King respected it.

  So he said, ‘I’ll share. Because I don’t think you have bad intentions.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Coombs said. ‘I just want to know why my entire career’s about to go to shit.’

  ‘Can’t you try damage control?’

  ‘That only works with public information,’ Coombs growled. ‘But this is all private. Behind the scenes, everyone in the know is aware that I vouched for the man that went rogue and wreaked havoc.’

  ‘If you’re going to be investigated, we can quash that.’

  Coombs shook his head. ‘These people aren’t the type to investigate. But word will spread. I’ll never be used again.’

  ‘I didn’t have a choice.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Sam Donati ordered the death of an innocent woman. All to get a few percentage points inked into his contract.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I heard it.’

  ‘So you killed him and assaulted his security?’

  ‘Assault implies there was no self-defence. It was seven on one.’

  ‘That’s your story?’

  ‘I have no story,’ King said. ‘I don’t exist.’

  Coombs stared. He reached up and tucked a strand of thick grey hair behind his ear.

  King said, ‘I’m not going to apologise.’

  ‘My career is over.’

  ‘You made hay while the sun shone,’ King said. ‘And then you slipped up. You didn’t do your due diligence. You sent me into a situation where I had to act. If I did nothing, I’d be corrupt through to the core. That’s on you. I’d do the same thing a thousand times over, if I had the choice.’

  ‘There were other ways to handle it.’

  ‘Not in my book.’

  ‘You could have let the law sort it out.’

  ‘An endless trial. A small army of the world’s best lawyers against me. All based on conjecture. All based on what I heard. I don’t think so.’

  ‘That’s why laws exist.’

  ’They’re rigid. And they take too long. That’s why people like me exist.’

  Coombs frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t.’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t. Is there anything else you want to say to me?’

  A vein pulsated on the side of Coombs’ throat. His neck had the texture of sandpaper.

  King said, ‘You want to kill me, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Coombs admitted. ‘I’m just angry.’

  ‘Which is understandable.’

  ‘I have money,’ Coombs said. ‘I’ll be fine. But the bulk of my work is over. No more high-roller clients. All thanks to you.’

  King said nothing.

  There was nothing left to say.

  He decided to let the old man vent.

  ‘Did he try to bribe you?’ Coombs said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How do I know you didn’t take it?’

  ‘Because he’s dead in a hotel suite.’

  ‘You could have double-crossed him.’

  ‘I didn’t take your money,’ King said. ‘Which was perfectly legit. Why would I take his?’

  A pause.

  Then a shrug of acceptance.

  Coombs walked back to the door.

  King followed.

  When the old man placed his palm on the handle, he looked back over his shoulder. ‘You know … deep down … maybe I’m wishing I had your integrity.’

  A rare moment of honesty.

  Then he stepped out, and was gone.

  Exiting King’s life as quickly as he’d entered.

  King savoured the newfound quiet, and methodically removed any feelings of irritation or resentment from his mind. Coombs was no longer a subject of concern, so there was no point wasting time wondering what the man’s future might entail. King had approached life that way for as long as he could remember. It was no business of his what other people thought about him. He simply tried to contribute to the common good. The incident in Moscow had required swift retribution, and that’s what he’d delivered. Sure, there’d be consequences, but what he’d done in the moment had done the most overall good, so he didn’t much care what resulted from it.

  He took a deep breath in, closed his eyes, and let it out.

  He opened them again and went to the fridge to get a beer.

  20

  Slater stepped out of the civilian plane and onto the jet bridge, Alexis by his side.

  As soon as he was free from the aluminium tube and found a couple of bars of reception, he dialled Violetta’s number.

  When it connected, he said, ‘I’m back.’

  A pause.

  She said, ‘What?’

  ‘I’m in New York.’

  ‘What happened? Relationship troubles?’

  Slater almost smirked. ‘Far from it.’

  ‘We argued for weeks about you taking this goddamn holiday. What made you give it up?’

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘So talk.’

  ‘Not over the phone.’

  A pause.

  She said, ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Never better.’

  ‘Will,’ she said. ‘You need to give me more than this.’

  He thought about it.

  And came to a conclusion moments later.

  He said, ‘Actually, Violetta, I don’t owe you anything. I’m asking to meet. Are you in town?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With your team?’

  ‘Most of them. I’m back at the same setup you saw, working with Alonzo.’

  Slater had caught a peek behind the curtain a few months ago, right here in Manhattan. Due to unusual circumstances, Violetta had been forced to bring them to one of the temporary black-ops HQs that the government ordinarily went to great lengths to hide them from. An enormous space within a rundown tenement building, hidden in plain sight, populated by dozens of software engineering geniuses sitting in front of computers, dressed in casual clothing, sifting through and analysing data at an incomprehensible rate. It hadn’t exactly lined up with his expectations, but it made sense in hindsight.

