Part 1 The Dash to New York #2
Likewise, no handcuffs, extra clips or drones: New York has issues with those, too.
Texas, on the other hand, is cool with you carrying every conceivable kind of deadly weapon or restraining device.
New York and Texas are very different. In short, I only had my laptop, some burner phones and sultanas in my backpack, which made it very light.)
In addition to all the space in the plane’s main cabin, there was also a small kitchenette with a bar fridge that was filled with beers, juices and sodas.
Once we were airborne, a pretty thirty-something flight attendant named Bonnie came through the cabin and offered us a basket overflowing with snacks.
(I wondered if Bonnie was FBI.)
I must admit I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of choice in the basket.
There were apples, bananas, pretzels, potato chips and protein bars.
And I was hungry—the call from the FBI had woken me up at 6:09 a.m. and their motorcade had arrived at my house soon after so I’d missed breakfast and I don’t like missing breakfast.
After a considerable pause, I selected a protein bar and said, ‘Do you take cash for the snacks or is it credit card only?’
‘Baby,’ Bonnie the flight attendant said, ‘it’s all free and you can take as many as you want.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Oh, hell yeah. You go nuts.’
(I noticed her pet name for me, baby, started with the same letter as her name. This has happened to me before. I can’t figure it out.)
I grabbed two extra bananas and Bonnie winked at me.
Usually when I travel by air, I fly coach and almost exclusively on Southwest Airlines.
I like Southwest Airlines because it’s consistently ranked as America’s most reliable airline. Its flights are nearly always on time and it rarely loses luggage.
It’s also very affordable, with most flights selling for under $300.
Some people don’t like Southwest Airlines because it has no First Class or Business Class but I don’t care for First Class or Business Class.
To me, a seat is a seat and I spend most of any flight reading a case file or a book anyway.
But the main reason I like Southwest Airlines is because they serve my favourite kind of in-flight snack: ‘Maui Monk’ flavoured mini pretzel braids made by the Stellar Snacks company.
(Don’t tell the Southwest corporation, but sometimes when I fly with them I ask for a second packet and the flight attendants always—always—give me another one. The flight attendants on Southwest are universally nice. Bonnie would have fitted in very well there.)
Speaking of case files, when my team and I had arrived at the private terminal at William P. Hobby Airport earlier that morning, one of our FBI escorts had handed me a folder with two sheets of paper in it.
‘Briefing material,’ he said.
(I wondered why they’d needed to put the sheets in a folder. I mean, there were only two.)
As we lifted off, I held up the first sheet so Heidi and Bill could read it with me.
It was a bio of the missing billionaire.
A colour photo of him was at the top of the page.
He was Aristotle King.
The world’s richest man.
Or the W.O.R.M., as some put it.
Born Aristotle Theodore King—but known as Aristo or Ari to his friends—he was worth $770 billion, a colossal fortune that had come from the success of several of his companies: a -graphics chip–making firm that had morphed into an A.I. chip–making firm that had morphed into a quantum computer chip–
making firm.
He was, in short, a genius.
His revolutionary chips—originally designed and coded by King, his first wife, and his college roommate from M.I.T.
, a fellow computer-engineering prodigy named Allen Derrickson—had more bandwidth than all the other A.I.
graphics processing chips on the market combined.
While King had long ago divorced his first wife, he and Derrickson, now both billionaires, were still close; indeed, King was godfather to Derrickson’s teenage daughter.
(There were, of course, rumours about the murky origins of this technology.
Much of the early funding had been provided by In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia, with links to the CIA.
Word was, King’s latest breakthrough device, a solid-state chip called the QuantumSpeed-7, had been specifically requested by the CIA to break Chinese military codes that in theory would take a trillion years to crack.
While still in the prototype phase, it was said that the QS-7 chip could accomplish that task in about seven seconds.)
While the original chip-making company King owned with his first wife and Derrickson was the primary source of his vast wealth, he had used that money to branch out into other industries that he just enjoyed.
Like aerial drones.
He individually owned a company based at an old artillery field in New Jersey that constructed the fearsome new Spiderhawk class of military attack drones that had made such an impact in the Ukraine war.
He also had a rocket company.
King’s privately owned rockets launched American satellites—government, military and commercial—and astronauts into space.
(He’d cheekily named his rocket variants Nostromo, Sulaco and Auriga after spaceships from the Alien movies, his favourite movies. As a fellow fan of these movies, I liked this about him.
