Monsters by Matt Rogers (bill gates books to read TXT) 📕

Monsters

The King & Slater Series Book Eleven

Matt Rogers

Copyright © 2021 by Matt Rogers

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Onur Aksoy.

www.onegraphica.com

Contents

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Books by Matt Rogers

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part I

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Part II

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Afterword

Afterword

Books by Matt Rogers

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About the Author

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Meet Ruby Nazarian, a government operative for a clandestine initiative known only as Lynx. She’s in Monaco to infiltrate the entourage of Aaron Wayne, a real estate tycoon on the precipice of dipping his hands into blood money. She charms her way aboard the magnate’s superyacht, but everyone seems suspicious of her, and as the party ebbs onward she prepares for war…

Maybe she’s paranoid.

Maybe not.

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Books by Matt Rogers

THE JASON KING SERIES

Isolated (Book 1)

Imprisoned (Book 2)

Reloaded (Book 3)

Betrayed (Book 4)

Corrupted (Book 5)

Hunted (Book 6)

THE JASON KING FILES

Cartel (Book 1)

Warrior (Book 2)

Savages (Book 3)

THE WILL SLATER SERIES

Wolf (Book 1)

Lion (Book 2)

Bear (Book 3)

Lynx (Book 4)

Bull (Book 5)

Hawk (Book 6)

THE KING & SLATER SERIES

Weapons (Book 1)

Contracts (Book 2)

Ciphers (Book 3)

Outlaws (Book 4)

Ghosts (Book 5)

Sharks (Book 6)

Messiahs (Book 7)

Hunters (Book 8)

Fathers (Book 9)

Tyrants (Book 10)

Rogues (Book 11)

LYNX SHORTS

Blood Money (Book 1)

BLACK FORCE SHORTS

The Victor (Book 1)

The Chimera (Book 2)

The Tribe (Book 3)

The Hidden (Book 4)

The Coast (Book 5)

The Storm (Book 6)

The Wicked (Book 7)

The King (Book 8)

The Joker (Book 9)

The Ruins (Book 10)

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Prologue

1

A hot evening wind blew up Hyde Street, carrying dank and rotten smells with it.

To Jack, the stench was all-encompassing.

He couldn’t move like he used to. Cartilage wears away, inflammation flares with each misplaced step, and before you know it you’re old and geriatric and the world’s passed you by. If not for his success in the boardroom, he’d have been forced to grapple with the inevitability of ageing a long time ago. His career kept him on his toes, kept his mind sharp, but soon that would go, too, and there’d be nothing but family and friends.

Retirement wasn’t something he wanted to consider yet.

He shuffled through the Tenderloin as purple dusk stretched over San Francisco, and it wasn’t just the knee pain that made him grimace with each step. For reasons unbeknownst to him, his contact wanted to meet in the grimiest and most crime-infested neighbourhood in the city. The guy was doing him a favour, though, so Jack wasn’t about to protest. He stepped gingerly round a homeless man passed out on the sidewalk, an empty needle still hanging from the injection site in his forearm. The overwhelming scent of urine rolled off the vagrant’s clothes, swept up by the wind. Jack pressed a hand over his mouth, patting down his silver moustache and beard, and kept walking.

He recited what he would say when he arrived. He’d written the speech down on his notepad the night before, but the pad was tucked away in his jacket. Longhand was a habit he’d carried into Silicon Valley and would’ve labelled him a relic of the past if he hadn’t been doing it since he was thirty. Now sixty-seven, the practice finally matched his age.

The night occupants were out on the 300 block when he arrived, a stretch of Hyde Street notorious for its destitution. The junkie with the needle in his arm had been an outlier at the edge of the Tenderloin, but here on 300 it was a sea of poverty and heroin. Jack understood the importance of keeping a low profile, but his contact had gone a little overboard. It wasn’t that his surroundings bothered him. Throw a stone through any high-rise in San Francisco and you’d hit a rich tech guy who likened the homeless to vermin, but Jack had never entertained that stance. He was known by board members past and present as a teddy bear, a passionate director with a heart of gold. Instead of degrading anyone, he looked for the explanation behind actions, using them to devise a way forward, a solution.

Tonight’s meeting was one of the rare situations where he just couldn’t find a clean fix.

Circumstances had forced him down a messier road.

The nature of the meet required him to be outwardly cold and callous, a world away from his usual compassionate demeanour, and he looked up at the address he’d been given with a face like thunder. A dreary apartment building, old and subsidised. Five vagrants congregated together on the sidewalk in front, mutually lost in a morphine wonderland. Jack could slap them in the face and they still wouldn’t know where they were.

If his contact had come here to maximise witnesses, he wouldn’t find competent ones.

Jack moved wraithlike through a lobby lit by only a couple of brilliant white bulbs, creating an entwinement of glare and shadow. He took a groaning elevator up three floors. It deposited him with a hiss of decompressing metal in a musty corridor that carried the same smells as the street below, only less oppressive. Faint bodily fluids and odour. Far from the gleaming high-rises with sparkling water on tap. He looked