Double Deal Page 12

  ‘Gregory, please give your president my president’s deepest appreciation. He knows how big a place President Diaz and her stepson filled in Montse’s heart …’ Maria paused, momentarily appalled by her choice of words, given that she knew the real cause of Montse’s death. She decided her best course was to keep talking. ‘The Catalan people will view the presence of President Diaz on this most difficult day as the highest tribute to Montse’s memory, since she will be here both as her dear friend and as the leader of the free world.’

  Maria noticed one of her aides flinch. The ‘free world’ was still a loaded term for many older people in Spain who remembered how the West – the free world – had betrayed Spain by ignoring Franco’s atrocities and condoning his dictatorship simply because he too was fighting against communism.

  But Maria was a pragmatist. Uri needed the kudos he’d get from welcoming the first American president ever to visit Barcelona, let alone a president who was Catholic and Hispanic.

  47

  Tori’s fingers gripped the shaft of her hairbrush but, luckily for her cab driver’s neck, the street sign they’d just passed told her he’d brought her to the correct address.

  He pulled up at the corner of a deserted cobblestone street, scraps of paper flitting and twirling upwards in the breeze.

  Before she got out, her eyes quickly took in the rest of her surroundings. Slathers of graffiti, rows of abandoned buildings, most of the windows broken or boarded up.

  The driver twisted around, showing a wide grin of yellowed teeth and skin peppered with a day’s worth of bristles. Trying to be helpful to his tourist passenger, he mangled his words, borrowing from Catalan, French and English. ‘Senyoreta, are vous certain vous wish me to leave vous içi?’

  ‘Oui … I mean … si,’ said Tori. ‘Gràcies, senyor.’

  He nodded, as if to convince himself he’d satisfied his obligation to a defenceless young woman. If he only knew, Tori thought, shoving her hairbrush back into her bag.

  ‘Normally little traffic,’ he added, ‘but today Barcelona is many detours, long delays. Big funeral is later. Many important people come to our city.’

  If there’d been detours and delays, she hadn’t noticed. The trip had taken the same nineteen minutes her app had predicted. Smiling, and giving him another gràcies, senyor, she peeled a few euros off the wad in her bag, enough to round up the fare with a tip, an amount that wasn’t so much or so little that she’d stick out in his mind. She got out, feigning a little unsteadiness until he drove off and disappeared around a corner.

  Once his passenger was out of sight, the cab driver pulled over and took the phone he’d been given out of his glove compartment, leaving his own, the one pinging with all the calls he’d ignored, on his seat.

  Package delivered, he texted. That done, he removed the SIM card as instructed, opened his door just enough to reach out and drop both the SIM and the phone into a drain.

  What a glorious day, he thought. His first trip and he’d got two tips, one from the woman and one from her worried uncle, a tip that was big enough to take him and his new girlfriend out for a dinner she’d never forget.

  48

  Through the peephole in his hotel room door Frank watched the cop outside yawn, swipe a finger down the screen on his phone and scratch his backside with his other hand. The poor guy was as happy being stationed there as Frank was being a virtual prisoner while Tori was out there alone, fending for herself.

  At least Axel and Ron got to be useful, trying to keep the deal alive by working the phones from Boston and sweet-talking Greenland’s acting leadership into sticking with it.

  ‘Francis, I think you should abide by the police request,’ Axel told him in their last call. ‘Keep your head down and stay there until we get some clarity.’

  He’d listened politely, but keeping his head down, lying low, sitting on his bloody bum … There was no way Frank would do that.

  He’d wait a bit, just long enough for Thatcher to wield the magic the pair had agreed on, so he kicked off his shoes, the new pair he’d bought in Barcelona, took the tea bag out of the cup he’d filled from his room’s kettle, and sank back against the bedhead, cuppa in hand, to watch the local TV news.

  How many times could they repeat the phrases el suposat assassí, Tori Swyft and vídeo depravat in the same sentence? He put the tea on his nightstand and got up to go to the toilet. He was halfway there when his burner beeped and then rang.

