by Matt Rogers
When he looked up, there was a bloody fist heading straight for his nose.
14
Slater turned his head to the side and took the blow to his ear — sound exploded in his eardrum and rippled through his skull, stunning him, making him slow to react. He had the Glock in an upward trajectory but it caught against the body on top of him — it was another man clad in black, bleeding profusely from the arm that had punched Slater in the head. Slater took one look at the situation and realised the guy had been shot in the forearm, disarmed by a stray shot. He’d taken cover against one of the doors and waited silently for an enemy to appear, instead of snatching for a discarded weapon and revealing his position.
It had worked.
Slater begrudgingly had to admit that the guy had pulled it off.
Now there was a half-second to discern who would live, and who would die. Slater had lost count of the number of times he’d found himself in similar situations, and here he was again. But he’d made it this far in life. He never hesitated. Not for a second.
That was how he won.
As the hitman — a bald Mexican guy with dilated pupils, his face a mask of sweat — loaded up for another blow to the ear, Slater bucked his hips, levering enough space to bring the Glock up between them. He tilted the barrel in an upward direction and the hitman spotted the gunmetal and recoiled, horror spreading across his features. But he threw the elbow all the same, and it crunched into Slater’s jaw with pinpoint accuracy.
Oh, no.
Accuracy trumped power, nine times out of ten. An all-out crushing blow to the wrong area could be dealt with, compartmentalised, handled later. A perfectly placed half-punch to a man’s chin could destroy his fine motor skills, rattling his brain in just the right way to knock him senseless.
Slater moved to scramble to his feet, but suddenly his legs lost all capacity to move. It was like the previous night, only twice as bad. He got one foot underneath himself and then his head drooped down as if yanked by an invisible marionette string, and his weight lurched too far in one direction and he sprawled across the nearest couch, sinking into the cushions, holding onto the Glock for dear life but nowhere near possessing the mental capacity to aim it.
He saw the hitman’s eyes flare up, recognising how badly he’d hurt Slater. There was nothing more terrifying in the world. The sicario’s limbs took on a life of their own, supercharging with opportunity, sensing the kill shot incoming. The man pounced, loading up another elbow, this time putting all his weight into it so he could come down with two hundred pounds of bodyweight on Slater’s throat, crushing his windpipe as he scrambled for consciousness.
Well, there it is.
Nothing you can do.
Say your goodbyes now, Will…
All Slater could do was think of the consequences. Neurons fired in his brain but found nothing to connect themselves too, like all five of his senses were suffocating in quicksand. He clawed and fought and battled for anything he could use to hold onto reality, but the truth was the elbow to the jaw had flipped a switch. He would probably be recovered in a matter of seconds, gathering his wits all at once, but he didn’t have seconds. He had maybe half a second to move, to desperately find the inner strength to roll off the couch, avoid the elbow, stay alive.
No.
Nothing.
He couldn’t find it.
The hitman lunged for the killing blow, and suddenly a new figure surged into the fight. A tall, gangly, long-limbed killer, materialising out of nowhere, like the strongest praying mantis the world had ever seen. Venom in his cold blue eyes. Murder in his movement.
Malvado.
The giant man seized hold of the enemy sicario as the thug leapt into the air, catching him by the mid-section and hurling him into the closest wall as if he weighed nothing. Plaster detonated and the hitman collapsed, all the air battered out of his frame. Malvado followed him down, dropping a knee into his solar plexus, crushing him further into the wall. Malvado stood up and smashed a kick into the guy’s head, knocking him senseless. That froze the hitman in place, so Malvado lined up another two or three kicks with reckless abandon, firing strike after strike like lasers into the unconscious body.
The guy was unquestionably dead in seconds.
Slater lay there on the couch, panting for breath, shocked by the ordeal. He hadn’t seen violence dished out with that kind of savagery since…
…he’d looked in a mirror.
’T-thank you,’ he managed, his head spinning around the room.
‘For what?’ Malvado hissed, his ocean blue eyes boring into Slater with unadulterated rage.
‘Oh…’ Slater muttered.
Malvado strode over to the couch, rolled Slater over, wrenched his arms behind his back, and yanked a cable tie around his wrists. Four actions executed flawlessly, dished out before Slater could even think about retaliating. He squirmed against the zip ties, and they bit tighter.
Then commotion sounded in the room and a black canvas sack slipped over his head, darkening his vision, cutting him off from the world.
Completely helpless to react, it took Slater a couple of minutes to recover from the beating he’d taken and recognise exactly how much trouble he was in.
15
Bouncing. Jolting. Rattling.
Sweat. Steel.
A headache. Drilling into his eyeballs. Throbbing and hurting and aching.
‘Oh, God,’ Slater muttered.
His voice came out muffled, like he was speaking into a tin can. He opened his eyes, and nothing changed. He was in pitch darkness. He tried to part his hands and the vicious bite of the cable ties bit into his wrists, keeping them secured in place, burrowed into his stomach, no longer behind his back. Malvado must have changed the position of his arms while he was unconscious. He was lying on his side in the foetal position, his legs and arms bound together, compressed into what surmounted to a metal box.
