Hawk, p.22
Hawk, page 22
part #6 of Will Slater Series
He had no gun, and he only had seconds to work with.
So he threw himself out of the moving vehicle and landed in the gravel only a few feet from the silhouette. The guy was dark-skinned, nearly six foot six, wearing dark khakis and a dark shirt. Powerfully built. Like an oversized version of Slater. He had a hard cruel face, currently creased in pain, and he had both hands on his ribcage.
The Tiguan skidded away across the gravel, driverless, and it coasted to a stop twenty feet away.
The man’s gun was somewhere on the ground.
King figured the impact against the car had broken several of his ribs, or torn muscle around his stomach. Whatever sort of injury it was, it had to be debilitating. The guy wasn’t concentrating on King in the slightest. He took a knee, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth twisted into a grotesque contortion of agony.
King found the gun lying in the gravel only a few feet away.
He walked over and picked it up.
It was a Glock 26 with tritium night sights.
King said, ‘Has this one got a kill switch too?’
The man didn’t respond. He went down from one knee to two. He doubled over further.
He still hadn’t looked King in the eye.
He was crippled.
King said, ‘Pull yourself together. Then we’re going to have a talk about who sent you.’
51
The handcuffs on Slater’s wrists and the straps around his ankles bit tight.
Hawk’s goons had slotted the bed onto a small flat trolley, and now they were wheeling it through a staggering entranceway with an expensive carpeted rug underfoot. The ceiling stretched out dozens of feet over his head, and a stairway at the other end of the hall ascended to a second level overlooking the ground floor.
Hawk strode in front, hands behind his back, admiring his own residence.
‘Like it?’ he said.
Slater said nothing.
Hawk spun around and slapped him across the face.
He hit hard, with an open palm, and the crack echoed off all the walls.
It resonated through the empty house.
Slater lay there with one side of his face on fire. He could barely see out of his right eye. But he didn’t let a shred of his discomfort pass over his features. He refused to react.
He stared up at the ceiling, and tried his best to look bemused.
Hawk let his hand fall to his side. He nodded to the four guards wheeling the metal bed, and they stopped it in its tracks.
Hawk loomed over the bed.
He said, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. You forget that I know everything about you. I know you relish pain. You wouldn’t have done the things you did throughout your career if you didn’t embrace pain every day of your life. So hitting you isn’t going to do much, is it?’
Slater said, ‘You’re on the right track. Shame you can’t control your urges. Not as superhuman as you thought, are you?’
Hawk’s eyes turned to stone. His expression slackened. He stared down at Slater for ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty.
Then he turned around and kept walking.
He said, ‘We’re going downstairs.’
‘Why not stay up here?’
‘What I’ve got in store for you is downstairs.’
‘How do you get away with all this?’ Slater said.
‘All what?’
‘You’re living in a house like this. What is it — ten bedrooms? Ten bathrooms? Ten car garage? I saw a few buildings around this place, too. Guest quarters. All of that is very public. The authorities haven’t come asking where you got your money from?’
Hawk barely registered the enquiry.
Slater saw the corner of his mouth tilt upward.
He was amused.
Hawk said, ‘We haven’t covered who I am, or where I came from, have we?’
‘Evidently not.’
‘I made my money legitimately. I don’t hide. It’s only recently that I’ve taken an interest in expanding into uncharted territory. That’s all I need to hide. I’ll keep you downstairs until I’m done with you, and then when I’m finished there’ll be nothing suspicious. I can parade you around in public and no-one will know the difference. That’s how intricate the human brain is. That’s how rapidly technology is advancing. The brain is controllable. It’s binary. Like a computer.’
‘And you can do that on your own?’
‘Of course not. It’s time for you to meet the team.’
The four thugs wheeled him into a service elevator — an enormous metal box underneath the stairwell. The trolley under the bed got caught on the metal grooves on the floor, so the four men lifted the bed right off the trolley and dumped it down in the middle of the metal room. Hawk followed them in, slid the safety screen across, and hit a button on the side panel.
The elevator creaked and groaned and began to descend.
Slater finally got a good look at the four men around him.
Two white guys, an Asian man, and an African man.
If he was to break free, they were his competition.
He didn’t like his chances.
