by Matt Rogers
No-one in the room must have known Nguyen too well, because Xu stayed alive. There were no shouts of protests, or drawing of weapons, or furious confrontations.
He tried to forget about his heart hammering against his chest wall, expecting at any moment to feel the cold touch of a gun barrel press against the back of his neck, followed swiftly by a trip to the great beyond.
But nothing happened.
The silence amplified.
Then the door to a connecting hallway opened and a man stepped through — he looked to be in his forties, broad-shouldered and carrying himself with the poise of an elite athlete. Xu instantly recognised the guy’s combat prowess — spend enough time around a specific discipline of martial art and after enough acclimatisation you can just tell when someone can kick the shit out of anyone in the immediate vicinity. They carry themselves with a gentle grace, undercut by the simmering tension of decades of honing their fast-twitch muscles fibres.
This man carried that aura.
He stepped into the centre of the room, like a speaker without a stage, and turned to face the audience. He glanced momentarily at one of his men up the back of the room — Xu saw the guy nod out of the corner of his eye.
He translated the gesture in his head.
All clear. Everyone’s here.
The man up the front of the room nodded and gently clasped his hands behind his back. Xu studied his clothing — the guy wore an overcoat that had to have cost at least ten thousand dollars. Xu had spent enough time around designer clothing to recognise quality when he saw it.
‘I am Velli, but you probably all guessed that,’ the man said.
Taking after Machiavelli? Xu thought.
More than likely.
The underworld was ruthless. The politician seemed a prudent figure to hone one’s image off.
‘Some of you have met me,’ Velli continued. ‘Some haven’t. I won’t waste words on unnecessary bullshit. You all know why you’re here.’
No, Xu thought. I don’t. Please enlighten me.
‘Any questions?’ Velli said.
Xu had dozens, but he kept his mouth shut. If any of the other occupants had concerns, none deemed it necessary to voice them.
Velli flashed a glance at the Hublot timepiece on his wrist and grimaced. ‘Right. We’re on a tight schedule here, so let’s get this started. I need this done in two hours. Everyone understand the rules?’
Silence.
‘I’ll take that as a yes. Lighten up, boys. Someone’s making their employers rich tonight.’
What the hell does that mean? Xu thought.
But, once again, he said nothing.
Velli slid a smartphone out of his pocket and busied himself swiping across the screen, seemingly oblivious to the twenty pairs of eyes laser-focused on him as he stood in the centre of the room, shrouded in shadow. It was only then that Xu noticed the scarcity of lighting — he wondered if only a few desk lamps had been switched on for sinister effect.
It certainly didn’t calm him down.
Velli looked up all of a sudden, as if surprised to see that everyone was still paying attention to him. Xu stared straight into his eyes, noticing the man’s pupils were dilated.
Was he high on something?
He seemed erratic, but Xu couldn’t imagine a man ascending to the top of the underworld without possessing at least some mentally unstable characteristics.
‘Are you boys fucking ready for this?’ Velli cursed, his intense gaze flitting from man to man. ‘I’m looking at a lot of placid faces right now. You boys better get your game faces on. This is war. Make no mistake about it. You understand what you’re competing for?’
A sea of nods.
Xu nodded in sync.
‘Distribution rights,’ Velli said. ‘I’m guessing not many of you know what the payload is, but your bosses do. That’s why they sent you here. Every man in this room — except my guys — is the best offering your organisation can provide. You know what that means? You know what kind of responsibility that places on you? You boys want to fail? You want to go back to your boss with your tail between your legs?’
A couple of murmured no’s, which Xu didn’t feel required parroting. He simply sat, and stared, and tried to control his pulse.
‘Then let me see some goddamn game faces!’ Velli shouted.
Definitely deranged.
The man looked down at his phone, shaking his head furiously from side to side in apparent disbelief at the relaxed nature of the men in front of him, even though Xu could cut the tension of the room with a knife. Each of the fifteen or twenty men all around him were crackling with nervous energy, ready to unleash hell on each other. For a brief moment Xu’s heart rate skyrocketed as he pictured a free-for-all in this very room. He imagined men beating each other into a living pulp, a no-holds-barred eruption of savagery that would throw all skill and ability out the window. The last man left standing in a twenty person all-out brawl would have nothing but luck to thank for the result.
Then Velli piped up, quashing that train of thought.
‘Nguyen,’ the man said, reading from a list off his phone’s Notes application. ‘Wilkinson. Stand.’
Xu stood, feeling every pair of eyes in the room drilling into the back of his head. He’d chosen a stool near the front of the procession, so he couldn’t see the nature of the looks he was receiving. But he sensed another man rising off a stool out of the corner of his eye. He looked across and studied a tall lanky white guy with gaunt features and a wiry athletic frame.
His opponent.
He gulped back apprehension.
In his peripheral vision, he caught a flash of white teeth.
Velli grinning.
‘Everything’s ready for you,’ the man said, making a deliberately over-the-top gesture toward the doorway he’d originally come through. ‘Two minutes. Make it count.’
