While she owed Axel and understood he needed someone to step in and run the deal, she really wanted to stay in Hawaii. She tried one last shot.
‘Couldn’t Henry step in?’ Henry Harvey was an SIS veteran who’d worked there longer than any other director bar Axel.
‘Henry is stuck saving Venezuela’s bacon in Caracas. Tori, this will be over before you know it. The hula dancers won’t even realise you’ve been away. Call me when you get to Nuuk.’
Even the name of the capital city sounded like someone beating their arms across their body to keep out the cold. She grabbed a beach towel off the deck tiles and wrapped it round her shoulders.
7
Barcelona
President Casals got to his office in the Generalitat Palace at 6 am despite the celebrations the previous night for the deal-signing. With two significant official functions on the day’s schedule – one of them very personal – he needed extra time to go over the speeches and make them perfect. At 2 pm, he’d be giving the eulogy at the state funeral for his cousin, Montse. Earlier, late morning, he’d be cutting the ribbon for Catalonia’s driverless car show, showcasing his region’s tech prowess.
His faithful chief of staff Maria Noguera was waiting for him, as usual. No matter what time her boss arrived at the palace, Maria was always there with a steaming cup of café amb llet and a plate of carquinyolis, the crunchy almond biscuits he loved. She also had his daily stomach-turner ready for him, a print copy of the morning’s El Mundo newspaper.
He could have read it online on his way in but he needed the sugar from the biscuit to give him the fortitude to withstand the inevitable attack. Since his election, not a single editorial in Spain’s national daily had rated him better than appalling. He dunked a biscuit in his coffee, popped it in his mouth and spread open the pages.
‘Fill de puta!’ he exclaimed, soggy chunks of biscuit spraying out over the paper. He looked up to apologise for his language but thankfully Maria wasn’t in the room. Clearly, she’d already read the piece and knew to make herself scarce until he stopped shouting.
He put his head back down and read the opening paragraph in full:
Catalan President Oriol Casals i Castanyé has learned nothing from his predecessors’ mistakes. Despite all the work there is for him to do at home, we see him once again prancing about on the global stage. Yesterday he was bumping shoulders with China and Greenland. Today it will be a conga line of world leaders. The man sucks up any excuse to distract the public from his weak leadership and tarnished image …
Since when was brokering such a brilliant deal a distraction, he fumed. Bringing China and Greenland together was a masterstroke, and his efforts put Catalonia, and Spain of course, right at the centre of it. Without him …
And what were they implying about the state funeral for one of Spain’s greatest daughters? Was Montse’s death a distraction too? Gilipolles! Assholes!
He was about to call out to Maria when she walked in with a file of papers in her hand and a grim look that silenced him.
‘It’s the autopsy report on Montse,’ she said. ‘The coroner was up all night working on it. Uri, it’s bad. Really bad.’
8
Air Force One, over the Atlantic
President Isabel Diaz smiled at the chief steward. For her, politics was similar to hospitality – the industry where she’d pulled herself up – and she appreciated the impact a simple smile or a nod could have on people.
The steward, dressed as always in perfect crisp white, was a five-year veteran of Air Force One. As he leant over to remove the dishes he winked at the First Man. Davey twinkled back, sucked the red sauce off his fingers then signed, ‘Thank you, Chief Danny. The burger was good, but not as good as one of Isabel’s.’
The officer looked quizzically at the president who, for once, was glad her crew’s American Sign Language skills were still fairly feeble. She tousled her ten-year-old stepson’s blond locks and signed to the boy, ‘Chef Lisa’s burgers are delicious, Davey. Besides, it’s not polite to diss her or Chief Danny when they’ve stayed up all night to please us.’
That said, she couldn’t help thinking that the boy was actually correct. While Lisa’s food was excellent, her burgers did lack the decades of devotion that Isabel had spent in perfecting her own, let alone the family restaurant chain she’d built to prove it.
