Page 19 of King’s Ransom

It was probably worth $80 million yet whenever Mr King sat in bed, he couldn’t see it because it was above and behind him.

As for the five people:

One was a bald senior FBI man (cheap suit). I guessed he was a deputy director and Special Agent Hooper’s boss.

The other four were most certainly not FBI. Each wore their own idiosyncratic attire.

They were the other detectives who had been summoned here.

Three men and a woman.

They all turned as I entered the enormous bedroom, parting as they did so, allowing me to see the bed for the first time.

‘Oh, gosh . . .’ I breathed.

The silver-and-glass wall clock struck 11:50.

I’d got here with ten minutes to spare.

But my eyes were locked on the bed and what was on it.

MASTER BEDROOM

THE BED

There were four objects on the bed.

Three were very small and one was quite large.

They were:

1.A watch.

(Richard Mille, expensive, thick white band, a small drop of blood on its face.)

2.An Apple iPhone.

(Screen cracked.)

3.A chess piece.

(Black, king.)

And lastly:

4.A seven-foot-wide quad-rotor aerial attack drone.

Within the confines of the bedroom—in the way that certain things seem out of scale when in the wrong environment—the drone looked huge. It took up almost the entire bed, creating depressions in the expensive sheets.

This was the stealth bomber of drones.

It was a huge, black, fearsome-looking thing, X-shaped and sharp-edged, with rotors at the ends of its four arched spiderlike arms.

It had a single glowing triangular red ‘eye’ on its ­downward-

­pointed nose and two long 7.62 × 51mm machine-gun cannons mounted on its back, pointed aggressively forward.

A military attack drone.