Double Deal

by John M. Green

  While the commissioner kept bleating, Maria had an idea and tabbed her computer monitor to the CCTV link that one of her interns had set up for the cameras surrounding La Sagrada Familia. The area was already perfect for international TV with the temporary flagpoles up and most of the United Nations members’ flags already aflutter. But, damn, her idea was flawed. The park opposite the church’s main entrance didn’t have enough open space to clear a landing for a chopper. ‘Plaça de Gaudí won’t work,’ she interrupted the commissioner. ‘Too many—’

  ‘Trees. Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘And the lake in there is too deep. The only place that might take a helicopter, two helicopters, is the street diamond where Mallorca intersects Marina.’

  ‘Two?’ she said, stepping away from her desk.

  ‘Three in total, two of them touch down, one stays in the air. Two are decoys. No one knows which one carries the president till she steps out of it.’

  With an upcoming re-election to win for Uri, Maria needed to trump American paranoia with Catalan pragmatism. She zoomed in on the street corner he’d mentioned. ‘Miquel, if you get half the emergency vehicles filling up that diamond to pull back into Mallorca, that blacktop will be plenty big enough.’

  ‘It’ll disrupt our—’

  ‘Miquel, we are safeguarding Montse’s memory here. Find a workaround. We cannot give Diaz’s people any excuse to pull her out. Her attendance today is crucial.’

  Their eavesdropper agreed completely.

  54

  Tori’s blood was racing as the shop door slowly pushed inwards. Don’t act rashly, she told herself, her arm held high. Keep calm, focused.

  A hand slid through the opening. A large hand, a man’s hand. His skin was brown, like the real Frank’s, but that wasn’t conclusive. The Voice could be any race, any colour. Any person. Maybe even Frank.

  No, that wasn’t possible. Not Frank. She’d worked with him. Liked him. But, she reminded herself, as Sun Tzu put it in The Art of War, ‘all war is deception’.

  The Voice wanted her to believe he was Frank. To turn her against her friend, deny her his support. By mimicking Frank’s voice, he was playing her, making her believe her friends were her enemies. All war is deception. Misdirection. Illusion.

  The shiv was high above her head and she gripped it tighter, tensed her arm, prepared to strike at any second.

  His wrist came through the gap, his shirt white, the cuff doubled back but missing its cufflink.

  She tightened every muscle in her body.

  His sleeve started to come through and she couldn’t stop the relief bursting out of her. It was like the air whooshing out of an untied balloon.

  Tweed never looked so good. For the first time in her life, Tori loved tweed.

  Or was she being too quick? Someone could slip on a jacket even easier than a fake voice. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘What?’ he said, sounding bewildered. ‘It’s me. Frank.’ He took half a step inside but stopped abruptly when the tip of her weapon came within a centimetre of his eye.

  ‘Was that you on the phone to me just now?’ The shiv glinted in her hand.

  ‘Phone? I don’t have a number for you. How could I call … Tori, you don’t think … you can’t think I have anything to do with this, surely.’ He reached for her hand. His touch was warm and soft, though at the same time it felt electric.

  ‘Tori, I can’t begin to imagine how you’re coping.’

  The gentleness of his tone weakened her resolve. After everything she’d been through, she finally let go and allowed him to take the shiv and place it on the front counter. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, slumping. ‘For doubting you.’

  ‘Given everything that’s happened, you’ve got to doubt everything.’

  She could have kissed him. ‘It was Thatcher, right? That’s how you found me?’

  He nodded, making her happier than she ought to be, since she’d explicitly asked Thatcher to keep Frank out of the loop.

  ‘Ugh, is that mothballs?’ He sniffed at the air. ‘I hate that smell. My aunt … never mind. Yes, Thatcher’s been fantastic. A pain in the proverbial, but without him, I wouldn’t be here.’

  Frank was suddenly staring at her.

  ‘What?’ she asked, still wanting to hug him but knowing she wouldn’t.

  ‘Your eyes …’ he started, his brow scrunching into a question mark.

  She angled her head coquettishly. ‘What? How they glimmer like emeralds in the moonlight?’

