by Matt Rogers
King had imagined a series of enormous dwellings clustered tightly together, but when he made it a few hundred feet down the street and realised he’d only passed two properties on either side, he started to understand the extent of the wealth in this neighbourhood.
The residences were gargantuan, surrounded on either side by giant swathes of perfectly gardened lawns, sweeping out underneath the night sky. King grimaced as he laid eyes on the first couple of properties — if Allen’s mansion was as wide open as this, he would have trouble approaching. He stayed invisible in the darkness, moving slowly, not in a rush. He had all the time in the world to take care of business.
He came to number thirteen and scurried into the shadows in the leftmost corner of the property. The fence was made of wrought iron bars with large enough gaps between to almost fit a man through. King peered through the gap at the very edge of the grounds and surveyed a sea of pine trees drifting down into a shallow valley, then in the distance sloping up to a flat patch of land sporting a lavishly elegant three-storey mansion.
‘Armed Forces,’ King whispered. ‘Then senator. How’d you get the money to afford this, you piece of shit?’
Without a security guard in sight, he slipped quietly over the perimeter fence of Arnold Allen’s compound and zigzagged left and right through the field of trees.
His Glock at the ready.
17
The security proved absolutely useless.
King found the three men assigned to the night shift kicking pieces of gravel across the giant courtyard in front of the mansion. Backlit by the ethereal glow of the manor’s exterior floodlights, they didn’t make a shred of conversation the entire time King slunk around the tree line, watching them from the shadows and selecting the opportune time to strike.
As he crouched, he took in the details.
He got the sense this entire setup had been a haphazard job, thrown together at the last minute without much rehearsal or fluidity or tactical training of any kind. These men were big and strong and pumped full of bravado, but it was fake masculinity. They wore suits, probably to look the business, but they carried themselves all wrong. All three of them had the situational awareness of complete incompetents.
King understood.
Surely, they didn’t expect anything to actually happen. They were getting paid pennies on the dollar to safeguard a paranoid senator, and they were probably more concerned with what they were going to have for breakfast the next morning. This was a new job — if it was the centre of their careers to protect Arnold Allen, they would be going about it with much more vigilance. But they were protecting a man who had falsified information to get a black operations warrior out of the country, and that made King’s blood boil.
So he wouldn’t hold back.
It only took thirteen minutes for one of the trio to loudly proclaim he needed to piss. He sauntered in the direction of the tree line, rapidly approaching King’s position. King stayed low, barely twitching a muscle, so still and so invisible that the guy wouldn’t be able to see a thing until he was right on top of him. As he got closer, King soaked in the finer details.
Very short. Five-eight, max.
Solid build. Seemed like he lifted weights.
Not much of a neck. Minimal support. He’d be out with one shot.
The guy got closer, unzipped his pants, and King stood up to his fullest height like a wraith emerging from hell and smashed an elbow so hard into the right side of his jaw that the guy flattened against the nearest tree trunk with an ominous thud. His limp body slid chest-first down the trunk, collapsing in a sad pile at the foot of the tree. Briefly King wondered if he’d dished out more damage than he’d anticipated, but he didn’t have time to focus on it.
The soft noise caught the attention of the two remaining guards, but they turned curiously to the sound instead of instantly identifying it as a threat. They both squinted, trying to make out a clear picture of what had happened — from their perspective, it must have seemed like their friend had fainted mid-piss and careened into the tree. By the time they saw King charging out of the shadows, it was far too late.
Hands snatched for hip holsters, but it was cold, and they were stiff from the nighttime chill, and they hadn’t been trained to react to a hostile situation this quickly. In their minds, any intruder would be spotted from a mile off and they would have all the time in the world to set themselves up as their enemy sauntered up to them.
Instead, King closed the gap between them in less than three seconds, sprinting with full uninterrupted strides. He used the momentum to simply drop a shoulder into the closest man’s chest, transferring force like a freight train hitting a brick wall. The guy howled as a crack echoed through the empty courtyard, and he went down in an unresisting bundle of limbs. King stomped down on his gut with the follow-through motion, targeting the liver, slamming the heel of his combat boot into the supple skin.
He couldn’t imagine the agony.
In one slick series of movements he sidestepped, lashed out with his free leg, and punted the Heckler & Koch pistol out of the guy’s hand. He’d managed to yank it free in the time it took King to cross the courtyard, but he’d been in the process of bringing it up to aim when King had hit him in the chest. Now, the kick broke a couple of fingers and the gun skittered away across the gravel.
But King had wasted valuable time incapacitating the man.
The third, standing just a couple of feet away, took a little longer to get his ice-cold hands on his identical Heckler & Koch. But he reached it, and began to pull it free from its holster, his limbs charged with desperation. King could see the rabid intensity in his eyes.
King raised his own Glock, lightning fast, and pointed it square between the final man’s eyes.
‘Take your hand off your weapon,’ he said, his voice low.
