Double Deal

by John M. Green

  The address Thatcher had given her was up ahead, a narrow seven-storey row house diagonally opposite the Sagrada Familia and directly across from a landscaped park. She pulled up on the park side of the street and flicked a leg over the bike to dismount.

  The flag flapping outside the house wasn’t one she recognised. Colombia’s flag was the one to its left and Costa Rica’s to its right, so if they were in alphabetical order, this one probably belonged to the Congo. A sky-blue ensign slashed by a thick stripe of red. Like a river of blood. Yes, probably the Congo.

  The kerbs were cleared of cars apart from a scatter of emergency vehicles further up the street, so Tori had a clear line of sight to the building’s upper levels, though a long red dumpster immediately outside blocked her view of the ground floor. Four or five metres wide, it took up almost the entire frontage. A fluoro-orange trash chute snaked out of a hole in its lid and slithered up the exterior wall, eventually coiling its way in through a window that, if she moved her head sideways, she could just make out behind the flag. It was on the sixth level, second down from the roof.

  Renovating a building in a prestige location like this made sense. East-facing windows for the sun to skip into across the tops of the trees in the park opposite. French doors on the wide balconies to draw in an even more dazzling stream of morning light and give the occupants a breathtaking side-view back to the basilica.

  But why, she pondered, would The Voice choose this particular place to track her from?

  She propped herself against the bike to contemplate the answer, watching and waiting.

  102

  Davey nudged Isabel, indicating that she look at Casals’ translator. Isabel’s International Sign wasn’t as good as Davey’s, so she found herself quite confused. The woman was signing about independence for Catalonia, not climate action.

  Davey, who must’ve seen her puzzlement, tapped her leg, this time pointing her to Casals. Read his lips, he mouthed. He’s talking in English now.

  She saw it immediately. Oriol’s speech was being hacked. Someone was manipulating the acoustic hologram technology, but only she and Davey were close enough, and had the skills, to see it.

  She glanced a second time down the row. Tushkin’s smug self-confidence had gone. He was gripping his seat like a man on the edge of a cliff. Chancellor Brinkmann, a cool customer with his arms folded and his lips pursed, was indifferent, a man whose only care in the world might be holding back a pork-knuckle burp. Her eyes stopped at President Rubio, his fingers clasped like a steeple, his cheeks redder than his name, a curl of a smile on his lips. Was he actually enjoying this?

  Isabel was raising her smartwatch to her mouth to alert Chief Franklin to Davey’s discovery when the word ‘Traïdor!’ boomed through the speakers.

  Casals stopped mid-sentence and stepped back, looking around to see who had called him a traitor. The voice continued, this time in English, over the same speaker system.

  ‘President Casals, your words today, though welcome, are cheap. You, and politicians like you, have wasted years doing nothing. You have all betrayed our planet. You are all traitors.

  ‘So it is now my solemn duty, President Casals, to inform you that Endz of the Earth has put you on trial for the crime of high treason.’

  This didn’t make sense. The people who’d hacked the speech – who’d switched it to climate change – were now attacking him over it.

  Was this truly Endz of the Earth, Isabel pondered, the same group who only that morning had made false attacks on America?

  People throughout the church, though not the dignitaries in the front rows, were rising from their seats.

  The voice started shouting through the speakers, terse, ominous, loud. ‘Everyone … Sit down. No talking. Stay quiet.’ He added, ‘Or else,’ just as two of the stained-glass panels at the back of the apse smashed inwards. Sharp chunks of coloured glass sprayed over the priests and children sitting directly below, and flew out to shower Casals and the king and queen.

  Security guards raced out of nowhere, weapons raised. Some rushed up to the royals, others to flank Casals, still others surrounded Isabel and the other leaders, but none of them knew what to do or even where to look. Her mind involuntarily replayed horrific images from the incursion on Washington’s Capitol in January 2021. She knew this was not going to end well.

