Part 4 Chess Moves
CHESS MOVES
Success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Things were now totally out of control.
Four people were dead.
The first child’s bodyguard: dropped down the express elevator shaft.
The FBI forensics agent who’d been in the bedroom when the drone had opened fire.
The detective Juno Everhart: killed in the explosion when she’d gone to the wrong apartment on the 61st floor.
And now Ajax King: the son of our missing billionaire.
Jesus Christ.
Audrey and I—along with our late-arriving colleagues—hurried up to the 75th floor to meet Merritt Garrett as he hauled himself back up the side of the building and rolled, gasping, onto the blow-through level with Cassandra King in his arms.
Others arrived shortly after:
Special Agent Hooper (he had a cut above his right eye from the blast on the 61st floor);
The Chinese-American detective, Xiao (silent and curious);
Plus an NYPD detective. The other three police officers had evidently been left upstairs.
Hooper was yelling angrily into his radio. ‘Ground teams! NYPD air! Did anyone see someone on the north face of the building in the previous twenty minutes? Somebody find video or CCTV footage of it, now!’
The NYPD pilot replied, ‘I never saw anything, sir. I was hovering over by the southwest side, near the master bedroom. Only came round to the north side when I saw that drone blast its way out of the bedroom. I took some hits and I’m shot up now. I gotta get back to base.’
We saw the chopper flying away over the neighbouring buildings.
‘Will somebody please tell me what the fucking hell is going on!’ Director Longmuir roared. ‘Can somebody—’
Garrett turned to Cassandra King. ‘Miss, can you tell us how this happened? Did you see whoever attached you to the side of this building?’
Still clearly traumatised, the young woman blinked rapidly as she answered. ‘No, I didn’t see who it was . . . I . . . I honestly don’t remember . . . I mean . . . I went to bed last night and I . . . well . . . I woke up just now stuck to the outside of the window.’
Hooper said, ‘I don’t get it. What does that even mean?’
Garrett frowned. ‘It might mean that whoever did this drugged her and her brother while they slept. Then while they were unconscious, he placed them outside.’
I felt it meant something even more pressing than that.
‘It means whoever did this is inside this building right now,’ I said.
‘What?’ Longmuir asked, shocked.
‘Whoever’s behind this is inside this building with us.
He put Cassandra and Ajax into their positions sometime in the last twenty minutes.
He used the elevator riddle with the first boy as a distraction so he could set up their trap.
Now, for all we know, Cassandra and Ajax might have been a distraction for another test.’
Merritt Garrett added, ‘And he may also be more than one person. I’m not sure one guy acting alone could have attached two people to the outside of those windows.’
I nodded at a security camera above the storage room’s door.
‘Where’s the superintendent?’ I called. ‘Maybe he can get the CCTV footage from that camera.’
Hooper and Longmuir turned, looking for the stocky super-intendent named Lenny in the white coveralls.
He wasn’t here.
‘Where’d the super go?’ Hooper said, perplexed. ‘Somebody find him!’
I turned to Garrett and Xiao. ‘We need to swap notes on the Grandmaster. He’s known for elaborate crimes but this is next level. What do you guys know? I mean, I don’t even know his real name.’
Garrett said, ‘I don’t know for sure, but I believe the Grandmaster’s real name is Sergei Kazan. I dealt with him a few years ago. It all happened down at the Battery Maritime Building—the old ferry terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan—back when they were renovating it.
‘Anyway, one of the contractors owed money to some Russian gangsters over in Brooklyn, so the Grandmaster grabbed him, hung him upside-down over the water from the underside of one of the docks, weighed him down with iron chains . . . and then just waited for the tide. Filmed the whole thing live, sending the feed to the contractor’s wife.
‘Said she had until the tide came in to pay up. The wife called me but we were out of time. So she paid. I raced down to the BMB and found him on the dock, still wrapped in chains. The Grandmaster left a chess piece in the contractor’s breast pocket.’
Xiao said, ‘My encounter with him didn’t end as well.
It was last January. The Grandmaster kidnapped the 26-year-old son of a Chinese businessman based here in New York.
He was a dumb, cocky kid: a bitcoin influencer on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
Flaunted his bitcoin fortune online, especially the new Ferrari he bought with it.
‘But it wasn’t a ransom thing. It was straight extortion.
‘The Grandmaster snatched the kid and tortured him for the passcode to his digital wallet. He lay the kid on his back under a car mechanic’s hoist and then lowered the Ferrari on top of him, dropping it six inches per hour until the kid relented.
‘The kid gave him the passcode and his bitcoin fortune vanished into the dark web.
‘The Grandmaster killed him anyway.
‘I found the lad in a mechanic’s shop in Staten Island crushed under his new Ferrari.
