Outlaws, page 22
‘Any issues integrating?’
‘None,’ King said. ‘I’m in the bathroom at the Coyote Grill. In South Laguna Beach. We’re having a late lunch. This place overlooks the water — it’s beautiful.’
‘Sounds like you’re living it up. Now I’m worried you might not come back.’
He forced himself to laugh.
He said, ‘Oh, I’ll come back, alright.’
She said, ‘Good. I miss you.’
He couldn’t bring himself to say, I miss you too.
She filled the silence by saying, ‘Is everything still on schedule?’
He grunted an affirmation. ‘We’re scheduled to pick up the container tomorrow night.’
‘Do you think you’ll be able to get a look inside?’
‘Hard to say. It won’t be easy. There’s six of them, and they’ve got a man watching me at all times, apart from when I need to piss. Like right now.’
‘You don’t need to look inside,’ she said. ‘Alonzo dug up some more information.’
‘Did he?’ King said. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s fentanyl. From China. The cartel sent it to Russia first to throw us off the scent, and packaged it properly over there. Then they used Donati Group to ship it to California. Duke and his crew — you included — are going to deliver it to the Baja cartel. Alonzo pieced it all together.’
‘Wow,’ King said, staring at the inside of the empty container. ‘I’ll be damned.’
‘So we know what’s in it,’ Violetta said. ‘And we can track it. All you need to do is help them deliver it to wherever it needs to go, and we’ll handle it from there.’
‘Will you?’
‘Are you deliberately being sarcastic?’
‘No,’ King said. ‘I’m just surprised you came up with all that so quickly.’
‘What can I say?’ Violetta said. ‘Alonzo’s a genius.’
King kept the phone pressed to his ear, and sealed his mouth into a hard line. A particularly hot gust of wind blew down the corridor, exacerbating how alone he suddenly felt.
She said, ‘Everything okay?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Undercover work is just taxing. I’ll be fine.’
‘I know you will,’ she said.
‘Any update on Slater?’
She said, ‘Not yet. He’s still in his apartment.’
King checked his watch.
Not a fucking chance he’s still in his apartment.
So she was lying about that, too.
He said, ‘Okay.’
‘Anything you need from me?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m good.’
‘I love you.’
He ended the call. He couldn’t say it back.
If this was all a huge misunderstanding, then he’d blame it on bad reception.
But he knew it wasn’t.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
Still motionless in the driver’s seat, Quinn said, ‘What happens now?’
‘Now you drop me at the airport.’
‘What about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘Aren’t you going to call the cops on us?’
King thought of the price they’d paid. Duke, Aaron, and Kurt — all dead. Cal and Vince — badly concussed. Is that penance enough? He tried to think, but couldn’t tear his mind away from the phone conversation.
A small voice told him, They’re still traffickers. They’re still terrible people. They deserved it.
But Violetta used them.
And he knew without Duke they were nothing.
He didn’t have the processing power to figure out how to handle the rest of it. So he said, ‘You figure it out. Just get me to the airport.’
Quinn hesitated. ‘Why? What’s changed?’
‘I think I have to kidnap my girlfriend.’
This time, the hesitation was even longer. ‘What are you on about?’
King rounded to the passenger side, slipped in, and half-heartedly angled the SIG at Quinn. ‘Just drive.’
‘You’re a weird dude.’
Quinn put the jeep into gear and pulled a U-turn, leaving Container 55D wide open, exposing the empty cavern within.
57
Darkness fell over Brooklyn.
John Paul Jones Park quietened.
Within the small walk-up apartment, Slater sat in front of a fresh MacBook Pro he’d ordered two days previously, with express shipping guaranteeing delivery for today. The courier had left it on the welcome mat out front with Slater’s online permission, and at midday he’d discreetly opened the door and picked it up. Zero potential witnesses. Then he’d set to work installing various dark web services, including a private browser several levels beyond Tor. By the time he’d finished, the computer was impenetrable — at least for the purposes he wished to use it for.
Namely, accessing the accounts scattered across Switzerland and Grand Cayman containing the bulk of his fortune.
He’d already briefly scanned the accounts the government knew about, and sure enough his legitimate funds had vanished. They’d drained all the money he’d made over the last couple of years in service of Uncle Sam, perhaps thinking that might impede his mobility. It was a cute move. He wouldn’t miss the money.
What really mattered was the nine-figure sum he had accruing interest in numbered accounts, of which the government knew nothing about.
Confident that the device was now secure, he hunched a little further over the screen, basking in the artificial glare. Alexis was out cold in the bedroom, napping after the stresses of the day. He didn’t blame her. If constant discomfort and uncertainty didn’t encompass the entirety of his waking experience, it might have affected him, too.
He logged in through the dark web, making sure all trace of his presence was invisible, and found the principal account, containing most of what he’d stolen from a triad in Macau.
$421,555,908.03.
An incomprehensible sum. Sitting there on the screen in one giant lump, but in reality diversified across a portfolio of investments. Mostly liquid, all executed by a trusted advisor in a shadowy corner of a bank in Zurich.
