Double Deal Read online

  An hour later, Tori was sitting in a sun lounge on a rooftop terrace looking out to sea, though unsure what she was hoping to spy. A whale? A pod of dolphins?

  Her phone vibrated but she ignored it. She’d even switched off her voicemail. This month, this break, was meant to be sacred. She’d put everything else on hold. Tori needed the water, the waves. The solace.

  The phone didn’t care and vibrated again, more insistent this time.

  She told her eyes not to look at it, but they disobeyed her. Axel Schönberg III the screen said.

  She swung herself off the sun lounge and stepped closer to the rooftop’s balustrade, debating whether or not to answer.

  Gazing out, she watched the waves, low and slow, rhythmic, carefree. A giggling rabble of children leapt in and out of the lacy froth at the shore. She was here alone, which was exactly what she needed. At least that’s what she told herself.

  Axel was her boss at SIS, a secretive family-run firm that, under the one red-tiled roof in Boston, brought together the smarts of a Goldman Sachs and the wiles of a CIA. It was why so many MBAs and former security services personnel worked there. People like Tori. People like Frank.

  SIS was a firm whose clients – kings, presidents and billionaires – only picked up the phone if their problem needed the special dose of discretion, guile or judgement that the publicity-shy Schönberg dynasty had been quietly mustering on their behalf for three generations.

  She remembered that Axel – the third, and possibly the most successful of his family line – had personally signed off on her leave, agreeing to her request that no one disturb her. Yet here he was, calling her himself. ‘The soul does need time out,’ he’d nodded, ‘a time when we can shut ourselves off from ourselves, as much as from what’s swirling around us.’ He’d taken a long draw on one of his Montecristo cigars and Tori wondered if he’d been speaking to himself as much as to her as she watched his smoke ring drift up to the ceiling.

  Despite his wealth and influence, Axel was an incredibly thoughtful and respectful employer, her best, in fact, so if he felt he needed to intrude on her sanctuary, it must be quite important.

  Axel was old-school so she expected he’d start off with an abject apology, and he did. It was genuine, she knew that, but she also knew his clients trumped everything. Their needs won out over anything else.

  ‘Tori, it’s the Arctic. Greenland, specifically.’

  The Hawaiian sun was still high, almost directly overhead, but the mere thought of ice and snow and blizzards sent a shiver through her skin.

  5

  ‘Greenland?’ Tori repeated, while she pondered what could possibly be behind Axel’s call.

  ‘Tori, what do you know about Greenland? Geopolitically?’

  ‘Geopolitically? Didn’t Donald Trump have some cockamamie plan to buy Greenland from Denmark a few years ago?’

  ‘Not so cockamamie, actually,’ said Axel pensively.

  She heard water glugging into a tumbler. Once it would have been champagne, but Axel was a different, thinner man now and he’d taken to honing his new body shape like a man running a hot knife through the butter he no longer let himself slather on a morning muffin.

  Apart from whales and polar bears and the impact of climate change on the ice sheet, and the blustering attempt by ex-President Trump to purchase it, Tori’s mental search engine didn’t have much on Greenland. ‘Axel, can we stop the twenty questions? All I know is that Greenland is a huge icy landmass with a tiny population.’

  ‘Yes, with a squeeze, Yankee Stadium could seat every single Greenlander, man, woman and reindeer, all 56,000 of them. It’s such a small population that the country is only economically viable because they’ve got a Juulimaaq … to a Greenlander, that’s Santa Claus.’

  Where was this going?

  ‘Every Christmas, Denmark slides down Greenland’s chimney and pops a half-billion dollars into their budget stocking.’

  ‘What’s in it for the Danes?’ she asked. ‘It can’t be charity.’

  ‘Originally it was, kind of. A mix of altruism and post-colonial guilt. But in more recent times it’s become a down payment on the future, staking a claim on the bounty that climate change is bringing to the Arctic.’

  ‘Bounty?’ Tori blurted out, thinking Axel’s new diet must be making him too weak to think straight.

