The Manhattan Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  ‘You will help me with this symbol. Then I will not need to finish this ritual. Otherwise …’ he reached down and picked up the knife. He swiped it through the air.

  ‘The ritual will be completed and quickly.’

  Isabel jerked again at the manacles.

  ‘You are all mad.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said Li. ‘There is something hidden down here, and I believe my friend is providing a good incentive for you to help us.’

  ‘What kind of a sick ritual cuts a child?’ said Sean.

  ‘An ancient and sacred Byzantine ritual,’ said the man. ‘Once their Empire was as powerful as the US is now. They were the only people who could ever turn base metal into gold, until now. The symbol hides an ancient secret. A puzzle you will help us solve.’ He pointed at the wall.

  ‘I don’t have the answer,’ said Sean. ‘You can’t do this to us.’

  ‘The ritual will be finished with your son if this puzzle isn’t solved.’ He sounded very sure of himself.

  ‘Set me free. I will open it for you,’ said Isabel.

  She was watching the altar. She knew she couldn’t trust any of them, even if she gave them what they wanted, but she also knew she had to take her chance.

  ‘How did you find this place?’ she said. She was trying to sound normal, though the thought of Alek bleeding was making her shake.

  ‘A friend. He heard about this place two years ago. He explained about what was down here, about this symbol, and I knew we had to buy this bank, to get access. It fitted with every piece of research we had done. But we had to move slowly. I encouraged him to employ you, Sean. I wanted you close at hand if we needed you. And now we are ready for the end game. You must open this up.’

  Alek let out a groan on the altar and shifted. He was alive.

  ‘Undo these,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Set her free,’ said the man.

  Li came forward and undid Isabel’s manacles.

  Sean turned to Xena. ‘You tried to help me in Jerusalem, why?’

  Xena shook her head, as if she pitied him.

  ‘My friend, Arap, went too far in Jerusalem,’ said the man. ‘We wanted you to find your wife. We thought you might be useful to us. We will see. You should help your wife solve this.’

  Isabel remembered what Sean had told her about Xena. There had been a lot of things that hadn’t made sense, like the fire at the villa she’d been held in. Had Xena started that to cover up evidence?

  She walked quickly to the altar, hugged Alek and listened to his breathing. She checked his wounds. There was a cut on his forearm and another on his calf. Both were bleeding slowly. She pressed his arm into his side. She tried to tear a strip off her shirt to stem the bleeding, but the man intervened, pushed her to the side.

  ‘There will be time for that later.’

  She didn’t believe a word. She wanted to grab Alek, run out and back to the elevator, but there were too many people to get past. She needed a distraction. And she needed it quickly.

  She went to the symbol.

  The square and arrow symbol was carved into the rock. The small holes were square. Narrow recessed grooves marked out all the lines.

  ‘Do you have a key?’ She put her finger into the bottom hole.

  ‘No. And we tried pressing every hole, in every combination,’ replied the man.

  ‘These holes are here for a reason,’ said Isabel. She tapped the stone. There was no echo.

  ‘What was that riddle we found with the symbol in Istanbul, Sean?’ said Isabel, quickly.

  ‘What new path must you take if you go from famine to death, yet wish to take each path, and each once only.’

  Isabel went close to the stone and looked inside the holes. ‘You know there’s a colour in there. It looks white.’ She put her hand to her forehead. ‘White is for purity, right? That’s what a white wedding dress is about.’

  ‘And black is for death,’ said Sean.

  ‘So what’s green for?’ Isabel asked.

  ‘Bile, sickness, famine?’ said Sean.

  She looked in the hole on the left.

  ‘There should be green in this hole, if it’s following the pattern from the symbol.’

  She bent down. She had to figure this out.

  She put her eye near a hole. There was a faint greyness at the back. Was that green? She couldn’t see.

  ‘Let me look,’ said Li, who was standing near her now. He bent down.

  ‘There is a little green dot at the back.’

  ‘If we follow the riddle, follow a path around the symbol from famine to death, from green to black and press in the holes on the path around the symbol that will open this up.’

