Page 45 of King’s Ransom

The NYPD pilot replied, ‘I never saw anything, sir. I was hovering over by the southwest side, near the master bedroom. Only came round to the north side when I saw that drone blast its way out of the bedroom. I took some hits and I’m shot up now. I gotta get back to base.’

We saw the chopper flying away over the neighbouring buildings.

‘Will somebody please tell me what the fucking hell is going on!’ Director Longmuir roared. ‘Can somebody—’

Garrett turned to Cassandra King. ‘Miss, can you tell us how this happened? Did you see whoever attached you to the side of this building?’

Still clearly traumatised, the young woman blinked rapidly as she answered. ‘No, I didn’t see who it was . . . I . . . I honestly don’t remember . . . I mean . . . I went to bed last night and I . . . well . . . I woke up just now stuck to the outside of the window.’

Hooper said, ‘I don’t get it. What does that even mean?’

Garrett frowned. ‘It might mean that whoever did this drugged her and her brother while they slept. Then while they were unconscious, he placed them outside.’

I felt it meant something even more pressing than that.

‘It means whoever did this is inside this building right now,’ I said.

‘What?’ Longmuir asked, shocked.

‘Whoever’s behind this is inside this building with us. He put Cassandra and Ajax into their positions sometime in the last twenty minutes. He used the elevator riddle with the first boy as a distraction so he could set up their trap. Now, for all we know, Cassandra and Ajax might have been a distraction for another test.’

Merritt Garrett added, ‘And he may also be more than one person. I’m not sure one guy acting alone could have attached two people to the outside of those windows.’

I nodded at a security camera above the storage room’s door.

‘Where’s the superintendent?’ I called. ‘Maybe he can get the CCTV footage from that camera.’

Hooper and Longmuir turned, looking for the stocky super­intendent named Lenny in the white coveralls.

He wasn’t here.

‘Where’d the super go?’ Hooper said, perplexed. ‘Somebody find him!’

I turned to Garrett and Xiao. ‘We need to swap notes on the Grandmaster. He’s known for elaborate crimes but this is next level. What do you guys know? I mean, I don’t even know his real name.’

Garrett said, ‘I don’t know for sure, but I believe the Grandmaster’s real name is Sergei Kazan. I dealt with him a few years ago. It all happened down at the Battery Maritime Building—the old ferry terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan—back when they were renovating it.

‘Anyway, one of the contractors owed money to some Russian gangsters over in Brooklyn, so the Grandmaster grabbed him, hung him upside-down over the water from the underside of one of the docks, weighed him down with iron chains . . . and then just waited for the tide. Filmed the whole thing live, sending the feed to the contractor’s wife.

‘Said she had until the tide came in to pay up. The wife called me but we were out of time. So she paid. I raced down to the BMB and found him on the dock, still wrapped in chains. The Grandmaster left a chess piece in the contractor’s breast pocket.’

Xiao said, ‘My encounter with him didn’t end as well. It was last January. The Grandmaster kidnapped the 26-year-old son of a Chinese businessman based here in New York. He was a dumb, cocky kid: a bitcoin influencer on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Flaunted his bitcoin fortune online, especially the new Ferrari he bought with it.

‘But it wasn’t a ransom thing. It was straight extortion.

‘The Grandmaster snatched the kid and tortured him for the passcode to his digital wallet. He lay the kid on his back under a car mechanic’s hoist and then lowered the Ferrari on top of him, dropping it six inches per hour until the kid relented.

‘The kid gave him the passcode and his bitcoin fortune vanished into the dark web.

‘The Grandmaster killed him anyway.

‘I found the lad in a mechanic’s shop in Staten Island crushed under his new Ferrari. A chess piece lay beside the hoist. I had reason to believe that the Grandmaster did the gig on contract for the Russian criminal gang based in Brighton Beach called the Brighton Bratva and led by Roman Oberov, but after I retrieved the boy, his father told me to let the matter go. He didn’t want to mess with Oberov and his Russians.’

‘What about you?’ Garrett asked me.

‘Mine was a ransom scenario,’ I said. ‘The kidnapping of a child that the parent wanted to keep quiet. It involved a rich oil driller out by Abilene. The Grandmaster—paid by a rival wild­catter—nabbed the driller’s daughter and FaceTimed a video of her lying in a steel tub that was slowly filling with crude oil. It was rising two inches every hour.

‘I was hired to find her and I did. I found the location—from some objects I saw in the background of the video—but the Grandmaster saw me coming and he called her father. Said he’d kill her right away if I didn’t retreat. I pulled back, the money was paid and the girl was handed back with a chess piece in her pocket.’