Part 11 Questions #4
I pulled out something that I’d taken from an emergency kit on the chopper: a tent tarp with four nylon ropes, all gathered in a tangled mess.
And I threw it all on top of the drone.
The natural enemies of a rotor are ropes and nets, because they get caught up in the rotor’s blades.
Which was precisely what happened here.
As the tarp and ropes landed on the drone from above, they got entangled in the aerial vehicle’s rotors.
The rotors spluttered and groaned, the gears straining until—whump!—the drone dropped to the ground, unable to stay aloft. It quivered on the concrete floor, struggling against its bonds, convulsing like a wounded bird.
I gripped my pistol and jumped down into the passageway next to it, ready to shoot the thing right through its glowing red eye—
But then the drone sprang up, the bladed edges of its rotors slicing through my net, and all of a sudden it was hovering right in front of me, at full strength again.
It came up firing.
Fortunately, it came up facing the opposite direction and its bullets sizzled away down the passageway.
My plan having failed, I bolted the other way, lunging around the first corner just as the drone swivelled laterally and loosed a wave of deadly rounds that destroyed the wall two inches behind me.
I was in big trouble now.
No more tarps or ropes.
And my Glock couldn’t possibly compete with the drone’s firepower.
I zigged and zagged through the concrete trenches, fleeing for my life.
Left, right.
Under some concrete stairs.
Along another trench.
Suddenly, the drone swooped low over me, searching for me, hunting me.
I raced around another tight corner and slammed into the wall of another trench . . .
. . . and saw something.
The drone buzzed by overhead.
Very close now.
I grabbed the object I’d seen and hustled back into the trench-maze to do some preparations.
Do-or-die preparations. Because if they didn’t work, I was screwed.
Two minutes later, the drone found me.
In the dead end.
I just sat there with my back to the concrete wall that formed the dead end of the trench, the Glock pistol in my lap.
The drone paused in front of me, filling the width of the trench.
It tilted forward, lowering its two massive guns to finish me off.
When I whipped up my gun and fired.
Not at the drone . . .
. . . but at the thick chain I’d laid across the top of the trench, the heavy chain with the ‘keep out’ sign on it that I’d tripped over earlier.
The chain dropped.
Right onto the drone.
This was no tarp or nylon rope.
Heavy and solid, the chain got immediately tangled in the rotors of the drone.
The rotor blades squealed in protest, grating and grinding against the chain.
This time my trap succeeded.
The drone’s rotors seized up completely.
And now it dropped hard to the concrete ground, its engines smoking in their futile effort to get free of the chain. But it was no use.
The drone shuddered, and bucked, and then went still.
I jumped forward and—blam!-blam!-blam!-blam!-blam!-blam!—put six bullets into its red sensor light.
The drone shut down, dead.
Caked in sweat and sand, I slumped with relief.
‘Goddamn,’ I breathed.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to do next.
I needed to get Murph some medical attention, but I also didn’t want to be here when the authorities arrived.
Aristo King was furious with me, and may have just tried to kill me with one of his drones.
The FBI was after me, and I couldn’t keep investigating this case from a holding cell.
In the end, I flagged down a couple of hikers who came down a nearby walking trail drawn by the explosion of the chopper.
I handed Murph to them. ‘Please, he’s been shot. Call 911 and get him to a hospital.’
I bent over Murph. ‘Hey, Murph. So, that autorotation landing, it worked. Not great, but it worked.’
‘Thanks for getting me out of that chopper, son,’ he said. ‘You could’ve left me.’
‘No, I couldn’t. But I have to now. There’re folks out there who want me dead and others who want to bring me in and I still have stuff to do.’
‘Go get ’em, champ,’ Murph said.
‘Do you mind if I borrow your Glock?’ I said. Not having a gun of my own in New York had become a real pain.
‘It’s all yours.’
‘Thanks.’ I dashed off and—please don’t tell anybody—stole a car from a parking lot that serviced the hiking trails and sped away in it.
The first rule of stealing a car is not to stay in it for too long: the cops will find you pretty fast. So I drove it down the length of the peninsula and into New Jersey, until I came to a subway station.
