Matt Drake 8 - Last Man Standing (9 page)

The assassin slithered underneath, but lost his footing. The sign bounced back and hit him in the spine. Alicia delivered a stunning, twisting elbow to the nose, breaking it with a loud snap. If Gozu even noticed the blow he gave no hint,
but scrambled on arms and legs up the stairs like an escaping insect. Drake pursued fast. By the time he, Alicia and now Dahl reached the Ninja, the man had gained the narrow bridge across the tracks.

“Running out of space, a
rsehole?” Alicia taunted.

But then Gozu showed his intention. His goal was Mai
, and Drake knew it; and should have anticipated the next move. Gozu leapt on to the paint-flecked railing that spanned the bridge and simply launched himself into space. He landed lightly on the platform below and tumbled, then sprinted hard at Mai with a terrible, driven, singular purpose evident in every quick realignment of his body.

Mai faced him
; calm, poised, as if expecting this charge all along.

Drake raced for the stairs, Alicia at his heels. Dahl, in his special way, followed the ninja-trained assassin right off the railing, landing heavy and with a loud bellow, but still managing to tuck and roll. He came up aching, shocked, but still in one piece.

By that time Gozu was firing everything in his arsenal at Mai. The Japanese ex-ninja skilfully stood her ground, retaliating when she could and dealing several severe blows of her own. Gozu was definitely deteriorating now, having held four world-class assailants off for so long and taking wounds along the way.

“Gyuki would have been proud of you
,” Mai said. “Such a loyal little worm.”

“I
am
loyal to my masters!”

“And you will die loyal.” Mai had purposely sought to raise Gozu’s heckles, knowing that besmirching his clan opened up the only crack in his
armor. When the man stopped for one split second and reacted with hatred, she darted in close and grabbed the short sword that was hidden among the folds of his black robe. With a deft tug she wrenched it partly free of its scabbard and sawed the exposed blade across his ribs. This time Gozu yelled out and half-folded. Mai danced clear. Gozu struck out blindly.

Drake pounded along the platform, closing fast on Dahl. Alicia raced past them all, so fast
Drake gawped and so close he heard the mantra she repeated under her breath.

“
. . . will
not
lose another, will
not
lose another—”

Mai drove a foot into Gozu’s knee, watched him fold
more acutely, then stepped in to finish the job.

“No!” Alicia cried.

Only Mai kept going. She didn’t see the small blade held behind Gozu’s back, who knew that even in defeat he could still kill his enemy.

“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 unbreak
able 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.

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.

Coyote never failed. She achieved the luxury of being able to quote her own timetable, her own
methods. Unusually for one in her profession, she was highly trusted to close the deal.

At that point she could have lived her life out in happiness, killing those she was assured deserved it, building a legendary reputation, and even enjoying her secondary life as part of a superb team.
The only downside was constantly pulling the wool over Crouch’s eyes, and she took no pleasure in that.

Then came Commander Wells and his blind servitude to the Shadow Elite and the eventual
order to stop Matt Drake from getting too close to the faceless sect of world leaders.

Coyote knew it was Wells
that had unknowingly contacted her, despite his attempts at anonymity. The irony was laughable. But the dilemma it posed to her purported humanity, her friendship with the soldiers of the Ninth Division, and the hit her reputation as an assassin might take if she refused ran deeper than all the blood she had spilled. She resolved to take a slight hit, and pay Alyson, Drake’s wife, a little visit, but not a fatal one.

That night, it had been raining. The roads were slick.
Coyote saw that both the target and Drake himself were at home, a little fact that was not a part of her Intel. She considered pulling the plug, coming back another day. This was not part of the release for her, it would not be a kill. Alyson was one of her soldiers’ wives. She could not be badly hurt. Coyote considered every option. In the end she figured that infiltrating the house was out of the question. Drake was a good soldier and would have installed security if not some kind of warning system and escape route. She determined to disable Alyson’s car, reasoning that it was late and the couple wouldn’t be venturing out again tonight.

Unlucky thirteen.

Driving away, satisfied that Alyson’s accident would be only that and not a death, she’d fought to assuage the disquiet inside her. The job had requested a murder. But Alyson Drake was different. The job, her urges, did not require blind acceptance, and the innocent wife of a good soldier was out of the question.

Coyote
had felt the rental car’s tires slip a little as she rounded a tight bend and focused her attentions on leaving the area without wasting her insurance deposit.

It was hours later, as the news of Alyson Drake’s death filtered through the system, that Drake’s friend, Shelly Cohen, learned of the
terrible accident and the two innocent lives it had taken.