Outlaws Page 2

  Which was to be expected.

  King was an outlier within the man’s usual inner circle. A late addition to the party. An enigma. Donati had kept him at arm’s length for the entire trip, valuing his unrivalled amount of experience but hesitant to open up to an independent contractor he’d only just met. It was an odd predicament all round.

  Now, it was odder.

  Donati squared up, the surprise dissipating, the anger amplifying. He was a large man, a couple of inches taller than King, sporting deeply tanned skin of Italian origin, and he was perhaps best characterised by the stubborn refusal to accept the fact he was going bald. The thick curly hair framing either side of his big head was his defining characteristic, making him stand out in a crowd. There was almost nothing left on top, but he’d be damned if he was going to admit it and start shaving his head.

  He was a stubborn man through and through, and if he decided on something he stuck to it no matter what it entailed.

  In that way, he and King were the same.

  Donati jabbed a fat finger at the phone pressed to his ear and said, ‘I’m on a call.’

  King took another step forward, crossing the threshold, committing to the interruption. The action carried with it a measure of finality. There was no going back. Without taking his eyes off Donati he reached back and gently closed the door.

  Sealing them in.

  Donati cocked his head to one side, which could mean he was listening to whoever was on the other end of the line, but more than likely meant he’d finally registered King as a threat.

  King said, ‘Hang the phone up.’

  Donati’s eyes flared with rage, and he pointed to the closed door. ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’

  King didn’t budge.

  He stared the man right in the eyes and simply said, ‘No.’

  Donati didn’t respond.

  But a little of the flame died down.

  Smart, King thought.

  The man wouldn’t win this one with intimidation. Making use of his impressive size and smouldering intensity had probably won him hundreds of business negotiations in the past.

  This was not a business negotiation.

  And whatever he could do to intimidate, King could do twice as well.

  Donati ended the call without another word. Which was a significant problem. King had expected a ‘Wait one,’ or a ‘Stand down for now,’ but instead Donati simply took the phone away from his ear, thumbed the touchscreen, and placed it face-down on the desk. He stayed fixed to the spot and crossed his giant hands in front of the gut bulging against his tucked-in shirt.

  He said, ‘What are we doing here, Jason?’

  ‘Call your man back, and tell him to stand down.’

  Donati raised an eyebrow. ‘This is quite the change of allegiance.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Are you going to explain why you decided to interfere?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d better start talking—’

  King ratcheted his gaze up a notch. Put a bit of his own smouldering intensity into it. It made Donati shut his mouth halfway through the sentence. The atmosphere shifted. King knew why. Donati was only just now beginning to understand that the man he was facing could snap him in half with his bare hands.

  King had experienced that dynamic many times before.

  The sudden thud of realisation in an adversary.

  Donati said, ‘Whatever you think you heard, you’re mistaken.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you.’

  King nodded. ‘You’re right. You don’t. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call off the hit.’

  Donati’s mouth sealed into a hard, firm line.

  King said, ‘It’s the girl from the surveillance photo, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is she really?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look…’ Donati said, and wiped a palm across his goatee in rumination. ‘Is it money you want?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This isn’t something I can reverse. But I can compensate you. To keep quiet. A hundred thousand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Five hundred thousand.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A million flat. You know I can wire you the money like that,’ — he snapped his fingers — ‘and you’ll have it tomorrow.’

  King stared. ‘You don’t get it.’

  ‘What’s not to get?’

  ‘I have more money than I need for fifty lifetimes,’ King said. ‘But I could be worth a penny and I still wouldn’t accept.’

  Silence.

  ‘You don’t need money?’ Donati said.

  King shook his head.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘Because I owe someone. This was never about money.’

  Donati squirmed.

  The one thing he could wield like a sword — bribery.

  The crux of his success.

  Now useless.

  ‘Pick up the phone,’ King said. ‘And call off the hit.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Then we’re going to have a problem.’

  A vein pulsed on Donati’s temple, and redness crept into his throat. The skin across his neck had the texture of sandpaper. King noticed every dry patch, every crack, every crevasse. He felt like he could see through to the man’s vocal chords.

  He knew what was coming.

  Donati roared, ‘Help!’ at the top of his lungs.

  King turned, steeled himself, and waited for six beefed-up private security thugs to come bursting through the door.

  2

  Manhattan

  Four days earlier…

  Will Slater was plagued by indecision.

  And not because he was in a bar.

  He no longer had the impulsive reflex to dull his racing mind. He hadn’t touched a drink in nearly two months. Which was relatively normal for your everyday civilian, but for Slater it might as well have been the achievement of a lifetime. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent this long sober. The mind needs balance, and he’d always needed to tip the scales back toward hedonism, given the intensity of his career. Train to his physical and mental limits, throw his life on the line for his country, get beat and cut and shot to pieces, lay low and recuperate, then do it all over again.

  You had to do something to take your mind off the savagery of the lifestyle.

