The Manhattan Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  The pastor stared at her.

  ‘I must take this,’ said Lord Bidoner. ‘I want you and my friend to pray together.’ He put the phone to his ear and walked to the other end of the long room near the double-height window. The glass shone as if it were a mirror. Outside the twinkling lights of other skyscrapers filled the air.

  He listened for a few minutes. Then he spoke, forcefully.

  ‘You will make him cooperate. Do whatever it takes,’ he said.

  He closed the line and put his hand on the window glass.

  ‘The last one is near,’ he whispered.

  Then he turned and went after Xena and the pastor. She had left the door of the panic room open just a half an inch. Through the crack he could see her helping the pastor take his shirt off. He stood in the darkness of the hall and watched until they were both naked.

  She ran her hands all over the pastor’s pudgy white body.

  Few could resist the way Xena prayed. And this pastor certainly wouldn’t have needed much persuasion about the earthy spirituality of her ancient beliefs.

  He had no idea what he was letting himself in for.

  16

  Isabel heard heels tapping across a floor. Then another voice came on the line. A woman’s voice. A voice she didn’t recognise.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Ryan, Sean isn’t here. George asked me to tell you.’

  Her balloon popped.

  Anger threatened like a sudden storm.

  ‘But George said he was there two seconds ago. He went to get him.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Ryan, George was mistaken.’ She sounded like a doorman telling some loser she couldn’t get in to their club.

  ‘Please, can you check again? Sean is supposed to be in a meeting there now.’

  There was a pause. This one was longer than the last. Isabel wanted to shout at the woman.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ryan, I have to go. Your husband is not here.’

  ‘Can I speak to George?’ She wasn’t going to get any sense out of this woman.

  She replied instantly. ‘Sorry, Mrs Ryan, George is out for lunch. Was there anything else?’

  ‘But I just spoke to him!’

  ‘He’s gone out now.’

  The conversation was coming to a quick halt. But there was one other thing she had to find out.

  ‘Was Sean in at all today?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Ryan.’ She sounded irritated.

  ‘Okay.’ Isabel cut the call.

  The activity light on Sean’s laptop was going mad. The Wi-Fi light was blinking. They had night-time only updates set on their machines. There shouldn’t be any Wi-Fi access going on that wasn’t user initiated.

  She checked what processes were active. There was one taking up 90 per cent of CPU time. She killed the process. What the hell was going on? They had the best antivirus software in the world.

  She checked to see what data streams had been active. It took her a while. The result caused a chill to pass through her. Someone had, in the last few minutes, taken a copy of a document from a folder called TAKEOVER.

  She opened the document. It was a three-page executive summary of technical and data protection issues relevant to the Institute’s facial recognition project, to be resolved in the event of a takeover of BXH by a non-EU or -US entity.

  She felt like a spy, thought about closing the document, but there was the possibility that it had something to do with Sean’s disappearance.

  The second page was a list of EU and US data protection regulations that would need to be complied with in the event of a takeover. The third page contained a list of the bank’s officers who were to be tasked with ensuring compliance with these laws.

  The final paragraph made an icy chill move up her spine. ‘There are significant data protection risks to the proposed merger. The identification and tracking of criminals, suspects, politicians, law enforcement and government officials will be greatly enhanced with widespread identity-validated facial recognition. Laws created to prevent privacy breeches can be circumvented, as previously described (BHZC124566/8.odm). There are significant state security implications to the project in its current form.’

  She looked at the date of the document. It had last been saved the previous morning before Sean had gone to work. She checked his email sent box. He’d emailed it to a long list of BXH staff, minutes after it had been saved. The next thing he’d done was to come down and have breakfast with her.

  She tried to remember what he’d been like. He’d seemed distracted, that was for sure. She looked at her watch. It was twelve fifteen. The second hand was moving fast, as if it was trying to tell her something.

  Had George really seen Sean at BXH? Why hadn’t he told her Sean wasn’t there himself? Was Sean dealing with whatever had made him make that warning? She balled her fist, pushed it against her lips. It was a nervous habit she used to do in uni. She moved her hand away. She wasn’t going back to those days.

  She should go to the bank, ask to see him. She closed her eyes. There was something depressingly familiar about all this. Rose had told her about one of the BXH wives who had arrived at the bank’s offices one day the previous summer and had demanded to know if her husband was in the building, after being told by an assistant that he wasn’t there.

  Apparently he’d stood her up.

  The security manager at BXH’s reception had relented under the woman’s you’ll-have-to-arrest-me-if-you-want-me-to-leave glare and had told her that her husband was in the building and that he would personally find him. Isabel had been shocked at the story at the time, and glad that Sean wasn’t the type of person who just disappeared.

  And now she was going to the bank on a similar mission.

  She opened her eyes. Okay, let’s get it over with. At least she could get there quickly. Sean always bragged about how it only took twenty minutes on the underground from Sloane Square to get into work.

  She ran down the stairs. She could be there and back by two thirty, maybe earlier, if she went straight away.

