Page 133 of King’s Ransom

I was looking for three.

Plus the mysterious ‘AY’ and his two colleagues from Modern Alchemical Solutions.

This was both satisfying and daunting at the same time.

You never want to find out that you’re up against more evil­doers than you originally thought, let alone six of them.

But at last I was getting somewhere.

I zeroed in on AY’s texts with 9101ZK.

That user was, I noted, the same one Monty had said was based at an employment agency on Doyers Street in Chinatown.

AY had told this customer that ‘your man is on the list’ and to ‘make sure your man is on the bridge’.

What list?

Regarding a man being on a bridge, the only man who’d been on any kind of bridge during the events of December 21st had been Xiao, the Chinese detective, who’d been . . .

. . . on the covered bridge at the cemetery with Audrey when they’d been meant to hand over the QuantumSpeed-7 chip to the drone.

And in that moment I realised what the list was.

Xiao had indeed been on a list.

A list that I had also been on.

The list of detectives who had been brought to 59West on December 21st.

Xiao had been there ostensibly as a detective, but in truth he’d been a plant, meant to be present when the QuantumSpeed-7 got out in the open.

Fuck. Me.

I would now definitely have to go to that ‘employment agency’ on Doyers Street in Chinatown.

It was past midnight, but I was on a roll, so I turned to the next chunk of plaintext that Monty had pulled from the comms of Modern Alchemical Solutions.

It was the one riddled with totally corrupted lines:

That was beyond my capabilities right now, so I went to the next readable paragraph, the third one:

Thankfully, this one was just like the first paragraph, and I quickly set about writing out its text by hand and removing the 0s and 1s.

Within a few words, I sat bolt upright.

Because I saw my own name.

4071AY: JUST SAW SPEEDMAN POKING AROUND AT THE MILL BY THE CEMETERY

A cold knot twisted in my stomach.

Uh-oh, I thought.

I continued deciphering the paragraph for another twenty minutes till it was written out in full.

Then I read it:

4071AY: JUST SAW SPEEDMAN POKING AROUND AT THE MILL BY THE CEMETERY. HE’S SMART AND DETERMINED. IF HE GETS ANY CLOSER, WILL HAVE TO TAKE ACTION