Weapons

by Matt Rogers

  They were drawn to each other in a way neither of them could describe, and she moaned in his ear, ‘Why did we ever part ways?’

  He said, ‘I have no idea,’ and kept thrusting, and she moaned again and their surroundings fell away.

  They reached a crescendo and climaxed in unison, something Slater usually had to time right, something that ordinarily took serious willpower and determination, but it was like their bodies were synced.

  They fell on each other, spent, sweating, shaking, gasping for breath.

  She whispered in his ear, ‘We’re in the middle of a serious crime scene. Better get our pants on.’

  He scoffed and shook his head and wondered how on earth he’d ended up with this life, with this reality, with this world.

  He wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  He said, ‘Good call.’

  They got dressed and clambered to the top of the cenote and stumbled back to the jeep, leaving nearly thirty bodies in their wake.

  55

  New York City

  ‘Again!’ the trainer yelled.

  In the living area of his penthouse, King thundered a side kick into the leather kickboxing pad held at waist height. It struck with a concussive boom, and the high-pitched slap of skin against leather echoed off the walls and the high ceiling. Sweat sprayed, but they’d put towels down in preparation.

  King’s trainer was Rory Barker, a former K-1 kickboxing champion with one of the most accomplished resumes on the planet. Now in his fifties, he’d agreed to discreet one-on-one sessions with King for a handsome fee in exchange for radio silence on who he was training, and how good his client was — effectively an NDA. And it was important that King established those boundaries in the beginning, because as soon as Rory had taken him through his first session, he’d stepped back in awe at the power King was able to generate.

  The man had said, ‘Who are you? Where have you fought?’

  King had said, ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘Which organisations?’

  ‘None of them.’

  ‘How…?’

  ‘Now you understand the need for secrecy.’

  ‘You’d have the UFC belt within three years if you went public. You’d be a superstar.’

  ‘Then it’s a shame I can never go public.’

  ‘You got a criminal record or something?’

  ‘Let’s call it that.’

  ‘You’re not government, are you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Did you used to be?’

  King had said, ‘Rory, I’m not paying you to talk. I’m paying you to train me.’

  And he’d paid handsomely, so Rory Barker hadn’t probed further. He’d just done his job, honing King’s fast-twitch muscle fibres, and somehow made him an even better fighter. The kickboxing work, coupled with the gruelling fitness regime, wrapped up in the decade-plus of experience he had with dishing out violence — it had all come together during his time living in New York.

  He was the best version of himself right now, and that was saying something.

  Now King fired off twenty consecutive kicks into the pads with each shin, and when Rory finally nodded his approval after glancing at the clock, King collapsed in a sweaty heap on the towels.

  ‘Not bad,’ Rory said. ‘Ninety minutes at ninety percent output. I think we could even crank that up a few notches next time.’

  ‘I’d probably throw up halfway through.’

  ‘Since when has that ever stopped you?’

  ‘Touché.’

  Rory collected his kickboxing pads and tucked them into a faded gym bag, which he slung over one shoulder. He said, ‘Same time tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll let you know, brother. There’s a lot on my plate right now.’

  Rory stared down at him, reading between the lines. ‘You working again?’

  King had never officially explained his past, but odd details always slipped out over time.

  Rory was piecing it together.

  King said, ‘Maybe. I don’t know what it is yet.’

  ‘Make sure you stay out of trouble. I’d hate to see all your talent go to waste.’

  King panted for breath and wiped his face with both palms. He watched the ceiling through swimming vision, experiencing momentary light-headedness, but that passed.

  A byproduct of thrashing his body to its limit.

  He said, ‘You really want me to go pro, don’t you?’

  ‘You’d be the biggest combat sports athlete on the planet.’

  ‘You’ve figured out what I used to do for a living, right?’

  ‘I have an idea.’

  ‘Think about how little time it’d take me to get assassinated on a street corner if I showed up in the public arena with cameras in my face every time I stepped outside.’

  ‘Right. Understood.’

  ‘Best to keep the rest of my life discreet, Rory.’

  ‘You made enemies?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Tell me about it one day over a beer.’

  King stared up at the man. He trusted him. Combat sports formed a deep, unbreakable bond. Even if it was just live drilling. ‘Maybe.’

  Rory pointed a finger. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  Then he left.

  No goodbyes.

  Rory Barker was a hard, cold man, but that’s what made him such a gem. When he offered a compliment, he genuinely meant it. He was as far from fake as you could get.

  King admired that in a world of false praise and interchangeable personalities.

  He lay on his back and waited to catch his breath. He was thoroughly spent, but he had a cocktail that would see to that. He clambered to his feet, went to the fridge, and took out a half-gallon jug of blue liquid. If anyone asked, it was harmless electrolytes, but what he’d mixed into the water had cost him well north of five hundred dollars.

