Hawk, p.32
Hawk, page 32
part #6 of Will Slater Series
With a hammering heart King ran over to the space and swept aside some of the finer debris. He found the outline of a trap door, barely perceptible after the cracks were filled with dust, and he motioned to it.
The worker nodded, still resting on his haunches.
King said, ‘Wait here. I’ll be back up soon. Then I’ll organise a wire transfer.’
‘Keep your blood money,’ the worker said.
He got in his excavator, turned it around, and trundled back toward an empty trailer bed attached to a pick-up truck near the front entrance. King had missed it on his way in. He shrugged it off and turned back to the square in the ground.
This was it.
The culmination of the havoc he’d received and dished out since running into Slater in the ruin bar in Budapest.
He didn’t dare give himself the once-over physically. He knew he was in bad shape, running on fumes, and as usual he wouldn’t find out how bad the damage was until the dust had settled and the mission was completed. Adrenalin was keeping him going, but it was finite, and if he stopped to assess his injuries he’d deplete himself of the vital momentum he needed to keep going.
And besides, the end was in sight.
One final hurdle.
One last-ditch effort.
Or not.
Or he’d stumble down to the basement and find a monster there waiting for him.
Because that was his grand conspiracy. That was what he suspected Ali Hawk was trying to do. To change Slater into something new.
Something different.
Something terrifying.
‘Change his brain, man. Like he did to me.’
He shivered.
He bent down and lifted the trap door.
Then immediately sprung aside.
Because he knew, if there was anyone down there with two brain cells to rub together, they’d station a guard directly underneath the entry point.
But no gunshot rose up to greet him.
There wasn’t even a panicked reaction.
Just silence.
Cold wind howled through the ruins.
King stared down into the dark abyss, and made out a circular concrete stairwell spiralling ever downward.
He took a deep breath and plunged into the dark.
75
With each step down, King picked up speed.
The stairwell was dark and dank and smelled musty. Like it hadn’t been used in years. It remained silent all the way down.
At the bottom of the concrete stairs, a faint shimmer of light floated up to meet the dawn light spilling down from the open trap door.
He found himself thinking, If they were going to ambush me, they would have done it already.
Which means they’re all focusing on something.
Something that doesn’t involve me.
His thoughts flitted to the scene of an operation. He pictured them dissecting Slater’s brain, taking it apart and putting it back together different. But in reality he knew that was nothing but an old wives’ tale. In all likelihood it would be a rapid procedure, over in a couple of hours maximum, with some sort of technological wizardry in the form of a microchip placed in the correct section of the brain. Connections would be made — perhaps hardwired in — and synced to one of the many electronic devices King had seen on his journey across New Zealand.
A world you know nothing about.
He quickened his pace. His mind started to float to the likeliest possibility.
Which was, It’s already too late.
They’ve already done it.
Slater is down here.
In the shadows.
Waiting for you to arrive…
He almost froze in paralysis. Something rustled in an alcove by his shoulder. He darted out of the way as silently as he could, hands coming up to protect himself, fear compounding.
But there was nothing there.
‘Are you down here?’ he whispered under his breath, inaudible to anyone but himself.
It reassured him slightly. Hearing the sound of his own voice. It was so dark down here. So impossibly dark.
Was Slater watching him as he moved?
Was it the same Slater?
He saw a silhouette, dead ahead.
Muscular.
Standing tall.
Eyes fixed on him.
He blinked, and it was gone.
An apparition.
A trick of the mind.
Or something else?
He covered the last few steps and came out at a crouch in a long rock corridor strewn with debris. There were wooden support beams smashed and discarded everywhere, and parts of the ceiling had caved in. It restricted his line of sight in either direction. He sensed endless pairs of eyes on him. The faint light he’d seen earlier came from gaps in the rubble. White artificial light spilled through, but they barely illuminated the stairwell King had come from. They only served to lengthen and stretch the shadows.
King stood perfectly still, and listened hard for any sign of activity.
He found it.
Somewhere close by.
He heard murmuring, and the rustling of instruments, and metal clinking against metal, and his heart leapt into his throat.
It was the sounds of an operation.
Or the preparation for one.
He couldn’t know for sure. He didn’t know where it was coming from, or how far they were into the process.
But the coldness of the sounds harrowed him.
Is it too late, Slater?
Are you still in there?
He listened for only a second longer, and then some sort of primal instinct activated in his brain.
He shifted his entire mental state in a heartbeat. He was no longer the safe tactician. He no longer cared about his own personal safety. There could be an army of Hawk’s minions standing guard between King and the operating theatre, and it wouldn’t have affected him in the slightest.
He’d rather go down in a blaze of glory than hesitate for a second too long and allow his brother-in-arms to become a monster.
So he exploded out of his crouched position. He didn’t care how much noise he made. He ran flat out for the source — weaving around rubble, leapfrogging fallen beams.
