by Matt Rogers
A nod.
‘So they saw you as a solution. They’d pitch in staggering amounts of money to your future campaign if you used your position in the government to help them quash this little problem for them. You’re in black operations. Your connections are unparalleled. They knew if you or your family were in jeopardy, the government would pull out all the stops. They’d send in the best. They’d send in us.’
A nod.
‘To them, you were a home run. You were easily influenced because you wanted the presidency. Dollars meant more to you than the average bureaucrat, because you knew what you could do with them. And you also knew how good our government’s elite soldiers are. You figured — what’s the risk? Sure, you had to leave your kid in the hands of a band of rogue kidnappers for a few days, but they’re focused on smooth transactions, aren’t they? They wouldn’t actually harm their hostage. And besides, you’ve been coordinating the most feared and respected elite soldiers on earth for years. You know what your black-ops killers can do. You figure, it’s the perfect storm. Let us hunt down and neutralise Mukta, shutting down that particular problem, and round up most of your campaign money in the process.’
A nod.
‘You’d think the donors wouldn’t make enough money from the kidnapping industry alone to justify the cost, but there’s two aspects to this. There’s the problem of the rogue kidnapper, and there’s also the problem of the Maoist insurgency. Mukta’s been using the rebels as his own personal militia, but your donors don’t like them much either. They’re a splinter group, and they’re making everything unstable. They’re converting rural villagers to communism. They’re carrying out violent attacks on infrastructure here in Nepal. They’re trying to stir up a rebellion. Which is bad for multinational corporations who have business endeavours over here. They’ve invested heavily in the developing third world, and they need to keep the peace. So paying you huge sums of money isn’t a problem. The elite soldiers who come to your aid will take care of the rogue kidnapper and the insurgents all in one go.’
A nod.
‘And then, after you kickstarted the process, you realised you’d fucked up. Mukta or one of his goons lifted your laptop, which had actual evidence you were being paid to coordinate this. You weren’t expecting that. You thought they’d just take Raya and either one or both of your bodyguards and leave everything else untouched. So, in your panic, you invented some bullshit story about HQ locations to make us prioritise getting the laptop back. You didn’t expect us to actually look through it after we retrieved it.’
A final nod.
Slater said, ‘You used us as pawns to carry out your dirty work, Aidan, and you got your daughter murdered in the process.’
Parker finally broke down.
He pressed his face to the cold floor of the storage room and wept.
87
When Parker finally resurface from his anguish, he moaned, ‘I didn’t even know they were going to kill Winston. I was promised a smooth process. I didn’t know…’
‘You did know,’ Slater said. ‘But you chose to ignore it. You thought ignorance would be bliss. Because if it all went to hell, which was always going to happen, you could just tell yourself it wasn’t your fault. Clearly it was the failure of the operatives, or the miscommunication from the donors. Surely it couldn’t be your responsibility that you let your own child get shot in the head by a lunatic kidnapper.’
Parker bowed his head.
King said, ‘That’s what the weakest of the weak do. They blame everyone else. They shirk all responsibility. They do anything and everything to advance their own position in society, and if it all falls apart they throw their hands up in the air and say, “What else could I have done?” You slaughtered your own kid. You’ll have to live with that for the rest of your life.’
Slater snatched Parker by the collar and jerked him forward, so he had to look Slater in the eyes.
The man’s eyes were bloodshot and teary.
Slater said, ‘I want you to know that I blame myself for Raya’s death. I’m sure King blames himself, too. Because that’s what good men do. They try to find any area they could have improved, and they vow to do just that. If we were a little faster, or a little sharper, or a little more resilient, then a fourteen-year-old girl would be here with us instead of dead at the top of a mountain. But that’s not what happened.’
Parker said nothing.
Slater said, ‘I want you to see what good men do. So maybe you can realise how pathetic you are before the truth comes out and you get vilified for it.’
‘Can you kill me?’ Parker said in a voice barely above a whisper.
‘No,’ Slater said. ‘That would make it too easy.’
Silence.
‘We should,’ King said. ‘You know how close your little scheme came to killing both of us? You know what we went through to get back here?’
‘That wasn’t the plan,’ Parker moaned. ‘None of this was the plan.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Slater said.
Parker scrunched up his face.
King said, ‘Do you actually expect us to feel sorry for you?’
‘I guess I expected you to show mercy.’
‘That’s not what this is,’ Slater said. ‘Maybe in the movies we might get cut and shot and beaten and exhausted half to death, then come back here and find it in our hearts to forgive you. But that’s not how the real world works, Aidan. You used us as your own personal enforcers. We came within a hair’s breadth of death. And your foolishness led to the death of the person you love most.’
Parker sat still, silent and morose.
‘Did you really love her?’ Slater said. ‘Or does everything come second to the pursuit of power?’
‘Of course I loved her.’
‘Not enough to protect her,’ King said. ‘Isn’t that what a father is supposed to do?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise to us. We’re grown-ups. We don’t need it.’
