by Matt Rogers
‘How did he get his hands on a grenade in the time it took to get to the motel?’
‘How do you know it was a grenade?’
‘I know what the remnants of a grenade blast look like. I was in the Special Forces.’
‘We know that also,’ Dawes said.
‘You do?’
Kitchener pointed at him. ‘I did some digging, King. After you escaped. Made some calls. You weren’t just a soldier. You were part of something called Black Force. What are the chances that a government mercenary just happens to come wandering through Jameson at the same time that all this shit goes down?’
King cocked his head inquisitively at Kitchener’s speech. Then he answered. ‘Very slim. Which is why I’m thinking it has something to do with me.’
‘I’m starting to suspect that too,’ Kitchener said.
‘You think I’m the one in charge?’
‘I don’t know what to think. This is a clusterfuck.’
‘Why would they send an imposter into the police station to try and kill me if I was the one in charge? See how little sense that makes?’
Silence.
‘See my face?’ King said. ‘You think I’d do that to myself?’
‘Like I said, I don’t know what to think.’
‘Well, use basic reasoning. I’m trying to help you stop this. And it has something to do with Rafael Constructions, I am one hundred percent certain.’
Dawes detached the radio from his belt and held down one of the buttons. ‘Helen, you there?’
Another voice crackled out of the speaker. ‘Here.’
‘Still at the motel?’
‘Yep. Forensics had to come down from Hurst. Twenty minute drive. They’ll be here a while.’
‘Can you run an errand for me?’
‘Sure.’
‘Head down to Rafael Constructions. Their head office. Just check it out quickly. Make sure everything looks okay.’
‘Will do.’
The conversation ended sharply. Dawes slotted the radio back into its place and leant on the conference table on his elbows, running a hand through his hair.
‘I’ve barely slept,’ he said. ‘We went to check out Brandt’s place yesterday afternoon. No sign of him. He’s likely dead. There’s something bigger going on…’
‘That’s what I was trying to work out,’ King said. ‘Before you two crashed my party. That Bernie guy is a slimy fuck. He knows something we don’t.’
‘Helen will give the place a look-over.’
‘Who’s Helen?’
‘Another officer.’
‘Can she protect herself?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’d say we should all head back there right now,’ King said. ‘Because that place gives me the creeps. And after all the shit I’ve seen in my life, anything that gives me the creeps is definitely worth checking out.’
‘We’ll let Helen handle it,’ Kitchener said. ‘Until then, we’re going to need a statement of everything you’ve done from the time you left yesterday to the time we picked you up today.’
King sat back in his chair and stared at them, allowing the silence to grow to an uncomfortable length. ‘You know I’m not going to be able to do that.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well I could lie. It wouldn’t take much effort to make up a bunch of bullshit. But I don’t want to waste your time. I want to get to the bottom of this.’
‘Then tell us what you saw.’
‘Nothing I saw has done anything to develop the investigation. I was close to developing it, but you two interrupted. Now we’re here.’
Then the radio crackled to life. A short, sharp burst of static. A moment of silence. Then a voice. Helen’s.
‘Uh … Dawes?’
Dawes picked up the radio, his hand twitching, his face reddening. ‘Helen, all clear?’
‘Kind of.’
‘What do you see?’
‘There’s no-one here.’
‘What?’
‘Everyone’s gone. The place is empty. A whole bunch of paper has been shredded. Looks like they left in a hurry.’
Rage flooded King and he slammed a fist on the desk, causing everyone in the room to startle. For once in the last three days he had come close to the truth. Close to getting the edge over Bernie and finding out exactly what the new owners of Rafael Constructions were doing with its resources. Now he was sitting in a police station, answering useless questions, letting the people behind this slip away without reprimand.
‘Get me there,’ he told them, ice in his voice. ‘Right now. I’ll sort this out.’
It didn’t take long for them to make up their mind. They glanced at each other, mulling over what decision to make next, wondering just how legal any of these processes were. But common sense eventually gained the upper hand.
They knew he was something else. Some kind of force they couldn’t contain.
Kitchener looked at him. ‘Back in the car.’
CHAPTER 27
Dawes broke the speed limit for the entire duration of the trip. They made it back to the head office in less than five minutes. King and Kate in the back, the two officers up front. What they were doing was completely against the law. Punishable by serious jail time. But in this situation, the smartest play. They’d recognised that King was a trained killer, and that they needed his help.
There was greater danger than King in the forest.
It was clear that Rafael Constructions had been deserted on a moment’s notice. The front door to the building lay ajar. Three vehicles that had previously been in the parking lot were now gone. There were no cars left except for Billy’s abandoned sedan, almost crumpled beyond recognition. A woman in police uniform stood on the front deck, beckoning them over. King guessed she was Helen. She looked to be at least six-feet tall, slim, in her late forties. A stern, no-nonsense woman. That much was clear.
