by Matt Rogers
Dane sucked in the cool morning air through gritted teeth and retreated into the building at a sprint to avoid getting shot.
King said, ‘Stay on me. Ready?’
Three grunts of affirmation came from behind.
If they were all armed, the smart move would be to split into teams of two to prevent them all getting bottlenecked in a trap. But three of them were unarmed, so staying in a tight unit was paramount.
As they raced out of the mess hall, Alexis stopped over the body of the forty-year-old disciple and bent down. King refused to look. He didn’t want to see what he’d done.
Besides, his entire concentration was focused on the building Dane had fled into.
Alexis caught up and the four of them swept through the doorway, King still leading the charge. They stepped into a lavishly furnished entranceway, done up with the same decor as the Riordans’ farmhouse. There were rattan chairs on bearskin rugs and mounted deer heads on the wooden walls.
Dane stood next to a doorway up the back of the big lobby, hands in the air, his face pale.
Surrendering.
100
King said, ‘Don’t fucking move.’
Dane’s lower lip quivered.
King ignored it.
Slater said, ‘He’s faking it.’
King said, ‘What?’
‘He’s not scared. He’s never scared.’
With inhuman athleticism, Dane leapt out of sight, sprinting through the open doorway into the next room like an Olympian coming off the starting blocks.
It’s unbelievable what fear can do.
King roared, ‘Stay with me!’ as he ran across the room, his footsteps muffled by the artfully placed rugs.
It would be suicide to charge into the unknown on his own, leaving Slater, Violetta, and Alexis stranded with no weapons. On the off chance he lost a battle of reflexes or ran into a trap, it was better for Slater to be right behind him, ready to scoop the Beretta off his corpse and finish the job.
They barrelled into the room.
It was pitch dark.
Lights flared to life overhead. Harsh white bulbs, leaving no room for shadow, exposing an entirely bare room. Every surface was concrete — the walls, the floor, the ceiling. There were brown stains on the floor. King knew immediately it was blood.
There was no sign of Dane.
He ground to a halt and twisted and caught Slater as the man sprinted in behind him. He spun Slater around like a top and shouted, ‘Out!’
Slater understood in milliseconds.
Violetta got it a second later.
It took Alexis a moment longer. She still had subconscious civilian tendencies, and reacting on the fly in a life-or-death situation takes longer than a few months to become ingrained in your DNA. You have to override your human instincts.
She was slow to catch up, and King and Slater hung back for a beat to make sure she got out with them.
Rapid footsteps sounded in the lobby, and the door swung shut on them.
Not Dane. The man couldn’t teleport.
One of the disciples, waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.
The back of the door was cold steel.
A bolt slid across the door on the other side.
All those tiny details you don’t notice in the heat of combat catch up to you. King should have seen the door was modified, the situation was abnormal, Dane was baiting him. But he couldn’t. Despite his reflexes and experience, there’s a limit to what the brain can process in milliseconds. Half the battle of staying alive in warzones is refusing to hesitate, but sometimes it’s a Catch 22. You hesitate, you see clearly. You go, you don’t. But if you don’t go, you die.
King’s heartbeat spiked as he stood motionless, looking around the room. He gripped the Beretta tight as sweat ran down his back, condensing in his armpits, forming rivulets down the side of his head.
He was still panting for breath when reality set in.
There were no exits.
The only feature of the room was a tinted glass window running halfway across the right hand wall. King didn’t need to shoot at it to know it was bulletproof, and the shot would destroy their eardrums in such a confined space. He needed every sense firing on all cylinders if he hoped to get them out of this alive.
Slater said, ‘We still have guns.’
He didn’t sound confident.
King held up the Beretta. ‘Gun. Singular.’
Alexis twitched, but King barely noticed.
A silhouette passed behind the tinted glass, its features darkened. King recognised the gait.
Dane watched them patiently, studying his prey.
101
King saw the building for what it really was.
A jail.
A torture chamber.
On the other side of the glass, Dane spoke to them through a grate of fine holes identical to those in prison visitation rooms. ‘Sorry about all this.’
King said, ‘No you’re not.’
Dane looked at him. ‘Jason King.’
King froze.
Dane turned. ‘Will Slater.’
He turned again. ‘Alexis Diaz.’
And again. ‘Violetta LaFleur.’
Silence.
Dane said, ‘You boys are outcasts from a black-operations division of our government. You are two of the most feared and most successful field operatives in this country’s history. Violetta, you were their handler, and then you followed them when they split. And you, Alexis … you’re a wild card. I don’t have as much information on you. Supposedly, you’re an ordinary civilian who got sucked into their cult just as badly as you all pretended to get sucked into mine.’
No one spoke.
King said, ‘You’re reaching,’ despite there being close to zero chance of that.
Dane raised his eyebrows. ‘Am I? I must say, that’d have to be one of the more accurate guesses in the history of guesses. I should buy a Powerball ticket.’
Slater said, ‘Someone fed you bad intel.’
