Part 11 Questions #2
King’s military drone company.
The moment our chopper touched down, three figures stepped out of the hangar to meet us, two men and a woman.
Aristo King, Merritt Garrett and Mia Kimura.
‘Dr Speedman!’ Aristo King shook my hand vigorously as I stepped out of the chopper.
‘It’s so nice to finally meet you. I really should’ve done this sooner, given all your heroics at the tower last week.
Merritt told me about everything you did, including saving Alexei and attempting to save Ajax.
I’m so sorry we haven’t met properly till now. Can I call you Sam?’
‘Sure.’
‘Sam, thank you,’ he said firmly and intently. ‘Thank you. Now, come this way.’ He started walking quickly toward the hangar, the moment over.
For a man who’d been kidnapped barely a week before and lost a child, he was remarkably chipper and energetic.
It seemed that even a day as crazy as December 21 was but a speedbump on his inexorable march into the glorious future he was creating.
Either that or he had an ego the size of Jupiter, which may also have been true.
Or it was all an act.
‘Hey, pal.’ Merritt Garrett grasped my hand as King headed off. Garrett was wearing black cargo pants and a fitted black shell jacket with Spiderhawk Systems embroidered on the chest. ‘Thanks for coming at such short notice.’
‘No problem,’ I said.
I nodded to Mia Kimura. ‘Ms Kimura, I hope you’re okay after everything that went down at the tower.’
Mia Kimura smiled tightly. ‘Thanks. I took a couple of days off but I’m back into everything now. Mr King, well, he never stops.’
Aristo King turned from up ahead. ‘Ain’t that the truth. Please, Sam, come this way. Your timing is perfect. We’re about to do a test.’
He guided me inside the hangar. Garrett and Kimura followed.
No sooner was I through the door than I stopped.
‘Whoa . . .’ I gasped.
Racks and racks of state-of-the-art military aerial drones stretched away from me.
They were all like the one that had attacked us on December 21st: black, sleek and aggressive. All were fitted with either guns or missile pods.
There must have been two hundred of them.
The whole space was the size of a football field and it was completely enclosed by the hangar’s high roof.
It was also all perfectly clean, spotless. Dozens of workers in white bodysuits moved around an assembly line.
King saw my wonder. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’
‘Sure is,’ I said.
‘This is my fleet of Spiderhawks,’ he said. ‘The Air Force and Navy love these babies.’
I noted an empty slot in one of the racks.
One of the drones was missing.
I was about to ask about it, but King had already crossed to an elevator on our right. The guy never stopped moving.
He entered the elevator. ‘Come! This way! It’s gonna be quite a show.’
I stepped into the elevator after him.
It rose quickly upward.
I stepped out into the top deck of the observation tower attached to the hangar.
The vast grassy field—with its mounds, bunkers and depressions—lay before me.
Technicians sat at computer consoles, speaking into headsets.
‘Are we ready?’ King asked them.
‘Rabbits are ready,’ one technician said crisply.
‘Hawks are ready,’ another said.
‘Commence the test,’ King said in a voice that reminded me of Jean-Luc Picard (‘Number One, engage.’).
And it began.
Holy shit.
Outside on the grass, a flock of small remote-controlled drones zipped out of a bunker and fanned out.
They were tiny, nimble and super-fast: the rabbits.
Then came the Spiderhawks.
There were six of them.
Bigger and bulkier than the rabbits—and each armed with twin cannons—they oozed power and menace.
They swooped across the grassy plain, firing at the rabbits.
As they did, their powerful guns issued blazing tongues of muzzle-flash.
The shots were devastatingly accurate, blasting apart the rabbit drones.
The smaller drones fled gamely, but the Spiderhawks were far too good for them.
In fact, as I watched the ‘battle’ play out, it seemed to me that the Spiderhawks were acting with coordination, as a pack, with one or two of them separating a smaller drone from its brethren and then driving it toward another waiting Spiderhawk which shot it down.
It was brutal, devastating and quite shocking.
‘Are they herding them . . .?’ I said.
King smiled knowingly. ‘Well spotted. We actually trained their A.I. chips—which I also manufacture—on pack-hunting analytics gathered from wolf and orca packs. This is animal behaviour in a thinking robot. Trust me, you don’t want one of these things hunting you.’
(He must have forgotten what I’d experienced with one of these drones on the 21st. But, then, I got the impression that Aristo King didn’t think about other people much at all.)
And all of a sudden there was only one rabbit drone left.
This little drone was feisty and it attempted to hide in a concrete bunker embedded in one of the low grassy hills.
It was no use.
The Spiderhawks descended on the bunker, flushed it out and shot it to bits.
It exploded and the exercise was over.
