Part 10 A Sinister Business
A SINISTER BUSINESS
When you look long into the abyss,
the abyss also looks into you.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
After Monty left, I lay on the cot inside the otherwise dark and silent building.
But I couldn’t sleep. I was still buzzing from the day’s events.
So, with nothing else to do, I figured I’d try my hand at making sense of the plaintext Monty had found in Modern Alchemical Solutions’ digital communications.
As Monty had warned, it would be tedious work, rewriting it all out manually, adding spaces, removing the random 0s and 1s. It would take time, but like with the security footage from 59West, this was what I did: sit down and grind through a task.
(Don’t get me wrong, doing it on a computer would’ve been much easier, since I could do word searches and the like. But Monty had been very uneasy about getting too close to Modern Alchemical Solutions, so I figured this was the best way to go about it.)
And so I pulled out my notebook and, letter by gruelling letter, I rewrote the first paragraph of plaintext by hand, divining the words and sentences and adding punctuation.
This was the text I started with:
The first few ‘words’ of the first line showed how difficult this was going to be. They appeared like this:
1216264071AYURI01WIL00LBLDGB11EREA01DYFO0RDEC21
First, I tried spacing the letters out into vaguely recognisable words. (Knowing the user identification numbers helped a lot, but the insertion of random 0s and 1s made things really finicky.)
After ten whole minutes, I had this:
121626 4071AY URI 01WIL 00 L BLDG B11 E REA 01 DY FO 0 R DEC21
Next, I drew lines through the 0s and 1s.
121626 4071AY URI 01WIL 00 L BLDG B11 E REA 01 DY FO 0 R DEC21
Only then was I able to string the remaining letters into readable words.
I wrote them out by hand and, finally, I had this:
12/16/26
4071AY: URI, WILL BLDG BE READY FOR DEC 21?
It began with a date—December 16th, 2026—and a question to someone named Uri about whether the building would be ready for the 21st.
And there in the darkness of the Tech Detect’s sleeping closet, I risked a smile.
I was reading correspondence between the perpetrators as they planned for December 21st.
This was serious progress.
Energised, I ploughed on, painstakingly transcribing the plaintext—removing 0s and 1s, adding spaces, making it readable. It was detailed and difficult work, but I was focused, intensely focused, and when I sat up thirty minutes later, I was able to read the first three lines.
12/16/26
4071AY: URI, WILL BLDG BE READY FOR DEC 21?
4071FB: YES, GROSSMAN INFILTRATION WORKING WELL. PREPARATIONS COMPLETE FOR ACTIVITIES ON LEVELS 44, 61, 73, 95, 98, PLUS 28 AS BACKUP. BLDG WILL BE READY FOR DEC 21
4071AY: VASHA, WILL THE CEMETERY BE READY FOR DEC 21?
4071VZ: YES. GM ACQUIRED PLUS TWO ESCORTS. WILL TRANSFER TO MILL ON DEC 20
4071AY: THEN 21 DEC IT IS. STANDBY
I wasn’t smiling anymore.
Now I felt a chill.
Because now I was way behind enemy lines.
I was reading secret conversations between the kidnapper--killers as they prepared everything at the tower and the cemetery for December 21st.
I swallowed.
I had to analyse what I was reading.
First, judging from the user IDs, it looked like there were three conspirators.
4071AY, 4071FB and 4071VZ.
They all had the same numerical prefix, 4071, plus two letters.
The first one—4071AY—seemed to be the leader, the coordinator (as Monty had surmised).
I called him AY.
The second one, identified as 4071FB, was someone named Uri.
And the third one—4071VZ—was named Vasha.
I reread their comments.
The one named Uri was reporting that the ‘Grossman infiltration’ was working well.
That was a reference to Lenny Grossman, the superintendent who had left New York a month ago only to—amazingly—be present at 59West on December 21st.
The Grossman infiltration.
These guys really had impersonated Lenny Grossman.
As I’d theorised earlier, it certainly would’ve been a great way to set up their operation.
With their man walking around the building in the guise of the superintendent, they’d had access to every corner of 59West.
As that concept ran through my mind, I again remembered what Roman Oberov had called the man behind Modern Alchemical Solutions: the man who walks around in other men’s skins.
I mean, had these people kidnapped—and killed?—the real Lenny Grossman and then inserted their own man—Uri—in his place as a doppelganger?
Uri went on to state that he’d completed preparations on levels 44, 61, 73, 95 and 98, plus one other on the 28th floor as a backup.
I went through the various deathtraps from December 21st:
Level 44 was the nanny’s apartment.
Level 61 was where the bomb in the robot cart had killed Juno Everhart.
Level 73 was Ajax and Cassandra.
Level 95 was where the boy, Alexei, and his bodyguard had been suspended underneath the express elevator.
Level 98 was the garbage chute on the blow-through level where Yasmina’s little girl Katya had been hidden.
