Ciphers

by Matt Rogers

  ‘Elevator.’

  King turned to Slater and said, ‘Elevator. Now.’

  Slater didn’t hesitate for a moment. He lurched forward, threw the front door open, raced out into the corridor and disappeared from sight.

  Just before he vanished, King saw him reaching back for the Colt in his waistband.

  King doubled back into the kitchen, yanked one of the drawers open in the kitchen island and came out with a Sig-Sauer P320. It was a weapon he’d become intimately familiar with during his time in Nepal, and after surviving against a horde of Maoist insurgents from the foothills using the very same handgun, he’d kept one in his kitchen as a backup plan in case his home was ever breached. Now he pivoted and raced to offer Slater backup, keeping the phone pressed to his ear the whole time.

  ‘How many?’ he said as he sprinted out the front door.

  Violetta started to answer, but she was cut off by gunshots from her end of the line.

  The call went dead.

  Then more gunshots blared outside the apartment.

  King tucked the phone away, lurched to a halt outside his penthouse and surveyed the scene.

  He needn’t have bothered with the backup.

  Sometimes he forgot who Will Slater was.

  There were four bodies against the far wall of the elevator, its metal walls now drenched in blood. They were all men, their faces masked by balaclavas and their torsos clad with body armour. They were dressed in casual-wear underneath the Kevlar vests — denim jeans, and button-up shirts rolled past their forearms. That way they could blend in as they approached the building on foot. More importantly, there were Heckler & Koch G36C compact assault rifles in their hands. None of them had the chance to fire a shot. Slater had been waiting there, zoned in like a madman, and he’d put a bullet in each of their skulls before the four of them could blink. He was standing over them now, panting with adrenaline, checking each corpse for signs of life.

  His back was still turned to King.

  King said, ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  It was all that needed to be said. Neither of them were in the mood for prolonged conversation anymore. The stakes had become horrifically real. There were people coming to kill them. It wasn’t a foreign sensation for either of them, but it never failed to put them in a savage mindset.

  Because, at the end of the day, that’s what they were.

  Savages trying to stay alive in a brutal world.

  King heard something. The clatter of a footstep, echoing off concrete walls. Coming from behind him.

  The stairwell.

  He called to Slater, ‘Gun. Now.’

  Slater understood. He darted into the elevator, picked up one of the G36C rifles, twisted and threw it underhand down the carpeted hallway. King tucked his Sig Sauer into his waistband and, a moment later, caught the rifle double-handed. He made sure the thirty-round magazine was locked and loaded and ready to go, then pivoted toward the stairwell and thundered a boot into the door frame.

  Perfect timing.

  He caught a man on the other side of the door as it swung into the stairwell, awkwardly pinning the assailant in place, halting his momentum. The guy shouldered it back in King’s direction, but by then King had the advantage. He threw his full weight into the door and sent the man tumbling off his feet. Then he stepped into the narrow gap created in the doorway and brought the G36C up to his shoulder and seized hold of the foregrip and took careful aim and pulled the trigger.

  Put three rounds into the guy’s throat, because he was wearing the same Kevlar vest as his buddies in the elevator.

  The rounds tore through his neck and killed him instantly, and the momentum sent him toppling back over the railing. He plummeted into darkness.

  King swept the barrel over the rest of the spiralling stairwell and found three men racing up toward him. Two of them had already drawn a bead on him with HK rifles of their own.

  Move.

  King fell back, reacting in a split second, his brain firing on all cylinders. His reflexes barely saved him. Rounds tore up through the stairwell and shattered the plexiglass window of the door beside him. He landed on his rear in the corridor and vaulted backwards, using his own momentum to roll to his feet.

  Behind him, he heard Slater snarl and charge forward.

  Slater tore past him, dropped to one knee, leant round the corner, and unloaded the ammunition of another stolen G36C into the stairwell.

  19

  King probably thought Slater had elected to spray-and-pray, but he was far from the type to throw caution to the wind unless it was absolutely necessary.

  He’d fetched one of the compact HK rifles off another body in the elevator, and as soon as he’d turned around to help, he’d seen King tumbling back out of the stairwell amidst a wave of gunfire.

  So he’d sprinted forward, putting his own wellbeing aside to protect his closest friend. It was second nature for both of them. If they couldn’t rely on each other in the pulse-pounding heat of war, they were as good as dead. He was now in the line of fire, as close to death as humanly possible. And some small part of him relished it. He was maximally alive, filling a doorway that could be riddled with bullets at any moment. Focus like this simply wasn’t possible without external stimuli — in this case, a stairwell filled with armed hostiles looking to pump lead into him until he flatlined.

  So he zoned in and aimed and fired. He took the utmost care with his shot selection, even though a couple of bullets missed him by mere inches the moment he stepped into the doorway. He ignored them — they hadn’t struck him, and therefore they didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except—

  Aim.

  Fire.

  He killed one man, then a second, then a third. Bodies collapsed against walls and blood flecked the concrete. The gunfire was deafening in the stairwell. Every unsuppressed shot sounded like a bomb going off. Slater temporarily lost his hearing, but he didn’t need hearing.