‘All rabbits destroyed,’ the second tech said.
King turned to me, grinning like a kid. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’
‘Yeah. Very cool,’ I said.
Sometimes, as a detective, you need to test people. Often it’s beneficial to do this when they’re feeling comfortable and confident.
‘I noticed downstairs that one of your drones is missing,’ I said. ‘Was it the one from December 21st? The one that was found on your bed and which later came alive and did all that damage?’
(It had also never been recovered. After it had shot Audrey on the bridge at the cemetery in Sleepy Hollow—and then been shot by me and Xiao—it had flown away.)
‘What? Oh, yes,’ King said, a little irritated. ‘It was stolen from here a couple of weeks ago.’
‘How could someone steal it? This place must be locked up tighter than Fort Knox,’ I said.
‘It happened during a flight exercise not unlike this one. Someone hacked that drone’s navigation and control systems and flew it away, simple as that,’ King said. ‘We’ve patched up the software flaw that allowed it to happen.’
‘Still, that’d require some serious hacking skills,’ I said. ‘These things are military grade.’
I was thinking about what I knew about Modern Alchemical Solutions.
The people there definitely had those hacking skills.
‘You better believe it,’ King said. ‘If I ever find the guy who did it, if I didn’t kill him first, I’d hire him.’
And at that moment, Aristo King’s face changed.
He smiled, turning on the charm, his irritation gone.
‘Speaking of hiring people, this brings me to why I wanted to meet with you today. Sam. Dr Speedman. Mr Garrett here says you’re a talented and gifted detective, a brilliant problem-
solver.’
‘That’s nice of him to say,’ I said.
‘I understand you’re working for my wife, Yasmina.’
‘I am.’
‘I suppose I should call her my soon-to-be ex-wife, given all that she did at the tower, paying for those murders.’
‘She says she was set up,’ I said.
‘What is she paying you?’
‘I can’t say.’ He didn’t have to know it was nothing.
‘I’d like you to work for me instead,’ Aristo King said.
‘I have many businesses and I employ thousands of people. Money and inventory go missing all the time and I feel that I need an in-house investigator. I think you’d be perfect for the job.
Garrett does, too. I’ll pay you a retainer of nine million dollars a year and you’ll work as required.
You can continue living in Houston and I’ll just send a plane for you whenever an issue arises. ’
I digested this in silence.
Nine million dollars per year to essentially do nothing except be on call to solve his internal mysteries.
It would be the easiest job in the world.
‘As long as I stop working for Yasmina?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘That could be a problem.’
‘Yasmina is probably going to prison for a very long time,’ King said. ‘This job will set you up for life.’
‘Yes, but she hired me first.’
King blanched.
‘She what? She hired you first?’ he blurted.
He collected himself, exhaling loudly.
‘Sam, not many people reject my offers.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘How much is Yasmina paying you? She can’t be paying you anything close to this,’ King said.
‘She isn’t.’
‘You’re saying no to nine million dollars, per year, to keep working for her?’
‘I am.’
Suddenly his voice became low. ‘Has she said anything about me? That’s it, isn’t it? What has she said about me?’
‘She actually seems to love you,’ I said. ‘Well, until you initiated divorce proceedings.’
That was when Aristo King exploded.
‘She hired a hit man to have me buried alive!’ he yelled. ‘And to kill my other children!’
‘Mr King—’
‘Does she have a lover? Is that it? Some guy she was working with to assassinate me? Like those Russians she used to know?’
‘I think she’s always been faithful to you. Have you been faithful to her?’
He reared back at that. ‘What?! Have I been faithful? Have I been—?’
He spun, waving a hand at Garrett. ‘We’re done here. Send him back. Get this little prick out of my sight.’
‘Mr King, one last question,’ I said, stopping him. ‘Have you ever heard of a company on the darknet called Modern Alchemical Solutions?’
He glared at me. ‘Never in my fucking life.’
And with those words, the world’s richest man stormed off, chased by Ms Kimura in her high heels.
He strode into the elevator and didn’t look at me again.
Merritt Garrett and I rode down in the same elevator shortly after, just the two of us.
‘Well, that could’ve gone better,’ he said.
‘I’m okay with it,’ I said. ‘Merritt, what about you? Ever heard of a company called Modern Alchemical Solutions?’
Merritt Garrett shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have. What kind of company is it?’
‘A problem-solving one. Like us, but in reverse. We solve crimes for customers, they commit crimes for them.’
‘You mean contract killings? Hit men?’ Garrett’s crows-feet eyes met mine. ‘You mean December 21st?’
‘Yeah.’
We reached the ground floor, exited the elevator and headed out to the helipad.
Murph was waiting beside the chopper, holding the door open for me.