Callsign: King - Blackout

ACTION/REACTION
14

Paris-2015 UTC/Local

Brown circled around his desk, picking up the two phones-King’s dedicated Chess Team phone and the quantum device-and casually slipped them in a pocket as he moved. King followed the gambler in his peripheral vision, but his primary focus was on the guards.

He had not expected to accomplish anything with his little game of chance. Certainly, he’d harbored no illusions that it might lead to his freedom, but even as he probed Brown for information, he’d wrestled with the matter of how to escape. Unfortunately, the plastic zip-tie binding his wrists together had not yielded a single millimeter to his surreptitious efforts, and that severely limited his options. His only chance would come when they moved him from the office to some out of the way corner of the riverboat, presumably the place where they intended to execute him, and that would mean cutting it very close.

As the two security men approached, King threw his weight to the side, toppling his chair over. He slammed onto his left shoulder, the impact driving the air from his lungs in a whoosh and sending a spike of pain through his head, but he’d done what he could to prepare himself for the crash and recovered his wits quickly.

The guards saw what he was doing and reacted without thinking, rushing forward to prevent what looked like an escape attempt, and that was exactly what King had been hoping for. Although the chair remained intact and his arms were still securely bound, one of the pair got close enough for King to wrap his nerveless fingers around the man’s ankle.

The guard spat an oath as he wrenched his leg free of King’s grasp.

The other man chuckled. “I told you he wouldn’t go quietly.”

The words were barely spoken when King twisted his body and snaked out a foot to sweep the second guard’s feet out from under him. The man’s arms windmilled as he landed flat on his back alongside King, and as he fell, King twisted again and kicked savagely at the man’s head. Two solid strikes left the man senseless on the floor.

The first guard reacted instantly, bringing his gun around and taking aim at King’s writhing form, but even as he did, something changed in his eyes. He blinked, as if unable to bring his target into focus, and then abruptly crumpled to the ground. The tetrodotoxin, administered when King had pressed his ring against the man’s leg, had done its job quickly.

Brown watched in disbelief as the melee, which had lasted only a couple of seconds, abruptly ended with both of his men incapacitated, but when King began maneuvering closer to one of the fallen guards, hoping to find a knife with which to cut himself free, the gambler sprang into action. He dashed around the desk and snatched up one of the fallen pistols.

King could tell by the uncertain way Brown held the weapon that the man was unused to this sort of thing. He had built his success on manipulation and playing the probabilities, and he had always relied on hirelings to take care of the dirty work. But the gun was a Glock 17-no bothersome safety to fumble with-and with only about ten feet between them, there was little chance that Brown would miss if he pulled the trigger.

King pushed closer to the guard he had dosed with the ring, but kept his eyes on Brown. “You’re probably responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths, but I’ll bet you’ve never had to do the deed yourself,” he said. “It’s one thing to order someone’s death, but pulling the trigger yourself? Not as easy as you thought it would be.”

Now he was the one gambling, and he was betting his life on the fact that his taunts would actually make Brown stop and think-not about the consequences of shooting him, but rather about how he still possessed a small army of mercenary guards only a few minutes away, any of whom would be more than happy to dispatch King.

But then Brown’s eyes hardened and his grip on the pistol steadied. A cold smile curled the corners of the gambler’s mouth. “There is a ninety-nine point nine percent probability that shooting you dead will make me the happiest person in the world.”

King watched, in startling detail, as Brown’s finger tensed and the trigger mechanism started to move…

And then his world was filled with light and noise.