by Matt Rogers
The guy did all the right things when Slater took him down. He kept a tight grip on his gun, aware that it was his lifeline, and pulled the trigger over and over again as he slammed down on his back. The barrel roared only inches from Slater’s head, but the shots went wide. Slater had a tight grip on the wrist of the gun hand. He tried to pull his own Glock out from underneath the man, but the guy was lying on it. Slater pulled its trigger but the gun was stuck flat, and the Osprey spat the round out from underneath him, whizzing away into the trees.
So Slater let go of his gun and clamped a palm down on the guy’s throat, squeezing tight with his fingers, like crushing a Coke can.
The man let go of his own gun and rolled, trying to escape the pressure.
Exactly what Slater wanted.
It freed the Glock.
Slater scooped his weapon up and lurched off the guy, putting space between them, and levelled the Osprey barrel at his head. Its sleek length glinted under faint moonlight.
The guy started rolling to his side, but froze mid-action, aware that if he reached for his gun it’d be the last thing he ever did.
He lay on his back, looked up at the moon, and sighed.
The sigh became a knowing smile and he put his hands behind his head, making himself comfortable.
Slater watched with muted fascination. ‘You done?’
The guy kept smiling, nodding as he did. He was a terrifically ugly man. Narrow eyes above a beak-like nose. He was perspiring from the close-quarters brawl, the oil across his features flushed away by sweat. Slater had seen men feign nonchalance in their final moments before. He knew all the micro-expressions. This man wasn’t faking anything. He genuinely didn’t care.
‘What are you trying to achieve?’ Slater asked.
The smile became a sneer. ‘Nothing. That’s the point. You know what I’m talking about.’ The man extended an accusatory finger up at Slater, pointing between his eyes like aiming a set of crosshairs. ‘This crusade of yours means nothing if you don’t get what you’re looking for.’
Slater said nothing, just kept his Glock aimed at the man’s forehead.
‘Because,’ the man said, ‘in the end, it’s all about you.’
Slater pulled the trigger.
A tiny piece of lead ripped through the front of the man’s skull, pulverised the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe in turn, then exited out the back of his head, showering the dry leaves with small pieces of his brain.
Shutting him up forever.
But the words lingered.
Festered.
Slater stared down at the body and felt no satisfaction. There was no justice here. The man was right. He’d done despicable things his whole life and never come close to being held accountable for any of it. He’d left the world happy, content, leaving incurable suffering and trauma in his wake. That was the ultimate victory.
That was pure evil.
Stewing on that fact left Slater frozen for a handful of seconds, unable to take his eyes off the corpse, but a series of gunshot reports from a semi-automatic weapon snapped him back to the present. Sounded like a pistol, back near the ambush location, and not King’s.
Fifteen or twenty seconds of silence elapsed, which Slater used to rapidly frisk the man he’d just shot, searching for anything resembling a remote-control detonator. He came up short, finding nothing but a wallet with a Massachusetts driver’s licence that read: Otis Gethin.
Then there was another gunshot.
Singular.
Final.
There was nothing to betray who was on the receiving end, but the sound of it hit Slater like a gut punch.
Intuition suggested something dark, unthinkable.
King.
He took off running.
71
Too long.
Far, far too long.
And the ninth energy drink was giving Arnold a panic attack. Complete tunnel vision, heart rate up to one fifty, one sixty, even though he was sitting down. He’d had a dozen similar episodes in the last year and still didn’t know any better. Caffeine had its hooks in him and wasn’t letting go.
Neither was the insidious thought that Ronan was dead.
Ronan had been radio silent for ten minutes now. He’d specifically told Arnold he wouldn’t do that, not unless the situation was dire.
So…
Arnold scanned the latest diagnostic report from the worm he’d created, trying to take his mind off the fact he’d soon have to make a decision on his own. He liked being told what to do. Liked it more than he’d ever been able to put into words.
All this Rain Man intelligence with a mouse and a keyboard, but the moral fortitude of papier-mâché.
It had always been that way. He was brilliant beyond all description, so smart his superiors couldn’t fathom it, but he’d never done more than he was instructed to do. Ronan had been one of the first men to genuinely believe in him, giving him a bar to reach for.
And now there was no Ronan.
All was normal in the diagnostic report. He gave it a second read-through, eyes flitting over code, and on the second-last line his heart slammed in his chest.
No.
No, no, no…
Oh my God.
There was a fresh cache in the program files, something he hadn’t put there. It wasn’t the work of the engineers in the power company’s control room because they were all idiots, so it must be King and Slater’s friend. What was his name? Alonzo? Arnold had read all about the man’s daring escape from a black site in the belly of Manhattan, aided by King and Slater and, of all allies, the Salvadorian embassy in New York.
Really, the only thing that held Arnold together was the knowledge that he was a better hacker than anyone he’d ever worked with, anyone he’d ever met. His life outside of that was a sick joke, but he could tolerate it if he had the anaesthetising comfort of superiority in his work. Without that, he was lost.
