Lion

by Matt Rogers

  You have two seconds before they’re on you. Cause as much damage as you can.

  Adrenalin and tension had dissipated from the rest of the men, and it would take them a period of valuable hesitation to return to combat-mode. Slater had been waiting for the opportunity to pounce for far too long — it gave him a distinct advantage.

  He twisted at the waist, turning to face the man on his right, and slammed his forehead against the cartilage in the guy’s nose. Blood sprayed and he went down howling.

  At that point the closest man to Slater who wasn’t incapacitated made a half-hearted lunge across the seats. Slater wasn’t sure what exactly the man was trying to achieve, but he batted the guy’s outstretched arms away and scythed an elbow from floor-to-ceiling, connecting against a sensitive portion of the man’s jaw and snapping his head back with enough kinetic energy to send him sprawling to the floor between both rows of seats.

  Three men down.

  He wasn’t moving fast enough.

  Slater noticed the four remaining security detail reaching instinctively for their waists, responding to the chaos that had erupted. They were carrying firearms. Slater registered the shift of momentum in a heartbeat. Behind him, the glass partition had splintered when the first guy’s head had bounced off it, creating a spider web of cracks across its surface.

  It was set to fall apart.

  Barely thinking, reacting out of intuition, Slater pivoted in his seat and swung a balled-up fist as hard as he could at the weakened glass. He accepted the consequences, and simply rode out the pain as his fist hammered straight through the sheet in an explosion of fragments, slicing his knuckles up. But Slater hit like a freight train, and the journey through the glass had taken barely any force out of the movement. His knuckles slammed home against the back of the driver’s skull. The man hadn’t yet responded to the carnage, which made his muscles loose, which added whiplash and shock to the punch. The driver’s brain rattled around inside his skull and he slumped over the wheel without resistance.

  The limousine picked up speed as he unconsciously leant pressure on the accelerator.

  Slater was already on the move, ducking down and dragging the two unconscious men on either side of him across his torso, forming a spur-of-the-moment human shield in case any of the men across from him felt inclined to fire directly at him.

  But they didn’t, frozen by hesitation, understanding that the limousine was in the process of careening out of control and that half their security detail had already been dispatched.

  The child screamed, responding naturally to the carnage.

  Panicking, the four remaining men struggled to wrench their sidearms free from their holsters, their eyes darting back and forth between Slater and the girl.

  She must be valuable, Slater thought.

  One of the closest men dove across the limousine’s interior, making a wild swing at Slater. His fist whistled by Slater’s chin — the guy had martial arts training. There was raw power and technique behind the blow. If it had connected — lights out.

  But it didn’t — mostly because the guy was off-balance, but also because the occupants of the limousine were being thrown around viciously as the vehicle swerved and mounted the sidewalk a few hundred feet down the road from Mountain Lion.

  Slater heaved the unconscious bodies off him, recognising what was about to happen. He reached over and snatched the girl off the seat, pulling her against his torso and locking her tiny frame in an iron grip. With the other hand, he reached desperately for a seatbelt. He didn’t have time to check how close to impact they were — he simply knew a crash was imminent.

  And it wouldn’t be pretty.

  No-one in the vehicle had bothered to secure themselves. They would be thrown around like cereal in a box.

  Slater wrapped a sweaty palm around one of the polyester straps and wrenched it tight across his body.

  He squashed the little girl between himself and the seat, securing her as best he could, and braced himself for the impact of a lifetime.

  5

  The world went completely mad.

  Slater had squeezed his eyes shut before the inevitable chaos, so he didn’t get a glimpse of how the destruction unfolded. He imagined he would have seen nothing but a blur as his vision dissipated from sensory overload. So he opted to bury his head into the soft upholstery of the seats and hold on for dear life.

  The limousine hit something side on, crunching into an obstacle with the sound of screaming steel. Slater felt the interior warping around him, and the next thing he knew the entire car had flipped onto its roof. His stomach fell into his feet and the seatbelt cut tight across his chest, preventing him from tumbling straight into the grinder underneath him as the roof shredded against the concrete sidewalk.

  The young girl screamed against his chest but he barely heard it, surrounded by a cacophony of noise. Bodies tumbled and spilled, and limbs splayed. When the limousine finally skidded to a halt — still resting upside-down on its roof — the noise died away and Slater released his white-knuckle hold on the seatbelt. He and the girl dropped a couple of feet to the surface below, landing hard on his back. He shielded her fall with his own body.

  The interior lighting had understandably died, and Slater found himself in relative darkness, surrounded by coughing, spluttering security guards in the process of recovering from the mother-of-all-crashes. Surprisingly, he had come out of the ordeal relatively unscathed. He rolled in either direction to assess any immediate threats.

  He spotted a gun barrel slicing through the air toward him.

  He recognised the make of the weapon — it was a Beretta M9 sidearm, relatively cheap on the black market. It meant these men weren’t employed in any official legal capacity, confirming his suspicions that they’d been in the process of doing something awfully sinister with the young girl.

