Ciphers

by Matt Rogers

  ‘He could be anywhere.’

  Bracing against the constant unsuppressed gunfire, Slater kept low and slipped his phone from his pocket. He angled it against his body to mask the screen glare, instantly lowered the brightness, and then navigated to King’s number. He tapped the screen.

  It rang, on and on.

  Nothing.

  No answer.

  ‘Right,’ Slater said, his teeth clenched.

  He didn’t dwell on what that might mean. Now wasn’t the time to contemplate the death of his closest friend.

  Riordan said, ‘That’s what we were trying to do before all this happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get inside the building.’

  ‘You’re not me,’ Slater said. Then he added, ‘No offence.’

  ‘How do you plan on breaching it?’

  ‘There’s at least a dozen first-floor windows on both faces. I’d guess they’ve barricaded the entirety of the ground floor, but you can’t reinforce every window. No matter how much manpower they’ve got. It’d take too much time.’

  He didn’t really care what Riordan thought of the plan. He wasn’t speaking to him. He was vocalising his internal thoughts, testing how they sounded out loud. Speaking to himself. All that mattered was his own conclusions. Years operating solo had taught him to rely on nobody but himself when everything went to hell.

  Riordan said something, but Slater didn’t hear it.

  He snuck a look over the top of the car, taking in what he could of the bank building. He didn’t think the first floor windows were reinforced, but he couldn’t be sure of anything.

  He ducked back down and said, ‘I’m doing it. Can you give me a chance?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Covering fire. I need it. I’m going in.’

  54

  Riordan grimaced and looked around, still overwhelmed, still in over his head. He said, ‘You’ll get yourself killed.’

  ‘I don’t see how that affects you. You don’t know me.’

  ‘Because I’m not an idiot,’ Riordan said. ‘If you work for the woman I talked to, then you’re something else. So if you get yourself killed trying this, then we’re fucked. You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t realise what’s gonna happen if this drags out any longer? Couple of days from now, people are gonna start panicking. I’ve seen what that’s like.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Been a cop a long time. Seen some shit. Riots, protests that escalate, you name it. It takes one second of desperation for all this … civilised shit … to just vanish.’

  Slater pondered that.

  ‘Why the hell were we assigned to this?’ Riordan snarled.

  The detective’s tone was a little heavier, a little shakier. It was sinking home that some of his men were dead. This wasn’t a fever dream. This was real life, and the consequences of what happened tonight would last for years.

  ‘Because of the state of the city,’ Slater said. ‘I thought that’d be pretty obvious. SF crews will get here eventually, but you combine the networks going down with the roads clogging up, and add in a few thousand people who need immediate assistance, and you’ve got a logistical disaster on your hands.’

  Riordan nodded, solemn. He knew that, of course. It was obvious, just as Slater had said. But now he was mirroring Slater’s earlier actions — speaking to himself instead of the audience. Like, How did I let this happen? Now I’m going to have to tell wives their husbands are dead. Tell kids their fathers aren’t coming home.

  Slater knew it was a downward emotional spiral waiting to happen.

  He changed topic.

  ‘The woman I work for,’ Slater said. ‘The one you mentioned before. You know who she is?’

  ‘I know how much power she has. All the way to the top.’

  ‘Then, by extension, I have the same power, no?’

  Riordan shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I do,’ Slater said. ‘And I’m ordering you and your men to give me covering fire. All I need is half a minute. Then I’m out of your hair forever. It’s not too much to ask for.’

  ‘You don’t need to flex your connections,’ Riordan said. ‘I was gonna help you, regardless.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Make sure you pull this off. For all our sakes.’

  Slater didn’t want to tell the guy that it made no difference whether he knew the stakes. If Slater caught a bullet in the brain, that’d be that, and he wouldn’t be around to understand what his failure had led to.

  Every time he put his life on the line, it encompassed the whole world.

  Because the whole world falls away when you die…

  He shook himself out of the stupor and said, ‘I’m ready. Can you tell your men?’

  Riordan nodded and hunched deeper behind cover, pulling his radio scanner close. He mumbled into it, relaying instructions, conveying the importance of the situation. Static crackled and short replies came in fast. It might have taken time for Riordan to amass enough men to help, but when they were together, they worked fluidly.

  Slater could admire any facet of law enforcement. He wasn’t elitist.

  Riordan looked at him. ‘On your call.’

  Slater nodded. He adjusted his grip on the carbine, then tensed his quadriceps and glutes, one by one, feeling the raw power in them. He’d have to sprint like a madman, and he knew it.

  His vision narrowed.

  His pulse rose.

  The rest of the world fell away.

  Then something penetrated the fog of war. Not for long, but a brief flash was enough. It was the face of the woman he’d met thirty minutes earlier, a woman he hardly knew, the result of a chance encounter that didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.

  But that’s the funny thing about chance encounters.

  Sometimes they mean everything.

  He asked himself, Do you really want to die here? Sure, it was a long shot, but he might have just met someone — someone to pull him out of the hedonistic, PTSD-riddled cloud he’d been floating along since Ruby Nazarian had died. He didn’t know Alexis, he’d hardly interacted with her, but sometimes there was an underlying feeling you couldn’t shake.

