Page 38 of King’s Ransom

Its two barrels blazed with long tongues of muzzle-flash as they unleashed powerful bursts of gunfire.

The sound was absolutely deafening.

BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!-BOOM!

Seeing Heidi and Bill drop to the floor, the Tech Detect had done the same, as did one of the FBI forensic agents, milliseconds in time.

The other forensic agent wasn’t so lucky.

The barrage of heavy-calibre gunfire tore him apart in multiple sprays of blood before—due to the rotation of the drone—the wave of bullets shattered the floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the corner bedroom and suddenly the drone swept out of the bedroom and into the sky.

Covered in broken glass, her pink hair blowing in the wind, Heidi yelled into her phone, ‘Sam! It just flew out of here! It’s gone!’

The doors of my elevator opened onto the 73rd floor (of course, we had unfettered access to every apartment on every floor now).

An empty apartment lay before Audrey, Merritt Garrett and me.

It was deathly quiet.

We raced through the apartment’s entry foyer, heading north toward the side of the building that faced the park—

—and saw them.

My mouth fell open.

‘Jesus . . .’ Garrett said.

‘Oh, God . . .’ Audrey said.

We could only see their backs, pressed up against the outside of the glass.

Ajax and Cassandra King.

They both wore studded black leather bondage collars around their necks (which I assumed were from the brand that Cassandra endorsed).

Industrial suction cups—the kind with handgrips that were used by construction workers to carry large panes of glass—were attached to the leather collars with plastic zip-ties and they held the two young heirs to the windows, seventy-three storeys above the sidewalk far below.

Down on the 61st floor, Juno Everhart sprinted from room to room in the apartment there, followed by Special Agent Trey Hooper and the Chinese private detective, Xiao.

‘I don’t see anything!’ Juno yelled from the living room facing Central Park.

‘Me neither,’ Hooper called from a bedroom on the southern side.

‘Maybe I was wrong—’ Juno said.

She cut herself off as something rolled into the living room.

It was a little box-shaped robot vehicle: an autonomous delivery cart.

The kind used by the building to deliver mail and packages to the apartments.

It had cute little round ‘eyes’, designed to anthropomorphise it and thus make humans who saw it smile.

It trundled up to Juno Everhart.

And then it exploded.

All the windows on the northern side of the 61st floor, plus a few on the eastern and western sides, blew out spectacularly.