Page 132 of King’s Ransom

‘Will transfer to mill on Dec 20,’ Vasha reported further.

The mill, I figured, was the ruined water mill near the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where I’d found the Narcan foil wrapping. Vasha would bring the three Russian patsies there the day before December 21st.

More preparations.

I thought about the name Vasha. It sounded eastern European, Russian even. Was it a woman’s name? If so, had there been any women at or near the cemetery on December 21st?

There had been one: the red-haired female gardener named Maria Dubrowski. Could she have been Vasha? Maybe. But I wasn’t sure. Maria Dubrowski had seemed genuinely shaken up by what she’d witnessed that day.

But then I recalled another mysterious female participant from December 21st: the female driver of 59West’s courtesy van, the one that had left really early on December 21st and never returned.

Could she have been Vasha? Given the successful infiltration of a fake Lenny Grossman at 59West, it seemed entirely possible that these people could have also inserted a fake driver of their own.

I’d reached the end of my first little translation, so I ploughed on again—head bent, pencil scribbling—transcribing and decoding the remaining lines of that first paragraph of plaintext.

The more I did it, the more adept I became at it. Still, it took me a while.

An hour later, I had a new translation.

It began with another date: 121726, December 17th, four days before the event.

4071AY: DATE IS SET 21 DECEMBER. YOUR MAN IS ON THE LIST. CONFIRM TRANSFER OF FUNDS TO ESCROW ACCOUNT

9101ZK: COPY. MONEY HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED TO ESCROW ACCOUNT

4071AY: MAKE SURE YOUR MAN IS ON THE BRIDGE AND YOU WILL HAVE SATISFACTION

4071AY: DATE IS SET 21 DECEMBER. CONFIRM TRANSFER OF FUNDS TO ESCROW ACCOUNT

3765AZ: THANKS. MONEY IS IN THE ESCROW ACCOUNT AS REQUESTED

4071AY: YOU WILL HAVE SATISFACTION

4071AY: DATE IS SET 21 DECEMBER. CONFIRM TRANSFER OF FUNDS TO ESCROW ACCOUNT

4633QQ: FUNDS TRANSFERRED

I inhaled sharply.

In this cluster of messages, AY from Modern Alchemical Solutions was corresponding with three more individuals, arranging for each of them to make a payment to an escrow account.

These were his customers.

Three of them.

With the user IDs: 9101ZK, 3765AZ and 4633QQ.

This clarified something that had been bugging me about the whole event.

I’d originally assumed there was one person behind everything that had happened at 59West on December 21st.

But the goals of whoever had been behind that day—ruining Yasmina’s life, acquiring the QuantumSpeed-7 chip and doing it all with elaborate traps—just didn’t add up for a single individual.

But if Modern Alchemical Solutions had been working for three separate people, then there could indeed be multiple motives.

The realisation hit me like a punch to the face.

I wasn’t just looking for one bad guy here.