Ciphers

by Matt Rogers

  He came to a skidding halt in a large bare room with the same tiled floor. There was no furniture, nothing at all besides the beginnings of a modern refurbishment.

  But the room wasn’t empty.

  There was a man standing in front of Slater, five inches taller than him, far wider, far thicker, far denser. Huge hands, huge feet, but sharp, laser-focused eyes and a thin cruel mouth. Handsome features for an otherwise bullish man. He had a hand to his bowling-ball sized shoulder, and his skin was ghost white. Then Slater saw the blood pouring out from between the man’s fingers.

  He’d been wounded.

  Everything happened at once.

  Slater raised his MP7 and pumped the trigger.

  He got three shots off.

  All fired low, because that was literally the only trajectory he could muster in time. If he’d raised the MP7 up to head height, the man would have battered it out of his hands before he could pull the trigger. So all three bullets caught the guy in the stomach and gut, surely tearing his intestines and liver to shreds, so how the hell was the guy still advancing?

  It threw Slater off. He couldn’t believe someone could defy the laws of physics like that. The survival mechanism was an incredible thing, because suddenly the enormous man was in his face and simply seized hold of the gun and jerked it upward and smashed it into the underside of Slater’s chin, knocking a tooth clean out of his mouth, nearly splitting his tongue.

  Slater went down like he’d been shot.

  It damn well felt like he had.

  He fought the urge to vomit, and through the mask of pain he clawed desperately for his weapon. He still had three fingers on it, but a particularly vicious bolt of pain seared through his head and threw off his equilibrium. His whole world swum, and he caught a glimpse of the huge silhouette looming toward him.

  He found a grip on the MP7, and scooted backward away from the giant, but he was so dizzy, so faint, so…

  The huge man dropped toward him.

  Slater rolled. It took all the effort he had.

  But the giant hadn’t been dropping a blow.

  He’d collapsed.

  The man came down right next to Slater, rolled over to a seated position, and scooted up against the wall behind them. He opened and closed his mouth, but all that came out was silence. He looked down at his gut, and seemed to notice the three bullet wounds for the first time, and let out a moan. He clasped both hands to the skin, trying to stem the bleeding.

  He wasn’t dead.

  But he was incapacitated.

  Slater got to his feet on shaky legs, and now he did spit out a mouthful of blood. He probed the inside of his mouth with a finger and found the gaping hole where a tooth had previously resided. His tongue was lacerated, but he hadn’t bitten it off. All in all, he was badly rattled, but it was nothing that would keep him permanently out of the fight.

  He loomed over the big man, breathing hard, shocked at how close he’d come to losing.

  It wasn’t an ordinary occurrence, but this wasn’t an ordinary situation. He and King were brutally disadvantaged, forced to fight against near insurmountable odds, but they were still here, and maybe they had a chance to—

  Right beside him, the curtains parted, and a gun barrel pointed squarely at his face.

  He held his breath.

  Jason King slipped inside and regarded the big man at Slater’s feet.

  ‘I realised who that is,’ King said. ‘It’s Rick Whelan.’

  Slater said, ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘My rib. You?’

  ‘My mouth. And I might be concussed.’

  Everything felt distant, detached. He’d experienced it before, but it never made the sensation any less strange. He was depersonalised, a common side effect of a concussion. Waving his hand in front of his face sent a strange response through his brain, like the whole movement was taped on a time delay. Early in his career, it might have thrown him off so drastically that he wouldn’t have been able to continue.

  Now, he barely thought about it.

  He realised Rick Whelan was still breathing, and together he and King exchanged a wordless look.

  Time to make him sing.

  64

  King crouched down first, squatting so his face was lined up with the big man’s.

  Rick said nothing. Most of his conscious effort was directed toward staying alive. He still had both hands pressed on his bullet wounds, but he seemed to be doing a respectable job of stemming the bleeding. King couldn’t help but be impressed by the man’s fortitude.