He dodged an object that looked eerily like a woman’s corpse, half-buried under rubble, but he had no time to slow down and check.
He rounded a corner, spotted an open doorway gleaming with light, and threw himself into it without a moment’s hesitation.
His intuition paid off. There was no-one standing guard. The three occupants of the room had heard him coming, but all three had been wrapped up in the surgical procedure.
And for good reason.
Brain surgery had no room for error. The tiniest twitch one way or the other could result in disaster, and it seemed that Hawk wasn’t willing to risk it with such a prized possession as Slater.
But Hawk was nowhere to be found.
He wasn’t any of the three scientists. One was grey and balding, an entirely unimpressive man, squared away in the corner of the room with a meek expression of fear on his face.
The other two men were equally as bland, but they were the ones performing the operation.
Slater was on his stomach on a metal operating table.
Passed out.
There was a knife in the back of his skull.
King didn’t even think about his next move. He just burst off the mark — despite the two surgeons wielding scalpels in self-defence. He’d never been more enraged. He’d come to this godforsaken island for vengeance and ended up falling into the scheme of a goddamn lunatic. He wasn’t about to let them get a moment further in their process.
But where’s Hawk?
Then King saw him. Ali Hawk was lying on his back on the cold floor, staring up at the ceiling with glassy dead eyes.
His throat was cut.
So perhaps Slater had managed some preliminary revenge after all.
Before he charged at the surgeons, King flashed a glance at Slater and deduced that the operation had just begun. They’d been in the early stages of making the first incision in the back of his head. They’d shaved away the remnants of his buzzcut and drawn lines signifying where a portion of his skull had to be lifted away.
Not yet.
It hasn’t happened yet.
He’s not a monster.
He’s still the same man you knew.
You know if he wanted to, he could come off that table with his teeth bared and tear you limb from limb.
But he won’t.
Thank God.
Because King knew Slater could manhandle him effortlessly. That was the way it had always been.
He put his own feelings of inferiority on the back-burner as he made it to the operating table.
He maintained a full sprint and lunged forward with a push kick, catching the first man square in the chest. The guy was slim and frail and in no way prepared for a fight, and he tumbled off his feet with a wild outcry of despair. King heard a vicious clang on the way down and realised the guy had knocked the back of his skull against the operating table.
He collapsed to the floor, out cold.
King turned immediately to the second man, who lunged at him with a scalpel in his hand. King caught a glint of the blade whizzing through the air under the harsh fluorescent lights and jerked out of the way at the last moment. But he had nowhere to go, pinned between the operating table and a row of metal trolleys. So he vaulted over Slater’s unconscious body and tumbled down into the fine debris on the other side of the ruined room.
The surgeon followed him around the table, slashing wildly.
King got to his feet and kicked out, but he didn’t dare put his full weight into it. The reality of a knife fight is nothing like the movies — especially when one party is armed and the other isn’t.
King had all the training and natural talent in the world, and the neuroscientist was small and squared away and looked like he’d never been in a fight in his life, but that did nothing to combat the simple truth.
The scientist had a knife, and King didn’t.
It was next to impossible to disarm a frenzied, manic knife-wielder. There was simply too much room for error. The slightest miss on King’s part would result in a slash across one of his limbs, perhaps bone-deep.
Perhaps severing an artery.
Then he’d be useless.
The scientist came at him fast, skirting around the operating table, and King picked up one of the metal trolleys and brought it down on the guy’s head.
A trolley weighs at least a hundred pounds, and King brought it down hard. With the veins in his forearms pumping he aimed for the top of the guy’s forehead and slammed it home with all the desperation he could muster. There was a brutal crunch and for a moment King thought he’d killed the man in a single blow.
The scientist’s legs gave out and the knife spilled from his hands and he folded at the waist and crumpled to the floor.
Dust particles puffed out in all directions from the impact zone.
King grunted and lifted the trolley up again, and slammed it into the small of the man’s back.
The guy cried out and lay still, helpless, possibly permanently disabled by the blow.
King didn’t care.
If he’d been a moment later, they would have removed a portion of Slater’s skull and changed his mind forever.
King frankly didn’t care whether the scientists lived or died.
He dropped the trolley, panting, before remembering there’d been a third man cowering in the corner when he’d walked in.
A man he’d never seen before.
He started to turn around and locate the target when a hypodermic needle plunged into his neck.
76
Everything happened in the blink of an eye.
Three separate actions, unfolding in a smooth chain of frantic movement.
Bang-bang-bang.
First, King reached up desperately in a wild panic, supercharged with fright, keenly aware of the foreign object embedded in his throat. He could feel the acute sensation of the needle worming around under the skin. He found the hands clutching the needle and latched onto them.
