Double Deal

by John M. Green

  She knew he wasn’t really asking her, he was making the point that his plan had worked. ‘Yes, Uri, you were right and I wasn’t. Happy?’ Her phone beeped and she looked at the screen. ‘Your eulogy. The redraft is in your email.’ She pointed to his screen. ‘I’ll print a copy and you can edit it on your way to the basilica. You’ve got to get going.’

  ‘What if I don’t like this draft?’

  She took another biscuit. ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to kill,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t when she saw the look on Uri’s face.

  90

  For Tori, this was an odd Metro carriage. It wasn’t so much the weirdo she saw reflected back at her from the window, the guy with sunglasses and the black, big-brimmed fedora and dreadlocks pretending to bop to the music that wasn’t actually streaming through his earbuds, it was that all the other passengers were doing what passengers rarely did – smiling, laughing, chatting to each other, chatting even to strangers. Almost the whole carriage was decked out with yellow flowers, either pinned to people’s shirts, pushed into their hair or tied to the straps of their bags.

  Frank would have been amused too, except he wasn’t here. Tori had successfully slipped away from him. She was going to disembark at the stop for La Sagrada Familia, walk half a block to the address she’d got from Thatcher and, if The Voice really was there, she’d confront him, face to face. She wasn’t sure how, not yet, but she’d made a career out of improvising, so she hoped it would carry her through now.

  After nine minutes and three stops, the train was approaching Monumental, the last station before the stop for the basilica, and a long announcement blared out over the public address. Judging by the flower waving and hugging going on, the other passengers seemed delighted with whatever they’d just heard. Tori was glancing up at the air vents to check for happy gas when an old grandma broke the spell. Despite three shopping bags at her feet and two children crammed either side, she managed to throw her arms in the air and yell out a long and bitter protest. Other passengers shushed her, two handed her flowers. Tori had no idea what was going on until the train was actually pulling into Monumental and the announcer repeated the message in English.

  ‘Route change … La Sagrada Familia station, the stop after Monumental, is closed today. Passengers for Sagrada Familia should alight either here at Monumental or at Encants … We have made this temporary change to help Barcelona give Montse the tender send-off our city’s favourite daughter deserves. Flowers are available for free inside these stations. Please share them with other citizens and visitors. May you go in peace and love … For Montse.’

  91

  The whump-whumps from TV station La 1’s news helicopter carried through the open balcony doors. Hermes could easily have looked out and seen the eye-in-the-sky take the place of the Army’s Tigres as they left their posts above La Sagrada Familia, but preferred to stay unobserved and keep watch via one of the six screens.

  The five other screens, tuned in to cameras inside the basilica, were not official feeds. ‘Florists’, contractors hired by Hermes, had planted these cameras at the tops of five of the columns during yesterday’s flurry to decorate the church. Casals’ directive to create a floral tribute to his cousin inside the church was a heresy according to Gaudí devotees, who argued that the majesty and simplicity of the architect’s design was itself a sublime ode, and obscuring his work with a forest of flowers was an insult to his vision and to God. The president pulled rank and rode over their objections, which suited Hermes’ purposes perfectly. The cameras hidden among the flowers gave the assassin eyes over every square metre of the basilica’s interior.

  Simply by swiping two fingers on a touch pad, Hermes could zoom in almost close enough to pinch the cheeks of anyone sitting inside. The mic in front of Hermes was patched into the basilica’s audio system via voice-masking software. When the master schemer had something to say, the entire congregation would hear it.

  The camera feed to Hermes’ eyrie piggybacked the frequencies that the emergency services believed they’d reserved for themselves. Listening in, Hermes heard that UEI, Spain’s elite counter-terrorism unit, was about to switch on their electronic geofence. It was designed to encase the grid, jamming signals from any unregistered devices. No unauthorised drones would be able to fly through. They’d either drop out of the sky or bounce off the geofence and return back to their base.

  Hermes used the audio mixer to turn up the sound while eavesdropping on UEI’s line. ‘Yes, Agent Franklin,’ – who Hermes knew was head of the American Secret Service team on the ground – ‘you have UEI’s guarantee that everyone inside the geofence, inside the basilica, will be safe.’

