The Malice Box Read online

  She announced she was going out again. ‘If you find out any more about what’s going on with Adam and that weird box, let me know. I’ll be at yoga.’

  ‘I’m going into Manhattan again. I need to see Scott to sign some documents.’

  She stopped by the door. ‘When I worked at the Foreign Office…’

  She still couldn’t say what she’d really done, even after all these years. They’d trained her to the bone and beyond.

  ‘… we were taught to listen to our instincts very closely. First impressions. Intuition. The hairs on the back of our necks. It could save our lives.’

  ‘You did well to get out when you did. I’m eternally grateful.’

  ‘Something about you right now feels wrong. Just so you know.’

  ‘Something about us feels wrong.’

  ‘No, I mean something new. Something very recent.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You’re afraid. I’ve never seen you afraid before.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do either.’

  She considered him for a moment. ‘You’re a rock, Robert. Don’t stop being a rock.’

  ‘I am Gibraltar.’

  ‘Don’t get into any more fights. We’re out of peroxide.’

  Alone in the house, Robert thought of Terri. There was no chance of anything happening with her. He wouldn’t allow it. But he recognized that he wanted it. It was one of the things he was afraid of. He was ready for something to happen.

  He cast his mind back to the weekend he and Katherine had fallen in love.

  Miami, September 1998

  They all convened on a Friday afternoon in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel.

  Robert, who had been covering the march of Hurricane Georges across the Caribbean for several days, was exhausted and irritable. Scores of people had been killed in flooding in the Dominican Republic, thousands driven from their homes across the Caribbean. The Keys were going to get hit, and maybe Miami itself. He’d evacuated the downtown GBN news bureau and set up a temporary operation deeper inland at the hotel. Now he’d come down to the lobby to politely with draw from Adam’s upcoming mystery weekend.

  Adam, who was mostly living between Havana and Miami Beach, had invited a small group of people a fortnight earlier to meet at the Biltmore at this hour, using his customary riddles, torn postcards and invisible writing. Robert wanted him to call it off.

  ‘Georges is very big, and very powerful,’ he’d told Adam by phone. ‘If it comes this way over sea, it’ll hit Miami like a bomb. A big one.’

  ‘I know. Delightful, isn’t it? Adds such an element of doom to the mood.’

  ‘Promise me you won’t have people out in the streets chasing bloody clues.’

  ‘They’ll all be lashed to masts on Miami Beach, Robert.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘Relax, I promise I won’t kill anyone.’

  ‘I’m going to have to pull out.’

  ‘I understand. At least come down and say hello.’

  ‘I have a job to do.’

  ‘Delegate. Just for an hour. The lobby, five o’clock. Please come. People want to meet you. I have a surprise.’

  Now they stood among the ornate octagonal birdcages in the cavernous lobby hall, awaiting Adam’s entrance. The finches and nightingales swooped and twittered with agitation at the approaching hurricane.

  A man Robert didn’t know, beautifully blazered, twinkled at him. Robert tried from the depths of his fatigue to twinkle back but didn’t have it in him. The man introduced himself as a William, American. He was with a Penny, British, whom he’d met on a boat trip to Cuba organized by Adam the previous year. There was Carmen, a tall black Cuban-American lady, electrifyingly dressed in all white and yellow, and a watchful man of sallow complexion called Vladimir. William appraised Carmen with a moneyed leer. Suddenly Robert perceived a woman approaching him at high speed from his left.

  ‘Miaow,’ she said. ‘You must be the one Adam warned me about.’

  ‘Katherine,’ he said, smiling. So she was Adam’s surprise. ‘My God. How long has it been?’

  She had a nautical effect going on, white shorts and a matelot top and tanned legs. She kissed his cheek.

  ‘Too long. You look tired. Busy?’

  He hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years, since London. Her ill-fated marriage to Adam. The performance of Newton’s Papers.

