by Matt Rogers
‘I’m not going to the mall. I told you that.’
‘Where’s the warehouse?’
King gave Lars the address, reciting it word-for-word from what Fischer had told him. Then he said, ‘If that little fuck gave me the wrong info…’
‘He won’t have lied,’ Lars said, carrying out a psychoanalysis on the spot. ‘If he lies, he achieves nothing. He probably wants to save face now, just like Allen did. If he sends you on a wild goose chase and his buddies carry out the attack, everyone will know he caused it. Now that it’s common knowledge, he won’t want it to go ahead. He’ll want you to stop it. Then at least he can maybe die before having to deal with the shame of it all going public.’
‘You seem to know a lot about him from never having met the guy.’
‘I know his type. Big and strong until the cards don’t fall in their favour.’
‘Yep. You nailed it.’
‘Are you armed?’
‘I’ve got a Glock.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s all I need.’
‘I’ll organise a drive-by with an unmarked Ohio P.D. car in the next ten minutes. See if we can get a glimpse of what you’ll be walking into. Because if you fail…’
‘Keep the police option on standby in case I die.’
‘You really think you’re going to die?’
‘Of course not. But that doesn’t mean I won’t.’
‘Don’t butcher this. You know what’s at stake.’
‘I know,’ King said, and then there was nothing further to be said.
Lars hung up. King tossed the phone into the empty passenger seat and gripped the wheel with both hands. He focused harder on the road ahead. At this speed, a crash would be instantly fatal. Just one of a hundred possible threats he subjected himself to on a daily basis. By now the danger had become so common that it almost seemed normal.
Almost.
His heart still thumped, and the sweat still flowed, and the intoxicating flood of stress chemicals still narrowed his vision to a tunnel.
Better than any drug in the world.
Jason King edged the Lamborghini faster still, well and truly alive, heading directly toward the greatest possible threat.
There was nothing else he’d rather do.
26
The endless fields of green shrank away in no time at all, replaced by the industrial grid of factories and warehouses Stanley Fischer had described. Now mid-morning, a beautiful autumn day had dawned in Ohio. Sunlight crept through the industrial smoke wafting from vents, clearing the air. King purred through wide open streets, passing semi-trailers and tractor bodies intermittently, their drivers staring in awe at the sleek Lamborghini. The car didn’t belong in these parts.
But King did.
Suddenly, the phone shrilled.
Aggressively.
Urgently.
King picked it up, squashing his foot to the floor in response. He knew it was serious based solely on how little time had passed since he’d last spoken to Lars.
‘King!’ Lars shouted. ‘King — where the fuck are you?’
‘Lars, calm down. What is it?’
‘Where are you?!’
‘Two minutes away! Less!’
‘That’s not enough. That’s not enough at all. They’re on the move. You understand me? They’re getting the show on the road. I just got an Ohio cop to have a look at the warehouse. The roller door’s up and they’re about to drive out. Fully armed. Everything.’
‘I’m coming. Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘I’m sending in the cops.’
‘Do not send in the cops!’ King roared. ‘They’ll get themselves killed. All of them. Hold off. Hold off for a minute.’
‘King…’
‘I’m putting the phone down. So help me God, if you send the police in I’ll never work for you again. Keep them away.’
‘They’re leaving the warehouse! Right now!’
‘I’m here,’ King screamed into the phone, twisting the wheel with one hand and taking the corner at an impossible speed. ‘I’m fucking here. Keep the police back.’
The Lamborghini’s tyres spun out, trying to correct course at fifty miles an hour, and the supercar fish-tailed wildly across the next street. King latched onto the wheel, his forearms pumping, and forced his head back against the G-forces trying to throw him into the door. Everything outside was a giant blur of motion, but he made out the notable shape of a pair of vehicles on the road. A hundred feet from his screeching supercar, an enormous Ford F-150 pick-up truck had pulled to a halt in the middle of the asphalt, its rear tray loaded with four men. Even in the madness of the skid, King saw the glint of gunmetal. He guessed the other four were tucked inside the main cabin.
Beyond the pick-up truck, a plain olive sedan was parked horizontally across the road.
‘No,’ King muttered.
A plainclothes police officer, trying to take a noble stand against the heavily armed force of drug-fuelled guns-for-hire.
The guy never stood a chance.
And King didn’t have time to interfere.
Combat was a game of inches.
He corrected course and punched the accelerator, making use of all ten cylinders, surging forward. At the same time the plainclothes cop fumbled his way out of the driver’s seat, hand at his hip holster, in the process of drawing his gun.
One of the men in the rear tray fired, his face covered with cloth, a turban wrapped shoddily around his head. A burst of muzzle flare arced from his M4 carbine and the cop jerked violently back against his sedan. Crimson blood splattered across the olive paint.
King swore at the top of his lungs, accelerated faster, and brought the Lamborghini back up to eighty miles an hour.
The guttural scream of the engine caught the attention of all eight men in the giant truck.
Too late.
