CJ had worked with all of the recruits, enhancing their natural talents and turning them into abilities. For Royce, that meant his senses became heightened, his speed increased, his coordination was sent off the charts until he became the perfect killer – a stealth machine capable of the very limit of human potential.
The whole thing had been a drug and he had been addicted. The very threat of taking away his abilities had initially been enough to keep him part of the Queen’s Guard, up until Havencrest, of course.
His plan had been to wait until he’d taken everything that the lizard could give him before he split, but it quickly became apparent that God was watching. God was always watching, and God knew all. After all, Royce knew better than anyone that information was power.
Around six months into the training regime, Royce had been diagnosed with a heart condition during a regular check-up. Such had been his excitement and devotion to CJ’s enhancements, he hadn’t thought twice about the doctor’s concerns, and when they’d suggested a bypass operation, he’d agreed. The fear of having all of this taken away and being sent back to the drab grey concrete of his cell made the decision redundant.
Of course, the operation had been a ruse. There had been nothing wrong with his heart, and when he woke up, God had been waiting for him.
The device that they fitted was simply a way of controlling him. One press of the remote control button that God carried would send an electric shockwave into his heart, stopping it immediately. He was still a prisoner, but now the bars encircled the whole world.
He’d been forced to serve his sentence – his full sentence, 30 years – split between the prison and his enforced service. God knew that he had his man under his thumb, a thumb which continually hovered over a remote button that could stop his heart, but Royce had patience, more than any man ever born, and he bided his time. Two decades of it.
Royce Langston had been erased and the man became the myth of Crimson. The missions had gone on through the war against SOUL and beyond. Crimson had more blood on his hands than he ever felt possible.
He had killed men, women and children on every continent in the world, and when his service finally hit the twenty-year mark, when the authorities had finally let their guards down, when Crimson had finally earned his freedom, when God himself had finally agreed to disconnect the device, Crimson had killed the old man.
Ironically, he had killed the man using all of his abilities and training to make it look like an accident, learning from his one previous mistake and not making it personal.
It had taken him a solid two years to learn how to fool the trackers that had been placed in the whole team, and a further four to get God’s schedule down to pat.
The time didn’t matter to him; he had more than enough patience for the job, and the day he had learned that his supposed heart condition had simply been a ruse to place an electronic device in his chest, one that could kill him in an instant, he’d made a promise that he’d kill the man responsible.
In truth, by the time his sentence had been served and the device removed, he no longer held the same amount of hatred towards God.
The man had proven himself time and time again on the battlefield and had directly saved Crimson’s life on more than one occasion, but a promise was a promise and he always kept his: a man was nothing if his word meant nothing.
God was smart enough to always keep moving. The man varied his schedule constantly, never allowing his movements to be anticipated or his location divulged. He was an old-school soldier who was always watching his own back – a lifetime of war had taught him that. But the man wasn’t immortal and he wasn’t infallible, and he’d succumbed to the one enemy that was currently undefeated: time.
Crimson had kept it simple: his tracker reading his position in the base, a slightly greased rubber bathmat in God’s bathroom, a weakened shower rail and an old man had led to a simple-to-understand fall.
The slip hadn’t killed God outright, but Crimson had been there to gently hold the man’s head under water despite his weak and groggy struggles until the air bubbles popped their last and he lay still.
He was out of the country before the investigation was finished, just in case his deed was uncovered, and his new life had begun – a new life and a new kingdom to build and rule.
Of course, there had been a full investigation and plenty of suspicion, but without Crimson’s mind within readable reach of Dr Quantum’s, he knew that they could never be entirely sure. Besides, almost everyone’s attention had been focused on Havencrest and the clean-up-cum-cover-job that was needed.
The old man’s son would undoubtedly be out for blood, but Crimson felt sure that CJ’s unbreakable walls of pious righteousness wouldn’t allow action without cast-iron evidence, and being thousands of miles away, he would deny them that.
He had taken the contract from Santiago Andrade and had killed his brother Javier in such a desired anonymous manner so as to not garner any attention on his own infamous name. The car accident had been almost impossible to detect as an act of foul play, and literally impossible, given the lack of expertise in Columbia at the time.
He had wondered about reclaiming the name Royce Langston, but in the end, he decided that the man was dead. He had spent the past couple of decades building the reputation of the world’s deadliest killer; it was simply his ego that refused to let go of his signed work.
Santiago had been so pleased with the anonymous assassination that afterwards he had offered Crimson a public job, revelling in the fact that he could have a worldwide known superhero on the payroll, another act of egotism that would prove fatal.
Crimson had taken the job, watched, waited and learned everything that he needed prior to working his way up the Andrade Cartel before killing Santiago and assuming control.
South America was a far easier continent to assume and maintain control than his home country. The place was so huge and lacking in the more important resources to bring down such a large criminal, and now well-run, organisation. The corruption only added to Crimson’s cause and he quickly put multiple government departments in his pocket through bribery or fear.
