‘You are mistaken. They are my sworn enemy.’
‘Except they don’t exist.’
‘Only because I took out their leadership—’
‘You are their leadership. The account you paid my fee out of two years ago – your account – is the same one that Endz paid my fee out of this time. That’s damn careless of you, Mr President.’
Fucking Oleg had messed up! Tushkin inventing Endz of the Earth and conning Hermes into believing they were his client was a genius move that had saved him a fortune – except now, it turned out, Oleg had screwed up with the payment. Denial was Tushkin’s only course. ‘Hermes, those Endz blyati … they are a scourge—’
‘Are you always this stupid, Tushkin, or is today an exception? Quit the phony outrage.’
The president fell quiet, a state he wasn’t used to.
‘You planned this out. You almost got to commit the perfect crime – against me, that is. You invented these freedom fighters for the planet, knowing Hermes would never work for you again but would have a soft spot for them, and you kept them on ice until you needed them. You preyed on my good nature, coaxing me to help Endz save the world from scum like you and the Americans and, what’s more, you got me to discount my fee as well. Tushkin, so far I’ve taken out six people to advance the Endz plan, except I now find out it was your plan. I wasn’t saving the Arctic from climate criminals like you, you were getting me to save it for you.’
‘Hermes, I—’
‘That’s a lot of damage you’ve done, to my reputation and to my self-esteem. How do you propose to repair it?’
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘What’s ridiculous is that you got almost everything you wanted and you got it with a fucking discount. I charged Endz five million all-inclusive when I would’ve charged a commercial client fifty plus expenses. So, Tushy, I’ll tell you how you’re going to fix this. First, you’ll pony up the difference. That’s $45 million, and I’ll cover the expenses. After all, Endz, or rather you, supplied me with the drones for free. Second, you’ll top up that forty-five with punitive damages of another forty-five.’
Tushkin picked up the bathtub’s extendable shower head and smashed it into the wall. ‘This is madness.’
‘The only madness is you trying to swindle me. So, in case your math is as poor as your judgement, that tots up to $90 million in cold, hard American greenbacks, and it’s all due and payable right now.’
Tushkin did his own calculating. Hermes was right, that he’d got virtually everything he wanted already: the viral sex video, Petersen and Rao dead … which meant China’s Arctic ambitions were too. The Project Gusher hoax, the lie buried with Buckingham. And Swyft painted as an American puppet. Whatever aspiration the United States had for Greenland was also in tatters. And last, with the UN Secretary-General dead, Diaz would most conveniently be attending her funeral.
Hermes’ job was done apart from that one last hit. And that was only a nice-to-have, a final flourish. If Isabel Diaz didn’t get assassinated on live TV with an anguished Tushkin sitting beside her, it would not be a disaster.
He still could relish how gullible Hermes had been to buy the pretext that killing Diaz would ‘literally cut off the head of the planet’s worst polluter’.
In reality, Tushkin couldn’t give a shit about all that climate stuff, but it was the best excuse he could come up with for getting an idiot like Hermes to take out Russia’s fiercest rival for global supremacy.
It was time, he decided, to put this prick of an assassin in his place. ‘Hermes, yes, I misled you, so shame on me. But what about the shame on you for falling for it? Do you really want your client base to find out how naive you are? Listen, we agreed a contract. You took the job and my money, so complete the fucking job.’
The line seemed to go dead but he could see it was still open. Tushkin waited, said nothing, gave Hermes time to let his demand sink in.
A video call was coming through on another line, from a number Tushkin knew well because he called it every day. It was his daughter’s number, her office at Oxford University where she was a professor of Russian literature.
Zoya was on her knees, her hair a mess, her face streaked with tears, her hands zip-tied behind her back. A man in a grey balaclava loomed behind her, one hand pointing a gun at her head, the other pulling on a thin wire halter that he’d looped around her neck. Zoya was looking up into the camera, trying to speak but no words were coming out. The man yanked on the wire and jerked her head back against the muzzle of his pistol.