  An ear-splitting sound erupted behind Isabel, like a car crash in a tunnel, as the windows on the nave’s north-eastern side exploded. Shards of flying glass sliced into necks, faces and hands raised protectively. Chunks of it smashed onto the stone floor and splintered. People everywhere were screaming, throwing their arms over their heads or trying to shelter loved ones.

  Dozens, maybe fifty, of the screeching pigeons – they were moving so fast they were a blur – shot into the basilica through the shattered panes. They flew low, hurtling around the interior of the church, so low that at one point Isabel had to duck, until, with a thunderous squawking, they rocketed up to roost among the flowers festooning the tops of Gaudí’s double-twist columns.

  Davey was shaking in Isabel’s arms. They both looked up, mouths gaping, only to see the beady, glassy eyes of the birds glaring back down at them.

  103

  The shouting from the speakers – Relax, they’re only birds! – made the crowd even jumpier. Chairs were tipped over; children, men and women of all ages became hysterical, many racing for the doors, past security guards whose eyes and gun barrels sought an invisible and impossible target.

  Davey had leapt to his feet crying. Isabel rose to comfort him, hugging him, burying his head in her tummy. She tried to look calm, stoic, a woman who, even if she was not in command of the situation, was in charge of herself. Tushkin, she noticed, was the only person still seated, but then he didn’t have to comfort a distraught child.

  ‘Return to your seats immediately. Everyone. Do not try to approach the doors. If you do, you will die. Endz of the Earth does not wish to hurt you. Our sole goal is to make the leaders, the traitors to our planet, pay for their crimes.’

  Most people did stop and go back to their seats. They righted them, slowly sat, and dabbed at cuts with whatever cloth they had. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were nervously looking around, up at the birds and back at the doors. The entire church was straining as people whispered, argued, cried, and tried to make sense of what was happening.

  Beyond the doors, Isabel heard new blasts and muffled shouting coming from outside the church. As if to explain, the screens cut away from Casals to cameras panning outside the church, accompanied by the words INSTANT REPLAY. The camera tilted up, showing a police tactical unit cable-dropping from an EC135 helicopter onto the terrace. The troopers’ visors were down, and their guns – which to Isabel looked like MP5s – were up. As soon as their boots touched the ground, they stormed the basilica’s giant bronze doors.

  As the first commando tried to yank the doors open, a flock of birds flew down from the roof and swarmed like bees around his head. When he tried to swat them away, they exploded, blowing away his hands and his head.

  Inside, at the back of the church, a man who was either crazy or brave – maybe both – ran down the centre aisle and pushed through the people still crowding there, to aid the commandos by pushing the doors open from the inside. Other people tried to hold him back but he tore away and pressed his shoulder against the doors. He was screaming in English, ‘Open up, save us!’ when two pigeons nosedived from the ceiling and detonated at his knees, blasting his legs off. His body collapsed to the floor, blood spraying out of his stumps, his face in shock as Isabel – though not Davey, whose eyes she was covering with her hands – saw the light of consciousness leave his eyes.

  ‘We warned you not to defy us. You have seen what we can do. So return to your seats … Now!’

  104

  After five minutes, Tori had seen no movement inside or around the building. No workers had gone in or out and the balconies were clear, even the one whose French doors wer
e open on the sixth floor.

  The dumpster clogging up the footpath in front had the usual building site safety pictograms slapped all over it, the kind forbidding entry to anyone who wasn’t decked out in protective gear. Thanks to Constable Akono’s involuntary generosity, Tori was fully kitted out, except for the steel-capped boots.

  She was about to push herself off the bike and cross the street when a series of crashes and blasts came from the nearby basilica and, shortly after, a squad of riot police began running up the steps from the street and a helicopter swooped down to hover just above the terrace. Akono’s helmet radio started to crackle. She didn’t catch it all but the general message was clear.

  Sagrada Família … emergència … immediatament … microdrones.

  A blare of sirens and horns, whistles and shouts thickened the air and, from her right, two blue-and-whites and three police motorcycles were whizzing past to the basilica.

