by Matt Rogers
Right now.
Not in three seconds, or five, or ten.
Now.
But he must have considered Rollins’ initial strike as a fluke, or forgotten the fact that Rollins outweighed the guy by at least thirty pounds. And that wasn’t taking into consideration the years Rollins had spent honing his mind and body in combat sports gyms and jiu-jitsu mats, or the time he’d spent in the field.
All in all, it wasn’t the smartest decision the addict had ever made.
9
As soon as the skinny idiot surged into range, Rollins thundered an uppercut into the exact same part of the guy’s chin. His fist moved like a bullet, darting between the guy’s outstretched hands and detonating off the base of his jaw.
Crack.
The guy lost his footing, stunned for the second time in a row.
This time, though, he didn’t get the chance to recoil backward.
Rollins seized him by the collar, yanking him into range. The guy threw a wild haymaker of a punch that glanced off the side of Rollins’ head.
Not hard enough to do any damage.
Rollins smiled.
He smashed an elbow into the guy’s temple, using the point of his bone like a baseball bat. The guy weakened, losing his confidence and his drug-fuelled intensity.
Rollins seized him by the collar with both hands, and put his head straight through the plaster wall.
The plasterboard tore with an overwhelming groan, and the addict came to rest buried up to the neck inside the wall, the rest of his body slumped pitifully in the room. Rollins couldn’t give a shit whether the guy was dead or not — it didn’t even cross his mind to find out. He didn’t care either way. He set to work clinically searching the man’s pockets, starting with the jacket and moving to the jeans.
He found a single key in the bottom of his jeans’ pocket, almost unnoticeable. He tugged it free, slotted it into the tiny lock between the steel manacles, and twisted, silently mumbling, ‘Please.’
The manacles sprang open.
It didn’t even pass Rollins’ mind that he’d used violence again. All that deliberation, all those promises — they meant nothing. It had been drilled into him early in his military career that addicts dependent on hard drugs were a different breed to the rest of society. They were entirely separate from the common adversary — they would do almost anything to get their next hit. They would steal and lie without remorse, and that would inevitably lead to darker crimes in future if they didn’t stray from the trajectory of their downward spiral.
This man, and no doubt the other two somewhere in the house, were so far down that path that Rollins barely considered them human.
He’d seen it in the man’s eyes.
The addict would have tortured Rollins mercilessly, without any regard for his wellbeing, just to get money for the next spoonful of crack.
So Rollins didn’t care if he’d killed him.
In fact, he hoped he was dead.
Leaving the motionless body half-buried in the wall, he sprang to his feet and took a deep breath, settling his heart rate after the outburst of testosterone. It took some practice. In fact, he found it easier to kill a man with his bare hands than calm himself down afterwards. The discipline required to store energy instead of using it to fuel a mad rampage took serious willpower. So he focused hard on the process, holding each breath for a few seconds at a time, lowering his heart rate. Simultaneously he reached down and lifted the addict’s jacket up, revealing the easily identifiable grip of a Walther PPX pistol.
Rollins wrenched the gun free, checked the pre-cocked hammer was resting in the correct position, and made sure the weapon was ready to fire.
He didn’t think he would need it, all things considered.
But it paid to be prepared.
He made it six feet across the room when the plaster creaked and groaned behind him, spelling trouble. Rollins paused in the middle of the room, almost reluctant to turn around because of what it would result in. Nevertheless, duty called. He spun on his heel — sure enough, the semi-conscious addict had levered himself out of the hole in the wall. His face was crimson, coated in blood from a multitude of cuts running across his forehead and cheeks. The impact of his head against the plasterboard had caused some significant injuries.
Injuries Rollins hadn’t anticipated anyone recovering from in a hurry.
But he should have connected the dots. He should have realised the inhuman capacity to handle pain possessed by a man in desperate need of hard drugs. This constant motion would not stop. If Rollins left the addict unconscious on the floor, eventually he would wake up and continue his mad rampage. He would try to hunt Rollins down, and when that didn’t work he would turn to the first innocent person to cross his path. He would attack them mercilessly and strip them of anything valuable that he could exchange for crack.
Rollins stared right at the man running across the room toward him. He saw the feverish rage in the guy’s eyes. He saw the shaking limbs, and the bared teeth twisted into a snarl, and the outstretched hands clawing at Rollins, reaching for his throat.
He saw enough.
Rollins raised the Walther PPX and put a 9mm bullet from the single feed magazine through the addict’s face.
Rollins felt nothing. His heart rate barely increased. He was not a man of mercy.
He had seen enough of the world to understood how it functioned. He knew what happened to people who always tried to find the best outcome in any situation. He’d seen first-hand — up close — what happened to those people. The world, as civilised as it had become in the twenty-first century, was not a kind place. Underneath the surface, horrible things stewed. Rollins had accepted the role of a Black Force operative with full knowledge that he would be forced to do things most people would find uncomfortable.