Silence.
‘Apologise to her.’
‘I can’t…’
‘And whose fault is that?’
Slater knew he’d broken through the sociopathic exterior. He’d cut through to the core, and Aidan Parker would never be the same. The budding politician’s old life had consisted of numbers, and charts, and projections, and risk analysis. And there was no doubt his assumptions had merit. If Mukta had just stuck to his normal routine, he wouldn’t have turned murderous, and Raya would still be alive. But that’s the problem with breaking everything down, analysing everything, sitting behind a desk and trying your hardest to work out how to climb to the top…
It just never goes that way in the real world.
Parker now understood that.
It had cost him everything.
Slater said, ‘We’re not here to babysit you. We operate outside the law, so none of this is our responsibility. We’re not going to arrest you, or punish you. But we’re going to go back home and tell them everything. Your life is over. I don’t know what they’ll do with you, but it won’t be sunshine and rainbows. You should steel yourself for that before you come back.’
Parker nodded quietly.
Slater said, ‘If you think we’re going to talk you out of doing anything drastic, we won’t. We honestly don’t care about you. You almost got us killed. We’re ambivalent about what happens next.’
Another soft nod.
‘Do you have a second gun?’
Parker nodded. He reached into his puffer jacket, came out with a second Beretta, and handed it over without the slightest hint of hostility.
He was truly broken.
Slater took it, and checked to make sure King had the other Beretta.
Then he said, ‘We’re leaving now.’
Parker nodded.
‘I’d say it’s been nice knowing you,’ Slater said, ‘but it really fucking hasn’t.’
King opened the door and shuffled out, and Slater lingered i
n the doorway for a long moment.
Looking back at the man who had almost destroyed them.
Parker looked up.
‘Are you going to shoot me?’ he said.
His voice echoed.
Slater said, ‘No.’
And tossed the gun on the floor at his feet.
‘Do what you think is best,’ he said.
He stepped outside and shut the door behind him.
King lingered in the dirt laneway. He noticed Slater come out without a weapon, and cocked his head to one side.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
Slater said, ‘Giving him a choice.’
‘Don’t underestimate his desperation,’ King said. ‘He’s going to open that door and try to shoot us.’
‘I don’t think so.’
To make sure they were covered for all contingencies, King raised and aimed his Beretta.
The silence drew out. Sounds from the village floated by — the distant rumbling of engines, the faint whine of a plane taking off, the steady thunk-thunk-thunk of a local chopping wood.
The door stayed closed.
There was no movement from the other side.
Then a single gunshot rang out, muffled by the rock and the heavy door.
Slater nodded. He took no pleasure in it. It was a horrible situation, and there was no joy to be had in the demise of the man who’d orchestrated it. But still…
…it was some measure of finality.
King said, ‘So that’s it.’
‘That’s it.’
They turned and walked away.
88
Washington D.C.
Three days later…
Jay Randwick had spent the past thirty years of his life obsessed with efficiency.
It had led to many outcomes, the large majority of them positive. There was the mansion in a quaint tree-lined street in Spring Valley, one of D.C.’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. There was the Bentley and the Rolls, and the Lamborghini Huracan for weekends. There were the memberships to the most esteemed country clubs, tables at the best restaurants in town, the finest whiskeys, the rarest cigars. There was the trophy wife — number three, which he had to admit had caused some considerable disruption to his career trajectory — but there were no kids. He’d never admitted it to anyone, but he’d done the math and realised how much children would cost him in future earnings. It simply wasn’t worth it. So he paid meticulous attention to detail in practicing safe sex, and despite his numerous affairs he’d never been confronted with a positive pregnancy test by any of the call girls or budding socialites he used and discarded with increasing frequency.
Sometimes he wished he found deep satisfaction in the material conquests — houses, cars, girls.
But really, none of it meant anything to him.
What he relished was the hunt.
The game. The process. It’s all he ever cared about, and he’d decided decades ago that it would be all he focused on until the day he died. There was something beautiful about the art of constructing things and then implementing them — businesses, ideas, routines. He was always coming up with faster and more efficient ways to carry out his days, and it had led to an empire he couldn’t fathom. There were so many industries he’d conquered, so many different pies he had his hands in. Because at the end of the day, everything came down to a simple logical process. Do this, do that, repeat until you’re profitable. Learn from your mistakes, fix what’s broken, don’t touch what isn’t. Use the profits to keep expanding. Never settle. Never relax. Never rest on your laurels.
Just keep going onward and upward.
He’d mastered the process.
And now there was the next logical step.
He’d made enough money for ten lifetimes. He had more than he knew what to do with. So what does a man who has everything acquire next?
Simple.
Power.
Sure, Aidan Parker was an unorthodox candidate for President, but Randwick had been dissecting what made people successful his whole life, and he knew Parker had the goods for a successful campaign. The man had an incredible knack for breaking down complex matters into simple explanations. That’s what the American people needed, and they’d buy his speeches hook, line and sinker. Randwick already knew it. He’d foreseen it.