  Hermes found the Spanish unit’s confidence endearing and hoped Agent Franklin had a good pension plan. After today, he would be needing it.

  92

  The man whose dreadlocks were now festooned with golden flowers was skipping along the street, a roving bush of a tourist throwing himself into the city’s spirit. While the flowers would have got Tori up to the security barriers, she needed a pre-issued lanyard with a red border to get past them, one that displayed her photo, her name and a unique security barcode. Each of the nine blocks inside the grid was allocated a different colour, and a temporarily erected street map told her the address she’d got from Thatcher was located in the red zone.

  She hung back from the knot of police at the corner of Mallorca and Lepant and leant against a bus stand, not too far from the two Portaloo trailers that had been wheeled in for the day. The long stainless-steel boxes, each a row of six stalls, two of them mobility-enabled, glinted in the emerging sunlight. Parked in parallel lines with the passageway between them discreetly angled away from the scrutiny of the nearby guard station, offering a modicum of privacy. The toilets were already fully occupied, judging by the waiting line.

  Tori leant back, chillaxed like a modern-day hippy, and watched the comings and goings. Police sauntered up to the checkpoint or rode through it, members of the general public got visual one-twos of their lanyards and faces, followed by cursory swipes of their barcodes. A few people, seemingly at random, got ushered behind a makeshift curtain, she assumed for body searches, though they were remarkably brief.

  Tori chose her moment, joining the line to the toilets right behind a young cop she’d just watched parking her motorcycle. She was from the Mossos d’Esquadra, according to the logo on her hi-viz and her bike, an electric BMW C-Evolution.

  Tori had ridden Harleys and Hondas, Ducatis and Triumphs but never a BMW, gas or electric. Today felt like the perfect time to try one out.

  The cop, her helmet on, turned towards Tori, the photo ID and security pass pinned to her jacket giving her name as Constable Joaddan Akono. She lifted her visor to give Tori a once-over, not realising that Tori was doing the same to her.

  Her gold-flecked eyes, no doubt once keen and vibrant, were lifeless, and Tori guessed at why. A black woman in uniform, plodding a thankless, humdrum beat, would undoubtedly have suffered racism and sexism.

  But Tori didn’t choose to line up behind Akono to offer her solidarity. It was because, first, she was a cop and, second, she was pretty much Tori’s height and build. Provided Tori was wearing Akono’s helmet and gloves, as she planned, they could easily pass as twins.

  The cop spoke, something beginning with Hola. Tori pulled out one of her earbuds. ‘Dude, I don’t speak Spanish,’ she said, in as deep and lazy a voice as she could muster. Taking a small risk, she picked one of the yellow buds out of her dreads and slotted it behind the cop’s security pass.

  At first Akono jerked back then, seeing Tori meant no harm, gave her a wink and, when she got a smile in return, turned back to face the toilets.

  From under the brim of her fedora, Tori studied Akono’s duty belt, imagining the heft of the kit, her own hips weighed down with the handcuffs, the baton, radio, what looked like a can of pepper spray, the taser, flashlight, the pistol and spare ammunition, the gloves clipped onto the si
de. Heck, how much gear did cops have to carry? Ten kilos, she guessed.

  Akono’s pistol was a Heckler & Koch USP, a 9 x 19 mm gun that Tori knew well from her days at The Farm, the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary. Due to their oversized trigger guards, HK USPs were perfect for motorbike cops facing an emergency where they needed to fire fast but didn’t have time to dismount or unglove.

  Tori knew what she was planning was wrong and, worse, illegal. A true crime to add to the litany she was falsely accused of, the first she’d actually be guilty of.

  By the time Officer Akono reached the front of the line, they were the only two left. Akono was jiggling slightly. Maybe she’d left her toilet run a bit late. One of the stall doors swung open, a disabled toilet, wider than the others. The door was spring-hinged, but the elderly man who exited chose to tap it closed behind him with his walnut cane, making it clang. In his neat crimson flat cap and camel hair jacket, this was a man, thought Tori, who reached his twilight years without ever leaving anything to chance, the type who’d sniff the ham slices in his fridge even if the use-by had a week to run.

