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Business As Usual [MultiFormat]
eBook by Steve Bederman
eBook Category: Mystery/Crime/Mainstream
eBook Description: Mitch Jacobs is handsome, charismatic, and troubled. He returns for the third sensational time in the corporate thriller series, Business As Usual. Mitch has built one of the largest and most successful technology companies in the world. He has had to face internal corporate strife, takeovers, fraud, death, destruction, and chaos. He has also gained loyalty, trust, and love from many the world over. He is now living in London in the flat of his murdered love, Angela. One evening he gets a call from Denver, Colorado, his corporate headquarters. In that moment, his world again turns out of control. He receives the shocking news of horror both in his office and at his home. As Mitch Jacobs attempts to put everything back in order he faces off with rival CEO's, his own past, and an ancient drug lord, among others. He races against time to save the other woman of his dreams, Pilar Reyes Crux, the ex-president of Colombia and his company, Symbiotic Technologies. The story again will take the reader around the world to Colombia, London, Singapore, Washington DC, and Denver. How it will end will shock into disbelief whoever follows Mitch Jacobs. It will remind everyone that both the worst and the best rise out of corporations; finally, leaving an unsettling sensation that there may never be another day of business as usual. The author, Steve Bederman, has been recognized as one of the few writers of corporate intrigue that can say he's been there. He is known globally as an internationally respected CEO of leading technology corporations. His first two novels, The CEO and Executive Execution, hit the top of the bestseller lists for 5 months running. In them he introduced the charismatic Mitch Jacobs and readers have been impatiently in wait for more. Steve Bederman continues to lead a worldwide technology company while writing. His other activities include his leadership of Commerce for Peace and Prosperity, the chairmanship of the Foundation for Independent Living, song writing, and the outdoors in the beautiful mountains of Colorado.
eBook Publisher: Solstice Publishing/Solstice Publishing
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2011
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Part One
Chapter One
Denver, Colorado
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He travelled the world, or not, as was his wont. He believed in charitably contributing to developing nation's growth in commerce. He donated time, resources, and effort in this on a full time basis through his foundation, 'Commerce for Peace'. His wealth was in Symbiotic Technologies, but his passion was in other things. Simply, the company provided the financial wherewithal necessary to allow Mitch Jacobs, CEO to do what he wanted to do, and when. He would not allow anyone to take that away from him. After all, Mitch had lost so very much in this last year through attacks that resulted in inconceivable death and destruction.
Today, as was the case each week, the Executive Management Team of his company was just finishing the catered lunch in the executive conference room and was getting down to business as usual. On the agenda, was deciding if they were going to offer a Letter of Intent to buy their largest competitor. Actually, it was the same company that had tried to make a play on Symbiotic during the chaos of the last year.
The dishes were cleared away by the catering staff. Christmas cookies, Hot Chocolate, and Hot Apple Cider were left behind to satisfy anyone's sweet tooth in this last meeting just a week before the holiday. It would be a good ending to an incredibly stressful year. A year that could only be imagined if one believed the stories of thriller novels.
This month's team leader stood up and the other five executives began to quiet their conversations and close their laptop computers from sneaking peeks at e-mails. The conference room was sound proofed and glass enclosed but since anyone walking past could see in from the outside, the leader reached for the remote control that would lower the window's shades. They had just started to come down from the ceiling and when they were halfway closed the leader looked out and saw the legs of five people, from their waist to their feet, spread out evenly from window to window.
He paused and said aloud, "That's odd!"
It all happened then in the blink of an eye. He took his finger off the remote and before he could utter another word, or his team partners could even recognize anything changing, he stopped dropping the shades. Instantly, all of the windows shattered as if exploding from the outside in blasts of machine pistols relentlessly invading their space and shattering the calm.
Three of the executive team members were dead before they had any chance to turn around to understand what was happening; backs and spines broken and gushing blood. The executive leader dove for the floor, but before he could land, his head exploded in a bursting spray of red mist. The other two members, that had been sitting on the side of the conference table looking towards the windows, instinctively reacted by grabbing the sides of the large table and shoving it over on its side to block the spray of bullets. It worked and they huddled together in abject terror, both finally recognizing that the sounds of breaking glass, the explosions of bullets, and the death of their peers had ceased into a surreal silence.
They looked towards each other, a tidbit of hope, faces bleached by fear. As their adrenalin filled lungs sucked in air they turned away from the table and looked behind them and up towards the shadow that had suddenly covered the lights in the room. Before they took their next breath both executives crashed backwards, flying fully sprawled onto the bottom of the conference table, their bodies so riddled with bullets that only later would the forensic pathologists finally determine their identities.
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