by Matt Rogers
‘How far upstairs?’
‘We got taken up there. Right at the start. I think seven or eight floors up. They have it all set up flawlessly. I saw three different families. Women and children. So six total. I’m the only person kidnapped with two kids. It’s probably logistically harder.’
‘You’re good at feeding me information,’ Slater noted.
‘My husband’s a lawyer. Will, you need to—’
Slater got to his feet and stared at one of the discarded Kalashnikovs in the doorway — an AK-15, he noted, now that he was illuminating the room with the phone flashlight. It struck him as odd that the Eastern European thug who had fled the room moments earlier hadn’t picked up one of the assault rifles and drilled a cluster of rounds through the back of Slater’s head whilst he’d been distracted.
But the room would have been pitch dark, and Slater had already punched the guy’s nose into the back of his skull, so he certainly hadn’t been thinking straight. He would have got to his feet and hurried straight out of the room, as quiet as he could.
To raise the alarm.
Slater realised he needed to move, just as Theresa had demanded. When the thug reached the top floor and informed his friends that the three gunshots they’d heard earlier hadn’t been their imagination and that there really was a trained hostile inside the building, all the other families being kept in the skyscraper would be placed in danger.
Who knew what a pack of unhinged guns-for-hire would do when their operation was in jeopardy?
Slater didn’t want to find out.
He needed to get the jump on them before they could do anything brash.
Already drained from the energy he’d exerted so far, he clambered to his feet and tightened his grip on both the Glock 17 and the smartphone’s flashlight.
Taking a deep breath, he muttered, ‘Be right back,’ and plunged straight into the unknown.
20
Expecting confrontation right off the bat, he found himself somewhat surprised to find the ground floor devoid of life. He raced through unfinished hallways and ducked under dirty steel beams, largely unsure of where he was headed, left with almost no information about what he would be running into.
He’d never been this unprepared in his life.
He’d elected to leave the Kalashnikovs behind — in such close quarters he preferred the ease with which he could wield a Glock. Not that it mattered, anyway. He spent the entire duration of the sprint strangely certain of his own impending death. The icy terror settling over him did nothing to calm his heart rate — his operations for Black Force had been pulse-pounding to date, but nothing like this.
He was heading up the stairwell of a half-finished skyscraper in the freezing cold, armed with a pistol, tasked with eliminating a small army of Eastern European thugs who had three innocent families to use as hostages and human shields.
Teeth chattering — he told himself it was the cold — he reached the barren stairwell after only twenty seconds of racing through the building’s ground floor. He stared up at the gaping maw above, unnerved by the scale of the spiralling vertical tunnel. It consisted of a giant rectangular space spearing up toward the night sky far above, running through largely unfinished levels of the skyscraper’s bottom half. The open air provided a little more natural light to work with — everything was shrouded in a dark blue hue instead of consumed by complete darkness. There was nothing to shield a fall through the central tunnel of the stairwell — no barricades, no walls. Just an eight-storey cylinder of open space riddled with the occasional stretch of scaffolding.
Slater hurried straight up the concrete stairs without a second thought.
There was no sign of activity. He doubted the Eastern Europeans would have sentries manning the access points — they didn’t seem like they had that level of intelligence. They would be in panic mode, debating what to do about the unsuppressed gunshots from below just as their comrade came racing into sight with his face caved in and blood pouring out of his nose, warning about a single intruder tearing through their forces.
They might not believe him.
Good.
Slater would take all the hesitation he could get.
The desolation of the construction site leeched through the atmosphere — Slater figured the three gunshots would have simply sounded like a car backfiring from out on the street. The structure was gargantuan, no doubt intended to act as the home for a giant corporate firm upon completion. But evidently the builders had gone into liquidation, or the developers had run out of money, or any number of problems had cropped up that were common in the corporate world.
As he raced up the stairs with the cool night air on his face and the barren concrete walls dwarfing him on all sides, Slater began to connect the dots.
D’Agostino’s connections with the city council might have notified him about this place. He could have subtly swept the building’s documents under the rug, pretending to pass them along the supply chain but in fact hiding all knowledge of the abandoned construction site’s existence. Then he would be free to use it as he pleased, not having to worry about the council seizing the land.
Sometimes it paid to hold a position of authority.
You could get away with murder.
If Slater thought his heart was racing earlier, he wasn’t prepared for the fatigue that set in as he reached the eighth floor. He’d covered the distance in record time, and for the first time in the field he found himself locked in a battle of willpower with his own mind. He’d heard of the concept of an adrenalin dump, but he hadn’t fully experienced the sensation until now. The fighting on the ground floor had sapped him of all his strength, requiring one hundred percent of his maximum output in the desperate battle for survival.
Now he fought the urge to sit down and recharge his internal batteries — there was no time for that. His experiences in the field thus far had been populated by brief, all-out explosions of violence, with long uninterrupted stretches of nothingness between them. He had never been forced to leap from confrontation to confrontation so fast.
