Double Deal Page 14

  No lights. No music. No curtains.

  Nothing.

  She listened beyond her own breath, trying to make out the slightest sound, the scuff of a shoe, the brush of an arm against a jacket, a puff on a cigarette.

  Nothing but pin-dropping silence.

  59

  Frank leant on the wall outside the niche, venting to Thatcher and slapping the crowbar against the wall. ‘Any sane person who found that passport, they’d go let’s bail. But not Tori. Thatch, you remember when the three of us were debating traps and clues? It’s like the discussion never happened. She just charges in, no backup, no one to protect her, and I’m stuck outside, useless.’

  With one hand, he picked up her boots and dangled them by the pull-loops, and with the other tossed the crowbar as far as he could, watching it wheel through the air until it clanked onto the asphalt and kicked up a cloud of dust.

  Down a corridor a long way ahead of her, Tori saw a thin greenish glow-strip at floor level, like someone had tossed down a Star Wars light sabre. Was it light creeping through the crack under a door? She slowly moved towards it, and when she got to the end of the hall, she bent over to pat the floor tiles which, thankfully, were dusty but not sticky. She dropped herself all the way down, stretched out lengthways and pressed her cheek against the floor, her backpack bearing down on her neck, the chill from the ceramic floor leaching into her skin and a draught of cold, acrid air streaming out through the gap under the door to the hum of what sounded like an air conditioner inside.

  She couldn’t see – the gap was too narrow – so she watched for movement, for the slightest smudge of a shadow drifting across to indicate someone was inside. The Voice, or maybe an accomplice.

  In the face of the draught, it took her lashless eyes a lot of blinking to stay open. Worse, the smell the air carried out was rank. After two minutes of this cold, sour microclimate she got up. She twisted around to squint back into the corridor’s dim emptiness, checking that no one was sneaking up on her.

  The sweat rolling down her back clearly wasn’t due to heat. Perhaps her body was reminding her how dangerous this was, how her only protection was a bulletproof backpack and the hairbrush shiv inside it.

  She slid the bag off and slung it in front of her chest, as she’d done leaving the hotel. The fat lady was back, handy if Tori took a shot from the front when she opened the door. She fished inside for the shiv and held it up and ahead of her in a right-handed attack grip. She extended the back of her other hand to the metal doorknob, a precaution learnt at Langley that was now a habit and, greeted by no electric shock, she turned the handle and burst into the room, ready to jump whoever was inside before they had time to react, before they fired or lunged at her.

  ‘What the—’ she exclaimed, just before a slick on the floor sent her into a skid.

  60

  Tori skated across a slippery skin of red. She lashed her arm out sideways, grabbing at the only vertical object – a tripod of all things – and used it to stop herself toppling backwards into the sea of blood.

  What confronted her was evil beyond weird. It was as if opening the door had whisked her back to Room 420.

  Two bodies, hacked and mutilated – the same bodies – were splayed out on the bed – the same bed – in their same godforsaken poses. The masked man was on his back, his lower half covered by a red-drenched sheet, his bloodied arms stretched above his head, yellow cable ties manacling his wrists to the bedpost. The woman had an ulu hatchet buried in the back of her head, her hair caked with red; razor blades jutted out of her back, her skin oozing blood. On the floor lay a spattered pile of clothes, a polka dot dress draped over the top.

  This was bizarre, surreal. The dead couple, the slaughter, the clothing. Had she been teleported back to the hotel room she’d just fled?

  Everything was the same, except for two things. Big things.

  First, the walls and the ceiling, which were a bright and luminous green, the colour so vivid that the more she looked, the more the bed seemed to float in it.

  Was this a green screen? The technique film-makers used to drop exotic location scenes behind actors enjoying the comfort of a studio set – waves crashing onto a sandy beach in Hawaii, an icy precipice in the French Alps seconds before an avalanche. Or Room 420.