There I ditched the car in an underground parking lot and boarded a subway train.
I took the long way back to New York City.
Crowds were my friend now, so first I took the subway to Newark Airport and changed trains there. I also bought a black New Jersey Devils hockey cap and some cheap sunglasses, in case the FBI were scanning the CCTV feeds.
(I also visited a men’s room where I tried to clean all the sand off my body. It had got everywhere.)
Dusk had fallen by the time my (fifth) train approached Penn Station and as I rocked with the motion of the carriage, my mind whirred.
Aristo King’s super-generous job offer.
A brazen attack by the deadly drone.
This was getting seriously out of control.
Then my burner phone rang.
It was Monty Woods.
‘Dude, I cracked the security on my clone of Aristo King’s phone. You better come down to my office, right now.’
60 Hudson Street
29 December, 1705 hours
Dirty, bruised and with sand still in my underpants, I arrived at 60 Hudson just after 5 p.m.
I desperately wanted to have a shower, but Monty was ready to go. He pulled up a chair for me.
‘Jesus, what happened to you? Forget it, never mind. I don’t want to know.’
He nodded at his main computer screen.
On it was an image of an iPhone.
‘So. This is a virtual avatar of Aristo King’s phone,’ he said. ‘If we were holding his phone right now, this is how it would look.’
‘Okay.’
‘Right,’ Monty said. ‘You asked me to look for any sex tapes that Aristo might have filmed on his cell phone. Well, he filmed a lot. Kept ’em in a multiple password–protected folder, so it took longer than expected, but I eventually cracked the passwords and got in.
Sam, the clips make for, ahem, interesting viewing. ’
‘Let’s see them,’ I said.
Monty opened the phone’s video app and I saw a grid of video files on its virtual screen.
There must have been fifty of them.
‘All right. Let’s do this,’ I said.
I’m sure some people might think watching a bunch of sex tapes is arousing, like watching pornography.
It’s not.
The sex tapes of regular people are usually short, poorly lit and often—like here—filmed with a hidden camera so one of the participants doesn’t know it’s being recorded.
It’s not sexy at all.
In my experience, watching a sex tape feels sort of dirty and, well, sad.
That was how I felt watching Aristo King’s sex tapes.
All were filmed from the same angle: from behind the two-way mirror looking across his 95th-floor corner bedroom, literally among the clouds.
Most occurred at night.
Some during the day.
All had time and date stamps.
How to describe it?
Well, basically, Aristo King had had sexual relations with a lot of women.
Many seemed to be one-night stands: like a famous Hollywood actress; an equally famous model; and one woman whom I recognised as a member of an evangelical Christian group that supported the President.
(King had arrived in his bedroom in a tux while she’d been wearing a ballgown; I figured they’d come from a fundraiser. She snorted cocaine as they fucked.)
Massage therapists. His private Pilates instructor.
In one video, King had sex with two women who looked to me like professional escorts.
‘He just doesn’t stop, does he . . .’ I said.
‘Oh wait, there’s more,’ Monty said. ‘These are just the women who appear in a single video each.’
The next young woman was very small. Compact, pretty and blonde.
And to my surprise, I recognised her.
‘Isn’t she that gymnast? The daughter of King’s business partner, Allen Derrickson? The one who might go to the Olympics? Aristo King’s goddaughter?’
‘Sure is,’ Monty said. ‘Dede Derrickson. Dede-D.’
In that video, the pretty young gymnast snorted cocaine off King’s abs then gave him oral sex. Then she bent over, her legs spread wide, gymnast-style, and he penetrated her from behind and she squealed in coke-fuelled joy.
‘Isn’t she . . . uh . . . sixteen?’ I said.
‘Yup.’ Monty shook his head. ‘Rich dudes. Even their buddies’ underage daughters aren’t off limits. Okay, then, now we come to the ladies who appear more than once in Mr King’s collection. He kept them in their own individual folders.’
And as I watched this next set of videos, it became apparent that I knew most of these women.
First was Yasmina Ivanova.
She appeared in four of the videos.