  King said, ‘Last we checked, you were in Grand Cayman.’

  Rick stared straight ahead. Said nothing.

  Slater crouched down beside King.

  King said, ‘You’re better off talking to us.’

  ‘And you’re better off putting a bullet in my head.’

  ‘That’s true,’ King said. ‘But we’ve never been the sharpest tools in the shed.’

  ‘You think I’m going to give you anything?’

  ‘You giving us something is the difference between bleeding out here on this cold floor and getting patched up at a hospital.’

  ‘Either way, my life is over.’

  ‘One option gives you at least some semblance of hope for the future, doesn’t it?’

  Rick stared rigidly forward.

  ‘Come on, Rick,’ King said. ‘Slater and I aren’t stupid. We knew that crushing one of the biggest crime families on the East Coast was going to have consequences. We got back from a job in Nepal a few months ago, and we had some spare time, so we followed it up. Found that most of the major players in the Whelan family, the ones with business smarts and ruthlessness in spades, had fled. Including you. So did you really go to Grand Cayman, or were you here the whole time?’

  ‘Here,’ Rick said.

  ‘Because you’re intelligent, and you knew we’d be chasing up any remaining leads, so you left a paper trail overseas while you lay low here and licked your wounds and figured out where to go next.’

  Rick shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I know you,’ King said. ‘Better than you think I do.’

  ‘And you know us,’ Slater said. ‘We were the motivation for all this, weren’t we?’

  ‘Not my motivation. I don’t let petty emotions affect me. Never have, never will.’

  ‘For Gavin?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rick said. ‘He’s a little more impulsive. He fucking despises the both of you.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  ‘I told you how I feel.’

  ‘You did,’ King said. ‘And I believe you. Every piece of intel we got on the Whelans after we dismantled them indicated that you were the glue holding the entire operation together. Is that accurate?’

  Something very close to pride flared in Rick’s eyes.

  Which had been King’s intention the whole time.

  But the big man tried to stay guarded. It was hard with mortal pain drilling behind his eyeballs, but he managed to cling onto emotionlessness.

  ‘You could say that,’ he said.

  King, however, knew what life-threatening pain did to a man. How easily it broke you down. Humbled you. Brought you to the sobering reality that you might be about to blink out of existence. Rick Whelan, a man of incredible ruthlessness, was starting to understand that.

  Because, deep down, he knew three bullets in the gut wasn’t survivable.

  King notched up the pressure to cave. ‘You’re not insane, Rick. Not like Samuel was. And you’re not blind in your hatred for us, like Gavin. You have poise, you have smarts, and you’re a master tactician.’

  Despite himself, Rick nodded.

  King said, ‘So what the hell are you doing here?’

  Rick’s eyes turned glossy. A mixture of crippling agony, acceptance, and resignation. Death awaited. He might as well speak his mind. He wouldn’t get the opportunity again.

  ‘To see if it could be done,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’r />
  ‘There’s nothing quite like la pista secreta,’ he said, referring to the Spanish phrase for the path of illegitimacy.

  The drug cartels used it to refer to their trade, their business, their “secret track,” as it quite literally translated to.

  King understood. He’d experienced the same thing when he got out of Black Force for the first time. For ten years, his life had been violent, and relentless, and hard-charging. He’d lived at the very edge of the human experiential spectrum. He’d trained and fought and killed and warred for his country, and when he got out, ordinary life seemed banal in comparison.

  Rick Whelan had experienced the same thing.

  ‘I always considered myself smarter than the rest of them,’ he said. ‘And then you two, a couple of highly motivated vigilantes, tore it all apart with very little effort. All you did was beat the upper echelon into unconsciousness and kill the head of the family. Usually, that’s salvageable. There’s contingencies in place. Successors. But it ruined our reputation on the street, and in a business like ours, that’s the end of the world. So I was out. Directionless. But I had my head screwed on straight, and I understood that the two of you were different beasts entirely. So I didn’t bother trying. I was lost, and I needed something to make me alive, and then Gavin came to me with a proposition.’

