Outlaws, Matt Rogers [best ereader under 100 TXT] 📗

man placed his palm on the handle, he looked back over his shoulder. ‘You know … deep down … maybe I’m wishing I had your integrity.’

A rare moment of honesty.

Then he stepped out, and was gone.

Exiting King’s life as quickly as he’d entered.

King savoured the newfound quiet, and methodically removed any feelings of irritation or resentment from his mind. Coombs was no longer a subject of concern, so there was no point wasting time wondering what the man’s future might entail. King had approached life that way for as long as he could remember. It was no business of his what other people thought about him. He simply tried to contribute to the common good. The incident in Moscow had required swift retribution, and that’s what he’d delivered. Sure, there’d be consequences, but what he’d done in the moment had done the most overall good, so he didn’t much care what resulted from it.

He took a deep breath in, closed his eyes, and let it out.

He opened them again and went to the fridge to get a beer.

20

Slater stepped out of the civilian plane and onto the jet bridge, Alexis by his side.

As soon as he was free from the aluminium tube and found a couple of bars of reception, he dialled Violetta’s number.

When it connected, he said, ‘I’m back.’

A pause.

She said, ‘What?’

‘I’m in New York.’

‘What happened? Relationship troubles?’

Slater almost smirked. ‘Far from it.’

‘We argued for weeks about you taking this goddamn holiday. What made you give it up?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘So talk.’

‘Not over the phone.’

A pause.

She said, ‘Is everything okay?’

‘Never better.’

‘Will,’ she said. ‘You need to give me more than this.’

He thought about it.

And came to a conclusion moments later.

He said, ‘Actually, Violetta, I don’t owe you anything. I’m asking to meet. Are you in town?’

‘Yes.’

‘With your team?’

‘Most of them. I’m back at the same setup you saw, working with Alonzo.’

Slater had caught a peek behind the curtain a few months ago, right here in Manhattan. Due to unusual circumstances, Violetta had been forced to bring them to one of the temporary black-ops HQs that the government ordinarily went to great lengths to hide them from. An enormous space within a rundown tenement building, hidden in plain sight, populated by dozens of software engineering geniuses sitting in front of computers, dressed in casual clothing, sifting through and analysing data at an incomprehensible rate. It hadn’t exactly lined up with his expectations, but it made sense in hindsight.

As the world became more modern and unfixed, there was little need for the attention-grabbing enormity of massive campuses and headquarters’ like the Pentagon. All that created was an unnecessary target. Now, staggering processing power existed within a single computer tower, which you could slot neatly under a desk. So the big data that Violetta and her team used to determine which situations required a response from last-resort operatives like King and Slater could be analysed from anywhere. It made perfect sense to decentralise, to erect dozens of temporary set-ups across the continental United States and move the whole roaming circus between discreet locations. That way, there was little risk of being targeted by enemies of the state. Not even the government’s own operatives knew where their shadowy secret HQs were located.

Alonzo was one of Violetta’s best tech prodigies, capable of translating mountains of data into something halfway understandable.

Slater said, ‘Am I needed?’

‘Not right now.’

‘Okay. That’s all I wanted to know. If you’re in town, I assume you’ll come to me?’

‘I’m rendezvousing with King in the morning. I’ll come to you afterwards.’

Slater paused. ‘What? He’s back?’

‘You two haven’t spoken?’

‘No.’

‘You’re both back early. But it sounds like his mini-vacation ended a whole lot worse than yours.’

‘What happened?’

‘Donati wasn’t the man King thought he was.’

Slater wasn’t exactly surprised. He couldn’t think of a more obvious twist than a billionaire known for hoarding wealth and capital turning out to be corrupt.

He said, ‘Is he in one piece?’

‘I believe so. He didn’t tell me about any injuries. We haven’t spoken much.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Donati’s dead.’

By that point, he and Alexis were out of the jet bridge, flowing with the masses of passengers in the giant terminal. He spied a bank of televisions along the far wall, above the conveyor belt. Several of them displayed separate twenty-four hour news stations. He scanned the headlines with a practiced eye, and came away with nothing of note. The death — a grisly one, if Slater knew King at all — of an American billionaire in Moscow would be plastered across every screen if it was public information.

He said, ‘Word isn’t out yet?’

‘Apparently not. We’re monitoring traffic.’

‘You speak to him first,’ Slater said. ‘I’m sure he’ll need to debrief you, and whoever else you’re working alongside.’

‘You know how it works,’ she said. ‘He tells me everything. I relay it up the chain. If there’s any discrepancies, then we get other parties involved. But it’s always something we like to avoid.’

‘He killed an important person on the economic hierarchy,’ Slater said. ‘There’s no way he’s not in trouble.’

‘He had his reasons.’

‘Of course he did. When don’t we?’

With a snap of clarity, Slater realised he didn’t much care about the inner workings of black operations anymore.

He said, ‘Let me get some sleep. Then we’ll talk.’

‘Eleven a.m.,’ Violetta said. ‘How’s that work?’

Slater checked the Hublot on his wrist. It was a hair after two in the morning.

He said, ‘Works just fine.’

‘Can you give me a heads up?’

‘About what?’

She paused.

She said, ‘Is it something serious?’

‘You said it yourself. I fought for weeks for that vacation. And now I’m back on day two.’

Silence.

He said, ‘You figure it out.’

He hung up.

They strolled in the general direction of international arrivals, and Alexis said, ‘She’s not going to be happy, is she?’

She hadn’t heard the call from Violetta’s side, but she’d put two and two together from what Slater had said on his end.

He said, ‘It’s just bad timing. That’s all.’

Alexis took his hand. ‘Why?’

‘I really shouldn’t tell you. You need plausible deniability.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.