Page 1 of King’s Ransom

PROLOGUE

TWO BUSINESSES

This is the sign on the door of my detective agency in Houston:

This is the splash page of a business on the darknet:

Some businesses should never meet.

THE DASH TO

NEW YORK

In the year 1192, while returning from the Third Crusade, King Richard the Lionheart of England was captured near Vienna and held captive. The ransom demanded for his safe return was a colossal 150,000 marks, an unheard-of amount at the time. It was ultimately paid—by raising taxes in England—and is the source of the term ‘a king’s ransom’.

– From: The Crusades by Theodore Coyne

Airspace over WEST VIRGINIA

21 December, 1030 hours

My sleek private jet shot over the eastern United States in a dead-straight line toward New York City.

It flew in a desperate hurry.

Indeed, since we’d taken off from Houston at 7 a.m. local time, our plane had been given priority clearance over all airspace between Texas and New York.

My presence in Manhattan had been demanded at the highest levels.

Of course, the jet wasn’t actually mine.

It belonged to the FBI.

The aircraft was a Gulfstream G550 which, in a world of expensive private jets is a very expensive private jet.

It costs $61.5 million brand new and is very popular with ­billionaires. Mark Cuban, Larry Page and Oprah Winfrey have all owned G550s at various times. (A Google search revealed that the FBI didn’t truly own my plane; it leased it from the Bank of Utah which is a little weird.)

The G550 has a maximum speed of Mach 0.89 which makes it one of the faster private jets in the world.

But speed doesn’t come cheap.

A flight in a G550 from Houston to New York will burn $7,000 worth of fuel.

Given that a similar flight on a commercial airline costs $291 and will only take maybe an hour longer—with most of that due to airport security—this might all seem like a lot of money and effort for the FBI to expend conveying me and my team to New York City.

But there was a crisis at hand.

A billionaire was missing.

And not just any billionaire.

The richest man in the world.

The phone call had woken me at 6:09 a.m., interrupting a vivid dream I was having about a giant zombie kitten rampaging through downtown Los Angeles.

I have strange dreams.

Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that sometimes.