  It was the best stuff money could buy.

  It was a poorly kept secret that every faction of special forces in nearly every military in the world relied on performance-enhancing drugs to sustain their soldiers. When you trained to your limits each day, your body broke down at an unparalleled rate. If King and Slater didn’t replenish with performance enhancers, they’d never be able to recover from the gruelling self-punishment that compromised their daily routine.

  The misconception that steroids only gave you larger muscles was a foolish belief — in truth, it was all about recovery. King replenished his shattered system each and every day with microdoses of designer steroids, engineered in labs by men and women a thousand times smarter than he was.

  The cutting edge.

  The next step in human performance.

  It was safer than ever, and he wasn’t about to pretend it didn’t happen.

  Superhumans didn’t exist. To do superhuman things, you needed something extra. Something more.

  But at the same time, he and Slater had never abused them. They took trace amounts, barely detectable in the bloodstream, and they improved the concoction with each passing year. Black Force had done it for them when they were employed, but now that they were out on their own they were forced to do the heavy lifting themselves.

  It was Slater’s realm of expertise.

  He was the mad scientist giving the orders.

  King took what he was given.

  And he’d never been in better shape.

  He drained the entire half-gallon, and returned the empty jug to the fridge. He let it digest, feeling the cool liquid snaking its way down his throat. There were no other sensations. Microdoses didn’t give you molten energy running through your veins. There was nothing like that.

  But he’d wake up the next morning ready to go again, and that was all that mattered.

  There was a knock at the door, and he sauntered into the hallway bare-chested. He had no qualms about answering it. Violetta hadn’t been lying about the ramped-up security. The building was now a virtual fortress, guarded by every possible form of government prot
ection. A civilian couldn’t see what was in place if they were looking right at it, but that was the whole point. They were there in the shadows, watching around the clock, keeping tabs on the two men living on the top floor.

  He opened the door, and she was standing there.

  She said, ‘Big developments.’

  ‘Am I needed?’

  ‘You are.’

  He sighed and bent over, putting his hands on his knees. ‘You could have told me before I expended all my energy.’

  ‘Too bad. Eat or drink something. Refuel.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then you’re good to go. Get dressed.’

  ‘You going to brief me?’

  ‘I can do it while you’re getting dressed.’

  ‘Anything we should do before I get dressed?’

  She stared at him, her expression muted. ‘I’m serious, Jason. This is bad.’

  ‘Okay. Let me shower.’

  He let her in and made for the bathroom.

  56

  As he pulled on a pair of khakis and a compression shirt in the walk-in closet, she lingered in the doorway and said, ‘What do you know about high-frequency trading?’

  He looked at her briefly. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There’s a few firms on Wall Street taking part in it. It exists in that soulless moral grey zone that comes with any form of capitalism. They don’t contribute to anything, they don’t help society — in short, they skim money off the top of the market and pretend it’s not happening.’

  ‘That sure sounds like Wall Street.’

  ‘These guys are particularly nasty, though. Basically, they sink hundreds of millions of dollars into building technology that lets them execute trades faster than the rest of the market. Think of their fibre cables as straighter than the rest of the country’s. If they do that, they can make billions by fucking around with the share prices in the milliseconds that it takes to execute a trade. Their computers are set up to take advantage of that.’

  ‘I think I follow.’

  It means that they have to get it right, though, or they can screw with the whole market. Because high-frequency trades are responsible for more than half the volume of all U.S. equity trades. And if they get these trades wrong — remember, they’re happening in milliseconds — they can fuck everything up. There’s something known as a flash crash. It’s happened before. For a couple of minutes, the whole market can plummet, then instantly rebound. The last one happened in 2010. It wiped over a trillion dollars off the market. Then everything was back to normal within minutes.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound good that they’re able to do that.’

  ‘It’s not. It means they could do it maliciously, with enough prior planning.’

  Then King froze. ‘Oh, shit. Is that where you’re headed with this?’

  ‘There’s a high-frequency trading firm with their headquarters right here on Wall Street. They’re called Geosphere. Their existence is one giant secret. They’re out there, but no-one knows how big they really are. They pay the big banks and the exchanges enormous sums of money to pretend they’re not using their platforms. They operate in something called dark pools. It’s corruption at the highest level, but it’s technically legal, so that’s what happens.’

  ‘What’s this big development you’re talking about?’

  ‘Three high-ranking employees of Geosphere — we think they’re responsible for most of the groundwork that built the firm — have gone missing.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Violetta nodded. ‘That sums it up.’

  ‘This is the ying pai’s plan? Cause another flash crash, or something worse?’

