Page 164 of King’s Ransom

4071AY: YOU’LL BE EXTRACTED UPON PAYMENT. SHE WON’T. IT WI************DOUBLE CROSSE****

4633QQ: OK. I’LL BE THERE.

4071AY: YOU WILL HAVE SATISFACTION.

12/20/26

4071AY: OVERALL RIDDLE HOL

The Unperson had been telling his client—4633QQ—that he needed them ‘to be there’.

The client replied, ‘You won’t . . .’

Then the Unperson said the client would be extracted upon payment while someone else—a woman—wouldn’t.

And then something about a double-cross.

‘You will be extracted on payment.’

Of what?

A ransom?

I tried to think of who, on December 21st, had been freed upon the payment of a ransom when someone else hadn’t.

Not the bodyguard who’d been suspended from underneath the express elevator.

The fake Quinn McCade—the Unperson himself impersonating the insurance executive—had said the Kidnapping & Ransom policy only applied to Aristo King’s family members.

(That exchange now took on a whole new awful complexion. The Unperson had probably enjoyed allowing the poor bodyguard to die.)

Not the boy Alexei.

The fake Quinn McCade—the Unperson again—had dissembled and delayed for so long that Ms Kimura had been forced to pay Alexei’s ransom of $40 million from Aristo King’s own funds. And the boy hadn’t been freed. He’d been dropped anyway, to be caught by me.

When Ajax and Cassandra had been attached to the outside of the windows of the 73rd floor, there was no ransom paid, and McCade—the Unperson—had been nowhere to be found.

(Now I knew that the Unperson had been up on the roof at that time, placing Winnie Tan and Yasmina in the FBI helicopter, presumably with his accomplice, the fake Lenny Grossman, after they had ruthlessly gunned down all the cops and bodyguards in the penthouse with their silenced machine guns.)

But a ransom had been paid later . . .

‘You’ll be extracted upon payment. She won’t.’

. . . a ransom that had seemingly been paid by the Unperson posing as Quinn McCade, supposedly on behalf of the insurance company . . .

. . . for Winnie Tan.

And she’d been released, even though—as I now knew—there had been no insurance company on the other end of the Unperson’s phone.

‘She won’t’ must have been a reference to Yasmina, who wasn’t ransomed.

Which would mean . . .

I was nearing the end of my long taxi ride.

My cab passed a couple of golf courses: Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the National Golf Links of America. Private clubs. High-end. Exclusive.

The cab turned onto Millstone Brook Road.