Dealing in Death: A Death and the Devil Extended Novella

by L. J. Hayward

  My worries and circling thoughts couldn’t be heard over the beautiful noise of a finely tuned engine. Just to chase them further away, I stopped at the gates of the storage facility and, when a gap appeared in the traffic, floored the accelerator and rocketed the Monaro out onto the road. Back end swinging out, she nevertheless responded well and, rear tyres smoking, I charged into battle.

  Pity we didn’t find one for a while, and when Seven finally pinged success with the favour I’d had Nine beg of her, I was nowhere near where it would go down.

  “Cabal tracking system finally hacked,” Seven reported. “GPS location for Two coming in now.”

  Sure enough, my overlay lit up with a map of Sydney and a red dot flashed, indicating Two’s position.

  The Cabal could track us through the implants, but we had never been allowed such access to each other. Any time we’d been required to know where our siblings were, it had been facilitated by the Cabal. Except not anymore.

  “I’m about ten minutes away from him,” Nine sent.

  “Go. I’m twenty minutes out,” I replied. The car was a hinderance in the city traffic, but if Jack was injured I’d rather get him away easily, and relatively more protected, than not.

  As we worked our way towards Two’s position, Seven kept us updated.

  “Shots fired. Police response five minutes out.”

  “Nearly there,” Nine reported, deadly serious.

  “Don’t close with him,” I commanded, even as Seven echoed me word for word.

  Nine just laughed.

  She didn’t make it in time to even have a chance.

  “Damn it,” she growled over the link a couple of minutes later. “Two’s gone and Loverboy’s about to take off.”

  “Follow Jack. I’ll take Two.” I pushed aside the burst of relief at knowing Jack was well enough to ride. A meeting with Two could have gone much worse.

  Two had to be on a bike, the way his tracking dot moved along streets I was having trouble navigating swiftly barely a minute later. I kept on his tail, however, hoping that he might lead me to wherever he was keeping Quinn. If the man was still alive. It all depended on Two’s intentions.

  I was finally starting to close the distance between us as we headed out of the inner city and into the northern suburbs when the tracking dot vanished from my overlay.

  “Seven? What’s happened?”

  “They killed his implant.”

  I nearly drove into the rear end of a bus.

  Nine’s shocked “What the—” devolved into a lot of swearing in Afrikaans.

  The Office had given Jack the option of disabling his own implant when he joined them, and I knew he was mostly autonomous in his use of it. I suspected the Office would have the ability to override the implant, but only in dire circumstances. We Cabal assassins, however, weren’t given any such consideration. Our handler, Zero, could and did access our implants whenever he wished. As could the core leaders. Anything stored on the implants was theirs to see and do with as they wished. Any use we put them to was logged and studied. The Cabal could in turn send location pings at any time to find out where we were—as Seven had been doing with Two.

  I had never known that they could kill our implants remotely, however.

  “They discovered my hack,” Seven responded coolly. “Killing his implant was the only way they could stop me tracking him.”

  “Do they know it was you?” I asked grimly.

  “No. They’re not good enough to do that. They weren’t even good enough to kick me out of their systems.”

  Thus why they took the drastic action they did. Because now, not only could we not follow Two, the Cabal had absolutely no control on him at all—except for the conditioning they had indoctrinated into us, and we had all tested that upon occasion in the past.

  “This is not good,” I muttered.

  Nine snickered. “Because it’s all been roses up till now. Oh shit!”

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Fucking truck tried to drive me off the road. And great, Loverboy’s disappeared into traffic.”

  My pulse stuttered. This was a fine time for Jack to manage to lose Nine. “Keep trying to find him, please.”

  Nine snorted and was silent, apparently concentrating on the search for my errant man.

  While Seven started on hacking into Sydney’s traffic systems in a hope of catching sight of Two that way, I continued a rather aimless search of the area Two had led me into. It was clear I was wasting petrol and the only chance I had of finding Two again was if Seven found him on a traffic camera.

  Then Dejana called.

  I’d routed the phone she’d given me through my implant and I seriously considered not answering, but I doubted this was a social call.

  “Hello.”

  “I need you.” She didn’t sound particularly alarmed.

  “I’m busy.”

  “And I have an AFP team closing in on me. If you don’t wish me to tell them how you aided me in escaping them last time, I suggest you help me now.”

  As Jack would say, I knew this was going to come back and bite me in the arse. If she was caught, not only would she not be able to sever me from the Cabal, but Director Tan would undoubtedly learn of my activities through the AFP, and that would void his agreement with Jack and I would be an open target for the Office once more.

  “Where are you?”

  She gave me the address and hung up.

  Blast it all.

  I braked hard halfway through an intersection and threw the Monaro into a sharp turn. Drivers honked, yelled and gave me the finger out the window, but I was gone in a squeal of tyres and curl of smoke. The huge engine roared as we tore down another street. The address Dejana had given me was not far from where I’d picked her up the other day, and I was already very close to the location, so I was there within ten minutes.

  Dejana wasn’t.

  I lapped the block and when I came past again, I saw her dart between parked cars and wave discretely.

