by Matt Rogers
‘Unknown number.’
‘Forget it. Keep dialling—’
King shook his head. ‘No, I think this is…’
He trailed off.
Slater shouted, ‘You think it’s what?’
King answered on speaker, so they both could hear. He said nothing. Didn’t so much as breathe heavy.
A low male voice said, ‘Do I have the pleasure of speaking with Jason?’
King didn’t answer.
An extended pause, then a sigh. ‘I don’t know what you think playing this game is going to achieve. I have your number and your family is uncontactable. It’s very clear how fucked you are. I suggest you get your lips moving.’
King’s veins were cold, his demeanour like ice. ‘What?’
‘There you are,’ the voice said. ‘The man, the myth, the legend. I assume I’m on speaker. Hi, William.’
Slater sat deathly still beside King.
The man said, ‘Tough crowd.’
Finally the light turned green and the line of cars moved forward. Slater stamped the accelerator and veered recklessly into the oncoming lane, no longer concerned about his own safety.
The engine roar must have bled through the microphone. The man said, ‘Oh, no. No, Will, don’t do that. I’d find a safe place to pull over if I were you. If you know what’s good for you…’
‘How about you shut the fuck up?’ Slater said as he accelerated harder.
King reached over and seized Slater’s forearm and shook his head firmly, No.
Slater grimaced, torn by indecision.
The voice said, ‘Yeah, okay. I could do that. But then I’d take offence, and, trust me, you really don’t want that.’
King’s throat was so tight he could barely breathe. Slater gripped the wheel two-handed, knuckles paler than the surrounding skin.
The voice said, ‘Jason, this is the part where you ask me why you wouldn’t want me to get offended.’
King covered the mouthpiece with one hand and said, ‘Pull over.’
Slater opened his mouth to retort.
King snapped, ‘Just fucking do it.’
Slater stamped the brakes, skidding into an empty parking space positioned diagonally off the kerb. He lowered his forehead to the wheel. Groaned. A long, low noise. His worst nightmare, coming true.
King took his palm away so whoever was on the other end could hear them again. ‘We’ve pulled over.’
‘Oh?’ Mock surprise. ‘Wonderful. That’s wonderful. God, it’s good to finally talk to you, man.’
‘Just tell us what you want.’
‘What — it’s not obvious?’
King stewed. The air in the car weighed heavy like a tomb, the seat a coffin.
‘I want you, Jason,’ the voice said. ‘You and Will both. But especially you. Honestly, it’s unfortunate that family has to be involved. You should consider it a compliment. I come from your world, but I’m not you. Not even close. And I think it’s important to be able to admit that. I’m not bigger. I’m not faster. I’m not stronger. Sure — your talents will eventually decline with age — but so will mine. Mine already have. Taming vices isn’t my specialty. And, if you want the truth’ — a pause that seemed genuine — ‘I’m not even sure I’m smarter than either of you. I like to think I am. Don’t we all? But I’m a realist. You’re probably sharper, quicker, better at problem solving. Really, there’s only a single flaw I can think of…’
King wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of playing along, saying, And what’s that?
He kept silent.
The voice pressed on regardless. ‘It’s your decency. Everything I’ve seen tells me you two do the right thing. Nothing’s led me to believe otherwise, not yet. I mean, I’m sure you killed Dom and Zach, but they tried to snatch your woman, so fuck it, fair play.’
‘Of course you’d be fine with that,’ King said. ‘You blew Troy’s face off, after all. You killed your own blood. Because that’s what you are, right? You black-ops boys from the same squad? You’re blood brothers.’
He’d only meant them as offhand remarks, but the voice on the phone hesitated for far too long, then said, ‘What the fuck did you say about Troy?’
‘You don’t know? You must not be the slimy-looking one, then. So you’re the blonde man with one eye who tried to snatch Tyrell. If you really don’t know, you should call your buddy, find out what he did.’
The voice said, ‘You think you’re so smart.’
‘Sometimes. Am I right?’
