The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

appraised the rear. A swimming pool and patio with open glass doors to the house. The pool was a feature for both relaxing and entertaining. The doors would remain open, adding to the spacious lounge and the capacious feel. An extension to the luxury within, and the breeze from the shaded forest side of the property would cool the house inside. So, here was his entrance point. A doorway to the house that would remain open right up until the inhabitants went to bed.

The villa that Nikolai had rented was entirely different. But not altogether less secure. A temporary rental, that King had checked with the agents, booked for a duration of six-weeks. A ten-bedroomed, split-level villa with two swimming pools, set amongst twelve acres of private forest and meadows on top of a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean some ten-miles distant. It was hemmed in by a ring of wire fencing that took in a full four acres of grounds. The fencing was to keep out wild boars, which were numerous in the mountains and a local delicacy when cured into hams by specialist butchers in the region. The fence was merely head-high, constructed from concreted metal posts and high-tensile wire, capable of withstanding persistent, three-hundred-pound wild boar intent on getting through to the well-tended gardens beyond.

There was basic security, a CCTV camera on the entrance and a further two mounted on each end of the property. King had taken details of the property from the letting agents - under the premise he was searching for a client interested in making property purchases in the area and all the way up to Siena, and who needed a base for these activities - and had familiarised himself with the layout. He was most interested in ideal surveillance locations and points of entrance and exit.

King was vastly outnumbered. He would be using the strengths and weaknesses of these people to help him with his plan. He had got the idea from the surveillance at Monteverdi Marittimo. The show of force and dominance had entertained King. For two organised crime bosses to meet in a low-key location could have been so easy. The security could have remained discreet. Instead, the meeting had created so much attention and been nothing more than a powerplay. King had finally formulated his plan when he had played back the audio in the car. He knew what the two men were planning, yet neither trusted the other enough to meet on anything other than mutually neutral ground. The Russian had compromised the most, meeting on the Italian mafia boss’s home turf, so King guessed that was why he had turned up with such overt security. Luca had at first been more discreet, but his men had eventually outnumbered the Russians, even if they were not so professional in their approach to their vehicles.

Luca Fortez was going big. He was planning to take out the two competing mafia families and take over half of Italy for himself. To do this, he would need resources. These came in the form of Russian ex-soldiers, now working for Nikolai. The Russian could muster two-hundred and fifty men, and he could bring in the arms and equipment for their coup. They would mount synchronised operations using paramilitary and special forces techniques, and a whole host of heavy armaments from AK47 rifles and Makarov pistols, to explosives and rocket launchers. There would be no link to Luca Fortez, who would be free to cry crocodile tears, but assume the control of the entire region. He would strike while the opposition was down, rounding up the stragglers and either killing them or force them to swear new allegiance. It was a positively medieval plan, but it looked set to work. The coup would be organised and planned for next month, whereby Luca would pay three-million euros down-payment and a significant thirty-percent royalty per year of all money accounted by his new organisation. It was an outsourced operation, with no direct evidence pointing at Luca Fortez and his seemingly untouchable enterprise.

King locked the camera in the glovebox and stepped out of the car. He had parked in a shopper’s carpark in the town of Castagneto Carduci, just five miles from the mountains and the town of Monteverdi Marittimo. The town was made up of many blocks of apartments, supermarkets, business centres and restaurants. It reminded King of towns in America with strip malls and clusters of businesses, each linked by roads running parallel to the main road which ran from Rome in the south to Pisa in the north.

King found a clothes and fashion accessories outlet in a small shopping centre. He made his purchases in cash. It was a twenty-minute walk to a shop he had seen on his way in by road, but before he reached it, he stopped at a tobacconist and stepped inside. The air-conditioning was a relief, it was thirty-degrees centigrade and the sun was strong and high, the sky cloudless and an azure blue from the sea all the way to the mountains, where it appeared washed out with white. The sky above the mountains always seemed to look that way, only to be as blue as the coast once you reached them.

The man behind the counter looked up, nodded, then returned to his magazine. The shop smelled heady with tobacco and leather goods, which ran along the walls. King looked around for a moment, then spotted what he wanted in a glass revolving cabinet towards the other end of the shop.

King always wondered how Britain had such terrible knife crime figures, when there were literally no places like this in the UK, yet throughout Europe, there was a place on every street that sold all manner of knives, and even swords, with as much ease and acceptance as shoes or wallets. King rotated the cabinet and coughed politely. The man looked up, put down his magazine and walked over. King did