Contracts

by Matt Rogers

  ‘You take,’ she said. ‘I find on road.’

  ‘Could you show me where?’ King said.

  She smiled and shuffled outside.

  King tried to get to his feet to follow, but it took him a moment. Already his muscles and joints had set in place, winding down for the day in a method that came with minor swelling and impediment of movement as his legs set to work gearing up for the next day. So he hobbled a few steps, cursing himself all the way, lambasting his body for uncontrollably showing weakness even though there was no-one around to see it. Then his muscles warmed up and he found some momentum and worked his way up to something resembling a normal gait.

  Slater said, ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No,’ he grumbled. ‘Just sore.’

  He stepped outside and saw the woman down below the concrete patio, already on the trail. She was standing over a cluster of weeds a foot away from the dusty gravel, perhaps thirty feet from the door.

  ‘Here,’ she called out.

  King judged the distance between the living quarters, and the location of the discarded briefcase. It was plausible.

  He said, ‘Thank you.’

  They returned inside.

  She motioned to the briefcase and said, ‘You keep.’

  Slater nodded his appreciation.

  Without prompting, she continued, ‘I no like it.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘It remind me of bad times. I have to clean room where man died. Blood — so much. I never forget.’

  King nodded solemnly. ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘Cart back down mountain. Wrapped up. This place for tourist. No place for body.’

  Slater muttered to King, ‘You should check with Violetta if Winston’s body is getting flown back home. I’m sure his family would appreciate that.’

  ‘Will do.’

  The woman said, ‘You two look very tired. You eat and drink? What you want?’

  ‘Please,’ King said.

  Slater handed over their two empty hiking bottles and said, ‘Water, thank you. We’ll purify it ourselves.’

  ‘Tea?’ she said.

  They both nodded.

  ‘Masala,’ King said.

  ‘Ginger,’ Slater said.

  She sauntered off to the kitchen.

  Neither of them moved. The stress of the day’s travels was still at the forefront of both their minds. King savoured the silence and let the transition to a resting state happen naturally. There would be no confrontation tonight. They were the teahouse’s sole guests. If struggle and battle and conflict would come, it would come way down the line. Briefly he wondered how he’d manage to put up a fight at this level of physical depletion, but that was a problem to be dealt with later. There was no use stressing over it now.

  Slater said, ‘You going to do the honours?’

  King fished the satellite phone out and called Parker.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  Must have been nervously anticipating the call, King thought.

  Parker said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Give me the code.’

  ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘It’s right here in front of me.’

  ‘3057.’

  King reached out and fidgeted with the combination lock until it displayed the correct four digits.

  Then he popped the case open.

  It was empty.

  30

  Slater heard King relay the news, and then the tinny discharge of cursing from the other end of the line.

  Parker droned on for half a minute, and then King said, ‘Understood.’

  He hung up the phone.

  Slater clasped his hands together and said, ‘Where the hell does this put us?’

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ King said. ‘Parker admitted this was all his own fault, thankfully. He said he’ll get in touch with the relevant parties and let them know exactly what’s now out in the open.’

  ‘Does that mean ten HQs are going to have to relocate?’

  ‘Probably. It’s not our problem.’

  ‘It is if they can’t pack up in time before they’re compromised.’

  King slammed a palm on the table, taking Slater aback. When he looked up, there was intensity in King’s eyes.

  ‘I know that,’ King said through gritted teeth. ‘You think this is any easier for me? I’ve always hated this shit. Now that we know the laptop’s missing, I’d rather be back on home soil protecting the hundreds of people that are probably now in danger. But we’re out here, doing this, and we have to stick to it because those are the orders. So let’s go get Raya and then get back home before everything falls apart.’

  ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ Slater said. ‘Not yet. We don’t know how bad it is. For all we know, the file didn’t even save. And even if the laptop’s password-protected, I doubt whoever has it has the software and hardware to get into it out here on the trail. If I had to guess, they’ve got it in their possession, but they’re waiting until they’ve dealt with Raya to crack it. Or sell it to someone who can.’

  ‘That’s just a theory.’

  ‘So is the suggestion that they’ve got into it. They’re all theories. We don’t know for sure. So we focus on the trail, and forget about everything else.’

  King hunched over the open briefcase, staring at the indent where the laptop used to rest. He almost put his head in his hands, but seemed to think better of it.

  Slater said, ‘This changes nothing.’

  ‘There’s too much happening,’ King said. ‘It’s hard to keep track of all of it at once.’

  ‘Get the girl back,’ Slater said. ‘That’s what matters.’

  ‘It’s all well and good to tell ourselves that, but there’s more at play here. I’m sure of it. If Parker has nothing to do with it, I’m convinced he’s still keeping something back from us. None of this makes sense.’

  ‘You’re tired,’ Slater said. ‘Don’t get me wrong — so am I. But now’s not the time to be dissecting all this new info. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now we eat, and rest.’

  ‘I don’t rest well.’

