Hunters

by Matt Rogers

He spoke at warp speed, each syllable following the other in rapid-fire.

  Slater took in the information, and his chest tightened.

  It all happened like that.

  He didn’t know whether King was in position or not, and there was no time to check.

  He said, ‘Do it. Now. Your orders.’

  Alonzo copy-pasted pre-prepared instructions complete with all the relevant confirmation codes into the live feed and fired them off.

  Then he waited.

  So did Slater.

  A long pause where the air seemed to sit still, then—

  Commotion from the reception area. Chairs scraping across the floor, desks shifting, footsteps pattering short distances. As if the diplomats were seeking cover.

  ‘What’s that?’ Slater whispered. ‘They’ve been warned in advance?’

  Alonzo closed the laptop. It served no purpose anymore. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. No use hunching over it praying it did. He stood up, and Slater moved into the hallway to allow him through.

  Somehow the narrow corridor was more claustrophobic than before. Slater followed the length of it with his gaze, all the way to the metal back door. Any moment he expected it to burst inward, knocked off its hinges by a breaching tool.

  Nothing happened.

  Standing beside him, Alonzo whispered, ‘Did it work?’

  Slater said nothing.

  In the reception, a landline phone rang.

  On and on its tone chimed, filling the gaping quiet.

  No one answered it.

  Slater’s mood was grim as he said, ‘Maybe that’s for us.’

  Alonzo said, ‘What?’

  ‘Who else would it be for?’

  ‘Will…’

  Slater looked at him, a touch nihilistic. ‘I have a compact pistol. They have dozens of Tier One operatives with automatic rifles and all the time in the world to plan a breach. If the call is for us, we might as well take it. What other options are there?’

  Alonzo paused to think about it, then seemed to realise Slater was right. The only other choice was to go back into their rooms and curl up cowering in the corner.

  Slater went to the door leading to reception and opened it.

  The diplomats were scattered throughout the space, but none of them were preparing for the workday. They were sheltering under desks, some of them curled in the foetal position, hands over their ears.

  Forewarned of the authorities storming their workplace.

  The phone carried on ringing on the reception desk, right behind the glass screen. Slater stepped into the receptionist’s box and lifted the handset off the base. The spiralling cord dangled as he brought it to his ear.

  Without waiting for an introduction, he said, ‘I’m guessing that didn’t work.’

  The voice on the other end laughed. ‘At least you’re a realist.’

  ‘Alonzo thought he might have been able to sneak it past your tech guys.’

  The voice said, ‘Evidently not. I thought I’d give you a call, though. It was impressive. We almost didn’t catch it.’

  ‘Are you Onyx?’

  A pause. Then, ‘Which one of them told you my name?’

  The hunters.

  Which was the weak link?

  ‘A couple of them,’ Slater said. ‘They weren’t robots. They had personalities. They revealed things in their dying breaths.’

  ‘“Had,”’ Onyx said. ‘Look where it got them.’

  ‘I thought you trained them.’

  ‘Clearly not well enough.’

  ‘So you’ll do it better next time?’

  ‘Of course. What’s life without improvement?’

  Slater said, ‘This call is between us, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘No one else listening?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Onyx’s sarcasm was clear.

  Slater said, ‘Everyone listening in knows you’ve got an expiration date. You were the hunter commander. You were in charge of the best of the best. How many hours, how much money, did you pour into those hunters? What resources were wasted with their deaths?’

  Silence.

  Slater knew this wasn’t how the shadowy figure had expected the call to go. He’d expected to hear Will Slater quaking, pleading for his life.

  Onyx said, ‘You must know you’re all out of options. Where’s your fear?’

  ‘It’s there,’ Slater said. ‘But I’ll never let you hear it. And I’ll die satisfied, knowing you won’t be far behind me.’

  Onyx didn’t answer.

  Slater said, ‘See? That scares you more than it scares me.’

  Onyx stayed on the line, but movement sounded from the other side of the consulate’s front door. Rapid footsteps, shuffling of bodies.

  Operatives getting into position.

  Slater pressed the handset close to his mouth so Onyx could hear every word. ‘And one more thing…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Watch what happens next.’

  Slater dropped the handset as the front door thundered off its hinges.

  107

  When Deckard swam back to reality in the motel room, there was a disorienting delay between seeing and understanding. He registered his predicament, but it took a few moments to compute.

  When he realised his laptop, work phone and gun were all gone, his stomach sank.

  Then he looked down and found out he was tied to the shitty desk chair in his underwear.

  That made it worse.

  He has my uniform, he realised. My gear, my—

  He cut himself off there, because nothing good would come from following that train of thought.

  Great, Cross thought.

  Another colossal fuck-up to add to the list.

  108

  The handset wasn’t the only thing Slater dropped.

  He also relieved himself of his weapon.

  Let go of the HK45CT and let it fall to the ground and raised both hands high in the air, fixing himself to the spot so the hit team charging into the consulate had no excuse to shoot him. Which didn’t mean they wouldn’t do it. They didn’t need an excuse.

