Part 15 Aftermath II
AFTERMATH II
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
via Robert W. Frank
New York City
1 January
A lot of stuff happened in the following days.
The media, naturally, jumped all over the story again.
The shooting death of Winnie Tan in her own apartment, in front of Aristo King and all their powerful guests, during an expensive party on New Year’s Eve: it was just too much.
They ate it up.
Headlines blazed:
BULLETS FLY AT BILLIONAIRES’ ROW!
ARI’S EX-WIFE SHOT!
Page Six had a field day.
Of course, connections to the events of December 21st were re-established . . .
. . . and a whole new narrative of that day was revealed.
It was a narrative with a new set of villains.
Rather than Yasmina Ivanova, the culprits were Winnie Tan, Merritt Garrett, Chinese spies operating a secret police force out of an ‘employment agency’ in Chinatown, and a murky company from the darknet called Modern Alchemical Solutions Inc.
The heroes of that day also changed.
Now they were Special Agent Audrey Mills (shot in the line of duty and almost kidnapped in a wild ambulance chase on the Henry Hudson Parkway while protecting the QuantumSpeed-7 chip from the Chinese) and Monty Woods (the brilliant Tech Detect, drowned in concrete by the killers from Modern Alchemical Solutions but not before he’d cracked their comms, which had proven to be vital in the investigation).
And me.
Once again, everyone in the media wanted to speak to me.
Especially after a photographer had snapped a shot of me leaving 59West, flanked by cops and FBI agents, covered in -concrete dust and spots of blood.
That shot appeared on the front page of every major news-paper and news website in the world.
The New York Post headlined it:
THE ACTUAL WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE!
I didn’t do any interviews.
I’d done the whole media thing once before and I wouldn’t do it again.
I directed all inquiries to the FBI, to Special Agent Trey Hooper.
While I was grateful for his assistance at Steinway Tower, he’d still been a dick before then.
He’d enjoyed talking to the media under the old narrative.
It seemed fitting that he should be the person to tell the media the real story now.
Yasmina Ivanova was released from Rikers Island first thing on New Year’s Day.
She left the jail with her sweet and loyal attorney Georgy at her side, to be confronted by a phalanx of reporters.
‘Yasmina! Yasmina!’ they yelled.
‘Aristo threw you to the wolves—!’
‘Are you going to divorce the richest man in the world—?’
‘Did you have a pre-nup, Yasmina—?’
She waved away their questions.
‘I’m just going to go home now, to my children,’ she said.
After she left in Georgy’s little red Toyota Yaris, she called me from Georgy’s phone and we chatted about a few things and arranged to meet the following day.
At the time Yasmina called me, I was with Audrey at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan.
I was standing with her and Deputy Director Longmuir in a secure parking garage as we watched the Unperson—now dressed in an orange jumpsuit and leg-irons—shuffle into the back of a prison van to be taken to a high-security federal facility.
He was flanked by a dozen Hostage Rescue Team agents in full tactical gear and gripping AR-15 assault rifles.
No chances were being taken.
The Unperson watched me as he strode to the van and stepped up into it.
He didn’t blink.
I held eye contact with him.
I wasn’t going to blink either.
‘He hasn’t said a word while he’s been in custody,’ Longmuir said. ‘Won’t answer anything, not even when we asked him if he wanted a lawyer. Just stares straight ahead. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
I said, ‘Did you ask him about Lenny Grossman, the superintendent?’
The real Lenny Grossman hadn’t been found.
After telling the super at his apartment building in the Bronx that he was going on vacation in the Ozarks, Lenny had never turned up anywhere in the Ozarks.
Instead, his doppelganger—Uri—had turned up for work at 59West for almost a month as Lenny.
(It was the same with the female driver of the courtesy van.
Not a single wealthy resident noticed either substitution.)
‘We did,’ Longmuir said. ‘He just gazed straight ahead and said nothing. We also asked him where he diverted the payment of $40 million in bitcoin that was paid directly from King’s account, because no-one can find it. Again, not a word. The guy’s eerie.’
‘No, he’s disciplined,’ I said. ‘He holds himself to a higher standard.’
‘Huh?’ Longmuir grunted.
‘I spoke with Records,’ Audrey said. ‘This guy has no identity that anyone can find, no history at all. Nothing. He surgically removed his fingerprints long ago. No dental matches. No residence we can find. No passport.’
‘If he has a passport, his picture on it would be with a different face,’ I said.
And if he had a residence somewhere, I imagined we’d find a surgery in it, where he did his identity-stealing operations.
