Double Deal Read online

  What was going on? In their last call, Frank was worried, solicitous, what she’d expect from a concerned colleague, a friend. But this version of him?

  ‘Frank? Are you watching me? Stalking me?’

  As he laughed, a long, cackling laugh, she pivoted into the room and saw the camera almost immediately. An amber-coloured plastic dome about the size of a ping-pong ball, stuck to the wall above the TV. How had she missed it before?

  Frank had seen everything.

  The couple. Her. Everything.

  Was Frank the devil who drugged her with ice? Glued her eyes shut? Made her do unimaginable acts? Was he really a sicko all along? The man who never swore, who attended Mass and confided once that he’d spent a year in a seminary studying to be a priest. The man who would not tolerate anything remotely unprincipled, such as when Tori wore the FrensLens glasses during the talks to eavesdrop a little better on the Chinese negotiators, until he called her out for it.

  He continued. ‘Tori, soon you’ll have visitors. A swarm. They’ll be garbed in blue uniforms, they’ll be wielding guns and batons and Tasers and they’ll be under orders to shoot to kill – to kill you. They might have dogs, huge, nasty, slathering animals with sharp teeth. Which reminds me, the media will be running close behind. You’re about to become a star of the screen, Tori. The whole world is going to know you and what you’ve done, so if you don’t get a gee-up and scoot out of that room, one of the first things people will see will be the police bundling you into a van, barefoot, hands cuffed behind you,’ he sniggered, ‘unable to prevent that fluffy white robe opening up and flaunting all your red-haired glory. I do hope for your sake that your little belt holds firm.’

  It was definitely a snigger, an unsettling, ugly snigger, and the Frank she knew would never do that.

  ‘Don’t even think of putting your polka dot number back on, the one on the floor splattered with bits of Songtian and the once lovely Nivikka. Poor them. Requiescant in pace. Or is it more appropriate to say requiescant in fragmenta. Ha! May they rest in pieces.’

  As Frank laughed down the phone, Tori was utterly stunned.

  22

  For the entire six months they’d worked together, Frank had been gentle, thoughtful, decent and chivalrous. Almost to excess. They’d seen eye to eye on virtually everything. Was that Frank a ruse?

  Sure, he’d previously worked inside a dark realm of smoke and mirrors at MI6, but that hardly made him a torturer or a deranged killer. Tori had worked for the CIA and she wasn’t like that. Well, according to the video she was, but she’d never been injected with crystal meth before. Frank couldn’t possibly be behind this.

  Nothing made sense, apart from being drugged, and right now she had to get herself dressed and out of here. But she’d do it without an audience. She got up onto her toes, stretched out with the pen she’d picked up and slid its point behind the camera dome to lever it off the wall. When it popped off and hit the floor, she bent over and smashed it to pieces with the base of the desk lamp then kicked it under the bed.

  ‘Aw, you’ve blinded me,’ he whined through the phone, ‘tit for tat, eh?’ He started singing, mimicking Stevie Wonder’s voice, ‘Very superstitious … camera’s on the wall.’ Then in his own voice, ‘When I did have my eyes, dear Tori, I saw you engaging in sexual activities that, speaking bluntly, appalled me. Worse, I watched you commit two callous and, frankly, depraved murders. Yet now you have the audacity to gouge out my eyes when,’ again he started singing as Stevie Wonder, ‘I just called … to say … they loved you, I just called to say I don’t care.’

  The singing clinched it. The real Frank had the deepest, honey-dripping voice but he couldn’t hit a note if his life depended on it. She knew that from the office karaoke party soon after she joined SIS, when peals of laughter had greeted his attempt to sing ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’.

  This was not Frank. Most likely, she decided, it was someone using sophisticated voice-masking software.

  ‘What do you want?’ she snapped at not-Frank.

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘What the hell do you want with me?’ she asked again through gritted teeth. Frustrated and angry, she wanted to punch the wall since she couldn’t hit the guy but instead, hoping to trap him into a confession, she set her own cell phone to record mode, pressed her phone up close to the one he’d been speaking through and said calmly, ‘Tell me what you want from me.’

