Double Deal

by John M. Green

  Casals bowed and then, unlike the other two, kneeled down and spoke to Davey. ‘Young man,’ he said in English, slowly in case his pronunciation made it difficult for Davey to read his lips, ‘I am excited that you will be signing President Diaz’s speech for her. Montse,’ he crouched a little more, ‘would be thrilled you came today. She told me many times how very special you were to her.’

  Davey beamed.

  96

  The two presidents escorted the last of the bigwigs, Spain’s king and queen, down the aisle and left them at the coffin, taking their own seats in the front row. The king, in a simple black suit and black tie, with a yellow boutonnière poised just above his medal of the Distinguished Order of the Golden Fleece, bowed his head and poked his fingers into the garlands, as if he was trying to create a physical bond with Montse through the mahogany of the casket.

  The queen, in a high-cut two-button black Dior jacket with welt pockets, and a knee-length pencil dress, as one reporter described it, just stood there. Like Isabel, the queen’s outfit had a touch of lace, hers at the neckline of her dress. She showed remarkable stoicism, though Isabel, sitting fairly close by, detected a slight tremble in her hand – not surprising, given the queen and Montse went back a long way, a friendship that had begun when they were college roommates.

  When the royals turned to walk up the steps to their seats, located to the left of the altar, Isabel noticed the queen’s heels. As thin as the legs of the pigeons outside the church, they were three times taller, and their colour, she was pretty certain, was Jimmy Choo’s liquid fluorescent yellow, one of her favourites. Montse was big on stilettos – Jimmy’s, Manolos, you name it – and once confessed to Isabel that her shoe collection, her only vice, boasted more heels than Carrie Bradshaw’s in Sex and the City. Montse’s philosophy was simple: if the shoe fits, buy it in every colour.

  Montse towered intellectually over many of the men she had to deal with but, conscious of her diminutive height, by wearing stilettos she could do it physically as well.

  Skyscraper shoes stopped being Isabel’s thing last year when, with the world watching, she’d stumbled as she stepped out of Marine One onto the deck of the USS Gerald R. Ford. Hence, she was wearing pumps today.

  The organ started as soon as the royals got to their seats, a canticle Isabel didn’t know. She looked back down the aisle to watch the procession approach, the priests first, then choristers, then children carrying candles in glass jars, and the archbishop last of all.

  After the kids passed by they circled the coffin, some placing their candles on the floor, the flickering lights adding an even warmer lustre of gold to the flowers draped over it. Other children put their candles on the steps leading up to the altar as they took their seats in the wide U-shaped pew behind it.

  The archbishop was carrying his crosier and now wore his mitre simplex, a spare, pointed hat of unadorned white linen damask.

  While Isabel knew most of the details of the service – the catechisms, the prayers – she’d taught herself to wear her own Catholicism lightly. It wasn’t for faith or prayer that her mother had taken her to Mass every week, it was for the free wine.

  97

  Casals’ eulogy soared from his first words. He likened Gaudí’s lofty columns to the strength and beauty of Montse’s character. He compared the bluish rays raking through the stained glass of the south-western transept to the spotlight she shone on disadvantage and societal dysfunction. The intricate stone carvings of the facades paralleled Montse’s dedication to making change for the good, in contrast to the vapid, arm-sweeping rhetoric of so many other politicians. He shot a glance at President Rubio when he said it.

  This building, this edifice, he said, was her favourite church, and its unfinished state was an analogy for her own unfinished work; for a good life cut short.

  His language, the timing of his pauses, his gestures, his eye contact were as masterful as Isabel had ever seen, better than her own would be if she was juggling a speech in five languages as he was. She had mastery of two, but he was giving each sound bite first in Catalan, then Spanish and English, followed by French and an African language she did not recognise. It was, he explained, a mark of respect to the millions of Montse’s admirers around the world.

