The Will Slater Series Books 1-3

by Matt Rogers

  He continued straight into the bowels of the construction site, keeping the Glock in the back of his jeans, unwilling to cause confrontation just yet. He was vulnerable to a surprise attack — if the people populating the skyscraper wanted him dead on the spot, they could simply shoot him in the back. They no doubt knew the layout of the site far better than he did.

  It was one of the more foolish moves in military history, no doubt — Slater couldn’t imagine a soldier displaying such insane foolhardiness to stride unprepared into enemy territory. But Slater’s work took place in the strange, muddied grey area of society — no-one knew he was a government operative. He could use susceptibility to his advantage, and he did so now.

  When the twin flashlights lit up the corridor around him, spearing through the darkness and illuminating him where he stood, he didn’t flinch.

  When the twin beams lowered to the floor, casting shadows across the walls and revealing a pair of muscular Eastern European men standing a dozen feet ahead, scrutinising him, he acted like there was nothing out of the ordinary.

  When he noticed the flashlight attached to automatic rifles, he didn’t bat an eyelid.

  He simply stood in place and pretended like he belonged.

  He found that particular gesture worked an uncanny amount of times.

  And when the barrels of the rifles remained trained on the floor, Slater realised he had the window of opportunity he’d been so desperately searching for.

  Simultaneously, it confirmed D’Agostino’s involvement in something menacing.

  A weight lifted off his shoulders. On the trek from the police station to the construction site, doubts had plagued him intermittently, trying to convince him that he’d made an error and killed an innocent man. But, time and time again, he turned back to the image of Ray D’Agostino descending on the cell with a murderous glint in his eyes and a switchblade in his hand.

  That immediately dispelled any thoughts of making a mistake.

  Even if there was nothing at the construction site, Slater felt nothing for killing a man who had tried to take his own life.

  That was the risk one took when dealing with a trained specialist.

  The two Eastern European men advanced, their physiques akin to muscle-packed gorillas. They were both big and burly and their tight jackets strained against their massive arms. Slater figured he would lose an arm wrestle to them.

  But he wouldn’t lose a fight.

  14

  Slater nodded to each of them in turn — they didn’t respond with any kind of acknowledgement, but they didn’t aim their weapons at him either, and that was all he asked for. He stayed on the spot to minimise his own aggression, allowing them to approach instead. If he had to guess, he would have picked them as Dagestanis, but it was hard to discern the difference between the specific regions of Eastern Europe.

  Whatever the case, they were hard, cruel men.

  Slater could see it in their eyes.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ one of them demanded, his accent thick.

  They were the first words spoken since the two parties had laid eyes on each other. The five syllables echoed off the walls, highlighting the isolation of the construction site. They were deep inside the skyscraper now, in unfinished halls, within the vicinity of no-one.

  Lots of room to bury a body in here.

  There was hostility in the man’s tone, and in both their demeanours — that was inevitable. But it wasn’t the kind of unwavering aggression that would result in Slater catching a bullet if he made the wrong move. Instead it was the kind of typical anger and frustration that came with having to deal with an unknown party.

  They thought he was involved with D’Agostino in some capacity. They simply didn’t know how to react to him.

  There was a vast difference between that, and wanting to shoot him dead where he stood.

  Because who the hell would stride willingly into this darkened structure if they didn’t have business within?

  ‘Ray sent me,’ Slater muttered, sending a piercing glare at both men to try and assert dominance.

  At the mention of the police commander, both men twitched. The man on the left — the one who had spoken first — shifted uncomfortably on the spot. ‘He did not mention this.’

  ‘Were you expecting him in the flesh?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Slater said, then cast a glance over his shoulder to sell the performance. ‘There’s been unexpected developments.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Slater beckoned with two fingers, urging the first man forward, as confident as always in his intentions. Sensing Slater’s brashness, the first guy shuffled a couple of steps further toward him. Now they were only half a foot apart.

  Dangerously close.

  Not that the man knew it.

  ‘Someone at the station,’ Slater mumbled, deliberately quietening his voice. ‘They figured out what was happening here.’

  ‘Police?’

  Slater nodded.

  ‘So who are you?’ the first man said, but there was far less hostility in his tone this time. There was genuine concern, unease that law enforcement might be descending on the structure at any moment.

  It was the oldest trick in the book. Slater had subliminally aligned his intentions with the men — even though he had no proof that he was who he said he was, they trusted him because of the mutual threat of being caught. They were united in their involvement in the operation, even though Slater wasn’t involved at all.

  But they didn’t know that.

  ‘I’m the muscle,’ Slater said. ‘Ray sent me to take care of things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The guy at the station, for starters. The one who realised what was happening.’

  ‘This station man,’ the first guy said in broken English. ‘Who?’

