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

and find something new without the pressures of paying rent or mortgages or loans.

King put the thought out of his head. It wasn’t time. He needed to focus on the job at hand. Focus on staying alive. Focus on hunting his enemy.

He opened the rear door and knelt on the ground. He checked under the seats, then under the floor mats. The search was fruitless, and he felt relieved. He was being proactive, getting himself in a better head-space for his tasks. He would stay in this mindset. Operating in the UK should take no less effort in personal security than if he were undercover in Syria or The Yemen. He felt better about himself, knowing he was upping his game. The enemy had got the drop on him back at his cottage, but he had beaten them. Taken out their assassin. Now he would be a tougher target.

A fox who had received a close call was a clever beast indeed.

King got down behind the wheel. The drive to London should take just under five hours. He knew the route he would take, didn’t need to punch anything into the satnav. It was a plug-in affair which came with the rental. King checked the glovebox, saw it packed away with the USB lead attached. He thought for a moment, then decided to take it out. He whipped out his pocket knife, opened the drop-point blade and undid the back. There were four tiny screw heads and he got them off quickly, used the tip of the blade to prise off the back. He could see the disk as soon as he opened it, around the size of a fifty-pence coin and twice as thick. He knew what it was the moment he saw it. It was a magnetic tracker with a lithium battery self-contained power source and GPS locator. He had used them before. They had around a forty-eight-hour life and were classed as a disposable unit. It could have been placed anywhere on the car, but somebody had gone to a great deal of effort to conceal this. Which told King two things. They expected him to search the vehicle, be at the top of his game. And they had known he would be away from the vehicle long enough to plant the device.

32

 

London

Gipri Bashwani was now at the top of the rich list. Which meant he was at the top of the kill list. He was third from the top when the list was conceived, and now he was the only one left. He had not donated anything more because of the threat. He had already done that. He had given twenty-two billion dollars to charities, schools, colleges and universities over the past ten-years. He had created a foundation which had taken ten-thousand families from the brink of homelessness in India alone. Despite Anarchy to Recreate Society’s claims, lifelong billionaires like Gipri Bashwani had done more good than the panic-shedding of wealth by scared dot-com billionaires who lived their life with more avarice than Bashwani would ever know. What he had created, as his legacy, was the infrastructure to continue his philanthropic work long after he was gone. At seventy-six years of age, he was a realist. He neither believed he had many years left at the helm of his empire, nor would he ever cower from the threats and actions of a terrorist group.

Few knew who Bashwani was. Certainly, he could walk down any street unrecognised. Readers of Forbes or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times would know his name, the worth of his companies. He was involved in mining, oil, textiles, computer software and artificial intelligence. His company had taken control of one of the world’s best-known prestige car companies and shaken the automotive establishment to its core by announcing its intention for sole reliance on electric power overnight. Not in decades to come, but within two years. Worldwide. And all without affecting the shareholder stock in his oil company.

He also owned many properties all over the world, entire tower blocks. He had started on his path to wealth as a private residential landlord, and changed little more than the amount of property he owned and the way the rent was collected.

Bashwani was adamant he was not going to change a single thing he did because of the threat. He already employed a close protection team. It was their job to keep him alive, and his job, his obligation to his shareholders, to make money. Nothing was going to change that.

The man watched Gipri Bashwani step out of his Maybach limousine, the door held open by his personal bodyguard. The chauffeur drove away when the door slammed closed, re-entered the traffic. The bodyguard walked Bashwani to the door of Century Towers, home of the billionaire’s London offices. A second plain-clothed security officer opened the door for him and the two men stepped inside the smoked glass facade.

The man smoothed his hand over his two-day-old stubble, then ran his hand through his dark hair. He noted that the chauffer had been premature, left no way of escape. If a threat came from inside the building, then Bashwani would be cut off. He knew that close protection worked on a series of scenarios and the ability to counter them. Either Bashwani’s security was not as well-honed as it should have been for that of a billionaire, or the chauffer had made a simple mistake. Either way, mistakes could be exploited.

The man wound down the window of the battered Ford Transit van and let in enough air to demist the windscreen. He made a note of Bashwani’s time of arrival. He had already noted down the registration number of the Maybach. He opened the file again and looked up the section about security. He had read the file earlier, but went back over the personnel section once more.

Bashwani