They seemed different to the mercenaries he and King had fought earlier that day. They were a different breed, a different class of athlete. A different level of warrior. He could see it in their mannerisms — they were confident, and that was half the battle right there.
Staring up at them, Slater got the sense the men who’d been dispatched to run him and King off the road were cannon fodder compared to Hawk’s private security.
These men were all tall, all broad-shouldered, and all patient. There was no unrest as the elevator moved slowly downward. They had calmness of mind in spades, and all four of them stared straight ahead through the safety screen at the twisted concrete of the elevator shaft.
Awaiting commands.
Slater hadn’t seen combatants with their demeanour since his Black Force days.
They looked like Ali Hawk.
They looked on top of the world.
The elevator thundered home at the bottom of the shaft. It was an old contraption, at odds with the opulence and luxury overhead. Hawk slid the safety screen open, and the four guards dumped Slater’s bed back on the trolley and wheeled it out of the elevator.
They rolled into a dark concrete tunnel eerily similar to a mine shaft. Wooden supports rose up on either side, forming a latticework across the roof. At regular intervals harsh white light shone from doorways branching off. The light spilling out of the adjacent rooms was the only illumination.
Shadows spread out, long and fearsome.
If Slater’s predicament didn’t scare him enough, the aesthetic of the basement made sure to pull the fear out of him.
But he put on a brave face.
Because what the hell else was there to do but be resilient in the face of your darkest fears?
‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ Slater said.
‘Look closely enough and you’ll see it’s all artificially constructed,’ Hawk said. ‘I just liked the idea of an underground lair. I don’t know about it. Thought I’d play around. Nothing else to do until I got my hands on the both of you.’
‘You don’t have King yet.’
‘But I will.’
Indeed, as Slater scrutinised the tunnel he noticed it was a mine shaft by resemblance alone. The supports were purely aesthetic — not structurally integral in the slightest — and parts of the rock seemed carted in, as if integrated during post-production of a feature film. Like a sick wonderland.
Like a kid’s playground.
Slater said, ‘Who were you before all this?’
His voice rang off the walls, and echoed down the tunnel, and Ali Hawk turned around to face Slater with the same bemused look.
‘You’re still searching for some elaborate conspiracy, aren’t you?’
Slater shrugged. ‘It’d make things easier to digest.’
Hawk gestured to one of the first holes in the wall. Halogen light flickered as it emitted from the doorway.
‘This way,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you all about exactly who I am.’
The four silent bodyguards pushed the trolley toward the light.
52
King quickly realised that if not for his last-second attempt to use the Tiguan as a battering ram, he would have come out the other side of the fight a battered, broken man.
The guy kneeling across from him in the dirt lot was well in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, and all of it was muscle. He’d suffered a vicious blow from the hood of King’s vehicle, and it had either ruptured internal organs or broken bones, but if not for that he might have crushed King with a single punch, or backed up a few steps and shot him through the face when he tried to get out of the car.
And there was also the fact that he’d chanced across King, merely by sweeping the state highways for anyone travelling alone.
How many more of them are there?
King knew he couldn’t get lucky forever.
He aimed the Glock at the man’s head as he knelt in the gravel and said, ‘Feel like talking yet?’
The guy tried to get up — some sort of vain attempt to preserve his dignity — but a wave of pain washed over his face and he rocked back like a baby, going all the way down. He kicked his legs up in the air, then let them fall to the ground. He lay on his back, staring at the stars, clutching his stomach with both hands.
He was hurt bad.
If not for his hardened physique, the impact against the Tiguan might have killed him.
King walked slowly over and sat down on the gravel, six feet away from the big man.
He had no reservations about a surprise attack.
You couldn’t fake that sort of agony unless you were an Oscar-level actor, and this guy wasn’t. He’d broken out in sweat. Perspiration poured off his forehead and dripped to the ground beneath him. There were large pit stains on his shirt. He was gnashing his teeth together, riding out the pain.
King pointed the Glock at the man’s head and waited for the initial wave to subside.
When the pain receded, the man stayed on his back. He looked up at the stars, panting for breath. Finally he rolled his gaze over to King, and he swore under his breath.
‘You should just shoot me,’ the guy said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’ve got nothing to tell you.’