‘He was a doctor once,’ I said. ‘But in another country. He said when he came to America, we didn’t accept his qualifications. But he obviously knows plastic surgery. That’s how he lives in other people’s skins, by performing surgery on his own face and on the faces of his colleagues.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Director Longmuir breathed.
‘He also has military training,’ I said. ‘He can fight, shoot and handle weaponry. He talked about being in a conscript army. He comes from a country with compulsory military service.’
‘It’s not easy to wipe yourself off all records,’ Audrey said. ‘That took time, a lot of time.’
‘He’s a preparer,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s made preparations in case he ever got sent to prison.’
‘We’ll keep a close eye on him,’ Longmuir said confidently. ‘This guy is not getting out of our sight.’
I threw a sideways look at Longmuir.
If I had to make a bet between the Unperson and Deputy Director Longmuir, I’d take the Unperson.
‘You want to talk about preparations?’ Audrey said.
‘Get this, our cyber guys reported this morning that the website for Modern Alchemical Solutions vanished from the darknet last night. It had some kind of self-delete program. He must’ve set it to delete in the event he was captured or didn’t log in for a certain amount of time. ’
‘He said he was like me,’ I said softly. ‘I also prepare.’
‘Sam, you’re nothing like him,’ Audrey said.
‘Any insights from his DNA?’ I asked. An analysis of his blood might show roughly where he came from in the world.
Audrey said, ‘His DNA showed broad genetic matches with populations that come from the Baltic region of Europe: north-western Russia, Estonia, Latvia, maybe even Finland. Couldn’t get more detailed than that.’
‘All countries with compulsory military service,’ I noted. ‘What about his partners, Uri and Vasha?’
Audrey said, ‘Only that they weren’t their real names. No fingerprints, either; the skin on their fingertips had also been surgically scraped off ages ago. Their DNA showed they were brother and sister and also of Baltic descent.’
‘A gang of bad hombres,’ Longmuir said. ‘But we got ’em. You got ’em.’
‘But did I get all of them?’ I said. ‘Was that his whole team?’
The Unperson was now sitting in the back of the van. His guards had finished attaching his handcuffs and leg-irons to studs in the van’s floor.
He was still staring right at me.
Unblinking. Emotionless.
Then he smiled thinly—
—as the doors closed over his face.
I watched the van go, uneasy, wondering in my heart if I should have killed him when I’d had the chance.
Thirty minutes later, Audrey and I were having lunch in the cafeteria at Federal Plaza—the food there was okay; plain and simple—when my phone rang.
It was Mia Kimura, Aristo King’s executive assistant and paramour.
‘If you have some time, Dr Speedman, Mr King would really like to speak with you,’ she said. ‘He can send a limo to fetch you.’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, ‘only this time he has to come to me.’
An hour later, Aristo King strode into an FBI conference room at Federal Plaza where Audrey and I sat waiting.
Mia Kimura was with him, of course. Upon seeing me, King smiled warmly, our previous unpleasant interaction at his drone base seemingly forgotten.
I introduced Audrey and we all sat.
‘Dr Speedman,’ the world’s richest man said, ‘I don’t apologise very often, but I must express how regretful I am about how I treated you the last time we met.
I just have to say it: you are really something else.
I mean, goodness, what a detective you are.
What an incredible investigation you mounted.
Especially when everyone else thought the case was over and done with. ’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘Tell me, how’s Murph?’
‘Who?’ he said quizzically.
I sighed inwardly.
He didn’t even know his chopper pilot’s name, the pilot who had been shot during the vicious drone attack at the Sandy Hook peninsula.
(Honestly, I’m not the type to judge anyone, but I was getting weary of these rich folks and their airy disregard for regular people.
Unless you had money, you were literally invisible to them or, to use Winnie Tan’s term, you were a ‘human rounding error’.
For the record, I found out later that Murph was recovering well in a hospital in New Jersey.)
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’
‘We’re both busy men, so I’ll get straight to the point,’ he said.
‘I need a new head of security. I think it’s safe to say that Merritt Garrett did not work out.
But you’re a different story, Sam. I’ll pay you forty mil per year to be by my side, all day, every day. To protect me and run my security.’
‘Forty million dollars . . .’ Audrey said. ‘Per year . . .’
‘That’s a lot of money,’ I said.
‘You’re worth it, son,’ Aristo King said.
I nodded slowly. ‘Sir, thank you for the offer, but I have to politely decline.’
‘Oh,’ he said, perplexed. ‘I was hoping we could put the past behind us, you know, let bygones be bygones.’