  ‘Er, no,’ he said. ‘Your eyelashes. You don’t have any.’

  ‘They’re overrated.’ She decided to avoid the details, for both their sakes.

  ‘Tori, we were supposed to have breakfast this morning. I’ve been worried sick and …’ A cloud as dark as her wig came over his face. ‘Why would you—?’

  She was aghast. ‘You think I did those … those things?’ If he thought she could have, then maybe she did. The thought still petrified her.

  ‘No, Tori. Never. Not at all. No. Why did you run? Not from the hotel, I get that. But why did you run from me?’

  ‘If the cops questioned you—’ ‘So I wouldn’t know anything. Sure, I get that, but why didn’t you let me make that choice for myself?’

  ‘You’re here now—’ she started, but stopped and looked at the phone she’d smashed on the floor. ‘Frank, we’ve got to get out of here. You found me and,’ she pointed to it, ‘so did the bastard who’s behind all this.’ She grabbed the shiv and her backpack and ran past him out of the store.

  55

  Tori sprinted like a gazelle fleeing a lion. Three blocks on, she was out of breath and kicked in the front door of an abandoned apartment block. She needed a moment and bent over panting, hands on her knees, just as a rat scurried along the bare boards, swishing its tail on the floor and scattering cockroaches before it disappeared into a hole in the wall.

  ‘Lovely digs,’ said Frank, following her inside. He was breathing quite normally, but he hadn’t had the morning she’d had. ‘Are you thinking of putting in an offer for the place?’

  Making light was one of Frank’s hallmarks and she usually found it endearing, not so much now. ‘We need to call Thatcher,’ she told him. ‘Is your phone encrypted?’

  He nodded, pulled it out and dialled.

  Thatcher answered. ‘Frank and Tori, especially Tori—’

  ‘Thatcher,’ said Tori, ‘how the hell did you know—?’

  ‘Chowders, have you not explained?’

  ‘Tori hasn’t given me much of an opportunity, actually. Tori, Thatcher’s taken control of the street-cams in this area and—’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Tori cutting in, ‘if you could find me, see me, so could—’

  ‘Tori, dear girl, what don’t you understand about the words Thatcher and control? No one else, especially your adversary, has access. That Voice chap may think he is good, but he is no match for yours truly.’

  She wasn’t satisfied. Anyone who could remotely operate a phone that was switched off might not be so easily thwarted. He may well have tracked her location via the device’s GPS. She decided to bring the two men into her plan. ‘There’s an abandoned strip club a few blocks from here. Bar Canona.’ She saw the quizzical look on Frank’s face so she pulled the plastic card out of her pocket and passed it over. ‘Whoever is responsible for the murders dropped an entry pass for that club in my hotel room and—’

  ‘It could be a bloody trap,’ said Frank, staring at her like she was crazy.

  ‘Or a previous guest might have left it behind and housekeeping missed it,’ said Thatcher.

  ‘Yes, to both. But if it is merely someone else’s card, what’s the harm if I go in there and—’

  ‘How about catching a contact STD?’ said Frank, handing the card back to her between two fingers as if it was tainted. ‘But like I said—’

  ‘A trap. It might be, for sure, but what if it’s a clue? I won’t know unless I go in.’

  Two cockroaches had climbed onto Fr
ank’s shoe. ‘Unless?’ He kicked them off, sending them into chaos. ‘Tori, unless is the Catalan word for crazy. Going inside that place, that’s a job for the police, not for you. Not for us.’

  56

  Tori and Frank worked together, curling their fingers under the grille that secured the club’s front entrance, trying to yank it up. It simply would not budge. It just clattered and rattled and clinked like the coins that would have jiggled in the pockets of the hundreds of old men in raincoats who’d skulked their way into this place in its heyday, the brims of their caps low to shade their furtive eyes.

  She picked up the crowbar – they’d pilfered it from one of the excavators parked at the far side of the site – and after sliding its chisel-edged claw beneath the bottom rail of the grating, tried to lever the grille up, but still made no headway.

  Frank took the metal bar and got the same useless result. He arched his back into a stretch and cricked his neck from side to side. ‘Hey, over there,’ he said, pointing to the wall to their right.

