Double Deal

by John M. Green

  She couldn’t imagine Nivi doing this with a man they’d negotiated hard against and whose gallantry, even under pressure, had almost been cloying, yet there was Nivikka, lewdly smacking a riding crop against his face mask, her free hand reaching backwards and tickling his scrotum, squeezing his penis, while the second woman, the faceless redhead Tori couldn’t bring herself to name, watched like a voyeur.

  Viewed from the back and completely naked, she looked like Tori, not that Tori knew what she really looked like from behind. The slope of the woman’s shoulders was similar, the cut of her hair, the same dumb dress tossed to the floor.

  She peered into the image to scan for her scar, the small crescent-shaped mark under her left shoulder blade, the one she got in Kabul, but the pixilation wasn’t fine enough to spot it. You can’t be me. You’re not me. Turn around and show me your face.

  The video redhead wasn’t listening, and instead provocatively wiggled the fingers of her left hand and reached out as if to move it to her breast while her other hand ventured lower, both her arms swinging, her hands obviously rubbing … Oh, God, no … Then, and only then, did she obey Tori’s command and turn her head – what looked like Tori’s head – to face the camera as she seductively licked her lips, what looked like Tori’s lips.

  Tori couldn’t watch. Not this.

  Covering the image of the redhead with her real hand, she looked beyond her, and beyond the Brunette – who Tori was refusing to think of as Nivikka – and put her focus on the Masked Man.

  His hood was identical to the one she’d unhitched, his arms pulled back and bound with yellow cable ties the same as those securing the man cut in half on her bed.

  The Brunette rhythmically lifted and dropped her lithe body, each movement faster than the one before. Her left hand reached out to her side, out of screenshot, her body tilting as if she was feeling around for something under the mattress. Suddenly her back straightened, her hand returned to view holding a bone saw longer than her forearm. Tori didn’t need to guess what she was about to do with it. For a moment, the Brunette’s fingertips held the saw vertically by its sturdy stainless-steel handle, teasing, showing it off and swinging it a little, its forty-odd centimetres of sharp, finely serrated teeth gleaming in the light.

  The Masked Man’s eyes drew wide beneath his hood, terrified, as he watched the Brunette wrap her fingers around the saw’s handgrip. He was desperate, seeming to grasp for the first time that what had started as a frolic was turning deadly. Tori watched the fingers of his bound hands curl into fists, his nails dig into his palms and his body twist in panic as he tried to toss the Brunette off him but she rode him like a bucking bronco.

  Fake Tori stepped forwards, her bare back to the camera, pried the saw out of the Brunette’s hand, slid the long blade in front of her face, moving her head from side to side as if she was licking the steel.

  The Masked Man continued writhing under the Brunette, panicked, his hood stretched out like he was shrieking beneath it.

  As Tori imagined his agonised screams, sweat streamed down her face. It was all she could do not to vomit again. As she cried out, the crumples of tissue blew out of her nose and the stink of the room, its reek of violent death, engulfed her. On the screen the Brunette kept riding him, up, down, sideways, rolling, twerking her hips as he thrashed around, his arms squirming, pulling, tearing at his bonds, trying to release his hands, kicking his legs, bucking his hips to toss her off him, his suddenly limp penis flopping out of her.

  Fake Tori moved in closer, her hands clenched around the handle of the saw, and set the teeth down on the bare skin of his stomach, then pushed.

  And pulled.

  Tori – real Tori – lashed at the wall, knocking the screen, slightly dislodging the flash drive so the horror movie freeze-framed, spurts of the Masked Man’s blood suspended mid-air, an affront to anything remotely human.

  Tori staggered backwards, tears streaming down her cheeks, her hands at her mouth. She was gagging, faint.

  She brought her hands to her cheeks to calm herself but instead became even more frantic when she realised what this video was. It was a taunt, to let her know how deep a pile of shit she was in. And that whoever filmed it could release more copies … would release them.

  She knew she had to unfreeze the video, to play it all the way through to search for a clue, a hint, any skerrick of evidence that ‘he’ or ‘they’ had carelessly left on it. Anything that proved the depraved redhead was not Tori Swyft.

