A loud shattering noise sounded inside the building.
A window breaking.
Someone was still here.
‘Gun,’ King said to Dawes. ‘Now.’
The officer took one look at his steely expression and did not protest.
‘This is so illegal,’ he muttered as he handed across his firearm.
King took it and advanced through the front door, gun up, eyes flicking left and right, searching for any sign of danger. There was nothing in the reception. It was exactly how he remembered it, save for an overturned chair in one corner.
He kicked the door to the interview room open, but it was just as bare as it had been an hour earlier.
A couple of hallways branched away from reception, leading to an array of offices. King didn’t know where to start.
Then he heard a noise. Some kind of rustling, at the end of the back hallway. A chair scraping against the floor. He let the familiar rush come back to him, juicing up his limbs, targeting his central nervous system, hyping him up. He took off down the hallway, heading for the source of the sound. As he got closer he pinpointed it. One of the rear offices, facing the lot out back. The door lay slightly ajar. A tiny sliver of the room inside was visible.
King didn’t slow down.
He launched himself at the door, slamming a boot into its centre. It shot open, revealing a small nondescript office. A large wooden desk sat in the centre, covered in shredded documents. A man stood behind the desk, rustling through one of the drawers, papers in his hands. He stood slumped, unconfident, worried. Before King could charge headlong into the room he produced a pistol and fired twice.
King spun out of trouble. He slammed into the adjacent wall. Taking cover from the gunfire.
It seemed they had left without something important. This man had been sent back to retrieve it. King fired his M&P blind into the office. The space was small enough to give him a solid chance of hitting the worker. But there came no cry of agony, or the sound of a body hitting the ground.
Just silence.
Then a window shattering. Struck by some kind of blunt object.
The worker fled. Fast, too, spurred on by the fight-or-flight mechanism hardwired into the human brain. Motivated to get away from danger as quickly as possible.
As soon as he heard him leaving, King spun on his heel and powered into the room. The guy was halfway out the window on the other side of the desk. His legs scrambled over the broken glass, kicking hard, a second away from dropping to the ground outside. King vaulted the desk and snatched at his legs. Too late. The guy disappeared from sight, successfully out of the building.
King felt an icy determination coursing through his veins. He would not let the worker get away. He took a deep breath, still in motion, and dove. He aimed for the centre of the window to avoid the shards of glass dotting the sill. His head passed through first, and he followed through by tucking his chin to his chest and turning his legs over. He hit the dusty earth outside shoulder-first and rolled with the landing, springing to his feet not a moment later.
Now he had all the time in the world.
The worker fled through an enormous gravel area packed with construction machinery; flatbed trailers, cranes, rusted forklifts. But he was nowhere near cover. King had a clear shot. He would take care not to miss.
He dropped to one knee and lined up the sight, pinpointing the fleeing worker’s back. Then he lowered his aim. It would do no use to accidentally kill the man. He’d killed too many leads already. He exhaled, breathing deep, tapping into that old feeling of being out in the field, of having to hit his mark or facing certain death.
He pulled the trigger.
The guy went down.
Bingo.
King stood up and walked toward him, boots crunching on the gravel. He passed through rows of machinery. The guy dragged himself feebly across the ground. Bleeding heavily from his left leg. King had shot him in the calf. A crippling injury that all but eliminated movement for the foreseeable future.
He dropped to one knee and wrapped a hand around the timid man’s shirt.
‘What’s your name?’
The guy panted. He had thin, dishevelled hair and pronounced cheekbones. ‘Jonas.’
‘You work here, Jonas?’
He nodded, gulping at the same time. In too much pain and shock to speak.
‘Why’d everyone leave?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘I’ll shoot you if you don’t.’
‘Please, man.’
‘You can either tell me, and I’ll let you live, and then you might have a chance of getting away from whoever you work for. Or you don’t tell me, and you die, without question. Pretty easy.’
‘The boss told me to come back. I forgot one of the files. He said he’d kill me if I left if there.’
‘What document? Who’s the boss?’
‘I really can’t tell you, man. Please.’
King slammed a fist into the guy’s stomach. He moaned and doubled over, clutching his ribs.
‘You can play the victim all you want, but there’s innocent people dying here,’ King said. ‘You’re willingly working for the ones responsible. So your pity party isn’t getting through to me.’
‘Alright, alright,’ he said, coughing. ‘There’s a concrete—’
Harsh static erupted through the lot, cutting Jonas off. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, blaring across the terrain. It fizzled and cracked and died out. King noticed the wooden poles dotted around the construction site, megaphones mounted on top. The loudspeaker system, designed to communicate with workers operating the machinery.
Someone was using it.
A voice came to life, low and booming, resonating all around them.
‘You always had a big fucking mouth, Jonas.’
King looked down at the worker. He was petrified. His face had turned to a mask of sweat. His eyes grew wide. The two of them made eye contact for a single moment.
Then the man’s head exploded in a gruesome spray of brain matter.
Hit by a fifty calibre bullet, long range.
King watched the faceless corpse of his only lead flop to the gravel, dead before the sound of the discharge echoed through the empty lot.
CHAPTER 28
For the second time in two days, King found himself under sniper fire.
He’d seen Jonas’ head pop from the left, meaning the round had come from the neighbouring factory. There was a sniper buried somewhere in that maze, using one of the hundreds of vantage points that King knew would be a good setup. He darted behind one of the forklifts nearby. Putting something large and metal between him and a bullet.
But no further shots came. Just the lone round that had killed Jonas. Palpable tension rose from the silence.
The back door of the head office burst open and Dawes came sprinting out, gun raised, reacting to the report that had echoed through the site seconds before.
‘No!’ King screamed. ‘Back inside!’
Too late.
He watched in horror as Dawes jerked sideways, taking a bullet to the temple with equally graphic results. There was little doubt that the officer was dead. He slapped against the gravel with the looseness of a corpse, half his head blown apart.
Kitchener was in the process of following Dawes outside. She had been halfway out the door when she saw him career off to the side. She screamed and fell back into the office, colliding with Kate in the process. The pair disappeared from sight.
Despite Dawes’ brutal demise, King managed to breath a sigh of relief. They would live if they stayed inside the building. He, on the other hand, faced a significant problem. The forklift against his back provided a rudimentary, temporary shelter. But sooner or later he would have to make a move. He didn’t know how much of a professional the enemy sniper was. First he’d assumed the talent of long distance shots had died with Cole, but it appeared there was more where he came from. He wondered how many more…