Hawk, p.30
Hawk, page 30
part #6 of Will Slater Series
Quinn stood still as a statue, contemplating, thinking it over.
Then he said, ‘Cut his throat.’
Hawk moaned.
Slater said, ‘What?’
Quinn said, ‘Do it.’
Slater said, ‘I’m serious here. I’ll do it.’
‘I know you will. So do it.’
Hawk said, ‘Please.’
And Slater froze in place. He’d never heard Hawk sound like that before. It was like his voice had shifted completely. Like a new person was speaking through his body, using it as a vessel.
Then Quinn lunged at Slater.
In hindsight, Slater should have known it was calculated. He should have known Quinn never intended to actually follow through with the gesture — only to startle. But hindsight achieves nothing in the moment, and in the moment Slater thought an attempt was being made on his life.
So he twitched involuntarily, jerking forward himself to intercept what he thought would be a raging Quinn.
Then Quinn pulled back.
The neuroscientist screeched to a halt and a sickly smile spread over his features.
It had been a fake charge.
Slater felt warm blood on his neck.
He looked sideways.
The blade had plunged into Ali Hawk’s artery.
The man was bleeding from the mouth, bleeding from the neck, bleeding from everywhere. Out of shock, Slater released him. Hawk slid to the floor and twitched on his back, staring up at the bright lights, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head. Then the bleeding got worse. Slater stared down at him, both horrified and resigned to his fate. Ali Hawk was his final lifeline.
There would be no mercy now.
Quinn would probably murder him in a blind rage just for having the gall to follow through with the move.
Then Slater lifted his eyes to Quinn, and realised that was exactly what the neuroscientist had been wanting to happen.
Quinn had a smug, satisfied grin on his face.
He crossed his hands behind his back and said, ‘Well, that’s that. Did you enjoy the show?’
Slater didn’t respond immediately.
He let the silence drag out.
Quinn raised an eyebrow, and said, ‘You don’t understand?’
‘What is this?’
Quinn strode over to Hawk’s corpse and dug one foot under the man’s shoulder. Then he rolled the body onto its front.
Slater stared down at Hawk’s backside.
‘What is this?’ he said again.
Slowly, Quinn bent down and swept Ali Hawk’s long hair off the back of his neck, exposing the skin.
There was a scar there.
Quinn lifted his eyes to meet Slater’s shocked gaze.
Slater said, ‘Oh, shit.’
Quinn said, ‘There we go. Now you understand.’
‘You’re…?’
Quinn nodded and smiled. ‘Think about it. I have physical control of the mind. You think I’d risk all of that potential on you or King pulling out some Hail Mary plan to save your own lives? You two are goddamn invincible. Seems like you cheat death every day of the week. I wasn’t about to put myself in the crossfire, even though I thought I had all my bases covered. So I got to work on a few new updates and put it in the head of one of my men.’
‘One of your men?’ Slater said, still barely able to comprehend it. He pointed down to Ali Hawk’s body. ‘Who is that?’
‘Just a grunt who looked the part. His name’s Quinn. He’s ex-Special Forces. I realised that most of what we think is vain. He was a fairly simple man, but he had that aura of charisma about him. He could charm anyone, and he had unending confidence. So I put the chip in his head under the guise that it would help him get smarter, better and faster. Instead I cranked the control up to eleven and fed him all my philosophies. Like the most advanced form of hypnosis on earth. We subjected him to this for weeks on end until he walked and talked like a supervillain. And you bought it hook, line and sinker.’
Slater sat in silence, stunned, unable to form a cohesive sentence.
Ten moves ahead.
The real Ali Hawk said, ‘You watch too many movies, Will. You don’t understand the world you’re in. You think because you got one handcuff loose you stood a chance?’
Slater slumped back against the metal.
He said, ‘What happens now?’
‘Now we go through with the surgery.’
‘You’re actually a neuroscientist?’
The real Hawk laughed. ‘Far from it. Everything the decoy told you was true. It just came out of his mouth instead of mine.’
Ten moves ahead.
The thought wouldn’t leave Slater’s mind.
He dropped his head, defeated.
70
King sauntered up to the pair, and the trio stood facing each other in the lee of the ruined mansion.
No guns.
No knives.
No weapons of any kind.
A combination of Hawk’s ruthless planning, and the devastation of the earthquake.
It meant they could walk right up to each other without risk of a surprise gunshot. This would be a fight to the death with their bare hands. And there was something primal about it.
King had always preferred a weaponless fight. There was less room for luck. It came down to skill, and timing, and technique, and strength, and willpower. If you were lacking in any of those categories, the tide would shift against you and you would cave to the momentum swing. It tested your limits in a way that was unrivalled.
It was pure.
If there was anything still pure in the mad world he lived in.
King said, ‘Guessing you’re the muscle.’
‘That’s us,’ the guy on the left said.
He was short, but built like an angry bull. He had thick slabs of muscle hanging off his frame — a barrel chest, rounded shoulders, thick fingers, veins on his biceps, massive traps, and tree trunk legs. King put him at five eight, but they both probably weighed the same. His face was red and there were veins in his neck.
