Hawk, p.6
Hawk, page 6
part #6 of Will Slater Series
‘Thank you, brother.’
‘What else was I going to do?’
‘I thought maybe your own spark might have gone out. I thought you might be dealing with the same things I was. I thought there was a chance you’d have given up on this world for good. That you would want no part of it.’
‘Even if that was the case,’ Slater said, ‘I would have brought myself back. Just like you did to help me in Russia. That’s how this works between us. And that’s the way it’ll be until we get ourselves killed.’
‘After Russia, I don’t know what it will take to get us killed,’ King said.
‘Don’t test your luck.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ King said. ‘I don’t think I was expecting this all to go ahead so fast.’
Slater stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought you’d need some persuading. Even if I always knew you’d come around.’
‘What a monumental waste of time that’d be. I’m ready. I’m not tied down to anyone or anything. So let’s go.’
‘I have a lead.’
Slater checked his watch. ‘It’s late as hell. Should we do this in the morning?’
King eyed him warily. ‘You’ve had too much to drink, haven’t you?’
‘Story of my life,’ Slater muttered.
‘Let’s find a place to crash.’
‘Somewhere nice,’ Slater said. ‘I can cover it.’
‘I do alright for myself.’
‘Not like what I’ve got saved up.’
‘What’d you do — rob a bank?’
‘You could say that.’
King paused. ‘Wait … was this in Macau?’
‘I got wrapped up in an altercation with the triad over there. I got their bank details. They weren’t in need of the money anymore.’
‘How much?’
‘Four hundred million. But it rises and falls with the market. I check each morning.’
King simply stared. ‘How’s that feel?’
‘No different to when I was worth ten,’ Slater said. ‘I have everything I need.’
‘That’s the way.’
They found a luxury five-star hotel with a lavish social club next to the lobby, consisting of broad armchairs and a massive fireplace and a bar staffed twenty-four-seven to accomodate any drink the patrons might crave. It looked like a private members’ area, exclusively for use by hotel guests. Slater strode right up to the enormous entranceway with King in tow, and as soon as he had eyes on the social area he nodded his approval and went right in.
King said, ‘Works for me.’
They stepped into the foyer.
10
By now, Slater had the process systematically refined to perfection.
He checked in within five minutes, acquiring a pair of king-bed rooms right next to each other for a last-minute discount, considering there was only half the night left. He politely skirted around all the optional extras the concierge offered, and had a pair of matching keycards not long after that.
The man behind the desk had slick hair combed back straight, and clipped English, and a warm demeanour. He said, ‘Is there anything else you require, sirs?’
Slater jerked a thumb at what effectively constituted the private members’ club and said, ‘Is that open to us?’
‘Of course, sir,’ the concierge said. ‘First drink is complimentary, too. The bartender will help you with any specific requests. We have a fine selection, I must say.’
Slater nodded his thanks, and ushered King across the marble lobby, toward the secluded cluster of armchairs near the fireplace.
The concierge called, ‘Sirs, would you like me to put your luggage up in your room?’
Slater looked at King, who looked back at Slater. They both shrugged to each other.
Slater turned to the concierge and said, ‘No luggage.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s a long story. We’re simple folk.’
‘Very well,’ the man said, but he couldn’t hide his confusion.
‘We mean no harm,’ Slater said. ‘Trust me.’
He led King to the armchairs and dropped into one of them himself. The warmth of the fire washed over him, flickering in the dim lighting. King sat in the leather chair opposite. Despite their lack of luggage, they both carried themselves as if they were international businessmen. They wore expensive clothes, they both had expensive watches on their wrists, and their posture was ramrod straight.
They were well-built, and confident in themselves.
There was no one action that conveyed this — it all simply added up to make them look right at home.
As a result, the waiter was over in seconds.
‘Greetings, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am the alchemist on duty tonight. What can I get for you?’
King said, ‘I’m fine.’
Slater said, ‘Your best whiskey.’
‘Sir, I’m afraid that won’t qualify as a complimentary—’
‘No problem,’ Slater said. ‘Happy to pay.’
Perhaps if he was underdressed or less sure of himself the waiter might have listed the price, or made a gesture to indicate that Slater should reconsider dropping such an extravagant sum of money at four in the morning. Instead he nodded curtly and turned on his heel.
King rolled his eyes, and said, ‘Yeah, what the hell,’ and the waiter turned back.
King said, ‘Get me one of those, too.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
The man floated away.
Alone and capable of private conversation, King said, ‘You’re going to suck me right back into this world, aren’t you?’
‘What world?’ Slater said, feigning ignorance.
‘Moving from one place to the next like there’s a fire behind us. Getting into trouble anywhere we can find it. Spending outrageously. Drinking plenty. There’s a reason I got away from all this.’
Slater cut through the bullshit and said, ‘King, I’m sorry about what happened to Klara. I didn’t know her for long, but she seemed like an amazing girl. We’re going to handle this situation, and then we can talk about the future. Sound good?’
