Part 12 Answers #3
‘Sam, it’s me, Monty.’ He was speaking quickly, breathlessly.
‘Talk to me,’ I said.
‘Dude, my algorithm just decoded the first two lines of that corrupted plaintext! Don’t go to Winnie Tan’s mansion! Don’t go in there yet, at least not without some cops or FBI with you! It’s her! She’s the client in the plaintext!’
I stopped on the driveway, glancing back at the closed gate.
The very idea of running now was stupid.
I was in the middle of nowhere, among forests and swamps, with no car.
Besides, I’d come here anticipating a less-than-enthusiastic reception, maybe even a confrontation. It’s kinda part of the job.
‘I was starting to suspect the same thing from the fragments of text we had,’ I said. ‘Tell me exactly what you’ve decoded.’
Monty said, ‘It’s just the first three lines of plaintext for now, but here it is:
‘4071AY says: “Need you to be there on the roof with Yasmina.”
‘Then 4633QQ says, “You won’t hurt me, will you?”
‘4071AY replies: “You’ll be extracted upon payment. She won’t. It will look like the GM double-crossed her.” And then the rest goes on. Sam, it was Winnie Tan on the roof with Yasmina Ivanova. She agreed to be there.’
‘Yeah . . .’ I said slowly. This was indeed formal confirmation of what I’d deduced in the cab.
‘Dude, did I catch you in time? You’re not there yet, are you?’
I looked up the drive ahead of me.
Winnie Tan’s butler stood on the steps of her huge white mansion, watching me.
‘It’s too late, Monty. I just got here. And I’m locked inside the grounds.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What I came here to do. Talk to Winnie Tan.’
I continued up the drive.
‘I saw you at Ari’s penthouse on the 21st, didn’t I?’ Winnie Tan said conversationally as I sat down opposite her on her enormous glassed-in rear deck.
It looked out over Bullhead Bay. The waters of the cove glistened. It was a truly eye-popping view.
Ms Tan had her own private jetty at the bottom of a wide sloping lawn. A seaplane and a huge motor yacht were docked on either side of it.
Hidden away from the main road, her mansion was colossal, the way the homes of billionaires are.
For unlike the other ex–Mrs Kings, Winnie Tan was a billionaire in her own right. She’d helped Aristo start his first successful computer chip company and now, thirty years later, still had a major stock holding in it and was on the board.
Her butler/bodyguard lurked a short distance away, ever ready to tackle me if I tried anything.
‘You were one of the five detectives who were brought in that day,’ she added.
‘I was. I hope you’ve recovered from all that. It was quite -traumatic for a few people, you included.’
I recalled that when I’d seen Winnie Tan at 59West on the 21st—at first on the 95th floor and later in the helicopter dangling precariously off the roof—she’d been dressed in a beige suit that had concealed her physique somewhat.
Now, in the warmth of her glasshouse-like deck, she wore gym clothes: sleek blue-and-white Alo leggings plus a matching sports bra that revealed her toned arms and stomach.
(I’d already seen her naked on the sex videos, so I knew how cut her abs were.)
She must have caught me looking at her clothes.
She glanced down at them. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I was about to do some yoga before I went shopping for a dress to wear to the event tomorrow night, the one I’m hosting with Ari in the Steinway Tower in Ajax’s honour and for the new foundation.
But thank you, yes, I’m fine now. Nothing that a few sessions with a therapist can’t fix. ’
She laughed lightly at her own joke, before sipping from a bottle of detoxifying iced tea.
(It looked expensive. When she’d offered me something to drink, I’d accepted a bottle of water, which also looked expensive.)
She added, ‘I thought all of that stuff at the tower had been concluded. The FBI told me that new Russian wife of Ari’s did it; that she hired some Russian trickster-killer to carry out all those ghastly riddles.’
‘That’s what the FBI thinks,’ I said. ‘But not me. When did you start sleeping with Aristo King again?’