18
All the guy’s limbs locked up at once, his face the very definition of a deer caught in headlights, his eyes boggling in their sockets as his brain tried to work out what to do. He was used to frantic confrontation — when violence broke out, everything became uncontrollable. But here was this resolute, stone-faced intruder pointing a Glock 17 at his head as if there was nothing wrong at all. The calmness no doubt threw him off completely.
‘Take your hand off your weapon,’ King repeated. ‘Or I shoot.’
The guy straightened up. He lowered both palms by his sides. His shoulders slumped. He didn’t know what the hell to do, but he’d been given no choice.
King strode right up to the man, keeping the Glock trained on his forehead, and at the last second he lowered the weapon to enable himself to load up on a right hook. He put his whole body into the motion, twisting at the hips and letting the tight muscles bunched up along his back transfer kinetic energy through his looping fist.
He hit the guy full in the face with the punch, and the transfer of momentum sent the man flying back off his feet — the backs of his knees caught on the edge of the giant stone fountain positioned in the middle of the courtyard, and he toppled unconsciously over into the knee-deep water. With a grunt of frustration, King crossed to the fountain and hauled the dripping body out of the water. He didn’t particularly feel like killing anyone tonight, maybe save for Arnold Allen.
Out cold, the guy would drown in the shallows if King left him to his own devices.
He deposited the unconscious guard on the gravel in a sodden mess.
A soft groan came from the second guy, and King twisted to see him in the foetal position, his knees tucked to his chest. He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. Taking a direct impact to the liver was an uncontrollable sensation, unrivalled in the arena of physical pain. No matter how adept one was at handling adversity, you couldn’t deal with your entire body shutting down on itself. He’d seen it countless times in televised mixed martial arts bouts. Men and women would go to war, beating each other senseless and failing to react to any of it. Then one blow would land clean on the liver, whether that
be a punch or a kick, and the ensuing reaction was entirely involuntary.
So King dismissed any chance of the guy putting up a fight in the near future. He considered fishing through the house for restraints and binding them up so they couldn’t recover and come after him, but it would take too much time. He wanted to be in and out before anyone realised what had happened.
So he collected their three Heckler & Koch P30s and hurled the lightweight pistols into the nearest treetops with the arm of a professional pitcher. He heard the sidearms clatter around the branches, all of them lodging somewhere above ground. None of them spiralled down to the carefully manicured lawn. Satisfied, he pivoted and headed straight for the mansion.
If they came after him unarmed, then that was their own fault.
He’d beat them down just as effortlessly as he’d already done.
King slipped inside through one of the doors at the front of the mansion, an amalgamation of white panelled wood and tinted glass. The interior juxtaposed harshly with the architecture — all the furniture was modern, hard-edged, failing to mesh with the high-domed ceilings and broad sweeping marble floors. King knew exactly what he was looking at. A man who had very recently come into wealth, opting to slap a mad combination of styles together in a vain attempt to look sophisticated.
Arnold Allen had no idea what to do with his money, because he’d never had any before.
He’d never had to worry about this kind of thing.
‘Wonder where it came from,’ King whispered under his breath.
He found the stairs and crept toward the master bedroom.
19
‘Hey, buddy,’ King said, wrenching the dozing senator out of his four-poster bed.
Panic set in.
Instantaneously.
Allen, in his early fifties with the trim body of a man who kept himself in notable shape in his older years, was in no position to resist. He’d served eight years in the Armed Forces, but those years were long in the past. On top of that, he was still in the process of determining whether he was in a nightmare or not. King made sure to let him know by grabbing the man’s skull between two giant hands and slamming his forehead into the nightstand.
The slate grey lamp spilled off the edge as the whole surface vibrated. King caught it before it hit the floor, noted its impressive bulk, and slammed the stone base into Allen’s ribcage. The senator coughed and moaned and cowered by the foot of the bed.
Surrounded by luxury.
And all alone.
‘Bet you weren’t expecting me back so soon,’ King said.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Allen moaned, his eyes still heavy with sleep.
King crouched down, seized him by the throat, and studied his features. He still had most of his hair, even though it had long ago turned grey. He looked healthy. He obviously took good care of himself. Habits instilled from his military service, maybe. It wouldn’t help him here.
‘I’m the guy you sent to Mali on a bullshit rescue op.’
Allen gulped, but King cut it off by tightening his grip on the man’s throat, digging his fingers in. He had a decade of strength training and the unparalleled power of adrenalin on his side. The senator reached up and rubbed his eyes, staring at King with a newfound awareness. He started going pale.
‘Oh, fuck,’ he said.
His gaze wandered over King’s shoulder, and instinctively King turned to look.
There was nothing there.
‘Looking for your security?’ he said.
‘They’ll be here any minute,’ Allen said.
‘I highly doubt that.’
The senator’s pupils expanded, a clinical sign of abject fear. ‘You … you already …?’
‘All three of them are dead,’ King said.
What Allen didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Allen paled and muttered, ‘Oh, God…’
King switched grip, moving his vice-like hold from Allen’s throat to the man’s jaw. He crushed the senator’s cheeks together, pulling his head forward in an overt display of power. He wanted the old guy to know he could snap him like a twig. He might keep himself healthy, perhaps even strong. But against a human weapon like King, he was helpless to resist.
