Page 199 of King’s Ransom

Unblinking. Emotionless.

Then he smiled thinly—

—as the doors closed over his face.

I watched the van go, uneasy, wondering in my heart if I should have killed him when I’d had the chance.

Thirty minutes later, Audrey and I were having lunch in the cafeteria at Federal Plaza—the food there was okay; plain and simple—when my phone rang.

It was Mia Kimura, Aristo King’s executive assistant and paramour.

‘If you have some time, Dr Speedman, Mr King would really like to speak with you,’ she said. ‘He can send a limo to fetch you.’

‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, ‘only this time he has to come to me.’

An hour later, Aristo King strode into an FBI conference room at Federal Plaza where Audrey and I sat waiting.

Mia Kimura was with him, of course. Upon seeing me, King smiled warmly, our previous unpleasant interaction at his drone base seemingly forgotten.

I introduced Audrey and we all sat.

‘Dr Speedman,’ the world’s richest man said, ‘I don’t apologise very often, but I must express how regretful I am about how I treated you the last time we met. I just have to say it: you are really something else. I mean, goodness, what a detective you are. What an incredible investigation you mounted. Especially when everyone else thought the case was over and done with.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘Tell me, how’s Murph?’

‘Who?’ he said quizzically.

I sighed inwardly.

He didn’t even know his chopper pilot’s name, the pilot who had been shot during the vicious drone attack at the Sandy Hook peninsula.

(Honestly, I’m not the type to judge anyone, but I was getting weary of these rich folks and their airy disregard for regular people. Unless you had money, you were literally invisible to them or, to use Winnie Tan’s term, you were a ‘human rounding error’. For the record, I found out later that Murph was recovering well in a hospital in New Jersey.)

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

‘We’re both busy men, so I’ll get straight to the point,’ he said. ‘I need a new head of security. I think it’s safe to say that Merritt Garrett did not work out. But you’re a different story, Sam. I’ll pay you forty mil per year to be by my side, all day, every day. To protect me and run my security.’

‘Forty million dollars . . .’ Audrey said. ‘Per year . . .’

‘That’s a lot of money,’ I said.

‘You’re worth it, son,’ Aristo King said.

I nodded slowly. ‘Sir, thank you for the offer, but I have to politely decline.’

‘Oh,’ he said, perplexed. ‘I was hoping we could put the past behind us, you know, let bygones be bygones.’

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘I just like working for myself and I have enough savings to be happy. There was, however, something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Shoot.’

I glanced at Ms Kimura. ‘You may want her to leave the room.’

‘Mia knows all my secrets,’ King said. ‘There’s nothing you can say that she can’t hear.’

‘Okay, then,’ I said. ‘So, I imagine you and Yasmina are finished?’

‘Yasmina? Oh, yeah, right. I’m sorry how all this panned out for her—I mean, being set up and all—but as you can imagine, it’s all pretty irreconcilable with her now.’