Betrayed: A Jason King Thriller (Jason King Series Book 4)

by Matt Rogers

  ‘I tried that,’ King said. ‘I even retired first. Doesn’t work. The uniforms always find you. And your funds are going to run out, aren’t they?’

  Muted silence from Lopez.

  ‘That’s why you fell off the grid,’ King said. ‘You knew she’d send me. Then you could get rid of me quietly, and firmly establish yourselves as the top dogs of Black Force. Getting the huge paycheques, like I did.’

  Slowly, an inch at a time, Lopez lowered the barrel of the pistol. King saw the worry creasing his features. The man clearly knew his options had run out. He knew the worst conceivable option was if Command became aware of their actions.

  And it had unfolded just like that.

  Now, if they ever wanted to see anyone they cared about again, they would have to convince King to call Isla and tell her he had been mistaken and that his previous accusations were false.

  ‘What was the plan?’ King said, keeping his tone neutral. He didn’t want to cause any kind of emotional reaction. Every fibre of his being was focused on staying alive.

  Lopez stared at the floor. ‘Bury you somewhere in the depths of Cairo. Resurface a couple of days later. Act like we had been held hostage by Nasser and broken free. We would have denied ever seeing or hearing from you. Everyone would have assumed Nasser got to you.’

  ‘You kept me alive,’ King said. ‘You could have shot me in the hotel room. Why?’

  Lopez shrugged, then scoffed at his own foolishness. ‘Greed, I guess.’

  ‘Ah,’ King said, connecting the dots. ‘All those Black Force funds I’ve locked away over the years?’

  ‘We were gonna pry your account details out of you,’ Price said. ‘Then return to Black Force and get all the top gigs.’

  ‘Why me?’ King said. ‘And how did you know I was back?’

  ‘Isla told us,’ Lopez said. ‘When you were in training and we were put on this bullshit surveillance task to track some nobody and get paid scraps to do so. You were coming back to seize all the big tasks. Jason King, the top dog. And you’d probably make millions in the process. We didn’t spend years and years wading through the shit just to reach the top and get knocked off in a couple of weeks. You know how much we were paid for Borneo?’

  King remembered reading over their case files, and recalled the hostage extraction the pair had undertaken in the jungles — and the small militia they had decimated while doing so. ‘Based on what I got, I’d say around a million.’

  ‘Each,’ Lopez said. ‘There’s no standard salary at this level. It’s a gig economy. The bigger the task, the greater the reward. And now they were giving it all to you.’

  ‘Isla told you that?’

  Price shrugged. ‘In different words. But she had to explain why we were sidetracked with this shit.’

  ‘What you thought was nothing is actually a huge deal,’ King said. ‘There’s a massive attack planned for the Giza pyramid complex tomorrow morning. Although I doubt you two care, given what’s been revealed.’

  Lopez stared blankly past King, too much on his mind to bother forming a response for a drawn-out half-minute. ‘Can we possibly cut a deal?’

  King threw the door of the sedan open and climbed out. Standing upright, he had a few inches of height on both men. He thought he outweighed them both, too. He saw the defeat in their body language — the slumped shoulders, the awkward posture. They had been backed into a corner that they knew would be nigh-on impossible to fight their way out of.

  ‘What kind of deal?’ he said.

  Lopez crossed his arms behind his back. ‘I’m not going to stand here and suck up to you and kiss your ass. We’re professionals. What’s done is done. We did it for our reasons, and I won’t apologise for it. But maybe we could help you with this Nasser thing, and then you could forget any of this ever happened. For all our sake.’

  King let the spiel hang in the air, fully considering the ramifications before responding. ‘I can put emotions aside. We have a job to do as operatives. I need all the help I can get with this before Nasser and his financier do something horrific. So if you two help complete the mission — which should have been your task all along — then I’ll forget this ever happened.’

  Lopez offered a hand. ‘I think this benefits the both of us.’

  King didn’t take it. He let Lopez extend it for the longest possible time until the silence reached uncomfortable levels. Then he spoke — a single sentence, short and sharp and demanding. ‘Give me the gun.’

  Lopez stared at him, unblinking, unfazed.

  King outstretched a hand in turn, motioning for the Glock. ‘You’ve got no options. Hand it over. You refuse and I won’t say a thing to Isla. She’ll have you buried in an abandoned auto-body factory within a few days. You know what she’s like.’

  Lopez passed the Glock-22 across.

  King gripped the handle and felt the weight of the weapon in his hands. It injected him with a new vigour, a wave of relief after what he could only describe as the closest he had ever come to death. Now, he officially had the upper hand. He turned to Price. ‘Yours too.’

  Price tossed it across. King caught it under-handed. He got the impression that Price was younger and more easily influenced. The entire plan appeared to be Lopez’s concoction, and Price must have been convinced by either the dollar signs or the heavy persuasion. Either way, he had still killed the elderly civilian in the underground garage without the slightest shred of remorse…

  ‘I think I’m going to change my mind,’ King said coldly, levelling the two barrels at each man’s head.

