Hawk, p.23
Hawk, page 23
part #6 of Will Slater Series
Slater was still tied to the metal bed, now seated in an upright position. Hawk had thumbed a remote ten minutes earlier, and the bed had folded in half with a mechanical whir. The handcuffs stayed on his wrists, and the shackles stayed around his ankles. But the top half of the bed tilted upward like a hospital gurney, so Slater could see the contents of the room without having to crane his neck.
It was a modern office, styled with architectural flair, complete with a triple-monitor setup on an enormous metal desk and a bank of CPUs — central processing units — wrapped up in sleek modern containers, arranged in rows on a series of shelves on the opposite wall.
Everything was state of the art.
Nothing was out of place.
Slater gazed around and felt the same unfamiliar shiver seize hold of him. It wasn’t the technological wizardry he was laying eyes on that troubled him. It was that Hawk seemed ten steps ahead in every moment.
Slater figured there would be no Hail Mary rescue this time.
He figured this time, whatever the hell Ali Hawk wanted to do to him, it would be done.
Slater said, ‘What do you mean you took care of your man? You told him to retreat?’
Hawk smiled like a patient carer and said, ‘No, you idiot. That’s impractical.’
Slater didn’t respond.
Hawk said, ‘I told you what I’m going to do to you. Work out for yourself what I did to my employee.’
Slater stayed silent.
Hawk said, ‘He’s not around anymore, if that’s what you’re wondering. He was hurt, according to his vitals. King was probably interrogating him. So I finished him off.’
‘Remotely?’
‘Yes.’
Slater said nothing. His stomach sank further and further. He bowed his head and tried to stifle the beginnings of a panic attack.
Hawk smiled again and said, ‘I told you this was the new world.’
‘What did you do?’
Hawk waved the question off. ‘No need for specifics. Use your imagination.’
Then he dismissed Fisher and Rodgers with a wave of his hand, and they bled out of the room.
It was just Slater and Hawk, alone, surrounded by the cold incessant hum of the underground maze.
Hawk pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the metal bed. He crossed his arms over his chest.
He said, ‘Now, what were we talking about before I was so rudely interrupted?’
‘Who you are.’
Hawk nodded, suddenly serious, and said, ‘I have no connection to you, if that’s what you were wondering. I wasn’t bluffing earlier. And maybe that’s the scariest part of it all for you.’
‘And why would that be?’
‘Because I’m the new breed. There could be a hundred like me across the world, but I doubt it.’
‘And what are you, exactly?’
‘I’m smart, I’m efficient, and I’m switched on. I was raised correctly, by well-meaning parents. I was taught self-discipline at an early age. I took advantage of a passion for learning. And that’s me in a nutshell. There’s nothing extraordinary about me. Anyone can do what I’ve done if they had reasonable smarts.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘I made my money legitimately. I bought and sold companies I saw value in. I almost never got it wrong. I focused on biotech for a while, then moved into corporate lending when I amassed a rainy day fund far in excess of what I needed. And then I nailed that too. I gave out nearly a billion in venture capital, and got back ten over five years. You don’t see that reported in the news if you do it through shell corporations. I’m the best kind of billionaire.’
‘The unknown one?’
‘Exactly. It lets me move out here and work on my passion projects. It lets me take a step back in private so I can go to the next level.’
Slater said, ‘I need to know one thing.’
‘What?’
‘Am I the first person you’re testing this on?’
Hawk smiled the same way, as if he were babysitting a toddler. ‘You think I’d risk the first test on a specimen like yourself?’
Slater said nothing.
‘You’re out of luck. I’ve already perfected this. There’s no more delays. There’s no more time for you to escape. I’ve put the right team together, and now I’m going to reap the benefits.’
‘Does your team know exactly what you’re doing here?’
Hawk raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course.’
‘So they’re just as morally bankrupt as you are?’
‘They’re interested in progress,’ Hawk said. ‘Not peer-reviewed research papers. I find it fascinating how easily I can entice people out to the middle of nowhere with a blank cheque and a promise to avoid all restrictions.’
‘Then I doubt you have the best.’
‘You and Jason King are anomalies in a morally bankrupt world,’ Hawk said. ‘You’re stubborn, and you’re dumb, and you’ll never achieve anything of significance without taking away the blinkers.’
‘We’ll have to agree to disagree about that.’
‘The smart ones are like me,’ Hawk said. ‘The smart ones recognise the importance of what I’m doing here.’
‘And what are you doing here, exactly?’ Slater said. ‘I’ve heard some vague threats, but nothing concrete. Nothing exact.’
‘Then let me show you,’ Hawk said. ‘Let me give you a first-hand demonstration.’
He ushered in his team.
54
King drove for ten miles in a state of shock.
It wasn’t that the man had died in front of him. He’d lost count of the number of people he’d seen killed. Death was as much a part of his life as eating, sleeping and breathing were.
It wasn’t that.
It was that King couldn’t understand how the guy dropped dead.