  Fight-or-flight kicked in.

  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Slater chose fight.

  The man with the firearm had likely been concussed as he’d been thrown around the limousine’s interior, but he’d still kept a grip on his weapon.

  Slater sensed the laborious nature of the man’s movements and capitalised instantly, rolling onto his side and snatching the Beretta out of the man’s grasp. The guy resisted, but a single burst of applied pressure to the guy’s wrist loosened his grip, and Slater wrenched it free. He knew how to deal with leverage and power like no-one else.

  He spun the weapon in a practiced motion and jammed a finger inside the trigger guard, so that the barrel ended up pointing straight back at the man who’d been clutching the gun a second earlier.

  The guy’s face paled, but Slater felt no inclination to spare his life.

  Slater would have met the same fate if he hadn’t been fast enough.

  Besides, anyone he left alive had the capacity to come for the girl.

  He fired once, piercingly loud in the cramped interior. The guy caught the bullet in the centre of his forehead and slumped pitifully to the floor.

  Slater rolled away from him and elbowed the nearest window, utilising the added strength that came with fear. It shattered, allowing him to lever the young girl out onto the street, taking care not to drop her directly into the thin coating of glass fragments dotting the sidewalk. He scrambled straight out after her, leaving the miserable occupants of the limousine to wallow in the injuries they’d sustained. One of their crew was dead for even bothering to wave a weapon in Slater’s direction, and he doubted the rest would be motivated to give pursuit after how effortlessly they’d been manhandled.

  He winced as one of the pieces of glass sunk into his hand, but forced it out of his mind. The little girl had taken up position a few feet from the limousine wreck, staring wide-eyed in disbelief at the scene before her. Slater imagined she was deep in the early onset stages of shock. He figured she might have broken down entirely if not for the drugs messing with her sense of reality. He kept a tight grip on the Beretta as he wriggled free from
the wreckage and stumbled to his feet alongside her, panting hard to expel some of the tension in his body.

  Before he said anything, he raised the Beretta level with the opening in the side of the limousine and lingered for a few critical moments. If anyone materialised in the window frame, intent on following him out of the vehicle, he would dot them with lead until they decided to either retreat or die.

  But no-one appeared.

  They’d thought better of giving pursuit.

  Nodding with satisfaction, he turned and ushered the young girl into the lip of the nearest alleyway — a narrow space between two towering residential complexes only a few hundred feet away from the largest casinos in Macau. Lights glowed in apartment windows even at this hour — Slater figured the whales lived here, the men and women who could afford a permanent residence in such close proximity to the largest gambling haven on the planet, a strip that dwarfed even Las Vegas in its level of turnover.

  The alley lay shrouded in darkness.

  Slater wondered if anyone had come here to blow their brains out with relative discretion after losing their entire fortune on the tables.

  ‘What just happened?’ the girl stammered.

  Slater paused, startled. Her accent was American. He’d intuitively figured that she spoke no English.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he muttered. ‘We’ll have time to talk about it later.’

  ‘There were seven of them,’ she said. ‘There’s only one of you.’

  Slater found himself surprised that she had the awareness to do a head count, even in such stressful circumstances.

  ‘You should have seen what I did in Yemen.’

  ‘What?’

  He hurried her into the alleyway, under cover of darkness.

  6

  At four in the morning Macau time, having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, Peter Forrest decided to call it a day.

  The penthouse atop the Mountain Lion Casino & Resorts complex had been constructed in such a way to provide him the ability to get downstairs to his offices in a heartbeat. Every waking moment he spent not working was simply an inconvenience, aside from an hour or so he carved out of each evening to unwind before he hit the sack. He slept four hours a night maximum, using the other eighteen to ascend up the financial ladder and climb the social hierarchy. He hated wasting time almost as much as he hated being broke, which had culminated in a schedule that left zero room for pleasantries.

  Except for that spare hour.

  The Asian woman rolled off him, both of them slick with sweat and panting with exhaustion. At ten thousand dollars a session, Forrest expected the absolute best that the prostitution industry had to offer, and he’d never come away from the sex disappointed during his entire time in Macau. They sure knew how to keep a man pleased over here.

  The girl who’d been summoned to his sleeping quarters was in her twenties. She could have graced the cover of any swimsuit magazine on the planet. Her lithe frame had gyrated over him for the better part of an hour now, and Forrest had only finished inside her upon realising he needed enough sleep to function the next day. Now she disappeared into the depths of his enormous penthouse, her work complete, and he dropped his head to the satin pillow behind him to let himself cool down.

  With sweat dripping off his ageing body, he stayed still for only the briefest of moments. There were endless thoughts spilling through his head, more than he could keep track of. He hated the concept of sleep. He wished something were invented to abolish the need for rest entirely. Working on his empire twenty-four hours a day would be the greatest blessing of his life.

  He latched onto the most pressing thought still churning at the forefront of his mind and lifted a digital tablet off the ornate bedside table. He tapped into the casino’s surveillance system and brought up a list of hundreds of different CCTV feeds. It didn’t take him long to find what he was searching for. He brought up footage from earlier that night in the specific VIP room he’d stormed into and watched his work unfold on the small screen.