The child signed back, a cheeky smile on his face, ‘Isabel, did you know I can sign how your burgers are the best in the world in six languages! Six! Montse taught me.’ He picked up his milk with both hands and guzzled it, then put the glass down.
Isabel took her napkin and wiped the white moustache off his upper lip. He gazed up at her with his big blue eyes. She knew what was coming. He’d been begging the same thing from the moment she told him they were flying to Barcelona.
‘Can I sign your speech for you at Montse’s funeral? Please? I’ve been learning it in International Sign,’ a fact to which every passenger and crewmember on board Air Force One could attest. ‘Please? Please?’
In truth, Isabel was as keen as Davey for him to do it, but she’d screwed up, asking the Catalan president about it during the same phone call with him two days ago when she’d raised the Greenland talks.
Oriol – only those close to him called him Uri – had exploded. Not about Davey’s request, but about the leak – the talks were top secret. ‘It was Madrid, wasn’t it?’ he raged; Spain’s national government constantly spying on Catalonia was bad enough without them leaking its secrets to foreign powers, let alone secrets that belonged to two other friendly nations.
Point blank, she told Oriol he was wrong, which was easy to do because he was. She didn’t tell him the complete truth, though. She’d have hell to pay if Greenland discovered that the five-star cybersecurity contractor they’d hired to protect their parliament’s digital network was ultimately controlled by the CIA.
Raising Davey’s request in the same call was imprudent, yet she’d done it and couldn’t undo it.
Montse, like her stepson, had lost her hearing. In her case it was nine years ago when, as Spain’s distinguished secretary of defence, she suffered a bout of meningitis after a mission to north Africa. Never one for half measures, Montse later perfected signing and gained fluency in six signing languages, making her a natural to take on the United Nations role.
There were still a few hours left before the service so Isabel hoped Oriol would recall the close friendship Montse had developed with her and, importantly, Davey, and change his mind.
Isabel first clicked with Montse years ago, during a Congressional Committee fact-finding tour to Madrid. Six months ago, when Montse got elected as secretary-general and moved to New York City, they became even closer, with Montse flying to Washington DC as often as both women’s frenetic schedules allowed, once a month on average, when she took the third place-setting for dinner at the Residence.
Inspiring as a public figure, Montse sparkled in private, and especially with Davey. Their dinner conversations, all in sign language, were raucous. On one occasion, Montse held her hands up to stop the laughing, a serious look cast across her face, her eyes darting left and right as if she was checking no one was listening, and then joked how the infamous eighteen minutes missing from the Watergate tapes weren’t blank at all, it was just President Nixon signing his okay to the conspiracy. Davey had no idea what a water gate or a conspiracy was but he laughed along anyway.
In her head, Isabel started playing back the opening line she’d crafted for the eulogy. One of the world’s greatest listeners has left us.
She wasn’t sure if people in the deaf community would welcome it as the tribute she intended or see it as a slight. Saying those words inside La Sagrada Familia – a basilica Isabel had yearned to visit since childhood – would amplify them, so she needed them to be perfect. To sing to Montse’s song. One of the world’s greatest listeners has left us.
The steward handed her the phone. ‘Madam President, it’s Pr
esident Casals.’
She looked across at Davey, hoping Oriol was calling to say yes, but he began sharply and with no greeting, his tone short and clipped, like a man barely constraining his emotions. ‘Montse did not leave us.’
‘What?’ Did a copy of her draft eulogy get leaked to him? Had Casals started to eavesdrop on her?
He continued. ‘What I’m about to tell you – from the coroner’s report – must stay confidential until after the funeral.’
Isabel knew there hadn’t been an autopsy in New York when Montse died there last week because, as was standard practice for a diplomat dying on an overseas posting, Spain had flown the body home immediately. Oriol explained the local report had come through overnight and his call to Isabel was his first after breaking the news to his own country’s president. ‘Madam President, I know you and Montse were very close. It breaks my heart to tell you this but she was assassinated.’