‘Daddy,’ she struggled to say, ‘if you don’t pay … what they’re asking … they’re going to kill me—’
That line went dead too.
83
Barcelona
Tori came back into the cafe. She’d needed air, a lot more than air, truthfully, but she had no time for that. ‘Thatcher,’ she said when they called him back, ‘the encryption on this phone. Could he be listening?’
‘Impossible,’ and he rattled off some technical gobbledygook that even for Tori was incomprehensible but which Frank understood well enough to give a nod of approval.
‘How solid is your proof? The police will need more than the say-so of a ghost.’
‘It’s rock solid,’ he said. ‘And yes, you’re most welcome.’ He began to take them through it. ‘The EXIF data is key—’
Tori interrupted, ‘EXIF?’
‘Exchangeable Image File Format,’ Frank told her, quietly so no one nearby could hear.
‘Chowders, please,’ said Thatcher. ‘Tori, you know how your phone automatically labels your photos with the time and place you took them? That’s the phone’s inbuilt clock timestamping every shot and its GPS geo-tagging, attaching the location coordinates of where you were standing when you took it. And all that metadata gets recorded in EXIF format.’
‘Pretty standard stuff,’ said Frank.
Standard to him. Tori’s pulse was beating so fast she felt a little dizzy, a sensation that was far more welcome than the plunge into utter despondency she’d just lifted herself out of. ‘So this metadata attached to the video proves it was not shot at the hotel?’
‘Not quite. Actually, they deleted the EXIF data, specifically to prevent someone of Thatcher’s genius from—’
Tori thought she must have misheard him, ‘Then why are we talking about it?’
He continued. ‘Because, Tori, these lowlifes were too smart by half. They wiped the data after they edited the video … after they’d cut bits out that made it too long or—’
‘—or frames,’ supposed Frank, ‘that revealed images they didn’t want us to see?’
‘Right,’ said Thatcher. ‘Like if Fake Tori’s real face got reflected in a mirror.’
As they were talking, Tori visualised long strips of film falling onto a cutting-room floor, including clips identifying the woman who’d posed as her.
‘But then something beautiful happened,’ said Thatcher. ‘Their boss, this Voice chap, he wasn’t happy with the finished product so he gathered up one teensy bit off the cutting-room floor, ordered his flunky to splice it back in and, wonder of wonders, the numbskulls neglected to delete the EXIF that was still hanging off it. It’s only two seconds of footage, a segment, dear friends, that a lesser mortal would have missed, but not yours truly. It tells us precisely where and when they made the video—’
‘Which was?’
‘Inside Bar Canona and, most crucially, not at your hotel, not in Room 420. And timewise, they shot it before your media conference, when Prime Minister Peterson and the Chinese fellow were still very much alive, as witnessed by countless TV cameras.’
Tori and Frank high-fived, then quickly looked around. Sheepishly, Tori picked up her glass and guzzled the dregs of her coffee, which was all condensed milk since the two liquids had separated and the sweet white slop was all that was left.
‘Then there’s the metadata on the photos that you managed to take inside Bar Canona, Tori. They show a
different timestamp, obviously, just before the explosion, which reinforces your account of events. More important, the GPS data says you shot those photos within a tight radius of where the original video was made. And wait, dear people, back to the video’s EXIF, the gift that keeps giving. It tells us the make of the video camera – a Canon – together with its model and serial number. If the Spanish cops are half good at their job, they’ll be able to track down where it was purchased, maybe who the customer was. Next—’
‘Stop,’ said Frank, so suddenly that Tori froze.
84
Frank apologised when he saw the fright on her face. ‘I didn’t mean to freak you out.’ He’d halted the conversation because the waiter was approaching with their pizza.
He pulled off a slice, thin strands of gooey cheese stretching from the plate to his mouth. ‘Thatch, you were saying?’
‘Sorry, Chowders. It’s your turn to wait.’
