He ended with Frank’s achievements at SIS, but not in terms of the deals, the clients or fees. It was all about character. ‘Francis’s decency, his sense of what was right, shone out to all of us like a beacon.’ He spoke about Frank’s loyalty, honesty and dedication and gave touching examples. Frank’s mother, a statuesque woman who’d had a hard life, was probably hearing for first time what a remarkable man her modest, self-effacing son was, and she crumpled into her husband’s arms.
Axel was about to leave the podium when he tossed a smile at Tori. ‘Francis’s last known act was typical of him, an act of the utmost loyalty, standing in the face of danger to rescue a friend and colleague. Like Francis,’ he said, ‘Tori Swyft was the victim of a shocking conspiracy. She spent weeks in a Spanish prison cell, her name sullied, her reputation trashed. But she is with us today because her friends, Francis and others,’ – he directed his gaze at Thatcher – ‘and even the president of the United States, we all relentlessly pursued the truth and …’
Tori couldn’t bear to hear the rest and buried her head in Thatcher’s coat. She left before the drinks, unable to bring herself to join in. She’d taken the first flight out of Heathrow for Lisbon and had a car waiting to bring her the ninety minutes here, to North Beach at Nazaré.
Nazaré hadn’t been her first choice. She’d thought of flying back to Hawaii – where all this began, where she’d been when she took Axel’s fateful call – but she wasn’t ready to even contemplate what her psychologist called resolution, let alone closure. Going back to Australia, to old friends, had also been an option, but if she did that, she told herself, she’d also be giving up on Frank.
A quick flight to Portugal was the answer. Nazaré. Where she’d confront some of the most treacherous surf on the planet. The waves crashing in front of her were not thirty-metre winter monsters like those she’d experienced the last time she’d come here. They weren’t even half the size, yet at the height of a five-storey building with hundreds of tonnes of water powering them forwards, they were still frightening, still deadly.
Changed into her wetsuit, she leant against the fire-red lighthouse on the roof of the cliff-top fort, a vantage point for mariners since 1577 and for surfers from much later.
She was among a crowd of strangers, thankfully. Fifty or so, some of them surfers, most of them day-trippers, but all of them craning to watch the board-riders, cheering if they got through or shrieking if their waves spat them out.
Tori hadn’t ventured out herself yet. She’d hired a board and arranged her tow, the requisite safety vest at her feet. Equipped with CO2 cartridges and four inflation pull tabs, it meant she’d be prepared even if she really wasn’t ready.
‘Dude, did I get axed out there,’ said a guy behind her, a Jersey boy she guessed from his accent.
She turned her head. She didn’t really see him. Just one more guy in a wetsuit, his hair dripping.
‘Worst moment of my life, and then the best,’ he said. ‘That’s why we do it, right? To draw out our miseries and crush ’em.’
He was right. It was why she couldn’t stay at Oxford, the reason she’d flown here. To face terror, to stare down Frank’s likely death, to rage at the heavens about Hermes, to remind herself that she was still breathing when a man who’d been more special to her than she’d allowed herself to know was gone, and it was solely because of her.
She tried to smile back at the surfer, but even that was too much and she fell to her knees as a torrent of ache and fury crashed down on her.
EPILOGUE
A private Pacific island
He had no idea how long he’d been here. Time wasn’t obvious when you were effectively sightless, incarcerated alone inside a windowless cell. Before they flew him to this island, wherever here was, they’d whisked him out of Barcelona in a van, drugged and blindfolded, driving for hours, four or maybe five.
The first thing to hit him when they dragged him out of the vehicle was the sunny smell of fresh-cut hay and the pungent wafts of cow manure. He didn’t know precisely where they’d taken him but it had to be a farm somewhere in the Catalonian countryside.
The glow of the late afternoon sun helped him discern vague blurs through the weave of the fabric covering his eyes and he heard the plane before he saw the glints of light from its windows in the sun as its wheels hit the airstrip. The flashes suggested six, maybe seven side windows, a small private jet, the size a rural runway could easily take.
