Frank was not used to answering questions. In his nine-year MI6 career, he was the one doing the asking, and after so many interrogations he pretty much knew every technique, every angle. The one these cops were using was the old keep-the-subject-in-the-dark-to-unnerve-him routine, drip-feeding the facts, snippet by snippet, either to tease out what he actually knew or to trap him into making a mistake.
Until the conversation he’d overheard in the bathroom, he’d known nothing about the murders, nothing about the video. The notion that he or, for that matter, Tori, could be a suspect, let alone guilty of such heinous crimes, was absurd, and it washed a sudden, uncharacteristic anger over him, an emotion he would normally constrain. ‘I’ll tell you precisely what I did when I got back here. I projectile vomited in my bathroom!’ he shouted. ‘Then I showered and I threw up again. And again. After that, I threw myself down on my bed.’ He glared at his accusers. ‘You should be out there,’ he pointed to the door, ‘trying to help Tori, not in here—’
‘Whose bed, Mr Chaudry?’ the younger detective asked, scratching a note on his pad, probably a reminder to get forensics to give Frank’s bathroom tiles a once-over to check his story.
‘Bugger you. The hotel CCTV will show you every step I took!’ he shouted again.
‘Senyor Chaudry, if Dr Swyft is as innocent as you seem to think, why did she flee?’
Frank wasn’t getting steamrollered. ‘We are done here,’ he said, getting out of his chair. ‘If I’m not under arrest, I’ll politely bid you farewell.’ He went to the door, his body tensed, half expecting a set of handcuffs to be snapped onto his wrists.
37
The cops’ caution as Frank left – or, more likely, their edict – was ringing in his ears. ‘You are not under arrest, but we will need you for more questioning so, please, consider yourself our guest in the hotel. Do not even think of leaving your room, Mr Chaudry.’
The cop stationed outside his door was ‘a guardian not a guard’, they said. Against what, or whom, Frank wondered.
Inside, with the door closed, he surveyed his room. Drawers were open, black fingerprint dust was scattered over many of the surfaces and, judging by the skewed angle of the mattress and the crumpled bedclothes, they’d stripped his room.
Or had they?
As with Tori, habits he picked up in the security service were hard to kick. He reached behind the bar fridge and pulled out his spare burner phone. The fools had missed it.
When he dialled Tori’s cell, the call went straight through to voicemail. After three more tries he got to his feet, this time wriggling his hand into the gap between the TV screen and the wall. The cops had missed his tablet too.
He carried it to the bed, kicked off his shoes and sat on the edge of the mattress. He clicked open the Find It app and watched a Barcelona street map slowly materialise on the screen, the hotel at its centre.
He stretched over to the minibar and took out a mineral water, unscrewed the cap and was about to take a slug when the app got a ping. It located his cell phone, the one the cops had confiscated. He watched it heading along a street named Dr Aiguader. The cop was probably cradling it in her lap, ready to pore over his logs, emails and text messages once she got back to HQ, looking for anything that might prove he and Tori were co-conspirators.
It’s not your day, lady, he mouthed and pressed the app’s wipe icon, standard SIS kit. Almost everything the firm worked on was highly confidential so, in a world full of prying eyes, this remote erase function was a necessity. In five seconds, every scrap of data held on the device would disappear permanently. Irrecoverably. Even the proof that he’d been trying to ring Tori since early that morning. Rubbing out that evidence might well make him look more suspicious, but he had no choice.
The second ping, unsurprisingly, came from the tablet he was working on. The third ping was his laptop, which the cops had taken without asking. It too was enjoying a trip down Carrer del Dr Aiguader. He pressed wipe a second time. He kept watching, waiting for one of Tori’s devices to ping. None of them did.
38
Frank tapped his boss’s direct number into the burner. It was mid-ring when he realised it was only 3.30 am in Boston so he hung up.
He got off the mattress and, after adjusting it to rest square on its base once again, he sat at the end of it and started flicking the TV from channel to channel. Not one was playing the infamous video. However, even though he couldn’t understand what the announcers were saying, they were obviously talking about it, since almost all of them featured images of Tori, her face blown up so much it made her look forbidding. Evil. Not at all like the Tori he knew.