  ‘Chowders, your humble servant has messaged you a link. Open it up.’

  Though ‘humble’ and ‘servant’ were not words Frank had ever associated with his big-headed chum, he kept the thought to himself as he picked up his tablet and clicked the link he found there. That way he could more easily talk and look at the same time.

  The link opened up on a fuzzy still image of a woman with dark – maybe black – hair, wearing sunglasses, poking her head around a street corner.

  Thatcher was zooming the camera in on her, the pixels sharpening, the image enhancing. Despite the hair, she was unquestionably Tori. ‘Am I watching this in real time?’

  ‘As real as Thatcher’s dulcet tones, dear boy.’

  ‘So you know where she is.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Frank sat on the bed, astonished. ‘But how? How did—’

  ‘Tori’s adversary displays a penchant for wiping CCTV tapes so Thatcher hit the city CCTV network to look for – what do the crime dramas call it? – to see if the same MO turned up somewhere else.’

  ‘Perhaps pointing us to where he might be hiding out?’

  ‘Your dear parents would be so proud to know, finally, that your mentally celibate years at Oxford were not wasted.’

  ‘Thatch—’

  ‘Yes, yes, to the point. You’re looking through a municipal camera located in a godforsaken square mile where all the recordings went poof! thirty-six hours back. The same cameras only came back online twenty minutes ago. That’s the good news.’

  ‘And the bad is … Oh my God. He switched them back on for a reason—’

  ‘Exactly, to watch his back, to see who might pop by for a visit.’

  ‘But if we know Tori is there … Thatch, turn the bloody cameras off again. Can you do that?’ There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘Sorry. Of course you can. Please, Thatch, do it now! And keep the cameras switched off till I get there.’

  Frank had made his decision. No matter what the police had demanded, or Axel suggested, he was done with keeping his head down. ‘And Thatch, the chap in blue outside my room,’ he said, his voice several notches quieter, ‘can you accelerate what we discussed last—’

  Frank heard a phone ringing through his door. ‘Thatch, is that you calling him?’

  ‘Certainly not, Frank. Most likely it’s the head nurse from the local hospital’s A&E giving him the bad news about his poor, poor mother. Something about a falling piano. If you look through your peephole, dear boy, you’ll see the frantic wretch turn on his heels any second and run down that corridor. Go pack your toothbrush.’

  49

  Tori snaked through the last dim, narrow lane. She’d strapped her bag on her back this time, for protection as much as convenience. The pathway fed her into a vast open space, a demolition site with a fleet of construction vehicles parked on the far side. Fire-red dump trucks, Caterpillar-yellow bobcats, two bulldozers, and three orange excavators. She counted eleven, twelve, thirteen vehicles and, leaping from one to another, three mangy cats.

  In the centre of the square, a single derelict building was waiting for these vehicles to flatten it. Around it, she saw the ghosts of kerbs and cobbles that hinted at three other buildings that once flanked it, all of them gone. The neon that hung precariously from the top of the building’s front wall confirmed she’d come to the right address. It was the same semi-naked pole dancer that was printed on the card she’d found in the hotel room.

  Apart from yowls from the cats and the pecks of a lone grey
bird not far from her feet, the area was eerily silent. The dove or pigeon, she didn’t know which, was nibbling at a half-eaten flauta de jamón ibérico, the local bread, tomato and ham speciality Tori had eaten every breakfast since she’d arrived in Barcelona.

  The one-time strip club was a forlorn structure, long and squat, two storeys high, with no windows or, if there were, they were plastered over by posters of concerts and dances with dates from long ago or spray-painted with images of couples in absurdly athletic positions.

  The asphalt between her and the building was cracked, bits of trash swooping and looping in the breeze above the smashed glass from green and brown bottles.

  The bird flew away from the bread roll and flapped up to the neon sign, perching on the woman’s toe, its wings fluttering just above the club’s name: Bar Canona.

  Tori stepped back into the shadows and let her eyes and ears crunch a path over the glass and gravel to the club’s entrance, alert for any sign that The Voice might be lurking inside.

