Wolf: A Will Slater Thriller (Will Slater Series Book 1) Read online

  Wolf

  The Will Slater Series Book One

  Matt Rogers

  Copyright © 2017 by Matt Rogers

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Onur Aksoy.

  www.liongraphica.com

  Contents

  Reader’s Group

  Books by Matt Rogers

  Foreword

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part II

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Announcement

  Afterword

  Reader’s Group

  About the Author

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  Meet Jason King — another member of Black Force, the shadowy organisation that Slater dedicated his career to.

  Experience King’s most dangerous mission — action-packed insanity in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest.

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  Books by Matt Rogers

  THE JASON KING SERIES

  Isolated (Book 1)

  Imprisoned (Book 2)

  Reloaded (Book 3)

  Betrayed (Book 4)

  Corrupted (Book 5)

  Hunted (Book 6)

  THE JASON KING FILES

  Cartel (Book 1)

  THE WILL SLATER SERIES

  Wolf (Book 1)

  “I, William J. Clinton, President of the United States of America, find that the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and of the means of delivering such weapons, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”

  Executive Order 12938

  1

  The lab reeked of disinfectant, an artificial stench that permeated throughout the steel room — a half-hearted attempt to overpower the smell of the dead.

  The three occupants couldn’t smell a thing. They wore protective rubber hazmat suits, covered head to toe in vapour-tight material to prevent a single viral particle from making contact with their skin. A hushed silence had fallen over the lab as they observed the grisly results of their experiment, the only noise coming from the distinct rasping of their self-contained breathing apparatus.

  The scene in front of them was ordinarily reserved for bad science fiction movies.

  Years ago, the trio would have turned away in disgust at the body on the steel gurney in the centre of the room. They would have lost the contents of their stomachs, unable to help themselves as natural instincts took over.

  Now, they stood silent, watching and analysing in clinical fashion.

  The world was a harsh, unforgiving place.

  They had come to learn that.

  ‘Take samples,’ the man in the middle said in his native tongue.

  His voice came out wrong, muffled by the face mask hanging over his features. It filtered out through the sides of his mouthpiece — the device that separated him from a fate worse than death itself.

  The men on either side stepped forward, approaching the corpse without hesitation. They knew the consequences of displeasing their boss. The rivers of blood dripping out of the body’s every orifice did little to deter them.

  They worked methodically, collecting DNA samples and slotting them into pre-arranged storage containers. The leader hung back, letting his underlings carry out the dirty work. He had no qualms about doing everything himself, but over the years he’d made a pointed attempt to delegate tasks more often.

  Trying to handle it all on his own had almost cost him his life six years ago.

  In this world, there was no margin for error.

  Once the necessary samples had been collected from the grotesque, misshapen corpse on the table, the trio set about running them through a complicated web of machinery and lab equipment that had set their financier back well over a million USD.

  The price would be worth it, though.

  It took just over an hour to confirm their rudimentary theory. Weeks of further testing and analysing and tweaking would be required, but for now they had the answer they’d been looking for.

  The pair of underlings turned to the leader.

  ‘You were right,’ one of them said.

  ‘It’s different to the original strain?’ the leader said.

  The other man nodded. ‘Ever so slightly. We don’t know what that means yet, but it could very well align with what you thought.’

  The leader turned to look at the horrifying sight of the body they had extracted the samples from. He couldn’t imagine the extent of the suffering the man had gone through before he finally succumbed to the virus. They had patiently observed every second of the three weeks it had taken the guy to finally reach breaking point and fade away into oblivion.

  It had tested all their resolves, but the leader had made it explicitly clear that if any of them had second thoughts about their involvement in the experiment, they would be silenced and thrown in a ditch for the wolves to pick at.

  Freeze-frames of horrific memories had etched into the leader’s brain, and he couldn’t see them ever going away. He remembered locking eyes with the test subject as the man spasmed in his death throes, bleeding out of his eyes and nostrils and mouth all at once.

  He remembered a hell of a lot more, but he tried not to dwell on it.

  Not yet.

  The operation was still live.

