The Magpye: Circus Read Online Free PDF Page A

them.
Behind them, somewhere, Jack Taylor's mind, razor sharp and dark
and bloody, was thinking, and planning, and calculating. King
realised that he'd locked himself in a small metal box with
probably the most dangerous man alive.
    "No, Jack, you're not. That's
why I've called in some outside help, someone who's worked for the
family before."
    "A specialist?"
    "Something like that."
     

MAKING IT STICK
    Ben Ryan hadn't started out a
bad kid, but that's what everyone said. Well, not everyone. When
he'd been in prison, he'd heard every hard luck story in the book.
Most of the guys there were innocent, the rest were there because
of someone or something else. Parents, wives, girlfriends, kids,
booze, drugs. For Ryan it had been Iraq. Iraq had crept inside his
head and come home with him. That's how he thought about it. Iraq
wasn't a place, wasn't a time he'd lived through, wasn't even a
memory. It was a thing, a living thing, like a parasite, that had
latched onto him and wouldn't let go.
    After all, he didn't have a family. He didn't have a
wife , or a girl , or kids. He drank,
sure, but no more than any other soldier, and drugs had never been
his thing. So what was it that drove him to be here, on this night,
finger nervously stroking the trigger-guard of an assault rifle,
twitching at every little sound? How had he ended up as a
god-damned Kingsman?
    Guard duty wasn't the worst gig
in the warehouse though. Piotr, a mountain of Russian muscle with a
face like a slab, had to feed the kids. Ben had watched him
prepping the food, stirring the giant rusty cans of low grade meat,
pouring in the antibiotics, the hormones, the sedatives. Enough
food to keep them alive, hormones to keep them small, antibiotics
to keep them healthy. Sedatives to make them shut up. Ben had joked
that Piotr should put it on the market, every mother in America
would want the recipe. That had got him a black eye and trip to the
dentist. After that, he'd steered clear of Piotr and the kids. He
stuck to his route around the gantry way, checking windows,
listening. A hundred or more kids at a time safe and sound
underneath him, at least until the next truck came.
    He didn't ask where they went.
It didn't really matter. Not asking questions was one of the major
job requirements if you wanted to last a long time as a Kingsman.
Questions got you killed. Answers got you killed quicker. So Ben
Ryan carried on being a good bad soldier and didn't ask
questions.
    He didn't ask questions when he
heard the crash above him, he just raised his gun.
    He didn't ask questions as the
black shape came plummeting towards him, he just took aim.
    He didn't ask questions as his
gun fell forwards. He didn't ask questions as he felt the hot gush
of his own blood splattering his thighs. He didn't ask questions as
his gun and most of his right hand clattered to the floor. All he
did was clutch at the mangled stump protruding from his wrist and
scream.
    The screaming stopped as Magpye
landed on top of him, crushing his windpipe with the
steel-reinforced heel of his boot. Ben Ryan's vision went dark and
he realised, at the very end of his life, that he had a lot of
questions after all.
    Quickly un-clipping the trapeze
wire from his belt, Magpye shook his line loose from the broken
skylight above him. The other guards were already on their way,
boots hammering on the gantry steps. Three in front of him, two
behind. Another two downstairs, running in a different direction to
the others. The ghosts sharpened Magpye's senses - the advantage of
having more than one mind at a time was an almost endless surplus
of concentration.
    Magpye threw back his greatcoat
and drew the twin pistols. From the bubbling soup of memory,
Malcolm surfaced. "Trick shot time," said Magpye, unable to keep
Malcolm's affected Texan accent at bay. "Yee-ha."
    The first bullet tagged the
front running guard in the shin, shattering the bone and bringing
him down instantly. The second guard was so close behind that