  ‘Top marks,’ said the voice finally, the voice that was definitely not Frank and now had a genteel Southern drawl. ‘I see you’re not wastin’ time askin’ who I am since you know I won’t tell you.’

  This voice was familiar too. Was he mimicking former US president Bill Clinton now?

  ‘What do you want from me?’ she pressed again.

  ‘Not a thing, Tori. I’ve got everything I need.’

  23

  After Frank rang down to the hotel operator he was back in the corridor outside Tori’s room, tapping his foot on a carpet that suddenly reminded him of what his stomach had disgorged last night. Why did hotels choose such revolting floor coverings? He checked his watch, eyed the door lock and, as the seconds and minutes ticked over, wondered if he should have simply picked the lock instead of calling for security, an idea that was becoming quite tempting until he spied a shiny black CCTV dome not far away in the middle of the hall ceiling. A moment later, the elevator chimed.

  Two men in black pants and black open-necked shirts came bolting out of the lift towards him, one behind the other since the corridor wasn’t wide enough to fit both giants abreast.

  Frank pointed to Tori’s door as the stampede got closer. ‘My colleague’s inside there. She’s in some kind of trouble.’

  The first man, wider than Frank and more than a head taller, slammed his meaty fist against the door.

  ‘She won’t answer,’ said Frank, rubbing his forehead with an uneasy mix of distress and impatience. He glanced up at the CCTV camera again, reminding himself that he might need to ask them to check the tapes, depending on what they found inside the room. ‘Just unlock the door. Please.’

  The man banging his fist looked back at Frank, the baby smooth skin above his pinprick eyes scrunched up in irritation. ‘És el protocol, senyor.’ He pulled back his shirt cuff to show Frank his watch as if that meant something and stood, waiting for what Frank counted out as an excruciating thirty seconds.

  It was all he could do not to shove both men aside, plus the fact that one guy was as big as a fridge and his colleague the size of the whole kitchen.

  At last, the first one pressed a card key against the lock and pushed the door open while the second gripped Frank’s arm to stop him rushing in. ‘Protocol,’ he said smiling, his bald head bobbing hugely, as if he saw Frank as an imbecile.

  Seconds later, after his partner’s voice bellowed out of the room with what sounded like an all clear, he let Frank step inside. ‘Nobody here,’ the first man said coming back towards him, his arms wide, his big hands empty.

  The room was unoccupied, prepped for its next guest, the bed made up with a black throw rug across the white doona cover and the pillows plumped up like perfect soufflés. The citrus orange curtains were wide open to give the next guest the same spectacular sea-view welcome that Tori would have got when she checked in.

  Frank pointed to the walk-in closet. The second man flung the door open to show him it was empty, no bags, no clothes, not a scrap indicating Tori had ever been here.

  The bathroom too was pristine, no towels tossed on the floor, no toothbrush, no toiletries other than the standard hotel miniatures neatly lined up along the vanity. Frank ran his hand over the marble basin. It was bone dry, and there was not a single strand of red hair anywhere.

  ‘When I spoke to her by phone, just a couple of minutes ago,’ he told the men, ‘she was here, she was definitely here.’

  They shrugged and, on their way out, one pointed to the hotel phone on the nightstand, ‘Recepció.’


  Frank waved a thank you and picked up the handset, ‘It’s Frank Chaudry from Room 2421 … That’s correct, I am calling from 2420, which is my colleague’s room. Your security people let me in. But she’s not here … vanished … and all her belongings are missing.’

  ‘Mr Chaudry, it was me you were speaking to before. One moment … yes, yes, now I see the problem. Your colleague … Can you give me her name, please? For security purposes.’

  ‘It’s Tori Sw—’ He stopped, remembering how reception asked for their passports when they checked in. ‘Victoria Swyft.’

  ‘Thank you. I apologise I didn’t pick this up when you called earlier. Dr Swyft moved rooms last night. That is why—’

  ‘That’s not poss—’ he began. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  ‘Please hold and I’ll put you through to her new room.’

