The Manhattan Puzzle (36 page)

‘Do you remember Robert Maximilian Kaiser?’ said the man now standing over Alek on the far side of the altar. He had placed Alek lying face-up on the stone.

‘Yes, we do,’ said Sean. ‘Somebody burnt him to death.’

‘Well, before he died he told us that you were probably the only people who knew the truth about the symbol and the book, because you knew where it had been found.’

Isabel was leaning up as high as she could go, staring at Alek. He had a black silk band tied around his forehead. Was he injured? Please, no.

‘What have you done to him?’

‘He is sedated, but he will meet a fate worse than Kaiser’s, if you do not cooperate.’

‘What the hell do you want from us? What the hell is this?’ Isabel screamed.

‘You will see,’ said the man.

He bent down and then stood straight. In his hand was a knife. He raised it in the air above his head and began mumbling something over and over.

‘
Quarto quattuor invocare unum
.’ After he had repeated it four times, louder each time, he moved the knife slowly downwards, towards Alek.

Isabel shrieked, ‘No.’

She looked around. Would anyone help them, help Alek? All eyes were on the altar.

‘Someone stop this!’ she shouted.

No one moved.

‘You’ll pay for this!’ shouted Sean.

The room reverberated with echoes of their panicked shouts.

‘Innocent blood is the most powerful,’ said the man, softly, as if he hadn’t heard them.

‘You bastard. What are you doing! Alek!’ Isabel’s scream ripped the air.

Xena was at the altar. She’d lit a black candle. She was holding something into the flame. It smouldered thickly and filled the air with a pungent, sickly odour, the odour of death.

Henry looked at his screen. It showed an image of a broken brick wall and NYPD officers standing around.

‘They still haven’t found the other floors,’ he said. There was frustration and tiredness in his voice.

‘Are they still planning to drill through the bottom level?’ said Finch.

‘There’s some issue about the sewers in the area,’ said Henry. ‘Apparently there’s all sorts of strange underground vermin in that part of Manhattan. They’re bringing in pest control specialists before they go down any further.’

He put his head in his hands.

‘I really don’t think they have time for that.’

‘What the hell was in that book that’s so particularly disturbing you?’ said Finch.

Henry looked up at her. ‘Every drop of blood is drained from a child’s body, while human skin is burnt as incense.’

Finch let out her breath in a slow whistle.

‘You don’t want that on your conscience.’

Isabel screamed again. She hadn’t seen the first cut being made, but she had seen the knife with blood dripping from its edge being raised afterwards.

She roared louder, her throat straining, as the knife was lowered again. This time the man sliced at Alek’s bare leg; he only had his underwear on.

A trickle of blood flowed.

Isabel let out a muffled, heart-rending, moan.

Alek groaned softly, as if in reply. Then the knife went up in the air again.

‘The next cut will be deeper,’ he said.

‘You bastard! You sick bastard. Why are you doing this?’ screamed Isabel. She could almost feel the blade on her own skin. She was pulling at the manacles rhythmically now, hoping they might break from the repeated strain.

But they didn’t.

Then Alek groaned again.

Sean was shouting. ‘Leave him, take me! Kill me, please!’

‘It’s not your blood we want,’ said the man.

He raised the knife again.

‘What are you doing this for?’ shouted Isabel.

The man lowered the knife.

‘Your son will die if I go on.’ He paused, looking from Isabel to Sean. ‘But I will stop, if you succeed where we have failed.’

‘Succeed? How?’ Xena had been holding the edge of a square piece of what looked liked dried parchment in the candle flame. As the man spoke she took it out of the flame and laid it on the altar near Alek’s feet.

He pointed at the wall on their left. ‘You will solve this puzzle. That block of stone has holes in it. I believe it can be opened by someone who knows the secret of that symbol.’

Sean and Isabel turned to the symbol on the wall. It did have small holes where the lines intersected.

‘Only this will save your son.’

‘What? Are you crazy?’ said Isabel.

‘No, far from it.’

‘This is totally sick.’ Sean pulled at the manacles, trying to free himself.

Xena came forward and watched. The skin on his wrists looked raw.

