Page 97 of King’s Ransom

‘It’s major shit, is what I know. Cutting-edge quantum stuff; the best code-cracking chip ever made. The QuantumSpeed-7 is a game changer.’

‘The presence of the QuantumSpeed-7 chip in all this really confuses me,’ I said. ‘Everything else that happened at the tower looked personal. It matched the narrative of a woman scorned paying the Grandmaster to exact revenge. But not the QuantumSpeed-7 chip. It suggests industrial espionage.’

‘I know,’ Monty said.

‘It also went missing at the cemetery,’ I said. ‘Still hasn’t been found, so far as I know. Can you find out who would want to deprive Mr King of his latest piece of world-changing tech? Maybe folks are talking about that in the really dark corners of the darknet.’

‘I’ll take a look,’ Monty Woods said.

My car swung around a wide curve on the Belt Parkway and the skyline of Coney Island came into view.

Project towers, plus the outline of an amusement park: a rollercoaster and a parachute-drop tower; the famous Luna Park.

‘Thanks, Monty. Great to be working with the famous Tech Detect. I gotta go. I’ve just arrived at my next stop.’

‘Nice to be working with the famous Detective,’ he said. ‘Where are you going anyway?’

‘To pay a visit to some Russian gangsters.’

Huntington Project Tower

Brighton Beach, NY

26 December, 1450 hours

Brighton Beach is known to many New Yorkers as ‘Little Odessa’ because of its sizeable population of Russian and Eastern European immigrants.

But in a city that has seen many of its historically working-class neighbourhoods get gentrified almost beyond recognition—looking at you, Brooklyn—Brighton Beach has remained resolutely blue collar.

This might be the result of all the project towers that loom over its streets.

There are many of them—tall, bulky and architecturally ugly—and they aren’t going anywhere soon, and rich yuppie-­hipster-bankers from Bushwick don’t want to live near the projects and their ethnically colourful residents.

All of which is to say that Brighton Beach—along with its neighbour, Coney Island, with its retro amusement park and cheesy tourist attractions—remains an ode to an older era of less affluent New York neighbourhoods.

And in neighbourhoods like that, criminal gangs and their bosses flourish.

Gang lords like Roman Oberov.

Now, you might ask, how does one get a meeting with a Russian gang boss like Oberov?

You ring his doorbell.

I pressed the buzzer for the top-floor apartment of the Huntington Project Tower.

A gravelly Russian-accented voice answered through the ­(reinforced steel) intercom. ‘What do you want?’

‘My name is Sam Speedman, I’m a private detective working for Yasmina Ivanova. I want to talk to Roman Oberov about Sergei Kazan, the Grandmaster, and what happened at Aristo King’s penthouse five days ago.’

There was a short pause.

Then, bzzzz, the front door beside the intercom unlocked.

‘Floor 19,’ the voice said.

The lobby of this public housing tower was drab, dirty and old.

The elevator smelled of cabbage.