  ‘How much of it was him, and how much of it was you?’

  ‘For a little brat, he’s surprisingly visionary,’ Rick said. ‘He’s twenty years younger than me, so he had the ideas I never could have. But, for all his strengths, he’s flawed. He drinks, he smokes, he fucks — he spends the money that his father and grandfathers fought tooth and nail to earn. But he knew he needed me. He knew he could never implement the things he wanted to do. He needed someone with razor focus to carry it all out.’

  ‘You’re a hacker?’

  ‘No,’ Rick said. ‘But this is the Internet age, my friend. If you have the assets, you can find people. You can find anyone.’

  ‘That’s all it took?’

  ‘That’s all it took. That’s why I did it. Because I didn’t quite believe I could expose the flaws the kid showed me. But they were there, and they were ripe for picking.’

  King’s stomach twisted.

  Rick said, ‘If you think about it, I did this country a service, didn’t I?’

  ‘Sure,’ Slater said. ‘You bet. We all learned our lesson. You’ve shown us the flaws in the system. Now reverse it.’

  ‘I’m dying,’ Rick said, smiling through bloodstained teeth. ‘Maybe if you’d let me live, I might have had a change of heart. Truth is, I always saw the madness in what Gavin was doing, but I guess I was too awed by the results to stop it. And now…’

  He lifted his hands away from his shirt, exposing the crimson stain covering half his torso. Blood overflowed the lip of his shirt and ran down his jeans. It dripped to the floor with finality.

  Rick looked King and Slater square in the eyes and said, ‘Well, now I don’t much care anymore. You killed the one sane man left in this building. Best of luck, boys.’

  Then, before either of them could lunge in to try to stem the tide, Rick Whelan bled out.

  65

  Slater swore out loud, turned and kicked the wall.

  Beside him, King swept through the curtains, submachine gun raised, making sure the lobby was still clear. Slater composed himself and followed the man out of the waiting room and, sure enough, it was still a ghost town. They both slotted fresh magazines into their respective MP7s and gave each other the same silent look.

  Slater knew what it meant.

  Everything was so abhorrently crazy that there was little left to say.

  They advanced, clearing the tight corners, one man moving, the other covering him. They repeated the process until they swept up into another broad concrete stairwell. Slater suppressed the odd sensation of déjà vu. Most of his night had been stairwells and lobbies and alleyways and bloodshed.

  The cold, alien stink of a city without power.

  And the key to its salvation lay within these walls.

  He steeled himself as they climbed two flights and came out in the mouth of an entire floor dedicated to office cubicles. The endless space was divided up by waist-high partitions, and it was all dark. There was enough midnight-blue light infiltrating the floor-to-ceiling windows that they could make out the outlines of their surroundings, but apart from that they were blind.

  ‘Ready?’ King whispered.

  ‘Go,’ Slater said.

  King switched on his flashlight.

  Gavin Whelan was a dozen feet in front of them, holding an AK-47 at shoulder height, its barrel aimed squarely between Slater’s eyes.

  Stalemate.

  If anyone pulled a trigger, Slater would die, and Gavin would die.

  Gavin looked exactly how Slater remembered. Handsome for an Irishman. The last time Slater had seen him, he’d placed him as the son of a powerful mobster and a gorgeous trophy wife. Now, he shared the same sentiment. Gavin had pale skin, and jet black hair falling in locks over his forehead, and full lips, and a strong jaw. He took good care of himself. Despite looking early twenties, he was probably closer to thirty, if not older.

  But there were a couple of noticeable differences. A year ago, Gavin had sported the straightened posture and calm confidence of someone used to getting their way. Now, he was slouched, broken, defeated. The confidence was still there, but the foundations had been shattered. He could still get his way, but he’d given up on the fairytale the rest of his life was supposed to have been.

  Slater knew why.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while.’

