Double Deal

by John M. Green

  The two men strolled through the aisles past stall after stall of T-shirts, gym clothes, phones, spices, fruit. Whatever you wanted, this market seemed to have it. Tori caught her reflection in a mirror and, without stopping, not wanting to attract any more attention than her outlandish looks might already, she saw how good Frank’s shopping job had been. People in Barcelona, tourists and locals, came in all shapes, sizes and get-ups, and while the dreadlocks flopping around her eyes and ears felt strange, when seen under the black fedora they gave off an aura of calm. Likewise, the tweed jacket and, a bonus, it wasn’t as scratchy as she’d expected. ‘Hey, Frank, what am I now – Rasta or rabbi?’

  ‘Sing Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” and you’ll kill both birds with one stone.’

  ‘Stoner, I’d say.’

  He laughed and pointed through the exit ahead of them to a pizza cafe across the road. ‘We were supposed to have breakfast, remember?’

  Tori pushed open the cafe’s swing doors. ‘Mmm,’ she said, inhaling deeply. ‘What is it about the aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans that tells your brain to ignore how totally shit your day is?’

  ‘If you really want to know,’ said Frank, ‘it’s furfurylthiol, methylbutanol and dimethylpyrazine.’

  ‘You really did hit those chemistry books at Oxford, didn’t you?’ She sat and pulled in her chair. ‘Look at us, the Terrible Twins in Tweed and not a bloodhound or a dead animal between us.’

  ‘There is that rabbit on your head,’ he said, flicking one of her locks.

  A waiter came over. ‘Two café bombóns, please,’ said Frank, as Tori gave him a nod. Despite his usual preference for tea, and that they both hated the local version of coffee when Casals introduced them to it – a fifty-fifty mix of espresso and sweetened condensed milk – they both craved the sugar hit.

  ‘A pizza, too,’ Tori added, her voice as deep as she could muster. ‘Large please. That one up there,’ she indicated the chalkboard, ‘with jamon and wild bolets. That’s ham and mushrooms, right?’ The waiter nodded, turned over the glasses on the table, poured them some water and left. Tori picked up her glass.

  ‘The votes are in,’ said Frank. ‘You’re definitely Rasta.’

  She looked at him over her drink. ‘What?’

  ‘Rabbis don’t order ham pizza.’

  Under cover of her brim, she scanned the cafe. What was missing was conversation and what was abundant was a proliferation of white cords dangling from the customers’ ears while they tapped on their phones or other devices. ‘That woman there,’ said Tori, tipping her head towards a customer whose foot was rocking a baby stroller in time, Tori supposed, to the music coming through on her earphones, while she typed on a laptop. ‘I bet she’s writing the next Harry Potter.’

  ‘It’s Harry in the stroller. I saw the scar on his forehead when we walked past.’

  Frank, bless him, was doing his best to bring light into her darkness. Sitting with him was the first normal, human thing she’d done all day, and while she wanted to savour it, she couldn’t allow herself to relax. They had a lot of ground to cover.

  She leant closer to him, her dreads swinging a little, one of them dunking into her water glass. ‘There are three things we don’t know.’

  ‘And there’s something I know,’ said Frank, ‘but you don’t. The law of gravity.’ He undunked her dread and pushed it back behind her ear.

  ‘Three unknowns. Who murdered Nivikka and Songtian?’ She held his gaze. ‘Why did they do it? Why are they framing me for it?’

  ‘We can narrow down the who question,’ Frank said. ‘It’s got to be someone who’ll benefit from the deal falling over.’

  She nodded. ‘Which puts the United States at the top of that list. This has all the hallmarks of a CIA black op.’ Frank was shaking his head, about to speak, but Tori continued. ‘Diaz’s phone calls to Nivikka and Oriol. She wanted in, obviously.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘America didn’t need to go dark. If she wanted to knock China out of the park, all she had to do was make a better offer. Which, I remind you, was why we, you, insisted that China agree to that two-week hiatus for the ratification process.’