Xu figured now would be the last opportunity to voice any concerns he had, but that would effectively ruin his cover, and he never would have stepped over the threshold one storey below if he hadn’t been fully committed to the task at hand.
He was no stranger to getting blood on his hands.
He wouldn’t shy away from it now.
He led the way, hurrying straight into the room without a single syllable of protest.
He didn’t know what he was doing there, or what he was trying to prevent, or who Velli was, or whether the suspicious activity at the docks had anything to do with whatever the hell was going on in this townhouse…
…but he knew how to fight.
4
The room he stepped into was a sight to behold.
He inhaled the stench of disinfectant before he sized up his surroundings. As soon as he moved through the doorway, he sensed the presence of the man called Wilkinson directly behind him, ghosting in his path. He felt the crinkle of shiny plastic underneath the sole of his boot before he looked around and soaked in the sight of the sheeting covering every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered under his breath.
Velli evidently expected a bloodbath.
The man had certainly prepared for it.
The room was a cube, spacious enough to move around in, but not much more than that. It had previously been some kind of office, judging by the expensive furniture that had been shoved up to the perimeter of the room underneath the plastic sheeting.
Xu wondered whether the townhouse itself was a rental.
There was some kind of sick fighting tournament taking place within its walls, but in the morning the evidence would be erased and the property would be returned to its rightful owner with a cheery smile and a slight shrug when the landlord asked if they got up to anything.
Xu let go of that thought as the door closed behind them, and he pivoted on his heel to see Wilkinson wasting no time whatsoever.
No matter how adept one was at combat, fighting hand to hand in a claustrophobic box like this could ne
ver result in one party emerging unscathed. The skill disparity didn’t matter in the slightest. Each man was going to get a flurry of punches and kicks off in the brief window of massive adrenalin that reared to the surface in the outbreak of physical warfare.
That was just inevitable.
Thankfully, Xu had devoted half his life to a discipline that focused on hardening one’s body into a literal powerhouse.
Muay Thai was a brutal, bloody, barbaric sport, all things considered. Xu would never forget the years of his youth that had sharpened him into the man he had become.
The relentless drilling of kicks against tree trunks until his shins bled and his nerve endings screamed for relief.
The instructors screaming at him in rundown gyms on the outskirts of his home village.
The blood and the sweat and the agony and the unfazed commitment to honing himself into a human weapon.
It meant, all these years later, that he could take a punch like no-one else.
So he simply allowed Wilkinson to unload an introductory barrage of strikes, judging each punch as they glanced off the sides of his head in a three-hit combination. He rolled with the punches, taking one to the skull, one to the ear, and one that glanced ever so slightly off his jaw.
He concluded that Wilkinson had some definite pop in his shots.
The skinny guy had training.
It wouldn’t be anywhere near enough though.
In the confined space, the testosterone crackled. Xu snarled as Wilkinson floated into range and fired off a strike of his own, returning the favour. He twisted into a turning side kick and his skin hammered into Wilkinson’s torso, omitting the kind of crack that drew parallels to an unsuppressed gunshot from a high-powered assault rifle.
And that was all it took.
Wilkinson crumpled, his internal organs failing him even though his mind was still sharp. Both the guy’s legs wobbled as unprecedented pain roared through his body. Xu had seen it all before. The fight had taken a rhythm, first with the soft pitter-patter sounds of Wilkinson’s punches cracking off Xu’s head, then the unbelievable sound of the gut kick resonating off the walls.
Pat-pat-pat.
Bang.
Over.
Xu had been in so many confrontations that he categorised the noise of the conflict, drawing parallels with most of the fistfights he found himself in. An initial flurry by his opponent, then a single well-placed return shot with the force of a thousand strikes. If that didn’t put the other guy down, then they were in for a world of hurt.
Wilkinson folded in on himself as he hit the plastic sheeting on the floor, adopting the foetal position, but Velli’s words rang in Xu’s ears.
Two minutes. Make it count.
Would he be judging this based on accumulated damage? Xu touched a hand to the side of his head and two fingers came away red with blood — Wilkinson had cut him with one of the grazing shots. The man himself was now completely incapacitated, but Xu knew basically nothing about the rules of the game.
For good measure, Xu lifted Wilkinson’s face toward the ceiling by cupping his chin in one hand, and with the other he delivered an earth-shattering straight right to the bridge of the man’s nose.
It wasn’t pretty.
But, then again, nothing in Xu’s field was.
Blood sprayed everywhere and Wilkinson went down again, howling, his hands flying to his face. Xu tried to feel a shred of sympathy but came up short — this was a dark, unforgiving world he had entered, and remorse was not something he had carried with him into the townhouse.
Everyone in this building was scum, without question.
Xu had spent years of his life waging war against undesirables across the globe, and he wasn’t about to go easy on a man who worked for an organisation that preyed on the weak and capitalised on innocence.
So Xu refused to release his grip on Wilkinson’s chin, and loaded up the same right hand to deliver a second punch that smashed a few teeth loose from the man’s gums.
He dropped Wilkinson in a pathetic, bloody heap at his feet.
The door flew open.
