by Matt Rogers
He managed a wry smile.
He’d pulled through again.
Then the world went dark.
22
After an indiscernible amount of time the darkness fell away, replaced by a fuzzy kaleidoscope of colours. Xu emerged from the realm of nothingness with a pounding head and a dry mouth. This time, he’d been unconscious for far longer. Sirens were screaming in the distance, and his shoulders jerked back and forth, seemingly of their own accord.
Confused, he sat up.
Someone was shaking him.
‘Jesus Christ,’ a voice said, and Xu’s vision became slightly clearer. ‘I didn’t even think you’d made it out of the townhouse.’
Memory worked differently based on the different levels of unconsciousness. Simply passing out from pain took you out of commission for longer, but it was easier to piece together recent events — connect the dots, in essence — when you weren’t beaten deliberately unconscious with physical violence.
There was less trauma to overcome.
Xu stared at the man holding him by the shoulders and immediately recognised him — there was no delay whatsoever.
‘Wilkinson,’ he said, flabbergasted.
‘I was on the couch in the doctor’s quarters when you started World War Three,’ he said. ‘Barely made it out alive. I was stepping over dead guys on the way out. Managed to follow you by the skin of my teeth and then… straight off the bridge. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I thought you’d tried to kill yourself.’
‘Quite the opposite,’ Xu muttered. ‘Hell of a drop, though. Where’s the cops?’
‘Taking them a while to get here. Bit difficult when you gridlock traffic for ten blocks with that little move.’
Xu smirked and nodded. ‘You realise I was telling the truth, then?’
‘Well, you stopped these guys,’ Wilkinson said, gesturing to the chaos surrounding the five stationary container trucks. ‘Which I’m guessing was the right move. I take it there’s nothing pleasant in those containers.’
‘Nothing pleasant at all.’
‘So you and I can explain this to the—’
‘I’m not explaining anything to anybody,’ Xu said.
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear a word I said back in the townhouse?’
‘Well, I did, but—’
‘You’re FBI, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then it’s your job to explain things. This is your operation. I was never here. You’ll find out what’s in the containers soon enough.’
‘Do you know?’
‘Roughly. It’s drugs and guns. Nothing explosive, but you’d better make sure they’re not booby trapped, just in case. Other than that I’m in the dark. All I know is that it would have been bad if I wasn’t here.’
‘But if they asked what happened here—’
‘You’re a big boy,’ Xu said. ‘You’ll figure something out.’
Wilkinson still had a firm grasp on Xu’s shoulders, and as they spoke the FBI agent’s fingers tightened around them, imperceptibly trying to keep him in place to prevent him leaving. Xu wasn’t even sure if he had the physical strength to get up and walk away, but if he did he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Wilkinson stop him.
‘Let go,’ Xu said quietly.
‘No. You’re staying right here. Everything you said might have been true but I have no way of knowing that. You might just be a noble vigilante. Ex-military or something. You need to stay here and be accountable for—’
Considering the fact that Xu had lost count of the amount of times he’d almost died over the course of the last hour, he found himself running on a tight fuse. He didn’t need hours of police interrogation and a few days of hurting under armed guard in a hospital. He needed silence, and calm.
So, even though it seemed as if he might snap in half at the slightest movement, he reached up and wrenched Wilkinson’s hand off his right shoulder. Then he got to his feet and simply shrugged off the other hand, getting his bearings.
His vision wavered.
His head spun.
His entire body sagged, lethargic and beat down and destroyed.
But James Xu did what he always did.
He put one foot in front of the other.
Wilkinson didn’t seem in the right headspace to cause much of a protest. FBI agent or not, the man was in shock. He’d been through a series of events ordinarily reserved for fables, surrounded by so much death and destruction and chaos that it probably felt like he was floating through a dream.
Whereas, for Xu, it was just another day.
‘See you round, Wilkinson,’ he said.
He started in the opposite direction, then paused and turned back as a wave of conflicting emotions seized him.
