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  The man was eccentric, annoyingly so, but as Frank told her, it was worth putting up with him since he was brilliant, one of the best in the business. Even before Frank introduced them, she knew of Thatcher’s legendary exploits, albeit under his hacker handle of Fig Jam. According to Dark Web folklore, Fig Jam was the only individual who’d successfully got into all the major intelligence agencies, America’s CIA and NSA, Britain’s MI5 and MI6, Australia’s ASIS, ASIO and ASD, France’s DGSE, Germany’s BND, Russia’s FSB and, most amazingly, Israel’s Mossad. It was astonishing he’d managed to do all that and stay alive.

  His unimaginative rivals, jealous of his prowess and aware of his arrogant self-belief, read his Fig Jam handle as short for the classic insult Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me but, as Frank told it, the reason Thatcher chose it was because he thought no morning was complete without a slice of toast slathered with the stuff. And it wasn’t just any toast either. It had to be made from Royal Bloomer, one of the world’s most expensive loaves, which Thatcher got the Orchard Pigs Bakery in Wales to ship over to him monthly. He didn’t particularly love the bread, it was the fact that he was the only hacker on the planet who could afford sourdough that substituted the water and salt of the standard recipe with champagne and flakes of twenty-three-carat edible gold.

  Tori plugged the flash drive into her tablet and pressed upload. While the forty-three photos and two videos were going through to the shared dropbox, she cut off Frank’s access rights. It was more for his own good than for the remote risk that he really was The Voice, the bastard who’d done this to her. Assuming he wasn’t, the less he knew or could find out, the less likely he’d be arrested for aiding and abetting the fugitive that Plan B was about to make her.

  Thatcher, on the other hand, was a totally safe bet since he was physically located where the long arm of Spanish law couldn’t easily reach him, in New York City. She started typing:

  URGENT!

  URGENT!

  URGENT!

  Thatcher,

  I’m sending through 43 photos and two videos. What I’m asking you to look at will appal you … it’s horrific … but please understand I’ve got no choice. I’m in trouble. I’m so sorr—

  She stopped. Someone was banging in the hall behind her.

  27

  Tori scrambled to her feet. Peering through the eyehole she saw a bellman stepping back from the door opposite as it cracked open. His heel hit the room service trolley behind him and the jolt knocked the red stiletto to the floor. He turned to pick it up and, without comment, returned it to the champagne bucket like it was a regular accessory.

  The hotel guest poked his head out, his shiny black hair hanging loosely over his bleary eyes, so long and stringy that it nipped the diamond stud in his nostril. The guest pulled the door wider, revealing a fluffy white towel wrapped around his waist and a chest that was bare apart from what looked like smears of cream over his nipples. The bellman began speaking to him softly, his words inaudible.

  Relieved, Tori sat back down and continued typing. Saying she was in ‘trouble’ was too much of an understatement, so she replaced the word with ‘emergency’ then explained about The Voice and asked Thatcher to do whatever he could to prove that Fake Tori was a phony, that the video was what she hoped it was: a deepfake.

  Her suspicion, her desperate hope, was that The Voice had spliced her face onto a different woman’s body. If anyone could prove that, it was Thatcher, since he’d been making his own deepfakes for quite a while. An early one Frank had shown her was a macabre yet amusing video of Michael Jackson’s head on Elton John’s body singing ‘I’m Still Standing’.

  The photos of the room she’d sent through would help him to do spot-the-differences, comparing what was on the video against the actual scene.

  She also asked him to hack the hotel’s CCTV system. See if you can get a time-stamped picture of anyone entering or leaving Room 420 in the past twenty-four hours. Anyone apart from me.

  Thatcher’s skills made him a perfect choice for these jobs. If Tori had the time, she could’ve had a good crack at doing them herself. But time was an asset she was fast running out of.

  She ended her message by explaining why she’d locked Frank out of their communal digital vault. She didn’t dare tell Thatcher there was a possibility – very remote, it was true – that his best friend might be The Voice, so she kept it to: Keeping Frank in the dark is the only way we can protect him. What he doesn’t know etc. So if he calls you, tell him nothing. Promise me that, Thatcher.