  It was there now.

  Slater had slept with more women than he could ever hope to keep track of. But he didn’t just want to take Alexis to bed.

  He wanted to get to know her.

  And he couldn’t do that if he was riddled with bullets, sprawled across a sidewalk in the Bowery in a pool of his own arterial blood.

  So he froze.

  Then Riordan said, ‘Now,’ into his radio mike.

  And all Slater’s thinking fell away.

  His instincts took over, and he vaulted over the sedan as gunfire poured at the bank building from multiple locations on the street. It was a whirlwind of unsuppressed shots, fired from semi-automatic pistols and submachine guns and a couple of fully automatic assault rifles that Slater guessed belonged to SWAT. He knew whoever was positioned at the windows, or anywhere along the façades bordering the street, was currently ducking away from the sills, taking temporary cover, to regroup and wait for a lull.

  Slater couldn’t wait for a lull.

  If they came up to return fire, he was a sitting duck.

  He worked his way up to a full sprint. His cadence hit maximum, and then he ran like a man possessed across the asphalt, weaving between cars, almost losing his balance in the process. He breathed like he was punching the air out of his body, sucking in oxygen in giant gulps.

  Then he ran faster.

  He veered up onto the sidewalk, moments away from plunging into the intersection. There was no cover out there, just a sea of cars spreading in every direction. No walls to cower behind, and no cars large enough to shield his mass. It was simply too close to the building — the men on the top floors could aim down and shoot him through the top of the head if he tried to take cover.

  No man’s land.

  Do or die.

&
nbsp; He went for it.

  Took three bounding steps and went to leap off the sidewalk and into the middle of the intersection, but before he could commit a looming silhouette came out of the shadows to his right, sprinting just as fast as he was. A large man, who came bounding in to intercept Slater, and before Slater could bring his rifle up to neutralise the target the guy seized Slater in a giant bear hug and wrenched him off his feet and spun him around and threw him into the shadows between two residential façades.

  Slater stumbled, and tried to keep his balance, and failed.

  He sprawled to the hard ground of an alleyway, gashing his shoulder, crushing half his face against the concrete, nearly breaking his own nose. He rolled with it and came to his feet, ignoring the pain, and spun to put a bullet in the head of whoever had tackled him.

  But Jason King was there in his face, wide-eyed, shaking his head.

  Slater dropped his guard, and lowered the carbine.

  King said, ‘Couldn’t let you go in alone.’

  55

  Slater’s pulse came down, and something close to calm settled over him.

  Close.

  But not quite.

  Given the circumstances, anything other than total panic was admirable.

  The gunfire outside the alleyway suddenly became two-sided, only seconds after King had tackled him. With his blood running cold, Slater realised the man had just saved his life. There wouldn’t have been enough time to reach the bank building before its occupants returned fire. They would have shredded him to pieces before he reached the opposite sidewalk, let alone scaled one of the granite faces to reach a first-floor window.

  With harrowing clarity, he said, ‘Thank you.’

  King nodded. ‘Saw you making a run for it. Knew you wouldn’t make it.’

  ‘You could have got killed yourself.’

  ‘That’s the job.’

  ‘I didn’t have another choice,’ Slater said.

  King nodded. ‘I know. But you do now.’

  ‘All we’ve got is a Hail Mary. I don’t see another way inside.’

  ‘He does,’ King said, jerking his thumb into the shadows only a few feet away.

  Slater let his eyes adjust, and made out the shape of a semi-conscious man slumped next to a dumpster. The kid couldn’t have been far over twenty, with a lanky frame and a gaunt face made worse by two sizeable black eyes. His nose was swollen and misshapen, and his upper lip was purple.

  ‘Who is he?’ Slater said. ‘What’d you do to him?’

  ‘I saw you crouched back there, before you made a break for it. I had him at gunpoint, but I knew he’d try to run if I left him alone. I had to make sure he stayed put. All it took was a forearm to the face. He got the message.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Slater repeated.

  King went quiet.

  Slater said, ‘What?’

  ‘He’s a Whelan,’ King said.

  Slater froze.

  Raised an eyebrow.

  King nodded.

  Slater said, ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why’s he here?’

  ‘He was with Rico. I think they met by chance. Convenient that the two most soulless individuals in the city came together, but they did. When you got away with Rico, the sicarios went after you. Left poor Samuel all on his own. But he hasn’t been an easy prisoner. He realised his hopes were vanquished when I got a hold of him, so he lost it. He’s barely sane.’

  Realisation dawned on Slater. ‘Hard to answer the phone when you’re wrestling with an uncooperative hostage.’

  King nodded. ‘Listen — he can get us inside.’

  Slater paused. ‘Wait…’

  King nodded again. ‘Do you understand now?’

  ‘That’s why you said I wouldn’t believe if you told me.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Slater stood motionless, the gears whirring in his mind. He said, ‘I thought we crushed the Whelans.’

  ‘We did. You ruined their reputation by putting most of the family in the hospital with your bare hands, and then I killed Tommy Whelan half a year ago. Without the patriarch, what little power they were clinging to evaporated.’

