Lion

by Matt Rogers

  Second, Forrest realised he could make a profit off her.

  That hadn’t always been the plan. Two weeks ago, Forrest had been a better man. He’d planned to hold the girl until he had enough money to make the first repayment, and then conveniently release her into the streets where she would find her way back to her father. Jang would never know who had taken her, or why, and Forrest would have bought himself time to collect revenue to make the repayments.

  All would have ended perfectly.

  But then he got greedy. He’d recently opened a new venture — a dark venture — in an industry he never thought he would dip his toes into. Now he was knee-deep in it, making money hand over fist, and reluctant to stop. If he shut down the operation — which took place deep in the bowels of the Mountain Lion complex — he would lose an important cash pipeline and find himself in even murkier financial waters.

  No.

  The operation had to continue.

  Which is why he’d decided to make Shien a piece of merchandise. He’d been days away from sending her onto paying customers when she’d slipped out of his grasp.

  As always, he’d become greedy.

  Now, the consequences were slamming home all at once.

  Twenty minutes slipped by — Forrest sunk deep into his own thoughts, mulling over what the future might hold. The limousine twisted and turned through the slums, its windows tinted to prevent anyone from getting a glimpse of its occupants. It burst out the other side into a rarely visited section of Macau, home to empty lots and generally abandoned streets. Junkyards and dormant industrial estates sprawled across the surroundings.

  Out here, Forrest felt exposed.

  And, tucked into the corner of the most unimpressive section of the land, lay a collection of the most powerful men in Macau’s most powerful triad.

  Forrest swallowed a ball of tension that had caught in his throat and wondered — for a split second — whether Jang had been successful in working out where his daughter had been taken.

  If he had, it wasn’t the smartest move for Forrest to have left the relative safety of the Mountain Lion complex.

  What if? he wondered.

  A moment later, the view out the window lurched sharply to the right. A horrific jolt threw Forrest across the cabin, cracking his head against the nearest window, and the sound of screaming metal roared in his ears. He recognised that something had rammed the vehicle from the left-hand side, but he could do nothing but snatch for a handhold as the limousine pitched off the road and entered a brutal barrel roll down the side of a shallow embankment.

  When the wild ride came to a bone-shattering conclusion, the limousine finished its descent upside-down in a filthy layer of sewage, wedged into the crevasse formed by two dirt slopes. The engine died and Forrest spat blood — a tooth followed the crimson liquid out of his mouth.

  He crawled pathetically for the nearest window, desperate to get out of the vehicle.

  He had no idea where the other two men were — or the driver. He didn’t know which way was up. His head pounded incessantly and a cold chill snaked its way up his spine.

  He knew what was happening.

  He was helpless to prevent it.

  Movement materialised all around the limousine — Forrest heard car doors slamming and heavy footfalls on the dirt. With his vision swimming, he glanced at the thin sliver of natural light spearing in through one of the destroyed window frames and spotted combat boots thumping into the dirt, standing directly next to the limousine, bearing down on him from all sides.

  He heard raised voices.

  Shouting. Madness. Chaos.

  He searched desperately for his giant Asian bodyguard.

  As soon as he craned his neck to try and locate his comrades, a hand reached into the limousine and grabbed him forcefully by the collar. It yanked him out of the relative safety of the vehicle, dragging him through muck and filth into daylight. Despite the cloudy weather, Forrest hadn’t been outside in days on end, and the bright light made him squint as hands snatched at him and hauled him in five different directions at once.

  Amidst the chaos, he reached down for the holster at his waist.

  A feeble, desperate attempt.

  ‘Gun!’ someone roared in Chinese.

  Still blind to what was happening, Forrest’s eardrums exploded as a gunshot rang close by. Unsuppressed, abhorrently loud, it came accompanied by a burst of pain across his forearm. He yelped and jolted in shock as he realised he’d been hit. Hands snatched at his waist and tore his gun free, disarming him in the space of a second.

  As his eyes adjusted to the daylight, he spotted a crimson sheet flooding down his forearm, blood dripping off his fingers. The bullet had sliced a trail of skin off his upper wrist. He was surrounded by stern-faced Asian men in suits — well-dressed mercenaries, no doubt. They were in the process of establishing control over the scene. Bodies dove inside the wrecked limousine in search of Forrest’s accomplices.

  One of the men holding Forrest by the throat slammed him back against the side of the limousine, knocking all the breath from his lungs as the chassis crumpled. He coughed and wheezed for breath — it had been some time since he’d been manhandled like this, and it was hard getting used to the feeling.

  If these men wanted to, they could kill him right now and no-one would be any wiser.

  The small Filipino man came crawling from the wreckage, hurled out into the open by two of the thugs. Another pair wrestled the big Asian guy out of the vehicle in turn. Both were badly hurt, blood covering their features and some of their limbs twisted at awkward angles. Forrest grimaced, desperate to maintain order but slowly losing his cool.

  ‘Relax, boys,’ he told his men. ‘I’ll get us out of—’

  One of the mercenaries wrenched a cumbersome Desert Eagle handgun from a giant holster at his waist and rammed the barrel into the side of the giant Asian bodyguard’s head. He pumped the trigger once, sending the guy’s brains across the crumpled limousine chassis.

