Hawk, p.31
Hawk, page 31
part #6 of Will Slater Series
Then Rodgers slipped, ever so slightly. The man shimmied a couple of inches down King’s back. He adjusted the body triangle and locked it in even tighter, crushing King’s abdomen between his bony lower legs.
But there had been enough of a delay for King to clear his mind and focus on what he could control.
He wasn’t giving up yet.
Rodgers sunk the choke in. He looped his arm around King’s neck and squeezed tight and found the right place to lock it up. He wrenched hard, and King felt the horrific sensation of his air being cut off, and then, on top of that, Rodgers continuing to squeeze until his face turned crimson and he was drowning, literally drowning, fading rapidly, fading, fading, fading…
And then he took five strides toward the porch and launched into a full somersault.
He outweighed Rodgers by close to thirty pounds, and he was supercharged with adrenalin, aware that if this didn’t work Rodgers would ride out the impact and keep the choke locked in, and then King would fade into unconsciousness, followed quickly by death.
So this had to work.
Which meant he put everything into it.
Every ounce of his soul.
All the blood, sweat and tears he’d expunged from his body over a decade of training. It would all be meaningless if he didn’t get Rodgers off him.
He leapt off the ground and pivoted in the air, carrying the lanky man on his back, and he came down on the edge of the porch, which was nothing but a massive granite slab dropped in front of the ruined mansion.
Rodgers came down on the corner of the slab, and then all two hundred and twenty pounds of King’s mass came down on top of him. Rodgers landed on the small of his back, and King heard a vicious, barbaric crunch and knew that it was his adversary’s spine snapping.
One of the most repulsive sounds on the planet.
Rodgers’ grip slackened instantaneously and his legs came away from King’s mid-section. They both bounced off the edge of the porch in unison and spilled into the dirt…
…but King was the only one who got to his feet in the aftermath.
Rodgers lay helplessly on his back, his face white as a ghost, his eyes bulging, his mouth flapping. The man knew immediately he was paralysed. King had pinpointed the impact zone and aimed for it as best he could, and he’d succeeded.
He’d cracked Rodgers’ back like it was made of plastic.
Now King stood over the lanky man and gasped for breath, letting the blood drain out of his face. His cheeks were the colour of beetroot, and the veins pulsed and throbbed in his neck.
He knew how close he’d come to passing out, and he didn’t even want to think about what might have happened if he had.
To put the Black Force candidate out of his miserable new existence, King stomped down on his throat three times, destroying all the soft tissue and sending Rodgers to a quick grave. He averted his eyes from the aftermath, and when he was finished he rolled the corpse onto its stomach so he didn’t have to look at the damage he’d inflicted.
When he stepped away from the body, he found the man behind the wheel of the excavator watching in wide-eyed horror.
‘Please don’t run,’ King said, walking toward the machine.
The worker — a big, burly man with hairy forearms and a bushy beard — had no colour in his face. He slipped out of the hard plastic seat and dropped to the ground in front of the mansion. He turned to run for the front perimeter fence.
King could tell the guy wanted to be anywhere but here.
King took one look at the mansion, debris strewn everywhere, lying in ruin, and knew if he wanted any hope of uncovering Slater from the wreckage, he’d need the worker alive.
And something told him he needed to act damn fast.
He reached out and grabbed the back of the guy’s shirt, stopping him in his tracks.
The worker leapt on the spot like he’d been touched by a ghost, and spun around with his fist cocked.
Before he could even throw the punch, King caught it, wrapping a giant meaty hand around the closed fist and holding it in place with brute strength.
He said, ‘You need to calm down, and we need to talk.’
The worker’s mouth creased into a hard line, and he wrestled desperately to break free of King’s iron grip.
King wrenched his fist down to waist level, so he couldn’t throw a punch in a hurry even if he got the limb free.
King said, ‘Please.’
Terror spread over the worker’s face. ‘You just killed that guy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me out of here, bro. Please just let me out of here. I don’t want any part of this. I’ll give you anything.’
‘You were willing to help them, and they’re a hell of a lot worse than I am. You don’t know the sort of suffering they cause, but you were still going to take their money. And now you’re going to take mine.’
‘Yours?’
‘Whatever they were paying you, I’ll double it. I just need you to do exactly the same work.’
‘No, man,’ the worker pleaded. ‘There’s people who need help in Tapanui. I wasn’t okay with coming out here in the first place. I only did it cause I thought you were decent folk.’
‘I’m not with them.’
‘You just stomped one of them to death.’
‘You must have missed the part where he tried to kill me first.’
‘I—’
‘Are you going to help me or not?’
The guy didn’t respond.
King said, ‘I’m going to stand here and you’re going to keep doing the job you were doing. I’ve got a friend down there who badly needs my help.’
‘Down in the basement?’
King paused. ‘Is that what you were clearing a path to?’
