The Manhattan Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  But all she heard was the freezing wind battering at the window.

  And now the house felt different, as if she was in it for the first time again, even though the cream Edwardian armchair was in its corner, and the white rug – the snow carpet as Sean called it – was still in front of the dressing table, a little askew, the way she liked it.

  Sean’s things stood out as she looked around. His books in a tottering pile under his bedside table. His watch collection in a row on top of it. His navy Macy’s dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. His silver pen on the dressing table.

  She went to check Alek. ‘I love you,’ he’d whispered sleepily, looking up at her the evening before as she’d tucked him in. Alek, named after Sean’s friend who’d died in Istanbul, could make fuzzy feelings glow inside her just by smiling.

  That morning he looked like a sleeping waif, his hair all over the place, his skin shining, ruddy from the warmth of his duvet.

  She should have told Sean to skip the stupid merger celebrations.

  She stared out at the back garden, shivering at the thought of how cold it had to be out there.

  In the far corner there were remnants of the inch of snow that had fallen the day before. This winter was shaping up to be the worst in the city in years.

  It reminded her of Decembers in Somerset, before her mother died. She shook her head. Those days were long gone. And anyway, they used to get proper snow then, a winter coat of it, not a thin veil like they did in London. At the bottom of the garden there was a snowdrift piled up against the six-foot-high red-brick wall at the back.

  Something tightened around her, as if a ghost had hugged her.

  Yesterday, as the afternoon light had been fading, she’d been out in the garden. In the corner, by the back wall, there’d been a mound of pristine whiteness. Now it all looked trampled.

  Her nose twitched. That faint lemony smell was in the air again.

  She glanced around the kitchen for anything else out of place.

  Then she remembered the creak that had woken her during the night, the feeling that there’d been someone in the house.

  She hadn’t experienced anything like that in a long time.

  The buzz of the landline sent her flying to the phone. She held it to her ear, ready to scream at Sean as soon as he opened his mouth.

  There was no one else she could think of who’d be ringing at this time.

  5

  Henry Mowlam scratched his head. The lights in the Whitehall meeting room were down low and everyone was looking to the front, so no one in the group of ten senior MI5 staff attending the presentation would see him, but still he moved his hand quickly back onto the table.

  Major Finch was giving the morning presentation.

  ‘The information we have out of China is that there is something big brewing in the financial arena. New banking legislation, the biggest change since their Commercial Banking law of 1995, will negatively impact many of the richest men and women in China. The knives are out. Literally. Two middle-tier officials connected with this new law have already disappeared.’

  Henry tapped the table hard with his red MI5 biro. ‘What’s the likely impact outside China?’ he said, when Finch paused to let others speak.

  ‘We’re still assessing that. But our current best guess is a big rise in Chinese firms taking over major companies in the West, as new sources of income and places to invest their surplus cash are sought out. I expect there’ll be a few hiccups.’

  Henry looked down at the shiny mahogany table. This should be fun, he thought, monitoring managers trying to impose Chinese six-days-a-week work practices.

  ‘But the cultural impact of Chinese takeovers is not what we’re really concerned about today. Our concern is that this might lead to a backlash against Chinese communities in the United Kingdom. That’s why I called you to this meeting. We have reason to believe that has started.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Henry. ‘Is the Ebony Dragon hedge fund on the list of companies being monitored?’

  ‘No,’ said Major Finch.

  ‘You do know I submitted a report about the activities of its chairman, Lord Bidoner. Ebony Dragon has a source of funding in China now. They’ve been buying up British companies, even a few well known ones.’

  Finch sighed. ‘You are barking up the wrong tree, Henry. I know you’ve been researching Bidoner’s link to that book that was found in Istanbul – what do they call a section of it?’

  Henry looked at the faces around him. A few of them had heard what the title of a certain part of the book had been translated as. Their faces were even more expectant than the others, as if they were looking forward to a diversion.

  He smiled back at them, then spoke. ‘The book of dark prayers.’

  Major Finch threw her eyes up to the low ceiling as a few coughs in the room disguised some of the badly suppressed sniggers.

  ‘Yes, I read that bit, Henry. But what I don’t get is why that sort of thing should be of interest to any of us. This is the twenty-first century.’

  Henry waited for some more coughing to stop before replying.

  ‘I don’t believe in it, but when people start copying the crap that is in that book I think we should all keep an open mind.’ He looked around. No one nodded in agreement.

  ‘You’re talking about those murders in Jerusalem. Those bodies being burnt, yes?’

  Henry nodded.

  ‘But no connection with Bidoner or his hedge fund has been proven, Henry. We monitored him for six months, didn’t we?’

  ‘Ebony Dragon were the only people who profited from what happened around that time.’

  ‘We can’t investigate everyone who makes a profit, Henry. We’d be seriously understaffed if we did. We have no proof that anything illegal went on. And Ebony Dragon is one of the largest hedge funds in the world. I expect they have fingers in a lot of pies.’

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ said Henry, quietly.

  Finch was already moving on to something else.