King jerked the wheel and crunched nose-first into the back of the Ford, hitting it like a speeding bullet, decelerating with such ferocity that everything went dark for a split second. There was a giant thump as he impacted, a resonating thwack as he jolted against the seatbelt, a vicious whomp as the airbag hit him full in the face, and then…
…lights out.
And then they were straight back on again.
At the receiving end of a flash knockout, King knew he’d have a headache for the next couple of weeks. But none of that mattered in the heat of the moment, because his consciousness remained intact.
All he needed.
He unbuckled the seatbelt, maintained a white-knuckled grip on his Glock, opened the door, and spilled out of the rapidly decelerating supercar.
His vision blurred. His ears rang after the thunderous boom of the collision. He hit asphalt, rolled instinctively, and made it to one knee before he had the chance to realise where he was.
The collision had overturned the Ford, spilling all four men out of the rear tray. The front half of the Lamborghini had been utterly demolished, the beautiful Italian engineering torn apart in the blink of an eye. The devastation had stopped as the momentum ran out, and the safety carriage around the interior had kept King from getting impaled on a stray piece of steel. The force of the impact had carried both vehicles in an ungainly skid across the street, where the Ford had dumped itself on its side and come to rest.
King didn’t spend any time assessing how much damage he’d caused. The skid had taken him to the very edge of the road, right up to the loading dock of the warehouse the men had just exited. Still on the move, he used the momentum to pivot and sprint straight down the loading dock’s declining slope, the pit usually reserved for loading goods into trucks. He leapfrogged over the concrete lip, using one hand to haul his bulk over the edge, and rolled inside the warehouse. Retreating to the space they’d just left behind.
They would come for him.
It was simple human instinct.
Neutralise the threat.
The smart thing to do would be to spl
it up — four of them should take the deceased cop’s sedan and carry out their mission, while the other four hunted King. But these weren’t professional guards tasked with protecting Stanley Fischer. They were racist psychos willing to massacre innocent families for the right price. That tilted the odds in King’s favour. They would bend to how he treated them. They would react to what he fed them.
If he could do it with mercenaries and terrorists, he could do it with these guys.
So he vanished into the warehouse, disorientating the shit out of the eight men dressed up as Islamic terrorists. From the shadows, he heard one man howling — King guessed his leg had been wedged between the falling rear tray and the asphalt beneath.
A grisly mental image.
But what the guy deserved, no doubt.
Panic rose amongst the other seven — a couple had sustained injuries when the Ford overturned, but most of them were up and about. They swore back and forth, a cacophony of noise, everyone speaking over another at once.
‘What the fuck—?’
‘Where did that thing come from?’
‘Jesus, Rob’s been crushed.’
‘Where’d he go? What the fuck is going on?’
‘I saw him! He went into the warehouse!’
‘The what?’
‘Right there.’
‘That’s a Lamborghini…’
‘Is that guy dead?’
‘Yeah, cop’s dead.’
‘Goddamn. Shit. That thing hit us like a bullet.’
‘What do we do? Get another car?’
‘Take care of this guy. That’s what Stan would want. Maybe this is the guy he was so worried about.’
‘You sure he went in the warehouse?’
‘I think so. I saw him jump out of the car.’
‘Ahhhhhh—!’
‘Shut up, Rob. Quiet. We’ll take care of your leg. Oh, Christ, this is fucked. Get off the street, boys! Off the street! We’re sitting ducks out here.’
King tightened his grip on the Glock 17, exhaled, ignored the torn skin on his arms and the throbbing pain in his ribs, and waited for the firefight that was sure to follow.
27
He retreated into the labyrinth of metal shelving, a space disused for what seemed to be years. The warehouse had a reasonably low ceiling, and the tops of the shelves hovered only a few feet from the rusting beams forming a grid across the roof. There was almost no natural lighting, with most of the small windows positioned low around the warehouse perimeter grimy and stained with dirt and dust.
Perfect.
King stayed in a crouch, taking cover behind a piece of farming equipment covered in a giant tarpaulin, wedged into one of the aisles and forgotten about. In the distance, a cluster of sirens screamed to life, rapidly approaching the industrial area. At the same time King heard a duller sound, something more thick and full and imposing. It all seemed vaguely familiar, but he didn’t have the chance to contemplate it further.
One of the men came sprinting into the aisle, his footsteps pronounced, his breathing laboured. Definitely artificially enhanced by some kind of stimulant. Cocaine, maybe. King had seen it countless times before. People unaccustomed to violence needed a drug to change their state before they carried out some kind of horrific wrongdoing, and these men certainly didn’t take part in regular massacres.
Their sensory overload would get them killed.
Instead of firing the Glock and revealing his position to the rest of the warehouse, King simply caught the guy as he ran past by wrapping one giant arm around his neck and using the other free hand to smother the guy’s face underneath the cloth. He squashed the balaclava into his mouth, cutting off any chance of an outcry, and slammed the guy into the side of the farming equipment. His head hit the metal and the resistance went out of his limbs. King lowered him to the floor as quietly as he could, left him in the dust, and delivered an elbow into his unprotected face, using the assistance of gravity to demolish the soft tissue in his nose.
