Contracts by Matt Rogers (i like reading txt) 📕

But for now…

Slater leapt out of bed, good as new. If anyone had been watching him as an observer for the last couple of days, they might have assumed it was a Herculean effort to lunge to his feet, but he knew enough about the primal workings of the human body to take it in his stride. He crossed to the door, opened it softly, and leaned into the hallway.

The doorway to room 108 was across the hall, maybe a dozen feet down.

There was no door there.

Someone had smashed it off its hinges and sent it tumbling into the room.

Slater couldn’t see anyone. Whoever had rushed 108 was now inside, probably hurling sheets off mattresses, realising the room was empty, rapidly calculating alternatives.

Slater counted to three.

Then a tall wiry man clad in a balaclava and camouflage fatigues crept back out through the open doorway. His mannerisms were sheepish — he’d created a whole lot of noise and had nothing to show for it. There was an AK-47 in his hands. Serious firepower for an assault on a crippled man. Clearly they didn’t underestimate Slater… but the guy didn’t get a chance to use the rifle.

He looked up and noticed Slater standing there, and that was the last thing he saw. Slater pumped the trigger once and gore exited the back of the man’s skull, and then Slater was on the move. He kicked the guy in the chest before he could collapse and sent the corpse splaying back through the doorway, where it crashed into two more guys on the way out. They didn’t fall over, but it took them a beat to lower their dead friend to the carpet and reach for their weapons again.

Slater filled the doorway.

He shot one of them through the top of the head and the other in the face when he jerked upright to greet the new threat.

Reacting to an impulse, Slater pivoted in the doorway and took a step out into the corridor. He aimed down the length of it, levelling the barrel with the glass entrance doors and the snowy embankment beyond.

Fresh insurgents stepped into the entranceway, responding to the blaring gunshots. Their guns were up and they were ready for a war.

They didn’t get one.

Slater put a round into each of them.

One.

Two.

Three.

They dropped like dominoes, a couple of them crashing into each other on the way down. The third guy pitched forward and fell straight through the glass door, shattering it. What ordinarily would have been an almighty noise fell on deaf ears.

Slater shrugged off the temporary hearing loss and backpedalled into room 105.

Because now his muscles were leeching, protesting, whining, his heart rate rising, his brain screaming, The tank’s empty. You’re done.

He stumbled through the doorway and barely got it closed before his legs gave out and he slid to the floor.

He tried not to panic, but it was like trying to hold back a tsunami with a dam wall.

Chaos reigned on the other side of the door. The handful of trekkers still in their rooms were now screaming, running, banging into walls and doors as they fled. Under the impression they were now caught in the midst of a deadly mass shooting. When they got out of the building, they might keep running until their legs gave out.

Slater closed his eyes, pressed his back to the door, and tried his best not to pass out.

66

‘Drop it, please,’ an accented voice said.

King calculated how fast he could pivot, smash the gun away, seize the upper hand.

He couldn’t.

He’d been through enough combat to know when the odds were hopeless.

So he dropped it.

He didn’t have a choice.

Turned around slowly, so the barrel came to rest against his forehead.

‘I know you move fast,’ the porter said. ‘Don’t try it with me. It won’t work.’

King believed him. The small man’s calloused finger was millimetres off the trigger. He was barely a shade over five feet tall, with skin like leather and an unimposing physique, but he only could have pulled this off if he had an arsenal of experience in this very realm.

And then the opportunity was gone anyway, because the porter backed up a few steps. Now he was out of range, leaving King a sitting duck in the depths of the cave.

‘Oscar, put the gun on the floor,’ the man said. ‘Then all three of you stand in a line.’

Perry complied. King heard him lower the empty handgun to the cave floor, and then sensed the man’s sizeable bulk in his peripheral vision. Perry stood still as a statue beside him, and Raya joined them. None of them said a word. They couldn’t afford to.

Then King decided to test his luck.

‘Mukta, isn’t it?’ he said.

The porter nodded.

King said, ‘That’s Indian?’

‘I was a Naxalite,’ Mukta explained, ‘for most of my adult life.’

India’s Maoist insurgency.

No wonder he was able to recruit Nepal’s own rebels so effortlessly.

Their supposed cause was one and the same.

‘And now you’re here,’ King said.

‘Now I’m here.’

Mukta whistled low under his breath, and a trickle of insurgents bled into the mouth of the cave. They were all identical, seemingly materialising out of nowhere, dressed in the familiar dark green fatigues and draped in balaclavas. King counted four of them, plus the porter.

The porter.

King said, ‘Your job. That was all a front?’

‘Yes and no. It’s a good cover story. I’m small, and you can tell I’ve lived a hard life. I don’t look any different from them. If I pretend I can’t speak English, I’m practically a chameleon.’

King recalled what Violetta had said. Most kidnappings aren’t actually reported.

He said, ‘How many ransoms have you racked up out here?’

Mukta’s eyes lit up. ‘Enough.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘You’re an inquisitive one, aren’t you?’

‘I’m here to negotiate.’

Mukta laughed. ‘Cute.’

The faint inklings of dread began to creep up King’s spine.

Because there was nothing more dangerous than an enemy who didn’t care about money.

King said, ‘You’re in the kidnapping business. Your hostage is worth a lot of cash. I’m the one who can