Page 41 of King’s Ransom

‘Ajax!’

‘Get me out of here, you useless fuck!’ he yelled back.

If I was going to reach him, I’d have to lean out, which meant I needed something to anchor me.

‘Be back in a few seconds,’ I called and hurried inside.

At the same time, two floors above me, having clambered up the fire stairs, Merritt Garrett burst out onto the blow-through level that was the 75th floor.

Instead of large square glass windows, this floor just had large square holes through which the wind passed.

Garrett checked his watch.

He had less than three minutes.

He peered over the edge of the building.

The northern flank of the pencil tower dropped away from him.

It was dizzying. The gold-tinted glass wall stretched all the way down to the street far below.

And there, two storeys directly below him, were Cassandra and Ajax King.

Hovering a few yards out from them was the fearsome black military drone.

Garrett never stopped moving.

He quickly found a storeroom containing the harnesses and ropes used by the window-cleaning crews.

(Supertall buildings didn’t use steel platforms that dangled from the roof to clean their windows; it was more efficient to suspend cleaners on individual harnesses from the blow-through levels.)

He put on a harness.

Two minutes.

And then—with his harness safely on and its rope clipped to a stanchion a few yards inside the rim—Merritt Garrett lowered himself over the edge and down the side of the skyscraper.

By then I had grabbed the longest electrical cable I could find in the apartment: a twelve-foot cable from a Christmas tree with many lights.

I tied one end of the cable to the leg of a sturdy lounge chair—which Audrey held in place—and then the other around my wrist.

Then, using the cable as a tether, I leaned out the shattered window, high above the street, and got closer to Ajax King.

A few moments later, I saw Merritt Garrett—hanging from his rope like a mountain-climber abseiling down a cliff—arrive beside the terrified Cassandra, pinned by her neck to the exterior of the 73rd floor.

Cassandra was sobbing, hyperventilating.

Ajax was swearing.

The drone lurked menacingly, like a giant bird of prey watching us with its frowning red eye.

When Cassandra saw Garrett descend into place beside her, her eyes popped with surprise and hope.

Time check.

50 seconds.

‘Help us!’ she cried to Garrett.