by Matt Rogers
Once again — silence.
Slater walked straight back into the room with the hostages, subconsciously glad that the conflict had taken place in the dark.
He didn’t really want to see the results of his rifle swing. From the sound of the impact, the thug was dead. That was all he needed to know.
Ears ringing from the unsuppressed gunshots, painfully aware of the racket that had been caused, Slater grimaced.
The situation had become a ticking time bomb.
18
He could barely hear a thing after the three shots he’d fired.
The room containing the three hostages had no windows or gaps in the walls aside from the doorway itself. As a result the sound of the gunshots had been contained, amplified by the confined space, to such an extent that the high-pitched whining in Slater’s ears caused him genuine pain. Convinced he’d given himself long-term hearing issues, he crouched low in the centre of the room, maintaining a calm demeanour in the face of total carnage.
‘It’s me,’ he said to the dark room, his words sounding hollow with his impaired hearing.
He wasn’t sure if the woman or the kids could hear him, but he didn’t want them panicking — he wanted them to know they were temporarily safe. He couldn’t risk turning on a flashlight, but it seemed foolish to try and calm them down.
He had just incapacitated four people in front of their eyes.
Nothing happened for a long time. A minute passed, and Slater remained still as a statue, eyes fixed on the dark gap in the wall where the doorway rested, waiting for reinforcements to come charging in.
Ready to deal with any further threats.
Finding none, he started to grow optimistic. Maybe it was a six-man setup. Maybe he’d killed everyone in the construction site who posed a threat. Maybe D’Agostino’s operation was done.
But nothing ever went according to plan.
When some semblance of his hearing began to return, he deemed it prudent to continue the conversation with the woman, even though he wasn’t sure how mentally scarred she would be from the proceedings.
‘What’s your name?’ he said quietly, trying to inject some shred of normality into the situation.
‘Theresa,’ she said.
‘Theresa, I’m Will.’
‘You killed those men?’
‘Yes.’
Neither of the kids piped up — Slater imagined they were both in a state of shock. Theresa, on the other hand, seemed surprisingly calm.
‘You okay?’ he said.
‘Fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Just get me out of here, okay?’
‘These guys kidnapped you?’
She nodded. ‘And my children.’
‘You three are a family?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Earlier today.’
‘Time?’
‘Roughly four p.m.’
‘How’d it happen?’
‘We were shopping. There’s a detour we usually take. Through an alley. They got us there.’
‘Shoved you into a van?’
‘Pretty much. It happened really fast.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s the father of these kids?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you think he’ll react to this?’
‘He’ll be devastated.’
‘He’d do anything to get you back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even pay an enormous ransom?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have money?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you do?’
‘He’s a lawyer. I run an online business. Jewellery.’
‘Big shot lawyer?’
‘I guess.’
‘Does he seem like the type of guy to play along with any demands?’
‘What do you mean?’
Slater pressed a pair of fingers into his closed eyelids, battling down an oncoming headache, connecting the dots between this particular incident and a story told to him by a model named Florence earlier that evening.
‘Just seems like there’s a pattern here in Chicago,’ he muttered. ‘And I have a feeling your husband’s being deliberately targeted.’
‘I don’t understand…’ Theresa whispered.
‘What type of lawyer is he?’
‘Criminal defence.’
‘He co-operates with the Chicago P.D. occasionally?’
‘Of course. Part of the job.’
‘You think he has friends in the force?’
‘I know he does. Actually, that name you mentioned earlier. Out in the corridor…’
‘D’Agostino?’
‘Yes. Stephen’s met with him a few times. You think…?’
‘I know,’ Slater said.
It would be easy, wouldn’t it?
As a police commander, you would make acquaintances with wealthy types — mostly lawyers, especially in the field of law enforcement. You would come to learn which of them were vulnerable to exploitation, and from there it would be fairly straightforward. Recruit a small force of hired goons looking for work in the Chicago underworld — maybe even use your experience running the central district to find the easiest nodes through which you could hire mercenaries. Abduct the wealthy target’s family, but use your vast experience as an officer of the law to do it in the most efficient way possible. Leave no trace of what you’ve done. Demand ransom, leaning on all kinds of pressure points that you discovered whilst befriending the husbands. When the money’s received, return the families safe and sound and insist that if a word is uttered about this incident, there will be blood to spill. Keep your identity disguised and anonymous the entire time. Let the Dagestanis handle the grunt work. After a few days pass and no-one goes forward to the police, too scared to act, the entire thing will be swept under the rug, never to be discussed or referred to again.
Because the best crimes made the victims implicit.
Because that’s what true master manipulators, like Commander Ray D’Agostino, were able to do.
But what about when the husbands didn’t co-operate?
