Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

and stepped to the side, out of sight if anyone looked through the peephole.

He waited fifteen long seconds.

Nothing happened.

He thought about moving on.

Then the door opened.

An elderly woman stood there, hunched over a walking frame, shorter than five feet. She was frail and confused. She craned her neck to look up at him, and it didn’t seem comfortable.

He said, ‘Sorry, ma’am. Wrong apartment.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and left it at that.

She closed the door in his face.

He walked straight past Violetta’s apartment, to the door to the right of hers. He repeated the process — knocked three times and stepped aside.

This time he only had to wait six seconds. The door opened halfway between the sixth and seventh second, revealing a huge man who looked like he’d spent most of the last few years of his life on the frontlines. He had a pockmarked, weathered face, with deep lines of stress etched into his forehead, and red ruddy cheeks. Iraq, maybe. He was serious business, and he had one hand behind his back, which no doubt clutched a handgun, but that didn’t matter because King was already pivoting as soon as he glimpsed the guy’s frame. After a ton of wind-up he ordinarily couldn’t afford, he slammed a perfectly placed right hook square into the centre of the guy’s face, causing a plethora of damage as it simultaneously sparked him out cold. Breaking his nose, maybe fracturing an orbital bone, maybe shattering one completely.

Serious, serious damage.

The clean punch would have shattered every bone in King’s hand if he was a novice combatant, but in much the same way Muay Thai fighters harden their shins by kicking poles, he’d hardened bone and tissue in his hands over a lifetime of use.

Unhurt, he stepped over the threshold and shut the door behind him.

Three minutes later he stepped back out, an entire roll of duct tape lighter.

He went one apartment over, and knocked on Violetta’s door. Repeating the same process. An icy impenetrable calm had settled over him, before he’d even stepped foot in the building. He thought nothing of what he was about to do — the bridge he was about to cross. There was no point second-guessing. He’d made up his mind. This was his decision. He’d have to live with it for the rest of his life.

She opened the door — probably because no one in the tier-one crew had alerted the guy in her apartment to any danger — and before recognition and confusion spread across her face he made sure to memorise every part of her features.

The straight blonde hair, the kind blue eyes, the pale skin, the flawless complexion.

She was beautiful, and he realised it might be the last time she’d look at him without hate in her eyes.

As if on cue, recognition and confusion seized her.

She managed a single, ‘What the—?’ before he filled the doorway with the Glock raised, sweeping the space over her shoulder.

The final operator was there — a tall wiry athletic guy with sharp features and a pronounced jawline. He’d come out of the spare room, and he’d come prepared. In the snapshot King caught he saw a flustered man, probably aggravated by Violetta abandoning protocol. He must have demanded he be the one to answer the door each and every time. She likely considered it ridiculous, especially if there was a sniper’s nest across the street and a guy next door watching all the CCTV feeds in the building. So he was pissed at her disobedience, which meant he’d reacted fast. He had a Beretta in his hands and those hands were on an upward trajectory, and now there was primal recognition in his eyes as he acknowledged King’s presence.

Suddenly King saw it all laid out before him.

He saw it from the operator’s perspective.

A rogue enemy of the state standing across the threshold. A handler between them, but not an important one. If it came to letting King escape with their country’s darkest secrets or taking out Violetta as unfortunate collateral, he’d go for the latter.

He would have been given those instructions, too.

Explicitly.

Do not, under any circumstances, let King get his hands on her. If he shows up in New York, then he’s allied with Slater.

Neutralise him.

Whatever the cost.

For milliseconds, King considered the possibility of a non-lethal response, then realised it was never going to work. He couldn’t be pure in this world if he wanted to exist in it.

He forced Violetta aside and shot the operator in the forehead before the guy could get off a shot of his own.

When he saw the trajectory of the operator’s barrel, and the closeness of the guy’s finger to the trigger, he knew the first shot would have blown through the back of Violetta’s head.

The body fell back against the plasterboard, and its neck bent in a way necks shouldn’t bend, and it collapsed to the floor.

She turned and stared at the corpse.

She didn’t speak.

A million questions played on her lips, but she settled on, ‘What did you do?’

‘Saved your life.’

She turned back, her pale face paler than usual. ‘What is this?’

He was still frozen in place, Glock raised to head-height, aimed at the bloody patch of wall down the corridor, showered by the residue of the exit wound.

Now, he drifted the barrel over and aimed it at the love of his life.

He watched her finally realise, with a gut shot of clarity, what was happening.

‘No,’ she said, her face falling.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘And don’t say another word until I ask you to.’

Fear and sadness rippled behind her eyes.

He said, ‘And get your story straight. Because I need answers.’

64

Slater didn’t hail a cab right away.

He walked, with his head down and his hands in his pockets. The sun was gone, replaced by thick cloud. Just for once he’d hoped for a few minutes of good weather — not that it would have achieved anything — but it seemed even that had been stripped from him. The sweatshirt under his leather jacket