  ‘Adam told me to expect a surprise but…’

  Katherine looked slimmer than he remembered her. Worry lines around her eyes crinkled when she smiled, but, despite her tan and vigour, she seemed not fully at ease. Haunted, he thought.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Posted here as bureau chief from London. About eighteen months.’

  ‘Any family with you?’

  ‘Jacqueline didn’t come. We called it a day.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. Kids?’

  ‘Never happened. You?’

  ‘I left the Foreign Office. Free as a bird. Oh, look, here he is.’

  Adam, the self-elected shaman to his friends, appeared from the direction of the elevators, wearing a white jacket, jeans and sunglasses, looking like a gigolo. He kissed everyone kissable.

  The group sought out the bar downstairs. They all liked themselves, especially when people were looking. And in their different ways they all loved Adam way too much. Feeling like the token local dullard and yearning to get back to work, Robert began whispering asides to Katherine as they settled around a table.

  ‘I suspect we’re the only ones with real jobs.’ She smiled and squeezed his arm and sat down next to him. ‘Vladimir looks like he was grown in a laboratory.’

  All the participants had received through the mail a riddle and half a postcard in a manila envelope. In Robert’s case, his half of the postcard showed a curve of tanned flesh and a line of fabric that was probably, though not certainly, a breast in a bikini top. The riddle was as follows:

  Complete the picture to a nicety, find the creature known for piety. Share a table, if you’re able, with a hottie (not for totty). The name and day are Mercury, Icks ecksive at eye.

  The Pelican Restaurant. A Wednesday, Mercredi, Miércoles, the day named for Mercury. Icks ecksive was IX XIV, 9/14. Eye was I, one o’clock. Reservation in the name of Frederick Mercury.

  A similarly personalized riddle had been received by Penny, which led her to the same Miami Beach restaurant, at the same time and the same table. The lunch date had allowed the two of them to join together their torn postcards, which, when combined, indeed gave a complete bikini top as well as the jumbled name of the Biltmore Hotel, today’s date and a time.

  Adam framed it as a summoning of heroes from the four corners of the earth, or at least a parlour game in which those were the roles, in order to solve a great mystery.

  Ensconced at the head of the table, he spoke: ‘I have asked you all to come here today because…’

  Little Falls, August 27, 2004

  Robert, his notes in one hand and a souvenir paperweight in the form of an obelisk from Buenos Aires in the other, pored over his horizontal map of Manhattan, squatting at the table’s edge to squint along streets and sight lines. He placed the paperweight, a gift from Katherine’s father, downtown at Fulton Street and Broadway, muttering to himself: ‘First waypoint. First cache. Obelisk.’

  He took a box of map pins from his desk.

  ‘Before that, Adam’s pied-a-terre.’ He stuck a yellow pin at Greenwich Street and Charles.

  ‘First waypoint again. St Paul’s Chapel.’ He stuck a red pin next to the obelisk at Fulton.

  ‘Join the dots…’ He tied a length of string between the two pins, then squatted again and looked south-east along its length with one eye closed. He moved around and did the same looking north-west.

  If something draws your attention, pay heed to it. Photograph it. Post it. But nothing leaped out at him.

  He took his notebook and dr
ew a diagonal line, imagining the full page as Manhattan.

  What else? The bullet casing.

  He’d been in a few fights in his time. Never sought them. But he was solidly built, and people didn’t usually mess with him. He’d taken a couple of bullies apart to protect smaller kids in his schooldays. Getting banged in the face didn’t bother him too much. But this had been different. The knife. And then the face that wasn’t there. That sickly yellow light where a face should have been and, pulsing at its core, the hypnotic staring eye. He knew it was death, stalking him through time, from the burning bedroom in Cambridge to the New York subway. The fire in Adam’s room had been rekindled, and he couldn’t put it out. Why did it want him? How could he fight it?