  His voice ice, Gavin said, ‘Glad you’re here.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the way things ended last time.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Gavin said. ‘Shame you didn’t come to me with your little apology sooner.’

  ‘Must have been the wake-up call of all wake-up calls, right?’ Slater said. ‘You think you’re the man, you think you’re unstoppable, and then I break your ribs and slap the shit out of you and leave you in a pool of your own blood. I seem to remember kicking you in the balls, too. Did I rupture one of them? I’d always wondered.’

  ‘Talk,’ Gavin said. ‘Talk as much as you want. You won’t get me angry, and you won’t get me to stop this. It’s pointless.’

  ‘You can’t stop it,’ Slater said. ‘The people who work for you can. All I need is for you to point us in their direction. You’re useless to us otherwise. Always have been.’

  That made the kid bristle.

  He didn’t react, and he brought himself back under control in an instant.

  But at least Slater cracked the exterior.

  Gavin said, ‘We can stand here all night if you’d like.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere. Rick’s dead. Everyone downstairs is dead. You don’t have much left, kid. It’s impressive what you managed to achieve. Let’s call it a day.’

  Gavin laughed, hollow, empty, drawn-out, until it finally tapered down to silence.

  Then he said, ‘Oh… you actually thought that speech was going to work? After you killed my grandfather and drove my father and uncle to suicide?’

  Slater bristled.

  Beside him, so did King.

  Slater thought, Did we know that?

  It was one piece of a psychological puzzle they hadn’t even begun to decipher. Rick had given them the barebones explanation, and then he’d died.

  ‘I had everything,’ Gavin said. ‘I had the whole rest of my life ahead of me. And then you two had to go and kill Tommy.’

  ‘You’re a smart kid,’ Slater said. ‘You could have done anything. Your thug family wasn’t the be all and end all.’

  ‘What could I do? Start a small business? Start my own organisation just to see it torn down the moment someone like you caught wind of it?’

  So that’s it, Slater realised.

  That’s what had broken Ga
vin.

  The fact that Slater and King had toppled the Whelan empire so effortlessly. It hadn’t even been their goal, but the law of unintended consequences sometimes fell in their favour. The family had disintegrated, the power had vanished, and depression and suicide had swept through the mafiosos in a wave. And that had ruined Gavin Whelan’s confidence, as it probably would for the rest of his life. He’d figured that as soon as he tried to achieve anything for himself, if it was in any way illegitimate, someone with the skillset that Slater or King possessed would storm in and crush him. For a third-generation mobster with a silver spoon in his mouth, that sort of hopelessness was unacceptable.

  For Gavin, there would be no point trying to scrape together a normal life.

  The failure, and the depression, had driven him to extremes.

  Slater looked around, soaking in the darkness.

  Sometimes, this was what extremes led to.

  66

  Gavin said, ‘You see? Finally I did something worthwhile. Finally I built something on my own. And now it’s going to bring down the city that chewed me up and spat me out.’

  King said, ‘Where are the rest of your men?’

  ‘You’d love to know that.’

  ‘I can hear the elevator moving behind us.’

  Gavin went quiet.

  King said, ‘Which makes me wonder what that guy’s doing behind you.’

  The oldest goddamn trick in the book.

  Gavin didn’t look. He wasn’t that stupid. But he did tense up involuntarily, anticipating that someone he wasn’t familiar with might crack something over his head, or make a lunge for his weapon. That didn’t happen, but his aim drifted an inch to the left.

  The kid probably didn’t even notice.

  King did.

  He pulled the trigger of his MP7 and sent three rounds into Gavin’s thigh, destroying his quadricep, tearing muscle, shattering the femur. The kid collapsed with an ungodly howl and Slater sprinted over and punted the AK47 away, sending it skittering down one of the office hallways. Gavin screamed as he lay there on his side, bleeding profusely, breathing fast, almost hyperventilating. King watched Slater shed his jacket and wrap it tight around the leg. Rudimentary pressure.