  Akono moved forwards, removing her helmet as she walked and shaking out a thick mass of black curls. Tori followed silently and as soon as the cop opened the stall door, she jumped her.

  In a quick, graceful move that she’d practised many times in training but had never used in the field, Tori looped her right arm around Akono’s neck, placed her left behind her head and pressed it forwards, hard, into a sleeper hold.

  In the struggle, Akono freed her hands by letting her helmet drop, reached up to pull Tori’s hands off her and kicked back. Tori expected the shin kicks so she’d already spread her own legs wide, booted the helmet into the stall and, at the same time, used the full weight of her body to shove Akono inside too, letting the door swing itself closed behind them.

  93

  On the terrace outside the basilica, the official welcoming party comprised the city’s archbishop and two men who were normally political adversaries, the president of Spain and the president of Catalonia’s Generalitat.

  Russian President Maxim Tushkin strode up the steps from his motorcade, gave each man a curt nod, avoiding the proffered handshakes and ring kissing, a habit of haughtiness he’d embraced long before the last pandemic made it acceptable. He posed with them for the obligatory photos but didn’t smile and offered no pleasantries. This was Tushkin’s perennial pose. I am Russia. Russia is me. Go fuck yourself.

  No one had mentioned there’d be flowers and he slapped aside the yellow bloom that one of the idiot presidents tried to pin onto his lapel. Merely thinking about the pollen made his eyes moisten.

  The wind shifted and he heard the whoop, whoop of an incoming helicopter. He looked up to see it was from the local TV station, not the American president doing her damnedest to upstage him.

  Two ushers escorted him inside, and as he went down the aisle his eyes were watering and he could feel the fingers of a wheeze limbering up to strangle his throat. Fucking flowers.

  When he reached the front row, the head usher pointed him to the third seat along from the centre aisle, past two others that were also empty, seating him next to Chancellor Brinkmann from Germany. Tushkin had no time for Brinkmann and had only last year shared his disdain publicly during a flare-up on a panel at Davos.

  While standing, he tapped the smartwatch on his wrist and spoke into his earbud. ‘Why do we not have the aisle seat?’

  The two free seats, he was told, were reserved for Isabel Diaz and her stepson. As a close friend of the deceased, Diaz was giving a speech so needed the easiest access to the lectern. ‘The kid will sit between the two of you. That way you can avoid her whingeing.’

  As he went to his seat, he wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, preventing him taking the German chancellor’s outstretched hand, not that he needed an excuse.

  Brinkman didn’t get the message, and tried to engage Tushkin in talk but, as the Russian sat, he brought a finger to his lips and tapped his ear, like he was listening to a feed from his security team. Rebuked a second time, the German looked down at the backs of his hands and kept his mouth shut.

  Tushkin pressed the handkerchief back into his pocket and looked up, away from Brinkman, and noticed the cross of Jesus hanging above the altar, just below the baldachin, a canopy of gold and ochre.

  Unusually, this effigy of Jesus was looking upwards, to the vaulted ceiling and the flowers up there. They were above Him, in front of Him, and wreathing the coffin beneath Him. Buds blazed in the aisles and on the congregation’s lapels. The perfume was intense, more pungent than jasmine even, the aggravating flower with the stench his idiot cousin in Minsk insisted on calling the ‘aroma of calm’ just to annoy him.

  He reached into his inner jacket pocket for the foil of antihistamines.

  Tushkin’s invincibility had limits, not that he’d ever let it be known.

  94

  Her visor down, the cop exited the toilet stall, letting the door slam shut behind her, the heel of her palm resting, ready, on the handle of her pistol. She looked sideways several times, satisfied no one would notice that her service belt no longer had a set of handcuffs swinging off it.

  Tori turned back to face the door and, using the cop’s marker, drew a large red circle and slashed an oblique red line across it. No entry. She didn’t know how to write out of order in the local language so the pictogram would have to suffice.

