Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 016

The alley opened onto a side street, and Mike led them through it at a brisk walk, his eyes moving in the practiced, unhurried way of a man who had spent years paying attention to the spaces behind him.

"This way," he said. "Comes out two blocks over. They won't find us quickly, not through here."

The urgency of the last hour had begun to drain out of his posture, replaced by the particular alertness of someone who was no longer in immediate danger but hadn't yet decided to believe it. He kept glancing back at intervals, not from panic, just from habit, the kind that had been built over years and didn't switch off because the shooting had stopped.

Noah fell into step beside his father and waited until they had turned the corner before he spoke. "Where did you get the rifle? I've lived in that house my whole life and I never saw it."

Mike didn't slow down. "A friend gave it to me."

"A friend." Noah repeated this with the tone of a man filing it under subjects to revisit when the timing was better. "You put one round through a window at eighty meters in the dark. With a bolt-action."

"I had a good angle."

"Dad. You're a sniper."

"I was a soldier," Mike said. "There's a difference. And this is not the conversation for right now."

Noah accepted this with visible reluctance. "Fine. But when we're somewhere safe, you're letting me try it."

Mike's expression suggested this was not a conversation he intended to have, but he let it go.

A few paces back, Evan was still helping support Father George Whitman, who remained unconscious with the deep, untroubled stillness of a man who had no idea how much worse the night had gotten since he blacked out. Evan glanced at Soren. "So. What now?"

"Money," Soren said.

Evan absorbed this. "We don't exactly have a lot of options on that front. Unless you're thinking about a bank."

"A bank would be a death sentence. But robbing a local g**g boss is considerably more manageable." Soren held up the phone he'd taken from one of the street-level thugs that afternoon, the one who'd given up his boss's address without much persuasion. "I already have what I need."

Evan's expression shifted as the memory surfaced: Soren, earlier that day, chatting amiably with a pair of low-level enforcers, walking away with a name and a location. He'd thought it was just Deception Arts being put to casual use. He hadn't considered that it was reconnaissance.

Soren turned to face Mike directly, and his tone changed, becoming more deliberate, the kind of register that meant what followed was meant to be taken seriously. "You got pulled into this because of us. That's not something I'm going to pretend didn't happen. If you and Noah want out, I'll contact the consulate and make sure you have enough money to get home and stay on your feet for a while. If you want to come with us, I'll make sure the passage is covered for all of us. Either way, I need one more thing from you tonight."

Behind them, a sound rolled through the dark: a deep, concussive c***k, followed almost immediately by the low roar of something catching fast. The sky above the church district bloomed orange.

They were burning it after all.

The firelight reached them even at this distance, painting the street in shifting amber, and it fell across Soren's face as he finished speaking. He didn't flinch. He didn't look back. He just stood there in the glow with his hands loose at his sides, watching Mike, and the steadiness of his expression in that moment was the kind that came from having already made peace with the cost of things.

Mike let out a slow breath through his nose. "You want me to come with you on the robbery."

"Yes. Straightforward as that."

"And the others?"

Soren glanced at Evan and Howard, who were close enough to hear every word. "Neither of them has any weapons training. I can't put a g*n in their hands and expect it to go cleanly. In a tight situation, an untrained shooter is more dangerous to his own side than to anyone else." He paused. "But you put one round through a pane of glass at night and hit exactly what you were aiming at. That's not luck. That's someone I can work with."

Mike was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, there was a rueful note in it, the sound of a man who had been hoping for a different answer and had known all along he wasn't going to get one. "Of all the nights to have the light on." He shook his head. "All right. One job. Then I go home. And you already paid the rent, so we're square on that."

Soren remembered: Evan, earlier in the evening, pressing the cash into Father George's hands at the door. The rent that had started the whole sequence. He almost smiled.

________________________________________

The sound that broke the moment was somewhere between a groan and a prayer.

"Oh, God... my head..."

Father George Whitman came back to consciousness slowly, blinking at the faces around him with the bewildered expression of a man reconstructing events from fragments. He looked at Evan. He looked at Noah. He looked at the general shape of the situation, and his face moved rapidly from confusion toward alarm, his mouth opening for what was clearly going to be a shout.

Evan's hand covered it before the sound came out.

"Father. Father, listen to me. You're safe. We're not k********g you. We're the people who were in the house. We got you out."

