‘Robert, that’s one heck of a coincidence.’
‘Or it’s not, ma’am. We suspect that both deaths are down to Hermes.’
Isabel didn’t have a clue what Hirsty was talking about. ‘The luxury brand?’
‘No, ma’am. The injectin’ of an air bubble … whether it’s under a toenail, behind the eye, inside the eardrum, anywhere you can hide a pinprick. That’s a Hermes signature.’
‘What is a Hermes?’ Isabel and Spencer blurted at the same time.
Hirsty’s head jolted back in surprise, as if what he was saying was common knowledge. ‘Hermes is a contract killer, an international assassin. CIA profile says he’s got a dark triad typology. Ain’t one country that—’
‘Dark triad?’
‘A medley of three personality traits all cooked up into the one malevolent fruitcake. You get the psychopath added to the narcissist, an’ all of it coated with the Machiavellian manipulator. Cold, callous, deceptive, zero scruples, ego as big as Mount Everest, the guy is evil unlimited. Like I was gonna say, ain’t no northern hemisphere country where Hermes hasn’t killed, threatened or ransomed at least one VIP. Everyone … us, Europol, Interpol … virtually every agency anywhere would love to lay their mitts on him. Unless he’s doin’ a job for ’em.’
‘We’ve hired this monster?’
Hirsty shook his finger. ‘Nope, ma’am. Could never happen. President Clinton signed an executive order blackbannin’ that. August 2000 he signed it, puttin’ a veto on any US government contact with Hermes, direct or indirect, unless we were takin’ him down. Forty-Two wrote his order tighter than a …’
Isabel chose not to listen to the rest of his sentence.
Clinton’s decision was personal, Hirsty went on to explain, coming straight after the assassin murdered one of the former president’s rockstar playmates. He’d been flying out to an Adirondacks resort to sing for Clinton’s fifty-fourth birthday party and died on board the jet.
Isabel recalled the death. She’d been a huge fan of the music herself. ‘But I remember it differently,’ she said. ‘He died from an overdose while he was in his bath. The whole world was—’
‘That was a blind, ma’am. Medics found the pinprick under his tongue. What alerted ’em to it was a piece of paper stuffed in his mouth with handwriting that copycatted Clinton’s. For Juanita, Kathleen, Paula and Monica, it said.’
Isabel knew those names, the four women who reluctantly became famous because Bill Clinton denied ever having sexual relations with them. ‘Are you telling me that this Hermes person is both an assassin and an avenger of women’s rights? What kind of sick ethical code justifies murdering an innocent man just to get payback on another man who’s—’
‘Who’s alleged—’ said Spencer, interrupting.
‘CIA reckons North Korea’s Kim Jong-il hired Hermes to do it, to give a message that the Norks had the resources to get at whoever they wanted, even a buddy of the president. The note was a bait and switch, a deception to fuel disgust against Clinton.’
‘It never did, though. Surely a hit meant to warn off Forty-Two would’ve made the headlines.’
‘The whole thing was hushed up,’ he said.
‘Covered up.’
‘I guess.’ He went on to describe how the singer’s body was ‘discovered’ at his home in Tennessee three days later, with the news reports showing what became a legendary photograph – the one Isabel remembered – a sad bathroom, the artist’s body limp, slumped back in the tub, his mouth open, his tongue lolling, a small spoon with a white crystalline substance resting on the edge of the porcelain.
‘The blind was a success. Not a single mention anywhere that he was murdered. An’ nothin’ neither about his missed gig for Forty-Two, the flight, the note in his mouth. Nothing about the prick under his tongue.’
And nothing, thought Isabel, about the prick who’d hired the poor man to sing at his party.
‘So we’ve never used this Hermes since?’
‘Not before, not after, ma’am. Even if we begged the guy to work for the US of A, he’d turn us down.’
Spencer cut in. ‘To know that we must have—’
‘Wasn’t our finest moment, I admit,’ said Hirsty, ‘but that was before Forty-Two’s veto. No one knows why Hermes’s got a grudge agin’ us. Somethin’ must have happened way, way back.’