  She knew exactly where his office was in the BXH building too. She’d been to a reception that the bank had given six months earlier. Sean had pointed down a wide, fawn-carpeted corridor to the door behind which he worked. The atmosphere had been hushed in the whole building, as if they had giant machines sucking away noise in every corner. Should she text him, she wondered, as she picked up her leather shoulder bag, tell him she was coming?

  No.

  She smiled. He hadn’t bothered finding a phone to let her know what had happened to him. He deserved her turning up at his office unannounced.

  No doubt he’d have some merger-related excuse; the project was collapsing or whatever. And maybe she would forgive him, eventually, but he was going to find out how pissed off she was, right down to the soles of his shiny black Loake shoes.

  Sabrina simply smiled at her when she’d told her where she was going.

  Outside, the wind was even icier. She glanced at Rose’s house as she passed. It looked dead, except for a light on upstairs. Had she taken Alek to the movie? She didn’t have time to find out.

  At Canary Wharf station the metallic grey escalators were crowded. The steel and glass canopy above seemed to be holding up the gunmetal clouds as she came up to street level.

  She could sense people getting ready for the weekend, for their Friday night out. No matter how many offices were gutted by redundancies, there was always an appetite for a good time in London. If anything, she’d heard it had increased in the past year, as people threw caution to the four winds.

  This was BXH’s world.

  As she crossed the road on Bank Street, past the gleaming towers of fund managers and little-known banks, she shivered as the ice-sharpened wind cut into every exposed piece of skin. What does this say about our marriage if I have to go to his office to find him?

  As she came up to the BXH building she noticed the airplane-wing shape of a black Mercedes S-Class
standing at the curb. A trickle of white smoke was slipping from its exhaust.

  Paul Vaughann had an S-Class. As she passed the vehicle she gave it a quick glance.

  There was someone in the back. Her snow-blonde hair was hard to miss. It was Vaughann’s wife, Suzanne. She was staring at her.

  She didn’t nod, or shown any sign of recognition. Was she surprised? No. They’d met only once. That time she’d had the demeanour of an ice sculpture too.

  She was probably waiting for her husband to come out of the BXH building. With the bonuses he’d notched up in the last few years there wouldn’t be any change in their lifestyle, whatever happened about the merger.

  She felt underdressed as she entered the marble and glass canyon-walled reception area of BXH, but she didn’t care.

  The place had been designed to look like the home of money. Intimidated was how you felt in other, lesser institutions. Here the feeling was of total awe. There was a hush in the air, broken only by the click of heels, a big shiny gold logo filled the far wall, and the smell of money, of leather and sweet marble polish, was hard to ignore.

  She waited in line, like a supplicant, at one of the queues in front of the reception desk. There was a group of five, mainly Chinese, businesspeople in front of her.

  They were muttering among themselves. They looked sleekly prosperous in their well-cut suits and shiny hair. The security guards on each side of the reception desk overseeing the glass turnstiles, which were the real access points to the building, looked like heavyweight boxers.

  Behind the reception desk there were four model-type receptionists, all wearing black uniforms and with TV-advert hair. They must have spent half their spare time keeping themselves glossy.

  It was her turn.

  The girl behind the desk smiled, her pencil-line eyebrows raised, as if she too was surprised to see Isabel standing there in her fashionably torn jeans and slightly distressed suede jacket, but she was far too polite to say.

  ‘Can you ask my husband, Sean Ryan, to come down, please?’

  Isabel returned the girl’s smile with equal insincerity. She had emphasised the word husband. She knew that for many of these receptionists the pinnacle of achievement would be for them to marry one of the bankers who slipped past their desks every day with few sideways glances.

  ‘Certainly, Mrs Ryan. Please wait over there.’ The receptionist pointed at a cluster of black leather sofas to her right. They weren’t in the best position in the foyer, the Chinese were occupying that, but it wasn’t the plumber’s entrance either.

  She went to her allotted place, anxiety burrowing through her gut, as if it was trying to break out.

  ‘Please be here,’ she whispered to herself.

  She watched the elevators. If Sean were to appear, a worried smile on his face, she’d be tempted to hug him, but she might just hit him instead. Hard too. He deserved it. Every time one of the elevator doors opened her nerves jangled. And every time it wasn’t Sean, her heart contracted as if an angry hand was squeezing it. She saw a few faces she knew from the reception they’d been to, announcing Sean’s project was going live. None of them gave her a second glance.

  Then the buzzer the receptionist had given her, a thick credit-card-shaped thing, was making a noise in her hand.

  She stood. A woman she didn’t know was talking to the receptionist.

  She was waving at her. Isabel hurried towards her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ryan, your husband isn’t here. We’ve checked.’ Her smile was sweet, like a goodbye kiss.

  17

  Henry Mowlam closed the document he’d been looking at. He stretched. The files he’d extracted from Sean Ryan’s laptop were of less interest than he’d hoped. The description of what had happened to Sean and Isabel in Jerusalem he’d checked before.

  The implications of the facial recognition project he was already aware of. The matter had been discussed at length within his unit and beyond. The project raised lots of red flags. The ability of a bank, and by implication a state’s security, revenue and police departments, to know who had what amounts lodged where throughout the world, gave unprecedented powers of oversight to any who had access to that information.