  She reclipped the marker to the vest pocket of her newly acquired hi-viz and, clinking the cop’s keys, sauntered over to Akono’s bike, thrummed the engine and rode the thirty metres to the security gate, touched her glove to her security pass, saluted the guards and drove through.

  She’d entered the red zone.

  95

  After the second-last motorcade pulled out, a flurry of American Secret Service agents scattered across Carrer de la Marina. Six of them paced down the street from the diamond at Provença to the one at Mallorca. Two ran electronic sniffers along the pedestrian barricade opposite the basilica. Another six eyed the sky, while four more were talking into their sleeves or into walkie-talkies.

  American presidents did not travel light.

  It was only when Chief Franklin – the special agent in charge of President Diaz’s protective division – gave his thumbs-up that the TV helicopter moved away from the airspace overhead and three VH-60N White Hawks flew in.

  One of the choppers carried a squad of eleven combat troops, the second more artillery than Spain wanted to know about, and the president was in the third. No one on the ground knew which was which.

  One did a sharp vertical drop until its landing skids brushed the asphalt a few metres from the basilica steps; it wobbled momentarily from ground effect then climbed straight back up.

  A second bird swooped down and it was only when the media caught the president’s hand waving out of the window that they began broadcasting, This is history in the making as Marine One touches down in Barcelona and brings the first American president…

  Isabel stepped out, followed by Davey, the downdraft from the rotors tousling the boy’s hair, a short black veil protecting hers. The lace lifted off her face momentarily and the cameras caught her eyes, dark and solemn.

  None of the TV commentators had paid any attention to the get-up worn by the male dignitaries but had gone into great detail for the few women, as if their viewers couldn’t see the clothes for themselves. They gave Diaz the same treatment, NBC reporting: she’s wearing a hip-hugging black Vera Wang suit and matching gloves, patent Stuart Weitzman pumps and a matching clutch with a golden yellow clasp. It’s the president’s all-American homage to her dear friend Montse. As if simply being there wasn’t an homage itself.

  Davey’s yellow tie was straight. Isabel had adjusted it just before they stepped out of the chopper. She’d got him to retie his yellow shoelaces too, so he didn’t trip over them.

  They moved away from the rotors and, after waving at the public b
ehind the barricades, took to the grey stone steps. Isabel felt the pull of Davey’s hand, a signal he was about to break off and either hop his way up the stairs or scamper off to scatter the pigeons. Or were they doves? Scores of the drab birds were pecking at the steps, like conscripts from the Secret Service employed to test every scrap of bread, worm or bug for any taint of explosive.

  She gave Davey’s hand a little jerk, a reminder to stick to the plan and make their walk from the chopper up to the Nativity Facade a solemn affair and not one for childish play. He complied.

  The archbishop, a bald man, his scarlet zucchetto the only adornment on his head, was the first to offer Isabel his hand.

  ‘Congratulations on your elevation to cardinal, Your Eminence,’ she said, dropping Davey’s hand while giving the boy a stern eye. Even through her glove, the priest’s palm felt slight and silken, like the boy’s, as if an extra sixty years of life hadn’t touched the man. On a ten-year-old it felt natural, on the prelate a little creepy.

  His other hand touched the pallium on his chest, a band of brilliant white wool adorned with gold crosses that was draped like a Y from his neck to his abdomen. Was this, she wondered, a hint of sinful pride? Vanity that the Pope himself had presented the archbishop with the vestment at a consistory in Rome a month ago?

  ‘Madam President, you are not only the first president of the United States to visit our city, you are also its first Roman Catholic president to do so. Although the reason you are here brings deep sorrow to all of Spain, we especially welcome you.’

  She glanced at Casals, who was wearing a black tie with a gold hatch and a yellow boutonnière in his lapel. She wondered if he’d shared the news of Montse’s murder with the priest.

  She turned to the third man in the welcoming party, Spain’s federal president Santiago Rubio. He went to kiss her on both cheeks, but she held out her hand. He took it and whispered that he’d keep his words for later when they’d be flying to Madrid together on board Air Force One.