  Emotion had to be forced to the side.

  ‘It can’t be anything else,’ he said. ‘An incubator can turn any lab-forged virus into something more powerful. You know that.’

  ‘We’re not certain yet. We need to run further testing.’

  ‘Do it. But I’ll make the call. I’ll tell them we have a weaponised variant.’

  ‘What does this mean?’ one of the men said. ‘Is our work done?’

  ‘Almost. Everything’s going according to plan.’

  The leader stepped out of the workstation, slipping silently through an adjoining door with a digital keypad built into the wall alongside it. He
closed and locked the door behind him, just to be safe, and pressed on into a small office. The space was indistinguishable from a retail store’s backroom. The operation’s budget had been reserved exclusively for the testing facilities — anything else was spartan in comparison.

  The leader sat down on a rickety wooden chair, peeled his face mask off, and reached for the landline phone on the desk. He punched in a long string of digits and waited for the call to be received.

  ‘Yes?’ a low voice said after a single second of ringing.

  ‘It’s done.’

  ‘You have the variant?’

  ‘We believe so. Further testing is required.’

  ‘Run the tests. There’s no rush. Make sure it’s airtight.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what you need it for.’

  ‘And I never will. You’ll see it in the news, though. Get back to work.’

  The call disconnected abruptly, without a word of farewell.

  The man stared at the phone in his hand for a significant length of time, twirling the device in his fingers, deep in thought. He glanced sideways at the tiered trays of empty round steel containers resting in orderly rows against the far wall of the office.

  Bomblets, ready to be filled with enough weaponised bacteria to cause unimaginable devastation.

  Especially given the nature of the virus they had bioengineered.

  The memories of the man who had succumbed to the infection came rolling back into the forefront of his mind. The skin turning a dark shade of horrifying blue. The uncontrollable bleeding, which had subsequently turned him entirely crimson by the end of the descent into madness. The loss of control of his bowels. The distinct screeches of agony as his organs failed and melted away inside of him.

  The leader pictured a populated city square inhaling the contents of the bomblets, trekking back to their apartment complexes to spread the virus to their loved ones and anyone who so much as stepped foot in the same room as them.

  He found himself disgusted by what he had become.

  But he wasn’t being paid to sit around and ponder the morality of his choices. He had made them, and now he was stuck fulfilling the wishes of a man who wanted nothing more than to see raw suffering on a global scale.

  He didn’t know the reasons for his financier’s deep-seated hatred.

  He only saw the wire transfers materialise in his account.

  He rose off the chair with enough speed for the legs to creak underneath him and — just as his financier had instructed — got back to work.

  2

  London

  England

  Diana Edwards tucked her tiny fingers inside the ribbed cuffs of her raincoat as the sky darkened and the first of the day’s sleet began to fall from the sky.

  Because it was her sixth birthday, her mother had finally allowed her to make the short trek home from school on her own. When the bell finally rang and she gathered her tattered beige backpack off its hook in the corridor and stepped out into the overcast afternoon, muscle memory had kicked in. She’d searched the faces of the hordes of parents bunched up around the school gates for her mother. She was accustomed to seeing the scrunched-up face with heavy bags under the eyes and heavily-chapped lips.

  It took her a moment to remember that today was her special day.

  Maybe her mother had taken the opportunity to start drinking a little earlier than usual.

  Diana didn’t really want to go home all that much.

  She trotted animatedly along the sidewalk, taking her time with her newfound freedom, staring at the familiar sights of Kingston upon Thames as she passed them by. She had never been able to take it slow along these streets. Her afternoons usually consisted of her mother holding a vice-like grip around her little wrist, tugging her along without much concern for how Diana felt about the whole thing. She didn’t appreciate it when her mother was in a rush. It was only ever to get to her favourite bottles, anyway.

  Sometimes the skin around Diana’s wrist changed colour, when her mother was unusually desperate to get home.

  She stopped by the familiar sight of the most well-known sculpture in the suburb of Kingston, an enormous row of twelve red post boxes all leaning on each other. She stood still on the cobbled path and spent a drawn-out minute admiring the strange sight. She only ever caught glimpses of it, usually.

