Ciphers - Matt Rogers (popular ebook readers txt) 📗

and winning a close-quarters skirmish against nine men across an elevator and a stairwell would be to collapse in pure ecstasy, in disbelief that you’d survived. But Slater didn’t do that. Instead he stepped back into the carpeted hallway and found King striding toward him with a collection of spare magazines for the G36C rifles.

King tossed three over, one by one, and tucked two of his own three into his waistband. Then he reloaded with the one in his palm.

Slater did the same.

They didn’t say a word to each other. They slotted full magazines into their weapons and focused on bringing their heart rates down and waiting for their hearing to return. Both outcomes happened, one after the other. First the heart rate slowed, then the tinnitus faded. They looked at each other and nodded once, silently coming to an agreement.

The stairs.

Not the elevator.

They had more opportunities to survive if they took the manual way down. Sure, the elevator would be faster, but if there were more mercenaries waiting for them in the lobby, it would come down to fifty-fifty odds when the doors slid open. A Wild West gunfight. First to shoot, wins. They’d probably win, given their unnatural reflexes, so it wasn’t exactly fifty-fifty, but if they had the ability to avoid such a tense showdown they might as well.

They wordlessly agreed on the best course of action, and set to work executing it. Slater turned and kicked the stairwell door open again and aimed his HK rifle down the three flights in his field of view. Then he whistled softly.

Clear.

King ran past.

Descended those three flights of stairs, keeping his rifle trained on the space in front of him the whole time, and then took up position at the edge of Slater’s field of view.

King whistled softly, too.

Slater ran to King, then swept down three more flights as King stood still as a statue, ready to provide covering fire as soon as he was needed.

Six flights covered.

Seventy-four to go.

Utilising the same tactic, they crept down the skyscraper’s core.

20

King had a premonition that he’d be the first to reach the ground floor.

He hadn’t done the math — really, there was no way he would focus his attention on something so banal when there could be mercenaries swarming into view at any moment — but he had a gut feeling.

And he was right.

Violetta was here somewhere. The last thing he’d heard from her end of the line was gunshots. He hadn’t been able to ascertain whether she was the instigator, or the one getting shot.

That’s what made him slip up. He was desperate to know. He and Slater acted like automatons in combat, but the human brain is a fickle bitch. Even the most hardened soldiers are still human. He could be blessed with all the talent in the world, but he still had emotion. And emotion makes you dumb. Not that anyone observing might have known the difference. He was still moving like a freight train, his guard up, his rifle aimed at the dead space in front of him. He stayed constantly in motion as he reached the bottom of the stairwell, creeping out into the lobby as he swept the barrel from one corner of the mammoth space to the other.

He noticed several things at once.

They all hit him, one after the other, like electric shocks to the brain.

First, the body.

He knew the night guard, Malcolm. The guy was close to fifty, with a wife and three kids in Brooklyn. Rapidly approaching the twilight years, but still in decent shape. He was ex-army, having served what he labelled a “long and unimpressive career” before being released into society to fend for himself. A security gig in a building like this paid handsomely, and he must have stood out from the pack somehow, so King had always doubted the man’s career was as dull as he claimed. From what he could tell, Malcolm was a man with a tremendous work ethic and a firm moral compass, who stayed true to his word even if it made him uncomfortable. All the qualities King admired. He’d even invited the guy up to his penthouse for a few beers over dinner just a couple of months ago. They’d talked for hours, and King had managed to skirt around the finer details of his career the entire time. He recalled liking Malcolm. There weren’t many security guards as self-disciplined and honourable as he was.

And now the man was dead. Lying facedown in a pool of his own blood on the marble floor of the lobby, maybe a dozen feet from the big reception desk. The light was still low in the lobby, accentuating the shadows, and the crimson had a surreal glint to it.

That’s where the emotion came into play.

King registered the sight of the corpse, and realisation rippled through him, and he hesitated for a fraction of a second.

Just long enough for the two remaining mercenaries to get the jump on him.

One of them materialised from behind a column, along with Violetta. The guy wasn’t wearing a balaclava. He had sandy red hair and a hint of stubble and a pale freckled face. Irish, probably. He had a burly exposed forearm around Violetta’s throat. It was rippling with muscle. Her long blond hair, ordinarily smooth as silk, was now slick with sweat. Her face showed fear, but her eyes were coolly detached. They glowed, blue and intense in the dark. The redhead had a gun pressed to her head, but she wasn’t hyperventilating, or even panicking.

She was ready.

But King wasn’t. Because the second merc stepped in from the left, emerging from the shadows, and trained his weapon on King from the side.

King froze in place. Just enough of his torso was exposed. He was half-in, half-out of the stairwell. He’d been capitalising on the momentum of descending eighty flights of stairs, and it had made him too hasty. That, coupled with the sight of a dead friend and the understanding