‘I think you do.’
‘Whatever you’re going to threaten to do to me, the man I work for will make it ten times worse.’
‘Do you know anything about my friend?’
‘Who?’
‘I had someone with me. He was taken by your organisation — whoever you are and whatever you do. Do you know anything about what happened to him?’
‘He’s still alive if that’s what you’re wondering. Other than that, I don’t know a thing.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Very.’
‘That man was a close friend. Almost like a brother to me.’
‘Look, man,’ the guy spat, and blood ran out from both corners of his mouth.
Internal bleeding, King thought. I don’t have long.
‘Look,’ the guy repeated, composing himself. ‘I’ll give you that. They’ve got your friend, but he’s not going to be the same friend when you find him. Even if he’s still alive.’
‘He can handle torture. We’ve both been trained for that.’
The guy just smiled, exposing bloody teeth. ‘Not torture.’
‘What, then?’
‘I told you to shoot me.’
‘And I’m still saying no. You’re going to give me answers.’
‘I ain’t telling you shit. Whatever you can do, my boss will do worse. I told you that.’
‘But your boss isn’t here, is he?’ King said, getting to his feet. ‘I’m the only one here. So right now, I’m the only one you need to worry about.’
King stepped forward and kicked the man in the ribs.
He screamed, and spat blood high into the air. The cloud rained down on him. He rolled over into the foetal position and clutched his abdomen.
It was already destroyed from the car hitting him.
Now it was ten times worse.
King squatted down and said, ‘I could keep this up for hours before anyone finds you. You want to play that game?’
The guy audibly whimpered. Then he said, ‘Your friend’s not going to be the same because my boss is going to change his brain.’
King didn’t respond. He maintained the squat, and tapped the gun against his thigh.
Then he figured what the man had said was too ludicrous to invent on the spot.
He said, ‘What?’
But something tickled the back of his neck. A premonition. A deep, dark primeval feeling. From the deep, dark primeval part of his brain.
An ancient instinct of sorts.
Something told him, You’re in a world you know nothing about.
The guy said, ‘Change his brain, man. Like he did to me.’
King tensed up.
The wind howled off the ocean and swept up the coast, buffeting the empty lot.
The sounds of nature rose up, drowning out the man’s laboured breathing.
King said, ‘What did he do to you?’
‘He changed me, man. He made me better. More disciplined. More logical. I wasn’t shit before he found me. He’s my saviour.’
‘What were you? Ex-military?’
‘Just a grunt. A private. EV2.’
‘U.S. military?’
‘You couldn’t tell from my accent?’
‘Just making sure. Where are you from?’
‘Tennessee.’
‘When did you enlist?’
‘Three years ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘I got dishonourably discharged. Wasn’t doing things properly. I had no self-discipline so I was trying to coast through the P.T., and they noticed. Started putting me to the test and I responded by throwing all the insults back in their faces. They kicked me out real fast. But Hawk saw potential in me. I’m smart, man, but I couldn’t get the discipline to do things right. He went inside my head and he fixed me right up, man. Now I’m free.’
King said, ‘Hawk?’
‘Ali Hawk. He’s my saviour.’
‘He’s a brain surgeon?’
‘No. But he knows the right people.’
‘What’s he going to do to my friend?’
‘He’ll change him, man. For the better.’
‘My friend doesn’t need changing. He’s got enough discipline for a hundred men.’
‘It’s not just discipline,’ the guy said with a manic glint in his eye. ‘It’s … anything. Maybe your friend is a rare breed of soldier.’
‘You have no idea.’
‘Then maybe Ali Hawk wants him all for himself.’
‘And me?’
‘Are you the partner?’
‘Of sorts.’
‘Then he wants you alive. I was told to hand-deliver you.’
‘How did you figure you’d do that?’
‘At gunpoint.’
King muttered, ‘You obviously haven’t met me, then.’
‘What?’
King said, ‘Tell me exactly how I can get to Ali Hawk or I’ll kick you in the ribs again.’
The man opened his mouth to respond.
A jolt seized him, starting in his head.
He jerked back against the gravel.
Blood ran from the corners of his eyes.
It spilled out his mouth.
It streamed out his nostrils.
He jerked once more in his death throes and lay still.
