Part 6 Aftermath #2
But King did, because right then he held up one hand and raised his voice. ‘Hold on! I have something to ask Mr Garrett!’
The assembled media waited.
‘Merritt, if you’re not going to retire on that, ahem, king’s ransom, he-he’—the crowd of reporters chuckled with the billionaire—‘I’d like to make you a serious offer.
If I’ve learned anything from these last few days, it’s that I need a stout man by my side.
How would you like to be my head of security? ’
Merritt Garrett looked shocked at first, but then he grinned like a starstruck fan, nodded and said, ‘Sir, thank you, I would love that.’
Bill whistled as he watched it all happen live on TV.
‘King said he’d pay thirty million bucks to whoever found him, and he did. Thirty million dollars.’
‘Seriously, some of that should be yours, Sam,’ Heidi muttered.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t find Mr King. Garrett did, so that money’s rightfully his.’
Heidi shook her head. ‘You’re a better man than I am, Sam Speedman.’
Even though the authorities wouldn’t let me see Audrey, I spent the whole of December 23rd in the waiting room at Phelps Hospital, if only to get the occasional update on her status from the staff.
She remained in her induced coma.
Sitting there in the waiting area with its TV always tuned to the news meant that I couldn’t escape the wall-to-wall coverage.
Interestingly, despite all the attention directed at Garrett and the FBI, it wasn’t all smiles and congratulations.
A lot of innocent people had died on December 21st:
Alexei’s bodyguard who’d fallen down the shaft.
The FBI forensics specialist who’d been shot by the drone when it had come to life in the bedroom.
Three cops (all shot to pieces during the silenced shooting spree that had occurred in the penthouse while I’d been down on the 73rd floor and Hooper’s group had been on the 61st).
The two personal bodyguards of Winnie Tan and Yasmina King, also killed during that shooting spree. Plus Katya’s bodyguard who had been discovered with her dead nanny near the garbage chute on the 98th floor.
Juno Everhart, the private detective, killed in the bomb blast on the 61st floor.
Aristo King’s bodyguard, buried in the dirt that had been shovelled on top of King’s wooden coffin.
And, of course, one of King’s adult children: the 25-year-old Ajax, who had fallen to his death having been affixed to the outside of the 73rd floor window.
(This last death garnered a lot of online attention.
Teary vigils were held by influencers at the various nightclubs Ajax had frequented, all assiduously filmed for Instagram and TikTok. New York influencers swayed dejectedly to EDM music and toasted Ajax’s memory with $36 martinis.
Ajax’s sister, Cassandra—who had survived the same awful scenario that had killed her brother, having been saved by Merritt Garrett—did not attend these vigils.
She had joined her mother Shelby Cox, who by then had arrived in New York from Vail. They were holed up in Shelby’s loft apartment in SoHo, making preparations for Ajax’s upcoming memorial service.)
Other funerals were also arranged and Aristo King put out a press release that he’d be establishing a foundation for the families of all the people who’d died trying to protect him and his family.
His former nanny, Madison Barnes, and her son were recovering in a 6-star resort-spa in Florida.
The QuantumSpeed-7 chip—last seen in the possession of Audrey when she was with the Chinese-American detective, Xiao—was lost during their confrontation with the aerial drone.
It had not been recovered yet.
Then other connections surfaced.
After Yasmina King’s text correspondence with the Grandmaster was revealed—his real name was indeed Sergei Kazan and DNA records had confirmed that the dead man in the woollen peacoat was him—the FBI turned its focus on her.
Its agents investigated all of her phone calls and financial transactions from the last ten years.
What they found was shocking.
It turned out that the Grandmaster did indeed have links to a Russian criminal network in Brighton Beach out by Coney Island led by Roman Oberov and known as the Brighton Bratva—and that over the last decade, Yasmina King had corresponded with them several times by phone.
She had also paid them large sums of money not once, not twice, not three times, but on four occasions.
$3 million.
$6 million.
$12 million.
$3 million.
It was damning stuff.
(The Grandmaster’s standard fee, it was revealed, for a -kidnap-and-extortion scheme was $3 million.)
Then angry text messages from Yasmina King to her former nanny were discovered.
It wasn’t the FBI who found those.
It was TMZ.
The gossip organisation gleefully reproduced a bunch of SMS exchanges between Yasmina and Madison Barnes in which Mrs King excoriated the young nanny for seducing her husband.