  Without hesitating a beat, he wheeled his aim to the Filipino man and sent a second round through the guy’s forehead. Both gunshots deafened Forrest temporarily, but he barely noticed. His knees gave out and he slumped to the ground as he watched his men die, helpless to prevent it.

  A third gunshot sounded, and in his hazy state of mind Forrest realised the driver had been killed.

  The reality of the situation sunk in.

  He was alone in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by waste and degradation, all his men shot dead, in the hands of an unknown party who could do as they pleased.

  Sweating, hyperventilating, panicking, surrounded by his dead workers and a dozen faceless, ruthless mercenaries, Peter Forrest wished they would just put a bullet in his brain and bring all his troubles to an end.

  Then he noticed a newcomer descending the slope ahead — in his sixties, Asian, with a whisper of grey hair and a suit that looked like it cost five figures.

  Jang.

  The old man was staring at Forrest with venom in his eyes.

  The venom of a father trying to get his child back.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ Forrest whispered, his skin turning white as a ghost.

  26

  ‘Like I said, my Daddy isn’t a bad man. I hope he’s okay.’

  Slater didn’t want to voice his opinion at risk of offending Shien, but he seriously doubted her father operated in this world and had even a shred of nobility. ‘I’m sure he’s fine.’

  They sat at either end of the sectional eight-seater couch in the centre of the lavish living quarters, facing each other across a distance the same size as the cramped apartment they’d stayed the previous night in. Both of them had taken long showers to wash the filth of the slums out of their skin, and Slater had ducked down to the luxury department stores on the ground floor to purchase a fresh set of clothes for both of them. He had an ulterior goal in mind when browsing outfits — he realised he might be needing to look presentable at a later time.
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br />   So now he sat in absolute comfort, feet stretched out across one of the couch’s sections, dressed in pale blue slim-fit jeans and a thousand-dollar woollen jumper he’d picked up from a designer outlet.

  That would satisfy any dress code he felt inclined to meet.

  Some colour had returned to Shien’s face — it seemed the shower and the change of clothes had refreshed her enough to wash further traces of the drugs out of her system. She still glanced around every room she entered, but a level of alertness had returned to her features. Slater watched her dozing across the couch and realised he’d inadvertently formed a bond that would be hard to break.

  Despite everything, he considered her a temporary daughter.

  It was his responsibility to make sure she made it through this turbulent time in one piece.

  Trouble was, he had no idea what to do next.

  He burrowed his head into his hands, taking deep breaths to combat the exhaustion churning his guts. He knew he had to utilise this downtime to rest up, but he had gone without sleep for over seventy-two hours in the past and lived to tell the tale. He’d felt it prudent to focus one-hundred percent of his time on the task back then…

  …and he felt the same now.

  As he considered the next best move, a soft noise resonated through the massive suite. He looked up and saw Shien stirring, shifting restlessly, her tiny frame wrapped in the chaise cushion. She opened her eyes and stared back at Slater.

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ she muttered.

  ‘Try to get some rest.’

  ‘You should be doing the same.’

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ he said with a smirk.

  She sat up, crossing her legs and straightening her back, as if carrying out a combination of moves a teacher had taught her to present herself better.

  ‘I want to talk,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You said you’d tell me about yourself when we have time. Now we’ve got time.’

  ‘Shien…’

  ‘Don’t tell me you were lying to me, Will.’

  ‘It’s not something you should be hearing.’

  She gestured all around her. ‘I’m a big girl. I can cope.’

  ‘You’re not a big girl. And I know you can cope, but I don’t know if I can.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I spent some time in Yemen. A couple of months ago. I don’t think it’s healthy to dwell on those memories.’

  ‘Did you do bad things?’

  ‘To bad people.’

  ‘Do you feel guilty about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why don’t you want to think about it?’

  Slater paused. He couldn’t discuss Yemen without bringing up something else, something that had been plaguing the recesses of his mind for his entire adult life.

  Something he’d sworn he wouldn’t talk about with Shien.

  Sitting alone in the enormous presidential suite, feeling alone in the world, he realised he had to eventually talk about it with someone.

  Why not her?

  ‘Shien, I need to tell you something about my childhood. About a time when I was around your age.’

  She paused. ‘I can’t picture you as a kid. You’re too tough and strong.’

  Slater smirked. ‘I was a kid. A skinny one, too. Thirteen years old. I couldn’t hold my own in a fight. I was shy. Painfully shy. And my home life was horrible. My mother was never around, and she never told me what she did. My father didn’t care about me — he took drugs almost everyday.’

  ‘Like what was in my system?’

  Slater paused. Heroin was strangely comparable to what Shien had been through.

  ‘Almost exactly like that.’

  ‘I didn’t like that feeling,’ she said. ‘I was confused all the time.’

