The Manhattan Puzzle Read Free Page B

this morning.’ There was a note of anger in his voice. Was he implying Sean was late?
    A prickly warmth spread over Isabel’s face. She hated anyone criticising Sean.
    ‘I thought he had a day off today?’
    A tiny snort came down the line.
    ‘What time had you been planning to leave for Paris, Mrs Ryan?’
    It sounded as if George thought the trip was bound to be cancelled. The hairs on the back of Isabel’s neck rose like quills.
    ‘The train’s at a minute past six. Our taxi’s coming an hour before that.’
    The journey from Fulham to St Pancras International station should take no more than forty minutes, even late in the afternoon, but Sean had wanted them to be early, to enjoy every second of what they’d earned, he’d said.
    By five fifteen that afternoon at the latest, according to Sean’s plan, they’d be in St Pancras. And after that it’d be first class all the way. It was going to be a weekend to remember. A well-deserved payback for all the evenings she’d spent alone while he was working.
    ‘Should I tell Sean something when I see him?’ she said.
    ‘Can 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.’

7
    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