  Propped up in the four-poster bed, he studied the surroundings for any sign that the other occupants had noticed the reason for his presence. Satisfied that everyone was keeping to themselves, he scrutinised his own actions, looking for anything that might have shown weakness.

  What he found had nothing to do with him.

  It had to do with a British dealer sitting a couple of feet away from where he’d pulled to a stop, literally shaking in his seat. The kid was sweating and wide-eyed and trying his best to keep his line of sight fixed on anything but Forrest.

  Forrest watched himself on the monitor. He figured he hadn’t been paying attention to the dealer at the time, and as a result he’d missed the obvious.

  This guy was involved, somehow, some way.

  Still naked, Forrest realised he wouldn’t be falling asleep any time soon. Fog had descended over his brain, brought on by a lack of sleep, but he had to keep moving. He felt a thousand strands tugging for attention in his mind, and he decided to approach them incrementally, eliminating the most pressing issue first.

  Which now concerned this new kid he’d missed upon first look.

  He’d sent a team of his men to deal with the other issue.

  The result of the retrieval was in their hands.

  He cancelled out of the surveillance footage app and brought up a catalogue of all the staff Mountain Lion Casino & Resorts employed. He found the young guy without much effort — Samuel Barnes, a twenty-two year old British expat who had applied for a job as a baccarat dealer six months ago and been granted a position in the VIP rooms after a successful job interview. The job paid almost nothing, but dealers in that setting usually received the occasional tip from a successful whale. Sometimes Forrest heard of staff getting upwards of fifty-thousand HKD in tips.

  The potential was astronomical.

  But maybe Samuel Barnes hadn’t received a tip in quite some time, and had turned to more desperate measures in collaboration with the Filipino dealer.

  In any case, Forrest was determined to figure out what the kid knew.

  He rolled off the bed and dressed in a simple collared shirt and dress slacks, grumbling to himself, close to a state of delirium. It was now four-thirty in the morning and he had a long night ahead of him.

  He snatched his phone off the dresser and dialled one of the triad thugs who had fetched him the Filipino dealer. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name — just the giant jewelled earring hanging off his right lobe — but the man answered in seconds. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need you to round up one of the other dealers.’

  A pause. ‘Who?’

  ‘Samuel Barnes. Same room as the last guy you brought me. I need to find out—’

  ‘What makes you interested in him?’

  ‘He was acting shifty on the surveillance footage. I want to find out what he knows about—’

  ‘Leave it with us.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The three of us will interrogate him. Find out what he knows. We’ll report back to you.’

  ‘I’d rather you—’

  ‘We’re on a tight schedule, sorry. Boss wants us back by the morning.’

  ‘Then bring him up to my penthouse and I’ll deal with him myself.’

  Forrest could almost hear the triad thug shaking his head on the other end of the line. ‘No. You need us. We’ll find out what we need and pass it up to you.’

  ‘Uh—’

  The line went dead.

  Forrest paused, awfully confused.

  He recalled his introverted childhood and the numerous years he’d spent caving into other people’s demands. Business and entrepreneurship had forced him to come out of his shell and he’d embraced the process relentlessly, morphing from a shy kid to an outgoing, confident adult. But his experience rested in handling real estate developers and lawyers and accountants. His dual venture into illegalities hand-in-hand with the triads had taken him far out of his comfort zone. He fou
nd himself wilting during intense back-and-forth conversations with the thugs.

  Once again he’d let them do as they pleased. They intimidated him, despite his penchant for violence and ability to adopt a menacing tone in front of them. He could scare dealers into submission, and even kill them, but he couldn’t do much else.

  He scolded himself, sweating profusely at the thought of the triad learning vital details about him and his business.

  Suddenly, a sharp electronic beeping sounded throughout the penthouse.

  His version of a doorbell.

  Forrest froze. The only people who had access to this echelon of the complex were his most trusted advisors. That included the security detail he’d sent out to deal with another problem that had cropped up — one of what felt like hundreds that he dealt with on a daily basis.

  This issue, however, carried a little more significance than most.

  Which made him sprint for the front door of his lavish suite, anticipating good news. It would settle his heart rate, and ensure he remained calm throughout the rest of his dealings.

  He flung the broad oak door open without even bothering to check through the peephole what might await him.

  Too late, he realised his mistake.

  But what he found didn’t put him in danger. There was no-one waiting with a weapon, ready to put a bullet through the billionaire’s head, despite what he’d been expecting.

  Instead he found two of the men he’d sent downstairs to recapture Shien, both still dressed in their official jet-black suits but missing their ties. Their shirts hung open at the collar, exposing blood across both of their chests. One of the men sported a freshly broken nose and the other was clutching his jaw in a manner that suggested serious internal injuries.

  Forrest paled. ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘She wasn’t alone,’ the man with the broken nose muttered — the other couldn’t talk. ‘A black guy ambushed us.’