  Lopez jerked to react, but something made him freeze in place. He knew how fast King was. Any operative at this level of the Special Forces had an uncanny reaction speed. King would have a bullet in their skulls by the time either of them covered the distance in an attempt to wrestle the weapons away.

  They had lost.

  ‘Fucking piece of shit,’ Lopez spat, rage in his eyes. ‘Can’t hold your word.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ King said.

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘You think I would just let you two back into the organisation without a second glance?’ King said, flabbergasted. ‘You’re both done. You kill innocents like it’s nothing, all for a bigger cheque. I’ve seen a thousand of you before. Besides, I didn’t really need you. I’ve worked alone my whole career. I’ll do it again. Better than getting stabbed in the back when I least expect it. You two would have put me in the grave the first chance you got. We all know it.’

  King stared deep into Lopez’s eyes, then Price’s, making both of them understand that he wasn’t playing around.

  Then he pulled both triggers.

  CHAPTER 24

  King left the corpses of the two Black Force operatives on the café floor and scurried away from the scene before the authorities arrived.

  He hadn’t even been slightly affected by what he had done. Lopez and Price should have taken their chances with hiding away from the U.S. Government for the rest of their days. No matter how slim the odds, they would have been greater than handing the weapons over to King. They had done so because they thought King might have been just as slimy as them.

  Not a chance.

  They had sealed their fate the second they killed an innocent person. King recalled the hate he’d felt as he watched the elderly woman drop lifelessly to the concrete floor, back in Nasser’s hotel. He used that to expunge all memory of Lopez and Price from his mind. They were better off dead. Anyone so easily swayed by dollar signs had no business operating at the top of the Special Forces. It would only be a matter of time before they found a new opportunity and acted on it, careless to the people they would affect in the process.

  King had experienced a similar situation with his old handler back in Australia…

  It seemed that decent men were becoming increasingly harder to find.

  As he ducked into the SUV the two operatives had arrived in — engine still running — and tore away from the chaotic sc
ene, he thought of Will Slater. Amongst other qualities, the man had possessed a strong moral compass even when faced with so much death and destruction. If King hadn’t met him, he might have thought he was the only person capable of causing so much pain while keeping his head on his shoulders. But Slater had proved him wrong.

  He wondered where Slater was now…

  King turned at the end of the street and forced the thought of Lopez and Price out of his mind. He had a task that required his full attention, and he couldn’t let himself become distracted by what had unfolded. Walcott was expecting Nasser at the Cairo Tower in a few short hours. Whether the extremist had made it out of the Marriott alive was anyone’s guess. He could have been discovered by Lopez and Price after King escaped … but King doubted it. Their attention had likely been focused solely on eliminating him — seeing that their entire future had been riding on remaining undetected.

  They’d failed drastically.

  King felt a familiar sensation creep into his spine. It started with a slight tremor, which built into an almost overwhelming sense of foreboding. He knew what it meant.

  War was on the horizon.

  Nasser and Walcott would be expecting trouble. During the time King spent with Nasser, the man hadn’t discovered a shred of information about him … but he knew King was dangerous. Their security would be tripled. There were thousands of grizzled ex-military contractors willing to do anything for the right price. They would defend their clients until their dying breath. King had already experienced enough of Walcott’s forces to know he meant business.

  Then again, so did King.

  As he drove through streets that seemed even more deserted than usual — maybe due to the wave of carnage that had fallen over Zamalek during the last twenty-four hours — he pulled out his phone and decided to try his luck searching for a particular business. He doubted there would be one on Gezira Island, but the madman in him thought he might need something…

  His phone revealed that there was indeed no such setup near Zamalek, but he found a store that could be of use across the Nile, in the heart of Cairo. He set his phone to provide audible directions and set off in reserved silence, mulling over what had transpired.

  There was a lot to process. He crossed the same bridge that Lopez and Price had attempted to smuggle him over, and passed the jagged gash in the fence that had been cordoned off by police tape. He thought of their plan, and the unashamed brashness with which they had acted. The pair had no qualms with killing at will to get what they wanted, and King never should have assumed otherwise.

  It was time he stopped believing that the majority of Black Force operatives had the same morals as he did.

  It was a strange juxtaposition. He killed too, often in brutal fashion, yet he would never even consider hurting anyone who didn’t deserve it. The problem had originally driven him away from the organisation, leading to the short-lived retirement that had been almost as explosive as his career. The boundaries were invisible and often left to the opinion of the operatives, because they acted outside traditional jurisdiction.

  At what point did King stop trusting his blind intuition?

  Later, he concluded.

  Right now, he had two psychopaths to stop — and not a lot of time to do it.

  He drove into the claustrophobic streets of Cairo, with merchants at every corner and dusty buildings packed end-to-end along the sidewalks. Three separate times he almost crashed into wild motorists that swerved into his lane. The luxury supercars and lack of traffic became a thing of the past. He found himself wedged between battered coupes and rundown wagons all desperate to reach their destination.

