Page 126 of King’s Ransom

28 December, 2200 hours

As an Art Deco building in downtown New York City, 60 Hudson Street doesn’t strike the casual observer as anything particularly special.

There are many other buildings like it, with its brick façade and stepped or ‘setback’ levels, but it is perhaps one of the most important buildings in Manhattan, maybe even in the United States.

This is because the building is what is known as a ‘colocation centre’: it’s a gigantic data facility packed with entire floors filled with servers, cabling and bandwidth, all of which is rented to commercial and retail customers.

Basically, the internet wouldn’t work without it.

And if your business requires robust and superfast network connections, you have an office there.

Wall Street firms that engage in high-frequency trading are based there so they can execute their trades in microseconds.

So are major cloud and telecommunications companies like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Yahoo!, Telefónica and China Mobile.

And so is Monty Woods, the Tech Detect.

Monty’s offices were on the 15th floor.

After announcing myself to the (rather large force of) security guards in the lobby, Monty buzzed me in, and after riding up in the elevator, I came to a sleek smoked-glass door marked:

THE TECH DETECT

Cyber Investigations

and

Security

Proprietor

Montgomery Woods

Everything about the place looked glossy, black and high tech. It would impress the Wall Street crowd, which I figured was Monty’s main clientele.

As soon as I arrived at the door, Monty opened it from within.

‘Heya, Sam. Come on in.’

The reception area was also a study in cool.

(Seriously, Monty’s interior decorator was awesome. I needed to up my office game.)

Dark walls, dark carpet.

A black-glass reception counter.

And on one entire wall, lit by recessed downlights, a display of gadgets.

‘Nice . . .’ I said, eyeing them.

It was an array of everyday items that had been modified for surveillance.

A bedside digital clock with a camera.

A ballpoint pen with a tiny forward-facing camera on its pocket clip.

And some cool radio-chip tracking devices disguised as everyday objects: a business card with a chip in it, even a tiny ball of fluff.