Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

$421,555,908.03.

An incomprehensible sum. Sitting there on the screen in one giant lump, but in reality diversified across a portfolio of investments. Mostly liquid, all executed by a trusted advisor in a shadowy corner of a bank in Zurich.

Slater simply didn’t have time to watch his money.

He delegated accordingly.

Now he navigated to the cash account and found a far smaller sum than the total assets, which was to be expected.

What wasn’t expected was the figure itself.

$31,500,000.00.

He hadn’t done that deliberately, and the last time he’d checked his cash account, it had been a random blur of different digits. Definitely below the $31,500,000 mark, but not by much. Which meant someone had made deposits to round the account up — to make the sum noticeable, to make it stand out.

To catch Slater’s attention.

His advisor?

He didn’t think so.

That wasn’t part of the drill.

With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he navigated to the list of account transactions and pulled the most recent transactions up on the screen.

All deposits from an unspecified account.

All with accompanying descriptions — an ordinary transfer procedure with a low character limit.

$107.80 — Return.

$76.00 — Immediately.

$50.55 — Or.

$69.09 — The.

$45.00 — Girl’s.

$101.00 — Family.

$456.00 — Dies.

The sinking feeling turned to freefall.

He sat motionless, nihilistic, suddenly plagued by a foreign sensation he couldn’t place. It didn’t take him long to figure out what it was.

Despair.

He’d always thought Violetta could maintain control. She could rant and rave all day about her lack of ability to interfere, but when it came to crunch time, she could surely prevent Alexis’ family from being touched.

He now realised why he’d been so foolish.

He’d met the four old men at Bannerman Castle, and fully believed their threats, but ultimately he thought he worked for a fundamentally good institution. A group of shadow people who broke rules regularly, just as Slater did, but had the greater good in mind.

He’d miscalculated horribly.

Maybe this was their idea of the greater good. What did it matter if an elderly couple in the UK had to perish under suspicious circumstances? If that was what it took to draw a rogue operative out of hiding, then so be it. Slater jeopardised their ability to remain in the shadows, and their existence in that darkness allowed them to accomplish missions and tasks they formally weren’t allowed to do.

So it made sense.

But he’d never considered it reality until now.

He put his face in his hands and warped his features, crushing his lips and spreading his eyes apart, becoming the personification of the despair he felt. He allowed himself that reprieve, if only for a moment.

Then he sat up, shook it off, and set to work attempting to salvage it all.

Because what the hell else was he to do?

He could control his own actions — not others’. That’s how people crumbled. That’s how hope was lost. He could give up in the face of bad odds, but that would be conducive to submitting to external circumstances. It was no secret that terrible things would happen — to himself and those he loved — and there was nothing he could do about it except his best. So his best was what he did now. Even if it would cost him everything.

His accounts weren’t secure, but he believed the brand new laptop still was. There was simply no way they could trace it back to this apartment — not with the procedures he was using. He knew there were countless ways they could have gained access to his fortune. He’d physically visited his advisor in Zurich a couple of times. A long time ago, but he’d done it regardless. If he’d been caught on CCTV footage, it’d be a simple process. The upper echelon wanted him badly enough to waive morality, so they could just threaten to execute each and every member of his advisor’s family unless he passed over Slater’s account numbers.

That was all they needed.

Not the passwords.

Just enough detail to make deposits and send a message.

But they probably had the passwords, too. He thought about changing them, but realised how futile it would be. So eventually he reached a decision that he thought was inevitable, and he went to the website tab used to make internal transfers and sent himself three separate sums from a smaller cash account.

$1.00 — If I do

$1.00 — Will you leave

$1.00 — Her out of it?

A shiver crept up his spine as he sat back away from the screen. His hidden advantage was now laid bare, exposed, available to the people hunting him. If it all vanished — all the accounts, all the dollars, all the investments — what then?

He’d make do. He knew he would.

Money wasn’t the problem.

Freedom was.

He masked all the uncertainty rippling through him, stood up, and walked to the bedroom.

Steadily realising that to keep Alexis safe, he might need to turn himself in.

Abandoning her forever.

He didn’t see it, but on the screen behind him, the banking paged automatically refreshed. Revealing a new transfer from an anonymous account, freshly deposited.

$1.00 — Yes.

58

When Quinn pulled up at the drop-off point outside John Wayne Airport, King ejected the magazine from the SIG and handed the empty gun over.

Quinn took it in a shaking hand, his face paler than ever, luminescent under the terminal’s exterior lighting.

‘You’ll be alright,’ King said. ‘Move on from all this chaos. Forget it happened. Get an honest job. Distance yourself from what happened in Emerald Bay.’

‘You killed my friends.’

‘They weren’t your friends. Duke was an opportunist. If you didn’t provide value, he’d have cast you out and brought in someone else.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I know people,’ King said. ‘I knew everything about Ryan Duke the moment I met him.’

‘What else do you know?’

‘Whoever Roman was,’ King said, ‘I doubt he ran away.’

Quinn stared.

King said, ‘You always had your suspicions, didn’t you?’

‘He wasn’t the type to run. That’s what I always thought.’

‘He probably didn’t. He’s probably six feet under the yard.’

‘Duke wouldn’t do that.’

‘You sure?’

Quinn hesitated. Then shook his head.

King said, ‘I thought so.’

‘How do I