Lynx

by Matt Rogers

  Slater got to his feet. ‘I need to go to the Whelans, unfortunately. It’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I assume they have ties with the cops.’

  ‘No shit. They’ve bought half the city.’

  ‘Good. Then they’re exactly who I need.’

  ‘I can’t let you do this, man.’ Then he paused, and furrowed his brow. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Will Slater.’

  ‘You do this often, Will Slater?’

  ‘I do it enough. And, trust me, it’s a win-win.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Right now, getting in touch with Russell Williams is the most important thing in my life. It used to be a breeze, but the numbers I have access to no longer exist. Believe me, I’ve tried. So I need to do something radical. Something that gets his attention and makes him come to me. And you’ve got a problem that can’t be addressed without a radical solution. You do the math. Pair them up. Make the most out of me while I’m here. Point me in the right direction and let me do what I do best.’

  ‘And that is?’

  Slater feigned delivering an elbow to a skull.

  Nazarian thought about it hard, which was understandable, considering the future of his family rested on this crazed man pumped with energy who had materialised out of the blue in his time of greatest need. Then he said, ‘I’ll give you the address.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Just don’t fuck it up.’

  ‘I never have. Not yet.’

  ‘Don’t let me be the first. Will you tell them I sent you?’

  ‘Of course not. But you can be damn sure I’ll deliver the message to leave you alone.’

  ‘They won’t listen.’

  ‘I can be persuasive.’

  Nazarian feigned raising his hands to his ears. ‘I don’t want to know. Just do what you need to do.’

  ‘How much trouble do you think I have to cause for one of the Whelans to run word of what happened up the pipeline?’

  ‘I couldn’t fathom.’

  Slater grinned, almost maniacal. ‘I can.’

  ‘You want the Don’s address?’

  ‘Who’s the Don?’

  ‘Tommy Whelan. The uncle.’

  ‘You have his address?’

  ‘It’s in the system at Abigail’s firm. I told her to steal it when I thought shit was about to hit the fan. I don’t know what I was thinking. There’s nothing I can do. It’s a modern townhouse in Manhattan. Probably cost eight figures. Five or six storeys, or something ridiculous like that. The whole Whelan family goes in and out of it. He’s a property mogul on the surface, but underneath…’

  Slater grinned again. ‘Oh, that’s perfect.’

  ‘You’re insane, aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe I’m just very, very good at getting things done.’

  ‘I don’t want to know about it. I’m going to pretend we never met.’

  Slater nodded. ‘Probably best for the both of us. This conversation never happened.’

  ‘What about the two guys up front?’

  Slater skirted around the giant slab of shipwreck and rested a hand on Nazarian’s shoulder. ‘I’ll take care of that.’

  ‘Don’t kill them. Not in my house.’

  Slater shook his head. ‘I’m not that type.’

  ‘Is this the part where you start to pretend you’re noble?’

  ‘Not in the slightest. I think we can agree my moral compass is skewed well off its axis. I like to think it’s because of the things I’ve seen. It taught me there’s times where violence is the answer. There’s times where violence is good. But I don’t kill people I’ve tied up.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘I’ll just make them forget.’

  ‘Are you a wizard?’

  Slater smirked, and took his hand off Nazarian’s shoulder. ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Do I want to see this?’

  ‘Depends. They were here to kill you. They had guns. Their safeties were off.’

  ‘Then I want to see it.’

  ‘It won’t be pretty.’

  Nazarian just looked at him.

  Slater nodded. ‘Right this way.’

  58

  The duct tape proved awfully effective at holding them in place. They lay flat on their stomachs, arms pinned behind their backs, legs bound together, chins pressed to the rug in the sitting room.

  Slater and Nazarian stood over them.

  Slater said, ‘You think six months is enough punishment?’

  Nazarian said, ‘What?’

  ‘I know these types. The Irish mob aren’t exactly the most honourable. They were here to kill you, but they would have shot the whole family if they were home. That’s the way it goes. Can’t have witnesses, can we?’

  Nazarian stared at the two writhing thugs with a new level of hostility. Slater sized them up for the first time, properly assessing their features.

  They could have been brothers.

  Twins, even.

  They were both pale redheads with big stocky frames, probably six foot each. One had an uglier face than the other. That was about the only thing separating them. And their eyes were dead. Black and soulless. As they needed to be, serving as enforcers in the New York underworld. It was a sickening place to thrive.

  Nazarian said, ‘What do you mean, six months?’

  Slater stomped on the first guy’s head, putting all his weight into it, relying on technique forged in the fire of constant, relentless training. His boot crunched against skull, flattening the red hair and red face into the rug, knocking him out cold. Giving him a second concussion in the space of half an hour, this one far worse than the first.

  The guy went completely unconscious under Slater’s heel.

  It stirred memories of a cold, dark wasteland.

  He said, ‘I had a similar injury in the Russian Far East. Only just now recovered from it. All the events around it are blurry, if I’m being honest. And my brain can take a beating. These boys aren’t ready for that level of recovery. I’d give them six months until they’re out of the woods, at least. And they won’t remember me. That’s for damn sure.’