Dane laughed. It echoed through the air holes. ‘Someone fed me very, very good intel. We’ve had our hooks in an intelligence asset in Washington for months now. He’s been helping to keep us out of the media, put a suppression blanket over unexplained disappearances, turn everyone’s attention away from the Thunder Basin grasslands. Everyone with common sense, that is. He lets the naïve ones wander in and fall into our trap.’
‘So you finally acknowledge it’s all bullshit?’ King said. ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’
Dane said, ‘Did you take me for an idiot?’
‘I don’t know what to take you as.’
‘I get it,’ Dane said. ‘This chat of ours will stay between us, so I don’t mind venting to the four of you. My wife, it seems, has fallen victim to the timeless mistake of believing her own lies. I keep everything functioning smoothly when she goes off the deep end … when she really thinks she’s Gaia.’
King said, ‘You know what she’s doing. You know how dangerous that could be.’
Dane said, ‘I do.’
‘Then put a stop to it.’
Dane shook his head. ‘I can’t. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.’
‘We can help you,’ King said. ‘We can work with you to end this.’
‘Did you not hear me?’ Dane said. ‘Why would I? Do you understand the trajectory of this movement? Do you know where we’re headed? We own all the right people now. No one’s going to investigate us. The beauty of the way the outside world is structured is that if you have power, you’re untouchable. And if you know the right ways to entrap people, accumulating power is … easy.’
King said, ‘I figured you’d say that.’
Dane smiled. ‘Good for you. Now put the gun down and kick it across the room or I’ll leave you here to die of dehydration. That’s not the way to go, believe me. You’ll be begging for a drop of water through split, cracked lips. Or you can die with dignity. Your choice.’
King
put the Beretta on the floor and punted it with his boot. It skittered across the concrete, came to rest in the far corner of the room, and lay still.
Dane signalled off to the side, to someone out of the line of sight.
The steel-core door opened and one of the disciples stepped in, brandishing a fearsome assault rifle. It was a military-issue M4 carbine, brand new and shiny, and King figured the weapon had never been used. Whichever intelligence asset Dane controlled had probably sent a crate of them to Mother Libertas free of charge in exchange for a never-ending supply of Bodhi. The arsenal was tucked away somewhere, maybe buried in the bowels of the Riordans’ farmhouse, and that’s where Dane had disappeared to in the early hours of the morning.
King thought about lunging across the space.
He wouldn’t make it in time.
The disciple was a guy in his thirties with a plain build and a plain face. His greasy hair was matted to his forehead in a bowl cut. His pupils were swollen with Bodhi. He’d do anything Dane commanded, and he was already bringing the carbine up to aim at them. This wasn’t the movies, so he wouldn’t deliver a spiel before he shot them. He was the grunt, carrying out the Riordans’ every wish.
King felt sickening helplessness.
He realised he was about to die.
Then Alexis’ hand came up holding the Beretta she’d taken off the body of the forty-year-old disciple. She’d had the pistol tucked into the small of her back, and now she fired once and blew the newcomer’s brains out the back of his head.
He slumped in a widening pool of his own blood and the rifle spilled from his hands.
The door hung wide open behind him.
Alexis turned to look at Dane, frozen in the window.
He couldn’t move, paralysed by how fast everything had unravelled.
She said, ‘What were you saying?’
He turned and ran.
King couldn’t believe it. If Dane had simply walked away from them, left them there to rot, they wouldn’t have been able to get out. They would have died of thirst before they got through the steel door or the bulletproof glass. But hubris and sheer human idiocy and impatience had led to the man wanting to make a statement. If he sent one of the disciples in to pump them full of lead, their bodies could be strung up on poles in the centre of the commune for all to see. A grotesque morale boost for Mother Libertas, showing the disciples what happens to their enemies.
Impatience and a need for dramatics lead to the deaths of many men.
Quiet professionals don’t take those risks.
Slater said, ‘“Gun. Singular.” Nice touch. Like we’d ever forget to take a dropped weapon.’
King scooped up the carbine, checked it was loaded with a full mag and ready to fire, and nodded to the other three.
Slater fetched the Beretta that King had kicked away, then they left the room. They swept the whole building, but Dane had already abandoned it.
Slater said, ‘I know where he’s going.’
Alexis said, ‘You do?’
He nodded. ‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll go to Addison,’ Alexis said. ‘She needs someone there for her when the cult is destroyed.’
Slater nodded.
He turned to King and Violetta. ‘What will you do?’
King said, ‘Destroy the cult.’
102
The log cabin wasn’t as terrifying without Bodhi crippling his emotions.
Slater strode across the prairie, keeping a tight grip on the Beretta. He expected resistance, but not a lot. The world Dane had so carefully built out here was coming down on his head.
There was no cohort of disciples standing guard around the cabin. No one at all. Just the wind and the dawn light and the stillness.
But the lights were on inside.
They’d been switched off last night.
Someone had repopulated the cabin.
Slater grappled with something he could only liken to post-traumatic memories. Laying eyes on the cabin sent a bolt of fear through him, making his stomach drop. His brain connected it with the mind-boggling Bodhi trip, and pleaded, No.