  ‘Tori, our warming planet has grim downsides but for the Arctic there are a few positives as well. As the ice melts, a diamond mine of potential reveals itself. Remember, Greenland was actually green once.’

  ‘So what’s this about? Potential farmland?’

  ‘And mining, oil and gas, fishing. Huge opportunities for tourism. With all that becoming possible, shipping and international trade will be early and huge beneficiaries. Russia got onto this years ago and already they’ve got forty icebreakers plying the Arctic with more on the production line. America, on the other hand, has been slow off the mark, a single operational icebreaker with a second that seems to spend its summers and winters in drydock for repair.’

  While Tori still didn’t follow where Axel was going, that was not unusual. He often approached a topic obliquely. ‘Axel,’ she said, ‘you’re not about to tell me SIS has accepted a job to work on Greenland for Russia, are you?’ If Russia was his client, she’d sit the deal out. The country’s current president, Maxim Vladimirovich Tushkin, was dark and primal, a chunk of dirty black coal as far from a diamond as she could imagine.

  ‘Heavens no. It’s our good friend President Hou Tao—’

  She almost whistled into the phone. Putting China and Greenland together would be huge. Not necessarily a good thing, but it would be massive. ‘You’ve persuaded China to step into Denmark’s, er, clogs?’

  ‘Actually, the word for clogs in Danish is træsko, but yes … President Hou is keen.’

  ‘But isn’t his attention on the BRI? China is spending trillions on it.’ Tori had read a lot about China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Via this vast infrastructure and investment project involving between sixty and seventy other countries, China was building the modern Silk Road – land and sea routes – to gain better and cheaper ways to ship its goods to Europe across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

  ‘Tori, Hou is a deep-thinking strategist. Yes, he’s building the BRI but he also wants to advance a Plan B, an alternative and competitive route that can zip his ships to Europe even faster, even cheaper. If he can seize an opportunity like that, China will be far less beholden to foreign powers. That Plan B is the new Polar Silk Road.’

  ‘Are you telling me that Greenland is his key to carving that out?’

  ‘Exactly. He’ll pare twenty days off China’s shipping times to Europe if their cargo freights go via Greenland instead of the traditional route that winds through the South China Sea, the Molucca Straits and the Suez. That’s a time-save of forty per cent. The current forty-eight days at sea cuts back to twenty-eight. It’s not just the time-to-market benefit, it’s also the savings in charter and fuel costs and dodging the huge port charges all those countries on the way are thrusting their hands out for. Shipping is the bread and butter of his Plan B, but the cream is mining and—’

  ‘So Donald Trump wasn’t a complete airhead.’

  ‘On this issue.’

  ‘If this is China’s Plan B, why the urgency?’ Tori asked, code for why couldn’t this wait till I got back from leave?

  ‘Because this is a charms race, Tori.’

  She wondered if she’d misheard. ‘Did you say arms race?’

  ‘No. This is about charm, and resources, both of which President Hou has in abundance. The thing is, Russia won’t accept a Chinese push into what they consider their territory lying down. America won’t either. They’ve tried to court Greenland before – incompetently – and they’ll try again. When Trump’s thought bubble flew out of his mouth everyone slapped him down … Greenland, the Danes, the media, the Twitterverse, you name it. But here’s the thing, Tori. The day afte
r Isabel Diaz moved into the Oval Office we … I … gave Hou a call and, while I can’t claim credit for the actual idea, we did fast-track his thinking. We told him that if a new administration in DC decided to dust off Trump’s idea, they’d approach it properly and professionally so he needed to move before they did. The elections in Greenland last month gave us the perfect opportunity, so now it’s all systems go, go, go. We started working seriously on this just after you went on leave and—’

  ‘Whoa, Axel.’ A scrap of intel from Tori’s CIA days had come back to her. ‘Greenland hosts a number of US military bases. DC will never countenance China wangling its way in—’

  ‘Which is why we’re playing Hou’s cards very close to our chest. By the way, he’s not our client. Greenland is. The new prime minister agreed this strategy with me long before she won the election. You’ll really like her. Nivikka Petersen. She’s quite the dynamo. An old family friend, actually.’

