Contracts by Matt Rogers (i like reading txt) 📕

‘I should be ready for a fight.’

‘You said it yourself, remember? Adrenaline will kick in. You’ll be okay.’

Slater’s footsteps seemed to become heavier. ‘Yeah… it’ll be okay.’

King didn’t linger on his friend’s condition. There was no other way to put it — Slater’s body was shutting down.

But you only need to make it to Gokyo.

Figure out who’s behind this, fire a few shots, grab the girl, get the fuck out of Nepal.

Simple as that.

He knew it wouldn’t be.

Nothing ever goes according to plan.

They passed the final lake, frozen over from the arctic temperatures, and then it was a simple flat path all the way to the base of the village. They saw Gokyo from a mile out, resting in the snowy plains, dwarfed by the enormous peak behind it. Gokyo Ri was a gargantuan piece of nature, rising up into the clouds, its peak invisible in the late-afternoon gloom. Trekkers summited it in the morning, often getting up at four a.m. so they had the best chance of a cloudless photo at the peak.

King saw it, and bristled.

Slater saw it too.

The cold seemed to intensify.

‘Be on guard now,’ King warned him. ‘They’ll see us coming from the village. Keep the buff over your nose and mouth, and don’t adjust your glasses. And get ready to fight.’

‘Mmm…’

King spun around and seized him by the shoulders, fear rippling through him. Not toward the insurgents they would almost certainly encounter, but toward Slater’s health. He’d never seen his friend like this. Snowy wind whipped and lashed against them, but they both steeled themselves.

‘Hey,’ King snapped, speaking over the snowstorm. ‘You hear me? Get it together. You might not have anything left in the tank, but you need to find some sort of reserves. You’re simply not going to survive if you walk into Gokyo like this.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘I know. Try harder.’

‘Okay.’

‘This is it,’ King said. ‘A few more hired thugs, and either Perry or the porter, and then it’s all over.’

Slater was sluggish as he nodded his understanding. ‘I’ll perform. Don’t worry.’

‘You ever felt anything like this before?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know you’ll be able to?’

Slater shrugged off King’s grip and started trudging through the snow again. ‘Because otherwise I’m dead.’

King wanted to say a million things, but elected not to.

He followed Will Slater into Gokyo.

57

It hurt to breathe.

Slater considered himself something of an expert in human willpower. He’d spent most of his career pushing his own limits, and been rewarded handsomely for it.

This, though…

This was a different beast.

His heart was working overtime to keep his body moving. There’d been a click inside his head halfway between Machhermo and Gokyo. He’d ignored it, just as he was ignoring all the discomfort rippling through him, but he knew what it meant. He was operating on full survival mechanisms now — when he stopped, he would crash. The fight or flight response was keeping him moving, but when he came to rest his body would likely shut down.

He couldn’t afford to think about it. Each step forward took a Herculean effort, and it was only going to get worse the longer they spent at this altitude. He’d been telling himself the adrenaline would override his exhaustion when it came time to fight for Raya, but as time passed he found himself doubting that more and more.

You don’t know who’s behind it.

You don’t know what you’re walking into.

You don’t know anything.

The right move would be to call it in. Accept they were compromised, inform Violetta they were pulling out, and leave it to the professional negotiators to sort out the mess they left behind.

A few hundred feet from the mouth of Gokyo, he voiced his concerns.

King said, ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Now that we’re this close to it, I’m pushing ahead. If you need to stop here, then stop. But something about this whole thing is fishy as hell, and you know just as well as I do that the negotiators won’t get to the bottom of it. I have an awful feeling if we pull out, no one will ever work out what happened here.’

Slater wasn’t going to argue with any of that. He shut his eyes, screamed at his body to respond, and quickened his pace.

It worked.

Even though his muscles protested, he sped up. King matched his pace and suddenly they were moving fast underneath a snow-covered archway. It symbolised their official entrance into Gokyo. They exchanged a glance, tucked their buffs a little further up the bridges of their noses, and pushed on.

‘Door to door?’ Slater said.

‘Yeah,’ King said. ‘Door to door.’

‘We’re going to get ourselves killed.’

‘No,’ King said. ‘Somehow, I don’t think we are.’

Slater could see the man’s demeanour shifting. It was more obvious because his own body was refusing to respond — in past confrontations they’d shared, their adrenaline tended to peak in unison, narrowing their focus, giving them tunnel vision. Now Slater could see King going through the transformation. King straightened up, and his breathing intensified, and he seemed to expand across the shoulders as his muscles linked together in a cohesive chain. He was ready for a fight to the death.

Slater wasn’t.

He could move faster than before, but the cocktail of stress chemicals that his brain ordinarily released like clockwork was still buried deep down inside. Inaccessible for now.

He told King.

There was no use hiding it.

‘Let me take the lead,’ King said. ‘There’s only a handful of teahouses here. We’ll have what we need to know within minutes.’

‘You hit the first one,’ Slater said. ‘I’ll wait out front.’

‘Try to make yourself invisible.’

‘Always.’

Then it was game time.

No build-up, no unnecessary machismo, no mutual chest-puffing.

Just a simple nod to each other, and then they went into operational mode.

As promised, King took the lead. He shielded himself from any vantage points in the windows of buildings they were approaching and transferred the Sig Sauer from his waistband to his jacket pocket. Then he kept both hands in his pockets, turned back to face the town, and made a beeline for the closest teahouse.

Slater followed.

It was