King went into survival mode. There was no other choice. He could very well die here.

  In fact, it was more likely than not.

  ‘Shoot him,’ Quinn said. ‘You should see what he did to Cal and Vince.’

  Duke’s eyes lit up with the slightest flicker of anger. ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘No.’

  Duke breathed out.

  Quinn said, ‘But he messed them up. He’s some elite soldier or something.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘I’m right here,’ King said. ‘Ask me.’

  Duke said, ‘Okay. You some elite soldier or something?’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  Duke bristled. ‘You think I’m going to make a mistake. Get angry.’

  ‘Shoot him,’ Quinn said. ‘Did you not hear a word I said?’

  ‘I want to know what he knows,’ Duke said. ‘He sure breezed his way in here, didn’t he? I don’t trust anyone, but I dropped my guard around him. That takes something special.’

  ‘Shoot him, you moron,’ Quinn said.

  ‘He won’t,’ King said. ‘He didn’t get this house by being too cautious. And he’s right. This was easy for me. My name isn’t Liam Kingsley. There is no apartment in Brooklyn. There’s no leverage. If I’d gotten away, all his leads wouldn’t have turned up a damn thing. I’m a ghost.’

  The speech was carefully spoken. Every word had intent.

  King could see they worked.

  They made Duke think, Could it be true?

  Because it was true, and on top of that it was feasible. And that threw him off. Now he was thinking, If this motherfucker can do that, who else could?

  It was the equivalent of calling your enemy’s phone and hearing it ring right behind you.

  It had well and truly spooked him.

  He’d let an imposter into the house, allowed him access to his private space, made himself vulnerable.

  Duke didn’t let the SIG waver an inch.

  He said, ‘Kurt. Tie him up.’

  King stiffened.

  He knew if he let that happen, he was as good as dead.

  But from here, he couldn’t spot any feasible escape plan.

  He’d been stumped by a goddamn fingerprint sensor.

  As Kurt rummaged around in one of the kitchen island drawers for something to restrain their prisoner with, King vowed that if he made it out of Emerald Bay alive, he would never allow a mistake like that to happen again.

  52

  Dead quiet.

  Kurt lifted a couple of rolls of duct tape out of the drawer and held them up for all to see. Duke flicked his gaze sideways, took in the sight, and nodded once. Supremely cautious. Barely allowing a half-second without his eyes fixed on King.

  King could see Quinn in his peripheral vision. The guy had his shoulders hunched, and his whole body was wound up, tight with stress. Unease rippled off him like he was radioactive with the stuff. The only other person in the room — Aaron — was an enigma. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, his movements lazy. King figured that unless the surfer lifestyle had made him inhumanly calm, then Aaron was probably high as a kite.

  Which would make him useless in a fistfight, if that’s what it came to.

  King’s heart thudded. He could feel it pounding in the left side of his chest, creeping up to his throat, where a vein in his neck pulsed at a hundred and twenty beats per minute. He actually hoped Duke noticed, because it was deceptive. Hopefully Duke took it as a sign of weakness. It didn’t mean he was afraid. The physical stress response is inevitable in a situation like this.

  You’re going to be on edge regardless.

  What you do with it is the key.

  King stayed deathly still, ratcheting the intensity of the atmosphere up a few notches. If he had any hope of surviving…

  Kurt approached.

  Duke tightened his grip on the SIG.

  ‘Drop your gun,’ Duke said. ‘You don’t need it. And you need your hands freed up.’

  King dropped the gun.

  He tried to raise his heart rate even further.

  It worked.

  The vein in his neck pulsated, a little harder, a little faster.

  Duke noticed.

  A half-smile crept into the corners of his mouth. He said, ‘Afraid?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘You should be.’

  Kurt kept coming forward.

  Quinn backed off a step.

  Aaron seemed to sense something. Out of the corner of his eye, King saw the surfer tense up. Anticipating…

  Maybe it was good weed. Maybe he was so high he’d become prescient.

  Because he sure as shit should be anticipating something.

  If that duct tape went around King’s wrists, he was rendered useless.

  He was at the mercy of Ryan Duke.

  Which simply couldn’t be allowed to happen.

  He’d rather die.

  King put his wrists together, making no sudden movements. He offered the pair out to Kurt.

  Who smirked and reached forward with the duct tape.

  Then King made a sudden movement.

  He interlocked his fingers, forming a two-handed club, and swung it up toward the ceiling with all the strength his shoulders could muster.

  He could muster a goddamn tank’s worth of strength.

  He’d picked the right trajectory. There was a key obstacle between his fists and the top of their arc.

  Kurt’s chin.

  He shattered half the teeth in the big man’s mouth with the uppercut. The exact same physical reaction played out. No matter how tough you think you are, that sort of abhorrent discomfort isn’t something you can train for. You can pump yourself up all day and inflate your ego with tales of how you’ll push through pain and overcome adversity, but until you experience both rows of teeth being smashed together and half of them breaking, you really have no idea how you’ll react.

  Kurt leapt backward like he’d been electrocuted.

  But King had been expecting that.

  He leapt with him.