  The door frame was relatively narrow, so they breached in a narrow phalanx formation, all four of them following one after the other with their weapon raised over the shoulder of the man in front. Three of them Slater recognised.

  The skull.

  The wolf.

  The clown.

  The fourth wore a plain balaclava, and he brought up the rear. The eyeholes of his balaclava were larger than his counterparts’ and Slater saw he was dark-skinned, eyes bloodshot with adrenaline. Slater thought he could see the veins in his throat pulsing against the wool of the balaclava. One-fifty, one-sixty beats per minute.

  He was jumpy.

  He was the main threat.

  Slater put a look on his face like he was the most innocent person alive, and he hoped Alonzo followed suit.

  When he caught a glance of Alonzo in his peripheral vision, he saw the tech wizard had raised his own hands.

  Good, Slater thought. We might survive a couple more minutes.

  One of the receptionists let out a soft whimper from under the desk Slater stood behind.

  The guy in the skull mask led the procession, and now he stepped further into the reception and aimed his rifle at the glass barrier.

  The skull had the same sinister voice behind the mask. ‘If you were just going to give up when we came in, why all this hassle?’

  Slater said, ‘Didn’t want to make it too easy for you.’

  ‘This is easy enough.’

  ‘Are we going to make it out of here alive?’

  ‘Come on out from behind that glass and find out.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The skull hovered ominously, the man behind it staring at Slater from behind his carbine’s sight. Then he chuckled, a strange sound when imminent death hung in the air. ‘Oh. I see. You’re waiting for your buddy to show up. That King motherfucker. Yes?’r />
  Slater shrugged.

  Diagonally behind him, a sound ripped through the back corridor.

  The rear door of the consulate, blasting off its hinges.

  Then heavy, rapid footsteps in the hallway.

  Too far away.

  ‘You think that might be him?’ the skull asked. ‘Coming to save you? Embedded in the rear unit?’

  Slater shrugged again.

  The skull turned to the clown. ‘What do you think, Tye?’

  Tye — the clown — said, ‘There’s a chance, isn’t there?’

  His voice was muffled behind the balaclava.

  The skull moved as its wearer beelined across reception. Striding hard. He’d make it past the glass barrier before the rear hit team reached them. Slater saw the man’s finger slide inside his trigger guard, almost in slow motion.

  He thought about diving for the gun he’d dropped.

  He hadn’t anticipated the guy being so intent on gunning him down.

  The skull mask floated around the side of the desk, and the carbine came up.

  A perfect line of sight, straight down the barrel.

  Slater and Alonzo in the crosshairs.

  Slater thought, Shit.

  The guy fired.

  Held down his finger on the trigger and emptied his weapon into Slater and Alonzo.

  109

  At least, that’s what he thought he did.

  The gun sure blared, made all the accompanying sounds of a relentless discharge. But his targets just stood there, seemingly immune to bullets. In fact, they looked at him with expressions that were almost bored.

  The carbine went dry in his hands.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  He stared down at it, unbelieving.

  Then he looked up at Slater.

  Slater winked and said, ‘Blanks.’

  What? the man thought.

  It didn’t compute.

  They were the only ones with access to their weapons. Cross had passed him his M4 in the truck, right before they’d gone in…

  Cross.

  He stared at the wolf mask.

  Whose wearer brought his carbine across to aim at the back of the clown’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Those aren’t blanks, the skull mask wearer thought as the clown’s twisted expression exploded in a shower of gore.

  Then Cross threw a staggering elbow straight backward like a cannonball, which practically caved in the fourth man’s throat — the guy in the plain balaclava. He went down without an ounce of resistance and then Cross put both hands back on his carbine and brought it up to aim directly between the eyes of the skull.

  The skull mask wearer thought, Did I actually see his face this morning? Or did he get in the truck with the mask on?

  He already knew the answer.

  The man who wasn’t Deckard Cross shot him in the head, so he didn’t get any time to ponder how badly he’d fucked up.

  110

  King ripped off the sweaty balaclava just as the rear unit barrelled into reception.

  He paused a beat, just in case they might surrender, but when they moved to shoot him he fired first, putting a separate three-round burst through both men’s heads. They both pitched forward from the momentum of their charge, so the guy taking up the rear sprawled on top of the corpse in front.

  King twisted and pinned the guy in the plain balaclava down with the sole of his boot. The operative was already struggling, flailing. King kicked his gun away and snarled, ‘Play dead and you’ll make it out of this alive. Comprende?’

  Comprende.

  The guy pretended he’d been knocked out cold.

  Humiliating, but better than being dead.

  In the stunned quiet of the aftermath, Slater asked, ‘How’s the arm?’

  King couldn’t feel it, so he answered with a simple shake of the head. He’d used his left arm to elbow the fourth operative, but only after recognising that he was willingly destroying all the healing that had taken place over the past forty-eight hours. The pain was back, as grave and head-pounding as before, but he could deal with that. It was a small price to pay for the freedom of his friends.