  As the world became more modern and unfixed, there was little need for the attention-grabbing enormity of massive campuses and headquarters’ like the Pentagon. All that created was an unnecessary target. Now, staggering processing power existed within a single computer tower, which you could slot neatly under a desk. So the big data that Violetta and her team used to determine which situations required a response from last-resort operatives like King and Slater could be analysed from anywhere. It made perfect sense to decentralise, to erect dozens of temporary set-ups across the continental United States and move the whole roaming circus between discreet locations. That way, there was little risk of being targeted by enemies of the state. Not even the government’s own operatives knew where their shadowy secret HQs were located.

  Alonzo was one of Violetta’s best tech prodigies, capable of translating mountains of data into something halfway understandable.

  Slater said, ‘Am I needed?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  ‘Okay. That’s all I wanted to know. If you’re in town, I assume you’ll come to me?’

  ‘I’m rendezvousing with King in the morning. I’ll come to you afterwards.’

  Slater paused. ‘What? He’s back?’

  ‘You two haven’t spoken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re both back early. But it sounds like his mini-vacation ended a whole lot worse than yours.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Donati wasn’t the man King thought he was.’

  Slater wasn’t exactly surprised. He couldn’t think of a more obvious twist than a billionaire known for hoarding wealth and capital turning out to be corrupt.

  He said, ‘Is he in one piece?’

  ‘I believe so. He didn’t tell me about any injuries. We haven’t spoken much.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Donati’s dead.’

  By that point, he and Alexis were out of the jet bridge, flowing with the masses of passengers in the giant terminal. He spied a bank of televisions along the far wall, above the conveyor belt. Several of them displayed separate twenty-four hour news stations. He scanned the headlines with a practiced eye, and came away with nothing of note. The death — a grisly one, if Slater knew King at all — of an American billionaire in Moscow would be plastered across every screen if it was public information.

  He said, ‘Word isn’t out yet?’

  ‘Apparently not. We’re monitoring traffic.’

  ‘You speak to him first,’ Slater said. ‘I’m sure he’ll need to debrief you, and whoever else you’re working alongside.’

  ‘You know how it works,’ she said. ‘He tells me everything. I relay it up the chain. If there’s any discrepancies, then we get other parties involved. But it’s always something we like to avoid.’

  ‘He killed an important person on the economic hierarchy,’ Slater said. ‘There’s no way he’s not in trouble.’

  ‘He had his reasons.’

  ‘Of course he did. When don’t we?’

  With a snap of clarity, Slater realised he didn’t much care about the inner workings of black operations anymore.

  He said, ‘Let me get some sleep. Then we’ll talk.’

  ‘Eleven a.m.,’ Violetta said. ‘How’s that work?’

  Slater checked the Hublot on his wrist. It was a hair after two in the morning.

  He said, ‘Works just fine.’

  ‘Can you give me a heads up?’

  ‘About what?’

  She paused.

  She said, ‘Is it something serious?’

  ‘You said it yourself. I fought for weeks for that vacation. And now I’m back on day two.’

  Silence.

  He said, ‘You figure it out.’

  He hung up.

  They strolled in the general direction of international arrivals, and Alexis said, ‘She’s not going to be happy, is she?’

  She hadn’t heard the call from Violetta’s side, but she’d put two and two together from what Slater had said on his end.

  He said, ‘It’s just bad timing. That’s all.’

  Alexis took his hand. ‘Why?’

  ‘I really shouldn’t tell you. You need plausible deniability.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘It’s King. He could be in deep water.’

  He said it because he had to vocalise it. Otherwise the thought would bounce around his head until it drove him mad. There was something bristling inside him, something he didn’t want to address.

  A toxic concoction.

  Guilt, shame, unease.

  Bad timing for King.

  And bad timing for him.

  She sensed his turmoil. She was better at that than anyone he knew. She stepped in and said, ‘Your whole lives have been in deep water. If he stays in, he’s always going to be in it. That’s something you have to be okay with. If you leave, he’s on his own.’

  Slater turned inward. Went quiet. The swarming passengers all around him seemed a world away. He was detached from civilian life, disassociated, depersonalised.

  He’d always known that would be the case.

  But had he really considered it?

  He said, ‘I know. I understand.’

  But he didn’t think he did.

  21

  King topped up with two brief hours of sleep to compensate for the sporadic rest he’d managed on the plane, then began the day like any other.

  A clueless onlooker would never know he’d beat up six trained combatants and killed a well-known billionaire on another continent the day before.

  He rolled out of bed, padded straight to the fridge, and drank half a gallon of water mixed with electrolytes and… something that wouldn’t pass Olympic drug testing. He and Slater had labelled the drink “Recovery Concoction” for a reason. There was no use breaking down their bodies in training if they didn’t take advantage of rapid advancements in performance-enhancers. Their schedules and mutual workload all but required it to keep them in one piece with the aid of “special” supplementation.