  Finally, after a nerve-wracking journey, he pulled into a small parking lot with overflowing dumpsters and rubbish littering the ground. He climbed out of the SUV and made for the small shopfront all the way at the end of the row. It was his best chance at finding what he was looking for. A tacky sign overhead read:

  Cairo Skydiving Academy

  A bell above the grimy glass door jangled as King stepped into the front office. An Egyptian man in a tattered singlet sat behind a sparse wooden reception desk, twirling a pen on his forefinger. He looked King up and down, and his eyes lit up. Perhaps he knew the sight of someone willing to drop substantial money to get what they wanted.

  ‘Hello,’ the man said in such a way that King knew his English was weak.

  King stepped forward and outstretched a hand. ‘My name’s Jason King. I’m looking to purchase a BASE jumping rig.’

  CHAPTER 25

  Khalil Nasser hobbled delicately into the ground floor of the Cairo Tower, surrounded by a maze of security.

  He was in undeniably bad shape. Even walking at a measured pace proved agonising, sending ripples of hot fire through his limbs. The four-storey fall had been long and unforgiving. He had ricocheted violently off the various awnings and window frames on the way down, which had likely saved his life.

  If he had sailed directly to the concrete without any kind of buffer, the result would have been grisly.

  He tore his mind off the throbbing and aching and stinging all over his body — and instead tried to still his rapid heartbeat.

  He couldn’t contain his nerves much longer.

  The last month had been a rollercoaster that wouldn’t seem to end. He had never imagined that the rigorous planning and constant fear of discovery that had taken place in the days and weeks beforehand would be the least of his problems.

  A mountain of issues had surfaced in the final stretch — all culminating with the appearance of a six-foot-three killer.

  He had no idea who the man was, or who his two enemies were. Much about the situation still confused him, to the point where he had to fight to take his thoughts away from them. Nevertheless, he found himself checking the corners of every room he walked into, looking over his shoulder incessantly. He did not fear death, but he feared his plan being foiled.

  Too much time and meticulous planning had been spent on this operation for it to go up in flames.

  A bead of sweat ran down the side of his forehead as he crossed the air-conditioned lobby. He wiped it away, knowing that he couldn’t display a shred of weakness. Around Walcott, he had to exert an aura of total confidence. The fact that the man had dropped most of his personal fortune on their venture placed a great weight on Nasser’s shoulders that he would only shrug off when the task had been completed.

  Until then, he would keep working.

  Four men — all dressed in the same cheap suits — flanked him on either side. There were more coming. Walcott spared no expense, and Nasser would put the security to use during this final meeting. Briefly he had considered calling off the lunch and holding the conversation in private. But then he had reconsidered.

  Cairo Tower’s restaurant was a wildly popular tourist destination — mostly due to the fact that the restaurant lay on a base that slowly revolved three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, providing unparalleled views over Cairo and the Giza Pyramids. It attracted tourists like flies. Meeting Walcott there would surround them with potential innocent casualties.

  If the mystery man worked for any kind of government entity, he would be hesitant to storm into such a setting with guns blazing.

  He would find it much easier to track down their vehicles and ambush them at a more private location.

  Nasser would not let that happen.

  He saw Walcott loitering near the elevator bank, surrounded by security of his own. Four men who took their jobs incredibly seriously patrolled the stretch of lobby, hustling civilians along who spent too much time milling about. None of the Cairo Tower staff batted an eye. They had likely been paid off, instructed not to cause a scene. Nasser did not get concern himself with the finer details of Walcott’s actions.

  His entire focus for the last few weeks had been on the three hundred pounds of Semtex explosive hidden across the tourist precinct of the Giza Pyramid complex.

  It had been simple enough to procure — e
specially given the unlimited budget. In Walcott’s own words, bigger was better. He had located laboratories across the Middle East who manufactured PETN and RDX, the two main components of Semtex. He had paid a handful of dirty scientists a small fortune to pump out as much of the finished product as they could in a finite time limit.

  He probably could have got the job done with twenty pounds. It took less than a pound of the explosive to bring down a commercial jet airliner.

  But the aftermath of the attack had to be so obscenely devastating to warrant all of Walcott’s stock market investments paying off. Of course, if he had gone forth with the bets under his own name, it would have instantly been linked to him. But that’s what off-shore accounts and Swiss banks and the underground economy existed for. To provide greater privacy and protection from any nosy government officials.

  Everything was in place.

  Soon, he would have enough money to fund all of his most unbelievable, radical ideas. Plans and plots that other similarly-minded men of Allah had laughed in his face over.

  He would show them.

  Walcott spun and noticed Nasser entering the building. He had worn a tailored suit for the occasion, which sharply contrasted with Nasser’s plain clothing.

  Nasser had no budget for the finer things in life. Not yet.

  He chided himself on his foolishness as he approached Walcott. Suits and lavish restaurants and fast cars were an unnecessary waste of his life. He swore to channel all the funds into doing Allah’s work, no matter how many lives he destroyed in the process.

  They did not matter.

  He clasped hands with Walcott and they made for the bank of elevators.

  Most of the security stayed behind. The only way up to the Revolving Restaurant was the elevators. If this mystery assailant had somehow tracked them down, he would have to get through an army of hired guns to reach them.

  They stepped into a wide silver elevator along with three armed men, who kept silent the entire time. They knew that any small talk would only frustrate the two men they were being paid to protect.