For decades, he explained, Hermes had operated freely as an elite global rent-a-kill, yet no one had the slightest clue as to his identity, not even his nationality.
‘Do we have any facts about him?’
‘Apart from that profile as a dark triad nutjob who don’t like America, he’s stayed pretty much invisible.’
‘And the name … Hermes?’
‘People s’pose he took it after the Greek Hermes, the mythical god who spent his time conductin’ souls into the afterlife. The ancients called him the divine trickster.’
‘So this time,’ said Isabel, ‘the devil wears Hermes.’
‘Huh?’ Hirsty didn’t have a clue.
‘Forget it,’ she said and contemplated how this Hermes could again and again execute the most daring hits, thumbing his nose at the world’s intelligence community each time, leaving not a single pointer to his identity. ‘If no one knows who he is, how do his clients hire him? How do they make contact?’
‘Ha!’ Hirsty’s expression brightened. ‘Technology’s changed it over the years, but the answer’s always been that he’ll contact you if he wants your job.’
She was none the wiser. ‘How would he know that you wanted to—’
‘You head over to the Dark Web, click into his encrypted site, leave a message. We’ve never been able to hack his site or even block it, the guy’s that damn good. He’s got these caduceuses all over it—’
‘Which are?’ said the vice-president.
Isabel called up the insignia of the US Army Medical Corps and shared it with the others on-screen, a stick with two snakes entwined around it. ‘Spencer, that’s a caduceus.’
‘Anyhoo, you punch in a private message and ID yourself – he’s mighty picky an’ it’s not just us he won’t work for – you also ID your target, your time-frame and the fee you’re offering. If the job don’t offend his delicate sensibilities, if he’s willin’ to take you on as a client, if the timing works for him and the money you slap on the table is high enough, he’ll let you know. Hermes never negotiates, by the way, which means you gotta pitch your dollars big, real big. Ma’am, this guy’s gotta be worth mega-millions by now.’
‘What did you say … your hit can’t offend his sensibilities? So while the money is crucial, it’s not his only motivator. Who else won’t he work for?’
‘The drug cartels. He’ll hit ’em but he won’t do a hit for ’em. Heck, he even works low bono if he likes your cause. You were on the right track askin’ if he’s some kinda moral vigilante. If someone he’s willin’ to work for wants him to take out a ring of child exploiters or human traffickers, that kinda thing, he’ll do those jobs for expenses only.’
‘What you meant by low bono versus pro bono?’
‘Exactly. Here’s an example from last year. The guy’s a greenie, too – go figure – so, for free, nada, he took out a Brazilian lumber company’s entire executive team when they were about to start loggin’ an ancient forest in the Amazon. CIA says a green group hired him and he even covered all his expenses, which they reckon coulda been a cool couple of million.’
Isabel was looking for an angle. ‘If Hermes killed both Montse and Buckingham as you think – two jobs he would not do for free – can’t we simply follow the money?’
‘Nothin’ simple about doin’ that, ma’am. With Hermes the money trail always goes dead pretty damn quick.’
‘Then what about working out who might profit from these hits, both of them? That would surely be a tiny group.’
Hirsty blinked slowly, an annoying tell that meant he was about to take issue with her. ‘Madam President,’ he said
using her formal title, in his case another tell, a flag for an ‘incoming’. That was a code-word that she and her chief of staff used for the cloying condescension that some of the men in DC still piled up on her, despite her being the most powerful person in the world. ‘It’s true we got two murders and one murderer, but the workin’ hypothesis of our intelligence community is the hits are unconnected.’
‘Really?’ said Spencer, clearly sceptical. ‘The two hits were in the one week.’
Hirsty explained that Hermes had done that before, executing separate contracts for separate clients, and not only in the same week but even in the same city. ‘Rumour mill says each client gets a fee-cut, so they share in his savin’s on resources. Never tells ’em what the second job is, just that there is one. Matter of fact, same thing happened with the Clinton thing. Two days later, Hermes hit a New York congressman, Jerry Benson. Publicly, the guy died from a heart attack but privately he was a scumbag member of a ring of child molesters.’