  ‘But we followed it up,’ Slater said. ‘After we got back from Nepal, we made sure they were finished. They were scattered across the continental U.S. by then. Most of them fled from Manhattan. It’s embarrassing to lose like that. Especially because of who they were before we showed up. They were the largest crime family in New York. And we reduced them to nothing.’

  ‘We reduced them to something,’ King said. ‘Something weaker. But we didn’t put out the flame. A handful of them are back, and they fucking hate us with every fibre of their beings, and I’ve got a gut feeling they chose to do something about it.’

  Slater doubled over and put his hands on his knees.

  Breathed in and out, slow and controlled.

  Trying to calm himself.

  Then he stood up and said, ‘None of this makes sense.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What do they get out of this if we’re the ones they wanted to punish? They could have sent an army after us with a tenth of the planning that something like this would have taken. And you really think a few stragglers of the Whelan family — a family that runs drugs and carries out union rackets and executions — has the smarts to take control of the power grid? This is some techno-terrorist shit. This isn’t the Whelans.’

  ‘Supposedly, it is.’

  Slater didn’t respond. They kept looming over Samuel, who by now was mostly awake and alert. Slater figured the kid was concussed — every nearby gunshot made him flinch like crazy. Or perhaps he was just wide-eyed and jumpy in general.

  Outside the lip of the alley, the war continued. The NYPD exchanged potshots with the bank building’s occupants, and the gunfire adopted a staccato rhythm. King and Slater barely flinched. They’d spent most of their lives in situations like this.

  Stress, and panic, and chaos … to them, it was home.

  Slater said, ‘What’s he told you?’

  ‘Nothing substantial. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was barely sane.’

  Slater bent down and seized Samuel by the back of the skull and pressed the barrel of his Glock into the kid’s forehead. ‘I know you understand what this is. Do you want to die here?’

  Getting restless, King said through gritted teeth, ‘I’ve tried that.’

  Samuel opened his mouth wide and laughed in Slater’s face. There was nothing in his eyes — no hope, no optimism. He was resigned to suffer and die, and he damn well wasn’t going to give up any secrets in the meantime. Slater’s stomach twisted as he realised he was faced with the worst kind of hostage.

  The type that didn’t care what happened to them.

  And, in this case, probably preferred death.

  Slater said, ‘Give me everything he told you.’

  King said, ‘He only tells me what he wants me to hear.’

  ‘But you said he can get us into the building? Why would he give that information up?’

  King nodded.

  Didn’t respond.

  Slater looked up.

  Realisation struck.

  He said, ‘Because he wants to let us inside.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He wants us to see what they’re up to.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Which means it’s probably too late to stop anything.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Slater put his hands on his hips and stared into the void.

  King said, ‘All we can do is try.’

  56

  King could see Slater grappling with the ramifications.

  King had been thinking a whole lot as he wrestled Samuel through the Bowery, and nothing good had come from it. They had to try, because that was the only option, and because, deep down, they both knew all this had more to do with them than they would have liked.

  Wordlessly, King hauled Samuel to his feet, and tossed Slater o
ne of the duffels he’d been carrying. Slater extracted the MP7 submachine gun and readied the weapon for use, putting down his own carbine rifle in the process. A wise move. If they actually made it inside, the compact SMG would prove much more useful than the bulky carbine.

  King watched Slater go through the motions, focusing on the task at hand. It put the man in a better headspace by forcing all other thoughts out of his mind.

  King gripped his own MP7, the select-fire switched to full auto, and kept a tight grip on Samuel’s collar. He said, ‘Lead the way.’

  Samuel waltzed forward, further into the alley. There was something close to a skip in his step.

  He started to whistle under his breath.

  King yanked him violently backward by the collar, choking the breath from his lungs, and then thrust him forward again.

  Samuel spluttered and retched, but as soon as the discomfort subsided he went straight back to whistling.

  King touched the MP7’s barrel to the back of Samuel’s head.

  ‘Do it,’ Samuel said. ‘Then you’re all out of options.’

  He laughed, a high-pitched cackle that the cold night air seized and whisked up and away.

  Behind them, Slater said, ‘This is reassuring.’

  ‘We just need to get inside,’ King said. ‘Then we don’t need him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Samuel said. ‘You sure don’t. Ain’t nobody ever really needed me.’

  ‘You were part of this,’ King said.

  ‘Wasn’t my idea.’

  ‘You contributed.’

  ‘I did what I was told.’

  ‘Has that always been the case? You ever thought for yourself?’

  ‘Nah,’ Samuel said. ‘I ain’t smart like the rest of you. But I’m good at following orders.’

  ‘What’d they get you to do for them?’

  ‘A whole lot.’

  ‘Care to elaborate?’

  ‘No,’ Samuel said. ‘I don’t think I will.’

  King said nothing.

  Just kept the barrel pressed against the back of his head.

  ‘What?’ Samuel said. ‘You going to hurt me? Do it. I’ll enjoy it. I deserve it.’

  ‘He’s a lost cause,’ Slater muttered.