So, in the grand scheme of things, eliminating a man who had assaulted him and tied him up and planned to torture and extort him for all he was worth barely fazed him in the slightest.
There was nothing pretty about death. Despite his skinny frame, the addict hit the wood-panelled floor with enough of a hollow thump to send vibrations through the ground floor of the house. Blood and brain matter spurted out of the exit wound, but Rollins didn’t turn away. If he was prepared to put a bullet in a man, he had to be ready to face the aftermath. He noted the fatal wound and compartmentalised it, mentally eliminating the corpse at his feet as a threat.
He turned back to the doorway as the sound of the front door crashing open echoed through the house.
10
Somehow, Rollins knew exactly what was about to happen.
He’d seen it in Viola’s eyes when she’d poked her head around the door minutes earlier. The apprehension. The discomfort.
That type of behaviour was always exploited in a situation like this.
Sure enough, panicked Italian mumbling floated through the hallways — the pair of thugs were trying to keep quiet, but even though he’d fired an unsuppressed gunshot five seconds ago Rollins had no trouble figuring out where they were. He worked out their positions, and stored it away for future use.
“Future” meaning three seconds from now.
But Rollins’ brain moved like lightning. Black Force had discovered that half a year ago when they’d scrutinised the results of his Operator Training Course. There had been others from Delta whisked into the program, handed the burden of solo operations and never heard from again. Rollins had lost count of the rumours that had circulated after Delta’s best operatives had disappeared from the detachment, as if they’d never been there at all.
Then his time had come.
They’d approached him under the radar, citing his unbelievable reaction speed and ability to process information in real time faster than all his peers. He hadn’t quite understood their fascination with the subject until he’d found himself alone in the field for the first time.
He wasn’t working for Black Force anymore, but his reflexes were still ther
e.
So this situation unfolded rather clinically.
He knew they would make a beeline straight for the source of the commotion, because that’s what scared addicts did. Not scared in a timid sense, but the thumping heart and cold sweats would make them motivated to get the conflict over as fast as possible. Sure, they kidnapped unsuspecting hikers to make ends meet — a violent occupation, no doubt — but Rollins figured the trio had never experienced true adversity. They would wilt at the first sign of things not going their way.
At least, that was the theory.
Two seconds later, it proved accurate.
Someone shouldered the door aside in an apparent attempt to capitalise on the panic. Smart, if they were dealing with a regular adversary.
Sam Rollins was far from a regular adversary.
He spotted Viola first, forced into the room with a powerful hand wrapped around the back of her neck. He saw the tears in her eyes and the way her mouth was twisted into a silent plea. She knew she was being used as a human shield, and anyone who fired with the slightest inaccuracy would take her head off. Almost anyone aiming a weapon at the doorway would instinctively fire as soon as they saw movement. Viola would die, and the shock would make them hesitate until the two crack addicts behind her could finish them off.
Not Rollins.
He waited patiently, the Walther PPX locked in place.
Still as a statue.
The first thug entered the room a half-second later.
He was a big, brutish Italian man with thick black hair tied back in a ponytail. It was almost inconceivable that he was a man addicted to hard drugs. He certainly didn’t have the same horrific complexion and skinny frame of the first guy Rollins had killed. But the eyes didn’t lie. His pupils were dilated, the whites bloodshot, and he sported the same expression as the first man. Despite his sturdy jawline and imposing physique and well-defined musculature, he carried himself with the gait of a maniac, shoving Viola into the room with apparent satisfaction at her predicament.
Then he realised no-one had fired a shot and the sadistic glee on his face fell away, replaced by intense panic.
The gun in his hand started on its upward trajectory to aim at Rollins.
Far too late.
Rollins fired, and Viola screamed as a puff of crimson mist splattered across the back of her neck. In the chaos she probably thought she’d been hit, and she fell forward out of fright, landing in ungainly fashion across the wooden floor.
Good, Rollins thought. Now she’s out of the way.
The man who had been holding her by the neck now sported a crater in one side of his own throat. He stayed on his feet for the briefest of moments, then his body registered that he’d departed from the land of the living and all two hundred pounds of his notable weight crashed to earth.
It certainly startled the second man in the procession, who almost tripped on his friend’s corpse as he thundered into the room.
Rollins didn’t wait.
There were possibilities, of course. Maybe this guy was easily influenced, and had been roped into the kidnapping ring by his two sinister friends. Maybe he wasn’t responsible for all the pain and suffering they’d dished out. Not directly.
It didn’t even cross Rollins’ mind. The man was a threat, and he had a semi-automatic pistol in his hand, and therefore it was as clear as day what needed to happen.
Rollins blasted two 9mm rounds through his forehead.
The guy landed on top of his buddy, both of them pale and bleeding and unquestionably dead.