  She was talking and also looking for a way to get hold of Li’s gun. It was in his waistband now. Then they might really have a chance. She was far from sure she could solve the puzzle.

  But she tried it, pressing the back of each hole in turn, then running her finger along the connecting grooves to the next hole. But each time she found that one of the paths or grooves hadn’t been passed along. You couldn’t travel along all the lines without going over one of them twice. The riddle wasn’t solvable.

  Li came closer to her.

  ‘We got as far as you.’

  ‘You have to go along each line only once,’ said Sean.

  ‘You have a few minutes left, that is all,’ said the man.

  She wanted to run at him, hit him, but she held herself back. She needed a weapon.

  How could this puzzle be solved?

  What did she know about puzzles?

  A memory of a puzzle book came to her. She’d bought Mark, her ex, an illustrated one when they’d been together. She’d partly bought it for herself too. Some of the puzzles had been listed as unsolvable. It was supposed to keep him entertained when they’d been working together in Istanbul. It hadn’t succeeded. But one of the puzzles had been German, about bridges you had to cross. It had had lines in it.

  What was it? She saw the book in her mind. Then she saw the page again. Each bridge had been a different colour. The bridges of Königsberg. That was it. She hadn’t thought about it in years. But what had been the solution?

  ‘Wait,’ said Isabel. She traced a finger around the square again. A tingle of anticipation ran through her. What had someone said about a new piece?

  ‘If we create a new path, from white to red, that would fit the riddle. We’d have a way to get from green to black and go along each path only once.’ She pressed into the holes in sequence, ending up at white, then pressed red, then the black hole.

  When she pressed into the final hole nothing happened.

  She banged her fist against the stone in frustration. Was she going to lose everything because of a stupid rock, a stupid puzzle she’d got wrong?

  She banged the rock again, even harder.

  She heard a hissing sound.

  It seemed to be coming from the wall. As she watched, a six-foot-wide square hole in the wall opened as the rock slid back and down with a grinding noise from where the symbol had been.

  ‘Look,’ she shouted, elation rising fast inside her.

  It had worked. She’d been right!

  A glimpse of light had appeared in her tunnel of desperation.

  She touched the wall where the square had opened. Inside it, beyond a two-foot-thick lip of rock, was a smaller, darker room. It was bare except for a foot-high urn made from grey sparkling rock in the centre. On top of the urn there was a green statue. There was a thin layer of dust everywhere, and a few small cobwebs in the corners of the low grey roof.

  She bent forward.

  Li slapped her back. ‘Your wife did it, Mr Ryan! We should have invited her, not you to come to New York.’ He slid over the lip of the hole.

  ‘Well done,’ said Sean.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ said the man who’d been standing over Alek. He went past Isabel and followed Li.

  Isabel went to Alek, cradled his head, lifted him up an
d held him in her arms.

  She shouted. ‘You’ve got what you want. Let us go now.’

  ‘Do not attempt to leave,’ said the man. ‘We will shoot you all down if you do.’

  Isabel stood there holding Alek. She was looking sideways at Li’s assistant. Overpowering him was their best bet now. But they had to take their chance soon. She moved towards the opening in the wall, hoping the assistant would join her out of curiosity.

  ‘That’s made of felsic, Lord Bidoner,’ said Li. He was peering at the foot-high urn.

  Lord Bidoner, thought Isabel. Now we know who this bastard is. But it also meant they were even less likely to let them go.

  ‘Felsic?’ said Bidoner.

  ‘It’s a quartz. It can be fragile.’

  ‘I am more interested in what is inside this,’ said Bidoner. There was a hum of excitement in his voice, as if he was aroused. ‘The destiny of humanity.’

  Li was waving his phone around, using the light from the screen to illuminate the glistening felsic urn and what stood on top of it.

  Isabel peered at the green standing figure statue, which sat on top of the urn. It glistened in the dim light. The foot-high figure was of a thin man with a long beard and ringlets of hair coming down past each ear.

