Laurence O’Bryan - The Manhattan Puzzle

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.