The Will Slater Series Books 1-3

by Matt Rogers

  She obeyed.

  Slater processed what he could see.

  The woman was in her early thirties with high cheekbones and a porcelain-like quality to her skin — probably a mixture of fright and a naturally pale complexion. She was undeniably beautiful, with an athletic frame and long blonde hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. She wore a full body tracksuit and dirty sneakers, and her left wrist hung uselessly a couple of feet off the ground, chained to the wall by a single handcuff and a bolt.

  Alongside her were two kids.

  They were both young — Slater estimated between four and six — and were in similar predicaments, one of their limbs each chained to the wall. The three sat only half a foot apart, lined up just inside the doorway. The rest of the room was threadbare, half-finished before construction on the skyscraper had seemingly shut down, all the developments that had been made on the ground floor already falling into disrepair.

  Slater saw all he needed, and turned the light back off instantly.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ he said under his breath, sporting the same volume as the previous exchanges. ‘I’m here to get you out.’

  17

  The darkness seemed to terrify the woman, who Slater deemed the only one of the three capable of conversing with him. He wasn’t about to interrogate a pair of kids — they had enough problems already. Beyond the barrel of his Glock he sensed her shaking, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to turn colder than usual.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Slater whispered.

  ‘The gun,’ she said, barely able to spit the two syllables out, her voice weak.

  ‘If I take it away, do you promise not to scream?’

  ‘Of course. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I know you’re not. But this is an incredibly stressful situation. People do crazy—’

  ‘Take the fucking gun off my head!’ she hissed under her breath.

  Slater nodded in the darkness, a useless gesture, and lowered the Glock. So far there was no sign of life anywhere else on the ground floor. He hoped the two thugs he’d dealt with a minute earlier were the only kind of resistance he’d face for the foreseeable future.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said, remarkably composed.

  ‘Just a guy who wants to help.’

  ‘Bullshit. I heard all that nonsense out in the corridor. You’re involved somehow. Who’s D’Agostino? Why am I here?’

  Slater paused, allowing the woman to spill all her thoughts before responding. ‘Did you hear a few muffled thumps?’

  ‘Yeah. What was—?’

  ‘Those two guys aren’t much of a problem anymore. Trust me now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, right now I’m the only person capable of getting you out of those cuffs. So I’d trust me if I were you.’

  Slater was about to ask for anything he could use to piece together what was happening in the construction site, and why a woman and two children were chained to a wall on the ground floor, but before he could get another sentence out she threw him off with a single question.

  ‘Where’s the rest of the guys on this floor?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you do with them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She went quiet, simultaneously coming to the same realisation as Slater. As if on cue thudding footsteps exploded into earshot, materialising at the foot of the corridor he’d just come from. Someone cursed viciously in Russian, and there was the sound of a semi-conscious body being hefted off the floor.

  Not good.

  ‘Who the fuck did this?’ a Russian voice snapped.

  ‘Down there,’ one of the men Slater had attacked said, his voice drowsy, barely able to hold it together.

  He must have signalled in the correct direction, because a second later Slater sensed three or four pairs of boots crunching through the loose dirt toward his location. In the darkness the sound amplified, horrifying close, approaching fast. They must have known exactly where the hostages were being kept and made a beeline for the doorway.

  He barely had time to get his feet underneath him. Slater prided himself on a frighteningly quick reaction speed, but even that didn’t help him here. The rapidity with which the hostile bodies poured into the room caught him entirely off-guard, and it took his brain a moment to flip the switch back into primal survival mode.

  But when he entered that state, there was no stopping him.

  His thoughts were consumed by the fact that there were two children in the room. It supercharged him with the kind of vigour he couldn’t tap into often — the sheer, unbridled intensity that came from the knowledge that a pair of kids and what seemed to be their mother would die painfully if he didn’t succeed.

  So when the first man to enter the room ran straight into Slater in the darkness, fumbling with the under-barrel flashlight on his weapon, Slater showed zero restraint.

  He wrapped the back of the guy’s head in a Muay Thai clinch, clasping one hand around the man’s skull, and fired off two consecutive knees into the bridge of the man’s nose. There was a weapon somewhere between them — Slater felt the uncomfortable jab of a bulky assault rifle against his stomach — but the barrel wasn’t pointed in his direction. Everything had unfolded too fast. Slater shattered bones in the guy’s face before he could get a shot off, and the man crumpled.

  Either from the sheer pain of his injuries, or because he’d been stripped of consciousness.

  One down.

  Slater hurled his unresisting body to the side and spotted two more silhouettes appearing instantly in the doorway. Even in the total darkness he spotted the unmistakable outline of automatic weapons, and he didn’t hesitate. He raised the Glock 17 and fired twice at the man on the left. The muzzle flares lit up the room for a half-second, and as the first man crumpled Slater used the brief burst of light to lock up his aim with the guy on the right.

