The King of Terrors
“Wow. What a book. Combining a breathtaking knowledge of international finance with an almost diabolical understanding of deviant personality, Spooner gives us a hero unique in contemporary adventure stories. A psychopath with a sense of humor.”
In The King of Terrors, John D. Spooner unleashes the pounding story of a man with a perfect cover, for whom the complexities of corporate finance hold no mysteries, who views international banking as merely a game to be played, like any other.
Kirk Abbott is the master of the world’s money markets, the tycoon possessed by his desire “to act like a Hughes, spend like a Getty, imagine like a Hearst.” And he is a man with almost nothing out of place, either on his desk or in his life. Almost…But now the personal loan he contracted to gain control of one of the country’s most prestigious retail store chains is overdue, a loan secured abroad from brokers with somewhat less than stainless reputations. Kirk Abbott owes fifty million dollars that he doesn’t have.
So he begins a new game as Alex, an anonymous, ruthless organizer who uses people as pawns: dissatisfied young men and women, black and white, recruited into a People’s Revolutionary Army to execute attacks on major U.S. corporations. Oil fields along the east coast are blown up. Airlines are hijacked and passengers ransomed. Power utilities are sabotaged. Top corporate presidents fall to snipers’ bullets. Jammed rush-hour subways are hit by grenade and tear gas assaults. Alex’s primary objective is extortion on a grand scale. His other objective does not include the survival of his army.
At the same time, in Costa Rica, Mr. Costas Anastos is preparing the most airtight, luxurious getaway ever pulled off.
Meet Kirk Abbott, dazzling, compulsive gamesplayer, always in control whether on the noisy trading floors, of Wall Street or in the quiet sanctums of Swiss brokerage houses’; or Mr. Costas Anastos, diabolically adroit entrepreneur and foreign banker; or Alex, methodical leader of a terrorist gang. The first two are financial geniuses; the last is a psychotic killer. All three are the same man – The King of Terrors!
“Wow. What a book. Combining a breathtaking knowledge of international finance with an almost diabolical understanding of deviant personality, Spooner gives us a hero unique in contemporary adventure stories. A psychopath with a sense of humor.”
Business Week