  ‘I know. Neither do I. It’s hard not to overthink this. But it’s what we need.’

  The elderly woman returned with mugs of tea, and placed them in front of King and Slater respectively. She smiled and nodded, the universal gesture of goodwill, and they smiled and nodded back.

  Then a Nepali man stepped inside, emerging from the dark.

  If Slater had to guess, he figured the man was a porter. Small, and serious, with dirt caked into the lines on his forehead. Slater put him at close to fifty, but he could have been thirty. Age and appearance didn’t always correlate out here. Some had harder lives than others. He had a strange complexion, with mottled skin and eyes that bulged out of their sockets. He didn’t blink. He surveyed the scene, and then turned to the host.

  He barked something in Nepali at the woman, who barked back. They were both equally hostile, snapping at each other in tones that no doubt contained thinly veiled insults.

  Then the guy scowled and walked straight back out into the night.

  But before he disappeared, he gave Slater and King a long stare with those unwavering, bulging eyes.

  Then he was gone.

  Slater turned to the woman. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He sometimes come through village. He work for himself. Try to get job on trail. No company to organise. I always say, does not work. But he still try.’

  ‘Tries to get jobs?’

  ‘He always alone,’ she said. ‘He try to find job carry bag. If he get job, no need to give cut to trek company. But no-one trust him with their bag. So he never get job. He only harass … my customer.’

  Slater and King nodded their understanding in unison.

  But, deep down, Slater couldn’t shake the overbearing feeling that something was off.

  He remembered the way the man’s g
aze had lingered.

  He looked at King.

  Who looked back.

  ‘Same deal,’ King said. ‘We don’t know. So there’s no use worrying.’

  They ordered their food, and half an hour later the woman returned with heaped plates of fried rice and dal bhat. They ate in the echoing silence of the teahouse, stewing over where they were, what they were doing, what might happen in the future.

  At least, Slater was.

  He couldn’t see inside King’s head.

  The night enshrouded the building, and it got completely dark, and the clock ticked onward.

  He and Slater tried to make small talk, but it wasn’t their forte.

  The host came to collect the plates, and Slater caught the woman’s eye and said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am. Would you happen to have a knife in the kitchen?’

  She paused. ‘What?’

  ‘A knife,’ Slater said. ‘I’d like to keep one overnight. Just in case.’

  King nudged him in the ribs, but Slater persevered. Sure, they had a couple of switchblades in their packs from the hostiles they’d encountered the previous day, but there was a world of difference between an enormous kitchen knife and a rusting box cutter.

  The woman seemed to have got the message that they were here to investigate the murder. Ordinarily she might have scoffed, but now she shuffled off and came back a moment later with a serrated butcher’s knife made of thick steel. She placed it on the table in front of Slater and raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  He nodded, and took it by the hilt.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ King muttered.

  ‘Am I?’ Slater said.

  She showed them to their rooms.

  31

  In the middle of the night, King tossed and turned in his sleeping bag.

  Wide awake.

  Coated in sweat.

  He’d drifted off for a spell, but it wasn’t obscenely cold yet and the bag was designed for sub-zero Celsius temperatures, so the result was an abundance of body heat trapped within, heating him up until the perspiration ruptured from his pores. He stuck his arms out and stretched them behind his head, clasping his hands together. He stared up at the ceiling.

  There were a thousand thoughts churning, and he figured the constant state of war-readiness in his mind had changed him permanently. Something about that wide-eyed porter set him on edge. In all likelihood, the guy was exactly how the owner had described — an awkward drifter searching for any work he could get on the trail.

  But King’s brain never stopped whirring, so the bugging eyes and intense stare had lodged there, leaving him to mull over the memory.

  He tried to cool down and listened to the roof creaking above his head. Wind battered the side of the building, and he wondered if he was staying in the room Winston had died in.

  The room Oscar Perry had probably strangled him in…

  Don’t assume.

  The wind suddenly intensified, swelling to a crescendo and rattling the pane beside his head.

  King looked across the room. Sure enough, the other bed was empty. He and Slater had opted to take separate rooms this early in the trek. Later on, they’d huddle together in closer quarters for maximum efficiency but right now it’d only draw attention. A pair of grown men sharing a room when every bed in the teahouse was available would stand out from the norm. And until they got close enough to Raya to act, they had roles to play. They were ordinary hikers. Friends tackling a gruelling trek together.

  So King had his gear sprawled across the other mattress, and Slater had the room next door.

  Weak flickers of light spilled in through the window, emanating from white bulbs stationed at intervals along the patio outside. They stayed on all night evidently. King sat up and watched the trail fade away into darkness. Eventually he got sick of it and tried his best to get back to sleep.

  Then he heard a footstep.

  Instinct kicked in. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint where it came from, and there was an overwhelming possibility he was just paranoid, but he leapt out of bed all the same. Dressed in a pair of athletic shorts and nothing else, he padded across the room with bare feet and pressed one ear to the door.