Level 28 was new.
We hadn’t gone there.
At some point, although it would be painful to do so, I’d have to tell the FBI to check the 28th floor—while the building was still evacuated—to see what this ‘backup’ trap was.
Horrified and enthralled, I kept reading.
This was their whole plan . . .
The third conspirator, Vasha, reported that the cemetery would be ready for December 21st and also: ‘GM acquired plus two escorts.’
I guessed that ‘GM’ was the Grandmaster and that the ‘two escorts’ were the two Russian goons who’d be found with him at the cemetery.
‘Will transfer to mill on Dec 20,’ Vasha reported further.
The mill, I figured, was the ruined water mill near the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where I’d found the Narcan foil wrapping. Vasha would bring the three Russian patsies there the day before December 21st.
More preparations.
I thought about the name Vasha. It sounded eastern European, Russian even. Was it a woman’s name? If so, had there been any women at or near the cemetery on December 21st?
There had been one: the red-haired female gardener named Maria Dubrowski. Could she have been Vasha? Maybe. But I wasn’t sure. Maria Dubrowski had seemed genuinely shaken up by what she’d witnessed that day.
But then I recalled another mysterious female participant from December 21st: the female driver of 59West’s courtesy van, the one that had left really early on December 21st and never returned.
Could she have been Vasha? Given the successful infiltration of a fake Lenny Grossman at 59West, it seemed entirely possible that these people could have also inserted a fake driver of their own.
I’d reached the end of my first little translation, so I ploughed on again—head bent, pencil scribbling—transcribing and decoding the remaining lines of that first paragraph of plaintext.
The more I did it, the more adept I became at it. Still, it took me a while.
An hour later, I had a new translation.
It began with another date: 121726, December 17th, four days before the event.
4071AY: DATE IS SET 21 DECEMBER. YOUR MAN IS ON THE LIST. CONFIRM TRANSFER OF FUNDS TO ESCROW ACCOUNT
9101ZK: COPY. MONEY HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED TO ESCROW ACCOUNT
4071AY: MAKE SURE YOUR MAN IS ON THE brIDGE AND YOU WILL HAVE SATISFACTION
4071AY: DATE IS SET 21 DECEMBER. CONFIRM TRANSFER OF FUNDS TO ESCROW ACCOUNT
3765AZ: THANKS. MONEY IS IN THE ESCROW ACCOUNT AS REQUESTED
4071AY: YOU WILL HAVE SATISFACTION
4071AY: DATE IS SET 21 DECEMBER. CONFIRM TRANSFER OF FUNDS TO ESCROW ACCOUNT
4633QQ: FUNDS TRANSFERRED
I inhaled sharply.
In this cluster of messages, AY from Modern Alchemical Solutions was corresponding with three more individuals, arranging for each of them to make a payment to an escrow account.
These were his customers.
Three of them.
With the user IDs: 9101ZK, 3765AZ and 4633QQ.
This clarified something that had been bugging me about the whole event.
I’d originally assumed there was one person behind everything that had happened at 59West on December 21st.
But the goals of whoever had been behind that day—ruining Yasmina’s life, acquiring the QuantumSpeed-7 chip and doing it all with elaborate traps—just didn’t add up for a single individual.
But if Modern Alchemical Solutions had been working for three separate people, then there could indeed be multiple motives.
The realisation hit me like a punch to the face.
I wasn’t just looking for one bad guy here.
I was looking for three.
Plus the mysterious ‘AY’ and his two colleagues from Modern Alchemical Solutions.
This was both satisfying and daunting at the same time.
You never want to find out that you’re up against more evil-doers than you originally thought, let alone six of them.
But at last I was getting somewhere.
I zeroed in on AY’s texts with 9101ZK.
That user was, I noted, the same one Monty had said was based at an employment agency on Doyers Street in Chinatown.
AY had told this customer that ‘your man is on the list’ and to ‘make sure your man is on the bridge’.
What list?
Regarding a man being on a bridge, the only man who’d been on any kind of bridge during the events of December 21st had been Xiao, the Chinese detective, who’d been . . .
. . . on the covered bridge at the cemetery with Audrey when they’d been meant to hand over the QuantumSpeed-7 chip to the drone.
And in that moment I realised what the list was.
Xiao had indeed been on a list.
A list that I had also been on.
The list of detectives who had been brought to 59West on December 21st.
Xiao had been there ostensibly as a detective, but in truth he’d been a plant, meant to be present when the QuantumSpeed-7 got out in the open.
Fuck. Me.
I would now definitely have to go to that ‘employment agency’ on Doyers Street in Chinatown.
It was past midnight, but I was on a roll, so I turned to the next chunk of plaintext that Monty had pulled from the comms of Modern Alchemical Solutions.
It was the one riddled with totally corrupted lines:
That was beyond my capabilities right now, so I went to the next readable paragraph, the third one: