Sharks - Matt Rogers (classic books for 11 year olds txt) 📗

of the mountains earlier that morning, and he didn’t want to overtrain, so he capped his maximum distance at five miles and set off with the reminder in the back of his head. He didn’t track it, which was practically sacrosanct. He’d left his fitness watch at home. He didn’t want to fuss over metrics — his average heart rate and its variability, or his pace — and instead wanted to think about nothing at all.

He could do that well.

But it was tough not to think about what he’d done at Lagoon. In the car he’d defended himself from Slater’s interrogation, but the truth was he had let his emotions get the best of him. He should have shot Cohen elsewhere, or taken a little more care to be discreet. Sure, Deborah’s description would be all over the place, muddied by shock, and in all likelihood she wouldn’t even talk to the cops in the first place, but King hadn’t considered any of that when he shot Cohen.

He’d just done it.

Was he getting angrier?

More impulsive?

It was a mistake as old as time. The king getting complacent, taking his dominance for granted.

Be smarter, he told himself. Don’t make that mistake again.

He swore not to, and found satisfaction in that. It was good to be honest with himself. He’d fucked up, and he wouldn’t in future.

The warrior that dies is the warrior that refuses to be objective.

Even though he wasn’t tracking his heart rate he could tell it was well within Zone 2, maximising his aerobic capacity, so he found himself barely out of breath when he returned to the estate after an exact five miles. After a couple of months of running the streets of outer Vegas, he knew them — and their distances — like the back of his hand. The night enshrouded the street signs, but he navigated the dark asphalt by memory alone.

He went inside, sweating freely, and found Slater and Alexis beside Violetta in the kitchen, all three of them hunched over the laptop on the kitchen island. Alexis sat on the bar stool beside Violetta, and Slater had his arms over her shoulders. She was resting her chin on one of his forearms, and looked perfectly content.

They were made for each other, King thought.

He ran a glass under the tap and sculled it down. ‘What have you got?’

‘Fucking shell companies,’ Violetta swore, eyes transfixed on the glare of the screen. ‘It blows my mind that any of this is allowed.’

‘What’s allowed?’ King said. ‘In layman’s terms, please. You know I’m an idiot.’

He wasn’t, and she knew he wasn’t. He and Slater had dealt with their fair share of financial conspiracies when he was employed by the government, so the two of them knew all the terms inside and out. But Alexis didn’t, and King didn’t want her to feel stupid, especially when she had no reason to know about any of it in the first place.

Violetta recognised all of this, and looked up at King with admiration.

He nodded softly back to her.

She said, ‘Métier Bank International is owned by a shell company, which is owned by a shell company, which is owned by another shell company, but I think I just got to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Dylan Walcott.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘No shit,’ she said. ‘You never hear about these people. They quietly become the richest men on earth and they stay that way.’

‘He’s one of the richest men on earth?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not even close. He’s a tiny fish in the global pond but he’s the biggest fish in the Bahamas by a country mile.’

‘What do you know about him?’

‘You’re lucky I have discreet access to Uncle Sam’s search engines,’ she said. ‘Otherwise he’d be a ghost.’

Slater said, ‘Like Alastair Icke was a ghost? Like Gloria Kerr was a ghost? We found out a whole lot about them real quick.’

It wasn’t intended to be taken seriously, but Violetta said, ‘They were nothing compared to this guy.’

‘I thought you said he wasn’t—’

‘One of the richest men on earth?’ Violetta said. ‘Please. Of course he’s not. None of us know who the richest people on earth are. You honestly think it’s any of the moguls you read about in the news? They’re legitimate money. You should see what illegitimate money gets you, money that doesn’t show up anywhere, that doesn’t officially exist…’

‘Is this argument circling back to Dylan Walcott?’

‘His grandfather was Archie Walcott,’ Violetta said, reading off the screen.

King said, ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’

‘Sure it means something.’

‘Who was Archie Walcott?’

‘He practically established Freeport.’

‘The city?’

‘If you could call it that,’ Violetta said, still scrolling, eyes still flying over lines of text. ‘It’s more of a private empire owned by a select few foreigners. You should read this history…’

‘Can you summarise it?’ King said.

It was late, and they had flights to catch in the morning. Again, it highlighted how little detail he needed to commit to something. Backstory, risks, red flags … it was all secondary to the two eternal questions.

Are there good people that need help?

Are there bad people that need to die?

Violetta answered both with what came next.

15

‘Archibald Walcott was an American business magnate,’ she said without taking her eyes off the screen. ‘From what I can gather, he worked closely alongside Wallace Groves in the 1930s to establish Freeport as a city. Groves was an American businessman who seems to have taken the majority of credit for pioneering the city in the thirties. But behind the scenes, Walcott carried out most of the groundwork.’

Slater said, ‘How exactly did they “establish” a city?’

‘Your usual bag of dirty tricks,’ Violetta said. ‘According to official records they formed the Grand Bahama Port Authority Limited, which allowed them to own all of Freeport as private property of the Port Authority.’

‘What did they offer the existing government to allow that to happen?’

Violetta said, ‘What do you think?’

Slater said, ‘It was a rhetorical question.’

‘I’ll answer it anyway,’ she said. ‘Bribes. They transferred