A chess piece lay beside the hoist. I had reason to believe that the Grandmaster did the gig on contract for the Russian criminal gang based in Brighton Beach called the Brighton Bratva and led by Roman Oberov, but after I retrieved the boy, his father told me to let the matter go.
He didn’t want to mess with Oberov and his Russians. ’
‘What about you?’ Garrett asked me.
‘Mine was a ransom scenario,’ I said. ‘The kidnapping of a child that the parent wanted to keep quiet. It involved a rich oil driller out by Abilene. The Grandmaster—paid by a rival wild-catter—nabbed the driller’s daughter and FaceTimed a video of her lying in a steel tub that was slowly filling with crude oil. It was rising two inches every hour.
‘I was hired to find her and I did. I found the location—from some objects I saw in the background of the video—but the Grandmaster saw me coming and he called her father. Said he’d kill her right away if I didn’t retreat.
I pulled back, the money was paid and the girl was handed back with a chess piece in her pocket. ’
Longmuir said, ‘But you never met him? Or saw his face?’
‘No.’
Audrey shook her head. ‘No disrespect, but this seems a lot bigger than those cases. I mean, the richest man in the world? Two very elaborate traps?’
‘I know,’ I said.
Garrett said, ‘The thing about the Grandmaster is: he’s a paid operator. He always works for someone else.’
‘That’s right.’ I turned to Hooper. ‘Hey, did you find that superintendent—’
Suddenly, a phone rang.
It was Director Longmuir’s.
He answered it.
‘What?’ he growled.
‘Hello, Director.’
It was him.
Longmuir waved everyone to silence and put the call on speaker.
‘Deary me. Poor Ajax. One week, he’s living large with the in-crowd, now he’s just another smear on the New York sidewalk.’
‘We know you’re in here!’ Longmuir roared. ‘This building is sealed off! You can’t get away!’
‘Who says I want to? You know, Director, you really should be more careful. I mean, the bodies are piling up and in all this trouble and strife, treasures of gold and bronze sometimes go missing.’
Longmuir froze.
I stood dead still, listening closely.
The voice said quickly, ‘Where are they? Here’s your clue: you can’t laugh without me. You can’t hate without me. I’m silent even when I’m in an orchestra.
‘You have five minutes to find them. Then I make my demand.’
‘Find them? Find who?’ Special Agent Hooper spat. ‘Who is it this time? More of the kids?’
‘No,’ someone said softly.
It was Zhang Xiao.
‘It’s his wives, King’s wives,’ he said. ‘Trouble and strife. It’s a British saying, Cockney slang for wife.’
My blood went cold as I saw where Xiao was going with this.
‘We need to get back upstairs . . .’ I breathed.
Director Longmuir clearly didn’t see it.
‘Aristo King’s wives?’ he said. ‘He’s had three of them. Two are here, the other one is flying in from Vail.’
‘Gold and bronze,’ I said.
‘Correct,’ Xiao said. ‘The first and the third. King’s first and third wives: Ms Winnie Tan and Yasmina King.’
Longmuir frowned. ‘But they’re here, we left them upstairs—oh, fuck.’
I was already running for the elevators. ‘We gotta get back up to the penthouse, now!’
There was blood everywhere in the penthouse.
Whatever had happened, it had been a slaughter.
There was blood in the kitchen: all over the refrigerator and the countertop.
In the living area: it stained the couches and lampshades.
In the elevator vestibule: all over the marble floor and on the artwork on the walls.
The dead bodies of Winnie Tan’s and Yasmina Ivanova’s body-guards lay slumped on the floor, each of them covered in bullet holes.
The three uniformed NYPD cops who’d been left up here were also dead. They lay in pools of blood.
None of them—not the bodyguards or the cops—had been able to draw their weapons before they’d been shot.
And Winnie Tan and Yasmina Ivanova were nowhere to be seen.
Upon seeing the bloodbath, another frightening thought hit me.
Heidi and Bill.
‘Heidi! Bill!’ I called, dashing toward the master bedroom in the southwest corner of the floor.
A moment later, Heidi emerged from the short hallway that led to the bedroom. She was followed by Bill and the Tech Detect.
Heidi said, ‘Sam, you should talk with Tech Boy here. While we were covering the body of the FBI forensic specialist who got shot up by the drone in the bedroom, he found something -interestin—oh, God . . .’
She stopped, seeing all the carnage.
‘You never heard any gunshots?’ I asked. (I must say I was very relieved she and Bill were okay.)
‘No, we’ve been in the bedroom the whole time. I mean, it’s windy in there, what with all the broken windows, but—’
I swapped a look with Garrett.
‘Suppressors,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’ He nodded grimly.