  Tori saw a faint light flashing, dim in the sunlight, no doubt the reason she hadn’t noticed it before. Red then green then red again, like an access panel on its rostered day off. She turned her back to him. ‘Can you get the FrensLens out of my backpack for me?’

  She put them on. After glancing sideways and behind, satisfied no one had come into the area, Tori slipped the cardkey out of her pocket. She rubbed it between her fingers, the words trap or clue blinking in her head like the lights on the security panel, trap in red and clue in green.

  She pressed the card up against the panel and the light went solid green, though only for a second. There was no click, no stutter of the grille to indicate that its rungs were about to climb up their tracks, no words in any language flashed up on the panel. She placed the card back into her pocket. ‘There’s got to be some other way to get in there. Around the back maybe?’

  ‘Or better yet,’ said Frank, ‘we get the hell out of—’

  His words froze as they heard shouts behind them, over near the trucks and the excavators. They spun around, and Tori realised what they’d heard wasn’t yelling so much as squeals and giggles. Four girls, seven- or eight-year-olds, were bounding out of a laneway and rushing up to the vehicles. The first to make it, a child wearing a blue smock and clutching a teddy bear, pigtails jutting out the sides of her head like handlebars on a bike, pressed her nose up against the blade of a bulldozer and covered her eyes. ‘Qui no s’ha amagat …?’ she shouted. The FrensLens instantly translated for Tori but she’d already got the idea from just watching. ‘They’re playing—’

  ‘Hide-and-seek,’ said Frank, his raised eyebrow telling her that he also didn’t need an app to tell him what was obvious.

  The other three kids were clambering over different vehicles and ducking down, finding their hiding places. One girl, in a red T-shirt and blue jeans, hid in a truck tray, the one in a green dress dropped herself behind the dozer blade, while the last girl stooped down behind a trailer to cuddle a stray cat which, from a distance, wore a coat as brown as her shorts.

  Tori started moving around the perimeter of the building and Frank followed, each of them sporadically checking over their shoulder for anyone watching. Tori was knocking her knuckles against the wall as she went along, hoping that one of the posters might be covering a doorway. She stopped when she reached the corner of the building, and when Frank caught up she indicated a spot halfway along the next wall. ‘There.’

  A mound of debris about knee-high was piled up outside a niche. When she got close to it she made out broken glass, cigarette butts, sticks, newspapers, cardboard. Condoms, too. The breeze shifted and she caught the stink of urine.

  The niche’s opening was as wide as her body but only as high as her chest. She held her nose and bent down to crane her head inside, a move that blocked the daylight. ‘Frank, can you give me your phone?’ She shone its flashlight inside and saw a dark-coloured booklet on the ground. ‘Hey, see that?’ she said to him, shifting herself so he could step forward.

  ‘Is it a passport?’ He went to reach his hand in but she grabbed it.

  ‘Wait.’ She shone the light around the entrance, onto the niche’s floor, the walls, the roof, checking for threads or tripwires. Satisfied, she rummaged through the rubbish pile outside with her foot, found a longish stick and tapped the booklet out into the open. A passport, its cover a dark navy blue.

  ‘Canadian,’ said Frank as he went to pick it up.

  Was The Voice a Canuck? Did he drop his passport there? She let the thoughts sink in. Canada was, she reminded herself, a member of the Arctic Council. If Ottawa saw China stepping on its toes would Canada stand by or would they put up a fight?

  ‘It can’t possibly be the Canadians,’ said Frank. ‘They’re so polite they’d have left their business card at the crime scene, probably embossed with maple leaves.’

  She took the passport from Frank and flicked it open. ‘Holy shit!’

  57

  Tori knew the woman whose face was on the passport intimately. Knew her every feature as well as her own, how the woman thought, where she’d been. Her entire backstory. Where she’d grown up and gone to school in Saint-Constant south of Montréal, her lovers, her jobs, her last apartment on Sherbrooke Ouest, its décor, the names of her next-door neighbours, even their kids. She knew all of that detail without needing to read her name: Kathryn Mary Lisson.

