paired with an affectionate pat of my forearm. ‘Limited, by email. Only two from each of them, and the last email from each is identical. It’s all here for you.’ He reached down and picked up a messenger-style briefcase – an expensive brand named Tumi – complete with a small combination lock. It was an indiscreet way to exchange information, and I couldn’t help but glance around us once more.
‘ROE?’ I asked, studying him closely.
Philip was quiet and the silence stretched on for long moments. The gentle lapping of the lake water was disproportionately loud against the sudden lack of speech from the man who dictated just how messy my life was about to become.
‘Get them out. Your rules of engagement are by whatever means necessary.’
CHAPTER 2
As the burst of warm water hit my body, I gave silent thanks to Philip for his choice of hotel. Tucked away in the city’s inner south, it was new but still managed to flaunt the water restrictions that turned most of the hotel showers in Canberra into ineffective dribbles. This was a glorious cascade of water that engulfed my entire body, washing away some of my weariness and soothing some of the pain in my back and left side.
I hadn’t opened the file Philip had given me yet, focused instead on the mental sorting that was required after a kill job. The emotional toll of controlling the fate and life of another human was more than most people could take. I’d never struggled with the moral side of what we did, perhaps because of the careful selection process of our targets. But I spent time after each job reviewing my work, criticising each decision and filing away the lessons for next time.
The lead had come from our analyst, Jack, a specialist in open source intelligence, or OSINT. He had discovered Mercham Myers, a Canberra-based member of an outlawed motorcycle gang, on the dark web, the secretive corner of the internet home to the most horrific of human desires. Myers was advertising services that included sexual favours from underage girls, drugs, or any combination of the two. Even Jack, an affable, smart kid used to researching people’s darker practices, had sounded particularly revolted by this case.
It was further evidence of a flourishing criminal underground along the length of the East Coast of Australia that specialised in the abduction and sale of sex slaves. Philip had sent a detailed, anonymous report to local law enforcement who had been unable to access the bulletin board and didn’t pursue the case. In truth, police departments lacked the sophisticated capability to conduct an online investigation on the dark web so that made it a problem for us to solve.
Myers had been so eager for money that when Jack reached out it only took three messages for Myers to offer a review of his ‘current collection’. When I met him yesterday, his only security check was a quick pat down that failed to find any of the weapons secreted on my person. Perhaps he’d been reassured by my scruffy appearance and ability to blend into this criminal world, given it was where I had spent most of the last five years. I was, after all, a criminal by any definition of the law, responsible for more deaths than even the most heinous mass murderer in Australian history. He let me in and led me down to a makeshift room, two floors under the semi-vacant house that served as a front for his endeavours.
I stretched a bit to let the water from the shower flow over my side, the warmth cancelling the pain from my bruised flesh. It wasn’t the two men I had killed that I saw as I closed my eyes, it was the victims. There had been seven girls there, ranging from early- to mid-teens, in varying states of drug-induced aloofness. Myers had paraded them before me, unafraid of the visible signs of their punishments, from sores on wrists and ankles to an array of bruising and needle marks in small, angry collections. They had the glazed eyes and quiet compliance of the heavily drugged.
‘Ignore that one,’ he shoved one of the taller girls firmly enough to make her fall to the ground. ‘She almost bit off a man’s cock.’ He took my silence as shock and nodded, telling me in graphic detail the punishment she would endure. I calculated the chance of killing him on the spot despite the snub-nosed revolver he had tucked in his pants. Ultimately, it wasn’t the proximity of his firearm but the fact it would be difficult to make it look like a suicide and then corral the girls to safety.
I examined the remnants of the job through the shower screen, the water not yet hot enough to create steam that would otherwise obscure the glass. Looking back at me was a man with deceptively youthful features, though I was just closer to 30 years old than 40. I kept my light-brown hair cut short, almost shaved on the sides and back and just a little longer on top. This meant I could get away without touching it unless I was trying to impress someone. Dark brown eyes and a mouth prone to a sardonic smile, often at highly inappropriate times. My features were tanned enough to pass for European if I needed to, plain enough that I’d never be called handsome but ensured I had a decent success rate when I tried to distract myself with female company. My body was average enough, lean and lightly muscled with a tone that needed further encouragement through gym time that I had dodged too much lately. A collection of scars of varying sizes and shapes, a patina that spelled out my history of surviving in a world that had done its best on a number of occasions to beat me. As usual, I glanced away from them, unwilling to go down the mental path of their history right now so as not to interrupt my review of the job.
I’d returned to Myers’ house only a few hours after my reconnaissance, keen to act before he delivered the girl’s punishment. Myers’s security measures were easy enough to bypass, given they consisted largely of padlocks and standard door locks that took less than half a minute each – I’d been careful to take note of each lock as he escorted me in earlier. Picking locks had been something that had taken a lot of time for me to learn, but like any tradecraft, if practised enough it was something that stayed with you. In this case, it was made considerably more difficult by the Oakley tactical gloves I wore that provided the fusion of protection from leaving fingerprints, and a tactile feel that only interfered with finer precision details like lockpicking. I put up with them given the hardened knuckles gave the option of hand-to-hand combat without leaving tell-tale DNA or bruised knuckles.
After breaking in, I closed the front door but left the next two I encountered open in case I had to make a quick exit. I headed through the house with quiet footsteps and found Myers in a makeshift lounge room, two floors under the semi-vacant house that served as a front for his endeavours. He was dozing in an armchair that would have looked old in the 1940s.
He was alone, his feet facing two closed doors that were separated by a wooden-panelled wall occupied with an archaic TV set. I assumed one of the doors led to where he kept the girls and the other possibly to his bedroom, even though it seemed likely he slept exactly where he was; the floor was covered in discarded food wrappers, pizza boxes and beer bottles and the chair was worn and stained with grease. I couldn’t work out what was more disgusting – his food-covered, hairy stomach that refused to stay hidden under his greasy t-shirt, the equally food- and grease -filled beard that seemed to start just under his eyes and progress to his chest, or the exercise book on the floor beside him with names and bookings for the use of the seven girls.
A bench that ran the full length of the room was also full of signs of his ‘business’: sex toys, leather garments and related paraphernalia in various states of cleanliness, along with the revolver I’d seen on him earlier. Paired with the room’s fetid odour, it was all I could do to keep from gagging.
I picked up a studded leather collar from the bench and extracted the ceramic knife tucked into the front pocket of my pants. I made a small hole in the collar to ensure it closed tighter than intended, though it was probably meant for leaner necks than the repulsive, sleeping beast before me. It was only then that I heard a sound that made my skin crawl. Knuckles hitting flesh, coming from one of the closed doors only a metre or two away. It turned my patient, deliberate speed into furious action.
I approached Myers
