It was a show of force, designed to intimidate the new arrivals.

  It might have worked, had the trio in the cabin not been immune to intimidation.

  The blue-eyed guard ran alongside the truck and directed it to pull up in the middle of the space in front of the house. King parked and killed the engine. The huge tractor unit creaked and groaned as it powered down.

  Behind them, the Dodge drifted lazily in through the front gate and parked behind the trailer.

  The front door of the house opened, but no one came out. King spotted silhouettes in the doorway, milling about with excitement. Probably the underlings, forced to stay back but enthusiastic about the arrival of the precious cargo. There were seven men in sight — the blue-eyed guard, the two guards atop the wall, and the four men with Hermès caps. A sizeable force in an open landscape with no nearby cover. Bad for King and Violetta and Banks. Bad for the cartel, too, but they had more than twice the amount of troops, and they were all expendable.

  The blue-eyed guard beckoned.

  King unclasped his seatbelt, popped the door and slid out of the cabin.

  ‘Wait here,’ he murmured over his shoulder as he exited. ‘Stay frosty.’

  ‘What was that?’ the guard said, twirling the snubnose revolver on his finger with a shocking lack of trigger discipline.

  ‘I just told them not to do anything stupid,’ King said as he stepped down into the dirt. ‘It’s a little tense, after all.’

  The guard shrugged. ‘I’m not tense.’

  Then he aimed the Colt at King’s chest.

  He smiled, exposing artificially white teeth. ‘Are you tense?’

  ‘No,’ King said.

  ‘You look it.’

  ‘You should take my pulse,’ King said. ‘You, on the other hand … you’re coked to the eyeballs. What are you right now — 140, 150 beats per minute? You look jacked.’

  ‘I’m fine, gringo.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  But the guard squirmed regardless. It was the equivalent of telling someone not to think about a white elephant. King even mentioning the man’s pulse — which was naturally elevated anyway — must have shot it through the roof, because the vein on the side of his neck started pumping and he reached up and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  Which only made him more fidgety.

  The compound effect, live in the flesh.

  The guy jerked a thumb toward the back of the trailer. His palm was slick with sweat. ‘Get to it.’

  King nodded. Started running through possibilities, trying to determine when would be the best time to catch them off-guard.

  Not for a while, he concluded. They were too spread out, too heavily armed. Violetta and Banks were still in the cabin, out of position, not ready for a quick-draw firefight. The night was hot and oppressive and rife to leach stress from pores. King shrugged off a nervous stab of energy, trying to calm himself, trying to wind down.

  In stillness, he could find his opportunity.

  Then he turned to make for the back of the truck and saw the Dodge’s driver door swing open.

  A man stepped out.

  Grizzled.

  Old.

  Long grey hair swept back off his forehead.

  A face like steel.

  Everything made a lot more sense. King thought about how odd it was that an ex-Navy vet who ran a small-time leadership company had been tasked with providing security detail for one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the United States. Jack Coombs had never fit the bill. It should have been obvious from the start. He was being used by Sam Donati the whole time, perhaps forced to work at a heavily discounted rate. Donati must have been getting considerable expertise for pennies on the dollar to bother using Coombs at all. But why?

  Because Jack Coombs had a guilty secret.

  A compulsive urge he had to keep away from the public eye.

  King wondered how the conversation had gone.

  Donati: You’re a dirty old man with dirty wants and needs. But you’re in luck. I bring girls over from Eastern Europe. It’s part of my business. You can take your pick when they get here. You can do what you want with them. But you give me all your expertise, and all your connections, and you work for me for free. How’s that for a deal?

  King looked into the old man’s eyes.

  That was a deal Jack Coombs would have agreed to in a heartbeat.

  But now there was a bigger problem.

  Coombs was now looking at the only delivery driver on the planet he knew damn well wasn’t part of the criminal underworld.

  King cocked his head, and so did Coombs.

  They recognised each other.

  King thought, Who’s going to talk first?

  82

  Neither of them said a word.

  Understanding rippled in the air around them.

  There were unspoken revelations hovering there, invisible and menacing.

  The corners of Coombs’ mouth tilted upward.

  A wry smile.

  The old man said, ‘Are you going to tell them or should I?’

  ‘I thought we might avoid that,’ King said.

  He tried to alert Coombs to the presence of the Glock at his waist, clearly visible in its holster.

  The old man saw it, then said, ‘I think not.’

  The wry smile amplified.

  Petty revenge for King botching the Moscow job, for almost ruining Coombs’ vital connection to the pipeline, for nearly stripping him of the vice he needed to satiate.

  Keeping him from a steady supply of Eastern European sex slaves.

  Coombs turned to the perimeter guard, and said, ‘This man right here is—’

  The rest of the speech wasn’t necessary, because there was only one potential outcome, so King fast-tracked Coombs along his chosen path by taking out his Glock and shooting the man once in the head. The long mane of grey hair snapped to the side, and his neck jerked from the whiplash, and he fell awkwardly into the dirt.

