Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

able to get a respectable line of sight on half the lobby.

He saw a hulking figure heading in from the left, its features indiscernible due to the absence of light.

There was only one way to play it.

Slater took a silent breath, raised the Glock, and fired an initial shot at the silhouette.

The muzzle flare lit up the lobby as the bullet struck home, but the figure didn’t go down. In the brief flash of illumination Slater soaked in the hostile’s features. He was big, and he was clad in serious body armour. Slater spotted a giant vest over his torso and copious amounts of reinforced padding on his arms and legs. His face was obscured by a helmet with a reflective visor, making him appear more like an automaton than a man. There was some sort of assault rifle in his hands — Slater couldn’t get a proper look at it, but he figured it might be a carbine.

All in all, the guy was clad in tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear.

A bulletproof tank on legs.

Slater’s first shot had accomplished nothing.

So he switched gears and emptied half his magazine in the direction of the throat region. He’d managed a blurry glimpse at the guy’s neck and spotted a gap between his vest and helmet. He sent seven more rounds at the guy, his finger pumping faster on the trigger than he could keep track of, and then he threw himself back behind the reception desk.

With an almighty crash, the body of the man thundered to the lobby floor.

Slater wasn’t done.

There were two more.

He had genetic gifts and an unparalleled work ethic on his side, sure. But there were simple laws of nature you couldn’t control. Gunshots in a confined space impair the human ear, ten times out of ten, without fail. No question. The same old whine returned, and everything became muffled, and no matter how many times it had happened to him it never became easier to discern sounds.

So he knew the other two armour-clad men were now charging at him, but he didn’t know how fast they were coming in, or what angle they were approaching from.

There simply wasn’t enough time to reload a fresh magazine.

Many men might have hesitated.

Overwhelmed by how it had all unfolded.

Hesitation wasn’t in Slater’s vocabulary.

He stood up and locked his focus on the closest man and emptied the rest of his clip at the guy’s face and throat. Eight full rounds. He was fully aware that if he tried to spare ammunition for the third man he was likely to fail to kill the first guy. Better to ensure he turned it into a one-on-one situation.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the last man raising his rifle and starting to squeeze off a shot, but by the time he returned fire Slater was already back behind the desk.

The wonders of inhuman reflexes.

Carbine rounds thudded into the decorative wall behind him, taking entire chunks of marble out of its surface, but none struck Slater.

And the automatic gunfire couldn’t mask the sound of the second man smashing into the lobby floor.

Stone dead.

His throat torn apart.

Slater breathed out.

He reached back for a fresh magazine, but he knew it was futile. He understood the timing of life-or-death encounters so well that it was practically second nature, and he knew he’d get halfway through the process of reloading before the final man rounded the reception desk. There was comfort and complacency in knowing it was three-on-one, but now Slater had evened the odds. The last guy would panic. They always did. He’d elect to commit to a full-steam-ahead charge.

And he did.

Slater started slotting the fresh magazine home in the Glock 22’s underside, but the footsteps got too close for comfort.

Screw it.

He dropped the gun, timed it perfectly, and burst forward.

He caught the guy around the mid-section, and they flew to the floor in a rabid cloud of testosterone.

44

The body armour covering nearly every inch of the guy’s frame was both an advantage and a disadvantage.

It made him cumbersome, slow to manoeuvre his limbs.

It also made him damn near impenetrable to Slater’s strikes.

Slater had never been a quitter. He came down on top of the guy and quickly slid to full mount position, throwing one leg over the man’s mid-section and pinning him to the ground. Then he reached down and snatched hold of the carbine — an M4A1, just as he suspected — and used brute force to wrench it free from his grip. Maybe, if this had been a blockbuster film, they might have wrestled with the weapon for nigh on thirty seconds, complete with shifts in momentum and the barrel drifting inches from each other’s faces in a daring game of chicken. But this was reality, and when someone with Slater’s explosiveness gets hold of a weapon it sure as hell isn’t staying in one place for long. He probably broke a couple of the man’s fingers, still resting in the trigger guard when Slater simply tore the weapon free, and because there wasn’t enough room to reverse the carbine around without losing his position, he simply hurled it away like it weighed nothing.

Then the guy truly panicked.

Behind his helmet Slater heard him hyperventilating, his breath likely clouding the reflective visor on the inside. Slater took full advantage of the panic. He reached down and seized the underside of the helmet and yanked it upwards. It didn’t come off the guy’s head, but it tilted his chin up, exposing more of his neck to the open air. Slater then cocked his other arm at a right-angle and took aim with his elbow and dropped it down with all two hundred pounds of his bodyweight behind it.

Crunch.

Not great for the muscles and tendons in the man’s neck, not to mention his throat and windpipe.

Slater heard a spluttering cough behind the helmet.

This was the part where he was supposed to show mercy. He had the upper hand, so clearly he should stand