And above all, Parker had the experience and the connections.
He knew how everything operated behind the scenes.
In a position like the presidency, that was golden.
So Randwick had put it all into a contract, as he did best. He’d laid it all out in simple, clear terms.
Use your resources to take care of a slight problem I have in Nepal, take a personal risk to demonstrate your loyalty, and I will reward you with unlimited funding.
Parker signed on the dotted line.
The last he’d heard, it was all going swimmingly.
So he pulled into his driveway with a certain optimism he didn’t usually allow room for. Things were looking up. He killed the Bentley’s engine and slipped out from behind the wheel. Which wasn’t a regular occurrence, but he’d told his chauffeur to take the day off. There was a certain power you felt when you were in the driver’s seat, and he wanted to experience it on the day the Nepal problem was cleared. He’d invested considerable funds in the country’s infrastructure, and there was no room for an insurgency when big business was involved.
Not that he had any inkling of what that meant for the soldiers sent in to do his dirty work. He knew the theory, obviously, but his specialty was coordination. He was the ideas man. There was no use getting involved in the gritty details. He simply gave orders, and allowed them to be carried out.
And it had carried him to unparalleled heights.
He went inside and called his wife’s name. He was met with silence. She was probably at the gym, slaving her way through the daily pilates class. He didn’t really care. He was going to savour his alone time.
He put his laptop bag down in the marble hallway and went to the study. Fixed himself a generous serving of fifty-year-old Glenfiddich in a crystal tumbler, dropped into the armchair, and exhaled the stresses of the day. The oak walls gave off a subtle caramel odour, and he drank it in. Outside, it was getting dark. Twilight settled over Washington as the sky turned purple, then dark blue. There was little light in the mansion, so he reached across and flicked on the standing lamp.
There were two men in the corner of the room.
Randwick froze in his seat, the tumbler halfway to his lips.
But then the efficient part of his brain took over, crafting the best solution to the problem over the top of his skyrocketing pulse.
He said, ‘If it’s money you want, I can—’
‘No,’ one man said.
Randwick said, ‘What, then?’
They stepped out of the shadows and rounded the leather couch across the room. They sat down in unison, one of them cradling a sleek black handgun. One was Caucasian, and the other was African-American. They were both big and built like stone-cold killers. Randwick had been analysing people his whole life, and he immediately knew these men were more dangerous than any he’d ever met. Their muscle was not for show. They didn’t have the soft supple frames moulded from commercial fitness routines. Their bodies were hard and corded and their hands were thick and calloused. There were fresh cuts and bruises all over them, which would soon turn to scars. They were built to break people.
And their eyes were ice cold.
The larger man said, ‘How’s business, Jay?’
Randwick gulped.
89
Jason King had also spent most of his life analysing people.
He could see sheer panic rise up in Randwick’s eyes, and he knew it was a foreign sensation. This was a guy who previously thought he was tough, thought he worked harder and longer and more efficiently than anyone else, thought that gave him confidence. But now the mental walls he’d spent his whole life erecting were crashing down in the
face of true adversity, and it was tearing him apart from the inside. He’d crafted a whole storyline for himself that had never faltered, never wavered, never been tested by actual difficulty.
It was easy to give orders.
It was hard to face their consequences.
King said, ‘Do you know who we are?’
‘No.’
‘You seem like a reasonably intelligent guy. Take a guess.’
Randwick put the whiskey down and bowed his head.
Thought hard.
In the interim, King reached over and picked up the crystal tumbler. He sniffed. Double-checked the bottle to make sure he was correct in his assumption. Then tipped the contents of the glass back and almost purred with satisfaction as it snaked its way down his throat.
Randwick watched him with suspicion.
Slater did too.
King shrugged. ‘It goes for thirty-six thousand a bottle.’
Slater raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, in that case…’
He reached over, snatched up the bottle, poured himself a generous serving, and tipped it back.
Went through the same reaction.
Randwick said, ‘I doubt you two are happy with me, so why don’t you get to the point?’
‘I asked you to guess who we are,’ King said.
‘I don’t know. Is this because of the Saudis?’
King paused. ‘No, it’s not. But it’s good to hear you’ve pissed them off, too.’
Randwick shrugged. ‘You don’t get a life like this without making a few enemies.’
‘Well, you made the wrong ones,’ King said.
‘What’d I do?’
‘You sent us in to clean up your issue in Nepal.’
‘Oh.’
Slater said, ‘We didn’t appreciate that.’
‘Look, if you honestly think I had malicious intent toward either of you, you’re mistaken. I don’t know who either of you are.’
‘We know,’ Slater said. ‘But now we know who you are.’
‘Are you honestly pissed that I sent you to kill a few savages? I assume you’re elite operatives, right? Isn’t that part of the job description?’