Part 5 The World’s Greatest Detectives #3
I was actually a little pleased at that first comment.
He’d bristled at the idea I could make him do something.
I’d got under his skin.
‘I’m gonna find you,’ I said.
‘And I’ll enjoy the pursuit,’ he replied.
‘Is that what this is? Some kind of thrill-of-the-chase thing? An adrenaline rush? You killed a bunch of police officers, federal agents, bodyguards and even Ajax King . . .’
There was no reply.
I peered through the window.
He was gone.
Trapped in the sauna, I pulled out my phone and called Audrey.
44th Floor
When her phone rang with my call, Audrey was staring in horror at something on the 44th floor.
While I’d been snooping around the 93rd floor and talking with our opponent, she, Merritt Garrett and Xiao had arrived at the apartment of Aristo King’s former nanny down on the 44th floor.
There they’d found the nanny—23, blonde, pretty and slim, her name was Madison Barnes—bound and gagged with duct tape, sitting on a couch by the corner windows.
On the couch beside her was her five-year-old son, also bound and gagged.
And in front of them was one of the autonomous robot carts that made deliveries to the apartments of 59West.
Its hopper was open.
Audrey had just looked inside it when my call came in.
‘Sam—’ Audrey answered.
‘Audrey, I’m trapped in the sauna on 93. Long story, but I—’
‘Sam, we got a big problem here. We found the boy and the former nanny . . .’
She gazed at the contents of the cart’s hopper.
Inside it were sixteen wads of C-4 plastic explosive—in neat piles, all connected by wires, with many flashing red detonator lights—plus a yellow Post-It note on top.
‘. . . and enough plastic explosive to break this whole building in half,’ Audrey finished.
Trapped in the sauna, I froze.
‘What’s the note say?’
Down in the apartment on the 44th floor, Audrey read the note aloud over the phone:
IN THE WIZARD OF OZ,
THE WIZARD COMMANDED DOROTHY TO FETCH
THE WICKED WITCH’S brOOMSTICK.
YOU WILL FETCH FOR ME MR KING’S
QUANTUMSPEED-7 PROTOTYPE CHIP
FROM THE SAFE IN HIS PANIC ROOM
AND brING IT TO HIS LOCATION.
ONLY WHEN THIS IS DONE
WILL I DEACTIVATE THE C-4 IN THIS APARTMENT
AND REVEAL THE LOCATION OF HIS YOUNGEST DAUGHTER.
DON’T DELAY.
MR KING RUNS OUT OF OXYGEN AT 2 P.M.
Xiao checked his watch. ‘It’s 1:05 p.m. now.’
‘We gotta call King and get the code for his safe,’ Merritt Garrett said. ‘His wife has the number for his work phone, the one he FaceTimed her from before.’
‘I have to call Director Longmuir,’ Audrey said.
I said over the phone: ‘Are the nanny and the boy attached to the bomb?’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Audrey said. ‘I don’t think this bomb is meant to kill them. It’s meant to bring down the whole building.’
‘See if you can free them, then come and get me,’ I said. ‘We gotta locate Aristo King.’
‘Hopefully, the others will find him over at St Patrick’s Cathedral,’ Audrey said.
‘They won’t find him there,’ I said.
St Patrick’s Cathedral
Fifth Avenue, New York City
While this was going on at the tower, Special Agent Hooper had arrived with his group at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, in its spot almost perfectly between Carnegie Hall and the Chrysler Building.
There they found the exhibit of relics from Worms Cathedral in Germany, and in the middle of all the medieval objects of the exhibit, they saw . . .
. . . a single autonomous robot cart from 59West.
Just sitting there.
Its lights blinking.
‘Clear this entire city block and call the bomb squad,’ Special Agent Hooper ordered.
93rd Floor
Back at the tower—after Audrey had freed me from the sauna—I stood with Garrett, Xiao, Mrs King and her son, plus Heidi and Bill, in Aristo King’s panic room.
(The nanny and her young son had been successfully freed from their bonds and, for want of a better place, had been left with the two cops up on the 95th floor.)
We all stared at the vault door embedded in the wall. It was thick and made of steel.
A small wireless Ring security camera had been stuck to it, aimed right at us. A Post-It under the camera read:
SMILE, YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA!
No doubt, this had been set up by the man in white when I’d seen him hustling in here earlier.
‘Mrs King,’ I said. ‘Call your husband on FaceTime.’
Yasmina King shook her head. ‘I tried it several times before, but it just rang out.’
‘It’s not your husband who’s controlling that phone, ma’am,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling it’ll be answered this time.’
‘Me, too,’ Merritt Garrett said.
Mrs King FaceTimed her husband’s work phone . . .
. . . and the call was answered.
Again, Aristo King’s face filled the frame, once again in a dark place and illuminated by his own screen’s glow, and still wearing his plastic oxygen mask.
‘Ari!’ Yasmina said. ‘Please! Listen to these detectives.’
She handed the phone to Merritt Garrett.
‘Sir, your kidnapper has demanded that, to save your life and reveal the location of your youngest daughter, we bring the QuantumSpeed-7 prototype chip to your location,’ Garrett said.