‘Wilkinson,’ he said, and the man looked up. ‘Don’t take what happened today lightly. I know what you tried to do in that townhouse. I know the type of situation you thought you were in, and I know it takes courage to try and take information to your grave. But don’t ignore it. We both know it happened. And it’ll fuck you up if you try to pretend it didn’t. Don’t bottle it up. If you need to talk to someone, talk to them. Don’t make the same mistakes I have, okay? I’ve been through enough shit to keep ten psychologists busy. Don’t become me. You tried to pull the trigger on yourself and that’ll weigh heavy on you for the rest of your life. But you did it for the right reasons. Or, at least, reasons you thought were right at the time. Never forget that.’
Then he ducked into the lee of a nearby stairwell leading off FDR Drive and disappeared into the shadows, returning to the dark realm of the world that he operated in.
Unseen and unheard.
And never officially recognised for anything.
He preferred it that way.
23
As he hobbled step by step through the aptly-named neighbourhood of Two Bridges, positioned between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge further north, Xu contemplated the immediate aftermath of the carnage.
It was not his role to involve himself with the epilogue of a brutal conflict.
It never had been.
Black Force was the silent, ruthless hammer. They took care of the nails however they deemed necessary, and then dissipated into the shadows to leave the legal repercussions to official entities. Sometimes the law proved too rigid and uncompromising for traditional bodies of authority to get anything done, and that was largely the reason the black operations division had been green-lit in the first place. It also spelled disaster if Xu was arrested in another country — he had no way to prove his role as an unrecognised government agent, and Uncle Sam sure as hell wasn’t going to claim responsibility for his actions.
But he’d accepted that just fine.
The cheques he received for acting as the human equivalent of a battering ram more than made up for the associated risks.
They allowed him to maintain a lifestyle in the most affluent suburb of New York City, in a building ordinarily reserved for the country’s richest billionaires.
That was where he was headed now.
Certain comforts were afforded for an operative of his calibre.
Even though he probably needed a week in intensive care, he couldn’t head for the nearest public hospital. The death toll on FDR Drive, as well as the slaughterhouse that would be uncovered in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, would turn the city into a cesspool of manhunts for anyone responsible or associated with the incidents.
Wilkinson had a tough task ahead of him in co-ordinating such an effort and explaining to the best of his abilities what had happened, but Xu didn’t pity him in the slightest.
Xu had done the hard work.
So he continued trundling northbound, moving through Midtown East, ignoring the urge to simply lie down and pass out in the nearest gutter. The amount of blood all over him would attract police like flies to shit, which would ultimately result in the same outcome as if he’d stayed on FDR Drive with Wilkinson.
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br /> The suburbs turned more affluent as he approached Central Park — he had grown used to living among the city’s elite long ago. His building on Park Avenue was one of the most expensive on the planet, rivalling London and Hong Kong’s elite establishments. The two-bedroom dwelling had more than enough space to keep him satisfied, along with offering unparalleled views over Central Park, towering above most of the structures around it.
When Black Force had gifted the apartment to him after his first year in the organisation, he couldn’t quite believe his luck.
In terms of status symbols, it was the pinnacle of achievement. Xu recalled breaking down in a puddle of tears when he’d first stepped foot in the apartment, comparing it to the one-room shacks of his youth. He had been through so much pain, so much relentless momentum applied in a consistent direction for as long as he could remember, that when it finally paid off with a life he’d dreamed about in his wildest fantasies he hadn’t been able to handle the sheer wave of emotion.
But, like anything, the materialistic tendencies faded.
Now it was just home.
And the money didn’t bring him satisfaction any longer. Seeing the expression on Velli’s face as Xu had torn his plans apart would satisfy him for as long as he required.
The knowledge that if he hadn’t been there to intervene, Wilkinson would have died at the hands of Felix, and the gangs of New York would have got their hands on enough weaponry and abused enough imported substances to cause anarchy on the streets.
He couldn’t imagine a Metal Storm rifle in the hands of a coked-up gangster.
So that was all he needed to spur him forward. He made it to Park Avenue, oblivious to how much time he’d spent walking. It had all blurred into a seething mass of pain and reflection, two things he would be experiencing a world of over the next few days or weeks or months.
Until Black Force came calling again.
He wondered if shutting down one of the most dangerous import pipelines the city had ever seen would add another digit to his bank account. By nature, the digits became harder and harder to acquire, but Black Force seemingly deemed it necessary to pay him obscene quantities of government black funds for his efforts.
He was up to eight now.
Thinking about the physical therapy that would be required in the months ahead, and considering how close he had come to death, he figured he deserved it.