‘You are. I’m Ronan. Impolite of me not to introduce myself.’
‘Any more information you want to give me? This is all very useful.’
‘Yes,’ Ronan said, steely, refocused. ‘I’m glad you asked. Time for me to get back on track, because, really, it doesn’t fucking matter what happened to Troy. What matters is the fact that I have both your families trapped in your basement rental on Marlborough Street. I’ve sealed the door from the outside, and there’s eight pounds of Semtex stuck to the keyhole. I repurposed the security cameras you so kindly left around the place, and I’m watching a live-stream. If either of you get within a hundred feet of that door, I’ll blow it. If I catch the slightest whiff that you — or the authorities — are in the area, I’ll blow it. And don’t bother trying to contact your girlfriends. I’m sure you already know, but all the major cell networks are down in Back Bay and the block’s lost power.’
King gripped the phone so tight he heard the case cracking.
Total tunnel vision.
Ronan said, ‘Any questions?’
42
Violetta rocked Junior in her arms in the dark.
After the initial freakout — the tears and the screaming and the wailing — he’d settled down after a breastfeed and gone right back to sleep.
She’d eventually decided to close her eyes instead of straining to see so much as a glimpse in the dark. Whatever had been done to the other side of the door had sealed all the cracks, blocking even the slightest ray of light from slipping in. It was a black so intense it looped all the way back round to a glare that hurt the retinas, as they searched for anything to latch onto.
Beside her in the pitch black, Alexis said, ‘You doing okay?’
Violetta knew she wasn’t talking to her.
Tyrell’s voice came back. ‘Yeah.’
‘We’re gonna be just fine,’ Alexis said. ‘You know what they’re capable of.’
She didn’t have to say their names. They knew who she was talking about.
Tyrell said, ‘Yeah. I do.’ After a pause, he said, ‘I been thinkin’ about something.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, shoot. I want to hear it. It’s not like we have anything better to do.’
Violetta listened for the soft exhale of Tyrell’s smile, and heard it. She’d come to recognise his facial expressions by the small sounds he made. She hadn’t considered herself capable of such observations, not when he wasn’t even her kid, but losing one sense seemed to amplify the rest.
Tyrell said, ‘What Will’s been teachin’ me…it’s given me a taste.’
‘Of what?’ Alexis said.
‘Of bein’ in control. And now we ain’t in control. And I hate it.’
‘Yeah,’ Alexis said. ‘I remember starting to feel that way, too. It happens when you see the other side, see Will’s world. Before, we didn’t even know it was an option.’
‘It’s like, I used to be okay with it, ’cause it’s all I knew. But Will’s showin’ me just how much control we have. So then when we’ve got that new perspective, shit like this just makes me angry instead of making me scared. Am I making sense?’
‘You’re making all the sense in the world.’
‘So that’s what I’ve been thinkin’ about. What I’m gonna do when I get out of here.’
Alexis’ question bled with trepidation. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Double down,’ Tyrell said, but it
didn’t sound like the wishful thinking of a teenager. It belied his years, somehow grounded in reality. ‘I’m gonna make myself into whatever you’d class Will as, so that this type of shit doesn’t happen to me or anyone I care about ever again.’
Alexis didn’t answer.
Violetta kept quiet. She reached out in the dark, fingers outstretched, and found Alexis’ forearm. She traced a path down with her fingertip and found the woman’s hand, gripped it.
Alexis gripped back. Violetta knew what the squeeze meant.
She was scared she’d created a monster.
43
The first thing King thought to say wasn’t, What do you want? or, Why are you doing this? but, ‘How?’
Ronan repeated it back. ‘How?’
‘How did you do it?’
King couldn’t mask the defeat in his tone. It wasn’t making any sense. Alonzo’s measures had hidden them from the entire intelligence community — kept them out of sight of the CIA, the NSA, and the agencies and divisions that weren’t publicly acknowledged. Yet somehow, a rogue band of ex black-ops soldiers had found a path through the maze, capitalising on glaring holes that must’ve been there all along. Or had they? Ronan sure didn’t sound like a competent black hat hacker.