  After she pressed send, she got some clean clothes out of the closet, ripped open the vacu-pack and took out the wig.

  Her disguise wasn’t complete yet but so far so good. Her red gym T-shirt was wrapped over her head like a scarf. It hid the wig – she’d reveal that to the world later – and she’d tucked its ends beneath the collar of her black shirt. She couldn’t see her eyes, not through the double cover of sunglasses and the pair of FrensLens beneath them. Her blue T-shirt was tied around her waist like a miniskirt.

  Back at her tablet, the videos and photos were flowing like a torrent down SIS’s VPN pipe, which was as thick as a fire hose, and the blue progress bar was showing 91 per cent … 96 per cent … and it was done. She switched the device off and, together with the flash drive, dropped it into her backpack.

  She was about to finish off her outfit when she thought about the dome camera she’d smashed and kicked under the bed, worried the police might miss it, initially at least. She placed one of the spare pillows from the closet over the floor at the foot of the bed, leant down and slapped the plastic bits and pieces back out. She placed the fragments onto the sideboard and only now noticed a plastic card already lying there. It was the size of a credit card, one side white, the other emblazoned with a lewd graphic of a naked woman, her thighs hugging a fireman’s pole, her hips thrust forwards and her spine arched back so her long hair dangled. The text underneath was scratched out but legible enough to read, Bar Canona.

  Tori tapped the card with a fingernail, wondering who left it. Was it a previous guest, some small-town accountant who’d flicked it there, an embarrassing memento of his big city business trip, the last thing he’d want his wife to discover after he got home? Or was it The Voice? And if it was him, was the card a clue or a trap?

  She put it into her pocket, then hoisted up her backpack and placed it in front of her stomach like a paunch, pulled its straps over her shoulders the wrong way around.

  Her disguise needed a couple more touches. She pulled on her boots and, for something to conceal the backpack, she raided the stack of clothes on the floor. Out of the middle, and thankfully free of blood, she got Nivikka’s gold cardigan, put it on, stretched the fabric over her new stomach and buttoned it up.

  The fat frump with appalling dress sense was ready to leave.

  28

  Tori checked the location of the nearest emergency exit on the map screwed into the back of her door. She peered through the peephole to see if the corridor was clear, pulled the scarf down over her dark glasses, yanked the tissues out of her nostrils and left.

  The fire stairs were to the right, after the elevators, and she scurried towards them like a dowdy old crone who was running late for her city bus tour or perhaps for breakfast, which, she reminded herself, was actually where she and Frank would have been if she hadn’t woken up inside a slaughterhouse.

  One of the lifts dinged behind her as her hand pressed against the fire door. She shoved it harder and entered, poking enough of her red headscarf back out to catch the backs of two men dressed in black pacing towards her room, their gait and brawn telling her they were more devoted to beer and burgers than barbells.

  She waited and watched. The men reached her room. The shorter one picked up the stiletto from the room service cart parked opposite and, laughing, waved it around by the sling-strap. His colleague went to knock on Tori’s door but his hand pulled back to his face – to his nose. He’d caught the stench.
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  She turned, letting the fire door close behind her as she took the banister loosely in her hand and, after checking there was no CCTV camera in the stairwell to record her, flew down the steps like a fit twenty-seven-year-old, two, three and four stairs at a time.

  29

  SoHo, New York City

  Like father like son? Hardly. Thatcher’s pa was a butcher in Nottingham, England, the beating heart of his working-class community, a small world where Thatcher felt suffocated; a life of bread and dripping and meat with three vegetables, all of them boiled to death.

  The life he’d built for himself was one his unworldly parents could not conceive of. His opulent top-floor penthouse in distant New York City – New York City! – spanned an entire floor, one end fitted out as a hi-tech haven to nurture his genius and operate his business, and the other an apartment so lavish that a Middle Eastern sheikh would be tickled pink to stash any number of new wives there.

