The Manhattan Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan
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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.