That didn’t happen without external stimuli.
He’d seen people succumb to internal injuries before. It was a long, gruelling ordeal — painful to watch, yet a thousand times more painful to experience. It took a long time — if mercy was on their side, only minutes, but often up to an hour. During that time they existed in some sort of delirious fugue state, barely conscious, holding onto life as best they could. Often King had dealt with treating injuries like that far from civilisation, where medical aid was hard to come by.
The man who’d ambushed him hadn’t succumbed to internal injuries.
He’d just died.
One second he was here, and the next he was gone.
And he’d jolted, like it had started in his brain, like there was something independent in there, deciding when and where to flip the switch and send him to the great beyond.
King gripped the wheel with both hands and drove through the night, heading fast for Fox Glacier.
Outside, the temperature dropped, and he passed the first major glacier near the highway — Franz Josef.
A sign signalled its presence, and he peered out into the gloom.
His eyes went wide.
He spotted the pale outline of the glacier in the soft moonlight, branching away to his right. It was tucked between two looming mountains, like an ethereal fissure in the earth. He stared for a while, and then concentrated on the road.
The windows fogged up from his own body heat, and he blasted the Tiguan’s air-conditioning and directed the air through the front vents, up at the windshield. A hole cleared on the glass, just wide enough to see through. He hunched forward and concentrated on the only thing he could control.
Forward progress.
And then a fresh set of headlights lit up the highway behind him.
He felt his pulse rate spike — felt it pound in his neck, the veins throbbing. He quickened his pace, and rounded a bend in the highway, and a sign loomed up out of the gloom.
Fox Glacier - 5km ahead
He knew from a rudimentary online search that Fox Glacier was the name of the town. The actual glacier itself rested off the highway, a looming eight-mile jagged gash of white in the foreboding landscape, much like the Franz Josef Glacier he’d just passed.
He buzzed down the window a crack — to test the conditions — and cold alpine air howled in, chilling him to the bone.
He rolled it back up and grimaced.
The car behind him stayed right on his tail.
You’re paranoid, he told himself. Everyone can’t be out to get you.
Or could they?
The next challenge presented itself immediately.
Commotion materialised up ahead — many headlights, frozen in time, illuminating a large dark object across the highway.
A fallen tree.
A colossal fallen tree.
It had cut off the entire two lanes, slipping down an icy embankment and coming to rest with a final, dying sigh. Its dark brown trunk, twisted and knotted, blocked any access on either side of the road. King saw flashing emergency lights through his foggy windshield, and as he grew closer and put pressure on the brake pedal, he noticed the line of cars stretching back on his side of the highway, resting like individual beacons in the gloom.
There were at least fifteen of them — it was late, but there were always people with places to be.
King coasted to a dead halt in the line, and slammed a palm against the wheel in frustration.
The steering wheel rattled, and silence enclosed the cabin.
The windows fogged, and fogged, and fogged.
There was no way out. No alternate route, aside from turning around and heading back for miles and miles the way he had come. And no matter how long it took to clear the tree off the highway, retreat was not an option. He’d end up on the same path Ali Hawk expected him to approach from, racing down the east coast and praying he didn’t get caught in the trap the unseen, unknown enemy had laid out.
Whoever the hell Ali Hawk is.
He had a name, and little else.
That harrowing fact sunk in as the car behind him pulled up close, adding to the queue.
King instinctively shrank down in his seat, fearing the bullet that would come smashing through the rear window and obliterate the back of his neck.
He was vulnerable here.
Yet still, there was the possibility he was simply deeply paranoid.
He held the Glock he’d stolen at the ready, eyes darting this way and that.
Cars joined the line, piling in minute by minute as the traffic banked up.
Like an endless row of fireflies, surrounded by cold darkness.
Then one of the cars right up the back pulled into the oncoming lane.
King saw the headlights in his side mirror, approaching at a methodical pace. He stiffened.
Horns blared in the night, cursing the queue jumper.
King thought he knew why the car had dipped into the oncoming lane.
He held his Glock tighter.
He readied himself for war.
The car pulled up alongside his Tiguan.
It stopped.
King rolled his window down, and started to bring the gun up into the line of sight, accepting the consequences of shooting a hostile dead in front of a crowd of dozens of witnesses.
Then he froze, with the Glock only inches from the windowsill.
The passenger window of the queue jumping car was down, and an elderly couple were scrutinising the stoic expression on King’s face with some level of concern.
The man called across the divide, ‘Excuse me, sir.’
His heart thrashing in his chest, King said, ‘Yes?’
‘Do you have any idea how much longer this will take? We’re desperate to get to a motel. My wife needs her medication. She can’t be sleep deprived. It’s not good for us.’
King said, ‘I’m not sure, sorry.’
His throat was dry.
His mouth was dry.
His lips were dry.
The old man in the driver’s seat nodded, and smiled politely, and threw the car into reverse.
It set off back the way it had come.
Hoping to slot into the same position in line.
King rolled his window up, and sat in the claustrophobic box, and controlled his breathing.
