Kitabı oku: «The Manhattan Puzzle»
LAURENCE O’BRYAN
The Manhattan Puzzle
‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.’
Henry VIII, Act 4, Sc. 2, William Shakespeare
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Epilogue
The Manhattan that I Love
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
‘Go for it. The rougher the better, girl.’ The man had a black silk blindfold tied around his head. He spoke slowly, his voice thick with desire.
Xena went to the door and unlocked it.
‘What’s that? Getting your toys out? Wow, this is even better than you promised.’
Lord Bidoner walked into the panic room. He closed the door behind him and pressed the button to turn on the air management system. The scrubber in the roof could remove the smoke from a blazing fire and turn the output into a vapour trail.
The man, spread-eagled and handcuffed to the stainless steel bed frame, had an expectant smile on his face.
‘Go on, do it,’ he said.
The navy Calvin Klein silk suit hanging from the stool beside the bed gave an indication of who he was. Lord Bidoner examined the man’s wallet. His bank ID card, a credit-card-sized piece of aluminium with an embedded proximity chip and his family name, Hare, embossed on it, confirmed what they already knew.
The head of global security at BXH, one of the world’s few truly global banks, was lying face-up and naked in front of him.
‘Don’t keep me waiting, girl.’
‘I won’t,’ purred Xena. She stroked his leg, then his inner thigh. He quivered in anticipation.
The man’s wife would surely appreciate photographs of this event, but Lord Bidoner had more pressing concerns.
He nodded at Xena.
She was dressed in a low-cut skin-tight black catsuit that fitted her thin frame perfectly. The man laid out in front of them was expecting something memorable from the woman he’d met in the champagne bar opposite Grand Central, two weeks before. Xena’s story, about being an Ethiopian diplomat’s daughter, and her eager smile, had captivated him.
She ran her finger down the man’s stomach. It trembled under her touch.
‘Don’t stop, honey. Don’t stop.’
With her other hand Xena clicked on the silver Turboflame blowtorch, the most expensive model in the world with its 1500C flame. She held the gently hissing blue, inch-long flame up and watched it glow brighter as her fingers moved slowly down his stomach.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
She didn’t reply.
Hare’s voice was still confident when he spoke. ‘Was that your sister who just came in? Is she gonna join us?’
‘We have a surprise for you,’ said Xena.
The man pulled on the handcuffs, which began to cut into his skin. It had taken a bit of persuasion, since this was their third meeting, for Xena to get him to go this far, but he trusted her now. And he’d made it clear that he wasn’t going to put up with any crap. He’d break the bed if she didn’t release him when he gave the password.
She’d smiled, hugged him and agreed.
They’d even laughed about making a written contract.
‘What’s the surprise?’ He shook the bed, testing its resilience and the strength of the handcuffs. He’d assumed they were easily breakable toys, like a previous pair she’d shown him. But he was wrong.
And he didn’t know that the bed was bolted to the reinforced slab of the panic room floor, either. Though he might have guessed that there was something wrong when it refused to move under him.
‘Just a friend of mine. We have a little question for you,’ said Xena.
‘Yeah?’ He was still curious, still expectant of further delights.
‘What is the password for the security system at BXH?’
The man didn’t reply verbally. He shook the bed from side to side, trying to break free. He didn’t know that his only hope was if his thrashing managed to separate his hands from his wrists, and his feet from his ankles. And very few people have strength enough to do that.
Xena waved the blue flame, raised it, as if offering it up. It flickered higher.
The odour of the burning butane gas filled the room like bad perfume. The sound of the blow torch was a threatening hissing now. Xena placed the tip of the flame against the top edge of the whiskey tumbler the man had been drinking from. The glass turned blue.
‘Wait until you feel this. Then you will tell me,’ said Xena. Her tone had changed. It was demanding now.
‘What? Fu …’ The end of that confident word was bitten off by the piercing scream that came from deep within his throat. Xena had touched the flame against the pale skin of his shoulder.
He began thrashing. Like a fish flailing. He moved from side to side, squirming away from the skin-blistering heat. But he couldn’t move fast enough. And his legs and arms were stretched out tight.
Easy targets.
The smell in the room changed and the atmosphere with it. Pain and whimpering, sizzling and guttural roars filled the air.
The man had become a dog.