Slater simply didn’t have time to watch his money.
He delegated accordingly.
Now he navigated to the cash account and found a far smaller sum than the total assets, which was to be expected.
What wasn’t expected was the figure itself.
$31,500,000.00.
He hadn’t done that deliberately, and the last time he’d checked his cash account, it had been a random blur of different digits. Definitely below the $31,500,000 mark, but not by much. Which meant someone had made deposits to round the account up — to make the sum noticeable, to make it stand out.
To catch Slater’s attention.
His advisor?
He didn’t think so.
That wasn’t part of the drill.
With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he navigated to the list of account transactions and pulled the most recent transactions up on the screen.
All deposits from an unspecified account.
All with accompanying descriptions — an ordinary transfer procedure with a low character limit.
$107.80 — Return.
$76.00 — Immediately.
$50.55 — Or.
$69.09 — The.
$45.00 — Girl’s.
$101.00 — Family.
$456.00 — Dies.
The sinking feeling turned to freefall.
He sat motionless, nihilistic, suddenly plagued by a foreign sensation he couldn’t place. It didn’t take him long to figure out what it was.
Despair.
He’d always thought Violetta could maintain control. She could rant and rave all day about her lack of ability to interfere, but when it came to crunch time, she could surely prevent Alexis’ family from being touched.
He now realised why he’d been so foolish.
He’d met the four old men at Bannerman Castle, and fully believed their threats, but ultimately he thought he worked for a fundamentally good institution. A group of shadow people who broke rules regularly, just as Slater did, but had the greater good in mind.
He’d miscalculated horribly.
Maybe this was their idea of the greater good. What did it matter if an elderly couple in the UK had to perish under suspicious circumstances? If that was what it took to draw a rogue operative out of hiding, then so be it. Slater jeopardised their ability to remain in the shadows, and their existence in that darkness allowed them to accomplish missions and tasks they formally weren’t allowed to do.
So it made sense.
But he’d never considered it reality until now.
He put his face in his hands and warped his features, crushing his lips and spreading his eyes apart, becoming the personification of the despair he felt. He allowed himself that reprieve, if only for a moment.
Then he sat up, shook it off, and set to work attempting to salvage it all.
Because what the hell else was he to do?
He could control his own actions — not others’. That’s how people crumbled. That’s how hope was lost. He could give up in the face of bad odds, but that would be conducive to submitting to external circumstances. It was no secret that terrible things would happen — to himself and those he loved — and there was nothing he could do about it except his best. So his best was what he did now. Even if it would cost him everything.
His accounts weren’t secure, but he believed the brand new laptop still was. There was simply no way they could trace it back to this apartment — not with the procedures he was using. He knew there were countless ways they could have gained access to his fortune. He’d physically visited his advisor in Zurich a couple of times. A long time ago, but he’d done it regardless. If he’d been caught on CCTV footage, it’d be a simple process. The upper echelon wanted him badly enough to waive morality, so they could just threaten to execute each and every member of his advisor’s family unless he passed over Slater’s account numbers.
That was all they needed.
Not the passwords.
Just enough detail to make deposits and send a message.
But they probably had the passwords, too. He thought about changing them, but realised how futile it would be. So eventually he reached a decision that he thought was inevitable, and he went to the website tab used to make internal transfers and sent himself three separate sums from a smaller cash account.
$1.00 — If I do
$1.00 — Will you leave
$1.00 — Her out of it?
A shiver crept up his spine as he sat back away from the screen. His hidden advantage was now laid bare, exposed, available to the people hunting him. If it all vanished — all the accounts, all the dollars, all the investments — what then?
He’d make do. He knew he would.
Money wasn’t the problem.
Freedom was.
He masked all the uncertainty rippling through him, stood up, and walked to the bedroom.
Steadily realising that to keep Alexis safe, he might need to turn himself in.
Abandoning her forever.
He didn’t see it, but on the screen behind him, the banking paged automatically refreshed. Revealing a new transfer from an anonymous account, freshly deposited.
$1.00 — Yes.
58
When Quinn pulled up at the drop-off point outside John Wayne Airport, King ejected the magazine from the SIG and handed the empty gun over.
Quinn took it in a shaking hand, his face paler than ever, luminescent under the terminal’s exterior lighting.
‘You’ll be alright,’ King said. ‘Move on from all this chaos. Forget it happened. Get an honest job. Distance yourself from what happened in Emerald Bay.’
‘You killed my friends.’
‘They weren’t your friends. Duke was an opportunist. If you didn’t provide value, he’d have cast you out and brought in someone else.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I know people,’ King said. ‘I knew everything about Ryan Duke the moment I met him.’
‘What else do you know?’
‘Whoever Roman was,’ King said, ‘I doubt he ran away.’
Quinn stared.
King said, ‘You always had your suspicions, didn’t you?’
‘He wasn’t the type to run. That’s what I always thought.’
‘He probably didn’t. He’s probably six feet under the yard.’
‘Duke wouldn’t do that.’