For good measure, he slammed the butt of the Glock into the guy’s forehead, adding insult to injury. Injecting a little more brain damage into the equation. He didn’t want this guy waking up in a hurry.
That wouldn’t be an issue.
The anonymous man exhaled with a rattling gasp, and then he breathed no more.
King sometimes underestimated how destructive he could be when he harnessed the power of fight or flight.
And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d chosen flight.
He tucked the corpse underneath the tarpaulin and carried on. By now the six remaining men were fanned out across the space, trying to maintain some kind of tactical awareness with their hearts beating fast enough to kill them. King could sense it in the way their voices shook when they spoke, laced with so much energy he wondered if they might succumb to burst valves before he could lay hands on them. They’d been ready to shoot up a mall, and now they were hunting a ghost through a shadowy warehouse.
King knew he could surgically destroy them, one by one.
It wouldn’t take much effort.
Then everything went to hell.
He identified the dull thrumming in the distance — it was a police chopper, approaching fast. Lars had deemed the situation irreparable. He’d sent in the cavalry. At the same time the sirens rose, injecting urgency into the atmosphere. If Lars held back as King instructed and left him to hunt the remaining six men, he could have dispatched them with ease. They would have focused on killing him as if it was the only thing in the world, but now the sirens brought them screaming back to the present.
They were now forced to make choices.
Desperate choices.
‘We’re wasting time, man!’ one of them screamed, pumped full of energy, his voice tearing through the space, echoing off the walls. ‘We gotta go. Logan, Austin. Stay here. Find this guy. The rest of us will hit the mall.’
‘How you gonna get there?’ a voice with a distinctive trawl said. ‘Can’t flip our truck, man.’
‘We’ll take the cop’s car.’
‘Okay. Go.’
King heard pounding footsteps, and suddenly control ebbed and flowed away from him. Heart pounding, he contemplated standing up to his fullest height and revealing his position, but right now there were six men with M4 carbines all around him. He couldn’t repeat what he’d done at Fischer’s mansion, not in this dark, musty space, not with shelving all around him blocking certain lines of sight. Tasting grime and dirt on his tongue from the violent spill out of the Lamborghini, he wiped sweat off his brow and contemplated what the hell to do next.
Four men sprinted out of the warehouse, nothing but shapes in the dark.
Screw it.
They can’t make it to that car.
King threw caution to the wind and unloaded a volley of shots in the direction of the silhouettes. One guy went down, but the other three murky shapes slid out into the cover of the loading dock.
They were free.
Logan. Austin.
The two guys remaining.
Deal with them, then deal with the rest.
Forming a clear list of tasks to be completed consecutively, a unique kind of drive surged through King. He’d revealed himself to the rest of the warehouse, but he figured he could take two hillbillies. One of the pair — a big guy, far larger than King, most of it fat — came stumbling into his aisle, M4 carbine at the ready, all brand new and shiny.
King shot him in the face.
The big man twisted and went down, his finger twitching on the trigger in his death spasm, sending a roaring blast of unsuppressed gunshots spraying wildly around the space. King ducked, and it only took him a few milliseconds to determine he hadn’t been hit. Taking advantage of the sudden chaos, he burst out of his concealed position and leapt over the body, exiting the rows of shelving simultaneously with the last remaining guy.
Logan, or Austin.
It didn’t really matter.
King crouched low and put
two rounds through his chest, then one through the head as the guy froze up. Logan or Austin died without fanfare, crumpling into the dust with his rifle clutched to his chest like a prized possession.
As if a blistering amount of firepower could ever save him from a trained professional.
But the other three didn’t need saving.
They just needed to empty their weapons into a crowd of innocent people.
And that didn’t take much professional training.
The roar of the chopper’s rotors grew deafening, and King turned on the spot, provided with a front-row seat to the carnage that ensued.
28
For reasons lost on King, the chopper’s pilot decided to touch down in what had surmounted to an active war zone. King had assumed the helicopter would be used exclusively for surveillance of the unfolding conflict, but when he saw the landing skids descend into view he let out a guttural groan.
He knew what would come next.
The Columbus Ohio Police had underestimated the level of firepower they were up against.
Two of the fleeing trio raked the chopper with fully automatic gunfire, letting their carbines loose on the cops climbing out of the passenger seats. In the process of stepping down onto the asphalt, wielding rifles and planning to return fire, the cops’ jerked on the spot, thudding back into the chopper’s chassis. Their body armour did nothing to prevent the bombardment.
The pilot caught a bullet too, and the front windshield shattered.
All of them dead, in the space of seconds.
The trio ducked around the corner of the warehouse, out of King’s line of sight. Otherwise he would have blasted them away right then and there. He heard them racing for the olive sedan the plainclothes cop from earlier had left running idly in the middle of the road.
King broke into a sprint, ignoring the corpse-riddled chopper, its rotors still spinning in the middle of the asphalt. He slid down into the loading dock, levelled the Glock, and squeezed off everything he had left of the magazine in a last-ditch effort to stop the sedan in its tracks.
Too late.
They were moving fast.