  It only took one more shot.

  Three down.

  Barely able to put a cohesive thought together because of the jolt of energy to his bones, Slater took off in a running start and hurled himself through the open doorway, anticipating a fourth combatant to come tearing into sight at any moment.

  Not that he could see anything in the carnage, anyway.

  But instead of diving over the threshold and hitting the dirt a second later, he thundered into a body halfway through his spear tackle, meeting some kind of centre mass that sent both parties sprawling to the dirt in a tangle of limbs. Slater bounced off the ground, nerve endings firing across his shoulders and back — he considered himself lucky not to have broken his neck in the reckless assault.

  But it had thrown both of them off-guard, and if there was one thing Slater had confidence in, it was his ability to capitalise on an even playing field.

  Which was exactly what he’d been intending in the first place.

  He maintained momentum as soon as he hit the ground and rolled closer to the last remaining hostile, coming down awkwardly on top of the man in the wide open hallway. The guy’s Kalashnikov became pinned between them, sandwiched between their respective weights.

  The guy underneath him struggled, cursing in Russian, spraying Slater with spit.

  He didn’t care.

  He’d somehow lost the Glock in the chaos, but he simply got his feet underneath him and wrestled the Kalashnikov off the guy with brute force. Instead of spending the valuable time fumbling over the weapon in the blackness, checking whether the safety was off and the reliable rifle was ready to fire, Slater simply treated the gun as a bat and brought it down with a thwack against the guy’s skull.

  Once again — silence.

  Slater walked straight back into the room with the hostages, subconsciously glad that the conflict had taken place in the dark.

  He didn’t really want to see the results of his rifle swing. From the sound of the impact, the thug was dead. That was all he needed to know.

  Ears ringing from the unsuppressed gu
nshots, painfully aware of the racket that had been caused, Slater grimaced.

  The situation had become a ticking time bomb.

  18

  He could barely hear a thing after the three shots he’d fired.

  The room containing the three hostages had no windows or gaps in the walls aside from the doorway itself. As a result the sound of the gunshots had been contained, amplified by the confined space, to such an extent that the high-pitched whining in Slater’s ears caused him genuine pain. Convinced he’d given himself long-term hearing issues, he crouched low in the centre of the room, maintaining a calm demeanour in the face of total carnage.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said to the dark room, his words sounding hollow with his impaired hearing.

  He wasn’t sure if the woman or the kids could hear him, but he didn’t want them panicking — he wanted them to know they were temporarily safe. He couldn’t risk turning on a flashlight, but it seemed foolish to try and calm them down.

  He had just incapacitated four people in front of their eyes.

  Nothing happened for a long time. A minute passed, and Slater remained still as a statue, eyes fixed on the dark gap in the wall where the doorway rested, waiting for reinforcements to come charging in.

  Ready to deal with any further threats.

  Finding none, he started to grow optimistic. Maybe it was a six-man setup. Maybe he’d killed everyone in the construction site who posed a threat. Maybe D’Agostino’s operation was done.

  But nothing ever went according to plan.

  When some semblance of his hearing began to return, he deemed it prudent to continue the conversation with the woman, even though he wasn’t sure how mentally scarred she would be from the proceedings.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he said quietly, trying to inject some shred of normality into the situation.

  ‘Theresa,’ she said.

  ‘Theresa, I’m Will.’

  ‘You killed those men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Neither of the kids piped up — Slater imagined they were both in a state of shock. Theresa, on the other hand, seemed surprisingly calm.

  ‘You okay?’ he said.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Just get me out of here, okay?’

  ‘These guys kidnapped you?’

  She nodded. ‘And my children.’

  ‘You three are a family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Earlier today.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Roughly four p.m.’

  ‘How’d it happen?’

  ‘We were shopping. There’s a detour we usually take. Through an alley. They got us there.’

  ‘Shoved you into a van?’

  ‘Pretty much. It happened really fast.’

  ‘You’re married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he’s the father of these kids?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you think he’ll react to this?’

  ‘He’ll be devastated.’

  ‘He’d do anything to get you back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even pay an enormous ransom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘He’s a lawyer. I run an online business. Jewellery.’

  ‘Big shot lawyer?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Does he seem like the type of guy to play along with any demands?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Slater pressed a pair of fingers into his closed eyelids, battling down an oncoming headache, connecting the dots between this particular incident and a story told to him by a model named Florence earlier that evening.

  ‘Just seems like there’s a pattern here in Chicago,’ he muttered. ‘And I have a feeling your husband’s being deliberately targeted.’

  ‘I don’t understand…’ Theresa whispered.

  ‘What type of lawyer is he?’

  ‘Criminal defence.’

  ‘He co-operates with the Chicago P.D. occasionally?’

  ‘Of course. Part of the job.’

  ‘You think he has friends in the force?’

