Extract: Kill Billionaire
Read an exclusive extract[s] from Kill Billionaire by Anders Lustgarten.
PREAMBLE: KATE
The Houses of Parliament are on fire and collapsing into the Thames. But that’s not what the crowd is watching.
The video is projected onto the burning Palace of Westminster, the man in it illuminated by the leaping flames like a medieval portrait of a saint. But he’s no saint. It’s King Charles III at his coronation. Charles is seated on his golden throne in imperial purple, with white ermine draped over his shoulders, crown protruding from his head like the world’s priciest case of encephalitis, and the doleful expression of a haunted bank manager. His lips move in time with the words, which run in a white crawl underneath his chin. The words are audible too, hard to hear under the thump of the choppers, but Kate recognises the clipped adenoidal whine of discontent. It’s Charles. But the things he’s saying just can’t be.
‘The only real question,’ posits the reigning monarch, ‘is does violence work? That violence is justified is beyond question.
‘We are offering a reward of ten million dollars for the elimination of a billionaire of your choice,’ continues the King of England, seemingly with complete sincerity. ‘Do to them what they’ve done to you. Monetise them. Turn them into profit. You kill a billionaire, and we will pay you for it. Ten million dollars. Untraceably.’
At this point Charles leans forward and looks into the camera, crown wobbling, dead-fish eyes alive.
‘KILL BILLIONAIRE.’
The shock of the cold and the lash of the rain are nothing to the frisson that runs through the packed crowd then. The bellows and the screams. Detective Sergeant Kate Anderson had to force her way through the dense crush on Westminster Bridge, pushing and shoving, yelling ‘POLICE! POLICE!’ to sullen non- cooperation – and in a couple of cases, active resistance – just to get to the edge of the bridge and see the projection. Now she tears her eyes away from the image for a moment, to take in the fervent, seething mass of people around her.
The crowd howls with fierce and feral laughter at the collapse of Parliament. They cheer every time a new bodybag is brought out of the wreckage, nudging and poking each other and trying to guess which widely hated wanker it contains. There are shouts about duck houses and PPE contracts. Raucous chants of ‘You’re going home in a fucking ambulance!’ The sense of four decades of frustration at the contempt and hatred of the political class for the rest of us being released in the insane saturnalia of a single night.
But the projection is something else entirely.
Chapter One: KAYLA
Perhaps one reason not enough people kill billionaires is it’s actually quite tricky. For starters, you’ve got to pick the right one, which is harder than it looks. There’s no point cracking some 87-year- old Korean semiconductor manufacturer nobody’s ever heard of. All you’ll get for your troubles is a great big yawn and a giant prison sentence. It’s got to be somebody the public already knows and hates. Otherwise, the relentless propaganda in the billionaires’ favour will make martyrs of them, and make people hate you instead.
My name is Kayla Connolly, but you already know that.
Lately, though, I’ve been called heaps of other things. Evil. Degenerate. Murderous. Courageous. The soul of her generation. ‘The Green Ned Kelly’. Some fucker with a sense of humour called me ‘Greta Thunberg with IEDs’, which I like. You will excuse the way I express myself. I am a bogan proud and true, and if you take expletives off a bogan, you rob her not just of a substantial proportion of her vocabulary but also an important part of her soul. We’re proud of our swearing in the bush. It’s a cultural thing, like sushi in Japan, or Italians walking up and down at night, or Americans killing black people for no reason.
But also, expletives are honest. They say what they mean. My idiot lawyer (hi, Jonathan) tells me this statement will ‘inform the judgement of the court’, maybe even ‘engender leniency’, but I do not trust the court, nor my idiot lawyer. Maybe I don’t want leniency, not from you buggers no road. Who are you to judge me? (Apart, obviously, from a court of law.) I know what’s coming, I am reconciled to your revenges. I am writing this not for you hallowed and illustrious judges but for me. To get my side of the tale down for anyone who cares to hear it.
The one thing I will not do is pretend to be something I’m not. There was a period when I used heaps of big words, a sesquipedalian tendency characteristic of autodidacts, which took time to extirpate. It came about after I sacked off school at nine years old and started teaching myself instead, about the blazing truth and beauty of the world, what’s really important and not what the fuckers tell you to care about. But as I got a bit older, maybe ten or eleven, I stopped worrying about what other people thought of me, and I never have again. So all I will try to do here is be honest, which is the thing I am most proud of in my life.
Apart, of course, from the killing of several billionaires.