The Manhattan Puzzle (3 page)

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.’

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.’

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.

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?

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.