But looks — or in this case, sounds — could be deceiving.
Ronan said, ‘Me, personally? I didn’t do much. Like I said, I know my weaknesses, which is a strength, really. I haven’t been in a good place for the last ten years, Jason. I’m man enough to admit that to you. But I held myself together enough to stay connected. You think you’re the only one with a government hacker behind you?’
King didn’t know what to believe. Was it smoke and mirrors? It wasn’t impossible. But someone better than Alonzo?
He unspooled the last half-year of memories, at the chaos he and Slater had caused in San Francisco, in Mexico, especially here in Boston. The question was, did this contact need to be better than Alonzo? Or had they stirred up enough leads to render all the digital protection and anonymity useless?
No way to know for sure.
Ronan could say anything.
The image of Violetta, Junior, Alexis, and Tyrell trapped in a pitch-black concrete prison crashed through his head like a series of breaking waves, distracting him from any sort of coherent thought, but he tried for any sort of psychological edge. ‘I know a thing or two about not being in a good place. I’ve been there.’
A snort. ‘No. You fucking don’t. You don’t have a clue about dark times, or bad places. All your suffering is your own choice. You choose to go to war, and you win every time. I’ve read your files. Both yours and Slater’s. Human wrecking balls, the pair of you. Must be nice. The rest of us live in the real world with our normal brains and our normal bodies and we try our best to keep our heads above water and we usually fail. Don’t sit on your high horse and lecture everyone else about struggle.’
‘Is that what this is?’ King clutched the phone tight, leant forward to get closer to the speaker. ‘You read about what we’ve done and you’re … you wanted us gone?’
‘Nice hesitation there. Doing your best not to use the word “jealous.” Good effort. But no, Jason, I’m not jealous of you. Or Will.’
‘You shouldn’t be.’
‘Oh, why, because you’re so tortured? “Trust me, you wouldn’t wanna be me.” Give me a fucking break.’
‘Just tell me,’ King said, raising his voice. ‘Tell me right now why you hate us. Stop playing these bullshit games. You have us by the balls and you know you do, so tell us.’
Ronan didn’t hesitate. His tone was scathing. ‘I had a buddy. No, let me rephrase. A brother. A blood brother, like you said. And you took him from me.’
King said nothing.
Ronan said, ‘Brad Forrest.’
King wracked his brain. Came up empty. His recall was impeccable, but there was simply no way to remember everywhere he’d been, everything he’d done. Maybe he’d be able to put a face to a name, but for now the name meant nothing. It was nothing recent. He knew that much.
He played along. ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘No,’ Ronan said quietly. ‘No, Jason, it wasn’t. It was only a few short months ago.’
King stared at Slater, kept the phone pressed to his ear.
Ronan said, ‘I don’t blame you. You didn’t know him by that name.’
Slater stared back, head cocked to one side.
Ronan said, ‘He was a special man. Went to heights the rest of the boys couldn’t dream of. His frame helped. A huge guy. Nearly seven feet. He could kill men with his hands, without even exerting himself physically. He was poached from our squad upon its dissolution, swept up in that murky world we dipped our toes into in Afghanistan.’
King’s stomach twisted.
‘He was recently labelled a “hunter,”’ Ronan said. ‘The best of the best. But he wasn’t just that. He was there for me when I needed him, and there’s no other man I can say that about. He stopped me putting a bullet in my brain, maybe a dozen times. I was in bad shape when I got out. The world was something else. Not how I remembered it. I spiralled. He pulled me out of the muck and the shit, over and over again, when he really didn’t owe me a damn thing. He was the only right thing in this twisted, fucked-up world. And you beat him to death in El Salvador. In the ruins of Joya de Ceren.’
Slater lowered his head.
Ronan said, ‘His call sign was Diamond.’
44
2017
Ronan woke with his mouth like a desert.