‘You sure?’
Quinn hesitated. Then shook his head.
King said, ‘I thought so.’
‘How do I extricate myself from this? You didn’t kill everyone. I can’t just walk away.’
‘Sure you can. Vince and Cal are badly concussed. They won’t remember details. They didn’t see what happened. For all they know, I killed you and buried you way out near the Cajon Pass. Under a big rock, maybe. Definitely somewhere in the desert.’
Quinn shook his head. ‘I’d have to leave them to fend for themselves. They’d be the only ones to take the blame for the massacre.'
King made to respond, then realised he didn’t care what happened to Quinn. He was being generous enough by not putting one through his skull. He said, ‘Whatever. Go back, don’t go back. You figure it out.’
Quinn stared vacantly at the middle of the steering wheel.
King said, ‘Look at me.’
The guy looked over, sporting the same ghost white pallor.
King said, ‘Whatever you do … whatever happens … I wasn’t here. You’d better make sure you stick to that. Even if you turn yourself in. Or I’ll come for you.’
Quinn half-nodded, but not all the way.
King said, ‘You think I won’t?’
‘I know you will.’
King closed the passenger door, fetched his bag out of the rear seats, and slapped the door twice. ‘Get going.’
The jeep rolled away, and King entered the terminal.
He knew his anonymity was secure — he used a second passport for the flight back to New York that neither Violetta nor the government had any knowledge of. He’d planned in advance, even slipping brown contacts into his eyes that he’d fished from a tiny case of solution. The passport photo was just similar enough to give him no issues on the way through, but different enough to avoid triggering any alerts if his picture was being circulated through the system.
It was all precautionary, anyway. Violetta trusted him. She wouldn’t be looking for him. Not yet.
The night was still young.
At the gate, before boarding the red eye, he called her.
She picked up. ‘All good?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m out front, out of earshot. They’re all inside, all drunk. They trust me completely.’
‘That’s good,’ she said, sounding genuinely relieved. ‘You’ve always been world-class at undercover work.’
‘Shower me in compliments, why don’t you?’
She laughed. ‘Only one more day.’
‘Feels like forever,’ he said. ‘I miss you.’
He felt horrible.
Not because she didn’t deserve to be manipulated, but because he’d never stooped to this level before. Their sacred bond was desecrated. It left him empty and hollow, but he knew there was no alternative.
She said, ‘I miss you, too.’
‘Where are you?’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘I’ve just been thinking,’ he said, putting a slur into his voice, as if he was feeling the effects of keeping up with the rest of the crew, beer for beer. ‘If Slater decided to … you know…’
‘That’s not my problem,’ she said. ‘There’s a whole world above me that is handling that problem. I’m at home.’
‘He doesn’t know where you live, does he?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Only you.’
Only me.
Unfortunate for you.
He said, ‘Stay frosty. You never know what he’ll do. What he’s capable of.’
She hesitated. ‘Do you know something we don’t?’
I know he’s the most loyal person I’ve ever met, King thought. I know you’re hunting him as we speak. I know you’re counting on me being in California for another twenty-four hours at the very minimum. So you can deal with this before I get back.
He said, ‘No. I’m just worried, that’s all.’
‘There’s security measures in place,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
Yes, he thought. I certainly do.
He said, ‘What security measures?’
‘My bosses sent out a tier-one crew to establish a perimeter around my place. I think it’s unnecessary, but…’
‘They wouldn’t have done that unless there was a serious threat.’
‘They’re being paranoid. Trust me, it’s fine.’
He said, ‘How good’s the perimeter?’
‘Why does it matter?’
‘Humour me this much, at least.’
‘You haven’t heard from Will, have you?’
‘No,’ King said. ‘Why? Has he threatened you?’
‘No,’ Violetta said after a half-second’s hesitation that said everything. ‘Of course not. Look, I get you’re concerned. But trust me — this is legit. I’ve met the tactical team myself. There’s four guys — two in the walk-up opposite my place, one in the apartment next to mine, one staying in my spare room.’
‘That’s some serious muscle.’
‘My employers spare no expense. You know that. And it’s only temporary. Until this all dies down.’
He said, ‘Stay safe.’
‘Always. Good luck tomorrow.’
‘Thanks,’ he said as the boarding announcement resonated through the gate. ‘I’ll need it.’
He hung up and went to queue for the plane.
59
Dawn broke over the park, and in the dinghy little flat, Slater hit “Enter” on a brand new transfer.
As it went through, he masked a sigh.
$1.00 — Where?
It had been a restless night.
He couldn’t help mentally torturing himself. He’d been naive, he knew, but if he never made a mistake in his life then he was nothing more than an automaton. Mistakes make you human. He’d placed too much faith in the general decency of the shadow world. He’d figured, because Alexis was a civilian, it would be a stretch to harm her at all, let alone track down her distant innocent family members in another continent and threaten to execute them. There was no feasible way he could have sent her entire extended family into hiding before they ran, so it was a chance he knew he would have to take if he wanted a life with her.