Slater had spent a lifetime mastering his fears.
He wasn’t about to change that.
He advanced.
As soon as he got within fifty feet of the cabin, the small door opened and Dane stepped out. His eyes were hollow and sunken, his forehead was lined with stress marks, and his teeth were clenched.
He held a switchblade knife to his own carotid artery.
Slater stopped in his tracks. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ll end it,’ Dane said. ‘Right here. Then you’ll never get what’s in my head.’
Slater stood motionless, aiming the Beretta at the dry prairie ground.
He didn’t raise it.
He simply raised an eyebrow.
It forced Dane to elaborate, to fill the silence. He was the one pleading, after all.
He said, ‘Wouldn’t that drive you mad? All this madness I’ve created, all these people I’ve killed, all this damage I’ve done to my followers. I would never repent for it. I’d just be dead. By my own hand, too. There’s a satisfaction in that. You want me alive. You want to hurt me for what I’ve done. I can see it on your face.’
Slater said nothing.
Dane pressed the blade tighter into his throat. ‘So what’s it going to be?’
‘You’re going to give this a moment’s thought,’ Slater said. ‘And you’re going to realise how stupid you are.’
Dane went tight-lipped.
Wind whistled across the grasslands.
Slater said, ‘Go on. Do it. I won’t stop you.’
Dane said, ‘We can negotiate. There are some things I want.’
‘You’re not going to get them. Go ahead and kill yourself. See if I care.’
Checkmate.
Dane didn’t take the knife away, didn’t admit defeat, but he didn’t break the skin either.
He stayed frozen.
Slater said, ‘It’s just you out here. No one else doing your bidding. And you don’t have a damn clue what to do.’
Dane said, ‘There are things I know. About the movement outside of this commune. You think this is it? This is a training ground for new recruits. You have no idea who we’ve bribed, who we’ve hooked on Bodhi. I can name names that would blow your mind. If I die, you’ll never get them. This thing will spiral out of control and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.’
Slater let him talk, let him get it out of his system.
He waited a long time to respond.
Then he said, ‘You’re a master manipulator, Dane. You wouldn’t tell me. You’d send me on a wild goose chase and you’d do everything in your power to save yourself. That’s who you are.’
Dane shook his head, but he was rattled by the tension, and he couldn’t lie as effortlessly as usual.
Slater said, ‘And there’s one other thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘No matter what I tell you to do, or what you think is right, you’re not going to cut your own throat. Because that takes incredible strength of character and your spine is weaker than glass.’
Dane’s face paled.
Slater said, ‘For example…’
He put the Beretta down and walked straight at Dane.
Who took the knife away from his neck and made a wild lunge at Slater.
Slater caught his wrist, bent it until it was inches away from snapping, and ripped the switchblade out of his hand by the hilt. Then he bent down and plunged the knife into Dane’s thigh and yanked downwards, carving a jagged line and severing the main artery in his leg.
Dane’s face went white as snow and he collapsed back against the side of the log cabin.
Arterial blood poured from his leg.
He was dead. He just didn’t know it yet.
103
Alexis entered the empty church with her gun up and cleared every potential hiding space in the nav
e and the transept before bounding over the altar.
She threw the sacristy door open, ran down the hallway, and burst into the room.
Her heart hammered at the sight. She almost fired out of impulse.
Then she realised all wasn’t what it seemed.
Brandon had Addison’s gun. He was no longer restrained, but he wasn’t jumpy or antagonistic. He sat in the desk chair, and when Alexis burst in he didn’t aim the weapon at her. Alexis swept the room, fearing the worst, expecting to see the young girl facedown in a pool of her own blood.
But Addison was unharmed. She sat against the far wall with her knees tucked up to her chest and her eyes red with tears.
Alexis aimed her weapon at Brandon. ‘Put it down.’
Brandon put it down immediately, and lifted his hands into the air.
Alexis said, ‘What happened here?’
‘I didn’t like being tied up,’ Brandon said. ‘So I got free.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yes.’
Alexis turned to Addison. ‘You let it happen?’
The girl looked up, her face sorrowful. ‘Of course. He’s my brother. I couldn’t hurt him.’
Alexis said to Brandon, ‘And when you got free, you took the gun off her?’
‘She handed it to me,’ Brandon said. ‘I know how to use it.’
‘But you didn’t hurt her?’
‘Of course not,’ Brandon said, refusing to look away from Alexis. ‘She’s my sister.’
Alexis sighed.
Humans were complicated animals.
She said, ‘And me? You didn’t try to shoot me.’
‘I probably would have missed,’ Brandon admitted. ‘I’ve only shot a gun a couple of times before. And … I’m tired.’
She could see that. His shoulders were slumped, his back bent like a hook. There were black bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. In comparison to the simplistic, straightforward existence of ordinary life in the commune, the previous twelve hours had been a whirlwind of emotion and stimulation. Brandon was committed to the cause, but it had worn on him all the same.
Brandon said, ‘Are you going to kill me now?’
