The Malice Box Read online

  ‘Please have a seat for a moment, I’ll tell her you’re here.’

  She put her head behind the second curtain from the left and spoke in a low voice. Robert heard giggling.

  Gemma looked over to him and beckoned. ‘She has something she wants to show you,’ she whispered.

  Robert went over to the curtain. Gemma gave his arm a squeeze and walked away. He peeped behind the curtain.

  And there was Terri.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  She was wearing a short silver-grey silk gown. Short black hair. Silvered wrap-around sunglasses. Petite. Smiling at him.

  She let the gown fall to the ground. She wore just a black thong, black stockings, black opera gloves. Just like the mannequin.

  Blood raced from his brain.

  ‘We meet at last, Robert. Give me your left hand.’

  He put it through the curtain.

  She took it and made it into a loose fist, separating out just the index finger. She raised the finger to her lips and blew softly on it. She gave a crooked smile.

  ‘Robert… don’t say anything…’

  She parted her lips and, with the tip of her tongue, teased the very end of his finger. She stopped, looked at him, smiled to herself, licked very softly again. He tried to pull his hand away.

  ‘This is forbidden, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s so… delicious. Don’t speak.’

  He stopped trying.

  She opened her mouth and placed the tip of his finger just inside. She breathed heat but did not close her lips. Removed his finger. Licked along its length with the tip of her tongue, barely touching.

  ‘You… and I… have some serious… talking to do.’

  She made a circle of her lips and closed it around the first joint of his finger. Electricity tore around his body. He leaned into the curtain between them. She placed her left hand on his chest through the curtain.

  ‘Pleased to see me?’

  She began to suck his finger rhythmically, slowly, slightly deeper each time.

  ‘Stop,’ he said.

  She slowed, halted, kept her lips squeezed together on the tip and slowly pulled his finger away, letting a string of saliva form. She stretched it till it broke.

  ‘I can’t resist this,’ Robert whispered. ‘I’ll fail.’

  ‘Silly… you’re not supposed to resist it. Now help me buy a corset.’

  She pushed his chest through the curtain.

  ‘Step back, I’m coming out.’

  He went back to the sofa, trying to hide his erection. He felt light-headed, his ears ringing. Terri emerged from behind the curtain in her silk robe and called to Gemma. ‘We’d like to try a corset or two. Can you suggest anything?’

  She moved in a way that suggested both vulnerability and iron self-possession at once. Gemma brought a flimsy black number and a solider pink creation with black draw strings. Terri held them both against herself for Robert, over her gown.

  ‘Which do you like better, darling?’

  ‘The pink.’

  ‘Would you lace me up in a moment, Gemma?’

  Terri walked back into the changing room with the corset and drew the curtain.

  ‘She’ll look so good in that,’ Gemma said to him. ‘She has such a beautiful neck and shoulders.’

  Robert smiled and nodded.

  ‘She said it’s your anniversary? Congratulations! How many?’

  He coughed.

  ‘First?’

  Terri came out from behind the curtain. Gemma moved behind her and placed one hand on Terri’s back as she pulled the laces taut.

  ‘Tighter,’ Terri said. ‘It feels so sexy to have it tight.’

  ‘You look great,’ Robert said.

  ‘Buy it for me? I’ll keep it on.’

  She took his arm as they left the store. She wore a sharp executive black jacket and knee-length skirt over the corset and stockings.

  ‘We’re not going far. Stay close.’

  They headed back to Fanelli’s at the corner and crossed Prince Street. Almost immediately, under a great iron clock, Terri steered them through an unmarked black door in a nameless red-brick building.

  A lobby like a hipster library greeted them. Books lined a full wall to their right. A few people sat at low tables, pecking at laptops or chatting among themselves. A whitewashed blank wall ahead dazzled Robert. Terri led them past the reception desk, where the young lady smiled and waved at her, directly to the elevators.

  New York, August 27, 2004

  When Horace assumed the role of the Watchman, sinking deep into a meditative state, a detached coldness came upon him. As loyal as he was to his charges, he could no longer be their friend. As the Watchman he had to be ready to take unsentimental decisions, even be prepared to sacrifice one of them if necessary. He hoped it would never come to that. He held the details of the plan in his mind and examined every detail. It must not fail. It would not, he fervently prayed, though at every stage there were great risks.

  He watched the players in motion, each pursuing their fragments of the puzzle, each acting on the instructions given to them on a need-to-know basis.

  Time was running out, but they were all on schedule.

  The seven minor keys were arranged along Manhattan in a special array. The maker of the Device had extended them like an antenna, the Watchman now understood, in order to increase the power of his original intended attack.

  It had been Adam who had captured the maker’s PDA on Blackout Day, but the Watchman had not trusted Adam with the information it contained. From the very day of the Blackout, it had been clear that souls had been conjoined. Entanglements created. The seed of Adam’s corrosion had been in him since that day. The Watchman had instead entrusted the PDA to Katherine, in deepest secrecy. Urged her to decode the files, thresh the good data from the noise. It had taken a year, but she had cracked them. Mysteries remained. But she had been able to extract the good waypoints, without realizing their full significance.

