Part 3 Unknown Caller #2
I said, ‘I was going to say that they were the references of an older guy: Superman, Lex Luthor, Otis. Hudson in Aliens, which came out in the 80s. I think you were right about the prime number, but I think they’re wrong about this riddle being a reference to some new nightclub.’
‘I’m older, too, and I have an idea about the answer,’ Garrett said.
‘I’m listening.’
‘You ever watch the NBA? Basketball?’
‘Not so much.’ (I didn’t at all, actually. I watched SportsCenter, though, so I could participate in conversations with people who did watch professional sports.)
Garrett said, ‘Well, this riddle comes down to who the “other worm” is. Our kidnapper said, “Exclusive clubs, celebrity parties . . . kind of like when the other worm was in L.A.” Whoever this other worm was, he or she went to glamorous parties during a stint in L.A. I think it’s an old NBA reference. ’
‘To who?’
‘Dennis Rodman.’
Even I’d heard of Dennis Rodman. ‘The basketball player with the rainbow-coloured hair and nose rings? From the Chicago Bulls, who played with Michael Jordan?’
‘Yeah. Rodman’s nickname was the Worm. And after his time at the Bulls, he spent a couple of years playing for the Lakers in L.A. . . .’
Garrett was now tapping on his phone, looking up something.
‘. . . where his jersey number was . . .’
He held up his phone so I could see it:
A picture of Dennis Rodman in a Lakers jersey, numbered 73.
‘. . . 73. And 73 is also a prime number,’ Garrett said.
I liked this logic much better.
I said, ‘We need to get to the 73rd fl—’
Suddenly, the radio on the belt of one of the NYPD cops squawked loudly.
‘All units, this is chopper unit. I have a visual on something on the north face of the building. Looks like—oh, Lord—it’s people! It’s two people attached to the outside of the building.’
‘To the outside of the building?’ Garrett repeated.
I snatched the cop’s radio, clicked the talk button.
‘Chopper unit, can you tell us what floor they’re on?’ I said.
The pilot answered: ‘Uh, can’t tell exactly, but they’re high up, in the top half of the tower, but below the blow-through level on the 75th floor.’
I turned to Garrett and Audrey.
‘Could be 61 or 73, let’s move!’
I pressed the button for the elevator.
It came and we dived into it and headed down to Level 73.
We had seven minutes.
As I stood in the descending elevator with Audrey and Merritt Garrett, I turned to face them.
‘Whoever’s doing this is inside this building with us,’ I said.
‘There weren’t any people attached to the exterior of this tower when we arrived.
The police chopper would’ve seen them, somebody would’ve seen them.
He must’ve put them out there while we were occupied with the boy in the elevator shaft. ’
‘I concur,’ Garrett said as he drew a pistol from a holster inside his blazer. It was a silver .45-calibre Smith & Wesson 4506–1. (It was a big gun, all swagger. Of course—unlike me—as a licensed private investigator in the state of New York, Garrett could -conceal-carry a firearm.)
I nodded at the pistol. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got another one of those handy?’
He grinned and tossed me a second, smaller, pistol from inside his jacket. It was a Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0. (Garrett was evidently brand-loyal when it came to his guns.)
My phone buzzed.
Heidi’s name was on the screen.
She must’ve arrived in the bedroom on the 95th floor by now.
I answered it. ‘Heidi? What’s up?’
‘Sam, you know that big-ass military drone that was sitting on Mr Billionaire’s bed?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, it’s not sitting on the bed anymore. It’s flying. A few seconds ago, its rotors started up. Now it’s hovering right in front of us.’
Up in Aristo King’s bedroom, Heidi, Bill and the Tech Detect stared wide-eyed at the huge black military attack drone now hovering above Aristo King’s bed.
Within the confines of the magnificent bedroom it was huge, its two massive guns now looking even more intimidating.
Only moments before, along with two glove-wearing FBI forensic technicians, Heidi and Bill had been examining the four items on the bed, beside the Tech Detect who’d been looking at Aristo King’s cell phone.
Then, without warning, the big drone’s quad-rotors had started turning, speeding up till they became spinning blurs, and the drone gently lifted up off the bed.
Down in the elevator, I said into my phone, ‘What’s it doing?’
‘It’s rotating laterally,’ Heidi said. ‘It’s turning.’
I thought for a second.
Then it hit me.
‘Heidi! Bill! Get down! Get on the floor now!’ I yelled.
Up in the bedroom, Heidi and Bill threw themselves to the floor just as the drone’s two massive guns explosively came to life.
Its two barrels blazed with long tongues of muzzle-flash as they unleashed powerful bursts of gunfire.
The sound was absolutely deafening.
BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!