  The sound system gave his address even more power. Isabel was seated as close to Casals as anyone and was fascinated that all his words came to her through the speakers dotted throughout the church, not a murmur carrying direct from his mouth to her ears. The result was a perfectly balanced acoustic, no echoes, no voice overlap, no aural confusion, just crisp, stirring oratory.

  When she saw the white boxes positioned either side of his lectern she realised he was using inverse acoustics, the same technology her own team had demonstrated to her three weeks ago. The boxes produced voice-cancelling acoustic holograms, a complex technology that her people explained cancelled out the speaker’s sound by beaming back at it the exact opposite anti-sound.

  Inside the boxes were a directional microphone, a directional transmitter and a computer. As the mic picked up Casals’ voice, the computer did two things: it pumped his words out of the speakers at the same time as it was reverse-engineering them and pulsing the mirror version back at his mouth.

  The result was even better than she’d heard in the White House. Davey, of course, was oblivious to it. He was sitting cross-legged on his chair, his yellow shoelaces lapping over the edge. He was fully absorbed, one minute his attention on Casals’ mouth, lip-reading when he spoke in English, then moving his head to focus on the International Sign translator, a woman standing a metre to the local president’s right, then he’d swivel again to watch Casals on one of the two monitor stands nearby. That way, he could see his lips in close-up and could also read the scrolling subtitles, which, thankfully, were in English.

  Isabel noticed Maxim Tushkin stealing glances at her over the boy’s head, but she couldn’t read him. That man was insufferable. He’d cancelled the one-on-one she’d asked for today because putting Estonia on the agenda was apparently ‘another offensive American attempt to meddle in Russian sovereignty that won’t be tolerated’. As if his repeated attempts to rig US presidential elections weren’t exponentially worse.

  Casals’ speech suddenly took an unexpected turn when he used Montse’s name to make a strident call for action on climate change. ‘March for Montse. March for the planet,’ he called out, asking people watching around the globe to picket their parliaments, to protest in their streets, and demand that their leaders and those present in Barcelona put an end to their talk-fests and excuses and start taking real action.

  A collective gasp of surprise seemed to empty the air in the church and, judging by Casals’ own facial expression, the response came as a shock to him, yet he spoke on, raising his tempo and his rhetoric even higher.

  Isabel fixed her expression to hide her own surprise, to make sure she’d look thoughtful and not at all defensive if any camera zoomed in on her, despite being as startled as everyone else.

  ‘Our Montse … she would have wanted this,’ Casals said.

  Isabel knew, from her private chats with Montse over the years, that there was at least an element of truth in what Oriol was saying. Montse, like Isabel, was frustrated by the glacial pace of action on climate change, but they both knew that operating in a hard-headed, pragmatic world, they couldn’t push too hard. Unlike in physics, they’d agreed that the shortest path in politics was rarely a straight line.

  On Isabel’s flight, in between the stress over Project Gusher, the assassinations and the extra matter of running a country, Gregory had had her practising her stony camera-face. The more he’d spoken to Casals’ office, the more he was concerned that he might hijack the funeral for his electoral purposes, with independence for Catalonia his most likely cause.

  While that was a benign issue for America, it carried the risk of Casals making some bold demand, and that was making her protective detail more paranoid than usual.
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  ‘With both you and Rubio there,’ Chief Franklin told her, ‘if Casals does call for independence, he could spark riots in the streets.’

  Franklin had not been convinced by Casals’ ‘peace and love’ TV address or by the blanketing of the city with flowers. It was why he’d insisted on using Marine One for Isabel’s arrival and more especially for her exit. If she had to get out, it might have to be fast.

  It seemed Franklin was right to be worried. He’d just picked the wrong cause.

  She glanced down her row of seats to President Rubio, a climate belligerent. He was holding onto power in Madrid by the fingernails of a precarious one-seat majority. She’d been privately hoping he’d lose at the next election.

  Casals’ demands were a direct challenge to Rubio. To Isabel, too, even if she shared his sentiments. Her problem was Congress, the reason why she kept reminding herself of Otto von Bismarck’s remark 150 years ago: ‘politics is the art of the possible’. With the current Congress, there wasn’t much about climate policy that was possible at all.

  Chief Franklin, she knew, would have already recalculated his security posture and she checked her smartwatch to see the outcome. Except she had no signal.

  Davey, his face screwed up, tapped her leg, and when he’d got her attention, he started signing, ‘This is weird.’

  ‘I know,’ she mouthed back.

  ‘No. You don’t,’ he answered.

  98

  A semi-circle of eight of Casals’ staffers were munching on xuixos as they crowded in front of his wall-screen. Apart from a smattering of snide comments about priests and altar boys, which Maria hushed, they were as respectful of the church service as anyone could be while stuffing their mouths with deep-fried pastries oozing custard.

  All of them knew the thrust of Oriol’s speech, and a couple knew the last draft verbatim. Five of them had worked on Team Casals for years, so they were attuned to his beats, the lifts that led into the dramatic flourishes his public lapped up. Whenever Oriol teared up in a speech – which was often – even these professionals couldn’t help tearing up and, when he laughed, they laughed. He had the knack. If he placed his hand on his heart, they would too. A finger to a trembling lip, the same. A breath and a lengthy pause for emphasis. His beautiful bedroom eyes raised to the heavens, his arms opening in peace, and the clincher, his ten-carat-diamond smile, the best vote-catcher local politics had witnessed in years.

  But this. What was this?

  ‘Maria, where is this speech coming from? We did not write these words. Did you know about this?’

  She did not. The Uri she knew often went off-piste, but this was so wide of the piste that he was tumbling over the side of the mountain.

  This was nothing like the call to arms they’d pored over, amended, rewritten and signed off on, the words Maria had personally sent through to him.

  ‘Maria, what happened to the call for independence?’

  There was a barrage of Maria, what? and Maria, why? but she had no answers for any of them. She was even more in the dark than they were. Uri consulted her on everything and he’d never once, in all the years they’d worked together, made a major policy announcement without bouncing it off her first. He didn’t always accept her point of view but he always asked for it, and he always listened. Until this.

  ‘He’s being so extreme.’

  ‘So fanatical.’

  ‘So un-him.’

  ‘He’s just thrown the election.’

  Maria had her head in her hands. ‘All our work, everything we’ve spent years building, our agenda—’

  ‘I didn’t come here for this! Maria, I’m done.’ The newest recruit, a careerist fresh out of Harvard’s Kennedy School, chucked his pastry at the screen, grabbed his satchel and stomped out.

  ‘Harvard shmarvard. Ignore that prick,’ said one of the older hands, a polling expert from Girona who’d worked for Maria for eight years. ‘The thing is, what Oriol is saying is actually honest. It’s raw. Maria, you’re the one who’s always telling him to be authentic. Well, it doesn’t get more authentic than this, so, hell, if he’s lost us the election, then fuck the election. As of this moment, I’ve never been prouder to work for anyone.’ She flipped the rest of her pastry up in the air, opened her mouth wide and caught it in her teeth.

  99

  Hermes yawned. Being forced to listen to the first half of Casals’ eulogy was even more tedious than reading it. If it was put to music, Hermes would’ve ranked it with Billy Ray Cyrus’s ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ as one of the most turgid songs ever written. What were the speechwriters thinking when they penned all that teary sop? Montse this. Montse that. The fawning. The saccharine-sweet hokum.

  Displayed on Hermes’ screen was the rest of the text, lifted when it was winging its way from Maria’s computer to the autocue in the church.

  More than anything, Montse wanted our beloved Catalonia to be independent.

  But friends, the way she saw secession was not through rupture, not through conflict.

  Montse saw the peoples of Catalonia and Spain as brothers and sisters, parents and children, cousins, friends, co-workers, co-investors.

  She would always say that, like the best of friends, like any family, we have our differences, different needs, different wants, but we should never ignore how much we share, how much we agree on.