  Despite Lisson being a strawberry blonde with glimmering blue eyes, her photo bore a startling resemblance to Tori.

  Because she was Tori, an identity she had crafted while she was at the CIA. This was one of the passports she’d got off-book and which she’d thought was in her backpack’s secret compartment. The compartment whose protective invisible thread had been intact until she broke it herself. The compartment where she’d kept the burner phone The Voice, not so mysteriously now, had hacked. She’d underestimated him. Big-time. Silently, she handed the open passport to Frank.

  He returned it, his scowl telling her what she already knew: that she shouldn’t let herself be suckered into playing The Voice’s game, that she and Frank should immediately run, or hide, or do anything except be drawn into following his lead. Except then, she told herself, she’d spend the rest of her life, probably a brief one, as a fugitive on the lam from the law.

  ‘Un, dos, tres, salvat!’ It was a jubilant cry from one of the children.

  One, two, three, safe!

  If only.

  58

  Frank was adamant. ‘There’s no way we’re going in.’

  Tori unslung her backpack and tossed it inside the alcove, ducking down and crawling in after it.

  ‘No, Tori, no!’ he called as she crawled forwards, drawing her feet in behind her.

  The alcove was just wide enough for her frame and she was already one metre in, the cardkey in her teeth and her body blocking the light when she felt Frank tugging on her feet, trying to wrench her out. Resisting, she continued to nudge her bag ahead of her, pushing it in further, trying to twist her feet out of his grip. Instead of stopping her, all he managed was to pull off her boots.

  She wriggled ahead quickly, not getting far before a steel barrier blocked her from going any further. Frank, loyal Frank, had given up trying to stop her and was grunting his own way in behind her. ‘If you insist on being an idiot, Tori, you’ll be safer if there’s two of us.’

  ‘Two mugs? That way we can really be in hot water.’ She half-laughed as she took the card out of her mouth, switched the light on her digital watch and pressed the card all over the cold metal, hoping it might activate something to open it. Bent and cramped in the tight, claustrophobic space, she tried twisting sideways and pressing her shoulder against the steel, but that didn’t budge it either.

  Frank, close behind, shone the brighter light from his phone past her. The metal began to moan, as if his phone was Indiana Jones’s flaming torch and it was rousing an entombed beast from centuries of slumber. ‘
Whoa!’ Tori cried out, banging her head on the ceiling as the barrier suddenly began to slide sideways ahead of her.

  She squinted to see beyond it but the light from their devices was too weak to penetrate the darkness. She slithered her way through, expecting Frank to follow, but as soon as her feet cleared, the steel barrier slid back fast and closed with a clang.

  If Frank was shouting, she couldn’t tell. All she could hear were quiet thuds from the other side, presumably his fists banging on the metal.

  Alone, no doubt how The Voice wanted her, she switched off her light and crawled a metre or so to her right, away from the barrier. There was no point making herself an easy target. Tense, alert for the sound of a step, a breath, the cocking of a pistol, a blade slicing through the air, she got up slowly, the wooden floor still cold through her socks.

  Her eyes began to adjust to the gloom. She wasn’t sure but she seemed to be at the side of a stage. She moved forwards slowly. One step. Two. Three, the floor so sticky that each time she lifted a foot it sounded like her sock was scritching itself off a patch of Velcro. Probably the tack from spilled beer, she hoped, since the alternative offerings in a strip club didn’t bear thinking about. She moved ahead again, startling herself when she brushed up against something long and snaky that dangled from the rafters, leaping sideways so her shoulder whacked into a strippers’ pole that she instinctively grabbed for balance, which she instantly regretted when she realised what it was, rubbing her hands against her pants as if they were covered in slime.

  Beyond the stage, all she could make out was a blur of strange shapes, possibly rows of tables with chairs stacked on top. Her peripheral vision, though, picked up a dull red glimmer from the wall closest to her. She edged over to it and felt a switchboard with multiple rows of toggles and knobs. If she acted fast, she might gain the element of surprise, so she flattened her palm against the panel and swept it downward, flicking every switch she could.