  Nazarian seemed barely fazed.

  He just nodded.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said.

  Slater strode over to the second man and repeated the process. It didn’t bring him joy. It didn’t bring him anything. It was a practical necessity. No other option. He didn’t find pleasure in the revenge, and he knew the moment he did he needed to walk away and exile himself to a tropical island for the rest of his life. Because then he would become something else entirely. Something that fuelled on vengeance, that drank it in. And he knew where that path would lead.

  So it was with a grim face that he turned back to Nazarian and said, ‘Can you take care of them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Put them in your car. Dump them somewhere. Cut the tape off. They’ll figure out the rest.’

  ‘What if they can’t—?’

  ‘Do you care?’

  Silence.

  Nazarian nodded. ‘Understood.’

  ‘It’s your call.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I couldn’t give a shit if they can’t remember their way home. Like you said. I’d be dead.’

  ‘So would Abigail. And your wife…?’

  ‘Anastasia.’

  ‘Anastasia. They would have shot both of them in the head.’

  Another nod.

  Nazarian said, ‘You need Whelan’s address?’

  ‘Please.’

  There was little left to say or do. Slater gathered up the pair of firearms previously possessed by the mob goons. Both identical sub-compact Sig Sauer P228s. Small sidearms, intended to get the job done and nothing else. Slater frisked both unconscious bodies for spare magazines, and came away empty. They clearly both had faith in their own abilities. They must not have anticipated much of a shootout. Perhaps the
y didn’t know Nazarian’s history in the Special Forces. Or they just thought he wouldn’t dare retaliate. Not if he knew any better. If he fought back against them, wounding or killing one or both of them, the reaction would be unprecedented.

  Slater understood his personal responsibility. He had to hit the Whelans hard, like nothing they’d ever experienced before, with enough force and shock to make them think twice about ever attempting to touch the Nazarians again. He knew what kind of pressure rested on his shoulders. He had to disrupt a mob family to its core. Rattle them in their comfortable throne. And if he didn’t, they wouldn’t hesitate to blow the brains out of Frank Nazarian and his entire extended family to get their revenge.

  Slater knew the price of failure.

  So did Nazarian.

  The man rested a hand on Slater’s shoulder, and the pale blue eyes bored into him.

  ‘You understand, right?’ Nazarian said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You ever shouldered this kind of burden before?’

  Slater almost laughed. He recalled a barbaric skirmish in the mountains of the Hadhramaut Valley, deep in the Yemeni highlands, fighting tooth and nail on a vast and dusty plateau to get his hands on a satellite radio and prevent one of the worst horrors of the twenty-first century from sweeping the streets of London. If he’d taken a few more seconds to achieve what he needed, hundreds of thousands of people would have died horrific deaths.

  Even the memory of the Marburg virus sent shivers down his spine.

  He said, ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘You sure you can do this?’

  Slater shrugged the hand off his shoulder. ‘You don’t seem to understand. Usually I’m playing defence. It’s a rare occasion where I need to play offence. And, I have to say, it’s something to behold.’

  ‘You sound awfully sure of yourself. Don’t get yourself killed at the start.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me about my daughter?’

  Slater mulled over it. Then he smiled.

  ‘She seemed to take after you,’ he said. ‘For better or worse.’

  ‘Will we ever see each other again?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  ‘Whatever you’re about to do, do it well.’

  ‘I’ll try my best. You’re a good man, Frank. You’re like me. Stubborn and bone-headed to a fault. You see a problem and you do everything you can to fix it.’

  ‘Something tells me you’re a little better at it than I am.’

  ‘I have a little more practice than you do.’

  ‘I need to give you my thanks. You didn’t just tell me about my daughter. You…’

  He trailed off, his gaze sweeping from the empty kitchen to the entranceway to the sitting room. He shivered in the quiet, starting to realise what might have transpired if Slater hadn’t arrived.

  ‘You lost hope?’ Slater said.

  ‘What the hell was I thinking?’

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Not like that. Not to me.’

  ‘You saw a problem you couldn’t fix. You caved. There’s always times like that. It’s human nature. As much as we want to run away from it. Even me.’

  ‘Has it happened to you before? Have you ever given up?’

  ‘I thought about it once.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Yemen.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Then it morphed into something I never saw coming.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I had no-one to contact. I was excommunicated from my old division. I’d run away from them. I had to fight my way up a mountain of armed tribesmen to get to a satellite radio and somehow try and stop a bio-terror attack. Every way I looked at it, it was going to get me killed.’

  ‘Did you prevent it?’

  ‘Have hundreds of thousands of people died in a single incident in the last year?’

  ‘Not that I heard of.’

  ‘Then I’ll leave that to your imagination.’

  ‘But that overwhelming feeling … when you can’t see a way out, and you just sit down and wait for the end. You got it?’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t sit down.’

  Slater fished an electronic key fob from the larger unconscious man’s inside jacket pocket. It had a smooth T indented on the plastic. He shoved his fingers deeper into the pocket and came away with a wallet. It had a driver’s license in it.