  ‘If your life is bad enough, sometimes you turn to that kind of feeling to feel relief.’ He paused. ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’

  ‘No, no, I understand. My life has been pretty good. There’s terrible people out there. I saw that before…’

  Her voice dropped off a cliff as she stifled emotions. Slater watched the angst run across her face — she had seen men die earlier that morning, and the reality was finally sinking home as the drugs flowed out of her veins.

  ‘Yeah,’ Slater said, trying to take her mind off the immediate sensation. ‘So Dad turned to drugs. We barely ever spoke. And my mother went off and … did things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘She sold herself for money.’

  Shien paused. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Shien, I will tell you every single part of this story, but you shouldn’t ask about what I just said. It’s not something you want to know about until you’re older.’

  She sensed the deathly serious nature of his tone, and nodded accordingly. ‘Okay, Will. Got it.’

  ‘One day, she just didn’t come home. Dad searched for a couple of days, then gave up. I managed to figure out what happened — I was old enough to piece it together. She’d been meeting with bad men who paid her to do what she did. Very bad men.’

  ‘Like the people we ran into earlier?’

  ‘Sort of. These men were called pimps. They sold my mother to another country, and they shipped her off. I never saw her again.’

  Shien froze, her brain whirring a million miles an hour. ‘Why did another country want her?’

  ‘They wanted to hurt her.’

  ‘Like punch her? And kick her?’

  ‘And other things…’

  Shien realised Slater wouldn’t budge, and she clammed up.

  ‘My Dad killed himself a year later.’

  ‘That’s called suicide, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. It left me without parents. I had to grow up fast. And I always had that feeling deep inside me the entire time — that I couldn’t do anything to save my mother, even though I knew the people who took her.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you do anything?’

  ‘They would have killed me.’

  ‘But… you can kill anyone now. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Now I can.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I joined the military.’

  ‘You became a soldier?’

  ‘A certain kind of soldier. I retired a few months ago.’

  ‘Did you go back to try and find the men who hurt your Mummy? After you became dangerous, I mean.’

  ‘They were long gone.’

  ‘But you tried to find them.’

  ‘Of course I tried.’

  ‘But that feeling’s still there?’

  He nodded. ‘That feeling’s always going to be there. For as long as I live. It’s the kind of anger that I can’t control, and it only comes up when I find situations like what happened to my mother.’

  Shien paused. ‘You think those men who took me were going to hurt me too? In the way I don’t understand?’

  ‘I think so, Shien.’

  ‘I hope they weren’t. I hope they were good people.’

  ‘I think it’s been proven that they’re not good people by this point.’

  The colour that had slowly started to return to her face disappeared again. She was paling, sweating, frightened. ‘What were they going to do to me, Will?’

  ‘Hopefully nothing. But that’s why I need to hang around. Now I can fix problems — if I had these abilities when my mother disappeared, I would have torn the whole world apart to find her. So if you were going to be in a similar situation, I’ll tear the whole world apart to make sure you stay safe.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that. You might die. Those were scary people who took me.’

  ‘I’m a scary guy,’ Slater said. ‘You just can’t see it. Because I’m on your side.’

  She paused, reflecting. ‘No — I can see it. But that’s a good thing because you want to help me.’

  ‘I could walk away right now and you’d stay safe. I could even get you back to your parents, m
ore than likely. But then the people who took you will carry on doing what they’re doing. And that’s something I can’t allow.’

  ‘Because of what happened to your Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, Shien. So that’s why I’m going back to Mountain Lion.’

  ‘Is that where I’ve been staying the past two weeks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t like that place much.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Are you going to hurt the men who wanted to hurt me?’

  ‘If I find them.’

  She sighed and settled back in the giant cushion, letting it envelop her frame once again. ‘Now I understand. Thanks, Will. I mean it.’

  Slater watched her eyes flicker shut and she sank deeper and deeper into slumber, her mind finally satiated by a handful of answers that had been eluding her. It clearly gave her just enough respite to allow tiredness to take over, and a minute later she was peacefully asleep.

  Left alone in the massive suite, Slater had time to compose his thoughts. He stared at the giant complex in the distance and began to formulate the initial steps for a plan of attack. There was four-hundred thousand USD worth of casino chips in his pocket, after all, and there was very little in Macau that such an obscene bankroll couldn’t purchase.

  He was known in the VIP rooms. He’d spent time there before.

  He would flash his wealth — tapping into his Zurich accounts if need be — until someone confirmed whether or not Peter Forrest was running a sex slavery ring out of the casino’s seedy underbelly.

  If his hunch was right, he didn’t want to know what he would unleash.

  But the billionaire owner of Mountain Lion would wish he’d never been born.

  27

  As a fresh layer of thick clouds filtered across the sky, darkening the already grimy day, Forrest’s insides turned to mush.

  Jang had found him, cornered him, eliminated his forces, and pinned him down.

  On top of that, from the dark look in the man’s glare, Forrest knew the Hong Kong businessman knew the truth.

  Forrest was the reason his daughter had been missing for more than two weeks.

  Forrest gulped back apprehension as two of the suit-clad mercenaries held him firmly against the jagged chassis of the overturned limousine. Even worse than the fact that Jang knew was the reality that he himself had no idea where Shien was.