by Matt Rogers
‘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 was 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 quest
ion. 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.
He heard the sound of another gunshot — and ducked reflexively — but felt nothing. It had missed. He wasn’t sure where the bullet had impacted, how close it had come to ending his life, but in the end it didn’t matter.
Whether it missed by a hair or a mile, he’d made it to the building in one piece.
He ran underneath an open roller door into a large space that had long ago been the factory floor of a slaughterhouse. The space was filled with rusted hydraulic equipment, conveyor belts, chains, hoists; anything that could be useful in the killing of animals. A row of broken industrial-scale refrigerators ran the length of the far wall. It was dark and musty and putrid, like the workers had abandoned the place without caring to salvage any of the machinery. Which gave anyone trying to sneak up on him plenty of cover to do so.
The roof far above creaked and the wind battered the outside of the structure and somewhere far away came the sound of dripping water. But otherwise, no hostile sounds.
Then a sharp crack filled his ears and his vision exploded and he dropped to his knees, the action involuntary. He’d been struck from behind. Whoever had crept up on him had done so with impeccable precision. Usually he was able to sense most attacks, yet this one caught him completely off-guard. He fell to the dusty floor, on the verge of retching. He careered forward. Crashed into the ground. Knocked senseless.<
br />
Another impact to the back of his head, from something long and hard and metal. This strike put him dangerously close to unconsciousness. He saw nothing except darkness. He heard nothing except a roaring in his ears. He felt his senses depleting, slipping away.
Then a male voice, close by, in his ear:
‘Jason King. Just who I expected to see.’
He used all the effort in his system to turn his head and attempt to get a glimpse at the assailant. In his peripheral vision he saw a blurry outline, dressed all in black, before another blow crashed against the side of his skull and he collapsed to the floor. Agony flared across one half of his face. The weapon had struck his already swollen cheek.
Everything shrunk to a pinpoint and disappeared.
CHAPTER 29
It was one of the worst concussions King had ever suffered.
Over the course of his time in the military he’d been battered, shot, cut, tortured, knocked out multiple times. The sensation of losing consciousness was impossible to get used to. His memory became sporadic. The next stage of his life passed in nothing but flashing, distorted images.
Someone helped him to his feet.
Dropped him into a car.
Still disoriented, he slurred his words. Unclear as to which way was up, which way was down, where he was headed, who he was with.
The trees flew by. They were driving on twisting mountain roads. The journey blurred into a single incomprehensible rollercoaster. His head throbbed and his eyes watered and he battled to control his senses. If he could just urge his limbs to act, then he could deduce whether he would survive the rest of the day. Was he being driven to a grisly death? Where was Kitchener? Where was Kate?
Then there were no more trees.
A building appeared in front of him.
Someone helped him inside.
He was in a small room with a double bed and flaky white walls and a cheap kitchen and a circular table. He lay on the bed and someone pressed a cool towel against his forehead. Time shrank and expanded and then suddenly, all at once, he could think clearly. He could still felt the concussion’s devastating effects. The pressure in his skull was immense. He felt like he would pass out again at any moment. But at least he had control of his bodily functions.