  Hydrated and invigorated by the power nap, he sweated off the jetlag by burning a thousand calories with a routine run-of-the-mill workout. He figured he’d been pushing his body so consistently for so long that he knew how to work with discomfort better than anyone on the planet bar Slater. Maintaining an elevated heart rate came as naturally as breathing, and he alternated between high-intensity intervals on the assault bike in his workout room and five-minute rounds on the heavy bag, launching punches and kicks and elbows into the thick leather with relentlessness.

  The whole time, a simple electronic band on his wrist tracked his performance. He’d been working with fitness trackers for the better part of two years now, and they’d accelerated his progress over the long term. It had taken him far too long to realise that maxing out your system each and every day didn’t get optimal results. Rest and recovery were just as important as the work itself, and by tracking his heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and sleep cycles, the band let him know when his body was ready to push, and when it was time to pump the brakes and recharge.

  Of course, in a live operation, he had to go all out regardless of how ready he was, but during periods of downtime he could use the data to hone himself into as devastating a weapon as possible.

  Truth was, whether it was civilians awed by their impressive physiques on the street, or mercenaries and terrorists awed by how effortlessly King and Slater could beat them to a pulp, everyone assumed it came naturally to them. Their genetic gifts were real — ungodly reaction speeds that had placed them at the forefront of government black operations — but everything else came from consistent, unwavering hard work.

  And slowly, over the course of decades, King had learned that hard work and smart work were one and the same. In his twenties, he could have slaved away at a backbreaking construction job and made decent coin instead of joining the military. He damn well had the physique and the grit for it. The work no doubt would have been as equally hard physically as even the most gruelling training regime. But it took just as much tenacity to use his brain, to recognise fields in which he was particularly talented and then focus rigidly on improving himself in those fields. Discipline to stick to the right areas of expertise was hard work in and of itself. It was the invisible work, the work that gave a small percentage of the population obscene riches and resources, and kept the rest in poverty. King had been conscious of it for as long as he could remember. Fixating on the things in his life that reaped maximum rewards, honing them over and over again, and completely ignoring the rest.

  It had gotten him here.

  Dripping with sweat in a fifteen-million dollar Manhattan penthouse, in possession of one of the most devastating skillsets on the planet.

  He’d modified his fitness band to suit his needs, so as soon as he hit a thousand calories, a small green light on the device came to life. He registered the illumination, then ended his workout with a final teep kick into the heavy bag.

  A cold shower and a change of clothes freshened him up, and he began preparing breakfast to replenish when a knock came at the door.

  A lighter, gentler knock than the one that had come earlier that morning, before dawn had broken over the city.

  He went to the door, opened it, and pulled Violetta in close.

  They breathed each other’s scent before they kissed, and when their lips touched all the treachery and tension and deceit that existed in their professional lives disappeared. He’d never lived in the present before he’d met her. Not truly. She crossed the threshold blind, eyes closed, face pressed to his. He swung the door shut behind her with a practiced push, sealing them in.

  She pulled herself away, then placed a hand on his chest.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I told you not to go,’ she muttered.

  He half-smiled. ‘Because you thought I might be needed here. Not because you thought I’d get myself killed over there.’

  ‘You vouched for Donati.’

  ‘Because Coombs vouched for him. And Slater trusted Coombs. That was all I needed.’

  ‘Bad call.’

  He nodded.

  She said, ‘At least you’re back in one piece.’

  He glanced down at the athletic garments draped over his frame. Then he looked back up. ‘You don’t know that. You should probably make sure. Conduct a thorough search.’

  She smiled.

  He said, ‘Do we need to debrief right now?’

  ‘Let’s pretend I arrive an hour from now.’

  ‘I like the sound of that.’

  He put his hands on her waist and she wrapped her legs around him.

  He carried her to the bedroom.

  22

  Slater and Alexis stepped into his penthouse right on three in the morning and each managed a replenishing five hours of sleep.

  Slater stirred first, and hit a button on the nightstand that controlled the blackout blinds. They rose with a barely audible whir, exposing Manhattan and Central Park. Alexis grumbled beside him, and he rolled to his side so he could whisper in her ear.

  ‘You should go home,’ he said.

  She sat up, her eyes half-closed, her hair tousled. She said, ‘Seriously?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Feels like I’ve just had a one night stand.’

  He smiled, then it faded. ‘It’s for the best.’

  She took a moment to compose herself. Reached up and wiped her eyes, then drank half a glass of water from her own nightstand. It seemed to clear her head.

  She said, ‘You don’t think your news is going to go down well?’

  ‘It might not,’ Slater said. ‘I want you well and truly back home when I hand in my resignation.’

  She scoffed. ‘Hand it in? You’ve got a letter?’

  ‘That was metaphorical.’

  ‘What actually happens?’ she said. ‘What’s it going to involve?’

  Slater paused. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never retired before.’

  ‘You said in the past you were a vigilante.’