Part 8 Superpower
SUPERPOWER
When the rich rob the poor, it’s called business.
When the poor fight back, it’s called violence.
– Mark Twain
Phelps Hospital Waiting Room
27 December
On December 27th, the funeral for Ajax King, the highest-profile victim of the events of December 21st, was held.
His memorial service took place at a church in Southampton.
I watched it from the waiting room of the hospital, having returned there to check on Audrey’s progress while I waited for Georgy to make his calls. (Audrey was still scheduled to be awoken from her coma the next day.)
It was impossible to miss the service.
All the broadcast and cable networks covered it, as did social media. The coverage played on the television mounted on the wall all morning.
Even though the actual funeral was held inside the church—meaning no TV cameras were allowed inside—that didn’t stop the news shows from filming Aristo King’s wealthy and famous friends arriving outside the church in the gently falling snow as if it were a royal wedding.
Business titans, movie stars, models, politicians.
Billionaires like Aristo King’s long-time friend and business partner, Allen Derrickson. He was there with his wife and pretty blonde daughter, Aristo’s goddaughter, Dede.
(Apparently, Dede was a world-class gymnast. The TV commentators gushed that ‘Dede-D’—as she was known to her many followers on TikTok—was on the shortlist to compete for America in the next Summer Olympic Games, even though she was only sixteen and still in high school.)
Cameras flashed as they strode inside.
While the guests made a show of shying bashfully away from the cameras, I noticed that they had all dressed in their most stylish black clothes and expensive sunglasses for the event.
Despite the banning of cameras inside the church, amateur footage of the service appeared on social media within minutes of it concluding. Some guests had filmed it on their phones.
Aristo King sat in the front row with his second ex-wife, Ajax’s mother, Shelby Cox—blonde hair, vivid blue eyes—and they both spoke movingly about their son.
(I noticed Merritt Garrett standing in a side aisle of the church a short distance from his new boss. He stood with King’s executive assistant, Mia Kimura. Gripping her iPad, she looked poised and svelte again, the traumas of December 21 seemingly behind her.)
Then it was over and all the rich and famous mourners retired to King’s home on Meadow Lane for a fully catered wake.
Cassandra King practically livestreamed that on her social media pages.
In one post she said, ‘Everyone who’s anyone is here!’
She also advertised the designer coat she wore.
Such grief.
While all this was playing on the TV, I was actually watching something else, something that was of far more interest to me.
The security footage from 59West that Georgy had sent to me.
As I’ve said before, this is my superpower.
If I can do anything better than anybody else in my trade, it’s sit down and grind through some hyper-detailed problem, like watching a thousand hours of security camera footage.
So, how do you watch a thousand hours of security camera footage?
For one thing, you start at the beginning and work your way through it all.
For another, you do it on fast-forward (otherwise it’ll take you a thousand hours and that’s way too long for anybody, even me).
Watching it on fast-forward actually helps, since what you’re really looking for in the footage are breaks in the daily routine.
The same cars come and go, park in the same spaces. You’re looking for disturbances in those routines: new cars, new people, like workmen in trucks or removalist vehicles.
And when you watch footage on fast-forward, disturbances like these stand out.
So I brought my backpack and laptop with me to the hospital that day and got to work.
I won’t go into the details of watching the footage from 59West—I did it all morning—but suffice it to say, as I moved through the month of November, the routines of 59West quickly became apparent and they rarely fluctuated, as one would expect of a building with few residents and tightly controlled access.
In short, the residents came and went in their luxury cars or limousines, going back and forth to the garage-level elevators.
I made notes about the comings and goings of the people I knew:
On the days he didn’t use his rooftop helipad, Aristo King departed and returned in a limo with Mia Kimura, usually at similar times.
On weekends, Ajax and Cassandra came home extra late.
The building’s courtesy van—a gleaming black Mercedes Sprinter van with ‘59West’ written in gold cursive on its side—entered and exited constantly, always parking in the same reserved spot close to the elevators.
(The residents of 59West had this van and its well-dressed female driver at their disposal to go anywhere within a two-mile radius.)
It was all pretty standard.
And then I saw something.
On November 28, I saw the superintendent Lenny Grossman in his white coveralls chatting with the courtesy van’s female driver.
I noted the date: November 28.
According to the super at Lenny’s apartment building in the Bronx, Lenny had left town before Thanksgiving on November 26 . . . yet here he was.