Then Xena asked him again.
‘The password, please.’ She spoke softly, as if they were still playing a game.
‘If you give it up, I will release you. You can explain these little burns to your wife. But the ones I will inflict next will require hospital treatment. Or the services of a morgue.’ She clicked the flame off, then pressed the hot tip hard and fast into the biggest blister she had inflicted, near his ankle.
‘What do you say, Mr Hare?’
The man answered with a defiant, animal roar. He shook the bed under him. The last vestige of his pride in working at BXH bellowed out of him.
Xena lit the flame again. She reached forward, touched it to his chest, and ran it fast down the middle until smoke from his burning body hair filled the room with a sickly odour.
‘Stop, stop!’ he screamed. His body squirmed to escape the heat.
‘It’s #89*99,’ he shouted. ‘Please! Stop!’
Bidoner keyed the password into his phone and pressed send.
‘I hope you’re not lying,’ said Xena. ‘I want all this to have a happy ending.’
She squeezed his thigh with her hand, then stroked it.
Tears streamed from under his blindfold. His cheeks were red. It was good he couldn’t see the weals on his body, because he would know immediately that he wouldn’t be able to explain any of them to his wife.
‘Please, let me go. I promise not to tell anyone. I swear, on my children’s lives.’
Lord Bidoner’s mobile beeped as an incoming message came in. He nodded at Xena. The code had worked.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But there is one more thing I must do for you.’
She put the Turboflame down and went to the fridge. She took out a six-inch-long serrated knife, honed with care to a perfect blade, from the freezer section.
She held it in the air, admiring its cold edge.
‘Now you will find release,’ she said.
The man’s body went still. His toes, which had scrunched up, half straightened. The only sound was his pain-filled whimpering.
The panic room in the apartment on Fifth Avenue, overlooking the skyscrapers of Manhattan, was soundproof. It was why they used the room.
Xena flicked the blade across the man’s pale skin, once, then twice, fascinated by how quickly blood gushed, how fast it flowed from a few simple cuts.
‘This is for my brothers,’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ he whimpered. Fear trembled in his voice. ‘I have two children, a wife.’
She growled, psyching herself up.
‘Prima quattuor invocare unum,’ she said, as she grabbed him, jerking him upwards and castrating him with one swinging motion.
She held the bloody remains up in the air.
His screams of terror and pain vibrated through the room as blood spurted two feet high. A foul smell followed and the man’s words became a babbling.
Lord Bidoner held his nose. He’d seen enough. He went out to the main room of the apartment, with its view towards the glittering Jazz-era spire of the Empire State Building.
‘You did good, my dear. The first offering has been done correctly,’ he said, when Xena joined him.
She was panting.
‘Come here.’
He pushed her up against the inch-thick glass of the window, as Manhattan glittered behind them.
Afterwards, he handed her a balloon glass containing a large shot of Asbach 21. She sipped the brandy, then downed it in one gulp.
Then she lay down on the sleek oak coffee table that dominated the room. The canyon of lights stretching into the velvet Manhattan night reflected all the way along the length of the table and onto her ebony skin.
He reached down and stroked her shoulder. It was trembling.
‘Three more before the moon rises again. That is what the book says. That is what we will do.’
She smiled up at him. Her white teeth shone as she leaned her head back and stretched.
2
A creak rang out against the muffled noise of night-time London.
‘Sean?’ Isabel’s voice echoed. Her head was off the pillow. Was that a shadow moving? The moment of deep pleasure at sensing his return was replaced in a second by fear, as no response came.
She slid out of bed. Alek, who was now four, was in the next room. If that was Sean out there, playing some game, she was going to make him pay. Big time. She’d just finished one of the most demanding projects she had worked on during her time as an IT security consultant, and her brain had been fried to mush. She needed sleep.
She stood in the doorway.
There was no one on the landing.
She peered downstairs. The house felt deserted. The heating had been off for hours. She went into Alek’s room, checked his breathing and tucked him in.
Was this going to be a replay of that night a few weeks ago when he didn’t come home? The thought made her shudder. In all the time she’d known him he’d never done anything like what he’d done that night.
She remembered the creak that had woken her. What had that been about?
Had she imagined it? Her dreams had been strange recently. Images from Istanbul and Jerusalem came too often. Maybe that was what had roused her.