  The outwardly derelict building was in one of the few remaining seedy parts of SoHo, its location and appearance part of a prudent subterfuge since Thatcher had every intelligence service in the world looking for him. This place was safe, the peeling walls and splintery boards nailed over the windows spelling ‘abandoned’ in every language, except the boards weren’t boards at all. They were sheets of one-way electric glass, specially treated with an advanced heat frequency nullifier that ensured not even a breath of his lair’s internal warmth could leak outside. If any agency sent a temperature-detecting drone or a spy chopper into the area to look for the infamous Fig Jam, this would be one building they wouldn’t dream of wasting their time checking out.

  Thatcher moved into his palazzo privato two years ago after a secretive anstalt in Liechtenstein paid for it on behalf of a Caymans trust that, in turn, was nominee for a shelf company in Nevis set up for Thatcher by a very expensive lawyer. Thatcher had never been to Nevis but he knew it was a small island that rose up out of the Caribbean, basically the nipple tip of a once-active volcano. It was home to 11,000 people as well as a fabled roomful of filing cabinets that, under lock, key and digital encryption, stored the business records and ownership details of 150,000 immensely opaque corporations, one of which was habitually very helpful to Thatcher’s interests.

  The criss-cross gate of his rickety elevator – installed in 1896 according to its brass plate – jangled shut and the car commenced its ritual jiggle and jerk upwards from the street, giving its usual unwelcome workout to Thatcher’s chins and the abundant stomach that tonight pressed against the eighteen-carat gold buttons of his newest tuxedo.

  He’d hurried back from the Lincoln Center uptown, from The Met’s afterparty for its world premiere of El lives for Ebrabeht. He’d been mid-sentence with one of the stars when he saw that Tori had sent him an SOS, so he put down his flute of bubbles and excused himself.

  Thatcher adored opera, unlike his parents for whom a great night out was a chippy tea in their local pub, and The Met’s new production had been revolutionary. They’d taken a big risk but Thatcher thought it worked brilliantly. They’d appropriated the classic The Barber of Seville, and recreated it entirely in reverse, the orchestra playing every bar of Rossini’s score backwards, the voices singing every syllable of Sterbini’s libretto likewise. Even the title read back to front.

  He’d loved it or, as he was about to say to the baritone, Ti devoli, a phrase he’d begun mentally perfecting the moment he got to his feet to join the standing ovation, but Tori’s SOS meant he never got the chance.

  The lift cage eventually reached his apartment and when it stopped bobbing up and down, he clacked the door open. Before stepping out, he leant over his stomach to check that the spatters of rain he’d encountered when he got out of his cab hadn’t marked the shine on his patent leather shoes. Satisfied, he pushed back the few luckless strands of hair that had fallen forwards from his otherwise bald head and shuffled across the silk Isfahan rug to his kitchen.

  Passing beneath his newest chandelier, an antique he’d chosen solely because Tiffany made it in the same year as his elevator, he made his way to the wine fridge. For someone so tech-savvy, the appliance was a dinosaur. All it did was cool wine. It didn’t text a message when his supplies were running low or when the internal temperature was too cold or too warm. It couldn’t play music. It had never met Siri or Alexa. In fact, there wasn’t a single internet-of-things appliance in Thatcher’s entire abode. He didn’t trust them, the companies that made them, or the people who might hack into them to find him.

  The cool air rolling out of the fridge felt good on his skin. Of course, he needed to solve Tori’s crisis, but first things came first and that was bubbles, always.

  He ran his fingers across the bottles, stopping at the Charles & Diana, a 1961 vintage Dom Pérignon had released twenty years later for the benighted royal couple’s wedding. He’d been waiting a long time for the right opportunity to savour the $8200 bottle and, given the evening of pleasure he’d just cut short to deal with Tori’s ‘emergency’, he knew she wouldn’t object if he added the cost to her tab.

