by Matt Rogers
‘Okay.’
King inched forward and delicately placed his fingers like pincers on either side of the jacket. Then he lifted them apart. He kept a keen eye on the sweaty finger the guy had planted on the detonator, depressing the trigger. One slight twitch, or a tiny slip, and they’d both get mopped up in buckets.
It was plastic explosive, arranged in neat cylinders, packaged and taped to the guy’s chest and stomach. It was a harrowing amount — enough to kill at least fifty people in crowded conditions. And there were a dozen others in this building.
Unless…
King gulped back fear.
Unless this guy wasn’t the first.
Keeping his voice low, King said, ‘How many others are there?’
‘Twelve. Not including me.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Worse than me.’
‘All of them?’
A slight nod. ‘I was the only one giving this second thoughts. But … you know how it goes. Suddenly everyone’s moving and there’s no time to say, “Hey, maybe not?” then they had the vest on me and they were telling me, “Go get revenge on everyone who messed you up,” and I believed them but now I don’t and I—’
He trailed off and broke down in tears.
‘What’s your name?’ King said.
‘Cody.’
‘Cody, I’m Jason.’
‘Hey, Jason.’
‘You’re going to help me, Cody. Because I’m going to fuck them all up for what they did to you. But I need you do to everything I say for the next few minutes.’
‘I’ll do my best, man. Move fast. I … go in and out of lucidity. My brain’s all fucked. That’s how I ended up here in the first place. I’m inconsistent. Right now I’m good. Help me, man.’
King stared at him. ‘You’re a brave kid. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘Christ.’
‘Help me, please.’
Still sweating, heart rate still through the roof, King bent down and scrutinised the vest. It was a professional job, but they’d been rushing to get everyone outfitted in time for the parade, so duct tape had been used liberally. He breathed a momentary sigh of relief and reached for a patch that wasn’t attached to any of the wires.
He said, ‘Stay real still, Cody.’
‘I’m still.’
King reached out and tore off a small patch of tape, his fingers and wrists and forearms straining to exert the effort necessary.
He was down on his knees, working the tape free, when Cody started to freak out.
‘Y-you’re not with the government, are you?’
‘Breathe, Cody.’
‘Nah, man, fuckin’ tell me. Because the government covers up so much shit, man. They’re globalists hungry for power. They’ve got a breakaway civilisation and they’re hoarding all the best scientists and creating their own fuckin’ utopia, and if you’re part of that you’d better tell me because I’ll let go of this trigger if you are, I swear to God, I’ll—’
I’m inconsistent, King remembered him saying. Right now I’m good.
Well, not anymore.
King said, ‘I’m not with the government.’
‘Who are you?’
‘A friend, trying to help.’
‘Oh, that’s good.’
King stood up, aware of his every movement, how precious each moment was. He glanced at Cody face-to-face and saw the anguish behind the kid’s eyes. The bomber was battling his demons, fighting for control.
King said, ‘I’m going to place this piece of tape between your finger and the detonator. We’re going to have to do this slowly. Even the slightest error could ruin it for both of us. You understand?’
Cody nodded.
King said, ‘Okay.’
He gently brought the tape down with both fingers. Cody’s thumb was on the detonator, slick with sweat, and his whole hand shook.
King said, ‘Lift the corner of your thumb, Cody. Gently.’
Cody’s thumb tilted sideways.
A little too far.
King’s heart stopped.
But nothing happened.
The thumb was half on, half off the button.
The button stayed down.
King moved the tape a few millimetres onto the edge of the button — the new surface that had been exposed. Then he stuck the edges to the side of the detonator, creating a cocoon around the button.
He said, ‘Keep your thumb right there, Cody.’
He didn’t know whether the tape was creating enough pressure to keep the button down on its own. He bent down and worked another piece of tape free from the vest. He transferred that to the detonator, too, sticking it down hard on top of the first piece, doubling up on the support.
Then he said, ‘Let go, Cody.’
He was terrified of what might happen, but there was no other way to test it, and he didn’t have time to waste.
If he was going to succeed at this, he had to—
Halfway through the train of thought, Cody let go.
Nothing happened.
The detonator hovered there between his shaking fingers, the button depressed, the tape quivering.
King breathed out and held up an open palm, instructing him to stay exactly where he was. Then he skirted around behind the guy and stripped the jacket off him, allowing him to scrutinise the back of the vest. Sure enough, as he suspected, there were plastic cable ties locking the contraption together, preventing Cody from removing it if he had second thoughts.
Ensuring he died inside the vest, wherever it happened to go off.
Too much collateral to let them escape if they got deterred.
King said, ‘Stay still, Cody.’
But the man wasn’t going anywhere.
King wiped his palms on his pants, then slid the Ka-Bar knife out of its sheath. He held it tight, and took a deep breath. His heart thudded. His limbs turned cold.
But he snaked the tip of the blade through the mass of exposed wires, precariously avoiding an explosive death, and nicked each cable tie with a slight downward jerk.