  Maybe the on-screen Tori wasn’t a true redhead at all. If only she could catch a stray lock of hair – blonde, brunette, black, purple, she didn’t care as long as it wasn’t red – creeping out from under a wig, she’d have proof. Maybe a reflection in the glass over the painting on the wall might capture Fake Tori’s face and reveal that her eyes weren’t green, that her nose was big and broken, anything that was different from Tori.

  She glanced over at the bag of crystals on the desk. Ice could make you psychotic, everyone knew that. Was that what she was seeing on the video? The terrifying possibility that she – the real Tori – had been in the grip of a manic ice rush she had absolutely no memory of?

  She pushed the flash drive back in.

  18

  Frank flicked across the TV channels to find one speaking English. How many channels in Spanish or Catalan did Barcelona need?

  If he’d held onto the FrensLens they’d brought to Barcelona with them – brilliant wearable technology, built into the frame of a pair of glasses – he could have used its instant language translator, but since Tori had kept them he had no alternative but to keep flicking channels. Where were BBC World and CNN when you needed them? Eventually he got a channel where the text ribbons scrolling along the bottom of the screen were in both English and what looked like Catalan … Terrorist group accuses CIA of causing Greenland ice melt … World pays with rising sea levels … US denies …

  What?

  Before he had a chance to take that in, a grainy video clip, time-stamped at 10.45 last night, started playing. It showed a man downing shots in a bar. Was it Rao Songtian? The image, dark and tinged with purple, looked like the club they’d gone to after the deal dinner, but Frank couldn’t be certain. He’d only stayed fifteen minutes and for most of that time he’d been doubled over, stomach spasms forcing his eyes shut until he rushed out to race back to the hotel. Leaving was hugely embarrassing but staying and throwing up over Tori or Rao or Nivikka or Uri … Oriol … whatever, would have been far worse.

  Frank couldn’t understand what the newsreader was saying but he did hear Nivikka’s and Oriol’s names. The camera pulled back from the man to reveal a woman in a polka dot dress, obviously Tori even though he couldn’t see her face. She was pouring iced water out of a jug, her pose stiff and inclined away from Songtian. He’d been a decent guy throughout the talks but Tori’s posture wasn’t a surprise since Frank knew too well how uncomfortable she felt socialising in a work context. Nivikka and Oriol were there too, somewhere, but the camera angle didn’t catch either of them.

  Frank had to re-read the text bar as its next headline crawled across the screen … Chinese envoy missing in Barcelona after signing with Greenland … and he sprang to his feet, almost tripping over his shoes as he sprinted for the door and into the hotel hallway.

  19

  The shower Tori took was the hottest and strongest of her life. The fastest, too, since she was on high alert in case her tormentor returned. In a robe, her hair still dripping, new wads of tissue stuffed up her nose to block the stink, she returned to the bedroom and uncapped a mini bottle of vodka from the bar fridge. She downed it neat, then pressed play on the remote.

  She forced herself to watch the video the whole way through, the sex, Fake Tori hacking at the Masked Man then at the Brunette, later flicking razor blades through the air at each of them like a crazed ninja. In a weird, sick kind of way, Tori felt a twinge of relief. She had many talents but blade throwing was not among them.
<
br />   Unless the crystal meth had done this to her.

  No, she is not me.

  She can’t be me.

  The lack of an audio track was a blessing, not hearing the shrieks, the crunch of the saw’s teeth through flesh and bone, the whoosh of the razors through the air … But it also meant she couldn’t listen for any clues, couldn’t hear if the victims had yelled a name, begged someone to stop.

  Tori took up the remote again, but her finger hesitated over the volume control.

  She turned it up, but all she got was the hiss of silence, as if the video was mocking her.

  Disappointed yet relieved, she took a deep breath through her mouth and restarted the video, playing fifteen seconds, rewinding, replaying, then moving forwards and backwards through the tape fifteen seconds at a time, scanning and rescanning every segment of the images, hunting for clues. It was hard to dissociate herself, to pretend she was watching actors and not a genuine, horrific snuff movie, but it was the only way she could push herself through it.

