Double Deal Page 11

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he shouted less than a minute later. Every coming and going in that corridor for seven days was there, neatly filed, except for the sixteen hours that started at 3.30 pm yesterday, Barcelona-time. From then until 7.30 am today the corridor tape was wiped, gone, vanished. No comings, no goings.

  He clicked into the directories for the elevator lobby, the elevators and a selection of the public areas. All the tapes for the same sixteen hours were missing. Tori’s adversaries had erased every second of footage for that entire period. He tried the logs but they were wiped too, so even the crumbs that Thatcher would ordinarily pick up to help him track down a miscreant were gone.

  He closed his eyes and drummed his fingers on the desk for minutes as he pondered his next move. When he eventually opened his eyes, none the wiser, he saw he must have accidentally tapped his computer mouse, hit the play button, because one of the hotel tapes was running. The timeclock in the screen’s corner was ticking over, telling him he was watching the corridor outside Room 420 at 7.33 am.

  The image, in black and white, was crisp, clear. He pressed fast-forward and was soon watching a bellman hurry from the elevator to the room opposite Tori’s, bump into a room service trolley and knock something to the floor, pick it up and put it back, speak to the guest inside and leave. Maybe ten minutes of elapsed time later – about thirty seconds on fast-forward – he saw a rather chubby woman sneak out of Room 420, her head down, wrapped in a scarf, as she scurried along the hallway, past the elevators and into the stairwell. The incident took eight seconds, eight seconds that screamed Guilty, your Honour.

  Thatcher afforded himself a smile, finally. Tori’s nemesis had screwed up. To let the tape capture one of his minions leaving was a huge mistake.

  He replayed the eight-second segment on slo-mo again and again, scouring it for a hint of the harridan’s identity. He was getting nothing. She kept her face scrupulously hidden with her head low, scarf covering most of it, sunglasses over her eyes, her shoulders hunched over her humungous stomach. What role might she have performed inside the room? The video camera operator, perhaps? Drug topper-upperer?

  If he couldn’t work out who this woman was, someone in Barcelona might.

  He made a copy of the clip and started typing up a post on his least disliked social media site using a fake Barcelona police account he created on the spot. Urgent: Can you identify this woman in Barcelona? Here she is fleeing the scene of the ghastly crime in the infamous Room 420 in Hotel …

  42

  Barcelona

  Tori’s cab driver didn’t speak for the whole trip. More surprisingly he didn’t take a single one of the aggravating fusillades of calls or messages that kept pinging and beeping on his phone. Have you seen the video? That evil witch is on the run. Don’t pick her up. Yes, she thought, the woman right behind you. The one with the hairbrush in her backpack that could kill you.

  Until now, she hadn’t thought too much about the brush, a weapon so brilliantly nondescript she’d carried it through airport security for years without challenge. It had become such a normal part of her carry-on she’d long ago started using it as a real brush. But in different circumstances all she had to do was rotate the toughened handle with a single twist and the bristle head would slip off to reveal a deadly twenty-centimetre shiv, its tip so sharp that just tapping her fingertip on it would draw blood. It was the dagger she had when she didn’t have a dagger. The hairbrush from hell.

  The cab squeezed into a deserted alleyway, the walls encrusted with graffiti, words even her FrensLens couldn’t translate and pornographic images that were all too clear. The car brushed past a pile of black trash bags dumped at the side of the narrow lane.

  This didn’t feel right. It reminded her of a time in Kabul when a cab driver had sandwiched her in an alleyway just like this. With no words, she’d silently unscrewed the hairbrush and pressed the tip of the shiv into that guy’s neck, a trickle of blood running down into his collar as she encouraged him to put his foot on the accelerator.

  With the hairs on her neck standing up the same way, she reached into her backpack and unsheathed the shiv, ready to do what she had to.