The four of them got out of the police car and approached the office with an air of apprehension. Dawes and Kitchener withdrew jet-black pistols from the leather holsters at their waist and aimed them at the building. King recognised their make. Smith and Wesson M&P40’s. Standard issue for Victoria Police. Semi-automatic. Reliable. They’d do the job.
‘Fun morning, huh, Dawes?’ Helen said as they stepped onto the deck.
‘To say the least,’ Dawes said. ‘You been inside?’
‘Briefly. There’s no-one around, I can tell you that.’
‘Helen, this is Jason King.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He was passing through. He used to be a soldier. He can help us.’
King nodded a greeting at Helen, but he wasn’t focused on pleasantries. He scanned the office’s exterior, looking for anything out of place.
A loud shattering noise sounded inside the building.
A window breaking.
Someone was still here.
‘Gun,’ King said to Dawes. ‘Now.’
The officer took one look at his steely expression and did not protest.
‘This is so illegal,’ he muttered as he handed across his firearm.
King took it and advanced through the front door, gun up, eyes flicking left and right, searching for any sign of danger. There was nothing in the reception. It was exactly how he remembered it, save for an overturned chair in one corner.
He kicked the door to the interview room open, but it was just as bare as it had been an hour earlier.
A couple of hallways branched away from reception, leading to an array of offices. King didn’t know where to start.
Then he heard a noise. Some kind of rustling, at the end of the back hallway. A chair scraping against the floor. He let the familiar rush come back to him, juicing up his limbs, targeting his central nervous system, hyping him up. He took off down the hallway, heading for the source of the sound. As he got closer he pinpointed it. One of the rear offices, facing the lot out back. The door lay slightly ajar. A tiny sliver of the room inside w
as visible.
King didn’t slow down.
He launched himself at the door, slamming a boot into its centre. It shot open, revealing a small nondescript office. A large wooden desk sat in the centre, covered in shredded documents. A man stood behind the desk, rustling through one of the drawers, papers in his hands. He stood slumped, unconfident, worried. Before King could charge headlong into the room he produced a pistol and fired twice.
King spun out of trouble. He slammed into the adjacent wall. Taking cover from the gunfire.
It seemed they had left without something important. This man had been sent back to retrieve it. King fired his M&P blind into the office. The space was small enough to give him a solid chance of hitting the worker. But there came no cry of agony, or the sound of a body hitting the ground.
Just silence.
Then a window shattering. Struck by some kind of blunt object.
The worker fled. Fast, too, spurred on by the fight-or-flight mechanism hardwired into the human brain. Motivated to get away from danger as quickly as possible.
As soon as he heard him leaving, King spun on his heel and powered into the room. The guy was halfway out the window on the other side of the desk. His legs scrambled over the broken glass, kicking hard, a second away from dropping to the ground outside. King vaulted the desk and snatched at his legs. Too late. The guy disappeared from sight, successfully out of the building.
King felt an icy determination coursing through his veins. He would not let the worker get away. He took a deep breath, still in motion, and dove. He aimed for the centre of the window to avoid the shards of glass dotting the sill. His head passed through first, and he followed through by tucking his chin to his chest and turning his legs over. He hit the dusty earth outside shoulder-first and rolled with the landing, springing to his feet not a moment later.
Now he had all the time in the world.
The worker fled through an enormous gravel area packed with construction machinery; flatbed trailers, cranes, rusted forklifts. But he was nowhere near cover. King had a clear shot. He would take care not to miss.
He dropped to one knee and lined up the sight, pinpointing the fleeing worker’s back. Then he lowered his aim. It would do no use to accidentally kill the man. He’d killed too many leads already. He exhaled, breathing deep, tapping into that old feeling of being out in the field, of having to hit his mark or facing certain death.
He pulled the trigger.
The guy went down.
Bingo.
King stood up and walked toward him, boots crunching on the gravel. He passed through rows of machinery. The guy dragged himself feebly across the ground. Bleeding heavily from his left leg. King had shot him in the calf. A crippling injury that all but eliminated movement for the foreseeable future.
He dropped to one knee and wrapped a hand around the timid man’s shirt.
‘What’s your name?’
The guy panted. He had thin, dishevelled hair and pronounced cheekbones. ‘Jonas.’
‘You work here, Jonas?’
He nodded, gulping at the same time. In too much pain and shock to speak.
‘Why’d everyone leave?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘I’ll shoot you if you don’t.’
‘Please, man.’
‘You can either tell me, and I’ll let you live, and then you might have a chance of getting away from whoever you work for. Or you don’t tell me, and you die, without question. Pretty easy.’
‘The boss told me to come back. I forgot one of the files. He said he’d kill me if I left if there.’
‘What document? Who’s the boss?’
‘I really can’t tell you, man. Please.’
King slammed a fist into the guy’s stomach. He moaned and doubled over, clutching his ribs.
‘You can play the victim all you want, but there’s innocent people dying here,’ King said. ‘You’re willingly working for the ones responsible. So your pity party isn’t getting through to me.’