And there was an oxygen mask pressed to his mouth and nose.
He fought against the urge to panic. It proved painfully difficult — he wasn’t usually claustrophobic, but this was horrific. He thought he might be buried alive, and that sent fear through him like nothing he’d ever known. Was this a coffin? Was he doomed to die of thirst, compressed in this dark box underground until his body gave up on itself?
Shit…
No, there was too much movement. The bouncing and jolting continued, and Slater paid close attention to everything he could sense. He heard the faint purr of an engine, and the box lurched as his surroundings dipped, like he’d passed over a pothole. He was in a vehicle. Travelling God knows where.
What have you got yourself wrapped up in?
Malvado.
The one guy he shouldn’t have messed with.
Nothing about the foreseeable future looked good.
‘What the hell is happening?’ he mumbled to himself.
The vehicle slowed. He felt the deceleration in the pit of his stomach, and next he heard muffled voices exchanging rapid Spanish back and forth. From both inside and outside the car.
Oh, God.
No.
No, no, no, no…
With true fear in his veins, Slater whispered, ‘The border.’
Disastrous, to say the least. The Sinaloa cartel were embedded so deeply in the rungs of Mexican society that Slater had no doubts they practically ran the state from the sidelines. If they made it to Malvado’s connections, he would never make it back to the States. Not a hope in hell.
But the Sinaloa cartel is after Malvado.
So now what?
And where’s Alonsa?
The fact that Malvado was excommunicated from his own organisation didn’t make anything better. In fact, as far as Slater was concerned, it made things worse. They would head to the middle of nowhere, some disused facility off the plot where they could bunker down and torture Slater to within an inch of his life. And they would have all the time in the world. Mexico was big enough to hide from spies f
or a while. A few weeks, at least. He tried to picture the things Malvado could do to him over the course of a few weeks. He’d seen the footage. The white hot rods, the drills, the saws, the electric cattle prods.
Twenty-seven years old and one of the most dangerous men on the planet, Will Slater felt like crying.
But he didn’t. He sucked it up and worked with what he could — which, right now, was nothing at all. He was helpless until they dragged him out of this godforsaken container, and then he could look for openings. Stressing about the future wouldn’t get him anywhere, so he settled his breathing and focused on each breath in turn, emptying his mind of any unnecessary thoughts. Meditation never failed to prove effective in the field, especially when dwelling on what lay ahead would no doubt drive him insane.
He concentrated on the inhale, then the exhale — and repeated ad nauseam.
He had no idea how long he lay there. There was no perception of time, just the unchanging rattling of the metal around him as the vehicle — probably a van, considering they’d fashioned an entire hidden compartment just for Slater — surged through Mexico. They could be headed anywhere. There was nothing in Slater’s pockets — his phone and wallet had been stripped. There was no incriminating evidence in either of those particulars, but their absence cut him off from civilisation all the same. He was entirely helpless.
The code of Black Force, the words that had been repeated to him over and over again by his superiors for as long as he could remember, rang in his head.
No-one will come for you.
You are entirely responsible for your own safety.
If prodded, the government will deny your existence.
You deal with sensitive matters, and that makes you a ghost.
It’s on you if you fuck up.
And he’d committed the mother of all fuck ups. The higher-ups would avoid him like the plague — he was solely responsible for getting himself back across the border, which would prove difficult even if he made it out of this mess in one piece, the odds of which were dwindling by the second.
The vehicle slowed after what seemed to be a couple of hours on the road, but could have been far less, or far more. There was no way to tell. Slater waited patiently as the engine died and the sound of doors opening and closing sounded from the other side of the metal wall.
Silence.
He settled his heart rate, sucked in a deep breath…
…and came up short.
What?!
There was no oxygen filtering through the mask. His airways constricting, his heart rate hammering in his chest, Slater held his breath and fought with every ounce of willpower he had not to panic. He could hold his breath for a couple of minutes, maximum. He tried to shake his head from side to side and throw the oxygen mask off his face, but it proved useless.
Twenty seconds passed…
He was going to die in this soulless box, another faceless victim of the cartels, left to suffocate in an abandoned car.
My God.
The horror of it all struck him, constricting his chest, twisting his insides.
He screamed.
Light flooded the box, and the roof disappeared. Slater blinked twice, blinded by the onslaught of brightness, and a hand reached down and tore the useless oxygen mask off his face. He sucked in lungfuls of fresh air, eyes bloodshot and boggling in their sockets, not quite believing he was still alive.
Malvado crouched over him. Slater looked up and noted he was skewered into a compartment underneath the rearmost row of seats in a passenger van. The seats had been lifted off and the roof of the storage space removed. The man grinned, stark white teeth resting under the pale blue eyes. His beady pupils locked onto Slater, extracting every shred of weakness from him, smelling it, sensing it, thriving on it.
Malvado lived for suffering.
It invigorated him.
‘How’d you like that?’ Malvado said. ‘Caught your breath?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Thought I’d shake you up a bit before the real fun begins.’
