The Alex King Series by A BATEMAN (free ebook reader for ipad TXT) 📕

Los Angeles, Milan and Paris worth an estimated thirteen-million-dollar fortune. However, after a little digging a journalist for a lifestyle magazine had discovered that it had initially been funded by an off-set of funds by Snell for seventeen-million. A four-million-dollar loss in a little under two-years. King had smiled as he had read the dossier. Everyone needed a hobby.

King brought the field glasses up to his eyes. The forensic team were finishing up their investigation and the coroner’s team were loading the body onto a gurney. There was no great mystery to the cause of death when a bullet .338 of an inch in diameter went through someone’s head at half its initial muzzle velocity, but still with a closing speed of six-hundred metres per second, but he had ordered a full post-mortem nonetheless. He had the budget and the authority, if not really a clue what to do with it. Maybe he’d learn on the job.

He turned back to the farmhouse. It was still. No movement, no signs from within. No shadow or light, no silhouette at the windows. Warm in there too, the top window was open about a foot or so, the curtain was open a few inches as well. There was little breeze today and the curtain rested still. The rest of the curtains were drawn wide open.

He looked back at the closed curtains behind the open window. “Yeah,” he mused to himself quietly. “That’s how I would have done it too.”

4

 

Three weeks, four days earlier

Social media announcement

 

Anarchy to Recreate $ociety

With the poorest 65% of the planet’s population worth the sum of just five men, that’s a staggering five-billion people, how can we continue to live as a society? Anarchy to Recreate Society does not want a socialist society, nor does it want the failed aspirations of communism. We want people to succeed. We want innovation. The planet needs innovation and success for mankind to continue to evolve, to find ways to heal the damage we have done. To move forward though, to be a humane and just society, we must first acknowledge that the gulf between poverty and wealth is now too great. The poorest people are reliant upon hand-outs and charity. These charities need more money to shrink that divide. Governments are in deficit and return little to their citizens because of the tax avoidance of billion-dollar commerce the world over. There are now almost two-thousand billionaires. Our argument is not with them. Our argument is with the top of the pile. Not the people who have gone beyond the million, gone beyond a thousand-million. But with the people who have gone a hundred times beyond that. Where did they think they would get to? When was ever going to be enough? Stand with us for justice. Stand with us for ethics and humanity.

Like and Share this post to start the new world order. Like and Share this to make a momentous change to the world.

5

Ignoring the area of foliage at the two-thousand metre mark, where he would have conceded to have taken the shot, King walked across the quiet country road, so narrow that moss ran through the centre of the tarmac, safe from vehicle tyres, and climbed the hedge to get onto the property. The farmhouse stood on a raised piece of ground, and as King neared and looked back down on the California house, he could see why. The height afforded a spectacular view of behind the compound opposite, and out across the stretch of glistening water beyond. He had studied the map before he had arrived to get a feel for the place and what neighboured the property. He could clearly see why the waterway, fed by several rivers, provided a sanctuary for yachts and small pleasure craft. Great headlands hemmed in the creeks and opened out to form a triangular shaped bay a mile across. Falmouth harbour and docks were visible from here, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond the headland tossed and churned with white horses. But he already knew this. He was familiar with this part of the world. He owned a cottage near Restronguet Creek on the Carrick Roads. On the other side of the expanse of water in front of him, and a few miles inland from the ocean.  He had lived there for part of the year, between their assignments, with his wife, Jane. He had lived there alone too, as a widower. On and off for three-years. Between assignments and postings, when his wife had been alive, it had been a bolt hole for them, their plan for a retirement cottage one day. But plans were things you made when you should have been living. He had learned from this with both regret and a new-found commitment to live more in the moment.

King turned and walked across the grass. It had the look of a garden let go to field. He thought the term was fallow, but he would be the first to admit he knew nothing about farming. His cottage had a small field, or paddock, like this. He liked the meadow flowers and long grass that swayed with the breeze. He would sometimes walk through it in late summer and brush the seeded tops with his fingers, like in the opening scene in the film Gladiator. Maybe the owners of this property didn’t like the view anymore and left the grass go. Didn’t feel inclined to sit out and look over the vulgar property of the fifth richest man on the planet, even if he was only in residence for two or three days a year. The wealth rating was a subjective exercise. Snell had technically been the second richest man alive that morning. His company’s shares had risen and continued to rise. News of his death would affect that, but news of his death had not yet been