The Manhattan Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan
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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.
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