A strange kind of silence — the type Rollins was all too familiar with — descended over the room. He knew exactly what it signified. It meant there were more dead bodies in the room than living ones. It was the fatalistic, complete, unwavering quiet that most people went their whole lives without experiencing.
Rollins imagined Viola hadn’t experienced it.
She burst into tears almost immediately.
11
For some reason, Rollins found it rather hard to sympathise with her.
After all, she had led him here.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered between giant sobs that wracked her body from head to toe. ‘Thank you so much.’
He pointed the gun at her face. ‘For what?’
She froze. What little blood she had left in her cheeks drained away instantly. ‘What are you doing?’
She stared up at him with bloodshot eyes, her expression gaunt, her eyes pained.
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ he said.
‘You’re pointing that pistol at me.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Why are you doing that?’
‘Why do you think?’
‘Please,’ Viola said, and to Rollins’ disbelief she batted her eyelids, as if trying to seduce him.
He stifled a laugh, smirking instead. ‘No, no. That doesn’t work anymore. Surely you’re smart enough to work that out.’
‘Please,’ she said again. ‘They were holding me here against my will.’
Rollins noted how good her English actually was. She’d been covering it up.
‘Sure seems like it,’ he said.
‘They have my family hostage.’
‘You’re an awful liar.’
‘What do you want from me?’ she said, her voice starting to rise in volume, the anger creeping in. ‘What on earth do you want? You have killed my friends! Leave me alone.’
‘Oh,’ Rollins said. ‘Now I’m the bad guy.’
‘Look at what you’ve done!’
‘I don’t need to look. I know exactly what I’ve done. I punched the guy behind me twice in the jaw, put his head through a wall, then shot him in the face. Then I tore the throat out of the second man, and shot his friend twice in the head. Just in case you didn’t catch it.’
Viola slid over to the far wall and sat up straight, tucking her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs, as if she could shrink away from all her problems. She stared at the floor beneath her feet, trying to avert her gaze from the rapidly expanding pools of blood leeching from the three corpses.
‘Leave me alone,’ she muttered.
‘I should kill you.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘No, I wouldn’t. Not just yet.’
‘Not just yet? What kind of monster are you?’
‘That’s rich.’
Rollins crossed the room and wrapped one hand around her slender arm, hauling her to her feet. He hurried her out of the room, despite her protests. As soon as he lowered the gun away from her frame, she made a wild swing at his head with a balled-up fist. He ducked straight under it, trying to suppress his anger.
‘Don’t do that again. I come from a different kind of profession. I’ll hit a woman if the job requires it.’
‘What job?’ she spat. ‘You’re retired.’
‘This has turned into a job.’
‘Fuck you.’
She swung at him again, and he dodged the blow even easier than the first time. To send a message, he tapped the bottom of the Walther PPX’s grip against the top of her forehead, hard enough to cause a sizeable welt and send her recoiling across the hallway in abject horror.
She screamed.
‘Oh, shut up,’ he said, and shoved her into a room branching off from the main corridor.
This dwelling was actually furnished, with a large window overlooking both the Italian coastline and half the villages in Cinque Terre. An unbelievable view, all things considered, but Rollins barely paid it any attention. He dumped Viola in an old leather armchair and sat across from her on a faded, tattered couch missing two cushions.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’
‘I don’t want to talk.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Why are you doing this to me?’
‘You’re not being serious, are you?’
‘I told you. I’m not who you think I am.’
‘You seem to be. You didn
’t seem to have any objections when you led me up the trail. It seems you picked on the wrong guy, Viola. You met innocent, happy, carefree Sam Rollins. You met the Sam Rollins trying to put his life back together one step at a time in a beautiful Italian village. You met a Sam Rollins trying to hide the scars of his past. Unfortunately, that guy’s gone. Now you’re stuck with this Sam Rollins.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Someone you probably shouldn’t have targeted.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I’m glad. Now, let’s get a couple of things straight. I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them truthfully. I am very, very good at working out when people are lying to me. Just like I could tell that these men definitely weren’t holding you hostage. There was nothing in your behaviour that seemed forced whatsoever down in Vernazza. I would have picked up on it. Because you were very good at acting. I’m surprised you were able to rope me into this at all.’
‘You want the truth?’ she said.
‘Please.’
‘I got wrapped up in the act. I actually felt something with you. That’s why it felt real. Because I didn’t have to force it. I ignored what was going to happen, because I didn’t want to think about it. Then when they chained you up, I got mad at them. Because I felt something with you — some connection, whatever — and I didn’t want you to get hurt. They didn’t like that. They slapped me and threw me around, and then when you broke out… well, you saw what happened.’
‘They used you as a shield.’
‘Yes.’
He raised the Walther PPX to shoulder height, aiming the barrel square between her eyes, his arm rigid, his hand unwavering.
‘You really wanted them to let me go?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She was telling the truth.
Rollins lowered the weapon. ‘Okay.’
Unbridled relief spread across her face. ‘You’re going to let me go?’