  It burst open in his face.

  The door actually smacked him square in the forehead, coming scarily close to concussing him. As his neck snapped back and he put a foot down to find his balance, the sleek black barrel of an automatic rifle slipped through the newly-opened gap in the doorway. It had been locked, but whoever was on the other side had snapped the weak thing apart with a single charge. King had blocked most of the initial trajectory with his own skull, so even though there were glowing spots in his vision he managed to throw his weight back into the door, hitting it shoulder-first, trapping the gun between the frame and the door.

  Then he calculated angles and figured, Yeah, go for it.

  He threw the door back open and snatched the rifle — a Kalashnikov AK-47 — by the lower handguard and wrenched it, along with its owner, into the room. He was firing on all cylinders, with sheer survival energy coursing through him, and that always translated into uncanny strength, so the guy holding the weapon ended up catapulting forward uncontrollably.

  The man tripped over the threshold and tumbled into the room with shock spreading across his face.

  Amidst the blur of adrenaline, King just managed to recognise that the guy was wearing faded military fatigues before he stabbed down with the ball of his foot an inch above the guy’s ear. He might as well have hit the guy with a steel bat. All the technique and power and nervous energy translated into the mother-of-all impacts, and if the man wasn’t dead he was close to it.

  King snatched up the AK and turned it toward the door and caught two more mercenaries shoulder-to-shoulder, in the process of muscling their way into the room. They had fearsome-looking curved knives in their hands, ready for use in case their comrade with the rifle failed.

  And he’d failed spectacularly.

  But they were out of range. It’d take them a couple of steps to get into the room and another second to swing the blade, and that was time they simply didn’t have because now King had the Kalashnikov aimed squarely at their faces.

  He didn’t hesitate.

  He shot the closer man through the forehead, then put three rounds into the chest of the second man.

  Two corpses toppled backward out of the doorway, and the echo of the gunshots roared down the mountainside.

  32

  Slater vaulted out of bed before his brain even woke up.

  It was instinct — he heard the blam-blam-blam-blam of four unsuppressed reports, which carried the same shock to his system as if someone had hit him in the face with a flaming two-by-four. All thanks to spending half his life behind enemy lines, in places he didn’t belong, in situations where discovery by the enemy meant certain death.

  He’d been wired to treat unexpected gunshots like the end of the world, so he was halfway across the room before he shook off the tendrils of sleep and thought, Oh shit, this is happening.

  The kitchen knife was in his hand. The same instinct had made him yank it out from underneath the pillow when he burst off the mattress. He made it to the bedroom door and threw it open and came face-to-face with three guys crowded in the small space in front of him. It was an alcove in the side of the building, the missing wall exposing the space to the elements. The other two sides were home to another bedroom and a communal toilet.

  The three men were dressed in faded military fatigues and wore shiny black boots on their feet and carried an assortment of weapons — one had a Kalashnikov rifle, the other a pistol, and the third had his hands curled into fists and his teeth bared.

  So, naturally, Slater slit the throat of the man with the rifle and shot a stabbing front kick into the nose of the guy with the pistol. The rifleman dropped, blood spurting from arteries in his neck, and the guy with the pistol staggered back, bleeding from both nostrils, his nose skewered at an odd angle, blinded by the
pain. The pistol was still in his hands, so Slater charged him and slammed him against the opposite door and thrust the knife between his ribs, aiming for the heart.

  He thought he found it, because the guy’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and he dropped the gun. Slater went to pull the knife out, but was met with resistance. The blade was lodged, probably between a pair of ribs.

  Slater abandoned it the moment he saw the last guy swinging for his unprotected head.

  He ducked away and barely avoided a right hook that seemed like it might have taken his head clean off his shoulders if it connected. The soldier clearly had some sort of formal boxing training, because he threw with enough technique to impress Slater. He pivoted at the waist and used the entire kinetic chain of motion, but that only made it worse when the punch missed in such a confined space. He connected with the wall and probably broke a few fingers, judging by the wince that spread across his face.

  Slater kicked him on the outside of the knee, putting his shin into it like a battering ram.

  The guy went down awkwardly into a half-squat, and before he righted himself Slater hit him with a picture-perfect uppercut that cracked off his chin and snapped his head back.

  Somehow, he stayed on his feet, so Slater opened up his hips and swung through with the same shin and connected with the same spot on the outside of the same knee, tearing muscle and ligament.

  Now the guy went down in a heap, and Slater stomped down on his head.

  Crack.

  Silence.

  A meticulous dismantling.

  He took a deep breath, snatched up the AK-47, and went to check on King.

  33

  King let the echo of the gunshots fade before he made his next move.

  The bodies came to rest sprawled across the alcove floor, bleeding from multiple orifices. It was never a pretty sight. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to the sight of life sapping from a human being for as long as he lived. That wasn’t something that ever became normalised. It hit you like a gut punch every single time.