  Discretion was long gone, so I slammed the car to a halt and threw open the passenger door. She dived in and we were away before the door was even closed. As we took a corner fast enough to have Dejana clutching at the door and dash, a large, dark-coloured SUV swung in behind us. It was unmarked, but even if they’d put a large sign on the bonnet saying AFP, they couldn’t have been any more obvious.

  I floored the accelerator and weaved around the cars in front. A red light started flashing in the rear vision mirror as the SUV surged after us. Seeing the light and hearing the siren, civilian cars scattered out of the way of the police, but not as quickly as I was manoeuvring around them.

  It wasn’t a fast chase with the amount of traffic but it took skill to keep moving. Dejana sank low into her seat, bracing against a lot of rapid turns and sudden swerves.

  Ahead I spied an arterial road and made a sharp right to get onto it, only to slam on the brakes. Another AFP SUV barrelled towards us in the middle of the road, lights and sirens allowing them to barge through the traffic.

  Dejana spat something in a language that sounded eastern European, then gasped as I rammed the Monaro into reverse and rocketed us backwards out of the trap. The police that had been behind us had just reached the intersection and angled across it to block our escape. I threw the car into a breakneck reverse one-eighty, the nose of the Monaro clearing the side of the SUV by inches. We came to a shuddering stop parallel to the SUV. With only a narrow space between the back of the SUV and the refuge island in the middle of the road, and the second AFP car coming into the intersection, it appeared that there was nowhere for us to go.

  “Saint,” Dejana said warningly.

  “This isn’t a problem.”

  I waited until the second SUV had come to a stop, then put the car into first and hit the accelerator. The V12 engine exploded into full roar. When I released the clutch the whole car lurched, then I stood on the brake and the drive wheels started spinning in place. Smoke bloomed aro
und the rear of the car, the stench of burning rubber quickly infiltrating the interior of the Monaro. There was movement inside the SUV beside us but no cops emerged, probably wary of entering a situation where they were visually compromised—my precise intent.

  “One-three, I’ve found Loverboy again,” Nine said inside my head. “He’s running east—”

  I blocked the link between myself and my sisters, needing to concentrate on the moment right now. It was a comfort knowing Nine was back in sight of Jack, but until I got out of the current mess, it wasn’t something I could linger on. So I didn’t.

  Calmly, I let the tyres spin against the asphalt until the entire car was wreathed in smoke thick enough I couldn’t even see the SUV outside my window. There may have been shouts from the federal police but the sheer avalanche of sound from the Monaro drowned it out to the point it may as well have not existed.

  “Saint?” Dejana had to yell over the noise.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  She tightened her grip on the seat and pressed back into the leather even further.

  Judging it time, I ceased the burn-out, rapidly shifted into reverse, and floored the accelerator.

  We burst out of the covering smoke backwards, swerved around the second AFP SUV and roared down the arterial road I’d initially wanted to take, facing the wrong way. Thanks to the blockade at the intersection, the lane was empty and I let the Monaro fly. We were several blocks away and starting to encounter traffic again when I slowed, and in a clear spot whipped the car around, bounced over a centre island and took another side street. There was no sign of pursuit. Yet.

  I spent a good while making sure we didn’t pick up any more tails and keeping an eye out for a car I could steal. Staying in the Monaro wouldn’t do us any good now that the AFP had had a good look at it. My eye was on a new silver Ford Mustang when I opened up the link to Nine and Seven again.

  “I’m back,” I sent silently. “What’s happening?”

  “Where the hell have you been?” Nine continued before I could even think about answering. “Loverboy’s not very smart, is he? He thought he was very clever evading me, but then he rode straight into a police blockade.”

  “Is he all right?” Alarm tried to break through but I pushed it aside. Jack needed me clear headed.

  “For now,” Nine muttered. “They’ve got him in the back of a car while they try to decide what to do with the arsenal he was riding with. He had a P90.” That seemed to impress her.

  This wasn’t good. If Jack ended up back in police custody, he would be a sitting target again, and I doubted the authorities would let him go so easily this time.

  “We have to get him out of there,” I sent. “Where are they?”

  Thankfully Nine didn’t argue with me and as I headed for her, we worked out a quick and dirty plan. When we reached the scene, I stopped the car well back from the intersection at the bottom of the off ramp from the highway. The red Suzuki motorbike pulled up beside the Monaro moments later. Nine and I surveyed the situation, refined our plan and when it was done, I eased the car forward and into the intersection.

  The police were too busy cataloguing the weapons Jack had been carrying to notice the car, so I revved the engine. That got their attention. I revved it again, longer and harder. The whole car vibrated around us. One of the police officers gave orders to the others, then started to approach, one hand on his gun, the other held up as if he could stop me physically. I let the Monaro answer his demand.

  “What are you doing?” Dejana asked.

  “Finishing what I started before you interrupted me.”

  She was quiet for a moment then said, “If you get me to my exit point by eight p.m. I’ll transfer the rest of your money free of charge.”

  At this stage getting my money was the least of my worries. “And you will facilitate my complete severance from the Cabal.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  I nodded. “Good. Now get into the backseat and stay down.”

  Dejana gave me a wide-eyed look but clambered into the back. “Now what?”

