“I beat you,” Mai said, leaning down.
Drake almost screamed. Damn, this wasn’t like Mai. The Japanese woman usually dispatched her enemies with no real emotion, clinical to the end. One man down and move on to the next and the next until all enemies lay motionless and cold. But this battle was personal, so personal she’d allowed its meaning to scramble her senses.
Gozu rose up, destined to die but determined to extract his vengeance. The knife swung around, a mere distraction, and Mai fell for it. She turned and blocked the blade, leaving her neck open to Gozu’s brutal attack.
He struck ruthlessly.
A band of unbreakable iron encircled her throat. Mai lost the ability to breathe, both her hands instantly coming up to try and loosen the crushing grip. This left her exposed to the blade.
Choking to death, she barely noticed. The blade plunged.
At the last instant, Alicia threw herself headlong at the pair. She crashed into them like a wrecking ball, demolishing the deadly embrace. The blade flicked away. Alicia tumbled on past, leaving Mai and Gozu prostrate in her wake. By then Drake and Dahl were almost on top of the ninja. Dahl bunched his huge fist into his robe and hauled him to his feet; Drake delivered a flurry of blows to his chest and midriff. The ones that landed on his open wound made him scream.
Drake didn’t stop. Dahl held him and Drake punched him until he slumped, unmoving. After that Dahl threw the body onto the tracks, out of sight. The four of them regrouped at the gate that exited the station and caught their breaths whilst Dahl broke out his tracker.
“All right,” he said after a while. “Their blips have stopped flashing and turned into stationary red dots, and so has Santino’s, so I guess we can safely conclude this means no vital signs. Three down,” he grunted. “Four bad guys to go. Not including us, of course, and Crouch and Coyote.”
“What time is it?” Drake asked.
Mai looked up at him. “Time I bought you a watch.”
“It’s midnight,” a disembodied voice told them and they all suddenly fell into defensive stances.
All except Drake. He knew that voice anywhere. “Michael Crouch, sir,” he said. “I wondered when you would show up.”
“Less of the ‘sir’,” Crouch said. “I guess I’m pretty much the civilian now.”
Drake met his eyes. “The Ninth Division… I’m sorry. What of the people that survived with you?”
“Awaiting my call. And who supports you?”
Drake looked a little sheepish and glanced at his colleagues. “Communications are disallowed. They have civilians wired to nano-vests, an army of mercs, some kind of computer genius and land mines.” He shrugged.
Crouch gave him raised eyebrows. “And more I assume. But even in that short list there is something you can exploit.”
Drake ran through it again in his head. Of course there was. But they would need outside help to do it, and from someone he didn’t believe was operationally fit. Still, needs must. He opened his mouth to speak.
“Wait,” Dahl said suddenly. “What the hell’s that noise?”
He knew of course. They all knew. As one, their five faces turned white, hard and desperate.
“God help them,” Mai whispered.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thirteen, Coyote thought. Unlucky for me, as always. I killed my first man at age thirteen. I am the thirteenth contestant. She’d found out later that her thirteenth kill had involved the death of an unborn child. If I were in a goddamn book, I’d be on chapter bloody thirteen.
Coyote had known only one overwhelming urge her entire life — the need to kill. When it first came, the feeling initially consumed her, engulfing her until she could hardly concentrate on anything else. But she guessed from the very beginning that sloppiness would lead to exposure and discovery, and ultimately to death. At first her attempts to blunt her urges were infinitesimal — small animals — but it did the trick. What she didn’t anticipate was that her disease would mature as she did, growing more complex and more demanding.
Eventually the animals were no longer enough.
Coyote was intelligent; a hard-working, likeable, sociable girl. The two sides to her were pure Jekyll and Hyde, one always lurking and demanding tribute whilst the other struggled to be the good girl everyone always thought she was.
As she grew she took martial arts and boxing classes, quickly demonstrating her ability to learn fast. The aggressive nature of the classes, five days a week, helped dull her urges, but only for a short while. The dark side didn’t like it when she had to rein in her terrible impulses so as not to visit them upon the rest of her class. It made her pay by growing stronger.
Coyote knew all along that she was a psychopath. She’d migrated toward the Army because it offered the chance of fieldwork and missions, and the naïve young woman in her saw a chance to hide her urges in plain sight. Before she joined the Army she had killed, but the hard code that she lived by enabled her to disguise the body and get away with it. The man she’d chosen, a wife-beating gang-leader, was barely missed and barely investigated but murder was still murder, and taking a life was robbing a person of the chance to do some good.
After the Army took her it actually got harder. The scrutiny was strict, relentless. It was only when Crouch offered her the post at the Ninth Division, having seen her past exploits, that she found a little space in which to fulfil her base desires.
Coyote thought back now. Those times had been the best: so simple, so invigorating. She could travel alone and meet her mark in Paris, stay the night and take her time over scratching an itch with a very sharp knife, and then return to London with a clear head, ready to help her friend and mentor, Crouch, and the boys in the field to the best of her quickly developing abilities.
“Stay frisky,” she used to say to help focus their minds on the job at hand and what waited for them back home, in their homes.
The ‘boys’ responded to her, most in a respectful, appreciative way, understanding her motives. The ones that didn’t erred only once, and were taught the errors of their ways. All but one then got the idea, and the one that didn’t was kicked out of the Army by Michael Crouch. Her boss, whom she respected completely, appreciated intelligence, initiative and skill but brooked no slackers. He was the very essence of the best boss an employee could ever have — one who had been where they were and seen everything that happened at every single level, not some shiny-arse rich man’s over-educated son handed a leadership on the back of a club membership, a helpful vote or even a month’s stay in some millionaire’s holiday castle on an exposed crag of an Icelandic mountain.
Coyote became the world’s greatest assassin by pure chance. A target bargained for his life; a real target, offering money, power and further jobs if she promised to take out his annoying partner. Coyote liked the idea. It gave her the chance of an extra kill, or at least pooling both jobs into one. It gave her a second supply line. It offered diversity, giving her the chance to use up stored vacation days. She informed Crouch that she’d turned the target instead of eliminating him, an action that actually brought her a promotion, and then started to take jobs, using him as an intermediary. After a while she grew wary of him, knowing she needed to preserve her anonymity or eventually lose everything, and spent a pleasant evening planning his accidental death. As her reputation grew he became less pliable and more dangerous, seemingly lacking the intellect to imagine he might become one of her victims. Later, she actioned her plan then set up a totally secure line of contact, three times removed from herself, through the dark Internet, a source even the US government were having difficulty penetrating. It could be accessed through secure, unhackable software exclusively available only to those that were allowed to purchase it. She used only the contacts she’d personally vetted and who knew how deadly she was.