Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 033

The sirens reached them before anyone said a word.

Faint at first, then unmistakably real, rising from somewhere below on the street. The wail of police cars, growing closer.

Someone outside had heard the shots.

A thin smile crossed Julian's face. It was barely there, gone almost as quickly as it appeared, but Soren caught it.

He let a moment pass, then spoke. "How much does he owe you?"

Julian glanced at the dealer beside him. She answered without hesitation. "Principal and interest combined. Forty million baht."

"What?" Mark Dalton's head snapped up. "I borrowed five million. Five. That's all."

"Principal and interest," Julian said, his voice flat with contempt. "Do you need me to explain how compound interest works?"

Soren looked at Hank.

"Just over a million and fifteen thousand US dollars," Hank said.

"Soren." Evan grabbed his arm, voice dropping low and urgent. "This has nothing to do with us. We can just walk out. Right now."

Soren shook his head. He didn't explain his reasoning, not all of it. Instead he said, "He's Uncle Mike's old comrade. If we can help, we help. Besides, I still need Mark to sort out our documents."

Julian let out a short, satisfied laugh. "Well. Blind luck after all. You people actually have money. I should've asked for more."

Soren didn't acknowledge him. He turned to Hank. "Pay him."

Hank reached into the document envelope without a word, counted out a stack of bonds, and dropped them onto the card table.

Julian picked them up, flipped through them with a practiced eye, and raised an eyebrow. "Bonds. Questionable provenance, I'd guess." He set them back down and shrugged. "Doesn't matter. This is a casino. We take all kinds." He waved a hand, suddenly magnanimous. "Go on, get out of here. Mark's debt is cleared. Use the back exit, and try not to run into the police on your way out. That would be your problem, not mine."

Soren nodded to Evan, who moved to Mark's side and took his weight under one arm. Soren retrieved the fragmentation grenade from the center of the table, dropped it back into the gear bag, and zipped it shut.

Evan said nothing until they were moving, and then only quietly, close to Mark's ear. "I don't care whose army buddy you are. You owe us. Remember that."

Mark gave a weak nod, his face creased with exhaustion and something that looked like genuine shame.

The four of them slipped out through the back exit and into the night.

________________________________________

Hank started to say something as they cleared the alley.

Soren raised a hand, cutting him off, and pulled out his phone. He dialed.

"Cody. You free tonight? We're in Bangkok. Something's come up."

Two hours later, they were seated at a street food stall on a busy night market street, the smell of grilled meat and lemongrass thick in the air around them. After a stop at a nearby clinic for basic dressing and disinfectant, Mark Dalton looked almost human again. He could walk without help now, though the bruising across his face had deepened to a vivid purple and one eye was still swollen half-shut. The damage looked worse than it was. Whoever had been working him over had known where the line was, and they hadn't crossed it. No broken bones. Nothing internal.

"I'm sorry, Soren." Mark sat hunched over the table, staring at nothing in particular. "I'll pay you back. Every dollar. As fast as I can."

"Don't worry about it." Soren lifted a piece of food with his chopsticks, took a drink. "That money doesn't stay in anyone's hands for long."

Mark looked up, confused.

Before he could ask, Soren's phone buzzed on the table. He picked it up, glanced at the screen, then looked out toward the crowd moving along the street.

It was the right time of year for tourists. The night market was packed, most of the foreign faces belonging to visitors from the mainland, their voices rising and falling in the familiar cadence of Mandarin over the noise of vendors and traffic. Somewhere in that crowd, a young man was scanning the stall fronts with a phone pressed to his ear.

Soren raised a hand. "Over here."

Cody's face broke into a wide grin. He jogged over and stopped in front of the table, dipping into a quick, earnest bow. "Mr. Soren! I came as fast as I could. What do you need?"

"Sit down. Eat something first."

Cody pulled up a stool and settled in. His eyes moved around the table, taking in Mark's battered face and Evan's barely concealed irritation, and he seemed to quietly arrive at a conclusion. "This is about him, isn't it."

"It is," Soren said. "Sorry to pull you in so fast. I thought we wouldn't need you today."

"Please don't apologize." Cody shook his head firmly. "I told you before. Whatever you need, I'm in."

They exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then Soren set down his cup and asked the question directly. "Cody. Are you willing to kill someone?"

Cody's expression stilled. "Who?"

"You should be asking how many."

Soren took another drink. "I'm planning a job. A serious one. Right now I've got three people who can handle a weapon, counting you. It's going to get loud, and there will be casualties on their side, probably a lot of them. But the payout should be significant. I'll cut you in."

Cody was quiet for a moment. He had grown up in the Fringe Territories, had seen violence up close since he was a child, had been around men who treated killing as a professional matter. But there was something different about the way Soren said it, the same tone he might use to discuss splitting a dinner bill, no weight to it, no theater. Just a fact being stated.

"If it's too much to ask," Soren added, "forget I said anything."

"No." Cody straightened. "If you're asking, I'll do it. As for the money, if it's possible, I'd like two hundred thousand dollars. But if the job doesn't yield that much, I don't need to be paid at all."

"Done. And you'll get it regardless of how the job goes."

Cody blinked, then nodded slowly, absorbing that.

Across the table, Mark was staring at the exchange with an expression somewhere between disbelief and alarm. He had served in the military. He had spent years working the margins of security and enforcement in Southeast Asia. He thought he had a reasonable sense of what dangerous people looked like. But this man that Old Sergeant had somehow befriended, sitting here at a street food stall casually arranging a killing operation over rice and beer, was something else entirely.

"Soren," Evan said carefully, "isn't this a little... fast?"

He had genuinely believed, back in that private room, that Soren had backed down. Paid the debt, taken the loss, chosen the quiet exit. He was only now realizing that had never been the plan.

Hank was more direct. "That hotel has a lot of security. Are you sure you don't want to bring in your other people?"

He meant Delta Team. Soren had given them a version of the story earlier, enough to explain the gear and the training without getting into anything that couldn't survive scrutiny. He had described them as a group of hired contractors, the uniforms just window dressing, which had left some gaps but neither Evan nor Hank had pushed.

"They're not available right now." Soren shook his head. "Here's how it goes. Mark and Cody come in with me on the ground. Hank, you're on the wheel, ready to move when we come out. Evan, you're creating the window."

"Wait." Mark set down his chopsticks. "I'm included in this?"

"You were in the military, weren't you?" Soren looked at him steadily. "Uncle Mike said you run a security company here. Honestly, I've had some doubts about that since this afternoon. A man in the private security business, and you spent an entire day hanging from a rope in a casino with nobody from your company coming to find you. Not one person."

Mark let out a long, deflated breath. "I was in the military, yes. But the security company..." He trailed off, then seemed to decide there was no point in maintaining the fiction. "It's basically a shell. The whole operation is me, the owner, and his brother-in-law. We're three people. The company's been on the edge of closing for over a year."

"Are you serious?" Evan stared at him. "You told my uncle you were a senior executive."

"I am a senior executive. Of a company with three employees."

"That's like calling yourself head chef because you're the only one in the kitchen."

Mark had the decency to look embarrassed.

Soren let it go. There was one thing that still mattered. "The documents. Uncle Mike said you could handle that for us. Is that still true?"

"Yes." Mark's answer was immediate and certain. "That part is real. In Sunvale, getting papers sorted isn't complicated if you know the right people. I know the right people."

Soren nodded, the tension in his jaw easing slightly. "Then that's enough. If you couldn't do that, this whole trip would have been a waste."