  Michael Taylor.

  Mickey, probably.

  Couldn’t find a more stereotypical Irish name if you tried.

  He clapped Nazarian on the shoulder in a final gesture, and nodded a reassuring look to the man. There seemed to be a resurgence in the blue eyes. A spark of some kind. Fresh motivation. He was steadily climbing out of the nihilism that had threatened to consume him.

  The law of unintended consequences.

  Slater had shown up out of some strange sense of goodwill, and had inadvertently saved a life.

  He reminded himself that he would ruin that same life if he failed now.

  Nazarian scrawled an address on a scrap piece of paper, folded it in half, and handed it over.

  There was nothing left to be said.

  Slater put the key, the wallet, and the paper into the pockets of his jeans and left quietly through the front door.

  59

  Manhattan proved as chaotic as Slater remembered it.

  He’d left the Mercedes S-Coupé out the front of Nazarian’s, preferring to drive a car that he wasn’t responsible for to a siege. He sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic in a white Tesla, amused by the juxtaposition of a couple of burly Irish mafia goons driving around in a luxury electric vehicle. It was a Model S P100D, its make revealed on the enormous display screen that fired to life as he push-started the engine. Whisper quiet, the sedan barely purred as it coasted through the quiet Brooklyn streets en route to the madness that constituted inner New York City. Slater noted every feature of the car as he sat wrapped in the plush leather, using the smartphone in his lap to search for an accurate price. He came away with $180,000 for the base model, not including a smattering of customisable options.

  So the Whelans are loaded to the gills.

  The pair of Sig Sauer P228s rested in either side of his waistband, the belt threaded through his jeans cinched tight over their bulk. It would have to make do — he’d flown straight here from Colombia, and there’d been no time to stop and arm himself with appendix holsters and all the requisite safety gear.

  The Whelan compound rested on the Upper East Side, which justified the obscene price tag Nazarian dropped on Slater earlier. It was a five-storey townhouse just off Park Avenue. No wonder it cost more than ten million. For a moment he wondered how the hell Tommy Whelan could justify living in such lavish luxury in plain sight, but it didn’t take him long to figure out the life of a property mogul provided an awfully convenient cover story.

  And half of it was probably true.

  There was no doubt the family owned an amalgamation of commercial and residential properties in New York, which would provide a small fortune in rental income in its own right. Then there was the endless corruption and other more unsavoury dealings on top of that.

  All in all leading to a bunch of wealthy brats who thought they could get away with anything.

  Slater almost salivated at the thought.

  It wasn’t every day he received the task of causing as much chaos as humanly possible to a collection of scum.

  He had Taylor’s driver’s licence in his left hand and the other resting on the steering wheel. He nosed forward, eyeing the skyscrapers dwarfing the street on either side. He’d already memorised the details. His mind entered a different mode of being, shifting from calm to wired. He analysed everything, sensing the stress chemicals building in his chest, just waiting to be released in an explosive burst. That would come, but
not just yet.

  He had a part to play first.

  He found the townhouse easily enough. It stood out in stark contrast to its neighbouring buildings, five storeys of thick floor-to-ceiling glass with maximum tint. Like a modern work of art slapped between two ordinary brick and mortar structures.

  There were two sentries posted in front of the entrance, at street level. Both pale redheads like the two men Slater had taken out in Brooklyn, each about six foot two with bulky frames under their leather jackets. Their faces showed disinterest, but the eyes never lied. They pierced everywhere they looked, searching for any sign of threats. To a passerby they might seem like a couple of big strong locals waiting to meet with a group of friends before a ball game, but to Slater they gave themselves away without much effort.

  Still pressed up to the car in front of him, Slater finessed the brake pedal, eyeing a vacant parking spot a few dozen feet ahead seemingly reserved for one of Whelan’s goons. It rested directly in front of the townhouse.

  Perfect.

  Slater had discovered, after years in the field, that most human interactions came down to confidence. The world of crime — the mob, particularly — was a complicated beast, most of it resting in the shadows with allegiances switching this way and that, and hired help utilised in almost all aspects when the family grew fat and lazy.

  Slater had to hope Tommy Whelan didn’t control the books with a painstaking eye to detail. That way, a newcomer would stand out. If there was even a shred of doubt in the sentries’ minds, Slater was in the clear. He wasn’t as talented as Ruby, but he could put on a game face when he needed to, and he’d spent enough time ingratiated with the vermin of society that he could do a pretty respectable job at it, too.

  Before either of the sentries could put him on the back foot, he seized a gap in traffic and shot the Tesla into the parking spot, screeching to a halt with enough precision to impress even the most critical of drivers. Still pumped up on false unrest, he made sure his T-shirt fell over the P228s before launching out of the car, levering himself up off the driver’s seat and crossing the sidewalk in a few broad steps.

  Five seconds, beginning to end.

  He was face to face with the two redheads before either of them could get in the first word and put a moment of thought into the encounter.