  43

  SoHo, New York City

  Thatcher was about to post the video clip of The Voice’s helper scurrying down the hotel corridor when his champagne called him. He poked his nose over the bowl of the glass and sniffed the incredible aromas of biscuit and brioche that only a perfectly stored 1961 vintage could offer. For this wine he’d chosen a wide tulip-shaped glass instead of a flute. The broader rim allowed him to capture a richer, fuller hit of the Charles and Diana’s flavours. Holding the glass away from his nose, he studied the bubbles, a process that always calmed him and helped him think. He liked to focus on one bubble from its birth at the pointy base of the glass and follow its life’s journey, watching it slowly expand until it was big enough to tear itself away and begin its flight up to the top, getting larger and faster, joining its brothers and sisters, so many siblings that he’d no longer be able to identify his bubble any more. By the time they’d be popping at the top, dozens of them, they’d have cleared his mind, told him what to do, or not do.

  Today was no exception.

  The Voice, they reminded him, was not the careless type. It was unlikely that the CCTV caught the old hag because The Voice had been sloppy.

  It was because he wanted people to see her.

  Which meant one thing. That the old hag was Tori in disguise and if he’d gone ahead and posted the clip as he’d been about to – Thank you, my dear bubbles – he’d have as good as hung her out to dry. Guilty, your Honour, indeed.

  Once again, his trusty tongue twister turned out true. Pinot never pops purposelessly. His bubbles proved their worth, deserved their reward.

  He replayed the eight-second clip and this time he saw what he should have noticed before: the woman was wearing Tori’s signature black riding boots. The elastic sides, the Cuban heels – an iconic Australian brand, she’d told him once, though he found himself wondering why any self-respecting Australian shoe company would choose to use a Cuban heel.

  Given how absurd the boots looked on a woman wearing a miniskirt he couldn’t understand how he’d overlooked them. But flailing himself wasn’t going to help Tori. By finding this clip, he knew he’d find more, shots capturing her in other parts of the hotel as she scurried her way out. The Voice had left them on purpose, so the police would find them and add them to the weight of evidence against Tori, to be sure she’d be crucified.

  ‘Well,’ he said out loud, ‘it’s a good thing that it’s Thatcher who got here first and not the police,’ and with an elegant economy of clicks, he vanished the whole building’s next half-hour of tapes, from 7.30 to 8 o’clock. ‘Fat lady? What fat lady? Did anyone see a fat lady?’

  He allowed the yeasty bubbles a moment to tickle his nose and tantalise his tongue. After making a toast to his genius yet again, he closed his eyes until a new thought came to trouble him.

  What if Tori was actually guilty?

  44

  Air Force One

  The president’s chief of staff was a stickler for language, for punctuality, and even his dress. Gregory L. Samson – don’t forget the L – never gave his Italian suits a vacation, not even on long-haul flights. His idea of casual was slinging a Zegna jacket over his shoulder; in an emergency he’d loosen the knot of his tie.

  He wasn’t like any other Australian Isabel had met. Gregory – or GLS to his staffers – didn’t touch alcohol. Isabel had seen him turn down a glass of Penfolds Grange once, like it was two-buck chuck. He didn’t say mate or strewth or fair dinkum. The only Aussies in his circle who did, he once told her, were politicians angling for votes.

  Isabel knew plenty of American legislators who were like that too, the Ivy Leaguers who morphed into homespun Harrys or Harriets whenever they saw a TV camera hovering nearby. They’d drop their g’s so they were comin’ or goin’, they’d say y’all and ca
ll everyone folks but as soon as the camera or the crowd left, they’d start raving about the soufflé and sauterne the hapless taxpayer had paid for on their last Congressional boondoggle to Paris.

  Isabel Diaz was not cut from the same cloth. She was a genuine rags-to-riches story. Not Ivy League or any league, she’d attended what she called ‘the college of the customer’, starting out as a runaway at fifteen, wiping tables in a diner in Half Moon Bay and, twenty-five years later, selling her ownership of one of America’s most popular family restaurant chains so she could enter politics and serve America in a different way.

