Page 129 of King’s Ransom

I checked my watch.

It was past 10:30 p.m.

It was late and I was tired, but now I knew one place I’d be visiting in the near future: 23 Doyers Street.

‘Thanks for all your help on this, Monty,’ I said. ‘Can I have a copy of that plaintext? I’ll take a stab at decoding it.’

‘Take a photo of it with your phone,’ Monty said. ‘Like I said, I don’t want to even cut-and-paste this data. Just touching it with a cursor might alert the owner to us reading it. And like I said, I don’t want to piss off Modern Alchemical Solutions.’

I took a photo of the plaintext with my phone.

‘I, um, have one more favour to ask,’ I said.

‘Shoot.’

‘Audrey’s holed up at a safe place, the FBI is after me, I just had a shootout with those Chinese assassins, and God knows who else might be watching me. Last night, I was staying at a motel up in Sleepy Hollow. Shit, I still have some of my stuff there . . .’

Monty smiled. ‘You need a bunk for the night? No problem, dude.’

He went over to a door in the corner of his office.

It opened onto a windowless closet with a small fold-out cot in it. Beside the cot was a reading lamp and an old landline phone.

‘I do all-nighters all the time,’ Monty said. ‘Slept many a night in here.’

‘A landline?’ I nodded at the old phone.

‘It was here when I moved in,’ Monty said. ‘Still works, too. I like it. Reminds me of the time, decades ago, when this building was a massive telephone exchange. Oh, and there’s a gym on the seventh floor where you can shower in the morning. Although, I do have a price for this.’

‘Yes?’ I said uncertainly.

‘You gotta help me find a girlfriend, buddy,’ Monty said. ‘My mom is driving me nuts, constantly saying I need to find a lady. You, I mean, you landed that FBI babe. You gotta tell me how you did that. Dark magic? I mean, maybe, I don’t know, maybe you could set me up with a friend of hers sometime.’

I smiled. ‘Sure. I’d be happy to.’

(Audrey had several friends who complained about how few nice men were out there. And Monty was nice.)

‘Cool, great, excellent, thanks,’ Monty said, nodding. ‘Oh, I also keep some deodorant and toothpaste and stuff in my private bathroom. Help yourself. What’s mine is yours. As for me, I’m going home to my electric blanket. You can let yourself out in the morning. I’ll give you the codes for all the doors.’

‘Thanks, Monty.’

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.)