Now he sat upon his jungle-hidden throne, the largest drug baron the world had ever seen, and he had his own government and a space alien to thank for creating him. The message on the screen telling him that Six-Shooter was dead, accompanied by his own echoing laughter, only brightened his day further.
Marshall had always had a cop’s mind even without the official badge. He was a Boy Scout who believed in the cause of his country’s bidding, infuriatingly for Crimson, always ignoring the blood on his own hands.
While the fact that Marshall was dead brought a wide smile to his lips, part of him did wonder at the fact that someone had taken the life of the deadliest shot on the planet.
His throne room was essentially a communications hub. Here he ran his kingdom without the deafening sound of interference.
The space replicated his mind: clean and clear with a huge bank of monitors that lined an entire wall. The screens all had their own tale to tell. Some were tapped into government hives, some were showing him global markets where he had his money buried, while others showed him the boundaries of his jungle hideaway.
His own personal guard had been trained by him and he kept them segregated from the rest of the hired guns in order to maintain his control. He recruited them from an earlier age, taking in boys who had to provide for their families through dead fathers lost in the countless drug wars. He raised them as his own, and as a result, they were fiercely loyal to him, willing to kill and die at a word.
The harsh jungle terrain meant that incursions were extremely difficult. His troops fanned out throughout the entire region, meaning that no one would be able to land a stealth copter without one of his eyes seeing it and warning him.
He sat now with his hands folded in front of his face as he thought. He still wore his ‘Crimson’ suit: a black leather suit with red slashes and mul
tiple belts and straps to hold a wide array of weapons and equipment. The outfit had once been completed with a red full-face mask but he had long since abandoned it, now preferring to show his face to his enemies.
Reaching out to a keyboard sitting on a sparse desk in front of him, his fingers began to fly.
The obvious benefit of starting with a photographic memory and then having it enhanced by a space alien was that he only ever had to witness something once before being able to replicate it flawlessly. He had once employed an expert hacker, bring the young man in from the US and setting him to work. He had watched in complete silence for almost three constant weeks before killing the kid. Loose ends in his business were a definite no-no.
His first port of call now was the Queen’s Guard database to see what they knew.
The security was tight, as he expected, but still there were loopholes that he hadn’t; apparently, the Queen’s Guard’s funding had taken a dip since the SOUL war.
The information was sketchy and largely unhelpful, but there was at least a longer version of the live broadcast.
Crimson studied the footage unnecessarily twice just to be sure, but in truth, it was logged the first time inside his mind.
He logged out of the system and sat back in his chair to replay the footage over and over again on his internal screen with his eyes closed.
There was little in the way of identifying markers to pinpoint the actual attacker, but whoever it was, they moved quickly and knew the layout of the room in order to hide from the camera.
The assailant was fast. Even accounting for Marshall’s deterioration once he’d hung up his spurs, no one should have gotten the drop on him that quickly or easily, and a little of his joy fell away as he started to take the threat seriously.
The wounds were deep and clawlike. According to the multiple autopsies, the attacks would have been assumed to be committed by a large animal of some kind, if they hadn’t been partially caught on camera, that was. Crimson knew that some beasts could be trained to attack, but none he knew of could move with the intelligence of escape that he’d witnessed here.
He opened his eyes suddenly as an enhanced natural sense of danger tickled his nose. Checking the monitoring cameras secreted around his base, he found nothing out of the ordinary, but he trusted his gut even over his own eyes. Something was out there: something dangerous.
He left the chair and opened the only other piece of furniture in the room, a tall double-door cabinet. He selected the two razor-sharp machetes hanging suspended on magnetic strips and slipped them into the twin holders on his back.
CJ had made the blades for him out of some weird material that his ship had been made from. As a result, the blades would never need sharpening, so they were still as deadly as the day they’d been made. They also had the added benefit of being able to be clipped together into a longer sword if the occasion arose.
The wide red multi-pocketed belt was next, and he slipped it around his waist. Dr Quantum had liked to tease him that it was his Batman utility belt, and in spite of not sharing the annoying woman’s love of comic books, he had to admit that it was an apt comparison.
Inside the many pockets were such useful pieces of equipment like mini smoke, gas and flash grenades. There were several nylon and near unbreakable bolas as well as a powerful taser. There was also an oxygen mouth breather for use underwater, as well as napalm gel for blowing holes in anything for a quick exit. In addition, there was an array of lock-breaking tools for stealth openings.
Crimson clipped the belt tightly around him and then slipped twin black Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistols into hip holsters before lastly grabbing two compact Brügger & Thomet MP9 submachine guns that he slid into underarm holsters.
While CJ had made twin energy revolvers for Marshall, weapons that did not require ammunition or reloading, Crimson had been left to use man-made firearms, but he had always favoured the blade.