Seeing Heidi and Bill drop to the floor, the Tech Detect had done the same, as did one of the FBI forensic agents, milliseconds in time.
The other forensic agent wasn’t so lucky.
The barrage of heavy-calibre gunfire tore him apart in multiple sprays of blood before—due to the rotation of the drone—the wave of bullets shattered the floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the corner bedroom and suddenly the drone swept out of the bedroom and into the sky.
Covered in broken glass, her pink hair blowing in the wind, Heidi yelled into her phone, ‘Sam! It just flew out of here! It’s gone!’
The doors of my elevator opened onto the 73rd floor (of course, we had unfettered access to every apartment on every floor now).
An empty apartment lay before Audrey, Merritt Garrett and me.
It was deathly quiet.
We raced through the apartment’s entry foyer, heading north toward the side of the building that faced the park—
—and saw them.
My mouth fell open.
‘Jesus . . .’ Garrett said.
‘Oh, God . . .’ Audrey said.
We could only see their backs, pressed up against the outside of the glass.
Ajax and Cassandra King.
They both wore studded black leather bondage collars around their necks (which I assumed were from the brand that Cassandra endorsed).
Industrial suction cups—the kind with handgrips that were used by construction workers to carry large panes of glass—were attached to the leather collars with plastic zip-ties and they held the two young heirs to the windows, seventy-three storeys above the sidewalk far below.
Down on the 61st floor, Juno Everhart sprinted from room to room in the apartment there, followed by Special Agent Trey Hooper and the Chinese private detective, Xiao.
‘I don’t see anything!’ Juno yelled from the living room facing Central Park.
‘Me neither,’ Hooper called from a bedroom on the southern side.
‘Maybe I was wrong—’ Juno said.
She cut herself off as something rolled into the living room.
It was a little box-shaped robot vehicle: an autonomous delivery cart.
The kind used by the building to deliver mail and packages to the apartments.
It had cute little round ‘eyes’, designed to anthropomorphise it and thus make humans who saw it smile.
It trundled up to Juno Everhart.
And then it exploded.
All the windows on the northern side of the 61st floor, plus a few on the eastern and western sides, blew out spectacularly.
Glass sprayed, raining down on the sidewalk and street far below.
In the bedroom, the concussion wave of the blast threw Special Agent Hooper against the windows, but luckily for him, they held.
It was the same for Xiao.
He was thrown across the kitchen counter, but he was okay.
They would find Juno Everhart’s body several hours later in the branches of a tree down in Central Park—the force of the blast having hurled her fully over 59th Street, the road that separated the building from the park.
Special Agent Hooper picked himself up and swore.
Not because he cared about Juno Everhart.
But because he’d been wrong.
As I came to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park—with the two adult children of Aristo King attached to their exteriors—the building around me shuddered with the force of a blast.
‘Was that an explosion?’ Audrey said.
‘It felt like it came from below us,’ Merritt Garrett said.
‘Like on the 61st floor,’ I said. ‘He said if we went to the wrong apartment, we could die.’
My phone rang.
Unknown number again.
‘I’m here,’ I said, putting the call on speaker so Audrey and Garrett could hear.
‘I know. I can see you.’
‘What’s the price this time?’
‘Let’s add another twenty million. Sixty million dollars. You have five minutes to pay or I drop them.’
Click.
‘Five minutes,’ I said.
Audrey said, ‘I’ll call the others upstairs. See if they’ll pay this time.’
‘By the time Mr Asshole Insurance Guy and Ms Kimura get their shit together, it might be too late,’ Garrett said. ‘I say we try to free them.’
I banged on the glass behind the larger of the two individuals stuck to the outside.
‘Ajax!’ I yelled. ‘Can you hear me!’
‘Yeah!’ his muffled voice called back. His hands and feet, I could see, were flex-cuffed.
‘We’re here to help you!’ I shouted.
‘Then hurry the fuck up, asshole!’
(I let this comment slide. He was in a highly stressful situation.)
I examined the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Each was fourteen feet square.
Cassandra was attached to one near the corner, while Ajax’s window was beside it.
As I did this, I heard Audrey speaking into her cell phone: ‘. . . he said sixty million this time—then come down now, damn it—73rd floor.’
Garrett was also assessing the big glass panes. ‘Can we open these windows?’
I said, ‘No, they’re both single sheets of glass sealed in place. They don’t open.’
Merritt Garrett didn’t reply.
When he didn’t say anything, I turned to look at him.
He was standing frozen on the spot behind me, looking out the windows, past the two figures suction-cupped to them.
I followed his gaze and saw it.
The big black military drone hovered directly outside the windows, its two mighty cannons aimed right at us and the two King children.
And in that moment I saw how our villain was going to do this.
He didn’t need to shoot the two children.