You learn something new every time, he thought.
Mustering what little energy he had left, he prepared himself for what he would find on the eighth floor. Conflict was inevitable, and he steeled himself as he reached the open concrete walkway that the stairwell levelled out onto.
The skyscraper was supposed to spear fifty or sixty storeys into the sky, but construction had ground to a halt on the ninth or tenth floor. Everything above Slater now was nothing but a twisted amalgamation of scaffolding and supports, some of them having already collapsed after months of disuse.
The stairwell had reached its conclusion.
He took a gulp of air, tasting the crisp Chicago night, and then ducked straight through a giant open doorway set into the concrete perimeter wall of the stairwell, leaving the vast vertical tunnel behind. He entered the familiar maze of a half-finished project, skirting around exposed supports and sticking to what little flooring had been erected before the builders had abandoned the site.
At one point he glanced through a grid of steel beams alongside him and blanched at the dizzying drop. Falling through one of the cracks would result in disaster.
Great.
Another thing to seize his attention.
He battled with a wave of conflicting emotions — half of Slater’s brain screamed at him to slow down, take his time, approach the situation with focus and discipline, whilst the other half urged him forward, pleading with him to speed up to avoid the risk of the families being murdered before he reached them. If he went too slow, and stumbled across a massacre that he could have prevented, he knew he would never be able to forgive himself.
So he sped up.
Even though it was detrimental to his own safety.
He couldn’t allow his own arrival to result in the deaths of all the innocents in the site.
Theresa’s estimation ran through his mind. Roughly six or seven hostiles left. Three
families, six innocent people total — three women, three children. All wrenched from their homes because of the insider information a bent central district commander had managed to acquire.
D’Agostino, you piece of shit.
Slater heard voices.
Dead ahead.
No time for thought.
Only action.
He raised the Glock, pulse pounding in his ears, heart racing, fatigue seeping in, and powered straight around the corner, ready for anything.
21
They’d heard him coming.
As soon as he burst into the open, rounding the L-shaped bend in the corridor, a blast of air washed against his left cheek. Ordinarily the sensation would mean nothing, but Slater understood exactly what it signified.
A bullet had just come within inches of blowing his face apart.
He recoiled instantly as his own recklessness hammered home. In his last three operations he’d become increasingly brazen with every passing altercation. There was something about being able to react faster than anyone you ran into that made him charge forward with a certain unhinged temperament. Now it had almost cost him his life. Usually he would have rounded the corner and let off a series of shots with the Glock before anyone had even realised he was there, but these men were a class above the common criminal.
Whatever the case, Slater ducked straight back out of sight. Both guys had their weapons trained on the space he’d been occupying a second earlier. Their buddy must have warned them that he was coming.
Heart pounding, he steadied his grip on the Glock and prepared for a close-quarters firefight, something he considered himself excellent at.
But then the two henchmen got greedy, and Slater realised it would be even easier than that.
He heard them barrelling down the hallway toward him not long after he’d ducked out of sight. He figured they were both charging recklessly, probably figuring they could capitalise on his retreat.
Did they really think he was fleeing with his tail between his legs?
They must have expected to send a couple of rounds through his back as he ran away. They hadn’t prepared for the fact that Slater was a seasoned professional, and although it might have appeared that he’d turned and run away, he was in fact positioned only a couple of feet around the corner.
So when the first guy — a bulky, six-foot-three Eastern European man with the standard shaved head and sturdy jawline — exploded into sight, Slater put him down with a pair of well-placed shots to the centre mass.
He was a little more accurate, and a little more prepared, than his adversaries.
The twin blasts from the Glock ripped through the top of the construction site, blending with the howling wind seeping through the cracks in the exterior. The first thug dropped like a stone as he took two lead projectiles to the chest, rupturing his internal organs and freezing his mad charge. His legs gave out from underneath him and he started to topple, but not before his friend bringing up the rear of the procession crashed straight into him.
Slater couldn’t quite believe his luck.
The second guy tripped over the first and tumbled head over heels across the bend in the corridor. He kept an admirable grip on his weapon — an identical Kalashnikov AK-15 no doubt purchased in bulk from the same supplier — but he didn’t get a chance to use it. Slater put a third round straight through the side of the head, taking somewhat more of a risk by targeting the tiny surface area whilst the target was on the move.
But he had momentum on his side.
The shot drilled home.
Both of the gangsters went down in an uncontrollable heap, bleeding from three separate bullet wounds spread across two bodies. Slater didn’t spend a moment admiring his handiwork, or even making certain that both hostiles were dead. They were out of commission, and wouldn’t pose him any problems, so he instantly forgot about their existence and hustled straight back around the corner, maintaining the same frenetic pace he’d sported earlier.
Because now the bulk of the thugs knew he’d reached the top floor, and they would be prepared to defend their operation with their lives.
Good.
Slater wouldn’t give them the chance to surrender anyway.