BBC World was different. Their backdrop was a man wearing a black bondage hood, his eyes so startled and full of agony that Frank had to turn his own away.
Barcelona … Brutal and sordid assassinations just hours after the Spanish city hosted China and Greenland signing a landmark agreement.
Greenland’s prime minister and the brother-in-law of China’s president are dead. Police are hunting down their deranged killer, a woman they believe to be Dr Victoria Swyft, a US-Australian dual citizen.
Thirty minutes ago, a shocking video of the murders was sent to every smartphone in the city, even phones belonging to children on their way to school.
While BBC World will not screen the video or post it to our website, we can confirm the unhinged killer is a redhead, as is Dr Victoria Swyft, and her likeness matches this shot of her taken …
No way! Frank shouted at the screen as an image of Tori taken at last night’s media conference popped up. She was wearing the dress Frank had pressured her to buy because it wasn’t all black and because she looked great in it – elegant, beautiful. But the TV people, the twisted bastards, picked a camera angle that made her look wanton, a seductress waiting to pounce.
Fake bloody news!
The video begins with a sadomasochistic sex-triangle. It ends with the woman believed to be Dr Swyft hacking the victims to death.
The murders have grave geopolitical implications. Greenland’s opposition leader is calling for the country’s landmark alliance with China, signed yesterday, to be scrapped.
We cross to Nuuk, the Arctic nation’s capital …
The opposition leader was standing in a white hooded anorak with a glacier rising up behind him. He spoke in English.
This video bares an ugly truth … that our novice prime minister allowed herself to be seduced, not only by China, but by her very own adviser, Dr Swyft …
‘No way,’ Frank whispered. This was crazy. Tori would never, nor would Nivikka or Songtian. From his dealings with Nivikka over this past month, mostly by Axel’s side, he saw a savvy, independent woman devoted to her country and her people. A sex triangle with anyone she was negotiating with? Not possible. Utterly out of character. And for Songtian too. He’d been a complete gentleman throughout the talks. Tough, absolutely, but always decent. Frank looked away from the screen, unable to bear the sneering politician any longer, and only looked back when the announcer started speaking again.
The shock waves coming out of Greenland don’t stop at China.
A fanatical eco-terrorist group, Endz of the Earth, is making a sensational claim against the United States … that actions America has concealed for decades have dangerously accelerated the melting of Greenland’s ice cap. According to Endz of the Earth, a secret CIA-backed …
Frank kept listening but before that story had time to sink in, the announcer mentioned Tori’s name again and a shot of her came back up on the screen.
Newsflash … Police in Barcelona are advising the public not to approach Dr Swyft. She is considered extremely dangerous and may be armed …
Using the company VPN, Frank began checking social media sites on his tablet to see if he could find the video. At first, all he could find was an avalanche of outrage, a never-ending toilet roll of filthy, anonymous posts that raged against Tori … burn the witch at the stake … track her down and end h
er … carve the monster up.
Eventually, he did find the video but after five seconds he wished he hadn’t. It was worse than anything he’d ever seen, and that was saying a lot since he believed he’d already seen the worst of the worst when, at MI6, he’d led a team that chased down, busted and imprisoned the leaders of an international paedophile ring, and many of their followers.
With one hand partly shielding his eyes, he pushed fast-forward with the other, gasping for breath as he went. Forty seconds was all he could take before he shoved the tablet aside and ran into the bathroom.
After splashing his face with cold water, he walked onto his balcony and gripped the railing. He looked beyond the shoreline to where the rolling swells were capped with streaks of colour from the vivid morning sky, swathes of oranges and yellows and vibrant pinks forming a sweeping canvas untainted by blood and violence.
Out there, God and Nature were resplendent.
Behind him, inside his room, it was Hell.
39
Air Force One
The latest intel to reach Isabel was that Professor Buckingham had been found dead. A bartender jogging home across Stone Arch Bridge saw a body floating down the Mississippi. The medics who pulled the corpse out of the water identified Buckingham from the wallet in his pocket.
‘Accident, suicide or murder?’ the president asked her Director of National Intelligence.