  Alonzo said, ‘How’d you manage that?’

  He hadn’t been informed of the specifics of King’s infiltration. Slater himself hadn’t been one hundred percent sure. They hadn’t had time to communicate in the minutes before it kicked off. Watching the skull wearer pull that trigger, the gun blaring in his face…

  Fifty-fifty.

  Complete victory, or your whole life snuffed away, like that…

  The ultimate gamble.

  So it made sense that his heart raced and that sweat broke out across his forehead and along his upper back, running down under his shirt.

  Wired with stress, he said, ‘I can guess what comes next.’

  His eyes were on the bodies.

  King nodded. ‘Forty-five seconds until evac. How fast can you get changed?’

  111

  Across East 36th Avenue, obscured by the tint of the opposite building’s windows, three snipers watched the strike team spill back out of the consulate.

  The three ground troops were frantic, and the fourth was nowhere to be seen.

  The survivors were panicked.

  On the verge of hysteria.

  The sniper to the far left of the opposite façade knew the ground operatives personally, so he quickly identified who was screaming behind the masks.

  The wolf and the clown. Deckard Cross and Tye Moore.

  It was unbecoming for them to be scared, which meant they must be in horrific agony.

  Nerve gas?

  He leaned closer into his MK12 Special Purpose Rifle, one eye squeezed shut, the other trained down the sight. He had an unobstructed shot if he needed it. He’d already carved a small cylindrical hole out of the reinforced window pane to feed the barrel through, a monstrous suppressor attached. If they were going to get into a shootout in Manhattan, it was prudent to have the best silencing technology on hand.

  So he had no qualms about using his weapon as he zeroed in on the entrance to the consulate, ignoring his screaming friends.

  They were the toughest men he knew.

  If they were hysterical, it was bad.

  What sort of poison did those sick fucks use? the sniper thought.

  He was so fixated on the entrance he didn’t notice the civilian vehicle breeze past on East 36th. Maybe he caught a flash of it out of the corner of his eye, but it didn’t register through his tunnel vision. The whole team — from the snipers to the intelligence gatherers to the ground forces — had received orders that they’d be going in within five minutes of breaching, so it made sense that the established cordon hadn’t fully done the trick. There was always a reckless commuter so desperate to get to work on time that they’d drive around an erected barricade.

  What did catch his attention was the three fleeing operatives ceasing their screaming and diving into the open rear door of the vehicle, one by one.

  Someone slammed the door shut from within and the car sped away.

  The sniper only caught the profile of the back of a blonde woman’s head behind the wheel, and a dark-haired woman in the passenger seat.

  Then the car was gone, veering onto Lexington and vanishing.

  The sniper hesitated.

  He grappled with confusion at heights he couldn’t fathom.

  He thumbed his throat mike and said, ‘What the fuck just happened?’

  112

  It took until the next day for King to realise being back stateside wasn’t so bad.

  Somehow the mainland didn’t feel so hostile.

  After all, the hunters were gone. Every last one of them. Their bodies were riddled across Las Vegas, Joya de Ceren, and Santa Ana. The very best the world of black operations had to offer was reduced to nothing, all its elite Tier One killers chewed up and spat out by a pair of retirees supposedly past their prime.

  Getting out of Manhattan had
proved straightforward enough. There simply wasn’t anyone of King or Slater’s calibre left to pursue them. The team that stormed the consulate had been more of the best, although not quite as qualified as the hunters. With them gone, snuffed out by King’s surprise assault, all that remained was to evade the regular police and security forces scattered throughout the state. With Alonzo on their side, it was a cakewalk. He’d designed many of the NYPD’s procedures and protocols in the first place, using insights gleaned from big data to develop a sophisticated approach to laying down roadblocks and bottlenecking fugitives. With that insider information in their possession, Alonzo simply laid out where he knew the hotspots would be located, and they avoided those roads. They made their way out of the five boroughs, went up north toward Albany, then eventually turned east into Massachusetts when Alonzo determined it was too risky to continue north.

  So now here they were.

  Winthrop.

  A coastal city in Suffolk County, a shade east of Boston, with oceanside properties overlooking pebble beaches and yacht clubs and lighthouses.

  The sky was overcast the morning after their daring escape from Manhattan, but King barely noticed the weather. It could have been sunny or hailing.

  What mattered was their condition, which was free.

  He realised for a government that preached freedom above all else, they sure were adamant about gagging anyone who knew of their dirty secrets. But as the strange calmness of the day settled over him, he figured this might be the first time the American secret world refrained from chasing him and Slater.

  It simply wasn’t worth it anymore.

  King stood at the window of a rented townhouse facing Pico Beach, his left arm bound tight in a competent sling. Now they had access to proper medical supplies, Violetta had done a flawless job of treating his arm. There was still muscle sheared off the bone, but after gentle scrutinisation Violetta had determined that surgery wasn’t required for the moment. Which was a good thing, considering they couldn’t step foot in a hospital. They would have had to bribe a doctor, which comes with its own myriad problems.