  Tori came at her point another way. ‘But Diaz couldn’t have known about the vote condition at that stage. Not until we announced the full details. And what if she’d decided the US couldn’t beat China’s offer? We got Beijing to really stretch on this, remember?’ She looked around, but no one seemed to be listening, no one was watching them, not even a single furtive look away.

  Frank was thinking. ‘True,’ he said eventually. ‘That is a possibility, except for one thing. Endz of the Earth—’

  ‘Whose top brass Russia buried down some deep hole in Siberia months ago. They’re defunct.’

  ‘Apparently not. You haven’t seen …’ He pulled one of the phones out, switched it on. ‘They issued a media release this morning. Just a second.’ He did an internet search for it. ‘Here,’ he handed her the phone. ‘Operation Gusher.’

  Tori started reading as he kept talking.

  ‘America denies the operation ever existed, of course, but while that allegation is out there, no incoming leader of Greenland would go near any offer from the US. Diaz could offer them California and they’d give her the finger, or whatever Greenlanders do. In other words, with this Project Gusher thing in play, America was screwed regardless.’

  79

  The list of remaining possibilities was short and Tori was now putting Russia at the top of it. ‘If it’s not the US, this has Tushkin all over it.’

  Frank nodded. ‘He’s got form, that’s for sure. He’s taken out enemies before, inside and outside of Russia. But he’s not the only possibility. Denmark has to be on the list. If Greenland cut ties they’d probably lose their prized seat on the Arctic Council.’

  ‘I doubt it’s them,’ said Tori. ‘They’re as wimpish as the Canadians. The last time the Danes did anything audacious was when their king wore a yellow star and told Hitler to—’

  ‘That,’ said Frank, ‘is an urban myth.’

  ‘Which only strengthens my point,’ said Tori. ‘Give me one daring thing the Danes have ever done.’

  ‘The Sydney Opera House?’ He paused. ‘Yeah, okay, it’s not the Danes. There’s Spain. Casals blamed Madrid for leaking the negotiations to the US, so—’

  ‘Only because it would humiliate him,’ said Tori. ‘But by helping the US, Spain might also extract some favour back in return.’

  ‘Or to build up goodwill with Russia. Europe still hasn’t got over your President Trump scaling down NATO.’

  ‘He was never my president. Besides, Trump is ancient history so I don’t …’ She stopped.

  The waiter placed two glasses of steaming liquid on their table, each one containing a double shot of espresso floating on top of a thick white sludge of sweetened condensed milk. Frank took up his spoon and Tori watched him swirl the milk and coffee the way Casals had guided them. ‘Stirred but not shaken,’ he’d joked.

  Frank took a sip and grimaced. ‘This drink exemplifies why a gentleman would always prefer tea.’

  She swirled hers, raised the glass by its metal handle and held it up to her mouth to blow across the rim. This wasn’t just a drink. It was liquid sugar and, as bad as it tasted, she drank most of it down. ‘Lucky I’m no gentleman, despite my, what did you call it? My elegant and raffish appearance.’

  She stood up and stretched, caught the waiter’s attention. ‘Where’s the, ah, men’s room?’ she asked, and wandered off.

  Tori sat back down. ‘Turns out this place is gender-neutral. Anyhow, I got to thinking, we have to put the US back on the list. That Gusher thing, from Endz of the Earth. It’s irrelevant.’

  ‘Why? Greenland would never parlay with America after that.’

  ‘After that. Precisely.’ She waited for the penny to drop, which it did when Frank slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Washington could
still have orchestrated the murders. They wouldn’t have known that Endz of the Earth were about to hammer them over an operation they thought was dead and buried.’ He took a sip of water and Tori waited for the cogs to spin in his brain. ‘No,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘That theory’s got a hole in it. Isabel Diaz would never have authorised those hits.’

  ‘Only if she knew,’ said Tori. ‘What makes you think those creeps at the CIA would ask her, or even tell her? The Agency gets to play dirty, she gets to stay clean with plausible deniability, and the US comes out on top. They use a double-whammy strategy, execute the hits to stymie China and lay the blame on someone they despise, someone expendable. Me.’

  ‘It’s a perfect strategy,’ Frank admitted, ‘until Endz of the Earth turned up and put a bomb under it.’