King nodded.
Slater said, ‘What’s your lead? You mentioned you had something. I assume we’re not blindly feeling in the dark.’
King reached into his coat pocket and took out a slim black smartphone. He twirled it in between his giant fingers for a few revolutions, then reached forward and placed it delicately on the table between them.
They both stared at it.
Slater opened his mouth to speak, but the alchemist returned that moment with two tumblers of glowing amber whiskey. They were some of the finest, most exquisite glasses Slater had ever seen.
He took his graciously and sipped at it.
It was warm and packed with flavour, and it burned all the way down his throat.
He settled back into the armchair, savouring the experience. Sometimes life passed him by, and he’d been learning to try to be grateful for more moments like this. Simple pleasantries in the palm of luxury, dotted through a life wrought with pain and death and suffering.
King sipped his own whiskey, and hummed with approval.
They put their tumblers down on the glass table and turned their attention back to the phone.
Slater said, ‘You got it off one of the bodies?’
King nodded. ‘They only had one between them.’
‘What’s on it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Slater stared down at the device. ‘We can find out.’
‘I don’t think we can,’ King said. ‘Not on our own.’
‘Why don’t you know what’s on it?’ Slater said, taking care not to ridicule King for his short-sightedness.
But King read his mind. ‘You think I found it password protected and gave up right then and there?’
‘I don’t know how good you are with technology,’ Slater said. ‘But I’ll admit the thought crossed my mind.’
‘It is password protected,’ King said. ‘But I’m not so stupid that I think that’s the end of the line. I know there’s a hundred ways around that. But I’m afraid that is actually where the line ends. Everyone I’ve taken it to comes up short. I’ve been told there’s an arsenal of encryption that’s stopping anyone from using a backdoor. The thing’s a steel trap. The guys who killed Klara really didn’t want anyone accessing the contents of the phone.’
Slater stared at the slim device and said, ‘There’s ways around that.’
‘I’m telling you there isn’t.’
‘Then you haven’t gone to the right people.’
‘Who are the right people?’
‘Tech wizards. But they’re few and far between.’
‘I thought you were one of them,’ King said.
‘Nowhere close,’ Slater said. ‘This is a different ball game I’m talking about. I know my way around a computer, but there’s people who have dedicated more time to cracking encrypted technology than we have learning how to kill people.’
‘Then how the hell are you surviving with four hundred million dollars of illegal funds to your name in today’s society?’
‘Because I’m very, very good at outsourcing. If there’s any skill I have, it’s being efficient. I know exactly what I can do, and I stick to that. Anything else — I pay the best people to set me up right. My money’s untouchable. It’s locked away so deep in Switzerland that you’d need the entire cyber crimes division of a few countries to come up with any evidence of it.’
‘So you can use those guys to crack this phone?’
Slater shook his head. ‘They’re bankers. They won’t talk to me unless it involves controlling staggering sums of money. And besides, they’re the same as me in some respects. They’re very, very good at one certain thing. Which is banking. If we want into that phone, we’re going to need the kind of guru you’d usually see on a TV show.’
‘Do they even exist?’
‘Yes, but like I said, they’re few and far between. If they’re obscenely good, they’re snatched up by Fortune 500 companies right out of college as developers or research scientists. Google and Apple and Netflix have a bunch of them, but they’re institutionalised, law-abiding citizens, and I don’t really feel like kidnapping anyone and forcing them to do what we say. We’d probably have to torture them.’
‘Okay,’ King said. ‘That’s out, then.’
‘Option two for these whiz kids is the government. The same deal applies to tech wizards right out of college, but if Uncle Sam — or any other government — thinks they’d make a good fit, they’ll approach discreetly. They’ll offer a crazy pay packet and unlimited benefits and put them straight to work. But they’ll make them sign a whole bunch of NDAs first, so we’ll never find them. And even if we did, they’d be even less co-operative. They’re even more institutionalised than the Fortune 500 company shills.’
King said nothing.
Slater said, ‘Limited options, I know.’
‘That’s it? That’s our only hope?’
‘There’s a third option.’
‘And what might that be?’
Slater paused for rumination, and sipped his whiskey. Then he put his hands behind his head and said, ‘King, I think there might be a reason you came into my life late tonight, and not a minute earlier.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘I think it’s fate. I think I was meant to run into a few certain individuals beforehand. Otherwise we’d be stuck in the mud here.’
King said nothing.
Slater said, ‘The third option is organised crime.’
11
They spoke for another half hour, catching up on the less exotic details of their time apart, ignoring the waiter circling their table and offering the opportunity for more drinks.
The staggeringly expensive whiskey settled in Slater’s stomach and a feeling of contentment washed over him. There was a way out of this mess. He could see it now, right in front of him, clear as day.