  He focused his mind on the bullet. An ad caught his eye on the back cover of a magazine on the stack by his desk. A red dot within a red circle. A Target ad. He tore the logo from the page and pinned it through the centre on to the map by the obelisk. A bullet and a target.

  Robert whispered to himself: ‘Is Adam the target? Am I? Who’s shooting?’

  He picked up the Malice Box. The master key, they’d called it. ‘Let’s have another look at you too, you evil bloody box.’

  He went out into the backyard, seeking some sunlight. The box resisted his initial twists and squeezes.

  ‘So help me, Hale, I will break your neck when I find you.’

  He tried pressing lightly on the various geometric patterns traced in its sides. Nothing. It gleamed a translucent reddish bronze in his hand. The concentric raised rings on its top seemed to flip from convex to concave and back… then they seemed to turn in a slow spiral. He stared into it. Lost himself. It was like a tiny black hole. He shook his head clear. Grabbed the Quad from his breast pocket and photographed it in the palm of his hand.

  Then he put it, together with the bullet casing, in the safe upstairs and got ready to head into Manhattan.

  August 14, 2003: Blackout Day

  Adam awoke to find himself in darkness, facing the eye. He could not feel his body. The eye was irresistibly beautiful.

  ‘You have thwarted us,’ it said. ‘Or at least you have thwarted our proxy, our creature. But there is a price. Now we have entered your being. We have become entwined, through him, in your very DNA. And we have entered your seed.’

  Adam became aware of the burned-out, smashed Ma’rifat’ somewhere on the floor near his feet. But the encounter was taking place elsewhere, in some deep corner of his consciousness.

  An image entered his mind, unbidden: tendrils of light spiralling from one double helix to another, from himself to Terri, Terri to Katherine, Katherine to Robert, all linked as though they were one. He felt a foreign presence within himself, one he must contain, a contaminant of hatred and loss.

  He saw another image, of Terri. He saw her body as though in a living X-ray. He saw a fertilized egg.

  ‘She’s pregnant?’

  ‘She was. She may yet become so again. But we are entangled now. The man you killed. This woman. You with us. We have halted this pregnancy before it begins. We have made it into something else and frozen it in time. Until you do our bidding.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘We are Iwnw.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘We have fought your kind for many years, though we are the same as you in many ways. We dwell equally in your world and the next. We reach you through the maker of the Ma’rifat’.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘He lives in you now. He is entangled with you. He is what we call a Minotaur, trapped between worlds, consumed with loss and fear. A powerful creature, become weak. He will be our gateway into you. We will not be denied. Do as we wish, at the time of our choosing, and we will reverse what we have done. Deny us, and cell division will proceed, in a form of eternal life.’

  ‘Eternal life?’ Adam spat. ‘How?’

  ‘There is a form of physical immortality available to everyone. It is caused by an enzyme called telomerase, which stops cells from dying when they are exhausted. It allows them to divide for ever. And there are some conditions in which the foetus doesn’t grow, but the placenta does, in an abnormal manner, in a way propitiated by this enzyme. It can spread rapidly to the rest of the body. Do you know what it is?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It is called cancer. We have altered the cell structure to ensure this is what will happen if we unfreeze it. And we will ensure it is of the most virulent kind, if you do not attend us when we call on you.’

  Miami, September 1998

  ‘… I need your help. There has been a killing. An unusual one. Your remarkable powers are required.’

  Adam’s guests exchanged amused looks.

  ‘The looming hurricane has forced a change of plans… but for the killer, as well as for us. We are all confined here in this magnificent lodging for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours. No one may leave. We are locked in together. But so is the person we each seek. Among us.’

  He took some green folders from a briefcase at his feet and passed them around the table. ‘Here, among other materials, you will find a photograph of the person you seek.’

  Robert opened his folder and laughed. He looked around the table and saw everyone had the same photograph.

  It was a chalk outline, the kind police drew around a dead body in noir thrillers, white outline on a black surface. Sans body.