He wouldn’t last long if it came down to a tactical fight, but King doubted it would be anything like that.
King said, ‘How’d the pair of you end up out here?’
The guy on the right said, ‘Not a whole lot of career options after leaving the Army.’
He had an American accent and he was a whole lot bigger than his counterpart. He was lanky, sporting long limbs corded with muscle, but at his core he looked impossibly strong. King didn’t quite know how he pinpointed it — he could just tell. The guy was built to inflict bodily harm. A genetic trait.
Same as King, only with sharp elbows and sharp knees and a wiry build, like a praying mantis designed to draw blood with a single strike. He had the cool predatory look of a seasoned combatant.
The shorter guy wasn’t as relaxed. He was trying to be, but he couldn’t mask the adrenalin coursing through him, so he shifted back and forth in the dirt.
‘U.S.?’ King said.
‘Yeah,’ the tall guy said.
‘Maybe we were in the same unit for a spell.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe we could have been friends.’
‘Doubt it.’
‘Why don’t you walk away?’
‘Can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Our boss is down there.’
‘You can’t be sure he survived the earthquake.’
‘He’s alive. He called us.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know anything about my friend?’
‘This isn’t the time for conversation.’
‘What is it the time for?’
‘You know.’
An uneasy silence elapsed.
‘I’d rather not kill you,’ King said.
‘Part of the job. You’ve got the right to try, and we’ve got the right to protect our man.’
‘Do you know who your boss is? What he does?’
‘Not all of it.’
‘Is that deliberate?’
‘Best not to know.’
‘Why are you out here?’
‘We told you. Money.’
‘There’s a lot of places to make money.’
‘Not like this.’
‘So what’s it going to be?’
They were at a tense stalemate — inching closer to each other as they spoke, harnessing the palpable hostility in the air, trying to keep the conversation neutral when the primal parts of all three of their brains were screaming, Don’t waste time! Fucking do it!
But King really didn’t want to do this. He preferred when the morality was black and white.
He hated the grey zone.
He wasn’t sure if they deserved to die.
He figured there were a myriad of reasons they were out here — disillusioned by authority, traumatised by war, or just plain psychotic.
Any of the above.
But then he realised he’d been out of the game too long, and that in the end it always became black and white.
When someone tried to kill him, he tried to kill them, too.
Simple.
‘What are your names?’ King said.
‘Why?’
‘When I’m done here, I want to look you up. See what you both did during your time in service. I want to know what led to this.’
‘This isn’t a therapy session.’
‘Humour me.’
The tall guy said, ‘Rodgers.’
The short guy said, ‘Fisher.’
‘I’m King.’
‘We don’t care.’
‘Please just walk away,’ King said. ‘Get out of here. The fairytale’s over. Your house is destroyed. All your boss’s resources are crippled. Chalk it up to a mid-life crisis and go do something worthwhile.’
‘You don’t know our boss,’ Rodgers said. ‘He’ll rebuild like that.’
The man snapped his fingers.
As he snapped them, King stepped in and smashed a kick into the side of his knee.
Then he darted back out of range.
Rodgers grimaced, and sweat sprung from the top of his forehead, and he stamped his foot into the earth once or twice to test the stability of his leg.
He came away satisfied.
He said, ‘Big fucking mistake.’
King said, ‘You think?’
‘My boss told me about you.’
‘Did he?’
‘I want you to know something. Before this starts.’
King said, ‘Okay.’
‘Black Force came to me five years ago and screened me. Because of my reaction speed. I refused. By that point I was fed up with the government, and I got out before they psychologically scarred me. But I got the offer.’
King didn’t respond.
Rodgers said, ‘How well will you do when you’re on a level playing field with your foe?’
King thought of a quiet road in Hungary, where he’d come up against Will Slater. Slater had manhandled him.
Got his back, taken him down, locked in the choke, and forced him to tap.
Like clockwork.
King told himself he’d been angry.
He’d been overly emotional.
If it was a fair, calm, measured fight, he would have won.
Is that true?
He didn’t know.
And the fear of the unknown threatened to cripple him.
But all he’d ever known was a fight.
So he stepped in and thundered a fist into Fisher’s gut, then pivoted into a spinning backward elbow that crashed off the side of his skull, and as Fisher was going down into a horrifying unconsciousness King stabbed out with a front kick and caught the angry little man in the face, breaking his nose and jaw at the same time.
Fisher hit the dirt.
He hit it so hard that King feared for his life.
The man lay still.
Rodgers watched from a distance, almost bemused.
‘Fisher didn’t get the offer,’ Rodgers said. ‘I did.’
King squared up to him.
Rodgers said, ‘You think you can win?’
‘We’ll find out.’
Rodgers burst forward and tackled him into the churned earth.
71
In the morose silence, Slater let the scalpel fall from between his teeth.
It served no purpose anymore. The true Ali Hawk stood six feet away, well out of reach.