  6

  It wasn’t Sean on the phone. It was one of his colleagues from work, George Donovan.

  George was a senior security manager at BXH who took an interest in Sean’s project there. He was a close-mouthed Iraqi war veteran, a borderline posttraumatic stress victim, Sean said, who’d rejoined his British army regiment when he’d heard they were heading to Afghanistan for a campaign.

  She’d met him only twice. There was something weird about his stare. It felt as if he was wondering whether to kill you or not. He reminded her of Mark, her ex, who had died in Israel. He’d had a similar distant stare at times, as if he’d seen too much.

  Sean had told her that George had been a hero. But why BXH needed that kind of security officer, he’d never explained.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Ryan.’

  ‘Good morning, George.’

  George cleared his throat. Isabel wondered was he at work, sitting in that neon-lit open-plan office on the twenty-ninth floor of BXH, the banking corporation worth the GDP of a fast-developing nation state, where he and Sean and ten thousand other Londoners worked like coal miners on twelve-hour shifts. Sean had been working late at the bank for months now, integrating the facial recognition software the Institute had developed with the bank’s IT systems.

  And if he was at the office already, did that mean that any minute now he was going to rush into one of those breakfast meetings Sean was always telling her about?

  ‘Can I speak to Sean, please?’ George’s tone was stiff, proprietorial, as if Sean belonged to BXH, not to Isabel. Not really.

  It was a tone Isabel hated. She had to tighten her hand around the phone to stop herself reacting.

  ‘He’s not here.’ There was no point in lying. ‘He hasn’t come back yet. I thought he was with you lot last night.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mrs Ryan. Sean has a meeting here at eight thirty. I’m sorry to disturb you. I thought I might catch him before he left your house.’ He
paused for a millisecond, to reload.

  ‘Aren’t you and Sean going away later today?’ There was the tiniest note of surprise in his tone. And something else too. Did he know something Isabel didn’t?

  She chewed her lip. She hadn’t done that in years. The pressure in her forehead was intense suddenly, as if a blood vessel had become trapped.

  ‘We’re going tonight.’ She tried to make it sound as if they had plenty of time.

  They had plenty of time.

  George hummed. It sounded almost as if he was laughing.

  Isabel wanted to explode. The pressure inside her was rising, like a wave.

  ‘What time did you last see him?’ she said, in as calm a tone as she could muster.

  A dog barked in one of the other back gardens. Isabel felt the bones in her fingers pressing into the plastic of the phone.

  ‘Maybe six yesterday evening. He was expected in here this morning.’ There was a note of anger in his voice. Was he implying Sean was late?

  A prickly warmth spread over Isabel’s face. She hated anyone criticising Sean.

  ‘I thought he had a day off today?’

  A tiny snort came down the line.

  ‘What time had you been planning to leave for Paris, Mrs Ryan?’

  It sounded as if George thought the trip was bound to be cancelled. The hairs on the back of Isabel’s neck rose like quills.

  ‘The train’s at a minute past six. Our taxi’s coming an hour before that.’

  The journey from Fulham to St Pancras International station should take no more than forty minutes, even late in the afternoon, but Sean had wanted them to be early, to enjoy every second of what they’d earned, he’d said.

  By five fifteen that afternoon at the latest, according to Sean’s plan, they’d be in St Pancras. And after that it’d be first class all the way. It was going to be a weekend to remember. A well-deserved payback for all the evenings she’d spent alone while he was working.

  ‘Should I tell Sean something when I see him?’ she said.

  ‘Can you tell him I’m looking for him? Thanks.’ The line went dead.

  Isabel tapped Sean’s number into the handset and got that stupid voicemail message again. She cut the line.

  She stood by the window, massaging her temples. An unsettling memory had come back to her.

  Sean had said something the weekend before about a feeling he’d had that George was spying on him. Sean had reported some regulatory issue to the bank’s technology security committee and ever since he’d constantly been asking him questions, Sean had said.

  Isabel had told him he was getting paranoid.

  But there was something about George’s tone on that call that had almost been like a warning. Sean had also told her that Paul Vaughann had been taking an interest in his project recently. He’d complained that Vaughann brought out the worst in people.

  Paul Vaughann III was the President and Chief Executive of the twenty-ninth-floor UK operation of BXH. Insiders called him The Shark, because of some mythical incident when he’d bitten a fellow trader’s arm to get his attention. And he loved the nickname so much, Sean said, that he’d had a shark’s jaws mounted behind the desk in his office.

  Vaughann was also known for biting people’s heads off if they criticised the bank in his presence, whether they were the bank’s employees or not.

  A low-flying jet on its way to Heathrow passed over the house noisily. Isabel looked up at the leaden sky.

  Not far away, the traffic would be bumper to bumper on the King’s Road, cars full of slowly stewing people, buses full of workers anxious to get in on time, trucks spewing diesel fumes.

  Isabel closed her eyes. ‘Come home, Sean.’