  Of course she was. Tori smiled. For a century the three Axel Schönbergs had been gathering friends and influence as matter-of-factly as Elton John collected sparkly jackets and Grammy awards. ‘How much of a friend?’

  ‘When Junior took me to Greenland for our fishing trips Nivi was our deckhand. Her dad was our guide.’

  It was bizarre, Tori thought, to hear her boss, not exactly a young man, referring to his late father, Axel II, as ‘Junior’ or his grandfather Axel as ‘Senior’. It always reminded her of an old joke: What’s the difference between an eccentric and a screwball? Money.

  She pictured Axel holding up a glass of sparkling water, Badoit maybe, and watching the bubbles playfully rise to the surface the same way his family’s connections inevitably did.

  It wasn’t only the past that was another country. The rich were too, Tori decided. They definitely did things differently.

  6

  ‘Nivikka’s party romped in,’ Axel was telling Tori. ‘Won the election by a landslide, or an avalanche. Whatever.’

  Tori detected a twinkle of pride in his voice. ‘You funded her campaign?’

  ‘Tori, please! SIS never has and never will soil its hands with grubby politics. Well, not this century.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but you’ve been advising her on this prospect with China since before the election?’

  ‘Naturally,’ he said, the word slipping off his tongue like a drop of morning dew from the petal of a pure white rose.

  ‘And she genuinely believes Greenlanders will be happy to live under China’s, er, patronage?’

  Axel chuckled. ‘I didn’t exactly say that, Tori. The perfect outcome is we tie up a brilliant deal with China, one Greenland will be very happy with. But then we encourage America and Russia, ideally America, to barge in and … you know … overbid.’

  ‘You’re planning to run an auction for a country? That’s actually a thing?’

  ‘Not for their sovereignty. Greenland will keep that. But a race to win first dibs over pretty much everything else. Their ports, natural resources, military facilities, shipping lanes, fishing rights. Sotheby’s will have nothing on SIS if we’ve got Tori Swyft banging the gavel. The richer the terms you strike with China, the better for our client, and the more the other two rival powers will fall over themselves to up the ante and come out ahead. At minimum, they’ll be desperate to stop China gaining a firm foothold in the Arctic. At maximum, they’ll want all that Greenland offers for themselves.’

  Tori’s mind was spinning.

  Axel went on. ‘Also, a globally significant deal like this needs an honest broker who—’

  ‘Aren’t we – you – the broker, Axel?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Like I said, we’re the trusted adviser to Greenland. China trusts us too, which is a bonus, but our actual client is Greenland. The broker sitting in the middle, the person who’ll bring the two sides together and smooth the tensions that Tori Swyft will inevitably cause when she squeezes China for every drop of value, that person is the president of Catalonia. He’s another friend, by the way.’

  Of course he was. Tori shook her head.

  ‘You’ll like Uri,’ he said. ‘Everyone does. Well, the powers in Madrid don’t but that’s not saying much. There hasn’t been a leader in Barcelona they’ve got on with for years.’

  ‘Because of the independence campaign?’

  ‘Exactly. But everyone else loves him. He’s got one of those long Continental names, Oriol Casals i Castanyé. Oriol Casals for short or, to really close friends, Uri. We’ve known each other since we were boys. His father was a Catalan hero, you know. Garrotted by Franco’s men. And now Uri is the president of Spain’s richest and most prosperous region, and forever grateful for the pension Junior gave his mother and the scholarship that funded his education. Consequently, he’s very happy to host our talks in beautiful Barcelona.’

  ‘What does that mean, practically speaking?’

  ‘He’ll start with the ceremonial stuff and will be available whenever there’s a sticky issue that you and China can’t agree on. He is running an important Spanish region so he can’t be at the talks all the time, but he will be close by. He’s allocated us a convenient private section of the government palace for the negotiations, so you’ll be away from prying eyes. I’m calling you from the courtyard right now. You’ll find the palace a simpatico venue to do the horse-trading on a deal of this import. A stately neoclassical façade behind which you and SIS will bring two ancient cultures together, China and Greenland. We – you especially, Tori – will be making history.’