‘You will help me with this symbol. Then I will not need to finish this ritual. Otherwise …’ he reached down and picked up the knife. He swiped it through the air.

‘The ritual will be completed and quickly.’

Isabel jerked again at the manacles.

‘You are all mad.’

‘No, we’re not,’ said Li. ‘There is something hidden down here, and I believe my friend is providing a good incentive for you to help us.’

‘What kind of a sick ritual cuts a child?’ said Sean.

‘An ancient and sacred Byzantine ritual,’ said the man. ‘Once their Empire was as powerful as the US is now. They were the only people who could ever turn base metal into gold, until now. The symbol hides an ancient secret. A puzzle you will help us solve.’ He pointed at the wall.

‘I don’t have the answer,’ said Sean. ‘You can’t do this to us.’

‘The ritual will be finished with your son if this puzzle isn’t solved.’ He sounded very sure of himself.

‘Set me free. I will open it for you,’ said Isabel.

She was watching the altar. She knew she couldn’t trust any of them, even if she gave them what they wanted, but she also knew she had to take her chance.

‘How did you find this place?’ she said. She was trying to sound normal, though the thought of Alek bleeding was making her shake.

‘A friend. He heard about this place two years ago. He explained about what was down here, about this symbol, and I knew we had to buy this bank, to get access. It fitted with every piece of research we had done. But we had to move slowly. I encouraged him to employ you, Sean. I wanted you close at hand if we needed you. And now we are ready for the end game. You must open this up.’

Alek let out a groan on the altar and shifted. He was alive.

‘Undo these,’ said Isabel.

‘Set her free,’ said the man.

Li came forward and undid Isabel’s manacles.

Sean turned to Xena. ‘You tried to help me in Jerusalem, why?’

Xena shook her head, as if she pitied him.

‘My friend, Arap, went too far in Jerusalem,’ said the man. ‘We wanted you to find your wife. We thought you might be useful to us. We will see. You should help your wife solve this.’

Isabel remembered what Sean had told her about Xena. There had been a lot of things that hadn’t made sense, like the fire at the villa she’d been held in. Had Xena started that to cover up evidence?

She walked quickly to the altar, hugged Alek and listened to his breathing. She checked his wounds. There was a cut on his forearm and another on his calf. Both were bleeding slowly. She pressed his arm into his side. She tried to tear a strip off her shirt to stem the bleeding, but the man intervened, pushed her to the side.

‘There will be time for that later.’

She didn’t believe a word. She wanted to grab Alek, run out and back to the elevator, but there were too many people to get past. She needed a distraction. And she needed it quickly.

She went to the symbol.

The square and arrow symbol was carved into the rock. The small holes were square. Narrow recessed grooves marked out all the lines.

‘Do you have a key?’ She put her finger into the bottom hole.

‘No. And we tried pressing every hole, in every combination,’ replied the man.

‘These holes are here for a reason,’ said Isabel. She tapped the stone. There was no echo.

‘What was that riddle we found with the symbol in Istanbul, Sean?’ said Isabel, quickly.

‘What new path must you take if you go from famine to death, yet wish to take each path, and each once only.’

Isabel went close to the stone and looked inside the holes. ‘You know there’s a colour in there. It looks white.’ She put her hand to her forehead. ‘White is for purity, right? That’s what a white wedding dress is about.’

‘And black is for death,’ said Sean.

‘So what’s green for?’ Isabel asked.

‘Bile, sickness, famine?’ said Sean.

She looked in the hole on the left.

‘There should be green in this hole, if it’s following the pattern from the symbol.’

She bent down. She had to figure this out.

She put her eye near a hole. There was a faint greyness at the back. Was that green? She couldn’t see.

‘Let me look,’ said Li, who was standing near her now. He bent down.

‘There is a little green dot at the back.’

‘If we follow the riddle, follow a path around the symbol from famine to death, from green to black and press in the holes on the path around the symbol that will open this up.’

She was talking and also looking for a way to get hold of Li’s gun. It was in his waistband now. Then they might really have a chance. She was far from sure she could solve the puzzle.