King watched him in horror, and quickly realised he was now alone in the darkness.
He nudged the body once with his toe, just to check.
No response.
Treading water in an unfamiliar realm, he trudged back to the car with an impending sense of doom lingering over him.
53
Ali Hawk turned away from a trio of sleek black desktop monitors and said, ‘Sorry. Had to clear up a slight problem.’
He’d just minimised three separate windows displaying a collection of charts and graphs. Slater thought he saw a heart rate monitor somewhere in there.
Hawk had turned away from their conversation as an alert rang out on the main computer in the room. He’d worked like a fiend at the keyboard and mouse, moving so fast across both that the tech team from the Hungarian airfield seemed comparatively amateur.
He’d assessed some unseen, unknown situation, came to a conclusion, and acted fast.
He’d initiated a final series of commands, entered a couple of passwords, and then shut it all down.
‘All done,’ he said now. ‘Where were we?’
Slater stared at the triple monitors behind him, each displaying a minimalistic desktop wallpaper.
He had the uneasy feeling something incredibly sinister had just happened.
He said, ‘What was that?’
Hawk said, ‘Nothing you need to worry about. I’m doing exactly what I said I was going to do, and that’s all you need to know.’
Slater’s stomach constricted into a knot.
‘Did that have something to do with King?’ he said.
Hawk managed a slight smile. ‘Perhaps. It seems I know where your friend is now.’
‘What did you just do?’
‘Had an alert from one of my men show up on the screen. I took care of him. King won’t be able to get anything out of him, so we’re in the clear. And now I know exactly where he is. He’s on the west coast. Smart move, but it won’t take long to flush him out now.’
He looked at one of the four bodyguards standing behind Slater. ‘Send Teams C and D to the west coast. Intercept him at Fox Glacier. Go all out. I want this done. Rustin and Blake — you go and lead. Fisher and Rodgers, stay. Got it?’
Four nods.
Two of the bodyguards peeled off — the dark-skinned man and the Asian man. They disappeared out the door without any palpable shift of emotion at the new orders. Taking their instructions like true professionals.
The two white guys stayed.
Fisher and Rodgers.
Slater filed the names away, and watched Hawk closely.
So he threw himself out of the moving vehicle and landed in the gravel only a few feet from the silhouette. The guy was dark-skinned, nearly six foot six, wearing dark khakis and a dark shirt. Powerfully built. Like an oversized version of Slater. He had a hard cruel face, currently creased in pain, and he had both hands on his ribcage.
The Tiguan skidded away across the gravel, driverless, and it coasted to a stop twenty feet away.
The man’s gun was somewhere on the ground.
King figured the impact against the car had broken several of his ribs, or torn muscle around his stomach. Whatever sort of injury it was, it had to be debilitating. The guy wasn’t concentrating on King in the slightest. He took a knee, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth twisted into a grotesque contortion of agony.
King found the gun lying in the gravel only a few feet away.
He walked over and picked it up.
It was a Glock 26 with tritium night sights.
King said, ‘Has this one got a kill switch too?’
The man didn’t respond. He went down from one knee to two. He doubled over further.
He still hadn’t looked King in the eye.
He was crippled.
King said, ‘Pull yourself together. Then we’re going to have a talk about who sent you.’
51
The handcuffs on Slater’s wrists and the straps around his ankles bit tight.
Hawk’s goons had slotted the bed onto a small flat trolley, and now they were wheeling it through a staggering entranceway with an expensive carpeted rug underfoot. The ceiling stretched out dozens of feet over his head, and a stairway at the other end of the hall ascended to a second level overlooking the ground floor.
Hawk strode in front, hands behind his back, admiring his own residence.
‘Like it?’ he said.
Slater said nothing.
Hawk spun around and slapped him across the face.
He hit hard, with an open palm, and the crack echoed off all the walls.
It resonated through the empty house.
Slater lay there with one side of his face on fire. He could barely see out of his right eye. But he didn’t let a shred of his discomfort pass over his features. He refused to react.
He stared up at the ceiling, and tried his best to look bemused.
Hawk let his hand fall to his side. He nodded to the four guards wheeling the metal bed, and they stopped it in its tracks.
Hawk loomed over the bed.