  Gregory placed his can of Diet Coke on the coaster, centring it over the presidential seal. ‘Madam President, it’s my firm advice that we should turn around and head back to DC. With that Swyft woman on the loose and the media megaphoning her past years in the CIA, and the whole Endz of the Earth thing as well, the Secret Service is worried that your presence in Barcelona might incite a wave of anti-US protests.’

  Isabel respected her agents, and Gregory too, but her response was firm. ‘If President Casals postpones Montse’s funeral, fine. If he asks me not to attend, also fine. But if neither of those happens, we’ll land this plane in Barcelona and I will deliver my eulogy. Tell Chief Franklin I appreciate his advice. He’ll just have to make the arrangements work.’

  ‘This Swyft thing, it’s potentially—’

  ‘She’s one of yours, Gregory,’ she said, after referring to the note on her screen detailing Tori’s background, including her dual citizenship. ‘Why can’t you, of all people, give her the benefit of the doubt?’

  ‘I never gave one to Rupert Murdoch and he started off as one of ours.’ He continued on another tack. ‘The Service thinks the furore over the murders—’

  ‘I’ve covered that. Anything else?’

  He picked up his Coke can the way he always did to hide his frustration, his thumb and first finger circling the very top rim, his other three fingers splayed out like a Chinese hand fan.

  45

  SoHo, New York City

  The phone tolled through Thatcher’s apartment. He knew it was Frank calling as soon as he heard the ringtone. He’d dedicated eleven of his incoming lines to individual clients, with the twelfth for Frank. All of the numbers were registered in false names at false addresses, three each in London and Paris, two in Prague, one each in Budapest, Bolivia, Edinburgh and Venice. The one he’d allocated to Frank was the one in Venice, a city Thatcher kept planning to visit but never did.

  Thatcher’s regulars were not people who wished to be traced. So if one of them, or Frank, dialled him using their allocated number, the call would bounce randomly from country to country at least seven and up to ten times, making it virtually impossible for the authorities to follow.

  Thatcher, on the other hand, would instantly know who was calling since he’d allocated each number a specific ringtone. What gave this call from Frank away was the initial upward sweep of violins and the martial horn refrain. It was the soaring intro to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.

  The great unwashed, as Thatcher liked to call the general public, knew the piece from Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, when the Black Hawks made a vicious aerial attack on a North Vietnamese village.

  Thatcher chose it because, while Frank was his dearest friend, his best friend, his one failing was that he was a Ring Nut, an aficionado of Wagner’s operas. Thatcher loved opera, but hated Wagner.

  Thatcher let the phone ring while he pondered how to play the call. Tori wanted him to keep his old friend in the dark to protect him. There was also the question of the fat lady. Thatcher didn’t seriously believe Tori could be guilty of anything – apart from her tacky disguise – but the question was still circling in his head, and it wouldn’t leave.

  ‘Chowders,’ said Thatcher when he eventually picked up, using the chummy nickname he’d given his friend the first day they met at Eton. He lifted his voice so it was as light as his bubbles, and went on and on about nothing, feigning ignorance that anything might be amiss.

  Frank cut him off. ‘Tori is in deep troub—’

  ‘Thatcher is aware, Frank, but his lips are sealed,’ he replied in his pinched adenoidal voice, using what Frank once had the gall to describe as his ‘third person superior’. Thatcher preferred to think of it as a subtle way to underscore his dignity and modesty.

  ‘Ah! She’s contacted you then, Thatch. That’s good. She probably told you not to tell me anything, right? Because it might compromise me?’

  ‘That is Thatcher’s quandary, old friend,’ he said, although the words sounded more like quandawy, old fwend due to yet another eccentricity, the speech mannerism Thatcher had slavishly copied as a boy from a young royal who’d sat in front of them in Latin class.

  ‘We don’t have time for quandaries.’