  7

  Pastor Stevson, the American pastor and tele-evangelist who had sponsored the most important archaeological dig in Jerusalem in fifty years, was coming up in the mahogany-panelled elevator of the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

  He’d been sweating. His white hair and beard were sticking to his pink-mottled skin. His wife hated him looking this way, but there was nothing he could do.

  He’d been out late and would have stayed out later if she hadn’t called and told him she was up and praying for his safe return, and that she’d tell everyone back in Dallas if he stayed out all night.

  As he strode down the blue-carpeted corridor he rehearsed his lines. His wife, whose money had sponsored his first TV station, was not someone he wanted to fight with.

  But he had to put her in her place.

  The first thing he noticed when he entered the suite was that someone had pulled the floor-to-ceiling blue and gold curtains back, allowing the twinkling lights of Manhattan into the room. Had she been praying at the window, as she’d told him she’d done before when she’d been suspicious about his whereabouts?

  ‘Where the hell were you?’ were the first words out of his wife’s mouth.

  ‘I was walking the streets and praying. Why are you questioning me?’

  ‘You’ve been gone since dinner.’ She spat the words out.

  ‘That was no reason to call me, woman.’ Pastor Stevson pointed at his wife. His finger was shaking in righteous anger.

  His wife stared at him, as if he’d just pissed on the floor.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ she drawled.

  Pastor Stevson pulled a thin prayer book out of the inside pocket of his jacket. His cream suit was crumpled, but she had no way of proving what he’d been doing. Unless that whore had had a camera. He smiled for a second. Where would she have put it?

  A memory of the redhead straddling him, her breasts bouncing, came to him. He wiped a hand across his brow. He had to put such thoughts away.

  He bellowed at his wife. ‘How dare you question me! Ye shall be cursed. Remember Ephesians 5:22. Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord!’ His hand shook as he raised it high.

  ‘I am deep in God’s work and you dare question me! This is the time for belief, not listening to the tongues of the devil playing in your mind. Ye shall be cursed if you continue this.’ He walked to the curtain and closed it.

  ‘What are you doing with all the money you moved out of the church bank account?’

  So that’s what this is about, he thought. Okay, I’ll tell her a little, just to keep her jaw busy. There can’t be any harm in telling my wife now we are so near the end.

  He turned to face her. ‘You remember that dig in Jerusalem we financed?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, I’ve been working with a group of believers since then. The money is invested with them. That dig in Jerusalem got closed down, but they couldn’t take away what I discovered.’ He pointed a shaking finger at himself. ‘A wonder that changes everything.’

  The pastor’s wife, a thin, blonde woman, whose black dressing gown was pulled tight under her chin, waved her hand dismissively through the air. ‘You told me there was a fire at that site, that the locals burnt that whole building down.’

  ‘Samples had already been taken. I told you that too.’ He put his hand towards her; it was a fist now.

  ‘Cut to the chase, who the hell are these people and what the hell do they need all that money for?’ She had a habit of asking the tricky questions.

  Pastor Stevson shook his head. He sat on the long yellow flower-patterned couch. It took up the area in front of the wall-mounted TV screen. He looked at the prints of Grecian urns that sat on either side of the TV.

  ‘What in hell’s name have you gone and done? I can’t believe this,’ said his wife. Then she held her hand out to him. ‘You are taking advantage of my family’s generosity.’ The oil price rise had done wonders for many families in their part of Texas in the last ten years.

  It was galling for Pastor Stevson to think of all that money gushing out of the ground, just because they had farms in the right place. The Lord gave way too much to that family.

  ‘Don’t question me, Martha.’

  His wife shook her head, turne
d away from him. She had a sour look on her face.

  ‘We’re going to bring forward the end times. His return. That’s what we’re working for. Our money is going to make it happen. And you have the gall to question this work?’

  ‘Why do they need all your church’s money?’ she said. She was shaking her head, slowly. Then she leaned towards the pastor, her face full of suspicion.

  Pastor Stevson had his reply ready. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because if we don’t get this right, we won’t be heading to heaven. We’ll all be heading for hell.’

  8

  Sean had warned her about getting paranoid after what they’d been through in Istanbul and Jerusalem, seeing conspiracies everywhere.

  Was this just paranoia? Wasn’t his work for BXH just another consulting project, even if it was a big one?

  The BXH project had been going on for over a year. First there’d been a small pilot project, which the Institute, where Sean worked, had been keen on Sean managing himself, due to his knowledge of super-fast image analysis. Then there’d been a long wait for a decision on implementation, while they kept doing tests.

  The whole thing should have been up and running by now, but it wasn’t. Sean had complained that he was at the end of his tether with it all.

  Was there anyone she could call?

  She knew a few of the other wives from the Institute well enough to go to coffee mornings with them, but she’d never had a phone call from any of them complaining that their husbands were missing.

  There was only one person she really trusted; Rose. Their husbands had been involved with the bank for about the same time. And she was also looking after Alek for the weekend.

  Most of the wives she knew from BXH were far too competitive to show any weakness publicly. Whenever she’d met them they talked about who was going to Ascot, what they were going to wear, the private schools their children attended, or their holiday homes in the south of France or Tuscany.