  By matching databases of who was controlling individual bank accounts you could uncover undeclared income, suspicious money flows and match accounts in alternative names for people with multiple passports and identities. High definition security cameras that could identify individuals at half a mile meant opportunities for hiding wealth or ill-gotten gains were disappearing.

  Facial recognition data, matched with global bank account statements would give foreign powers access to information on the wealth of individuals, regulators, businessmen and even politicians, as they arrived in that country.

  Such data would provide endless opportunities for coercion of the unexplainably rich and the embarrassingly poor.

  But they hadn’t reached that point yet. Thankfully. The software was still only being piloted in a few locations at BXH.

  What concerned Henry more now was the fact that he didn’t know where Sean Ryan was.

  The man in charge of the most sensitive information technology project in the United Kingdom, possibly in the western world, had disappeared into thin air.

  He didn’t like it. And it wasn’t his only worry about Sean Ryan. The number of unanswered questions swirling around him and BXH was growing at an alarming rate.

  He felt like a theatregoer watching actors pushing hard into the stage curtain while they moved around unseen behind it. There was something going on and he was only glimpsing part of it.

  What he knew for sure was that there was a connection between the murder in Soho and Mr Ryan. The connection was looser than it might be, but it was real. The book Sean Ryan had found in Istanbul contained pages sewn in about obscene prayer practices from the early days of Christianity. It listed prayers that required real blood being poured and drunk, fire rituals, the castration of offenders and the murder of heretics and apostates, including cutting patches of skin from victims.

  The most gruesome ritual involved murdering four people in twenty-four hours, each in a more sadistic way.

  The purpose of that ritual was given in a Latin phrase above the small line-drawn images of how each murder should be carried out.

  The phrase was: Quattuor Invocare Unum.

  It had been translated as Four to Invoke the One. Henry shook his head. Whoever the sick bastard was who’d killed that poor girl, at least he hadn’t started the ritual where four people were going to die. He never wanted to see someone being murdered the way it was shown in those drawings.

  Because they were the cruellest things he’d seen in a long time.

  18

  Isabel held the edge of the desk. She was getting the runaround. Something was going on that she wasn’t being told about. That’s what it felt like, even if she couldn’t prove it.

  Yet.

  ‘Is the security manager available?’ she said, as calmly as she could, addressing the receptionist.

  The woman looked at her, her mouth slightly open. Then her expression changed. Her mask of smiling professionalism slipped back on.

  ‘Certainly, Mrs Ryan. If you’d like to wait over there, I’ll see if she’s available.’

  Isabel sat on the front edge of one of the sofas, examining everyone who passed by. Was it still too early to call the police? Would BXH be a bit more accommodating if she had a police officer with her or if she told them they were on their way?

  She looked at her watch. It was still only eight or nine hours since he should have been home, not twenty-four. She took a slow breath, then counted to ten. The world around her was continuing in real time; prosperous-looking people were going out for their lunch break. Though many of them were grim-faced, others were smiling, as if they had nothing to worry about and the stories all over the media about BXH were just lies.

  The buzzer in her hand went off again. She turned. Standing beside the
receptionist was a small, wide-shouldered, cropped-haired woman. There was going to be no friendly smiles with this lady.

  ‘Are you the security manager?’ were Isabel’s first words.

  ‘Your husband is not here, Mrs Ryan.’ Her tone was as definite as a punch in the ribs. ‘His car is in the car park all right. It’s been here since last night. The rules of this building are quite clear. No employee is allowed to leave a vehicle overnight. When you see your husband, will you ask him to remove it?’ She looked at Isabel as if she had a contagious disease.

  ‘Can I speak to George Donovan?’

  ‘You’ll have to call him later. He’s out.’

  ‘A lot of good that’ll do.’

  The woman recoiled, as if Isabel had slapped her.

  ‘It’s all I can suggest, Mrs Ryan.’

  She thanked the woman for her help, and crossed the foyer, pulling her coat tight around her as she left the building.

  The black Mercedes was still standing, purring at the curb.

  Then it came to her. Maybe the wonderful Mrs Vaughann might know something about what had happened last night. Her husband had probably been with Sean.

  She headed for the car and tapped on the window, hard. Mrs Vaughann stared at her, eyes wide, as if Isabel was a beggar. She knocked again, harder this time.

  The window slid open less than an inch.

  ‘Mrs Vaughann, we met last summer. I’m Isabel Ryan. My husband works with Paul.’

  ‘Isabel,’ Mrs Vaughann shouted, as if she’d found a decades-lost friend. The door clicked open.

  Mrs Vaughann leaned forward. She looked like someone waiting desperately for something, the way an alcoholic looks while waiting for a bar to open. Her eyebrows were raised. Her skin was pale. Her cheeks hollow. Her brow was all scrunched up.

  Isabel stepped inside, then pulled the door closed behind her. It made a perfect reassuring clunk. The driver was in front behind a wall of thick glass. He didn’t even turn his head as Isabel got in.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ said Mrs Vaughann. ‘I almost didn’t open the window.’ She sounded amazed at herself that she had.