  In Slater’s case, he’d found the answer in the bottom of a bottle. Drink, dull the mind, suppress the bad thoughts (and the good ones too), wake up the next morning with a splitting headache, sweat it out, get back to training. It wasn’t ideal for longevity or health, but nothing in his life was.

  He’d never understood how Jason King had resisted the urge to do the same.

  Now, he got it.

  It was all habit. He’d conditioned his brain to operate on autopilot. Downtime? Open a beer. Pour a whiskey on the rocks. It had become automatic, an unconscious primitive response to his circumstances. As soon as he’d changed the script, the urge had fallen away. It hadn’t been easy. But there was someone new in his life, and she’d helped him through the uncertainty.

  Despite decades of meditation, for the first time in his life he was truly at peace.

  Now he sat across from King in a familiar speakeasy-style bar in Koreatown. King had a pint of craft beer in front of him, the glass dewing with condensation.

  Slater had a glass of water. It barely fazed him.

  King looked down at the water, and then over to his own beer. He shook his head.

  Slater said, ‘What?’

  ‘You classed yourself as an alcoholic, but you practically fixed yourself overnight.’

  Slater shrugged. ‘I used to rely on it. So that’s definitely what I was.’

  ‘You never even struggled to get out of the woods.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Yo
u found the right girl, and it was like booze had never existed.’

  ‘It wasn’t because of her. That was just good timing.’

  ‘Still, I never saw you struggle.’

  ‘No shit.’

  King paused, ruminated on it, then nodded. Slater was grateful. They didn’t need to talk about it for hours. Two syllables was enough to convey meaning, and all at once King understood.

  No shit.

  Meaning, All we’ve done for the last twenty years is struggle. We’ve fought and clawed for our own survival, all for a paycheque. All we know is the eternal fight. So, yes, I struggled. But I didn’t let it show. Not to you, not to anyone. Because that’s what I’ve been conditioned to do.

  It wouldn’t feel right if they weren’t constantly struggling.

  Peace was a foreign concept.

  King said, ‘When are you off on your little vacation?’

  Slater twitched, below the surface. That was the reason for his indecision.

  He said, ‘We fly out tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘I have no idea how you managed to get away with that.’

  ‘Violetta says we’re on good terms with the upper echelon.’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ King said. ‘Never met them.’

  ‘But surely you can believe that they’re grateful for what we did last time out.’

  ‘There’s entire divisions of our government that we’ll never lay eyes on,’ King said. ‘Violetta’s above us, and then there’s a whole world above her we know nothing about.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this? That’s the way it’s been our whole lives. Are you expecting it to change?’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ King said, ‘because I don’t think “grateful” exists in their vocabulary. They’re the shadow people.’

  ‘You have no idea what their vocabulary is,’ Slater said. ‘But we saved all of New York from anarchy. You know how close it was. You know we scraped through by a hair’s breadth. Sure, they’re in the shadows. They’re the ones behind the public façade of the President and Congress. They’re the ones who don’t change when Republicans and Democrats see-saw back and forth in and out of office. But even if they’re power-hungry sociopaths like you seem to think they are, they’d still be out of a job if New York went dark and the largest city in America plunged into anarchy. So, yes, I think they’re grateful. No matter who they are.’

  King mulled it over and shrugged. He lifted the beer to his lips and took a swig, then wiped foam off his lip. ‘Fair point.’

  Slater paused. ‘Do you really think that?’

  ‘Think what?’

  ‘That they’ve got their own best interests in mind.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ King said. ‘All our operations have been morally straight, so surely they’re selfless.’

  ‘Something along those lines.’

  ‘I think they know who we are,’ King said. ‘We have a track record. If we get dealt a bad hand, we rebel. We’ve done it multiple times. We don’t fall into line just because someone tells us it’s patriotic to do so. But the only reason they haven’t neutralised us is because we’re so damn good at our jobs. That doesn’t mean everything they do is pure. It just means they give us the ops they know we won’t turn down.’

  Slater thought about it.

  Didn’t answer.

  They were good at that. They’d spent so long together that they knew, more often than not, a spiel didn’t need a response. Critical objective thinking was the key to their success and longevity. So Slater used it.

  He thought more.

  Then cocked his head. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘I’m just saying the world isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.’

  Slater tensed his core, felt the faint phantom pain of a hundred battle scars. He looked down and saw his calloused blistered knuckles and the damaged skin along the tops of his hands.

  He lifted his eyes to King and said, ‘You think I don’t know that?’

  But he saw the same faint stirring of traumatic memory in King’s eyes, and he knew it was a pointless question.

  They both knew it.

  Maybe better than anyone on the planet.

  They’d seen the worst of humanity. They’d been all the way down to the bedrock. And they were still here. Still fighting.

  Maybe that said something.

  Maybe they knew there was more good in the world than there was bad.

