Page 20 of King’s Ransom

A Spiderhawk.

Manufactured by Aristo King’s own company in New Jersey.

And as I came closer to it, I could hear that it was talking.

A speaker on the drone’s fuselage—designed, I guessed, for crowd control—was playing a recorded message.

A cultured man’s voice was saying:

‘—I have Mr King and four of his children. And so I propose a test, a battle of wits against the five greatest detectives in America today. Bring Zhang Xiao, Montgomery Woods, Juno Everhart, Merritt Garrett and Samuel Speedman here by twelve noon or I start killing the King progeny and ultimately Mr King himself—’

Then the recording started again.

‘—I have Mr King and four of his children. And so I propose a test . . .’

The bald fbi man stepped forward.

‘Dr Speedman, you made it just in time,’ he said. ‘I’m Gavin Longmuir, Deputy Director of the CCRSB Division at the Bureau and head of the Critical Incident Response Group. We’re short on time, so I’ll make the introductions brief.’

He indicated the other detectives:

First, a wiry Chinese guy in a fedora and brown trenchcoat. (Yes, a fedora hat. He stood unnaturally still and had eyes as hard as steel, which all combined to make his hat look pretty darn cool.)

‘This is Zhang Xiao, from Chinatown.’

Second, an overweight white guy in his early 30s wearing a t-shirt with a Kali Linux symbol on it. He had thick glasses, messy red hair, pasty skin and a scraggly red beard.

‘Montgomery Woods, also from here in New York, known as—’

‘The Tech Detect,’ I said, nodding respectfully. ‘Very nice to meet you.’

The Tech Detect was a legend in the cyber world. He reclaimed stolen identities for ordinary people on the regular internet and recovered stolen bitcoin from Russian hacker farms on the darknet.

(To put his talent into perspective: I myself had pretty good cyber skills—hacking law enforcement databases, coding, etc.—but the Tech Detect was leagues above me. If you ranked such skills on a scale of 1 to 10, I was an 8.5. He was a 20.

Another cool thing: he had his offices at 60 Hudson Street down in Tribeca, which was basically the most wired-up building in America.

Called a ‘colocation centre’, the whole building was filled with servers, fibre-optic cabling and cooling systems. If there was an absolute core to the internet in America, it was 60 Hudson Street.)

Third, Longmuir indicated the woman: mid-30s, seen-it-all eyes, stocky. She styled her hair in striking shoulder-length braids with beads at the tips and while she wore casual clothes—puffer jacket and cargo pants—it didn’t escape my notice that her boots were military.

‘Juno Everhart from Chicago.’ She gave me a curt professional nod. I hoped I could introduce Heidi to her later.

Fourth came a tall, good-looking dude in his late 50s. He had a tanned, wrinkled face, sharp blue eyes and flowing brown hair. He wore a navy blazer, a white t-shirt, Wrangler jeans, a big belt buckle and cowboy boots. He was more ‘cowboy’ than I was and I’d lived my whole life in Texas.

‘Merritt Garrett, also from New York, and finally . . .’

He indicated me.

‘. . . Samuel Speedman from Houston.’

Standing in a loose semicircle, we all looked at each other, uncertain what exactly this ‘test’ was, what it would require us to do, and—to be honest—whether it might make us compete against each other.

It was 11:53.

Since I’d arrived last and we had a few minutes, I felt I had a little catching up to do.

I nodded at the items on the bed.