by Matt Rogers
Slater wheeled to the other side of the tree, Glock already raised.
He fired again.
Couldn’t miss this time.
He hit the guy square in the chest from two feet away.
The man was mid-stride, putting it all on the line. He’d been sprinting at Slater’s position, his own gun raised. He fired too, at centre mass just like Slater. Both of them selecting the option that had the highest chance of success.
They shot each other in their vests.
Slater tried to raise his aim and fire again but his body didn’t respond. His brain then caught up, a delayed response to the crushing pain in his ribs. Bulletproof vests, no matter how modern, or high-tech, aren’t bulletproof. They’re at best resistant. Slater didn’t think the enemy’s round had made it all the way through and pierced the skin, but there was no way to tell with the agonising sensation sweeping through his whole core, like someone had snatched his liver in their giant hand and squeezed it as hard as they could.
Involuntarily, he went down on one knee.
Which saved his life.
The man fired over the top of Slater’s head.
Acting on sheer impulse, Slater lurched forward and wrapped his arms around the guy’s hips, driving him down.
66
Arnold Locke swept eight cans of Red Bull off the surface of his desk.
They clattered to the floor, all empty, their contents sloshing around in his stomach, the caffeine slicing into his bloodstream, upping the crushing pressure on his heart. A stimulant fiend since he first had a can of energy drink at the age of fourteen, not even the last three years of increasingly severe chest pain could deter him.
As he shoved the cans aside he grunted.
Ronan was supposed to be contactable — whenever, wherever, with whoever. It didn’t matter. This entire fucking thing relied on smooth communication and now the piece of shit had gone radio silent on him. If Arnold wasn’t drowning from the inside in stimulants, he might’ve been able to slow his thoughts, realise that much of his anger came from past triggers. At any point he feared Ronan would be done with him, casting him aside as soon as King and Slater were dead.
When his digital aptitude was no longer needed, would he be?
He shook himself out of it. It wasn’t that. Right now, he was perhaps more needed than anyone Ronan had ever worked with. On the thirty-two inch computer screen in front of Arnold, an arsenal of windows lay open, arranged like some sprawling postmodern artwork.
Front and centre was a 1080p livestream of the safe house on Marlborough Street, the feed coming from King and Slater’s cameras that Ronan had commandeered. Arnold could see the plastic explosive squashed over the keyhole, like thick brown putty, and the military-grade sealant already dry around the perimeter of the door, entombing the women and children trapped inside. Around the livestream was a smorgasbord of black hat programs, feeding him live updates every half-second on the digital worm he’d embedded in the city’s infrastructure. All of Back Bay was his, and the authorities were still flapping around like the rote amateurs they were, tweeting half-hearted reassurances as their engineers scrambled to figure out what was wrong.
We are working on a solution as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.
The message came from the state government, directed toward the residents of Back Bay, but Arnold read the tweet in Ronan’s voice, directed toward him.
He dialled again.
Nothing.
‘What?!’ he screamed to himself, alone in the room. ‘You want me to read your fucking mind?! What do you want?!’
The instructions were clear. Always had been. No contact for longer than five minutes, and the op was blown. If the safe house was still intact after Ronan fell off the face of the earth, Arnold was to blow the Semtex remotely.
It was so simple. An electronic command over the airwaves to the blasting caps stuck in the plastic explosive, and bang, detonation.
A single line of code, and the ENTER key.
In comparison to his career, it was one of the easiest things he’d ever used a computer to do.
But if he was overreacting, Ronan would quite literally murder him. Tear him limb from limb. If Arnold was paranoid because of Ronan’s past flakiness, and it turned out the man was simply in the middle of a shootout that he survived, and then called to find out Arnold had prematurely blown the safe house for no good reason, well…
Arnold didn’t even want to consider that.
So he waited.
Reached into the mini-fridge below the desk, cracked open another can of Red Bull, slurped half of it down, and waited.
His foot tapping incessantly against the carpet.
In the dull reflection of the black wallpaper behind the open windows, Arnold watched the vein in his neck throb, one-twenty, one-thirty beats per minute.
67
Alonzo found a way in when he narrowed his search.
He realised, probably too late, that unconscious biases had kept him looking for a digital worm akin to the virus that had taken down the entire New York power grid more than a year ago. That particular infection had been a thing of beauty, a technological marvel created by a group of young prodigies that self-propagated by chewing up every file it came into contact with, making them malicious and turning them over to its side.
But Arnold didn’t need anything close to that level of ingeniousness, not for a single block.
He needed something small and direct, embedded deep. His main priority would be stealth, going undetected in the system, which would make his worm hard to find, but at the same time flawed. A self-propagating virus is nearly impossible to overwrite because it swallows everything it touches, but if Arnold’s code didn’t have that digital line of defence…
Alonzo wrote a quick page-long algorithm, typing so fast his wrists burned from carpal tunnel, and inserted it into the enormous digital infrastructure that kept Massachusetts’ power grid up and running. That very moment, there’d be a team of engineers freaking out in some control room, trying desperately to regain access, unaware that two hackers from the very top of the food chain were deep in the grid, vying for power.