  80

  Air Force One

  As an aerial Oval Office, Air Force One worked fine. But being parked on an airport apron 4000 miles from her key advisers when they had no answers made Isabel crabbier than usual.

  DNI Hirsty was reporting back. At her direct request, he’d quizzed the directors of every agency face-to-face about the Buckingham hit, including two agencies not a single member of the House Intelligence Committee even knew existed, nor Isabel, until he told her.

  He’d got each man – they were all men – to sign a statement, on oath, confirming that his agency ‘did not commit, authorise, or know anything about’ the professor’s murder. Once Isabel sighted the sworn denials, she told Hirsty to destroy them, and watched him slide them into the high-security, P-7 cross-cut shredder he kept beside his desk.

  On Project Gusher, which he annoyingly kept referring to with air quotes, she’d asked him to personally drill into DC’s most sensitive databases, caches of files that were classified top secret, restricted data, and sensitive compartmented information – records that very few people had access to. ‘I ran dry, ma’am. Nothin’ on any program called Gusher in Greenland, and nothin’ like it. If that dang project ever existed I’d a found it.’

  He was definitive yet she didn’t completely trust him and, after she clicked off the call, she picked up the sheet Gregory had given her with the phone numbers of two of the oldest surviving CIA directors. These were two of the men who had headed the Agency in the 1990s, men she’d never met, never spoken to. They’d served under presidents with different party allegiances to hers and so were not likely to agree with her politics and, worse, given the era they’d operated in, she suspected they might have a problem with a woman sitting in the Oval.

  All of that plus having to rouse two cranky old codgers out of bed in the middle of the night made these calls very chancy.

  She was wrong to be worried. As soon as she identified herself and apologised for the time of her call, each man, as patrician and crotchety as he came across on pick-up, snapped to attention, neither one uttering a single word of complaint.

  These were people who, when a president phoned them – even if it wasn’t their president, or their party – they respected the office. These were the dedicated kind of officials that DC used to be full of before the mud rose up to swamp the place. It was people like them, she reminded herself, who did make America great. Since then, instead of people who spoke truth to power, the Beltway became full of people for whom the truth was whatever their bosses wanted to hear.

  Both men gave her the same message. ‘The way the Agency ran back in those times,’ said one, ‘if any of my predecessors had run this Project Gusher under that or any other name, I’d personally know about it. It was protocol, director to director. We might not keep any files, but I’d know. And I’m telling you straight, ma’am, I didn’t know. I don’t know. Never heard of it. Never heard of anything like it. So in short, ma’am, it never happened. Period. It’s total bull. Fake news.’

  Being a hoax wasn’t the end of it for Diaz. It threw up other troubling questions, such as who’d manufactured the ‘evidence’ – if Endz of the Earth ever got around to producing it – and why. And Hermes: why would a bizarre international assassin kill a nonagenarian professor so that Endz of the Earth could pin the death on her? There was also Montse. The same assassin killed her. Again, why?

  Did Hermes have one client, as Isabel suspected, or was Hirsty correct, that Hermes was working for two clients, the timing purely a convenient coincidence?

  As she nestled back into her chair to think through what she knew, Davey once again poked his head in, his arms wide, not playing at being an airplane this time, just a kid shrugging and inclining his head towards her in silent query.

  She’d neglected to tell him the news. She jumped up out of her chair with a wide smile, a thumbs-up and signed that Casals had okayed the boy’s role at the funeral.

  Before she could go over and hug him, Davey saluted her, turned his arms back into wings, banked left and zoomed out the door.

  Isabel glowed. Davey was her greatest gift, her one bright note on a dismal day.

  81

  Barcelona

  The napkin on the cafe table was vibrating. Tori lifted it off the phone, took out a long, white earpiece cord, and plugged it in. She passed one of the buds over to Frank and fitted the other into her own ear.

  Thatcher’s voice boomed out at them, his excitement palpable. ‘Tori, your photos from inside Bar Canona – brilliant. No, sorry, horrendous. The blood, the violence … You taking them, that was brilliant. And most important, the Room 420 video, as you suspected, it’s one hundred per cent a deepfake, a digital sleight of hand. This call is bringing you a rolled-gold Thatcher guarantee that you are not that woman.’