  “Brace yourself. This is going to be fun.”

  Driving calmed me. Driving fast around a racetrack centred me as few other things could. Driving fast while dodging traffic and evading dogged pursuit was pure bliss. The decisions were immediate, the moves ingrained in muscle memory, everything was physics and mechanics and spatial cognition. It didn’t need emotion or personal awareness. It was simple.

  And it was definitely fun.

  Six of the cops took the bait and followed us in three cars, leaving behind only two officers and the car holding Jack for Nine to deal with. Easy odds for her. The strength of the pursuit, which came to include two more cars as we raced westwards on the highway, had to be thanks to our earlier encounter with the AFP. They had undoubtedly given the description of the Monaro to the city police, who took the chase very seriously.

  So seriously, in fact, it took me a good hour to shake them long enough for us to ditch the Monaro in an empty industrial yard, set it on fire, steal a mid-sized SUV, and drive sedately away like any other law-abiding citizens.

  All the while, Dejana’s only concern was the time it ate up. Her exit point was a small, private airstrip just west of Wollongong, nearly two hours drive south of Sydney. It would be tight, but I was certain we would make it in time. She wasn’t the only one with a deadline tonight.

  Nine sent a message that Jack was safely away from the police and, at her best judgement, back within the security of the Office. She ended it with the observation, “Great ass and some okay moves, but he’s not very bright, is he?”

  We ditched the second stolen car of the day—an old Honda hatchback—a couple of blocks away from the new storage unit and walked the rest of the way. I wasn’t worried that it would lead the police here. After tonight, I wouldn’t need it anymore. One way or another.

  “Now this,” Dejana murmured appreciatively when she saw Victoria, “is the style I expected from you, Saint.” She ran a hand along the smooth lines of the Vanquish and made a low humming sound in the back of her throat.

  “I’m glad you approve. Get in, we don’t have much time to spare.”

  The drive out of Sydney was tedious thanks to evening traffic, but when we hit the highway going south, Victoria got to unleash herself on a much more open road. The Monaro had performed amazingly and I would miss it somewhat, but nothing beat the pure symphony of a finely crafted, high-powered supercar. Even Dejana melted into the leather seat and sighed contentedly.

  We encountered no obstacles and drove through the gates of the airfield with three minutes to spare. A small twin prop plane was on the tarmac, propellers spinning.

  “Thank you, Saint,” Dejana said as she opened Victoria’s door. “I do appreciate everything you’ve done for me over the past weeks.”

  I acknowledged her sincerity with a nod. “How long will it take you to do what you promised?”

  Dejana opened her mouth, then shut it and after a moment shrugged. “I’ve never had to facilitate something so unusual. It can be done. I have . . . leverage with certain elements involved. It may take a month, maybe several. I’ll let you know when it’s done by transferring the money from the final Swiss account. The rest of your transfers were finished this morning, free of charge.”

  “Thank you.”

  She got out and walked over to the waiting plane. Once she was safely inside and the plane’s engine was winding up further in preparation for take-off, I backed Victoria off the tarmac, turned and left the airstrip.

  If I pushed the speed limits on the way back to Sydney, I would make it in time to catch Two at the Cenotaph before Jack.

  I didn’t make it.

  Nothing more sinister than the usual Sydney traffic evils held me up, but it was enough.

  “Where are you?” Nine demanded right on ten p.m.

  “Nearly there,” I ground out, swerving around a lumbering truck.

  “Doesn
’t matter, you’re too late.” She heaved a sigh. “Loverboy’s winging it. Like I said, not very bright.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes. Please, do what you can to keep Two away from Jack.”

  Nine groaned. “You owe me peppermint crisp tart every week for the rest of your life.”

  “Done.” All things considered, it was an easy promise to make.

  Five minutes later, idling on Pitt Street, I could see things hadn’t gone according to plan. A pair of shadowed figures fought close by the dark bulk of the war memorial. They were unmistakably Nine and Two. I couldn’t see Jack anywhere and hoped he was well away from danger but didn’t bank on it. That wasn’t Jack’s standard operating procedure at all.

  Spinning Victoria’s steering wheel, I turned directly into the pedestrian mall and floored it.

  At the Cenotaph, Nine delivered a powerful kick to the back of Two’s knee. He buckled but turned it into a roll and came up on his feet. Only to jerk back, the faint echo a gunshot barely audible over Victoria’s roar. Jack stepped out of the shadows by the Cenotaph, gun up—and right into Victoria’s path toward Two.

  Thankfully, Jack dived out of the way as I slammed her into handbrake turn, aiming for Two. Her rear fender hit him with a satisfying thump and he flew backwards, hitting the ground hard. Hopefully it was enough of an advantage for Nine to get the upper hand.

  Leaning over, I opened the passenger door. “Jack! Get in.”

  “We need to secure Toomey.” Jack prowled around Victoria, heading for the spot Two had been, USP up and ready.

  “Jack, leave him.” My plan had failed but I wasn’t about to let Jack risk himself unnecessarily. “Nine will take care of him. Let’s go.”

  The stubborn oaf hesitated, then continued on. “Toomey! Drop your weapons and show me your hands.”