  Duke panicked and fired and hit Kurt in the small of his back. The gunshot roared. No matter how high the ceilings were or how big the space was, it was still a gunshot. It blared, and Quinn practically shit his pants, ducking for cover. King lost sight of Aaron but it didn’t matter because all his attention was focused on keeping Kurt in front of him. The big man roared in turn, hand flying to where he’d been struck, and King knew the guy’s concentration was now ruined.

  He skewered himself into the ground with one foot and used the other to front-kick Kurt in the stomach.

  Perfect placement.

  Smooth technique.

  Inhuman strength.

  Accurate trajectory.

  Check, check, check, check.

  Kurt careened backward, completely off-balance, and crashed into Duke. King sprinted after them and hurled Kurt aside and found Duke’s aim was now off by a few inches.

  Not much. Any sane person would have panicked and tried to run, because all Duke needed to do was swing the barrel around and pull the trigger and King would die in grisly fashion. That was enough to deter almost anyone.

  Not King.

  He realised if he kept his momentum the bullet would miss. So he threw caution aside and threw himself forward and crash-tackled Duke to the floor. The SIG went off, but the bullet went wide. King had no idea how close it had come — all he knew was that it didn’t hit him.

  He landed on top of Duke, and instead of throwing a strike he pivoted on top of the guy and snatched at his gun hand.

  He got both hands on Duke’s wrist.

  Then it was simple physics.

  He smashed the wrist into the floor, maybe breaking it, definitely bruising it. Duke still had his finger inside the trigger guard and he pumped it with all the desperation he had left. He fired four shots at random, none of them coming close to hitting the adversary on top of him. King slammed the guy’s wrist into the floor again, this time definitely breaking it.

  Duke gasped and let go of the SIG. King snatched it up and shot to his feet and planted the sole of his boot into Duke’s throat, crushing his windpipe, pinning him to the floor.

  He surveyed the scene.

  Not pretty.

  Kurt was facedown on the tiles, a rapidly expanding pool of arterial blood forming around his head. One of Duke’s stray shots had hit him in the face or neck. King took in the information, filed it, and promptly forgot all about Kurt.

  He wheeled, searching for Aaron.

  He found the surfer in the far corner of the living area, in newfound possession of another SIG Sauer P226. Their weapon of choice, apparently. Duke must’ve received a case of them, which King figured were scattered all over the house, considering Aaron had found one in seconds.

  The surfer locked his aim onto King’s centre mass like he’d been exclusively practicing that motion his whole goddamn life.

  King panicked.

  He hadn’t been anticipating the accuracy, or the reaction speed. He’d underestimated the kid, writing him off as too high to function, when maybe it was a particularly effective strain of weed that had made him scarily sharp. Whatever the case, Aaron raised and aimed and fired a tight cluster of shots that went high. They would have drilled through King’s brain and pulverised his head if he hadn’t dropped behind the kitchen island milliseconds before the rounds burst forth from the chamber.

  He flattened himself down, and the bullets whisked overhead, tearing the opposite cupboards to pieces.

  He took a deep breath.

  Worked his way back to a crouch, pressing his upper back to the drawers, affording him a good look at Ryan Duke a few feet away.

  The man’s wrist was mangled, and the skin on his neck was bright red with King’s boot imprint. He’d managed a crouch of his own, but he was clutching his bad arm with his good one, rendering him useless, and his face was creased with unfamiliar pain and shock.

  King looked him in the eye and shook his head.

  Don’t move.

  Or I’ll have to kill you.

  Duke stared back, and King knew he understood.

  Whether he would listen was another matter entirely.

  Technically, he obeyed.

  He didn’t move.

  He said, ‘Aaron, now.’

  53

  King steeled himself and ran through a number of ways the firefight could unfold.

  He was halfway through that list, dissecting tactics and possible manoeuvres, when he heard a rapid chain of footsteps from the other side of the island.

  Close.

  Way too close.

  He realised what was happening, and knew he needed to forget about Duke entirely.

  There was a far more imminent threat.

  He looked up and braced himself and raised the SIG to a vertical trajectory, just in time to see Aaron’s wiry frame slide over the lip of the countertop above him.

  That’s the worst thing about madness. It’s unpredictable, and it throws off even the most tactically sound plans. Of all the possibilities King had contemplated, he’d never expected the kid to dive head-first onto the countertop and use its smooth surface to slide all the way across, coming down in a heap of limbs on top of him. Of course it was suicide. Of course it wouldn’t work. But it didn’t need to be foolproof. It just had to buy Ryan Duke some time. And clearly his “boys” were more than old buddies. Clearly they were willing to die for this man who had given them everything.

  It changed the whole dynamic instantly.

  King fired three times, given the fact that he’d miraculously predicted the move and had the SIG aimed in the right direction.

  All three bullets slammed home in Aaron’s torso — two in the chest, one in the stomach.

  Suicide, as predicted.

  But his body came down directly on top of King’s head, the deadweight nearly snapping King’s neck. A few inches to the right and it might have. But King rolled out from under the bleeding body and rescued his grip on his own SIG and searched rabidly for Duke.