So he wrote code like his life depended on it, bundled it up into a new virus, and inserted it into the system to directly attack Alonzo’s cache.
It worked.
The files were overwritten in a blink.
Arnold rocked back in his seat, let out a nervous laugh. He fumbled with his phone, its screen dirty with fingerprints and sweat. He tried Ronan again.
No answer.
The last straw.
He lost his nerve, panicked. He’d regained control of the system but it meant nothing anymore, not if Ronan was disappointed in him. With trembling fingers he brought up the live-stream of the safe house on Marlborough Street. Nothing amiss. Just a door plastered with Semtex. No one had tampered with it.
Ronan had offered Arnold a spare detonator the day before, and Arnold had scoffed.
He didn’t need a physical button. What an archaic and useless concept.
One line of code and he could electronically trigger the blasting caps with a tap of the keyboard.
So that’s what he did.
Typed it in, looked it over.
It was correct. It would do the job.
He danced a finger through the air above the ENTER key.
72
Found you.
Still on all fours, Ronan fished the remote off the forest floor.
The plastic shield had fallen back into place when he’d dropped it, so gravity hadn’t done the job for him. He went to flip it up but a noise on the other side of the boulder made him freeze. It sounded very much like a body crashing into the rock. The noise was disconcerting. Ronan thought, Did the shooter just fall down the fucking hill?
He had to know who it was, what had happened.
Because if the two he’d just killed were cops, then the shooter should be either King or Slater.
Unless they were too cowardly to come themselves.
Ronan gripped his SIG in one hand and the detonator in the other and rounded the boulder, step by step. A feeling of freedom and looseness hung over him, something he’d never felt in combat before, and
he realised he didn’t care one way or the other whether he lived or died anymore. It gave him the room to play, to have fun with it. He wondered why he hadn’t always lived this way.
He finished the circumnavigation of the boulder and saw a big silhouette standing up, pulling a pistol from an abdomen holster. Ronan had a view of the guy’s side profile, and the large man hadn’t seen him.
Had to be King.
Ronan shot him through the side of the head.
It only took one bullet and a span of milliseconds, and the guy was dead. Ronan realised too late he should’ve held him at gunpoint, watched the look on King’s face as he pressed the button. Then he could die happy.
Oh, well.
This would do.
He flipped the plastic shield up.
What the hell had King been aiming at?
Ronan took a step closer to the man he’d shot. A big Italian-looking guy. A stranger. He turned to the patch of forest floor that the mystery man had been aiming his weapon at, and there was King.
Lying on his back.
A gun in his hand.
The barrel swaying slightly, but aimed directly between Ronan’s eyes.
73
In pitch darkness, Violetta, Alexis, and Tyrell had moved every piece of furniture in the basement to the front of the space.
If they could see, they’d be looking at a solid wall composed of tables, dining chairs, bed frames, mattresses, armchairs, partitions, and a sofa. The rest of the basement was now a concrete shell, gutted of everything that made it human, but they couldn’t see that. All that mattered was that the man-made barrier might serve as a meagre line of defence. Whether it was mercenaries coming through the door with a battering ram, or a bomb that turned the basement into a boiling cauldron, maybe a few feet of furniture would mean the difference between life and death.
Alexis sat with her back to the far wall, Tyrell beside her. She clutched a SIG Sauer P226. She’d retrieved it from under the kitchen sink and she knew how to use it, but something told her it wouldn’t make any difference.
Both hers and Violetta’s phones had been on low battery to begin with after hastily making their way here, and they were now both dead.
It didn’t just feel like they were cut off from King and Slater.
It felt like the world had ended, and that everything in it was gone.
Violetta’s voice floated out of the dark. ‘Should we scream for help? It’s a rich neighbourhood. Someone will hear.’
‘I wouldn’t dare,’ Alexis said. ‘What if whatever’s on the other side is noise-activated?’
‘Why the hell would it be—?’
‘I just … don’t think it’s a good idea.’
Tyrell reached out and gripped Alexis’ hand. ‘You think all that stuff against the door will work? If it’s a … y’know…’
He didn’t need to say the word bomb.
Alexis said, ‘Probably.’
She didn’t need to add the word not.
Probably nothing would work.
But that didn’t mean they shouldn’t try.
74
The gunshot blared.
King thought he was dead. He wondered what was keeping his senses firing. Maybe some delayed reaction. The brain catching up to its expired body.
He didn’t know.
Death was a novel experience.
But it was Niccolò who collapsed, brains ejecting out one side of his head in a grisly shower. King blinked, unsure what exactly had happened, but he had the wherewithal to reach out and pat the earth and find his weapon. He brought the SIG up and aimed it at the space that Niccolò’s killer stepped into.
The man was blonde, long-haired, with a face drawn and battered by a lifetime of suffering. He wore a ponytail and he was missing an eye.