He ran a sandpaper tongue across cracked lips and rolled over in bed. A crack of sunlight made it through the apartment curtains, and as he switched sides the ray touched his eye. A pounding ignited in his head, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat like a taiko drum. He moaned and rolled away.
He reached blindly for the fifth of Jack Daniels on the nightstand.
A couple of swigs and he was somewhat stable.
He lay there for an indeterminate length of time. Could’ve been a few minutes, could’ve been an hour. He rested the bottle of whiskey on his chest, his stomach rising and falling. His mouth hung open, still bone dry, but after the morning pick-me-up his brain always went numb enough to ignore it. A small voice in his head pined — no, pleaded — for water.
But that’d mean dragging himself out of bed and over to the small sink, and right now that was too much to bear.
The trance-like state eventually faded as the Jack wore off. He levered himself up to a sitting position, took another long swig, and checked his phone.
Four messages from Arnold.
And a missed call from Brad.
The notification from Brad was a soothing reassurance compared to Arnold’s annoying stream-of-consciousness. The kid always sent over his thoughts via text. Ronan could go days without responding to Arnold, so he swiped those message notifications away and returned Brad’s call.
Who answered right away.
Ever reliable.
Brad’s deep voice said, ‘Brother.’
Ronan said, ‘Brother.’
‘Thought I’d check in. See how you’re doing.’
Ronan glanced at the date on his smart watch. June? What the fuck? He was losing time again. That’s when he knew it was getting bad.
He said, ‘Thought you were in Namibia.’
‘I am.’
‘On assignment?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You shouldn’t be making calls.’
‘No shit. But you can always find a way. Don’t worry — no one’s tracing it.’
‘You don’t know that.’
A scoff from Brad’s end. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m indispensable now. They let me do what I want. And if I run amok, well … they grin and bear it.’
‘Must be nice.’
‘Hey.’ Brad’s fraternal tone had never matched his intimidating physicality. ‘Don’t act like you’ve never had anyone turn a blind eye. We got away with it in Kora
ngal.’
Ronan gazed around the filthy bedroom. It wasn’t much, but at least it wasn’t a cell in some CIA black site. ‘Yeah. Yeah, we did.’
‘It’s ten years to the day,’ Brad said. ‘Since we tore through that village. I been thinking about it a lot, that day. I think that was when we transcended. You know. Everything we talked about. It got me to where I am now, knowing that I’m capable of anything. And it all stemmed from that day.’ A pause. ‘And it was you who pushed me to do it.’
Ronan wanted to say so much. Wanted to say, Yeah, it helped you. It didn’t do anything but rip me up inside. All I can see when I close my eyes is the boy’s face. The one I held down and shot in the head. He couldn’t have been older than ten. And I stripped the life out of him. Blew his brains out, for no other reason than to see if I could. Did it to women, too, village wives, but it’s the kid that haunts me. You should know something about that. You killed four kids. Took the gun off me when I got my eye slashed.
Instead he mumbled, ‘Ten years, huh? Crazy…’
Ever charismatic, capable of carrying a conversation with even the most unenthusiastic participant, Brad said, ‘That’s why I made sure to get my hands on a phone today. Had to take it off some uncooperative Namibian’s corpse, but who’s gonna miss him?’
‘Appreciate that.’
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘You haven’t told me how you’re doing yet.’
Ronan sighed. The dryness rattled in his throat. ‘Well…’ He looked around again. You could barely see the floor through the sea of dirty clothes and dishes and cutlery and discarded wrappers and cigarette butts and empty fifths of Jack, their caps lost somewhere in the filth. ‘I’ve been better.’
‘I figured. Call it a sixth sense. Something told me. Listen, man, it’s what happens. You get back to the real world, it feels like nothing matters. Hell, I don’t know what I’m gonna do when they finally cut me loose.’
Ronan couldn’t help his jadedness. ‘You talk to your new buddies about this stuff?’
‘No,’ Brad said, with conviction, and Ronan believed him. ‘I’m the silent giant to the other hunters. I barely say a word. I save the talking for my real boys.’