He extracted the blade.
Narrowly missing a red wire.
Then he re-sheathed the knife and took his sweet time extracting Cody from the vest. He made no sudden movements, no jerky actions, and before he knew it he was clutching the vest in one hand and the taped-up detonator in the other, and Cody spun away from the plastic explosive like the vest had turned white-hot. He collapsed against the exterior wall of the warehouse and ran his hands along the metal grille underfoot, pale and wide-eyed.
King said, ‘You said there were a dozen more like you?’
‘Yes. And you won’t change their minds. They’ve been well and truly radicalised. It’s been going on for months.’
King bowed his head.
87
José Luis Gómez swallowed a couple of Dexedrine tablets and sat with his leg twitching as he waited for the stimulants to kick in.
He was in a small camper van, sitting in murky darkness. There were curtains pulled tight across all the windows, with only slivers of natural light allowed to spill through. He was hunched over a small flat tabletop.
He was with two other men. Men he’d grown up with in the shanty towns. Men he trusted with his life. Men like him, who’d do practically anything for a dollar, because money was everything when you broke down what made society tick. Money made existence a little less miserable — or, at least, that’s what Gómez had found. It was the difference between spending every waking moment at work making less than minimum wage so you had the privilege of stumbling home exhausted in the dark, and drinking Dom Pérignon at a nightclub with two high-priced call girls going down on you in the VIP booth.
That was what money could do.
So he’d gladly live in shit conditions for a few days and spray a few clips into a crowd if it meant adding to his growing investments that funded the narco lifestyle.
Sure, it was a risk.
>
But everything was a risk, and when you came from where he came from, you were open to a little risk.
Ordinarily the Sinaloa cartel didn’t prostitute itself out to the highest bidder, but the offer had come down the pipeline, and it had been irresistible.
Irresistible, even, to the narcos with billions.
So the Gómez brothers got the go-ahead. They were off to California with a couple dozen of their best men in tow. They’d met up briefly, and discreetly, with a horde of ex-U.S. military mercenaries that had been hired for the same job, and even more briefly with a couple of sketchy-looking Middle Eastern men who hadn’t said much, but their silence had said everything. Gómez had known immediately who they were and what they were here for.
And it had sent shivers down his spine.
Because that was a world even he didn’t fuck with.
Too barbaric, too savage.
There were a couple of bare single mattresses spread across the inside of the camper van, stained yellow in patches from the night sweats. It was hot out here, and they’d been ordered not to show their faces under any circumstances, so that led to a whole lot of sitting around doing nothing — mostly getting high, playing cards, and pulling the curtains back to get a glimpse of nature every once in a while.
They were parked in one of the clearings near the trails at the top of the Rancho Corral de Tierra wildlands. Hikers that flocked to San Francisco always seemed to pass over these trails, which was exactly why the Sinaloa cartel had selected them.
They’d been told to lay low here until they were given the go-ahead, and they were set to receive that in less than an hour.
So they were all jumpy, which was helped along by the Dexedrine tablets, and Gómez was even considering doing a line of coke he had in a small baggie when he noticed a shadow pass over the curtains, right by the door.
He tensed up and snatched a small .22 off the floor.
There was a knock at the door, and it rippled through the van.
Gómez’s two companions stiffened, too. They went for their guns, but Gómez inched one of the curtains aside and caught a glimpse of the figure standing there. He had his back turned, but he was dressed in familiar garb, with the same woollen balaclava they were about to don.
Gómez breathed out. ‘Don’t worry. It’s one of us.’
His two friends nodded and lowered their weapons.
Gómez undid the latch and swung the door outward. ‘Time to move?’
‘No,’ Will Slater said, and killed them with a tight trio of headshots.
88
Slater knew he’d killed the other Gómez brother the second he pulled the trigger.
He’d found a silenced Heckler & Koch USP .45 Tactical pistol in the second RV, and now he used it to kill José Luis Gómez, followed swiftly by his two colleagues. Of course, there’s nothing truly silent about a silencer, but it shifted the horrific bang of a regular gunshot into a compressed, guttural punch.
Which, from a distance, was indistinguishable from a car backfiring.
And there was only one other camper van in this clearing, which led him to believe that the real fight rested in the final clearing, so he was keen to clear this place out as quickly as possible.
He double-checked that everyone in the camper van were corpses. One of Gómez’s thugs twitched — probably an involuntary death spasm — but Slater didn’t have time to wait around and make sure. He put another bullet into the guy, then swung the door closed and left them there to rot.
Then he sprinted for the second camper van.
And his luck ran out.
The front windshield shattered as gunfire erupted from within.
Unsuppressed, fully automatic gunfire, deafening in its intensity, accompanied by muzzle flashes.
Slater dropped and rolled into the nearest ditch, which put him below the wheels of the camper van. He put it at a couple of dozen feet away — close enough to cause problems for both of them — but what terrified him was the sudden explosion of noise. They weren’t that far from the other clearing.