  ‘Something much worse,’ Violetta said. ‘Look — no-one really understands how the stock market works, besides the people who built the systems it operates on. And they’re the no-names, the ones hiding in plain sight. Firms like Geosphere work closely with them, so they can do their high-frequency trading in those systems without anyone knowing any better. They could get away with murder.’

  ‘And the Chinese could exploit that, if they knew about it. They could exploit our greed.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You think they’re truly missing?’ King said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I wouldn’t take that chance if I were the Chinese. They won’t be able to perform complex tasks like that under duress. They’d fuck it up by being scared for their lives.’

  ‘You’re suggesting…?’

  ‘This is Wall Street,’ King said. ‘And the Chinese have an endless stream of money.’

  ‘You think they were bought? Their wives reported them missing. All three of them have kids. Families. You think they’re that soulless?’

  ‘This is Wall Street,’ King said again.

  Violetta furrowed her brow. ‘I mean … it’s possible.’

  ‘If they were bought, it’s infinitely worse. Because it means they’ve been planning this for weeks, if not months, or even years. You said it yourself — the ying pai, above all else, are supremely patient.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Any news on where they disappeared to?’

  ‘No — they’re ghosts. We’ve got the whole city’s CCTV cameras looking for them. No-one’s seen a thing.’

  ‘Where’s the last place they were spotted?’

  ‘They left their offices at the end of the work day yesterday. None of them made it home. Usually that’s not long enough to report a missing persons case, but it was all three of them at once. It was marked as suspicious, and we found out about it straight away, because we were scouring for exactly that type of problem.’

  King rubbed his brow.

  And then a harrowing thought struck him.

  Guns.

  And black boxes.

  57

  He went to the bedroom and came back out carrying the mysterious black box by the handle. He put it down in front of Violetta, and she studied it.

  She said, ‘Is that a CPU?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How’d you get it?’

  ‘Before you showed up, Slater and I stumbled across a bunch of street thugs smuggling unmarked crates off the Hudson River. We figured we’d take matters into our own hands, and we relieved them of their precious cargo.’

  ‘I could have you arrested for that.’

  ‘Cut the shit.’

  ‘No — I’m serious. If this shaky relationship between our government and the pair of you is going to work, then you have to let us gather the intelligence, and let yourselves carry out the orders. Is that understood?’

  ‘I think you’re missing the part where we did that for a decade each,’ King said. ‘As far as we were concerned, we were on the government’s shit list. This “shaky relationship” is a fairly new development. When we did this, we considered ourselves on our own.’

  ‘So that’s what this is?’ Violetta said. ‘I think I get it now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The penthouses, side by side. The location — right in the heart of the city. You’re a couple of vigilantes. An army of two. Waging war against organised crime.’

  ‘This little project was our first attempt at it. We weren’t sure if we were going to continue.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you ended up with that?’ she said, pointing to the black box.

  ‘There was more than one. And there were HK417s, and miniature claymores, and handguns.’

  ‘Sounds like someone was arming themselves to the teeth.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Did you find out who?’

  ‘No. But the Whelans were the ones in charge of delivering the goods.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They’re an Irish organised crime family. Remnants of the old-school mafia.’

  ‘So they’d know where it was headed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you want to track them down and make them talk?’

 
‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re looking for my approval to do it?’

  ‘Yes. Like you said, you gather the intelligence, and I carry out the orders.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re gathering the intelligence right now. What does this have to do with Geosphere?’

  ‘I think it might be connected.’

  She stared down at the box. ‘Some sort of foreign tech?’

  ‘If they’re trying to crash the market, they’d need some serious resources to get it done.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, chewing her bottom lip. ‘Maybe. Maybe it’s a coincidence.’

  ‘You have contacts in New York, I assume?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  King picked up the box, and handed it over. She took it.

  ‘Give this to them,’ he said. ‘Get them to pull it apart. Find out what it is. It’s above my pay grade, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Okay. But I don’t want you hanging around doing nothing in the meantime. Do you know which Whelan specifically to go after?’

  ‘No — but Slater will.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘They’ve got … a history. At least that’s what I’m told.’

  ‘Do I want to know details?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Then keep it to yourself. But find out. Give me a name, and I’ll track him down and send you in. Discreetly, of course.’

  King pulled out his phone, and Violetta pulled out hers — no doubt to contact her people in the city to arrange delivery of the mysterious black box. King dialled Slater, and noted the time as he lifted the phone to his ear.

  Nine a.m.

  Either everything had gone to hell, or Slater had collected Ruby and was back on the plane.

  It rang, and rang, and rang.

  On, and on, and on.

  Just before it went to voicemail, it was answered.

  Slater said, ‘Hey.’

  He sounded out of breath.

  ‘You okay?’ King said.

  ‘If only you knew the morning I’ve had…’