Laurence O’Bryan - The Manhattan Puzzle

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.

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.

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.

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.’