  Now, she could take her time.

  She felt like she was doing something wrong by lingering.

  Mother was always in a hurry, after all.

  Maybe it’s normal to always be in a hurry.

  Pouting with uncertainty, she set off along the typical route, suddenly nervous. Passers-by noticed her trotting by and smiled as she went past.

  Diana smiled back.

  She felt the downpour starting to fall across her upper back and ducked her head, pulling the raincoat’s hood over her golden locks. She allowed herself a cheeky smile as she did so. When her mother wasn’t around, she had all the time in the world.

  Sometimes Diana got in trouble for wanting to pull her hood up. She didn’t like to slow her mother down. It was usually met with a verbal tirade.

  Never physical.

  Steve was the only one who was allowed to hit her.

  She didn’t much like it when that happened.

  Diana found her building and hurried undercover as the afternoon sky went entirely dark and the sheets of rain began to intensify. She scurried into reception, which consisted of nothing more than a small room with plaster walls and a shadowy staircase in the far corner.

  London had a limited amount of space, after all.

  ‘Diana!’ a voice cried. ‘Where’s your mother, dear?’

  Diana recognised the tone and smiled up at Beryl, the kind-faced elderly woman who manned the reception desk at all hours of the day. ‘I’m a big girl now!’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ Beryl said, smiling warmly back. ‘You shouldn’t be walking home on your own though, my love.’

  ‘Mummy said it’s okay.’

  ‘I might need to talk to Mummy about that. Will you tell her to come down later?’

  Diana shrugged, even though she knew it would be impossible to drag her mother off the couch after six in the evening. Something in the bottles she drank from made her hard to understand in the evenings. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Go on now, dear. Get upstairs.’

  Diana smiled and nodded and hurried up the stairwell, a twisting cylinder permanently plagued by a strong, musty aroma — the scent of damp boots leaving imprints on the carpeted stairs, which no-one ever bothered to wash off. She hummed softly to herself as she made the journey up to the fourth floor, where her home was tucked into a cramped corner of the apartment complex.

  They didn’t have much room, but it seemed like no-one in London did.

  There were two people in the narrow fourth floor corridor when Diana stepped out of the stairwell and began the trek down to the other side of the complex. She recognised both of them — she always seemed to pass them by at roughly the same time each afternoon. She’d never spoken to them. Her mother didn’t like hanging around in public unnecessarily.

  Maybe today would be the start of a new pattern in her life.

  She skipped along the carpet, ignoring the make-up stains and crusty remnants of God-knows-what caked into the floor. The first person she passed refused to look at her — an elderly woman who lived three doors down, sporting a permanent scowl across her features at all times.

  Diana smiled as she passed her by.

  The woman brushed crumbs off the shoulder of her faded overcoat and bustled straight past, ignoring Diana entirely.

  Diana frowned, and continued.

  The second person seemingly kept to himself just as much as the elderly woman did, but his demeanour seemed warmer. He appeared to be in his early twenties, with dark skin and a mop of unkempt brown hair atop his head. Diana decided to attempt her pleasantries again and smiled up at the man as he strode toward her.

&nbs
p; He returned the smile, nodding imperceptibly.

  As Diana shuffled past him, her insides warmed.

  It wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things, but it provided an effective rebound from the harshness of the first passer-by.

  She found the panelled black door to her apartment and pushed it open. It was unlocked. She stepped through into a tiny entrance hallway with a cluster of open doorways bunched tightly together along the walls, leading into a smattering of different rooms with just as little space as the one she currently stood in.

  Already, she could hear the raised voices resonating through the apartment.

  A deep knot formed in the pit of her stomach. Diana physically grimaced as she heard the vile insults being thrown back and forth.

  ‘You were probably off fucking some cheap whore!’ a female voice roared.

  Mummy.

  ‘It’s none of your business where I fuckin’ was, bitch!’ a deep voice returned, sharp enough to cut through the air and make Diana jolt in alarm. ‘I pay most of the rent, so shut your mouth.’