Hunters, Matt Rogers [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

He stared harder, as if he could will the alert into existence.

Nothing.

Then it flashed on-screen.

44

At McCarran, Violetta took the lead.

None of them had bothered with hair dye or corrective contact lenses. Unless there was in-person surveillance at the airport itself by undercover agents, then CCTV footage would return nothing of note if it scanned their faces. Alonzo had put a digital blocker on their features months ago, like a blanket thrown over any facial identification software that picked them out of a crowd in public footage. Someone would need to physically watch every camera in the airport to catch them lined up in the queue, and not even the U.S. government had that sort of manpower. Those rudimentary tasks had been delegated to machines years previously.

Violetta handed the passports over. She’d already booked the flights online, squirrelling them onto a red-eye to El Salvador.

The tired yet artificially happy woman behind the desk didn’t look at their passports twice. She scanned them one-by-one, asked if they had any baggage, looked semi-surprised to find that they didn’t, but her forced smile returned after she realised it didn’t really matter one way or the other.

No alarms sounded, but why would they?

The first they would hear of it would be a gun barrel stuck in their faces as they disembarked in El Salvador.

The woman handed them their passports with a ticket slotted into the first page of each, and sent them on their way.

45

Alonzo highlighted the chunk of incoming data.

Its headline flashed loud on the monitor.

HIGH IMPORTANCE. POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION @ MCCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. JASON KING. WILL SLATER. VIOLETTA LAFLEUR. ALEXIS DIAZ.

There was more underneath about the nature of the alert — flagged passports, et cetera — but Alonzo didn’t have time to read.

Sweating bullets, he executed the “erase” command, tapped in his ten-digit security verification code as fast as his fingers could fly across the keyboard, and hit “Enter.”

He had uninhibited access to the system, so it was as simple as that. Anyone else required approval from a superior, but he’d designed a sizeable swathe of the system in the first place, so he had free reign over it.

The text disappeared. It had remained on screen for all of two seconds, but Alonzo was by no means the only one with access to the feed. Blank faces in higher places than he could even fathom relied on it to make measured decisions about the future of the country. They were faces he’d never even heard of, let alone met.

Alonzo stared at the text box, now blank again, and breathed out. He drank the dregs of his coffee down. They were cold, but the disgusting texture didn’t even register. He pitched back in his swivel chair, looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. Spun a long, slow revolution. That was the last major risk he’d need to take. In El Salvador it would be simpler. He could streamline it, delegate responsibility to Antônia, forget this whole messy ordeal had ever happened.

When he spun back around there was a broad-shouldered man in a grey pinstripe suit filling the doorway.

Alonzo froze on the spot.

Stared at the guy, who was maybe sixty with bushy eyebrows and a rugby player’s iron jaw. He didn’t recognise the distinct features. There was no ah-ha moment. He didn’t know the man.

Alonzo said, ‘Are you new?’

The man said, ‘No.’

Alonzo’s blood ran cold.

He said, ‘Fuck,’ involuntarily.

The steel-jawed man nodded. ‘Yeah. “Fuck.”’

‘Are you armed?’

‘I don’t need to be. You’ll comply. You’re aware of the alternative.’

Alonzo managed a begrudging nod. He thought he might vomit, but it wouldn’t achieve anything and would only serve to delay the inevitable, so he battled the impulse down.

The man said, ‘Come with me, boy.’

Alonzo rose and tapped his keyboard twice. The monitor went to sleep. It elicited no reaction from the unknown man, because his fingers barely brushed the keys. He knew how to be slick when the situation demanded it.

Then he shuffled out of the office like a wounded dog.

He knew it would be the last time he ever saw his workspace again.

46

The flight itself was uneventful and quiet, as most red-eyes are.

There were perhaps two dozen other passengers in total, half of them bleary-eyed businessmen and the other half that undefined assortment of civilians. No kids or babies, but that was no cause for suspicion. Families don’t often fly to any of the violent three countries in the Northern Triangle in the dead of night.

The foursome banded together, as there was no point remaining apart. It was all on Alonzo now. Sitting separately on the flight would achieve nothing, so they boarded as one. The plane had no middle seats, just a central aisle, so Slater and Alexis took the left-hand row and King and Violetta took the right.

There were the usual safety demonstrations that nobody who’d flown before paid attention to, and then they were in the sky, cruising above thirty thousand feet.

Violetta nestled against King’s shoulder. For her, he was a reprieve from the madness. As long as they were beside each other, they’d be okay.

Violetta said, ‘That’s it, then. Our house is gone.’

‘“House,”’ King said. ‘It wasn’t home to you, was it?’

She paused, thinking with her eyes closed. ‘It didn’t feel like it. We bought it quickly. Alexis put her heart and soul into the interior design, but there was still … something missing. Do you get me?’

‘I get you.’

She lifted her eyes to meet his. ‘You felt the same?’

‘That’s how I feel everywhere,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the idea of a “forever home.” Not after the way I’ve lived. You need to be ready to do what we just did. Abandon every shred of material possessions and flee. I’ve done it before this. So many times. I guess that’s conditioned me…’

She didn’t respond. She recognised he needed time to process it, sort out the mess in his head.

Finally he said, ‘I think it’ll be different when the baby’s here. I’ll raise him right. We’ll