  50

  Air Force One

  President Diaz wasn’t changing her mind. ‘For the last time, no, Gregory.’ Her chief of staff sat opposite in her office on the upper deck. Unusual for a man, as she observed for the umpteenth time, he was ramrod straight. Gregory never slouched.

  Isabel, tired of his toing and froing and perfect posture, was keen to be with Davey, who she knew would be trying out the virtual reality headset game she’d given him for his birthday.

  ‘Today’s agenda remains as is,’ she said as she stood. ‘We land, we do the one-on-ones at the airport,’ the private half-hour meetings she’d set up with the leaders of Germany, France and, ideally, Russia in the unlikely event that Gregory could get Tushkin’s people to change their leader’s mind, ‘we motorcade to Montse’s funeral, deliver our eulogy – hopefully Davey gets to sign it – then we fly to Madrid for the talks with President Rubio and do our joint media conference.’

  Santiago Rubio was the federal president of Spain. Her people and his had been negotiating changes to the governance at NAVSTA Rota, a joint naval station commanded by a Spanish rear admiral but fully funded by the US. Rota was strategically located near the Strait of Gibraltar at Spain’s southernmost tip. Their talks this afternoon were meant to seal the deal on the new arrangements.

  ‘Ma’am, I’ve said it before—’

  ‘And I’ve heard you every time.’ She stepped towards the door.

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if—’ He stood up. ‘Look, there’s a high risk that Barcelona will go into lockdown given these assassinations. And with Swyft on the run, an American …’

  ‘Half-American.’

  ‘And fully on the run.’ He sat again, back at the pointy end of her V-shaped desk and lifted his drink can off the leather coaster.

  Gregory’s heart was in the right place, she knew that, but she’d had enough. ‘We’ve got unique factors at work here. For one, we’re making history. I’m America’s first Hispanic president—’ apart from Matt Santos, she reminded herself, the Jimmy Smits character she’d loved so much in the West Wing TV series, ‘and I’m visiting Spain’s two most important cities. But about Tori Swyft, if she—’

  ‘—is guilty, which it looks like she is, ma’am—’

  ‘I’m not so sure. The CIA’s exit psych report says she’s far more likely a victim than a perpetrator.’

  ‘Not according to the head of the Agency.’

  ‘Swyft quit the CIA. The upper echelon despises her for that, but the psych report is pretty damn conclusive. What you see on that foul tape isn’t remotely who she is. I’ve tasked the NSA—’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I know, to check it’s not a deepfake—’

  ‘—like the one that showed me standing on the bridge of the USS Gerald R. Ford and declaring war on Russia last month.’ That video, created by North Korean ‘interests’, had roiled the financial markets for the fifteen minutes it took the White House to issue a formal statement that it was a fake. Gregory had acted as fast as he could but a lot of financial damage still got done.

  He put his Coke can back down again, as if the movement helped him think. ‘Our Secret Service team on the ground—’

  She’d wasted enough time on this. ‘This hassling to go home, Gregory. It’s a pretext, isn’t it? Because you’re scared you won’t pass the Spanish drug test at the airport.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said, looking confused.

  She pointed to his drink can and smiled as she left the room.

  He sighed as the door was closing. ‘I’ll test positive for coke? Really? That’s the best you can do?’

  The door clicked shut.

  51

  Barcelona

  Tori spied a street-cam on the corner. Though it wasn’t pointing towards her it still got her worried that she might have missed one from the time she got out of the taxi until now. If the image got put up on TV or social media and the cab driver saw it … She needed to change her appearance again.

  She’d passed a women’s clothes store one street back so she returned to it. The sign on the door said it would Obert a les 10h – open at 10 am – though she couldn’t imagine why they’d bother, since most of the buildings nearby were deserted. The locals had been relocated, she guessed, paid off to make way for the construction project.

  The front door was painted with a thick black lacquer, a yellow plastic smiley face stuck on it at eye level. She stepped into the doorway and rattled the padlock, cranky at herself for having given up carrying a set of lock picks. She went back to the building site and kicked around in the debris. Soon enough she uncovered a couple of thin steel nails that would do the trick.