  The camera operator and the editor had been meticulous. By the time the control bar showed sixteen seconds of runtime left, she’d found nothing helpful. It was either going to be the sixteen seconds where she’d find the hook to hang her innocence on, or sixteen more seconds of utter depravity.

  The clip panned to the empty part of the king-sized bed, the third where Tori had been sleeping. On the video, her pillow and her part of the sheet were awash with blood and gunk, nothing like now. Fake Tori, naked, still with her back to the camera, sidled over to that part of the bed, reached down and yanked the blood-soaked sheet off the bed. A tell-tale glint told Tori it was plastic, a drop sheet.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ Tori blurted out her frustration as the plastic slithered to the floor taking the red-soaked pillow and the mess with it, exposing an impeccably white linen sheet.

  Fake Tori plucked a fresh pillow from off-camera and set it on the bed, climbed in face down and, with three seconds of runtime remaining, slowly, teasingly, began rolling over, the lens zooming in on her breasts, tilting upwards, the finale … her face, her smile.

  Tori’s face, for the second time. Her emerald eyes gave a wink to the camera, her hand a cheeky wave.

  20

  Tori scanned the room for her cell phone. Normally she’d leave it charging on the nightstand beside the bed but it wasn’t there. The hotel phone sat on the stand beside Rao Songtian but it was plastered with bloody globs of slop. Her clutch bag was on the sideboard. She unlatched it, found her phone inside, its ringer on silent, and saw its screen light up with message tiles, most of them sent in the last few minutes: four texts from Frank, two from Oriol Casals, two more from the Chinese ambassador, and seven missed calls including three local Barcelona numbers she didn’t recognise.

  She was about to speed dial Frank when his number flashed up.

  ‘Tori, where the hell are you?’

  ‘My room. It’s—’

  ‘Why won’t you open your door? I’ve been banging on it for three … four minutes. I’ve got people in the corridor staring at me, Tori. Let me in.’

  No one was knocking. No one had been knocking.

  Was it the meth? Was that why she wasn’t hearing? Maybe that was why she didn’t get any sound on the video. Maybe the person behind all this, who’d drugged her and Nivikka, maybe even Songtian, had done to her ears what he’d done to her eyes.

  Then she realised how ridiculous that was. She could hear Frank’s voice as clear as ever. If this was her getting paranoid, even without the meth, who could blame her?

  ‘I’m coming to the door but be prepared, Frank, it’s bad in here,’ she said, desperate to see his face, setting the phone down on the sideboard next to her purse, tightening the belt round her robe and repeating I’m coming through the dark timber as she slid off the chain lock and swung the door open.

  The corridor was empty, to the left and to the right. Canvas bags with newspapers hung off a few door handles and opposite, between the door to Frank’s room and the one beside it, a lonesome room service trolley was parked with a platter of half-eaten strawberries and yellowish curdled cream, a champagne bottle shoved upside down into a silver bucket and a red sling-back stiletto hooked by its heel off the side. That wasn’t remotely Frank’s style. Besides he was ill last night, she recalled. He had been ill, hadn’t he?

  As she went to close her door, she noticed the do not disturb sign starting to swing on the handle. No Molestar! it said. I wish, she thought as she called out to her phone, still in the room. ‘Frank, where the hell are you?’

  She slammed the door and ran over to get her cell, slipping on something wet and slick. A knife. Reaching out for stability, her fingers unwittingly grabbed for Nivikka’s ankle and as soon as she realised it, she yanked her hand back like it was on fire.

  ‘Tori,’ Frank was shouting, ‘I can’t magic your door open. The TV says Songtian is missing. The police want to interview a woman in a polka dot dress. A redhead. You … obviously.’

  ‘Stupid fucking dress,’ she sang out, kicking it where it lay on the floor.

  ‘Tori, the TV’s showing a video from last night.’

  She froze. In this room her world had already collapsed and apparently it was disintegrating in public as well.