Xu stood in the centre of the room and watched Velli rush in, reacting to the sound of the kick that Xu had thundered into Wilkinson’s gut. They had been in the room for no longer than ten seconds.
‘Satisfied?’ Xu said, motioning to Wilkinson’s crumpled frame.
Velli winced as he watched blood drip from both Wilkinson’s nostrils and leak from the corners of his mouth. At the same time, the man’s face was a mask of pain, reeling from the kick to the gut.
‘Christ,’ Velli muttered. ‘Take him downstairs. The doctor’s waiting.’
5
If the plastic sheeting had been draped across the walls and ceiling and floor to prevent a mess in the townhouse, that concept was ruined as soon as Xu took Wilkinson out of the room in a rudimentary fireman’s carry.
The man’s face dripped blood all over the wood-panelled floor of the main living area, leaving a trail of crimson droplets behind Xu as he strode toward the stairwell.
He sensed the twenty men silently watching him, but no snide comments were launched in his direction this time. He’d seen that kind of visceral reaction before.
No-one quite knew how to respond to sudden, massive, shocking violence.
And the way Xu fought all but guaranteed that in every confrontation.
That’s why he was here.
Black Force had suspected that the notion of a “tournament” would involve some aspect of physical combat, so they’d sent in Xu. He was their dark horse, their secret weapon when shit hit the fan. His ability to improvise in the heat of the moment and his incredible reaction speed were requirements to secure a place in the elite black operations division of solo operatives, but the ace up Xu’s sleeve was his ability to unleash disgusting amounts of violence at the drop of a hat.
It had seized the attention of Lars Crawford three years ago, and Xu’s life had been a whirlwind ever since.
Now, though, he couldn’t see himself making any progress at all.
He had beat a man to a pulp, but had got nowhere in the process.
Now he hurried down the stairs, ignoring Wilkinson’s feeble cries of protest. A pair of Velli’s men met him at the base of the stairwell and ushered him into a connecting room. Xu sensed movement at the far end of the hallway but dared not look. His life had become a flow of reactions ever since he’d stepped foot in the townhouse — hell, ever since he’d touched down in New York. He was responding intuitively, moving from one moment to the next without any knowledge as to what the future would hold.
It suited him okay.
He was still alive.
He should have been in the midst of an active recovery period — the last three weeks in Ghana had become a muddied mess of an operation. He hadn’t taken much physical damage but the constant stress wreaked havoc on even the toughest minds on the planet. Rest was necessary, if not for the sole purpose of recharging his drive and motivation. Lars told him that all active operatives had compulsory downtime periods, even if only for a few days at a time.
But, once again, this opportunity had presented itself, and Xu had been heading back stateside anyway.
And they had no-one else in New York.
Not on twelve hours notice.
So instead of touching down at LaGuardia Airport and heading to his apartment on Park Avenue, he’d received instructions from Lars, picked up a rental car that had already been booked in his name, and made straight for the unimpressive townhouse that held a darker secret.
What that secret was, he was yet to find out.
The in-house “doctor” turned out to be a hard-faced man roughly a decade older than Xu, who motioned them into another converted office where he had temporarily set up shop. He took Wilkinson off Xu’s hands and gently lowered the man horizontally onto a leather couch. The entire situation felt inherently strange — Xu had just rearranged Wilkinson’s face upstairs, and now he was for
ced to act as a rudimentary caretaker.
Unsure if he was supposed to head upstairs or not, he hovered uncomfortably on the spot as the doctor set to work assessing Wilkinson’s injuries.
Xu watched the man move clinically through the process of temporarily fixing Wilkinson up, studying his movements. The guy’s face was tanned and his hair was salt-and-pepper, cut short. He had a thick jawline and moved with the soft, flowing actions of a man who was well-versed in dealing with serious injuries. Xu watched him remove the blood from Wilkinson’s face with a sterilised wipe and shove two cotton buds up each of the man’s nostrils, followed by lifting a small metal rectangle out of a bucket of ice water and pressing the cool steel into the swollen blister of skin underneath Wilkinson’s right eye.
Xu recognised it as an enswell, often used to reduce swelling on boxers and mixed martial artists between rounds.
‘Are you a cutman?’ Xu said.
The doctor turned to him. ‘What?’
American, Xu nodded.
Maybe local.
Maybe willing to turn a blind eye to the exact nature of his work in exchange for a hefty paycheque.
‘You heard me. A cutman. For combat sports. You look like one. You act like one.’
‘I’m a doctor.’
‘I figured that. That doesn’t answer my—’
The doctor turned to look at Xu with absolute scorn spreading across his face. ‘Why the hell do you think I’ll tell you anything? I’m not allowed to talk to you.’
‘Right.’
‘Now shut up while I finish here.’
‘Is that what you’ve been told to do? Just clean them up and send them on their way?’
‘One more word out of you and I’ll go get Velli.’
Xu didn’t doubt that, so he remained patiently in place while the doctor continued his work. At some point during their conversation the door had shut softly behind him, sealing him into the room. He didn’t know whether that had happened naturally as it swung closed, or whether someone on the outside had deliberately shut it.
In any case he deemed the best option was to remain deathly still.
