Double Deal Read online

  You can run from a killer – unless the killer is you …

  In top-secret talks in Barcelona, ex-spy Dr Tori Swyft seals a landmark Arctic deal with Beijingthat sends Washington DC and Moscow reeling. The nextmorning, she wakes beside two dead bodies …

  A nameless voice phones her, taunting her and revealing a shocking video that shows Tori asthe murderer. Yet she has no memory of what happened.

  With Spanishpolice converging at her door, Tori flees, in a race against time to findThe Voice and prove her innocence – before it’s too late.

  Also by John M. Green

  The Trusted

  The Tao Deception

  Nowhere Man

  Born to Run

  DOUBLE

  DEAL

  Contents

  About the Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ‘Whoever holds Greenland holds the Arctic.

  It’s the most important strategic location in … the world.’

  – Director of Arctic Studies, US Naval War College

  ‘The United States [owning Greenland] would be nice.

  It’s essentially a large real estate deal.’

  – Former US President Donald J. Trump

  ‘Between two evils, I always pick the one I’ve never tried before.’

  – Mae West

  In loving memory of

  Nigel Dunn (1948–2021)

  1

  Barcelona, Spain

  Tori Swyft’s eyes were glued shut. Her head was pounding, her body quivering, yet this wasn’t a hangover. Couldn’t be.

  At last night’s celebrations she’d let barely a drop of alcohol touch her lips. How could she risk any misstep when the treaty – the one she had personally negotiated – was ‘the first major shake-up of the Arctic’s balance of power since the Cold War’? And that was The New York Times speaking, not her.

  With Tori’s help and guidance, Greenland – her client – chose China as its future polar partner, ending centuries of Danish colonial rule and decades as an American ally. If the US and Russia, the Arctic’s two prevailing powers, kept out of the way … a very big if … this new accord would unlock a vast treasure trove of prosperity for the tiny population of this icy nation.

  For chrissakes, her eyes … They refused to open, no matter how much Tori rubbed them. Her world was totally dark. Pitch black.

  This wasn’t eye gunk from sleep. It wasn’t conjunctivitis.

  Glue?

  Was it actual glue? Was that even possible?

  Had someone – who? – glued her eyes shut?

  Her skin prickled and her breath shortened as a quake of terror surged through her. Panic wasn’t the answer, she knew that, but her body wasn’t listening, her hands taking it upon themselves to scrub and yank at her eyes, every muscle in her face contorting as she tried to open a crack between her lids.

  With her heart hammering, sweat flooding from her pores, the locomotive of panic kept roaring through her.

  Breathe, she commanded, but even her nose wasn’t cooperating. Her nostrils were clogged too, so she inhaled through her mouth. Belly breaths, deep breaths.

  Someone did this. To her.

  Was it linked to the accord? Was it the Russians? The Americans?

  Was this how they were going to play their hand?

  The monster who’d done this, where was he? Close by, out in the blackness? Silently baring his teeth at her? Exulting in her terror?

  She strained her ears but all she heard was the rumble of the air-conditioner and the sound of her own breathing.

  No one was moving, no one crowing over what they’d done. To her.

  She tried to sniff the air, to detect a scent – cologne, perhaps, the sourness of body odour, bad breath – but her nose was blocked.

  She pressed a thumb over her nostrils, first one then the other, blowing hard, her hand catching the slugs of snot, which she wiped off on her pillow.

  The rasp of her lungs, the pounding in her ears, the thump of her heart … she needed to slow it all down. Breathe, Tori, she told herself. Synch with something rhythmic, anything. The drone of the AC was the only thing.

  Slow. Down.

  Her heart rate was dropping and her nose began to sense an odour. It was not a wel
come one. The first whiff was acrid, sour. The second was repulsive, stomach-churning, a stink Tori knew well but wished she did not, the same stench of death she’d gagged on two years ago in a Mosul hospital.

  Her stomach heaved like it had that day in Iraq, the pit of her gut hurtling up to her throat. She whipped her head to the side, hoping her vomit would splatter the bastard who did this to her – if he was there.

  He didn’t flip out, didn’t make a sound.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t present, watching and smirking.

  Tori knew the power of silences. Interrogation Techniques 101 at the CIA included a whole chapter on silences. She had applied them herself.