  That also explained the second difference, the complete lack of furniture apart from the death bed. No nightstands, no desk, no TV, no wall art, no closet. Nothing apart from the pile of clothes on the floor, the tripod Tori was still holding onto and the butchery on the sheets.

  The sex and the murders, she realised, must have been filmed here – with these two victims – and The Voice then dropped clean background footage from an empty Room 420 in behind it.

  The Voice had accomplished a stunning sleight of hand, a filthy, murderous lie meant to vilify three people’s reputations, sabotage the deal between two countries and frame Tori. This was proof.

  Her socks were soaking up this unknown couple’s blood from the floor, and she had no way to stop it. Tears began rolling down her cheeks. She let them fall. These people were innocents, human sacrifices, pawns in a lunatic’s insane plan. Probably sex workers who’d bought some bullshit story about earning stacks of cash making a hard-core BDSM porn video. They might have families, might have planned to use the money to take their kids on vacation.

  What was becoming clear was that nothing about this was spur of the moment. Tori ran through the steps in her mind. Locating and setting this place up, painting the room the right shade of green, hiring the two victims, tracking down an ulu knife exactly like Nivikka’s, not easy to find if you weren’t in Greenland, then accessing clothes that were similar to Tori’s, Nivikka’s and Songtian’s … scripting the couple to act out a sadistic fantasy with Fake Tori, whoever she was, orchestrating a change of hotel room for Tori, drugging her and the others – maybe spiking their drinks while they were still at the bar – transporting them unseen into the hotel and up to Room 420 – for that The Voice surely needed inside help – murdering two of them, hacking at their bodies and arranging their corpses to mimic the scene already filmed here. A faithful but gruesome replica created for the police and public.

  The person who stage-managed all of this was not just a monster, he was a master. His Master’s fucking Voice.

  If she got out of here – if he let her – she’d be able to point to this place as the irrefutable proof that she was a victim and not the sadistic, perverted killer the police were hunting down.

  Which, she realised, meant she wasn’t supposed to get out. Should have heeded Frank’s warning that Bar Canona card was a trap, not a clue. A one-way ticket.

  With Tori locked inside here, The Voice could get rid of two birds – three to be precise – with one stone.

  Which meant she had to find some way to escape, and fast. And it also meant that she needed to take evidence with her, proof that this slaughterhouse actually existed.

  She started taking snaps with her tablet as fast as she could, just like she’d done in Room 420. She got to the woman’s hand, posed on the pillow exactly like Nivikka’s, except she noticed a disparity. These fingernails were lacquered with pink polish, not gold.

  As soon as she photographed that, she slotted the device back into her pack. She turned to leave and heard a click behind her.

  She stopped. It clicked again.

  It wasn’t a gun since it was scratchy, not metallic, more like plastic against plastic.

  A third click, and this time the lid of the camera on the tripod sprung open like a jack-in-the-box, and dark red flashes began radiating out of it.

  61

  The LED inside the camera was displaying the number 180. No, it was 179. … 178 …

  The air con had stopped so the room was eerily silent, as if it was holding its breath. The LED was ticking over like her heart, far too fast. She felt bull ants were crawling all over her skin.

  … 173 … 172 …

  She raised a sleeve
to wipe away the sweat streaming into her eyes, held her hand out flat, horizontal, and stared at it, amazed it wasn’t shaking, then turned it over to see her wristwatch ticking its seconds over at the same pace as the LED.

  Her mind was reeling. Who is this bastard, Stanley fucking Kubrick? With his smoke and mirrors, his video, his green screen – and now this ticking-clock movie cliché where in … 167 … 166 seconds … What? Was some flunky about to leap out of the darkness with a gun and shout, Bang, bang, you’re dead?

  … 165 …

  Staying put for anything close to another 164 seconds, a little more than two and a half minutes, was not, she decided, a gamble worth taking.