  She noted that Axel hadn’t asked her if she’d work on it, and she knew he wouldn’t. Her boss had lost his paunch but not his cheek.

  She planned to come back to that question soon enough but had a few others to ask first. ‘Isn’t Greenland the logical place to hold the talks?’

  ‘If a Chinese delegation put a toe on the ice, it wouldn’t take thirty seconds for the vultures of the global media to swoop in on it. In Greenland, Tori, everyone is someone’s daughter, brother, sister, cousin, aunt, whatever. And before you ask, holding the talks in China isn’t an option either.’

  She nodded. ‘That would show weakness on Greenland’s part. Hence Barcelona: neutral territory, millions of visitors coming and going again, so no one stands out. But why me, Axel?’ She watched the sea foam calling to her, glistening as it crept up the sand. ‘You seem to have everything under control and, frankly, I’d really prefer to stay here.’

  ‘Tori, if I had an alternative I—’

  ‘You’ve been front, centre and behind all of this, Axel. You started it so shouldn’t you be the one to finish it?’

  ‘Until an hour ago that was my plan. I would never have called you, Tori. I know how important … But an emergency in Saudi Arabia has cropped up. The king phoned – he and I were at Harvard together – and the poor fellow is frantic. Just between us …’

  As she listened to the details of the unfolding Saudi crisis she understood why Axel had to drop everything else for it and that, unfortunately, meant the same for her.

  Which made an issue scratching at the back of her brain even more important. ‘Axel, China’s developed a pretty dubious reputation for drowning poor countries in huge amounts of—’

  ‘You mean debt-trap diplomacy. Yes, a lot of world opinion, or should I say a lot of self-interested Western opinion, claims that China has a policy of seducing Third World countries with cheap loans for grand projects they want but can’t afford, and that when those projects blow out, as they often do, the locals suddenly discover they can’t even afford to make the interest payments to China let alone pay back the principal, so China forecloses, and they win a stranglehold over the projects as well as over the key components of the country’s economy. Conquest by debt.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s what people say but Hou doesn’t see it that way. But as Greenland’s adviser and his friend, I was upfront with him from Day One about that, making it plain that Greenland, and SIS, won’t have a b
ar of any deal if there’s even a sniff of that kind of thing. Not only does Hou understand, he’s bending over backwards. He wants this to become the benchmark deal that proves to the world they have misunderstood China’s past conduct.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve already nutted out some protections. Yes, China will be lending our client billions but Hou’s already agreed for Greenland to have a ten-year holiday from having to pay any interest at all. Ah, Tori, my car is pulling up. I need to go, so Francis will update you with the rest. He’s been working on this with me so he’s, er, full bottle on everything. Isn’t that what you Australians say? Whatever, he’s all over the detail. He and I both think the two of you can wrap this up in two weeks, three at the outside, which means we’ll get you back to Hawaii before your beach towels dry.’

  That Frank Chaudry – or Francis as Axel always insisted on calling him – was up to speed and on the case was more than welcome. Frank was super-smart, incredibly diligent and a guy who always thought outside the box.

  Tori couldn’t help remembering her first day at SIS when he walked through her office door, devastatingly dark and handsome with a charming British reticence and a voice that thrummed like salted caramel on the tongue.

  ‘So you need me in Barcelon—’

  ‘Your first stop will be Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. After my jet gets me back to Boston, it’ll swing over to Hawaii with Francis on board to pick you up and take you both there. We’ve got a natural break in the talks. The Chinese team are going back home for Ancestor Day or Tomb-Sweeping Day, something like that. This way you get the opportunity for Francis to introduce you to Nivikka, for her and her people to get comfortable with you, as well as a few days for Francis to bring you up to speed before you all head back to Barcelona to wrap it up.’

  A shadow floated over Tori and she looked up. A red-tailed tropicbird, otherwise silky white, was gliding in the thermal, its resplendent coral red streamers trailing behind it.