So those narcos would hear.
Lead ripped over the top of his head, thudding into the gravel, and Slater became keenly aware of the newfound urgency. He had to sort this out right now, or risk the other sicarios escaping. They could take any number of roads down the mountain, so Scachi’s cordon wouldn’t work. That was the soulless beauty of their plan. If your goal was to massacre as many civilians as possible, there was almost no way to prevent you from doing that if you were armed to the teeth and scattered across a bustling city. You only needed minutes to accomplish your task.
Slater raised his head a few inches to get a sliver of a view, and a round whisked past his head to reward him for his endeavours. He pressed himself back down into the gravel stomach-first, and reached into his back pocket for something else he’d picked up in the RV.
Something he hadn’t been willing to use unless shit hit the fan.
Which it had.
So he reached his arm up blindly and fired three shots in through the windshield frame as suppressive fire, then ripped the pin out of the olive M84 stun grenade and got to his knees. He hurled it like a fastball at the open maw, and watched with satisfaction as it struck home.
It went off with ferocity, and the flash half-blinded Slater when he didn’t turn away in time. His ears rang from the concussive blast, but he still had enough wits about him to stumble out of the ditch, throw the camper van door open, and shoot all four men inside dead. They were in no position to mount any sort of resistance — they’d been totally blinded and deafened by the blast. He took his time, saving ammunition, and put one round into each of their heads.
He found a MAR compact carbine variant of the Galil rifle resting on the van floor, and snatched it up.
Then he slotted the silenced USP back into his belt, because there was no use going with suppression anymore. The stealth aspect was over. Everyone in the vicinity would have heard the firefight, and now there was nothing to do but charge forward.
He had minutes — no, seconds — before all the narcos in the other clearing scattered.
So he ran flat out, feet pumping over the gravel.
‘Shit,’ he snarled under his breath. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit.’
This wasn’t how he’d wanted it to play out.
He thought he’d had it sorted.
He double-tapped his earpiece as he ran and between laboured breaths shouted, ‘I might be compromised here. I’m running into a war zone.’
Violetta said, ‘They know you’re coming?’
‘Couldn’t stay silent the whole time.’
‘Get this done, Will. You need to get this done. There’s no other option.’
‘Tell Scachi to mobilise whatever he’s got into the hills. In case I don’t get them all.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘Ruby called him in first.’
‘Is she okay?’
‘I don’t know. But she’s outnumbered, and it’s all going to hell.’
‘And King?’
‘Radio silence.’
Slater gulped and double-tapped again, ending the connection.
And with the breath rasping in his throat, he ran for his life into the trees.
89
The guy named Phil collapsed with most of his lifeblood coming out the underside of his chin.
Ruby pulled the knife free and spun, but she hadn’t counted on the cocaine elevating the rest of the mercs’ reaction speed. They were already charging at her like wild crazed bulls — a mistake she knew they hadn’t made consciously.
Because at surface level she was still a thin woman, and even though they didn’t have guns within easy reach they were all north of two hundred pounds and hardened military vets, who got up early and worked out hard and did the difficult tasks that no-one else wanted to do. They were men’s men — alpha males who took no shit and got what they wanted from life by simply going after it a
nd refusing to give a shit about who they hurt along the way.
So they figured, Yeah, I could take her.
I could rip her apart for what she did to Phil.
And I’m about to do just that.
Maybe due to the cocaine, maybe not.
But it certainly helped.
And she did feel true fear. Because there was merit to their plan. There was eight hundred plus pounds of them, and a hundred and thirty pounds of her, and the room was small and tight and cramped and there was little room to manoeuvre out of harm’s way.
She was already backed up against a desk, and she couldn’t juke to the side because all four of them were barrelling toward her in a line, as if each of them wanted to be the first to get their hands on her, and she knew it had to be the cocaine. Because simple logistics meant that one of them was going to get sliced open, but it seemed none of them cared who that was going to be.
She thought, Is that all this is going to be? Kill one of them, and let the rest beat me to death with their bare hands?
The primal part of her brain thought that, but then she overrode it.
Because she remembered who she was.
She locked onto her target with laser precision — the exposed throat of the closest mercenary — and jabbed the Ka-Bar into the soft flesh. The skin broke and arteries were severed and blood sprayed. He fell forward immediately, his body shutting down on him, and she sidestepped him and he crashed into the desk and it caved in with an almighty boom.
Blood flowed over the papers and onto the carpet but Ruby ignored them, recognising she was going to have to take a couple of bumps and bruises if she wanted to get out of this alive. She was out of position when the second guy reached her half a second later and he dropped his shoulder into her and sent her careening back into the wall.
She let her limbs go weak, and bounced off the plaster like a rag doll, denting the wall in the process, but she made it look far worse than it was. She still smacked her head against the hard surface and saw stars and a few black spots in her vision and felt the searing discomfort in her central nervous system, but she was by no means down for the count.