While Frank’s teeth were breaking the cheese strings, Tori could hear Thatcher popping a cork. Just as she was about to finesse her own slice of pizza into her mouth, its tip sagged and a glob of yellow cheese grease oozed onto the table. She wiped it up with a finger and brought the morsel to her mouth. ‘Frank, since you knew about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty thingy, are you on top of Einstein’s special theory of pizzativity?’
He looked at her like she was indeed nuts and picked a mushroom off his slice and popped it into his mouth, ‘I guess you’re about to enlighten me.’
‘It’s E = MC2, obviously, like his other theory.’
He kept looking at her.
‘Ecstasy = Mozzarella x Carbs x Crust.’
‘Which proves,’ said Frank as he scooped up another slice, ‘pleasure diminishes as the crust disappears.’
Thatcher came back online. ‘Can we continue?’ he said, smacking his own lips. ‘Those parts of the video that show your face, Tori. It is truly your face, by the way—’
Frank cut in, ‘But you said—’
Tori gestured for him to wait. She expected they were about to hear what she’d hoped from the start.
‘It is Tori’s face and it is her head, but the hands doing all those …’ Thatcher grunted his disgust. ‘They’re the hands of a different person, on a different body. The same goes for Greenland’s prime minister.’ The people who created the deepfake video, he explained, had lifted real images of Tori’s and the PM’s faces – perhaps taken while both women were drugged – and using artificial intelligence tools they’d pasted them onto the bodies of other people. ‘If it wasn’t for Thatcher’s keen eye they’d have gotten away with it.’
‘More accurately,’ Frank whispered to Tori, ‘it was your keen thinking in asking him to check the video out for you.’ A scrap of mushroom flew out of his mouth and plopped into his drink, which she noticed was largely undrunk.
‘If you want the detail—’ said Thatcher.
‘We don’t,’ Frank whispered again, no spray of mushroom this time.
Thatcher wasn’t listening or, if he was, he wasn’t about to spare them a show of his brilliance. ‘Thatcher found some tell-tale flickering in the video’s temporal smoothness, a tiny change of skin tone near the edge of the supposed Tori’s cheeks, also at the tip of the PM’s nose. For a split second, Tori, they gave you a double chin.’
‘You didn’t find a loose pair of eyelashes lying around, did you?’
‘What?’
‘Forget it,’ she said. She was feeling a hell of a lot better now and while she was doing her best to make light, something was nagging at her, and she needed to be diplomatic how she raised it.
‘Thatch, how do we answer an argument, from the police, say, that you, as my friend, created that scrap of EXIF data and planted it on the video so as, you know, to throw the scent off me?’
Thatcher laughed. ‘Tori, there’s no way anyone can claim that. You weren’t the one who sent the video out to a million phones, yet they’ve all got the EXIF data on them. The copies people posted to social media, they have it too.’
All up, it did seem like Thatcher had given Tori a genuine stay-out-of-jail card. Frank was beaming again, and for the first time today, her heart wasn’t cracking her chest open.
‘Tori, Thatcher has one more nugget for you, his pièce de résistance—’
For once she knew what he was going to say. ‘The prime minister’s nail polish. I know.’
85
Oriol Casals was at his desk, checking through the city’s street-cams via his monitor. Demonstrators were massing across the city, their numbers growing fast, their chants loud. The protesters weren’t coordinated – rather, a farrago of diverse, even clashing objectives. One group, waving placards like Gusher is a Crime Against Humanity, was congregating at Plaça de Pablo Neruda. They were demanding that Spain arrest Isabel Diaz for Project Gusher and place her on trial at the International Criminal Court, despite the inconvenient details that she had not been president at the time or that America had never recognised that court’s jurisdiction.
Across town, anti-Tushkin activists called on people to Avenge the Endz Five, the leaders of the group who Russian Special Forces had killed months ago.
At three other locations, crowds of pro-Catalan independence advocates were coming together. Not as pleasing to Casals was the large group of Federalists, locals opposed to secession, who’d chosen to congregate – ironically? – at Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes. Another crowd, at Plaça de Catalunya, was shouting, Greens say No to Greenland’s Yes. Another group was demanding Halt China’s Economic Imperialism. And a second anti-US assembly wanted American Bases Out Now.