  He found him.

  Duke was six feet away.

  On his feet.

  He’d snatched up the gun Aaron had dropped in his death throes.

  Duke angled the SIG diagonally downward and fired three shots into King’s chest at close to point-blank range.

  The right move.

  Go for the largest target.

  Minimise your chance of missing entirely.

  Duke had combat training.

  The bullets struck hard, knocking King backward, throwing him off his feet.

  He sprawled to the tiles, all the breath pounded out of his lungs…

  …but with no other significant injuries.

  Duke hesitated.

  Confused.

  King shot him between the teeth. The bullet went through the back of his mouth and came out the rear of his skull in a grisly exit spray. Duke’s lifeless body twisted and fell and the gun clattered out of his limp hand.

  ‘That’s what you should have done,’ King muttered.

  He gave himself the once-over before he got to his feet, but none of his ribs were cracked. He breathed a sigh of relief, because he could breathe. He’d broken ribs before. It was abhorrent how useless it rendered you. He stood up, wincing at the bruising he knew would already be forming across his chest and stomach, but bruising paled in comparison to what might have been.

  Before he checked the full extent of the damage, he swept the rest of the space.

  Quinn was still alive.

  Cowering in the corner behind an authentic Eames chair.

  The other three were dead.

  Kurt.

  Aaron.

  Ryan Duke.

  All corpses.

  King said, ‘Get up, Quinn.’

  Quinn rose shakily, hands raised above his shoulders, fingers spread wide, a ridiculous demonstration of the fact he was unarmed.

  King said, ‘Put your hands down. I know you don’t have a gun.’

  Quinn nodded, practically blinking back tears, and lowered his hands inch by inch, until they were out of sight behind the chair.

  King froze, watching closely.

  Then he shook his head in disbelief.

  Quinn said, ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a terrible actor,’ King said. ‘Two choices. Either you put a finger on either side of the chair back, and spin it slowly around to show me the gun that’s taped there, or you try to pry that gun free and use it to kill me, in which case you’re dead.’

  Quinn didn’t move.

  King said, ‘It’s a simple decision, Quinn.’

  Quinn’s hands came back up.

  There was nothing in them.

  He extended a finger on each hand, put them both on top of the chair back, well out of harm’s way, and swivelled the whole thing around.

  Exposing another SIG Sauer P226 resting in a polymer holster glued to the wood.

  King said, ‘Duke thinks of everything, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to use it, man.’

  ‘That’s why you went and hid behind the Eames chair. So you could not use the hidden gun attached to it.’

  ‘I swear,’ Quinn said.

  ‘I don’t care that you wanted to protect yourself, Quinn,’ King said. ‘I do care if you lie to me.’

  A long, uneasy pause.

  Then Quinn said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  King shrugged. ‘I’m not the one who needs your apology.’

  ‘Who does?’

  King looked around. ‘Whoever you’re going to have to explain this to.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Quinn said, putting his face in his hands. ‘Oh, God, man. I…’

  ‘You didn’t know it would be this way?’

  Quinn lifted his gaze. ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before. Let me guess: Duke roped you into all of this, it was his idea, you only saw dollar signs, you didn’t think about the consequences of your actions, you didn’t think about the cargo you were transporting, or where it was going, or whose hands it would end up in. You didn’t think. Blah, blah, blah.’

  Quinn bowed his head again.

  King said, ‘Am I on the right track?’

  Quinn shrugged.

  Speechless.

  King said, ‘Do one thing for me.’

  Quinn’s eyes flared with hope, despite the fact he could see three of his closest friends’ brains splattered across the mansion’s walls.

  King said, ‘I’m going to leave now. There’s nothing stopping you finding a phone and alerting whoever you know at the port about an incoming unwanted visitor. They could probably assemble some manpower and pull the container off its plug before I make it there. They could feasibly hide it.’

  Quinn stared, sheepish, clearly disappointed King hadn’t let him off the hook.

  King said, ‘If that container isn’t there, I’ll come back and murder you. Even if you’re in custody, I’ll find you there, too. Actually, you know what … I won’t kill you straight away. You’ll wish you were dead.’

  King finished his spiel and stared at a broken man. Quinn was pale, shellshocked, hunched over, remorseful, guilty, terrified — every negative adjective, really.

  He wouldn’t be speaking to anyone.

  ‘Okay,’ the man said, still struggling to put a sentence together. ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘You take care of Cal and Vince. I’d wager they’re heavily concussed. You make sure they don’t drop dead before the cops or the ambulances get here.’

  ‘Isn’t that… your job?’

  King raised an eyebrow. ‘Because I’m a cop?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Then who are you?’

  ‘You’ll have plenty of time to come up with theories in prison.’

  King turned, satisfied, figured he’d leave it there.

  Then he reconsidered.

  The path of least resistance was a bad rule to follow in day-to-day life, because it led to trading short-term comforts for long-term unhappiness, but on a mission it was best to make things as effortless as possible. There was no point passing up an opportunity staring him right in the face.

  So he turned back and said, ‘Actually, I’ve changed my mind. You’re coming with me.’