‘The QuantumSpeed-7 . . .?’ Aristo King whispered. ‘Is that what this is all about?’
Yasmina leaned in. ‘He said it’s in your safe, Ari, in your panic room. And he won’t tell us where Katya is till it is delivered! Please, just give him what he wants and end this!’
Garrett grimaced. ‘We need the code for the vault, sir.’
On the phone, Aristo King said immediately, ‘6–4–6–8–8–0. The QuantumSpeed-7 chip is on the bottom shelf. Just find my daughter and get me out of this.’
I punched in the code on the vault’s keypad.
Bolts clunked as it unlocked.
I swung the heavy door open to reveal a large walk-in vault.
Wads of cash were stacked on shelves. (I mean, lots of them; all 100-dollar bills; many millions of dollars in cash.)
A couple of paintings.
A marble sculpture.
And there, on the lowest of the shelves, beside the wads of cash, was a slim silver silicon chip the size of half a credit card.
Garrett grabbed it and held it up to the phone. ‘Is this it, sir?’
‘Yes. That’s—’
The call cut off.
Someone else was indeed controlling that phone, while also watching us.
Suddenly, Audrey’s phone rang.
The caller ID said: trey.
She answered it on speaker: ‘Trey, how’d it go at the cathedral?’
Special Agent Hooper’s voice said, ‘We found one of those robot carts here, so we’ve got the bomb squad inbound. Any progress there?’
‘Not on King’s location—’
‘Then I’m staying here at the cathedral. Call me if anything changes.’ Then he just hung up.
I turned to Merritt Garrett. ‘Aristo King isn’t at the cathedral. He never was.’
‘How do you know?’ Heidi asked.
‘Because the cathedral didn’t answer all the clues. It fit the Carnegie and Chrysler clues, but it didn’t have any connection to the Ambien pill inside the hollowed-out Sherlock Holmes book. That’s the clue we have to figure out.’
‘Say that again,’ Merritt Garrett said, looking right at me.
‘We need to find an answer that not only addresses the Carnegie and Chrysler clue, but which also answers the riddle of the Ambien pill inside the hollowed Sherlock Holmes book.’
‘I think I know the answer,’ Garrett said. He shook his head. ‘Damn, I shoulda seen it before. It’s a true New York riddle for a true New Yorker.’
‘What is it?’ Xiao said.
Garrett said, ‘What does Ambien make you do? Sleep. And where did we find the Ambien pill? Inside a hollow book. The answer’s Sleepy Hollow.’
‘You mean the town?’ I said. ‘From the story about the headless horseman?’
‘Yes. As the crow flies, it’s only about twenty-five miles north of here, up the Hudson,’ Garrett said.
‘But here’s the thing. Sleepy Hollow is famous not only for the Washington Irving story, but for its cemetery.
The cemetery at Sleepy Hollow contains the graves and mausoleums for a whole bunch of famous people, including Washington Irving, William Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Walter Chrysler. ’
I gave Garrett a look.
He gave me a look.
We were both thinking the same thing.
‘Those calls with Aristo King,’ I said. ‘Dark place. Oxygen mask. The first note said he was with other worms. And he’s gonna run out of air at 2 p.m. Jesus, he’s been—’
‘—buried alive at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery,’ Garrett finished. ‘What time is it?’
It was 1:15 p.m.
‘We need to get to that cemetery now!’ Garrett said.
Minutes later, our little group—Garrett, Xiao, Audrey, Bill and me—burst out onto the roof of 59West and ran to the FBI chopper, now once again tied down on the helipad.
The helicopter’s windshield still bore a bullet hole and blood from when its pilot had been killed earlier, but we had to take it.
We needed to get to Sleepy Hollow fast.
We took off in the chopper, now flown by Bill Brewster.
(Heidi stayed behind to guard Mrs King and her son and the nanny and her boy. Given the strange people lurking around the tower and the killings that had already taken place when we’d been elsewhere, I didn’t entirely trust the two cops still there.)
Our chopper roared over the buildings of the Upper West Side and then banked right, zooming at speed up the Hudson River, heading north toward Sleepy Hollow.
(I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be in a chopper again, but I had no choice. And also, Bill was flying, and knowing his Army experience, I felt as safe as I could hope to.)
As we’d taken to the air, Audrey had called Special Agent Hooper and told him where we were going. There was no time to collect him and the others from St Patrick’s Cathedral, with its robot cart problem.
We were heading to Sleepy Hollow without any FBI backup.
St Patrick’s Cathedral
Fifth Avenue, New York City
While we were speeding up the Hudson toward Sleepy Hollow, the NYPD bomb squad arrived at the cathedral to deal with the robot cart.
They did that, of course, with a robot of their own.
While the FBI and the cops all waited outside on Fifth Avenue, a tracked scanning bot crept up to the cart and scanned its interior with X-rays and Doppler scans.
The scanning bot beeped, sending back its findings.
‘That’s weird,’ the bomb squad captain said to Hooper. ‘There’s nothing inside the cart, except—’