The president had signed off on the city’s security arrangements two days ago. The face-to-camera broadcast he was about to make – going out live to TV, radio and online – was part of that plan. His director of communications snapped the clapperboard, ‘Fifteen seconds,’ and the makeup guy who’d been trimming a few wild hairs above Casals’ ears took the towels off his shoulders and left.
‘Senyor President, five seconds, four, three, and we are … live.’
‘My fellow citizens and family, friends and admirers of Montse,’ Casals began, ‘today is her day. Barcelona is a city where we celebrate peaceful protest. That is our civil right. But with that right comes obligation,’ he paused. ‘We have a solemn duty to honour Montse, her incredible achievements and her lifelong devotion to Catalonia and Spain that made her one of our country’s greatest daughters.’
He lifted a greyish-green sprig of weaver’s broom off his desk, its fragrant yellow flowers in full bloom, and brought it to his nose.
‘This is a spray of Montse’s favourite flower.’ The script on the autocue told him to close his eyes, inhale and pause, and he did. ‘Whenever I smell its delicate honeysuckle perfume I remember how, when Montse and I were children growing up together, these golden yellow buds would burst out of the drains and cracks in our street. You know,’ he said, letting a wistful look come into his eyes, ‘she would tell me that they sang the scent of summer … sang the scent of summer. Her words, not mine. How they reminded her of the Senyera that we fly from our flagpoles. Later today when I pay formal tribute to this inspiring woman at La Sagrada Familia, you will see how the basilica will also be alive with these beloved flowers of hers, and you will see me wearing this one here as my boutonnière.’
On script, he broke off a length of the stem and threaded it through the hole in his lapel; slowly, to make sure the camera operator could bump up the yellow filter intensity to make it really pop.
Seeing the lens pull back to crop his head-and-shoulders, Casals looked deep into the camera with his warm bedroom eyes, the eyes Maria told him were better vote-catchers than his policies.
‘If you go into our streets, you will find hundreds of our city’s magnificent policewomen and men, and what will they be doing? They’ll be distributing tens of thousands of Montse’s gorgeous blooms so each of you can remember her by placing one of them against your heart, l
ike me.’
He held up a badge, adorned with a sunny photo of Montse’s face and her fingers aloft in a sign of peace. One of Maria’s interns had photoshopped the fingers in. ‘All our police have this badge pinned to their uniforms today, also reminding us of Montse as we walk our streets. She will be all around us, smiling, wishing us love and peace today, just as she did when she was alive. Thank you.’ And with that his media director clicked off the broadcast.
Uri turned to Maria. ‘It was corny, but will it work?’
She shrugged and put a new draft of his eulogy in front of him.
86
When Tori asked Thatcher to package up the evidence – to give it to the police and, as comfort to Greenland, to Axel as well – she didn’t count on the intensity of his reaction.
‘For Axel, certainly, but for the police, no, nyet, nada, never. If you didn’t know it before, Tori, you need to know it now … Thatcher suffers from a debilitating case of coprophobia.’
‘Thatch, just because a word’s got cop in it does not mean it’s about the police. You do know that, don’t you?’ She whispered to Frank, ‘It’s a fear of—’
‘Excrement.’ He nodded.
Thatcher heard them. ‘Which, dear Tori, is precisely the point.’
‘I know he’s a genius and a true friend,’ she told Frank after they’d ended the call, ‘but he can be insufferable. If you’d stayed with the Church, they’d probably canonise you for tolerating him. St Francis of Thatcher.’
‘Hmm.’ He wet a fingertip and tapped up the last few flakes of bolets from the plate between them. ‘Now we’re onto religion, what’s the difference between Jesus and pizza?’ He gave the answer without waiting, ‘Jesus can’t be topped.’
Axel and Ron Mada listened silently as Tori and Frank walked them through Thatcher’s evidence. At the conclusion, Frank said, ‘That should answer any doubts about Tori.’
Double Deal Page 19