Isabel felt as if her plane had suddenly dropped a few hundred metres and she gripped the edge of her table. In shock, she managed, ‘But the doctors … they said it was a heart attack.’
‘That was correct but incomplete.’ Oriol sighed. ‘Montse did have a cardiac arrest but the coroner found it was caused by an arterial embolism. A person unknown injected an air bubble into her bloodstream.’
9
Barcelona
Tori managed to snip just enough lash off one eyelid to get a slit of her sight back, not that it helped much since the room itself was pitch black. She needed some light and a mirror to complete the job safely, so she fumbled her way past the nightstand and felt along the wall until she got to a door she hoped was the bathroom.
The lights didn’t work. The bastard who’d done this to her had either cut the power or removed the bulbs, though when she tapped around and found the makeup mirror above the sink, she discovered the one light he’d neglected to neuter. It wasn’t super bright but it was enough to get the job done.
Finished, she blinked several times, big, wide-open blinks, and pulled her brows up high, relieved her eyelids were working perfectly. She took a deep breath, then leant forward into the mirror to check out her handiwork. Going lash-free wasn’t as creepy as she’d expected and, except for a drop of blood where she’d nicked her bottom left lid, she wondered if anyone would actually notice.
She drew back from the mirror and when her eyes began adjusting to the room she saw the rest of the blood.
On the towel. In the sink.
On her, too. A river of crimson down her right arm. Splatters of red on her right breast. On her stomach. Down her right leg. All of it on her right side, none on her left.
She spun on her heels and poked her head back into the bedroom but it was still too dark inside even with the dim light from the makeup mirror and the sliver of light seeping in beneath the front door.
The smell, too … all the effort to get her sight back had taken her mind off it. The reek of vomit was hers, but not the rest.
Bloody and naked, she gaped into her hotel room as the hazy outline of her bed and what was on it started to take shape.
10
Again, Tori wanted to scream but held it in, instead jerking back the drapes so that streaks of morning sun lit up a savagery that was beyond anything she’d witnessed before, in Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere.
A man and a woman, or what was left of them, were right beside where Tori had been lying, their bodies hacked and mutilated. The bed was soaked with their blood and entrails.
The woman, naked, was face down in the middle of the mattress, her legs spread, rivers of red oozing out of her body and pooling at her sides. Her skull cleaved by a hatchet, her brown hair – was it brown? – caked in blood. Razor blades, twenty or so, stuck out of her back as if a crazed ninja had been flinging shuriken throwing stars at her.
The hatchet, with its half-moon blade, was familiar, a traditional Greenlander’s ulu like the one Prime Minister Petersen always carried on her belt and which Tori saw her use daily to cut fruit, slice bread, even once to shock some sense into China’s delegation.
The killer had posed the man on the far side of the bed in a sickening bondage tableau. A sheet was draped over his lower half, drenched in red up to his chest, and a studded black fetish hood obscured his face. His arms were hitched above his head, his lats thick and taut and slathered in blood, his wrists bound to the bedhead with yellow plastic cable ties.
Who were these people? Why were they in her room, in her bed? What monster had done this to them? To her? And why? Where was he? Lurking under the bed? In the walk-in closet?
She grabbed the lamp from the sideboard and, in a single move, yanked its cord out of the wall and raised it shoulder-high, ready to swing it. She crouched down and peeked under the mattress only to find that the bedframe was so low to the floor that even the single black sock she found there would’ve had trouble slithering in.
She got up, lamp still held high, and jerked open the door to the walk-in robe, ready to attack. Apart from her wheelie bag, backpack and her clothes hanging there, the closet was empty.
Whoever he was, he’d left.
She set the lamp down on the floor and slid the security chain across the front door. A useless gesture, perhaps.
She looked back at the bed. The only part of the sheet that was still white was the hollow where she’d been sleeping, the contour of her right arm and right leg proof of where her own body had acted as a dam, holding back the woman’s blood.