When she was ending the call, Diaz asked her veep to stay on the line. ‘Spencer, I get the feeling Hirsty is hiding something from us. His protestation that Hermes would never take a job from the US doesn’t sit well with me. Why is our money untouchable when he’s willing to do his dirty work for almost anyone else? North Korea, for example.’
‘You’re thinking it’s camouflage,’ said Spencer, nodding. ‘Hirsty giving us plausible deniability.’
‘Precisely. So if there’s ever a revelation that the US was involved in these two assassinations, you and I can put our hands on our hearts and say we honestly didn’t know.’
65
Barcelona
Tori left Frank perched on the edge of the shop’s front counter, partly to keep guard while he sent the photos she’d taken inside Bar Canona to Thatcher, and partly to allow her a modicum of privacy while she used the washroom down the back to freshen up and change.
Her clothes, now piled on the floor and covered in dust and fragments of things she didn’t want to think about, reeked of smoke. As she shook her wig out multiple times, she couldn’t avoid visualising a little girl hugging her teddy bear as the blast tore it and her to shreds.
She’d scrubbed her face so hard it was feeling raw, and as she emerged out of the racks, washed, clothed and wigged, she hoped the dim store light would stop Frank noticing that she wasn’t able to keep her eyes dry.
His hand went to his mouth. He’d noticed.
She wiped her eyes, again, with her sleeve. ‘I can’t get those kids out of my head,’ she confessed. ‘If it wasn’t for me …’ She let the words hang like a sentence, the judgemental kind.
‘Tori, he did that, not you. All we can do for those kids and their families is bring him to justice, so let’s get moving and stop moping.’
Tori looked down. He was right about the moving part. But she couldn’t help feeling responsible. She looked back up and saw his expression had changed, like he’d sucked on a lemon. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Your outfit. It’s like you’ve got a green neon arrow pointing at you and it’s flashing Hey, look at me! I was kind of expecting a more blend-into-the-shadows get-up.’
‘Even the wig?’
‘The wig’s fine, especially now you’ve flipped it blonde side up. The hair is the least offensive part … You are definitely not the Invisible Woman you need to be.’
Was he right? She hadn’t thought so when she’d picked the clothes out. Perhaps it was the incredibly poor light filtering through to the back of the store. Plus her tears. And her exhaustion. Or maybe the drugs were still in her system and clouding her judgement. She could attribute her gaffe to lots of things, but paying less attention to creating a disguise than was prudent was a rookie error.
She pulled her shirt – green paisley – over her head and held it out in front of her to check it out. Frank was right. Here, nearer the window, it was flashy. Garish, even. As she stood in her bra and slacks and reset her wig, she noticed Frank had turned his head away.
He really was Mr Decent, she thought, as she rifled through another rack of shirts.
She slipped another shirt off the rack, dark grey, plain, no pattern, long-sleeved. After undoing the top two buttons of its Peter Pan collar, she pulled it over her head. ‘Ta da! You can look now.’ She pulled the shirt cuffs down over her wrists and, as Frank turned back to face her, she spun on her toes in the sneakers she’d found in the washroom. Fortunately, they were close enough to her size, a pretty good fit. ‘So, Ralph Lauren Chaudry, what do you think now?’
‘Better,’ he said, eyeing her. ‘The blandness of the grey makes the mauve slacks less awkward. Nice shoes, by the way.’
She checked her watch. ‘Shouldn’t we call Thatcher?’
66
The bad news kept coming, and this time they heard it via Thatcher. The Voice, he told them, had briefly managed to breach Thatcher’s control of the street-cams. ‘He live-streamed the explosion over social media. Your escape, too, Tori. Frank, the camera didn’t catch you, just an errant flap of your magnificent jacket, but Tori, the footage of you escaping and the little girls running inside – and Thatcher must be honest here – it gave the impression that you were looking back and admiring your handiwork. Like it was your bomb that killed them.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Social media is on a rampage. Any crazy person who can type is pinning those kids’ deaths on you. Hopefully you’ve had time to switch your clothes in that shop you broke into.’
