by Matt Rogers
Tyrell started to understand. ‘Naw, man. These are bad people in these photos, ain’t they?’
‘Dwayne’s worse,’ Slater said.
He started recording and touched the blue flame to Myles’ dossier. The paper flared then curled and blackened. Slater dropped the lighter and used the burning folder as a torch to light the rest.
He burned most of Dwayne’s blackmail before the multiple flaming documents lit the broken desk, sending the whole thing up in an inferno. Slater backed up and touched a hand to Tyrell’s chest, instinctually shielding him from the flames. He aimed his phone at the twisting and belching pyre until the flames started to lick the walls. Then he panned to Tyrell, proving the boy was here, giving Dwayne all the motivation he needed to come.
He stopped recording, saving the video, and ushered Tyrell out of the shack.
The flames cast warm light on them in the grey morning, two figures, vastly different sizes.
Slater sent the video to the number Tyrell had given him.
He attached the text message: YOU KNOW WHERE WE ARE.
They turned to face the flames. The mud and the wet air were already stifling the blaze, but the damage was done. The shack would stay standing as the fire fizzled out, swallowed by the swamp, but the blackmail hadn’t survived.
Tyrell said, ‘Man, what have you got yourself into?’
Slater didn’t speak, just slipped a single folded photo into his pocket.
He’d palmed it.
For future use.
65
Barrelling east toward Quincy after dropping Rebecca off outside the lobby of a local hotel, King mulled over the fact he hadn’t told her the truth.
When a kidnapper has a gun to their hostage’s head, it’s too unpredictable.
That was the truth.
No level of combat training or persuasive negotiation skills solve anything unless the kidnapper chooses to take the gun away of their own free will. Nothing more than that. You shoot the kidnapper, they spasm and kill the hostage, especially if their finger’s on the trigger.
He sped faster and faster east, and still had nothing close to a plan.
Dealing with sane kidnappers was hard enough.
This…
This would be impossible.
On the outskirts of Quincy, under a huge heavy island of low cloud that turned everything a shade of steel, King pulled to the side of the road and took his phone out. He dialled Slater. ‘Bad time?’
Slater said, ‘Not yet. About to be.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Marshfield. I can’t talk for long. I just made Dwayne Griggs maybe the angriest man in the country.’
King breathed out. Sometimes the stars aligned. Not often. But sometimes. ‘That’s exactly what I needed.’
‘I’ve got my own problems right now, man. I can’t be worrying about yours.’
‘I need you to keep Dwayne alive.’
‘Keep him alive? You have any idea how badly I just infuriated him?’
‘What’d you do?’
‘Found his precious safe house and burned it. All the dirt he has on the people he bribes, gone.’
‘How does he know?’
‘I sent him a video.’
King said, ‘Listen, I need you. Myles went for Rebecca’s parents.’
‘You let him escape?’
‘He didn’t show. Put two dirty cops in place instead.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘You can guess.’
‘We’re never going to be able to stay in one place, are we? You’re killing cops now. We need to leave Massachusetts behind after this is all over.’
‘They weren’t cops,’ King said. ‘A real cop is a good man, a good woman. They were killers with badges. Outliers. I’m glad I took care of them.’
‘That doesn’t change what I said.’
‘There’s nothing tying any of this to us. Not yet. It all comes down to what happens today.’
‘I can’t predict what’ll happen,’ Slater said. ‘It might be a while before he shows.’
‘I don’t have a while.’
‘You’ll need to. I can’t get him here any faster.’
King mulled it over, realised he actually had as much time as he needed. Everything he’d told Rebecca still rang true. Myles was desperate, pathetic, stuck in limbo. He’d wait. As long as it took for someone to show.
King said, ‘I can lay low until you get it done. But you need to get it done.’
‘Like I needed any more pressure. What do you want from Dwayne?’
King told him.
A long silence played out.
Then Slater said, ‘Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll let you know when it’s going down.’
‘Roger that.’
King killed the line. He left his Dodge RAM where it was. He was only four blocks away from the Templeton residence in Quincy Point. He doubted Myles had more dirty cops willing to guard a psychotic last stand — there was a difference between going after an aggressive enemy and helping hold an elderly couple hostage — but it never hurt to be cautious. So King did what he should have done at the safe house, moving concentrically on foot around the leafy suburban sidewalks until he came to the Templetons’ street.
As he suspected, there was no one.
He slipped down a side path and vaulted into the backyard of a two-storey house, five down from where Myles was holding Rebecca’s parents hostage. Then he moved his enormous frame silently over fences and through shrubbery, finally dropping quiet as a cat into the side alley of the right house.
There was a window cracked open on the ground floor, maybe a dozen feet away, facing the side fence.
King didn’t approach.
He pulled his Glock and waited and listened — something he could do all day and all night, if he had to.
In a game of patience, he’d beat anyone.
It didn’t take long. After a few minutes he caught the whisper of a sound, like the ghost of a whimper. It was muffled by something, maybe a gag, but it drifted out through the crack in the window all the same. King’s senses were firing by then. Nothing in the world mattered except this, so he heard every tiny wavelength in all their detail.