  As soon as she’d accessed them, barely a few days earlier, the PDA had lit up and fired off a signal. The maker of the Ma’rifat’ had clearly booby-trapped the PDA to send it if the waypoints were decoded.

  Kat had told the Watchman immediately. And the Watchman had concluded a second Device had now been armed. The clock had started ticking.

  The Watchman had seen what the waypoints traced. He saw the full picture. He was able to maintain control of the game and to dole out the parts as required. To Adam. To Katherine. To Terri, in part behind Adam’s back. To Robert. Eachwould have to experience loss and pain in order to play their part. Without a delicate balance, all would be lost.

  Once Kat had cracked the codes of the PDA, a summons had quickly reached Adam to attend a meeting with the Iwnw. For a year Adam had been resisting them, and they had not pushed too hard, mysteriously waiting for the moment that now clearly had come. He could no longer refuse. It was then, as soon as the invitation arrived, that Horace had decided what form Robert’s trials would have to take.

  The second trial would be sex. Robert would be led to a situation in which he would be subject to the powerful, disruptive forces that dwelled in sexual desire. These were the energies of water – second only in raw power to those of earth. To pass the trial, he would have to tap into those forces and fold them fully into his progress along the Path, neither squandering them nor weakening them. Like many people, he was cut off from their full force.

  The Watchman saw the necessary changes in Robert’s relationship with Katherine that would be brought about, and in Terri’s relationship with Adam.

  All must suffer, he said to himself. Alas, all must suffer.

  Robert would be forced to choose between being true to himself and being true to a sacred vow. They would tear him down by beginning to destroy his marriage.

  He would recover a second key, in the form of one circle splitting from another. And he would begin to reassemble a body, his own new body of light
.

  Adam had asked to meet Robert at a couple of points along the Path. The Watchman had been unsure, not intending to share the specific waypoints with Adam, wary of fully trusting him once everything had begun. Adam had claimed it would help them both: as Robert grew stronger, that strength would help to slow Adam’s own corrosion. And it would help Robert focus his powers by confronting Adam at key points. He’d suggested the first and third trials, maybe the fifth. The Watchman had refused, saying only he would monitor Robert’s progress. If Robert needed to confront Adam, he would send Adam the coordinates in due time.

  The Watchman reviewed the remaining five trials, one by one. As Robert climbed the ladder of the different stages of the Path, each energy he tapped into would become less raw and more organized; finer and more capable of intentional direction. And eachone would become more lethal. Without the combined powers of earth and water, he would be killed by the higher energies themselves, if not by the Brotherhood of Iwnw, before he could go any further.

  May heaven help us, the Watchman said to himself.

  Miami, September 1998

  Adam smiled in delight as Robert joined them at dinner on Saturday evening. He boomed: ‘What news?’

  ‘Georges is giving the Keys a real pounding.’

  ‘Do you think he’s related to the pianist in the lobby?’

  ‘Good one.’

  ‘Does your presence mean we’re safe?’

  ‘Taking a break. But I’m afraid I have to miss your grand finale. We’re not out of the woods yet. Looks like it’ll veer towards the West Coast and the Panhandle. But it could still switchagain and come straight back at us.’

  Everyone else was already finishing their main course. Katherine had kept a seat vacant for him next to her. He grimaced an apology.

  ‘And so,’ Adam said, without rancour, ‘we must solve the mystery without the services of our good friend Robert. Let us apply ourselves.’

  Later that night, Katherine stretched on the bed in Robert’s room.

  She recounted the whole experience Adam had put together for them, more in amusement than in puzzlement. He’d locked them in hotel rooms, sent them hunting for clues in ice buckets, had them cracking rudimentary codes. At one point, in one of several rooms rented for the event, he’d pulled a conjuring trick on them, asking them to place all their money, passports, driving licences and photographs of loved ones into a metal bin, and then appearing to set fire to its contents. ‘He almost got himself lynched right there,’ Katherine said.

  At the climax, in a breathtaking vaulted suite on the thirteenth floor that had once housed a Prohibition-era casino, Adam had told them the murderer was in the room among them. Then he’d said the victim was too. He’d asked each of them to open a sealed envelope containing the true identity of both the killer and the victim.

  Katherine’s envelope had contained a photograph of Katherine. They found they all had photographs of themselves. And, just as they realized this and puzzled protests were starting, Adam had set off some kind of high-intensity flash, like a magnesium flare, and vanished. All that remained was a note inviting them all to stay through Sunday night at his expense, together with a passage translated from a twelfth-century masterpiece of Persian literature, The Conference of the Birds, which he recommended to them. Their experiences had been intended to dramatize and reveal the fabled mystical work in a fresh light, he added.

  ‘I think he lost a couple of friends, but to be honest I really enjoyed it,’ Katherine said. ‘It was all about the language of the birds, I guess.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what that means.’

  ‘That’s OK. Let’s not talk any more about Adam.’