If the man wanted to, he could saunter into one of the other rooms and come back with a loaded firearm. It would take him perhaps a minute, tops, and then he could snuff out Slater’s life like it had never meant anything in the first place.
So there was no use holding onto the scalpel.
It would only serve to antagonise.
Utterly demoralised, Slater considered pleading for mercy for the first time in his life.
Quinn — no, not Quinn, Hawk — spoke up. ‘George, never even think about disobeying me like that again. I told you all what roles you were to play, and you almost went off-script.’
‘I’m sorry,’ George said, and Slater could tell he meant it.
‘We’re moving forward with the surgery right now. You and Eddie can start your prep. You don’t need Renae — you never did. She was brilliant, but so are you two. The three of you worked fine together, but we’ve refined the process now. Now the pair of you can do it on your own.’
‘Where is Eddie?’ George said.
Slater remembered the last remaining neuroscientist — it had been a four-person team before everything had gone to hell.
Well, three, he thought.
One of them had been Ali Hawk in disguise all along.
‘I might kill him,’ George muttered. ‘I can’t stop shaking.’
‘That’s his loss, then,’ Hawk said.
Slater grimaced and closed his eyes.
This can’t be happening.
‘Get everything sterilised,’ Hawk said. ‘I want this over quick.’
‘We can’t do it quick.’
‘We’re getting faster and faster each time. We’ll make it happen. We don’t have time for a lengthy procedure.’
‘Why not?’
Hawk pressed two fingers into his eyeballs, frustrated by how rapidly the tide had shifted, and said, ‘Because now Fisher and Rodgers aren’t answering their phones.’
‘Aren’t they up there?’
‘They were. But I’ve heard no word from anyone I sent after King. They’ve all gone radio silent on me, which shouldn’t happen ever. So they’re dead. And now Fisher’s probably dead. I don’t know if King can get past Rodgers, but if he does…’
King made it, Slater thought. He actually made it.
Holy shit.
‘That’s it, then?’ George said, and gulped.
‘They’d called in an excavator. They were working on getting us out of here. I don’t know what the progress is. But if King takes over the rescue effort in the absence of my entire fucking army, then he’ll be down here in no time at all.’
George looked like he might start to cry.
Hawk jabbed a finger at Slater and said, ‘Unless we turn his genetic rival against him. We need him on our side.’
Slater saw George go deep in his own head, inching steadily toward a drop.
He thought about it a moment more, pondering.
Then he metaphorically leapt over the edge.
The fear shrank away, replaced by intense passion. There was no nerves left. George seemed to realise it was counterproductive to be scared. Now he was relishing the adversity, devoting himself completely to Hawk’s ideas. It was the only way he could see himself walking out of this nightmare alive.
And Slater suddenly knew he’d lost his one and only lifeline down here.
George had no doubts anymore.
If King didn’t make it down to the basement, he was as good as done for.
Hawk and George called Eddie — a dull unimpressive man in his late forties — into the room, and the trio started prepping for surgery.
Slater sat back in bed and forced himself not to hyperventilate.
72
King hadn’t been expecting a takedown.
He’d been priming himself for the sort of visceral, no-holds-barred street fight that often rose up in situations like these.
He’d expected a wild flurry of strikes — punches, kicks, knees — which would figure out the winner in the space of a few seconds.
In fact, he’d been counting on it.
He had more muscle than the tall, lanky Rodgers, and he figured his best shot at winning early was to throw caution to the wind and enter a wild brawl. So he’d been preparing to throw a colossal haymaker, his knuckles searching for Rodgers’ chin, when the man ducked low and came in with the speed and grace of an Olympic wrestler.
Rodgers plucked King’s leg off the ground by wrapping both arms around his knee and lifting.
The fabled single-leg.
King hopped once, and threw a desperate punch which glanced off the back of Rodgers’ head. It did nothing to deter the man.
Rodgers stepped in and sliced his lanky calf behind the leg King was using to support all his weight. He utilised momentum and technique and threw him off-balance, sending him crashing down into the dirt. The earth was soft after the quake — the tremors had shaken and loosened the dirt. King copped a mouthful of the stuff, and found himself temporarily blinded.
Temporarily meaning a quarter of a second.
But that was the game they played.
Two Black Force-calibre combatants with similar reflexes and technique. Therefore, the edge came down to the near imperceptible gaps in time that the ordinary civilian could barely comprehend. To a bystander, the fight would have looked mad — two men fighting in a space the size of a phone booth. A wild tangle of limbs and rapid, jerky movements.
But they each were aware of the gravity of a mistake.
And King had made one by failing to anticipate the takedown.
Now he reeled and wiped dirt out of his eyes, and in that moment Rodgers leapt onto his back and wrapped his legs around King’s mid-section in a picture-perfect body triangle. He used the back of his knee like a socket and looped his other foot around to rest in between, preventing King from being able to shake the long lanky man off his back. Then Rodgers went straight for the choke, and King’s heart rate skyrocketed. He had nauseous flashbacks to Slater executing the same movement, and for a moment he thought, That’s it. You’re done. Just like you thought would happen.