  Frank’s eyes were popping out with excitement. ‘I knew it. I knew it,’ he said and threw himself across the table to hug her, but Tori pulled away. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, shrinking back into his seat. ‘What will people think? I didn’t mean …’

  She didn’t mean it either. Truly, she was ecstatic at Thatcher’s corroboration and thrilled, really thrilled, that Frank’s blind faith in her had proved justified, that he’d believed in her, regardless of … everything. Even more than all that, she was psyched she could finally silence the harrowing howl of paranoia that had filled her head since she woke up, and which irrationally, neurotically, continued to hound her even after she’d been inside Bar Canona and seen the evidence that disproved she had actually done it, the fixation that her moral fibre was so feeble that the merest jab of some drug could tip her over the edge to commit such awful crimes.

  And yet, despite all the relief, she couldn’t relish the moment because Thatcher’s news also washed a heavy fog of heartbreak over her. It was a repellent reminder of the nightmare she’d woken up to, the horrific deaths she could never unsee, the murders of two people she’d grown to admire and respect. And two more she didn’t know, who’d been pawns in some evil bastard’s plan. Not to mention the four innocent little girls.

  A fear hung over her, too. What if Thatcher’s self-confidence was misguided? What if he’d made a mistake, and she’d be stuck trying to disprove her guilt with a few photos and little more than her word? The word of the monster on that video, the word of a woman who’d been whacked out on ice?

  And finally there was the slow, suffocating terror, like someone holding a pillow over her face, that this thing wasn’t over. That The Voice was not done with her, and was coming after her.

  She dearly wanted to squeeze Frank’s hand in thanks. But she simply couldn’t do it. She knew she was fucked up. She just didn’t know how much, not until she heard Thatcher gloating how it was all over, when clearly it was not.

  Frank looked up at her, a muscle twitching at the corner of his eye, his lips taut. He leant forwards. ‘Thatcher,’ he said, ‘we’ll ring you back.’ He ended the call, took up the napkin and wiped away the tears Tori hadn’t realised were streaming down her cheeks.

  82

  In the skies above France

  President Tushkin gripped the handset, his knuckles as white as the towel wrapped around his wa
ist. His eyes narrowed and, despite Natasha’s tender pats with a fresh cloth on his back, his skin felt like it was on fire. ‘Where did you get this number?’ he snapped into the phone. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The real question, Tushy – may I call you that? – is who the hell are you?’ The unnamed voice was speaking in Russian, though with a perceptible Chinese accent.

  Tushkin now knew precisely who was calling. He reached back and brushed Natasha away and, pumping with rage, he shouted down the phone, ‘How dare—’

  ‘Your ravings and rantings might silence your apparatchiks but they won’t work on me. You chose the wrong bunny to make a fool out of, Mr President. You assumed I’d take your blood money no questions asked, except Hermes always asks questions. You defrauded me, sir.’

  On a small screen located below the light switches on the wall of Tushkin’s spa, he tapped out a message, Oleg, have you got a trace on this call yet? ‘That’s nonsense,’ Tushkin said into the phone. ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Tushy, if you think your flunky Oleg is going to track me down, you’re so dumb you could blow your brains out with a Kleenex.’ All Oleg would see, Hermes explained, was this call flitting around the world. First from a farm in Novosibirsk, a moment later from a pub in Manchester, then back over the Atlantic to a schoolhouse in Kansas, a slum in Dar es Salaam, a wine bar in Hobart, and so on.

  How, Tushkin wondered, did this arrogant prick know he’d messaged Oleg, specifically Oleg, to run a trace? He pressed the device against his chest, opened the door and signalled for both women to leave. They weren’t dry or dressed but that was their problem. ‘Go!’ he ordered them. They hunched over, their arms covering their bodies, their eyes darting down the corridor checking that no one would see them. He pulled a couple of towels off the rack and tossed them at the women through the gap as the spring-loaded door started to close.

  ‘Tushy, I told you two years ago, after our last encounter, that I would never accept another job from you. So what do you do? You masquerade as Endz of the Earth—’