  Just sight.

  A fourth man tried to leapfrog his buddy’s corpse a couple of flights down. But he was jumpy and nervous and deafened, and he certainly hadn’t been expecting a firefight in such a tight enclosed space. He’d seen his coworkers die, and if this was a mercenary force then the guns-for-hire had probably been working together for years. Even if you had no morals and sold your soul to the highest bidder, you still formed connections with your fellow brothers-in-arms.

  Even the bad guys have attachments.

  Slater knew that all too well. Which explained why the fourth man panicked and stumbled and tripped over his friend in his haste to get upstairs. He was probably angry, trying his hardest to get his hands on the men that had killed his friends.

  He didn’t get the chance.

  Combat is a ruthless game.

  When he tripped and fell forward and splayed across the cold stairs, Slater didn’t show him mercy. Instead he shot the man through the top of his head with a single well-placed round from the G36C.

  Not the movies, he thought.

  No time to consider taking prisoners and debating what to do with them for hours on end.

  No, this was the real world, and in the real world, you focus on just one thing when there’s bullets coming at you.

  Survival.

  Four men dead. A fifth lay at his feet, shot by King before Slater had even got to the stairwell.

  The coast was clear.

  Slater moved like an automaton, going through the motions in the only way a man well-accustomed to putting his life on the line could. The usual reaction to getting shot at by automatic rifles and winning a close-quarters skirmish against nine men across an elevator and a stairwell would be to collapse in pure ecstasy, in disbelief that you’d survived. But Slater didn’t do that. Instead he stepped back into the carpeted hallway and found King striding toward him with a collection of spare magazines for the G36C rifles.

  King tossed three over, one by one, and tucked two of his own three into his waistband. Then
he reloaded with the one in his palm.

  Slater did the same.

  They didn’t say a word to each other. They slotted full magazines into their weapons and focused on bringing their heart rates down and waiting for their hearing to return. Both outcomes happened, one after the other. First the heart rate slowed, then the tinnitus faded. They looked at each other and nodded once, silently coming to an agreement.

  The stairs.

  Not the elevator.

  They had more opportunities to survive if they took the manual way down. Sure, the elevator would be faster, but if there were more mercenaries waiting for them in the lobby, it would come down to fifty-fifty odds when the doors slid open. A Wild West gunfight. First to shoot, wins. They’d probably win, given their unnatural reflexes, so it wasn’t exactly fifty-fifty, but if they had the ability to avoid such a tense showdown they might as well.

  They wordlessly agreed on the best course of action, and set to work executing it. Slater turned and kicked the stairwell door open again and aimed his HK rifle down the three flights in his field of view. Then he whistled softly.

  Clear.

  King ran past.

  Descended those three flights of stairs, keeping his rifle trained on the space in front of him the whole time, and then took up position at the edge of Slater’s field of view.

  King whistled softly, too.

  Slater ran to King, then swept down three more flights as King stood still as a statue, ready to provide covering fire as soon as he was needed.

  Six flights covered.

  Seventy-four to go.

  Utilising the same tactic, they crept down the skyscraper’s core.

  20

  King had a premonition that he’d be the first to reach the ground floor.

  He hadn’t done the math — really, there was no way he would focus his attention on something so banal when there could be mercenaries swarming into view at any moment — but he had a gut feeling.

  And he was right.

  Violetta was here somewhere. The last thing he’d heard from her end of the line was gunshots. He hadn’t been able to ascertain whether she was the instigator, or the one getting shot.

  That’s what made him slip up. He was desperate to know. He and Slater acted like automatons in combat, but the human brain is a fickle bitch. Even the most hardened soldiers are still human. He could be blessed with all the talent in the world, but he still had emotion. And emotion makes you dumb. Not that anyone observing might have known the difference. He was still moving like a freight train, his guard up, his rifle aimed at the dead space in front of him. He stayed constantly in motion as he reached the bottom of the stairwell, creeping out into the lobby as he swept the barrel from one corner of the mammoth space to the other.

  He noticed several things at once.

  They all hit him, one after the other, like electric shocks to the brain.

  First, the body.

  He knew the night guard, Malcolm. The guy was close to fifty, with a wife and three kids in Brooklyn. Rapidly approaching the twilight years, but still in decent shape. He was ex-army, having served what he labelled a “long and unimpressive career” before being released into society to fend for himself. A security gig in a building like this paid handsomely, and he must have stood out from the pack somehow, so King had always doubted the man’s career was as dull as he claimed. From what he could tell, Malcolm was a man with a tremendous work ethic and a firm moral compass, who stayed true to his word even if it made him uncomfortable. All the qualities King admired. He’d even invited the guy up to his penthouse for a few beers over dinner just a couple of months ago. They’d talked for hours, and King had managed to skirt around the finer details of his career the entire time. He recalled liking Malcolm. There weren’t many security guards as self-disciplined and honourable as he was.

  And now the man was dead. Lying facedown in a pool of his own blood on the marble floor of the lobby, maybe a dozen feet from the big reception desk. The light was still low in the lobby, accentuating the shadows, and the crimson had a surreal glint to it.

  That’s where the emotion came into play.