As he entered a new, unimpressive, half-finished stretch of corridor, he knew immediately where the rest of the gangsters were. He could hear their frantic shouts, the short panicked commands in Russian, and above that the sudden screams of hostages.
Where?
Slater zoned in on a section of the eighth floor that branched off from the hallway he was racing down, spiralling to the right through another unfinished, open doorway. Based on a rough estimate, he figured he was getting close to the front of the construction site. He imagined a wide concrete expanse devoid of furniture or decorations of any kind, exposed to the elements, lacking a roof. He painted a vivid picture of the setting in his mind, because he would need every available millisecond to react once he made it to the final hurdle.
It all came down to this.
Could he perform?
He didn’t know. He simply didn’t have a clue. The Glock in his palm seemed like an extension of his own body, and his senses had never been more tuned to the present moment, but all the skill in the world couldn’t overcome five or six gun barrels pointed in his direction. And he couldn’t hesitate — there was almost nothing separating the hostages from death. The thugs would no doubt have a contingency plan in place — eliminate the cumbersome innocents with shots to the head, destroying the collateral, and then flee.
They might be enacting it right now.
So Slater didn’t think twice about his own life. He couldn’t. Acknowledging the fact that he would have to willingly make the same move that had almost got him killed twenty seconds ago, he raised the Glock to shoulder level and sprinted straight through the open doorway, all the neurons in his brain firing on full alert.
Go time.
22
The first incoming shot hit him in the soft flesh on top of his left hand.
In fact, it didn’t sink home. It simply grazed past, taking most of the skin off in a thin line, sending specks of blood flying back into Slater’s own eyes. Despite the screaming nerve endings and the sudden hot burst of agony and the shock to his system as he realised he’d been hit, he kept his composure. Eyes darting in ten directions at once, he surveyed the scene at the same time as the bullet sliced across his hand and passed him by.
The expanse certainly was concrete, and it certainly was devoid of furniture or obstacles of any kind, and it certainly didn’t have a roof — all the things he’d conjured up in his mind’s eye before entering the room. It was a giant grey bowl, with half-completed walls and a couple of empty rectangular holes in the far wall looking out over the urban Chicago street. Construction had ceased before window panes had been put into place. Wild activity was taking place in every corner of the room at once — burly men hauled small children and cowering women off the dusty floor, urging them to their feet as fast as they could, preparing them for movement.
Too late.
Slater had arrived.
He counted five remaining men at first glance, all carbon copies of each other. It made sense — living in squalor amidst an ageing construction site, they probably employed the same daily routines. All five of them were pale-skinned and sported identical buzzcuts. They were all built like tanks, either a byproduct of their profession or an attempt to stay in shape whilst laying low. They all seemed to originate from the same region — inductive reasoning pegged them as Eastern European, considering everyone he’d dealt with so far sported the same ethnicity. Even from a single glance he could see coldness in their demeanours — these were harsh, cruel men, accustomed to fighting for survival and making a living however they could. They would have served D’Agostino well, and none of them would understand the concept of surrender.
They wouldn’t even consider it.
Slater weighed all this up in a split second. Next h
e assessed the nearest hostiles — he quickly determined that the man who’d shot him was the same guy whose nose Slater had shattered downstairs.
In the carnage, Slater had almost forgotten the fact that his own nose was broken, too.
This man was the closest, and his Heckler & Koch sidearm was raised to shoulder height in anticipation for Slater’s arrival. As far as Slater could tell, none of the other four thugs had bothered to line their aim up with the open doorway. They all had bulky rifles swinging off shoulder straps, but they were uniformly preoccupied with the hostages.
Done.
Situation processed.
All in the time it took for blood to spray off Slater’s hand and into his eyes.
Black Force recruited those with phenomenal reaction speeds for a reason.
Because in situations like these, when the odds were horrifically stacked against Slater, he could still come out on top.
He turned and blasted two shots in the direction of the guy with the broken nose. Both struck home, punching twin holes in the man’s forehead, and the guy folded over unnaturally as important neural connections were destroyed by lead. Slater ignored him, deploying a mental tally mark to indicate a neutralised enemy, and maintained his mad pace deeper into the room.
Now, two of the remaining four started to react to the gunshots. Slater was locked in a tunnel, zoned in on anything that lay in front of him with zero regard for any other aspect of his consciousness. He’d experienced the feeling a couple of times before, and it was difficult to properly articulate how everything clicked, but he transitioned seamlessly from one millisecond to another in a way he couldn’t understand. Everything was streamlined. All the stars were aligned.
He was ready.
Ignoring the blood pumping out of his left hand — he barely even noticed the injury had happened, and perhaps wouldn’t have realised at all if not for his own blood spraying across his face — he wrenched the Glock’s aim from hostile to hostile, laser-focusing on the two men raising assault rifles in his direction. With barrels heading his way, he knew he could fire at will without any risk of wild shots hitting the hostages. If the two thugs were going to impulsively pull their triggers in their death throes, the bullets would hit Slater instead of the hostages.
