Reckless
A breathtaking novel of suspense from the co-author of five No 1 James Patterson bestsellers including Judge and Jury and Lifeguard, and the hit thrillers The Blue Zone and Don't Look TwiceTy Hauck has left law enforcement for a job with a big-time private security firm. But he quickly learns that life in the private sector can be every bit as dangerous as wearing a badge – if not more so.When a successful trader at one of Wall Street’s largest firms is murdered his suburban home along with his wife and daughter, it seems at first to be a case of burglary gone wrong.Then another financial executive is found dead in a very suspicious ‘suicide’. As Hauck digs deeper he uncovers a horrifying financial conspiracy that stretches from New York to Central Europe to London. And its perpetrators will kill anyone who gets in their way…
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Before turning to full-time writing, Andrew Gross was an executive in the sportswear business. Andrew has co-authored 5 novels with James Patterson, all of them reaching Number One in the New York Times Bestseller list. This is the fourth novel in his series featuring Greenwich detective Ty Hauck. He currently lives in New York with his wife, Lynne, and their three children.
Reckless
Andrew Gross
London.
“Beep, beep! Beep, beep!”
Amir, “Marty” al-Bashir’s six-year-old son, raced his motorized Formula One model around the dining room table, almost crashing it into Anna, the Lebanese housemaid, as she brought out their Sunday lunch of flatbread and spiced lamb.
“Amir, watch out!” his mom, Sheera, yelled. “You’ll run Anna over. Marty, is it not possible for you to tell your son to stop?”
“Amir, listen to your mother,” Marty called from the den, distracted. He and his older son, Ghassan—they called him Gary—were crouched in front of the wide-screen TV in the midst of a crucial football match. Manchester United versus Chelsea. The match was scoreless with only seconds remaining in the first half, and Man U was his son’s favorite team—they had just acquired Antonio Valencia, his favorite winger and the hottest foot in the game.
“Oh, no, look!” Gary shouted as Marty focused back on the screen. A Chelsea attacker had curled a thirty-meter beauty just inside the left post, an inch beyond the Manchester goalie’s outstretched dive.
“Damn, now look what you’ve made me miss, Sheera,” Marty groaned, deflated, “a goal!”
“A goal, big deal. Your son is driving that thing around the house like Jenson Button. Amir, listen…” Sheera’s voice grew firm. “If you don’t stop this instant, you can forget about going to Universal Studios when we are in L.A. Do you hear?”
As if on autopilot, the model race car came to a stop. From the floor, Amir caught his father’s amused gaze and grinned sheepishly. “Yes, I hear, mama.”
“Come on, boys, your mom’s gone to a lot of trouble for us. Let’s eat.” Marty rose and the family drew chairs around the sleek van der Rohe table in the stylishly decorated town house.
Outside, the view from the wide third-floor window of their fashionable Mayfair Georgian was over Hyde Park, among the most desirable views in town. The home cost close to six million pounds, but as the chief investment officer of the Royal Saudi Partnership, a sovereign fund of Marty’s native Saudi Arabia, it was hardly more than a rounding error on the daily tallies of one of the largest troves of investment capital in the world.
“Marty,” which al-Bashir had been called for years, was simply an Americanized form of Mashhur, his birth name, given to him in his undergraduate days when he had studied under Whiting and McComb at the University of Chicago and followed up with stints in portfolio strategy at Goldman and Reynolds Reid, and in private equity at Blackstone in New York.
It was only back home in his native country that Marty was called anything else.
Now he oversaw a giant fund with interests that stretched to every point on the globe and every conceivable type of asset. Stocks. Mezzanine capital. Currencies. CDOs. Complex derivatives. They also had vast real estate holdings—in New York’s Rockefeller Center and London’s own Trafalgar Square. When the price of oil rocketed, they bought up ethanol-producing sugarcane fields in Brazil. When the commodity fell, they bought up offshore U.S. development leases and massive tankers. Royal Saudi’s holdings were more than a trillion dollars. Their hands were in everything. In times of crisis, they had even been called on to prop up many national treasuries around the world.