His life was pain. An almost endless stream of it. As soon as the physical therapy had run its course his employers would come calling, and like a loyal dog he would answer.
But he didn’t mind.
There were worse jobs.
He would rather die in the line of fire than waste his life away without ever realising the capabilities of his potential.
He imagined the other Black Force operatives felt similarly. It took a rare individual to devote their life to something like this.
He reached his building on Park Avenue and avoided the main lobby — the regular staff knew him, and probably could guess his occupation involved some level of violence considering the state he often entered the building in, but in particularly sensitive times he had a back entrance to take advantage of.
He went there now, ducking into an alleyway beside the enormous private complex and knocking twice on a nondescript side door skewered into the brick. It opened immediately and he stepped through, still under a fog of suffering. He could barely pay attention to his surroundings, let alone stay wary of threats.
But as soon as he stepped through the doorway he knew he was safe.
‘Not a good night, eh?’ the private entrance’s receptionist said.
Xu didn’t know how long the man had worked in the same position — as long as Xu had been living in the complex, in any case. He didn’t often need to use this entrance, given the fact that most of his operations took place overseas, but when carnage erupted close to home it was reassuring to know he had a safe passage to fall back on.
‘Not my best performance,’ Xu muttered.
He could hardly speak.
For a moment his vision bucked, and he thought he might pass out in the dimly-lit corridor. But he regained his senses and managed to croak out another sentence.
‘Send the doctor up, will you?’
‘Of course, sir.’
The man — dressed in traditional hotel attire and sporting a warm smile of understanding — stepped aside and ushered Xu through. He limped down the dark brick corridor, reaching a bank of elevators and waiting with bated breath for one of the cable cars to collect him. He took it straight to the fifty-second floor, alone with his thoughts.
But he was tired of thinking.
He reached a silent corridor with plush carpet underfoot and ornate decorations on the walls and made the same trip to his apartment — 527. There were rumours that floated around the secret world every now and then, including the hint that another Black Force operative by the name of Will Slater owned a condo in the luxury complex, also gifted to him by the organisation.
But Xu would never know.
He would never meet his fellow operatives for as long as he lived.
Maybe they would all end up in the same place, eventually…
Afterwards.
He didn’t give much thought to any of that. He killed freely, and threw himself at tasks with reckless abandon, but he’d lost count of the damage he’d prevented over the course of his relatively short career. And, as far as he was concerned, that made up for any suffering he deemed necessary to dish out.
He let himself into the multi-million dollar apartment and spent a moment looking out over the city, observing how the lights around Central Park boxed the great slab of darkness into its own private rectangle. The view was picturesque, but Xu didn’t spend long admiring it.
He hobbled to the bedroom and collapsed on the king-sized mattress, hardly giving a shit if he coated the sheets in blood. The doctor would be here soon, and then he would sink into a world of painkillers and medication until he was back to one hundred percent, at which point he would be thrown without mercy into the next task.
He would never be recognised for his achievements. He and the other black operations soldiers would slave away in silence, unnoticed, but dealing with perhaps the most important issues one could imagine.
It was not an easy life.
But it was a good one.
And Xu would do it for as long as he could.
It takes a certain type.
JAMES XU, AND OTHER OPERATIVES, WILL RETURN.
MORE BLACK FORCE SHORTS COMING SOON…
Books by Matt Rogers
THE JASON KING SERIES
Isolated (Book 1)
Imprisoned (Book 2)
Reloaded (Book 3)
Betrayed (Book 4)
Corrupted (Book 5)
Hunted (Book 6)
THE JASON KING FILES
Cartel (Book 1)
Warrior (Book 2)
Savages (Book 3)
THE WILL SLATER SERIES
Wolf (Book 1)
Lion (Book 2)
BLACK FORCE SHORTS
The Victor (Book 1)
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About the Author
Matt Rogers grew up in Melbourne, Australia as a voracious reader, relentlessly devouring thrillers and mysteries in his spare time. Now, he writes full-time. His novels are action-packed and fast-paced. Dive into the Jason King Series to get started with his collection.
Visit his website:
www.mattrogersbooks.com
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amazon.com/author/mattrogers23
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Matt Rogers, The Victor: A Black Force Thriller (Black Force Shorts Book 1)