The bucolic air and the fuzzy outline of big wheels next to his captors’ van told him the vehicle they’d pulled up beside was a tractor.
They dragged him out onto the grass, two men flanking him. He heard the buzz of a mosquito apparently before they did. No, it wasn’t a bug … it was a motorbike in the distance.
‘That’s annoying,’ said a woman still sitting inside the van, a Midwestern American accent. ‘You gave me a guarantee that the farmer wouldn’t be here, that this was his regular day in town.’
‘Hermes, that was our intel.’
While they argued, he pondered the name Hermes. It seemed to ring a bell, though at that moment, in his drug-induced fog, nothing was ringing very clearly.
As the bike rode nearer, the two men started shouting and took off towards it, leaving him standing near the tractor. He wasn’t sure where the woman was, if she was still in the van, had gone with them or was watching him. He tentatively stretched out a hand and touched the tractor’s side, the metal warm from the day’s sun. He ran a finger over the surface. Rough, encrusted with the seasons, with years of dust and dirt. A gritty door handle. A few bubbles of rust. A ding and a gash in the metal panel, perhaps from skidding the vehicle across mud into a tree last winter or taking a hind kick from an indignant cow or whatever animals they had on this place. Wherever they were, he hadn’t heard any.
He pressed his palm over a jagged curl of metal, aware it might be rusty but infection was the least of his worries. He swiped his palm across the edge, to and fro, feeling the coldness of the cut as it broke his skin. A warm drizzle of blood. A smear he purposely left to dry there.
He took his hand back, slipped it into his pocket. Wherever they were taking him, disappearing him to, his blood was here. Which meant he’d been here.
It was a silent victory, a blessing in waiting.
A grisly memory of a knife slicing across his throat was pushing through his haze, the recollection getting clearer, as if he was somehow witnessing his own death in a mirror. He knew it was ridiculous, but still he rubbed his throat to check. A little stubble but no stitches, no bandage.
The woman, Hermes … She was the one he’d heard give the order. One of the men holding him – the guy who punched out his eye – had held the knife.
When it happened, he started to recall, it was strange. He hadn’t felt anything. Like he was numb to it, as if it was an out-of-body experience. Something he was watching on a video.
Why didn’t they really kill him? Why bring him to this farm, to the landing strip? What use could he possibly be to them?
A gunshot burst out of the distance, a single blast ricocheting through the rural emptiness. The incoming bike stopped. The drone of the mosquito died. The woman’s laughter drifted over from that direction.
Certain he was alone, he pulled his hand out of his pocket, pressed down on his palm and rubbed more of his blood over the tractor’s door, praying that if people eventually came looking for the dead farmer – a local who ventured into town rarely so it might take a while – they might also stumble over his blood. Discover his DNA.
Then they’d know, Tori would know, that he’d survived.
Inside his solitary cell, that was the one hope keeping him sane. Sane-ish, he corrected.
A sound he hadn’t heard before broke into his mental meandering. The cranking of his cell door opening. Not the food flap at the floor, the actual door. The whole door. The rays of sunlight raking across his walls were so dazzling he had to cover his eyes.
‘F
rank Chaudry,’ said a woman. ‘Your vacation is over. Come with me and earn your keep.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass.’
Anton Chekhov
My love affair with Spain, and Catalonia, was cemented on a couple of trips. A hike up the Spanish Pyrenees and along the Costa Brava with two effervescent Backroads tour guides bubbling with stories about their history and culture, Oriol (Uri) Muns and Gloria Castañé Carrera. You’ll see echoes of their names in one of my characters. Marta Bonastre Aguilar helped me initially with some Spanish and Catalan idiom. But my memories of Catalonia would not be as fond or as striking without Laura Coch, not only a brilliant tour guide (www.LauraToursBarcelona.com) but Laura cast her keen eye over the entire manuscript to nudge my portrayals of Catalan culture, locale and idiom in the right direction.