‘Lenny . . .’ I said aloud, gazing at the footage. ‘You’d gone on vacation. You shouldn’t be in that garage, but you are.’
This bolstered my theory that he’d been impersonated.
I cracked my neck, rolled my shoulders.
I’d been watching footage nonstop for about five hours.
I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes.
When I put them back on, I looked around the waiting room and saw someone standing at the rear section of the emergency department with Nurse Narelle.
Someone I hadn’t expected to see here.
Zhang Xiao.
My fellow private detective.
I wondered why he was at the hospital.
After shaking Nurse Narelle’s hand and thanking her, he ambled over to Kenneth the janitor and spoke with him in whispered Mandarin.
I observed their chat in interested silence.
When they were done, Xiao came over to me.
‘Dr Speedman,’ he said. ‘I wanted to check in on the brave Agent Mills. Her nurse tells me she is stable and expected to be brought out of her coma tomorrow.’
‘Audrey’s tough,’ I said.
‘I gather you’ll be here when she is awakened.’
‘That’s my plan.’
‘Please give her my best wishes,’ Xiao said with a kind smile. ‘She and I survived a shootout together.’
‘I will,’ I said.
He left.
I noticed that Kenneth the janitor watched Xiao closely as he departed.
There was something in his eyes.
Was it worry? Anxiety? Or fear?
About ten minutes later, as Kenneth came by my seat to mop the floor under it, I said, ‘Kenneth, do you know Zhang Xiao, that detective who came by just now?’
Kenneth’s eyes darted left and right.
It was definitely fear.
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know him?’
Kenneth hesitated.
He seemed to be weighing me up: an American, but also one who had helped him with the drunk asshole on Christmas Eve.
At last, he said, ‘Mr Xiao is—how you say—policeman.’
‘Yeah, a private detective.’
‘No, no, not detective. Policeman. Chinese policeman.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In Chinatown,’ Kenneth said, ‘if you have crime problem, you no go to NYPD. You go to Mr Xiao and he investigate.’
‘Is that so?’
I’d heard stories about this.
It was said that certain Chinese communities in America—notably in New York and San Francisco—had their own ‘internal’ police forces who kept criminal matters that arose within the Chinese subculture out of the formal legal system.
The unspoken reality of this parallel police force was that its ‘officers’ were US-based members of the Chinese government. In other words, Chinese spies keeping an eye on the Chinese-American population in the States.
I hadn’t known that Xiao was part of that world.
It was both interesting and alarming, given: (a) it suggested Xiao had close links to the Chinese government; (b) how close he’d got to the super-classified QuantumSpeed-7 chip on December 21st; and (c) his appearance here to check on Audrey, a government agent and the last person to be in possession of that chip.
It also raised another huge question:
Why had a guy like Xiao been included on the list of five detectives brought to Aristo King’s penthouse on December 21st?
Maybe there was more to that list than I first realised.
These thoughts lingered in the back of my mind for the rest of that day as I watched more security footage on fast-forward and the highlights from the funeral played on the TV.
Then I trudged back to my motel and went to bed.
Phelps Hospital Waiting Room
28 December
It was now December 28th, the day Dr Shepherd had said he’d bring Audrey out of her coma, so I once again made camp in the waiting room.
This worked well, since I was still waiting for Georgy to get us permission to view the Grandmaster’s body at the morgue (which, it turned out, was no easy task as it required him to speak to, and then send formal legal documents to, all manner of bureaucrats).
So, while Georgy spent the morning doing that, I spent it hunched over my laptop watching the remaining security footage from 59West.
Throughout December, the routines didn’t change much.
Then I came to the footage from December 21st.
I sat up in my seat, slowed the playing speed a little, leaned closer.
Game day.
And immediately I noticed a deviation in the routine.
It involved the courtesy van.
One constant in the footage till then was 59West’s black Mercedes courtesy van.
Its routines were very reliable: mostly the ladies of 59West used it to go to early-morning yoga around 5:45 a.m., lunch around midday and then dinner in the evenings.
But on December 21st the courtesy van left the garage at 4:33 a.m., much earlier than it usually did.
Its uniformed female driver loaded a crate on a wheeled handcart into the rear of the van, got in and drove away.
And didn’t return.
This created a clear disturbance in the routine when two older female residents arrived in yoga clothes and gripping yoga mats as usual at 5:45 a.m.