Alonzo rocked back in his seat, hands shaking.
It wasn’t up to him anymore.
Either his code would snap onto Arnold’s, locking it down, or it wouldn’t.
He’d known Violetta LaFleur for years, long before she met King, in the role of black-ops handler. They’d had successful careers together and, more importantly, neither of them had lost their minds in the process. It’s easy for the job to tint your worldview, make a normal life impossible, but they’d all been happy living in Winthrop, going about their lives. From what little time Alonzo had spent with Alexis Diaz, he knew she was cut from the same cloth as Violetta. As for Tyrell … the teenager was years beyond his age, one of the smartest kids Alonzo had ever met. And Junior, the spitting image of King, with those baby blues and that impossibly happy smile…
Losing all four in one fell swoop, because of his own failure to catch a rival hacker, would be too much to bear.
He stared through a pulse-pounding headache at the screen and, even though he wasn’t religious and never had been, he prayed.
68
After watching Otis run into the trees, Ronan could do nothing but laugh.
The gunfire roared all around him, some pathetic attempt to intimidate. It hadn’t so much as raised his pulse, but it didn’t seem to be totally futile, because it had sent Otis scattering. Already the slimy bastard had disappeared into the trees.
Ronan knew he’d never see the man again.
He saw then that he’d only been able to keep the squad together with a single fragile thread. It hadn’t taken much for his ties to each of them to snap, very much like that delicate string — for Dom and Zach when they gave up Troy, for Troy when he let Otis do what he’d always wanted to do to him, and for Otis when he realised he may very well die in this miserable ghost town.
So now t
hey were all gone.
Everyone from Afghanistan.
Leaving Ronan alone.
The way it had always been, if he stopped looking at things through rose-tinted glasses.
So he laughed. The gunfire blared and he cackled as loud as he wanted, because it was inaudible against the backdrop of unsuppressed rounds whipping through the night. They were on the other side of the boulder with a rifle (sounded like an M27) so they could shoot away all night if that’s what they deemed best, and it wouldn’t get them anywhere. To get a piece of him they’d have to come round here, make it close-quarters and ugly, but for now they were content with laying down suppressing fire and hoping it’d scare him.
The shooting died away, and, still chuckling, Ronan produced the little remote that was responsible for electronically detonating the blasting caps in the Semtex way back in Boston.
The wonders of modern technology.
The button itself was just a tiny stub, smaller than his index finger, housed by an equally tiny casing. The plastic shield was smudged from where he’d pushed his fingerprint into it earlier that night.
You can take every single one of them from me, Ronan thought. Brad. Dom. Zach. Troy. Otis. But what’s the point if you can’t stop this?
He flipped the shield up, exposing the little orange button.
Dry leaves broke underfoot, very close, only a few feet around the side of the boulder.
Oh, he thought. Well done.
From where he figured the rifleman was positioned, there was no chance the guy could’ve made it all the way down the hillside five seconds after he stopped shooting. So this was a secondary force, a pair of footsteps rushing in from the side after the first team laid down covering fire.
Maths had never been Ronan’s strong suit, but that made more than two.
King and Slater had enlisted help.
Ronan had factored many things, but not that. After spending ten years isolated in his apartment, and only scrounging together his old squad with psychological manipulation, he simply hadn’t had the perspective to consider that his enemies might have friends.
In his world, there were no friends, only the users and the used.
The secondary force rounded the boulder and were on him.
He used all his training and flattened himself prone, clawing his way into the bed of leaves. From there he gripped his pistol tight and fired upward at a diagonal angle, spamming the trigger as fast as his finger could pump. He caught both men by surprise, hitting the first man four times in his centre mass and the second man twice in the face. The first guy stumbled, blasted back a step by the force of the impacts against his vest, and his buddy failed to catch him and hold him upright, what with being dead and all.
The shots they’d fired had all gone over Ronan’s head, aimed at the centre mass of some nonexistent target.
These boys hadn’t learned the cardinal rule: never assume where someone’s going to be.
Ronan lurched forward on all fours, bear-crawling across the forest floor like a possessed soul in need of an exorcism. He fell on the guy who was still alive and batted his gun hand away and shoved his pistol into the man’s throat, hard against his Adam’s apple.
The guy was big and white, but his hair was fair and his skin was too pale.
Not Jason King.
From the way the pair had moved, Ronan figured they were cops.
‘Goddamnit,’ Ronan hissed, staring down at the winded man, who was blinking in shock. ‘Oh, well…’
He pulled the trigger, obliterating the mystery man’s throat, silencing him forever.
He let out a low moan as he clambered off the bodies, recognising that a certain part of his humanity — whatever was left — was now gone forever. His voice had a low inflection, almost demonic, as he croaked, ‘Oh, Jason…’
Right now he’d fucking kill anyone that crossed his sight, just to feel something.
Man, woman, or child.
