m still aiming at you. Strip down to your underwear. Do it right now.’

  The man complied. He was thin, and the clothes would be tight on King, but they’d fit.

  King said, ‘Now turn around.’

  The man spun slowly. His eyes were wide with fright. King jerked his head toward the cool room. ‘Go in there. Stay there until someone comes to get you. You’ll be fine. If I see you again, I’ll kill you. And I’ll be here for a while, so I wouldn’t risk it if I were you.’

  Simple instructions.

  Easy to follow.

  The guy followed them.

  As soon as the chef shut the cool room door on himself, King put the pistol down and used his good arm to tug the white jacket over his own shirt, then he grabbed the half-peeled lobster and dumped it on a shiny tray on the countertop. The MEU(SOC) pistol went back in his hand, palm toward the ceiling, and he balanced the tray on the flat side of the weapon, holding the gun horizontally like a gangster in a B-movie. It was a competent disguise for a minute of actual work. He only needed to get past the first glance anyway. It’d take anyone a couple of seconds to realise he wasn’t the actual chef, and that was the only purpose it served.

  He’d never be able to actually bluff his way past the guards, but he didn’t need to. Antônia’s notes revealed there were only two in the house at any one time.


  Torres valued his privacy.

  King left the kitchen and practically walked into the first guard.

  80

  At six a.m. on the dot in Manhattan, large bay doors on one side of the featureless skyscraper rumbled upward.

  A convoy of SUVs drove out in a precise single-file chain, like they were invisibly connected from bumper to tail.

  They picked up speed down the alleyway, framed by grimy commercial buildings that surrounded the skyscraper in a tight cluster. The alley spat them out onto 5th Avenue, where a sizeable gap in the morning traffic had been carved out in advance by two civilian sedans driven by plainclothes government operatives. The sedans had stalled at the West 22nd Street intersection, overshadowed by the triangular Flatiron Building the district was named after. The honking horns of angry commuters had been a small price to pay for the gap, which the five SUVs now slotted into.

  Two trained Special Forces snipers activated by the shadow world between deployments manned windows on either side of 5th Avenue. They had an unobstructed view of the convoy below, scanning the sidewalks and nearby vehicles through the scopes of their M39 Enhanced Marksmanship Rifles for threats. The snipers had done these gigs dozens of times before without incident.

  Which meant they were a little slow to react when the Chrysler in the opposing lane swerved hard, accelerated, and rocketed nose-first into the first SUV in the convoy.

  The Chrysler’s bumper crushed the big four-wheel-drive’s fender and drove it into a parked car.

  After the screech of tyres and the thump of metal slamming into metal, there was an ominous pause.

  Then it happened.

  Two screaming Hispanics spilled from the Chrysler, both clutching Kalashnikov AK-47s. One of them emptied half his curved magazine into the hood and bulletproof windows of the leading SUV. The shots pinged harmlessly off the reinforced armour, but the noise was horrendous. The other hostile leapt onto the hood of the Chrysler, affording him a view of the other four vehicles in the convoy, and he fired at the second and third vehicles, roaring at the top of his lungs. When his weapon was near-empty, he lifted the barrel to the sky and held down the trigger, pumping rounds into the air.