Crime scene or not, she stepped over to the bed. The woman’s face was buried in the pillow, her right hand flat beside it, the fingernails freshly painted gold like the sun streaming through the window, a sight the woman would never witness again.
Tori reached over. No pulse, the woman’s skin chill.
Like anyone with even basic training in the field, Tori knew the Glaister equation, the formula used the world over to estimate a victim’s time of death. Normal body temperature minus current temperature divided by blah blah. The victim’s current temperature was supposed to be taken rectally but Tori wasn’t doing that to the app on her watch. Approximation would have to do, so she pressed the clock face up against the woman’s wrist, waited ten seconds, pulled it off and did the calculations.
The woman took her last breath five hours ago, maybe six, which meant she’d been murdered at around 1 or 2 am.
Tori was about to turn the woman’s head, to check if she knew her, but the move brought her face close to the man’s dead brown eyes, staring at her out of the holes in his face mask.
Her hand flew to her mouth. Frank? Was this Frank?
With all the blood it was hard to know. Only small splotches of his skin poked through, seemingly olive or tan. Thankfully, not Frank’s deeper brown. To take herself to his side of the bed, she had to step over a crumpled pile of clothes. The outfit lying on top was hers, the black and white polka dot dress she’d worn last night, the one Frank had urged her to buy. Except now it was splattered red like a slaughtered Dalmatian.
‘Black. You always wear black, Tori.’ He’d said it with the same eye roll she reserved for the scratchy jacket he seemed to live in, a tweed in baby-poop green.
‘I like black. I love black,’ she’d told him, not for the first time. People often said it set off the fire in her red hair and the green sparkle of her eyes, but it was practicality, not vanity. Tori was no fashionista. She might have had the body for it but she didn’t have the temperament. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘I’ll splash out on this polka dot thingy – which is black and white – provided you buy a decent jacket, one that doesn’t instantly evoke fusty armchairs, fox hunting or Pip pip, dear chap.’ Frank’s jacket had been a running joke between them. ‘For the son of Pakistani immigrants,’ she told him the first week they’d met, ‘you’re more Eton and Oxford than someone who actually went to Eton and Oxford.’
‘Actually Tori, I graduated from both of those fine institutions.’ He laughed it off, but then he was a gentle
man so he would, if only to help her feel less awkward. For a woman who prided herself on never stereotyping, she’d really screwed up.
That was then. This time, she bought the dress and he bought a jacket.
She knew it was weird to be pondering trifles like that right now but looking down at the blood-spattered dress, taking in the carnage all around her, desperately hoping the man wasn’t Frank, she needed to focus on trivia, to find a life raft of normality in a roiling sea of revulsion.
Nothing in this room was normal and it was dawning on her that nothing would ever be normal for her again.
Briefly she closed her eyes and held her breath before she checked the man’s neck for a pulse, the man she couldn’t bring herself to think of as Frank.
She felt nothing. Nothing except the chill of his skin.
She pulled back from the bed, trying to decide whether or not to unfasten his mask, when a glimmer flickered up from the floor – a wristwatch. She took a hotel pen from the desk and bent down, slid it into the band and picked it up, dangling it in the fetid air. The clock face, she saw, was cracked and the time frozen at 1.32 am, almost six hours ago, telling her she’d made a pretty good estimate of the time when the couple were slaughtered.
The watch was a Blancpain, a Fifty Fathoms ‘bathyscaphe’ model that looked very expensive, which meant it could not be Frank’s. Moths would fly out of Frank’s wallet before he’d ever stump up for a pricey piece like this.
So if this was the victim’s watch he couldn’t be Frank. But what if it was the assailant’s?
If she unclipped the face mask she’d know one way or the other. Except she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Not yet.
She took herself back into the bathroom to rinse her face again. This time, with daylight coming through the balcony doors, she could see how ropy and clumpy her hair was, the red dark and grubby, and the touch viscous and tacky, so nauseating that her knees began to give way. She reached out for the sides of the sink in time, only just managing to stay on her feet.
Double Deal Page 3