‘I don’t know what you’re—’
‘I know all about it, ma’am. King secretly filmed it.’
‘But how—?’
‘Detective,’ I said.
She sighed. Shifted in her chair. Took on a new tone.
‘The first time was five months ago. I confess, Mr Speedman, that I haven’t always been in great shape. Back when I was at MIT with Ari and when we started that first company, gosh, I was a frumpy little thing. Don’t really know what he saw in me.’
I nodded, letting her speak.
Often that’s the best thing to do.
‘Then this year, I hired a trainer, ate better, hit the gym. Never knew I looked like this under all that fat. Men started to notice me, you know.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I mean, seriously. My hunky young trainer. Married men from around here whose wives were away in Paris. I’d never been so wanted by men in my life. So desired. It was a revelation.
‘Then back in July, I saw Ari at an art show in Manhattan and, well, he saw me and’—her eyelids fluttered—‘he was blown away. We went back to his penthouse and . . . well . . . fucked like minxes.’
‘How many times did you sleep with him?’
I’d seen at least four of those occasions on video.
‘Gosh, maybe a dozen times. Here, at hotels, his penthouse, once even in the lavatory at the private jet terminal at East Hampton.’
‘All while he was married?’ I said.
She looked at me hard.
‘Yes, right. You’re working for Yasmina Ivanova, aren’t you?’
I hadn’t said that.
Clearly, she had her own information sources.
‘Why have you come here? To try to blackmail me with some sex tapes?’ Winnie Tan said.
‘No, I—’
‘You think I’m some doe-eyed billionaire’s ex-wife who’s going to be cowed by a sleazy private detective?’
‘Did you want him back?’ I asked flatly.
‘What?’
‘After you reconnected with Aristo King, did you want him back?’
‘Maybe . . .’
‘You were a new woman, fit and gorgeous, and now you were banging him every chance you could get.’
‘Ari is the smartest and most charismatic man I’ve ever met. He’s the most brilliant person in any room. I never stopped loving him, not even after we divorced all those years ago.’
‘And so this year, when you started sleeping with him again, you thought you could get him back,’ I said. ‘And you’re a billionaire, which means you’re used to getting what you want.’
‘I am.’ Her voice had turned much colder.
‘You’re a coder,’ I said. ‘Do you know much about the darknet?’
‘Some.’
‘Ever heard of a company there called Modern Alchemical Solutions?’
Her face was a mask.
She said nothing, which was itself an answer.
I pressed, ‘Did you want to win Aristo back? Get him to return to this new you?’
Winnie Tan said nothing.
Again her silence said everything.
‘But Yasmina Ivanova was in your way.’
She said nothing.
I pressed, ‘You’d never met Yasmina, but you despised her because she had something you wanted: Aristo King.
So you found a company on the darknet, Modern Alchemical Solutions, and submitted your proposal to them, a proposal to get her out of Aristo’s life.
And Modern Alchemical Solutions took on your case. ’
When I was finished, Winnie Tan did something that I didn’t expect.
She didn’t shout at me.
She didn’t call over her butler/bodyguard to kick me out of her home.
She just looked over my shoulder and said, ‘You said he was clever. Solve this. Now.’
I turned around.
And my heart nearly stopped.
Three figures stood—eerily still—in the doorway behind me, blocking the way back into the mansion.
Their hairstyles had changed since December 21st.
But not their facial features.
I recognised all three of them.
On the left was a chunky man of perhaps fifty who I knew as the superintendent from 59West—‘Lenny Grossman’—only now his bushy black moustache had been shaved off and instead of all-white coveralls, he wore a worn sheepskin-lined jacket.
He gripped a Glock 19 pistol with an extended mag in his right hand.
I guessed he was Uri.
On the right was the woman who’d introduced herself to me at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery as Maria Dubrowski, the female gardener with long red hair.
Today, her hair was black and short.
This must be Vasha.