  ‘What the hell?’ she said, leaning closer. Li’s assistant was near now. Only two feet away. He was watching what was going on. She held Alek tighter in her arms, then took another step closer to the wall and peered into the room beyond the window-like opening.

  Bidoner put a hand on Li’s arm. ‘We have all waited a long time for this,’ he said. His voice was low, reverential.

  Li put a hand out and stroked the head of the statue, as if it was a child’s.

  Sean and Isabel looked at each other. He moved his head, indicating that she should come to him. She moved a foot in his direction. Nobody noticed.

  Li spoke quietly.

  ‘This is also the pride of the Chinese people.’

  ‘You have kept it in your care,’ said Bidoner.

  Isabel raised her eyes. What were they on about?

  ‘Do not try to release your husband, Mrs Ryan.’ Li glared at her.

  ‘What the hell is that statue and what’s in it?’ she said. She had to keep them talking. There was no way they were going to let her, Sean and Alek go. She had solved their puzzle, but that didn’t mean they were going to stop their sick ritual.

  ‘The first Emperor of the Chinese, Qin Shi Huang, the man who brought us together, had this commissioned as the symbol of a unified China. It contains a mythical power – so the ancient stories say. See the wavy lines on it?’ Li didn’t wait for a reply.

  ‘These symbolise the three unruly dragons being unified. For as long as this was in China we were the most powerful nation in the world. And now I will take it back. And all will come and bow before us again.’

  He stroked the head. He was smiling, as if he had been reborn.

  ‘So what’s it doing buried down here?’ said Isabel. It was hard to believe that the statue held such significance. It needed a polish. She could imagine it in a museum, but the symbol of China? And what did Bidoner mean about something being inside it?

  ‘This was stolen from the Summer Palace in Beijing when it was looted in the Second Opium War,’ said Li. ‘The Qing Emperor said that losing this was worse than the burning of a thousand acres of his palaces.’

  ‘So how did it end up here?’

  ‘It was taken to Hong Kong by British mercenaries,’ said Bidoner. He seemed captivated by the statue. ‘The bank it was lodged in was taken over by BXH a hundred years ago, in an arranged financial crisis in the colony.’

  Li stroked it again. ‘We guessed it might be secreted somewhere in this building,’ he said.

  ‘Which one of you gets it?’ said Isabel.

  ‘Now we are part of the takeover of BXH the statue is ours, again.’ Li looked at Bidoner. ‘And what’s inside it will be shared.’

  Lord Bidoner smiled.

  ‘They thought there was nothing of value down here,’ said Li. ‘Just a long-lost mausoleum to past presidents. They know nothing about real value. The value of what people believe in. This will change everything.’ He reached forward with both hands and grabbed the statue.

  Bidoner put his out to steady the urn, but it was too late.

  As Li lifted the statue, a crack sounded. When he released it with a swift upward motion the sides of the urn fell outwards and smashed into fragments with a noise that filled the two rooms with a roll of sound.

  Isabel went closer to the wall again and looked into the chamber with the urn. In the place of the urn there was a jagged-edged hole a foot across. There was a dark space below where the urn had been, a deep hole.

  And then she heard something. A far away rustling, like leaves on a path being scrunched by walkers.

  An ominous feeling swept over her, making her jerk away from the wall. Li was clutching the jade statue to his chest, as if it was a baby. That was when Isabel heard the rustling noise again, only louder.

  ‘No!’ Bidoner shouted.

  He stepped back from the hole, as if he’d seen something horrible. Then he turned to Isabel. She saw wide-eyed fear in his face.

  ‘Run!’ he yelled.

  Li was scrambling over the low wall that separated them from the main room.

  The sight she saw next sent a shout to her lips.

  ‘Sean!’

  Pale rats, giant rats, were streaming out of the hole in the ground where the urn had been. They were leaping in the air and even from twenty feet away, she knew what they had to do.

  ‘We have to go,’ she screamed.

  Li glanced back, letting out an odd high-pitched yelp.