  King registered the sight of the corpse, and realisation rippled through him, and he hesitated for a fraction of a second.

  Just long enough for the two remaining mercenaries to get the jump on him.

  One of them materialised from behind a column, along with Violetta. The guy wasn’t wearing a balaclava. He had sandy red hair and a hint of stubble and a pale freckled face. Irish, probably. He had a burly exposed forearm around Violetta’s throat. It was rippling with muscle. Her long blond hair, ordinarily smooth as silk, was now slick with sweat. Her face showed fear, but her eyes were coolly detached. They glowed, blue and intense in the dark. The redhead had a gun pressed to her head, but she wasn’t hyperventilating, or even panicking.

  She was ready.

  But King wasn’t. Because the second merc stepped in from the left, emerging from the shadows, and trained his weapon on King from the side.

  King froze in place. Just enough of his torso was exposed. He was half-in, half-out of the stairwell. He’d been capitalising on the momentum of descending eighty flights of stairs, and it had made him too hasty. That, coupled with the sight of a dead friend and the understanding that someone he loved deeply was being held hostage, had led to the tiniest fraction of a mistake.

  In this game, that’s all it took.

  He had his own rifle aimed squarely between the redhead’s eyes, but there was no doubt if anyone pulled the trigger they’d all wind up dead.

  King didn’t hear a thing behind him. He didn’t know where Slater was. He didn’t know if either of the mercenaries had even seen him.

  The redhead said, ‘Drop it.’

  King said, ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll shoot her.’

  ‘I’ll shoot you.’

  Silence.

  King said, ‘You didn’t come here to die. Let’s compromise.’

  ‘This bitch killed three of my friends,’ the guy snarled. ‘Cut them all down with a Glock before we could react. What is she — Special Forces or something? They were my buddies. I grew up with them.’

  King nodded at Malcolm’s body between them. ‘He was my friend.’

  ‘I didn’t do that.’

  ‘He’s dead all the same.’

  ‘We came for you. And the other guy. Where is he?’

  ‘Behind you.’

  The redhead didn’t turn around. But King could almost see the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. The shadows sure didn’t help. King imagined the cogs in his brain turning, running over and over again with hypotheticals. Like, Could it be?

  And Violetta knew that was her cue.

  She was five-eight, slim at the waist and curvaceous in the hips, with thin arms. Not the sort of physique you’d expect to be effective in combat, especially against a six-two angry Irish thug dressed in tactical gear with a loaded gun in his hand. But fighting isn’t really about strength. It is in a cage, with a referee, which is why weight classes exist. But when Violetta threw her head back like it was a bowling ball and pulverised the mercenary’s nose with the back of her skull, it came as no surprise to King that it worked flawlessly.

  Because physics were the same no matter how big or small you were.

  A nose is fragile, and a skull is hard.

  The crack actually echoed through the lobby, as spacious and silent as it was. It was a brutal noise, bound to make almost anyone squeamish. In his peripheral vision, King noticed the merc to his left get distracted. Once again, only for a half-second, but it was enough. The man’s gaze flitted sideways to determine the source of the broken bone. Was it his buddy in a pickle, or had the redhead simply decided to teach Violetta a lesson to speed up the proceedings?

  He realised it was his buddy with a now-broken nose, and immediately jerked his gaze back in King’s direction, because now the situation was serious. But suddenly there was someone behind Kin
g, filling up the rest of the doorway. An African-American man, materialising out of nowhere.

  Three things happened at once.

  First, Violetta deliberately jerked her head forward, in the opposite direction to her initial headbutt, and the momentum was enough for the redhead’s aim to slip. Suddenly the barrel wasn’t skewered into the side of her head, and when he pulled the trigger reflexively the bullet missed her head by a couple of inches, passing through the space between his chest and the back of her head.

  Second, King shot the redhead in the face.

  Third, Slater shot the other mercenary in the face.

  Two bodies clattered to the floor with twin thwacks.

  Violetta stepped away from the redhead’s corpse and quietly dusted herself off.

  She said, ‘Thanks.’

  King breathed a sigh of relief.

  21

  Slater eased himself out of the doorway and surveyed the lobby for the first time since it had been breached.

  It was a mess. A disaster zone. The big slab of marble that constituted the reception desk was riddled with bullets and scorch marks. There was the body of the night guard in the middle of the space, and a dead woman in uniform behind the desk. Her face was pale and her eyes were glazed over. There were two bloody holes in the centre of her chest. Slater turned away from the macabre sight and took in the chipped columns, the overturned furniture, the soft wind trickling in through the space where the floor-to-ceiling windows used to be, the dead mercenaries scattered across the ground. The redhead hadn’t been lying. Violetta had gunned down most of the backup on her own.

  Without her, he and King mightn’t have been so lucky.

  She said, ‘Are either of you hurt?’

  ‘No,’ he and King said in unison.

  This time it was her turn to sigh with relief. ‘Okay.’

  She went quiet.

  King said, ‘Don’t beat yourself up. You were outnumbered.’

  ‘You’re outnumbered every operation. You two still manage.’

  ‘We’re… a little different.’