Ciphers - Matt Rogers (popular ebook readers txt) 📗

Then he stepped forward and grabbed Samuel by the collar and hauled him onto the lowest rung of the ladder. He pressed his own MP7 into the back of the kid’s neck and said, ‘Climb.’

‘No,’ Samuel hissed.

He kept an iron grip on the rungs, his knuckles white.

Slater said, ‘I’ve met a couple of people throughout my career who didn’t care whether they lived or died. Only a couple. You’re not one of them. They’re exceedingly rare.’

‘Well, you bought it for longer than you should have…’

‘Up the ladder,’ Slater said.

Samuel went pale. With each passing second, he looked more and more like a real skeleton.

Slater said, ‘You don’t want to die. Not down here. So you’re going up that ladder, or you’ll get a bullet through the throat.’

Samuel said nothing.

He stayed frozen, like a deer in headlights.

Slater said, ‘If it’s a trap up there, then you might survive if they realise it’s you. But if they’re waiting, they’ll be jumpy…’

‘Shoot me here,’ Samuel muttered. ‘I’d prefer it.’

‘I will, in five seconds.’

A pause.

‘I’m not kidding,’ Slater said. ‘You’re wishing I am, but I’m not. I don’t care about you, kid. So make your choice. Die down here, or maybe die up there.’

Silence.

‘Five.’

Samuel didn’t move.

‘Four.’

Samuel didn’t move.

‘Three.’

Samuel lurched up the ladder, scrambling up the rungs in record time, fuelled by desperation. In doing so, he bared his soul. Sure, he had no regard for others, and killing indiscriminately was second nature to him, just as killing for justice was second nature to Slater and King. But at the end of the day, no matter how desensitised you are to violence, everyone wants to live.

Even psychopaths.

‘Two.’

Samuel ascended the ladder like a spider and put one hand on the bottom of the manhole’s lid and heaved with all his might, exposing huge rippling veins in his forearms and biceps to accentuate his rail-thin physique. There wasn’t much strength in the kid’s frame. He pushed like a man possessed, a man fighting to survive.

‘One.’

Fight-or-flight adrenaline swamped the kid, and he chose fight, because there was nowhere to flee. It added a little extra strength to his gangly arms, and finally the lid moved. First an inch, then half a foot, then it caught its own momentum and swung all the way up and out.

Samuel burst up and out, his top half above the manhole, screaming, ‘No, no, no, it’s me!’ at the top of his lungs, but he was too late to prevent the knee-jerk reaction of those lying in wait.

The top of his head came off in a grisly shower of brain matter.

60

King didn’t hesitate.

As soon as the first shot was fired above ground, he shouldered past Slater and leapt up the first four rungs of the ladder in a single bound. He kept one hand on his MP7 and used the other to heave himself higher, faster and faster. By the time Samuel’s decimated corpse fell off the ladder, losing its grip on the rungs as the brain controlling the hands disintegrated, King was only a couple of feet below him.

Samuel fell on top of him, and King simply shouldered him aside.

The gunfire abruptly ceased, and a deep voice, unsure of itself, said, ‘Oh fuck, Rick, that was—’

King almost smiled.

They’d realised they’d killed one of their own.

It would freeze them up, maybe only for a second.

To King, that was all the time in the world.

He reared up out of the manhole, his focus impenetrable, his mind so dedicated to the task at hand that he barely even registered that he was in danger. He took in the recognisable features of a bank lobby, understood where he was, and then tuned it all out.

He spotted two burly silhouettes as the closest to his position, both adopting wide stances, heavy assault rifles in their hands. But both barrels were lowered a few inches. It was an imperceptible, involuntary response to realising you’d just killed one of your own men, no matter how deranged that man in question might be.

There was temporary guilt, and shock, and acceptance.

King had the MP7 on full auto, and he simply squeezed the trigger and worked the barrel in a short horizontal line from left to right. Not quite spraying and praying. More accurate, more surgical. The submachine gun roared and bullets laced the chests of the silhouettes. They jerked and hit the floor.

He calculated his next decision in a split second.

Down, or up?

A quick pivot on the ladder revealed the lobby was a strange combination of traditional Renaissance architecture and a half-completed modern refurbishment. The building must have been in the midst of renovation when it was closed to the public and became a private dwelling. The walls speared up to a dome-shaped ceiling, and they were adorned with pilasters projecting from the marble, giving the space a regal aura. The black-and-white tiled floor spread out in all directions from the manhole, but although the lobby might have previously been one cavernous space, now it was partitioned into separate open-plan sections with the help of a few modern upgrades. King saw glass and wood partitions coloured in warm hues, with thick decorative curtains adding privacy.

If the bank was still open, they might have led through to private consulting rooms and swanky waiting areas.

Now, the lobby was dead and empty.

The only artificial light came from giant floodlights running on backup generators, the only ambient noise. The lights hummed gently between the roaring gunshots, their white beams aimed up toward the dome ceiling, spilling large shadows over the floor and walls.

With the rudimentary analysis of his surroundings complete, King turned to the matter of the hostiles. Gunning down two men in brutal fashion had sent a couple of the stragglers scattering, and he saw them now ducking behind curtains, throwing the heavy material aside in their desperation to retreat and regroup.

But one of them didn’t.

A hulking silhouette stood frozen in the corner of the space, draped in the shadow of the modern wall behind him. He