  Then a big hand fell on Slater’s shoulder, and he looked up into the eyes of a man he hadn’t seen in at least a decade. The guy was in his sixties, grizzly, rugged. He still had all his hair, and it was still thick, but it was silver. He’d grown it long and swept it back, tucking strands behind his ears. His face had craters and crevasses and pockmarks — partially from a lifetime of exposure to the sun, but mostly from a lifetime of exposure to pain.

  Slater thought the guy was an apparition, a long dormant parcel of his memory now stirred up.

  But he was real.

  And he was standing over them in a bar in Manhattan.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Slater said. ‘Jack Coombs.’

  3

  King wasn’t in the know.

  He kept silent as Slater leapt up and pulled the grizzled man into a bear hug. They slapped each other on the back hard enough to draw the attention of everyone in the bar, but they seemed to wise up to the commotion they’d caused.

  Slater dropped back into the booth and slid across so he was between the old man and King. The guy bent down and dropped into the space Slater had been occupying a minute earlier.

  Slater said, ‘Jason King, meet Jack Coombs.’

  King extended a hand, and Coombs reached out and clasped it. His grip was powerful. Like iron. All three of them were the same. Built with hard corded muscle, but even stronger underneath than they looked on the surface.

  Which was considerably impressive, given just how toughened their exteriors were.

  King said, ‘Guessing you two know each other.’

  Coombs smirked. ‘Will’s an old student of mine.’

  ‘Navy,’ Slater said. ‘A long, long time ago.’

  King said, ‘I thought you were Air Force.’

  ‘I did two years there. Then they transferred me, which was a serious abnormality. But they wanted to capitalise on my “genetic gifts.”’

  Coombs leant forward, dropping both elbows onto the chipped wooden table. ‘I was the First Phase Officer in Charge when the boy went through BUD/S.’

  Basic Underwater Demolition — SEAL.

  The initiation into the Navy SEALs, which included the fabled and feared Hell Week — one hundred and thirty continuous hours of sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, and mental suffering.

  King said, ‘How’d he go?’

  ‘That’s why I remember him,’ Coombs said. ‘The kid breezed through it. All the instructors… it mentally fucked us. Even at the end of Hell Week, his body was destroyed, but his eyes were sharp. I’ll always remember that. Sharp eyes. Ate the whole thing like a Tic-Tac.’

  ‘Sounds like Will,’ King said.

  Coombs stared at Slater.

  Slater stared back.

  Coombs said, ‘I can’t fuckin’ believe it, kid. Here you are.’

  ‘Here I am. How’ve you been, old man?’

  Coombs shook his head. ‘This ain’t about me. You’ve got some explaining to do.’

  Slater raised an eyebrow. ‘Do I?’

  ‘They whisked you outta the Navy real quick, didn’t they? You were there, and then you were gone. The rumour mill churned. We all thought you were dead. We thought they got fed up and put a bullet in your head for making the whole thing look too damn easy.’

  They all laughed. A mutually genuine, wholehearted laugh. Not the superficial forced bullshit that usually plagues social interactions.

  It was the only kind of laugh King and Slater allowed themselves.

  A real one.

  Slater said, ‘They had other plans for m
e.’

  ‘Who did? They never told us shit.’

  ‘They didn’t tell me shit either. Not until I was already off the books.’

  Coombs stared. ‘You’re kidding.’

  Slater jerked a thumb at King. ‘He and I. We’re cut from the same cloth. We did the same sort of wet work. Spent most of the last fifteen years operating independently. Now we work together.’

  Now Coombs stared at King. ‘What are you two doing in New York?’

  King said, ‘We live here.’

  ‘Are you supposed to be telling me this?’

  ‘Hell no.’

  ‘I thought as much.’

  Slater said, ‘I trust you, and King trusts me. That’s all that’s needed.’

  ‘You sure? I’ve only just run into you.’

  Slater shrugged. ‘It’s intuition.’

  They regarded each other across the booth. Exchanged glances of mutual respect and understanding.

  Whatever’s said here does not leave this table.

  No matter what.

  It didn’t need to be vocalised. They were men of discipline. They knew.

  Slater said, ‘What about yourself, Jack? The hell are you doing here? Retired?’

  ‘From active service,’ Coombs said. ‘But I’m still working. I’m busier than ever.’

  ‘What does an old dog like yourself do in the civilian world?’

  Coombs smirked again. ‘You wouldn’t approve. Especially if you’re still doing wet work.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m a leadership advisor,’ he said. ‘I know — it sounds like I’ve given myself a fancy title and then jerked myself off. But turns out there’s a few tricks this old dog can teach to big businesses. I’ve crawled my way up to Fortune 500 companies. I give them the time-tested principles that worked so well in the SEALs. Helps that I know them like the back of my hand.’

  ‘You’re doing well for yourself?’

  ‘Better than well. Better than I deserve, probably.’

  King met the old man’s eyes and said, ‘We know what you mean.’

  Coombs shrugged. ‘Turns out it’s an untapped market. People are weak. I’m hard. Haven’t had a pretty life, but that actually helps in some ways.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ Slater said. ‘Pretty lives are usually hollow.’