Slater didn’t want to know how long D’Agostino had been running this operation. It would no doubt come to light, when news of his death hit the newspapers and television, and his dark empire slowly emerged from the shadows. Witnesses would come forward. They wouldn’t have known it was D’Agostino at the time, but they would connect the dots. The pieces would fall into place.
A hostage operation carried out with the painstaking detail of a commander who knew exactly how to get away with any kind of crime.
Genius.
But Slater had no time to consider D’Agostino’s empire, because Theresa piped up. ‘Will?’
Her voice was shaking.
‘What?’ Slater said.
‘Are you sure you killed those men?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s just… I heard something.’
The first guy.
Slater’s heart rate skyrocketed and he yanked the phone out of his back pocket, not interested in keeping quiet anymore. He turned the flashlight on, revealing something worse than the first guy regaining consciousness.
The man simply wasn’t there anymore.
19
Slater recalled the damage his strikes would have caused. Two undefended knees directly to the nose — the man’s septum would have shattered and it probably would have briefly knocked him unconscious.
But he must have recovered just enough to get his feet under him and slip unobstructed out of the room, taking advantage of the darkness and Slater’s distracted state. He’d been processing everything Florence had told him, grappling with the coincidence that her story was connected with D’Agostino and the operation in the skyscraper. Now he found himself reeling — he’d lost a hostile, one that knew where he was and what he was armed with.
&nbs
p; He couldn’t let the guy escape.
But it looked like the man already had.
Slater wheeled on the spot, bringing the flashlight over to illuminate the three hostages. He got a look at the two kids for the first time — both were ghostly white, shaking and shivering and staring up at him with wide eyes and dilated pupils. He wasn’t sure whether they’d been drugged or not, but they were scared out of their minds.
He didn’t blame them.
Inwardly, he was too.
Racing through a laundry list of ways to respond to the crisis, he turned to face Theresa. Despite her relatively calm answers to Slater’s questions, she seemed in a similar state to her kids.
‘Theresa,’ he said, ignoring the horrified expression on her face as she glimpsed the three dead bodies lying across the threshold to the room, only a few feet away from her. He imagined the family didn’t have much experience with blood and violence.
Sometimes he wished he didn’t either.
But he was slowly beginning to accept the fact that this situation felt perfectly normal.
He was steadily becoming accustomed to the overwhelming wave of emotions that plagued every life or death encounter.
He was learning to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
And he hasn’t lost all control of the situation.
Yet.
‘Theresa,’ he repeated, and finally she took her eyes away from the bodies.
‘Yes?’
‘What else can you tell me? Are there more?’
‘More what?’
‘More thugs. The guys who kidnapped you.’
She looked at him as if he were stupid. ‘Of course there’s more.’
Slater sensed the blood draining from his cheeks. He battled down a racing heart and wiped his sweaty palms against his jeans. ‘Okay. How many more?’
‘At least ten. This place is crawling with them.’
‘Ten?!’
‘Well, you’ve killed a few. Maybe six or seven left. It’s an entire convoy of those Russian guys. They all look the same. They’re all horrible.’
‘I can’t hear anyone approaching. And I fired my weapon two minutes ago. What does—?’
Theresa audibly gasped. ‘Oh, God. Will. Move!’
‘What?’
‘They’ll be dealing with the collateral. Oh, no. Oh my God. Go!’
He seized her by the shoulder. ‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘There’s more families. Upstairs.’
‘Fuck. Why are you down here, then?’
‘We’re new arrivals. I guess this is like a… holding cell.’
‘How far upstairs?’
‘We got taken up there. Right at the start. I think seven or eight floors up. They have it all set up flawlessly. I saw three different families. Women and children. So six total. I’m the only person kidnapped with two kids. It’s probably logistically harder.’
‘You’re good at feeding me information,’ Slater noted.
‘My husband’s a lawyer. Will, you need to—’
Slater got to his feet and stared at one of the discarded Kalashnikovs in the doorway — an AK-15, he noted, now that he was illuminating the room with the phone flashlight. It struck him as odd that the Eastern European thug who had fled the room moments earlier hadn’t picked up one of the assault rifles and drilled a cluster of rounds through the back of Slater’s head whilst he’d been distracted.
But the room would have been pitch dark, and Slater had already punched the guy’s nose into the back of his skull, so he certainly hadn’t been thinking straight. He would have got to his feet and hurried straight out of the room, as quiet as he could.
To raise the alarm.
Slater realised he needed to move, just as Theresa had demanded. When the thug reached the top floor and informed his friends that the three gunshots they’d heard earlier hadn’t been their imagination and that there really was a trained hostile inside the building, all the other families being kept in the skyscraper would be placed in danger.
Who knew what a pack of unhinged guns-for-hire would do when their operation was in jeopardy?
Slater didn’t want to find out.
He needed to get the jump on them before they could do anything brash.
Already drained from the energy he’d exerted so far, he clambered to his feet and tightened his grip on both the Glock 17 and the smartphone’s flashlight.