King wrenched the man forward, throwing him off-balance where he sat, and hissed, ‘Look into my eyes.’
Arnold Allen complied.
‘You think I’m full of shit?’ King said. ‘You think I’m bluffing in any way?’
Allen shook his head.
‘You want to die here tonight? Right after you were blessed with all this opportunity, all this wealth? You want that to fizzle out right here?’
Allen shook his head again.
‘Then I’m going to take my hand off your face, and you’re going to answer my questions. If I even get the slightest whiff of a lie, I’ll kill you slowly, like I did to your security. Comprende?’
‘Comprende,’ Allen muttered through squashed lips.
King took his palm away from the underside of Allen’s chin, then followed it up by bringing the Glock into view and aiming it right at Allen’s forehead. The guy started shaking.
‘You ever had a loaded gun pointed at you?’ King said.
‘Not from this distance.’
‘I hear you served for eight years.’
‘You hear right.’
‘Guess that doesn’t stop you from being a monumental piece of shit, does it?’
‘If I tell you everything, does that redeem me?’
It was the first confirmation King had received of his suspicions. This whole time he’d maintained the sinister feeling in his gut that both he and Lars were royally wrong about Allen’s treachery, but here the man was, confirming it in the flesh.
‘It’s a good start,’ King said. ‘You’re willing to do that?’
‘I fucked up.’
‘You sure did.’
‘I thought … I never imagined it would get traced back to me. I thought I could get away with—’
King saw the puke coming. Mid-sentence, all the blood drained from Allen’s face and his eyes started to widen as he realised the ramifications of his mistakes. His life was over. His reputation, his career, what little family he had — all down the drain. King recognised the guilt and scooted back across the carpet, only a couple of seconds before Allen leant forward and vomited his dinner from the night before.
‘Pull yourself together,’ King said. ‘You give me everything and I might let you live.’
‘But … my life is ruined.’
‘It doesn’t have to be. Depends on the severity of what you did.’
‘It’s severe.’
‘Well, let me hear it.’
‘I’m scared.’
‘You should be.’
To hammer his point home, King reached forward and touched the tip of the Glock’s barrel to Allen’s sweaty forehead. The man audibly whimpered.
‘Speak,’ King said.
‘It’s not me,’ Allen said. ‘I didn’t do this. I just … helped the guy who’s doing it. I’m not responsible.’
‘You are responsible.’
‘No, I swear—’
King picked up the stone lamp and thundered it into Allen’s chest, smashing the breath from his lungs. He dry-heaved, but there was nothing left to empty from his stomach. Sweating and shaking, he collapsed back against the bed frame.
‘It wasn’t me,’ he said again, this time more feebly, as if trying to convince himself of his own innocence. ‘I don’t know anything about the attack.’
‘What attack?’
Allen lifted his bloodshot eyes to meet King’s. ‘You really don’t know a thing?’
‘I was in Mali fourteen hours ago. You’d better start explaining.’
‘I don’t know what to do. I’m dead either way.’
‘You’re dead right now unless you start talking.’
‘He might make it more painful.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Stanley.
’
‘Stanley who?’
‘Stanley Fischer. He’s the one running all this, okay? It’s not me. I swear.’
King froze in place, letting the name roll through his head, attaching it to snippets of information he’d seen on the news. ‘Stanley Fischer? The fucking governor of Ohio?’
Allen nodded. ‘He’s trying to win the election. By any means necessary. So he’s going to carry out an attack.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Wish I was.’
Sitting in the mansion of a cowardly, inept senator, King realised he was barely scratching the surface of the puzzle.
‘When’s it happening?’
‘Eight hours from now.’
An icy chill settled over the room.
20
‘What kind of attack?’ King said.
‘I told you. I don’t know anything about it. I’m telling the truth.’
‘There’s no way you’re being kept in the dark.’
‘I think he envisioned exactly this kind of situation happening. He thinks I’m weak. He thinks if someone interrogates me, I’ll break. Even though I carry myself like a tough guy.’
King studied the thin film of tears in Allen’s eyes, his bright red complexion, his rapid breathing, and said, ‘No comment.’
‘I swear, I don’t know…’
‘Then what does he need you for?’
‘I was instrumental in Black Force’s creation,’ Allen said. ‘I was one of the keys to getting the green light. But you probably know that already.’
‘I only heard about you today. You’re not as important as you think you are.’
‘Lars Crawford owed me a favour. So I decided to use it. For the wrong reasons … Christ, I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise. Explain.’
‘Okay. Okay, okay. Here goes. So, I’ve never had a penny to my name. The military pays like dog shit, and then I went into politics thinking it would be the golden ticket, but it turns out all this corruption shit is too much for me to handle. I’ve got the military experience, but I can’t convert it into confidence. I can’t do a goddamn thing. Fischer is right. I am weak. I don’t know what to do with myself in meetings, when the going gets tough. I just … don’t know.’
