Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

engineer,’ he said. ‘All I do is plan for hypotheticals. There’s no scenario where they’ll find out. What I’ve done is untraceable, so all they have to work with is the suspicion that I was involved in your disappearances. And suspicion is baseless. They can question me all they want. There’s no scenario where I break.’

‘You don’t know how low they’re willing to stoop.’

‘I’ve considered every hypothetical,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Violetta fell quiet.

‘And besides,’ Alonzo said, ‘they need me. You said it yourself. I’m the best.’

King chuckled at that.

‘Hey, Jason,’ Alonzo said.

‘You’re a good man,’ King said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Least I can do.’

‘What are you going to do without me?’ Violetta said.

‘Something tells me I’ll manage.’

She smiled.

King said, ‘You’re sure this is bulletproof?’

‘I’ll pretend not to be offended that you even asked.’

‘Understood.’

‘So what’s left to do?’ Violetta said. ‘Give you the go-ahead?’

‘I’m sitting at my computer,’ Alonzo said. ‘The go-ahead is all I need.’

Silence.

Then Alonzo said, ‘Done.’

King gripped the wheel tight to ride out a wave of relief, and stared through the windshield at the desert whipping past on either side of the highway.

A free man once more.

Alonzo said, ‘The four of you can go anywhere, do anything. My contact in Vegas will sort you out with the physical documents, but your identities are sacrosanct. No one at any level of the government — surface or shadow — knows of their existence. Same goes for Beckham Lang. His application at the Rentarío Paralysis Centre in Henderson has been processed and accepted in their system. They’re expecting him in three days time under a whole new identity, which gives him time to learn his new details. As for you four, no photo identification software will work on your new ID photos. I’ve altered what subtle traits needed to be altered. No one will know the difference. And lastly I’ve wiped all trace of what I’ve done from every system our beloved Uncle Sam has access to.’

Neither King nor Violetta said a word.

Alonzo continued. ‘As for the money … it was me who followed the trail to Slater’s accounts. I doubt anyone else could have managed. So I wiped the trail and buried his accounts under additional layers of secrecy that he wasn’t knowledgeable enough to think of. It’s untouchable now. You have all your money. A little over four hundred million, to be precise. You can do as you please with it.’

The silence stretched out.

Alonzo said, ‘Go. Be free. Enjoy yourselves.’

Violetta said, ‘Somehow I don’t think enjoying ourselves is on the cards.’

King managed the slightest head shake. It was strange that the smallest gesture conveyed the largest impact, revealing what he was destined to do until the day he died — fight.

Violetta stiffened in the passenger seat.

Alonzo sensed the hesitation and said, ‘You know it’s not too late. There’s a way to salvage all of this. The upper echelon isn’t all the way corrupt. They will listen to reason. They’ll listen to the three of you, if you all come back. There’s a hypothetical where everything goes back to the way it was. If that’s what you want.’

King said, ‘No. This time, Alonzo, there isn’t.’

Violetta said, ‘It’s the principle. We’re done serving a country.’

Now it was King’s turn to fall quiet.

A deep admiration stirred in his chest.

Violetta said, ‘We’re individuals. Not drones. We’ll do it our way.’

‘You’re really on board with this?’ Alonzo said.

She looked at King. ‘I really am.’

‘Then I wish you Godspeed.’

‘Thank you again,’ Violetta said. ‘Best of luck, my friend.’

‘You, too.’

The line went dead.

Silence.

Overwhelming silence.

King said, ‘So that’s it?’

Violetta said, ‘That’s it.’

Simple as that.

New lives. New identities. New futures.

King stepped on the gas. It didn’t matter as much if they were pulled over now. No system could identify them. They were a well-off couple with a Benz in a country of over three hundred million people.

Ghosts in the wind.

King accelerated into the night.

90

Even though he’d known it was coming, the news took Slater by surprise all the same.

We’re in the clear.

No one will ever find us.

We can start again.

They’d been driving for two full days since receiving word from Violetta — through Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Now they branched off I-93 onto I-11 as they crossed the state border into Nevada, taking it up past Boulder City and into the sleepy suburban city of Henderson. They trawled through residential streets, passing rows and rows of identical houses with cream walls and ochre roofs. Xeriscaping dotted the middle strip of each street. It was early evening, and the lowering sun had both elongated the shadows and drenched the suburbs in golden light.

According to the GPS, their destination was two streets away.

Slater had to admit the knowledge was jarring.

Both he and Alexis had got to know Beckham Lang over the previous forty-eight hours, and they’d both concluded separately that they’d never met a tougher soul. What Slater did paled in comparison to Beckham’s reality. Sure, he put his body and health on the line in the name of vigilante justice, but at least he still had the ability to feel pain, to experience movement and exertion. Beckham had spent a decade trapped in the prison of his own body, and yet his morale had never wavered.

Not once.

Earlier that morning, Slater had asked him how he dealt with it on a day-to-day basis.

Beckham had said, ‘I separate tasks.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a concept I read about in some book, right before I was paralysed. I can’t control what happens to me, and I can’t control what people think about me. All I can focus on is what I can control, no matter how broken I am, no matter how much I’d love to play the victim. Playing the victim isn’t a task that benefits me in any way. What benefits me is persevering. So I separate everything I can potentially do into the tasks that have positive outcomes, and then I do only those things. I have no expectation of anything else. It helps me stop thinking about what could