  The rats were like the ones they’d seen up above. And within a few seconds a group of them had attacked Bidoner, who was only then reaching for the wall that Li had just scrambled over.

  He screamed. It was a chilling scream of terror. Isabel felt pleased and shocked at the same time. Li didn’t make any effort to go back for Bidoner. He was almost at the gate out of the chapel already. His assistant, looking terrified, was with him.

  There was no one guarding them. Isabel put Alek down by Sean and went to undo Sean’s manacles. They came free after a few of the longest seconds she’d ever experienced.

  ‘Take Alek, Sean. Run as fast as you can. Don’t worry about me. Get him out of here.’

  Xena was the only one who tried to do something about the rats. Bidoner screamed as about five of them, like small dogs, bit into him as he tried to exit the inner chamber. Two were on his arm, one was on the other arm and one was near his neck.

  Xena had a knife in her hand and she lashed out at the rats as they swarmed, sending two, then a third, into the air, blood flowing. But there were too many and as she flailed with them, Sean took hold of Alek.

  Then Isabel saw the gun in Bidoner’s hand. It was facing the rats coming out of the hole. It went off, with an echoing thud as he shouted a curse she didn’t understand. Then, as his arm flailed, the gun fell and slid across the floor. Xena hadn’t seen it fall. She was trying to pick rats off Bidoner. Isabel picked up the gun and went after Sean and Alek.

  She turned as she passed through the gate and saw more rats jumping on Bidoner. There were more and more of them piling their teeth into him. Then she heard a gnawing sound and saw Xena stepping back from the rats at their feasting. She had a squirming rat in each hand. She threw them at the wall.

  Isabel raced on. She never saw Bidoner again.

  Sean, with Alek in his arms, and Li and his colleague were all running back to the elevator.

  Sean was behind the others, but gaining on them.

  As she raced after them Isabel stumbled, almost fell. She looked back. Xena was not far behind. Then she was coming up on Li. Sean was ahead, even though he was carrying Alek. Li was weighed down with the statue. The elevator was still a hundred feet away. Isabel looked over her shoulder again, fear filling h
er mind. Were the rats coming?

  They were!

  They had been delayed by their feasting in the chapel, but there must have been more rats who were still hungry.

  And now there was a pack running after them.

  Her heart pounded. She thought about using the gun on Sean and Alek if the rats caught them.

  Li shouted and his colleague, who had been running near him, responded. Isabel turned just in time to see the man holding his gun out to Li, passing it to him. Isabel looked forward again.

  Then she heard a shot.

  Had the rats reached Li already?

  She turned, but only Li was following her. And there was a hand behind him, near the ground, waving in the air. Then she realised. He had shot his assistant.

  She turned her head and kept running, determination and fear pushing her on.

  Every muscle was straining now. Her feet were pounding rhythmically on the stone. The hairs on her arms and on her back were standing up. She was running as fast as she’d ever run. Her breath was coming in thick gulps. Her thigh muscles were aching. Then she turned. The rats were on Li’s assistant. She glimpsed white fangs and claws.

  Li was wheezing, and still behind. ‘Drop the statue!’ she shouted.

  He shook his head furiously. Xena was off to the left, far enough away that she couldn’t be shot easily by Li.

  The squealing behind them was getting louder again.

  ‘Come on, Isabel,’ Sean shouted. He was waving her forward.

  Her legs were aching, her lungs burning. She turned her head and gasped.

  Li had fallen. The rats were on him. He was screaming. They formed a little hill and were swarming all over him. His hand was raised high and lashing about. She slowed, Sean shouted at her.

  She glanced back again. A large rat had jumped up to bite Li’s hand. It held on tight as he swung it around in a despairing movement.

  A strangled shout twisted in her throat. Fear and revulsion gripped her.

  And then, as she watched, she saw Xena heading for Li. She slowed, kept watching. There was no doubting Xena’s courage. But she didn’t engage with the rats this time, she bent and picked the statue up, which was behind Li, and ran off, fast, towards the wall of the cavern on the right. Was there another way out?