What I didn’t like were the occasional dumb comments he made publicly, like the time he’d said that democracy would work better if women didn’t vote.
That hadn’t gone down well at all and he had been excoriated for it in the media and online.
While he’d apologised for it many times, it still dogged him in interviews.)
In the end, though, what it all amounted to was an empire built on cutting-edge technology, much of it so advanced that it was banned from export to certain nations.
King had the trim look of the modern tech billionaire: the healthy physique and the glowing skin a 63-year-old gets when he has a personal chef, a personal dietician, a personal trainer and a personal Pilates instructor.
(He also wasn’t immune to the usual billionaire psychobabble health nonsense.
In one TV profile I saw, when asked how he stayed mentally sharp, he extolled the virtues of ‘inversion’ therapy: he was filmed hanging upside-down from a pull-up bar using a pair of ‘gravity boots’—basically, padded plastic sheaths that clasped around his ankles and hung by hooks from the bar.
Like I said, nonsense.
Hanging upside-down has no proven physiological effect on one’s mental acuity.)
In any case, with his messy blond hair, vivid green eyes and his penchant for wearing rock’n’roll band t-shirts—he favoured The Eagles and The Violent Femmes—Aristo King looked about twenty years younger than his age and way cool.
He was connected, too.
He knew everyone in Silicon Valley, from Elon Musk to Sam Altman and the Winklevoss twins.
(A newspaper article I once read about him—titled, of course, ‘The King of Tech’—said that back in 2010, on a lark, King had bought $10,000 worth of bitcoin from the Winklevosses at the price of 10c per coin.
That ‘investment’ was now worth about ten billion dollars.
‘Play money,’ he called it.)
With his quantum-chip empire, his rockets and his political donations, King was often compared to Elon Musk—especially after he overtook Musk as the world’s richest man—but while Musk knew enough about coding, Aristo King was a legit world-class coder and computer engineer.
Although there was one comparison to Musk that was very apt.
Aristo King had a lot of kids—six, in fact.
With three different women: two ex-wives and his current wife, a former Victoria’s Secret lingerie model from Eastern Europe.
Heidi snorted.
‘Look at this asshole,’ she said. ‘What a total fucking rich white guy. I bet he paddleboards. I mean, shit, his ex-wives literally decline in intelligence.’
She jerked her chin at the bio sheet.
‘First wife: brilliant computer engineer who he met when they were both at M.I.T. Second wife, his executive secretary from his first company who he was banging while married to Wife No. 1. And now this third one: a former lingerie supermodel from Russia.’
Heidi gave me a look. ‘What is wrong with you men? Are you mind-controlled by your dicks?’
‘Mostly, yes,’ Bill said.
‘Where are the ex-wives now?’ I asked. ‘Where do they live?’
In murder and kidnapping cases, the first suspect is usually the spouse or ex-spouse.
Hell hath no fury and all that.
Scorned women do sometimes hire hit men to exact revenge on their ex-husbands.
Heidi tapped on her laptop and brought up some data.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Wife No. 1, Winnie Tan, lives in a mansion in Southampton, about two hours’ drive from Manhattan. She has two adult kids with King, ages 34 and 32. Still sits on the board of his original company and chairs a charity that upkeeps historic New York buildings.
‘Wife No. 2, Shelby Cox, the former personal assistant, divides her time between homes in Vail, New York City, St. Moritz and West Palm Beach. Has two kids with King, ages 25 and 23. No charities. Lives large.
‘And Wife No. 3, Yasmina Ivanova, the model, age 31. Jesus, she’s younger than his two oldest kids.
Lives with King in a mansion on Meadow Lane in the Hamptons and in his penthouse in one of those skinny new skyscrapers in Manhattan.
Her two kids with him are much younger, ages 6 and 5.
Runs two charities. Gosh, these ladies of leisure have to find something to do with their time. ’
(Heidi doesn’t like the wealthy. She often says she prefers ‘people who work for a fucking living’.)
‘Having a Russian-born wife must affect his security clearance,’ I said. ‘Is she a US citizen now?’
‘Sam,’ Bill said, ‘when you donate a few hundred million dollars to the President’s election campaign, you get security clearance no matter who you’re sleeping with.’
‘And, yes, she’s a US citizen now,’ Heidi said.
‘Didn’t he give his kids weird names?’ Bill said. ‘I heard that somewhere.’
Heidi tapped some more on her laptop. Brought up a list:
ARISTO KING: CHILDREN
Helen (f, 34)
Hector (m, 32)