  Now she brushed her fingers over her body. It was bare, varnished with sweat.

  She understood.

  Today, she, Tori Swyft, was the target.

  She visualised her captor, leering at her from some vantage point, revelling in his handiwork as he calibrated his next move.

  Confront him, she told herself. She wiped the puke off her lips with the back of her hand. ‘What do you want?’ She pushed out the question, her words dry and croaky.

  She wanted his name, to make a connection, to remind the ghoul that I’m a person, not simply your captive, a standard tactic in hostage negotiation she’d also learnt from the CIA.

  Except she knew it would not work. A man prepared to glue a woman’s eyes shut would know that game and refuse to play it.

  He’d proffer his name when it suited him. If it suited him.

  ‘What do you want?’ she repeated, her voice clearer, firmer.

  The monster said nothing.

  She pictured him holding a knife and silently stepping closer, almost felt him hovering over her and running his tongue along the blade of a KA-BAR. In her harrowed imagination she saw his fingers around the leather-washer handle, his reflection in the polished Cro-Van steel blade, brain drunk with his power over the naked woman he’d blinded, the tingle of cold metal against his tongue.

  The fear welling up inside her was a dead weight, a barrier to action. She shook herself. There was nothing to be gained if she kept imagining the worst.

  What if this silence signalled his absence?

  If he’d stepped outside – a possibility – she’d have a small window to make her escape, or at least to try.

  Again she pulled at her eyelids, but still failed to wrench them apart. This time, though, her fingernail caught on a thin lip of gum, a hard thread like plastic that snaked across her lashes and fused them together.

  She picked and scratched at it, ripping clumps of eyelashes out. But not enough to see.

  Without thinking, she opened her mouth to scream, opened it wide, drawing in as deep a breath as she could, and stopped herself. If he really had stepped out, the racket would bring him back and then …

  That smell and her glued eyelids told her what he was capable of.

  She exhaled, closed her mouth and groped sideways for a nightstand, hoping to find a phone. Hers. Anyone’s.

  As she reached out she experienced a sharp twinge in the crook of her arm. Felt a tiny lump, right over the bulge of a vein.

  On top of whatever else the bastard had done, he’d drugged her.

  2

  Tori groped her left hand across the top of the nightstand beside the bed, its glass surface cold and strangely barren. She couldn’t feel a lamp, a clock, not even one of those ludicrous fifteen-dollar bottles of hotel water that housekeeping left in her room every night – the kind she always refused to open on principle but would have paid ten times for right now.

  Her hand nudged something metallic. It slid away, almost falling off the edge. She caught it in time and ran her fingers down its tapering length … an open penknife.

  Did her captor leave it behind as a threat? Or was it meant to tantalise her, a possible weapon to use against him, only to have him whip it away at the last minute?

  She swung her legs to the side of the bed, keeping her feet away from where she anticipated the puddle of vomit had landed, and sat up. With her head spinning – she assumed from the drugs – she sat still, waiting for the wooziness to settle, half expecting this to be the moment her tormentor would say his piece. Yet he remained silent.

  She weighed the small knife in her hand as a new fear came over her. What if the glue had got onto her corneas? Almost in a panic she pinched the hairs on her left lids between her thumb and forefinger and pulled. The suction popped and her lids lifted off her eyeball. Thank heavens.

  She repeated the procedure with her right eye and thankfully got the same result.

  Her eyelashes had done what eyelashes were meant to do, they’d trapped the foreign matter and stopped it from getting into her eyes.

  She balanced the knife in her hand again and decided her only way forward was to cut off her lashes. It would make her look weird, but weird was not blind.

  With her left hand she pulled at her lashes and with her right took the knife and worked gingerly at the hairs, just tiny nicks, chipping as close to the skin of her lids as possible without slicing into them.

  3

  In the room across the hotel hallway, Tori’s work colleague Frank Chaudry sat at the end of his bed, his eyes briefly on his left foot as he pulled on a sock then looked up again to catch the sub-titles scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen.

  Yesterday had been epic. The best day in his post-MI6 career. He and Tori – well, Tori mainly – had tied up the Greenland–China deal in time to make the evening news bulletins in Europe and the mid-morning ones in America.