  24

  Tori ignored the insistent trill of the room phone and dashed over to the closet to get her backpack, one she’d bought from an online survivalist store a month before she quit the Agency. It was a triumph of science-meets-design and was sold as the perfect go-bag, with well-concealed inner compartments, a lining as bulletproof as Kevlar yet four times lighter due to a layer of graphene nanotubes. The original supplier swing tag claimed that if you slung the bag over your shoulders a kill shot from behind would feel no worse than a friendly pat on the back.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill me when you butchered Songtian and Nivikka?’ she asked.

  ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’

  Tori might once have thought that hearing those words from Hamlet, especially in Bill Clinton’s voice, might be funny, ironic even, but here, now, they felt sick, dirty.

  ‘And don’t forget, dear lady, it was you who killed them,’ he said, chuckling. ‘That trophy video of yours proves it for the world to see, and oh yes, the world’s definitely gonna see that, baby.’

  This maniac had handpicked her, had drugged her, to make her the star in his macabre snuff movie and she was mystified why.

  She checked that her phone was still recording him – yes, the red record button was active – so she placed the two phones next to each other on the floor, a dry spot, and started unzipping the backpack.

  ‘Why did you kill Nivikka Petersen and Rao Songtian?’

  ‘For a PhD you’re a pretty slow learner,’ he said.

  Stunned, Tori couldn’t speak. What didn’t this guy know about her?

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked. ‘If you’re thinking of scampering off – which I strongly urge you to do – don’t forget about that video. The scene where you get yourself off at the same time as you’re hacking them to death … it’s Palme d’Or material, right? The folks at Cannes would love it. It’s as good as any Tarantino film, better really because it’s hyper-realistic – because it is real. You know what? Instead of you and I waiting to premiere it in Cannes, I’ll get it to stream onto every phone screen in this city. Yes, let’s do that. What time, Tori, what time would you like me to raise the curtain on our little movie? You’re the star so you can choose. Five minutes from now … ten … thirty minutes? You choose.’

  ‘How about never?’

  She was shaking so much her finger almost missed the off button.

  25

  Tori only had two options, and both were bad.

  Her Plan A, the I’ve-been-framed route, was straightforward: call the cops immediately, before they kicked in her door and tossed her to the floor, cuffed her and dragged her out by her hair. That would mean phoning 911 or whatever the Spanish emergency number was, throwing on some clothes, waiting out in the corridor, handing them the mongrel’s phone and her incriminating recording of their conversation, and pointing them to the drugs and the wall camera she’d smashed. Purity proved. Go home.

  All of that was fine and dandy except for a few crucial details. Like the video, like her hair in the bed, the bathroom, all over the bedroom.

  Especially the video.

  As well, the bastard could easily have refilled the syringe he’d used to drug her with her own blood and squirted her DNA all over the crime scene. After he’d put her under, he could have pressed any of the weapon handles up against her fingertips. Which meant that ‘cleaning’ the room was not an option, even if she had the time, which she didn’t.

  She took up her phone and pressed play:

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Not a thing, Tori. I’ve got everything I need.’

  She had him, even if his voice was masked.

  Her own voice was coming through strongly:

  ‘Why didn’t you kill me when you butchered—’

  Mid-sentence, the audio stopped. Ended.

  She tapped play again but nothing happened. Pressed it repeatedly, urgently, until it eventually resumed, but the words coming out were different:

  ‘Now you hear it, now you don’t. I’m pretty amazing, right? Call me Houdini, Penn & Teller, Joshua Jay, Andy Jerxman, any magicians you want to pick. Harry damn Potter if you like. But Tori, this recording is … hocus pocus, hey presto, abracadabra, alakazam … Poof! Gone forever.’

  And with that, all the audio, including the hammy incantations, vanished off the phone.

  As if their dialogue never existed.

  The sole shred of evidence she had to corroborate she’d been framed by a remote mastermind had disappeared. Like magic.

  The call register on her phone was empty too. She checked the log three times. The only thing she had to shift the pall of guilt away from her was her own word, which no sane person would believe once they saw the tape.

  If she stuck with Plan A she’d rot in a prison cell for the rest of her life – if she was lucky.