He said, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. You forget that I know everything about you. I know you relish pain. You wouldn’t have done the things you did throughout your career if you didn’t embrace pain every day of your life. So hitting you isn’t going to do much, is it?’
Slater said, ‘You’re on the right track. Shame you can’t control your urges. Not as superhuman as you thought, are you?’
Hawk’s eyes turned to stone. His expression slackened. He stared down at Slater for ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty.
Then he turned around and kept walking.
He said, ‘We’re going downstairs.’
‘Why not stay up here?’
‘What I’ve got in store for you is downstairs.’
‘How do you get away with all this?’ Slater said.
‘All what?’
‘You’re living in a house like this. What is it — ten bedrooms? Ten bathrooms? Ten car garage? I saw a few buildings around this place, too. Guest quarters. All of that is very public. The authorities haven’t come asking where you got your money from?’
Hawk barely registered the enquiry.
Slater saw the corner of his mouth tilt upward.
He was amused.
Hawk said, ‘We haven’t covered who I am, or where I came from, have we?’
‘Evidently not.’
‘I made my money legitimately. I don’t hide. It’s only recently that I’ve taken an interest in expanding into uncharted territory. That’s all I need to hide. I’ll keep you downstairs until I’m done with you, and then when I’m finished there’ll be nothing suspicious. I can parade you around in public and no-one will know the difference. That’s how intricate the human brain is. That’s how rapidly technology is advancing. The brain is controllable. It’s binary. Like a computer.’
‘And you can do that on your own?’
‘Of course not. It’s time for you to meet the team.’
The four thugs wheeled him into a service elevator — an enormous metal box underneath the stairwell. The trolley under the bed got caught on the metal grooves on the floor, so the four men lifted the bed right off the trolley and dumped it down in the middle of the metal room. Hawk followed them in, slid the safety screen across, and hit a button on the side panel.
The elevator creaked and groaned and began to descend.
Slater finally got a good look at the four men around him.
Two white guys, an Asian man, and an African man.
If he was to break free, they were his competition.
He didn’t like his chances.
They seemed different to the mercenaries he and King had fought earlier that day. They were a different breed, a different class of athlete. A different level of warrior. He could see it in their mannerisms — they were confident, and that was half the battle right there.
Staring up at them, Slater got the sense the men who’d been dispatched to run him and King off the road were cannon fodder compared to Hawk’s private security.
These men were all tall, all broad-shouldered, and all patient. There was no unrest as the elevator moved slowly downward. They had calmness of mind in spades, and all four of them stared straight ahead through the safety screen at the twisted concrete of the elevator shaft.
Awaiting commands.
Slater hadn’t seen combatants with their demeanour since his Black Force days.
They looked like Ali Hawk.
They looked on top of the world.
The elevator thundered home at the bottom of the shaft. It was an old contraption, at odds with the opulence and luxury overhead. Hawk slid the safety screen open, and the four guards dumped Slater’s bed back on the trolley and wheeled it out of the elevator.
They rolled into a dark concrete tunnel eerily similar to a mine shaft. Wooden supports rose up on either side, forming a latticework across the roof. At regular intervals harsh white light shone from doorways branching off. The light spilling out of the adjacent rooms was the only illumination.
Shadows spread out, long and fearsome.
If Slater’s predicament didn’t scare him enough, the aesthetic of the basement made sure to pull the fear out of him.
But he put on a brave face.
Because what the hell else was there to do but be resilient in the face of your darkest fears?
‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ Slater said.
‘Look closely enough and you’ll see it’s all artificially constructed,’ Hawk said. ‘I just liked the idea of an underground lair. I don’t know about it. Thought I’d play around. Nothing else to do until I got my hands on the both of you.’
‘You don’t have King yet.’
‘But I will.’
Indeed, as Slater scrutinised the tunnel he noticed it was a mine shaft by resemblance alone. The supports were purely aesthetic — not structurally integral in the slightest — and parts of the rock seemed carted in, as if integrated during post-production of a feature film. Like a sick wonderland.
Like a kid’s playground.
Slater said, ‘Who were you before all this?’
His voice rang off the walls, and echoed down the tunnel, and Ali Hawk turned around to face Slater with the same bemused look.