  ‘I know he does. Actually, that name you mentioned earlier. Out in the corridor…’

  ‘D’Agostino?’

  ‘Yes. Stephen’s met with him a few times. You think…?’

  ‘I know,’ Slater said.

  It would be easy, wouldn’t it?

  As a police commander, you would make acquaintances with wealthy types — mostly lawyers, especially in the field of law enforcement. You would come to learn which of them were vulnerable to exploitation, and from there it would be fairly straightforward. Recruit a small force of hired goons looking for work in the Chicago underworld — maybe even use your experience running the central district to find the easiest nodes through which you could hire mercenaries. Abduct the wealthy target’s family, but use your vast experience as an officer of the law to do it in the most efficient way possible. Leave no trace of what you’ve done. Demand ransom, leaning on all kinds of pressure points that you discovered whilst befriending the husbands. When the money’s received, return the families safe and sound and insist that if a word is uttered about this incident, there will be blood to spill. Keep your identity disguised and anonymous the entire time. Let the Dagestanis handle the grunt work. After a few days pass and no-one goes forward to the police, too scared to act, the entire thing will be swept under the rug, never to be discussed or referred to again.

  Because the best crimes made the victims implicit.

  Because that’s what true master manipulators, like Commander Ray D’Agostino, were able to do.

  But what about when the husbands didn’t co-operate?

  Slater didn’t want to know how long D’Agostino had been running this operation. It would no doubt come to light, when news of his death hit the newspapers and television, and his dark empire slowly emerged from the shadows. Witnesses would come forward. They wouldn’t have known it was D’Agostino at the time, but they would connect the dots. The pieces would fall into place.

  A hostage operation carried out with the painstaking detail of a commander who knew exactly how to get away with any kind of crime.

  Genius.

  But Slater had no time to consider D’Agostino’s empire, because Theresa piped up. ‘Will?’

  Her voice was shaking.

  ‘What?’ Slater said.

  ‘Are you sure you killed those men?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s just… I heard something.’

  The first guy.

  Slater’s heart rate skyrocketed and he yanked the phone out of his back pocket, not interested in keeping quiet anymore. He turned the flashlight on, revealing something worse than the first guy regaining consciousness.

  The man simply wasn’t there anymore.

  19

  Slater recalled the damage his strikes would have caused. Two undefended knees directly to the nose — the man’s septum would have shattered and it probably would have briefly knocked him unconscious.

  But he must have recovered just enough to get his feet under him and slip unobstructed out of the room, taking advantage of the darkness and Slater’s distracted state. He’d been processing everything Florence had told him, grappling with the coincidence that her story was connected with D’Agostino and the operation in the skyscraper. Now he found himself reeling — he’d lost a hostile, one that knew where he was and what he was armed with.

  He couldn’t let the guy escape.

  But it looked like the man already had.

  Slater wheeled on the spot, bringing the flashlight over to illuminate the three hostages. He got a look at the two kids for the first time — both were ghostly white, shaking and shivering and staring up at him with wide eyes and dilated pupils. He wasn’t sure whether they’d been drugged
or not, but they were scared out of their minds.

  He didn’t blame them.

  Inwardly, he was too.

  Racing through a laundry list of ways to respond to the crisis, he turned to face Theresa. Despite her relatively calm answers to Slater’s questions, she seemed in a similar state to her kids.

  ‘Theresa,’ he said, ignoring the horrified expression on her face as she glimpsed the three dead bodies lying across the threshold to the room, only a few feet away from her. He imagined the family didn’t have much experience with blood and violence.

  Sometimes he wished he didn’t either.

  But he was slowly beginning to accept the fact that this situation felt perfectly normal.

  He was steadily becoming accustomed to the overwhelming wave of emotions that plagued every life or death encounter.

  He was learning to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

  And he hasn’t lost all control of the situation.

  Yet.

  ‘Theresa,’ he repeated, and finally she took her eyes away from the bodies.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What else can you tell me? Are there more?’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More thugs. The guys who kidnapped you.’

  She looked at him as if he were stupid. ‘Of course there’s more.’

  Slater sensed the blood draining from his cheeks. He battled down a racing heart and wiped his sweaty palms against his jeans. ‘Okay. How many more?’

  ‘At least ten. This place is crawling with them.’

  ‘Ten?!’

  ‘Well, you’ve killed a few. Maybe six or seven left. It’s an entire convoy of those Russian guys. They all look the same. They’re all horrible.’

  ‘I can’t hear anyone approaching. And I fired my weapon two minutes ago. What does—?’

  Theresa audibly gasped. ‘Oh, God. Will. Move!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ll be dealing with the collateral. Oh, no. Oh my God. Go!’

  He seized her by the shoulder. ‘What the hell are you on about?’

  ‘There’s more families. Upstairs.’

  ‘Fuck. Why are you down here, then?’

  ‘We’re new arrivals. I guess this is like a… holding cell.’