Page 197 of King’s Ransom

Rather than Yasmina Ivanova, the culprits were Winnie Tan, Merritt Garrett, Chinese spies operating a secret police force out of an ‘employment agency’ in Chinatown, and a murky company from the darknet called Modern Alchemical Solutions Inc.

The heroes of that day also changed.

Now they were Special Agent Audrey Mills (shot in the line of duty and almost kidnapped in a wild ambulance chase on the Henry Hudson Parkway while protecting the QuantumSpeed-7 chip from the Chinese) and Monty Woods (the brilliant Tech Detect, drowned in concrete by the killers from Modern Alchemical Solutions but not before he’d cracked their comms, which had proven to be vital in the investigation).

And me.

Once again, everyone in the media wanted to speak to me.

Especially after a photographer had snapped a shot of me leaving 59West, flanked by cops and FBI agents, covered in ­concrete dust and spots of blood.

That shot appeared on the front page of every major news­paper and news website in the world.

The New York Post headlined it:

THE ACTUAL WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE!

I didn’t do any interviews.

I’d done the whole media thing once before and I wouldn’t do it again.

I directed all inquiries to the FBI, to Special Agent Trey Hooper.

While I was grateful for his assistance at Steinway Tower, he’d still been a dick before then.

He’d enjoyed talking to the media under the old narrative.

It seemed fitting that he should be the person to tell the media the real story now.

Yasmina Ivanova was released from Rikers Island first thing on New Year’s Day.

She left the jail with her sweet and loyal attorney Georgy at her side, to be confronted by a phalanx of reporters.

‘Yasmina! Yasmina!’ they yelled.

‘Aristo threw you to the wolves—!’

‘Are you going to divorce the richest man in the world—?’

‘Did you have a pre-nup, Yasmina—?’

She waved away their questions.

‘I’m just going to go home now, to my children,’ she said.

After she left in Georgy’s little red Toyota Yaris, she called me from Georgy’s phone and we chatted about a few things and arranged to meet the following day.

At the time Yasmina called me, I was with Audrey at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan.

I was standing with her and Deputy Director Longmuir in a secure parking garage as we watched the Unperson—now dressed in an orange jumpsuit and leg-irons—shuffle into the back of a prison van to be taken to a high-security federal facility.

He was flanked by a dozen Hostage Rescue Team agents in full tactical gear and gripping AR-15 assault rifles.

No chances were being taken.

The Unperson watched me as he strode to the van and stepped up into it.

He didn’t blink.