  Thatcher suspected Frank was right but Tori had been explicit, and in his dark profession the revealing of confidences, even to someone you’d trusted pretty much your entire life, was a grave taboo. Reputations were hard to build in hackerland and very easy to destroy. ‘Dear, dear boy,’ he said, ‘she was most adamant—’

  ‘That was before the Barcelona cops gave me the third degree. I’m in the clear now,’ Frank said, though Thatcher wondered if he was stretching the truth. ‘Thatch, you’ve got nothing to worry … Thatcher! Are you drinking?’

  He put down his glass and listened to Frank recount his morning so far, what had happened last night, the video, the Endz of the Earth release, all of it.

  ‘On that basis, Thatcher welcomes you inside the loop,’ he said, crossing his fingers since he wasn’t going to allow Frank inside the whole loop. For one, he didn’t want to taint his friend’s thinking with knowledge of Tori’s suspicious-looking getaway. He’d almost convinced himself it was nothing, an innocent woman whose face was plastered all over Barcelona simply hiding her identity so she could escape and help Thatcher prove her innocence.

  ‘Chowders,’ Thatcher continued, ‘Old Mother Hubbard was rather busy before you called. The thing is that when she broke into the hotel, she found its cupboards were bare. Someone, the people who framed Tori, emptied them and—’

  ‘Thatcher, what the hell are you gabbing on about?’

  Honestly, thought Thatcher, Frank could be rather thick. ‘Francis, the real monster behind the ghastly goings-on in Room 420 is a man Tori calls The Voice. He wiped the hotel CCTV recordings from yesterday afternoon until, er, eight this morning. Thatcher went looking but he found nothing to help us identify the true miscreant. Nothing.’

  ‘Was there anything to implicate Tori?’

  Thatcher didn’t mean to pause, but he did.

  46

  Barcelona

  The Catalonian president’s chief of staff had spent the last hour picking up so many phone calls she felt like a one-handed drummer.

  Her phone started to dance on the table. Again. ‘For the last time, no delays and no cancellations,’ she snapped into the handset as she picked it up. ‘Both events will start and finish on time.’ As far as she was concerned, nothing was going to spoil the Cata-Cars launch, the hi-tech extravaganza she and Uri had started working on months ago – or Montse’s state funeral. Both events were crucial to Catalonian pride and, as a bonus, they were certain to turbocharge Uri’s re-election campaign.

  She hung up and turned to her staffers, ‘That was Madrid, again. Cancel, postpone, cancel, postpone. They’re like a broken record. What do they care about a showcase of Catalan innovation? Or a tribute to Montse’s memory? Postponing the funeral would be—’

  ‘A slap in Catalonia’s face,’ said her aide. ‘Turning away all these world leaders at the last—’

  ‘An affront,’ said Maria, wiping genuine tears from her eyes.

  Over the years, before and after Uri’s cousin lost her hearing, Maria had spent many late nights with Montse, the two women discussing politics, diplomacy, the Madrid–Catalan tensions and the parade of men they’d encou
ntered in their careers who kept women down, though in their personal cases, those men had failed miserably. Uri was an exception. Exceptional, even. Maria and Montse couldn’t have had a firmer supporter, not that either woman needed it.

  ‘Has the president finalised the eulogy?’ asked the staffer, a pushy young woman whose name Maria tried not to remember. The one who’d given Uri two good paragraphs and was only angling to find out if her words survived so she could add the success to her resumé and move on to her next job.

  ‘He’s still working on it,’ said Maria. She encouraged ambition, especially among the women on her staff, but she was not one to waste time by holding people’s hands.

  She took the next call, listened for five seconds before she held the phone away from her head and barked into it, ‘What good are you, Miquel, if your officers haven’t got that Swyft witch in custody? Do your fucking job!’ She slammed it down.

  For the next caller, Gregory Samson – Gregory L. Samson – she switched to oily politeness, as necessary in a role like hers as brusque economy. She put the call on speaker so her staff could listen, and learn.

  In Samson’s last call, he’d given her the unwelcome heads-up that the US Secret Service were advising his boss to turn her plane around. This call would tell them his president’s decision. Maria crossed herself and so did her staff. As Gregory spoke, smiles caromed around the room, as well as some quiet high-fives.