Contracts by Matt Rogers (i like reading txt) 📕

King stayed right where he was.

A silent barrier.

But his bones were starting to ache. Invisible scales had been tipped, and he was declining rapidly. The overbearing sensation suffocated him — the knowledge that he’d pushed his body past its limits and jeopardised his health in the process. He tried to quietly will himself toward regaining energy, but it was useless. The tiredness took hold of him, and he did his best to ride it out.

Meanwhile, Slater hunched further over the laptop.

King sensed Perry bristle.

Not good, he thought.

Slater said, ‘I can’t find anything.’

‘Keep looking.’

‘Hold on, there’s something here…’

A thought struck King, and he wheeled around. ‘You said your boss’s work is none of your business, right?’

Perry said, ‘Right.’

‘But when I met you, you told me that’s how Mukta worked out the laptop was valuable. Because you saw him fiddling around with it, and you freaked out.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why would you freak out if you didn’t know there was compromising information on it? How do you know he left documents out of the cloud?’

Silence.

‘You and Winston were in the other room, Perry.’

Silence.

‘What made you freak out?’

Perry didn’t respond.

He was caught up in too many lies.

He needed time to sort them out.

King knew immediately something was wrong, and went for his gun.

But Perry had been anticipating that.

King had his palm around the P320 when Perry lunged across the room and tackled him in the mid-section. He took his hand off the weapon to make sure he didn’t shoot himself in the foot, but the momentum of a pair of two-hundred-pound men falling backwards prevented them from getting off any further strikes. They crashed into the metal bed frame and sprawled across the concrete between the single beds.

King made to leap to his feet, but two things weighed him down.

First, his condition. He was firmly on the decline, and no amount of adrenaline could fight through the fatigue of total exhaustion for very long.

Second, he’d smashed the back of his head on the bed frame.

He didn’t even realise in the heat of the moment, but now he got to one knee before his vision jerked to the right, throwing him entirely off-balance. He came down on his rear and scrambled for purchase on the cold hard floor, but he couldn’t find anything fast enough.

He got his hands underneath his body and tried to lever to his feet, but Perry kicked him in the face before he got halfway through the motion.

Then Perry spun and ripped his own handgun from his waistband so he could get the drop on Slater, but King saw none of it.

His vision was reeling this way and that. He wasn’t unconscious, but he might as well have been. With his equilibrium firmly disrupted and his muscles pleading for mercy, he kicked and flailed on the concrete like a fish out of water.

And he was forced to listen to the horrifying sounds of two men fighting to the death.

78

Slater took longer than usual to react.

He saw something on the laptop that really shouldn’t have been there. He read the file name, blinked, and read it again just to make sure.

Then there was a moment of hesitation as his brain connected the dots.

He thought, Are you fucking kidding me?

Then there was an explosion of sudden violent movement — a hurricane of noise — and when he looked up King was on the floor and Perry was halfway through the process of pivoting toward him. One of the bodyguard’s hands was on the way down to his waistband.

That was all Slater needed to see.

He tensed up and utilised a surge of adrenaline and literally threw the whole table at Perry. It was a small round circular thing, but it was still made of sturdy wood and heavy enough to pack a punch. The laptop flew off the surface and smashed against the far wall and the three table legs hit Perry in the chest. Something cracked in the man’s sternum, and the blunt force of the impact sent him stumbling back across the room.

Slater went for his gun but it wasn’t there.

He remembered feeling something tickling his waist back in the chopper, but the whole flight had been a blur of fatigue and exhaustion. If Perry had lifted his weapon off him before even arriving in Lukla, then the bodyguard was more brazen than he thought. It didn’t gel with Slater’s usual situational awareness, but he recognised that had been thrown out the window when his body shut down. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he remembered feeling the Sig Sauer at his waist.

For all he knew, it was resting in the dirt of the heli field, discreetly discarded when they all slipped out of the chopper.

Then he worked out where it was all at once, because both of Perry’s hands flew to his waist.

He had both guns.

Slater didn’t hesitate to wonder how, or why, or what. He just flipped a switch in his brain and lunged across the room like a man possessed. He got his hands on Perry at the same moment the bodyguard ripped both P320s from his belt.

But by that point Slater had momentum on his side, and he used another savage burst of intensity to pivot and tense and squeeze and throw.

Perry went airborne, bounced like a rag doll off the concrete wall, and sprawled in a heap onto one of the thin mattresses.

The guns went everywhere, skittering around the room.

Slater thought about lunging for one, but there was no guarantee they were ready to fire. Instead he took advantage of a disorientated enemy and leapt onto Perry, pressing all his weight on top of the bodyguard. As soon as Perry lifted his head to break free of the crushing pressure, Slater would loop an arm around his throat and squeeze the life out of him.

Jiu-jitsu 101.

But Perry didn’t do that, because he was obviously a trained combatant himself.

Instead he tucked his chin to his chest and pushed off the mattress and sent