  The thump of his body hitting the ground was the equivalent of a starting gun, firing a shot to initiate all-out war.

  Banks had already vaulted out of the cabin and landed in the dirt beside the tractor unit. As soon as Coombs died, he brandished the M4A1 carbine rifle that had been sitting on his lap the whole time and unloaded on the sicarios in the Hermès caps.

  King saw him peppering silhouettes with clusters of bullets out of the corner of his eye, and before he could blink four men were dead. He expected nothing less from a fully prepared, razor-sharp DEVGRU operative.

  King in turn executed the three guards closest to him at blistering speed. He put a round through the face of the blue-eyed man — the body smacked into the dirt beside Coombs — then turned to the two men along the parapet and nailed them with shots until they both fell, one clutching a fatal wound in his throat as the other simply dropped stone dead on the spot, a cylindrical hole in the centre of his forehead.

  Violetta leapt from the cabin, landed beside King, and used her Beretta to fire a trio of shots at the open front door of the ranch-style house. A shriek of either pain or surprise came from within, but King barely registered it. His hearing was reeling from the barrage of unsuppressed rounds, particularly from Banks’ carbine.

  Savouring a second’s respite, King ejected the half-empty mag and slammed a fresh one into the handle.

  Violetta’s covering fire had bought him precious time.

  Not much.

  An inexperienced combatant would waste it thinking and planning and calculating.

  He simply sprinted for the front of the house.

  The front deck was aproned by a thick row of xeriscaping, and King slid to a halt behind an enormous drought-resistant plant he couldn’t identify. It wouldn’t stop bullets, but it shielded his mass entirely, and for those vital seconds no one was looking. Everyone inside was cowering from follow-up shots.

  King crouched and put his head down and waited.

  Then shots blared from the second storey windows, only a dozen or so feet above his head. They weren’t aiming at him, though. They were aiming at Violetta and Banks, now safely behind cover on the other side of the truck.

  King leant backward and saw them right above him, practically leaning out the windows. Three men — one per window.

  King aimed and fired, aimed and fired, aimed and fired.

  Three dead.

  One body fell out and crashed into the sand in front of the house, and the other two fell back inside.

  King dived laterally, crab-crawling a dozen feet along the row of landscaped shrubbery, avoiding the follow-up shots he knew would come his way. And they did, predictably reactionary, tearing apart the plant he’d been cowering behind seconds earlier. But now he was a world away, and his mindset became ice, and his thoughts fell away, and all he saw was tunnel vision. A wrecking ball in human form. Still prone, he sandwiched himself between a pair of desert plants and got a clear view of the front doorway and found two men bundled up together in a supposed rush to riddle the enemy with lead.

  Except all they riddled with lead was a native plant.

  King aimed the Glock — methodically, surgically, and shot one in the chest, then the other. These two weren’t wearing protective clothing, so he didn’t bother with headshots. They collapsed limply atop one another, forming a makeshift barricade in the doorway, and King saw it all laid out before him and kept deathly still, so still he might as well have been part of the landscaping.

  Because he knew what was coming.

  A hotheaded adrenaline-fuelled sicario eventually spotted the barricade of corpses and figured he ought to use it as cover, so he did just that. King only had to wait ten calm seconds before he spotted movement behind the bodies, and then he simply unloaded all the remaining rounds in the magazine through the doorway. Corpses are terrible bullet-stoppers, and at least a couple of lead parcels got through the dead flesh and slammed home against the living.

  An inhuman shriek rose from the entranceway.

  King reloaded again, leapt to his feet, and sprinted through the front door.

  He found the third sicario writhing in a pool of his own arterial blood and put one through the top of his head to put him out of his misery.

  Then he took a breath.

  Three dead here.

  Three dead upstairs.

  Seven dead outside.

  There are sixteen of us here, the perimeter guard had said. We can take it by force.

  ‘Not anymore you can’t,’ King muttered.

  Three left.

  He settled into berserker mode and advanced into the darkened house.

  83

  He should have remembered how the cartel functions.

  All sixteen of the occupants couldn’t be foot soldiers. There had to be a hierarchy, a chain of command, which meant top dogs. But that was far less reason to worry. It’s easy to slack off at the top. It’s easy to convince yourself you’re invincible. So when King swept the whole corridor and stepped out into a large communal living space and found the last three members sitting bolt upright on the sofa with an entire bowl of cocaine in front of them, he wasn’t surprised.

  Absolute power might corrupt absolutely, but a little power can do the trick also.

  Not one of them was a shade over twenty-five. Two guys, one woman. She was dressed in skin-tight leggings and a tube top that pushed her breasts up, but there was nothing superficial about her. Her eyes were the eyes of a killer. She had to be, to be sitting where she was, ordering the rest of them around. She’d draped a leg over the skinny guy with the mop of unruly black hair on the left, and not even King’s arrival had made her take it off. The other guy was a little further away from them, a little beefier, fat in the face and red in the cheeks.