But she tried it, pressing the back of each hole in turn, then running her finger along the connecting grooves to the next hole. But each time she found that one of the paths or grooves hadn’t been passed along. You couldn’t travel along all the lines without going over one of them twice. The riddle wasn’t solvable.

Li came closer to her.

‘We got as far as you.’

‘You have to go along each line only once,’ said Sean.

‘You have a few minutes left, that is all,’ said the man.

She wanted to run at him, hit him, but she held herself back. She needed a weapon.

How could this puzzle be solved?

What did she know about puzzles?

A memory of a puzzle book came to her. She’d bought Mark, her ex, an illustrated one when they’d been together. She’d partly bought it for herself too. Some of the puzzles had been listed as unsolvable. It was supposed to keep him entertained when they’d been working together in Istanbul. It hadn’t succeeded. But one of the puzzles had been German, about bridges you had to cross. It had had lines in it.

What was it? She saw the book in her mind. Then she saw the page again. Each bridge had been a different colour. The bridges of Königsberg. That was it. She hadn’t thought about it in years. But what had been the solution?

‘Wait,’ said Isabel. She traced a finger around the square again. A tingle of anticipation ran through her. What had someone said about a new piece?

‘If we create a new path, from white to red, that would fit the riddle. We’d have a way to get from green to black and go along each path only once.’ She pressed into the holes in sequence, ending up at white, then pressed red, then the black hole.

When she pressed into the final hole nothing happened.

She banged her fist against the stone in frustration. Was she going to lose everything because of a stupid rock, a stupid puzzle she’d got wrong?

She banged the rock again, even harder.

She heard a hissing sound.

It seemed to be coming from the wall. As she watched, a six-foot-wide square hole in the wall opened as the rock slid back and down with a grinding noise from where the symbol had been.

‘Look,’ she shouted, elation rising fast inside her.

It had worked. She’d been right!

A glimpse of light had appeared in her tunnel of desperation.

She touched the wall where the square had opened. Inside it, beyond a two-foot-thick lip of rock, was a smaller, darker room. It was bare except for a foot-high urn made from grey sparkling rock in the centre. On top of the urn there was a green statue. There was a thin layer of dust everywhere, and a few small cobwebs in the corners of the low grey roof.

She bent forward.

Li slapped her back. ‘Your wife did it, Mr Ryan! We should have invited her, not you to come to New York.’ He slid over the lip of the hole.

‘Well done,’ said Sean.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ said the man who’d been standing over Alek. He went past Isabel and followed Li.

Isabel went to Alek, cradled his head, lifted him up and held him in her arms.

She shouted. ‘You’ve got what you want. Let us go now.’

‘Do not attempt to leave,’ said the man. ‘We will shoot you all down if you do.’

Isabel stood there holding Alek. She was looking sideways at Li’s assistant. Overpowering him was their best bet now. But they had to take their chance soon. She moved towards the opening in the wall, hoping the assistant would join her out of curiosity.

‘That’s made of felsic, Lord Bidoner,’ said Li. He was peering at the foot-high urn.

Lord Bidoner, thought Isabel. Now we know who this bastard is. But it also meant they were even less likely to let them go.

‘Felsic?’ said Bidoner.

‘It’s a quartz. It can be fragile.’

‘I am more interested in what is inside this,’ said Bidoner. There was a hum of excitement in his voice, as if he was aroused. ‘The destiny of humanity.’

Li was waving his phone around, using the light from the screen to illuminate the glistening felsic urn and what stood on top of it.

Isabel peered at the green standing figure statue, which sat on top of the urn. It glistened in the dim light. The foot-high figure was of a thin man with a long beard and ringlets of hair coming down past each ear.

‘What the hell?’ she said, leaning closer. Li’s assistant was near now. Only two feet away. He was watching what was going on. She held Alek tighter in her arms, then took another step closer to the wall and peered into the room beyond the window-like opening.

Bidoner put a hand on Li’s arm. ‘We have all waited a long time for this,’ he said. His voice was low, reverential.

Li put a hand out and stroked the head of the statue, as if it was a child’s.

Sean and Isabel looked at each other. He moved his head, indicating that she should come to him. She moved a foot in his direction. Nobody noticed.