‘I’m not who you think I am.’
‘Oh, really? Big shot cyber defence expert just so happens to be an expert marksman and a goddamn phenom in hand-to-hand combat? You’re strong as an ox, too. Don’t think I’m buying your schtick for a second.’
‘I didn’t lead those men to you.’
‘Well, someone did. And now I’m fucked.’
‘They were from your own cartel, you idiot,’ Slater spat. ‘How can you not see that?’
Malvado reached down into the container and clasped a hand around Slater’s throat. He was helpless to resist, the cable ties pinning his limbs in place. Malvado leant pressure on his spindly fingers, bruising Slater’s airways.
‘I know they’re from the cartel,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t know that.’
‘Alonsa told me.’
‘The girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re dealing with her separately. Awfully noble of you to rat her out, though.’
‘You should be protecting her. She’s your ally.’
‘No she fucking isn’t.’
It was useless. Nothing Slater said could dig him out of the hole he’d leapt into with both feet. Malvado hauled him out of the box, dragged him by the collar out of the van, and dumped him in the dust, covering him in orange silt. Slater spat the stuff out of his mouth and looked around, his eyes still adjusting to the light.
Sure enough, they were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by undulating fields of dust and weeds.
And a cluster of rusting warehouses — abandoned maquiladora factories, by the looks of it — sat ominously ahead.
Malvado grinned, rubbed his hands together, and dragged Slater by the back of his neck toward the nearest structure.
16
In his underwear, strapped to a wooden chair in an abandoned facility somewhere in Mexico, surrounded by livid sicarios who’d watched their brothers die only hours earlier, led by a man responsible for torturing the Sinaloa cartel’s enemies limb from limb, Will Slater figured he’d never been in a more precarious position in his life.
But he could talk, and he figured that was the only way he was going to save himself.
The question was whether Malvado would listen.
The ponytail bounced off the back of his neck as the man pulled up a chair directly opposite Slater and sat down, white-hot intensity in his eyes. He clutched a power drill in his left hand, and intermittently he tested the trigger. The metal bit whirred to life with a sickening noise, each time sending a pang of terror through Slater’s chest. Black operative or not, there was nothing he could do to train against this. He wouldn’t utter a word about the organisation he worked for, no matter what they did to him, but he feared the pain all the same.
‘One insertion through the top of your knee and you’ll never walk again,’ Malvado said.
‘I know.’
‘I don’t think you do. I don’t think you can comprehend the pain that would cause.’
‘I’ve got an idea.’
‘Want to find out?’
‘Not particularly. Is it as simple as that? Want to get tortured? No. I don’t. We done?’
Malvado backhanded him across the face. ‘Shut up.’
He fired up the drill and brought it in a downward arc toward Slater’s knee. Every nerve ending at once reflexively flinched, anticipating horrendous pain. Slater turned pale as a sheet and beads of sweat sprouted out of the corners of his forehead. Malvado smiled and lowered the drill.
‘I don’t care how much training you have,’ he said. ‘You will learn about pain.’
‘I’m sure I will.’
‘So you’re going to answer me a few questions.’
‘Can I talk first?’
‘No.’
‘I think you might like to hear it.’
Malvado paused, then threw a glance over his shoulder. Maybe paranoid. But the warehouse was empty, its ceiling supports hover
ing almost a hundred feet over their heads. It was eerily close to the size of an airplane hangar. In the middle of the empty concrete floor, the small party would look like ants from above. Slater had the chance to count how many friends Malvado had left — five sicarios.
Six of them total. One of him. And he was unarmed and restrained.
Not looking good.
It would have to be rectified with words.
If that was even possible.
‘I’m U.S military,’ Slater said. ‘Black ops. You would have guessed that, and if not it would come out eventually, I’m sure. I’ll spare you the wait.’
‘You could be lying. Throwing me off.’
‘You really think you could walk up to the government and wave sensitive information in their faces and expect them not to react?’
Malvado’s eyes lit up with intensity. Slater couldn’t have known that unless he was telling the truth. He nodded. ‘Okay. This isn’t looking good for you, I must say.’
‘I could say the same for you,’ Slater said. ‘You’re fucked. And I’m putting it nicely. Sounds like you made an enemy of your own cartel. Tried to tug too many strings at once. You leave me untouched and I’ll help negotiate your extradition to the United States. That’s the only future where you don’t get beheaded. And you know it.’
It was certainly a difficult approach, because it forced Malvado to drop his ego — something Slater doubted he would jump to do. It would require him to admit that he needed help, and Slater couldn’t imagine such a cruel man ever willingly relying on others.
Malvado got off the chair, closed the gap between them, and crouched down in front of Slater. The man stared deep into his eyes, then rose and thundered a fist into his gut. Slater retched, almost threw up on the floor, and rocked back in the chair — at least, as much as he could. The rope around his heaving chest held tight. He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
‘Maybe,’ Malvado whispered. ‘Maybe. But we have things to sort through before we get to that.’
‘What things?’
‘There’s the matter of the girl.’