‘Yes. There’s an emergency stairwell blocked by rubble. You didn’t know that?’
‘I told you — I’m not with them.’
‘Why should I stay? You’re not armed.’
‘And still I caught you. And now I’m holding you here against your will and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. If you turn and try to run, I’ll catch you. I’m faster. And then I’ll do to you what I did to the last guy. You don’t want that, do you?’
The worker gulped and shook his head.
‘Thought not,’ King said. ‘Get to work. And hurry.’
73
Ali Hawk — it still felt strange to address him by his true name — advanced toward Slater with a hypodermic needle between his fingers.
‘What’s that?’ Slater said, icy with fear.
‘Just a little something to make sure you don’t go anywhere when we take the restraints off. And then we’ll put you under. We’ll electrically stimulate your neural tissue. We’ll put state-of-the-art electrodes in your head.’
Slater remained mute.
Hawk said, ‘When you wake up, you’ll be mine.’
Slater kept his mouth shut.
Hawk said, ‘Whatever I tell you to do, you’ll do it. You won’t be the same person. You’ll have no control over your impulses. And it’s irreversible. I’ll make sure they’re all attached permanently. You’ll never be the same.’
George was hard at work restoring the overturned trolleys to their original positions and going through the process of sanitising the surgical instruments that had spilled onto the floor during the quake. He was single-minded in his determination, and Slater found it hard to believe how the man had descended so quickly into an anarchic state of mind.
George seemed to have concluded that his options were slim and decided to press forward with the best available outcome.
Slater wondered if things would have turned out differently had King not materialised as a threat.
With a rogue agent upstairs working on freeing Slater, George might have considered the more humane options. But now he was being threatened, and that changed things significantly. He was no longer concerned with the morally righteous decision.
He was focused on self-preservation.
And that involved turning Slater into an automaton.
‘This is just a numbing agent,’ Hawk said. ‘To allow us to get you into position. The good stuff comes later.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Because I want you to know what’s about to happen to you. Makes it more exciting.’
Claustrophobia weighed heavy on Slater’s insides.
He was fine with dying — he figured if it came on the battlefield, it would come quick. But the knowledge that some parts of him would still remain and some would be snuffed out terrified him.
Would he still be conscious in this new life, but unable to control his own decisions? Or would he be a new person entirely, forged out of altered parts of his brain?
Would the old Slater be wiped out completely?
All these thoughts ran through his head and he suppressed a stifling panic attack as Hawk slid the hypodermic needle into a vein on the side of his neck.
Hawk removed the needle, and fifteen minutes passed in uncomfortable silence.
It began with a soft tingling, followed swiftly by a numbness in all his limbs at once. Hawk stood back patiently and observed the results, and only when he was sure Slater wouldn’t lunge off the bed did he undo the leather straps around his ankles and unlock the last remaining handcuff on his left wrist.
Slater was free.
But so far from free at the same time.
He lay motionless in a seated position on the metal bed, and Hawk reclined it back down to a horizontal plane. Hawk wandered over to the side, and Slater got a good look at him. He scrutinised the man’s features for what seemed like the first time.
The true Ali Hawk was more physically flawed than the decoy. Slater understood why he’d used such a charming, attractive double. Hawk had the cunning personality of his dead counterpart — of course he would; the decoy had a mirror image of Hawk’s personality — but his receding hairline was flecked with grey, and his eyes were large and spaced a little too far apart. He had a short squashed nose and chapped lips. His skin was mottled, seemingly from years of stress.
And when he looked at Slater with those dead grey eyes, Slater saw no humanity whatsoever.
The decoy — Quinn — had elicited some sort of sinister charm. With his thick black hair swept back off his forehead and bright brilliant eyes, the decoy had evoked memories of a cunning, dashing supervillain — perhaps precisely what Ali Hawk had been going for.
The real man was more bitter, more disillusioned with the world. There was none of the intoxicating passion of the decoy.
That had been invented — a fake ideal designed to impress.
And as Slater thought of what the decoy had told him, it began to add up.
Ali Hawk was a deeply troubled man.
Slater could still talk — just. Over the course of perhaps twenty minutes, he’d lost most of the feeling in his body, but his lips still moved.
He said, ‘Ordinary life wasn’t enough, was it?’
Hawk frowned down at him. ‘What are you trying to achieve here?’
‘I’m trying to get to the bottom of this.’
‘It doesn’t matter whether you get to the bottom of it. This procedure is going to happen to you regardless.’
‘You’re a brilliant man who got everything he ever wanted early in life,’ Slater said. ‘You figured it all out. You bought and sold companies and got rich beyond your wildest dreams. And then you realised it didn’t make you happy, so you decided to go all-out in the hunt for power. You started playing around with the human mind, and you realised technological advances in the twenty-first century could allow you to physically control the brain. And now you think that’s going to put everything in place. You think that’s going to make you happy. But it won’t. You can keep going on this path for as long as you want, but the quest for more control and more assets is going to reach its limit. And then you’ll realise you never sorted your life out, no matter how brilliant you think you are. And that’s going to be a bitch of a pill to swallow. You might even commit suicide when you get to the end of the line. I hope you find some sort of redemption before then.’