  Now she spoke from the depth of her memories, her eyes still on the invisible, secret world she had left behind, the one of which she could never fully speak.

  She told him about the man she had lost.

  ‘He was as brave as a lion, in his own way. Went in to spy for us. To betray his country for the greater good of the world. He was one of the people who actually think that way.’

  Robert assumed it had involved nuclear secrets of some kind.

  ‘He was already being squeezed by his own intelligence people, by the local Mukhabarat. He didn’t care for them. They put pressure on him through his family. It was tawdry and stupid – he said they weren’t even asking him sensible questions. So he came to us. And I made myself the greater good of the world. That’s what I was to him. For him there was no world without me, and its future happiness was whatever made me happy.’

  ‘You were his… controller? You ran him?’

  ‘He ran himself. But, yes, in the organigram of who was to blame, I was the one. I didn’t discover him. Finders don’t usually get to be keepers. He was actually a walk-in. I wish to betray my country, sooner rather than later, and I am also in a great hurry to fall in love. But he was mine to exploit, and I was good at it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t despise yourself.’

  ‘I wonder, if it hadn’t been me, whether anyone would have done. For him, I mean.’

  ‘To the extent that they were male with bad breath and a hairy back, I doubt it.’

  ‘Any woman, then.’

  ‘Were there that many of you? In your line of work?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘But he was given to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there are strictures, I assume, about falling in love with those one is controlling. Running.’

  ‘Yes. Verboten. Whereas vice versa may prove useful.’

  ‘Was it your head for maths he loved?’

  ‘The fact that I could discuss the science at a professional level was helpful. You know how well trained we were. And it was platonic.’

  ‘Willingly so?’

  ‘No, of course not. He wanted to consummate, and I didn’t let him.’

  ‘But you didn’t crush his hopes.’

  ‘Not once I saw which way it was going. That it would serve as a tool. And then one day…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He said something. It won’t sound shattering or epic or anything. It was silly, really.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said he was always afraid. Every day, all night, all the time. Except when he saw me, and we talked about mathematics. He said it stilled his mind.’

  Robert looked at her quizzically.

  ‘And something broke for me. I realized I couldn’t treat him like that. That doing so made me part of the problem. Definitively, resolutely, not the greater good of the world. Quite the contrary.’

  ‘And you told your superiors and were pulled off the case and never saw him again.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I imagine they call that being unprofessional?’

  ‘They have lots of words, if they find out about it.’

  ‘But they didn’t.’

  ‘They didn’t. And I sent him in because if I didn’t, we wouldn’t be saving the world. There was no way not to send him. He could love me only if that’s what we were doing. And somewhere along the line I started to believe.’

  ‘Can I ask where this was?’

  ‘Does it matter? His name was Tariq. He was giving such a lot. Everything. I felt I had to give him something in return. Something of value to him, something commensurate.’ She sighed. ‘I gave him something I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘What?’

  She frowned. ‘We’d talked a lot about the great Arabic thinkers. The philosophers, the scientists, the alchemists. He was intensely proud of his lineage, as he called it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You remember the Newton document that Adam was the guardian of?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘It quoted several of the great Muslim scholars. On the nature and manufacture of the great secret. On the ways to combine glass and metals. I gave him a copy.’

  ‘Did Adam know?’

  ‘No. I trusted Tariq. And the formula wasn’t complete. But it’s haunted me ever since.’


  ‘What did he do with it?’

  ‘He called it just a beautiful artefact, and a reminder of lost knowledge. Then he gave it back to me. Trust for trust. For several years we had good material. The best. No one else had it. Not the Americans. No one. Grandma would have been proud of me.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he wanted to come out.’

  ‘Not so keen on saving the world after all?’

  ‘You’ve no idea of the strain he was under. I was told to keep him in-country.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be muchuse once he’d been let out, I imagine.’

  ‘He was priceless. We owed him. But we pushed harder. Eventually it was agreed he could come out, but only if we squeezed every last drop of intelligence we could from him first. So we did. And we said we’d arrange something for his family. His father. Get him out of the hands of the Mukhabarat.’

  ‘Around when is this, now?’

  ‘1997, late summer. So I arranged his extraction.’

  ‘Just you?’

  ‘A team of us. I was in charge.’

  He sat still, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘We were all set. Van, secret compartment, funny passports. He’d confirmed he was coming. Yellow chalk mark the previous day, pre-set location. It was a grey morning. Overcast.’

  ‘Cold?’

  ‘Yes. And… he never came. He just… wasn’t there.’

  ‘You waited.’

  ‘Till it was dangerous. Beyond dangerous. We all agreed to pushit. But we couldn’t stay for ever.’

  ‘He was arrested?’

  ‘Never knew. Probably, after a fashion. They would have hurt him. For days. Then I assume he died. I never heard. It makes it harder to grieve, in some ways, but in other ways I’d rather not know. There’s always the slim hope that he survived.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And so I got myself out of the service.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘There was one other thing.’

  ‘Your gift?’