Page 83 of King’s Ransom

Online trolls derided her.

Obviously, she’d placed her son and herself in positions of fake danger to make them seem like innocent victims when in reality they’d been in no peril at all.

Indeed, both had been saved when others hadn’t.

At 7 p.m. on December 23, as I sat in the waiting room at the hospital, I watched as Yasmina King was arrested live on television.

Shortly after, a publicist working for Aristo King announced that he was initiating divorce proceedings against her.

That same publicist also asked all news outlets to henceforth refer to Yasmina by her maiden name, Ivanova.

Yasmina Ivanova was denied bail and remanded to the Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers Island. Known as Rosie’s, it was New York’s jail for female offenders.

The media coverage became even more brutal.

The Post jumped on Yasmina’s Russian heritage and called her the ‘Russian Widow’ and queried just how long she and the Russian gangsters had been working together.

Having been a model in her working life meant that every story was accompanied by photos of her in skimpy swimsuits or lingerie.

Since she was being held at Rikers, her two young children would stay with their father, Aristo King, in his ocean-front mansion on Meadow Lane in Southampton.

FBI forensics teams descended on 59West.

At 8 p.m. on December 23rd, a press conference was held in the lobby of the tower.

At this packed gathering, Special Agent Trey Hooper—who else?—answered the media’s questions.

Again, I watched from the hospital’s waiting room.

Hooper’s answers included:

The whole building had been sealed, given that the Bureau had to examine crime scenes on several floors plus the roof. All residents were still forbidden from returning to their apartments.

An FBI forensics team had gone over every inch of the penthouse.

During this sweep, the Grandmaster’s DNA—taken from his body at the cemetery—was found on many of the gags that had been on the victims.

Each victim, Hooper said—Aristo King himself, four of his children, the bodyguard who’d been suspended from the express elevator with Alexei, and even King’s two wives who had been taken from under our noses and deposited in the chopper on the roof—had been immobilised with an injection of an anaesthetic drug called Duramorph.

I thought about this last revelation.

Most modern kidnappers used roofies or chloroform to knock out their victims, chiefly because those soporific drugs are easy to get.

Duramorph, on the other hand, was a medical-grade anaesthetic used in surgical procedures. It wasn’t easily obtainable to someone outside the medical field.

I looked it up.

Duramorph, it turned out, was the commercial name for an opioid called morphine sulfate and it was popular with surgeons because of its rapid onset and quick recovery time.

Patients who were administered it went under in a few seconds and then—in what seemed to them like the blink of an eye—woke up in the recovery room with no memory of their surgery.

It had one other singular feature.

Unlike other anaesthetics like Propofol, patients injected with Duramorph could be instantly awakened with a shot of naloxone.

In short, it was potent yet precise: depending on the dose, a victim could be knocked out for five or ten minutes, and if necessary, awakened on demand with naloxone.

(Apparently, this also worked in reverse: an anaesthetist couldn’t put you under for surgery if you had naloxone in your system.)