  Slater inclined his head toward the floor, hunching forward as if he had secrets to share. The first Dagestani took another imperceptible step in Slater’s direction. Now their heads were separated by mere inches, as if Slater was about to whisper a revelation in the man’s ear.

  And he did.

  ‘Me.’

  15

  It threw the guy off for a second — he hadn’t been expecting Slater to admit that kind of information. He paused for the briefest of moments in time as the gears whirred in his head, connecting the dots and understanding the fact that the stranger in front of him had sinister intentions.

  By that point it was already too late.

  Slater activated all his fast-twitch muscle fibres at once, transitioning from a state of calm to an explosive battering ram that threw everything with murderous intent. He launched a thunderous right hook that scythed through the shadows and connected with every knuckle at once on the side of the Dagestani’s head, drilling into the soft skin right above the man’s left ear.

  Lars’ words proved correct.

  Slater did have a knack for smashing people unconscious.

  The guy dropped with no control of his limbs, folding over like a lawn chair and crumpling into the loose dirt underfoot. The floor of the hallways on the ground level hadn’t been installed yet, and the dirt softened the impact as the first guy went down. As a result, his comrade didn’t notice the sudden explosive shift in atmosphere until his chance of retaliation had dissipated.

  Slater leapt over the first guy’s prone form and transferred all his forward momentum into a jumping front kick that concluded with the heel of his boot crushing into the second guy’s sternum. Hurt but not unconscious, the second guy uttered an uncontrollable grunt of surprise and spiralled into the far wall, the breath stripped from his lungs and the assault rifle stripped from his hands.

  With both guns now on the floor, the light vanished. A thin glow of luminescence filtered along the dirt, but everything more than a few inches above the ground remained shrouded in darkness. Slater could barely make out the silhouette of the second guy bouncing off the half-finished plaster wall, st
umbling for balance in the narrow corridor.

  But one glimpse was all he needed.

  He surged forward and let fly with three consecutive punches to the guy’s exposed torso, using his left fist, then his right, then returning to the left. It only took a little over a second to deliver the three blows, and they sapped what little energy the man had right out of him. He doubled over, and Slater sensed his opportunity.

  Slater dropped the point of his elbow into the back of the man’s head, flattening him into the dirt and transporting him to the same realm as his unconscious buddy a few feet away.

  The corridor became still again.

  Slater’s brain went haywire, immediately assessing the aftermath of the conflict.

  By this point he’d been in enough life or death fights to understand the emotions racing through him. Sure, he was technically an elite black operations warrior, but the chemical cocktail that floods your brain in the aftermath of shocking violence can’t be avoided.

  Slater rested one hand against the half-finished wall of the corridor and took a couple of deep breaths in and out, settling his racing heart. The burst of adrenalin racing through his mind, supercharging his limbs with unnatural intensity, threatened to overwhelm him. He had grappled with it before, but it always took sizeable effort to control.

  And those who could control it won the war.

  His instincts told him to charge straight through the construction site and beat down anyone he laid eyes on. It was his body’s natural response to the fight. There were all manner of ways to try and deny the fact that beating adversaries into the dirt wasn’t intoxicating, but Slater had long ago stopped pretending to ignore it.

  If you can embrace that fact, you can work on taming it.

  In truth, it felt damn good to destroy competition so effortlessly. Slater had spent years of his life toiling away without a day off, slaving his mind and body to their physical limits in MMA gyms and, more recently, state-of-the-art training facilities created by Lars Crawford to develop elite soldiers. He was at the pinnacle of athletic achievement, which made it fairly effortless to gain the upper hand on thugs like the two men at his feet.

  And remaining clinical and measured in the face of such power often proved difficult.

  But Slater was getting the hang of it.

  Even though his brain screamed at him to throw caution to the wind and take off into the bowels of the skyscraper, trying to convince himself that he could overcome any adversity he faced, he allowed the silence to settle back over the hallway. The two flashlights on the ground maintained their thin sheen of illumination — Slater stared at them for a moment, then paced over to the bulky torches and stamped down on each of them. Glass shattered and the lights flickered out, plunging the corridor back into total darkness. It would be foolish to heft one of the enormous devices into one hand and stroll aimlessly through the structure, signalling his presence in the most obvious way possible.

  Instead he embraced the blackness and silently retrieved the two automatic rifles from their last known locations on the floor — they were Kalashnikovs of some kind, a staple on the black market, but Slater didn’t have time to fumble around in the darkness and discern their exact model. He deposited the two cumbersome weapons in a gap between the plaster boards, tucking them out of sight in case the two thugs woke up. Then he slid the Glock 17 out of his waistband, automatically disengaging the trigger safety by resting his index finger against it.

  There was no need to employ trigger discipline in this hostile environment.

  He had seen enough action to employ restraint if he spotted an innocent person. He wouldn’t impulsively fire on anything that moved. But at the same time, he wanted to be ready to retaliate to any violence at the drop of a hat.

