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

previous day had been strange, and the fragments of memory reinforced the fact he didn’t like to dull anything.

Now the afterglow of the oxycodone hung around, making the state of his body bearable, but only just.

That would do.

He’d committed Antônia’s written instructions to memory, and all that was left was to execute.

He came up on the east side of the estate in the deep dark and took a long look at the layout. Torres had a lot of land. His mansion was three storeys, made predominantly of cream coloured stone, with an ochre roof. There were two-storey east and west wings framing a towering central building, all of it surrounded by sloping manicured lawns. The grass was neatly trimmed and shone brilliant green under the exterior lights. There were plenty of them, all facing outward, illuminating the silhouettes of Torres’ security team patrolling the grounds.

But there were holes.

There’s always holes.

King had his bad arm bound tight in a makeshift sling Violetta had fashioned. It was better that way, so the torn muscles didn’t shift under the skin as he swung the limb around. The arm was useless anyway, so there was little point keeping it free. He could do this one-handed.

He had to.

He timed the patterns of the two guards on the east side of the property and scaled the fence with a one-armed heave at the exact moment Antônia instructed. She was smaller, so she would have been able to do it easier, but he still got it done.

Dropped to the lawn, allowed the shadows to envelop him, and waited ten long seconds.

Then he heard it.

A distant muffled voice on the south side of the estate. The sound was painfully strange in the quiet of the early morning. The tone was whispered, but the voice was amplified, like someone softly muttering nonsense into a megaphone.

The guard to his right, closest to the noise, jolted in place, and his head snapped sideways like he’d been shocked. He set off fast toward the back of the house, striding it out.

Eventually he’d find the burner phone King had buried in the undergrowth on the other side of the south fence. It’d take him longer to find the small portable speaker Violetta had picked up from the electronics store. The two devices were connected by Bluetooth, and they’d play the recording of King’s garbled mutterings until either someone found them or the speaker ran out of battery.

King set off, making sure he didn’t put a foot out of place. There was a narrow blind spot up the east side of the grounds, missing the field of view of two CCTV cameras that didn’t quite overlap.

That was the hole.

He didn’t need to subdue anyone, let alone fire a round. But he still kept the MEU(SOC) tight in his grip as he crouch-walked up the lawn.

He reached the terrace of the east wing, dropped prone, and belly-crawled over the smooth stone until he came to the glass sliding doors. Torres instructed his guards to keep them unlocked in the early morning — he smoked half a Cuban on the east terrace each day at five-thirty a.m. sharp. He probably enjoyed the pleasant nicotine buzz to kickstart the day.

King got to his feet, tugged one door open, and stepped inside.

Too damn easy.

He went down the corridor, the antique rug muffling his footsteps, and ducked into the chef’s kitchen. He knew exactly where it was. Antônia had told him.

The chef was tall, hunched over a lobster on the steel bench top. King came up behind him without a sound. He put the barrel of his pistol against the back of the man’s neck.

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ he breathed. ‘Don’t die for your owner. He’s scum. He’d give you up without a second thought.’

The chef was frozen, but he seemed to understand.

‘I’m going to take a step back. Don’t turn around. I’m still aiming at you. Strip down to your underwear. Do it right now.’

The man complied. He was thin, and the clothes would be tight on King, but they’d fit.

King said, ‘Now turn around.’

The man spun slowly. His eyes were wide with fright. King jerked his head toward the cool room. ‘Go in there. Stay there until someone comes to get you. You’ll be fine. If I see you again, I’ll kill you. And I’ll be here for a while, so I wouldn’t risk it if I were you.’

Simple instructions.

Easy to follow.

The guy followed them.

As soon as the chef shut the cool room door on himself, King put the pistol down and used his good arm to tug the white jacket over his own shirt, then he grabbed the half-peeled lobster and dumped it on a shiny tray on the countertop. The MEU(SOC) pistol went back in his hand, palm toward the ceiling, and he balanced the tray on the flat side of the weapon, holding the gun horizontally like a gangster in a B-movie. It was a competent disguise for a minute of actual work. He only needed to get past the first glance anyway. It’d take anyone a couple of seconds to realise he wasn’t the actual chef, and that was the only purpose it served.

He’d never be able to actually bluff his way past the guards, but he didn’t need to. Antônia’s notes revealed there were only two in the house at any one time.

Torres valued his privacy.

King left the kitchen and practically walked into the first guard.

80

At six a.m. on the dot in Manhattan, large bay doors on one side of the featureless skyscraper rumbled upward.

A convoy of SUVs drove out in a precise single-file chain, like they were invisibly connected from bumper to tail.

They picked up speed down the alleyway, framed by grimy commercial buildings that surrounded the skyscraper in a tight cluster. The alley spat them out onto 5th Avenue, where a sizeable gap in the morning traffic had been carved out in advance by two civilian sedans driven by plainclothes government operatives. The sedans had stalled at the West