‘I don’t think so. If they pushed beyond the two weeks, China would walk away. Greenland would lose its leverage.’
‘You say you’d walk away, but would you? Really?’
72
Barcelona
Tori took the burner phone from Frank, pressed accept and put the call on speaker.
‘This man,’ Thatcher started, though for the first couple of seconds Tori didn’t really hear him, she was so relieved he wasn’t The Voice ringing to gloat. ‘… these people you’re up against are highly capable. Those cars knew precisely where you were sitting.’
‘We were there, remember.’
‘Which means this device you’re talking on, any other devices you’re carrying, could be beaming your location to him. Which therefore means that in a few moments you’ll be ditching everything electronic that you’re carrying. Phones, tablets, those FrensLens glasses, too. But before you do, Thatcher needs to bring you up to date.’
Tori had already taken off her FrensLens and crushed them underfoot, and she was now wiping the data off her tablet.
‘Before you leapt into the tunnel, Thatcher cut all nearby signals, the street-cams, the outside-broadcast TV, cell towers, even the signals to those cars. No one who was watching remotely – your nemesis or the cops – could have seen you leap through that manhole. You’re welcome.’
‘The cars,’ said Tori, thinking about all the people above ground. ‘If you poked out their driver’s eyes they might’ve hit innocent—’
‘While Thatcher has never thought it necessary to possess an actual driver’s licence – he remains a ghost to the authorities – he did manage to slip behind the wheels, virtually, and ensured public safety. Again, you’re welcome.’
‘But this phone we’re talking on?’
‘It’s the only open signal, highly encrypted, specifically directed, a Thatcher one-off. At your service.’
‘Thatch, a woman up there identified Tori,’ said Frank. She might’ve seen us drop down here, and by now, she might’ve found a cop.’
‘The female of Rubenesque proportions? The one with three snotty-nosed children at her heels, all dolled up in the colours of the Estelada? Yes?’
Tori and Frank looked at each other. Thatcher was so full of his own brilliance it was often excruciating to talk to him, even if his ego-trips were almost always justified.
‘Her name is Agnès Blanxart. As we speak, she and her brats have rushed onto a crowded train that is pitching and lurching its way to Bellvitge Hospital. Turns out, dear friends, that straight after she identified Tori, she took a call from 112 – the local 911 – and a paramedic gave her the shocking news that her sister had suffered a coronary and was being rushed to that same hospital.’
‘How did that call get through if you—’
‘The same way this one did. You’re welcome, yet again. It was a garbled call, naturally, due to the time lag for the translation software to wing its way from New York to Barcelona, but Agnès picked up enough of it to rush her kids down the escalator into the plaza’s Metro station. There was more bad news for her, too. Her Vodafone account was suddenly cut off so she has no way to contact the police or the media, at least for a little bit.’
Tori was so relieved she spontaneously hugged Frank. But when his arm tightened around her waist she quickly pulled away.
‘Thatcher also bears you both good news about that unmentionable video,’ but before he could finish, the manhole motor began to purr and a splinter of light came through.
‘Thatch,’ said Frank, cutting in. ‘Why are you opening the cover?’
‘Hello, folks. And Mr Thatcher, nicely done, letting me know your name and your city. That knowledge might come in handy if I need to track you down. A little advice, sir. If you hear a knock at your door anytime soon, don’t assume it will be the Mormons. So … Who am I?’ He sang the words, the classic line from the musical Les Misérables. ‘But no, I’m not Jean Valjean. Wrong sewer, wrong city.’
The trio were stunned, Tori and Frank looking at the phone like it was a sorcerer’s talisman, then up at the manhole as it closed again.
Thatcher broke the spell. ‘Ditch the phone and run!’
As the pair charged down the tunnel into the blackness The Voice’s laugh echoed behind them. ‘Catch you later,’ he called.
