Part 2 A Test #2
‘This way,’ Hooper said. ‘Everyone’s in the master bedroom.’
Ms Kimura followed us as we strode toward the southwest corner of the floor.
As we moved out of the central elevator vestibule and into the southern half of the floor, I saw, off to my left, a living and kitchen area that occupied the southeast corner.
Two women sat on opposite sides of the space, almost as far apart as they could get.
One was a short Asian woman in her mid-50s, dressed in a tailored beige suit.
She sat on a stool by the kitchen counter, flanked by a compact no-neck bodyguard, and watched me with hopeful tear-stained eyes.
‘The first Mrs King,’ Audrey said. ‘Winnie Tan. She came in from her mansion out at Shinnecock Hills.’
The second woman was sitting on a sofa by the corner windows (flanked by her own gigantic, shaven-headed bodyguard and a lean, bearded, tanned gentleman in a perfectly cut pinstripe navy suit and glasses; he seemed to be consoling her).
This woman couldn’t have been more different from Ms Tan.
She was dressed in a tracksuit top, figure-hugging yoga pants and gold flip-flops, and even though she was seated, I could tell she was incredibly tall and slim.
And she was startlingly beautiful.
Eyes, cheekbones, hair. Model beautiful.
She, too, watched me closely, but her gaze was harder, almost imperious.
Audrey said, ‘The current Mrs King. The ex-supermodel, Yasmina King née Ivanova.’
‘By the look of things, I’m guessing Wife No. 1 and Wife No. 3 don’t get along,’ I said.
‘They haven’t spoken a word to each other all morning,’ Audrey said.
‘And Wife No. 2?’
‘She was spending the holiday season in Vail with her ski--instructor boyfriend. Flying back as we speak,’ Audrey said.
‘Was the current wife staying here?’ I asked.
‘No, but her two kids were, with a nanny,’ Special Agent Hooper said.
‘The current Mrs King, Yasmina, was at her mansion on Meadow Lane in Southampton. Choppered in this morning after they pulled her out of her hot-room Pilates class. She’s understandably devastated that her husband and children are missing.
You can talk to her later. We gotta keep moving. ’
As we passed them, Hooper called to the tanned and bearded gentleman who’d been consoling Yasmina King.
‘Yo, insurance man, you’re up,’ he said brusquely.
Tanned-bearded guy came over.
He was good-looking and fit, with dark hair; his perfectly trimmed beard lined his angular jaw. His pinstriped suit looked even nicer up close. His glasses were Tom Ford.
He extended his hand. ‘Dr Speedman, thanks for coming. Quinn McCade, I’m with Sinclair & Loewe.’
Sinclair & Loewe were a very exclusive insurance company that catered to the ultra-wealthy, providing special life insurance deals and other bespoke policies on assets like superyachts and art.
Sinclair & Loewe also sold Kidnap & Ransom insurance, hence Quinn McCade’s presence here.
(Mr McCade’s presence also explained all the bodyguards.
If it seemed like there were a lot of them in the apartment, it’s because there were.
When billionaires take out K&R insurance on themselves and their family members, the insurance company insists that each insured person has a bodyguard—since it’ll be the insurance company that’ll end up paying any ransom.
So, the bodyguards, while employed by the customer, are actually there to mitigate the insurance company’s risk.)
Our group came to a short hallway that led to the master bedroom.
As I began to enter it with Heidi and Bill by my side, Special Agent Hooper suddenly stepped in our way.
‘Not them, only you,’ he said. ‘No assistants. The kidnapper asked for you so we bring in only you.’
‘What about Agent Mills?’ I nodded at Audrey.
Hooper pondered that for a moment, his reptilian eyes literally calculating the career ramifications of the decision.
He grunted. ‘Fine.’
With a nod to Heidi and Bill, I went inside the master bedroom, followed by Agent Hooper, Ms Kimura, Mr McCade and Audrey.
How can I describe the bedroom of the richest man in the world?
If the rest of the apartment was gorgeous then this was sublime.
Mr King’s bedroom occupied the entire southwest corner of the floor, so it had floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides.
The southern set of windows offered a view that could only be described as iconic.
It looked out over the entire length of the city, including a collection of some of the world’s most famous buildings: the Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the Freedom Tower.
We were so high up, I could see the Statue of Liberty out in the bay, then the Atlantic Ocean stretching to the horizon.
The styling of the bedroom was less ‘understated beige’ and more ‘minimalist silver on white’.
Like the $30,000 silver-and-glass Teckell TAKTO Allegro wall clock. Very slick.
A long mirror occupied most of one wall and thus doubled the natural light.
I touched the mirror as I walked past it, scanning the low bookshelf that ran beneath it.