‘You’re still searching for some elaborate conspiracy, aren’t you?’
Slater shrugged. ‘It’d make things easier to digest.’
Hawk gestured to one of the first holes in the wall. Halogen light flickered as it emitted from the doorway.
‘This way,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you all about exactly who I am.’
The four silent bodyguards pushed the trolley toward the light.
52
King quickly realised that if not for his last-second attempt to use the Tiguan as a battering ram, he would have come out the other side of the fight a battered, broken man.
The guy kneeling across from him in the dirt lot was well in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, and all of it was muscle. He’d suffered a vicious blow from the hood of King’s vehicle, and it had either ruptured internal organs or broken bones, but if not for that he might have crushed King with a single punch, or backed up a few steps and shot him through the face when he tried to get out of the car.
And there was also the fact that he’d chanced across King, merely by sweeping the state highways for anyone travelling alone.
How many more of them are there?
King knew he couldn’t get lucky forever.
He aimed the Glock at the man’s head as he knelt in the gravel and said, ‘Feel like talking yet?’
The guy tried to get up — some sort of vain attempt to preserve his dignity — but a wave of pain washed over his face and he rocked back like a baby, going all the way down. He kicked his legs up in the air, then let them fall to the ground. He lay on his back, staring at the stars, clutching his stomach with both hands.
He was hurt bad.
If not for his hardened physique, the impact against the Tiguan might have killed him.
King walked slowly over and sat down on the gravel, six feet away from the big man.
He had no reservations about a surprise attack.
You couldn’t fake that sort of agony unless you were an Oscar-level actor, and this guy wasn’t. He’d broken out in sweat. Perspiration poured off his forehead and dripped to the ground beneath him. There were large pit stains on his shirt. He was gnashing his teeth together, riding out the pain.
King pointed the Glock at the man’s head and waited for the initial wave to subside.
When the pain receded, the man stayed on his back. He looked up at the stars, panting for breath. Finally he rolled his gaze over to King, and he swore under his breath.
‘You should just shoot me,’ the guy said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’ve got nothing to tell you.’
‘I think you do.’
‘Whatever you’re going to threaten to do to me, the man I work for will make it ten times worse.’
‘Do you know anything about my friend?’
‘Who?’
‘I had someone with me. He was taken by your organisation — whoever you are and whatever you do. Do you know anything about what happened to him?’
‘He’s still alive if that’s what you’re wondering. Other than that, I don’t know a thing.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Very.’
‘That man was a close friend. Almost like a brother to me.’
‘Look, man,’ the guy spat, and blood ran out from both corners of his mouth.
Internal bleeding, King thought. I don’t have long.
‘Look,’ the guy repeated, composing himself. ‘I’ll give you that. They’ve got your friend, but he’s not going to be the same friend when you find him. Even if he’s still alive.’
‘He can handle torture. We’ve both been trained for that.’
The guy just smiled, exposing bloody teeth. ‘Not torture.’
‘What, then?’
‘I told you to shoot me.’
‘And I’m still saying no. You’re going to give me answers.’
‘I ain’t telling you shit. Whatever you can do, my boss will do worse. I told you that.’
‘But your boss isn’t here, is he?’ King said, getting to his feet. ‘I’m the only one here. So right now, I’m the only one you need to worry about.’
King stepped forward and kicked the man in the ribs.
He screamed, and spat blood high into the air. The cloud rained down on him. He rolled over into the foetal position and clutched his abdomen.
It was already destroyed from the car hitting him.
Now it was ten times worse.
King squatted down and said, ‘I could keep this up for hours before anyone finds you. You want to play that game?’
The guy audibly whimpered. Then he said, ‘Your friend’s not going to be the same because my boss is going to change his brain.’
King didn’t respond. He maintained the squat, and tapped the gun against his thigh.
Then he figured what the man had said was too ludicrous to invent on the spot.
He said, ‘What?’
But something tickled the back of his neck. A premonition. A deep, dark primeval feeling. From the deep, dark primeval part of his brain.
An ancient instinct of sorts.
Something told him, You’re in a world you know nothing about.
The guy said, ‘Change his brain, man. Like he did to me.’
King tensed up.
The wind howled off the ocean and swept up the coast, buffeting the empty lot.