73
Two security guards, possibly the beefiest men in Barcelona, were trying to lift Casals off the stage but he managed to wriggle out of their grasp and scuttle down the stairs by himself. The rest of his security detail were lined up at the bottom, guns drawn. What he’d planned as a glorious stride towards independence had morphed into a debacle, a personal disaster, a public humiliation that his political enemies would remind him of every day until the election.
His people were trying to bustle him into the SUV that had screeched into the centre of the roundabout, but Oriol was done with cars and he could only imagine the photograph El Mundo would run on its front page tomorrow: ‘Hi-tech president fails. Slinks off in “old-school” vehicle.’ He’d risk an enormous electoral backlash. He sloughed off the guards’ arms and said, ‘I’m walking,’ even managing to push away his bodyguard Guillem, a human fridge twice as wide as Uri and easily half a head taller.
The palace was a thirty-minute walk away, forty allowing for the crowds, but hopefully less if he went quickly. With Guillem following and his other guard Jordi clearing a path ahead of him, Casals strode down Paral-lel.
His phone tingled. ‘Maria, it was a total fuck up,’ he said. ‘Did you see?’
‘Where are you? How close to the palace?’
He looked up, ‘I’m on Paral-lel at Floridablanca. I want Lluïsa—’
‘You’re walking?’
‘I want Lluïsa waiting for me when I get back.’ Dr Lluïsa de la Riva was the inspiration and chief engineer for the Cata-Car program. ‘She needs to explain how she let this debacle happen.’
‘Uri, get in a damn car. Forget the optics.’ Maria knew him well.
Casals’ assistant handed him a coffee at the palace’s front entrance, strong and black and, he hoped, with a shot of vermut. He sipped it as he walked. No vermut.
‘Where’s Maria?’ he snapped and brushed past Dr de la Riva into his office. He put the mug on his desk, threw himself into his chair and fumed, unable to find the right words, glaring at Lluïsa.
As beautiful as always, she looked unruffled in her white coat, more like a thirty-five-year-old lab technician than a fifty-three-year-old Nobel Laureate whose life’s work had just imploded.
She spoke first. ‘Uri, we got hacked.’
‘Don’t say.’
‘We don’t know how but we’re looking.’ She brushed back her blonde fringe, the same hair she’d let Uri toy with a couple of times after his wife died, though that was as far as it went. ‘We’ve got the toughest, most advanced encryption known to protect our Cata-Car system. Quantum key distribution. It’s unbreakable.’
‘Apparently it isn’t.’ Uri picked up his coffee then put it down again, some of the liquid slopping onto the draft of his eulogy.
After what just happened, his speech would come across as pathetic at best, a farce at worst. He recalled the relevant sentence word-for-word, Of the many things Montse stood for, Catalan innovation was … But he stopped, unable to finish it, even in his head. He bellowed towards his door, startling Lluïsa. ‘Maria, we need a new eulogy.’
Her voice came back. ‘We’re already on it.’
He turned again to Lluïsa. ‘So, this encryption?’
‘The encryption wasn’t the problem.’ She sighed. ‘Last night, we had a thing.’
‘A thing?’ he said, banging the desk, then apologised when he saw her take a step back. Casals was famous for not losing his cool. He spoke softly. ‘Lluïsa, I’m sorry. What thing?’
After her head of security got home last night, she explained, he thought he’d misplaced his cell phone somewhere around the house. Strangely, an hour l
ater, it surprised him by ringing in the pocket of his lab coat, the pocket that he’d checked and rechecked multiple times. Yet his wife had called five times for him and it hadn’t rung once. ‘When he answered the call, the screen briefly flashed up what he thinks was a caduceus—’
‘Which is?’
‘An ancient symbol, a stick entwined by two snakes. But he isn’t certain, it was fleeting and it vanished almost immediately. We can’t find any trace of it on his phone. Now he’s wondering if he imagined it.’
‘Who was calling?’
‘No one. The line was dead, the number unidentified and untraceable.’
Maria put her head round the door. ‘President Diaz’s office is on the line, so is Chancellor—’
‘Fuck it, Maria. Tell them all yes to whatever they want. Tell them yes the funeral is going ahead, tell them yes we are beefing up security, and get Guillem to instruct the commissioner to do that if you haven’t already—’
‘I have.’
