Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 015

The squad leader looked at the bodies on the corridor floor and made the only rational decision available to him.

"We're pulling out. This is above our pay grade."

No one argued. Six men in under ten minutes, and they still hadn't seen the man who'd done most of it. Just the sound of shots in the dark, the shapes of their teammates going down, and the single round that had come through the window glass from somewhere outside with the kind of precision that didn't belong to an amateur. Half the team was gone. Whoever was in that building had trained for this kind of environment and was using it against them with methodical, unhurried efficiency. Staying inside to find him wasn't courage. It was arithmetic, and the arithmetic was bad.

They moved out through the kitchen, past the two men on the floor, and back through the gate in a tight, quiet group that was considerably smaller than the one that had entered.

Soren watched them go from the second-floor landing, one hand on the wall, the Beretta 92F held low at his side. He didn't relax. He didn't move. He gave it a full thirty seconds after the last set of footsteps faded before he allowed himself to breathe at a normal rate.

Retreat didn't mean gone. It meant regrouping, and regrouping meant options, and some of those options were worse than a direct assault.

He went down the stairs and out through the side door, moving to the far edge of the compound wall where the shadow was deepest, and listened.

________________________________________

Elliot Blake's voice carried in the night air with the particular carrying quality of a man who was used to being heard and was currently too angry to modulate his volume.

"They were two people. Two. What exactly were you afraid of?"

The squad leader's answer was flat and unapologetic. "Their tactics were professional. Systematic. If we'd stayed in there, we'd have lost the rest of the team, and then you'd have no one left to protect you."

This gave Elliot enough pause to bring his voice down half a register. Soren could hear him thinking through it, the anger still there but the calculation beginning to reassert itself. Then: "Fine. We burn it. The priest is a foreigner. The Blake family can manage a foreigner."

"That won't be necessary."

The squad leader's tone had shifted into something quieter and more deliberate. "We call the police right now. Let them handle it. Illegal immigrants, no papers, multiple bodies on the scene. We tell the story however we like."

A pause.

"I didn't know you had that in you," Elliot said, with something that might have been approval.

"Those were my men in there," the squad leader said. "I don't plan to let that go."

Soren had heard enough. He understood the language, understood the plan, and understood exactly what it meant for the timeline. Local police arriving at a church with six bodies and a group of people carrying no valid documents was not a problem he could talk his way out of. The squad leader was right about one thing: the story would be told by whoever got to the authorities first, and it wasn't going to be told in his favor.

He was still processing this when the sound of engines came from the main road.

Heavy engines. Multiple vehicles.

He moved to the corner of the compound wall and looked.

Three trucks, military green, rolling in tight convoy formation. The men in the truck beds were in uniform, rifles up, and they were already dismounting before the vehicles had fully stopped. Within seconds, the Blake family's gunmen were surrounded by a perimeter of soldiers that had materialized out of the night with the practiced efficiency of men who had done this kind of thing before.

"Hold them," a voice commanded from the lead vehicle.

Victor Shaw stepped down from the cab, adjusted the collar of his uniform jacket, and walked toward Elliot Blake with the unhurried pace of a man who had the numbers and knew it. He looked around at the assembled gunmen, at the gate of the church compound, at the general shape of the evening's disaster, and then he looked at Elliot with an expression of mild, dangerous interest.

"Elliot Blake. Out past midnight, half an army in tow, and right outside a church." He tilted his head slightly. "What exactly brings you to this part of the city?"

Elliot's jaw was tight. "We were collecting on a debt. Private business. I don't think that requires your authorization."

"No," Victor agreed pleasantly. "But killing my brother does."

The silence that followed had a specific texture to it.

Elliot started to answer, stopped, and Soren could see the moment the information connected: the cargo truck on the highway, the report his men had given him, the ambush that had let the fugitives escape in the first place. He turned it over, and the color of his expression changed.

"That was your truck," Elliot said slowly. "You were moving cargo through Blake territory without telling us. And when someone hit your convoy, you—"

"Choose your next sentence carefully," Victor said. His hand was at his side, and it was not empty. The pistol was pressed against Elliot's forehead before the sentence finished, the motion so practiced it barely registered as movement at all. "Are you suggesting that General Carver's men are highway bandits?"

Elliot went very still. Whatever he'd been about to say, he swallowed it. Saying that word aloud — confirming it, even implying it — was the kind of thing that ended with his head displayed at the gates of Axiom Works by morning. The Blake family had money and influence and the kind of reach that mattered in a city. General Carver had soldiers, and soldiers were a different kind of reach entirely.

"No," Elliot said, carefully. "I'm not suggesting anything."

Victor held the pistol there for another moment, then lowered it with the same unhurried economy. "Good. Then we have nothing to argue about tonight." He glanced toward the church gate. "Leave. Take your people and go. Whatever business you had here is finished."

________________________________________

Soren didn't wait to see how the conversation resolved.

The two factions posturing at each other in the street was exactly the kind of distraction that wouldn't last, and when it ended, both sides would still be looking for the people who'd started the evening's trouble. He moved back through the side door, up the stairs, and crossed the landing to where Mike was still positioned at the window, the Springfield M1903 resting across the sill, his eye at the scope.

"We need to go," Soren said. "Right now."

Mike read his face, asked nothing, and stood. "Back door. I know a way."

He called up to the others in a low, carrying voice that didn't travel beyond the walls. Noah came down first, then Howard, then Evan with Father George supported between them, the priest's head lolling with the specific bonelessness of unconsciousness.

Soren looked at Evan.

"He was too loud," Evan said, with the expression of a man who was not entirely sorry about this.

There was no time to address it. Soren nodded and fell back to the rear of the group, pistol in both hands, muzzle angled down, watching the corridor behind them as Mike led them through the church to the far side of the building.

The rear gate was set into the compound wall at the end of a dead-end alley, the kind of exit that didn't appear on any casual survey of the property. Mike found the key in the soil beneath a planter box with the automatic confidence of a man who had put it there himself, years ago, and had never needed it until now. Old habits from an old life, kept current by the kind of instinct that doesn't fully switch off.

He eased the key into the lock. Soren moved up beside him, stepped to the hinge side of the gate, and brought the Beretta up to chest level.

The lock turned. Mike pushed.

Soren went through in two steps, muzzle sweeping right, and Mike came through a half-second behind him, covering left. The alley was empty in both directions. No movement, no silhouettes, no sound beyond the distant noise of the confrontation still playing out at the front of the compound.

"Clear," Soren said.

He waved the others through and took the rear position, walking backward for the first twenty meters, watching the gate until the alley turned and the church wall disappeared from sight.

From somewhere behind them, carried on the night air, came the sharp, unmistakable smell of petrol.

They were burning it anyway.

Soren filed this information away without breaking stride. Whatever arrangement Victor Shaw had offered Elliot Blake in the street, it hadn't included mercy for the building. He didn't look back.

"We need money," he said quietly to Evan, as they cleared the alley and moved into the side street beyond. "And we need it before morning. Whatever Mike's contact at the port requires, we have to be ready to meet it."

Evan didn't ask how. He just nodded, with the expression of someone who had already been running the same calculation and had arrived at the same conclusion.

"Then we figure it out," he said.

Behind them, the sky above the church district had begun to carry a faint orange tinge that had nothing to do with the dawn.