  King understood.

  The skinny guy was where the nepotism lay.

  He was the son of someone important. King drew eerie parallels to a kid named Rico he’d met a few months ago, the scion of a cartel over the border. Rico had lashed out needlessly at Slater, and ended up paying for it with his life. Slater hadn’t killed him, but the nature of their profession usually made that sort of thing inevitable.

  Now, King regarded this kid sitting before him.

  Even weaker than Rico.

  He was trying to shrink into the corner of the sofa, as if he could turn himself invisible on a whim. There was no aggression or confidence in his eyes. King turned to assess the girl and realised her eyes were flooded with those very things. The fat guy on the right was a hanger-on, unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

  The girl was the ringleader.

  King sat down on the footstool in the middle of the room, facing the couch.

  The girl tried to look smug.

  King said, ‘Is this the part where you convince me there’s more guards?’

  ‘Of course there are,’ she spat.

  ‘I got them all.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Thirteen.’

  ‘There’s fifteen.’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking right at her. ‘There isn’t.’

  She didn’t lose any of the arrogance, but she relented. ‘What are you hoping to achieve?’ She reached out and tilted her boyfriend’s chin up, trying to give him some dignity, trying to make a man out of him. He couldn’t have been any older than nineteen. She, on the other hand, had to be in her mid-twenties. She said, ‘Do you know who this is?’

  King said, ‘No. But I know he doesn’t want this life.’

  The kid looked at him, his eyes hollow, his face blank.

  She said, ‘Of course he does. He’s—’

  ‘If you’re going to rattle off a name,’ King said. ‘I don’t care. I’m sure his surname means something. Speed this story up.’

  ‘He is the heir to the throne,’ she said. ‘Señor Álvaro is his father. You kill him, you start a war with the whole Álvaro clan. Do you understand what that means?’

  ‘I’ve started wars before,’ King said. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘You clearly don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, I understand,’ King said. ‘He’d rather do something else. Anything else, really. Whatever doesn’t involve killing a bunch of people and then dying young. Because that’s what happens to most of you. I’m sure he’s buried brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. But you … you’re grooming him for the throne. You’re the one who wants it. What’s your name?’

  ‘María.’

  ‘María, what will you do once you get it?’

  ‘His name is Damien Álvaro, and you will—’

  ‘If it mattered,’ King said, ‘he’d tell me himself.’

  Damien Álvaro seemed like he’d rather be anywhere else. And not just because a hulking executioner was across the room with a loaded semi-automatic pistol. He had unmistakable nihilism in his eyes. As if he was silently telling her, See what I told you? I don’t want this. I never did. And now here we are.

  King said, ‘Damien, what’s going to happen to me if I put a bullet in you?’

  Álvaro looked at the floor.

  King said, ‘Now’s your chance. Tell tales of your family’s power. Tell me everything.’

  María opened her mouth.

  King aimed the Glock at her face.

  She quietened.

  Damien just slowly shook his head, his eyes squeezed shut, his face pale.

  King thought, They still think I’m a monster.

  They don’t know this is Judgment Day.

  He turned to María and said, ‘I’m here for the container that just got dropped off. I’m willing to let you all go if you look the other way. There’s some valuable goddamn women in there. I could get a pretty penny for them. How’d you pull that deal off?’

  María leered, sensing opportunity. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  She shrugged, opening back up, seizing the moment. ‘Damien here doesn’t think it’s savoury. But it’s good for business. And it gives this one—’ she pinched Damien’s cheek, ‘—a solid rep. Doesn’t it?’

  She spoke to him like someone spoke to their pet.

  King realised what he needed to do.

  He raised an eyebrow, and half-smiled, embracing the malevolence. ‘I knew it. I could see in his eyes he was a pussy.’

  Damien kept looking at the floor.

  María laughed, keeping her leg draped over him. ‘You’re smart. It’s okay. I’m bringing him round. He’ll get there eventually. But, yes, take the container. There’s a lot more where that came from. I think that’s a fair trade, don’t you?’

  King nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  Then he turned to the fat guy with the red cheeks. ‘What about you? You going to miss the supply?’

  The red cheeks brightened as the little psychopath smiled.

  ‘Nah, man,’ the kid said. ‘I can go a few weeks without. Been a wild ride for the last year, though. You’d better enjoy yourself when you run with what’s inside. Prime eye candy.’

  King laughed.

  The fat guy laughed.

  María joined in.

  Damien looked at the floor.

  King stood up, wiped the smile off his face, and shot both María and the fat guy once each in the forehead.

  84

  Neither had the chance to react. They slammed back against the sofa and froze in seated positions, their wide eyes glassed over.

  Damien finally looked up.

  Genuine surprise on his face.

  King said, ‘You can disappear. They’ll chalk it up to an abduction if everyone else in this compound is dead. They won’t look for you for very long. They’ll assume you were taken and tortured and killed and then buried.’