  As she pushed the door open, a wave of old-people smell hit her. It was what her aunt’s house reeked of, what she later learned was the naphthalene flakes her dad’s sister used to sprinkle in her drawers to stop the moths eating her woollens. Tori moved inside, pushing past racks crammed with clothes that, even in the dim light, she could tell would be more at home in a charity shop. Near the back she came across what loosely passed as a washroom, more of an alcove, with a shabby chenille curtain dividing it off from the rest of the store. She was about to pull the drape across when her burner phone started ringing.

  Which wasn’t possible since she’d switched it off when she left the hotel and hadn’t turned it back on.

  It kept ringing.

  52

  The caller ID read ‘Frank’, which was also puzzling since the phone was a burner and Tori had not loaded any of her contacts onto it. She held it up to her ear, her pulse pounding against the plastic or glass or whatever the screen was made of.

  ‘Love that wig,’ said Frank.

  An unnerving image leapt into her head: Hannibal Lecter wearing his bite mask in The Silence of the Lambs, except the features belonged to Frank, not Anthony Hopkins.

  ‘Tori, hold the phone out in front of you. I want to check if your delightful face still looks like the one on a certain video that’s just gone viral … Congratulations, by the way. You’re super famous.’

  He used the word delightful but his tone was menacing. The Frank she knew would never talk like this. ‘Fuck you,’ she said into the air, a chill scuttling down the back of her neck as she put her finger over the camera lens.

  He ignored his sudden blindness and babbled on, but Tori was concentrating on the words, scraps of sentences, she could vaguely make out in the background. There was an echo too, like snatches of sound from a distant public address system. They were in Spanish or Catalan, she couldn’t be sure, since she’d put her FrensLens in her backpack. She thought she heard innovació … tecnologia … Cata-Cars … definitely Cata-Cars and also onze en punt, which she knew was eleven o’clock in Catalan, two and a half hours from now. The time that President Casals was set to cut the ribbon at Catalonia’s driverless car show, something he’d talked about last night.

  She had no idea why The Voice or Frank or whoever this really was might be near the car s
how, but she was done with him. That was easily said, of course. Being done with a guy who could remotely activate a phone that was switched off and turn on its camera was complicated. Anyone who could do all that would most probably also be able to use the device to track her and know precisely where she was. Without hanging up, she dropped the phone to the store’s tiled floor and stomped her heel on it again and again, as if she was crushing the air out of his throat.

  ‘Hey Tori,’ came a voice, this time from outside the door. ‘It’s me, Frank.’

  Sure, you are.

  ‘Tori, I know you’re in there.’

  If this ‘Frank’ was The Voice, finally about to step out of the shadows and reveal himself, she knew it was not likely to end well. Silently, she drew her hairbrush shiv out of her bag, gripped the handle and raised it high with the point forward and down, poised, ready to strike.

  She waited.

  He pushed the door in, slowly but steadily.

  She moved her hand a little to the right, ready to plunge the shiv into the side of the bastard’s neck before he had time to shoot her, stab her, or do whatever else he was planning.

  53

  ‘It’s the Americans, again,’ the police commissioner grumbled to Maria, his tone so frustrated she could almost hear his eyes roll. ‘The Secret Service won’t accept a motorcade for their precious president. Convoys are good enough for the Brit, the Russian, our own king and queen, for goodness’ sake, but not Isabel fucking Diaz.’

  ‘They can’t walk her from the airport, so what—’

  ‘Chopper. A fly-in to the basilica. All our planning thrown …’

  Maria stopped listening to him. Miquel was an idiot. He’d clearly missed what was really happening. It wasn’t the Secret Service behind this, it was Gregory Samson, the chief of staff from hell, from L, she corrected herself. He was orchestrating a scenario to get his boss to pull out. So he could tell her with a straight face, We tried everything, ma’am, but the Spanish couldn’t accommodate Marine One. I know you desperately want to be there, but our top people say that if they can’t fly you in, you can’t risk going.