Page 68 of King’s Ransom

Our chopper roared over the buildings of the Upper West Side and then banked right, zooming at speed up the Hudson River, heading north toward Sleepy Hollow.

(I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be in a chopper again, but I had no choice. And also, Bill was flying, and knowing his Army experience, I felt as safe as I could hope to.)

As we’d taken to the air, Audrey had called Special Agent Hooper and told him where we were going. There was no time to collect him and the others from St Patrick’s Cathedral, with its robot cart problem.

We were heading to Sleepy Hollow without any FBI backup.

St Patrick’s Cathedral

Fifth Avenue, New York City

While we were speeding up the Hudson toward Sleepy Hollow, the NYPD bomb squad arrived at the cathedral to deal with the robot cart.

They did that, of course, with a robot of their own.

While the FBI and the cops all waited outside on Fifth Avenue, a tracked scanning bot crept up to the cart and scanned its interior with X-rays and Doppler scans.

The scanning bot beeped, sending back its findings.

‘That’s weird,’ the bomb squad captain said to Hooper. ‘There’s nothing inside the cart, except—’

At that moment, on their video screens, they saw the robot cart’s lid pop open . . .

. . . everyone tensed . . .

. . . only to see a jack-in-the-box head on a coil come springing out of it.

Hanging from its neck was a handwritten sign:

WRONG.

Hooper swore.

‘Damn it, he’s at Sleepy Hollow.’

The Hudson River swept by beneath our chopper as we sped north along the path of the waterway.

The sky was still a hard grey. Snowflakes whipped by outside.

At first, both sides of the broad river were covered in a pale urban sprawl: New Jersey on the left, New York on the right.

But after we passed the George Washington Bridge, the sprawl quickly gave way to forested hills and valleys.

Then a squat red-and-white lighthouse came into view on the right-hand shore of the river: the Sleepy Hollow Light.

By the time we reached it, it was getting on 1:45 p.m.

We sped around the lighthouse and over the town of Sleepy Hollow, heading inland toward some tree-covered hills that contained its cemetery.

SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY

A minute later, our chopper was hovering above the cemetery.

‘Where do you want me to put her down?’ Bill asked.

On the way, Garrett, Xiao and I had consulted some online maps of the graveyard.

Andrew Carnegie’s grave was roughly in the middle, while the Chrysler mausoleum was at the far northern end of the property.