He almost wished for a fight. He wished for the sudden fury, and the scramble for the upper hand, and the gunshots and screams.
He was a junkyard dog in a fight.
He wanted to bite down on the metaphorical mouthpiece and get to work.
He couldn’t handle the tension. He knew they were coming for him — but where, and when?
And then his prayers were answered.
The headlights right behind him flared in the darkness, suddenly beaming.
They were close.
Far, far too close.
The SUV rear-ended him and thrust the Tiguan into the car in front.
Jamming his vehicle in place.
Jason King tightened his grip on the Glock, bit down on the metaphorical mouthpiece, and went to war.
55
The team came in, silent and morose.
They didn’t introduce themselves.
There were four of them.
Three men, and a woman.
They entered quietly, crossed to the opposite wall, and stood shoulder to shoulder. They were dressed simply in tracksuit pants and loose-fitting sweaters — Slater figured Ali Hawk favoured getting results over implementing a strict dress code. It matched the man’s penchant for efficiency. He didn’t care about how people looked.
He wanted progress.
One of Hawk’s guards stepped into the room next. Slater watched it all unfold like some sort of sick silent film. The guard nodded a polite greeting to his boss, and stood at attention just inside the doorway. He crossed his hands behind his back and waited for further instruction. It was clear he’d been told to enter after the team of scientists, but hadn’t been informed of anything else.
He was short — maybe five eight — and stocky. He had coarse weather-beaten skin and a grey five o’clock shadow and rough fat fingers. He was an outdoorsman, used to toiling away beneath an open sky — no matter the weather. He seemed loyal enough to his boss.
The woman in the team of four unclipped a small electronic device about the size of a smartphone from her utility belt. She checked the screen — glowing softly in the dim lighting — and nodded once to Ali Hawk.
Hawk turned around, looked Slater deep in the eyes, and said, ‘Watch this.’
His voice came out louder than before, and the tone had changed. It was still patient and methodical, but now it dripped with authority.
Slater got the sense something awfully sinister was about to happen.
Hawk said, ‘Ray, please show our prisoner your scar.’
The guard named Ray looked at Hawk for a beat, mulling over the strange request. Then he shrugged, and nodded, and turned a hundred and eighty degrees on the spot to face the opposite wall. He reached over his shoulder and lifted his hair up at the back of his neck, revealing a jagged purple scar perhaps six inches in length, running all the way down to the collar of his shirt.
He dropped his hair back into place, turned around, and nodded again.
‘Ray was one of our first test subjects,’ Hawk said. ‘He volunteered. We’ve substantially cleaned up the insertion process since then. No more scars like that. But would you say it’s been worth it, Ray?’
‘Absolutely, boss,’ the man said.
He had a thick, rough Australian accent, and Slater got the impression he was ex-military.
Slater knew the type — just from the man’s micro-expressions.
He’d seen them a thousand times before.
The eagerness to impress, the ramrod straight posture, the capacity to take any order from the man paying the bills. And on top of all of that, the ease at which he blended into a macabre setting like this.
A disillusioned ex-soldier wondering why he put himself through hell for a measly paycheque when individuals like Ali Hawk were perfectly happy to pay for his services post-retirement.
Sure, he had to look the other way every now and then to preserve his morality.
But what did that matter in the grand scheme of things?
Hawk said, ‘Ray, come over here.’
The guard approached tentatively, aware of Slater tied to the bed in the corner. A trickle of unease crossed his face, but only for a moment. He didn’t like the weird pacing of the conversation, or the apparent performance he was putting on for their prisoner.
But the need to please his boss trumped everything else, so he crossed the room and pulled to a halt right in front of Hawk.
They were nose to nose, or they would have been if Hawk hadn’t stood a considerable amount taller. Almost six inches, Slater figured.
Hawk reached around to the small of his back and pulled a Glock 19 from a holster.
He pressed it into Ray’s palm.
He closed Ray’s fingers around the sleek black metal.
He said, ‘Ray, go stand over there.’
Ray looked down at the Glock in his hand.
Slater could taste the tension in the air.
Ray nodded.
His default setting, it seemed.
He crossed to the other side of the room, putting a dozen feet of distance between himself and the rest of the occupants. Slater saw him place his back against the far wall. He stood at attention, and raised an eyebrow in question.
The guard said, ‘What are we doing here, boss?’
Hawk said, ‘I just want to show my prisoner something.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
Silence.
‘What’s with the gun, boss?’
Silence.
‘You want me to shoot that guy on the bed?’
Silence.
Slater stayed perfectly still.
He could hear his own heartbeat.
Hawk turned to the team of four.
The woman glanced down at the device in her hand.
She studied a reading.
She looked up, and gave a final nod of approval.
Whatever was about to happen, it was primed and ready to go.
Hawk said, ‘Ray, I want you to shoot yourself in the head.’
‘What?’
‘Under the chin. Just aim the barrel toward the ceiling and pull the trigger.’