Spoiler alert: Whenever I am in Barcelona, I visit La Sagrada Familia to savour the ethereal, the sensation that springs out at me from this place’s magical fusion of folly, genius and sheer dedication. It’s in that light I point out that what happens to the basilica in my story in no way endorses what George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia (his 1938 chronicle of six months fighting with the Catalan militias against Franco). ‘La Sagrada Familia is one of the most hideous buildings in the world,’ he wrote. ‘It has four crenelated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles. Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was spared because of its “artistic value”. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.’
Several magicians kindly peppered me with advice for creating a master assassin who is equally talented in the dark arts of magic, misdirection and illusion: Joshua Jay (who shared his thesis, ‘Tragic Magic – A Survey of Fatal Conjuring: 1584–2007’); Stephen Bargatze (international president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians); Dr Gene Anderson; Steve Valentine; Larry Wilson; Marcus Denton; Sreekanth; Roger Snirt; Doug Krueger and Mike Mound. Also, thanks to Jimmy Fingers for his permission for Hermes to perform part of Rope-u-tation, his rope-through-body effect.
David Hambling, author of Swarm Troopers, advised me on drones. Bestselling author Steve Berry offered insights in his ITW Thrillerfest masterclass. Ronald Ross, again my go-to guy for expertise in WiFi and tracking technology. For help with Tori’s escape from one of Hermes’ fixes, Roan Chapin, thriller writer and doctor, and ophthalmologist John Kennedy. John and Hiraani Clapin sleuthed the hotel environs of Room 420 for me in Barcelona. (By the way, it’s not true that all of the clocks are set at 4.20 in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.) Jordi Muñoz Mendoza, the Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in Political Science at the University of Barcelona, gave advice on presidential succession in Catalonia. And Edmund Blenkins, Batlow firefighter, truffle hunter and trail builder, for inspiring Tori’s prowess at parkour and free-running.
Most of all, Tori Swyft and I thank editor Linda Funnell, the incredible team at Pantera Press, especially Lex Hirst and Lucy Bell, proofreader Sarina Rowell, Luke Causby for the book cover and, of course, my co-founders and co-lots-of-things, Ali Green and Marty Green, and the ultimate co-founder of all that’s good in my life, Jenny Green.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John M. Green is the author of Double Deal, The Tao Deception, The Trusted, Born to Run and Nowhere Man.
He left his day job as a banker two years before the global financial crisis – enough of a lag so no one could accuse him of starting the whole mess! He wrote his first novel about it.
His childhood years roaming the back alleys of Sydney’s infamous Kings Cross set the stage for his later careers, in law and finance. He became a partner in two major law firms and then an executive director in a leading investment bank.
Today, he straddles writing, business and philanthropy. He’s a director of several organisations, listed and unlisted, including cyber-security, financial services, engineering, publishing and not-for-profits. He’s been a Council Member of the National Library of Australia and a director of two publishing houses. And, like one of his story characters, he’s a magic aficionado.
He lives in Sydney with his wife, the sculptor Jenny Green.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations,dialogue and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, organisations, events or locales is coincidental.
First published in 2021 by Pantera Press Pty Limited
www.PanteraPress.com
Text copyright © John M. Green
John M. Green has asserted his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.
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A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this workis available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN 978-0-6486769-2-8 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-0-6486769-3-5 (eBook)
Cover Design: Luke Causby, Blue Cork
Cover Images: Mark Owen/Arcangel, 135pixels/Adobe Stock, lornet/Adobe Stock, richardlight/Adobe Stock
Publisher: Lex Hirst
Project Editor: Lucy Bell
Editor: Linda Funnell
Proofreader: Sarina Rowell
Typesetting: Kirby Jones
Author Photo: Erica Murray
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