The sounds of nature rose up, drowning out the man’s laboured breathing.
King said, ‘What did he do to you?’
‘He changed me, man. He made me better. More disciplined. More logical. I wasn’t shit before he found me. He’s my saviour.’
‘What were you? Ex-military?’
‘Just a grunt. A private. EV2.’
‘U.S. military?’
‘You couldn’t tell from my accent?’
‘Just making sure. Where are you from?’
‘Tennessee.’
‘When did you enlist?’
‘Three years ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘I got dishonourably discharged. Wasn’t doing things properly. I had no self-discipline so I was trying to coast through the P.T., and they noticed. Started putting me to the test and I responded by throwing all the insults back in their faces. They kicked me out real fast. But Hawk saw potential in me. I’m smart, man, but I couldn’t get the discipline to do things right. He went inside my head and he fixed me right up, man. Now I’m free.’
King said, ‘Hawk?’
‘Ali Hawk. He’s my saviour.’
‘He’s a brain surgeon?’
‘No. But he knows the right people.’
‘What’s he going to do to my friend?’
‘He’ll change him, man. For the better.’
‘My friend doesn’t need changing. He’s got enough discipline for a hundred men.’
‘It’s not just discipline,’ the guy said with a manic glint in his eye. ‘It’s … anything. Maybe your friend is a rare breed of soldier.’
‘You have no idea.’
‘Then maybe Ali Hawk wants him all for himself.’
‘And me?’
‘Are you the partner?’
‘Of sorts.’
‘Then he wants you alive. I was told to hand-deliver you.’
‘How did you figure you’d do that?’
‘At gunpoint.’
King muttered, ‘You obviously haven’t met me, then.’
‘What?’
King said, ‘Tell me exactly how I can get to Ali Hawk or I’ll kick you in the ribs again.’
The man opened his mouth to respond.
A jolt seized him, starting in his head.
He jerked back against the gravel.
Blood ran from the corners of his eyes.
It spilled out his mouth.
It streamed out his nostrils.
He jerked once more in his death throes and lay still.
King watched him in horror, and quickly realised he was now alone in the darkness.
He nudged the body once with his toe, just to check.
No response.
Treading water in an unfamiliar realm, he trudged back to the car with an impending sense of doom lingering over him.
53
Ali Hawk turned away from a trio of sleek black desktop monitors and said, ‘Sorry. Had to clear up a slight problem.’
He’d just minimised three separate windows displaying a collection of charts and graphs. Slater thought he saw a heart rate monitor somewhere in there.
Hawk had turned away from their conversation as an alert rang out on the main computer in the room. He’d worked like a fiend at the keyboard and mouse, moving so fast across both that the tech team from the Hungarian airfield seemed comparatively amateur.
He’d assessed some unseen, unknown situation, came to a conclusion, and acted fast.
He’d initiated a final series of commands, entered a couple of passwords, and then shut it all down.
‘All done,’ he said now. ‘Where were we?’
Slater stared at the triple monitors behind him, each displaying a minimalistic desktop wallpaper.
He had the uneasy feeling something incredibly sinister had just happened.
He said, ‘What was that?’
Hawk said, ‘Nothing you need to worry about. I’m doing exactly what I said I was going to do, and that’s all you need to know.’
Slater’s stomach constricted into a knot.
‘Did that have something to do with King?’ he said.
Hawk managed a slight smile. ‘Perhaps. It seems I know where your friend is now.’
‘What did you just do?’
‘Had an alert from one of my men show up on the screen. I took care of him. King won’t be able to get anything out of him, so we’re in the clear. And now I know exactly where he is. He’s on the west coast. Smart move, but it won’t take long to flush him out now.’
He looked at one of the four bodyguards standing behind Slater. ‘Send Teams C and D to the west coast. Intercept him at Fox Glacier. Go all out. I want this done. Rustin and Blake — you go and lead. Fisher and Rodgers, stay. Got it?’
Four nods.
Two of the bodyguards peeled off — the dark-skinned man and the Asian man. They disappeared out the door without any palpable shift of emotion at the new orders. Taking their instructions like true professionals.
The two white guys stayed.
Fisher and Rodgers.
Slater filed the names away, and watched Hawk closely.