‘Thatcher,’ said Frank as he poked his head out of the front door, ‘if the street-cams allowed you to follow us,’ he gave Tori a thumbs-up of an all-clear, ‘could The Voice—’
‘Francis, Francis, you really need to listen more carefully. Thatcher told you The Voice only got brief access to the CCTV. Your Saviour from SoHo cut him off just after the explosion, so he did not see the direction you went or the shop whose door you shouldered. But chaps, you really need to get moving. He might have people out there searching for you.’
‘Before we go, Thatcher,’ she said, ‘I need you to access the CCTV in another part of the city. A square where the local president is launching a driverless car spectacular,’ she checked her watch, ‘in forty minutes or so.’
‘Why?’ said Frank, looking worried.
She told them about the call she got from The Voice on her now extinct burner phone and the Cata-Car announcement she thought she’d picked up in the background. ‘Thatcher, I need you to case the place, or whatever your hacker-speak is for that kind of work. We need to find him before he finds us, or me anyway, and that’s the only clue I’ve got.’
She dug down into her backpack, which was on the floor near Frank’s feet, moved the polka dot dress, now in a plastic bag, to one side, and pulled out five one-hundred euro bills, placed them on the counter under the store’s receipt book and on the cover scribbled, ‘Gràcies per la clothes & sorry per la door and the mess.’
‘Frank,’ she said, ‘we’re going to the car show,’ then she grabbed her bag and ran out into the street and headed left, scaring off two pigeons that were pecking at a mound of trash.
67
El Prat Airport, Barcelona
Not more than a minute after Air Force One rolled to a halt, Davey slunk into Isabel’s office, his face shrouded in misery, his chin tucked in, his lower lip jutting and his mooning eyes even more adorably blue than usual. Dealing with presidents and chancellors was way easier than trying to handle a whiny ten-year-old.
The funeral was still hours away but the boy was already dressed in his new black suit. His shirt’s top button had popped open and his thin tie, yellow like his shoelaces – Montse’s favourite colour – was skewed to the side, and with his spiky shock of blond hair he looked like a skinny Mini-Me version of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
‘Did they say yes?’ Davey signed. He took a step forwards, crossed his fingers, his arms and then his legs so he almost toppled over and made it hard for
Isabel not to laugh.
Before she could straighten her face, her chief of staff put his head around the door. He tapped the boy on the shoulder and waited for him to unfurl his limbs and look up at him. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Davey, this is urgent.’ Then Gregory manoeuvred his own face into a position where Davey could not read his lips. ‘Ma’am, President Hou Tao is on the line.’
Isabel was dreading this call. She and Gregory had toyed with pre-empting it, calling China’s leader first, but decided that risked Isabel coming across as defensive even though she had nothing to hide.
As far as she knew.
‘Here come the accusations. You killed …’ She paused. While Davey couldn’t see Gregory’s lips, he could still see hers. ‘Davey—’ she started signing, but the boy anticipated that he was about to be dismissed and left.
68
Plaça d’Espanya, Barcelona
Plaça d’Espanya is one of Barcelona’s most important public spaces, with a monumental fountain and huge grassed area at its centre and a bustling seven-lane road encircling them, a massive roundabout heavy with the traffic that congests the six roadways that criss-cross the plaça. For today, all traffic was banned, and the city had erected a giant circle of grandstands, ten rows high, in front of the museums, exhibition buildings and shopping mall – a former bull-fighting ring – that lined the roundabout’s perimeter.
Instead of cars, the plaça was bustling with thousands of people, locals and tourists who’d won numbered seats in the lottery. Tori and Frank weren’t among them but Tori had snapped up a scalper’s last two tickets. They were in section L, second row from the front and, luckily, facing north-west, so the glare of the sun was at their backs, ideal for a woman with no lashes. With only one row of seats in front of them, their view was virtually uninterrupted.
Around eighty autonomous cars – Cata-Cars, driverless vehicles designed and built in Catalonia – were fanned around the circle of the central parkland, their front bumpers almost touching the grass. A Catalan flag, the Senyera, draped each vehicle, the stripes of red and gold making the display look like an array of two-colour petals on a huge petunia.
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