  Which is why she felt that now is the time. The time to celebrate all our heritages. The time we choose to live both together and separately.

  To live as the best of neighbours, sharing our fruits and our bounties, our joys, while at the same time each of us making our own rules and respecting the other’s.

  Equals, neither subservient nor superior …

  ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ The congregation, thought Hermes, should be grateful that they’d never have to listen to these unctuous globs of hooey. Instead, the words coming out of Casals’ mouth, almost literally, were words Hermes had crafted for him, words that radical environmentalists like Endz of the Earth would be proud of … If they’d ever existed.

  Hermes’ brilliant, and high-priced, tech team in Silicon Valley had worked hard to ensure that the new text coming out was in Casals’ own voice, that it was synched to his lips, to his pauses, his beats and his cadences. It wasn’t all down to them, though. The NSA had a hand in it, although they didn’t know so they couldn’t take a bow. Hermes had pilfered the artificial intelligence software her people were using from them. As a result, the task wasn’t anywhere near as difficult or as time-consuming as it would be otherwise.

  Only a few months ago, scanning the terabytes of Casals’ speeches and interviews on the internet and isolating the precise snippets of words and phrases needed for the new speech would have taken weeks, and the output would’ve still been clunky. Today, Hermes’ people had taken just an hour and they’d achieved near perfection.

  Bless you, NSA, for the bountiful gifts that your taxpayer billions keep bestowing on me.

  100

  The Russian pulled back his sleeve to check the message coming through on his smartwatch. He pressed the alert button to make sure his security people saw it too.

  10-MINUTE WARNING:

  Tushkin, your funds haven’t arrived.

  You obviously haven’t grasped the force of my ultimatum, so I suggest you fix your eyes on that droning Catalonian.

  Once you see what your little birdies do to him, you will know what will happen to you if you don’t pay me.

  The Russian raised his eyes to the ceiling and closed them to pray. His watch vibrated again and he looked down.

  Idiot, I’m watching you. Prayers won’t help you. Only paying me will do that.

  Heed this warning.

  While I’ve got Casals mouthing your bullshit Endz of the Earth script, he’ll be taking a little diversion and I want you to appreciate every nuance of it.

  When your birdy bots start toying with him, be sure you keep your tight little backside glued to your seat. If you don’t, a st
ray bird might lash out at you.

  So … do NOT stand up. Do NOT signal for help.

  If you do either, I’ll do to you what I’m about to do to him.

  Send me my fucking money.

  Outside, the basilica steps were a battleground. Tens of annoying pigeons pecked at the feet of a line-up of pushy reporters who were pretending to ignore them as they spoke to camera about the unexpected turn of events inside.

  The CNN correspondent, wishing she hadn’t decided to go with open-toed shoes, looked back to camera from the basilica.

  ‘Behind me, President Casals is demanding an urgent step-up in climate action. It’s a huge slap in the face for US President Isabel Diaz. And the question on the lips of locals who’ll be heading to the polls in a month is whether Casals has cut his own electoral throat—’

  The reporter stopped mid-sentence when several of the pigeons flapped up in front of her face, hovered, then flew over her head. ‘Shit, what’s with these birds?’ she said, forgetting that the camera was live as she waved them away.

  Her cameraman kept filming, capturing at least a hundred more birds forming a swarm above the reporters’ heads. They divided, one flock heading towards the apse at the front of the church, the other flying to perch on the stone ledges beneath the stained-glass windows on the northeast facade. For a moment, the cameraman imagined he was filming a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

  101

  Tori sat high in the motorbike saddle. Rigged out in police hi-vis, gloves and helmet, she was regretting not also taking Akono’s boots. No one had noticed the sneakers, not yet.

  She drove slowly beneath flag after flag of the countries of the United Nations, the avenue of towering aluminium flagpoles fluttering their welcome for the benefit of the international media and the dignitaries who’d been driven past them on their way to the funeral service.