  … 163 …

  … 162 …

  Synching her watch’s timer to count down like the LED used up a couple of those seconds, possibly crucial seconds, but she took them anyway, and when both timers showed the same numbers at the same time … 159 … 158, she flicked on her watch’s flashlight, grabbed the polka dot dress – hoping Fake Tori’s DNA was crawling all over it – stuffed it into her bag, took another item off the pile – a gold cardigan unsoaked by blood – then stepped out of the room, slowly, so she didn’t risk slipping over.

  Leaning up against the wall in the corridor she peeled her socks off, carefully from their very tops to keep the gore they’d sponged up from the floor off her hands. She dropped them on the clean floor first, then the cardigan, wiped her feet on it, pointed her watch light forwards and raced down the hallway.

  Despite the dim light, it took her no more than twenty-six seconds to navigate her way back to the steel barrier she’d come in through.

  She took out the cardkey and pressed it on the steel plate, around the architrave, everywhere she could, hoping that it might reactivate the mechanism that had opened it previously. It didn’t.

  At 94 seconds, she started waving the card around in case there was a motion detector. Nothing.

  91 seconds.

  89 seconds.

  When she and Frank were pacing the outside of the building, she’d seen no windows, so there was nothing to smash and jump out of. All that was left was the roller grille at the front that they hadn’t managed to budge even with a crowbar.

  She charged back into the auditorium to find the grille from the inside, fast-tracking a turn to the left by grabbing onto the stripper’s pole, no time for the distasteful thoughts she’d had last time. She twirled her body halfway around it, too hard apparently because as she leapt off the stage she heard it clatter to the floor.

  At the toilets – unisex – she pushed open the door to double-check there was no window. There wasn’t.

  At 75 seconds, she swung a right, kicking open the doors to three dressing rooms – also windowless – and ran down another corridor.

  At 52 seconds, she yanked back a curtain. It opened onto a foyer where smoke was billowing out of an AC vent on one side.

  The public address system screeched and the guttural voice of a madman screamed out, something about being a god of hell fire, backed by pounding bass pedals and a blaring Hammond organ. The psychedelic sample kept looping, the smoke thickening as time was running out.

  She dropped the curtain, took a deep breath of the cleanest air she could get, squinted to keep as much smoke out of her eyes as possible and tore through the split in the fabric, the drapes flapping behind her.

  The glass doors ahead were only vaguely visible. As she got closer to them she could just make out the security grille on the other side, still reaching to the ground. She caught a hazy lime-green light pulsing through the smoke a metre or more to her right and, limiting her breathing as best she could, she waved the smoke away from her eyes and stepped towards it, relieved to see a security pad. Finally.

  Maybe.

  35 seconds left.

  Spluttering, pressing her eyes closed to squeeze out the smoke, her eyes streaming, she pressed the passcard against the pad. When she thought she could hear the creak and rattle of the roller grille over the looping music, she pulled her shirt up over her mouth, felt her way to the glass door and pushed her nose up against it, but with her eyes weeping and stinging so much, she could not see outside.

  She shoved the door – it was locked – and moved her hands over the surface to find the handle, then pulled and pushed it. Nothing. All she achieved was hearing the door banging up against the bolts that locked it to the floor.

  25 seconds.

  62

  Frank was outside the alcove when he heard maniacal music booming from around the corner. ‘Thatch, I’ve got to go.’ He ran to the front, putting his phone in his pocket as he went, arriving as the grille was clanking its way up. The sound from inside was ear-splitting.

  He ducked underneath the shutter, leapt up the steps and pushed and pulled on the glass door but it was locked. He couldn’t see inside, the foyer so full of smoke it was starting to billow out from under the glass.

  As he was looking around for something – anything – to smash it, he saw two hands emerge through the smoke and press up against the glass, then a nose … Tori’s.

  He flew down the steps, his head almost hitting the bottom of the rising shutter and sprinted to where he’d thrown the crowbar, and tore back.

