Page 153 of King’s Ransom

Aristo King was furious with me, and may have just tried to kill me with one of his drones.

The FBI was after me, and I couldn’t keep investigating this case from a holding cell.

In the end, I flagged down a couple of hikers who came down a nearby walking trail drawn by the explosion of the chopper.

I handed Murph to them. ‘Please, he’s been shot. Call 911 and get him to a hospital.’

I bent over Murph. ‘Hey, Murph. So, that autorotation landing, it worked. Not great, but it worked.’

‘Thanks for getting me out of that chopper, son,’ he said. ‘You could’ve left me.’

‘No, I couldn’t. But I have to now. There’re folks out there who want me dead and others who want to bring me in and I still have stuff to do.’

‘Go get ’em, champ,’ Murph said.

‘Do you mind if I borrow your Glock?’ I said. Not having a gun of my own in New York had become a real pain.

‘It’s all yours.’

‘Thanks.’ I dashed off and—please don’t tell anybody—stole a car from a parking lot that serviced the hiking trails and sped away in it.

The first rule of stealing a car is not to stay in it for too long: the cops will find you pretty fast. So I drove it down the length of the peninsula and into New Jersey, until I came to a subway station.

There I ditched the car in an underground parking lot and boarded a subway train.

I took the long way back to New York City.

Crowds were my friend now, so first I took the subway to Newark Airport and changed trains there. I also bought a black New Jersey Devils hockey cap and some cheap sunglasses, in case the FBI were scanning the CCTV feeds.

(I also visited a men’s room where I tried to clean all the sand off my body. It had got everywhere.)

Dusk had fallen by the time my (fifth) train approached Penn Station and as I rocked with the motion of the carriage, my mind whirred.

Aristo King’s super-generous job offer.

A brazen attack by the deadly drone.

This was getting seriously out of control.

Then my burner phone rang.

It was Monty Woods.

‘Dude, I cracked the security on my clone of Aristo King’s phone. You better come down to my office, right now.’

60 Hudson Street

29 December, 1705 hours

Dirty, bruised and with sand still in my underpants, I arrived at 60 Hudson just after 5 p.m.

I desperately wanted to have a shower, but Monty was ready to go. He pulled up a chair for me.

‘Jesus, what happened to you? Forget it, never mind. I don’t want to know.’

He nodded at his main computer screen.

On it was an image of an iPhone.