‘Our people got the local medical examiner out of bed and he’s on it. The first responders reckon the old coot was probably dead before his boots hit the river. His external injuries were—’
‘—consistent with post-death trauma,’ said Isabel, ‘his body smashing up against rocks and showing cuts but little bruising?’
‘Exactly.’
Which sounded like murder to her. ‘What have we got here? Buckingham goes public with a crazy conspiracy theory and threatens us with a cache of documents no one’s ever seen and then he’s dead. Any minute now, Endz of the Earth will come out and say we killed him to silence him. So tell me, did we? Did we kill him?’
40
Barcelona
When Axel’s call came through, Frank heard the strain in his boss’s voice, his pitch higher than usual, his Boston vowels rounder. ‘Francis, we’ve been in the office here, worried sick, for almost an hour.’
For Axel to be at his desk outside of 10 am to 7 pm was almost unheard of. Four in the morning, or close to it, was unprecedented. ‘We, Axel?’
‘Ron’s here with me, and we’ve got you on speaker.’
Ron Mada, Axel’s second in command, was a complete bastard. Frank understood how a man of Axel’s decency, a softie, needed a hard man beside him, but Ron took hard so much to heart that Frank suspected he didn’t have one. If it wasn’t for Axel, and more recently Tori, he would have thought about quitting SIS long before now.
‘President Hou got me out of bed,’ said Axel. ‘Not his office, Francis, but Hou himself. I roused Ron straight after and my driver picked him up on our way into the office. Oh my God, Francis. What a mess. We’ve been trying to call you ever since.’
‘The police took my cell, my laptop. Still have them. They were questioning me—’
‘You’ve wiped them, right?’ said Mada.
‘Ron, of course, he has. Francis, I can hardly speak.’
The line got crackly with static and Frank couldn’t be sure who was talking. If it was Ron, they wouldn’t be words of grief or sympathy for Tori. She and Ron didn’t have a relationship, they had a stand-off. After her very first encounter with him, she’d told Frank, ‘If I’d been his mother, I would’ve given him a toaster as a bath toy.’
‘Francis, are you there?’
‘Axel, I don’t know how much you know but Tori is missing. I spoke to her by phone before she vanished, very briefly. She was … Axel, she was hellishly distressed, muddled. There’s this vid—’
‘We’ve seen it,’ said Ron, his voice cold.
Axel came back on. ‘If only we hadn’t.’
‘Like I’ve always said, Frank, Swyft is a conniving bitch—’
‘Ron, shut the hell up,’ Frank snapped, surprising himself since it wasn’t his way to be disrespectful to a superior even if the man was a slop bucket of dung. He took a pause, then spoke again, ‘Tori couldn’t have—’
‘Hell she could. Your problem, Chaudry, is perspective. Your lack of it. You and Swyft are too close, you’re like the brown on her rice.’
Frank was stunned. Not so much by Mada’s inherent racism but how his contempt for Tori overrode any concept of common decency. Frank drew himself back from the phone, taking a second to visualise the scraggy, physically insignificant man who was probably huffing out his sunken chest and heaving his pencil-thin shoulders back, proud of his filthy mouth.
In Frank’s younger days, he’d let the poison of casual racism go past him, but that was then. He pulled up his sleeve and waved his bare arm at the phone, not that the slug in Boston needed to be reminded of Frank’s heritage. ‘That comment, Ron, is entirely … unbecoming. You need to withdraw—’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Axel, offering Mada a respect Frank didn’t believe he deserved, ‘no matter what superficial evidence there is against Tori we—’
‘Axel,’ said Mada, ‘what’s superficial about that video? It explicitly—’
‘Ron! You know what Hou Tao said. I’ll come to that in a moment, Francis, but the key point is this. The three of us, and SIS as a firm, will assume our colleague’s innocence. We have to. We’ll give her whatever assistance we can to prove it and we won’t stop unless we are shown categoric evidence of her guilt. Categoric. Unimpeachable. This isn’t just Tori’s reputation at stake here, it’s also our firm’s. Have you got that, Ron?’
Bless you, thought Frank.