Taking a deep breath, he muttered, ‘Be right back,’ and plunged straight into the unknown.
20
Expecting confrontation right off the bat, he found himself somewhat surprised to find the ground floor devoid of life. He raced through unfinished hallways and ducked under dirty steel beams, largely unsure of where he was headed, left with almost no information about what he would be running into.
He’d never been this unprepared in his life.
He’d elected to leave the Kalashnikovs behind — in such close quarters he preferred the ease with which he could wield a Glock. Not that it mattered, anyway. He spent the entire duration of the sprint strangely certain of his own impending death. The icy terror settling over him did nothing to calm his heart rate — his operations for Black Force had been pulse-pounding to date, but nothing like this.
He was heading up the stairwell of a half-finished skyscraper in the freezing cold, armed with a pistol, tasked with eliminating a small army of Eastern European thugs who had three innocent families to use as hostages and human shields.
Teeth chattering — he told himself it was the cold — he reached the barren stairwell after only twenty seconds of racing through the building’s ground floor. He stared up at the gaping maw above, unnerved by the scale of the spiralling vertical tunnel. It consisted of a giant rectangular space spearing up toward the night sky far above, running through largely unfinished levels of the skyscraper’s bottom half. The open air provided a little more natural light to work with — everything was shrouded in a dark blue hue instead of consumed by complete darkness. There was nothing to shield a fall through the central tunnel of the stairwell — no barricades, no walls. Just an eight-storey cylinder of open space riddled with the occasional stretch of scaffolding.
Slater hurried straight up the concrete stairs without a second thought.
There was no sign of activity. He doubted the Eastern Europeans would have sentries manning the access points — they didn’t seem like they had that level of intelligence. They would be in panic mode, debating what to do about the unsuppressed gunshots from below just as their comrade came racing into sight with his face caved in and blood pouring out of his nose, warning about a single intruder tearing through their forces.
They might not believe him.
Good.
Slater would take all the hesitation he could get.
The desolation of the construction site leeched through the atmosphere — Slater figured the three gunshots would have simply sounded like a car backfiring from out on the street. The structure was gargantuan, no doubt intended to act as the home for a giant corporate firm upon completion. But evidently the builders had gone into liquidation, or the developers had run out of money, or any number of problems had cropped up that were common in the corporate world.
As he raced up the stairs with the cool night air on his face and the barren concrete walls dwarfing him on all sides, Slater began to connect the dots.
D’Agostino’s connections with the city council might have notified him about this place. He could have subtly swept the building’s documents under the rug, pretending to pass them along the supply chain but in fact hiding all knowledge of the abandoned construction site’s existence. Then he would be free to use it as he pleased, not having to worry about the council seizing the land.
Sometimes it paid to hold a position of authority.
You could get away with murder.
If Slater thought his heart was racing earlier, he wasn’t prepared for the fatigue that set in as he reached the eighth floo
r. He’d covered the distance in record time, and for the first time in the field he found himself locked in a battle of willpower with his own mind. He’d heard of the concept of an adrenalin dump, but he hadn’t fully experienced the sensation until now. The fighting on the ground floor had sapped him of all his strength, requiring one hundred percent of his maximum output in the desperate battle for survival.
Now he fought the urge to sit down and recharge his internal batteries — there was no time for that. His experiences in the field thus far had been populated by brief, all-out explosions of violence, with long uninterrupted stretches of nothingness between them. He had never been forced to leap from confrontation to confrontation so fast.
You learn something new every time, he thought.
Mustering what little energy he had left, he prepared himself for what he would find on the eighth floor. Conflict was inevitable, and he steeled himself as he reached the open concrete walkway that the stairwell levelled out onto.
The skyscraper was supposed to spear fifty or sixty storeys into the sky, but construction had ground to a halt on the ninth or tenth floor. Everything above Slater now was nothing but a twisted amalgamation of scaffolding and supports, some of them having already collapsed after months of disuse.
The stairwell had reached its conclusion.
He took a gulp of air, tasting the crisp Chicago night, and then ducked straight through a giant open doorway set into the concrete perimeter wall of the stairwell, leaving the vast vertical tunnel behind. He entered the familiar maze of a half-finished project, skirting around exposed supports and sticking to what little flooring had been erected before the builders had abandoned the site.
At one point he glanced through a grid of steel beams alongside him and blanched at the dizzying drop. Falling through one of the cracks would result in disaster.
Great.
Another thing to seize his attention.
He battled with a wave of conflicting emotions — half of Slater’s brain screamed at him to slow down, take his time, approach the situation with focus and discipline, whilst the other half urged him forward, pleading with him to speed up to avoid the risk of the families being murdered before he reached them. If he went too slow, and stumbled across a massacre that he could have prevented, he knew he would never be able to forgive himself.