Page 82 of King’s Ransom

(This last death garnered a lot of online attention.

Teary vigils were held by influencers at the various nightclubs Ajax had frequented, all assiduously filmed for Instagram and TikTok. New York influencers swayed dejectedly to EDM music and toasted Ajax’s memory with $36 martinis.

Ajax’s sister, Cassandra—who had survived the same awful scenario that had killed her brother, having been saved by Merritt Garrett—did not attend these vigils.

She had joined her mother Shelby Cox, who by then had arrived in New York from Vail. They were holed up in Shelby’s loft apartment in SoHo, making preparations for Ajax’s upcoming memorial service.)

Other funerals were also arranged and Aristo King put out a press release that he’d be establishing a foundation for the families of all the people who’d died trying to protect him and his family.

His former nanny, Madison Barnes, and her son were recovering in a 6-star resort-spa in Florida.

The QuantumSpeed-7 chip—last seen in the possession of Audrey when she was with the Chinese-American detective, Xiao—was lost during their confrontation with the aerial drone.

It had not been recovered yet.

Then other connections surfaced.

After Yasmina King’s text correspondence with the Grandmaster was revealed—his real name was indeed Sergei Kazan and DNA records had confirmed that the dead man in the woollen peacoat was him—the FBI turned its focus on her.

Its agents investigated all of her phone calls and financial transactions from the last ten years.

What they found was shocking.

It turned out that the Grandmaster did indeed have links to a Russian criminal network in Brighton Beach out by Coney Island led by Roman Oberov and known as the Brighton Bratva—and that over the last decade, Yasmina King had corresponded with them several times by phone.

She had also paid them large sums of money not once, not twice, not three times, but on four occasions.

$3 million.

$6 million.

$12 million.

$3 million.

It was damning stuff.

(The Grandmaster’s standard fee, it was revealed, for a ­kidnap-and-extortion scheme was $3 million.)

Then angry text messages from Yasmina King to her former nanny were discovered.

It wasn’t the FBI who found those.

It was TMZ.

The gossip organisation gleefully reproduced a bunch of SMS exchanges between Yasmina and Madison Barnes in which Mrs King excoriated the young nanny for seducing her husband.

Like you didn’t do it yourself, bitch, Ms Barnes had replied.

When it became known that the former nanny and her son had also been two of the victims during the ‘Tower of Terror’ incident, the calls for Yasmina King’s head intensified.

Yasmina protested her innocence.

During that day, she said, her own son, Alexei, had been put in mortal danger in the elevator shaft. And she herself had been strapped in the chopper on the edge of the roof.

It didn’t help.

It may even have made things worse.