Now fully armed, he used a secret door from his inner sanctum to head out into the compound.
The night air was still and the jungle should have been teeming with life, but instead it was eerily still and quiet.
He moved quickly and stealthily through the grounds; his ears honed into the green world around him and his eyes like a cat’s could see perfectly in the dark.
His nose twitched, catching the faint odour of blood, and he changed course towards one of the sentry posts. He found one of his guards slumped over a sandbag wall with his throat torn out.
The man still held an A4 assault rifle slung over his shoulder, and he clearly hadn’t made any move to use it. This puzzled Crimson greatly as all of his sentry guards had been personally trained by him and there was no way that anyone should have been able to get the drop on him.
All of his inner guards wore alarm bracelets which were simple to operate. With the simple push of a button, the whole place should have been lit up and locked down.
Crimson tested the air again and found that it was now full of death and yet no screams of pain, fear or signs of fighting. Despite all his preventative measures – his defences, his men and the training he’d given them – something was here; something was hunting him.
The hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood up on end as though an electrical charge had been fired through them. Inconceivably, in spite of all of his enhanced advantages, someone had snuck up on the world’s deadliest man.
To his credit, the twin blades were in his hands in the blink of an eye. His age may have slowed his movements but not enough to allow him to be butchered from behind without a fight.
“Come on then, you bastard. Come get some,” he snarled under his breath as a large shadow engulfed him.
The words may have sounded out loud like a fearless warrior’s immortal battle cry, but for the first time in a long time, Crimson felt something new in his bloody life: he felt afraid.
----------
Thousands of miles away, a young Queen’s Guard agent sat opposite a monitor waiting for the satellite to pass over the Amazonian compound.
It was a dull duty, sitting watching and logging information from the screen, but Agent Vincent was happy to start somewhere at the department. It may have been a long time since the Queen’s Guard had had an active remit, but he lived in hope of the department being called back into action so that he could live out his own comic book fantasies.
Most of his peers looked down on his youthful enthusiasm and more often than not, took advantage of it with unwanted duties such as this, but he was fascinated by the world of the Queen’s Guard and their missions fighting SOUL.
The Queen’s Guard had been monitoring Crimson’s compound for some time unbeknownst to the man himself, Vincent guessed – or maybe not, given the lack of incriminating footage they’d gathered in the past few months.
It was always hard to tell in this business who knew what. Often, plans were compartmentalised, and fake out bluffs were par for the course. Maybe Jesus was playing Crimson, or maybe the once masked hero had the upper hand. The movements of chess grandmasters were enough to give a low-level agent a headache.
A red light flashed on his desk, notifying him that the satellite was in place, and he opened up the channel. The monitor came online and the young agent’s face fell in shock and surprise. The compound, which was usually a lively but mundane watch, was now quiet: deathly quiet.
He could see bodies strewn about the place as he used the joystick to zoom in and move around. Crimson’s men had been massacred – and recently too, judging by the freshness of the blood.
Agent Vincent made sure that the system was recording before he raised the alarm, and in spite of the death on the screen in front of him, he couldn’t help but feel a stab of excitement. This could be the start of something for the Queen’s Guard and an ambitious young agent.
chapter 8
SOUL
29 YEARS AGO – SIX MONTHS AFTER THE LANDING
“Brothers and sisters!” the woman yelled f
rom her position on the high steps outside of an office building in the nation’s capital. “It is time to listen to the word; it is time to turn and face the darkness that has risen in our midst!”
There were thirteen of them in total, a divine number in her opinion. Of course, she would never allow such blasphemy as to anoint herself a comparison with the lord, but a leader who had drawn twelve disciples to her cause? Surely that was a clear sign from above.
They all wore white, the purest colour that could honour their god and his cause.
The sheep that continued to walk by them without understanding the peril they were all in triggered the heightening frustration for Cynthia Arrow, but her game was the long kind now.
Born the daughter of a lay preacher, she had travelled the country with her father as he sought to bring the light of God’s love to the people.
She had watched from an early age the defiance that the devil had sown into the people. No matter how much her father fought for their souls, too many people seemed to have no inclination for self-preservation. She knew through her father’s teachings that hell was full with non-believers. Their bodies were stacked high and their blood flowed through the burning streets.
Her father had been her hero – a man willing to sacrifice his own wants and needs to serve God; a man who slept rough and ate dumpster scraps in order to serve the highest of all callings.
Her mother had never been able to see God’s plan for their family and her parents had fought for their child’s attention, but Cynthia was her father’s daughter. Her will was iron like his and her calling was never in doubt.
Gloria Arrow had left the family, so her father had told her. Her mother just upped and left in the middle of the night when Cynthia had been just ten. Her father told her that her mother’s shame was such that she had never dared to contact her friends or family again, instead sinking into a pit of sin of her own making.
Capes Page 10