Page 163 of King’s Ransom

‘Can you put me on speaker, please?’

She did and I quicky told her and Heidi about everything that had happened since I’d left them two nights ago: Aristo King’s invitation to his drone base and the drone attack on the way back, Xiao and the Chinese, Modern Alchemical Solutions, the mysteri­ous plaintext, my chat with the Unperson, King’s collection of sex tapes, including some with his first wife, Winnie Tan, and, last of all, my encounter with the real Quinn McCade at Sinclair & Loewe Insurance.

When I was finished, Heidi said, ‘Surgically altered imposters, bad darknet companies, drone attacks. Little man, why oh why do you dig so deep . . . fuuuuck.’

‘Jesus,’ Audrey said. ‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m heading to Southampton to interview Winnie Tan at her home.’

‘Winnie Tan?’ Heidi said. ‘What makes you possibly think she’ll let you in to see her?’

‘I think she’ll see me,’ I said. ‘And the way I see it, right now, the only way for me to get out of all this without getting arrested by the FBI is to solve the whole damned thing, so that’s what I’m gonna do.’

‘Be careful, Sam,’ Audrey said.

We hung up.

I still had about thirty minutes left to travel.

I extracted my photos of the plaintext Monty Woods had pulled from Modern Alchemical Solutions’ communications with its three unknown clients.

I gazed at the middle paragraph with its heavily corrupted text, still undeciphered:

I called Monty Woods.

He picked up on the second ring.

‘Hey, Monty, any luck with that corrupted paragraph of text?’

‘I’m close,’ he said. ‘I wrote it all out on another standalone computer and am trying a new algorithm on it right now. But it’s slow. It’s literally processing as we speak. Hoping I’ll crack it sometime today.’

‘Please call me as soon as you get something.’

‘Copy that. Hey, Sam, you, er, didn’t happen to be in Chinatown today? Like, when that explosion went off? It’s all over the news.’

‘Might have been.’

‘Hot damn, I love you, dude! You are so hardcore! Don’t forget I want you to set me up on a date, if you don’t end up dead in all this. Talk later.’

He rang off.

I looked out the window of my cab.

Since I still had a short way to go, I figured I’d take a stab at the tricky paragraph, see if I could make anything of it.

I started at the beginning.

It began with ‘4071AY’ again.

The leader at Modern Alchemical Solutions, the Unperson.

I scanned the first five lines:

I rewrote it with spaces and punctuation, deleting the random 0s and 1s:

4071AY: NEED YOU THERE TO BE ****************OOF WITH *******

4633QQ: YOU WON’T ****************