Predator One Read Online Free PDF Page B

pockets.
    His pockets, and those of the other Kings.
    Bin Laden, and the other Kings, were essentially apolitical. For them it was all a runningcon, albeit the most dangerous one in history. Fighting the Kings was a bitch. They were a massive organization, built over decades, with thousands of operatives seeded carefully into world governments, multinational corporations, and law enforcement agencies. They constructed a kind of bureaucracy so sophisticated that any single one of the Kings could run it all. Hell, it could probably runwithout any of them. As long as the money trickled down from the top—from well-established bank accounts—then the agents buried into society would continue to do their jobs. Which meant that they were always ready to strike, to disrupt, to do damage. All it took was a phone call, a coded e-mail, a text message.
    And they have continued to stay busy. Kings operations have been ongoing, and we seetheir fingerprints in terrorist attacks, suspicious oil spills, domestic insurrection in countries that produce key commodities, and so on.
    The DMS has been working very hard to tear the whole damn thing down. The King of Plagues, Sebastian Gault, was presumed dead along with the Goddess. The founder of the whole organization, Hugo Vox, the King of Fear, was definitely dead at Mr. Church’s ownhand. Two reliable informants—the former assassin Rafael Santoro and a former aide to the King of Plagues, Alexander Chismer—provided us with enough actionable intel to go after the others. I’d spent a lot of time over the last few years making some pretty serious house calls.
    The King of War had been a high-level member of the Israeli military. We sent a team to extract him, but he didn’t wantto come quietly. He was killed during a mother of a gunfight. Pretty much the same thing happened with a Russian manufacturer who served as the King of Famine. Right around the time we breached his defenses in a remote site in Siberia, he ate his gun. The Italian banker who called himself the King of Gold swallowed eighty Vicodin when his sources told him we were closing in.
    We were able to arrestthe King of Thieves, a French commodities broker, but he managed to get himself killed while in custody. Exactly how that happened is a matter of some concern, and there’s a hunt for a spook within the marshal’s office.
    Bin Laden was the last.
    We didn’t want him dead, though. If our theory was right and the Kings organization was essentially running itself, then we needed insight into the infrastructure.We wanted to stop the runaway machine. We placed a lot of stock in swiping bin Laden from the Resort and encouraging him to help us with that.
    Now, though.
    Damn.
    When SEAL Team Six went to Pakistan, much of the intel upon which they acted came from MindReader searches, from clues provided reluctantly by Santoro and willingly by Chismer, familiarly known as Toys. We shared that intel with theCIA, and the mission was set.
    What we didn’t know then and found out the hard way later was that there is a splinter cell buried like a tick within the skin of the CIA, and it wanted bin Laden alive. They knew that bin Laden had at least five surgically altered and very well trained stand-ins. Much like the ones used by Stalin and Hitler. And, if the rumors were true, by William Taft. The stand-inswere either true believers who were happy to surrender to the knife in order to further Osama’s cause. Or they were on the payroll. Some of bin Laden’s family knew about the switch. Some of those were believers. Others were agents of the Seven Kings. It’s a complicated mess of duplicity and intrigue. The guy living in the cave in Afghanistan was only one of the fakes. So was the guy on dialysis.Funny thing is, the real Osama had been healthy and fit and hadn’t been inside either Iraq or Afghanistan since May of 2001. He hadn’t been in Pakistan since 2008.
    The CIA splinter cell knew this. They knew it because eighteen