He had a SIG Sauer also, and a remote-control detonator in the other hand.
The SIG wasn’t aimed at King.
Too slow.
King said, ‘Don’t move.’
He didn’t dare move either. If he tried to get up, Ronan could snap his aim around, and it’d be a stand-off, like an old-fashioned Western. King had been in enough of those. It wasn’t on the cards tonight.
King said, ‘Drop the remote.’
Ronan’s sole functioning eye watered. It was bloodshot, wracked with turmoil. ‘You sure?’
King looked closer.
The plastic shield was flipped up, the button exposed. Ronan’s finger rested on its tip. Only the slightest downward pressure would be needed to depress it. A tiny, gentle push.
Ronan shook the remote. ‘You want to risk it?’
King’s head swam. He saw double, then quadruple, his vision splitting as he danced on the edge of consciousness. Four Ronans, four eyes staring. Four remotes twirling through the air as the man moved his arm in a swaying loop.
‘I have to,’ King said, the realisation thudding. ‘You’ll push it anyway if I let you walk away.’
The night grew cold and still.
Ronan said, ‘Oh.’
King’s heart stopped.
Ronan looked down at the detonator, shrugged. ‘Well, if that’s the way it is…’
He pushed the button.
75
The voice in Arnold’s head screamed, Enough!
He’d psyched himself out, frozen like a deer in headlights, finger hovering over the keyboard.
What if…? he’d been thinking, ending in a dozen different variations.
What if?
What if?
What if?
No more speculation. It served no one.
He stabbed the ENTER key, blew the bomb.
76
Through the wall of furniture, on the other side of the door, Alexis heard a noise.
She strained her ears across the room, amassed all her concentration to try to process what she heard.
The sound was so soft, barely noticeable.
A mechanical click.
Like a precursor to something…
A dark premonition fell over her. Like the worst kind of sixth sense.
She took a sharp breath, reached out, and instinctively gripped Tyrell’s hand.
As if that would keep him safe.
Violetta said, ‘Wha—?’
A blinding flash of light.
77
King pumped the trigger rapid-fire into Ronan’s chest and face.
Ronan had expected that.
As he pushed the button he spun away and ducked his head, like a turtle going into its shell. Four of King’s shots slammed into the back of his vest, knocking him forward, and instead of shooting him through the backs of his legs King used the couple of seconds he’d bought himself to lurch to his feet. He still couldn’t see properly, and knew the concussion symptoms would last weeks, but nothing mattered anymore.
He felt nothing but murderous rage.
He couldn’t process what had happened, so he just charged forward. Ronan spun as soon as he heard King coming and managed to get a single shot off, but by that point there was no slowing the oncoming freight train.
The bullet went straight through King’s arm.
It entered at the elbow and came out the back of the joint in a shower of bone fragments.
King didn’t feel it.
He felt nothing at all.
An inhuman, steaming monster.
The sensation in his left arm fell away, the proprioception of everything below the bicep sucked into a black hole, a jarring and unnerving feeling, or lack thereof. He ignored it. Somehow he could still control the hand even though he couldn’t feel it, at least for a few seconds more. He used the opportunity to wrap both arms around Ronan’s waist and pick him up and run him over to the boulder.
He fell forward at the last moment, a makeshift spear-tackle, driving the man’s spine into the rock.
Snap.
Ronan gasped and his sole eye went wide, bug-eyed, as he slid down the boulder. His gun and detonator were nowhere to be found, his
hands empty. He’d dropped them when his spine cracked against the boulder. King had seen the look on Ronan’s face before, on men who’d been similarly paralysed in the heat of combat. It was the sudden understanding that they were changed forever, that they couldn’t feel anything below the neck and knew in the bottom of their heart that they never would again.
It made it real.
Ronan might have thought he was nihilistic, uncaring, but we all care. He wanted to survive this. He wanted to carry on living. He probably saw a world of possibility, now that he knew his future wouldn’t exist. The brain is funny like that. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Ronan slumped forward, buckling, his legs no longer able to support him. His arms slackened at his sides and he got that faraway look in his eyes, that true depression when you understand nothing’s possible anymore.
King grabbed Ronan underneath the jaw with his good hand, holding him up by the neck.
Ronan’s face strained, turning purple.
King growled, ‘You could’ve been something.’
He shoved the back of Ronan’s skull into the boulder, smashing bone against rock. Blood spilled from the man’s cracked head, masking some of the letters engraved at shoulder height.
Ronan’s eye lit up, aware it was his final moment on earth. He was frozen in metaphysical horror, wishing he could take it all back, wishing he hadn’t got caught up in this stupid game of pointless and unnecessary revenge.
Too late.
There was nothing to take back.
King relished the look in Ronan’s eye, the turbulence in his soul. That might have been some consolation if his own soul hadn’t been split, shattered into a million tiny pieces.