Speaking of…
He glanced down at his hands, both gripped tight on his sidearm. The adrenaline of a life-or-death confrontation strips everything away but the need for survival, makes you forget all else. He couldn’t remember at what point he’d let go of the remote to hold his SIG with both hands. It couldn’t have gone far, though. There was maybe six feet of ground between where he’d shot the cops and where he’d finished them off.
He fell back to all fours, shuffling like a wounded dog.
‘Where are you?’ he whispered. ‘Where the fuck are you…?’
A glint of reflecting moonlight between leaves.
He smiled. ‘There you are.’
69
King’s reaction speed saved his life in much the same way as it had for his whole career.
His brain computed subtle shifts in Niccolò’s pose before the man even started turning. This visual data converted into warning signals in the span of milliseconds, too fast for King to process or understand, but the result was that his body was primed by the time the cop actually pivoted with the rifle, shoving it in the direction of his stomach.
If King hadn’t leapt a few lateral feet across the hill, he’d be holding his guts in his hands, bleeding out.
Instead, Niccolò fired into empty space, space King no longer inhabited.
Niccolò whipped further sideways, following King’s path, but by the time he could fire again King was within arm’s reach.
King snatched the gun barrel and heaved it upwards, slamming it into Niccolò’s face with all the strength he could muster.
He felt the bones in the cop’s nose shatter under the impact.
Niccolò fell back, but impulsively reached out and snatched with outstretched fingers, blind from the shock of his exploded nose. He got lucky. His fingers found King’s collar. Niccolò was heavyset, roughly the same weight as King, and normally that wouldn’t have mattered, but King’s footing was precarious. He tried to grind his heels into the dirt, but the ground was loose and it gave way under the pull of Niccolò’s bodyweight.
King pitched forward.
Then they were both tumbling down the hillside.
A fall down a steep slope is often played for comic relief on the big screen, but in reality it consists of sprained joints, broken bones, vicious lacerations, and lengthy concussions. King had dealt with his fair share of uncontrollable tumbles in his day, so he knew what to do. He covered the sides of his head by gripping the back of his neck with interlocked fingers, and tried his best to curl into the foetal position. Then it was all up to fate, which is perhaps the most horrifying aspect, worse than the potential pain or life-altering injuries.
The possibility is worse than reality.
Much like anything, really.
He rolled straight into a tree trunk, jarring every bone in his body, but when he bounced off the hard wood, he realised he’d taken the impact horizontally across his chain of upper back muscles. It was probably the best place to take a hit in terms of force distribution.
He only hit one more object on the way down, at the very end of the fall.
Niccolò.
He came out of the foetal position when he sensed the hillside levelling out into forest floor, and that was when the cop’s frame filled his vision, Niccolò already sprawled at the bottom of the slope on his back. King braced for impact and, although completely disoriented, he managed to bring his knee up in the middle of his body’s rotation. When he crashed into Niccolò, it was with the point of his kneecap, all his weight and momentum transferring through into the cop’s ribcage.
A bunch of ribs cracked under the blow.
King knew it would drain all the fight out of the man, and that’s when he got complacent. He relaxed a little when he felt the ribs give way, but he should’ve braced, because the momentum of the fall hadn’t entirely dissipated. He kept tumbling, one final revolution, and the back of his skull slammed against the boulder.
Solid and unbreakable rock against flesh and bone.
Like Kin
g’s head was a coconut, and that coconut was hit by a bat.
He blacked out momentarily, a flash knockout. The dark world went even darker and the next thing he knew he was fumbling around on a bed of leaves, lying on his back, staring up at the stars. Even more disorienting than the snap back to reality was the fact that time had passed. Only a few seconds, but enough for Niccolò to now be standing over him, hunchbacked from the pain of his broken midsection. The cop was barely able to move but he still had the wherewithal to fight through it all, to wrestle with the Beretta in the holster at his belt.
He worked it free.
King’s head spun, swimming upstream in the fight for consciousness.
He reached out desperately, manically, but his own gun was nowhere to be found.
Niccolò gripped the Beretta tight, levelled it at King’s centre mass. He smiled through teeth stained crimson from internal bleeding.
King reached up, fingers splayed, as if he could stop the bullet with his palm.
The shot ripped through the night.
70
Slater was levels above on the ground.
His ribs burned in pain, but they didn’t impede his movement, so he had access to his skillset.
He wasn’t getting any younger, but his decline was far over the horizon. Nearly forty, he was close to his physical prime, having powerlifted, run miles, and trained relentlessly in every facet of martial arts for going on twenty years. Other men might be tougher, grittier, more motivated, but there wasn’t a chance they’d matched Slater’s consistency over two decades, and that’s always what separates the hungry amateurs from the patient professionals.
Sure enough, the oily-faced man was tough, and gritty, and motivated to survive. On top of that, he was an elite soldier. He’d surely been put through all the training the military had to offer, and then some — counterterrorism, weapons, hand-to-hand, field tactics, resistance to interrogation. He’d been in black operations like Slater — that was, if Ronan was to be believed — but it was the same as two men being black belts in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Sure, the rank was the same, but in reality one could be leagues above the other, in skill, experience, and tenacity.