She went downstairs and turned on all the lights. Nothing was out of place, though there was an odd smell. A lemony tang, as if a cleaner had passed through. She stood near the front door. This was all Sean’s fault. She picked up the telephone and pressed redial. The call went to voicemail, again.
She slammed the phone down.
Bastard.
Stop it. He’ll be home soon.
She turned out the lights, headed back to bed, and tried to sleep. The icy wind buffeting the window didn’t help. Neither did the cold space where Sean’s freckled body should have been.
The matchbook-thin Bang & Olufsen docking system said it was five past three. How many years do you get these days if you murder your husband?
She lay there, seething, angry not only with Sean, but with the idiots at BXH too. And with whoever had decided to hold their stupid celebration the night before. It was bad enough that they demanded he work long hours, couldn’t they at least let him come home?
When she woke again after a disturbed sleep, London rumbled even louder. It was ten to eight. Her first thought was that he’d come back, and had already gotten up. He usually woke before she did. He could be down in the kitchen making toast with that new poppyseed bread.
He’d stick his jaw out when she asked him what time he’d come in, then run a hand through his thick brown hair and give her that blue-eyed innocent look, his secret weapon ever since she’d met him in Istanbul.
She turned.
His side of the bed was unruffled. A prickling sensation ran over her skin.
She picked up her phone, pressed his number. He’d better have a good explanation. A very good explanation.
The call went to voicemail. She wasn’t going to leave another message.
Her stomach tightened. She felt sick. Where was he?
Her life was not supposed to be like this. She was too young for all this crap. They’d gone through a lot when they’d first met, that watery tunnel in Istanbul, that hellhole in Israel, but all that was long behind them. Their life was peaceful now, family oriented.
So what about that last time he hadn’t come home?
It hadn’t been that long ago. Three weeks, to be precise. That had been a Thursday night too. He’d come home for breakfast, pleading for forgiveness, with that elaborate excuse on his lips. What had it been? Oh yes, a planning meeting that had gone on too long.
Did he think the bank’s mega-merger finally being completed would be enough to placate her? How could a celebration dinner, drinks, explain this? He wasn’t even a full-time employee there, he was a consultant, working for the Institute of Applied Research on a project that had already eaten up a year of his life.
She breathed in, told herself to calm down.
Someone would have called her if anything had happened.
He was late. That was it. That was all.
The same as last time. And she would make him pay properly this time. She listened for the soft click of the front door opening. He wasn’t going to let her down. Sean didn’t do things like that. They were going to Paris later that day. They were going to be soaping each other in a pink marble bath at the Franklin Roosevelt Hotel, just off the Champs-Élysées, before midnight.
That was his plan.
Everything was ready.
Since his uncle and aunt had invited them to stay in the hotel with them while they were visiting Paris, she’d been counting the days. And Sean knew it.
The trip was just what they needed. And such a great gesture from his uncle and aunt. They were the only people from Sean’s family that she really got on with. They’d insisted Sean find someone to look after Alek. The Louvre and the Opera House weren’t ideal places for a four-year-old, never mind one with a hyperactive streak. They deserved this weekend.
And they were booked into the hotel’s honeymoon suite. Tonight they’d be sleeping in a Louis XIV four-poster under a canopy of mauve silk. It was going to happen. No one was going to take it away from her.
Not even Sean Ryan.
3
The girl’s head rolled from side to side. There was no turning back now. The effects of Rohypnol wear off after a few hours.
He had work to do.
He ran his hands over her naked body. She winced as he pushed her legs apart, but didn’t wake. Looking at her splayed out made him want her properly this time. But he stopped himself.
He couldn’t afford for his DNA to be found.
He knelt.
The blade made a sighing noise as it cut through the air. There was a spasm of wet jerking as skin, muscle and artery were cut.
Even then she didn’t wake. The blood began to flow like paint cans tipped over, and as it did the shaking in his body slowed, then stopped, as if the flames of a fever were easing.
He was glad he’d done it quickly. The next job he had to do would be messy.
4
Isabel closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm.
They were going to have a wonderful weekend. Romantically speaking, the Franklin Roosevelt Hotel was about a million miles from Fulham, from working every spare minute helping people to find endless lost or deleted files on their computers and making sure Alek was dressed and fed and not wasting his life watching too much TV. And looking after Sean too, when he came home. She listened, and willed a faint noise to be the front door opening. She waited for him to bound up the stairs, for her life to go back to normal.