  Whatever was happening had one upside. The police focus would not be on her, at least for a while. Tori stepped across the road.

  105

  Inside and outside the basilica was pandemonium, not least in the temporary security hub, an enclosed marquee pitched that morning and shared by virtually all the foreign agencies who had leaders attending the funeral. The swing door flew open and Chief Agent Franklin burst out onto the roadway holding his phone up to the air.

  He could no longer reach his president, or any of his agents inside the church with her. All comms going in or coming out of the basilica were cut off, apart from the TV broadcast, which, also worryingly, the network had lost control of.

  He re-entered the marquee. The call he needed to make demanded absolute privacy, and the hub’s three purpose-built SCIFs – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities – were still occupied, the reason he’d run outside in the first place. Luckily, he only had to wait twenty seconds for his Saudi counterpart to exit one of the SCIFs.

  The prince – everyone he’d ever met from Saudi Arabia seemed to be a prince or a sheikh – gave him a nod. ‘Franklin, the landline is working fine. I expect you’ll be wanting to advise your people back home to make a call on the Twenty-Fifth. That is the relevant Amendment, isn’t it?’

  Franklin gave him no more than a raised eyebrow as he entered, but the Harvard law graduate had picked it in one.

  Franklin dialled. ‘Mr Vice-President, it’s—’

  ‘Your phone hasn’t been answering, Franklin, nor is POTUS’s. I’ve been trying to reach you both. The broadcast—’

  ‘Sir, forgive me if I get straight to the point.’ This was history in the making so Franklin was choosing his words carefully, aware the only precedent for the counsel he was about to give the vice-president was from Hollywood movies. ‘Mr Vice-President, terrorists operating remote-controlled drones have seized control of the Sagrada Familia. They’ve blocked all comms in and out. I am unable to communicate with President Diaz or any of our agents inside and it’s the same for every country with a leader in there. Sir, at this time I, the Service … we cannot guarantee the president’s security nor can we extract her safely. Therefore, sir, I believe I have no choice,’ he bit his lip, wishing he did not have to say the words, ‘Mr Vice-President, it is my considered judgement, my solemn advice to you as the nation’s second-in-command, that President Diaz,’ he was almost choking on her name, ‘that our president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of her office.’

  Prentice was silent. Franklin assumed he was gathering his thoughts or his composure, or both. ‘Franklin, surely your CAT team,’ he said, meaning the Counter Assault Team that always travelled with the president, ‘surely they—’

  ‘Mr Vice-President, we are past that. My urgent advice, sir,’ Franklin could feel his heart pounding against the pistol in his shoulder holster, ‘is that you immediately convene an emergency meeting of Cabinet to initiate Section Four of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.’

  After a lifetime of devoted service, at the moment of his president’s greatest need, Franklin felt he’d let her and their country down. He unpinned his Secret Service lapel pin, brought it to his lips and kissed it, then placed it in his pocket.

  ‘Franklin, no Cabinet has ever—’

  ‘Sir, I cannot see any alternative. I am …’ his words caught in his throat. ‘Sir, I am truly sorry.’

  It was a momentous step. In the Republic’s almost 250-year history, a majority of its Cabinet had never voted to remove a president’s powers.

  106

  Hermes was ad-libbing and loving it and, if Tushkin’s intransigence meant the Russian’s own microdrones would be turned against him, the day would get even more delicious.

  Endz – in truth, Tushkin – had spun a lie to Hermes, claiming that they’d stolen the breakthrough Nano-Air-Vehicles from a high-security facility in Siberia operated by the country’s elite Advanced Research Foundation.

  Until then, Hermes had only heard rumours about NAVs like these, tiny robots modelled as birds that could hide in plain sight, as they’d done today, their long-life batteries letting them coo and peck for hours on the basilica’s terrace, on the steps, the roof, in the park opposite. And no one had noticed.