Before, he’d been treading water in uncertainty. He thought King had no leads, and would therefore be forced to wallow in his misery for the rest of his life — however long that entailed.
But now there was a phone, encrypted to the nines, and an avenue to crack that code.
But Slater didn’t want to discuss details until the next morning. He was buzzed as hell, and he didn’t want to admit it. He figured King could tell — they’d shared enough experiences to be able to read each other — but he didn’t want the man thinking he had a drinking problem.
But you do, a small voice said.
He stuffed it back down where it belonged.
Locked it away in a drawer in his own mind and fought through the haze of alcohol.
He rose to his feet and gestured for King to wait one moment. Then he went over to the alchemist and offered a platinum-coloured credit card to cover the cost of the two tumblers of whiskey. The price had three zeroes next to the first number, and he almost fainted at the sight. But he reluctantly waved the transaction through and sauntered back to the fireside.
There was still a thin layer of alcohol in each of their glasses. Slater pointed to King’s tumbler and said, ‘Make sure you savour that.’
‘How much was it?’
‘Just enjoy it.’
They both drained the rest of the contents of their glasses, and left the social club behind. They took the elevator up thirty floors to their rooms, resting side by side in a lavish hallway.
Outside King’s door, Slater offered a hand.
King shook it.
‘Good to have you back, brother,’ Slater said. ‘I wish it was under different circumstances.’
‘Me too, King said, a certain weariness behind his eyes.
Slater left him there, pondering his own misfortune.
He didn’t want to tell King he was deep in the throes of an intoxicating buzz, and therefore not prepared in the slightest to tackle deep, weighty emotional issues. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other and used the keycard to let himself into a beautifully furnished, exquisitely put-together hotel room with a king bed and a stunning view over central Budapest.
Like something out of a spy movie, with the corners drenched in shadow and the mystery and intrigue cranked up to maximum.
As drunk as he’d been in a long time, Slater stumbled to the bed and wrenched the covers back. The sheet was tucked tight into the base of the mattress. He worked it free, took his coat off, slipped into bed fully clothed, and found himself alone with his thoughts for those brief moments before he passed out.
He hated these moments.
He thought of the hopelessness he’d been dwelling on ever since he left Zimbabwe. He’d always stuck to the line of reasoning that he couldn’t save everyone, and he’d parroted it to anyone he’d ever had to justify his stance on the world to. But there was something very different between spouting the same things he’d always said, and truly understanding them.
The reality was, he couldn’t help everyone.
He would never be able to stop 99.99% of the suffering in the world.
In fact, less than that.
It was sobering. Depressing. It sometimes made him think everything he was doing was for nothing. And that was a dangerous line of reasoning. It was a scary path to go down.
Because he put his body and mind through hell for the sake of helping others, and that tested his willpower like nothing else. He justified it with the knowledge that he was helping people, but when he saw suffering on such a staggering scale — like in Zimbabwe — it sobered him to the bleak reality.
He closed his eyes and drifted into an uneasy, dreamless sleep.
He never dreamt.
Not anymore.
He’d suffered a brief bout of nightmares directly after retiring from active service, but now he just passed out, dead to the world.
Mostly due to the alcohol.
He wondered if it was normal to live like this. Then he figured he was scratching at the very edge of the spectrum, experience wise. He was living a life rich with emotion and sensation. It was unparalleled. It was pain and satisfaction in equal measure. Most people got up and went through the same routine, and sat behind a desk they hated at a job they hated, and came back home and dulled themselves with alcohol just the same as he did.
But at least he was living a life for the ages.
His last thought before he drifted off was whether it was a good omen that Jason King had walked back into his life…
…or the exact opposite.
12
He came awake at the crack of dawn as the booze wore off from the night before.
He hadn’t closed the curtains, so the bleak grey light flooded into the room, inch by inch, as the darkness receded.
Instead of closing them and struggling through another few restless hours of sleep, he surrendered to consciousness and got out of bed. He crossed to the floor-to-ceiling windows and stood there, admiring the view. He stared out over residential apartment complexes and great basilicas, and Parliament House, and the Danube River flowing through all of it, cutting a path through the skyline. He lingered on the apartment complexes, with their quaint balconies and ornate railings. He spotted a couple of early risers hunched over small outdoor tables, sipping from steaming mugs of coffee.
Busy in their own worlds, with their own problems and their own relationships and their own goals and aspirations.
A whole world out there, ebbing and flowing as the city rose for the daily commute.
Sometimes Slater wanted part of it.
It would be dull and drab and monotonous, but hell, at least it would be normal.
Sometimes he yearned for that sensation. He always chided himself for caving into societal norms, but they were societal norms for a reason. They encouraged a sense of community. They brought people together in the same routines, the same leisure activities.
Like a billion fingers on the same pulse.
Slater was a world away from that reality. He couldn’t compare his life to anyone, or anything. It didn’t make the least bit of sense. As if he was coldly detached from the rest of the world.