  30

  Barcelona

  The fat lady was not singing. She was waddling eastwards from the hotel with her head down as a cavalcade of police cars whizzed past in the opposite direction, sirens blaring. Soon she arrived at Nova Icària Beach, its silky white sand scattered with sprawls of stoners recovering from their all-night binges, a place Tori was certain she’d blend into once she ditched her disguise inside the public toilet block.

  Though its windows were high up and small, the walls were strobing red and blue as more and more police cars sped by outside. Minutes later, yet one more stoner staggered out, a young, thin woman with black hair, dark glasses, dressed all in black, dragging a backpack behind her and swinging her boots by the pull-loops.

  Tottering unsteadily off the concrete path and kicking her bare feet into the sand, Tori stumbled down the beach until she was about ten metres from the shoreline, stopping near a six-pack of ex-partygoers, three of them taking turns swigging from a fast-depleting quart of vodka, two of the women sticking their hands into each other’s clothes, and one of the men laid out on his back, dozing or passed out.

  She’d only just plonked herself down on the sand, not close enough to encourage banter, not far enough away to look conspicuous, when a shadow loomed over her from behind and a hand tapped her shoulder. She froze, didn’t look up.

  ‘Hola.’ A male voice.

  Still she didn’t look up, letting her head loll onto her chest, curling her legs beneath her, tensing them, ready to leap up and run.

  ‘Cervesa, Coca-Cola, aigua freda?’ A drinks hawker.

  Without looking up, she vaguely waved him off and when his shadow moved away, she started to have second thoughts. Hiding in plain sight meant props and right here, right now, a cold can of something, anything, was as good a deception as any, plus she could use a sugar hit. She called out to him, ‘Hola.’ He kept walking away. ‘Hola,’ she repeated, louder this time, adding, ‘una Coke freda.’ She watched him shake his head in frustration, turn and saunter back to her, a drinks cooler swinging off his arm and a sneer on his face that said, What’s wrong with these deadbeats?

  Silently, without giving Tori a price, he pulled a can out of his chiller – it was red but also gold – and tore open the ring-pull.

  Before the froth ran over the label, she read it was a beer, an Estrella. ‘No, una Coca-Cola,’ she repeated, hearing him grunt with disgust.

  Flamboyantly, he raised his hand high above her and tipped the beer into the sand, a ribbon of the amber fluid waterfalling to her feet. She said nothing and pushed herself back from the splashes like a woman in her semi-smashed condition might.

  He handed her the empty can as if to say, ‘You get rid of this, bitch,’ and she took it, dropped it on the sand beside her, and raised her hand to the air where, palm open, she held it. ‘Coke,’ she insisted.

  He stared at her for a few seconds, extract
ed a Coke from his stash and handed it to her, not bothering to pop the ring this time. He told her the cost, which was exorbitant, no doubt because he included the beer, but she shrugged it off, dug into her bag and airily handed him a few bills, then took the can, popped the ring, faked a smile and took a swig. As he moved away, she downed another mouthful. It was more refreshing than she’d expected, and she drank half the can, then pressed it to her cheeks and her forehead – being a fugitive was hot work. She’d only just dug the can a little way into the sand so it wouldn’t topple when a shout came from down the beach.

  Three uniformed police had stepped onto the sand at the far end, close to the hotel. She watched them split up and approach separate groups of layabouts, holding up phones and showing them something. A photo of Tori, most likely. Have you seen this woman?

  Slowly, methodically, they moved along the beach, repeating their routine. On her count, they had thirty-plus groups to cover before they reached her. A drop of sweat ran into her left eye. Damn those lashes, she thought.

  31

  Frank had no idea why the two plain-clothes detectives were still interrogating him. They’d commandeered the hotel manager’s office and he’d fielded the same barrage of questions three times in the last twenty minutes.

  One of the cops, his cell phone face up in the centre of the desk, was recording the interview. An interpreter was standing to one side, a weedy-looking man who kept interrupting his translations with weak coughs and continually pulled at a black tie so thin it looked like it a cord that was strangling him. If anyone was guilty of anything, Frank thought, it was that guy.