‘The video, Axel—’
‘Ron, are you deaf? Francis, what I’m about to tell you,’ he continued, ‘is in the strictest of confidence. Hou’s brother-in-law could not have participated in the activities that video shows. Hou does not want it publicly known – he’s relying on SIS’s complete discretion – but, Francis, you need to know. Years ago, when Rao was a fighter pilot, he crashed into the South China Sea. He suffered serious injuries, including to his … He became incapable of … having sex. He simply could not have, ah, performed the acts that the man supposed to be him was performing.’
Frank was quietly overjoyed. Sad for the two victims, of course, but over the moon for Tori. ‘That’s all the proof we need, isn’t it? That the tape is a fake,’ he said. ‘That Tori’s been framed.’
Ron laughed down the phone. ‘Just because a president tells Axel off-the-record that his brother-in-law couldn’t get a hard-on doesn’t mean it’s true. The stakes are high for Hou. He might say anything to make the pall of corruption disappear. I’ve been thinking about it, Axel, and that story sounds pretty damn expedient. He invents it to put the heat on you to get the Greenlanders back onside and—’
‘Except we’d be trying to do that anyway, Ron. Wouldn’t we?’
‘And we’d fail if they believed the tape was true. Let me finish, Axel. He tells you this snippet but makes you promise to keep shtum. And what does he do next, eh? He picks up the phone to our president, Diaz. He doesn’t tell her what he told you, and instead he accuses the United States of being behind this … Shit, he’s probably putting the heat on Diaz that Swyft did this because she’s a CIA stooge. She did work for them before you had your brain freeze and put her on payroll.’
Axel stepped in before Frank could. ‘First, Ron, in my experience Hou is a man of integrity. And yes, before you say it, I acknowledge my experience of him is limited, but if I’m good at one thing, Ron, it’s judging character. Usually.’ Axel paused, and Frank imagined him staring Ron down, putting him in his place. ‘Second, I remind you of Hou’s final words to me, Save Swyft and save the deal, which as you know, Ron, will also save our fee. Hou’s insisting the deal goes ahead, Francis, come hell or high water—’
‘Not a very appropriate expression,’ Ron interrupted, ‘with the ice cap scandal—’
‘Francis, have you spoken to anyone from Greenland this morning?’
‘I was being interrogated by the police until a few minutes ago.’
‘Then we’ll have to divide and conquer.’
41
SoHo, New York City
Thatcher’s glass of gently bursting bubbles was untouched. When he’d originally read Tori’s message, he’d cloaked himself in the stoic calm that a stressful job like this demanded, never expecting he’d be peering through trembling fingers at the video she’d sent though. He had to tap on the mouse twice before he could halt the footage. Desperate to shake it all out of his head, he twirled his chair away from the screen and rolled it over to another computer, one that would let him heave his best cyber battering ram up against the hotel’s walls and bust into its CCTV network. If he could show that Tori was taken there already drugged, carried perhaps, he might never need to watch another frame of the horrendous video again.
The hotel network withstood his first assault, as most corporate firewalls usually did. What he didn’t expect, and highly respected, was how the system immediately shifted into counterattack. Going on the offensive and ‘hacking back’ was a manoeuvre that was illegal in most countries, unless you were one of the state’s own agencies. The hotel’s possible malfeasance was not of any concern to Thatcher. A man in his line of work was in no position to snitch, plus he relished a challenge, and he would have enjoyed this one if it hadn’t petered out in nine pathetically fleeting minutes. Premature emasculation, he sniggered, as he opened up the hotel’s CCTV repository, terabytes of its video recordings. Too easy.
Smug, excited, Thatcher rolled up his sleeves, though only metaphorically since he’d never actually treat this precious mulberry silk shirt in such a fashion. The directories were set up conveniently into sub-directories, one for ‘Passadissos’ – which his translation software told him were corridors, with separate sub-sections for each floor – another for ‘Vestíbuls de l’ascencor’, lift lobbies, and more for restaurants, the main lobby, driveways, and other public areas. He clicked open the files for the fourth-floor corridor, the south end where Room 420 was, and braced himself for the thrill he expected to experience when he nabbed The Voice in flagrante delicto.
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