PROLOGUE

Sometime after 2pm Sunday, February 21, 1965: Malcolm X shot

Malcolm, hands-on the dais before him, stared into the many faces looking into his. The numerous looks as if pleading with him to continue speaking, absorbing his every word. Every person felt he was talking only to them; a personal conversation. Removing his glasses, he cleans them with a small cloth and replaced them. A symbolic gesture. Clean lens meant a fresh focus, especially with what he had to say next. He paused glancing down at a brother suddenly standing in front of the stage.

For a moment the great, charismatic leader smiled directly at the enthusiastic man. He still smiled as the brother unfurled a double-barrelled shotgun from under his raincoat. He still smiled as the room reverberated from loud explosions. And was still smiling when he was thrown back away from the dias, his chest peppered at point-blank range. Malcolm X was dead long before the other two brothers jumped onto the stage and filled him with another twenty-one bullets.

6:01 p.m. Thursday, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King shot

Martin Luther King Junior stood on the balcony in a contemplative mood, staring at nothing in particular. A few cars were paralleled parked at least 20 feet below him in the motel's parking lot. Nothing moved in the early evening.

Closing his eyes, he inhales. As he opens them, a glint sparkled across the way, in another nondescript, bland building like the one he booked into the previous evening. Something flashed, followed by a loud report. The bullet slammed into his cheek, breaking his jaw, neck, and several vertebrae, severing his jugular and major arteries.  Pitching him against the wall behind, Martin Luther King Jr was unconscious before he dropped to the balcony floor. In a few minutes, he’d be dead.

12:30pm Thursday, June 2009: Michael Jackson found dead

Police received a call at 12:30pm from Michael Jackson's Bel-Air mansion. Paramedics rushed to the scene and found Michael Jackson in a coma, not breathing. He was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA.

‘The King of Pop’ died the same day, June 25^th 2009 2:26pm, due to cardiac arrest, at the age of 50. On August 28^th, 2009, the cause of Jackson's cardiac arrest was reported to be a combination of the potent drugs propofol, lorazepam and midazolam. The death was classified as a homicide, and law enforcement officials were investigating the actions of his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray.

*****

Folding the broadsheet newspaper and placing it on the long clean, polished oak table, the man smiled. Rising from the large leather chair, he walked slowly to the picture window overlooking the city. The transparent glass ran the entire length of the meeting room. The polished oak table, located in the middle of the room, was capable of seating twenty people, this time at one end, sat another individual. The seated man waited for the man by the window to speak.

London was covered in its usual low grey mist with the pointed rectangle of a few skyscrapers like pyramids standing erect from the desert, pushing through. Their many windows as dull as the colourless layer straddling them.

Grey hairs tainted the tall man’s temples and the soft blue Hugo Boss suit sat on his broad frame. Some women said he looked younger than his age. He would laugh at that, enjoying their attention, shock, and bemusement whenever he did reveal his true age.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ He asked, hands behind his back, still staring out the window.

‘As dead as when his heart stopped beating.’

‘Uhuh.’ He glanced at his colleague, an older man, bald and bulbous; the result of too many expensive and late meals. ‘How many left on the list?’

The fat man picked a pair of designer glasses from the table and placed them on his nose. He shifted through a shaft of papers in front of him, selecting one. Tracing a thick finger down the page, he stopped.

‘Double figures.’

‘Uhuh.’ The man said again. ‘We should just organise an event. Get them into one room and blow them up.’

The fat man chuckled but quickly fell silent, his boss’s cold stare chilling any humour.

‘You’re serious?’

‘I am.’

‘I think that would be too obvious, Mr. Jac….’ He fell quiet again, nearly slapping himself for almost calling out his employer’s name.

‘Mr. Peat…you know I do get what I want, when I want, however, I want…right?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Well, make it happen…’

‘Right now sir…we are in the process of exterminating the next target, sir.’

‘Oh…we are?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Who?’

‘Whitney Houston. Prince. Sandra Bland.’