Monsters
The King & Slater Series Book Eleven
Matt Rogers
Copyright © 2021 by Matt Rogers
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Onur Aksoy.
www.onegraphica.com
Contents
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Books by Matt Rogers
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part I
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part II
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Afterword
Afterword
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Meet Ruby Nazarian, a government operative for a clandestine initiative known only as Lynx. She’s in Monaco to infiltrate the entourage of Aaron Wayne, a real estate tycoon on the precipice of dipping his hands into blood money. She charms her way aboard the magnate’s superyacht, but everyone seems suspicious of her, and as the party ebbs onward she prepares for war…
Maybe she’s paranoid.
Maybe not.
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Books by Matt Rogers
THE JASON KING SERIES
Isolated (Book 1)
Imprisoned (Book 2)
Reloaded (Book 3)
Betrayed (Book 4)
Corrupted (Book 5)
Hunted (Book 6)
THE JASON KING FILES
Cartel (Book 1)
Warrior (Book 2)
Savages (Book 3)
THE WILL SLATER SERIES
Wolf (Book 1)
Lion (Book 2)
Bear (Book 3)
Lynx (Book 4)
Bull (Book 5)
Hawk (Book 6)
THE KING & SLATER SERIES
Weapons (Book 1)
Contracts (Book 2)
Ciphers (Book 3)
Outlaws (Book 4)
Ghosts (Book 5)
Sharks (Book 6)
Messiahs (Book 7)
Hunters (Book 8)
Fathers (Book 9)
Tyrants (Book 10)
Rogues (Book 11)
LYNX SHORTS
Blood Money (Book 1)
BLACK FORCE SHORTS
The Victor (Book 1)
The Chimera (Book 2)
The Tribe (Book 3)
The Hidden (Book 4)
The Coast (Book 5)
The Storm (Book 6)
The Wicked (Book 7)
The King (Book 8)
The Joker (Book 9)
The Ruins (Book 10)
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Prologue
1
A hot evening wind blew up Hyde Street, carrying dank and rotten smells with it.
To Jack, the stench was all-encompassing.
He couldn’t move like he used to. Cartilage wears away, inflammation flares with each misplaced step, and before you know it you’re old and geriatric and the world’s passed you by. If not for his success in the boardroom, he’d have been forced to grapple with the inevitability of ageing a long time ago. His career kept him on his toes, kept his mind sharp, but soon that would go, too, and there’d be nothing but family and friends.
Retirement wasn’t something he wanted to consider yet.
He shuffled through the Tenderloin as purple dusk stretched over San Francisco, and it wasn’t just the knee pain that made him grimace with each step. For reasons unbeknownst to him, his contact wanted to meet in the grimiest and most crime-infested neighbourhood in the city. The guy was doing him a favour, though, so Jack wasn’t about to protest. He stepped gingerly round a homeless man passed out on the sidewalk, an empty needle still hanging from the injection site in his forearm. The overwhelming scent of urine rolled off the vagrant’s clothes, swept up by the wind. Jack pressed a hand over his mouth, patting down his silver moustache and beard, and kept walking.
He recited what he would say when he arrived. He’d written the speech down on his notepad the night before, but the pad was tucked away in his jacket. Longhand was a habit he’d carried into Silicon Valley and would’ve labelled him a relic of the past if he hadn’t been doing it since he was thirty. Now sixty-seven, the practice finally matched his age.
The night occupants were out on the 300 block when he arrived, a stretch of Hyde Street notorious for its destitution. The junkie with the needle in his arm had been an outlier at the edge of the Tenderloin, but here on 300 it was a sea of poverty and heroin. Jack understood the importance of keeping a low profile, but his contact had gone a little overboard. It wasn’t that his surroundings bothered him. Throw a stone through any high-rise in San Francisco and you’d hit a rich tech guy who likened the homeless to vermin, but Jack had never entertained that stance. He was known by board members past and present as a teddy bear, a passionate director with a heart of gold. Instead of degrading anyone, he looked for the explanation behind actions, using them to devise a way forward, a solution.
Tonight’s meeting was one of the rare situations where he just couldn’t find a clean fix.
Circumstances had forced him down a messier road.
The nature of the meet required him to be outwardly cold and callous, a world away from his usual compassionate demeanour, and he looked up at the address he’d been given with a face like thunder. A dreary apartment building, old and subsidised. Five vagrants congregated together on the sidewalk in front, mutually lost in a morphine wonderland. Jack could slap them in the face and they still wouldn’t know where they were.
If his contact had come here to maximise witnesses, he wouldn’t find competent ones.
Jack moved wraithlike through a lobby lit by only a couple of brilliant white bulbs, creating an entwinement of glare and shadow. He took a groaning elevator up three floors. It deposited him with a hiss of decompressing metal in a musty corridor that carried the same smells as the street below, only less oppressive. Faint bodily fluids and odour. Far from the gleaming high-rises with sparkling water on tap. He looked