  Choking from the smoke, deafened by the thunderous music and with 17 seconds left on her timer, Tori didn’t have to imagine what was about to go down. The place was about to blow, obliterating the truth about Nivi and Songtian’s deaths – and her innocence – and purging the world of the evidence to prove it.

  Beyond the glass, she could make out the grille rolling its way up. She stepped back and, turning side-on, ran at the door, hitting it with such force she almost cracked her shoulder.

  15 seconds.

  Turning, unable to see, she ran back through the curtain and into the auditorium, which was also filling with smoke, her knee slamming against the front of the stage. Dismissing the pain – she had no time for it – she scrambled up onto the stage, her feet tapping around the floor for the fallen stripper’s pole. When she located it, she dragged it back to the foyer, picked it up and hoisted it under her arm like a medieval knight taking his lance into a joust.

  At 5 seconds to go, the music stopped abruptly.

  At first, the hush felt deafening. Is this another mind game?

  Her eyes stinging and open only a crack, her lungs raw, she stepped back, one hand at the rear of the pole, one towards the front, and charged at the doors. At the same time as the metal hit glass, she heard more crashing, this time from the outside. The glass shattered, the cracks spider-webbing. She unslung her backpack, gripped it in front of her face and head-butted the crazed surface, smashing her way through it, chunks of safety glass crumbling around her and revealing Frank ahead of her, a crowbar poised in the air above his head.

  ‘Run!’ she screamed, with no time to thank him. He dropped the bar and they both jumped the stairs and hurtled into the demolition site, Frank making ground ahead of her since she was barefoot and had to dance around chunks of broken glass and stones and sticks. Not looking back, sucking in fresh air, the only sounds were their feet pounding the asphalt and the roller rattling back down behind them, until Tori heard snickers from the children.

  Still running, she twisted around, saw the smoke dissipating, the roller three-quarters down and closing fast. When she saw the kids, she stopped suddenly, stubbing a toe on a rock, and watched the four little girls laughing and giggling as they chased after a cat that loped under the roller and up the steps. They followed fast behind.

  ‘No … Don’t go in there!’ Tori shouted. She was still screaming when the howl of the explosion blew her backwards off her feet.

  Debris started shooting out of the building, the blast wave picking her up and slamming her into the side of a steel dumpster a couple of metres behind her.

  Disoriented, she scrambled around to the back of the skip, crouching under its lip as a torrent of rubble started raining down, chunks of brick, shards of tiles
and splinters of wood landing all around her, and, at her side, the bloody, scraggly arm of a child’s teddy bear.

  63

  The air was thick with dust and the stench of burning flesh. Dazed, with grit in her throat and her ears ringing, Tori got up, a little giddy as she looked back at the mountain of rubble where Bar Canona once had been. Clouds of smoke and dust were billowing into the sky, blotting out the sun.

  Frank stepped out of a doorway he’d sheltered in, his hair and tweed unsullied. The anxious faces of onlookers were poking out of side streets, some of them, she fretted, probably parents of the girls, mothers and fathers about to enter their worst nightmare. As she moved backwards, dirt and who knew what else falling from her shoulders, she took Frank’s hand and pulled him into the shadows of a deserted alleyway.

  They ran over the cobbles, took a right and a left and hit a small strip of shops – none of them open yet – first a phone store, then a massage parlour, and last of all another clothes store. Frank checked that no one was around, nodded to Tori and while she gaped at the wild, dirty and dishevelled mess she saw reflecting back at her from the store window, he burst the door open with his shoulder.

  64

  Air Force One

  President Diaz was on a video call with her vice-president when her DNI, Robert Hirsty, came through on another line. She joined the two calls up, her screen showing each participant in a separate window.

  ‘Ma’am, sir,’ said her DNI, ‘turns out that old coot of a professor, Buckingham, he died from an arterial aneurism. Just like the UN Secretary-General.’ Isabel had been a little elastic with President Casals’ request for confidentiality about the true nature of Montse’s death when it came to her closest advisers.