  Ordinarily, an electronic geofence would have blocked Hermes from operating these rogue drones, but Endz – Tushkin, as it turned out – told Hermes Russia had a mole inside Spain’s intelligence agency. He, or she, Hermes didn’t know or care which, had created a breach in the fence, one wide enough for Hermes’ signals to penetrate and operate the drones as well as the cameras, computers and speakers planted inside the church.

  It was yet another opportune example of the asymmetry of digital warfare, the state of affairs that meant governments and corporations had the impossible task of keeping the bad guys out 100 per cent of the time, whereas people like Hermes only had to find the tiniest crack once and squeeze their way through it, just like today.

  Hermes put Casals back on the screen, the patsy’s hair glinting with chunks of glass and his face shiny from the sweat beading on his brow and above his top lip. As the president leant forwards into the microphone, Hermes chose to interrupt him, and started typing into the voice-masking software, smiling when the text came out in a gravelly, meat-and-potatoes Bronx accent that would have made Robert De Niro proud.

  ‘President Casals. Keep your mouth [the word came out as mowt] shut. If you say a single word [woid] our birds [boids] will choose a family in that church [choich] at random and top them. Their murders [moiders] will be on your head.’

  Hermes tilted the cameras inside the church up towards the ceiling and zoomed in on three pigeons as they swooped down, following them until they hovered above the heads of a young family cowering at the back of the church. Three people, tree Hermes mouthed, the blathering child no more than eight years old. This was superb theatre, a performance Hermes thought worthy of an Oscar if assassins had the time or inclination to form their own Academy.

  Isabel Diaz hugged Davey close with one arm, her other hand tapping her smartwatch behind him, futilely trying to communicate with Chief Franklin. From the baffled looks on the faces of the security guards and police inside the church, all of them tapping earpieces or wrists like she was, their comms seemed to be suffering the same problem.

  However, Maxim Tushkin, she saw, was reading his smartwatch, and whatever he saw there made his brow crease with desperation, his eyes bulge and his mouth open as wide as a dying catfish’s. Until now, Isabel had only ever seen his lips snap-frozen into a thin straight line, one that always made her think of a spike he probably kept at the ready to impale his nearest enemy.

  This was not the Tushkin she knew.

  The Russian shut out the chaos and reread the message on his watch for the third time.

  You’ve stalled long enough.

  Three minutes – that’s all you’ve got left.

  Casals first.

  If that doesn’t get you to pay me, then one minute later, it’s your daughter Zoya’s turn.
>
  Start visualising a sharp, cold blade slicing across her throat.

  Two minutes after that, if I still can’t see your funds in my account, Mother Russia will need to appoint a new big daddy.

  For you, it will be death by pigeon. Your own, of course.

  Flap, flap. Squawk, squawk. Bang, bang.

  I’m leaving your comms open so you can fix this.

  His heart was racing as he tapped his watch and spoke quietly via his earbud, ‘Have you read it? Their threat?’

  ‘I have,’ said the real Tushkin, speaking from the comfort, and safety, of a white leather armchair as his jet began to taxi towards the runway. ‘Vitali Ivanovich Fetinov, you are my most loyal friend and supporter—’

  ‘Mr President, I apologise for asking but do I still have your assurance?’

  ‘You have that and more. Russia will forever be in your debt. Your cosmetic surgery, acting as my double these past months … Whether your cancer takes you or it’s the hand of our enemies, know that your family will never want for a thing. You have my word on that, Vitali. The mortgage on your home was cleared this morning. Your wife has no debt hanging over her head and her pension is secure for life.’

  ‘My son’s scholarship, for his doctorate?’

  ‘He will make us both proud, Vitali. He received the university’s confirmation ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr President. Again, I do apologise for asking, but here among the chaos, the birds, the madness … Until today, risking death as your double was hypothetical. I’m sorry, sir, I mean no disrespect.’

  ‘None taken,’ said Tushkin. His plane moved away from the apron and as he looked out his window to give the troops encircling Air Force One a cheeky salute, two seagulls flew by.