  His cover had been blown.

  He didn’t need to blend in anymore. He hoped there wasn’t an army of Eastern European gangsters in this construction site. He hadn’t come here for a war.

  He had come here for answers.

  Then a noise burst through the absolute quiet. Slater picked up the soft sound on the edge of his hearing, and he nearly jolted in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting anything like what he’d just heard.

  The pitiful whimper of a child.

  16

  It had come from the ground floor, filtering through the darkness in the kind of eerie manner ordinarily reserved for horror movies. At any moment Slater expected to follow the sound to its bloody conclusion, but instead of being ambushed by a demonic presence he would find himself embroiled in a vicious war with a party of Eastern European thugs.

  What did you get yourself wrapped up in, D’Agostino? he thought.

  But there was no time to dwell on what could be. Possibilities meant nothing in his field. He needed concrete information, data to see and process and react to.

  So he didn’t think twice about heading straight into the unknown.

  Even though it might result in his life being cut awfully short.

  He hurried further into the construction site, keeping as quiet as he was able, leaving the pair of gangsters behind. They would soon regain consciousness — this wasn’t the movies, and people recovered from being stripped of their senses in seconds — but they would find themselves in complete darkness, free of their weapons, clawing their way around and trying to determine what the hell had happened.

  Slater didn’t pay them a second thought — they might shout for help, but that would work in his favour. He embraced confusion and hysteria. He was one man against an unknown number of hostiles, and anything that turned the tide of panic against his adversaries he would happily accept.

  He took his tentative time ghosting down the corridor. Another whimper floated through the darkness, but this time it was harshly cut off mid-cry. The noise itself was barely perceptible, but the rest of the sob had been muffled, as if someone had clamped a hand over the child’s mouth.

  Slater’s guts twisted into a knot. He never liked involving innocents. He would have given anything to be isolated in this construction site with gangsters and mercenaries and street thugs, free to dish out punishment as he saw fit. Bringing someone who didn’t deserve to die into the equation only ever resulted in disaster.

  But that was how the situation was unfolding, and that was what he would have to deal with.

  It was his job to improvise and find solutions.

  He strained his eyes for any sign of the path ahead — worst case scenario, he would use his phone’s flashlight, which was far less noticeable than one of the thug’s enormous torches. But he glimpsed the faintest outline of a darker space in the left-hand side of the wall ahead. The tiniest shred of illumination from the streetlights far behind him was trickling through the minuscule gaps in the construction site’s exterior, allowing him to barely see the way ahead and make sure he wasn’t about to stumble over an enormous drop.

  He saw the doorway.

  He shifted the Glock into a ready position, and crept straight through into the dark space within. He kept his centre of mass low, hunching over and bending at the knees to minimise the target area any potential hostiles had to work with. He froze only a foot inside the doorway, not making a sound, the couple of footfalls he’d taken to step inside the room producing no noise whatsoever. If there were people a few feet in front of him, they wouldn’t have heard him.

  But at the same time, he couldn’t see them either.

  Patience was steadily becoming Slater’s specialty. Even though he’d utilised maximum effort to beat two men into the ground only thirty seconds earlier, now he poised still as a statue inside the doorway, listening for the slightest hint of human presence.

  He found it in seconds.

  ‘What do we do?’ the child’s voice breathed, only a couple of feet from Slater’s position. The kid had uttered the words in a tone below a whisper, barely vocalising any noise whatsoever.

  But Slater heard it.

  He remained deathly still.

  The kid
had been searching for guidance, expecting answers to his enquiries, wanting someone in a position of authority to lead the way.

  There was someone else here.

  In this room.

  Right next to him.

  ‘Shh,’ another voice breathed in response — this one older, throatier, female.

  A woman.

  The mother?

  Slater didn’t budge an inch.

  ‘Quiet,’ the woman continued, maintaining the same decibel level as the kid, her words almost unnoticeable, even in the absolute silence. ‘I think there’s someone close by.’

  Slater couldn’t stay put any longer. The general atmosphere around him indicated that there were no hostiles. He didn’t think there was another gang of Eastern European thugs in this room — they wouldn’t be able to maintain this kind of silence. Even if they had guns pressed to the child and woman’s heads, they would make noticeable adjustments. They would shift around, or quietly demand the hostages to shut their fucking mouths.

  Slater reached back, moving an inch at a time, and slid the smartphone out of his back pocket.

  He activated the flashlight with the soft tap of a finger.

  Harsh white light speared through the small room and the woman — sitting with her back against the wall right near the doorway — stifled a scream of surprise. To make sure she didn’t follow through with the piercing noise, Slater swung the barrel of the Glock around in a tight arc and jammed it against her forehead, pressing the back of her skull against the wall with just enough force to let her know he meant business.

  In the newly formed light, he bore an icy stare directly into her eyes, silently instructing her to stay completely quiet.