He estimated Myles and the Templetons were ten, fifteen feet from the window.
He dropped to his belly and crawled across the freshly mowed grass, got blades of it in every crevice of his clothes. He made it to the flower bed under the window and squashed all of them by gently lowering his bulk onto the bed.
The Templetons would have to forgive him for that.
He became so still he might as well have been a feature of the side path, indistinguishable from the ground and the walls and the fence.
With the open window directly above him, he waited.
He knew it might take hours.
Maybe all day.
He didn’t care.
66
The first wave came at eleven a.m.
Deep down, in the core of his being, Dwayne Griggs was a spineless narcissist who relied on underlings to take the risks he wouldn’t dare to bear himself. Slater understood people, what made them tick, what burdens they were willing to shoulder.
So it didn’t surprise him that Dwayne didn’t lead from the front.
Bunkered down alone in a tiny hiding hole he’d ripped out of the nutgrass maybe a hundred feet from the shack, at the very tip of the marsh, Slater watched them arrive through the reeds.
They pulled up in a black SUV at the end of the cul-de-sac that housed Slater’s Porsche. Four men leapt out, the driver included, armed with terrifying firepower. Heavy black carbine rifles, gripped double-handed, complete with holographic sights and fat cubic suppressors. State-of-the-art modern weaponry. They were all that breed of hard, calloused man who’d seen the very worst that humanity was capable of. Ex-soldiers, maybe even ex-SF. These weren’t Dwayne’s boys. They were cut from the same cloth as the pair who’d dragged Alonzo into Slater’s hous
e. You could go your whole life without catching a glimpse of them in society because they couldn’t survive there. They could only function at the fringes, where laws didn’t matter because you were in and out before anyone caught a whiff of the deeds you’d done.
They were mercenaries.
Savage mercenaries.
If King and Slater were the yin of black-ops soldiers, these men were the yang.
You couldn’t have one without the other.
They were tactically competent but impatient. One of them slashed the Porsche’s tyres with a serrated combat knife then tucked it away and joined the other three in a tight semi-circle, each of them using their field of fire to pan over a different swathe of South River Marsh.
They opened fire as one.
Slater flattened himself to the marsh and hoped for the best. The odds of being hit were minimal at best, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. Huge suppressors muffled the reports so the wave of gunfire came as a cacophony of demonic spitting. Reeds shredded and dead cypress branches snapped and the swamp swallowed the rounds, the mud eating them alive.
A clump of nutgrass maybe ten feet from Slater’s mud-coated head exploded, chewed up by supersonic lead.
He pressed his face into the mud, felt it fill his nostrils, smear over his lips, squelch against his closed eyelids. With his heart pounding and the fatigue already weakening his muscles, he knew his endurance was shot, and holding his breath became torturous after only a handful of seconds, but he didn’t dare raise his head if the gap between life and death came down to a few inches.
The gunfire ceased, and Slater heard the fast and disciplined chnk-chnk-chnk-chnk of four fresh magazines sliding into four carbines.
He came up for a silent inhale and swallowed a bit of mud along with it.
Braced himself for the next wave of shots.
They didn’t come.
He peeked through a sliver of space between strands of nutgrass and saw the four mercenaries moving through the swamp in the direction of the shack. He’d set up his nest well out of the way, so they wouldn’t stumble upon him, but they barrelled toward the safe house faster than he’d anticipated. They kept their rifles up, sweeping through interlocking fields of fire, but they threw their boots down with no interest in stealth. The mud and dirt squelched and slapped as the weight of their body armour and tactical kit bore down on the ground.
He could take them all now.
Line up his shots, pick them off like sitting ducks.
Then it clicked, and his pulse hammered.
They were ready for that. That’s what they wanted. They were too fast, too loud. No respectable combatant would move so brazenly across open ground.
As soon as Slater opened fire, his position would be exposed to...
The real shooters.
Slater knew what he had to do, but time was scarce. The four mercs in the first wave couldn’t be allowed time to storm around the burned safe house. It was a charred husk of a shack now, but there was something valuable within.
No time for thought. Only action.
Slater didn’t fire on the first wave. He stayed low and circled toward the tree line between the cul-de-sacs, refusing to allow even a square inch of his frame to be visible over the swamp grass. When he made it into the trees he doubled his pace, circling round so he’d come out of the woods at the tip of the cul-de-sac that housed his Porsche and the enemy SUV.
He came up on the real shooters from behind.
There were three of them, all wielding long-range rifles, stretched out on their bellies so they had a clear field of view over the marsh. They hadn’t roared up in an SUV like the first team, who Slater now saw were mere decoys. They’d ghosted in on foot and set up on small rises in the undergrowth, laying their rifles in perfect firing positions. Then they’d lain in wait for the show to begin.
Thankfully, Slater had seen the show for what it was.
Coated in mud from head to toe, like a monster spewed forth from the marsh, he came up on the first sniper nest from behind and grabbed the guy around the throat.
67
The merc tried to shout but all he managed was a meek whimper with Slater’s fingers crushing the soft tissue, digging through his Adam’s apple.