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, turned 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.
Having worked in Istanbul for years, for the Foreign Office, before retiring early after an incident in Istanbul, Isabel felt like an outsider when it came to the things those people seemed to be obsessed with.
She headed for her wicker chair in the conservatory. She had an hour before her coffee date with Rose and the handover of Alek to her for the weekend. It had been a big decision to leave him with Rose. One she’d doubted ever since, if she thought about it for more than a minute.
But everything was ready. And Sean had been so definite that it would be good for them both. She deserved three nights of peace. That was what he had said.
And he was right. She pushed the shard of doubt away.
Within twenty-four hours they’d be back to normal. She’d forgive him. He’d talk about the big merger and finally finishing the project that would secure the Institute’s future, their future. And that would be it.
A crunching sounded from the garden, as if someone was walking out there. She turned to the window and took a deep breath.
9
Henry Mowlam turned to the screen on his left. The hum of the office in Whitehall had hardly changed in the past few years. The only noticeable difference was that the screens they were watching at the monitoring stations were thinner and the light was yellower, more natural, it was claimed, though Henry didn’t believe it.
The secure PDF on his screen was the oldest military archive file he had ever accessed. At the top there was a summary by a Royal Engineers Major. Below was a handwritten report in a thin spidery scrawl enlivened by occasional twirls and flourishes. The name at the top was Captain Charles George Gordon.
Henry scrolled down the document.
It was a personal account of the destruction of the Summer Palace of the Xianfeng Emperor of China in Beijing during the Second Opium War in October 1860.
‘On the night of the 20th we were carrying out Lord Elgin’s orders and came upon a remote palace building, which had not been destroyed up to that point due to its location on an island and its small size. I ordered only the porcelain to be removed and the building to be left intact, but one of the Sergeants took it upon himself to break through a trap door and loot an underground room. He arrived back while we were loading up the boats. He was carrying a green jade statue, about the size of an owl. I confiscated it in the name of Barkers & Son, Bankers, whose kin had been tortured and murdered by the Chinese, and whose shipment of opium had been lost on the Pearl River six months before.’
Henry closed the PDF. Barkers & Son were one of the early manifestations of the BXH banking conglomerate. Henry switched to his right-hand screen and studied the report on Lord Bidoner that had recently been emailed to him.
So this was where Bidoner was going to invest the ill-gotten loot he’d escaped with after the Jerusalem incident. It couldn’t be proven that it was an attempt to provoke a war and then profit from the surge in certain shares of companies, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Henry still seethed at the thought of how much money Bidoner had made. He read the report again. It stated that Lord Bidoner had already built up a shareholding in BXH that should have been notified to the authorities, but hadn’t. And now he was doing more buying through nominee accounts.
What was he up to?
BXH was definitely in trouble, on the blocks for an immediate takeover. If that didn’t happen, the bank could very well be taken over by the US Government. And if that happened Bidoner would lose his investment.
Was there something going on that he didn’t see?
He read the email from Lord Bidoner to the CEO of BXH, which they had intercepted. It requested an inventory of the bank’s artworks. It also stated that Lord Bidoner had an artistic interest in a jade statue that the bank was rumoured to have in its possession since the time of the Second Opium War.
He turned to look at the report from Captain Charles George Gordon. Was Bidoner looking for the statue mentioned in this report? It certainly looked like it.
But why?
10
Isabel went to the back door and looked out, her face close to the window. She could feel the cold leaking through the glass. She moved away. The noise could have been a neighbour’s cat, hunting for mice. Or it could have been an early rising burglar. She checked the back door was locked, rattled the handle. Hopefully whatever it was would go away.
A memory of the thugs who had chased her and Sean from the hotel in Istanbul came back to her.
She put the back door key on the top of the mahogany dresser. The doorbell rang. It was one of those old-fashioned bells that emits a buzz for as long as the person outside wants it to. Whoever was pressing it clearly wanted an answer quickly.
She was at the door in seconds.
Had Sean lost his key?
Through the stained glass front door window she could see a bulky shape. It was Sean! He’d lost his keys. Her heart thumped like an overexcited schoolgirl’s. She swung the door open and froze, her body temperature cooling fast.