The books on this shelf, I noticed happily, had actual titles on their spines.
I noted even more happily that a few of them were books that I owned, too: the sci-fi novels Ender’s Game and the Hyperion series plus a gorgeous leather-bound edition of The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (although my Sherlock Holmes book was the generic one you can get from Barnes & Noble for $7. 98).
It all made me think of my own bedroom. Small and tidy, with its own little collection of books and pop-culture mementos. The only difference was several hundred billion dollars.
There were people here already, five of them.
They were gathered around the room’s focal point, the bed, blocking my view of it.
On the wall above the bed’s headboard was a Magritte: one of the Belgian surrealist’s L’Empire des lumières paintings.
It was probably worth $80 million yet whenever Mr King sat in bed, he couldn’t see it because it was above and behind him.
As for the five people:
One was a bald senior FBI man (cheap suit). I guessed he was a deputy director and Special Agent Hooper’s boss.
The other four were most certainly not FBI. Each wore their own idiosyncratic attire.
They were the other detectives who had been summoned here.
Three men and a woman.
They all turned as I entered the enormous bedroom, parting as they did so, allowing me to see the bed for the first time.
‘Oh, gosh . . .’ I breathed.
The silver-and-glass wall clock struck 11:50.
I’d got here with ten minutes to spare.
But my eyes were locked on the bed and what was on it.
MASTER BEDROOM
THE BED
There were four objects on the bed.
Three were very small and one was quite large.
They were:
1. A watch.
(Richard Mille, expensive, thick white band, a small drop of blood on its face.)
2. An Apple iPhone.
(Screen cracked.)
3. A chess piece.
(Black, king.)
And lastly:
4. A seven-foot-wide quad-rotor aerial attack drone.
Within the confines of the bedroom—in the way that certain things seem out of scale when in the wrong environment—the drone looked huge. It took up almost the entire bed, creating depressions in the expensive sheets.
This was the stealth bomber of drones.
It was a huge, black, fearsome-looking thing, X-shaped and sharp-edged, with rotors at the ends of its four arched spiderlike arms.
It had a single glowing triangular red ‘eye’ on its -downward-
-pointed nose and two long 7.62 × 51mm machine-gun cannons mounted on its back, pointed aggressively forward.
A military attack drone.
A Spiderhawk.
Manufactured by Aristo King’s own company in New Jersey.
And as I came closer to it, I could hear that it was talking.
A speaker on the drone’s fuselage—designed, I guessed, for crowd control—was playing a recorded message.
A cultured man’s voice was saying:
‘—I have Mr King and four of his children. And so I propose a test, a battle of wits against the five greatest detectives in America today. Bring Zhang Xiao, Montgomery Woods, Juno Everhart, Merritt Garrett and Samuel Speedman here by twelve noon or I start killing the King progeny and ultimately Mr King himself—’
Then the recording started again.
‘—I have Mr King and four of his children. And so I propose a test . . .’
The bald fbi man stepped forward.
‘Dr Speedman, you made it just in time,’ he said. ‘I’m Gavin Longmuir, Deputy Director of the CCRSB Division at the Bureau and head of the Critical Incident Response Group. We’re short on time, so I’ll make the introductions brief.’
He indicated the other detectives:
First, a wiry Chinese guy in a fedora and brown trenchcoat. (Yes, a fedora hat. He stood unnaturally still and had eyes as hard as steel, which all combined to make his hat look pretty darn cool.)
‘This is Zhang Xiao, from Chinatown.’
Second, an overweight white guy in his early 30s wearing a t-shirt with a Kali Linux symbol on it. He had thick glasses, messy red hair, pasty skin and a scraggly red beard.
‘Montgomery Woods, also from here in New York, known as—’
‘The Tech Detect,’ I said, nodding respectfully. ‘Very nice to meet you.’
The Tech Detect was a legend in the cyber world. He reclaimed stolen identities for ordinary people on the regular internet and recovered stolen bitcoin from Russian hacker farms on the darknet.
(To put his talent into perspective: I myself had pretty good cyber skills—hacking law enforcement databases, coding, etc.—but the Tech Detect was leagues above me. If you ranked such skills on a scale of 1 to 10, I was an 8.5. He was a 20.
Another cool thing: he had his offices at 60 Hudson Street down in Tribeca, which was basically the most wired-up building in America.
Called a ‘colocation centre’, the whole building was filled with servers, fibre-optic cabling and cooling systems. If there was an absolute core to the internet in America, it was 60 Hudson Street.)
Third, Longmuir indicated the woman: mid-30s, seen-it-all eyes, stocky. She styled her hair in striking shoulder-length braids with beads at the tips and while she wore casual clothes—puffer jacket and cargo pants—it didn’t escape my notice that her boots were military.