Slater wrenched the guy’s head back. He was a big dude, maybe fifty pounds heavier than Slater, rare for a sniper. Slater visualised Tyrell’s life in danger and used the channelled aggression to cave the guy’s face in with a dropped elbow. He grabbed his head like a bowling ball and smashed it into the stock of his sniper rifle three consecutive times. Then he lay the bloodied corpse down and picked up the rifle.
It was the Marine Corps version of an SR-25 — the MK-11 Mod 0. Slater could still remember all the details. He unconsciously noted its Leupold sight, swivel-base bipod and QD suppressor, all of which added weight to the heavy weapon. The weight was all he was interested in, because he wasn’t about to let the first team know where he was. He hefted the SR-25 like the baseball bat he’d used the night before, and jogged silently over to the second nest.
The second merc saw him coming.
Didn’t make a difference.
The guy looked over his shoulder even though Slater hadn’t made a sound. Maybe it was some primitive connection to his comrade, a sixth sense that signalled something was gravely wrong. Whatever the case, his eyes went wide above the smeared camouflage paint coating his face and he jerked like he was going to do something, but there was nothing he could do.
He didn’t get the chance to reach for his sidearm because Slater used a double-handed grip on the QD suppressor to bring the rifle’s stock down on the guy’s skull.
It put a giant dent in the top of his head, rattling Slater’s arms with the impact, but by now he was immune to pain. The sensation of dislocation rippled through his elbows but he knew they weren’t hurt, they only felt hurt. He brought the rifle down again like a baseball bat, and it was the second impact that killed the guy, caving his skull all the way in.
Slater saw the guy in the third nest rolling over, panicking as he reached for his sidearm, but thankfully this nest was much closer.
Within range of a single lunge.
Slater dropped the MK-11 Mod 0 and leapt over the barrier of undergrowth, all two hundred pounds of his bodyweight coming down on top of the third man just as he rolled onto his back. The sniper had managed to wriggle his pistol halfway free from its holster but Slater’s hipbone crushed the guy’s fingers when it slammed into them. It probably broke a couple of them. Ruined his chances of a competent counterattack.
He opened his mouth to scream and Slater thundered a close-range uppercut with dirty boxing technique. It shot upward through the slim space between them and cracked the guy’s jaw closed, knocking teeth loose. He was about to follow up with endless strikes to the guy’s face when he sensed an opportunity to finish it a touch smoother.
The sniper was panicking, and he bucked underneath Slater to try and get away. It achieved nothing — he only rolled onto his stomach — but it left Slater wearing him like a backpack, and the choke was right there for the taking. Slater locked his arm around the man’s throat and rested his hand in the crook of his opposite elbow…
…then applied pressure.
His pressure was at a different level. Over fifteen years of gruelling and consistent training had broken his tissue down and rebuilt it so many times that his muscles were like corded steel. He wrenched them tight over the sniper’s throat and squeezed for his life, picturing Tyrell’s life in danger. It lent him a surge of extra strength that he didn’t really need because the guy was dead in ten seconds anyway, his throat crushed.
Slater shoved off his limp body and left it there, facedown in the mud.
What he deserved, coming after Will Slater without doing his research.
Slater assessed the damage. The three snipers were brutalised, nullified, and now there was no one to pick off the enemy. The first team that were only supposed to serve a
s decoys could be confronted without the risk of a secondary threat.
That satisfied him, but when he gazed out over the marsh he noticed the four silhouettes were only a couple dozen feet from the shack’s charred roof.
Not good.
He hefted the third sniper’s SR-25 rifle into his arms and sprinted down the slight decline, careening into the marsh like his feet had been set aflame.
68
Rebecca had no control of her mind.
Her brain had run rampant. It was counting how long she’d been sitting in this goddamn chair by the second. She was up to three hours, fifty eight minutes, seventeen seconds. She could tell the four hour mark was going to be ominous, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. While her mind fixated on certain things and overanalysed them, everything else was lost to her. She couldn’t remember the name of this hotel. It was an enormous lobby with ornate furniture and a chandelier overhead that must have cost seven figures, and there were dozens of people streaming between the elevators and the reception desk and the entrance at any one time, so she was ensured anonymity.
King had told her to wait here, so that’s what she’d do.
She was over in the quietest corner, a woman on her own in one of the plush waiting chairs, maybe anticipating the arrival of someone special. No one had looked twice at her.
Her foot tapped restlessly on the hard shiny floor. As consistent as the second hand of a clock, but twice as fast.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap—
She couldn’t do this forever. For the whole four hours she’d been ignoring what rested in her hand. Willing herself not to use it, not to do what her brain was telling her to do.
It was a new smartphone. She’d bought it from the store across the street as soon as King had dropped her here and peeled away.
She knew Myles’ number off by heart.
Why are you doing this? she asked herself. What are you hoping to achieve?
She wasn’t smart enough to understand why, but she was smart enough to know humans were deeply flawed creatures. They do things that make no sense and they somehow convince themselves it’s the right thing to do.