It wasn’t Sean. It was a young man with streaky blonde hair and purple skin eruptions, a before specimen from a magazine ad for acne treatment.
As he stretched his hand out to her she felt stupid at having opened the door so quickly. She could easily have checked in the security viewer. She stepped back and got ready to close the door, fast.
Mr Streaky Blonde’s suit was light grey. It had thin lapels and it looked way too tight, bulging in all the wrong places.
‘James Kilfeather, from Gold and Ferry in the City.’ He smiled at her, like a salesman who’d just seen his next bonus appearing in front of him.
The look on her face must have taken him by surprise. He stepped back, his expression changing from friendly to troubled in a second.
‘Is Mr Ryan here?’ He glanced over her shoulder.
Had Sean made an appointment he hadn’t told her about?
‘No, he’s not. I’ll tell him you were looking for him.’ She tried to sound friendly, but all she wanted was for him to go away.
That was when she saw the clipboard. It was one of those big blue plastic ones with a shiny silver clip to keep the papers down. Under the clip there was a sheet with printed boxes, as if he was about to fill something in. He was holding it as if it was his raison d’être.
‘Did Mr Ryan tell you I was coming to do the valuation?’
She stared at him.
‘Valuation?’ The word stuck in her throat, as if it were a piece of bread too big to swallow. She could feel herself getting angry, the muscles in her neck tightening.
‘Mr Ryan rang our office on Wednesday. He was very specific. He asked us to value this property. Are you Mrs Ryan?’ Streaky Blonde was getting peeved, as if it was her fault Sean wasn’t there.
Why would Sean need the house valued?
She felt light-headed. This had to be a practical joke.
‘You’re mistaken. We’re not selling up. I’ll get Sean to call you, sort all this out when he gets back.’
She smiled thinly, closing the door on his reddening face.
She watched his shadow through the stained glass, her pulse drumming. Would he go away? A second later he was gone.
What the hell was Sean up to?
That was when she noticed the silver front door key.
It wasn’t hers, she was sure of it. All her keys were on her key ring with the enamel apple she’d picked up on their last trip to New York, on a visit to BXH’s head office, which even the wives had been invited to.
Was it Sean’s key? She moved it near the pile of mail that had arrived for Sean the day before. Then she pulled her phone from her jeans pocket.
She tapped in his number. Number unavailable. This was getting too weird. She stood in the hall. The house seemed very quiet.
‘Alek,’ she called out. Anxiety exploded inside her. She rushed up the stairs. As she got to the top she saw Alek’s bedroom door was closed.
She pushed it open, fast. Alek was on the bed, moving a toy soldier up a pillow mountain. His amber locks looked adorable. She slumped against the wall and closed her eyes. Her heart was drumming rapidly. What the hell was happening to her? She wasn’t normally this paranoid.
‘Come on, Alek, let’s get ready. We’re going.’ Alek didn’t budge.
‘Remember,’ she said. ‘You’re going for a sleepover. And Rose is going to take you to that new movie.’
She felt a tug of guilt looking at his upturned face, but when he moved off the bed like a boy possessed, the guilt subsided. The thought of a new movie beat just about anything in Alek’s mind.
‘Pick one toy to bring with you,’ she said, as she left the room. Alek’s hands were full already.
Sean’s weekend Samsonite bag was in a corner of the bedroom. It was empty. She’d already packed hers with most of what she’d need for the weekend.
She threw some of his things into his bag: socks, two shirts, his leather jacket. She was determined to keep to the plan. He wasn’t going to let her down. They had plenty of time before the taxi came.
Just as long as Mr Vaughann didn’t insist he stay at work. And she would conveniently forget about that message George had given her until they were safely on the train. Sean deserved a break too.
They’d hardly had any holidays in two years. Not like some of them at the bank. One of the few financial downturn-induced changes at BXH, as far as Isabel could make out, was that some of the senior managers had been forced to call off their weekday golf outings.
A cruel punishment indeed.
The only other change Isabel could see was all the extra hours Sean had been putting in.
It was time to go. At least without Alek hanging off of her, she’d be able to focus on finding Sean, and getting away to Paris in time.
She stopped, and put her hand to her forehead. Was she crazy thinking their trip would still happen?
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