  ‘It’s showing you,’ Frank said, ‘with Songtian. At the club last night.’

  Strangely, she felt relieved. He was talking about a different video, maybe one shot by some social media addict who’d been drinking at the same club.

  ‘Tori, what happened last night?’

  Frank stood in his socks outside Tori’s door. He ignored the elderly Asian couple gawking at him from down the corridor and stared at the phone in his hand. Tori only had a few minutes before Oriol, or anyone else from the dinner last night, notified the police that the woman in the polka dot dress was Tori. They’d rush here and kick down her door. The same door he’d been banging on. The room she was in, yet not in.

  He pocketed the phone and crossed back to his own room.

  All Tori remembered about last night was going to the bar, Frank getting sick and leaving, and she and Songtian drinking, and it was only water. Or so she thought at the time. She didn’t know how to explain her situation to herself, let alone to Frank. Cutting him off was easier. It was probably for his own good, and definitely for her own. The fact she was in terrible trouble didn’t mean she should drag him into it too. She needed to prove her innocence somehow and if Frank was in the dark, at least for now, it would keep him free to help her later. Assuming he believed her.

  She went through her phone’s settings to access the Find It app that the SIS risk team installed on all company work devices in case they got lost or stolen. The last thing she’d want if she was going on the run – she was going to run, wasn’t she? – was for the police to be able to track her down. She disabled the app and, for good measure, switched the device to flight mode to disconnect it from the cell network.

  Nothing was making sense. The room, the video, Songtian and Nivikka, Fake Tori, Frank standing in the hall banging on her door but not standing in the hall and not banging on her door. Suddenly something about the door jogged her memory, something peripheral, so she ran back to it and, after putting an eye to the peephole to check no one was there, flung it open so quickly that the do not disturb hanger again started swinging from side to side.

  The room number that she’d seen when she’d opened the door the first time – 420 – that was not her room number. It was not the room she’d been taken to when she checked in, not the room she’d stayed in the whole time since. That room was 2420.

  She dropped her eyes to the floor expecting the missing number 2 had fallen there, but it hadn’t. She ran her fingers over the spot on the door where the 2 should’ve been but the wood panelling was totally smooth, with no residue or flakes of glue to rub against her fingertips.

  She glanced across the hall to the other doors, and all of them were also wearing num
bers in the four-hundreds. This was the fourth floor, not the twenty-fourth.

  She closed the door and went over to the balcony, looking outside for the first time, and yes, she was far closer to ground level than her actual room had been.

  Which meant Frank was banging on her door, was ringing her room. Except it was the wrong door, the wrong room. The wrong floor.

  21

  Tori poked inside the walk-in closet, rifling through the hangered clothes, opening and closing drawers, checking her bag. All her things were exactly as she’d left them – except that she had put them ‘there’ twenty floors up. A phone started up close by, inside the closet with her, coming from her backpack. The ringtone was bouncy, playful.

  The Rain in Spain.

  If this was someone’s idea of a joke, it was far from funny.

  A screen lit up, hatched by the stretch netting on the side of her bag. An unfamiliar metallic red case held the edges of the phone and she could see the caller ID: Guess Who? She removed the phone and weighed it in her palm, debating whether to take the call. She did.

  ‘A hale and hearty good morning.’

  The baritone timbre was coated with the creamy richness of Frank’s voice so it sounded like him except for two things – that they’d already spoken on the other phone, and hale and hearty was not an expression he’d use.

  ‘Your robe,’ he went on, ‘it’s rather elegant. Quite becomes you.’

  This was unnerving. Frank never strayed from being the consummate professional, a complete gentleman and loyal co-worker.

  But this Frank, this was not the Frank she knew, respected and, yes, liked. She shook her head and looked around the closet for a camera. There wasn’t one and she was about to step back out into the room when Frank continued.

  ‘In all the circumstances – and you know what I mean, Tori – you might put a bit more speed into getting dressed. By the way, those tissues up your nose … a super touch. Now you smell it, now you don’t, ha? And how you fixed your eyelashes. You’re amazingly resourceful.’