Father George went still, processing. Then, piece by piece, the evening reassembled itself in his memory: the knock at the door, the rent, the light in Mike's window, and then men with guns pushing through the church gate, and then a young man with an apologetic expression and a very firm fist.

Three times, in the end. The first two hadn't done the job.

Evan removed his hand carefully. Father George sat up with the dignity of a man determined to reclaim some composure, and fixed Evan with a look of profound theological disapproval. "Young man. What you did is going to require a great deal of reflection on your part."

"Probably," Evan agreed, with the expression of someone who was not going to lose sleep over it. He nodded toward the glow still visible above the rooftops. "While you're reflecting, maybe put in a word upstairs about the people who burned your church down."

Father George turned.

The cross at the peak of the church tower was visible against the sky, backlit by the fire consuming the building beneath it, a silhouette of faith outlined in someone else's arson. Father George stared at it for a full three seconds. Then his eyes rolled back and he went limp again, caught by Evan with the reflexes of a man who had been expecting exactly this.

Evan looked at Noah over the unconscious priest's shoulder. Noah's mouth was doing something complicated.

"Amen," Evan said, and crossed himself.

________________________________________

By the time the sky had lightened to grey and then to the flat, washed-out white of early morning, they had found a hotel near the waterfront, the kind of place that asked no questions and required no documentation, which in Port Morrow was not an unusual arrangement. The city had a long and pragmatic relationship with people who needed to be somewhere without being officially recorded as having been there.

Soren was sitting on the edge of the bed when Mike came in from the corridor, moving with the focused economy of a man who had finished one task and was preparing for the next.

"I reached someone at the port," Mike said, settling into the chair across from him and setting down the Springfield M1903 with practiced care. "There's a cargo freighter. Not registered in the Frontier Republic, just stopping to offload. No connection to the Blakes or anyone like them. It departs tonight at ten." He paused. "Three passengers to the Sunvale Republic. Fifteen thousand dollars total. About a week at sea."

Soren kept his expression neutral. "And on the other end?"

"I have a former colleague there. He runs security operations for a private firm. Enough standing in the city to help with documentation, if you need it."

"We'll need it," Soren said.

Mike nodded once. "Then we have a deadline."

Soren stood, pulled the baseball cap from the nightstand, and settled it low on his head. He checked the weight of the Beretta 92F under his jacket by feel, not by sight, and moved to the door.

Under normal circumstances, a professional robbery required days of preparation: observing the target's routine, mapping the response time of local law enforcement, identifying exit routes, accounting for variables. Weeks, sometimes, for a cautious operator.

They had approximately three hours.

But the target hadn't left for the day yet, and that window was the only one they were going to get. Preparation was a luxury. Timing was what they had.

The dried seafood shop was four blocks from the hotel, which was not a coincidence. Soren had chosen the hotel the same way he'd chosen everything else since arriving in Port Morrow: with the next move already in mind.

________________________________________

Outside the shop, a young man sat with his feet up on a crate, watching the street with the glazed, proprietary attention of someone who considered himself intimidating and had never been seriously tested on the point. He straightened when the door behind him opened.

The man who came out was heavyset, with the kind of build that suggested an appetite for comfort and a long history of having other people manage his problems for him. His face had the particular shine of someone who had eaten well and slept well and had not recently been given reason to reconsider either habit. He looked out at the quiet morning street with the satisfaction of a man surveying his territory, and found it acceptable.

"Any customers?" he asked.

"Nothing yet, Boss. Slow morning." The young man grinned. "Probably those women from North Street again, talking about your weights being off."

The Boss made a dismissive sound. "Send a few of the boys over. Remind them how things work." He reached behind him and produced a pistol, its finish worn with the same greasy sheen as its owner's face, and held it out. "And if you run into that guy from yesterday, the one with the g*n, put him down."

The young man took the weapon with visible enthusiasm and headed off down the street.

The Boss lowered himself into the reclining chair by the door with the contentment of a man who had delegated satisfactorily, folded his hands across his stomach, and closed his eyes.

A shadow fell across the stall.

He opened one eye.

A young man in a black baseball cap was standing at the front of the shop, turning over a piece of dried fish with the unhurried interest of a casual browser. A wireless earpiece sat in one ear, its cord disappearing into the collar of his jacket. He didn't look up.

"How much for the fish?" he asked, his voice low and even, with the particular quality of someone who was not, in fact, asking about the fish.