‘And tell the Americans that yes, her boy can sign her speech. The kid can sign for me too if he knows Catalan. Assuming I get a decent speech from you.’
He turned back to Lluïsa.
74
30,000 metres above France
President Tushkin luxuriated in his spa bath with Natasha and Valentina, his two favourites among the flight crew. While he watched the news, this time via CNN so he could hear the parochial American angle, he let the women soap his arms, and other appendages.
The news anchor, a New Zealand woman whose voice he found particularly beguiling, loomed out of the MicroLED TV screen spanning the wall from the mirrored ceiling down to the gold taps. ‘Shh,’ he hushed the women.
… Eco-fanatics Endz of the Earth are making yet another explosive allegation, claiming that US President Isabel Diaz herself illegally authorised the professor’s assassination. If correct, the implications are far-reaching.
For an American president to sanction the murder of a US citizen on American soil …
Tushkin lay his head back against the rim of the bath. Endz of the Earth were becoming a force to be reckoned with. He smiled as a thought in English came to mind, The Endz justifies the means, then he placed Natasha’s hand where it could do its best work.
75
Barcelona
‘How long is this damn tunnel,’ huffed Tori. They’d been running in the dark, in fits and starts, for four minutes, Frank slipping twice and Tori once, during which time she ditched her digital watch, having forgotten to do that before. Her forehead was throbbing from a thump into a low-hanging beam, and her eyes were stinging, but at least it was sweat and not blood.
Up ahead a shard of light appeared out of the blackness. As they got closer, the sliver swelled into a beam and, closer again, broke up into a cluster of smaller beams. ‘If it’s a grate,’ said Frank getting close, ‘watch out, there might be—’
Tori braked herself not a moment too soon. Less than a metre ahead of her the tunnel floor started to rake down into the stormwater trench where Frank had landed on his butt in a puddle, tiny circles of light speckling over him from above. ‘One halo’s not enough?’ She couldn’t help laughing.
He pushed himself up, the back of his pants glistening, his shoes drenched, but his beloved tweed bone-dry. He got up onto his toes, poked his fingers through the vents in the grate ready to push it open. ‘Could this be one of those Schrödinger’s Cat moments—’
‘Where we know we’re alive down here but to someone up top we could be alive or dead—’
‘Unless it’s The Voice up there, in which case we will be dead.’
‘That’s a comforting thought.’ Tori sloshed past him, moved his hands away and grabbed the rim of the grate herself and began to push it open. ‘If we’re talking about cats, you’d better remember Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.’
‘What?’ said the Oxford graduate. ‘That the more accurately you measure the velocity of a cat, the less accurately you know its position?’
‘No,’ said Tori, as she kept pushing the grate aside. ‘Curiosity either killed the cat or it didn’t.’
76
‘The cat lived,’ said Tori, peering back down into the drain hole from above. ‘All the cats. The alleyway up here stinks and … You’ll see.’ As she lowered a hand to help Frank clamber out, she glanced up and down the passageway. Tomcats and tabbies leapt from dumpster to dumpster. The bins were spilling over with paper, boxes, rotten apples, bananas and other produce. A mountain of empty fruit boxes was so high it was almost toppling.
Frank got one knee up onto the rim of the grate just as a rodent scurried over his fingers. ‘Maybe I should’ve said Schrödinger’s Rat.’ He lifted his other knee, stood and shook himself off. ‘I need new pants … shoes.’
‘Don’t forget the jacket.’
‘It didn’t get wet … Oh, it’s just your usual witticism.’
Tori touched the label on one of the boxes. It showed the destination address Mercat de Sant Antoni. ‘You’ll probably find what you need in the market behind that wall. I’ll wait here. Go crazy. Buy us some new burners.’
He came over and took her face in his hands. ‘That’s a heck of a bruise on your forehead.’ He moved her head gently from side to side. ‘You okay, Tori?’