  26

  Plan A was clearly no plan, especially after she’d seen how her nemesis had perfected the Mission: Impossible routine of this-tape-will-self-destruct-in-five-seconds. If the guy could remotely hack into a phone that was cut off from the network, a phone in flight mode, delete a recording on it then remotely embed a new one and delete that once she’d heard it, he truly was a magician, a hacking Houdini.

  Her phone had to go. If he could do all that he could also use it to track her, know her precise location, what she was doing moment by moment. If he switched on her camera, he’d know who she was with, and if he flicked on her mic, what they were talking about.

  She opened the phone’s settings, went into reset and erased all its contents. When the data was wiped, she placed the phone on the ledge behind the lounge, hoisted up the desk lamp again and, this time shielding her eyes with her other hand, brought its heavy black marble base down hard, shattering the device, thin shards of glass and plastic and splinters of electronics spearing into the back of the chair.

  Plan B, which had been the riskier option, was now her only option. She had to get hard, irrefutable evidence of the scumbag’s guilt, track him down, tear the incriminating video apart, whatever it took. Her big question was how.

  Even though she didn’t have much time, first things were first, so she placed her backpack just in front of the door to the hallway, one of the few large carpet patches not splattered with blood. She crouched down and began unzipping the compartments, slipped the contents out and arranged what she planned to keep on the floor in front of her: the FrensLens glasses, her sunglasses, her US and Australian passports, a power adapter, her hairbrush – which was more than a brush – and a portable power bank that was almost fully charged with three of its four blue LEDs aglow.

  She opened the laptop, erased all its data – she wouldn’t be taking it with her since she needed to travel light – pushed her tablet computer to the side then reached back into the bag’s innermost compartment for the Velcro tab, the one that released the false lining. She felt beneath it for the invisible tip-off thread, slipped a fingernail under it to give it some tension and, certain it was still intact, severed it with a sharp jag to free up the hidden flap behind it and tipped up the bag, allowing the contents to
tumble out onto the carpet.

  She’d packed them while she was still in the CIA and left them there after she’d resigned, as a kind of security blanket. A two-sided wig – black one side, blonde the other – vacu-shrunk into a tiny plastic bag no bigger than a change purse. Several fake passports she’d bought off-book with credit cards in the same names. Three rubber-banded wads of cash, US dollars, British pounds and Euros. Four pairs of differently coloured contact lenses and a spare burner phone with a battery that, unsurprisingly, was completely flat. She plugged it into the power bank, picked up her tablet and got to her feet, opened up the camera and started snapping photos of the grim crime scene from multiple angles and aspects. Wide shots first, then closeups of the bed, the weapons, Songtian’s face and the bindings tying him to the bedhead, Nivikka’s hand on the pillow. When it came to recording their mutilations, she just pointed and shot, squinting her eyes, trying not to look.

  Forty-three still shots and one panning video of the whole room later, she pulled the flash drive out of the TV and returned to the clean patch of carpet to send all the photographic materials to Thatcher, a virtuoso hacker who’d gone to school with Frank. Beating someone as tech-savvy as The Voice – how she now thought of her adversary – meant fighting his fire with her fire. And since she was about to go on the run, that meant asking for Thatcher’s help.

  For that she needed the internet and she also needed to make sure The Voice would not be eavesdropping, so she connected to her target destination, a high-security dropbox in the Cloud, one she shared with Frank and Thatcher, by using SIS’s proprietary encrypted Virtual Private Network. The VPN was basically a lead-lined digital tunnel that blocked unwanted eyes, ears and fingers.

  Tori didn’t know if Thatcher was his first or last name. Frank had introduced him as Thatcher and that’s what he answered to. It probably was his surname, an affectation harking back to their schooldays at Eton, two working-class boys on scholarships. Unlike Frank, who wore his schooling lightly, Thatcher cloaked himself in pretension as snugly as his tuxedoes, his preferred clothes du jour. ‘One has to look the part,’ he’d told her the first time they’d met. She didn’t quite know what part he was playing but it certainly was not that of a stereotypical hacker surrounded by towers of empty pizza boxes and soda cans.