Hawk could have shut him up at any point during the spiel, but the ugly little man narrowed his eyes and let scorn creep over his face. And in that moment, Slater knew he was right. No matter what happened, he could die satisfied. He’d dedicated the majority of his life to a noble cause, and that was enough to take him to the grave in a semi-blissful state.
The fear shrank away.
The unease fell aside.
His mind opened up, and accepted where he was and where he’d come from and what he’d done.
And he closed his eyes with a smile, because if this was the end of the road then it had been a worthwhile journey.
Whereas Hawk stood over him, hunched and cold, brimming with rage.
Hawk rolled him onto his front, impatient to get on with the operation, and said, ‘Are we ready?’
Someone — either George or Eddie — said, ‘Good to go.’
‘Doesn’t matter what he thinks,’ Hawk mumbled to himself, but Slater heard it all. ‘He’s my prisoner. Doesn’t matter. He’s wrong. He’s a dead man walking. I’m right. I’m the pioneer. I’m the high achiever. I’m who will be remembered. Yes. That’s it. That’s right.’
‘But you won’t be,’ Slater said, his chin pressed against the cold metal. ‘No-one will remember you before long, no matter what you achieve. You should sort yourself out before you tear the rest of the world apart. Or don’t. Like I said, we both know how you feel, deep down. All of this is overcompensating. Don’t die as miserable as you’ve lived most of your life.’
Hawk said nothing. He simply slipped a needle into the vein just below the crook of Slater’s elbow and injected a general anaesthetic into his bloodstream.
Slater said, ‘I’m going happy.’
Hawk didn’t respond.
Slater said, ‘I’m going satisfied.’
Hawk didn’t respond.
Slater said, ‘I’m going…’
Then he drifted into the darkness.
Perhaps forever.
74
King had never experienced such an anxiety-ridden wait in all his life.
Each pile of rubble cleared by the excavator sent a fresh pang of tension through his chest. Something was plaguing him the entire time. A gnawing feeling of discontent.
He had the sensation that there was something happening down there in that basement.
Something horrifying.
Something that would leave Slater a broken wreck.
King replayed the events of the last twenty-four hours in his mind — the electronic safeties on the guns, the implants in heads, the unexplainable deaths. It all rattled him, and he thought he was piecing together what Ali Hawk wanted from the pair of them.
He had a rough outline mapped out.
And it horrified him beyond description.
The guy in the excavator worked diligently, as if he suddenly understood that King’s fear wasn’t unfounded. He seemed to get it. The shock of the murder wore off, and the guy was beginning to realise that whoever owned this mansion might truly be a bad, bad man.
King could be convincing when he needed to.
In any case, the man didn’t seem to be in the mood to flee. He was committed to clearing the rubble. Perhaps he’d decided that the situation was too complicated to decipher, and figured he would simply do his job and then get the hell out of there as fast as possible. Without the harrowing consequences of the earthquake, he might not have stayed. The death of a man right in front of him would have rattled him more. It wouldn’t have seemed as inconsequential amongst such rampant devastation.
At some point, Fisher picked himself up out of the dirt. King turned and watched him, but didn’t react. The guy’s face was a swollen, incomprehensible mess. King had been accurate in his initial assessment. Fisher’s jaw was broken, and so was his nose. The guy spun in a semi-circle, barely aware of his surroundings. Through swollen puffy eyes he noticed King, and visibly flinched.
King didn’t react.
He simply watched.
Then he pointed at the front gate.
A command.
Fisher saw Rodgers’ body, then turned back to King and nodded gratefully. Thanking him for sparing his life.
He stumbled off in the direction of the road. His legs wobbled as he walked, and a bystander might have thought the earthquake was still in full effect.
King stood solemnly amidst the ruined landscape and let the guy wander away.
He’d killed enough people for a lifetime.
But he knew it wasn’t done. There was someone below ground with Slater. Most definitely Hawk. Maybe others. Those who had survived the initial tremors. Maybe some guards on the top floor had made it down to the safety of the basement before the rest of the house had come down.
It took thirty minutes for the excavator to get the job done.
When it was done, the worker spilled out of the cabin and sat down in the ruins of the house. His face was pale, and his breathing was laboured. Shock was setting in. He’d just seen King beat a man to death with his bare hands, and now he was doing work for that same man.
It shocked him. Flabbergasted him. Like a betrayal of his own morals.
King frankly didn’t have time to convince him otherwise.
He said, ‘Point me in the right direction.’
The worker lifted a shaking finger and pointed to a flat stretch of dusty concrete he’d cleared out in a corner of the mansion.
‘There,’ he said.