Second, the man holding the needle depressed the plunger. King felt hot liquid flow into his neck and panic seized him.
Third, he ripped the syringe out of his neck and shoved the unknown enemy away, opting to put space between himself and the man before figuring out his own predicament.
He stumbled a couple of steps. Worry seized hold of him. He’d just been injected with something. What was it? Who’d done it?
He found the answers shortly.
It was the third man. The man with the grey hair and the squashed ugly face. He stood panting for breath a few feet from King. Manic glee spread across his face. His features lit up like a Christmas tree.
He said, ‘Well, that’s it, then.’
King said, ‘What?’
‘I win.’
‘Do you?’
‘You’ll start feeling your body go numb soon. Shouldn’t take long.’
‘You’re weaponless. Defenceless.’
‘But I’m a lot smaller. I can outrun you.’
King lunged forward before the man finished the sentence, hands outstretched, trying to snatch hold of his clothing.
The man darted back like a whip cracking, and in an instant he overturned a medical trolley across their path.
King leapt over it, but when he landed his right ankle slipped out from underneath him.
He inhaled sharply.
Then he noticed the tingling in the back of his neck.
The ugly man smiled, still panting for breath, invigorated by his success. He was eight feet from King, over by the doorway. He was poised like a coiled spring.
King said, ‘What’d you do to me?’
‘It’s a numbing agent. I gave you triple the regular dose.’
‘Why didn’t you just shoot me?’
‘I don’t have a gun.’
‘You injected Slater with that before the surgery?’
‘Yes. It was all I had available. I had to think on the spot.’
‘Smart.’
King kept his voice measured, but inside he was falling apart.
His surroundings had started to blur, and he experienced the uncanny sensation that he wasn’t in control of his body. When he told his arms and legs to move, they responded late.
There was a delay.
And it was only getting worse and worse with each passing second.
The scientist seemed to sense it. He smiled wider, and said, ‘How did you run through all my forces and then lose to me?’
‘Your forces?’
‘Oh,’ the man said, and wagged a finger in King’s direction. ‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘What?’
‘Did you meet Ali Hawk at any point in the last two days?’
‘No. I think I saw him from a distance.’
‘Do you see him now?’
King jabbed a finger over his shoulder. ‘What’s left of him.’
‘That’s a decoy.’
‘Oh.’
‘How much do you know about what I’ve been doing here?’
‘You?’
‘I’m Hawk.’
‘You’re—’
But King couldn’t finish the sentence. He couldn’t put a coherent thought together. His mind slipped, and his surroundings started to shimmer.
The overhead lights grew brighter and brighter, and he began to descend into some sort of fantasy world. Like a strong dose of hallucinogens, kicking in all at once.
He said, ‘Fuck.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why are you still standing there?’
‘Because I want to watch the most feared man on the planet succumb to a liquid I jabbed in his neck. That’s personally satisfying, to say the least.’
‘I—’
‘Let’s make this fun,’ Hawk snarled. ‘I’m going to go get my gun from the other room. You stay here if you wish. I don’t care what you do. I know you’re probably still too dangerous to approach, so I’m not going to risk it. Good luck.’
Then he left, disappearing into the ruined corridor outside.
The darkness swallowed him whole.
King stood rooted to the spot, unable to do anything but let his hands drop by his sides and his fingers twitch intermittently. He thought his legs were set in concrete casts, cemented to the floor. He lifted a hand to wipe sweat off his forehead, and then a voice in the back of his head began to scream at him.
Why did you talk to him for so long?
Why didn’t you try to get a hold of him?
Are you insane?
Have you given up already?
He had no answers for his subconscious. Whatever the numbing agent was doing to him, it was also dragging him down into the pit of paralysis. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t prioritise. He was losing a grip on where he was. He figured the man — Hawk? Ali Hawk? — had administered an outrageous dose.
Which made him realise he’d be unable to function in a few minutes.
And that kicked him into gear.
Because Jason King, if he was anything, was not a quitter.
He powered forward, heading through the doorway into the darkness. Rubble and ruin rose up to greet him, and before long he realised he was moving at a snail’s pace.
Moving through quicksand.
The air was quicksand.
The atmosphere was mud. It was dragging him down, crushing his throat and his chest and his internal organs. Lethargy fell over him in thick, crashing waves. He gasped for breath, but he was merely shuffling through the shadows.
He came to another room, and paused by the edge of the door frame.
His head swam.
His world swam.
He clawed for breath.
He slowly, gently rounded the corner.
A muzzle flash lit up his vision, and the bullet passed right by him. It was fired from shaky hands, and he made out the hunched silhouette of Ali Hawk at the back of the small office, and he realised in that moment the man was scared.
Hawk — the real Hawk — had missed a shot from nearly point blank range. He’d relied for years on hired help to do all his dirty work. He was the master of delegation, but he was far from the master of his own reality.