‘Alright, alright,’ he said, coughing. ‘There’s a concrete—’
Harsh static erupted through the lot, cutting Jonas off. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, blaring across the terrain. It fizzled and cracked and died out. King noticed the wooden poles dotted around the construction site, megaphones mounted on top. The loudspeaker system, designed to communicate with workers operating the machinery.
Someone was using it.
A voice came to life, low and booming, resonating all around them.
‘You always had a big fucking mouth, Jonas.’
King looked down at the worker. He was petrified. His face had turned to a mask of sweat. His eyes grew wide. The two of them made eye contact for a single moment.
Then the man’s head exploded in a gruesome spray of brain matter.
Hit by a fifty calibre bullet, long range.
King watched the faceless corpse of his only lead flop to the gravel, dead before the sound of the discharge echoed through the empty lot.
CHAPTER 28
For the second time in two days, King found himself under sniper fire.
He’d seen Jonas’ head pop from the left, meaning the round had come from the neighbouring factory. There was a sniper buried somewhere in that maze, using one of the hundreds of vantage points that King knew would be a good setup. He darted behind one of the forklifts nearby. Putting something large and metal between him and a bullet.
But no further shots came. Just the lone round that had killed Jonas. Palpable tension rose from the silence.
The back door of the head office burst open and Dawes came sprinting out, gun raised, reacting to the report that had echoed through the site seconds before.
‘No!’ King screamed. ‘Back inside!’
Too late.
He watched in horror as Dawes jerked sideways, taking a bullet to the temple with equally graphic results. There was little doubt that the officer was dead. He slapped against the gravel with the looseness of a corpse, half his head blown apart.
Kitchener was in the process of following Dawes outside. She had been halfway out the door when she saw him career off to the side. She screamed and fell back into the office, colliding with Kate in the process. The pair disappeared from sight.
Despite Dawes’ brutal demise, King managed to breath a sigh of relief. They would live if they stayed inside the building. He, on the other hand, faced a significant problem. The forklift against his back provided a rudimentary, temporary shelter. But sooner or later he would have to make a move. He didn’t know how much of a professional the enemy sniper was. First he’d assumed the talent of long distance shots had died with Cole, but it appeared there was more where he came from. He wondered how many more…
A round struck the ground a few feet in front of him, slotted precisely through the empty space in the forklift’s cabin. He ducked. They wanted him dead, that much was certain. And they would succeed if he stayed put.
He had a single M&P handgun. They had an unknown number of forces, and enough ammunition to bother supplying a group of local bikers with military-grade assault rifles.
As he lay there on the gravel, scrunched up into as little space as possible, pressing the back of his head against the cold steel, he came to the conclusion that he would not bother fleeing. These people had some kind of connection to him, unless he was facing the most unbelievable of coincidences. Which he knew he wasn’t.
He knew the distance to the factory would not be impossible to close. There was little cover in between save for a handful of industrial vehicles and a few mounds of scrap. He knew the closer he got, the more trouble it would be to hit him. Sniper fire relied on long range, on stationary targets. Yet he had no knowledge of how talented his adversary was.
There was only one way to find out.
He waited until the next shot came. He knew it would. It was only a matter of time. When the report blasted in his ears and the ground nearby kicked up a handful of
gravel he turned and got his feet underneath him and powered out from behind the forklift, running wildly, zigzagging, jerking his head off-centre, doing anything possible to throw off the marksman’s aim.
He had little time to get a grip on his surroundings. A single moment of opportunity came to take a glance at the nearby factory. He saw a blurry mound of steel and metal twisting above the trees. Too many open spaces. Too many vantage points. Nowhere near enough time to pinpoint the sniper.
He dove behind a rusting flatbed trailer on the very edge of the property. Another round slammed into it, shaking it on its wheels. A near miss. Luckily, the space between each neighbouring property had no obstructions. No chain link fences, no barbed wire, no barriers of any kind. Which gave King a slight advantage. He could make one more burst across open ground and then the awnings of the factory would shield him from view. He’d be swallowed up by the enormous building. Once he was inside, he knew the playing field would turn ever so slightly in his favour. He thrived off confusion. Tight spaces, wild close-quarters combat, no strategy or tactics or anything of the sort. It brought all encounters down to speed, power and timing.
Three things he excelled at.
There came a break in the gunfire. Silence descended over the site, but none of the familiar sounds of the forest returned. All the wildlife had been scared away. Now the only audible noises came from the groans of long-dormant machinery, spurred on by a cool breeze. The sudden quiet was eerie. King zoned in and slowly looked over the top of the flatbed.
Nothing. No gunshot. If there was, he would never know anyway. He would be dead before the sight or sound registered. But he stayed alive, because the sniper had run out of ammunition. King knew he would be reloading.
Now.
He vaulted off the dusty earth and slid across the width of the trailer, moving with the efficiency and energy of a man running for his life. He saw nothing from the factory ahead. No muzzle flashes, no sudden movements. There was only time for a rudimentary glimpse, though. When he touched down on the other side of the trailer he surged toward the ground floor of the factory like a man possessed.