  ‘This was someone we all love very much. The victim fought to the very end. It was a brutal struggle. The hunt for the killer will take place inside this splendid hotel. Outside, there is nothing. Just the gathering storm. I’d planned certain outings for this event that will have to be cancelled. But we can do it all here perfectly well.’ He paused and gave a rueful smile. ‘If we survive… Now, please read through the rest of your materials and begin. Oh, and one last thing. The identity of your target is contained in a sealed envelope. Each of you has one. Under no circumstances may you open the envelope until you are ready to confront him… or her.’

  Robert’s cell phone buzzed. It was his deputy. ‘The mayor’s about to speak again, Boss.’

  ‘On my way.’

  He picked up his folder and mimed regrets to Adam. For Katherine, he jotted down his room number on a business card and slid it into her folder.

  Robert returned to the lobby. The birds were shrieking and banging into the bars of their cages now. Before going back up to the makeshift bureau, he stepped out on to the front steps of the hotel and looked up at the sky. It was livid green and purple. It was starting to boil.

  Katherine came to Robert’s room shortly before midnight, as the edge of Georges flayed the hotel with sumptuous rain. He was on the phone with his news editor, wrapping up coverage plans for the coming twenty-four hours. He waved to her to sit. She riffled through her folder until he was ready.

  ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘I have six hours off now. I’ll pick it up from Mike again in the morning.’

  ‘Is it coming here?’

  ‘They usually head straight for Miami and veer off at the last minute. This one hasn’t veered yet.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘If it comes, we’ll know about it. This thing’s the size of Texas. Enough energy to light Manhattan for a decade. If I tell you to get into the bathtub and cover your head, do it.’

  ‘Will it protect me?’

  ‘No, but it’ll give me a good laugh. It’s full of water at the moment. In case we get hit.’

  She smiled.

  Robert got up and perused the contents of the mini-bar. ‘Want anything?’

  ‘Jack Daniel’s, straight. Thanks.’

  He cracked open a small bottle of wine for himself. ‘So… what’s Adam got you all doing?’

  ‘Chasing clues. It’s been fun. We all just compared notes over dinner. Everyone’s all over the place.’

  ‘Teams of two?’

  ‘No, everyone’s on their own but collaborating.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t take part. I think.�
��

  ‘There are clues every few floors, starting in the basement. Want to hear one?’

  ‘Not now. My brain is shot.’

  ‘Want me to leave?’

  ‘Not in the least. Tell me about you. All about you. It was rumoured you became a spook.’

  ‘Foreign Office.’

  ‘Based where?’

  ‘Everywhere. Paris, some of the time. London. Short stints elsewhere.’

  Beneath her calm, she was as tense as a wire.

  ‘And you quit.’

  ‘There are things I can’t talk about.’

  ‘I understand. But you quit.’

  ‘I did a lot of work in non-proliferation. Of sorts.’ She snorted to herself, an expression of disgust on her face. Then she looked out of the window for a long time.

  ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘I didn’t plan to. It was a last-minute decision. I was thinking that Adam and I had seen quite enough of each other for this lifetime.’

  ‘Did you get his letter from Havana?’

  Adam had written to several friends earlier in the year, after the Pope’s visit to Cuba, announcing among other things the death of his mother, his coming into a small inheritance and his retirement as a foreign correspondent. He would now dedicate himself, he wrote, purely to what he termed the Rope Trick: the pursuit of wisdom and a good laugh, though not necessarily in that order.

  ‘I thought he’d gone batty.’

  ‘Me too. Nice to see him happy, though.’

  ‘So this is part of the Rope Trick?’

  ‘He said it was a way of sharing the Rope Trick with friends. Experimental, he said.’

  ‘So why did you come?’

  ‘It was a free air-ticket. Change of scene. Adam said you’d be here. And I wanted to tell him I finally understood.’

  ‘Understood what?’

  ‘Losing someone. Having them torn away. Losing them to violence. Like he lost Isabela.’