She pulled away. ‘Apart from dealing with a maniac who’s out to kill me, yes I’m okay.’
‘How do I look?’ Frank asked Tori, who was holed up inside a scrappy delivery box, the only large one that wasn’t reeking of decaying fruit.
When it came to clothes, Tori knew Frank was no risk-taker. When he spun around on the toes of his new shoes, she knew nothing much had changed. They were the identical utilitarian black style he wore all the time. One difference was his new slacks. They were grey, of course, but they came with a sharp front pleat. For Frank, that was a radical fashion statement.
‘Here,’ he said, swinging a large white shopping bag through the air to her.
She stood up inside her box, caught the bag and looked inside. ‘Men’s clothes? Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘Barcelona’s Most Wanted is a woman. It might be smart if you stopped being one.’
She nodded and rummaged through the bag. ‘This jacket, it’s—’
‘Tweed, yes. And that tedious joke of yours … now it’s on you too, so enjoy.’
The fabric was in greenish tones whereas his was a palette of browns and, in her mind, pukes.
‘There’s a hat and shades to go with it.’ He drew a gold-rimmed pair of knock-off Ray-Bans and a pitch-black fedora out of a bag he’d left on the ground. ‘It’s quite fetching,’ he said, running his hand round the brim of the hat, ‘and with this silvery band it’s … I don’t know … elegant yet a little raffish? The stall owner says it’s the best quality rabbit.’
‘It’ll make me look more rabbi than rabbit.’
‘Rabbis don’t wear tweed,’ said Frank.
‘No one does.’
‘How droll.’ He pulled a wig out of the same bag and threw it to her. ‘Rabbis don’t do dreadlocks either.’
‘Actually, they do,’ she said as she caught it. ‘Sort of. You know, those long side bits.’ She held the wig up to her ear, the dreads dangling down onto her shoulder. ‘You don’t care about cultural appropriation, do you?’
‘Your culture’s been appropriating mine for so long it’s become part of my culture.’
There was some wisdom in that, she thought. ‘Did you get the phones?’
He brought out three, in different colours, blue, gold and pink. He threw her the gold one. It had four bars of charge. The others did too apparently. He’d paid for them in cash, no ID required.
‘I bought a fourth as well. Messaged Thatcher on it then chucked it. Gave him the numbers for all of these so he could set up the encryption. That way your guy can’t monitor—’
Tori snapped. ‘He’s as much my guy as coronavirus was my disease. If you want to refer to him, try fucki
ng murderer, voice of Satan, but never my guy.’
77
Air Force One
Most days, Isabel loved being president. Not for the trappings of power. Not for the crisis management. It was the times when she could make a difference, improve people’s lives, give solace or work at rekindling a national tone of civility that years of belligerent politics had squashed. Today was not one of her good days.
Emails, papers, reports and memos were tiled over her computer screen. Despite taking up pages and pages and thousands of words, they all said the same thing: Project Gusher wouldn’t, couldn’t, and therefore didn’t happen.
Isabel wasn’t one to be comforted by claims on paper, by anodyne reports or faceless research, especially when all the pages and words boiled down to a single but equivocal fact: no one could find a single government record that gave even a hint of a possibility there’d ever been a secret oil drilling project in Greenland, whether it was called Project Gusher or anything else.
What she needed was proof, at the very least an unambiguous denial from an original source, a person she could trust, someone who’d actually know what they were talking about from their own lived experience.
The same applied to Endz of the Earth’s claim that she’d ordered Professor Buckingham’s murder. While she absolutely knew that she didn’t order it, what she needed was verification that no one else had done it ‘for her’.
Gregory was counselling her not to press, not to poke, not to go beyond the documents in front of her. He was urging her to apply the classic wisdom of the courtroom cross-examiner, Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.
While she dreaded what the truth might actually turn out to be, she feared even more the risk that whatever it was would fly out of the blue and turn black on her.
78
Sant Antoni Market, Barcelona
Double Deal Page 17