The Messiah's Hand

By Chris Knight

On a seemingly ordinary Monday morning,an office secretary at Trusthouse,a reputable New Zealand Insurance firm,is astounded when she checks her answering machine. A blood-curdling,anonymous voice has left a message on the tape sometime over the weekend,informing her that her millionaire boss,Oscar Silver,has been kidnapped and is being held to ransom.

The information given is very curt.

The Insurance company presidents life is now for sale...The price-tag is one million NZ dollars,and the time limit,24 hours!

The voice was explicit- no police involvement or the old man prematurely meets his maker!

The old mans life is now thrust irrevocably into the nervous hands of his naturally tight-fisted eldest son,Isaac. At his wits end,Silvers eldest son and Trusthouse second-in-command,is now asking himself some frightening questions: Just how serious are the unknown assailants? Just how far are they prepared to go? Can Trusthouse afford to pay up? Can they afford not to? And just exactly, how far is Isaac prepared to go to find out?

Is he willing to gamble,wager with his fathers life or will he quickly cough up the dough?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477243657

Chris Knight

Chris Knight is a research fellow at UCL and author of Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1.

RODNEY JACOBSEN sat at his desk. The 27-year-old redhead rubbed his short goatee thoughtfully.

The averagely built insurance salesman opened his diary and glanced down, musing with mild interest at his appointments for the upcoming week. He began his Monday morning biro-in-mouth scan of the next five day’s appointments.

Outside, the mid-morning sun shone brightly, a warm March day; New Zealand in autumn, and a northwest wind blew leaves over the largely deserted pavements.

Scattered clusters of people wandered up and down the mostly barren, 10am, central Christchurch streets. People going places.

Rod glanced out the window; town was not overly busy. He guessed most people were at work. He wished he were some place else, going somewhere. He was bored, tired and irritated. Selling insurance had become very humdrum.

He had gotten too used to it. He had worked at Trusthouse Insurance for four years, since graduating from university with a degree in economics.

He had learned the trade, so to speak. Customers came in; they told him their situations; he tried to listen, to determine the best policy for them. He advised, they considered and, hopefully, all going well, they’d sign up. He would receive his cut, his commission, for services rendered.

He was really little more than a pen pusher, a paper filer. The customer did the real work, agonizing over the best policy after having been given all the info.

He was merely a sounding board, the guy who jotted down the details, and told the customer where to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

The challenge of the work had long since gone. It had died a natural death after about two years, and here he was, still living with the corpse, 24 months later.

It had smelled bad at first, reeked to high heaven, but now his nostrils were de-sensitized, used to it. He smelled nothing. It was as though he’d had a permanent case of sinusitis for some months now, and he no longer cared. He was quite numb to it, on full autopilot.

The young, grey-suited robot lifted his restless blue eyes, which came to rest on a couple standing across the road from his ground-floor office window. They were arguing in the autumn breeze. The cold wind blew their coats up and they held their hats with their free hands, while they continued to debate in the chilly, wind-blown street.

He momentarily wondered what had got them so worked up. He watched with some mild interest while they continued to gesture madly to their middle-aged, grey-haired and thick-around-the-waist selves. He suddenly wished he could lip read; their gestures were getting more chaotic, and their mouths more contorted, their faces more twisted in the autumn breeze.

They looked up — ‘busted!’ He’d been spotted, sticking his proverbial nose in. Sightseeing. He’d been tempted just a few seconds earlier to stick his head out the door and try and catch an earful of the drama, but had wisely decided against it at the last moment.

The couple stared at him angrily, their eyes narrowed, giving him that ‘fuck off’ and ‘mind your own business’ look.

Rodney flinched, embarrassed, and glanced away, but not quick enough not to see a middle finger directed right at him. The husband had flipped him the bird. He looked back quickly; the gesture had alarmed him. He hadn’t expected or seen it coming. He didn’t look like the type of guy to flip the bird, but then again, in a moment of anger, he wouldn’t put it past anybody.

He looked again to see the two rain-coated strangers disappearing down the chilly wind-swept street, and they were soon lost in the pedestrian traffic somewhere outside the bakery.

The real offence in the finger was in its element of surprise, the unexpectedness of it. It was a cold and brutal aggressive gesture, an unpleasant modus operandi, but it spoke a lot. More than words, sign language.

He felt foolish for looking too long; he had brought it on himself. He could just see his mum saying: ‘Well Rod, you shouldn’t have been staring,’ as he momentarily imagined himself telling her the whole sad story over a post-mortem cup of tea, at the kitchen table when he got home from work that evening.

‘Brrring…’ suddenly went the desk phone, bringing Rod back to his office-day reality. He’d been sitting at his kitchen table arguing with his dressing gown, slipper wearing and rollers-in-her-hair mum.

Yes, Jacobsen, he said politely.

Rod, get a move on, Mr Steinman wants a quote for his home and contents premium. Have you got the paperwork ready for him?

Sure Henry, I’ll send it out today.

Well, just see you do! snapped Henry Dexter, the angry-voiced, second-floor-located office manager.

I don’t want to have to make any excuses for you this time; got that?

Yes, loud and clear, Rod said. He did not have the patience for any of Dexter’s 50-year-old, ‘piled-high-in-paperwork-and-panicking’ motivated rants today.

He knew Henry well; a nice guy but a bit of a panic-merchant; a bundle-of-nerves, especially when it came to the customer, spelled G.O.D to the middle-aged, ambitious, corporate-ladder climbing manager.

Rod sat in silence, staring at the silent phone. The whole week lay intimidatingly in front of him. He suddenly felt overwhelmed and cowardly. He didn’t know if he had the courage to face it. He should have called in sick. He felt like a lone fisherman caught in an unexpected storm in a small vessel, tossed about on ninety-foot waves, and his tiny boat and life could be lost at any given moment.

The finger had triggered some bad emotions in him; stirred up a hornet’s nest. He hated falling victim to rudeness. Like most people, he didn’t handle insults well. A temperamental person, he could’ve easily chased the rain-coated blob down the street and made him sorry. But then again, he valued his job; as tedious as it was, it paid the bills and kept him off the streets.

Time for lunch, he murmured to himself with relief, as he got up from his desk, reaching for his black raincoat and the brown scarf that hung on the back of his chair.

CHAPTER 2.

ROD SAT IN MACDONALDS munching his Big Mac and sipping hot coffee. Sixty precious minutes of priceless heaven stretched out welcomingly before him.

The Mickey D’s was mildly busy. High school kids crowded the counter, overwhelming the white-uniformed, red-capped attendants ‘en-masse’.

‘Rush hour’, they were probably used to it. The kids seemed to be all ordering at once, and it took time to get their orders straight. They bustled and jostled each other. The counter staff workers were trying to take it all in, distracted by the loud talking and constant concentration-breaking laughter.

Rod eyed the kids sternly. One or two noticed him giving them the ‘evil eye’, and they nudged each other and pointed at him, whispering and muttering behind their hands, and laughed louder.

He took off his scarf, hung it on the back of his chair, and looked down at his raincoat, that in his midday-rush he hadn’t taken off. Quickly he began searching the pockets for his cell phone, rummaging through with 10 frantic, fumbling, frisking fingertips. He’d felt the