Page 48 of King’s Ransom

Our killer—or killers—had snuck up on the two bodyguards and the cops from behind and opened fire on them on full auto, with silencers.

It was beyond ruthless.

It was pitiless.

Few people in the world are capable of such unfeeling violence—

Thump.

A soft whump made everyone spin.

It had come from the walk-in pantry in the kitchen.

We converged on it quickly, all our guns up.

Hooper gripped his service pistol, edgy and nervous. He yanked open the door—

—to reveal the little boy, Alexei, bound and gagged with duct tape, looking up into the barrels of all our guns.

Hooper almost shot the kid, but thankfully didn’t.

‘Move it, Eliot Ness.’ Heidi pushed past Hooper and bent to untie and comfort the petrified boy.

I exhaled and turned to the Tech Detect. ‘What was it you found?’

He was glancing from the boy to all the blood. I don’t think Monty Woods got out in the field very often.

‘Uh, what, sorry?’ he said.

‘Heidi said you found something interesting.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘I recorded that voice earlier, when he was giving us the first riddle. It sounded almost too clean and clear, so I ran it through a voiceprint analyser. It’s completely digital, created by a real-time AI algorithm. The speaker speaks and the program recreates what he or she says in that voice.’

‘So, the speaker could be a man or a woman or even multiple people?’ I said. ‘But the voice we hear stays the same?’

‘Correct.’

Audrey said, ‘Our opponent or opponents also just used the second riddle as a distraction for this one. Killed all these men and took the wives from right under our noses. He’s toying with us.’

‘So where are the two wives?’ Hooper asked.

‘They can’t be far,’ Xiao said. ‘This only happened in the last ten to fifteen minutes.’

Director Longmuir turned to the insurance guy, Quinn McCade. ‘Does your board pay out for King’s wives?’

McCade scowled. ‘I’ll call them now, so we’re ready this time.’

Merritt Garrett turned to me. ‘The new riddle was: You can’t laugh without me. You can’t hate without me. I’m silent even when I’m in an orchestra.’

In a flash, I saw the solution.

Either the riddles were getting easier, or I was getting better at solving them.

‘I know the answer,’ I said.

‘What is it?’ Longmuir said.

‘The letter h,’ I said. ‘It’s in the words laugh and hate and it’s silent in the word orchestra.’