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

But the big man tried to stay guarded. It was hard with mortal pain drilling behind his eyeballs, but he managed to cling onto emotionlessness.

‘You could say that,’ he said.

King, however, knew what life-threatening pain did to a man. How easily it broke you down. Humbled you. Brought you to the sobering reality that you might be about to blink out of existence. Rick Whelan, a man of incredible ruthlessness, was starting to understand that.

Because, deep down, he knew three bullets in the gut wasn’t survivable.

King notched up the pressure to cave. ‘You’re not insane, Rick. Not like Samuel was. And you’re not blind in your hatred for us, like Gavin. You have poise, you have smarts, and you’re a master tactician.’

Despite himself, Rick nodded.

King said, ‘So what the hell are you doing here?’

Rick’s eyes turned glossy. A mixture of crippling agony, acceptance, and resignation. Death awaited. He might as well speak his mind. He wouldn’t get the opportunity again.

‘To see if it could be done,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘There’s nothing quite like la pista secreta,’ he said, referring to the Spanish phrase for the path of illegitimacy.

The drug cartels used it to refer to their trade, their business, their “secret track,” as it quite literally translated to.

King understood. He’d experienced the same thing when he got out of Black Force for the first time. For ten years, his life had been violent, and relentless, and hard-charging. He’d lived at the very edge of the human experiential spectrum. He’d trained and fought and killed and warred for his country, and when he got out, ordinary life seemed banal in comparison.

Rick Whelan had experienced the same thing.

‘I always considered myself smarter than the rest of them,’ he said. ‘And then you two, a couple of highly motivated vigilantes, tore it all apart with very little effort. All you did was beat the upper echelon into unconsciousness and kill the head of the family. Usually, that’s salvageable. There’s contingencies in place. Successors. But it ruined our reputation on the street, and in a business like ours, that’s the end of the world. So I was out. Directionless. But I had my head screwed on straight, and I understood that the two of you were different beasts entirely. So I didn’t bother trying. I was lost, and I needed something to make me alive, and then Gavin came to me with a proposition.’

‘How much of it was him, and how much of it was you?’

‘For a little brat, he’s surprisingly visionary,’ Rick said. ‘He’s twenty years younger than me, so he had the ideas I never could have. But, for all his strengths, he’s flawed. He drinks, he smokes, he fucks — he spends the money that his father and grandfathers fought tooth and nail to earn. But he knew he needed me. He knew he could never implement the things he wanted to do. He needed someone with razor focus to carry it all out.’

‘You’re a hacker?’

‘No,’ Rick said. ‘But this is the Internet age, my friend. If you have the assets, you can find people. You can find anyone.’

‘That’s all it took?’

‘That’s all it took. That’s why I did it. Because I didn’t quite believe I could expose the flaws the kid showed me. But they were there, and they were ripe for picking.’

King’s stomach twisted.

Rick said, ‘If you think about it, I did this country a service, didn’t I?’

‘Sure,’ Slater said. ‘You bet. We all learned our lesson. You’ve shown us the flaws in the system. Now reverse it.’

‘I’m dying,’ Rick said, smiling through bloodstained teeth. ‘Maybe if you’d let me live, I might have had a change of heart. Truth is, I always saw the madness in what Gavin was doing, but I guess I was too awed by the results to stop it. And now…’

He lifted his hands away from his shirt, exposing the crimson stain covering half his torso. Blood overflowed the lip of his shirt and ran down his jeans. It dripped to the floor with finality.

Rick looked King and Slater square in the eyes and said, ‘Well, now I don’t much care anymore. You killed the one sane man left in this building. Best of luck, boys.’

Then, before either of them could lunge in to try to stem the tide, Rick Whelan bled out.

65

Slater swore out loud, turned and kicked the wall.

Beside him, King swept through the curtains, submachine gun raised, making sure the lobby was still clear. Slater composed himself and followed the man out of the waiting room and, sure enough, it was still a ghost town. They both slotted fresh magazines into their respective MP7s and gave each other the same silent look.

Slater knew what it meant.

Everything was so abhorrently crazy that there was little left to say.

They advanced, clearing the tight corners, one man moving, the other covering him. They repeated the process until they swept up into another broad concrete stairwell. Slater suppressed the odd sensation of déjà vu. Most of his night had been stairwells and lobbies and alleyways and bloodshed.

The cold, alien stink of a city without power.

And the key to its salvation lay within these walls.

He steeled himself as they climbed two flights and came out in the mouth of an entire floor dedicated to office cubicles. The endless space was divided up by waist-high partitions, and it was all dark. There was enough midnight-blue light infiltrating the floor-to-ceiling windows that they could make out the outlines of their surroundings, but apart from that they were blind.

‘Ready?’ King whispered.

‘Go,’ Slater said.

King switched on his flashlight.

Gavin Whelan was a dozen feet in front of them, holding an AK-47 at shoulder height, its barrel aimed squarely between Slater’s eyes.

Stalemate.

If anyone pulled a trigger, Slater would die, and Gavin would die.

Gavin looked exactly how Slater remembered. Handsome for an Irishman. The last time Slater had seen him, he’d placed him as the son of a powerful mobster and a gorgeous trophy wife. Now, he shared the same sentiment. Gavin had