Like you didn’t do it yourself, bitch, Ms Barnes had replied.
When it became known that the former nanny and her son had also been two of the victims during the ‘Tower of Terror’ incident, the calls for Yasmina King’s head intensified.
Yasmina protested her innocence.
During that day, she said, her own son, Alexei, had been put in mortal danger in the elevator shaft. And she herself had been strapped in the chopper on the edge of the roof.
It didn’t help.
It may even have made things worse.
Online trolls derided her.
Obviously, she’d placed her son and herself in positions of fake danger to make them seem like innocent victims when in reality they’d been in no peril at all.
Indeed, both had been saved when others hadn’t.
At 7 p.m. on December 23, as I sat in the waiting room at the hospital, I watched as Yasmina King was arrested live on television.
Shortly after, a publicist working for Aristo King announced that he was initiating divorce proceedings against her.
That same publicist also asked all news outlets to henceforth refer to Yasmina by her maiden name, Ivanova.
Yasmina Ivanova was denied bail and remanded to the Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers Island. Known as Rosie’s, it was New York’s jail for female offenders.
The media coverage became even more brutal.
The Post jumped on Yasmina’s Russian heritage and called her the ‘Russian Widow’ and queried just how long she and the Russian gangsters had been working together.
Having been a model in her working life meant that every story was accompanied by photos of her in skimpy swimsuits or lingerie.
Since she was being held at Rikers, her two young children would stay with their father, Aristo King, in his ocean-front mansion on Meadow Lane in Southampton.
FBI forensics teams descended on 59West.
At 8 p.m. on December 23rd, a press conference was held in the lobby of the tower.
At this packed gathering, Special Agent Trey Hooper—who else?—answered the media’s questions.
Again, I watched from the hospital’s waiting room.
Hooper’s answers included:
The whole building had been sealed, given that the Bureau had to examine crime scenes on several floors plus the roof. All residents were still forbidden from returning to their apartments.
An FBI forensics team had gone over every inch of the penthouse.
During this sweep, the Grandmaster’s DNA—taken from his body at the cemetery—was found on many of the gags that had been on the victims.
Each victim, Hooper said—Aristo King himself, four of his children, the bodyguard who’d been suspended from the express elevator with Alexei, and even King’s two wives who had been taken from under our noses and deposited in the chopper on the roof—had been immobilised with an injection of an anaesthetic drug called Duramorph.
I thought about this last revelation.
Most modern kidnappers used roofies or chloroform to knock out their victims, chiefly because those soporific drugs are easy to get.
Duramorph, on the other hand, was a medical-grade anaesthetic used in surgical procedures. It wasn’t easily obtainable to someone outside the medical field.
I looked it up.
Duramorph, it turned out, was the commercial name for an opioid called morphine sulfate and it was popular with surgeons because of its rapid onset and quick recovery time.
Patients who were administered it went under in a few seconds and then—in what seemed to them like the blink of an eye—woke up in the recovery room with no memory of their surgery.
It had one other singular feature.
Unlike other anaesthetics like Propofol, patients injected with Duramorph could be instantly awakened with a shot of naloxone.
In short, it was potent yet precise: depending on the dose, a victim could be knocked out for five or ten minutes, and if necessary, awakened on demand with naloxone.
(Apparently, this also worked in reverse: an anaesthetist couldn’t put you under for surgery if you had naloxone in your system.)
The Grandmaster had evidently used this particular anaesthetic because he needed his victims to be immobile when he bound them and placed them in their precarious positions—dangling upside-down from elevators; attached to the exteriors of windows; seated inside helicopters.
But it seemed that he’d also wanted to wake up his victims so they could see their lethal predicaments.
To suffer.
By the third day, December 24th, things started to die down.
Other events began to seep into the news.
The world moved on.
I kept going to the hospital.
According to the nice nurse—her name, I’d discovered, was Narelle Wyvill and the doctor was Dr Brian Shepherd—Audrey was still in a coma but her vitals were stabilising and Dr Shepherd anticipated bringing her out of her coma in a few days.
After making sure I was okay with it, Heidi left the motel to stay with a friend in the West Village down by the Meatpacking District. She would stay there for Christmas and remain till New Year’s Eve.
‘If you need anything, little man, you just call me, you hear,’ she said.
I said I would.
Similarly, since there was nothing more he could do here, Bill decided to return to Houston to spend Christmas with his daughter and grandkids, and to manage our existing clients and cases back there.