  But this morning Barcelona TV was barely mentioning the story. That wasn’t really strange, not with the state funeral this afternoon overshadowing everything, and the buzz of all the global politerati starting to converge on the city. Prime ministers, chancellors, a couple of kings. Even US President Isabel Diaz was coming.

  Frank and Tori had been present three days ago when Oriol Casals – president of Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia and the host of the secret talks – took the fateful call. They watched the colour leach from his face as he dropped the phone.

  His cousin’s heart attack in New York City hit him hard. Not only had they grown up together on the same street in Barcelona, she’d also gone into politics, in her case to become one of Catalonia’s – and Spain’s – favourite daughters. Once the country’s celebrated defence minister, it was only six months ago that Montserrat Vilaró i Mas was elected the youngest ever secretary-general of the United Nations. All of Spain loved her and called her Montse.

  The bad news hit at a tense moment in the talks when Rao Songtian, China’s lead negotiator, was at his most intransigent. So Tori, God bless her, whipped up the death, and the funeral, as a spur to bring the deal to a close. Their host, Oriol Casals – Uri for short to people who were close to him – was about to become completely preoccupied with the arrangements for his cousin’s funeral. And, as Tori also knew, he had an election coming up.

  The ante was upped even higher the next morning when America’s president called both Casals and Greenland’s newly elected prime minister. The US had got wind of the talks and was seeking a delay to give them time to put together a counteroffer to China’s, one that Greenland would find compelling.

  ‘This is brilliant,’ Frank remembered Tori whispering to him and Greenland’s leader, Nivikka Petersen, in a side room as she high-fived each of them. ‘Let’s go back in and really put the squeeze on China.’

  Tori was class, thought Frank. She strode back into the negotiation room, sat directly opposite Rao Songtian, who was putting his own phone back onto the table, and regarded him coolly.

  Not only did he return the stare but he spoke before she could. ‘I know.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Tori kept her tone light, playing out a standard tenet of negotiation, never assume.

  ‘I know that the United States knows,’ he said, his eyes glancing back at his phone. ‘You leaked these talks to them,’ he added a
nd pushed back his chair, started to stand and turned to Petersen. ‘Madam Prime Minister, this breach of security is intolerable,’ he said. ‘On behalf of the People’s Republic of China, I regret to advise you that we are done here.’

  Frank watched. Tori’s gaze was unwavering, her back straight. ‘Rao,’ she said, ‘the leak did not come from us, you have my word. But Washington does know, that’s a fact. The other fact is they want Greenland at least as much as China does. More, perhaps. So here’s how we’ll play this. Walk out of here if you wish. We won’t stop you. But if you do I’ll pick up my phone,’ she put it on the table, ‘and as soon as you slam the door shut we’ll open talks with Washington. If you stay, we keep negotiating only with you but, with the US trying to bash down the door, your exclusivity will now end at 3 pm tomorrow. If you haven’t reached a deal with us by then, we will invite Washington to come in and join the party.’

  Rao Songtian had sat back down.

  Frank stared at his socks. Black. Like all his socks. Bland. Plain. Frank liked to blend in. Unlike Tori, who shone even in black, which was her trademark. Everything she wore was black. She said it was purely utilitarian, so everything went with everything else, but he wasn’t so sure, since it made the red of her hair crackle like flames across any room. At least he’d persuaded her to make a slight change for last night’s celebration, even if it was only to move from black to black and white.

  4

  Oahu, Hawaii

  It was just a month earlier that Tori had been on her surfboard, moving up and down on the swells, manoeuvring and waiting for the right wave. Time had faded the freckles that bridged across her nose as a child surfing on Sydney’s famous northern beaches – these days her skin had a pasty bookish pallor. Yet out here the power of the sea offered her more solace than any book possibly could.

  The incoming surge felt right and, grabbing her board’s rails, she raised her torso and flicked back her hair, flinging out a sparkling curtain of spray. The salt on her lips cracked as she fleetingly looked back and, at the perfect moment, she started paddling hard and caught the wave.

  Close to shore, Tori heard gasps from the beach as she leant forward, placing her hands on the board, then her head and, after forming this human tripod of support, she kicked her legs back and out, arcing them up into the air above her into a headstand. Balancing herself upside down, a manoeuvre that for most surfers was near impossible, she let the wave glide her all the way in to the shore.